THIRTY MINUTES OVER BROADWAY! JETBOY’S LAST ADVENTURE!

by Howard Waldrop

Bonham’s Flying Service of Shantak, New Jersey, was socked in. The small searchlight on the tower barely pushed away the darkness of the swirling fog.

There was the sound of car tires on the wet pavement in front of Hangar 23. A car door opened, a moment later it closed. Footsteps came to the Employees Only door. It opened. Scoop Swanson came in, carrying his Kodak Autograph Mark II and a bag of flashbulbs and film.

Lincoln Traynor raised up from the engine of the surplus P-40 he was overhauling for an airline pilot who had got it at a voice-bid auction for $293. Judging from the shape of the engine, it must have been flown by the Flying Tigers in 1940. A ball game was on the workbench radio. Line turned it down. “‘Lo, Line,” said Scoop.

“‘Lo.”

“No word yet?”

“Don’t expect any. The telegram he sent yesterday said he’d be in tonight. Good enough for me.”

Scoop lit a Camel with a Three Torches box match from the workbench. He blew smoke toward the Absolutely No Smoking sign at the back of the hangar. “Hey, what’s this?” He walked to the rear. Still in their packing cases were two long red wing extensions and two 300-gallon teardrop underwing tanks. “When these get here?”

“Air Corps shipped them yesterday from San Francisco. Another telegram came for him today. You might as well read it, you’re doing the story.” Line handed him the War Department orders.

TO: Jetboy (Tomlin, Robert NMI) HOR: Bonham’s Flying Service Hangar 23, Shantak, New Jersey

1. Effective this date 1200Z hours 12 Aug ‘46, you are no longer on active duty, United States Army Air Force.

2. Your aircraft (model-experimental) (ser. no. JB-1) is hereby decommissioned from active status, United States Army Air Force, and reassigned you as private aircraft. No further materiel support from USAAF or War Department will be forthcoming.

3. Records, commendations, and awards forwarded under separate cover.

4. Our records show Tomlin, Robert NMI, has not obtained pilot’s license. Please contact CAB for courses and certification.

5. Clear skies and tailwinds,

For Arnold, H. H. CofS, USAAF ref. Executive Order #2, 08 Dec ‘41

“What’s this about him having no pilot’s license?” asked the newspaperman. “I went through the morgue on him-his file’s a foot thick. Hell, he must have flown faster and farther, shot down more planes than anyone-five hundred planes, fifty ships! He did it without a pilot’s license?”

Line wiped grease from his mustache. “Yep. That was the most plane-crazy kid you ever saw. Back in ‘39, he couldn’t have been more than twelve, he heard there was a job out here. He showed up at four A.M.-lammed out of the orphanage to do it. They came out to get him. But of course Professor Silverberg had hired him, squared it with them.”

“Silverberg’s the one the Nazis bumped off? The guy who made the jet?”

“Yep. Years ahead of everybody, but weird. I put together the plane for him, Bobby and I built it by hand. But Silverberg made the jets—damnedest engines you ever saw. The Nazis and Italians, and Whittle over in England, had started theirs. But the Germans found out something was happening here.”

“How’d the kid learn to fly?”

“He always knew, I think,” said Lincoln. “One day he’s in here helping me bend metal. The next, him and the professor are flying around at four hundred miles per. In the dark, with those early engines.”

“How’d they keep it a secret?”

“They didn’t, very well. The spies came for Silverbergwanted him and the plane. Bobby was out with it. I think he and the prof knew something was up. Silverberg put up such a fight the Nazis killed him. Then, there was the diplomatic stink. In those days the JB-1 only had six .30 cals on it-where the professor got them I don’t know. But the kid took care of the car full of spies with it, and that speedboat on the Hudson full of embassy people. All on diplomatic visas.”

“Just a sec,” Linc stopped himself. “End of a doubleheader in Cleveland. On the Blue Network.” He turned up the metal Philco radio that sat above the toolrack.

” Sanders to Papenfuss to Volstad, a double play. That does it. So the Sox drop two to Cleveland. We’ll be right-” Linc turned it off. “There goes five bucks,” he said. “Where was I?”

“The Krauts killed Silverberg, and Jetboy got even. He went to Canada, right?”

“Joined the RCAF, unofficially. Fought in the Battle of Britain, went to China against the Japs with the Tigers, was back in Britain for Pearl Harbor.”

“And Roosevelt commissioned him?”

“Sort of. You know, funny thing about his whole career. He fights the whole war, longer than any other American-late ‘39 to ‘45—then right at the end, he gets lost in the Pacific, missing. We all think he’s dead for a year. Then they find him on that desert island last month, and now he’s coming home.” There was a high, thin whine like a prop plane in a dive. It came from the foggy skies outside. Scoop put out his third Camel. “How can he land in this soup?”

“He’s got an all-weather radar set-got it off a German night fighter back in ‘43. He could land that plane in a circus tent at midnight.”

They went to the door. Two landing lights pierced the rolling mist. They lowered to the far end of the runway, turned, and came back on the taxi strip.

The red fuselage glowed in the gray-shrouded lights of the airstrip. The twin-engine highwing plane turned toward them and rolled to a stop.

Linc Traynor put a set of double chocks under each of the two rear tricycle landing gears. Half the glass nose of the plane levered up and pulled back. The plane had four 20mm cannon snouts in the wing roots between the engines, and a 75mm gunport below and to the left of the cockpit rim.

It had a high thin rudder, and the rear elevators were shaped like the tail of a brook trout. Under each of the elevators was the muzzle of a rear-firing machine gun. The only markings on the plane were four nonstandard USAAF stars in a black roundel, and the serial number JB-1 on the top right and bottom left wings and beneath the rudder.

The radar antennae on the nose looked like something to roast weenies on.

A boy dressed in red pants, white shirt, and a blue helmet and goggles stepped out of the cockpit and onto the dropladder on the left side.

He was nineteen, maybe twenty. He took off his helmet and goggles. He had curly mousy brown hair, hazel eyes, and was short and chunky.

Linc,” he said. He hugged the pudgy man to him, patted his back for a full minute. Scoop snapped off a shot. “Great to have you back, Bobby, said Linc. “Nobody’s called me that in years,” he said. “It sounds real good to hear it again.”

“This is Scoop Swanson,” said line. “He’s gonna make you famous all over again.”

“I’d rather be asleep.” He shook the reporter’s hand. “Any place around here we can get some ham and eggs?”

The launch pulled up to the dock in the fog. Out in the harbor a ship finished cleaning its bilges and was turning to steam back southward.

There were three men on the mooring: Fred and Ed and Filmore. One man stepped out of the launch with a suitcase in his hands. Filmore leaned down and gave the guy at the wheel of the motorboat a Lincoln and two Jacksons. Then he helped the guy with the suitcase.

“Welcome home, Dr. Tod.”

“It’s good to be back, Filmore.” Tod was dressed in a baggy suit, and had on an overcoat even though it was August. He wore his hat pulled low over his face, and from it a glint of metal was reflected in the pale lights from a warehouse.

“This is Fred and this is Ed,” said Filmore. “They’re here just for the night.”

“‘Lo,” said Fred. “‘Lo,” said Ed.

They walked back to the car, a ‘46 Merc that looked like a submarine. They climbed in, Fred and Ed watching the foggy alleys to each side. Then Fred got behind the wheel, and Ed rode shotgun. With a sawed-off ten-gauge.

“Nobody’s expecting me. Nobody cares,” said Dr. Tod. “Everybody who had something against me is either dead or went respectable during the war and made a mint. I’m an old man and I’m tired. I’m going out in the country and raise bees and play the horses and the market.”

“Not planning anything, boss?”

“Not a thing.”

He turned his head as they passed a streetlight. Half his face was gone, a smooth plate reaching from jaw to hatline, nostril to left ear.

“I can’t shoot anymore, for one thing. My depth perception isn’t what it used to be.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Filmore. “We heard something happened to you in ‘43.”

“Was in a somewhat-profitable operation out of Egypt while the Afrika Korps was falling apart. Taking people in and out for a fee in a nominally neutral air fleet. Just a sideline. Then ran into that hotshot flier.”

“Who?”

“Kid with the jet plane, before the Germans had them.”

“Tell you the truth, boss, I didn’t keep up with the war much. I take a long view on merely territorial conflicts.”

