WINTER'S CHILL

By George R.R. Martin

The day arrived at last, as he had known it would. It was a Saturday, cold and gray, with a brisk wind blowing off the Kill. Mister Coffee had a pot ready when he woke at half past ten; on weekends Tom liked to sleep in. He laced his first cup liberally with milk and sugar, and took it into his living room.

Old mail was strewn across his coffee table: a stack of bills, supermarket flyers announcing long-departed sales, a postcard mailed by his'sister when she'd gone to England the summer before, a long brown envelope that said Mr. Thomas Tudbury might already have won three million dollars, and lots of other junk that he needed to deal with real soon now. Underneath it all was the invitation.

He sipped his coffee and stared at the mail. How many months had it been sitting there? Three? Four? Too late to do anything about it now. Even an RSVP would be woefully inappropriate at this date. He remembered the way The Graduate had ended, and savored the fantasy. But he was no Dustin Hoffman.

Like a man picking at an old scab, Tom rummaged through the mail until he found that small square envelope once again. The card within was crisp and white.

Mr. & Mrs. Stanley Casko request the honor of your presence at the wedding of their daughter, Barbara, to Mr. Stephen Bruder, of Weehawken. St. Henry's Church 2:00 p.m., March 8

Reception to follow at the Top Hat Lounge

RSVP 555-6853

Tom fingered the embossed paper for a long time, then carefully set it back on the coffee table, dumped the junk mail into the wicker trash basket by the end of his couch, and went to stare out the window.

Across First Street, piles of black snow were heaped along the footpaths of the narrow little waterfront park. A freighter flying the Norwegian flag was making its way down the Kill van Kull toward the Bayonne Bridge and Port Newark, pushed along by a squat blue tugboat. Tom stood by his living-room window, one hand on the sill, the other shoved deep in his pocket, watching the kids in the park, watching the freighter's stately progress, watching the cold green water of the Kill and the wharves and hills of Staten island beyond.

A long long time ago, his family had lived in the federal housing projects down at the end of First Street, and their living-room window had looked out over the park and the Kill.

Sometimes at night when his parents were asleep, he would get up and make himself a chocolate milk and stare out the window at the lights of Staten Island, which seemed so impossibly far away and full of promise. What did he know? He was a project kid who'd never left Bayonne.

The big ships passed even in the night, and in the night you couldn't see the rust streaks on their sides or the oil they vented into the water; in the night the ships were magic, bound for high adventure and romance, for fabled cities where the streets shone dark with danger. In real live, even Jersey City was the land unknown as far as he was concerned, but in his dreams he knew the moors of Scotland, the alleys of Shanghai, the dust of Marrakesh. By the time he turned ten, Tom had learned to recognize the flags of more than thirty different nations.

But he wasn't ten anymore. He would turn forty-two this year, and he'd come all of four blocks from the projects, to a small orange-brick house on First Street. In high school he'd worked summers fixing TV sets. He was still at the same shop, though he'd risen all the way to manager, and owned almost a third of the business; these days the place was called the Broadway ElectroMart, and it dealt in VCRs and CD players and computers as well as in television sets.

You've come a long way, Tommy, he thought bitterly to himself And now Barbara Casko was going to marry Steve Bruder.

He couldn't blame her. He couldn't blame anyone but himself. And maybe Jetboy, and Dr. Tachyon . . . yeah, he could blame them a little too.

Tom turned away and let the drapes fall back across the window, feeling like shit. He walked to the kitchen, and opened a typical bachelor's refrigerator. No beer, just an inch of flat Shop Rite cola at the bottom of a two-liter bottle. He stripped the foil off a bowl of tuna salad, intending to fix himself a sandwich for breakfast, but there was green stuff growing all over the top. Suddenly he lost his appetite.

Lifting the phone from its wall cradle, he punched in seven familiar numbers. On the third ring, a child answered. "Hewo?"

"Hey, Vito," Tom said. "The old man home?"

There was the sound of another extension being lifted. "Hello?" a woman said. The child giggled. "I've got it, honey," Gina said.

"G'bye, Vito," Tom said, as the child hung up.

"Vito," Gina said, sounding both aggravated and amused. "Tom, you're crazy, you know that? Why do you want to confuse him all the time? Last time it was Guiseppe. The name is Derek."

"Pfah," Tom replied. "Derek, what kind of wop name is that? Two nice dago kids like you and Joey, and you name him after some clown in a soap opera. Dom would've had a fit. Derek DiAngelis--sounds like a walking identity crisis."

"So have one of your own and name him Vito," Gina said. It was just a joke. Gina was just kidding around, she didn't mean anything by it. But the knowledge didn't help. He still felt like he'd been kicked in the gut. "Joey there?" he asked brusquely.

"He's in San Diego," she said. "Tom, are you all right? You sound funny."

"I'm okay. Just wanted to say hello." Of course Joey was in San Diego. Joey traveled a lot these days, the lucky stiff. Junkyard Joey DiAngelis was a star driver on the demolition derby circuit, and in winter the circuit went to warmer climes. It was sort of ironic. When they were kids, even their parents had figured Tom was the one who'd go places while Joey stayed on in Bayonne and ran his old mans junkyard. And now Joey was almost a household word, while his old family junkyard belonged to Tom. Should have figured it; even in grade school, Joey was a demon on the bumper cars. "Well, tell him I called. "

"I've got the number of the motel they're at," she offered. "Thanks anyway. It's not that important. Catch you later, Gina. Take care of Vito." Tom set the phone back in its cradle. His car keys were on the kitchen counter. He zipped up a shapeless brown suede jacket, and went down to the basement garage. The door slid closed automatically behind his dark green Honda. He headed east on First Street, past the projects, and turned up Lexington. On Fifth Street, he hung a right, and left the residential neighborhoods behind.

It was a cold gray Saturday in March, with snow on the ground and winter's chill in the air. He was forty-one years old and Barbara was getting married, and Thomas Tudbury needed to crawl into his shell.

They met in junior Achievement, seniors from two different high schools.

Tommy had little interest in learning how the freeenterprise system worked, but he had a lot of interest in girls. His prep school was all boys, but JA drew from all the local high schools, and Tom had joined first as a junior.

He had a hard enough time making friends with boys, and girls terrified him. He didn't know what to say to them, and he was scared of saying something stupid, so he said nothing at all. After a few weeks, some of the girls began to tease him. Most just ignored him. The Tuesday-night meetings became something he dreaded all through his junior year.

Senior year was different. The difference was a girl named Barbara Casko.

At the very first meeting, Tom was sitting in the corner, feeling pudgy and glum, when Barbara came over and introduced herself. She was honestly friendly; Tom was astonished. The really incredible thing, even more astonishing than this girl going out of her way to be nice to him, was that she was the prettiest girl in the company, and maybe the prettiest girl in Bayonne. She had dark blond hair that fell to her shoulders and flipped up at the ends, and pale blue eyes, and the warmest smile in the world. She wore angora sweaters, nothing too tight but they showed her cute little figure to good advantage. She was pretty enough to be a cheerleader.

Tommy wasn't the only one who was impressed with Barbara Casko. In no time at all, she was president of the JA company. And when her term ran out, after Christmas, and it was time for new elections; she nominated him to succeed her as president, and she was so popular that they actually elected him.

"Ask her out," Joey DiAngelis said in October, when Tom worked up the nerve to tell him about her. Joey had dropped out of school the year before. He was training as a mechanic in a service station on Avenue E. "She likes you, shithead."

"C'mon," Tom said. "Why would she go out with me? You ought to see her, Joey, she could go out with anybody she wanted." Thomas Tudbury had never had a date in his life. "Maybe she's got shitty taste," Joey said, grinning.

But Barbara's name came up again. Joey was the only one Tom could talk to, and Barbara was all he could talk about that year. "Gimme a break, Tuds," Joey said one December night when they were drinking beer inside the old ruined Packard by the bay. "If you don't ask her out, I will."

Tommy hated that idea. "She's not your type, you dumb wop."

Joey grinned. "I thought you said she was a girl?"

"She's going to college to be a teacher."

