Wildcards

5. Clear skies and tailwinds,

For Arnold, H. H. CofS, USAAF ref. Executive Order #2, 08 Dec '41

"What's this about him having no pilot's license?" asked the newspaperman. "I went through the morgue on him-his file's a foot thick. Hell, he must have flown faster and farther, shot down more planes than anyone-five hundred planes, fifty ships! He did it without a pilot's license?"

Line wiped grease from his mustache. "Yep. That was the most plane-crazy kid you ever saw. Back in '39, he couldn't have been more than twelve, he heard there was a job out here. He showed up at four A.M.-lammed out of the orphanage to do it. They came out to get him. But of course Professor Silverberg had hired him, squared it with them."

"Silverberg's the one the Nazis bumped off? The guy who made the jet?"

"Yep. Years ahead of everybody, but weird. I put together the plane for him, Bobby and I built it by hand. But Silverberg made the jets-damnedest engines you ever saw. The Nazis and Italians, and Whittle over in England, had started theirs. But the Germans found out something was happening here."

"How'd the kid learn to fly?"

"He always knew, I think," said Lincoln. "One day he's in here helping me bend metal. The next, him and the professor are flying around at four hundred miles per. In the dark, with those early engines."

"How'd they keep it a secret?"

"They didn't, very well. The spies came for Silverbergwanted him and the plane. Bobby was out with it. I think he and the prof knew something was up. Silverberg put up such a fight the Nazis killed him. Then, there was the diplomatic stink. In those days the JB-1 only had six. 30 cals on it-where the professor got them I don't know. But the kid took care of the car full of spies with it, and that speedboat on the Hudson full of embassy people. All on diplomatic visas."

"Just a sec," Linc stopped himself. "End of a doubleheader in Cleveland. On the Blue Network." He turned up the metal Philco radio that sat above the toolrack.

" Sanders to Papenfuss to Volstad, a double play. That does it. So the Sox drop two to Cleveland. We'll be right-" Linc turned it off. "There goes five bucks," he said. "Where was I?"

"The Krauts killed Silverberg, and Jetboy got even. He went to Canada, right?"

"Joined the RCAF, unofficially. Fought in the Battle of Britain, went to China against the Japs with the Tigers, was back in Britain for Pearl Harbor."

"And Roosevelt commissioned him?"

"Sort of. You know, funny thing about his whole career. He fights the whole war, longer than any other American-late '39 to '45-then right at the end, he gets lost in the Pacific, missing. We all think he's dead for a year. Then they find him on that desert island last month, and now he's coming home." There was a high, thin whine like a prop plane in a dive. It came from the foggy skies outside. Scoop put out his third Camel. "How can he land in this soup?"

"He's got an all-weather radar set-got it off a German night fighter back in '43. He could land that plane in a circus tent at midnight."

They went to the door. Two landing lights pierced the rolling mist. They lowered to the far end of the runway, turned, and came back on the taxi strip.

The red fuselage glowed in the gray-shrouded lights of the airstrip. The twin-engine high-wing plane turned toward them and rolled to a stop.

Linc Traynor put a set of double chocks under each of the two rear tricycle landing gears. Half the glass nose of the plane levered up and pulled back. The plane had four 20mm cannon snouts in the wing roots between the engines, and a 75mm gunport below and to the left of the cockpit rim.

It had a high thin rudder, and the rear elevators were shaped like the tail of a brook trout. Under each of the elevators was the muzzle of a rear-firing machine gun. The only markings on the plane were four nonstandard USAAF stars in a black roundel, and the serial number JB-1 on the top right and bottom left wings and beneath the rudder.

The radar antennae on the nose looked like something to roast weenies on.

A boy dressed in red pants, white shirt, and a blue helmet and goggles stepped out of the cockpit and onto the dropladder on the left side.

He was nineteen, maybe twenty. He took off his helmet and goggles. He had curly mousy brown hair, hazel eyes, and was short and chunky.

Linc," he said. He hugged the pudgy man to him, patted his back for a full minute. Scoop snapped off a shot. "Great to have you back, Bobby, said Linc. "Nobody's called me that in years," he said. "It sounds real good to hear it again."

"This is Scoop Swanson," said line. "He's gonna make you famous all over again."

"I'd rather be asleep." He shook the reporter's hand. "Any place around here we can get some ham and eggs?"

The launch pulled up to the dock in the fog. Out in the harbor a ship finished cleaning its bilges and was turning to steam back southward.

There were three men on the mooring: Fred and Ed and Filmore. One man stepped out of the launch with a suitcase in his hands. Filmore leaned down and gave the guy at the wheel of the motorboat a Lincoln and two Jacksons. Then he helped the guy with the suitcase.

"Welcome home, Dr. Tod."

"It's good to be back, Filmore." Tod was dressed in a baggy suit, and had on an overcoat even though it was August. He wore his hat pulled low over his face, and from it a glint of metal was reflected in the pale lights from a warehouse.

