Wild Cards

by George R. R. Martin

  Behind him the crowd began to solidify. Here was a superstar—an ace—taking his stand with them. Across the bayonet hedge the eyes of National Guard troopers flickered nervously behind the thick lenses of their masks. They were mostly young men who'd joined the Guard to avoid being drafted and sent to 'Nam; they knew who was facing them. Many owned Destiny records, had Douglas's haughty features staring down from posters on their bedroom walls. It was harder, somehow, to use bayonet or rifle-butt against someone you knew, even if it was only as a face on a record jacket or in a photo spread in Life magazine.

  Their captain was of sterner stuff. He barked an order from the cupola. Tear-gas guns coughed, a half-dozen small comets arched down around Douglas and among the crowd surging up to join him. Billows of thick white smoke, CS gas, hid the singer from view.

  Taking a shortcut through an alley, Mark had managed to miss the police lines. At this moment he emerged to a perfect sideline view of his very own idol standing with smoke swirling around him like a medieval martyr at the stake. He stopped and stared openmouthed at the confrontation shaping up before him.

  The acid kicked in.

  He felt reality's collagens dissolve, but the scene before him was too intense for hallucination. As the stiff morning breeze tattered the curtains of gas, a man standing with legs braced and fists raised appeared, auburn hair streaming back from a broad face that somehow flickered, interspersed with the head of a giant cobra, scales gleaming black, hood extended. The Guardsmen drew back; the Lizard King was in their midst.

  The King moved forward in a sinuous glide. Uniforms gave way. Someone jabbed at him with a bayonet, or maybe just didn't back off quickly enough. A flick of the wrist, seeming lazy and disdainful but delivered with superhuman speed, and the rifle went spinning away as its owner stumbled backward to the grass with a yelp of terror. The captain in his iron box shouted hoarsely, trying to pull together the fraying strands of his men's determination.

  But as he assumed his Lizard King aspect, Douglas loosed his mind games upon them; their eyes began to wander, seeking visions of desperate beauty or mind-numbing horror, each affected in his own way by the Lizard King's black aura.

  The crowd was advancing now, chanting, shouting, menacing. The Guard captain did the only thing he could—his thumb pulsed once against the fifty-caliber's butterfly trigger. The gun vomited noise to bust glass and a Volkswagen flame, streaming tracers over the protesters' heads.

  Triumphant an eyeblink before, the crowd came apart in screaming panic. The noise of the shots struck Mark like a giant pillow and spun him backward along endless, twisting corridors. But the scene stayed before him, light at the end of a tunnel, terrible and insistent. No one had been hit by the burst, but the protesters, like Mark himself, had come up for the first time against the reality their prophet Mao had tried to impress on them: where power comes from.

  Tom Douglas was standing so close that muzzle-flash singed his eyebrows. He didn't flinch, though the noise struck him with a force a truckload of speakers couldn't match. Instead he met it with a roar of his own that sent Guardsmen tumbling like frightened puppies.

  A prodigious leap and he stood on the upper deck of the APC. He bent, grasped the gun's barrel, heaved. The heavy Browning came away from its mounting like a sapling torn up by the roots. He held the weapon above his head, both-handed, then with a single convulsion of shoulders and biceps bent the barrel almost double. Having displayed his contempt for the Establishment and its war machines, he tossed the ruined machine gun after the troopers, now in full rout, and bent forward to pluck the now-terror-stricken captain from the cupola by the front of his blouse. He held the man up before him, legs kicking feebly.

  And was struck down from behind by a blow driven with the full awesome strength of an unknown ace.

  Mark snapped. With a shriek his soul vanished into swirling dark. His body turned and blindly ran.

  Wojtek Grabowski saw the sinister serpent figure in black leap onto the APC and tear the weapon from its mountings and knew it had been the right choice to live.

  Only devout Catholicism had stopped him from throwing himself to his death. He'd hurried from the site—already deserted as the workers rushed to attack the demonstrators—and home to his cramped apartment to a nightlong vigil of misery and silent prayer.

  With dawn had indeed come Light; and he knew with a warm rush that his ace affliction was divinely sent, a blessing not a curse. Revolution threatened his adopted home, led by those who'd sworn allegiance to the forces of darkness. He had washed, dressed, made his own way to the park with peace in his heart.

