Aces High wc-2

by George R. R. Martin

  He drifted high over the city, a cold wind keening around his shell. The police monitor crackled with trivialities. Tom switched to the marine band, thinking maybe he could find a small boat in distress. Once he'd saved six people off a yacht. that had capsized in a summer squall. The grateful owner had laid a huge reward on him afterward. The guy was smart too; he paid cash, small worn bills, nothing bigger than a twenty. Six damned suitcases. The heroes Tom had read about as a kid always turned down rewards, but none of them lived in a crummy apartment or drove an eight-year-old Plymouth. Tom took the money, salved his conscience by giving one suitcase to the clinic, and used the other five to buy his house. There was no way he'd ever have been able to own a house on Tom Tudbury's salary. Sometimes he worried about IRS audits, but so far that hadn't come up.

  His watch said it was 1:03. Time for lunch. He opened the small refrigerator in the floor, where he'd stashed an apple, a ham sandwich, and a six-pack.

  When he finished eating, it was 1:17. Less than forty-five minutes, he thought, and he remembered that old Cagney movie about George M. Cohan, and the song "Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway." A bus leaving right now from Port Authority would take forty-five minutes to get to Bayonne, but it was quicker by air. Ten minutes, fifteen at the most, and he could be back.

  But for what?

  He turned off the radio, pushed the Springsteen tape back in, and rewound until he found 'Glory Days' again.

  The second time around, things went a lot better. After graduation she'd gone to Rutgers, Barbara told him that first night, over steak sandwiches and mugs of beer at Hendrickson's. She'd gotten a teaching certificate, spent two years in California with a boyfriend, and come back to Bayonne when they broke up. She was teaching locally now, kindergarten, and in Tom's old grammar school, ironically enough. " I love it," she said. "The kids are fantastic. Five is a magic age."

  Tom had let her talk about her life for a long time, happy just to be sitting there with her, listening to her voice. He liked the way her eyes sparkled when she talked about the kids. When she finally ran down, he asked her the question that had been bugging him all these years. "Did Steve Bruder ever ask you to our prom?"

  She made a face. "No, the son of a bitch. He went with Betty Moroski. I cried for a week."

  "He was an idiot. Jesus, she wasn't half as pretty as you."

  "No," Barbara said, with a wry twist to her mouth, "but she put out, and I didn't. Never mind that. What about you? What have you been doing for the last ten years?"

  It would have been infinitely more interesting if he had told her about the Turtle, about life in the cold skies and mean streets, about the close calls and the high times and the head lines. He could have bragged about capturing the Great Ape during the big blackout of 1965, could have told her how he'd saved Dr. Tachyon's life and sanity, could have casually dropped the names of the famous and infamous, aces and jokers and celebrities of every stripe. But all that was part of another life, and it belonged to an ace who came canned in an iron shell. The only thing he had to offer her was Thomas Tudbury. As he talked about himself, he realized for the first time how bare and dreary his 'real' life truly was.

  Yet somehow it seemed to be enough.

  That first date led to a second, the second to a third, and soon they were seeing each other regularly. It was not the world's most exciting courtship. On weekdays they went to local movies at the DeWitt or the Lyceum; sometimes they just watched television together and took turns cooking dinner. On weekends, it was off to New York; Broadway plays when they could afford it, late dinners in Chinatown and Little Italy. The more he was with her, the more he found himself unable to be without her.

  They both liked red wine, and pizza, and rock 'n' roll. She had marched on Washington the year before, to get the troops out of Vietnam, and he'd been there too (inside his shell, floating over the mall with peace symbols painted on his armor and a gorgeous blonde in a halter top and jeans sitting on top, singing along to the antiwar songs that blared from his speakers, but he couldn't tell her that part). She loved Gina and Joey, and her parents seemed to approve of him. She was a baseball fan, brought up to abominate the Yankees and love the Brooklyn Dodgers, just like him. Come October, she sat beside him in the Ebbetts Field bleachers, when Tom Seaver pitched the Dodgers to victory over the Oakland A's in the seventh and deciding game of the Series. A month later, he was there to share her anguish at McGovern's landslide defeat. They had so much in common.

