He figured he’d probably be safest on the convention floor, where he could hide behind the rest of his delegation.
2:00 P.M.
Gregg phoned from Ellen’s hospital room. He stroked her hair as the call went through, smiling at her pale, drawn face. Ellen tried to smile back and failed. She looked lovely and very vulnerable, and he could feel tears starting in his eyes, looking at her.
God, I’m sorry, Ellen. I’m very, very sorry.
Someone picked up the phone and he tore his attention away from her. “Cal? Hartmann.”
“Senator.” Redken sounded nervous. Gregg could tell that he didn’t want to talk. “How’s things going?”
The fat s.o.b. If we were there … Puppetman rose, angry. “That’s what I wanted to know. I’d expected some action by now, Cal.”
That put the man immediately on the defensive. Gregg could damn near see the flush on Redken’s pimply face as he blustered. He’d be reaching for a candy bar in consternation. “Look, Senator, it isn’t so easy.” A wrapper snapped in the background. “The bottom line on your Russian is that he’s dead. Dead a year and a half and fried to a crisp. The file is closed according to everyone I’ve talked to, and no one in the Justice Department, the CIA, or the FBI seems inclined to open it. I’m getting tired of being told I’m nuts or a pain in the ass or stupid.”
Gregg could feel his own temper fraying. Redken was stonewalling and making excuses, and in the meantime, Tachyon was still here and still kissing up to Jackson. Devaughn was scowling and cursing, and all the political favors had been called in just to slow the reversed momentum.
Ellen smiled at Gregg quizzically from her bed, sleepy from a shot of Demerol; Gregg brushed her hair back from her forehead and shrugged back to her. He took a deep breath and returned his attention to the phone.
“Video’s got the damn pictures, Cal. I know she’s a joker, but the images are real. Didn’t they convince someone to at least start looking? Didn’t you get her deposition? What about the reporter who made Polyakov here in Atlanta. Doesn’t anyone believe him?”
“No one can find Video, Senator. That’s the problem. A reporter’s supposed sighting isn’t enough. No one’s seen Video for several days. Without her, well, I don’t know how much I can help you.”
“That’s not good enough,” Gregg said flatly. “Not good enough at all.”
Cal sighed, just on the verge of insolence. He put something in his mouth, chewing noisily. Puppetman stirred. When we get back to Washington, he’ll pay for this. Gregg pushed the power back down harshly.
“I’m sorry, Senator,” Redken was saying again. “I’ve done all I can do at the moment. We’ll keep looking for Video. I’ll keep following the paper trail, but it’s damn cold and you know how slow that can be at the best of times. I’ll hound Peters over at Intelligence and tell him again that his data’s screwy. If I do get more, I’ll make sure the right people jump. But it might be a few days before that happens.”
Gregg’s temper went entirely. “I don’t have a goddamn few days, Cal. I may not even have this afternoon.”
There was no answer to that, just the hiss of the satellite connection and Redken’s chewing. “Look, get what you can as soon as you can,” Gregg said at last. “And keep in mind that I’ll remember just how well you do.” He slammed the phone back into the cradle.
“Serious problems?” Ellen asked. She held out her hand to Gregg.
He took it. He let Puppetman lick at the pain that leaked around the edges of the Demerol. It seemed to salve his own frustration.
We have to do it ourself, Gregg. There’s no other way. It’s safe now, with Gimli taken care of. Think of it.
Gregg was. And he knew exactly what he needed to do.
“Maybe,” he said in answer to Ellen’s question. “Or maybe not as serious as I’d thought. There’s other ways to deal with the problem. It’s time to start using them.”
“I’m sorry you and Dr. Tachyon quarreled, Gregg. He’s such a nice man, but so stubborn.”
“Don’t worry about it, darling,” he said. “Tachyon is just a temporary problem.”
4:00 P.M.
It was like being on Mercury: The air-conditioning of the Marriott beat on his back as he stepped through the doors. The Atlanta heat started the sweat rolling down his face. The sidewalk was crowded with Jackson supporters waving bright-red JESSE! signs. Just beyond them was the limo. Jackson clasped Tachyon’s hand and lifted them up over their heads. Tachyon squirmed, dancing on his toes. The reverend was so much taller.