  Now he was confronted with a beast that seemed to have many heads, knew that he was face-to-face with the hated Tom Douglas himself.

  Fury blasted into him. The ace transformation overtook him, bulking his muscles hugely to fill his baggy clothes to the bursting point. The steel hat of his profession was on his head, a yard-long pipefitter's wrench in his hand. Lingering doubts about using his strength against normal humans vanished; here was an enemy worthy of him, an ace, a traitor—a servitor of Hell.

  He raced forward, vaulted onto the vehicle even as the snake-headed creature in black plucked its commander from the hatch. Students cried warnings Douglas didn't hear. Hardhat raised his wrench and struck at the back of a head now bushy-haired, now black and glabrous and obscene.

  The blow would have pulped the skull of a normal human, or torn his head from his shoulders. But the constant shifting of Douglas's appearance confused Grabowski's aim. The blow glanced off. Douglas dropped the squirming officer and slumped bonelessly off the vehicle as momentum carried the wrench downward to buckle the aluminum top-armor like tinfoil.

  Thinking he had killed him, Grabowski felt strength ebb. He needed rage to stay in the meta state, but all he felt was shame. Desperate, he turned to face the crowd. “Go home,” he shouted in his hoarse, harsh English. “Go home now, Is over. You must not fight no more. Obey your leaders and live in peace.”

  They stood and stared at him with sheep's faces. Morning dew had sucked the tear gas down into it and poisoned the grass. A few white CS tendrils writhed on the ground like dying snakes. Tears streamed down Grabowski's face. Wouldn't they listen?

  From the rear of the crowd a young man shouted, “Fuck you! Fuck you, you mother fuckin' fascist!”

  To have that epithet thrown at him, a man who still carried fascist bullets in his flesh, by some spoiled, insolent, ignorant puppy—anger filled him in abundance, and with it that inhuman strength.

  Fortunately for him, because about then Tom Douglas got his wits back, jumped to his feet, grabbed the Hardhat by the ankles, and yanked his boots out from under him. Grabowski's helmet struck the deck like a giant cymbal. Every bit as furious as the man who'd taken him down, Douglas caught him as he fell, slammed him against the side of the vehicle, and began to piledrive blows into him with his own ace strength.

  But Grabowski too had more than human durability. He dragged his wrench up between their bodies, thrust Douglas violently away. Douglas's feet slipped once on the wet grass, he caught himself with serpent agility and lunged forward to the attack—only to check himself and go up on tiptoe like a ballet dancer while a savage two-handed swipe of the wrench whined within an inch of his abdomen.

  Douglas dove inside the wrench's deadly arc. He grappled his opponent, slamming punches in under the short ribs. Grabowski took a quick step backward, put a hand on Douglas's sternum, and pushed. Douglas fell back a step. The wrench lashed out, and this time only Douglas's metahuman reflexes saved him from catching it square in the front of his skull.

  The tool-steel beak raked his forehead. Blood cascaded. He backpedaled furiously, wiping his eyes with one hand while the other thrashed about in an attempt to ward the following blow.

  Hardhat swung his wrench like a baseball bat and took Douglas under the right arm with a sound that echoed through the park like a grenade explosion. Douglas went down. Hardhat stood over him with legs spre
ad wide, raising the wrench slowly above his head like a headsman preparing the stroke. Blood drooled from the corner of his mouth. He was berserk, beyond compunction, beyond compassion, devoid of anything but the need to smash his opponent's skull like a snail on a rock.

  But even as the gleaming blood-dripping wrench started down, a golden chain wrapped around it from behind and stopped the blow before it was launched.

  With a fighter's reflex Hardhat instantly relaxed his arms, allowing his wrench to travel in the direction the sudden restraint pulled. Then he snapped the weapon forward and down, spinning as he did so to throw the entire augmented weight of his body against the slack. But as he moved, a houlihan rippled down the chain and it loosened, so that the wrench slithered free with a musical sound. Motion unchecked by expected impact, Hardhat spun around completely, staggering forward, continued through another half-turn so that he faced his opponent across five meters of muddy, trampled earth.

  A youth stood there, slender and tall, golden hair falling to his shoulders, dangling a saucer-sized peace medallion of gold on a long chain. Despite Bay-morning chill he wore only a pair of jeans. To the short, dark Grabowski, he looked like nothing so much as a figure stepped from a Nazi recruiting poster.

