Innocence. Helplessness. They drew him like a magnet. His cock pulsating with excitement and need, he lumbered toward the village.
He had almost reached it when a voice spoke in his head: “Wait.”
He stopped, growling resentment at the intrusion. The massive horned head swiveled left and right, looking for the source of the irritation. Fury beyond fury piled upon the anger that blazed within him. No one told him to wait.
“This isn’t you. I know it’s not.”
He raised clawed hands, roared a shattering wordless affirmation: IamIII!
“No. You aren’t. You’re an illusion, an aberration. I’m speaking to the real you. That which is buried deep inside. That which is … good.”
Monster shook his head, as if to cast forth the insistent voice. He hated the voice. He wanted to find where it came from, and smash, and kill. It said things that must never be said to him.
“Isis … Moonchild. It’s me, Eric. Your love.”
NO! Negation erupted from the molten core of him.
“Yes.” Images flooded his mind: Isis and Eric, holding hands by candlelight, walking out along the paddy dikes beneath the moon’s benevolent face. Gentle; loving.
Monster pummeled his face with the heels of his hands. He would not see these things. He must not.
“Isis. You’re still in there. Come out. Fight the evil. You can defeat it, send it back where it came from.”
Monster was out of control, reeling blindly in agony. In fear.
Fear fed the anger. As it always does. It was not right that he should fear. He was the mightiest of beings; His will be done, on Earth as it was in Hell.
He looked around, desperate. And there was the village, still dark, still silent, still virginal, nearby.
He would slay. He would rape. He would wade in horror to the sac of his gravid balls. And that awful voice would bother him no more.
“‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio,’” J. Robert Belew quoted aloud, not without relishing the taste of it, “’than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”
Orbiting the looming horror at what he guessed was a safe distance, Belew drew a deep sigh. His ammunition cans were empty, his bombs and rockets spent. The monster had been acting crazy for a moment there, but it had pulled itself together. Now it was going to lay waste to the helpless village.
He couldn’t let that happen. At least, not without a fight.
J. Bob Belew considered himself a hard man, and generally lived up to his own expectations. But he had a weakness. He thought of himself as a white knight, sans peur et sans reproche. All of the things he had done — even the hard things, the repugnant things — had been done out of an unshakable sense of Right. And a white knight didn’t let dragons slaughter defenseless peasants.
Even if it cost him his life.
“‘Lord, what fools these mortals be,’” Belew said sadly, speaking of himself “And worse, what mortals be these fools.” He soared high, savoring a last moment of ecstasy, of flight and power. Then he nosed over and went at the creature’s back in a full-power dive.
Monster strode toward the village. His cock throbbed with need. There were women in the village, and children. He wanted to hear them scream as he plucked them to pieces.
The village showed no signs of life. The occupants were all hunkered down in the illegal bunkers beneath their hootches, waiting for the storm to pass. But this storm would not pass. Not until it had dug them out and devoured them all.
His feet were at the fence. Behind him he heard the scream of a tortured engine. He paid no attention; that wasn’t the kind of screaming he yearned to hear. He stretched out a hand.
An image burst like a bomb in his mind: himself, poised to give pain. And then, looming over him, a dozen times greater, a hundred, was Moonchild in her black and silver. And at her side stood Cap’n Trips, resplendent in his purple suit, and J. J. Flash, and Cosmic Traveler, and Aquarius — and, yes, the blond one, the dead one, and a legion of others the Monster did not know.
He raised his fists to defy them. It was a dream, a lie! The others weren’t bigger than he. They were weak, they were small. He was big. He was greater than anything.
“All you need,” the voice said, “is love.”
He roared his contempt. And the giant faces gazed down upon him, and love flowed out.
It burned him like napalm. Like Crypt Kicker’s acid. He screamed.
He tried to force the image from his mind. He failed. His dream self lashed out against all those other selves, the soft, self-righteous selves. They would not raise hands in return. They only … loved.
J. Robert Belew held the helicopter that was himself in its suicide dive. The green-black mass of corruption filled the flat windscreen. He braced for impact, and grinned at his own futility.
“So long, Ma,” he said. “You were right all along: I’m coming to no good end.”
And the monster blew up in his face.
The excess mass the Monster had drawn into himself in his moment of borning let go in a flash and mighty blast.
Then there was nothing but a village blown down above the heads of its inhabitants — terrified but safe in their bunkers — and a wounded helicopter auto-rotating to a hard landing back among the trees, and Mark Meadows lying in a fetal ball among bean plants, weeping and vomiting.
And then a great wave of calm passed over him. He rolled onto his back and gazed up at the skies.
The stars gazed back. Wouldn’t you know it, he thought. Yet they held no terror for him anymore. They were just … stars.
… He felt the presence of Starshine, joined with his comrades for the fight of all their lives, going away from him. He felt sorrow well up within him. “Wait!” he cried, “don’t go!”
“Don’t mourn,” Starshine’s voice said, “organize.” And he was gone, and Mark knew he’d never come again.
He blinked the tears from his eyes. The time would come when he would mourn that other self. And then he would be whole, and he would go on, to wherever it was he was heading.