"This is Fred and this is Ed," said Filmore. "They're here just for the night."

"'Lo," said Fred. "'Lo," said Ed.

They walked back to the car, a '46 Merc that looked like a submarine. They climbed in, Fred and Ed watching the foggy alleys to each side. Then Fred got behind the wheel, and Ed rode shotgun. With a sawed-off ten-gauge.

"Nobody's expecting me. Nobody cares," said Dr. Tod. "Everybody who had something against me is either dead or went respectable during the war and made a mint. I'm an old man and I'm tired. I'm going out in the country and raise bees and play the horses and the market."

"Not planning anything, boss?"

"Not a thing."

He turned his head as they passed a streetlight. Half his face was gone, a smooth plate reaching from jaw to hatline, nostril to left ear.

"I can't shoot anymore, for one thing. My depth perception isn't what it used to be."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Filmore. "We heard something happened to you in '43."

"Was in a somewhat-profitable operation out of Egypt while the Afrika Korps was falling apart. Taking people in and out for a fee in a nominally neutral air fleet. Just a sideline. Then ran into that hotshot flier."

"Who?"

"Kid with the jet plane, before the Germans had them."

"Tell you the truth, boss, I didn't keep up with the war much. I take a long view on merely territorial conflicts."

"As I should have," said Dr. Tod. "We were flying out of Tunisia. Some important people were with us that trip. The pilot screamed. There was a tremendous explosion. Next thing, I came to, it was the next morning, and me and one other person are in a life raft in the middle of the Mediterranean. My face hurt. I lifted up. Something fell into the bottom of the raft. It was my left eyeball. It was looking up at me. I knew I was in trouble."

"You said it was a kid with a jet plane?" asked Ed. "Yes. We found out later they'd broken our code, and he'd flown six hundred miles to intercept us."

"You want to get even?" asked Filmore.

"No. That was so long ago I hardly remember that side of my face. It just taught me to be a little more cautious. I wrote it off as character building."

"So no plans, huh?"

"Not a single one," said Dr. Tod.

"That'll be nice for a change," said Filmore. They watched the lights of the city go by.

He knocked on the door, uncomfortable in his new brown suit and vest.

"Come on in, its open," said a woman's voice. Then it was muffled. "I'll be ready in just a minute."

Jetboy opened the oak hall door and stepped into the room, past the glass-brick room divider.

A beautiful woman stood in the middle of the room, a dress halfway over her arms and head. She wore a camisole, garter belt, and silk hose. She was pulling the dress down with one of her hands.

Jetboy turned his head away, blushing and taken aback. "Oh," said the woman. "Ohl I-who?"

"It's me, Belinda," he said. "Robert."

"Robert?"

"Bobby, Bobby Tomlin."

She stared at him a moment, her hands clasped over her front though she was fully dressed.

"Oh, Bobby," she said, and came to him and hugged him and gave him a big kiss right on the mouth.

It was what he had waited six years for.

"Bobby. It's great to see you. I-I was expecting someone else. Some-girlfriends. How did you find me?"

"Well, it wasn't easy"

She stepped back from him. "Let me look at you." He looked at her. The last time he had seen her she was fourteen, a tomboy, still at the orphanage. She had been a thin kid with mousy blond hair. Once, when she was eleven, she'd almost punched his lights out. She was a year older than he. Then he had gone away, to work at the airfield, then to fight with the Brits against Hitler. He had written her when he could all during the war, after America entered it. She had left the orphanage and been put in a foster home. In '44 one of his letters had come back from there marked 'Moved-No Forwarding Address.' Then he had been lost all during the last year.. "You've changed, too," he said.

"So have you."

"Uh."

"I followed the newspapers all during the war. I tried to write you but I don't guess the letters ever caught up with you. Then they said you were missing at sea, and I sort of gave up."

"Well, I was, but they found me. Now I'm back. How have you been?"

"Real good, once I ran away from the foster home," she said. A look of pain came across her face. "You don't know how glad I was to get away from there. Oh, Bobby," she said. "Oh, I wish things was different!" She started to cry a little.

"Hey," he said, holding her by the shoulders. "Sit down. I've got something for you."

"A present?"

"Yep." He handed her a grimy, oil-stained paper parcel. "I carried these with me the last two years of the war. They were in the plane with me on the island. Sorry I didn't have time to rewrap them."

She tore the English butcher paper. Inside were copies of The House at Pooh Corner and The Tale of the Fierce Bad Rabbit.

"Oh," said Belinda. "Thank you."

He remembered her dressed in the orphanage coveralls, just in, dusty and tired from a baseball game, lying on the reading-room floor with a Pooh book open before her.

"The Pooh book's signed by the real Christopher Robin," he said. "I found out he was an RAF officer at one of the bases in England. He said he usually didn't do this sort of thing, that he was just another airman. I told him I wouldn't tell anyone. I'd searched high and low to find a copy, and he knew that, though."

