at the tiger.
And Green Terror stopped.
He swung his huge head back to Mr. Legere, almost turned, and
then slowly turned back to Mr. Indrasil again. There was a
terrifyingly palpable sensation of directed force in the air, a mesh
of conflicting wills centered around the tiger. And the wills were
evenly matched.
I think, in the end, it was Green Terror's own will -- his hate of Mr.
Indrasil -- that tipped the scales.
The cat began to advance, his eyes hellish, flaring beacons. And.
something strange began to happen to Mr. Indrasil. He seemed to
be folding in on himself, shriveling, accordioning. The silk-shirt
lost shape, the dark, whipping hair became a hideous toadstool
around his collar.
Mr. Legere called something across to him, and, simultaneously,
Green Terror leaped.
I never saw the outcome. The next moment I was slammed flat on
my back, and the breath seemed to be sucked from my body. I
caught one crazily tilted glimpse of a huge, towering cyclone
funnel, and then the darkness descended.
When I awoke, I was in my cot just aft of the grainery bins in the
all-purpose storage trailer we carried. My body felt as if it had
been beaten with padded Indian clubs.
Chips Baily appeared, his face lined and pale. He saw my eyes
were open and grinned relievedly. "Didn't know as you were ever
gonna wake up. How you feel?"
"Dislocated," I said. "What happened? How'd I get here?"
"We found you piled up against Mr. Indrasil's trailer. The tornado
almost carried you away for a souvenir, m'boy."
At the mention of Mr. Indrasil, all the ghastly memories came
flooding back. "Where is Mr. Indrasil? And Mr. Legere?"
His eyes went murky, and he started to make some kind of an
evasive answer.
"Straight talk," I said, struggling up on one elbow. "I have to know,
Chips. I have to."
Something in my face must have decided him. "Okay. But this isn't
exactly what we told the cops -- in fact we hardly told the cops any
of it. No sense havin' people think we're crazy. Anyhow, Indrasil's
gone. I didn't even know that Legere guy was around."
"And Green Tiger?"
Chips' eyes were unreadable again. "He and the other tiger fought
to death."
"Other tiger? There's no other ---"
"Yeah, but they found two of 'em, lying in each other's blood. Hell
of a mess. Ripped each other's throats out."
"What -- where --"
"Who knows? We just told the cops we had two tigers. Simpler
that way." And before I could say another word, he was gone.
And that's the end of my story -- except for two little items. The
words Mr. Legere shouted just before the tornado hit: "When a
man and an animal live in the same shell, Indrasil, the instincts
determine the mold!"
The other thing is what keeps me awake nights. Chips told me
later, offering it only for what it might be worth. What he told me
was that the strange tiger had a long scar on the back of its neck.
THE
REPLOIDS
Stephen King
Appeared in
Night Visions #5, 1988
No one knew exactly how long it had been going on. Not long.
Two days, two weeks; it couldn't have been much longer than that,
Cheyney reasoned. Not that it mattered. It was just that people got
to watch a little more of the show with the added thrill of knowing
the show was real. When the United States - the whole world -
found out about the Reploids, it was pretty spectacular. just as
well, maybe. These days, unless it's spectacular, a thing can go on
damned near forever. It is neither believed nor disbelieved. It is
simply part of the weird Godhead mantra that made up the
accelerating flow of events and experience as the century neared its
end. It's harder to get peoples' attention. It takes machine-guns in a
crowded airport or a live grenade rolled up the aisle of a bus load
of nuns stopped at a roadblock in some Central American country
overgrown with guns and greenery. The Reploids became national
- and international - news on the morning of November 30, 1989,
after what happened during the first two chaotic minutes of the
Tonight Show taping in Beautiful Downtown Burbank, California,
the night before.
The floor manager watched intently as the red sweep secondhand
moved upward toward the twelve. The studio audience
clockwatched as intently as the floor manager. When the red sweep
second-hand crossed the twelve, it would be five o'clock and
taping of the umpty-umptieth Tonight Show would commence.
As the red second-hand passed the eight, the audience stirred and
muttered with its own peculiar sort of stage fright. After all, they
represented America, didn't they? Yes!
"Let's have it quiet, people, please," the floor manager said
pleasantly, and the audience quieted like obedient children. Doc
Severinsen's drummer ran off a fast little riff on his snare and then
held his sticks easily between thumbs and fingers, wrists loose,
watching the floor manager instead of the clock, as the show -
people always did. For crew and performers, the floor manager
was the clock. When the second-hand passed the ten, the floor
manager counted down aloud to four, and then held up three
fingers, two fingers, one finger ... and then a clenched fist from
which one finger pointed dramatically at the audience. An
APPLAUSE sign lit up, but the studio audience was primed to
whoop it up; it would have made no difference if it had been
written in Sanskrit.