And another voice in his head: “Isis. Is he — is it — did we win?”
“Eric!” It was his lips, but Moonchild’s voice.
“He’s still alive,” he said in his own voice. “We gotta help him!”
He picked himself up and headed back for the clearing at a stumbling run.
Chapter Fifty-one
O. K. Casaday lay on his belly, peering through binoculars at the temple. After the Monster’s departure the little party had made it to the relative safety of a ridge several hundred meters to the north. The PAVN officers had turned up a squad of infantry, which was currently dug into a defensive perimeter around them. Nobody felt too much confidence in it.
“What do you see, man?” Colonel Vo urged from his shoulder. “What do you see?”
“Don’t jostle me, dammit,” Casaday snarled. “Looks like the Brigaders have pretty well rallied. They’re all crowding back into the clearing again.”
“Good,” Vo exulted. “Excellent! All is not lost.”
Casaday rolled an eye away from the eyepiece of his glasses and looked at him.
Freddie Whitelaw sat on his broad bottom, scanning the southern horizon with the telephoto lens of his Leica. “What happened to that horrid thing?” he kept asking. “What happened?”
“How the hell should I know?” Casaday asked, sitting up and brushing soil from his tropical suit. “I saw the same thing you did: son of a bitch just blew up.”
“What on Earth could have destroyed it?”
“When you find out,” Casaday said, “I’m sure you’ll have a hell of a story.”
The senior PAVN officer had been speaking over the squad’s radio. He came forward now with an air of grim satisfaction.
“We have been holding a weapon in reserve,” he announced. “We could not deploy it against that … creature, because it was in the midst of our own troops. We could not risk so many tanks.”
“Typical socialist priorities,” Whitelaw murmured. “Worry about the war toys first, and the men last.”
“Now that the monster has been dealt with, however that occurred, we can use our fuel-air explosive shells against another menace to our Socialist Republic.”
Casaday looked at him in surprise. “You have FAE?” The officer nodded.
“You will destroy the rebels with it, then?” Vo asked, eyes shining with eagerness.
“No. They are too dispersed. To be effective, FAE devices require concentrated targets. Concentrated, like that mass of smaller monsters down there by the temple.”
Vo went white. “What are you saying? They’re our men!”
“They are monsters. They attacked us. They are rabid, like dogs. They must be destroyed.”
“No!” Vo shouted. “You can’t! We can still use them! We can still win! They”
The PAVN officer’s backhand blow knocked him to the ground. When Vo blinked away the big balloons of light from behind his eyes, he saw Casaday standing over him, aiming his Beretta at his face.
“But why?” Vo gasped. “It was your project too.”
“My main priority,” Casaday said, “is wiping out wild card filth wherever I find it. If the project’s a write-off, I can still say, mission accomplished.”
To punctuate his words, a whistling crossed the breaking sky.
When Mark came in sight of the clearing, he saw that a pole had been set up in front of the pagoda. Colonel Sobel’s head was stuck atop it. The New Joker Brigade was dancing around and around it.
He stopped, swallowed. What am I getting myself into?
But Eric was hurt. Eric needed him — needed Moonchild. Hell, needed all of them. Eric had saved him twice tonight, once from the mob and once from himself.
Mark shut his eyes, willed his conscious self to recede, let himself slip as far into Moonchild mode as he could.
Eric, she thought. Eric, where are you? I’ve come to help you.
“Isis?”
Mark’s eyes opened. Yes, Moonchild said within his mind. I’m here.
Panic filled her mind. “No, you’ve got to get away from here. It’s too late for me — too late for any of us.”
Eric, tell me where you are. I’ll come to you.
“Isis, you can’t. They’ll kill you.”
Who? The jokers?
“Or the nats. It’s a race now, don’t you see? Do we destroy ourselves first, or do the nats finish us off?”
She saw him now, staggering from the midst of the exuberant mob. Weak, moving painfully, his T-shirt dyed red with his own blood: Eric.
I see you. Just walk a little farther into the trees. I’ll come for you —
He stopped, cocked his disfigured head to the side.
“No, don’t! Get away — run! It’s too late, I told you. Run!”
Eric — A scream filled the sky.
“Wouldn’t you know,” came the sardonic thought. “The nats win again.”
She heard popping then, too small a sound, she thought, for bombs or shells. Most of the jokers didn’t even pause in their dance.
Eric, I love you!
“I love you too, hon.”
And then temple, clearing, the jokers, and Eric, all vanished in a single brilliant orange flash. Mark was hurled backward, into darkness.
Epilogue
WHAT A LONG,
STRANGE TRIP
IT’S BEEN
“So love conquers all.”
The room was elegantly furnished, in dainty fin-de-siècle French style. Mark perched on one of the antique chairs, looking luridly out of place, like a stork in a drawing room. His cheeks were still sunburn pink from the dragon’s breath of the fuel-air blast, and his ears rang.