“As I should have,” said Dr. Tod. “We were flying out of Tunisia. Some important people were with us that trip. The pilot screamed. There was a tremendous explosion. Next thing, I came to, it was the next morning, and me and one other person are in a life raft in the middle of the Mediterranean. My face hurt. I lifted up. Something fell into the bottom of the raft. It was my left eyeball. It was looking up at me. I knew I was in trouble.”

“You said it was a kid with a jet plane?” asked Ed. “Yes. We found out later they’d broken our code, and he’d flown six hundred miles to intercept us.”

“You want to get even?” asked Filmore.

“No. That was so long ago I hardly remember that side of my face. It just taught me to be a little more cautious. I wrote it off as character building.”

“So no plans, huh?”

“Not a single one,” said Dr. Tod.

“That’ll be nice for a change,” said Filmore. They watched the lights of the city go by.

He knocked on the door, uncomfortable in his new brown suit and vest.

“Come on in, its open,” said a woman’s voice. Then it was muffled. “I’ll be ready in just a minute.”

Jetboy opened the oak hall door and stepped into the room, past the glass-brick room divider.

A beautiful woman stood in the middle of the room, a dress halfway over her arms and head. She wore a camisole, garter belt, and silk hose. She was pulling the dress down with one of her hands.

Jetboy turned his head away, blushing and taken aback. “Oh,” said the woman. “Ohl I-who?”

“It’s me, Belinda,” he said. “Robert.”

“Robert?”

“Bobby, Bobby Tomlin.”

She stared at him a moment, her hands clasped over her front though she was fully dressed.

“Oh, Bobby,” she said, and came to him and hugged him and gave him a big kiss right on the mouth.

It was what he had waited six years for.

“Bobby. It’s great to see you. I-I was expecting someone else. Some-girlfriends. How did you find me?”

“Well, it wasn’t easy”

She stepped back from him. “Let me look at you.” He looked at her. The last time he had seen her she was fourteen, a tomboy, still at the orphanage. She had been a thin kid with mousy blond hair. Once, when she was eleven, she’d almost punched his lights out. She was a year older than he. Then he had gone away, to work at the airfield, then to fight with the Brits against Hitler. He had written her when he could all during the war, after America entered it. She had left the orphanage and been put in a foster home. In ‘44 one of his letters had come back from there marked ‘Moved-No Forwarding Address.’ Then he had been lost all during the last year.. “You’ve changed, too,” he said.

“So have you.”

“Uh.”

“I followed the newspapers all during the war. I tried to write you but I don’t guess the letters ever caught up with you. Then they said you were missing at sea, and I sort of gave up.”

“Well, I was, but they found me. Now I’m back. How have you been?”

“Real good, once I ran away from the foster home,” she said. A look of pain came across her face. “You don’t know how glad I was to get away from there. Oh, Bobby,” she said. “Oh, I wish things was different!” She started to cry a little.

“Hey,” he said, holding her by the shoulders. “Sit down. I’ve got something for you.”

“A present?”

“Yep.” He handed her a grimy, oil-stained paper parcel. “I carried these with me the last two years of the war. They were in the plane with me on the island. Sorry I didn’t have time to rewrap them.”

She tore the English butcher paper. Inside were copies of The House at Pooh Corner and The Tale of the Fierce Bad Rabbit.

“Oh,” said Belinda. “Thank you.”

He remembered her dressed in the orphanage coveralls, just in, dusty and tired from a baseball game, lying on the reading-room floor with a Pooh book open before her.

“The Pooh book’s signed by the real Christopher Robin,” he said. “I found out he was an RAF officer at one of the bases in England. He said he usually didn’t do this sort of thing, that he was just another airman. I told him I wouldn’t tell anyone. I’d searched high and low to find a copy, and he knew that, though.”

“This other one’s got more of a story behind it. I was coming back near dusk, escorting some crippled B-17s. I looked up and saw two German night fighters coming in, probably setting up patrol, trying to catch some Lancasters before they went out over the Channel.”

“To make a long story short, I shot down both of them; they packed in near a small village. But I had run out of fuel and had to set down. Saw a pretty flat sheep pasture with a lake at the far end of it, and went in. When I climbed out of the cockpit, I saw a lady and a sheepdog standing at the edge of the field. She had a shotgun. When she got close enough to see the engines and the decals, she said, “Good shooting! Won’t you come in for a bite of supper and to use the telephone to call Fighter Command?” We could see the two ME-110s burning in the distance. `You’re the very famous Jetboy.’ she said, ‘We have followed your exploits in the Sawrey paper. I’m Mrs. Heelis.’ She held out her hand.”

“I shook it. `Mrs. William Heelis? And this is Sawrey?’ ‘Yes,’ she said.”

“‘You’re Beatrix Potter!’ I said.”

“‘I suppose I am,’ she said.”

“Belinda, she was this stout old lady in a raggedy sweater and a plain old dress. But when she smiled, I swear, all of England lit up!”

Belinda opened the book. On the flyleaf was written

To Jetboy’s American Friend, Belinda,

from Mrs. William Heelis (“Beatrix Potter”)

12 April 1943

Jetboy drank the coffee Belinda made for him. “Where are your friends?” he asked.

“Well, he they should have been here by now. I was thinking of going down the hall to the phone and trying to call them. I can change, and we can sit around and talk about old times. I really can call.”

“No,” said Jetboy “Tell you what. I’ll call you later on in the week; we can get together some night when you’re not busy. That would be fun.”

“Sure would.” Jetboy got up to go.

“Thank you for the books, Bobby. They mean a lot to me, they really do.”

“It’s real good to see you again, Bee.”

Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!

“Nobody’s called me that since the orphanage. Call me real soon, will you?”

“Sure will.” He leaned down and kissed her again.

He walked to the stairs. As he was going down, a guy in a modified zoot suit-pegged pants, long coat, watch chain, bow tie the size of a coat hanger, hair slicked back, reeking of Brylcreem and Old Spice-went up the stairs two at a time, whistling “It Ain’t the Meat, It’s the Motion.”

Jetboy heard him knocking at Belinda’s door. Outside, it had begun to rain.

“Great. Just like in a movie,” said Jetboy.

The next night was quiet as a graveyard.

Then dogs all over the Pine Barrens started to bark. Cats screamed. Birds flew in panic from thousands of trees, circled, swooping this way and that in the dark night.

Static washed over every radio in the northeastern United States. New television sets flared out, volume doubling. People gathered around nine-inch Dumonts jumped back at the sudden noise and light, dazzled in their own living rooms and bars and sidewalks outside appliance stores all over the East Coast.

To those out in that hot August night it was even more spectacular. A thin line of light, high up, moved, brightened, still falling. Then it expanded, upping in brilliance, changed into a blue-green bolide, seemed to stop, then flew to a hundred falling sparks that slowly faded on the dark starlit sky. Some people said they saw another, smaller light a few minutes later. It seemed to hover, then sped off to the west, growing dimmer as it flew. The newspapers had been full of stories of the “ghost rockets” in Sweden all that summer. It was the silly season.

A few calls to the weather bureau or Army Air Force bases got the answer that it was probably a stray from the Delta Aquarid meteor shower.

Out in the Pine Barrens, somebody knew differently, though he wasn’t in the mood to communicate it to anyone.

Jetboy, dressed in a loose pair of pants, a shirt, and a brown aviator’s jacket, walked in through the doors of the Blackwell Printing Company. There was a bright red-and-blue sign above the door: Home of the Cosh Comics Company. He stopped at the receptionist’s desk.

“Robert Tomlin to see Mr. Farrell.”

The secretary, a thin blond job in glasses with swept-up rims that made it look like a bat was camping on her face, stared at him. “Mr. Farrell passed on in the winter of 1945. Were you in the service or something?”

“Something.”

“Would you like to speak to Mr. Lowboy? He has Mr. Farrell’s job now.”

“Whoever’s in charge of Jetboy Comics.”

The whole place began shaking as printing presses cranked up in the back of the building. On the walls of the office were garish comic-book covers, promising things only they could deliver.

“Robert Tomlin,” said the secretary to the intercom. “Scratch squawk never heard of him squich.” “What was this about?” asked the secretary.

“Tell him Jetboy wants to see him.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”

“Nobody ever does.”

Lowboy looked like a gnome with all the blood sucked out. He was as pale as Harry Langdon must have been, like a weed grown under a burlap bag.