A ragged cheer went up, and they headed for the limo, smiling and shaking hands as the spectators crowded in around them. Jackson pressed the flesh with practiced ease. Tachyon looked at him enviously.
Ackroyd was waiting at the door of the car. “What now?”
“Jesse wants us to talk to the jokers outside the Omni,” Tachyon explained. “He and I together. His positions on wild card issues are just as strong as Hartmann’s, if they will only listen…” He gave a long, deep sigh. “Jay, if you have other leads to follow up, there’s really no need for you to come along.”
Jay shrugged. “Might as well,” he said, “can’t dance.”
At least the limo was air-conditioned, Tachyon thought gratefully as they drove off.
Jackson’s bodyguard, the ace called Straight Arrow, stared implacably across at him. Tach began to realize how hopeless, how stupid this was. They were not going to listen. Jesse would have a better chance without him. Tension made his voice jump as he blurted, “This is not going to work.”
“Faith, Doctor,” said Jackson.
He was wedged firmly between Jay Ackroyd and the reverend. He looked desperately from Jay to Jesse. “They hate me now.”
The limo pulled up, and Jackson studied the ranks of silent jokers. “Only some. It’s not as if you switched your support to Barnett. I’m not that unacceptable, am I?”
“Not to me.” Tach gave the tall human’s arm a squeeze. “And you will convince them. I know it.”
“Well, help me a little.”
“I will do my uttermost best.”
Straight Arrow swung open the door of the black limousine, and Jackson and Tachyon stepped back out into the heat. The police had driven a wedge into the jokers. At the end of that long aisle was a flatbed truck equipped with a sound system. The heat was unbelievable, bouncing in waves off the pavement. As he watched, Tach saw Arachne’s eight legs fold beneath her and she went down with a sigh. There was a flurry of movement as her nat daughter dropped down at her mother’s side, and began fanning the unconscious woman with a folded newspaper.
“How can they hate them so?” Tachyon asked. The lilac eyes were wide with misery. “They are pitiful, and so brave. So very brave.”
The crowd had noticed them. Uncertainty ran like a shiver through them, then large numbers began pushing forward against the lines of police as Jackson walked into their midst. Setting his jaw, Tachyon threw back his head, and followed. His eyes met Gills’s. The joker’s thick neck worked, the membranes over the gills fluttering. He hacked, and a gob of thick white mucus hit Tachyon in the face. The alien recoiled, then lunged forward, hand outstretched, pleading for understanding. But Gills had already turned his back on Tachyon.
He mopped away the spittle, and they moved deeper into the crowd. Up ahead Tach could hear the ring of Jesse’s voice, but the words eluded him. He was too busy scanning the crowd, evaluating the faces of his friends and people. Disinterest, outright hatred, sympathy. A shadow fell across him. Turtle. But Tommy flew on.
A huge, pallid figure snapped the linked arms of two policemen. A brick wall wasn’t going to stop six hundred pounds of Doughboy. He rolled to a stop before the tiny alien.
“Doctor.”
“Yes, dear.” He couldn’t bring himself to call the joker “Doughboy.”
“They thaid Mith Thara’s a twaitor, and now they thay you are too. I don’t underthand.”
“It’s very confu
sing, child.”
“Don’t you love the thenator anymore?”
Tach covered his eyes with a hand. “I love all of you better.”
“Funny way of showing it,” howled a voice from the crowd.
“Traitor. Traitor! TRAITOR!”
The sound battered at him, and Tach dropped his face into his hands. Suddenly Jackson was there, an arm tight about his shoulders.
“Come on. You can do it. We walk through this crowd. We get up on that truck, and we speak. It’s going to be all right.”
“No, Reverend, I am afraid that some things can never be repaired.”
But he had been reminded of his duty, so with a smile firmly in place Tach began moving down the line of people. Some of the most unbelievable things were held out to him—claws, tentacles, misshapen lumps covered with foul-smelling discharge. The sight of a normal human hand was such a relief that Tachyon almost ran to grip it.
A young man, dressed in a leather jacket despite the heat, raised heavy lids to regard him. Eyes as blank as a shark’s.