  Just how much he did not realize until the week after Thanksgiving, when she came to his place for dinner. He'd gone to the kitchen, to open the wine and check his spaghetti sauce, and when he came back he found her standing by his bookcase, leafing through a paperback copy of Jim Bishop's Day of the Wild Card. "You must be interested in this stuff," she said, nodding toward the books. His wild card collection took up almost three shelves. He had everything; all the biographies of Jetboy, Earl Sanderson's collected speeches and Archibald Holmes's memoirs, Tom Wolfe's Wild Card Chic, the autobiography of Cyclone as told to Robin Moore, the Information Please Almanac of Aces, and so much more. Including, of course, everything that had ever been published about the Turtle.

  "Yeah," he said, "it's, uh, always interested me. Those people. I'd love to meet a wild card one day."

  "You have," she said, smiling, sliding the book back on the shelf next to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

  "I have?" He was confused, and a bit taken aback. Had he given himself away, somehow? Had Joey told her? "Who?"

  "Me," Barbara said. He must have looked incredulous. "No, really," she said. "I know, it doesn't show. I'm not an ace or anything. It didn't do anything to me, as far as anyone can tell. But I did get it. I was only two, so I don't remember anything. My mother said I almost died. The symptoms-I must have been quite a sight. Our doctor thought it was the mumps at first, but my face just kept on swelling, until I looked like a basketball. Then he transferred me to Mt. Sinai. That's where Dr. Tachyon was working at the time."

  "Yeah," Tom said.

  "Anyway, I pulled through. The swelling only lasted a couple of days, but they kept me for a month, running tests. It was the wild card all right, but it might as well have been the chicken pox, for all the difference it made to me." She grinned. "Still, it was our deep, dark family secret. Dad quit his job and moved us to Bayonne, where nobody knew. People were funny about the wild card back then. I didn't even know myself until I was in college. Mom was afraid I'd tell."

  "Did you?"

  "No," Barbara said. She looked strangely solemn. "No one. Not until tonight, anyway."

  "So why did you tell me?" Tom asked her. "Because I trust you," she said quietly.

  He almost told her then, right there in his living room. He wanted to. Afterward, whenever he thought about that evening, he found himself wishing that he had, and wondering what would have happened.

  But when he opened his mouth to say the words, to speak to her of teke and Turtles and junkyard secrets, it was as though the years had rolled back and he was in high school again, standing with her in that corridor, wanting so desperately to ask her to the prom and somehow unable to. He'd kept his secrets for so long. The words would not come. He tried, for a long moment he tried. Then, defeated, he had hugged her and mumbled "I'm glad you told me," before retreating to the kitchen to gather his wits. He looked at the spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove, and suddenly reached out and turned off the burner.

  "Get your coat," he said when he returned to her. "The plans have changed. I'm taking you out for dinner."

  "Out? Where?"

  "Aces High," he said as he lifted the phone to call for the reservation. "We're going to see those wild cards tonight." They dined among aces and stars. It cost him two weeks' salary, but it was worth it, even though the maitre d' took one look at his corduroy suit and led them to a table way back by the kitchen. The food was almost as extraordinary as the light in Barbara's eyes. They were enjoying an aperitif when Dr. Tachyon came in,
wearing a green velveteen tuxedo and escorting Liza Minelli. Tom went over to their table, and got both of them to autograph a cocktail napkin.

  That night he and Barbara made love for the first time. Afterward, as she slept curled up against him, Tom held on tightly to her warmth, dreaming of the years to come, and wondering why the hell he had taken so long.

  He was making a swing over Central Park Lake, listening to Bruce and eating a bag of Nacho Cheese-flavored Doritos, when he noticed that he was being followed by a pterodactyl.

