Instant silence.
Highly gratified and showing it, Mike launched into whatever speech he settled on, but most unusually oddly. His mouth moved convincingly, his gestures seemed apt and well chosen, but no sound came out. This lasted for what would have been one and a half sentences, during which his face went through an amazing series of changes on the general theme of absolute dismay. Then he bent over, brought his lips as close to my ear as he could without exciting comment, and whispered tonelessly, “You tell them. I can’t talk. Lost my voice.” I was careful not to laugh.
So I got up on the table, waited for Michael to get down and some whispering to fade, and then with great solemnity said, “Laszlo Scott has finally gone and done it.”
I told them about the invasion, playing Laszlo up and the lobsters down. They knew Laszlo, after all, and were ready to believe anything villainous of him, even to consorting with blue lobsters that they wouldn’t’ve believed in otherwise. I dwelt at length on the horrible consequences of turning everybody on to the Reality Pill.
“Remember what happened last Saturday? Butterflies and chaos and confusion and the National Guard and what have you? Remember that? And that was just a handful of people high, less than a dozen. I mean, all it took was one cat from Texas to make all those butterflies!
“Now, what if Everyone was like that? The whole city of New York, ten million people, all of ’em high on Reality Pills at the same time. And it only took one cat to make all those butterflies. Think about that.”
A few of them whistled approvingly at the notion, but then it sank in. They didn’t like the idea any more than I did. It’s nice to have friends who think the way you do.
Then I told them what the lobsters were planning to do, heavily stressing Laszlo’s willing treason against the human race. I don’t think I ever quite mentioned that the lobsters looked like lobsters. “Nonhumanoid blue aliens,” is the closest I recall coming to a description of them. Laszlo or not, this particular audience might think that giant blue talking lobsters were a bit too much to be believed.
I was speaking quite rapidly, but very clearly and with great intensity, and I had the crowd in the palm of my hand all the way. Indeed, I was doing much better than I had any right to expect. Even Andrew Blake looked about to be convinced.
So I swung into a glowing peroration, saying — almost chanting — “And no one in the whole world knows what’s happening but us! Nobody’s hip enough to believe it but us! By the time anybody else can figure out what’s happening, it’ll be too late for everyone.
“We’re all alone with this thing, babies, and here is where it’s at: We-Have-Got-To-Save-The-World-Ourselves! Us! Save the world from Laszlo Scott! Save…”
That’s as far as I got. They were cheering and yelling and shouting things, and it didn’t seem worth my while to go on. I’d been talking for under ten minutes.
I bent down and said, “Hey, Michael, voice back yet?”
“Just about.” Actually, not quite. He could be heard, but his voice sounded tattered and shopworn.
“I didn’t mean to get them all so excited,” I said. “I just wanted to get enough volunteers to fill the bus. Now what’ll we do?”
“Pick,” his voice was really pitiful, “and choose. Tell the rest to alert the authorities.”
“Groovy. That’ll keep ’em hopping.”
And that’s the way we did it. When the noise died out, I recruited the mixed bag of warriors Mike and I had tried to phone a few hours back, sixteen heads including ourselves, and sent the rest, some forty-five or fifty, jabbering hippies, out to warn the unsuspecting world.
And then it was five forty-five, ninety minutes till sunset and darkness.
’It’s time, gentlemen, it’s time,” said Michael, beginning to regain some vocal strength. “Let’s get moving.” And off we went.
“Hey, Andy,” Joe stopped me at the cash register. “Jeez, that was really Some Show you put on there, Andy. Honest to God.”
“You liked it?”
“Like it? You was Great, Andy. Great. I ain’t never heard nothin’ like that in my whole life. Jesus Christ! You know what? You almost got Me believin’ all that stuff. Honest to God!”
“Well, gee, Joe. I’m — well, I’m just Glad you liked it.”
“Like it? Tell you what: you had a cuppa coffee, right? An’ it’s onna house. It’s on me. That’s how much I like it, see?”
And so I went off to the war feeling just a bit foolishly good about things.
20
IT WASN’T until we’d pushed our way through a ring of gawking teenyboppers and boarded the much-admired Tripsmobile that I stopped feeling foolishly good and started worrying properly once more. I realized, while Mike was warming up the motors and getting them in sync, while our unshielded air cushion side-blast was scattering tourists left and right like brightly colored shrieking leaves, while all this noise and busyness was happening… I realized that we’d now done everything we’d planned, back at the house, and that no one, least of all us, knew what to do next.
We were going to the Croton Reservoir. Sure. And there we were going to prevent Ktch and Laszlo and their buddies from pouring six hundred gallons of that fiendish reality drug into the city’s drinking water. Sure.
It was all so simple until you wondered how. I was wondering how. Also with what. And worrying like a pro.
To begin with, we had our little army: sixteen standard Greenwich Village heads and hipsters of various kinds — except that there were two empty seats, so we had fourteen, not sixteen. We hadn’t even started yet, but already we’d lost two men — which worried me — and I couldn’t remember which two — which worried me more. And of the fourteen fighters we had left, one was Little Micky, who wasn’t even on the list. That meant we’d lost three men, and I was thoroughly confused.
What an army. Besides Michael, Sean, Sativa, and myself, we had the rest of the band: lovable Stewart Fiske, a hundred pounds of muscle and ten pounds of hair on a six-foot-three-inch skeleton he must have bought at Sears and put together in his spare time by himself, whose purple buckskin jacket was almost buried under buttons saying “End the War in Israel” et al, a less than awesome warrior whose gentleness was so complete we’d had to amplify his drums;
And playful Patrick Gerstein, an authentic human puppy wholly dedicated to romping — through pastures of cannabis, through female populations, through psychedelic fun houses and rock-n-roll music rants — sturdy enough that he might be able to fight if he could want to, but impossible to imagine wanting to, a constant laugher without even a temper to lose — some warrior;
And Kevin Anderson, no kin of mine, who had the best furnished mind and longest, kinkiest hair in Greenwich Village, plus a well-designed and carefully developed body, but whom I’d seen paralyzed with terror before a pugnacious twelve-year-old punk from New Jersey less than a week ago.
(While I was taking this worried inventory, the tourists and teenyboppers outside the Tripsmobile started jeering and making sarcastic cracks about windbags, beatniks, and what have you, adding embarrassment to my worry, and a cop started walking toward us with clearly less-than-friendly intent. There were six motors, you see, and if they weren’t properly synchronized, the bus would be, to say the least, unstable. And this, naturally, was the time Mike had to have trouble getting them in sync. All of this hassle just to save the world.)
I wasn’t much of a fighter, either, and Michael — though I supposed he could if he had to — was basically more the undercover type. Any cover. Sativa, on the other hand, might actually be dangerous in a fight, if only because her gleaming nails were an inch and a half long.