Comeback Tour

by Jack Yeovil

  There were people around him, dragging him away from the stand. Someone twisted the taps.

  Dr Blaikley had hold of him. He felt her soft body pressed close to him. She was holding his arms at his side while someone else squirted an air bubble out of a hypodermic syringe.

  She wasn’t joking lewdly now. She was treating him as dispassionately as she did her animal subjects.

  But why was she loosening his belt?

  He tried to protest, but he couldn’t get the words out through his clenched jaws. He could taste his own blood.

  Two assistants had him now, and Dr Blaikley was lugging his pants down. He thrashed his legs, and she pulled his jockey shorts to his knees.

  Merciful heavens, was the crazy woman trying to rape him?

  “Just a little prick,” she said, “with a needle.”

  The assistants turned him round, and bent him over a sink. His spinal column was a fiery mass of pain.

  He felt the needle sink into his buttock, and heard Dr Blaikley say, “Got him.”

  The pain vanished instantly, but so did all other feeling. Still fully conscious, he was unable to move a muscle. He sagged, and someone mercifully pulled his underwear and pants up.

  “Shame,” said Dr Blaikley. “Still, it’s not the size of your pencil, it’s how you write your name.”

  They took him out of the washroom, and there was a gurney waiting for him.

  He lay flat, looking up at the white ceiling. A fan was turning up there.

  “It’s happening fast,” someone said. “His metabolism must differ from the others.”

  “He’s not a proper subject,” Dr Blaikley snapped. “He’s GenTech brass. The fecal matter just collided with the ventilation system.”

  He was being trundled down a corridor.

  “Hiroshi,” said Dr Blaikley, looming into his field of vision and talking straight at his face. “You’ve had a turn. We’ve seen these symptoms before. There’s nothing to worry about. We help you.”

  Her hair was hanging into his face. He could smell her lemon shampoo.

  “You’re going to be just fine.”

  Then she turned away to someone else and said, under her breath but loud enough for him to hear, “God, I hope the Nip swallows that shit.”

  He was being wheeled deeper into “A” block.

  “Get Visser, and tell him what’s happened,” Blaikley said.

  Fans and overhead lights passed. His head rolled from side to side. He fought to get control of his neck muscles, but couldn’t.

  His head flopped. He realized he was hearing things again. The same sounds that had been getting into his dreams recently. They were like the keening cries of swamp birds. Primordial noises.

  There was an animal smell. He had never toured this part of the compound. It was not his field.

  Like one of his snails, he snatched a breath that would have to last a long time. His chest wasn’t rising properly, as if the dope they’d shot into him had paralyzed his lungs.

  “He’ll come out of it soon.”

  “Then freaking hurry up, Misty. I like having two hands and big teats.”

  The gurney stopped, and he was transferred to a cot. It was just a mattress over an iron frame. Things were stuck into his arm, and he heard the steady beeping of a vital signs monitor.

  Dr Blaikley peered into his eyes, pulling the lids back. Her sweet breath was on his face. Her heavy breasts brushed his chest.

  “Hurry up, Misty,” she said to someone.

  His hand was working now. He raised it, and caught Blaikley’s skirt, just above her thigh. He felt the warm meat of her hip.

  She flinched, and Shiba thought he could see something strange in her expression. It was most un-Mary Louise Blaikley-like. It could have been pity.

  She took his hand between thumb and forefinger and put it on his chest, touching it as little as possible as if it were a dead rat. Or a diseased one.

  There was a clanking, and Dr Blaikley and the others were gone. The pain was creeping back, and he could move his limbs slightly. His hand stung where Dr Blaikley had touched him.

  His lungs expanded, and he tore another breath from the air, feeling the fires raging inside his chest.

  There were sprouts of pain all along his jaws now.

  He sat up, and realized he was not in an infirmary room. He was in a cage.

  IV

  “You’ve messed with the Good Ole Boys one time too many, guitar man.”

  Robert E. Lee Chamberlain was going to fulfil a longstanding ambition by killing him, Elvis realized. But first he was going to make a long, boring speech about it.

  Elvis looked around. The indentees were sat down on the ground, their chains between them. Good Ole Boys with guns chewed toothpicks, and tried to look cool behind their Sterlings.

