400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  Shrill whistle. Wheels whirring.

  A body sails into the Boy and flattens him out with a footful of razors and ballbearings. Purple-blond topknot and a big grin. The Galrog skips high and stomps his hatchet hand into cement, leaving stiff fingers curling around mashed greenish blood and bones.

  Shell laughs at Jade and takes off.

  I run over and yank him to his feet. Two Boys back away into a dark alley that lights up as they go in. We start after, but they have already been fixed by Quazis and Drummers lying in wait.

  Jade and I turn away.

  HiLo still stares down the street. One Boy has stood tall, stronger than the rest and more resistant to our power. He raps a massive club in his hand.

  “Come on, slicker” HiLo calls. “You remember me, don’t you?"

  The biggest of the Boys comes down, eating up the streets. We concentrate on draining him, but he shrinks more slowly than the others.

  His club slams the ground. Boom! Me and some Galrogs land on our asses. The club creases a hive, and cement sprays over us, glass sings through the air.

  HiLo does not move. He waits with red-and-black lightning bolts serene, both hands empty.

  The big slicker swings again, but now his head only reaches to the fifth floor of an Rx. HiLo ducks as the club streaks over and turns a storefront window into dust.

  The Soooooot’s scalpel glints into his hand. He throws himself at the Boy’s ankle and grabs on tight.

  He slashes twice. The Boy screams like a cat. Neatest hamstringing you ever saw.

  The screaming Boy staggers and kicks out hard enough to flip HiLo across the street into the metal cage of a shop window. HiLo lands in a heap of impossible angles and does not move again. Slash cries out. His gun shouts louder. One blood-silver shot. It leaves a shining line in the smoky air.

  The Boy falls over and scratches the cement till his huge fingertips bleed. His mouth gapes wide as a manhole, his eyes stare like the broken windows all around. His pupils are slit like a poison snake’s, his face long and dark, hook-nosed.

  God or boy, he is dead. Like some of us.

  Five Drummers climb over the corpse for the next round, but with their slickie dead the Boys are not up to it. The volcanoes belch as though they too are giving up.

  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 Fictio
n 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!”

  As he ran through the gate, he heard barking. Too late, he remembered Mab.

  The black Labrador retriever bounded around the side of the house. He yelled as she knocked him down, then stood over him drooling, her paws on his shoulders.

  Lou laughed as he pulled the dog away. “You'll never be an astronaut if you can’t get past Mab.”

  “There's no dogs in space,” Jeff said, getting to his knees. “A dog went up with Sputnik, but she burned up on reentry.”

  Mab strained at her collar, trying to pounce on Jeff's dad as he came through the gate. “How's the space shot?”

  Lou took his hand. “Bad reception, Billyboy. Come on in.”

  Jeff was the first inside. The TV gave the living room a blue glow. On the screen was a model of the LEM in its gold foil wrapper.

  “Oh, boy!” Jeff said. “Color.”

  “Hello, boys,” said Aunt Maddy.

  Her dark hair was up in a bun, and her lipstick shone a weird shade of purple as it caught light from the TV. Jeff tasted cherry wax when she kissed him. “Gosh, it's good to see you two.”

  “It's only been a week,” he said.

  “Do you want something to drink? Juice or soda pop?”

  “RC,” Eddie said.

  They followed her into the kitchen, where she filled glasses with ice and cola.

  “Do they have soda pop on the moon?” Eddie asked.

  “Not yet,” said Jeff. “They eat Kool-Pops and stuff like toothpaste. Hey, Aunt Maddy, I got some Sputnik bubble gum.”

  “You know all about space, don't you?” she said. “I bet you’ll be the smartest astronaut they ever see.”

  “He’s no astronaut,” Eddie said.

  “I will be. I'll be the first man on Mars.”

  “I'll bet.”

  “Okay, boys,” said their mother, entering the kitchen. “You know you shouldn’t be drinking that stuff.”

  Jeff slipped past her into the living room and dropped onto the sofa. RC stung and hissed in his mouth. His dad had set up a camera tripod in front of the TV and was taking his Nikon from the case while Walter Cronkite described the leg of the lunar excursion module.

  The screen showed static.

  “Hope this clears up,” said his dad.

  Cronkite said that they were looking at the lunar surface now. Crestfallen, Jeff peered at the fuzzy image. There was no stunning landscape of sharp horizons and vast craters, no Earth floating moonlike in star-prickled space.

  “It has to get better,” he said.

  “You wish,” said Uncle Lou, crossing to the front door and going out.

  “Jeff,” said his dad, “could I get you to hold the camera?”

  As he stood, his innards lurched from carbonation.

  The screen door squealed, and Mab bounded inside. She leapt onto Jeff, bathing him in slobber while he called for help.

  “Hey, watch the camera!”

  Lou came back in, pulled Mab away, and thrust her outside.

