On rounds, Kraft himself hears the precocious lecher come on to Suzi Banks, the Colostomy Girl. Asks to see the lump under her dress. And virtually in the same breath, the mini-mogul hits up on Joleene Weeks, whose response to acute lymphatic havoc has been to drift into a kind of self-induced autism. “You’re cute,” he tells her. “When did you first do it?”
“Do what?” the girl manages, her first, faltering verbal steps independent of the Chatty Cathy in more than a week.
“Coy one, are we? I like that in a woman. ‘Still waters run deep,’ and like that.”
Still waters? Kraft’s pretty sure that catch phrase died out with democracy in America. Where the hell does this kid come from? Kraft tries asking, with a kind of verbal head-pat, in their first conversational exchange. So, uh, you’re not from around these parts, are you? Nico snaps at him. “Right down the street. Read the chart, Dr. Killdeer.”
Time-scrambled sass, and weirder than it is rude. Who taught this little Spanky to speak? The diction instructor is revealed after a few days when the little old guy produces, from out of nowhere, several gross of comics—a major-league library of them. Complete, contiguous series span the whole illustrated spectrum from classic demigods down to diluted, contemporary, adolescent chelonians. The collection incorporates everything from old Arthropodmen and Vigilante Patrols to Tender Traumas, Tales from Beyond Terrors, strips starring inflatable bubble-figures, Masterplots Illustrateds (including four-color, frame formats of The Ambassadors and The Magic Mountain), the adventures of Amie and pal Jimjam (at a ridiculously recently integrated Brookvale High), Green Stingers, Dark Cowls, cartoon anthro rats, cats, and wombats—all the perennials, and some titles so obscure they barely lasted through single numbers, not to mention a European department complete with a Gallic imperial pocket of resistance, two Fleming kids constantly getting one another into big-time trouble, and a cowlicked cosmopolitan news reporter somewhere between fifteen and a hundred fifty years old.
Nico unpacks not only this Rabelaisian bibliothèque, but also a thick, loosely bound Blue Book of his own devising that accompanies the collection. In it, he has carefully cross-listed, in the block letter capitals of a spastic on a muscle stimulant, every single issue number, its publisher, date, and point of acquisition, a synopsis of the adventure, and, of course, the volume’s fair resale price. The pricing scheme has only one foot, size 2½, in the realm of supply and demand. For instance, an old Cosmic Sentinel scarce enough to command the bulk of an upper-middle-class ten-year-old’s annual allowance even back when Kraft was doing his own international assets trading costs roughly the same as a buck-a-bushel dentist’s office throwaway.
His market yardstick has nothing to do with peddlable rarity. It’s something altogether different—use value, readability, the catalyzing spark, or some other subjective look under the hood. Whatever his pricing formula, Nicolino imposes mercantile order upon the naïve economic anarchy of the pede department. Every item in his comic inventory is available for open circulation, but only after the book value has been coughed up.
He establishes a cashless barter system. “Gotta watch it or those Fed creeps’ll be on our cases.” Other kids’ comics, from parental care packages once shared out freely, are kicked into the kitty according to a rigorous system of swapped debits and credits. He’ll take any currency: broken hand-held LCD games, Mars bars (unwrapped are half value), singing rings—anything with resale potential. Nico introduces new commodity wrinkles from day to day, producing, by spontaneous generation, bulk shipments of cinnamon-soaked toothpicks, iridescent kaleidoscope disks, or silly sand. Rooms of the demoralized listless soon start to hum with the biggest trading racket since Green Stamps.
He is utterly scrupulous; he will not skim or scalp. If a Fantastic Forces returns to his pool in roughly initial condition, it will earn back its original price or the equivalent in, say, multicolored water-pistol pens. Yet he’s dead firm on the rates of exchange. He’s not going to trade a good Saviors of the Universe for anything less than two middle-weight ghost yarns plus a knock-off heartthrobber. In this manner his catalog steadily grows. But somehow, so do the smaller satellite stockpiles of his trading partners. In a form of perpetual motion, the ward’s magic cottage industries begin to generate wealth.