  “Who are you?” Hardhat snarled. Then, realizing he had spoken in his own tongue, repeated it in English.

  The youth frowned briefly, as if perplexed. “Call me Radical,” he said then with a grin. “I'm here to protect the people.”

  “Traitor!” Hardhat launched himself, swinging the wrench. Radical danced aside. No matter how savagely Hardhat attacked, no matter how he feinted, his opponent eluded him with apparent ease. Frustrated at his attempts to strike the golden youth, Hardhat turned once again to Douglas, still moaning on the ground. And Radical was there, peace symbol weaving a golden figure of eight in the air before him, warding Hardhat's most ferocious blows with sparks of coruscance while soldiers and students alike stood transfixed by the spectacle.

  But if Hardhat couldn't strike past the amulet, Radical seemed unwilling or unable to counterattack. Noting this Hardhat backed away, waving his wrench menacingly. After a moment Radical followed, flowing like mist. Hardhat circled widdershins. Radical kept pace. Slowly the Pole drew his long-haired opponent away from the recumbent Douglas.

  Lightning fast, he wheeled left and hurled himself at the onlookers. Though his speed wasn't as great as Radical's it was greater than a norm's, and he was among the crowd of protesters before any could react, wrench upraised to smash. Caught by surprise, Radical was unable to react in time.

  The wrench stayed up, frozen like a fly in lucite. Radical sprang forward, driven to attack by desperation, swinging his peace medallion at the back of the tree-trunk neck below the helmet's sweep. It connected with the chunk of an ax striking wood; not as mighty a blow as the Lizard King could have delivered, not to be compared in the least with the terrible force of Grabowski's wrench, but sufficient to scramble Hardhat's senses, send him pitching face first into the grass and mud and crumpled signs.

  Radical poised above him, swinging his medallion in a slow circle at his side. A moment later Douglas joined him, rubbing his side and grimacing. “Think he cracked a few ribs, there,” he rasped in his familiar dirt-road baritone. “What the hell?”

  Even as they watched, the inhumanly squat form of Hardhat dwindled into a stocky, balding man in baggy clothes, lying with his face in the mud, sobbing as if his heart were broken. Shaking his shaggy mane, Douglas turned to his benefactor. “I'm Tom Douglas. Thanks for saving my ass.”

  “The pleasure's mine, man.”

  And then Douglas stepped forward and embraced the taller blond man, and a cheer went up from the crowd. The National Guard soldiers were already in retreat, leaving their APC behind. The revolution would not come today, or ever, perhaps, but the kids had been saved.

  As the television cameras churned, Tom Douglas proclaimed Radical his comrade in arms and called into being a celebration as wild as any the Bay Area had known. While the police kept their uneasy perimeter and the National Guard licked its wounds, thousands of kids poured into the park to hail the conquering heroes. The abandoned M113 provided an impromptu stage. Tents dotted the park like colorful mushrooms. Music and drugs and booze flowed freely, all that day and all that night.

  At the center of it all glowed Tom Douglas and his mysterious benefactor, surrounded by beautiful, compliant women—none more so than the willowy brunette with eyes like impacted ice everybody called Sunflower, who appeared to have sprouted from Radical's hip like a postnatal Siamese twin. The newcomer would give no other name than Radical, and he turned away all questions as to his origin, and how he happened to be at that place at that time, with a grin and a shy “I was here because I was needed here, man.” At dawn the next day, he slipped quietly away from the dwindling festivities and vanished.

  He was never seen again.

  In the spring of 1971, charges against Tom Douglas stemming from the People's Park confrontation were dropped—at the recommendation of Dr. Tachyon, who'd been called in by SCARE to help investigate the incident—just as Destiny's album City of Night hit the stands. Shortly thereafter, Douglas electrified the rock world by announcing he was retiring—not just as a musician, but as an ace.

  So he took Doc Tachyon's experimental trump cure, and was one of the fortunate thirty percent on whom it worked. The Lizard King disappeared forever, leaving behind Thomas Marion Douglas, norm.

  Who was dead in six months. His overuse of drugs and alcohol had achieved such heroic proportions that only ace endurance kept him alive. Once that was gone his health deteriorated rapidly. He died of pneumonia in a seedy hotel in Paris in the fall of 1971.