“Jetboy!” He held out a hand like a bunch of grub worms. “We all thought you’d died until we saw the papers last week. You’re a real national hero, you know?”

“I don’t feel like one.”

“What can I do for you? Not that I’m not pleased to finally meet you. But you must be a busy man.”

“Well, first, I found out none of the licensing and royalty checks had been deposited in my account since I was reported Missing and Presumed Dead last summer.”

“What, really? The legal department must have put it in escrow or something until somebody came forward with a claim. I’ll get them right on it.”

“Well, I’d like the check now, before I leave,” said Jetboy. “Huh? I don’t know if they can do that. That sounds awfully abrupt.”

Jetboy stared at him.

“Okay, okay, let me call Accounting.” He yelled into the telephone.

“Oh,” said Jetboy. “A friend’s been collecting my copies. I checked the statement of ownership and circulation for the last two years. I know Jetboy Comics have been selling five hundred thousand copies an issue lately.”

Lowboy yelled into the phone some more. He put it down. “It’ll take ‘em a little while. Anything else?”

“I don’t like what’s happening to the funny book,” said Jetboy.

“What’s not to like? It’s selling a half a million copies a monthl”

“For one thing, the plane’s getting to look more and more like a bullet. And the artists have swept back the wings, for Christ’s sakesl”

“This is the Atomic Age, kid. Boys nowadays don’t like a plane that looks like a red leg of lamb with coat hangers sticking out the front.”

“Well, it’s always looked like that. And another thing: Why’s the damned plane blue in the last three issues?”

“Not mel I think red’s fine. But Mr. Blackwell sent down a memo, said no more red except for blood. He’s a big Legionnaire.”

“Tell him the plane has to look right, and be the right color. Also, the combat reports were forwarded. When Farrell was sitting at your desk, the comic was about flying and combat, and cleaning up spy rings-real stuff. And there were never more than two ten-page Jetboy stories an issue.”

“When Farrell was at this desk, the book was only selling a quarter-million copies a month,” said Lowboy.

Robert stared at him again.

“I know the war’s over, and everybody wants a new house and eye-bulging excitement,” said Jetboy. “But look what I find in the last eighteen months .”

“I never fought anyone like The Undertaker, anyplace called The Mountain of Doom. And come on! The Red Skeleton? Mr. Maggot? Professor Blooteaux? What is this with all the skulls and tentacles? I mean, evil twins named Sturm and Drang Hohenzollern? The Arthropod Ape, a gorilla with six sets of elbows? Where do you get all this stuff?”

“It’s not me, it’s the writers. They’re a crazy bunch, always taking Benzedrine and stuff. Besides, it’s what the kids want!”

“What about the flying features, and the articles on real aviation heroes? I thought my contract called for at least two features an issue on real events and people?”

“We’ll have to look at it again. But I can tell you, kids don’t want that kind of stuff anymore. They want monsters, spaceships, stuff that’ll make ‘em wet the bed. You remember? You were a kid once yourself!”

Jetboy picked up a pencil from the desk. “I was thirteen when the war started, fifteen when they bombed Pearl Harbor. I’ve been in combat for six years. Sometimes I don’t think I was ever a kid.”

Lowboy was quiet a moment.

“Tell you what you need to do,” he said. “You need to write up all the stuff you don’t like about the book and send it to us. I’ll have the legal department go over it, and we’ll try to do something, work things out. Of course, we print three issues ahead, so it’ll be Thanksgiving before the new stuff shows up. Or later.”

Jetboy sighed. “I understand.”

“I sure do want you happy, ‘cause Jetboy’s my favorite comic. No, I really mean that. The others are just a job. My god, what a job: deadlines, working with drunks and worse, riding herd over printers-you can just imagine! But I like the work on Jetboy. It’s special.”

“Well, I’m glad.”

“Sure, sure. Lowboy drummed his fingers on the desk. “Wonder what’s taking them so long?””

“Probably getting out the other set of ledgers,” said Jetboy.

“Hey, no! We’re square here!” Lowboy came to his feet. “Just kidding.”

“Oh. Say, the paper said you were, what, marooned on a desert island or something? Pretty tough?”

“Well, lonely. I got tired of catching and eating fish. Mostly it was boring, and I missed everything. I don’t mean missed, I mean missed out. I was there from April twentyninth of ‘45 until last month.”

“There were times when I thought I’d go nuts. I couldn’t believe it one morning when I looked up, and there was the U. S. S. Reluctant anchored less than a mile offshore. I fired off a flare, and they picked me up. It’s taken a month to get someplace to repair the plane, rest up, get home. I’m glad to be back.”

“I can imagine. Hey, lots of dangerous animals on the island? I mean, lions and tigers and stuff?”

Jetboy laughed. “It was less than a mile wide, and a mile and a quarter long. There were birds and ats and some lizards.”

“Lizards? Big lizards? Poisonous?”

“No. Small. I must have eaten half of them before I left. Got pretty good with a slingshot made out of an oxygen hose.”

“Huhl I bet you did!”

The door opened, and a tall guy with an ink-smudged shirt came in.

“That him?” asked Lowboy.

“I only seen him once, but it looks like him,” said the man. “Good enough for me!” said Lowboy.

“Not for me,” said the accountant. “Show me some ID and sign this release.”

Jetboy sighed and did. He looked at the amount on the check. It had far too few digits in front of the decimal. He folded it up and put it in his pocket.

“I’ll leave my address for the next check with your secretary. And I’ll send a letter with the objections this week.”

“Do that. It’s been a real pleasure meeting you. Let’s hope we have a long and prosperous business together.”

“Thanks, I guess,” said Jetboy. He and the accountant left. Lowboy sat back down in his swivel chair. He put his hands behind his head and stared at the bookcase across the room.

Then he rocketed forward, jerked up the phone, and dialed nine to get out. He called up the chief writer for Jetboy Comics.

A muzzy, hung-over voice answered on the twelfth ring. “Clean the shit out of your head, this is Lowboy. Picture this: fifty-two-page special, single-story issue. Ready? Jetboy on Dinosaur Island! Got that? I see lots of cavemen, a broad, a what-you-call-it-king rex. What? Yeah, yeah, a tyrannosaur. Maybe a buncha holdout Jap soldiers. You know. Yeah, maybe even samurai. When? Blown off course in A. D. 1100? Christ. Whatever. You know exactly what we need.”

“What’s this? Tuesday. You got till five P M. Thursday, okay? Quit bitchin’. It’s a hundred and a half fast bucksl See you then.”

He hung up. Then he called up an artist and told him what he wanted for the cover.

Ed and Fred were coming back from a delivery in the Pine Barrens.

They were driving an eight-yard dump truck. In the back until a few minutes ago had been six cubic yards of new-set concrete. Eight hours before, it had been five and a half yards of water, sand, gravel, and cement and a secret ingredient.

The secret ingredient had broken three of the Five Unbreakable Rules for carrying on a tax-free, unincorporated business in the state.

He had been taken by other businessmen to a wholesale construction equipment center, and been shown how a cement mixer works, up close and personal.

Not that Ed and Fred had anything to do with that. They’d been called an hour ago and been asked if they could drive a dump truck through the woods for a couple of grand.

It was dark out in the woods, not too many miles from the city. It didn’t look like they were within a hundred miles of a town over five-hundred population.

The headlights picked out ditches where everything from old airplanes to sulfuric-acid bottles lay in clogged heaps. Some of the dumpings were fresh. Smoke and fire played about a few. Others glowed without combustion. A pool of metal bubbled and popped as they ground by.

Then they were back into the deep pines again, jouncing from rut to rut.

“Hey!” yelled Ed. “Stop!”

Fred threw on the brakes, killing the engine. “Goddamn!” he said. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

“Back therel I swear I saw a guy pushing a neon cat’s-eye marble the size of Cleveland!”

“I’m sure as hell not going back,” said Fred.

“Nab! Come on! You don’t see stuff like that every day.”

“Shit, Ed! Someday you’re gonna get us both killedl”

It wasn’t a marble. They didn’t need their flashlights to tell it wasn’t a magnetic mine. It was a rounded canister that glowed on its own, with swirling colors on it. It hid the man pushing it.

“It looks like a rolled-up neon armadillo,” said Fred, who’d been out west.