  Eddie, giggling, said, “I don't want to watch the stupid old moon. Isn’t there a game on?”

  “Why don’t you look?” said Uncle Lou.

  “Lou,” said Maddy, “this is the moon.”

  The screen was a flurry of black and white; color TV made no difference. Walter Cronkite’s voice gave way to the faraway hiss of the astronauts. Neil Armstrong said—

  “If you want a better car, go see Cal!”

  Eddie had changed the channel by remote control.

  “Hey!” Jeff shouted.

  “Leave it on the moon,” said their dad. “This is history.”

  “Yeah,” said Jeff.

  “Well, they're not doing anything yet,” said Jeff’s mother. “It won’t hurt for a minute.”

  Eddie wandered from the TV, oblivious to the condition he had created.

  “Go see Cal, go see Cal, go see Cal!”

  Jeff's dad reached for the knob.

  Lou said, “Wait a minute, Bill. Let's see what this is.”

  “It's a commercial.” Disbelief was plain in his voice. He shook his head and turned back to the moon.

  Jeff saw Maddy lay a hand on Lou's arm and look into his face.

  “Get me another beer,” he said.

  “Get it yourself,” she said.

  “I'm close,” Jeff’s mother said, and ducked into the kitchen.

  The picture wavered like a tapestry of lunar snow and glare, but Jeff was determined to figure it out. He thought he could see ghosts moving in the snow. Then the image settled, and he saw reruns of the Apollo 11 liftoff: a black-and-white torch blasting ramparts aside, flaring high, and dwindling into blue sky. Animated illustrations showed the rocket’s stages parting in flight; the relative distance of the moon; the ship’s orbital path and the loop of its planned return, a dashed infinity sign.

  “What sort of pictures do you think you'll get, Bill?” Lou said.

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Can’t imagine they’ll come out.”

  “Uncle Lou,” Eddie said, “can we see your Vee-nam pictures? You always say you’ll show us your chopper.”

  “Not now.”

  “Why not?” said Maddy. “I’ll get them.”

  He caught her arm, repeating, “Not now. Not with all this.” He gestured with his fresh beer. “It’s bad enough as it is.”

  She drew away from him and went into the kitchen. Jeff watched her open the fridge and stare inside, her face pale. Reaching for a beer, she glanced over, saw him watching her, and smiled.

  “Tuna sandwich, Jeff?” she called.

  “Please.”

  She brought in a foil triangle and sat next to him on the sofa while he unwrapped it.

  “When I go to Mars I'll get you to make my lunches,” he said, chewing.

  “It’s a deal.”

  “And when I get there I’ll send a message to you.”

  “Really? What will you say?”

  “I don’t know. ‘We did it.’”

  She laughed. He offe
red her half of his sandwich.

  “Your Uncle Lou doesn’t think we should waste energy sending people into space.”

  “Christ,” said Lou.

  “He says we should take care of our problems on Earth before we take off for the moon.”

  “I guess,” said Jeff, saddened. He looked at his uncle, who was watching TV with a surly smile.

  “I don't think he believes in stars anymore.”

  “That's like not believing in Walter Cronkite,” Jeff said.

  The camera clicked.

  Maddy laughed. “Oh, Bill, you're a riot. Taking pictures of pictures.”

  “They’ll be valuable someday. Jeff and Eddie will be able to look at them and remember this.”

  “If they remember to look,” said Lou. He got up and walked into the back of the house.

  “What’s with him?” asked Jeff's dad, her brother.

  “I don’t know, Bill.”

  “How've you been, Maddy?” asked his mother, sitting beside Jeff. With adults on either side, he felt overwhelmed. He slipped from the sofa and stood by his father, still focusing on the television.

  “Hey,” said his dad. “I think this is it. Turn up the sound, Jeff.”

  He hurried to the TV. An astronaut spoke:

  “It’s kind of soft. You can kick it around with your foot.”

  Suddenly the picture changed into a screaming blur. Jeff leapt back, swept by chills. What had they found up there?

  “My God!” Maddy said, running for the hall. “The hair dryer!”

  “I’m not touching it!” Lou yelled from the bedroom.

  The picture calmed. Something moved into the lunar view. Jeff twisted the focus knob and played with the tint. The moon turned red, then yellow, and the haze got worse. The sound began buzzing and throbbing.

  “Let me,” said Jeff's dad. He worked the knobs, and the picture returned . . but they were too late.

  “—for mankind.”

  Jeff yelled, “We did it!”

  “Damn,” said his dad. “Get out of the way, Jeff.” He stepped back and accidentally hit the tripod. His dad swore and swatted at him, then took picture after picture. Amazingly, the clarity remained. Neil Armstrong was on the moon. Jeff could almost see what it looked like.

  Maddy came out of the hall, weeping. Behind her, the bedroom door slammed shut.