Deuces Down

  She gave me a kiss, then closed the inner hatch.

  Once the air pressure had bled down, I opened the outer hatch and hauled myself out. Moving was incredibly difficult, not because of lunar gravity (which, thanks to the heavy suit, felt the same as Earth gravity to me). I slid rather than climbed down the side of Quicksilver, and fell to my knees in the lunar soil. I saw the slightest puff of gray dust, which settled instantly.

  “Oh, beautiful,” Sampson said, sarcastically.

  I thought at first he was referring to my inelegant first steps, but instead he was looking at the undercarriage of Quicksilver:

  A shiny gash ran from back to front. The cause was obvious . . . a small, rounded rock that rose about a foot higher than the otherwise flat, soft lunar soil around it. “Did that do any damage?”

  “Hard to tell,” Sampson said, getting on his hands and knees and trying to look under the vehicle. “There’s a stain on the skin of the ship, but that could have been there before landing, or even before we took off.”

  Sampson’s attitude suggested a man who was confronted with, at worst, a flat tire. I envied that, as I stared at what could only be a fuel leak, knowing we needed to fire the main engine before I could perform a lift that would send us flying back to Earth. “What do we do?” I said, trying not to sound as terrified as I felt.

  He was back on his feet, bouncing toward the array package I had dropped. “Complete the mission. We’ll deal with the other problem in its turn.”

  “It’s too bad this had to happen,” Sampson said abruptly, about halfway through the construction of Tominbang’s array. Just when I thought he was going to address our problem, he continued: “If the damn Takisians hadn’t arrived, this would be the biggest story on the planet! ‘Man on the Moon’! Can you imagine? Thousands of people would be listening on the radio. We might even have television here.

  “And we would just be the first. There would be other landings, too. Scientists would come up here. Even tourists. Once the human race proved it could do something like this, it would never turn back!”

  I could have argued with him: I wasn’t too sure that the human race “would never turn back”. We’d “turned back” every chance we got.

  Or I could have told Sampson that a certain mobster in southern California agreed with him completely. But all I said was, “If the Takisians hadn’t come, neither of us would be here.”

  So we completed our mission, performing an hour of pointless work under the glare of a naked sun. Only when we were starting back toward Quicksilver did I pause to attempt to appreciate the fact that I could die in a place no humans had ever visited. I remember thinking it was an honor I would rather have done without.

  Eva-Lynne would die, too, which made it even worse.

  As Sampson loped ahead of me, I stopped and, using my boot, wrote the following in the soil: “Cash + Eva-Lynne”. I wondered how long it would be before human eyes saw it. If they ever saw it.

  Sampson was already back at his controls when I emerged from the airlock. He acted as if everything were fine. “Strap in, gang. No sense hanging around longer than we have to.”

  As I finished removing my suit (it was covered with dust, and my oxygen tanks were empty), I put my head close to Eva-Lynne’s. “Did he—?”

  “I was listening,” she said, finishing my question. We had no time for further conversation, because Sampson snapped, “Let’s go back there!”

  I was angry, but I strapped in. In fact, I tried to reassure Eva-Lynne. “It might be nothing,” I said, whispering.

  Sampson finished his checklist, and with twenty seconds’ warning, punched the engine start button. With a dull drone, it started up—

  Then died. Now the warning lights flashed. “Dammit.” It was the first time I had heard Sampson use profanity. “We’ve got fuel, but we’ve got a leak in the line that runs to the main engine.” Which meant we didn’t have enough energy to get off the surface of the Moon.

  I looked at Eva-Lynne; it was her turn to see panic in my face. For a moment she seemed lost. Then that disturbing, yet attractive knowing look appeared on her face, and she leaned close to me. Her hair, stirred by small breezes from the ventilation fans, surrounded me, caressing me. I forgot about the stale odor of the Quicksilver interior as I inhaled perfume.

  And felt her warm breath on my neck and her hand on my chest. Her lips brushed my ear. I think I mumbled a syllable of protest. “Sshh,” she said. Then: “Colonel, why don’t you step inside the airlock.”