He was paying half attention to the television droning on: “— White House appears to be backing down from a statement made earlier today by President Bush that he was prepared to dispatch the American Pacific Fleet to prevent what he termed an ‘ace-powered criminal mastermind’ from becoming president pro tem of South Vietnam. The reassessment seems to have been prompted by the People’s Republic of China’s recognition of the breakaway Republic.
“Meanwhile the survival of the communist regime in Hanoi itself remains very much in doubt —”
Mark looked up at his guest. “At least love helps an old hippie conquer himself,” he replied.
Belew laughed. The renegade secret agent had a pair of tubular metal crutches propped by his chair and bandages on his face. He had not made a real good landing after Monster blew up in his face.
“The great work,” Belew said. “It goes on and on. ‘Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.’”
“I’ve been there, man.”
Among the other tightrope walkers over the Abyss, William “Carnifex” Ray was lying under guard in a Saigon clinic formerly reserved for Party officials and their families. He was in much worse shape from his aerial adventures than Belew was. Without his body’s ability to regenerate he would have been dead, crippled at the least. As it was, the Medecins sans Frontières doctors expected him to make a full recovery over time.
Crypt Kicker’s condition was stable: he was dead. Whether his condition was critical or not was a different matter. His lightning-blasted corpse lay in a cold drawer in the Saigon city morgue. The bemused attendants were under instructions to open up if they heard knocking.
Croyd Crenson lay in a bedroom here in Mark’s official Saigon residence. He was still sound asleep.
“How do you feel?” J. Bob asked Mark.
“I feel strange. Soiled, somehow. Evil. I didn’t know I had all that in me.”
“Everybody has that in ’em, son,” Belew said. “You’re just the only one who has such an impressive means of letting it out.”
He slapped Mark on the arm. “Just think of all the anger you managed to work out of your system. Does wonders for you, they say.”
Mark grimaced.
“Some people say no one ever won a fight,” Belew said. “They lie. But there’s always a cost. Always a butcher’s bill. You pay a price in blood, whether you’re scratched or not.”
He walked over and touched Mark on the shoulder. “Time for a change,” he said softly. “Your public’s waiting.”
“Thanks,” Mark said.
Belew gathered up his crutches and left the room. I hope I don’t have to kill him someday, Mark thought.
Mark looked toward the window. The night had come down outside. It was time for the new president to address her constituents.
He took his hand from his pocket, held the vial it held up to the light. Black crystals swirled among silver. He brought it to his lips, hesitated. He would never take one of the potions again without that moment of fear, that glass-breaking instant of decision.
He took the potion.
A moment later Moonchild bent to turn off the television. “Goodbye, Eric,” she said. There was no pain in the space he had occupied in her soul. Just void. “The Dream is in my hands now.”
She stepped to the French doors that gave onto the balcony. She could feel the adulation of the crowd coursing through them like benevolent radiation. Like the healing rays of the moon.
The opportunity before her was great: to turn South Vietnam into a safe haven for all those touched by the wild card; to lay the foundation for a better world. To give peace a chance, the way the song said.
It was also terrible. A fleeting glimpse of such opportunity as this had led Sobel and Eric astray. Had led them to mortgage their souls, to become in the end that which they had dedicated themselves to struggling against.
But we know well always try to do what’s right, Mark said from just below the surface of her mind. We won’t give in to the temptations of power Won’t make all the same mistakes.
Yeah, J. J. Flash thought. Right.
The white jetliner turned its nose wheel into a quicksilver pool of sun-shimmer on the Tan Son Nhut runway
and stopped. Mark’s motley honor guard of jokers, Montagnards, and ethnic Vietnamese snapped as close to attention as they ever got. Feeling his heart going all light and drifty in his chest, Mark looked left and right at them and thought it was a good thing he didn’t take this presidential trip too seriously.
Especially since he wasn’t actually the president.
The ramp was wheeled up to the door of the plane. It opened. A slim young woman in jeans and a white T-shirt with teddy bears on it came down the steps. Her long blonde hair gleamed in the sun.
Mark craned his head, looking past her. Then he looked more closely at her. She was studying him with a puzzled look.
They broke toward each other, running gangle-legged and careless, hit and hugged, their tears mingling.
“Daddy!”
“Sprout!” He hugged her again, then held her away to look at her. “Honey, you look all grown up now.”
She threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “I didn’t recognize you. You look so strong.”
“I’ve been getting lots of exercise, honey,” he said. “C’mon. Let’s get you out of the sun.”
“Daddy, I love you.”
He felt tears sting his eyes. He smiled. “Honey, I love you too. More than anything in the world.”
THE VIETNAM WAR
A Personal Statement
I did not go to Nam. I was too young (just). I could have arranged to, had I worked at it, but the truth is I didn’t want to.
In the sixties and seventies I had two feelings about the War:
First, I thought the American involvement in Vietnam was wrong, from a moral, political, and military point of view. It’s no reflection on those who fought there; they didn’t make the policy.
Second, I thought communism was a bad thing. I did not support the government of North Vietnam. I simply believed that the U.S. government had no business spending our lives and treasure trying to make other people behave the way it wanted them to.
Turn of the Cards Page 42