"This other one's got more of a story behind it. I was coming back near dusk, escorting some crippled B-17s. I looked up and saw two German night fighters coming in, probably setting up patrol, trying to catch some Lancasters before they went out over the Channel."

"To make a long story short, I shot down both of them; they packed in near a small village. But I had run out of fuel and had to set down. Saw a pretty flat sheep pasture with a lake at the far end of it, and went in. When I climbed out of the cockpit, I saw a lady and a sheepdog standing at the edge of the field. She had a shotgun. When she got close enough to see the engines and the decals, she said, "Good shooting! Won't you come in for a bite of supper and to use the telephone to call Fighter Command?" We could see the two ME-110s burning in the distance. `You're the very famous Jetboy.' she said, 'We have followed your exploits in the Sawrey paper. I'm Mrs. Heelis.' She held out her hand."

"I shook it. `Mrs. William Heelis? And this is Sawrey?' 'Yes,' she said."

"'You're Beatrix Potter!' I said."

"'I suppose I am,' she said."

"Belinda, she was this stout old lady in a raggedy sweater and a plain old dress. But when she smiled, I swear, all of England lit up!"

Belinda opened the book. On the flyleaf was written

To Jetboy's American Friend, Belinda, from Mrs. William Heelis ("Beatrix Potter")

12 April 1943

Jetboy drank the coffee Belinda made for him. "Where are your friends?" he asked.

"Well, he they should have been here by now. I was thinking of going down the hall to the phone and trying to call them. I can change, and we can sit around and talk about old times. I really can call."

"No," said Jetboy "Tell you what. I'll call you later on in the week; we can get together some night when you're not busy. That would be fun."

"Sure would." Jetboy got up to go.

"Thank you for the books, Bobby. They mean a lot to me, they really do."

"It's real good to see you again, Bee."

Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!

"Nobody's called me that since the orphanage. Call me real soon, will you?"

"Sure will." He leaned down and kissed her again.

He walked to the stairs. As he was going down, a guy in a modified zoot suit-pegged pants, long coat, watch chain, bow tie the size of a coat hanger, hair slicked back, reeking of Brylcreem and Old Spice-went up the stairs two at a time, whistling "It Ain't the Meat, It's the Motion."

Jetboy heard him knocking at Belinda's door. Outside, it had begun to rain.

"Great. Just like in a movie," said Jetboy.

The next night was quiet as a graveyard.

Then dogs all over the Pine Barrens started to bark. Cats screamed. Birds flew in panic from thousands of trees, circled, swooping this way and that in the dark night.

Static washed over every radio in the northeastern United States. New television sets flared out, volume doubling. People gathered around nine-inch Dumonts jumped back at the sudden noise and light, dazzled in their own living rooms and bars and sidewalks outside appliance stores all over the East Coast.

To those out in that hot August night it was even more spectacular. A thin line of light, high up, moved, brightened, still falling. Then it expanded, upping in brilliance, changed into a blue-green bolide, seemed to stop, then flew to a hundred falling sparks that slowly faded on the dark starlit sky. Some people said they saw another, smaller light a few minutes later. It seemed to hover, then sped off to the west, growing dimmer as it flew. The newspapers had been full of stories of the "ghost rockets" in Sweden all that summer. It was the silly season.

A few calls to the weather bureau or Army Air Force bases got the answer that it was probably a stray from the Delta Aquarid meteor shower.

Out in the Pine Barrens, somebody knew differently, though he wasn't in the mood to communicate it to anyone.

Jetboy, dressed in a loose pair of pants, a shirt, and a brown aviator's jacket, walked in through the doors of the Blackwell Printing Company. There was a bright red-and-blue sign above the door: Home of the Cosh Comics Company. He stopped at the receptionist's desk.

"Robert Tomlin to see Mr. Farrell."

The secretary, a thin blond job in glasses with swept-up rims that made it look like a bat was camping on her face, stared at him. "Mr. Farrell passed on in the winter of 1945. Were you in the service or something?"

"Something."

"Would you like to speak to Mr. Lowboy? He has Mr. Farrell's job now."

"Whoever's in charge of Jetboy Comics."

The whole place began shaking as printing presses cranked up in the back of the building. On the walls of the office were garish comic-book covers, promising things only they could deliver.

"Robert Tomlin," said the secretary to the intercom. "Scratch squawk never heard of him squich." "What was this about?" asked the secretary.

"Tell him Jetboy wants to see him."

"Oh," she said, looking at him. "I'm sorry. I didn't recognize you."

"Nobody ever does."

Lowboy looked like a gnome with all the blood sucked out. He was as pale as Harry Langdon must have been, like a weed grown under a burlap bag.

"Jetboy!" He held out a hand like a bunch of grub worms. "We all thought you'd died until we saw the papers last week. You're a real national hero, you know?"

"I don't feel like one."

"What can I do for you? Not that I'm not pleased to finally meet you. But you must be a busy man."

"Well, first, I found out none of the licensing and royalty checks had been deposited in my account since I was reported Missing and Presumed Dead last summer."

