He’d reached the torture machines. Michael was beginning to enter the room.
“Torture machines,” I explained. “Leave them alone.” I had plans for those gadgets. If they could just be stolen, I could make narcotics obsolete in Greenwich Village.
“Hmm. They’re turned on.” Michael had arrived. “How do you turn ’em off?”
I said, “God knows. Just leave ’em be, will you? I want to save them if I can. How about untying me?”
“Torture machines, you say?” Michael eyed them with a hungry look I didn’t like at all.
“Come on, Michael, turn me loose.”
“Maybe this red button here…”
“No! Cool it! Don’t touch any…”
ZAP!
“…thing.”
Sparks — green, blue, scarlet, quite electrifying — flew from machine to machine, a depressingly gaudy display. The room suddenly stank of ozone. Sharp popping noises and loud bubbling hisses issued from the depths of the machines. Wisps of plaintive blue smoke rose into the air.
“No,” Mike said, backing off, “I guess not.”
I had nothing to say.
It was Sean who finally untied me. Mike was too engrossed in watching the machines destroy themselves to move.
I’ll admit it was quite a show. As the rainbow sparks continued to fly and the smoke grew thicker, the machines began to glow dully, then to sag, and then to melt. Liquid metal gathered in small pools under the machines, and then ran slowly across the room, setting the ancient wooden floor afire.
My boots and briefcase were up against the rear wall, beside an open barrel half full of those well-known little blue pills. Impulsively, I filled the briefcase with pills. “Evidence,” I explained to myself. Then I grabbed my boots and cut for the door.
Sean was there before me, looking just about as puzzled as usual, but Mike was still involved with the machines. “C’mon,” I yelled. “Let’s split, man.”
The smoke was getting thicker, the ozone was stinging my nose and eyes, and the fires were beginning to crackle a lot. I didn’t really want to stick around much longer. “Kurland!” I yelled again, but still Mike didn’t move. Dropping my boots, I ran over and shook him. Hard.
“Oh,” dazedly. “Sorry ’bout that.”
He came peacefully.
Halfway down the stairs I remembered my boots, Too late. The fire was already roaring, and the fourth floor didn’t seem to be a healthy place to visit anymore. Those boots’d always been too tight anyhow.
When we reached the street, Mike said, “Torture machines?” He was still pretty dazed.
“When I tell you about it, you’ll cry,” I promised. “Sean, why don’t you hail us a cab?”
Once he’d caught a whiff of us, the cabby didn’t want our business, but it was too late. We were already aboard and in motion. He turned his air conditioner up as high as it’d go and drove on, muttering Brooklynoid curses.
“Hey, you stink,” I told Mike. He was coming out of his trance.
“That’s cool. So do you. What happened?”
“When I tell you,” I repeated, “you will weep.” Then I told him.
I was still telling him when we pulled up in front of the pad. I gave the cabby a five without interrupting my report and didn’t linger for the change. All the way up the stairs I talked and into the living room. Still talking, I tore off my stained and fragrant clothes and ran for the shower.
“Yeee!” Sativa screamed.
“Sorry.” I jumped in. She yelped and jumped out. “My need is greater than thine,” I explained. Then I went on with the report.
Mike took a shower next, and then Sean, so I remained in the bathroom, talking a blue and lobster-ridden streak.
When, mod-ishly garbed in paisley towels, we returned to the living room, I was still talking.
“Hmph!” Sativa snorted. “Men!” She stomped off to finish her bath. We sat down and I continued to talk. It was a long story.
I wound it up over my second plate of poached eggs and kelp. “And that’s it. They’re on their way to the reservoir now. What are we going to do?”
“Is it okay if I just, you know, go back to Fort Worth?”
Mike sniffed. Then, “We’ve got to stop them. Obviously.”
“Groovy,” I observed. “With what army?”
Sean said, “I’m gonna call the cops. Right now!”
“Cool it,” Mike cooled him. “They’ll never believe us. And all the evidence is going up in smoke, too. We just have to do it ourselves, that’s all.”
I repeated my question.
“Easy,” he said. “There are how many — twelve of them, right?”
“Plus Laszlo.”
“Twelve and a half then. So we’ll get all our friends to help.” He sounded perfectly rational — but our friends? “We’ll outnumber them, for one thing. And we shouldn’t have any trouble anyway, not if these lobster critters are as nonviolent as you claim they are.”
“Oh, they’re nonviolent, all right. But I don’t know, Michaeclass="underline" our friends?”
“Who else?”
“You mean Andrew Blake? Gary the Frog? Our friends? Are you sure?”
“Well, some of our friends. I’ll start calling them now.”
18
HAVE YOU ever tried to talk a bunch of hippies into helping you save the world? Forget it. Next time I save the world, by Starky, I’m gonna do it solo. Easier that way, less work.
To begin with, it was a little after three on a warm summer’s Wednesday afternoon, which meant that almost everyone was hanging out in Washington Square and almost no one was home to answer vidiphone calls. When you’re trying to collect an army in a hurry, it slows you down something fierce if Andrew Blake’s the only person you can reach by vidiphone.
“I don’t believe it,” Andrew told us several times. “You’ve all been taking chemicals. You’re on a trip. It’s pretty, but I don’t believe a word of it.”
That’s the sort of thing that discourages people who’d otherwise be more than glad to save the whole world daily, twice on Sundays.
I tried to explain. I knew better, but I tried. “We’re not on anything, Andy. We’re not even high. This is really Happening, cross my heart. It’s real. It’s just like your halo, only worse.”
“Halo?” His voice changed from bassoon to oboe. “What halo?”
So I gave up. When Andrew doesn’t believe in something, he’s thorough. I did persuade him to meet us at The Garden of Eden at five, though, which would’ve been an accomplishment if it weren’t that he was planning to be there at five anyhow.
So we hit the street, the four of us. Sativa was now a member of the Army of Deliverance. While we were phoning, she’d had her daily mystical experience and decided it was her karma to save the world single-handed, but she was willing to let us come along and watch. Sativa always appreciates an audience.
Except for a half million strangers, St. Mark’s Place was empty. We’d expected that. But we wasted half an hour in Tompkins Square discovering that it was empty too, which we hadn’t expected. Tompkins Square was home turf for the Psychedelic Conspiracy that year, full of almost everyone we knew.
“Dere aw oba dere inna Village,” the Good Humor Man growled. “Dere aw oba dere watchin’a balLett, y’unnastan? All dem dencers.”
So Sativa, little Sean, and I trotted west on St. Mark’s Place, moving much too quickly for the temperature and trying not to notice, and Mike cut out for the garage, two blocks away in the other direction, to pick up The Tripouts’ bus.
That was our most treasured possession, that bus. It was an old Army surplus ground-effect troop carrier, made in 1969 or so and obsolete before delivery, that we’d converted into a mobile rock-n-roll dream pad. It could seat sixteen and sleep dozens, depending on how friendly they were, and was equipped with hot and cool running everything. The roof was a sun deck, planted with grass and dandelions. The back third was a fully stocked practice studio, complete with battery-powered duplicates of our regular instruments that couldn’t play as loudly as the real things but were otherwise quite satisfactory. We’d toured the Midwest in it last summer, getting citations for maintaining a nuisance (the blowers weren’t too well shielded, and produced authentic hurricane effects uninterruptedly as long as the motors were on), disturbing the peace (the battery-powered instruments weren’t all that quiet), and general suspicion (the bus was painted in the highest psychedelic style, even to glowing in the dark) in every town we passed through. It was a great old bus. Well, it’d do to get our army to the reservoir, at least.