… all five shells into a couple of the gasbags. Then he crashed the plane right into us. The walls blew. Fred and Filmore were thrown out without their parachutes.
When the pressure dropped, I felt like I couldn't move, the suit got so tight. I tried to get my parachute. I see that Dr. Tod has the fuse and is making it to the bomb thing.
I felt the airplane fall off the side of the gondola.' Next thing I know, Jetboy's standing right in front of the hole his plane made.
I pull out my roscoe when I see he's packing heat. But he dropped his gat and he heads toward Tod. Stop him, stop himl" Tod's yelling over the suit radio. I get one clean shot, but I miss, then he's on top of Tod and the bomb, and right then I decide my job's been over about five minutes and I'm not getting paid any overtime."
So I head out, and all this gnashing and screaming's coming across the radio, and they're grappling around. Then Tod yells and pulls out his. 45 and I swear he put four shots in Jetboy from closer than I am to you. Then they fall back together, and I jumped out the hole in the side.
Only I was stupid, and I pulled my ripcord too soon, and my chute don't open right and got all twisted, and I started passing out. Just before I did, the whole thing blew up above me.
Next thing I know, I wake up here, and I got one shoe too many, know what I mean?…
… what did they say? Well, most of it was garbled. Let's. see. Tod says "Stop him, stop him," and I shot. Then I lammed for the hole. They were yelling. I could only hear Jetboy when their helmets slammed together, through Tod's suit radio. They must have crashed together a lot, 'cause I heard both of them breathing hard.
Then Tod got to the gun and shot Jetboy four times and said "Die, Jetboy! Die!" and I jumped and they must have fought a second, and I heard Jetboy say:
"I can't die yet. I haven't seen The Jolson Story."
It was eight years to the day after Thomas Wolfe died, but it was his kind of day. Across the whole of America and the northern hemisphere, it was one of those days when summer gives up its hold, when the weather comes from the poles and Canada again, rather than the Gulf and the Pacific.
They eventually built a monument to jetboy-"the kid that couldn't die yet." A battle-scarred veteran of nineteen had stopped a madman from blowing up Manhattan. After calmer heads prevailed, they realized that. But it took a while to remember that. And to get around to going back to college, or buying that new refrigerator. It took a long time for anybody to remember what anything was like before September 15,
1946.
When people in New York City looked up and saw Jetboy blowing up the attacking aircraft, they thought their troubles were over.
They were as wrong as snakes on an eight-lane highway.
– Daniel Deck GODOT IS MY CO-PILOT: A Life of Jetboy Lippincott,
1963
From high up in the sky the fine mist began to curve downward.
Part of it stretched itself out in the winds, as it went through the jet stream, toward the east.
Beneath those currents, the mist re-formed and hung like verga, settling slowly to the city below, streamers forming and re-forming, breaking like scud near a storm.
Wherever it came down, it made a sound like gentle autumn rain.
by Roger Zelazny
I. The Long Walk Home
He was fourteen years old when sleep became his enemy, a dark and terrible thing he learned to fear as others feared death. It was not, however, a matter of neurosis in any of its more mysterious forms. A neurosis generally possesses irrational elements, while his fear proceeded from a specific cause and followed a course as logical as a geometrical theorem.
Not that there was no irrationality in his life. Quite the contrary. But this was a result, not the cause, of his condition. At least, this is what he told himself later.
Simply put, sleep was his bane, his nemesis. It was his hell on an installment plan.
Croyd Crenson had completed eight grades of school and didn't make it through the ninth. This was not because of any fault of his own. While not at the top of his class he was not at the bottom either. He was an average kid of average build, freckly-faced, with blue eyes and straight brown hair. He had liked to play war games with his friends until the real war ended; then they played cops and robbers more and more often. When it was war he had waited-not too patiently--for his chance to be the ace fighter pilot, Jetboy; after the war, in cops and robbers, he was usually a robber.
He'd started ninth grade, but like many others he never got through the first month: September 1946…
"What are you looking at?"
He remembered Miss Marston's question but not her expression, because he didn't turn away from the spectacle. It was not uncommon for kids in his class to glance out the window with increasing frequency once three o'clock came within believable distance. It was uncommon for them not to turn away quickly, though, when addressed, feigning a final bout of attention while awaiting the dismissal bell.
Instead, he had replied, "The blimps."
In that three other boys and two girls who also had a good line of sight were looking in the same direction, Miss Marston-her own curiosity aroused-crossed to the window. She halted there and stared.
They were quite high-five or six of them, it seemedtiny things at the end of an alleyway of cloud, moving as if linked together. And there was an airplane in the vicinity, making a rapid pass at them. Black-and-white memories of flashing newsreels, still fresh, came to mind. It actually looked as if the plane were attacking the silver minnows.
Miss Marston watched for several moments, then turned away.
"All right, class," she began. "It's only-"
Then the sirens sounded. Involuntarily, Miss Marston felt her shoulders rise and tighten.
"Air raid!" called a girl named Charlotte in the first row. "Is not," said Jimmy Walker, teeth braces flashing. "They don't have them anymore. The war's over."
"I know what they sound like," Charlotte said. "Every time there was a blackout-"
"But there's no more war," Bobby Tremson stated. "That will be enough, class," Miss Marston said. "Perhaps they're testing them."
But she looked back out the window and saw a small flash of fire in the sky before a reef of cloud blocked her view of the aerial conflict.
"Stay in your seats," she said then, as several students had risen and were moving toward the window. "I'm going to check in the office and see whether there's a drill that hadn't been announced. I'll be right back. You may talk if you do it quietly." She departed, banging the door behind her. Croyd continued to stare at the cloud screen, waiting for it to part again.
"It's Jetboy," he said to Bobby Tremson, across the aisle. "Aw, c'mon," Bobby said. "What would he be doing up there? The war's over."
"It's a jet plane. I've seen it in newsreels, and that's how it goes. And he's got the best one."
"You're just making that up," Liza called from the rear of the room.
Croyd shrugged.
"There's somebody bad up there, and he's fighting them," he said. "I saw the fire. There's shooting."
The sirens continued to wail. From the street outside came the sound of screeching brakes, followed by the brief hoot of an auto horn and the dull thud of collision.
"Accident!" Bobby called, and everyone was getting up and moving to the window.
Croyd rose then, not wanting his view blocked; and because he was near he found a good spot. He did not look at the accident, however, but continued to stare upward.
"Caved in his trunk," Joe Sarzanno said. "What?" a girl asked.
Croyd heard the distant booming sounds now. The plane was no longer in sight.
"What's the noise?" Bobby asked. "Antiaircraft fire," Croyd said. "You're nutsl"
"They're trying to shoot the things down, whatever they are."