The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  Ray was digging in his pocket for nickels and dimes.

  “Not money. Something that will remind you not to do this again.”

  “Tell you what,” said Leroy. He had worked himself away from Slim. “You think Bobby and the Bombers can sing?”

  “Easy!” said Lucius to Bobby, who had started forward with the Bombers. “Yeah, kid. They’re the best damn group in the city.”

  “Well, I think we can outsing ’em,” said Leroy, and smiled around his dead cigar.

  “Oh, jeez,” said Zoot. “They got a record, and they’ve – ”

  “I said, we can outsing Bobby and the Bombers, anytime, any place,” said Leroy.

  “And what if you can’t?” asked Lucius.

  “You guys like piss a lot, don’t you?” There was a general movement toward the Kool-Tones. Lucius held up his hand. “Well,” said Leroy, “how about all the members of the losing group drink a quart apiece?”

  Hands of the Kool-Tones reached out to stifle Leroy. He danced away.

  “I like that,” said Lucius. “I really like that. That all right, Bobby?”

  “I’m going to start saving it up now.”

  “Who’s gonna judge?” asked one of the Bombers.

  “The same as always,” said Leroy. “The public. Invite ’em in.”

  “Who do we meet with to work this out?” asked Lucius.

  “Vinnie of the Hellbenders. He’ll work out the terms.”

  Slim was beginning to see he might not be killed that night. He looked on Leroy with something like worship.

  “How we know you guys are gonna show up?” asked Bobby.

  “I swear on Sam Cooke’s grave,” said Leroy.

  “Let ’em pass,” said Bobby.

  They crossed out of the freight yard and headed back for the projects.

  “Shit, man!”

  “Now you’ve done it!”

  “I’m heading for Florida.”

  “What the hell, Leroy, are you crazy?”

  Leroy was smiling. “We can take them, easy,” he said, holding up his hand flat.

  He began to sing “Chain Gang.” The other Kool-Tones joined in, but their hearts weren’t in it. Already there was a bad taste in the back of their throats.

  Vinnie was mad.

  The black outline of a mudpuppy on his white silk jacket seemed to swell as he hunched his shoulders toward Leroy.

  “What the shit you mean, dragging the Hellbenders into this without asking us first? That just ain’t done, Leroy.”

  “Who else could take the Purple Monsters in case they wasn’t gentlemen?” asked Leroy.

  Vinnie grinned. “You’re gonna die before you’re fifteen, kid.”

  “That’s my hope.”

  “Creep. Okay, we’ll take care of it.”

  “One thing,” said Leroy. “No instruments. They gotta get us a mike and some amps, and no more than a quarter of the people can be from Monster territory. And it’s gotta be at the freight dock.”

  “That’s one thing?” asked Vinnie.

  “A few. But that place is great, man. We can’t lose there.”

  Vinnie smiled, and it was a prison-guard smile, a Nazi smile. “If you lose, kid, after the Monsters get through with you, the Hellbenders are gonna have a little party.”

  He pointed over his shoulder to where something resembling testicles floated in alcohol in a mason jar on a shelf. “We’re putting five empty jars up there tomorrow. That’s what happens to people who get the Hellbenders involved without asking and then don’t come through when the pressure’s on. You know what I mean?”

  Leroy smiled. He left smiling. The smile was still frozen to his face as he walked down the street.

  This whole thing was getting too grim.

  Leroy lay on his cot listening to his sister and her boyfriend porking in the next room.

  It was late at night. His mind was still working. Sounds beyond those in the bedroom came to him. Somebody staggered down the project hallway, bumping from one wall to another. Probably old man Jones. Chances are he wouldn’t make it to his room all the way at the end of the corridor. His daughter or one of her kids would probably find him asleep in the hall in a pool of barf.

  Leroy turned over on the rattly cot, flipped on his seven-transistor radio, and jammed it up to his ear. Faintly came the sounds of another Beatles song.

  He thumbed the tuner, and the four creeps blurred into four or five other Englishmen singing some other stupid song about coming to places he would never see.