"Ah, never mind that shit. How big are her tits?" Tom punched him in the shoulder.

By March, when he still hadn't asked her out, Joey said, "What the hell are you waiting for? She nominated you to be president of your fuckin' candyass company, didn't she? She likes you, dork."

"Just 'cause she knew I'd make a good company president doesn't mean she'd go out with me."

"Ask her, shithead."

"Maybe I will," Tom said uncomfortably. Two weeks later, on a Wednesday night after a meeting where Barbara had been especially friendly, he got as far as trying to look up her number in the phone book. But he never made the call. "There are nine different Caskos listed," he told Joey the next time he saw him. "I wasn't sure which one was her."

"Call 'em all, Tuds. Fuck, they're all related."

"I'd feel like an idiot," Tom said.

"You are an idiot," Joey told him. "So look, if that's so hard, next time you see her, ask for her phone number." Tom swallowed. "Then she'd think I wanted to ask her out. "

Joey laughed. "So? You do want to ask her out!"

"I'm just not ready yet, that's all. I don't know how." Tom was miserable.

"It's easy. You phone, and when she answers you say, `Hey, it's Tom, you want to go out with me?"'

"Then what if she says no?"

Joey shrugged. "Then we'll phone every pizza place in town and have pies delivered to her house all night long. Anchovy. No one can eat anchovy pizza."

By the time May had rolled around, Tom had figured out which Casko family Barbara belonged to. She'd made a casual comment about her neighborhood, and he'd noted it in the obsessive way he noted everything she said. He went home and tore that page from the phone book and circled her phone number with his Bic. He even began to dial it. Five or six times. But he never completed the call.

"Why the fuck not?" Joey demanded.

"It's too late," Tom said glumly. " I mean, we've known each other since September, and I haven't asked her out; if I ask her out now, she'll think I was chickenshit or something."

"You are chickenshit," Joey said.

"What's the use? We're going to different colleges. We'll probably never see each other again after June."

Joey crushed a beer can in his fist, and said two words. "Senior prom."

"What about it?"

"Ask her to your senior prom. You want to go to your senior prom, don't you?"

"I dunno," Tom said. "I mean, I can't dance. What the fuck is this? You never went to no goddamned prom!"

"Proms are shit," Joey said. "When I go out with a girl, I'd rather drive her out on Route Four-forty and see if I can get bare tittie than hold her fuckin' hand in some gym, you know? But you ain't me, Tuds. Don't shit me. You want to go to that stupid prom and we both know it, and if you walked in with the prettiest date in the place, you'd be in fuckin' heaven."

"It's May," Tom said sullenly. "Barbara's the cutest girl in Bayonne, no way she doesn't have a prom date already."

"Tuds, you go to different schools. She's probably got a date to her prom, yeah, but what are the fuckin' odds that she's got one to your prom? Girls love that prom horseshit, dressing up and wearing corsages and dancing. Go for it, Tuds. You got nothing to lose." He grinned. "Unless you count your cherry."

In the week that followed, Tom thought about nothing but that conversation. Time was running out. Junior Achievement was wrapping up, and once it was over he'd never see Barbara again, unless he did something. Joey was right; he had to try. On Tuesday night, his stomach was tied in a knot all during the long bus ride uptown, and he kept rehearsing the conversation in his head. The words wouldn't come out right, no matter how many times he rearranged them, but he was determined that he would get something out, somehow. He was terrified that she would say no to him, and even more terrified that she might say yes. But he had to try. He couldn't just let her go without letting her know how much he liked her.

His biggest worry was how in the world he could possibly get her aside, away from all the other kids. He certainly didn't want to have to ask her in front of everybody. The thought gave him goose bumps. The other girls thought he was hilarious enough as is, the presumption of him asking Barbara Casko to the prom would double them up with laughter. He just hoped she wouldn't tell them, after. He didn't think she would.

The problem was solved for him. It was the last meeting, and the advisers were interviewing the presidents of all the different companies. They gave a bond to the kid picked as president of the year. Barbara had been president of their company for the first half-year, Tom for the second; they found themselves waiting outside in a hallway, just the two of them, alone together, while the other kids were in at the meeting and the advisers were off doing interviews.

"I hope you win," Tom said as they waited.

Barbara smiled at him. She was wearing a pale blue sweater and a pleated skirt that fell to just below her knees, and around her neck was a heart-shaped locket on a slender gold chain. Her blond hair looked so soft that he wanted to touch it, but of course he didn't dare. She was standing quite close to him, and he could smell how clean and fresh it was. "You look really nice," he blurted awkwardly.

He felt like an idiot, but Barbara seemed not to notice. She looked at him with those blue, blue eyes. "Thank you," she said. "I wish they'd hurry." And then she did something that startled him-she reached out and touched him, put her hand on his arm, and said, "Tommy, can I ask you a question?"

"A question," he repeated. "Sure."

"About your senior prom," Barbara said.

He stood like a zombie for a long moment, aware of the chill in the hall, of distant laughter from the classroom, of the advisers' voices coming through the frosted-glass door, of the slight pressure of Barbara's hand, and above all, of the nearness of her, those deep blue eyes looking at him, the locket hanging down between the small round bumps of her breasts, the clean, fresh-washed smell of her. For once, she wasn't smiling. The expression on her face might almost have been nervousness. It only made her prettier. He wanted to hug her and kiss her. He was desperately afraid.

"The prom," he finally managed. Weakly. Absurdly, he was suddenly aware of a huge erection pressing against the inside of his pants. He only hoped it didn't show.

"Do you know Steve Bruder?" she asked.

Tom had known Steve Bruder since second grade. He was the class president, and played forward on the basketball team. Back in grammar school, Stevie and his friends used to humiliate Tom with their fists. Now they were sophisticated seniors, and they just used words.

Barbara didn't wait for his answer. "We've been going out together," she told him. "I thought he was going to ask me to his prom, but he hasn't."

You could go with me! Tom thought wildly, but all he said was, "He hasn't?"

"No," she said. "Do you know, I mean, has he asked somebody else? Is he going to ask me, do you think?"

"I don't know," Tom said dully. "We don't talk much."

"Oh," Barbara said. Her hand fell away, and then the door opened and they called his name.

That night Tom won a $50 savings bond as junior Achievement President of the Year. His mother never understood why he seemed so unhappy:

The junkyard was on the Hook, between the sprawl of an abandoned oil refinery and the cold green waters of New York Bay. The ten-foot-high chain-link fence was sagging, and there was rust on the sign to the right of the gate that warned trespassers to keep out. Tom climbed from his car, opened the padlock and undid the heavy chains, and pulled inside.

The shack where Joey and his father Dom had lived was far gone in decay now. The paint on the rooftop sign had faded to illegibility, but Tom could still make out the faint lettering: DI ANGELIS SCRAP METAL & AUTO PARTS. Tom had bought and closed the junkyard ten years ago, when Joey got married. Gina hadn't wanted to live in a junkyard, and besides, Tom had been tired of all the people who prowled around for hours looking for a DeSoto transmission or a bumper for a 1957 Edsel. None of them had ever stumbled on his secrets, but there had been close calls, and more than once he'd been forced to spend the night on some dingy rooftop in Jokertown because the coast wasn't clear at home.

Now, after a decade of benign neglect, the junkyard was a sprawling wasteland of rust and desolation, and no one ever bothered driving all the way out there.

Tom parked his Honda behind the shack, and strode off into the junkyard with his hands shoved into his pockets and his cap pulled down against the cold salt wind off the bay. No one had shoveled the snow here, and there had been no traffic to turn it into filthy brown slush. The hills of scrap and trash looked as though they'd been sprinkled with powdered sugar, and he walked past drifts taller than he was, frozen white waves that would come crashing down when the temperatures rose in the spring.

Deep in the interior, between two looming piles of automobiles turned all to razor-edged rust, was a bare place. Tom kicked away snow with the heel of his shoe until he had uncovered the flat metal plate. He knelt, found the ring, and pulled it up. The metal was icy cold, and he was panting before he managed to shift the lid three feet to the side to open the tunnel underneath. It would be so much easier to use teke, to shift it with his mind. Once he could have done that. Not now. Time plays funny tricks on you. Inside the shell, he had grown stronger and stronger, but on the outside his telekinesis had faded over the years. It was all psychological, Tom knew; the shell had become some kind of crutch, and his mind refused to let him teke without it, that was all. But there were days when it almost felt as though Thomas Tudbury and the Great and Powerful Turtle had become two different people.

