The radio warmed finally and I learned about the virus. People who felt sick were to report to emergency tent hospitals set up by the National Guard all over the city. There was one in Washington Square Park, near where I was living. I didn't feel sick, but on the other hand I could juggle the icebox, which was not exactly normal behavior. I walked to Washington Square Park. There were casualties everywhere some were just lying in the street. I couldn't look at a lot of it. It was worse than anything I'd seen in the war. I knew that as long as I was healthy and mobile the doctors would put me low on the list for treatment, and it would be days before I'd get any help, so I walked up to someone in charge, told him I used to be in the Army, and asked what I could do to help. I figured if I started to die I'd at least be near the hospital.
The doctors asked me to help set up a kitchen. People were screaming and dying and changing before the doctors' eyes, and the medics couldn't do anything about it. Feeding the casualties was all they could think to do.
I went to a National Guard deuce-and-a-half and started picking up crates of food. Each weighed about fifty pounds, and I stacked six of them on top of each other and carried them off the truck in one arm. My perception of the light kept changing in odd ways. I emptied the truck in about two minutes. Another truck had gotten bogged down in mud when it tried to cross the park, so I picked up the whole truck and carried it to where it was supposed to be, and then I unloaded it and asked the doctors if they needed me for anything else.
I had this strange glow around me. People told me that when I did one of my stunts I glowed, that a bright golden aura surrounded my body. My looking at the world through my own radiance made the light appear to change.
I didn't think much about it. The scene around me was overwhelming, and it went on for days. People were drawing the black queen or the joker, turning into monsters, dying, transforming. Martial law had slammed down on the city-it was just like wartime. After the first riots on the bridges there were no disturbances. The city had lived with blackouts and curfews and patrols for four years, and the people just slipped back into wartime patterns. The rumors were insane-a Martian attack, accidental release of poison gas, bacteria released by Nazis or by Stalin. To top it all off, several thousand people swore they saw Jetboy's ghost flying, without his plane, over the streets of Manhattan. I went on working at the hospital, moving heavy loads. That's where I met Tachyon.
He came by to deliver some experimental serum he was hoping might be able to relieve some symptoms, and at first I thought, Oh, Christ, here's some fruitbar got past the guards with a potion his Aunt Nelly gave him. He was a weedy guy with long metallic red hair past his shoulders, and I knew it couldn't be a natural color. He dressed as if he got his clothes from a Salvation Army in the theater district, wearing a bright orange jacket like a bandleader might wear, a red Harvard sweater, a Robin Hood hat with a feather, plus-fours with argyle socks, and two-tone shoes that would have looked out of place on a pimp. He was moving from bed to bed with a tray full of hypos, observing each patient and sticking the needles in people's arms. I put down the X-ray machine I was carrying and ran to stop him before he could do any harm.
And then I noticed that the people following him included a three-star general, the National Guard bird colonel who ran the hospital, and Mr. Archibald Holmes, who was one of F.D.R.'s old crowd at Agriculture, and who I recognized right away. He'd been in charge of a big relief agency in Europe following the war, but Truman had sent him to New York as soon as the plague hit. I sidled up behind one of the nurses and asked her what was going on.
"That's a new kind of treatment," she said. "That Dr. Tacks-something brought it."
"It's his treatment?" I asked.
"Yeah." She looked at him with a frown. "He's from another planet."
I looked at the plus-fours and Robin Hood hat. "No kidding," I said.
"No. Really. He is."
Closer up, you could see the dark circles under his weird purple eyes, the strain that showed on his face. He'd been pushing himself hard since the catastrophe, like all the doctors here-like everyone except me. I felt full of energy in spite of only getting a few hours' sleep each night.
The bird colonel from the National Guard looked at me. "Here's another case," he said. "This is Jack Braun." Tachyon looked up at me. "Your symptoms?" he asked. He had a deep voice, a vaguely mid-European accent. "I'm strong. I can pick up trucks. I glow gold when I do it."
He seemed excited. "A biological force field. Interesting. I'd like to examine you later. After the"-an expression of distaste crossed his face-"present crisis is over."
"Sure, Doc. Whatever you like."
He moved on to the next bed. Mr. Holmes, the relief man, didn't follow. He just stayed and watched me, fiddling with his cigarette holder.
I stuck my thumbs in my belt and tried to look useful. "Can I help you with something, Mr. Holmes?" I asked. He seemed mildly surprise. "You know my name?" he said.
"I remember you coming to Fayette, North Dakota, back in '33," I said. "Just after the New Deal came in. You were at Agriculture then."
"A long time ago. What are you doing in New York, Mr. Braun?"
"I was an actor till the theaters shut down."
"Ah." He nodded. "We'll have the theaters running again soon. Dr. Tachyon tells us the virus isn't contagious."
"That'll ease some minds."
He glanced at the entrance to the tent. "Let's go outside and have a smoke."
"Suits me." After I followed him out I dusted off my hands and accepted a custom-blended cigarette from his silver case. He lit our cigarettes and looked at me over the match.
"After the emergency's over, I'd like to run some more tests with you," he said. "Just see what it is that you can do." I shrugged. "Sure, Mr. Holmes," I said. "Any particular reason?"
"Maybe I can give you a job," he said. "On the world stage. "
Something passed between me and the sun. I looked up, and a cold finger touched my neck.
The ghost of Jetboy was flying black against the sky, his white pilot's scarf fluttering in the wind.
I'd grown up in North Dakota. I was born in 1924, into hard times. There was trouble with the banks, trouble with the farm surpluses that were keeping prices down. When the Depression hit, things went from bad to worse. Grain prices were so low that some farmers literally had to pay people to haul the stuff away. Farm auctions were held almost every week at the courthouse-farms worth fifty thousand dollars were selling for a few hundred. Half Main Street was boarded up:
Those were the days of the Farm Holidays, the farmers withholding grain to make the prices rise. I'd get up in the middle of the night to bring coffee and food to my father and cousins, who were patrolling the roads to make sure nobody sold grain behind their backs. If someone came by with grain, they'd seize the truck and dump it; if a cattle truck came by, they'd shoot the cattle and toss them on the roadside to rot. Some of the local bigwigs who were making a fortune buying underpriced wheat sent the American Legion to break the farm strike, carrying axe handles and wearing their little hats-and the whole district rose, gave the legionnaires the beating of their lives, and sent them scampering back to the city.
Suddenly a bunch of conservative German farmers were talking and acting like radicals. F. D. R. was the first Democrat my family ever voted for.
I was eleven years old when I first saw Archibald Holmes. He was working as a troubleshooter for Mr. Henry Wallace in the Department of Agriculture, and he came to Fayette to consult with the farmers about something or other-price control or production control, probably, or conservation, the New Deal agenda that kept our farm off the auction block. He gave a little speech on the courthouse steps on his arrival, and for some reason I didn't forget it.