The man behind the thing blinked at them, unable to see past their flashlights. He was tattered and dirty, with a tobaccostained beard and wild, steel-wool hair.

They stepped closer.

“It’s mine!” he said to them, stepping in front of the thing, holding his arms out across it.

Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!

“Easy, old-timer,” said Ed. “What you got?”

“My ticket to easy street. You from the Air Corps?”

“Hell, no. Let’s look at this.”

The man picked up a rock. “Stay back! I found it where I found the plane crash. The Air Corps’ll pay plenty to get this atomic bomb back!”

“That doesn’t look like any atomic bomb I’ve ever seen,” said Fred. “Look at the writing on the side. It ain’t even English.”

“Course it’s not! It must be a secret weapon. That’s why they dressed it up so weird.”

“Who?”

“I told you more’n I meant to. Get outta my way.” Fred looked at the old geezer. “You’ve piqued my interest,” he said. “Tell me more.”

“Outta my way, boyl I killed a man over a can of lye hominy once!”

Fred reached in his jacket. He came out with a pistol with a muzzle that looked like a drainpipe.

“It crashed last night,” said the old man, eyes wild. “Woke me up. Lit up the whole sky. I looked for it all day today, figured the woods would be crawlin’ with Air Corps people and state troopers, but nobody came.”

“Found it just before dark tonight. Tore all hell up, it did. Knocked the wings completely off the thing when it crashed. All these weird-dressed people all scattered around. Women too.” He lowered his head a minute, shame on his face. “Anyway, they was all dead. Must have been a jet plane, didn’t find no propellers or nothing. And this here atomic bomb was just lying there in the wreck. I figured the Air Corps would ay real good to get it back. Friend of mine found a weather balloon once and they gave him a dollar and a quarter. I figure this is about a million times as important as that!”

Fred laughed. “A buck twenty-five, huh? I’ll give you ten dollars for it.”

“I can get a million!”

Fred pulled the hammer back on the revolver. “Fifty,” said the old man.

“Twenty.”

“It ain’t fair. But I’ll take it.”

“What are you going to do with that?” asked Ed. “Take it to Dr. Tod,” said Fred. “He’ll know what to do with it. He’s the scientific type.”

“What if it is an A-bomb?”

“Well, I don’t think A-bombs have spray nozzles on them. And the old man was right. The woods would have been crawling with Air Force people if they’d lost an atomic bomb.”

“Hell, only five of them have ever been exploded. They can’t have more than a dozen, and you better believe they know where every one of them is, all the time.”

“Well, it ain’t a mine,” said Ed. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t care. If it’s worth money, Doctor Tod’ll split with us. He’s a square guy.”

“For a crook,” said Ed.

They laughed and laughed, and the thing rattled around in the back of the dump truck.

The MPs brought the red-haired man into his office and introduced them.

“Please have a seat, Doctor,” said A. E. He lit his pipe. The man seemed ill at ease, as he should have been after two days of questioning by Army Intelligence.

“They have told me what happened at White Sands, and that you won’t talk to anyone but me,” said A. E. “I understand they used sodium pentathol on you, and that it had no effect?”

“It made me drunk,” said the man, whose hair in this light seemed orange and yellow.

“But you didn’t talk?”

“I said things, but not what they wanted to hear.”

“Very unusual.”

“Blood chemistry.”

A. E. sighed. He looked out the window of the Princeton office. “Very well, then. I will listen to your story. I am not saying I will believe it, but I will listen.”

“All right,” said the man, taking a deep breath. “Here goes. “

He began to talk, slowly at first, forming his words carefully, gaining confidence as he spoke. As he began to talk faster, his accent crept back in, one A. E. could not ace, something like a Fiji Islander who had learned English from a Swede. A. E. refilled his pipe twice, then left it unlit after filling it the third time. He sat slightly forward, occasionally nodding, his gray hair an aureole in the afternoon light.

The man finished.

A. E. remembered his pipe, found a match, lit it. He put his hands behind his head. There was a small hole in his sweater near the left elbow.

“They’ll never believe any of that,” he said.

“I don’t care, as long as they do something!” said the man. “As long as I get it back.”

A. E. looked at him. “If they did believe you, the implications of all this would overshadow the reason you’re here. The fact that you are here, if you follow my meaning.”

“Well, what can we do? If my ship were still operable, I’d be looking myself. I did the next best thing-landed somewhere that would be sure to attract attention, asked to speak to you. Perhaps other scientists, research institutes…”

A. E. laughed. “Forgive me. You don’t realize how things are done here. We will need the military. We will have the military and the government whether we want them or not, so we might as well have them on the best possible terms, ours, from the first. The problem is that we have to think of something that is plausible to them, yet will still mobilize them in the search.”

“I’ll talk to the Army people about you, then make some calls to friends of mine. We have just finished a large global war, and many things had a way of escaping notice, or being lost in the shuffle. Perhaps we can work something from there.”

“The only thing is, we had better do all this from a phone booth. The MPs will be along, so I will have to talk quietly. Tell me,” he said, picking up his hat from the corner of a cluttered bookcase, “do you like ice cream?”

“Lactose and sugar solids congealed in a mixture kept just below the freezing point?” asked the man.

“I assure you,” said A. E., “it is better than it sounds, and quite refreshing.” Arm in arm, they went out the office door.

Jetboy patted the scarred side of his plane. He stood in Hangar 23. Linc came out of his office, wiping his hands on a greasy rag.

“Hey, how’d it go?” he asked.

“Great. They want the book of memoirs. Going to be their big Spring book, if I get it in on time, or so they say.”

“You still bound and determined to sell the plane?” asked the mechanic. “Sure hate to see her go.”

“Well, that part of my life’s over. I feel like if I never fly again, even as an airline passenger, it’ll be too soon.”

“What do you want me to do?”

Jetboy looked at the plane.

“Tell you what. Put on the high-altitude wing extensions and the drop tanks. It looks bigger and shinier that way. Somebody from a museum will probably buy it, is what I figure-I’m offering it to museums first. If that doesn’t work, I’ll take out ads in the papers. We’ll take the guns out later, if some private citizen buys it. Check everything to see it’s tight. Shouldn’t have shaken much on the hop from San Fr an, and they did a pretty good overhaul at Hickam Field. Whatever you think it needs.”

“Sure thing.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, unless something can’t wait.”

HISTORICAL AIRCRAFT FOR SALE: Jetboy’s twin-engine jet. 2 x 1200 lb thrust engines, speed 600 mph at 25,000 ft, range 650 miles, 1000 w/drop tanks (tanks and wing exts. inc.) length 31 ft, w/s 33 ft (49 w exts. ) Reasonable offers accepted. Must see to appreciate. On view at Hangar 23, Bonham’s Flying Service, Shantak, New Jersey.

Jetboy stood in front of the bookstore window, looking at the pyramids of new titles there. You could tell paper rationing was off. Next year, his book would be one of them. Not just a comic book, but the story of his part in the war. He hoped it would be good enough so that it wouldn’t be lost in the clutter. Seems like, in the words of someone, every goddamn barber and shoeshine boy who was drafted had written a book about how he won the war.

There were six books of war memoirs in one window, by everyone from a lieutenant colonel to a major general (maybe those PFC barbers didn’t write that many books?).

Maybe they wrote some of the two dozen war novels that covered another window of the display.

There were two books near the door, piles of them in a window by themselves, runaway best-sellers, that weren’t war novels or memoirs. One was called The Grass-Hopper Lies Heavy by someone named Abendsen (Hawthorne Abendsen, obviously a pen name). The other was a thick book called Growing Flowers by Candlelight in Hotel Rooms by someone so self-effacing she called herself “Mrs. Charles Fine Adams.” It must be a book of unreadable poems that the public, in its craziness, had taken up. There was no accounting for taste.

Jetboy put his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and walked to the nearest movie show.

Tod watched the smoke rising from the lab and waited for the phone to ring. People ran back and forth to the building a half-mile away.

There had been nothing for two weeks. Thorkeld, the scientist he’d hired to run the tests, had reported each day. The stuff didn’t work on monkeys, dogs, rats, lizards, snakes, frogs, insects, or even on fish in suspension in water. Dr. Thorkeld was beginning to think Tod’s men had paid twenty dollars for an inert gas in a fancy container.

A few moments ago there had been an explosion. Now he waited.