He dropped down into darkness, into the tunnel that he and Joey had dug together, night after night, way back inwhat year had that been? '69? '70? Something like that. He found the big plastic flashlight on its hook, but the beam was pale and weak. He'd have to remember to bring some new batteries from the store the next time he came out. Alkaline next time; they lasted a lot longer.

He walked about sixty feet before the tunnel ended, and the blackness of the bunker opened up around him. It was just a big hole in the ground he'd scooped out with his teke, its crude roof covered over with a thin layer of dirt and junk to conceal what lav beneath. The air was thick and stale, and he heard rats scuttling away from the light of his flashlight beam. In the comic book, the Turtle had a secret Turtle Cave deep under the waters of New York Bay, a marvelous place with vaulted ceilings and computer banks and a live-in butler who dusted all the trophies and prepared gourmet meals. The writers at Cosh Comics had done one fuck of a lot better for him than he had ever managed to do for himself.

He walked past two of the older shells to the latest model, punched in the combination, and pulled up the hatch. Crawling inside, Tom sealed the shell behind him and found his chair. He groped for the harness, and belted himself in. The seat was wide and comfortable, with thick padded armrests and the friendly smell of leather. Control panels were mounted at the ends of both arms for easy fingertip access. His fingers played over the keys with the ease of long familiarity, turning on ventilators, heat, and lights. The interior of the shell was snug and cozy, covered with green shag carpet. He had four 23-inch color televisions mounted in the carpeted walls, surrounded by banks of smaller screens and other instrumentation.

His left index finger jabbed down and the outside cameras came to life, filling his screens with vague gray shapes, until he went to infrared. Tom pivoted slowly, checking the pictures, testing his lights, making sure everything was functional. He rummaged through his box of cassettes until he found Springsteen. A good Jersey boy, Tom thought. He slammed the cassette into the tape deck, and Bruce tore right into "Glory Days." It brought a flat, hard smile to his face.

Tom leaned forward and threw a toggle. From somewhere outside came a whirring sound. That garage door opener would have to be replaced soon from the sound of it. On the screens, he saw light.pour into the bunker from overhead. A cascade of snow and ice fell down onto the bare earth floor. He pushed up with his mind; the armored shell lifted, and began to drift toward the .light. So Barbara Casko was getting married to that asshole Steve Bruder, so what the hell did he care; the Great and Powerful Turtle was going out to kick some monster butt.

One thing Tom Tudbury had found out a long time ago was that life doesn't give you many second chances. He was lucky. He got a second chance at Barbara Casko.

It happened in 1972, a decade after he'd last seen her. The store was still called Broadway Television and Electronics then, and Tom was assistant manager. He was behind the register, his back to the counter while he straightened some shelves, when a woman's voice said, "Excuse me."

"Yeah," he said, turning, then staring.

Her dark blond hair was much longer, falling halfway down her back, and she was wearing tinted glasses in oversized plastic frames, but behind the lenses her eyes were just as blue. She wore a Fair Isle sweater and a faded pair of jeans, and if anything her figure was even better at twentyseven than it had been at seventeen. He looked at her hand, and all he saw there was a college class ring. "Barbara," he said.

She looked surprised. "Do I know you?"

Tom pointed at the McGovern button pinned to her sweater. "Once you nominated me for president," he said. " I don't," she began, with a small puzzled frown on that face, still the prettiest face that had ever smiled at Tom Tudbury in all his life.

" I used to wear a crew cut," he said. "And a doublebreasted corduroy jacket. Black." He touched his aviator frames. "These were horn rims the last time you saw me. I weighed about the same then, but I was maybe an inch shorter. And I had such a crush on you that you wouldn't believe. "

Barbara Casko smiled. For a moment he thought she was bluffing. But her eyes met his, and he knew. "How are you, Tom? It's been a long time, huh?"

A long time, he thought. Oh yeah. A different eon. "I'm great," he told her. It was at least half-true. That was at the end of the Turtle's headiest decade. Tom's life was going nowhere fast-he'd dropped out of college after JFK had been shot, and ever since he'd been living in a crummy basement apartment on 31st Street. He didn't really give a damn. Tom Tudbury and his lousy job and his lousy apartment were incidental to his real life; they were the price he paid for those nights and weekends in the shell. In high school, he'd been a pudgy introvert with a crew cut, a lot of insecurity, and a secret power that only Joey knew about. And now he was the Great and Powerful Turtle. Mystery hero, celebrity, ace of aces, and allaround hot shit.

Of course, he couldn't tell her any of that.

But somehow it didn't matter. just being the Turtle had changed Tom Tudbury, had given him more confidence. For ten years he'd been having fantasies and wet dreams about Barbara Casko, regretting his cowardice, wondering about the road not taken and the prom he'd never attended. A decade too late, Tom Tudbury finally got the words out. "You look terrific," he said with all sincerity. "I'm off at five. You free for dinner?"

"Sure," she said. Then she laughed. " I wondered how long it'd take you to ask me out. I never guessed it'd be ten years. You may just have set a new school record."

Monsters were like cops, Tom decided: never around when you really needed one.

December had been a different story. He remembered his first sight of them, remembered that long surreal trip down the Jersey Turnpike toward Philadelphia. Behind him was an armored column; ahead; the turnpike was deserted. Nothing moved but a few newspapers blowing across the empty traffic lanes. Along the sides of the road, the toxic waste dumps and petrochemical plants stood like so many ghost towns. Every so often, they'd come across some haggard refugees fleeing the Swarm, but that was it. It was like a movie, Tom thought. He didn't quite believe it.

Until they made contact.

A cold chill had gone up his spine when the android came streaking back to the column with the news that the enemy was near, and moving on Philly. "This is it," Tom said to Peregrine, who'd been riding on his shell to rest her wings. He had just long enough to find a cassette-Creedence Gold and slide it into his tape deck before the swarmlings came over the horizon like a black tide. The fliers filled the air as far as his cameras could see, a moving cloud of darkness like a vast onrushing thunderhead. He remembered the twister from The Wizard of Oz, and how much it had scared him the first time he'd seen the movie.

Beneath those dark wings the other swarmlings movedcrawling on segmented bellies, scrabbling on meter-long spider legs, oozing along like the Blob, and with Steve McQueen nowhere in sight. They covered the road from shoulder to shoulder, and spilled out over its edges, and they moved faster than he could have imagined.

Peregrine took off. The android was already plunging back toward the enemy, and Tom saw Mistral coming down from above, a flash of blue among the thin cold clouds. He swallowed, and turned the volume on his speakers all the way up; 'Bad Moon Rising' blasted out over the dark sky. He remembered thinking that life would never be the same. He almost wanted to believe it. Maybe the new world would be better than the old.

But that was December, and this was March, and life was a lot more resilient than he'd given it credit for. Like the passenger pigeons, the swarmlings had threatened to blot out the sun, and like the passenger pigeons, they were gone in what seemed like no time at all. After that first unforgettable moment, even the war of the worlds had turned into just another chore. It was more extermination than combat, like killing especially large and ugly roaches. Claws, pincers, and poisoned talons were useless against his armor; the acid secreted by the flappers did fuck up his lenses pretty badly, but that was more a nuisance than a danger. He found himself trying to think of new, imaginative ways of killing the things to relieve the boredom. He flung them high into the air, he ripped them in half, he grabbed them in invisible fists and squeezed them into guacamole. Over and over again, day after day, endlessly, until they stopped coming.

And afterward, back home, he was astonished at just how quickly the Swarm War faded from the headlines, and how easily life flowed back into the old channels. In Peru, Chad, and the mountains of Tibet, major alien infestations continued their ravages, and smaller remnants were still troubling the Turks and Nigerians, but the third-world swarms were just page-four filler in most American newspapers. Meanwhile, life continued. People made their mortgage payments and went to work; those whose homes and jobs had been wiped out dutifully filed insurance claims and applied for unemployment. People complained about the weather, told jokes, went to movies, argued about sports.