"What, really? The legal department must have put it in escrow or something until somebody came forward with a claim. I'll get them right on it."

"Well, I'd like the check now, before I leave," said Jetboy. "Huh? I don't know if they can do that. That sounds awfully abrupt."

Jetboy stared at him.

"Okay, okay, let me call Accounting." He yelled into the telephone.

"Oh," said Jetboy. "A friend's been collecting my copies. I checked the statement of ownership and circulation for the last two years. I know Jetboy Comics have been selling five hundred thousand copies an issue lately."

Lowboy yelled into the phone some more. He put it down. "It'll take 'em a little while. Anything else?"

"I don't like what's happening to the funny book," said Jetboy.

"What's not to like? It's selling a half a million copies a monthl"

"For one thing, the plane's getting to look more and more like a bullet. And the artists have swept back the wings, for Christ's sakesl"

"This is the Atomic Age, kid. Boys nowadays don't like a plane that looks like a red leg of lamb with coat hangers sticking out the front."

"Well, it's always looked like that. And another thing: Why's the damned plane blue in the last three issues?"

"Not mel I think red's fine. But Mr. Blackwell sent down a memo, said no more red except for blood. He's a big Legionnaire."

"Tell him the plane has to look right, and be the right color. Also, the combat reports were forwarded. When Farrell was sitting at your desk, the comic was about flying and combat, and cleaning up spy rings-real stuff. And there were never more than two ten-page Jetboy stories an issue."

"When Farrell was at this desk, the book was only selling a quarter-million copies a month," said Lowboy.

Robert stared at him again.

"I know the war's over, and everybody wants a new house and eye-bulging excitement," said Jetboy. "But look what I find in the last eighteen months."

"I never fought anyone like The Undertaker, anyplace called The Mountain of Doom. And come on! The Red Skeleton? Mr. Maggot? Professor Blooteaux? What is this with all the skulls and tentacles? I mean, evil twins named Sturm and Drang Hohenzollern? The Arthropod Ape, a gorilla with six sets of elbows? Where do you get all this stuff?"

"It's not me, it's the writers. They're a crazy bunch, always taking Benzedrine and stuff. Besides, it's what the kids want!"

"What about the flying features, and the articles on real aviation heroes? I thought my contract called for at least two features an issue on real events and people?"

"We'll have to look at it again. But I can tell you, kids don't want that kind of stuff anymore. They want monsters, spaceships, stuff that'll make 'em wet the bed. You remember? You were a kid once yourself!"

Jetboy picked up a pencil from the desk. "I was thirteen when the war started, fifteen when they bombed Pearl Harbor. I've been in combat for six years. Sometimes I don't think I was ever a kid."

Lowboy was quiet a moment.

"Tell you what you need to do," he said. "You need to write up all the stuff you don't like about the book and send it to us. I'll have the legal department go over it, and we'll try to do something, work things out. Of course, we print three issues ahead, so it'll be Thanksgiving before the new stuff shows up. Or later."

Jetboy sighed. "I understand."

"I sure do want you happy, 'cause Jetboy's my favorite comic. No, I really mean that. The others are just a job. My god, what a job: deadlines, working with drunks and worse, riding herd over printers-you can just imagine! But I like the work on Jetboy. It's special."

"Well, I'm glad."

"Sure, sure. Lowboy drummed his fingers on the desk. "Wonder what's taking them so long?"

"Probably getting out the other set of ledgers," said Jetboy.

"Hey, no! We're square here!" Lowboy came to his feet. "Just kidding."

"Oh. Say, the paper said you were, what, marooned on a desert island or something? Pretty tough?"

"Well, lonely. I got tired of catching and eating fish. Mostly it was boring, and I missed everything. I don't mean missed, I mean missed out. I was there from April twentyninth of '45 until last month."

"There were times when I thought I'd go nuts. I couldn't believe it one morning when I looked up, and there was the U. S. S. Reluctant anchored less than a mile offshore. I fired off a flare, and they picked me up. It's taken a month to get someplace to repair the plane, rest up, get home. I'm glad to be back."

"I can imagine. Hey, lots of dangerous animals on the island? I mean, lions and tigers and stuff?"

Jetboy laughed. "It was less than a mile wide, and a mile and a quarter long. There were birds and ats and some lizards."

"Lizards? Big lizards? Poisonous?"

"No. Small. I must have eaten half of them before I left. Got pretty good with a slingshot made out of an oxygen hose."

"Huhl I bet you did!"

The door opened, and a tall guy with an ink-smudged shirt came in.

"That him?" asked Lowboy.

"I only seen him once, but it looks like him," said the man. "Good enough for me!" said Lowboy.

"Not for me," said the accountant. "Show me some ID and sign this release."

Jetboy sighed and did. He looked at the amount on the check. It had far too few digits in front of the decimal. He folded it up and put it in his pocket.

"I'll leave my address for the next check with your secretary. And I'll send a letter with the objections this week."