The phone rang.

“Tod—oh, god, this is Jones at the lab, its-” Static washed over the line. “Oh, sweet Jesus! Thorkeld’s—they’re all-” There was thumping near the phone receiver on the other end. “Oh, my…”

“Calm down,” said Tod. “Is everyone outside the lab safe?”

“Yeah, yeah. The… oooh.” The sound of vomiting came over the phone.

Tod waited.

“Sorry, Dr. Tod. The lab’s still sealed off: The fire’s—it’s a small one on the grass outside. Somebody dropped a butt.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I was outside for a smoke. Somebody in there must have messed up, dropped something. I-I don t know. Its-they’re most of them dead, I think. I hope. I don’t know. Something’s—wait, wait. There’s someone still moving in the office, I can see from here, there’s-“

There was a click of someone picking up a receiver. The volume on the line dropped.

“Tog, Tog,” said a voice, an approximation of a voice. “Who’s there?”

“Torgk—”

“Thorkeld?”

“Guh. Hep. Hep. Guh.”

There was a sound like a sack full of squids being dumped on a corrugated roof. “Hep.” Then came the sound of jelly being emptied into a cluttered desk drawer.

There was a gunshot, and the receiver bounced off the desk.

“He—he shot-it-himself,” said Jones. “I’ll be right out,” said Tod.

After the cleanup, Tod stood in his office again. It had not been pretty. The canister was still intact. Whatever the accident had been had been with a sample. The other animals were okay. It was only the people. Three were dead outright. One, Thorkeld, had killed himself. Two others he and Jones had had to kill. A seventh person was missing, but had not come out any of the doors or windows.

Tod sat down in his chair and thought a long, long time. Then he reached over and pushed the button on his desk. “Yeah, Doctor?” asked Filmore, stepping into the room with a batch of telegrams and brokerage orders under his arm. Dr. Tod opened the desk safe and began counting out bills. “Filmore. I’d like you to get down to Port Elizabeth, North Carolina, and buy me up five type B -limp balloons. Tell them I’m a car salesman. Arrange for one million cubic feet of helium to be delivered to the south Pennsy warehouse. Break out the hardware and give me a complete list of what we have-anything we need, we can get surplus. Get ahold of Captain Mack, see if he still has that cargo ship. We’ll need new passports. Get me Cholley Sacks; I’ll need a contact in Switzerland. I’ll need a pilot with a lighter-than-air license. Some diving suits and oxygen. Shot ballast, couple of tons. A bombsight. Nautical charts. And bring me a cup of coffee.”

“Fred has a lighter-than-air pilot’s license,” said Filmore. “Those two never cease to amaze me,” said Dr. Tod.

“I thought we’d pulled our last caper, boss.”

“Filmore,” he said, and looked at the man he’d been friends with for twenty years, “Filmore, some capers you have to pull, whether you want to or not.”

“Dewey was an Admiral at Manila Bay, Dewey was a candidate just the other day Dewey were her eyes when she said I do; Do we love each other? I should say we dol”

The kids in the courtyard of the apartment jumped rope. They’d started the second they got home from school.

At first it bothered Jetboy. He got up from the typewriter and went to the window. Instead of yelling, he watched. The writing wasn’t going well, anyway. What had seemed like just the facts when he’d told them to the G-2 boys during the war looked like bragging on paper, once the words were down:

Three planes, two ME-109s and a TA-152, came out of the clouds at the crippled B-24. It had suffered heavy flak damage. Two props were feathered and the top turret was missing.

One of the 109s went into a shallow dive, probably going into a snap roll to fire up at the underside of the bomber.

I ease my plane in a long turn and fired a deflection shot while about 700 yards away and closing. I saw three hits, then the 109 disintegrated.

The TA-152 had seen me and dived to intercept. As the 109 blew up, I throttled back and hit my air brakes. The 152 flashed by less than 50 yards away. I saw the surprised look on the pilot’s face. I fired one burst as he flashed by with my 20mms. Everything from his canopy back flew apart in a shower.

I pulled up. The last 109 was behind the Liberator. He was firing with his machine guns and cannon. He’d taken out the tail gunner, and the belly turret couldn’t get enough elevation. The bomber pilot was wigwagging the tail so the waist gunners could get a shot, but only the left waist gun was working.

I was more than a mile away, but had turned above and to the right. I put the nose down and fired one round with the 75mm just before the gunsight ashed across the 109.

The whole middle of the fighter disappeared—I could see France through it. The only image I have is that I was looking down on top of an open umbrella and somebody folded it suddenly. The fighter looked like Christmas-tree tinsel as it fell.

Then the few gunners left on the B-24 opened up on me, not recognizing my plane. I flashed my IFF code, but their receiver must have have been out.

There were two German parachutes far below. The pilots of the first two fighters must have gotten out. I went back to my base.

When they ran maintenance, they found one of my 75mm rounds missing, and only twelve 20mm shells. I’d shot down three enemy planes.

I later learned the B-24 had crashed in the Channel and there were no survivors.

Who needs this stuff? Jetboy thought. The war’s over. Does anybody really want to read The Jet-Propelled Boy when it’s published? Does anybody except morons even want to read Jetboy Comics anymore?

I don’t even think I’m needed. What can I do now? Fight crime? I can see strafing getaway cars full of bank robbers. That would be a real fair fight. Barnstorming? That went out with Hoover, and besides, I don’t want to fly again. This year more people will fly on airliners on vacation than have been in the air all together in the last forty-three years, mail pilots, cropdusters, and wars included.

What can I do? Break up a trust? Prosecute wartime profiteers? There’s a real dead-end job for you. Punish mean old men who are robbing the state blind running orphanages and starving and beating the kids? You don’t need me for that, you need Spanky and Alfalfa and Buckwheat.

“A tisket, a tasket, Hitler’s in a casket. Eenie-meenie-Mussolini, Six feet underground!” said the kids outside, now doing double-dutch, two ropes going opposite directions. Kids have too much energy, he thought. They hot-peppered a while, then slowed again.

“Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep,

Where old Hitler lies asleep.

German boys, they tickle his feet,

Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep!”

Jetboy turned away from the window. Maybe what I need is to go to the movies again.

Since his meeting with Belinda, he’d done nothing much but read, write, and go see movies. Before coming home, the last two movies he’d seen, in a crowded post auditorium in France in late ‘44, had been a cheesy double bill. That Nazty Nuisance, a United Artists film made in ‘43, with Bobby Watson as Hitler, and one of Jetboy’s favorite character actors, Frank Faylen, had been the better of the two. The other was a PRC hunk of junk, jive junction, starring Dickie Moore, about a bunch of hepcats jitterbugging at the malt shop.

The first thing he’d done after getting his money and finding an apartment, was to find the nearest movie theater, where he’d seen Murder, He Says about a house full of hillbilly weird people, with Fred McMurray and Marjorie Main, and an actor named Porter Hall playing identical twin-brother murderers named Bert and Mert. “Which one’s which?” asks McMurray, and Marjorie Main picked up an axe handle and hit one of them in the middle of the back, where he collapsed from the waist up in a distorted caricature of humanity, but stayed on his feet. “That there’s Mert,” says Main, throwing the axe handle on the woodpile. “He’s got a trick back.” There was radium and homicide galore, and Jetboy thought it was the funniest movie he had ever seen.

Since then he’d gone to the movies every day, sometimes going to three theaters and seeing from six to eight movies a day. He was adjusting to civilian life, like most soldiers and sailors had, by seeing films.

He had seen Lost Weekend with Ray Milland, and Frank Faylen again, this time as a male nurse in a psycho ward; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; The Thin Man Goes Home, with William Powell at his alcoholic best; Bring on the Girls; It’s in the Bag with Fred Allen; Incendiary Blonde; The Story of G.I. Joe (Jetboy had been the subject of one of Pyle’s columns back in ‘43); a horror film called Isle of the Dead with Boris Karloff; a new kind of Italian movie called Open City at an art house; and The Postman Always Rings Twice.

And there were other films, Monogram and PRC and Republic westerns and crime movies, pictures he’d seen in twenty-four-hour nabes, but had forgotten about ten minutes after leaving the theaters. By the lack of star names and the 4-F look of the leading men, they’d been the bottom halves of double bills made during the war, all clocking in at exactly fiftynine minutes running time.