People made wedding plans.

The swarmlings hadn't been completely exterminated, of course. A few remnant monsters lurked here and there, in outof-the-way places and some not-so-out-of-the-way. Tom wanted one badly today. A small one would do-flying, crawling, he didn't care. He would have settled for some ordinary criminals, a fire, an auto accident, anything to take his mind off Barbara.

Nothing doing. It was a gray, cold, depressing, dull day, even in Jokertown. His police monitor was reporting nothing but a few domestic disturbances, and he'd made it a rule never to get involved in those. Over the years he'd discovered that even the most abused wife tended to be somewhat aghast when an armored shell the size of a Lincoln Continental crashed through her bedroom wall and told her husband to keep his hands off her.

He cruised up the length of the Bowery, floating just above rooftop level, his shell throwing a long black shadow that kept pace with him on the pavement below. Traffic passed through underneath without even slowing. All his cameras were scanning, giving him views from more angles than he could possibly need. Tom glanced restlessly from screen to screen, watching the passersby. They scarcely noticed him anymore. A quick glance up when the shell hove into their peripheral vision, a flicker of recognition, and then they went back to their own business, bored. It's just the Turtle, he imagined them saying. Yesterday's news. The glory days do pass you by.

Twenty years ago, things had been different. He'd been the first ace to go public after the long decade of hiding, and everything he did or said was celebrated. The papers were full of his exploits, and when the Turtle passed overhead, kids would shout and point, and all eyes would turn in his direction. Crowds would cheer him wildly at fires and parades and public assemblies. In Jokertown, men would doff their masks to him, and women would blow him kisses as he went by. He was Jokertown's own hero. Because he hid in an armored shell and never showed his face, a lot of jokers assumed he was one of them, and they loved him for it. It was love based on a lie, or at least a misunderstanding, and at times he felt guilty about that, but in those days the jokers had desperately needed one of their own to cheer, so he had let the rumors continue. He never did get around to telling the public that he was really an ace; at some point, he couldn't remember just when, the world had stopped caring who or what might be inside the Turtle's shell.

These days there were seventy or eighty aces in New York alone, maybe as many as a hundred, and he was just the same old Turtle. Jokertown had real joker heroes now: the Oddity,

Troll, Quasiman, the Twisted Sisters, and others, joker-aces who weren't afraid to show their faces to the world. For years, he had felt bad about accepting joker adulation on false premises, but once it was gone he found that he missed it.

Passing over Sara Roosevelt Park, Tom noticed a joker with the head of a goat squatting at the base of the red steel abstraction they'd put up as a monument to those who had died in the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976. The man stared up at the shell with apparent fascination. Maybe he wasn't wholly forgotten after all, Tom thought. He zoomed in to get a good look at his fan. That was when he noticed the thick rope of wet green mucus hanging from the corner of the goat-man's mouth, and the vacancy in those tiny black eyes. A rueful smile twisted across Tom's mouth. He turned on his microphone. "Hey, guy," he announced over his loudspeakers. "You all right down there?" The goat-man worked his mouth silently.

Tom sighed. He reached out with his mind and lifted the joker easily into the air. The goat-man didn't even struggle. Just stared off into the distance, seeing god knows what, while drool ran from his mouth. Tom held him in place under the shell, and sailed off toward South Street.

He deposited the goat-man gently between the worn stone lions that guarded the steps of the Jokertown clinic, and turned up the volume on his speakers. "Tachyon," he said into the microphone, and "TACHYON" boomed out over the street, rattling windows and startling motorists on the FDR Drive. A fierce-looking nurse popped out of the front door and scowled at him. "I've brought one for you," Tom said more softly.

"Who is he?" she asked.

"President of the Turtle Fan Club," Tom said. "How the hell do I know who is he? He needs help, though. Look at him."

The nurse gave the joker a cursory examination, then called for two orderlies who helped the man inside. "Where's Tachyon?" Tom asked.

"At lunch," the nurse said. "He's due back at one-thirty. He's probably at Hairy's."

"Never mind," Tom said. He pushed, and the shell rose straight up into the sky. The expressway, the river, and the rooftops of Jokertown dwindled below him.

Funny thing, but the higher you got, the more beautiful Manhattan looked. The magnificent stone arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, the twisting alleys of Wall Street, Lady Liberty on her island, the ships on the river and ferries on the bay, the soaring towers of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, the vast green-and-white expanse of Central Park; from on high the Turtle surveyed it all. The intricate pattern of the tragic flowing through the city streets was almost hypnotic if you stared at it long enough. Looking down from the cold winter sky, New York was gorgeous and awesome, like no other city in the world. It was only when you got down among those stone canyons that you saw the dirt, smelled the rotten garbage in a million dented cans, heard the curses and the screams, and sensed the depth of fear and misery.

He drifted high over the city, a cold wind keening around his shell. The police monitor crackled with trivialities. Tom switched to the marine band, thinking maybe he could find a small boat in distress. Once he'd saved six people off a yacht . that had capsized in a summer squall. The grateful owner had laid a huge reward on him afterward. The guy was smart too; he paid cash, small worn bills, nothing bigger than a twenty. Six damned suitcases. The heroes Tom had read about as a kid always turned down rewards, but none of them lived in a crummy apartment or drove an eight-year-old Plymouth. Tom took the money, salved his conscience by giving one suitcase to the clinic, and used the other five to buy his house. There was no way he'd ever have been able to own a house on Tom Tudbury's salary. Sometimes he worried about IRS audits, but so far that hadn't come up.

His watch said it was 1:03. Time for lunch. He opened the small refrigerator in the floor, where he'd stashed an apple, a ham sandwich, and a six-pack.

When he finished eating, it was 1:17. Less than forty-five minutes, he thought, and he remembered that old Cagney movie about George M. Cohan, and the song "Forty-Five Minutes From Broadway." A bus leaving right now from Port Authority would take forty-five minutes to get to Bayonne, but it was quicker by air. Ten minutes, fifteen at the most, and he could be back.

But for what?

He turned off the radio, pushed the Springsteen tape back in, and rewound until he found 'Glory Days' again.

The second time around, things went a lot better. After graduation she'd gone to Rutgers, Barbara told him that first night, over steak sandwiches and mugs of beer at Hendrickson's. She'd gotten a teaching certificate, spent two years in California with a boyfriend, and come back to Bayonne when they broke up. She was teaching locally now, kindergarten, and in Tom's old grammar school, ironically enough. " I love it," she said. "The kids are fantastic. Five is a magic age."

Tom had let her talk about her life for a long time, happy just to be sitting there with her, listening to her voice. He liked the way her eyes sparkled when she talked about the kids. When she finally ran down, he asked her the question that had been bugging him all these years. "Did Steve Bruder ever ask you to our prom?"

She made a face. "No, the son of a bitch. He went with Betty Moroski. I cried for a week."

"He was an idiot. Jesus, she wasn't half as pretty as you."

"No," Barbara said, with a wry twist to her mouth, "but she put out, and I didn't. Never mind that. What about you? What have you been doing for the last ten years?"

It would have been infinitely more interesting if he had told her about the Turtle, about life in the cold skies and mean streets, about the close calls and the high times and the head lines. He could have bragged about capturing the Great Ape during the big blackout of 1965, could have told her how he'd saved Dr. Tachyon's life and sanity, could have casually dropped the names of the famous and infamous, aces and jokers and celebrities of every stripe. But all that was part of another life, and it belonged to an ace who came canned in an iron shell. The only thing he had to offer her was Thomas Tudbury. As he talked about himself, he realized for the first time how bare and dreary his 'real' life truly was.

Yet somehow it seemed to be enough.

That first date led to a second, the second to a third, and soon they were seeing each other regularly. It was not the world's most exciting courtship. On weekdays they went to local movies at the DeWitt or the Lyceum; sometimes they just watched television together and took turns cooking dinner. On weekends, it was off to New York; Broadway plays when they could afford it, late dinners in Chinatown and Little Italy. The more he was with her, the more he found himself unable to be without her.