  Through a telephoto lens, Tom watched it circle above him, riding the winds on a leathery six-foot wingspan. Frowning, he killed his tape and went to his loudspeakers. "HEY!" he boomed into the winter air. "COLD ENOUGH FOR YOU? YOU'RE A REPTILE, KID, YOU'RE GOING TO

  FREEZE YOUR SCALY ASS OFF"

  The pterodactyl replied with a high, thin shriek, made a wide turn, and came in for a landing on top of his shell, flapping energetically as it touched down to keep from going over the edge. Its claws scrabbled against his metal and found purchase in the cracks between his armor plates.

  Sighing, Tom watched on one of his big screens as the pterodactyl rippled, flowed, and turned into Kid Dinosaur. "It's just as cold for you," the kid said.

  "I've got heaters in here," Tom said. The kid was already turning blue, which wasn't surprising, considering that he was naked. He didn't look too steady up there either. The top of the shell was pretty broad, but it did have a pronounced pitch, and human fingers couldn't get into the cracks between the plates nearly as well as pterodactyl claws. Tom began to drift downward. "It would serve you right if I did a loop and flipped you into the lake."

  "I'd just change again and fly off," Kid Dinosaur said. He shivered. "It is cold. I hadn't noticed." In his human form, New York's only brat ace was an ungainly thirteen-year-old with a small birthmark on his forehead. He was gawky and uncoordinated, with shaggy hair that fell across his eyes. The merciless gaze of the cameras showed the blackheads on his nose in excruciating detail. He had a big pimple in the cleft of his chin. And he was uncircumcised, Tom noted.

  "Where the hell are your clothes?" Tom asked. "If I set you down in the park, you'll get busted for indecent exposure."

  "They wouldn't dare," Kid Dinosaur said with the cocksure certainty of the adolescent. "What's going on? Are you off on a case? I could help."

  "You read too many funny books," Tom told him. "I heard about the last time you helped someone."

  "Aw, they sewed his hand back on, and Tacky says it's going to be just fine. How was I supposed to know that the guy was an undercover cop? I wouldn't of bit him if I'd known."

  It wasn't the least bit funny, but Tom smiled. Kid Dinosaur reminded him of himself. He'd read a lot of funny books too. "Kid," he said, "you're not always running around naked turning into dinosaurs, right? You've got another life?"

  "I'm not gonna tell you my secret identity," Kid Dinosaur said quickly.

  "Scared I'd tell your parents?" Tom asked.

  The boy's face reddened. The rest of him was bluer than ever. "I'm not scared of anything, you old fart," he said. "You ought to be," Tom said. "Like me, for starts. Yeah, I know, you can turn into a three-foot-tall tyrannosaur and break your teeth on my armor. All I can do is shatter every bone in your body in twelve or thirteen places. Or reach inside you and squeeze your heart to mush."

  "You wouldn't do that."

  "No," Tom admitted, "but there are people who will. You're getting in way over your head, you dumb little fuck. Hell, I don't care what kind of toy dinosaur you turn into, a bullet can still kill you."

  Kid Dinosaur looked sullen. "Fuck you," he said. The emphatic way he said it made it clear that he didn't often use language like that at home.

  This wasn't going well, Tom thought. "Look," he said in a conciliatory tone, "I just wanted to tell you some things I learned the hard way. You don't want to get too caught up. It's great that you're Kid Dinosaur, but you're also, uh, whoever you are. Don't forget that. What grade are you in?"

  The kid groaned. "What is it with all you guys? If you're going to start in about algebra, forget it!"

  "Algebra?" Tom said, puzzled. "I didn't say a thing about algebra. Your classes are important, but that's not all there is either. Make friends, damn it, go on dates, make sure you go to your senior prom. Just being able to turn into a brontosaurus the size of a Doberman isn't going to win you any prizes in life, you understand?"

  They landed with a soft thump on the snow-covered grass of the sheep meadow. Nearby, a hot-pretzel vendor in earmuffs and overcoat was staring in astonishment at the armored shell and the shivering boy atop it. "Did you hear what I said?" Tom asked.

  "Yeah. You sound just like my dad. You boring old farts think you know everything." His high, nervous laugh turned into a long reptilian hiss as bones and muscles shifted and flowed, and his soft skin thickened and grew scaly. Very daintily, the little triceratops deposited a proto-coprolite on top of the shell, skittered down its side, and waddled off across the meadow with its horns jutting arrogantly into the air.