But this free-enterprise zone is the least of Nicolino’s impacts on the nation of sick children. He forms the inhabitants, both terminal and transient, into voting blocks, loose political parties that he then coerces into running referenda on the kids’ choice for chief nurse and head resident. He presents the results, scribbled in pencil on a nubbly-edged sheet of shabby spiral-notebook paper, to the staff. When the mandate fails to produce the demanded changes, the new ward boss—his own constituency more or less ensured—starts talking hunger strike and sets himself up as People’s Government in Exile.
He gradually picks up the tempo of the place until it lags just behind his own. He cannot keep still long enough even to do up his laces. He rallies his troops, splits them into rebus-solving R & D teams. He sets them to work prototyping escape vehicles. He enlists them in cracking jigsaws—a 1,496-piece Garden of Earthly Delights spread across the top of his bedcovers, for want of enough flat space anywhere else. He teaches them to sing innocuous verses that turn obscene when sung as rounds. He organizes gangway-long grudge matches of Smear the Queer with the Ball. He awards the highest-ranking, most loyal of his cadres with revolving titles, offices, and privileges. He designs gambling ladders, plays out pools on sporting events using tons of colored golf tees as the stakes. He endows taffy pulls, paper airplane competitions (prizes for both outrageous design and distance flight), potato-printing marathons—activities selected exclusively for their ability to leave a trail of carnage in their wake.
He doesn’t sleep. Some voice must somehow rag him into trying to thrash time while time is still his to thrash. At ridiculous hours, he appears at the bedsides of all-too-willing friends, whispering “Are you awake?” until they are. Then come the first of the expeditions, slipping invisibly past the adult night watch to whatever destinations they might pick their way into without tripping alarms. They shoot for the roof heliport or raid the inner kitchens as if they were Prester John’s lost kingdom or the source of the Nile. There they fall upon whatever loose prizes they can carry off undetected.
In less time than it takes him to age another decade, Nicolino wins over the whole turf. Those who had been most frightened by his beak and baldness become the most devoted. That’s the source of his manic power. Convince them there’s nothing to be afraid of. That you’re just one of the gang. The only place where this one’s ever going to be inconspicuous is front and center, in the brightest light. In days, Nico comes into his own, kingpin of these victims, the race of those singled out for damage, barred from public playgrounds.
The boat girl alone treats him with a mixture of suspicion and astonishment. “What’s with What’s-her-namee-vong?” Nicolino asks Chuck, the No-Face, whose fantastic handicap, despite his angelic good nature, promotes him to Nico’s second-in-command and senior partner in crime.
Chuck shrugs. “Think she had to have some stuff taken out of her ankle.”
“Not that matter, Cluckie. I mean, how come she’s got her head up her bunghole and her nose in dictionaries all the time? We’re working some great angles here. And where the crud is she? Studying.”
“Maybe we move around too fast for her. She’s still a little wobbly. . . .”
“Wobbly? Hah. Ben here is your basic beach ball. Double amputee, and he’s in on just about every operation we run.”
“I don’t know, Nico. Maybe we . . .”
“Maybe we better go have a talk with this chick, that’s what. Let’s see. Think she’d go for one of these?” He riffles through his stash of illustrated fiction and produces a Sergeant Shrapnel, all about hand-to-hand fighting on a Pacific island infested with subterranean networks of enemy burrows crawling with giant bamboo rats. A hesitant pause from Chuck ma
kes Nico throw up his age-wasted arms in exasperation. “Come on! Gimme a flipping bee. This is one of the best ’zines I got.”
He pulls out the Blue Book as proof, but Chuck stands firm. “Uh-uh, Nico. I don’t think so. She likes to read those . . .”
“I know what she likes to read. That’s exactly the problem here, isn’t it? Wait. I got it. Here’s the ticket.” He rummages around in the piles of noncomic trading booty, at last locating a plastic bag no bigger than his fist. “Come on, Cluck. Let’s go have a word with this femme.”
Preliminaries are awkward. Or, rather, there are no preliminaries. Joy watches them approach from the horizontal, frightened and expectant, as if she has long known that this visit was inevitable.
“Here,” Nico says, when they reach her bedside. He thrusts the buy-off peace offering into the boat girl’s hands. The boss remains unflustered despite the suppressed giggling on all sides. But it does unnerve him a little when this Joy creature refuses to ask what the present is, resorting instead to label reading.