They both liked red wine, and pizza, and rock 'n' roll. She had marched on Washington the year before, to get the troops out of Vietnam, and he'd been there too (inside his shell, floating over the mall with peace symbols painted on his armor and a gorgeous blonde in a halter top and jeans sitting on top, singing along to the antiwar songs that blared from his speakers, but he couldn't tell her that part). She loved Gina and Joey, and her parents seemed to approve of him. She was a baseball fan, brought up to abominate the Yankees and love the Brooklyn Dodgers, just like him. Come October, she sat beside him in the Ebbetts Field bleachers, when Tom Seaver pitched the Dodgers to victory over the Oakland A's in the seventh and deciding game of the Series. A month later, he was there to share her anguish at McGovern's landslide defeat. They had so much in common.

Just how much he did not realize until the week after Thanksgiving, when she came to his place for dinner. He'd gone to the kitchen, to open the wine and check his spaghetti sauce, and when he came back he found her standing by his bookcase, leafing through a paperback copy of Jim Bishop's Day of the Wild Card. "You must be interested in this stuff," she said, nodding toward the books. His wild card collection took up almost three shelves. He had everything; all the biographies of Jetboy, Earl Sanderson's collected speeches and Archibald Holmes's memoirs, Tom Wolfe's Wild Card Chic, the autobiography of Cyclone as told to Robin Moore, the Information Please Almanac of Aces, and so much more. Including, of course, everything that had ever been published about the Turtle.

"Yeah," he said, "it's, uh, always interested me. Those people. I'd love to meet a wild card one day."

"You have," she said, smiling, sliding the book back on the shelf next to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

"I have?" He was confused, and a bit taken aback. Had he given himself away, somehow? Had Joey told her? "Who?"

"Me," Barbara said. He must have looked incredulous. "No, really," she said. "I know, it doesn't show. I'm not an ace or anything. It didn't do anything to me, as far as anyone can tell. But I did get it. I was only two, so I don't remember anything. My mother said I almost died. The symptoms-I must have been quite a sight. Our doctor thought it was the mumps at first, but my face just kept on swelling, until I looked like a basketball. Then he transferred me to Mt. Sinai. That's where Dr. Tachyon was working at the time."

"Yeah," Tom said.

"Anyway, I pulled through. The swelling only lasted a couple of days, but they kept me for a month, running tests. It was the wild card all right, but it might as well have been the chicken pox, for all the difference it made to me." She grinned. "Still, it was our deep, dark family secret. Dad quit his job and moved us to Bayonne, where nobody knew. People were funny about the wild card back then. I didn't even know myself until I was in college. Mom was afraid I'd tell."

"Did you?"

"No," Barbara said. She looked strangely solemn. "No one. Not until tonight, anyway."

"So why did you tell me?" Tom asked her. "Because I trust you," she said quietly.

He almost told her then, right there in his living room. He wanted to. Afterward, whenever he thought about that evening, he found himself wishing that he had, and wondering what would have happened.

But when he opened his mouth to say the words, to speak to her of teke and Turtles and junkyard secrets, it was as though the years had rolled back and he was in high school again, standing with her in that corridor, wanting so desperately to ask her to the prom and somehow unable to. He'd kept his secrets for so long. The words would not come. He tried, for a long moment he tried. Then, defeated, he had hugged her and mumbled "I'm glad you told me," before retreating to the kitchen to gather his wits. He looked at the spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove, and suddenly reached out and turned off the burner.

"Get your coat," he said when he returned to her. "The plans have changed. I'm taking you out for dinner."

"Out? Where?"

"Aces High," he said as he lifted the phone to call for the reservation. "We're going to see those wild cards tonight." They dined among aces and stars. It cost him two weeks' salary, but it was worth it, even though the maitre d' took one look at his corduroy suit and led them to a table way back by the kitchen. The food was almost as extraordinary as the light in Barbara's eyes. They were enjoying an aperitif when Dr. Tachyon came in, wearing a green velveteen tuxedo and escorting Liza Minelli. Tom went over to their table, and got both of them to autograph a cocktail napkin.

That night he and Barbara made love for the first time. Afterward, as she slept curled up against him, Tom held on tightly to her warmth, dreaming of the years to come, and wondering why the hell he had taken so long.

He was making a swing over Central Park Lake, listening to Bruce and eating a bag of Nacho Cheese-flavored Doritos, when he noticed that he was being followed by a pterodactyl.

Through a telephoto lens, Tom watched it circle above him, riding the winds on a leathery six-foot wingspan. Frowning, he killed his tape and went to his loudspeakers. "HEY!" he boomed into the winter air. "COLD ENOUGH FOR YOU? YOU'RE A REPTILE, KID, YOU'RE GOING TO FREEZE YOUR SCALY ASS OFF"

The pterodactyl replied with a high, thin shriek, made a wide turn, and came in for a landing on top of his shell, flapping energetically as it touched down to keep from going over the edge. Its claws scrabbled against his metal and found purchase in the cracks between his armor plates.

Sighing, Tom watched on one of his big screens as the pterodactyl rippled, flowed, and turned into Kid Dinosaur. "It's just as cold for you," the kid said.

"I've got heaters in here," Tom said. The kid was already turning blue, which wasn't surprising, considering that he was naked. He didn't look too steady up there either. The top of the shell was pretty broad, but it did have a pronounced pitch, and human fingers couldn't get into the cracks between the plates nearly as well as pterodactyl claws. Tom began to drift downward. "It would serve you right if I did a loop and flipped you into the lake."

"I'd just change again and fly off," Kid Dinosaur said. He shivered. "It is cold. I hadn't noticed." In his human form, New York's only brat ace was an ungainly thirteen-year-old with a small birthmark on his forehead. He was gawky and uncoordinated, with shaggy hair that fell across his eyes. The merciless gaze of the cameras showed the blackheads on his nose in excruciating detail. He had a big pimple in the cleft of his chin. And he was uncircumcised, Tom noted.

"Where the hell are your clothes?" Tom asked. "If I set you down in the park, you'll get busted for indecent exposure."

"They wouldn't dare," Kid Dinosaur said with the cocksure certainty of the adolescent. "What's going on? Are you off on a case? I could help."

"You read too many funny books," Tom told him. "I heard about the last time you helped someone."

"Aw, they sewed his hand back on, and Tacky says it's going to be just fine. How was I supposed to know that the guy was an undercover cop? I wouldn't of bit him if I'd known."

It wasn't the least bit funny, but Tom smiled. Kid Dinosaur reminded him of himself. He'd read a lot of funny books too. "Kid," he said, "you're not always running around naked turning into dinosaurs, right? You've got another life?"

"I'm not gonna tell you my secret identity," Kid Dinosaur said quickly.

"Scared I'd tell your parents?" Tom asked.

The boy's face reddened. The rest of him was bluer than ever. "I'm not scared of anything, you old fart," he said. "You ought to be," Tom said. "Like me, for starts. Yeah, I know, you can turn into a three-foot-tall tyrannosaur and break your teeth on my armor. All I can do is shatter every bone in your body in twelve or thirteen places. Or reach inside you and squeeze your heart to mush."

"You wouldn't do that."

"No," Tom admitted, "but there are people who will. You're getting in way over your head, you dumb little fuck. Hell, I don't care what kind of toy dinosaur you turn into, a bullet can still kill you."

Kid Dinosaur looked sullen. "Fuck you," he said. The emphatic way he said it made it clear that he didn't often use language like that at home.

This wasn't going well, Tom thought. "Look," he said in a conciliatory tone, "I just wanted to tell you some things I learned the hard way. You don't want to get too caught up. It's great that you're Kid Dinosaur, but you're also, uh, whoever you are. Don't forget that. What grade are you in?"

The kid groaned. "What is it with all you guys? If you're going to start in about algebra, forget it!"

"Algebra?" Tom said, puzzled. "I didn't say a thing about algebra. Your classes are important, but that's not all there is either. Make friends, damn it, go on dates, make sure you go to your senior prom. Just being able to turn into a brontosaurus the size of a Doberman isn't going to win you any prizes in life, you understand?"