Jetboy sighed. So many movies, so much of everything he’d missed during the war. He’d even missed V-E and V-J Days, stuck on that island, before he and his plane had been found by the crew of the U.S. S. Reluctant. The way the guys on the Reluctant talked, you’d have thought they missed most of the war and the movies, too.

He was looking forward to a lot of films this fall, and to seeing them when they came out, the way everybody else did, the way he’d used to do at the orphanage.

Jetboy sat back down at the typewriter. If I don’t work, I’ll never get this book done. I’ll go to the movies tonight.

He began to type up all the exciting things he’d done on July 12, 1944.

In the courtyard, women were calling kids in for supper as their fathers came home from work. A topple of kids were still jumping rope out there, their voices thin in the afternoon air:

“Hitler, Hitler looks like this,

Mussolini bows like this,

Sonja Henie skates like this,

And Betty Grable misses like this!”

The Haberdasher in the White House was having a pissass of a day.

It had started with a phone call a little after six A. M.-the Nervous Nellies over at the State Department had some new hot rumors from Turkey. The Soviets were moving all their men around on that nation’s edges.

“Well,” the Plain-speaking Man from Missouri said, “call me when they cross the goddamn border and not until.” Now this.

Independence’s First Citizen watched the door close. The last thing he saw was Einstein’s heel disappearing. It needed half-soling.

He sat back in his chair, lifted his thick glasses off his nose, rubbed vigorously. Then the President put his fingers together in a steeple, his elbows resting on his desk. He looked at the small model plow on the front of his desk (it had replaced the model of the M-1 Garand that had sat there from the day he took office until V-J Day). There were three books on the right corner of the desk-a Bible, a thumbed thesaurus, and a pictorial history of the United States. There were three buttons on his desk for calling various secretaries, but he never used them.

Now that peace has come, I’m fighting to keep ten wars from breaking out in twenty places, there’s strikes looming in every industry and that’s a damn shame, people are hollering for more cars and refrigerators, and they’re as tired as I am of war and war’s alarm.

And I have to kick the hornet’s nest again, get everybody out looking for a damn germ bomb that might go off and infect the whole U. S. and kill half the people or more.

We’d have been better off still fighting with sticks and rocks.

The sooner I get my ass back to 219 North Delaware in Independence, the better off me and this whole damn country will be.

Unless that son of a bitch Dewey wants to run for President again. Like Lincoln said, I’d rather swallow a deerantler rocking chair than let that bastard be President.

That’s the only thing that’ll keep me here when I’ve finished out Mr. Roosevelt’s term.

Sooner I get this snipe hunt under way, the faster we can put World War Number Two behind us.

He picked up the phone.

“Get me the Chiefs of Staff,” he said. “Major Truman speaking.”

“Major, this is the other Truman, your boss. Put General Ostrander on the horn, will you?”

While he was waiting he looked out past the window fan (he hated air-conditioning) into the trees. The sky was the kind of blue that quickly turns to brass in the summer.

He looked at the clock on the wall: 10:23 A.M., eastern daylight time. What a day. What a year. What a century. “General Ostrander here, sir.”

“General, we just had another bale of hay dropped on us…”

A couple of weeks later, the note came:

Deposit 20 Million Dollars account # 43Z21, Credite Suisse, Berne, by 2300Z 14 Sept or lose a major city. You know of this weapon; your people have been searching for it. I have it; I will use half of it on the first city. The price goes to 30 Million Dollars to keep me from using it a second time. You have my word it will not be used if the first payment is made and instructions will be sent on where the weapon can be recovered.

The Plain-speaking Man from Missouri picked up the phone.

“Kick everything up to the top notch,” he said. “Call the cabinet, get the joint Chiefs together. And Ostrander…”

“Yessir?”

“Better get ahold of that kid flier, what’s his name?…”

“You mean Jetboy, sir? He’s not on active duty anymore.”

“The hell he’s not. He is now!”

“Yessir.”

It was 2:24 P .M. on the Tuesday of September 15, 1946, when the thing first showed up on the radar screens.

At 2:31 it was still moving slowly toward the city at an altitude of nearly sixty thousand feet.

At 2:41 they blew the first of the air-raid sirens, which had not been used in New York City since April of 1945 in a blackout drill.

By 2:48 there was panic.

Someone in the CD office hit the wrong set of switches. The power went off everywhere except hospitals and police and fire stations. Subways stopped. Things shut down, and traffic lights quit working. Half the emergency equipment, which hadn’t been checked since the end of the war, failed to come up.

The streets were jammed with people. Cops rushed out to try to direct traffic. Some of the policemen panicked when they were issued gas masks. Telephones jammed. Fistfights broke out at intersections, people were trampled at subway exits and on the stairs of skyscrapers.

The bridges clogged up.

Conflicting orders came down. Get the people into bomb shelters. No, no, evacuate the island. Two cops on the same corner yelled conflicting orders at the crowds. Mostly people just stood around and looked.

Their attention was soon drawn to something in the southeastern sky. It was small and shiny.

Flak began to bloom ineffectually two miles below it. On and on it came.

When the guns over in Jersey began to fire, the panic really started.

It was 3 PM.

“It’s really quite simple,” said Dr. Tod. He looked down toward Manhattan, which lay before him like a treasure trove. He turned to Filmore and held up a long cylindrical device that looked like the offspring of a pipe bomb and a combination lock. “Should anything happen to me, simply insert this fuse in the holder in the explosives”-he indicated the taped-over portion with the opening in the canister covered with the Sanskrit-like lettering-“twist it to the number five hundred, then pull this lever.” He indicated the bomb-bay door latch. “It’ll fall of its own weight, and I was wrong about the bombsights. Pinpoint accuracy is not our goal.”

He looked at Filmore through the grill of his diving helmet. They all wore diving suits with hoses leading back to a central oxygen supply.

“Make sure, of course, everyone’s suited with their helmet on. Your blood would boil in this thin air. And these suits only have to hold pressure for the few seconds the bomb door’s open.”

“I don’t expect no trouble, boss.”

“Neither do I. After we bomb New York City, we go out to our rendezvous with the ship, rip the ballast, set down, and head for Europe. They’ll be only too glad to pay us the money then. They have no way of knowing well be using the whole germ weapon. Seven million or so dead should quite convince them we mean business.”

“Look at that,” said Ed, from the copilot’s seat. “Way down there. Flak(“

“What’s our altitude?” asked Dr. Tod.

“Right on fifty-eight thousand feet,” said Fred. “Target?”

Ed sighted, checked a map. “Sixteen miles straight ahead. You sure called those wind currents just right, Dr. Tod.”

They had sent him to an airfield outside Washington, D.C., to wait. That way he would be within range of most of the major East Coast cities.

He had spent part of the day reading, part asleep, and the rest of it talking over the war with some of the other pilots. Most of them, though, were too new to have fought in any but the closing days of the war.

Most of them were jet pilots, like him, who had done their training in P-59 Airacomets or P-80 Shooting Stars. A few of those in the ready room belonged to a P-51 prop-job squadron. There was a bit of tension between the blowtorch jockeys and the piston eaters.

All of them were a new breed, though. Already there was talk Truman was going to make the Army Air Force into a separate branch, just the Air Force, within the next year. Jetboy felt, at nineteen, that time had passed him by.

“They’re working on something,” said one of the pilots, “that’ll go through the sonic wall. Bell’s behind it.”

“A friend of mine out at Muroc says wait till they get the Flying Wing in operation. They’re already working on an alljet version of it. A bomber that can go thirteen thousand miles at five hundred per, carries a crew of thirteen, bunk beds for seven, can stay up for a day and a half!” said another. “Anybody know anything about this alert?” asked a very young, nervous guy with second-looie bars. “The Russians up to something?”

“I heard we were going to Greece,” said someone. “Ouzo for me, gallons of it.”

“More like Czech potato-peel vodka. We’ll be lucky if we see Christmas.”

Jetboy realized he missed ready-room banter more than he had thought.

The intercom hissed on and a klaxon began to wail. Jetboy looked at his watch. It was 2:25 B M.

He realized he missed something more than Air Corps badinage. That was flying. Now it all came back to him. When he had flown down to Washington the night before it had been just a routine hop.

Now was different. It was like wartime again. He had a vector. He had a target. He had a mission.