Jokers clogged the street, silent and horrible. The heat and the light seemed to suffocate you, to wrap around your chest like a python, tightening by degrees. It reminded Mackie of Hamburg in summertime. He hated anything that reminded him of home. He hated the heat and the humidity, and wasn’t too crazy about the light of day. Most of all he hated jokers.
Nonetheless he was happy. Redemption sang in his veins like a hit of good speed.
Der Mann was giving him another chance. He was Macheath again, slipping through the mob with his song bubbling mantric down in his throat.
In this mass of monsters, nothing was remarkable. Particularly Mackie. His lack of size let him avoid most contact. The awful heat sent sweat tentacles crawling down his ribs inside his jacket and aging T-shirt, but his personal stink was lost in the crowd.
Glancing impact, then, “Hey, there, motherfucker!”
The hand on his arm was feathered. “Watch who you’re shoving! Who the fuck you think you are?”
“I’m Mack the Knife, you filthy creature!” Anger swelled like his cock. He started to bring a buzz.
No! Remember your job! He snarled something wordless and phased out, leaving the monstrosity standing there holding air. The stupid look on what passed for its face made him laugh.
Insubstantial, he walked through a maggot clump of horrors pretending to be people, found an eddy big enough to phase his skinny body back in. The jokers paid him no mind. A chant had started, low and hostile. The words blurred in his mind. He didn’t try to understand. Jokers had nothing to say. The beasts didn’t even know he was walking through them! He was Mackie Messer, he was stone mystery and death. He was invincible.
Looming alongside his quarry was the tall nigger running for president—and wasn’t that capitalist decadence, to let such people hold political office? Karl Marx said the black man was a slave, and der alte Karl knew what he was talking about. The man hanging tight on Tach’s other side struck Mackie somehow familiar. Probably one of the alien’s toadies from Jokertown.
Tachyon was moving down a line, shaking hands or whatever. The thought of all that joker touch made Mackie’s skin creep. He circled, like the shark in his song, who wears his teeth in his face.
You must be extremely careful, the Man had said. Tachyon is a mind reader. You must not let him sense your intention.
Good enough. He was Mack the Knife. He knew how to do these things.
It would be simple to phase through the crowd, approach from behind, buzz his hand and jam it right through Doctor precious Tachyon’s alien fucking heart. It would be too simple. He’d never done an alien before. Nor had he done anybody really big, really famous like Tachyon was.
He wanted to feel Tachyon’s eyes in his. He wanted the little bastard to know who was killing him.
The jokers surged forward, carrying him right where he needed to go.
The world contracted to Tachyon and the touch.
The afternoon came to Jack in little coherent bursts interspersed with noise and pointless movement, like a film cut into pieces and spliced together at random. Delegates surged back and forth, vote totals changed by the half hour. The only two constants were that Hartmann was losing votes and Barnett was gaining. Despite denials from Hartmann and Devaughn, everyone assumed that Jack’s accusation of Barnett had been a last, desperate attempt by Hartmann’s camp to regain its lost momentum. “Hey,” Devaughn finally scowled as reporters pressed him. “Give the guy a break. Yesterday somebody stopped his heart—who knows how many brain cells he lost?”
Thanks, Charles, Jack thought. Compassionate as always.
The only conceivable remedy was another swig of overproof.
Jim Wright, calling for vote after vote, looked as if his liver had just failed. Fistfights swirled on the floor. The band played whatever came into its collective head, anything from Stephen Foster to Jagger-Richards. A Starshine glider crashed in front of Jack and he stepped on it by mistake while trying to pick it up. He tried to throw the crumpled thing anyway, and it came apart as it left his hand.
Fucking flying joker, he thought.
As Jack finished the bottle, a kind of lucidity returned, an intense consciousness of the horror of it all. Aw, shit, Jack thought. I’ve drunk myself sober.
No choice, he decided, but to get another bottle. He lurched from his seat and headed across the pandemonium toward the nearest exit. As he left the auditorium, he saw a young woman with Hartmann buttons talking earnestly to a tall black man in hornrims.