  Krokodil was just standing, a little away from the car, her hands out where everybody could see them.

  “Got any songs you wanna sing, guitar man?”

  Chamberlain was pointing his automatic. The girl he had shot earlier wasn’t crying any more, just pressing her ragged ear flat against her head. It was about time they had a slave revolt down here in Georgia.

  “How about ‘John Brown’s Body,’ massah?”

  Chamberlain sneered, and shot the ground by Elvis’s feet. He raised a divot. Elvis wished he hadn’t flinched, but knew he had. He had the feeling he’d be seeing Jesse Garon pretty soon.

  “How d’you feel without your nigra buddies to help you out, guitar man?”

  Elvis didn’t say anything. Chamberlain had taken a severe humiliation back in Memphis thanks to Gandy, Big Bill and the Dollman. This wasn’t going to be over until the Good Ole Boy thought he had paid the Op back for that.

  “I’ve got orders to put you out of the game, guitar man. Orders from Judgement Q. Harbottle himself.”

  “The big man?”

  Chamberlain grinned. “Yeah. The big man. You should be flattered. Usually, Judgement has better things to do than bother with pissant solos who screw up field Ops. You’ve been a regular ’skeeter, bitin’ and botherin’ us. But he says we gotta make an example of you.”

  He waved at the indentees.

  “You’ll be real pleased to know that after we do the business on you and your ladyfriend, we’re gonna let these nigras go free as birds.”

  Chains chinked as the indentees shifted. They knew better than to trust Chamberlain.

  “The important thing is not that you get a .45 headache, but that these coloured boys see you check out. You’ve got quite a rep with the swamp trash. They reckon you’re some kind of a hee-ro. But with your brains shot out through your greasy hair, I reckon you’ll jus’ be another piece of dead shee-it. These nigras will spread the word that the guitar man got blown away, and the Good Ole Boys won’t gel so much rebelliousness from the ’denties. Killin’ you is gonna accomplish a lot of things…”

  He brought the gun up to bear, and Elvis could see the rifling on the inside of the barrel.

  “… but it’s also gonna give me a li’l piece of harmless amusement.”

  Elvis wasn’t sure how what happened next happened, but he lived through ten seconds, and was able to breathe again…

  Krokodil moved faster than was possible, and Chamberlain swung around to take a shot at her. It went wild. A Good Ole Boy was on the ground, blood coming out of a hole in his throat. Another was up in a tree with a broken back. A hoodhead was holding his ripped guts to his belly.

  Krokodil was cartwheeling, her hands bloody and buzzing.

  Elvis was in the grass, moving on his elbows. A shot fired overhead. Chamberlain was out to get him.

  Krokodil was wrapping a hoodhead into a pretzel shape. Someone was speeding the hell out of the area on a cyke. That might well be a smart move.

  There was another shot, and dirt lifted before Elvis’s face.

  He was down flat by the Cadillac now. A bullet spanged off the bodywork.

  Two Good Ole Boys came at Krokodi
l with electroprods. She put a hand to her face and shifted her eyepatch. A sizzling beam struck out and the two GOB men fell screaming, their heads on fire. Krokodil had an optic burner implanted to replace her missing eye.

  Half of the indentees had tried to make a break, dragging the other half with them. A Good Ole Boy with a scattergun jacked in some shells and was ready to bring them down, but Krokodil was behind him, her elbow nutcrackering his neck, and he fell like a broken doll.

  She had the scattergun. It went off, and a bloody stetson rolled past Elvis’s cover spot.

  Most of the enemy would be out of the action by now.

  Elvis pulled the cardoor open, and squirrelled into the passenger seat. He saw Chamberlain through the windscreen. A slug flattened uselessly against the bulletproof glass, and Chamberlain ejected an empty clip, fumbling in his jacket pocket for a spare.

  Elvis pulled what he wanted out of the dash, and stepped out of the car.

  Krokodil wasn’t even breathing heavily. The last of the hoodheads was dead at her feet, still spasming.

  Chamberlain had the clip out now, but froze.

  Elvis held up the voodoo doll.

  “You don’t believe in magic, do you?” he said.