He also had on an experimental Navy T-2 pressure suit. It was a girdle manufacturer’s dream, all rubber and laces, pressure bottles, and a real space helmet, like out of Planet Comics, over his head. They had fitted him for it the night before, when they saw his high-altitude wings and drop tanks on the plane.

“Wed better tailor this down for you,” the flight sergeant had said.

“I’ve got a pressurized cabin,” said Jetboy.

“Well, in case they need you, and in case something goes wrong, then.”

The suit was still too tight, and it wasn’t pressurized yet. The arms were built for a gorilla, and the chest for a chimpanzee. “You’ll appreciate the extra room if that thing ever inflates in an emergency,” said the sergeant.

“You’re the boss,” said Jetboy.

They’d even painted the torso white and the legs red to match his outfit. His blue helmet and goggles showed through the clear plastic bubble.

As he climbed with the rest of the squadron, he was glad now that he had the thing. His mission was to accompany the flight of P-80s in, and to engage only if needed. He had never exactly been a team player.

The sky ahead was blue as the background curtain in Bronzino’s Venus, Cupid, FoUy and Time, with a two-fifths cloud to the north. The sun stood over his left shoulder. The squadron angled up. He wigwagged the wings. They spread out in a staggered box and cleared their guns.

Chunder chunder chunder chunder went his 20mm cannons.

Tracers arced out ahead from the six .50 cals on each P-80. They left the prop planes far behind and pointed their noses toward Manhattan.

They looked like a bunch of angry bees circling under a hawk.

The sky was filled with jets and prop fighters climbing like the wall clouds of a hurricane.

Above was a lumpy object that hung and moved slowly on toward the city. Where the eye of the hurricane would be was a torrent of flak, thicker than Jetboy had ever seen over Europe or Japan.

It was bursting far too low, only at the level of the highest fighters.

Fighter Control called them. “Clark Gable Command to all squadrons. Target at five five zero… repeat, five five zero angels. Moving ENE at two five knots. Flak unable to reach.”

“Call it off,” said the squadron leader. “Well try to fly high enough for deflection shooting. Squadron Hodiak, follow me.” Jetboy looked up into the high blue above. The object continued its slow track.

“What’s it got?” he asked Clark Gable Command. “Command to Jetboy. Some type of bomb is what we’ve been told. It has to be a lighter-than-air craft of at least five hundred thousand cubic feet to reach that altitude. Over.”

“I’m beginning a climb. If the other planes can’t reach it, call them off, too.”

There was silence on the radio, then, “Roger.”

As the P-80s glinted like silver crucifixes above him, he eased the nose up.

“Come on, baby,” he said. “Let’s do some flying.”

The Shooting Stars began to fall away, sideslipping in the thin air. Jetboy could hear only the sound of his own pressurebreathing in his ears, and the high thin whine of his engines. “Come on, girl,” he said. “You can make itl”

The thing above him had resolved itself into a bastard aircraft: made of half a dozen blimps, with a gondola below it. The gondola looked as if it had once been a PT boat shell. That was all he could see. Beyond it, the air was purple and cold. Next stop, outer space.

The last of the P-80s slid sideways on the blue stairs of the sky. A few had made desultory firing runs, some snap-rolling as fighters used to do underneath bombers in the war. They fired as they nosed up. All their tracers fell away under the balloons. One of the P-80s fought for control, dropping two miles before leveling out.

Jetboy’s plane protested, whining. It was hard to control. He eased the nose up again, had to fight it.

“Get everybody out of the way,” he said to Clark Gable Command.

“Here’s where we give you some fighting room,” he said to his plane. He blew the drop tanks. They fell away like bombs behind him. He pushed his cannon button. Chunder chunder chunder chunder they went. Then again and again.

His tracers arced toward the target, then they too fell away. He fired four more bursts until his cannon ran dry. Then he cleaned out the twin fifties in the tail, but it didn’t take long for all one hundred rounds to be spent.

He nosed over and went into a shallow dive, like a salmon sounding to throw a hook, gaining speed. A minute into the run he nosed up, putting the JB-1 into a long circling climb. “Feels better, huh?” he asked.

The engines bit into the air. The plane, relieved of the weight, lurched up and ahead.

Below him was Manhattan with its seven million people. They must be watching down there, knowing these might be the last things they ever saw. Maybe this is what living in the Atomic Age would be like, always be looking up and thinking, is this it?

Jetboy reached down with one of his boots and slammed a lever over. A 75mm cannon shell slid into the breech. He put his hand on the autoload bar, and pulled back a little more on the control wheel.

The red jet cut the air like a razor.

He was closer now, closer than the others had gotten, and still not close enough. He only had five rounds to do the job. The jet climbed, beginning to stagger in the thin air, as if it were some red animal clawing its way up a long blue tapestry that slipped a little each time the animal lurched.

He pointed the nose up. Everything seemed frozen, waiting.

A long thin line of machine-gun tracers reached out from the gondola for him like a lover.

He began to fire his cannon.

From the statement of Patrolman Francis V (“Francis the Talking Cop”) O’Hooey, Sept. 15, 1946, 6:45 P M.

We was watching from the street over at Sixth Avenue, trying to get people from shoving each other in a panic. Then they calmed down as they was watching the dogfights and stuff up above.

Some birdwatcher had this pair of binocs, so I confiscated ‘em. I watched pretty much the whole thing. Them jets wasn’t having no luck, and the antiaircraft from over in the Bowery wasn’t doing no good either. I still say the Army oughta be sued ‘cause them Air Defense guys got so panicky they forgot to set the timers on them shells and I heard that some of them came down in the Bronx and blew up a whole block of apartments.

Anyway, this red plane, that is, Jetboy’s plane, was climbing up and he fired all his bullets, I thought, without doing any damage to the balloon thing.

I was out on the street, and this fire truck pulls up with its sirens on, and the whole precinct and auxiliaries were on it, and the lieutenant was yelling for me to climb on, we’d been assigned to the west side to take care of a traffic smash-up and a riot.

So I jump on the truck, and I try to keep my eyes on what’s happening up in the skies.

The riot was pretty much over. The air-raid sirens was still wailing, but everybody was just standing around gawking at what was happening up there.

The lieutenant yells to at least get the people in the buildings. I pushed a few in some doors, then I took another gander in the field glasses.

“I’ll be damned if Jetboy hasn’t shot up some of the balloons (I hear he used his howitzer on ‘em) and the thing looks bigger-it’s dropping some. But he’s out of ammo and not as high as the thing is and he starts circlin’.”

I forgot to say, all the time this blimp thing is got so many machine guns going it looks like a Fourth of July sparkler, and Jetboy’s plane’s taking these hits all the time.

Then he just takes his plane around and comes right back and crashes right into the what-you-call-it-the gondola, that’s it, on the blimps. They just sort of merged together. He must have been going awful slow by then, like stalling, and the plane just sort of mashed into the side of the thing.

And the blimp deal looked like it was coming down a little, not a lot, just some. Then the lieutenant took the glasses away from me, and I shaded my eyes and watched as best I could.

There was this flare of light. I thought the whole thing had blown up at first, and I ducked up under a car. But when I looked up the blimps was still there.

“Look out! Get inside!” yelled the lieutenant. Everybody had another panic then, and was jumping under cars and around stuff and through windows. It looked like a regular Three Stooges for a minute or two.

A few minutes later, it rained red airplane parts all over the streets, and a bunch on the Hudson Terminal…

There was steam and fire all around. The cockpit cracked like an egg, and the wings folded up like a fan. Jetboy jerked as the capstans in the pressure suit inflated. He was curved into a circle, and must have looked like a frightened tomcat.

The gondola walls had parted like a curtain where the fighter’s wings crumpled into it. A wave of frost formed over the shattered cockpit as oxygen blew out of the gondola.

Jetboy tore his hoses loose. His bailout bottle had five minutes of air in it. He grappled with the nose of the plane, like fighting against iron bands on his arms and legs. All you were supposed to be able to do in these suits was eject and pull the D-ring on your parachute.

The plane lurched like a freight elevator with a broken cable. Jetboy grabbed a radar antenna with one gloved hand, felt it snap away from the broken nose of the plane. He grabbed another.

The city was twelve miles below him, the buildings making the island look like a faraway porcupine. The left engine of his plane, crumpled and spewing fuel, tore loose and flew under the gondola. He watched it grow smaller.