"Do that. It's been a real pleasure meeting you. Let's hope we have a long and prosperous business together."

"Thanks, I guess," said Jetboy. He and the accountant left. Lowboy sat back down in his swivel chair. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the bookcase across the room.

Then he rocketed forward, jerked up the phone, and dialed nine to get out. He called up the chief writer for Jetboy Comics.

A muzzy, hung-over voice answered on the twelfth ring. "Clean the shit out of your head, this is Lowboy. Picture this: fifty-two-page special, single-story issue. Ready? Jetboy on Dinosaur Island! Got that? I see lots of cavemen, a broad, a what-you-call-it-king rex. What? Yeah, yeah, a tyrannosaur. Maybe a buncha holdout Jap soldiers. You know. Yeah, maybe even samurai. When? Blown off course in A. D. 1100? Christ. Whatever. You know exactly what we need."

"What's this? Tuesday. You got till five P M. Thursday, okay? Quit bitchin'. It's a hundred and a half fast bucksl See you then."

He hung up. Then he called up an artist and told him what he wanted for the cover.

Ed and Fred were coming back from a delivery in the Pine Barrens.

They were driving an eight-yard dump truck. In the back until a few minutes ago had been six cubic yards of new-set concrete. Eight hours before, it had been five and a half yards of water, sand, gravel, and cement and a secret ingredient.

The secret ingredient had broken three of the Five Unbreakable Rules for carrying on a tax-free, unincorporated business in the state.

He had been taken by other businessmen to a wholesale construction equipment center, and been shown how a cement mixer works, up close and personal.

Not that Ed and Fred had anything to do with that. They'd been called an hour ago and been asked if they could drive a dump truck through the woods for a couple of grand.

It was dark out in the woods, not too many miles from the city. It didn't look like they were within a hundred miles of a town over five-hundred population.

The headlights picked out ditches where everything from old airplanes to sulfuric-acid bottles lay in clogged heaps. Some of the dumpings were fresh. Smoke and fire played about a few. Others glowed without combustion. A pool of metal bubbled and popped as they ground by.

Then they were back into the deep pines again, jouncing from rut to rut.

"Hey!" yelled Ed. "Stop!"

Fred threw on the brakes, killing the engine. "Goddamn!" he said. "What the hell's the matter with you?"

"Back therel I swear I saw a guy pushing a neon cat's-eye marble the size of Cleveland!"

"I'm sure as hell not going back," said Fred.

"Nab! Come on! You don't see stuff like that every day."

"Shit, Ed! Someday you're gonna get us both killedl"

It wasn't a marble. They didn't need their flashlights to tell it wasn't a magnetic mine. It was a rounded canister that glowed on its own, with swirling colors on it. It hid the man pushing it.

"It looks like a rolled-up neon armadillo," said Fred, who'd been out west.

The man behind the thing blinked at them, unable to see past their flashlights. He was tattered and dirty, with a tobaccostained beard and wild, steel-wool hair.

They stepped closer.

"It's mine!" he said to them, stepping in front of the thing, holding his arms out across it.

Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!

"Easy, old-timer," said Ed. "What you got?"

"My ticket to easy street. You from the Air Corps?"

"Hell, no. Let's look at this."

The man picked up a rock. "Stay back! I found it where I found the plane crash. The Air Corps'll pay plenty to get this atomic bomb back!"

"That doesn't look like any atomic bomb I've ever seen," said Fred. "Look at the writing on the side. It ain't even English."

"Course it's not! It must be a secret weapon. That's why they dressed it up so weird."

"Who?"

"I told you more'n I meant to. Get outta my way." Fred looked at the old geezer. "You've piqued my interest," he said. "Tell me more."

"Outta my way, boyl I killed a man over a can of lye hominy once!"

Fred reached in his jacket. He came out with a pistol with a muzzle that looked like a drainpipe.

"It crashed last night," said the old man, eyes wild. "Woke me up. Lit up the whole sky. I looked for it all day today, figured the woods would be crawlin' with Air Corps people and state troopers, but nobody came."

"Found it just before dark tonight. Tore all hell up, it did. Knocked the wings completely off the thing when it crashed. All these weird-dressed people all scattered around. Women too." He lowered his head a minute, shame on his face. "Anyway, they was all dead. Must have been a jet plane, didn't find no propellers or nothing. And this here atomic bomb was just lying there in the wreck. I figured the Air Corps would ay real good to get it back. Friend of mine found a weather balloon once and they gave him a dollar and a quarter. I figure this is about a million times as important as that!"

Fred laughed. "A buck twenty-five, huh? I'll give you ten dollars for it."

"I can get a million!"

Fred pulled the hammer back on the revolver. "Fifty," said the old man.

"Twenty."

"It ain't fair. But I'll take it."

"What are you going to do with that?" asked Ed. "Take it to Dr. Tod," said Fred. "He'll know what to do with it. He's the scientific type."

"What if it is an A-bomb?"