They landed with a soft thump on the snow-covered grass of the sheep meadow. Nearby, a hot-pretzel vendor in earmuffs and overcoat was staring in astonishment at the armored shell and the shivering boy atop it. "Did you hear what I said?" Tom asked.

"Yeah. You sound just like my dad. You boring old farts think you know everything." His high, nervous laugh turned into a long reptilian hiss as bones and muscles shifted and flowed, and his soft skin thickened and grew scaly. Very daintily, the little triceratops deposited a proto-coprolite on top of the shell, skittered down its side, and waddled off across the meadow with its horns jutting arrogantly into the air.

That was the best year in Thomas Tudbury's life. But not for the Great and Powerful Turtle.

In the comic books, the heroes never seemed to need sleep. Things weren't so simple in real life. With a full-time nine-to-five job to keep him busy, Tom had done nearly all his Turtling on nights and weekends anyway, and now Barbara was taking up that slack. As his social life took up more of his time, his career as an ace suffered proportionately, and the iron shell was seen less and less frequently over the streets of Manhattan.

Finally, a day dawned when Thomas Tudbury realized with something of a shock that almost three and a half months had passed since he'd last gone out to the junkyard and his shells. The trigger for the realization was a small story on page twenty-four of the Times, with a headline that read 'TURTLE MISSING' FEARED DEAD. The story mentioned that dozens of calls for the Turtle had gone unanswered in the past few months (he hadn't turned on his ham radio since God knows when), and that Dr. Tachyon had been especially worried, to the extent that he'd been running classified ads in the papers and offering a small reward for the news of any Turtle sightings (Tom never read the classifieds, and these days he hardly read the papers).

He ought to get into his shell and pay a call on the clinic, he thought when he read that. But there wasn't time. He'd promised to help Barbara take her class on a field trip up to Bear Mountain, and they were due to leave in two hours.

Instead he went out to a public phone booth, and called the clinic.

"Who is this?" Tachyon demanded irritably when Tom finally got him on the line. "We're quite busy here, and I can't spare a lot of time for people who refuse to give their names."

"This is the Turtle," Tom said. "I wanted to let you know that I'm all right."

There was a moment of silence. "You don't sound like the Turtle," Tachyon said.

"The sound system in the shell is designed to disguise my voice. Of course I don't sound like the Turtle. But I am the Turtle."

"You'll have to convince me of that."

Tom sighed. "God, you're a pain. But I should have expected it. You whined at me for ten years just because your arm got broken, and it was your own goddamn fault. You didn't tell me you were going to hide under a forklift, damn it. I'm not telepathic like some people I could name."

"I didn't tell you to knock over half the warehouse either," Tachyon said. "You're just lucky I wasn't crushed to death. A man with powers like yours ought to . . ." He paused. "You are the Turtle."

"Ahem," said Tom.

"What have you been doing?"

"Being happy. Don't worry, I'll be back now and again. Not as often as before, though. I'm pretty busy. I think I'm going to get married. As soon as I work up the courage to ask her."

"Congratulations," Tachyon said. He sounded pleased. "Who is the lucky bride?"

"Ah, that would be telling. You know her, though. One of your patients from way, way back. She had a little bout with the wild card when she was two. Nothing serious. She's completely normal today. I'd invite you to the wedding, Tacky, but that would kind of give away the game, wouldn't it? Maybe we'll name one of the kids after you."

There was a long, awkward moment of silence. "Turtle," the alien finally said, in a voice somehow gone flat, "we need to talk. Can you find the time to come over to the clinic? I'll arrange my schedule to suit."

"I'm awfully busy," Tom said. "It's important," Tachyon insisted.

"Well, all right. Late at night, then. Not tonight, I'll be too tired. Tomorrow, say, after Johnny Carson."

"Agreed," said Tachyon. "I'll meet you on the roof."

By now the wedding was safely over. He could thank Kid Dinosaur for that much, at least; the little fuck distracted him through the worst part.

His shell drifted slowly up Broadway toward Times Square, but his mind was across New York Bay at the Top Hat. The last time he'd been to the Top Hat had been for the reception after Joey and Gina had gotten married. He'd been the best man. That had been a good night. He could remember it all, everything from the flocked wallpaper down to the taste of kielbasa and the sound of the band.

Barbara would be wearing her grandmother's wedding gown. She'd shown it to him once, a decade ago. Even now, he could close his eyes and see the expression on her face when she brushed her hand over all that antique lace.

Unbidden, her image filled his mind. Barbara in the gown, her blond hair behind the veil, her face uplifted. "I do." And next to her, Steve Bruder. Tall, dark, very fit. If anything, the sonofabitch was better-looking now than he had been in high school. He was a raquetball fanatic, Tom knew. With a boyish smile and a fashionable Tom Selleck mustache. He'd look wonderful in his tux. Together, they'd make a dynamite couple.

And their child would be a stunner.

He should go. So what if he hadn't replied to the invitation, they'd still let him in. Dump the shell in the junkyard, dump the shell in the fucking river for all it mattered, pick up his car, and he could be there in no time at all. Dance with the bride, and smile at her, and wish her happiness, all the happiness in the world. And shake the hand of the lucky groom. Shake Bruder's hand. Yeah.

Bruder had a great handshake. He was in real estate now, in Weehawken and Hoboken mostly; he'd bought early and been perfectly positioned when all the yuppies in Manhattan woke up one morning and discovered that New Jersey was just across the Hudson. Making a bloody fortune, going to be a millionaire by forty-five. He'd told Tom himself, that hideous night when Barbara had gotten them both to dinner. Handsome and self-assured, with that jaunty boyish grin, and going to be a millionaire too, but his life wasn't all roses, his big screen TV was giving him a little trouble and maybe Tom could take a look at it, eh? For old times' sake.

In grade school, they'd shaken hands once and Steve had squeezed so hard that Tom had gone to his knees, crying, unable to break loose. Even now, Steve Bruder's sophisticated grown-up handshake was still a lot firmer than it needed to be. He liked to see the other guy wince.

I'd like the Turtle to shake his fucking hand, Tom thought savagely. Grab the hand with his mind and give a little friendly squeeze, until the hand began to crimp and twist, until that smooth tanned skin ripped and the fingers snapped like broken red chopsticks, bones sticking through the flesh. The Turtle could pump his fucking arm up and down until it came right out of its socket, and then he could pull off the fingers one by one. She loves me she loves me not she loves me she loves me not she loves ME.

Tom's throat was dry, and he felt sick and dizzy. He opened the refrigerator and got out a beer. It tasted good. The shell was moving above the sleaze of Times Square. His eyes went restlessly from screen to screen. Peep shows and porn theaters, adult bookstores, live sex on stage, neon signs that screamed GIRLS GIRLS NAKED GIRLS and HOTTEST SHOW IN TOWN and NUDE TEENAGE MODELS, male hustlers in denim and cowboy hats, pimps in long mink coats with razors in their pockets, hard-faced hookers in fishnet stockings and slit leather skirts. He could pick up a whore, Tom thought suddenly. Literally. Yank her twenty feet off the ground, make her show him what she was selling, make her take it off right there in the center of Times Square, give the fucking tourists a real show. Or take it off for her, rip it off piece by piece and let it float to the ground. He could do that, yeah. Let Bruder have his wedding night with Barbara, the Turtle could have a wedding night of his own.

He swallowed another slug of beer.

Or maybe he should just clean out this filth. Everyone was always bitching about what a pesthole Times Square had become, but no one ever did anything about it. Fuck it, he'd do it for them. He'd show them how to clean out a bad neighborhood, if that's what they wanted. Pull down those marquees one by one, herd the fucking whores and pimps and hustlers into the river, drive a few pimpmobiles through the windows of those third-floor photographic studios with the nude teenage models, rip up the goddamned sidewalks if he'd a mind to. It was about time somebody did it. Look at this place, just look at it, and barely spitting distance from Port Authority, so it was the first thing a kid would see after getting of the bus.