  He went through the stations until he stopped on the third note of the Monotones’ “Book of Love.” He sang along in his mind.

  Then the deejay came on, and everything turned sour again. “Another golden oldie, ‘Book of Love,’ by the Monotones. Now here’s the WBKD pick of the week, the fabulous Beatles with ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face.’” Leroy pushed the stations around the dial, then started back.

  Weekdays were shit. On weekends you could hear good old stuff, but mostly the stations all played Top 40, and that was English invasion stuff, or if you were lucky, some Motown. It was Monday night. He gave up and turned to an all-night blues station, where the music usually meant something. But this was like, you know, the sharecropper hour or something, and all they were playing was whiny cotton-choppin’ work blues from some damn Alabama singer who had died in 1932, for God’s sake.

  Disgusted, Leroy turned off the radio.

  His sister and her boyfriend had quit for a while, so it was quieter in the place. Leroy lit a cigarette and thought of getting out of here as soon as he could.

  I mean, Bobby and the Bombers had a record, a real big-hole forty-five on WhamJam. It wasn’t selling worth shit from all Leroy heard, but that didn’t matter. It was a record, and it was real, it wasn’t just singing under some street lamp. Slim said they’d played it once on WABC, on the Hit-or-Flop show, and it was a flop, but people heard it. Rumor was the Bombers had gotten sixty-five dollars and a contract for the session. They’d had a couple of gigs at dances and such, when the regular band took a break. They sure as hell couldn’t be making any money, or they wouldn’t be singing against the Kool-Tones for free kicks.

  But they had a record out, and they were working.

  If only the Kool-Tones got work, got a record, went on tour. Leroy was just twelve, but he knew how hard they were working on their music. They’d practice on street corners, on the stoop, just walking, getting the notes down right – the moves, the facial expressions of all the groups they’d seen in movies and on Slim’s mother’s TV.

  There were so many places to be out there. There was a real world with people in it who weren’t punching somebody for berries, or stealing the welfare and stuff. Just someplace open, someplace away from everything else.

  He flipped on the flashlight beside his cot, pulled it under the covers with him, and opened his favorite book. It was Edward J. Ruppelt’s Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. His big brother John William, whom he had never seen, sent it to him from his Army post in California as soon as he found Leroy had run away and was living with his sister. John William also sent his sister part of his allotment every month.

  Leroy had read the book again and again. He knew it by heart already. He couldn’t get a library card under his own name because the state might trace him that way. (They’d already been around asking his sister about him. She lied. But she too had run away from a foster home as soon as she was old enough, so they hadn’t believed her and would be back.) So he’d had to boost all his books. Sometimes it took days, and newsstand people got mighty suspicious when you were black and hung around for a long time, waiting for the chance to kipe stuff. Usually they gave you the hairy eyeball until you went away.

  He owned twelve books on UFOs now, but the Ruppelt was still his favorite. Once he’d gotten a book by some guy named Truman or something who wrote poetry inspired by the people from Venus. It was a little sad, too, the things people believed sometimes. So Leroy hadn’t read
any more books by people who claimed they’d been inside the flying saucers or met the Neptunians or such. He read only the ones that gave histories of the sightings and asked questions, like why was the Air Force covering up? Those books never told you what was in the UFOs, and that was good because you could imagine it for yourself.

  He wondered if any of the Del Vikings had seen flying saucers when they were in the Air Force with Zoot’s cousin. Probably not, or Zoot would have told him about it. Leroy always tried to get the rest of the Kool-Tones interested in UFOs, but they all said they had their own problems, like girls and cigarette money. They’d go with him to see Invasion of the Saucermen or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers at the movies, or watch The Thing on Slim’s mother’s TV on the Creature Feature, but that was about it.