"Well, I don't think A-bombs have spray nozzles on them. And the old man was right. The woods would have been crawling with Air Force people if they'd lost an atomic bomb."

"Hell, only five of them have ever been exploded. They can't have more than a dozen, and you better believe they know where every one of them is, all the time."

"Well, it ain't a mine," said Ed. "What do you think it is?"

"I don't care. If it's worth money, Doctor Tod'll split with us. He's a square guy."

"For a crook," said Ed.

They laughed and laughed, and the thing rattled around in the back of the dump truck.

The MPs brought the red-haired man into his office and introduced them.

"Please have a seat, Doctor," said A. E. He lit his pipe. The man seemed ill at ease, as he should have been after two days of questioning by Army Intelligence.

"They have told me what happened at White Sands, and that you won't talk to anyone but me," said A. E. "I understand they used sodium pentathol on you, and that it had no effect?"

"It made me drunk," said the man, whose hair in this light seemed orange and yellow.

"But you didn't talk?"

"I said things, but not what they wanted to hear."

"Very unusual."

"Blood chemistry."

A. E. sighed. He looked out the window of the Princeton office. "Very well, then. I will listen to your story. I am not saying I will believe it, but I will listen."

"All right," said the man, taking a deep breath. "Here goes. "

He began to talk, slowly at first, forming his words carefully, gaining confidence as he spoke. As he began to talk faster, his accent crept back in, one A. E. could not ace, something like a Fiji Islander who had learned English from a Swede. A. E. refilled his pipe twice, then left it unlit after filling it the third time. He sat slightly forward, occasionally nodding, his gray hair an aureole in the afternoon light.

The man finished.

A. E. remembered his pipe, found a match, lit it. He put his hands behind his head. There was a small hole in his sweater near the left elbow.

"They'll never believe any of that," he said.

"I don't care, as long as they do something!" said the man. "As long as I get it back."

A. E. looked at him. "If they did believe you, the implications of all this would overshadow the reason you're here. The fact that you are here, if you follow my meaning."

"Well, what can we do? If my ship were still operable, I'd be looking myself. I did the next best thing-landed somewhere that would be sure to attract attention, asked to speak to you. Perhaps other scientists, research institutes…"

A. E. laughed. "Forgive me. You don't realize how things are done here. We will need the military. We will have the military and the government whether we want them or not, so we might as well have them on the best possible terms, ours, from the first. The problem is that we have to think of something that is plausible to them, yet will still mobilize them in the search."

"I'll talk to the Army people about you, then make some calls to friends of mine. We have just finished a large global war, and many things had a way of escaping notice, or being lost in the shuffle. Perhaps we can work something from there."

"The only thing is, we had better do all this from a phone booth. The MPs will be along, so I will have to talk quietly. Tell me," he said, picking up his hat from the corner of a cluttered bookcase, "do you like ice cream?"

"Lactose and sugar solids congealed in a mixture kept just below the freezing point?" asked the man.

"I assure you," said A. E., "it is better than it sounds, and quite refreshing." Arm in arm, they went out the office door.

Jetboy patted the scarred side of his plane. He stood in Hangar 23. Linc came out of his office, wiping his hands on a greasy rag.

"Hey, how'd it go?" he asked.

"Great. They want the book of memoirs. Going to be their big Spring book, if I get it in on time, or so they say."

"You still bound and determined to sell the plane?" asked the mechanic. "Sure hate to see her go."

"Well, that part of my life's over. I feel like if I never fly again, even as an airline passenger, it'll be too soon."

"What do you want me to do?"

Jetboy looked at the plane.

"Tell you what. Put on the high-altitude wing extensions and the drop tanks. It looks bigger and shinier that way. Somebody from a museum will probably buy it, is what I figure-I'm offering it to museums first. If that doesn't work, I'll take out ads in the papers. We'll take the guns out later, if some private citizen buys it. Check everything to see it's tight. Shouldn't have shaken much on the hop from San Fr an, and they did a pretty good overhaul at Hickam Field. Whatever you think it needs."

"Sure thing."

"I'll call you tomorrow, unless something can't wait."

HISTORICAL AIRCRAFT FOR SALE: Jetboy's twin-engine jet. 2 x 1200 lb thrust engines, speed 600 mph at 25,000 ft, range 650 miles, 1000 w/drop tanks (tanks and wing exts. inc.) length 31 ft, w/s 33 ft (49 w exts.) Reasonable offers accepted. Must see to appreciate. On view at Hangar 23, Bonham's Flying Service, Shantak, New Jersey.

Jetboy stood in front of the bookstore window, looking at the pyramids of new titles there. You could tell paper rationing was off. Next year, his book would be one of them. Not just a comic book, but the story of his part in the war. He hoped it would be good enough so that it wouldn't be lost in the clutter. Seems like, in the words of someone, every goddamn barber and shoeshine boy who was drafted had written a book about how he won the war.

There were six books of war memoirs in one window, by everyone from a lieutenant colonel to a major general (maybe those PFC barbers didn't write that many books?).