  The Good Ole Boy rammed the clip into the gun, and sighted at Elvis.

  “Careful, you might hit the dolly.”

  Elvis gripped the doll, feeling the wood strain and crack. Chamberlain looked uncomfortable. His face was red again.

  “It’s all psychosomatic, you know.”

  He pulled his tie loose, and his collar button burst.

  “It just depends on the victim’s credulity.”

  Chamberlain coughed, and tried to speak. He couldn’t.

  “You and me, we’re not like that, are we?”

  Chamberlain threw the gun away.

  Elvis dropped the doll in the grass, and Chamberlain spluttered, clutching his throat, cursing…

  Krokodil walked over to the car. She seemed almost bored. There was blood on her face and clothes, and several smoke-blackened holes had appeared in her jacket. She pulled the garment off, and wiped her face and hands with it. Her body was bruised, but the skin didn’t seem broken at all. She was not self-conscious about her nudity, Elvis saw. She moved like a living statue, and again the Op wondered how much of her was the original girl.

  She took an identical suit out of her hold-all, and stepped into the loose pants.

  “Enjoying the view?” she said, not at all nastily, but without any invitation either.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he gulped. He had been staring. Even Chamberlain, who was drawing in quick, chesty breaths, had been fixing his eyes on her.

  She slipped on her jacket and knotted the sash at her waist. With a touch of the vanity she hadn’t hitherto suggested, she ran a hand through her unbound hair, tidying it a little. She adjusted her eyepatch over the burner, smiled tightly and said “Ready?” to him.

  She slipped into the car, and waited.

  Whatever trouble she had been expecting on the journey, this was only a minor instance of it. Elvis was not quite scared by that.

  Chamberlain was looking for his gun. Elvis saw it glinting, and kicked it across to the indentees.

  A man picked it up, and pressed it to his ankle-lock.

  “No,” Elvis said, “you’ll blow your foot off.”

  One of the electroprod men had a ring of keys hanging from his belt. He tossed it to the indentee, who unlocked himself, and passed the keys on.

  Chamberlain sat glumly, not saying anything.

  “The keys will be in their ve-hickles,” Elvis told the indentee. “If I were you I’d strike West. You can lose yourself in the Delta country, maybe make it to Texas.”

  “Thanks, man,” he said. Elvis didn’t hold out much hope for them. It was a long trip. But the GOBs and the CAF hoodheads had plenty of loose hardware lying around. The runaways would be well-armed, well-wheeled.

  All the indentees were free now, rubbing their aching ankles and wrists.

  The wounded little girl looked up at Elvis. She had tight curls, and a protruding lower lip. He smiled at her, and patted her head.

  “Here,” he said, “have a dolly.”

  He scooped the Robert E. Lee Chamberlain doll out of the grass and gave it to her. She looked at it, unsure. It was an ugly thing, after all.

  Chamberlain opened his mouth to protest, but the girl had her thumb over the doll’s face. His eyes stared.

  It was just a psychosomatic reaction, Elvis told himself.

  He looked at the faces of the indentees, and saw the sufferings that had come with their forefathers from Africa. The man he had given the keys looked a lot like a picture he had seen of Robert Johnson, thin and scared and running…

  The girl started chewing on the doll’s wooden hand. Agony showed on Chamberlain’s flabby face.

  The girl laughed, and started twisting the doll’s head and limbs.

  Chamberlain convulsed, kicking the air.

  Elvis waved goodbye, and got into the Cadillac.

  Krokodil had already turned the ignition. Elvis took the wheel. The automatic windows rose, cutting out Chamberlain’s cries.

  He saw the girl waving. The doll had come apart in her hands, and she had what looked like red paint on her dress.

  As they drove away, Elvis supposed that really had been the last time he would mess with Robert E. Lee Chamberlain.

  He wasn’t sorry.

  V

  Since the Prezz touched down, things on the Cape had been really jumping. Fonvielle was being consulted all the time as the Black Hats beavered around the command bunker, trying to hook up the systems again. It was a lot like stringing Christmas tree lights. You had to get every circuit working at the same time, or the whole thing would shoot sparks and fall to pieces. The Black Hats weren’t up to the old NASA standards, but they were enthusiastic about the work. It was like the early days again. They were on the threshold, expanding the envelope, strutting out the righteous stuff, spitting up at the sun, holing the doughnut and conquering the high frontier.