  Leroy’s favorite flying-saucer sighting was the Mantell case, in which a P-51 fighter plane, which was called a Mustang, chased a UFO over Kentucky and then crashed after it went off the Air Force radar. Some say Captain Mantell died of asphyxiation because he went to 20,000 feet and didn’t have on an oxygen mask, but other books said he saw “something metallic and of tremendous size” and was going after it. Ruppelt thought it was a Skyhook balloon, but he couldn’t be sure. Others said it was a real UFO and that Mantell had been shot down with Z-rays.

  It had made Leroy’s skin crawl when he had first read it.

  But his mind went back to the Del Vikings. What had caused them to break up? What was it really like out there on the road? Was music getting so bad that good groups couldn’t make a living at it anymore?

  Leroy turned off the flashlight and put the book away. He put out the cigarette, lit a cigar, went to the window, and looked up the airshaft. He leaned way back against the cool window and could barely see one star overhead. Just one star.

  He scratched himself and lay back down on the bed.

  For the first time, he was afraid about the contest tomorrow night.

  We got to be good, he said to himself. We got to be good.

  In the other room, the bed started squeaking again.

  The Hellbenders arrived early to check out the turf. They’d been there ten minutes when the Purple Monsters showed up. There was handshaking all around, talk a little while, then they moved off into two separate groups. A few civilians came by to make sure this was the place they’d heard about.

  “Park your cars out of sight, if you got ’em,” said Lucius. “We don’t want the cops to think anything’s going on here.”

  Vinnie strut-walked over to Lucius.

  “This crowd’s gonna be bigger than I thought. I can tell.”

  “People come to see somebody drink some piss. You know, give the public what it wants. . . .” Lucius smiled.

  “I guess so. I got this weird feelin’, though. Like, you know, if your mother tells you she dreamed about her aunt, like right before she died and all?”

  “I know what feelin’ you mean, but I ain’t got it,” said Lucius.

  “Who you got doing the electrics?”

  “Guy named Sparks. He was the one lit up Choton Field.”

  At Choton Field the year before, two gangs wanted to fight under the lights. So they went to a high-school football stadium. Somebody got all the lights and the P.A. on without going into the control booth.

  Cops drove by less than fifty feet away, thinking there was a practice scrimmage going on, while down on the field guys were turning one another into bloody strings. Somebody was on the P.A. giving a play-byplay. From the outside, it sounded cool. From the inside, it looked like a pizza with all the topping ripped off it.

  “Oh,” said Vinnie. “Good man.”

  He used to work for Con Ed, and he still had his ID. card. Who was going to mess with Consolidated Edison? He drove an old, gray pickup with a smudge on the side that had once been a power-company emblem. The truck was filled to the brim with cables, wires, boots, wrenches, tape, torches, work lights, and rope.

  “Light man’s here!” said somebody.

  Lucius shook hands with him and told him what they wanted. He nodded.

  The crowd was getting larger, groups and clots of people drifting in, though the music wasn’t supposed to start for another hour. Word traveled fast.

  Sparks attached a transformer and breakers to a huge, thick cable.

  Then he got out his climbing spikes and went up a pole like a monkey, the heavy chunk-chunk drifting down to the crowd every time he flexed his knees. His tool belt slapped against his sides.

  He had one of the guys in the Purple Monsters throw him up the end of the inch-thick electrical cable.

  The sun had just gone down, and Sparks was a silhouette against the purpling sky that poked between the buildings.

  A few stars were showing in the eastern sky. Lights were on all through the autumn buildings. Thanksgiving was in a few weeks, then Christmas.

  The shopping season was already in full swing, and the streets would be bathed in neon, in holiday colors. The city stood up like big, black fingers all around them.

  Sparks did something to the breakdown box on the pole.

  There was an immense blue scream of light that stopped everybody’s heart.

  New York City went dark.

  “Fucking wow!”

  A raggedy-assed cheer of wonder ran through the crowd.

  There were crashes, and car horns began to honk all over town.

  “Uh, Lucius,” Sparks yelled down the pole after a few minutes. “Have the guys go steal me about thirty automobile batteries.”

  The Purple Monsters ran off in twenty different directions.