Maybe they wrote some of the two dozen war novels that covered another window of the display.

There were two books near the door, piles of them in a window by themselves, runaway best-sellers, that weren't war novels or memoirs. One was called The Grass-Hopper Lies Heavy by someone named Abendsen (Hawthorne Abendsen, obviously a pen name). The other was a thick book called Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms by someone so self-effacing she called herself "Mrs. Charles Fine Adams." It must be a book of unreadable poems that the public, in its craziness, had taken up. There was no accounting for taste.

Jetboy put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and walked to the nearest movie show.

Tod watched the smoke rising from the lab and waited for the phone to ring. People ran back and forth to the building a half-mile away.

There had been nothing for two weeks. Thorkeld, the scientist he'd hired to run the tests, had reported each day. The stuff didn't work on monkeys, dogs, rats, lizards, snakes, frogs, insects, or even on fish in suspension in water. Dr. Thorkeld was beginning to think Tod's men had paid twenty dollars for an inert gas in a fancy container.

A few moments ago there had been an explosion. Now he waited.

The phone rang.

"Tod-oh, god, this is Jones at the lab, its-" Static washed over the line. "Oh, sweet Jesus! Thorkeld's-they're all-" There was thumping near the phone receiver on the other end. "Oh, my…"

"Calm down," said Tod. "Is everyone outside the lab safe?"

"Yeah, yeah. The… oooh." The sound of vomiting came over the phone.

Tod waited.

"Sorry, Dr. Tod. The lab's still sealed off: The fire's-it's a small one on the grass outside. Somebody dropped a butt."

"Tell me what happened."

"I was outside for a smoke. Somebody in there must have messed up, dropped something. I-I don t know. Its-they're most of them dead, I think. I hope. I don't know. Something's-wait, wait. There's someone still moving in the office, I can see from here, there's-"

There was a click of someone picking up a receiver. The volume on the line dropped.

"Tog, Tog," said a voice, an approximation of a voice. "Who's there?"

"Torgk-"

"Thorkeld?"

"Guh. Hep. Hep. Guh."

There was a sound like a sack full of squids being dumped on a corrugated roof. "Hep." Then came the sound of jelly being emptied into a cluttered desk drawer.

There was a gunshot, and the receiver bounced off the desk.

"He-he shot-it-himself," said Jones. "I'll be right out," said Tod.

After the cleanup, Tod stood in his office again. It had not been pretty. The canister was still intact. Whatever the accident had been had been with a sample. The other animals were okay. It was only the people. Three were dead outright. One, Thorkeld, had killed himself. Two others he and Jones had had to kill. A seventh person was missing, but had not come out any of the doors or windows.

Tod sat down in his chair and thought a long, long time. Then he reached over and pushed the button on his desk. "Yeah, Doctor?" asked Filmore, stepping into the room with a batch of telegrams and brokerage orders under his arm. Dr. Tod opened the desk safe and began counting out bills. "Filmore. I'd like you to get down to Port Elizabeth, North Carolina, and buy me up five type B -limp balloons. Tell them I'm a car salesman. Arrange for one million cubic feet of helium to be delivered to the south Pennsy warehouse. Break out the hardware and give me a complete list of what we have-anything we need, we can get surplus. Get ahold of Captain Mack, see if he still has that cargo ship. We'll need new passports. Get me Cholley Sacks; I'll need a contact in Switzerland. I'll need a pilot with a lighter-than-air license. Some diving suits and oxygen. Shot ballast, couple of tons. A bombsight. Nautical charts. And bring me a cup of coffee."

"Fred has a lighter-than-air pilot's license," said Filmore. "Those two never cease to amaze me," said Dr. Tod.

"I thought we'd pulled our last caper, boss."

"Filmore," he said, and looked at the man he'd been friends with for twenty years, "Filmore, some capers you have to pull, whether you want to or not."

"Dewey was an Admiral at Manila Bay, Dewey was a candidate just the other day Dewey were her eyes when she said I do; Do we love each other? I should say we dol"

The kids in the courtyard of the apartment jumped rope. They'd started the second they got home from school.

At first it bothered Jetboy. He got up from the typewriter and went to the window. Instead of yelling, he watched. The writing wasn't going well, anyway. What had seemed like just the facts when he'd told them to the G-2 boys during the war looked like bragging on paper, once the words were down:

Three planes, two ME-109s and a TA-152, came out of the clouds at the crippled B-24. It had suffered heavy flak damage. Two props were feathered and the top turret was missing.

One of the 109s went into a shallow dive, probably going into a snap roll to fire up at the underside of the bomber.

I ease my plane in a long turn and fired a deflection shot while about 700 yards away and closing. I saw three hits, then the 109 disintegrated.

The TA-152 had seen me and dived to intercept. As the 109 blew up, I throttled back and hit my air brakes. The 152 flashed by less than 50 yards away. I saw the surprised look on the pilot's face. I fired one burst as he flashed by with my 20mms. Everything from his canopy back flew apart in a shower.