  Sampson didn’t hesitate. With a look on his face that combined disgust and hope, he crawled past us and into the chamber, dogging the hatch.

  My straps seemed to unbuckle themselves. Eva-Lynne’s under-garment removed itself, as did mine. I took her in my arms, feeling her breasts against me, her mouth on mine.

  Moments later, I fumbled for the tiller, and faster than any rocket, we fired off the Sea of Storms.

  That is the inside story of the first human flight to another world. This is, as far as I know, the only record of it. None of the support team talked. I don’t believe many of them knew what our true destination was.

  I never saw or heard from Tominbang again, though the relay station was fully operational. Did he survive to make his transactions?

  Sampson is now a major general, first chief of the new Space Command. He’ll never talk, at least not until he’s safely retired. He was mortified at witnessing my love-making with Eva-Lynne. (He wouldn’t meet our eyes on the flight home.) An association with our highly-illegal operation would also be bad for his military career, which is going great. He took the lessons he learned from Quicksilver and applied them to a revamped vehicle called the Hornet, which flies into orbit without the need of an assist from a horny deuce.

  Nor will you find Eva-Lynne or Cash Mitchell on Paregrine’s Perch telling tales of that first flight to the Moon. Not as long as Warren Skalko lives. Skalko never forgets.

  Nevertheless, I am forever grateful for my small role in a secret history. I not only found Eva-Lynne, I learned the truth of her life-long lesson, the one she almost imparted to me on the hillside above Tehachapi-Kern Airport:

  Sex trumps all.

  FOUR DAYS IN OCTOBER

  By John J. Miller

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1969: OFF DAY

  TOMMY DOWNS kept a straight face as he showed Sister Aquilonia the Ebbets Field press pass his father had obtained for him. It was hard not to smile, but he knew the Sister would deem him insufficiently serious if he did, and deny him leave from school.

  Sister Aquilonia, his ninth grade English teacher at Sanguis Christi and the faculty advisor to the school newspaper, The Weekly Gospel, was obviously impressed by the pass, but still needed some convincing to sign him out of school for the day. Tommy didn’t know how he knew that, he just did. He was, he frequently told himself, a good judge of character. It helped when he was hot on a story.

  “Well . . .” Sister Aquilonia stroked her vermillion chin. She used to be a Negro, until the wild card virus had turned her a striking orangey-reddish. Some of the boys said that it had changed her body in other interesting ways, but it was impossible to tell for certain because of her voluminous habit. She did, Tommy noted, smell rather sweet, but he wasn’t sure if that was her actual odor, or some kind of perfume. Nuns, he knew, generally didn’t use perfume, but neither did he remember her smelling so nice before. He thought of complimenting her on it, but something told him not to.

  “I gotta get to Ebbets today, Sister,” Tommy pressed his case. “I gotta take advantage of this opportunity. My Dad went through a lot of trouble to get me the pass.”

  Tommy’s father was a salesman for a Cadillac dealership over in Manhattan. He was a real wheeler dealer. He knew how to get a little sugar for himself when he closed the deal, or in this case, for his son. Even though Tommy was only in the ninth grade there was no doubt that he was going to be a reporter when he grew up, and he was already working hard to establish his crede
ntials. The Weekly Gospel was only his first step, as he saw it, on his way to journalistic immortality.

  “No doubt,” Sister Aquilonia agreed.

  Tommy knew he almost had her. “Think of it. I bet I’m the only reporter on a high school paper with a Series press pass. The Gospel will have an exclusive: Inside the World Series through the eyes of Thomas Downs.”

  The idea of covering the Series appealed to him largely because it meant four days away from school, four days of freedom untrammeled by nuns and uniforms and kids mostly bigger than himself. Not that Tommy wasn’t a Dodger fan. There was hardly a boy breathing in the city who wasn’t a Dodger fan that summer. Cellar dwellers for as long as Tommy could remember, the Dodgers had somehow catapulted themselves out of the basement and had taken the National League East Division crown. Then they’d beaten the vaunted Milwaukee Braves in the first ever Divisional Series, and, as National League champions, were facing the heavily favored American League champs, the Orioles, in the World Series. They’d already split the first two games in Baltimore. The next three were scheduled Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for the Dodgers old park in Flatbush, a thirty minute subway ride from Sanguis Christi, in Queens.