So things started off just as they were supposed to start off: dead
on time. This was not so surprising; there were crewmembers on
the Tonight Show who, had they been LAPD officers, could have
retired with full benefits. The Doc Severinsen band, one of the best
showbands in the world, launched into the familiar theme: Ta-da-
da-Da-da ... and the large, rolling voice of Ed
McMahon cried enthusiastically: "From Los Angeles,
entertainment capital of the world, it's The Tonight Show, live,
with Johnny Carson! Tonight, Johnny's guests are actress Cybill
Shepherd of Moonlighting!" Excited applause from the audience.
"Magician Doug Henning!" Even louder applause from the
audience. "Pee Wee Herman!" A fresh wave of applause, this time
including hoots of joy from Pee Wee's rooting section. "From
Germany, the Flying Schnauzers, the world's only canine
acrobats!" Increased applause, with a mixture of laughter from the
audience. "Not to mention Doc Severinsen, the world's only Flying
Bandleader, and his canine band!"
The band members not playing horns obediently barked. The
audience laughed harder, applauded harder.
In the control room of Studio C, no one was laughing.
A man in a loud sport-coat with a shock of curly black hair was
standing in the wings, idly snapping his fingers and looking across
the stage at Ed, but that was all.
The director signaled for Number Tw
o Cam's medium shot on Ed
for the umpty-umptieth time, and there was Ed on the ON
SCREEN monitors. He barely heard someone mutter, "Where the
hell is he?" before Ed's rolling tones announced, also for the
umpty-umptieth time: "And now heeeere's JOHNNY!"
Wild applause from the audience.
"Camera Three," the director snapped.
"But there's only that-"
"Camera Three, goddammit!"
Camera Three came up on the ON SCREEN monitor, showing
every TV director's private nightmare, a dismally empty stage ...
and then someone, some stranger, was striding confidently into
that empty space, just as if he had every right in the world to be
there, filling it with unquestionable presence, charm, and authority.
But, whoever he was, he was most definitely not Johnny Carson.
Nor was it any of the other familiar faces TV and studio audiences
had grown used to during Johnny's absences. This man was taller
than Johnny, and instead of the familiar silver hair, there was a
luxuriant cap of almost Pan-like black curls. The stranger's hair
was so black that in places it seemed to glow almost blue, like
Superman's hair in the comic-books. The sport-coat he wore was
not quite loud enough to put him in the Pleesda-Meetcha-Is-This-
The-Missus? car salesman category, but Carson would not have
touched it with a twelve-foot pole.
The audience applause continued, but it first seemed to grow
slightly bewildered, and then clearly began to thin.
"What the fuck's going on?" someone in the control room asked.
The director simply watched, mesmerized.
Instead of the familiar swing of the invisible golf-club, punctuated
by a drum-riff and high-spirited hoots of approval from the studio
audience, this dark-haired, broad-shouldered, loud-jacketed,
unknown gentleman began to move his hands up and down, eyes
flicking rhythmically from his moving palms to a spot just above
his head - he was miming a juggler with a lot of fragile items in the
air, and doing it with the easy grace of the long-time showman. It
was only something in his face, something as subtle as a shadow,
that told you the objects were eggs or something, and would break
if dropped. It was, in fact, very like the way Johnny's eyes
followed the invisible ball down the invisible fairway, registering
one that had been righteously stroked ... unless, of course, he chose
to vary the act, which he could and did do from time to time, and
without even breathing hard.
He made a business of dropping the last egg, or whatever the
fragile object was, and his eyes followed it to the floor with
exaggerated dismay. Then, for a moment, he froze. Then he
glanced toward Cam Three Left ... toward Doc and the orchestra,
in other words.
After repeated viewings of the videotape, Dave Cheyney came to
what seemed to him to be an irrefutable conclusion, although many
of his colleagues - including his partner - questioned it.
"He was waiting for a sting," Cheyney said. "Look, you can see it
on his face. It's as old as burlesque."
His partner, Pete Jacoby, said, "I thought burlesque was where the
girl with the heroin habit took off her clothes while the guy with
the heroin habit played the trumpet."
Cheyney gestured at him impatiently. "Think of the lady that used
to play the piano in the silent movies, then. Or the one that used to
do schmaltz on the organ during the radio soaps."
Jacoby looked at him, wide-eyed. 'Mid they have those things
when you were a kid, daddy?" he asked in a falsetto voice.
"Will you for once be serious?" Cheyney asked him. "Because this
is a serious thing we got here, I think."
"What we got here is very simple. We got a nut."
"No," Cheyney said, and hit rewind on the VCR again with one
hand while he lit a fresh cigarette with the other. "What we got is a
seasoned performer who's mad as hell because the guy on the snare
dropped his cue." He paused thoughtfully and added: "Christ,
Johnny does it all the time. And if the guy who was supposed to
lay in the sting dropped his cue, I think he'd look the same way.