Tom drained the beer. He chucked the can onto the floor, swiveled, and searched for another, but there was nothing left in his six-pack but the plastic holder. "Fuck it," he said. Suddenly he was furious. He turned on his microphone, twisted the volume all the way. "FUCK IT," he shouted, and the voice of the Turtle thundered over 42nd Street, distorted and amplified into a red roar. People stopped dead on the sidewalk, and eyes craned up at him. Tom smiled. He had their attention, it seemed. "FUCK IT ALL," he said. "FUCK EVERY ONE OF YOU."

He paused, and was about to expand on that topic, when a police dispatcher's voice, crackling over his monitor, caught his attention. She was repeating the code for an officer in trouble, repeating it over and over again.

Tom left them gaping, while he listened carefully for details. Part of him felt sorry for the poor asshole who was about to get his head handed to him.

His shell rose straight up, high above the streets and buildings, and shot south toward the Village.

"I figured you were just slow," Barbara said, when she had composed herself. "It always took you time to work up to anything. I don't understand, Tom."

He couldn't look into her eyes. He looked around her living room, his hands in his pockets. Over her desk she'd hung her diploma and teaching certificate. Around them were arrayed the photographs: pictures of Barbara grimacing as she changed the diaper on her four-month-old niece, pictures of Barbara and her three sisters, pictures of Barbara showing her class how to cut black witches and orange pumpkins out of posterboard for Halloween, supervising six dancing presidents for a school play, loading a projector to run cartoons. And reading a story. That was his favorite picture. Barbara with a tiny little black girl on her lap and another dozen kids ranged all around her, staring at her with rapt faces while she read aloud from The Wind in the Willows. Tom had taken that photograph himself.

"There's nothing to understand," he'd snapped when he looked away from the pictures. "It's over, that's all. Let's break it off clean, okay?"

"Is there someone else?" she said.

It might have been kinder to lie to her, but he was a poor liar. "No," he said.

"Then, why?"

She was baffled and hurt, but her face had never been lovelier, Tom thought. He couldn't face her. "It's just best," he said, turning to look out her window. "We don't want the same things, Barbara. You want to get married, right? Not me. Forget it, no way. You're terrific, its not you, it's . . fuck it, it just isn't working. Kids; every time I turn around there's a mob of kids. How many does your sister have, three? Four? I'm tired of pretending. I hate kids." His voice went up. "I despise kids, you understand?"

"You can't mean that, Tommy. I've seen you with the kids in my class. You took them to your house and showed them you comic collection. You helped jenny build that model of Jetboy's plane. You like kids."

Tom laughed. "Oh, fuck it, how naive can you get? I was just trying to impress you. I wanted to get into your pants. I don't-" His voice broke. "Damn it," he said. "If I like kids so fucking much, then how come I had a vasectomy? How come, huh? Tell me that?"

When he turned, her face was as red as if he had hit her.

The playground was surrounded by police cruisers, six of them, flashers strobing red and blue in the gathering dusk. Cops were crouched behind the cars with guns drawn. Beyond the high chain-link fence, two dark shapes sprawled under the basketball net, and a third was draped over one of the barrels. Someone was whimpering in pain.

Tom spotted a detective he knew, holding the collar of a skinny young joker whose face was as soft and white as tapioca pudding, shaking him so hard his jowls bounced. The boy wore Demon Prince colors, Tom saw on a close-up shot. He drifted lower. "HEADS UP," he boomed. "WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?"

They told him.

A gang dispute, that was all. Penny-ante shit. Some nat juvies operating around the fringes of Jokertown had trespassed onto Demon Prince turf. The Demon Princes had gotten together fifteen or twenty members and gone into the East Village to teach the interlopers some respect for territorial boundaries. It had gone down in the playground. Knives, chains, a few guns. Nasty.

And then it had gotten weird.

The nats had something, tapioca-face screamed.

They'd come out of it as friends. He was proud of that. It was hardest when their wounds were still raw, and for the first eleven months they avoided each other. But Bayonne was a small town in its own way, and they knew too many people in common, and it was not something that could go on forever. Maybe that was the hardest eleven months Tom Tudbury ever lived through. Maybe.

One night she called him out of the blue. He was glad. He had missed her desperately, but he knew he could never call her after what had happened between them. "I need to talk," she'd said. She sounded as though she'd had a few beers. "You were my friend, Tom. Besides everything else, you were my friend, right? I need a friend tonight, okay? Can you come over?"

He bought a six-pack and went over. Her youngest sister had been killed that afternoon in a motorcycle accident. There was nothing to be done or said, but Tom did and said all the usual useless things, and he was there for her, and he let her talk until the dawn broke, and afterward he put her to bed. He slept on the couch.

He woke in late afternoon, with Barbara standing over him, wearing a terry-cloth robe, red-eyed from crying. "Thank you," she said. She sat down at the foot of the couch and took his hand and held it for a long time in silence. "I want you in my life," she said finally, with difficulty. "I don't want us to lose each other again. Friends?"

"Friends," Tom said. He wanted to pull her down on top of him and smother her with kisses. Instead he squeezed her hand. "No matter what, Barbara. Always. Okay?"

Barbara smiled. He faked a yawn, and buried his face in a pillow, to keep her from seeing the look in his eyes.

"STAY DOWN," the Turtle warned the policemen. They didn't need to be told twice. The kid was hiding inside one of the cement barrels, and they'd seen what happened to the cop who had tried to go into the playground after him. Gone, gone as if he'd never existed, blinked out, engulfed in a sudden blackness and somehow . . . erased.

"We were cutting the fuckers," the Demon Prince said, "teaching 'em good, teaching them the price if they come bothering Jokertown, fuckin' nat wimps, we had 'em dead, and then this spic come at us with a motherfuckin' bowling ball, and we just laughed at the fucker, what's he gonna do, try to bowl us down, stupid little prick, and then he held out the ball at Waxy and it grew, man, like it was alive. Some kind of black shit came out of it, real fast, black light or a big dark hand or something I don't know, only it moved real fast, and Waxy was just gone." His voice got shrill. "He was gone, man, he just wasn't there no more. And the nat fucker did the same to Razor and the Ghoul. That was when Heehaw shot him and he almost dropped the ball, got 'im in the shoulder I think, but then he did it to Heehaw. You can't fight nothin' like that. Even that motherfuckin' cop couldn't do shit." '

The shell slid above the chain-link fence that surrounded the playground, silent and slow.

"We have something," Barbara said. "We have something special." Her finger traced patterns in the condensation on the outside of her glass. She looked up at him, her blue eyes bold and frank, as if she were challenging him. "He's asked me to marry him, Tom."

"What did you say?" Tom asked her, trying to keep his voice calm and steady.

"I said I'd think about it," Barbara said. "That's why I wanted to get together. I wanted to talk to you first."

Tom signaled for another beer. "It's your decision," he said. "I wish you'd let me meet this guy, but from everything you've told me he sounds pretty good."

"He's divorced," she said.

"So's half the world," Tom said, as his beer arrived. "Everyone but you and me," Barbara, said, smiling. "Yeah." He frowned down at the head of his beer and sighed uncomfortably. "Does the mystery beau have kids?"

"Two. His ex has custody. I've met them, though. They like me."

"Goes without saying," Tom said. "He wants to have more. With me." Tom looked her in the eye. "Do you love him?" Barbara met his gaze calmly. "I guess. Sometimes I'm not so sure these days. Maybe I'm not as romantic as I used to be." She shrugged. "Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if things had worked out differently for you and me. We could be celebrating our tenth anniversary."

"Or maybe the ninth anniversary of our acrimonious divorce," Tom said. He reached across the table and took Barbara's hand. "Things haven't turned out so badly, have they? It would never have worked the other way."

"The roads not chosen," she said wistfully. "I've had too many might-have-beens in my life, Tom, too many regrets for things left undone and choices not made. My biological clock is ticking. If I wait any longer, I'll wait forever."

"I just wish you'd known this guy longer," Tom said. "Oh, I've known him a long time," she said, tearing a corner off her cocktail napkin.

Tom was confused. "I thought you said you met him last month at a party."