  “Well . . .” The nun considered options with agonizing deliberation. “Okay.” Tommy suppressed any signs of glee as Sister Aquilonia scribbled on a release form, tore it off the pad, and handed it to him. “Here’s a pass for the day—good for noon. That should give you plenty of time to get over to Brooklyn and run down your story.”

  Tommy hid his disappointment. Only noon? He’d miss less than half the day? Well, he philosophized, that was better than nothing. Knowing he had to stay on the nun’s good side, he pasted a smile on his face. “Thanks, Sister. I’ll get a good story, you’ll see.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  “I won’t let you down,” Tommy said, as he pushed open the classroom door and went into the corridor beyond. Let’s see, he thought, first period study hall. The penguin’s note will let me report late. No need to hurry.

  Study hall was in the cafeteria. He didn’t hate it, but it was boring. You had to sit there for almost an hour, being quiet, at least pretending you were doing something. He went down the silent, empty corridor, his footsteps echoing loudly. At the intersection he showed his pass to the hall monitor, almost contemptuously. There was no lower form of life at Sanguis Christi than hall monitors. They were all brown noses.

  The monitor checked his pass, waved him on. He went down the hall, past the second floor boy’s bathroom. Dare he go in, he wondered? Sometimes you could kill some time with the guys, but sometimes it wasn’t the best place to be, all depending on who was hanging. A sudden urge to pee decided him, and he pushed open the heavy door and ducked inside.

  Almost immediately, he knew he’d made a mistake. By then it was too late to back away. That would only have compounded his mistake, making him look like a scaredy-cat, and he couldn’t afford to look like that.

  The air was redolent with cigarette smoke, and something else. Tommy couldn’t define it, but he could smell the wrongness in the air, hidden in the cigarette smoke. He couldn’t define that smell, though the familiar odor had been popping up lately in unexpected, unexplained times and places. It was subtle. He couldn’t figure out where it came from. It was just sometimes there, tickling his nose and prodding his consciousness, as it was doing now.

  “Hey, look,” one of the three said, “it’s Tommy boy.”

  Tommy recognized him from around Christi. He was known to all, even the nuns, as Butch. The kids also called him Butch the Bully, but not to his face. He was a senior, much older than Tommy, who having skipped a year in grade school, was young for a freshman. If rumors were to be believed, Butch was older than anyone else in school. From what Tommy knew about him, he was dumb enough to have been held back a year, or even two. Dumb but big. And mean.

  That was a bad combination.

  “C’mere, Tommy boy.”

  Tommy approached the three reluctantly. Butch was looking pseudo-serious. His sycophants were grinning. Not a good sign. Tommy knew that anything from a verbal hazing to a lunch money shakedown to a serious beating was in store. He also knew that it’d be worse if he ran and they had to chase him.

  Butch straightened up from the sink he was leaning against. He expelled a long stream of smoke from his nostrils. It didn’t smell like smoke from a real cigarette. Maybe that was where the sweet smell was coming from.

  “How come you’re not in class, Tommy boy?”

  He had six inches and fifty pounds on Tommy. He was as menacing as any monster out of myth or movie, and much more frightening because he was there, he was real, and Tommy knew he could kick the shit out of him without breaking a sweat. That sudden, sweet order was strong around him. It was coming off him in waves. Not from the hand-rolled cigarette he was sucking on, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs, but from him. None of the others seemed to notice it. Somewhere in a corner of his frightened mind, Tommy wondered why.

  “How come, Tommy?” Butch the Bully repeated, a harder edge in his already edgy voice.

  “I have to pee,” Tommy said.

  Butch looked at his sycophants. “He has to pee,” he repeated in an almost apt imitation of Tommy’s higher, lighter voice. He looked back at Tommy. “I hope you don’t pee your pants little boy.”

  His voice was lilting, mocking. The other two laughed. “Yeah, pee your pants,” one of them said.