  As for Hardhat—interviewed by Dr. Tachyon the day after the confrontation, hospitalized for observation with a mild concussion, Wojtek Grabowski insisted his foes had not defeated him. “All you need is love” ran the received wisdom of the day—and love had brought him down. Or so he claimed. Because when he hurled himself against the crowd, he found himself staring into the face of Anna, his wife, lost to him for two decades and a half.

  Not quite Anna, he said tearfully; there were differences, in the color of hair, the shape of nose. And, of course, Anna would not now be a woman in her early twenties.

  But their daughter would be. Grabowski was convinced he had seen, at last, the child he had never known. The horrible knowledge that his anger had almost led him to destroy that which he cherished most in all the world bled the strength from him in an instant, so that what Radical's medallion struck was a being in transition from full ace strength to a normal human state.

  Touched, Dr. Tachyon helped Grabowski search the Bay Area for his daughter. Privately he never expected to find her; at the moment Grabowski believed he saw her, Tom Douglas had been recovering, his Lizard King aspect still active. And that black aura could make you see what you most wished to see. As far as Tachyon was concerned, it had.

  To none of his surprise, the search turned up nothing. In any event, he was able to devote little time to Grabowski, no matter how much the man's plight affected him. He returned East after three weeks of assisting Grabowski and SCARE investigators. A couple of months later he learned that Grabowski had vanished, no doubt to pursue the search for his family. Since then, no more had been heard of Wojtek Grabowski, or Hardhat.

  And as for Radical . . .

  In the early morning hours of May 6th, 1970, Mark Meadows staggered out of an alley opening into People's Park with his head full of white noise, clad only in his one pair of jeans. He had no memory of what had happened to him, scarcely realized where he was. He found himself amongst the remnants of last night's celebrants, heavy-eyed with fatigue but still chattering like speed freaks about the fantastic events of the last twenty-four hours. “You should have been there, man,” they told him. And as they described the events of yesterday morning, strange fragments of memory, surreal and disjointed, began to bubble to the surface of Mark's
mind: perhaps he had.

  Was he remembering his own experiences? Or was the last of the acid casting up images to match the breathless, vivid descriptions a dozen eyewitnesses pressed on him at once? He didn't know. All that he knew was that the Radical represented the realization of his wildest dream: Mark Meadows as Hero.

  And when he saw Sunflower standing nearby, hair disarrayed, eyes dreamy, and she said to him, “Oh, Mark, I just met the most fantastic dude,” he knew that whatever hopes he'd had of being more than Sunflower's friend had just gone poof. Unless he were, in fact, the Radical.

  He knew what to do, of course. He'd learned more than he consciously realized during his street apprenticeship with Sunflower; by nightfall he was crosslegged on his own mattress among his cookies and comic books, clutching two weeks' living-expenses worth of LSD. He was so exalted when he popped the first tab that he barely needed the drug to get off.

  Which was all he did. No Radical transformation. Nothing. He just . . . tripped out.

  For a week he didn't leave the apartment, living on moldy crumbs, slamming down increasing doses of acid as fast as the effects of the last charge faded. Nothing. When at last he staggered forth for more drugs he'd already taken on a blur around the edges.

  So began the quest.

  Interlude Three

  From “Wild Card Chic,” by Tom Wolfe, New York , June 1971.

  Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. These are nice. Little egg rolls, filled with crabmeat and shrimp. Very tasty. A bit greasy, though. Wonder what the aces do to get the grease spots off the fingers of their gloves? Maybe they prefer the stuffed mushrooms, or the little Roquefort cheese morsels rolled in crushed nuts, all of which are at this very moment being offered them on silver platters by tall, smiling waiters in Aces High livery. . . . These are the questions to ponder on these Wild Card Chic evenings. For example, that black man there by the window, the one shaking hands with Hiram Worchester himself, the one with the black silk shirt and the black leather coat and that absolutely unbelievable swollen forehead, that dangerous-looking black man with the cocoa-colored skin and almond-shaped eyes, who came off the ele- vator with three of the most ravishing women any of them have ever seen, even here in this room full of beautiful people—is he, an ace, a palpable ace, going to pick up a little egg roll stuffed with shrimp and crabmeat when the waiter drifts by, and just pop it down the gullet without so much as missing a syllable of Hiram's cultured geniality, or is he more of a stuffed mushroom man at that . . .