I pulled up. The last 109 was behind the Liberator. He was firing with his machine guns and cannon. He'd taken out the tail gunner, and the belly turret couldn't get enough elevation. The bomber pilot was wigwagging the tail so the waist gunners could get a shot, but only the left waist gun was working.

I was more than a mile away, but had turned above and to the right. I put the nose down and fired one round with the 75mm just before the gunsight ashed across the 109.

The whole middle of the fighter disappeared-I could see France through it. The only image I have is that I was looking down on top of an open umbrella and somebody folded it suddenly. The fighter looked like Christmas-tree tinsel as it fell.

Then the few gunners left on the B-24 opened up on me, not recognizing my plane. I flashed my IFF code, but their receiver must have have been out.

There were two German parachutes far below. The pilots of the first two fighters must have gotten out. I went back to my base.

When they ran maintenance, they found one of my 75mm rounds missing, and only twelve 20mm shells. I'd shot down three enemy planes.

I later learned the B-24 had crashed in the Channel and there were no survivors.

Who needs this stuff? Jetboy thought. The war's over. Does anybody really want to read The Jet-Propelled Boy when it's published? Does anybody except morons even want to read Jetboy Comics anymore?

I don't even think I'm needed. What can I do now? Fight crime? I can see strafing getaway cars full of bank robbers. That would be a real fair fight. Barnstorming? That went out with Hoover, and besides, I don't want to fly again. This year more people will fly on airliners on vacation than have been in the air all together in the last forty-three years, mail pilots, cropdusters, and wars included.

What can I do? Break up a trust? Prosecute wartime profiteers? There's a real dead-end job for you. Punish mean old men who are robbing the state blind running orphanages and starving and beating the kids? You don't need me for that, you need Spanky and Alfalfa and Buckwheat.

"A tisket, a tasket, Hitler's in a casket. Eenie-meenie-Mussolini, Six feet underground!" said the kids outside, now doing double-dutch, two ropes going opposite directions. Kids have too much energy, he thought. They hot-peppered a while, then slowed again.

"Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep,

Where old Hitler lies asleep.

German boys, they tickle his feet,

Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep!"

Jetboy turned away from the window. Maybe what I need is to go to the movies again.

Since his meeting with Belinda, he'd done nothing much but read, write, and go see movies. Before coming home, the last two movies he'd seen, in a crowded post auditorium in France in late '44, had been a cheesy double bill. That Nazty Nuisance, a United Artists film made in '43, with Bobby Watson as Hitler, and one of Jetboy's favorite character actors, Frank Faylen, had been the better of the two. The other was a PRC hunk of junk, jive junction, starring Dickie Moore, about a bunch of hepcats jitterbugging at the malt shop.

The first thing he'd done after getting his money and finding an apartment, was to find the nearest movie theater, where he'd seen Murder, He Says about a house full of hillbilly weird people, with Fred McMurray and Marjorie Main, and an actor named Porter Hall playing identical twin-brother murderers named Bert and Mert. "Which one's which?" asks McMurray, and Marjorie Main picked up an axe handle and hit one of them in the middle of the back, where he collapsed from the waist up in a distorted caricature of humanity, but stayed on his feet. "That there's Mert," says Main, throwing the axe handle on the woodpile. "He's got a trick back." There was radium and homicide galore, and Jetboy thought it was the funniest movie he had ever seen.

Since then he'd gone to the movies every day, sometimes going to three theaters and seeing from six to eight movies a day. He was adjusting to civilian life, like most soldiers and sailors had, by seeing films.

He had seen Lost Weekend with Ray Milland, and Frank Faylen again, this time as a male nurse in a psycho ward; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; The Thin Man Goes Home, with William Powell at his alcoholic best; Bring on the Girls; It's in the Bag with Fred Allen; Incendiary Blonde; The Story of G.I. Joe (Jetboy had been the subject of one of Pyle's columns back in '43); a horror film called Isle of the Dead with Boris Karloff; a new kind of Italian movie called Open City at an art house; and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

And there were other films, Monogram and PRC and Republic westerns and crime movies, pictures he'd seen in twenty-four-hour nabes, but had forgotten about ten minutes after leaving the theaters. By the lack of star names and the 4-F look of the leading men, they'd been the bottom halves of double bills made during the war, all clocking in at exactly fiftynine minutes running time.

Jetboy sighed. So many movies, so much of everything he'd missed during the war. He'd even missed V-E and V-J Days, stuck on that island, before he and his plane had been found by the crew of the U.S. S. Reluctant. The way the guys on the Reluctant talked, you'd have thought they missed most of the war and the movies, too.

He was looking forward to a lot of films this fall, and to seeing them when they came out, the way everybody else did, the way he'd used to do at the orphanage.

Jetboy sat back down at the typewriter. If I don't work, I'll never get this book done. I'll go to the movies tonight.

He began to type up all the exciting things he'd done on July 12,