  “We’re reaching out again,” Fonvielle told the Prezz as the Big Board started to light up. “We’re gonna stick up a hand and grab ourselves a fistful of the sky.”

  The Prezz just smiled and nodded sagely. He looked a lot different now than the last time they had met. Then, he had been a jowly, growling character, direct and domineering. Now, he was a quiet, confident, smoothly handsome man with a touch of a French accent. Fonvielle was used to the Prezz changing. Over the years, he had taken many new faces, many new bodies. But he was still the Prezz. Fonvielle had taken his oath personally to the President of the United States, and he would stick by it. He had always known that the Prezz would remember, even if the rest of the world forgot. You could count on the White House to be on top of everything.

  The Black Hats had been pumping swampwater out of the bunker, and repairing or replacing the rusted equipment. The damage was surprisingly slight. NASA had built to last back in the ’60s, before it lost its guts and balls to the Suits. Fonvielle would miss the knee-high warm brine he had been sloshing around in for twenty years. He had rigged himself a hammock between two of the old central consoles, and become an extremely expert spear-fisher.

  The locals had all been driven away by the creeping waters, and the few die-hard swamp-dwellers who stuck around on the peninsula had stayed clear of him. They called him the Mad Old Man. He didn’t give a damn. He had always known that some day the Prezz would be back, and that he would have to get the Cape operations-ready at short notice. He hadn’t been lonely. After all, the ghosts were all his friends.

  At first, he had thought the figures—manshapes in charred spacesuits, lumbering around as if weightless—were hypnagogic visions, and had had to caution himself against going crazy. He would be no use to the Prezz if his mind went out on him. Then, he had started to recognize them. The one with the red-smeared visor was Collins, whose helmet had ruptured during E
VA, and the one leaking water from the suitseals was Gus Grissom, who had gone down with his capsule. All the other names came back to him: Shepard, Capaldi, Griffith, Mildred Kuhn, Mihailoff, Lindsay, Breedlove. All the other lost-in-space victims. Even the Russians were there, CCCP stencilled on their cosmonaut suits. Gagarin, the re-entry burn-up, was a man-shaped mass of mobile ash, with a bulbous helmethead. Fonvielle hadn’t known the Soviets personally, but he had picked up their names over the years. Victorov, Netelkina, Sementsova, Dvorshetsky, Lazarev, Klimov, Ledogora, Rakan.

  Sometimes, the ghosts would congregate in a crowd on the launchpad, standing on the water surface as if it were solid concrete, looking up at the abandoned gantry. Fonvielle understood what they wanted. If the Cape remained abandoned, then their lives and deaths were meaningless. If all this activity was for anyone, it was for the ghosts.

  Black Hats with mops were drying the concrete floor. They went about their work with strange smiles on their faces and didn’t say much except when they wanted to tell you how wonderful everything was since they saw the light. Fonvielle wasn’t used to live people any more, but the Hats didn’t seem worse than any of the others.

  One thing that was good was that the Black Hats had a full security staff with some heavy hardware. Fonvielle had been getting tired of bucking the odds in his one-man war with the Suitcase People. They had started showing up about two or three years back, slithering out from the inland swamps, tails lashing, jaws grinding. They would eat anything that came their way, including human limbs. Fonvielle had been potting them whenever he got the chance, but he was only one guy and the swamp was getting thick with the Suitcase People. The Hats had already had a tussle or two with the creatures, and had got over the initial shock of their ’gator faces. Now, the problem was being contained. The Prezz had taken one of the things out personally as soon as he arrived. Fonvielle was interpreting that as a policy statement.

  Black Hats were working over the consoles. One or two were in poor shape and had been dismantled, tangles of multicoloured wire spilling onto the floor as screwdrivers and soldering-irons were wielded in their insides. Others were operational, and the staff were transmitting test signals. The Black Hats were using a decommissioned but still-functioning satellite for the tests, bouncing messages off it to their HQ in Salt Lake City. Fonvielle was proud that the technology had lasted so well, so long.