“Sorry, Sheila,” the man in glasses said. “Your old man’s the nicest guy I’ve ever met, and I’m sorry to disappoint him, but if I don’t switch to Jesse on this vote I can kiss my standing in the neighborhood good-bye.”
Some kind of rally was going on right outside the auditorium. There was a flatbed truck covered with Jackson banners and a limo trying to get through the crowd toward it, the horn bleating. Swarming around everything were more jokers than Jack had ever seen in one place.
He tried moving through the crowd, but it was too dense. The people in the limo must have decided the same thing, because its doors opened and the passengers got out—Straight Arrow in his gray uniform, some little white guy Jack didn’t recognize, Jesse Jackson, and Tachyon.
Great. Just the people Jack wanted to see.
The crowd roared. Media people jostled jokers to find camera setups. Police and Secret Service were trying to wedge their way to the truck without knocking anyone off their feet. Tachyon and the candidate were shaking hands as they progressed. Someone spit in Tach’s face. Straight Arrow looked appalled, probably not at the saliva but at the fact it could as easily have been a bullet.
A shadow passed overhead and Jack looked up. The Turtle moved past in silence. Someone had painted HARTMANN! across his shell in big silver letters.
Jack looked down and saw, through a split-second gap in the crowd, the freak gliding through the crowd. The kid with buzz-saw hands, just fifteen feet away.
Adrenaline crashed into Jack with the force of a hurricane.
“No!” he yelled, and began to swim through the crowd with great sweeps of his arms, driving his way heedless of yells of protest.
The leather boy had disappeared. Jack craned to find him.
Then there he was, leaning forward under the arm of a policeman, his hand outstretched. Tachyon saw him and smiled.
“No!” Jack yelled again, but no one could hear him.
Tachyon took the hand.
Tachyon took his hand with something like relief. He clamped down hard.
“I’m Mackie Messer,” he said, and laid on maximum buzz.
There was a shower of blood and bone and the buzz-saw sound that Jack remembered all too well. Tachyon screamed. So did a hundred other people. So, maybe, did Jack.
Jack charged forward, but the crowd was surging back, and he stumbled, almost fell, as people went down around him. A silver-eyed joker child was clutching his l
eg. Jack tried to shake the boy off, yelling in fury.
Tachyon staggered back, blood pulsing from his torn wrist. Straight Arrow had been watching the crowd around Jackson and was only now turning his head to comprehend the situation. The policeman under whose arm the leather boy had reached was the only one near enough to react. Half the cop’s face was dripping with Tachyon’s blood, and his actions were slowed by shock. He tried to grab the boy’s leather jacket. If he’d had time to think, he’d have done almost anything but that.
The leather boy turned to face the cop and Jack’s heart jumped into his throat. All the kid had to do was glance past the policeman and see Jack heading for him. But the freak didn’t notice Jack—he was too busy smiling up at the cop, his tongue enjoying the taste of Takisian blood on his lower lip. He sliced off the cop’s right arm at the shoulder.
The kid turned back to Tachyon, away from Jack. Jack shook off the joker kid and ran, his arm cocking back, his hand making a fist. If the kid was going to finish off Tach, he’d have to remain material, and Jack could hit him with all the force of a cannon.
The leather boy reached toward Tachyon. His hand movement was gentle, almost a caress. One more step and Jack was going to knock the hunchback’s head about twenty blocks.
Jack let the punch go, and the freak disappeared with a pop! The punch spun him around as Jack screamed in rage. Tachyon’s blood slipped under his feet but somehow he managed to stay upright.
“Who did that!” he shrieked.
Straight Arrow was standing there, a flaming arrow raised high in one hand, like a statue of Zeus throwing a thunderbolt. The Secret Service had knocked Jackson down and had piled on him. A lot of guns were out.
“Ackroyd,” Straight Arrow said. The flame disappeared from his fingertips.
The crowd moaned as if in pain. Men with television cameras circled the police cordon, trying to get a better look. The eyes of the nation were sopping it all up.
Tachyon’s eyes fluttered and he fell to the pavement. The cop was screaming. Jack could see that his wound was too high to tourniquet. Jack stepped up to him, drew back his fist, hit him gently on the temple. The policeman’s head bounced like a punching bag and he went unconscious.