The bag is full of tiny, brown bulbs that shuffle about as if alive. She watches hushed as the lumps of animate popcorn bang randomly with increasing vigor as she takes them into her hand. The label reads:
MEXICAN JUMPING BEANS
Born into the only home they will ever know, gradually expending their finite supply of food, these tiny larvae hurl themselves continuously against the walls of their constricting prisons. . . .
“Immense, huh?” Nico prompts.
“Intense,” Chuck is quick to ratify.
But Joy looks up after a moment’s incomprehension. “Sad.”
“Sad?” Nico fails to keep the note of moral outrage out of his dignified tone.
“Very sad.”
Chuck jumps in, the hapless moderator, eager to show the merits of both sides. “Yeah, but, I mean, they can’t be unhappy in there. Huh? Because they’ve never seen anything but the inside. They don’t even know about, they can’t even picture . . .”
“Then why are they trying so hard to get out?” Joy’s interruption, awful in its certainty, is soft to the point of disappearing. But she looks forgivingly at Chuck; he, at least, is doing the best he can.
“Holy jump up and sit down. Listen to this, will ya? Get outta my star system. Get outta order. I’ve never heard such drivel. These things are utterly cool. You got to be completely whacked not to see that. And they’re illegal too! Any idea what it takes to slip one of these babies past the Agriculture agents they got posted all up and down the borders?”
“Half the children in this hospital have slipped . . .”
“Wait a minute,” Chuck intervenes. “They must be able to get out. If they can’t get out, then how do they . . . ?”
“How what, you weed weevil?”
“How does the species, you know . . . ?”
“Procreate?” Joy suggests, at almost speaking volume.
“‘Procreate,’ Cluckie? That the word you’re looking for?” Nico shoves his buddy, almost spitting with smirk.
The question returns Joy to the magic beans with new intensity. Perhaps there is more to this prison than the identifying label lets on. “Thank you. I’ll take care of them,” she says, looking into the eyes of the man who never shed boyhood. A nervous treaty, but the one he came to establish.
“Great. You do that. Now tell me one thing. How come you just lie here studying all the time?”
“My leg hurts.”
“No, the studying part. I mean, Louise. You’re on vacation here.”
“We still have to graduate.”
“Oh wow. You are spoo-ky. Graduate? Why?” Nico tries to wipe the sweatband of his ball cap without removing it. “Okay, never mind that one. Suppose, just for grins, that I humor you. So what do we have to know for the exam? Go ahead. I’m asking. Graduate me. Learn me something.”
She gives him a strange, probing look. Her eyes tell him: You can drop the disguise. No need to pretend with me. I’ve read your biography. Twice through. And this is where I’m supposed to teach you the end of the story you were eavesdropping on, outside the window, late one interrupted night.
The look, the accusation—I know who you are—rattles him. “Hey, Cluckie. C’mon. Let’s blow this peanut stand. We got work to do.”
Chuck hesitates a moment, his bandaged face trying to twist into an explanation wide enough to appease everyone. He turns to trot after the boss, when Joy calls them back.
“Wait a minute. ’Lino?” She swallows the first syllables in ignorance or first, awkward attempt at familiarity. The summoned boy returns to bedside, nice and casual like. “I wanted to ask you.” She reaches, without letting him from her steady scrutiny, for a thin volume that she has kept at her side since receiving it days back. She fixes on the ancient, taut face, hoping to surprise it into dropping its disguise. “Do you know this story?”
If she flushes out the revealing muscle-flinch she expects, it does not show. Nico takes the hundred and fifty pages, thumbs through it back to front, reads the dedication and the title page. “I’ll swap you two superheroes, a sci-fi, and a kissy thing of your choice.”
He looks up. His eyes challenge those of this overlathed dowel, this vanishing girl. “And I’ll throw in a mint-condition chocolate cream egg. Just because I’m a nice guy.”
FOR OBVIOUS REASONS, the premature pensioner becomes Linda’s darling. Any kid who not only puts up willingly with her amateur therapy reading but actually ad-libs asides is a patient after her own heart. On her rounds, she quickly learns how to get the maximum rile-up by calling out to him, “How’s it hanging, old man?”
