The survivors stand glowing in the middle of their bloc. A few start crying, and that is a sound I cannot spell. It makes Crybaby start up. He sits down in cement, sobbing through his fingers. His tears are the color of an oil rainbow on wet asphalt.
We keep on sucking up the fever glow, grounding it all in the earth.
The Boys cry louder, out of pain. They start tearing at each other, running in spirals, and a few leap into the lava that streams from the pyramids.
The glow shrieks out of control, out of our hands, gathering between the Boys with its last strength—ready to pounce.
It leaps upward, a hot snake screaming into the clouds.
Then the Boys drop dead and never move again.
A hole in the ceiling of smoke. The dark-blue sky peeks through, turning pale as the smoke thins. The Boys’ last scream dies out in the dawn.
The sun looks bruised, but there it is. Hiya up there!
“Let’s get to it,” goes Slash. “Lots of cleanup ahead.” He has been crying. I guess he loved HiLo like a Brother. I wish I could say something.
We help one another up. Slap shoulders and watch the sun come out gold and orange and blazing white. I don’t have to tell you it looks good, teams.
“400 Boys” copyright 1983 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Omni Magazine, November 1983.
THE RANDOM MAN
Milt Random had put a few beers under his belt, sitting alone in his dark little apartment, when he noticed that the grains of his wooden coffee table were subtly rearranging themselves. Blinking through his alcoholic haze, Milt cleared away the magazines and ashtrays that littered the table, and peered closely at the scarred surface:
RANDOM
His name. Written in the wood grain, right there on the coffee table. Too many beers.
But… more words were forming themselves around the first:
U R LIVING N A RANDOM UNIVERZ
Milt belched. The coffee table shifted: N E THING CAN HAPPEN
“Uh-oh,” Milt said. There was no one to hear him but the table.
WUTS WRONG
Milt stood quickly, went into the kitchen for a sponge, and came back to scrub at the elusive words. As he touched the table with the sponge, there was a sudden rearrangement of wood grain. Everything was normal again. Milt sighed, set aside the sponge, and reached for his half-full Coors.
It was no longer a Coors. It was a Don’t be afraid.
Milt dropped the can and stared. The patterns on the plaster wall were going wild:
U R THE CHOZEN RANDOM
Shift: CHOZE AT RANDOM
Shift: MILT RANDOM
Milt was doing his best to ignore the writing, hoping that it would just go away. He stared at his hand, thinking that surely his own body was inviolable.
Wrong. His freckles were migrating into an undeniable message:
WUTS WRONG MILT
“My freckles are talking to me.”
They shifted back into scattered obscurity. The air at his ear began to buzz, forming words—a clear speaking voice with perhaps a touch of a Swedish accent:
“Don’t be scared, Milt,” it said. “Yust relax.”
“I’m trying,” Milt gasped.
“Dere’s really nothing you can do.”
“Why are you talking to me?”
“No particular reason, it’s yust happening. Given a random universe, it’s perfectly plausible, though the florts are against it.”
“The whats?”
“I meant ‘odds.’ It’s hard to get all the words right when everything is just a fluke.”
The voice buzzed away. Glowing letters bobbed in the air before his eyes, sparkling:
4 INSTANZ IF ALL THE AIR IN THE ROOM MOVED SIMULULTANEOUSELY INTO 1 CORNER YOU WUD SUFOCATE ITS POSSIBLE
“You’ve got some spelling problems,” Milt said.
SO DO 5000000 MONKEES
“You mean all this is happening coincidentally?”
RITE UP 2 THEEZE LETTERS
AND THOZE
THOSE 2
“I get the idea.”
“Anything can happen,” whispered the fallen magazines, pages flapping. “So let’s make a deal.”
“A deal?”
“We represent chaos, right? Well, we need a human agent.”
“Me?”
“Who else?”
Milt’s clothes suddenly curled and reshaped themselves around his body. He was garbed in an outlandish superhero costume—knee high boots, velvet-lined cape, rakish hood.
U LOOK GOOD IN BLACK, said the shag carpet.
“Yeah,” said Milt, liking the idea immediately. “I can see it in print!”
The ceiling, reading his mind, spelled in bold letters:
MILT RANDOM: AGENT OF CHAOZ
“But you’d better do something about your spelling,” Milt said.
WUT DO U SAY
“Sure,” said Milt. “Why not? If I’ve been chosen at random, why not?” He paused. “Say, does that mean I can do anything?”
SURE. The chrome letters on the Westinghouse this time.
“Fly?”
Milt felt a rippling in his shoulders. Huge wings unfolded from his back. He spread them across the living room.
“Wow. And big muscles?”
Milt felt himself growing larger, swelling… suddenly there was an odd twisting amid his molecular components. A scattering.
THE ODDZ WERE AGAINST IT, the silverware opined.
Milt was gone, spreading in a fine dust of randomly scattered particles. The cloud eddied about a bit, flowed over couch and coffee table, drifted at last onto the floor. Its last random drifting said:
OOPZ
“The Random Man” copyright 1984 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July 1984.
SEA OF TRANQUILLITY
It was the year 1969. In the van, Jeff was broasting alive, and his tongue had turned to pumice, but he hardly felt the July heat. The freeway shimmered as if it were aflame, and where the illusion was strongest the boy imagined he could see through cement to the surface of Earth’s moon. Somewhere high above Burbank’s smoggy gray sky, the lunar excursion module crouched like a spider on stilts. Down here, lanes merged and diverged, cars sped from near to far away in seconds, and two ladies in black changed a tire on a black T-Bird by the side of the road. Up there, astronauts waited to walk.
When they parked at a supermarket, Jeff begged his dad to leave the key in the ignition. He leaped to turn up the radio, but the engine cover seared his legs. “Yow!”
“Careful, Jeff,” said his mother, wearing dark glasses without depth or surface. “I’ll get it.”
His brother Eddie said, “Hey, Mom, lookit—”
“Sh!” Jeff said.
He listened to the static, hoping to catch the voices of astronauts or Houston Control.
“Drink Royal Crown Cola—”
“Don’t shush me,” said Eddie, flicking Jeff’s earlobe.
Jeff spun around, ready to punch his brother.
“Boys, I’ll turn it off.”
“He started it!” Jeff said.
“I’m in no mood for this.” She snapped it off. “Here’s your father.”
“See?” said Jeff, glaring.
“I see a monkey,” said Eddie.
Their dad got in, and they drove on into Burbank.
Jeff’s aunt and uncle lived in a tiny Spanish-style house with white stucco walls, a roof of overlapping pink tiles, and a yard guarded by a picket fence. As they parked. Uncle Lou came out on the porch with a can of Coors. He was a tall redhead, as broad as the doorway and crimson from sunburn.
Jeff was the first one out of the van. “Uncle Lou, have you seen it? They’re on the moon!”