  Tommy gulped, started to move backward, and Butch came towards him, his sycophants right at his heels. He had a bright, weird look in his too-focused eyes. Some bullies, Tommy knew, liked to have their henchmen deliver beatings for them. Butch looked like he liked to hand them out himself. “Do you need a diaper, little boy?” he said, grinning slow and lazy. “Only babies need diapers.”

  I hate this place, Tommy thought, closing his eyes.

  Butch towered over him. Backed up against the row of sinks, Tommy had nowhere to go. Butch grabbed Tommy’s shirt and pulled him up onto his toes with little effort. Tommy closed his eyes against the tears that suddenly sprang up in them. Would he rather take the humiliation of a pants-wetting, or the pain of a beating? Considering, though, that they’d probably kick his ass no matter what. . . .

  You bastard, he thought, you big dumb ugly bastard.

  Butch put his face close down almost against Tommy’s. Tommy’s eyes were still shut, but he could feel Butch’s hot breath against his cheeks. “Piss your pants, boy,” the bully said, his breath oddly sweet as a field of flowers in May. “Pisssssssss—”

  Butch’s final word was elongated, like a reptilian hiss, and it concluded with a strange, funny sound like a whispered, gagging, choke. Tommy opened his eyes. Butch’s suddenly stricken face was changing contours.

  His features slackened, then seemed to stiffen and tighten. He screamed into Tommy’s face as his head grew narrower, more elongated. His hair fell out in clumps, down upon his shoulders and chest. Butch screamed again and his tongue flopped out of his mouth. It was long and bifurcated. It caressed Tommy’s face like gentle fingers.

  “Clarence—” one of his sycophants said, “Uh, I mean, Butch?”

  Everyone stared at Butch as he started to twitch all over. Tommy got it first.

  “He’s turning a card!” Tommy pulled away from the bully’s suddenly slack grip and started to back away fast. It took the other two a moment, then they barkpedaled as Butch sank to his knees.

  “Whu—whut’s happening to me?” Butch asked plaintively, barely able to shape the words with his suddenly lolling tongue and elongated jaw. He shook like a dog trying to throw off droplets of invisible water, but no one answered him.

  The boys ran from the bathroom, Butch’s companions screaming like they were on fire. Tommy lost himself in the ensuing excitement, blending in as just another ordinary kid in a group of ordinary, if excited, kids. Eventually Butch was taken away by emergency medics. Tommy, watching safely from the crowd as th
ey wheeled him past, saw that he was tied down to the dolly with all but his head covered with a sheet. He was still alive, at least. He twisted frantically against his bonds, almost as sinuous as a snake or lizard, hissing all the time.

  Everyone was talking about it. Tommy, after getting back to the bathroom and unburdening his frightfully over-strained bladder, kept silent about his participation in the affair. He wondered about the strange smell Butch had exuded like a night-blooming orchid. As the morning progressed he managed to get next to Sister Aquilonia for a moment, and took a deep sniff. She gave off the same smell, but not as strongly. A couple others around Christi had it, too. Tommy made careful inquiries among his classmates, and nobody seemed aware of Sister Aquilonia’s perfume, or that of the strange girl in eleventh grade who was quite pretty but had feathers instead of hair. As he checked out of Sanguis to take the sub-way to Ebbets Field over in Brooklyn, Tommy began to wonder. Began to think if maybe detecting that odor was an ability he had alone. It made him feel queasy and excited at the same time.

  Was he a wild carder? If so, he was one of the lucky ones. He wasn’t one of those pathetic misfit jokers, but more like Golden Boy, and that Eagle guy, and Cyclone who had that cool uniform. And the Turtle, of course, but no one knew what he looked like. Maybe he was a creepy joker hiding in his shell, but he, Tommy, was a normal kid, maybe just a little smarter than the others.

  Tommy was running over the possibilities in his head as he arrived at Ebbets Field and asked directions to the locker room. The gate attendants were skeptical that he was a reporter, but all he had to do was show his magic pass and they let him through.

  As he walked through the bowels of Ebbets Field, heading to the locker room, his mind wasn’t on baseball. It was whirling with notions of him, Tommy Downs, actually being a wild carder, being—let’s face it—an ace, with the secret power to ferret out those infected with the virus.