He glows under the sobriquet, puts on a palsy act, laces his already disconcerting voice with parody tremolo, and warbles back, “Can’t complain. Well, I could complain. In fact . . .” Or: “Hanging? Wait. Lemme check.”
Well, she asked for it. This afternoon, Linda finds Nico and a fraction of his gang camped around a TV. “What’s up? What’s on?” Perfect chance to get them to tell her one for a change.
“Stupid so-called show about some cartoon future that the friggin’ cat dragged in.” Nico’s betrayal of the spell that has held half a dozen of his cohorts enthralled causes several wounded faces to jerk in hurt incomprehension. His better self, protesting pitifully from its perch on the traditional right clavicle, causes Nico to repent his rudeness by the time honored method of redoubling it. “Yeah. You heard me right. Dumbshit program here, gentlemen.”
“Nico,” Linda growls. Quite the little performance he’s mustering for her sake. A shame that kind of strutting is restricted to the young, or the old, or whatever her potty-mouthed courtier actually is.
“Oh. Sorry, ma’am. I mean dumb-fu . . .”
“Cut! That’s enough out of you. Somebody fill me in.”
But the other kids are too cowed now to give a synopsis, and His Nibs is pulling this royal sulk to punish the woman. So just kick back and watch a while. Linda settles in, tries to catch the drift of this installment’s saga. It’s set in that obligatory, endless High Chaparral of Space. She can tell it’s the outermost Outer, because the guns, bombs, and assorted vehicles of outrageous intricacy are all proton-powered. Wider and wilder skeins, eternally higher levels of energy manipulation: that’s, like the immortal hokey-pokey, what it’s all about.
On the one hand, they’ve got the matter transporter—the be-all and end-all of the whole civilized shooting match. On the other hand, galactic destiny still comes down to a slew of hand-to-hand combats with what amount to electrified meter sticks. The story takes place in two different worlds. One world just doesn’t cut it with discriminating audiences anymore. Seems on one of these two, there’s this combination architect, civil engineer, and voice crying in the wilderness . . .
“Hold it. Who is this guy? I can never understand it when they talk through those echo machines.”
Suzi Banks peers up suspiciously, steals a glance at Nicolino and then back at Ms. Espera. “Beezaholi,” she murmu
rs, in a coy, little-girl drawl as impenetrable as the cartoon sound effects.
“Say who? Beet-aholic? Would you mind spelling that?”
A violent shush from Nico cannot quell the ranks’ revival. Suddenly, paraphrase flies at Linda from all directions, almost as if recounting gives as much pleasure as watching the wrinkle of event unfold in the first place.
“Beezaholi.”
“He’s evil.”
“He’s not evil. He’s the one’s gonna save M-31.”
“What’s M-31?”
“That’s where the Dromedaries live.”
“Andromedans, pissbag.”
“Oh, them,” Linda says. “I remember them. We go way back. What’s bugging them this time?”
Childhood’s hair-trigger tone detectors threaten to set off a chain reaction of suspicion, jamming all the communicator channels. Linda is rescued by the beautiful Chuck, who says, “They’re facing Galactic Heat Death something fierce.”
“Sun blowing up on them?”
An exasperated quartet shouts, “No! Dying out slowly.” Dummy. Get your stellar thermodynamics straight.
Their spark is going cold, motionless, still. A race against the last ticks of the thermal buzzer before life fades into the freezing vacuum. The fable’s appeal is as familiar as the planet-encroaching ice caps visible even from here, in the smogged semitropics of Angel City. Every day, a little trickle of available use escapes irreversibly through the cracks of the system. Cars slow, appliances rust out, neighbors capitulate in a hush. If Linda herself feels it, these kids must be frantic. These, the fresh heat litmuses, the thermostatic coils still factory mint, must long ago have registered the approach of absolute zero and are left to go about astonished that the planet makes no preparation.
Beezaholi chooses this lull to mumble to himself: “The Cyclogeneron must be assembled on a scale no one has yet imagined. It must span the entire diameter of the star system! Only then will it be capable of accelerating particles to the velocity needed to give us final power over the very laws of . . .”
Operation Wandering Soul Page 19