By then it didn't matter. The stranger who wasn't Johnny Carson
had time to recover, to look at a flabbergasted Ed McMahon and
say, "The moon must be full tonight, Ed - do you think - " And that
was when the NBC security guards came out and grabbed him.
"Hey! What the fuck do you think you're - "
But by then they had dragged him away.
In the control room of Studio C, there was total silence. The
audience monitors picked up the same silence. Camera Four was
swung toward the audience, and showed a picture of one hundred
and fifty stunned, silent faces. Camera Two, the one medium-close
on Ed McMahon, showed a man who looked almost cosmically
befuddled.
The director took a package of Winstons from his breast pocket,
took one out, put it in his mouth, took it out again and reversed it
so the filter was facing away from him, and abruptly bit the
cigarette in two. He threw the filtered half in one direction and spat
the unfiltered half in another.
"Get up a show from the library with Rickles," he said. "No Joan
Rivers. And if I see Totie Fields, someone's going to get fired."
Then he strode away, head down. He shoved a chair with such
violence on his way out of the control room that it struck the wall,
rebounded, nearly fractured the skull of a white-faced intern from
USC, and fell on its side.
One of the PA's told the intern in a low voice, "Don't worry; that's
just Fred's way of committing honorable seppuku."
The man who was not Johnny Carson was taken, bellowing loudly
not about his lawyer but his team of lawyers, to the Burbank Police
Station. In Burbank, as in Beverly Hills and Hollywood Heights,
there is a wing of the police station which is known simply as
"special security functions." This may cover many aspects of the
sometimes crazed world of Tinsel-Town law enforcement. The
cops don't like it, the cops don't respect it ... but they ride with it.
You don't shit where you eat. Rule One.
"Special security functions" might be the place to which a coke-
snorting movie-star whose last picture grossed seventy million
dollars might be conveyed; the place to which the battered wife of
an extremely powerful film producer might be taken; it was the
place to which the man with the dark crop of curls was taken.
The man who showed up in Johnny Carson's place on the stage of
Studio C on the afternoon of November 29th identified himself as
Ed Paladin, speaking the name with the air of one who expects
everyone who hears it to fall on his or her knees and, perhaps,
genuflect. His California driver's license, Blue Cross - Blue Shield
card, Amex and Diners' Club cards, also identified him as Edward
Paladin.
His trip from Studio C ended, at least temporarily, in a room in the
Burbank PD's "special security" area. The room was panelled with
tough plastic that almost did
look like mahogany and furnished
with a low, round couch and tasteful chairs. There was a cigarette
box on the glass-topped coffee table filled with Dunhills, and the
magazines included Fortune and Variety and Vogue and Billboard
and GQ. The wall-to-wall carpet wasn't really ankle-deep but
looked it, and there was a CableView guide on top of the large-
screen TV. There was a bar (now locked), and a very nice neo-
Jackson Pollock painting on one of the walls. The walls, however,
were of drilled cork, and the mirror above the bar was a little bit
too large and a little bit too shiny to be anything but a piece of one-
way glass.
The man who called himself Ed Paladin stuck his hands in his just-
too-loud sport-coat pockets, looked around disgustedly, and said:
"An interrogation room by any other name is still an interrogation
room."
Detective 1st Grade Richard Cheyney looked at him calmly for a
moment. When he spoke, it was in the soft and polite voice that
had earned him the only halfkidding nickname "Detective to the
Stars." Part of the reason he spoke this way was because he
genuinely liked and respected show people. Part of the reason was
because he didn't trust them. Half the time they were lying they
didn't know it.
"Could you tell us, please, Mr Paladin, how you got on the set of
The Tonight Show, and where Johnny Carson is?"
"Who's Johnny Carson?"
Pete Jacoby - who wanted to be Henny Youngman when he grew
up, Cheyney often thought - gave Cheyney a momentary dry look
every bit as good as a Jack Benny deadpan. Then he looked back at
Edward Paladin and said, "Johnny Carson's the guy who used to be
Mr Ed. You know, the talking horse? I mean, a lot of people know
about Mr Ed, the famous talking horse, but an awful lot of people
don't know that he went to Geneva to have a species-change
operation and when he came back he was-"
Cheyney often allowed Jacoby his routines (there was really no
other word for them, and Cheyney remembered one occasion when
Jacoby had gotten a man charged with beating his wife and infant
son to death laughing so hard that tears of mirth rather than
remorse were rolling down his cheeks as he signed the confession
that was going to put the bastard in jail for the rest of his life), but
he wasn't going to tonight. He didn't have to see the flame under
The Collective Page 29