  That was the best year in Thomas Tudbury's life. But not for the Great and Powerful Turtle.

  In the comic books, the heroes never seemed to need sleep. Things weren't so simple in real life. With a full-time nine-to-five job to keep him busy, Tom had done nearly all his Turtling on nights and weekends anyway, and now Barbara was taking up that slack. As his social life took up more of his time, his career as an ace suffered proportionately, and the iron shell was seen less and less frequently over the streets of Manhattan.

  Finally, a day dawned when Thomas Tudbury realized with something of a shock that almost three and a half months had passed since he'd last gone out to the junkyard and his shells. The trigger for the realization was a small story on page twenty-four of the Times, with a headline that read 'TURTLE MISSING' FEARED DEAD. The story mentioned that dozens of calls for the Turtle had gone unanswered in the past few months (he hadn't turned on his ham radio since God knows when), and that Dr. Tachyon had been especially worried, to the extent that he'd been running classified ads in the papers and offering a small reward for the news of any Turtle sightings (Tom never read the classifieds, and these days he hardly read the papers).

  He ought to get into his shell and pay a call on the clinic, he thought when he read that. But there wasn't time. He'd promised to help Barbara take her class on a field trip up to Bear Mountain, and they were due to leave in two hours.

  Instead he went out to a public phone booth, and called the clinic.

  "Who is this?" Tachyon demanded irritably when Tom finally got him on the line. "We're quite busy here, and I can't spare a lot of time for people who refuse to give their names."

  "This is the Turtle," Tom said. "I wanted to let you know that I'm all right."

  There was a moment of silence. "You don't sound like the Turtle," Tachyon said.

  "The sound system in the shell is designed to disguise my voice. Of course I don't sound like the Turtle. But I am the Turtle."

  "You'll have to convince me of that."

  Tom sighed. "God, you're a pain. But I should have expected it. You whined at me for ten years just because your arm got broken, and it was your own goddamn fault. You didn't tell me you were going to hide under a forklift, damn it. I'm not telepathic like some people I could name."

  "I didn't tell you to knock over half the warehouse either," Tachyon said. "You're just lucky I wasn't crushed to death. A man with powers like yours ought to…" He paused. "You are the Turtle."

  "Ahem," said Tom.

  "What have you been doing?"

  "Being happy. Don't worry, I'll be back now and again. Not as often as before, though. I'm pretty busy. I think I'm going to get married. As soon as I work up the courage to ask her."

  "Congratulations," Tachyon said. He sounded pleased. "Who is the lucky bride?"

  "Ah, that would be telling. You know her, though. One of your patients from way, way back. She had a little bo
ut with the wild card when she was two. Nothing serious. She's completely normal today. I'd invite you to the wedding, Tacky, but that would kind of give away the game, wouldn't it? Maybe we'll name one of the kids after you."

  There was a long, awkward moment of silence. "Turtle," the alien finally said, in a voice somehow gone flat, "we need to talk. Can you find the time to come over to the clinic? I'll arrange my schedule to suit."

  "I'm awfully busy," Tom said. "It's important," Tachyon insisted.

  "Well, all right. Late at night, then. Not tonight, I'll be too tired. Tomorrow, say, after Johnny Carson."

  "Agreed," said Tachyon. "I'll meet you on the roof."

  By now the wedding was safely over. He could thank Kid Dinosaur for that much, at least; the little fuck distracted him through the worst part.

  His shell drifted slowly up Broadway toward Times Square, but his mind was across New York Bay at the Top Hat. The last time he'd been to the Top Hat had been for the reception after Joey and Gina had gotten married. He'd been the best man. That had been a good night. He could remember it all, everything from the flocked wallpaper down to the taste of kielbasa and the sound of the band.

  Barbara would be wearing her grandmother's wedding gown. She'd shown it to him once, a decade ago. Even now, he could close his eyes and see the expression on her face when she brushed her hand over all that antique lace.