"Yes. But we knew each other before. In high school." She looked at his face again. "That's why I didn't tell you his name. You would have been upset, and at first I didn't know it would lead anywhere."

Tom didn't have to be told. He and Barbara had been good friends for more than a decade. He looked into the blue depths of her eyes, and he knew. "Steve Bruder," he said numbly.

He hovered above the playground and floated the fallen warriors over the fence, one by one, to the police waiting outside. The two from the basketball court were dead meat. It would take a lot of scrubbing to wash the bloodstains from the cement. The boy draped over the barrel turned out to be a girl. She wimpered in pain when he lifted her with his teke, and from the way she was clutching herself it looked like her guts had been sliced open. He hoped they could do something for her.

All three were nats. The battleground was free of fallen jokers. Either the Demon Princes had really been kicking ass, or their own dead were somewhere else. Or both.

He touched a control on the arm of his chair, and all his floodlights came on, bathing the playground in a white-hot brilliance. "IT'S OVER," he said, and his loudspeakers roared the words into the twilight. Over the years, he'd learned that sheer volume scared the hell out of punks. "COME ON OUT, KID. THIS IS THE TURTLE."

"Go away," a hoarse thin voice screamed back at him from inside the cement barrel. "I'll disintegrate you, you joker fuckface. I got the thing here with me."

All day Tom had been looking for someone to hurt; a monster to pull apart, a killer to pound on, a target for his rage, a sponge to soak up his pain. Now the moment was finally at hand, and he found he had no more anger in him. He was tired. He wanted to go home. Behind his bravado, the boy in the barrel was obviously young and scared. "YOU'RE REAL TOUGH," Tom said. "YOU WANT TO PLAY THE SHELL GAME? GREAT" He concentrated on the barrel to the left of the boy's cover, held it in his mind, squeezed. It collapsed as suddenly as if a wrecking ball had smashed into it, shards and dust flying everywhere when the cement shattered. "NOT IN THAT ONE. GEE." He did the same thing to the barrel on the other side of the kid. "NOT IN THAT ONE EITHER. GUESS I'LL TRY THE MIDDLE ONE."

The boy exited in such haste that he whacked his head on the overhang of the barrel as he stood up. The impact dazed him momentarily. The bowling ball he'd been clutching with both hands was suddenly whisked from his grip. It shot straight up. The boy screamed obscenities through shiny steelcapped teeth. He made a desperate leap for his weapon, but all he managed to do was brush the tips of his fingers against its underside. Then he came down hard, scraping his hands and knees along the concrete.

By then the cops were already moving in. Tom watched as they surrounded him, yanked him to his feet, and read him his rights. He was nineteen, maybe younger, wearing gang colors and a studded dog collar, shaggy black hair teased out in spikes. They asked him where all the people were, and he snarled curses at them and screamed that he didn't know.

As they hustled him toward the waiting cruisers, Tom opened an armored portal and floated the bowling ball inside his shell for a closer look, shivering in the blast of cold air that came with it. It was a weird thing. Too light to be a bowling ball, he thought when he hefted it; four pounds, maybe five. No holes either. When he ran his hand over it, his fingers tingled, and colors glimmered briefly on its surface, like the rainbows on an oil slick. It made him uneasy. Maybe Tachyon would know what to make of it. He set it aside.

Darkness was falling over the city. Tom pushed his shell higher and higher, until he floated up above even the distant tower of the Empire State Building. He stayed there for a long time, watching the lights go on all across the city, transforming Manhattan into an electric fairyland.

From this high up, on a clear cold night like this, he could even see the lights of Jersey over across the frigid black water. One of those dots was the Top Hat Lounge, he knew.

He shouldn't just float here, he thought. He ought to take the bowling ball to the clinic; that was the next order of business. He didn't move. He'd do it tomorrow, he thought. Tachyon wasn't going anywhere, and neither was the bowling ball. Somehow Tom could not bring himself to face Tachyon tonight. Not tonight of all nights.

In those days, his shell was a lot more primitive. No telephoto lenses, no zooms, no infrared cameras. Just a ring of hot spotlights, so bright that they left Tachyon squinting. But he needed them. It was dark on the roof on the clinic, where the shell had come to rest.

The photographs that Tachyon held up were not the sort that Tom wanted to see in more detail anyway. He sat in darkness, staring into his screens, saying nothing, as Tachyon shuffled through them one by one. They had all been taken in the clinic's maternity ward. One or two of the children had lived long enough to be moved to the nursery.

Finally he found his voice. "Their mothers are jokers," he said, his voice emphatic with false conviction. "Bar--She's normal, I tell you. A nat. She got it when she was two, damn it; it's like it never happened."

"It happened," Tachyon said. "She may appear normal, but the virus is still there. Latent. Most likely, it will never manifest, and genetically it's axecessive, but when you and she have-"

"I know a lot of people think I'm a joker," Tom interrupted, "but I'm not, believe me, I'm an ace. I'm an ace, damn it! So what if the kid carries the wild card gene, so he'll have major-league teke. He'll be an ace, like me."

"No," Tachyon said. He slid the photographs back into the file folder, his eyes averted from the cameras. Deliberately? "I'm sorry, my friend. The odds against that are astronomical." "Cyclone," Tom had said, on the edge of hysteria. Cyclone was a West-Coast ace whose daughter had inherited his command of the winds.

"No," said Tachyon. "Mistral -is a special case. We're almost certain now that her father somehow subconsciously manipulated her germ plasm while she was still in the womb. On Takis . . . well, the process is not unknown to us, but it rarely succeeds. You're the most powerful telekineticist I've ever seen, but something like that demands a fine control that is orders of magnitude beyond you, not to mention centuries of experience in microsurgery and gene splicing. And even if you had all of that, you'd probably fail. Cyclone had no idea what he was doing on any conscious level, and was freakishly lucky on top of it." The Takisian shook his head. "Your case is entirely different. All that's guaranteed is that you'll be drawing a wild card, and the odds are just the same as if-"

"I know the odds," Tom said hoarsely. Of every hundred humans dealt the wild card, only one developed ace powers. There were ten hideously malformed jokers for every ace, and ten black-queen deaths for every joker.

In his mind's eyes, he saw Barbara sitting up in bed, the sheet tangled about her waist, her blond hair cascading softly around her shoulders, her face solemn and sweet as their child suckled at her breast. And then the infant looked up, and he saw its teeth and bulging eyes and monstrous, twisted features; and when it hissed at him, Barbara cried out in pain as the milk and blood flowed freely from her raw, torn nipple. "I'm sorry," Dr. Tachyon repeated numbly.

It was past midnight before Tom returned to his empty house on First Street.

He shrugged out of his jacket, sat down on the couch, and stared out the window at the Kill and the lights of Staten Island. A freezing rain had begun. The droplets pinged against his windows with a sharp, crystalline sound, like forks tinging off empty wineglasses when the wedding guests want the newlyweds to kiss. Tom sat in the dark for a long time.

Finally, he turned on a lamp and picked up the telephone. He punched six numbers, and couldn't bring himself to hit the seventh. Like a high-school kid terrified of asking a pretty girl for a date, he thought, smiling grimly. He pressed the button down firmly, and listened to the ring.

"Top Hat," a gruff voice said.

"I'd like to speak to Barbara Casko," Tom said.

"You mean the new Missus Bruder," the voice replied. Tom took a long breath. "Yes," he said.

"Hey, the newlyweds left hours ago. Off for their wedding night." The man was obviously drunk. "Going to Paris for the honeymoon."

"Yeah," Tom said. "Is her father still there?"

"I'll look and see."

There was a long silence before the phone was picked up again. "This is Stanley Casko. Who am I speaking to?"

"Tom Tudbury. I'm sorry I couldn't attend, Mr. Casko. I was, uh, occupied."

"Yes, Tom. Are you all right?"

"Fine. Couldn't be better. I just wanted . . ."

"Yes?"

He swallowed. "Just tell her to be happy, okay? That's all. Just tell her I want her to be happy." He set the phone back in its cradle.

Outside in the night, a big freighter was going down the Kill. It was too dark to see what flag it flew. Tom turned out the lights and watched it pass him by.