  “Ahhhyyyhhyyh,” said Vinnie, spitting a toothpick out of his mouth. “The Monsters get to have all the fun.”

  It was 5.27 p.m. on November 9, 1965. At the Ossining changing station, a guy named Jim was talking to a guy named Jack.

  Then the trouble phone rang. Jim checked all his dials before he picked it up.

  He listened, then hung up.

  “There’s an outage all down the line. They’re going to switch the two hundred K’s over to the Buffalo net and reroute them back through here. Check all the load levels. Everything’s out from Schenectady to Jersey City.”

  When everything looked ready, Jack signaled to Jim. Jim called headquarters, and they watched the needles jump on the dials.

  Everything went black.

  Almost everything.

  Jack hit all the switches for backup relays, and nothing happened.

  Almost nothing.

  Jim hit the emergency battery work lights. They flickered and went out.

  “What the hell?” asked Jack.

  He looked out the window.

  Something large and bright moved across a nearby reservoir and toward the changing station.

  “Holy Mother of Christ!” he said.

  Jim and Jack went outside.

  The large bright thing moved along the lines toward the station. The power cables bulged toward the bottom of the thing, whipping up and down, making the stanchions sway. The station and the reservoir were bathed in a blue glow as the thing went over. Then it took off quickly toward Manhattan, down the straining lines, leaving them in complete darkness.

  Jim and Jack went back into the plant and ate their lunches.

  Not even the phone worked anymore.

  It was really black by the time Sparks got his gear set up. Everybody in the crowd was talking about the darkness of the city and the sky. You could see stars all over the place, everywhere you looked.

  There was very little noise from the city around the loading area.

  Somebody had a radio on. There were a few Jersey and Pennsy stations on. One of them went off while they listened.

  In the darkness, Sparks worked by the lights of his old truck. What he had in front of him resembled something from an alchemy or magnetism treatise written early in the eighteenth century. Twenty or so car batteries were hooked up in series with jumper cables. He’d tied those in with amps, mikes, transformers, a li
ght board, and lights on the dock area.

  “Stand clear!” he yelled. He bent down with the last set of cables and stuck an alligator clamp on a battery post.

  There was a screeching blue jag of light and a frying noise. The lights flickered and came on, and the amps whined louder and louder.

  The crowd, numbering around five hundred, gave out with prolonged huzzahs and applause.

  “Test test test,” said Lucius. Everybody held their hands over their ears.

  “Turn that fucker down,” said Vinnie. Sparks did. Then he waved to the crowd, got into his old truck, turned the lights off, and drove into the night.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the Purple Monsters . . .,” said Lucius, to wild applause, and Vinnie leaned into the mike, “and the Hellbenders,” more applause, then back to Lucius, “would like to welcome you to the first annual piss-off – I mean, sing-off – between our own Bobby and the Bombers,” cheers, “and the challengers,” said Vinnie, “the Kool-Tones!” More applause.

  “They’ll do two sets, folks,” said Lucius, “taking turns. And at the end, the unlucky group, gauged by your lack of applause, will win a prize!”

  The crowd went wild.

  The lights dimmed out. “And now,” came Vinnie’s voice from the still blackness of the loading dock, “for your listening pleasure, Bobby and the Bombers!”

  “Yayyyyyyyyyy!”

  The lights, virtually the only lights in the city except for those that were being run by emergency generators, came up, and there they were.

  Imagine frosted, polished elegance being thrust on the unwilling shoulders of a sixteen-year-old.

  They had on blue jackets, matching pants, ruffled shirts, black ties, cuff links, tie tacks, shoes like obsidian mortar trowels. They were all black boys, and from the first note, you knew they were born to sing:

  “Bah bah” sang Letus the bassman, “doo-doo duh-du doo-ahh, duh-doo-dee-doot,” sang the two tenors, Lennie and Conk, and then Bobby and Fred began trading verses of the Drifters’ “There Goes My Baby,” while the tenors wailed and Letus carried the whole with his bass.