The air was purple as a plum-the skin of the blimps brut as fire in the sunlight, and the sides of the gondola bent an torn like cheap cardboard.

The whole thing shuddered like a whale.

Somebody flew by over Jetboy’s head through the hole in the metal, trailing hoses like the arms of an octopus. Debris followed through the air in the explosive decompression. The jet sagged.

Jetboy thrust his hand into the torn side of the gondola, found a strut.

He felt his parachute harness catch on the radar array. The plane twisted. He felt its weight.

He jerked his harness snap. His parachute packs were ripped away from him, tearing at his back and crotch.

His plane bent in the middle like a snake with a broken back, then dropped away, the wings coming up and touching above the shattered cockpit as if it were a dove trying to beat its pinions. Then it twisted sideways, falling to pieces.

Below it was the dot of the man who had fallen out of the gondola, spinning like a yard sprinkler toward the bright city below.

Jetboy saw the plane fall away beneath his feet. He hung in space twelve miles up by one hand.

He gripped his right wrist with his left hand, chinned himself up until he got a foot through the side, then punched his way in.

There were two people left inside. One was at the controls, the other stood in the center behind a large round thing. He was pushing a cylinder into a slot in it. There was a shattered machine-gun turret on one side of the gondola.

Jetboy reached for the service .38 strapped across his chest. It was agony reaching for it, agony trying to run toward the guy with the fuse.

Thewore diving suits. The suits were inflated. They looked like ten or twelve beach balls stuffed into suits of long underwear. They were moving as slowly as he was.

Jetboy’s hands closed in a claw over the handle of the .38. He jerked it from its holster.

It flew out of his hand, bounced of the ceiling, and went out through the hole he had come in.

The guy at the controls got off one shot at him. He dived toward the other man, the one with the fuse.

His hand clamped on the diving-suited wrist of the other just as the man pushed the cylindrical fuse into the side of the round canister. Jetboy saw that the whole device sat on a hinged doorplate.

The man had only half a face-Jetboy saw smooth metal on one side through the grid-plated diving helmet.

The man twisted the fuse with both hands.

Through the torn ceiling of the pilothouse, Jetboy saw another blimp begin to deflate. There was a falling sensation. They were dropping toward the city.

Jetboy gripped the fuse with both hands. Their helmets clanged together as the ship lurched.

The guy at the controls was putting on a parachute harness and heading toward the rent in the wall.

Another shudder threw Jetboy and the man with the fuse together. The guy reached for the door lever behind him as best he could in the bulky suit.

Jetboy grabbed his hands and pulled him back.

They slammed together, draped over the canister, their hands entangled on each other’s suits and the fuse to the bomb. The man tried again to reach the lever. Jetboy pulled him away. The canister rolled like a giant beach ball as the gondola listed.

He looked directly into the eye of the man in the diving suit. The man used his feet to push the canister back over the bomb door. His hand went for the lever again.

Jetboy gave the fuse a half-twist the other way.

The man in the diving suit reached behind him. He came up with a .45 automatic. He jerked a heavy gloved hand away from the fuse, worked the slide. Jetboy saw the muzzle swing at him.

“Die, Jetboyl Diel” said the man. He pulled the trigger four times.

Statement of Patrolman Francis V O’Hooey, Sept. 15, 1946, 6:45 PM. (continued).

So when the pieces of metal quit falling, we all ran out and looked up.

I saw the white dot below the blimp thing. I grabbed the binocs away from the lieutenant.

Sure enough, it was a parachute. I hoped it was.

Jetboy had bailed out when his plane crashed into the thing.

I don’t know much about such stuff, but I do know that you don’t open a parachute that high up or you get in serious trouble.

Then, while I was watching, the blimps and stuff all blew up, all at once. Like they was there, then there was this explosion, and there was only smoke and stuff way up in the air.

Thepeople all around started cheering. The kid had done it he’d blown the thing up before it could drop the A-bomb on Manhattan Island.

Then the lieutenant said to get in the truck, we’d try to get the kid.

We jumped in and tried to figure out where he was gonna land. Everywhere we passed, people was standing in the middle of the car wrecks and fires and stuff, looking up and cheering the parachute.

I noticed the big smudge in the air after the explosion, when we’d been driving around for ten minutes. Them other jets that had been with Jetboy was back, flying all around trough the air, and some Mustangs and Thunderjugs, too. It was like a regular air show up there. Somehow we got out near the Bridge before anybody else did. Good thing, because when we got to the water, we saw this guy pile right in about twenty feet from shore. Went down like a rock. He was wearing this diving-suit thing, and we swam out and I grabbed part of the parachute and a fireman grabbed some of the hoses and we hauled him out onto shore.

Well, it wasn’t Jetboy, it was the one we got the make on as Edward “Smooth Eddy” Shiloh, a real small-time operator.

And he was in bad shape, too. We got a wrench off the fire truck and popped his helmet, and he was purple as a turnip in there. It had taken him twenty-seven minutes to get to the ground. He’d passsed out of course with not enough air up there, and he was so frostbit I heard they had to take off one of his feet and all but the thumb on the left hand.

But he’d jumped out of the thing before it blew. We looked back up, hoping to see Jetboy’s chute or something, but there wasn’t one, just that misty big smudge up there, and all those planes zoomin’ round.

Thirty Minutes Over Broadway!

We took Shiloh to the hospital. Tbat’s my report.

Statement of Edward “Smooth Eddy” Shiloh, Sept. 16, 1946 (excerpt).

…all five shells into a couple of the gasbags. Then he crashed the plane right into us. The walls blew. Fred and Filmore were thrown out without their parachutes.

When the pressure dropped, I felt like I couldn’t move, the suit got so tight. I tried to get my parachute. I see that Dr. Tod has the fuse and is making it to the bomb thing.

I felt the airplane fall off the side of the gondola.’ Next thing I know, Jetboy’s standing right in front of the hole his plane made.

I pull out my roscoe when I see he’s packing heat. But he dropped his gat and he heads toward Tod. Stop him, stop himl” Tod’s yelling over the suit radio. I get one clean shot, but I miss, then he’s on top of Tod and the bomb, and right then I decide my job’s been over about five minutes and I’m not getting paid any overtime.”

So I head out, and all this gnashing and screaming’s coming across the radio, and they’re grappling around. Then Tod yells and pulls out his .45 and I swear he put four shots in Jetboy from closer than I am to you. Then they fall back together, and I jumped out the hole in the side.

Only I was stupid, and I pulled my ripcord too soon, and my chute don’t open right and got all twisted, and I started passing out. Just before I did, the whole thing blew up above me.

Next thing I know, I wake up here, and I got one shoe too many, know what I mean?…

…what did they say? Well, most of it was garbled. Let’s. see. Tod says “Stop him, stop him,” and I shot. Then I lammed for the hole. They were yelling. I could only hear Jetboy when their helmets slammed together, through Tod’s suit radio. They must have crashed together a lot, ‘cause I heard both of them breathing hard.

Then Tod got to the gun and shot Jetboy four times and said “Die, Jetboy! Die!” and I jumped and they must have fought a second, and I heard Jetboy say:

“I can’t die yet. I haven’t seen The Jolson Story.”

It was eight years to the day after Thomas Wolfe died, but it was his kind of day. Across the whole of America and the northern hemisphere, it was one of those days when summer gives up its hold, when the weather comes from the poles and Canada again, rather than the Gulf and the Pacific.

They eventually built a monument to jetboy-“the kid that couldn’t die yet.” A battle-scarred veteran of nineteen had stopped a madman from blowing up Manhattan. After calmer heads prevailed, they realized that. But it took a while to remember that. And to get around to going back to college, or buying that new refrigerator. It took a long time for anybody to remember what anything was like before September 15, 1946.

When people in New York City looked up and saw Jetboy blowing up the attacking aircraft, they thought their troubles were over.

They were as wrong as snakes on an eight-lane highway.

-Daniel Deck GODOT IS MY COPILOT: A Life of Jetboy Lippincott, 1963

From high up in the sky the fine mist began to curve downward.

Part of it stretched itself out in the winds, as it went through the jet stream, toward the east.

Beneath those currents, the mist re-formed and hung like verga, settling slowly to the city below, streamers forming and re-forming, breaking like scud near a storm.

Wherever it came down, it made a sound like gentle autumn rain.

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