She scooted off. "Have you a moment, Mark?"
"Oh, sure, man. Always, for you."
A pair of kids with leather overcoats and dandelion-climax hair lurked among the paraphernalia and vintage posters on the other side, but Mark was not the suspicious type. He nodded Tach toward a table by the far wall, collected a teapot and a couple of mugs, and followed, loose-limbed, bobbing his head slightly as he walked. He had on an ancient pink Brooks Brothers shirt, a fringed leather vest, a pair of vast elephant bells faded almost to the hue of the white firework bursts tiedyed into them. Shoulder-length blond hair was crimped at his temples by a braided thong. Had Tachyon not seen him in the full splendor of his secret identity, he'd have thought the man had no sense of dress at all.
"So what can I do for you, man?" Mark asked, beaming happily through the glass planchets of his wire-rims.
Tach set elbows on the tablecloth-also tie-dyed-pursed his lips as Mark poured.
"A joker named Doughboy has been arrested for murder. A young woman reporter has come to me maintaining that be's innocent."
He drew breath. " I myself believe it, too. He is a very gentle individual, for all that he is huge and hideous and possesses metahuman strength. He is . . .
retarded."
He waited a moment, heart hanging in his throat, but what Mark said was, "So it's a rip-off, man. Why do the pigs say he did it?" The epithet was spoken without rancor.
"The murdered man is a Dr. Warner Fred Warren, a popular astronomy-to use the term loosely-writer in the tabloids. To give you some idea, he wrote an article last year entitled, `Did Comet Kohoutek Bring AIDS?"'
Mark grimaced. He was not your standard hippie, disdaining/distrusting all science. Then again, he was a latecomer to the faith, who had gotten into Flower Power at a time when everyone else in the Bay Area was getting heavily into Stalin.
"Dr. Warren's latest prognostication is that an asteroid is about to strike the Earth and end all life, or at least civilization as you know it. It did create quite a bit of controversy; amazing what attention you Earthers lavish on such folly. The police theorize that Doughboy heard his friends talking about it, became frightened, and one night last week went into the doctor's lab and beat him to death."
Mark whistled softly. "Any evidence?"
"Three witnesses." Tach paused. "One of them positively identifies Doughboy as the man he saw leaving Warren's apartment building the night of the crime."
Mark waved a hand. "No problem. We'll get him free, man."
Tachyon opened his mouth, shut it. Finally he said, "We need to see what other information they have amassed in the case. The police are not proving cooperative. They tell me to mind my own business, almost!"
Mark's blue eyes drifted off Tach's sightline. Tach sipped his tea. It was stringent and crisp, some kind of mint. "I know how you can take care of that.
Does Doughboy, like, have an attorney?"
"Legal Aid."
"Why don't you get in touch with him, offer to act as unpaid medical expert."
"Splendid." He looked quizzically at his friend, head tipped like a curious bird. "How do you know to do that?"
"I don't know, man. It just came to me. So, like, where do I come in?"
Tach studied the tabletop. In the background forks clove tofu and thunked against earthenware cushioned by soggy romaine lettuce. It had been as much for the tonic effect Mark had on his spirits that he'd come here from the Tombs. But still . . .
He was out of his depth; he was, as he'd assured Sara, no detective. Now, Mark Meadows, the Last Hippie, didn't on the surface appear a much more promising candidate for sleuth, but he happened also to be Marcus Aurelius Meadows, PhD, the most brilliant biochemist alive. Before dropping out he'd been responsible for a number of breakthroughs, laid the groundwork for many more. He was trained to observe and trained to think. He was a genius.
Also, Tach liked the cut of his coat, which in itself was about enough for a Takisian.
"You've already helped me, Mark. This is your world, after all. You understand its ways better than L" Though I've been on it longer, he realized. "And there are your friends. You do have, ah, others than the two we met on my cousin's ship?" Mark nodded. "Three others, so far."
"Good. I hope these prove more tractable than the others." He hoped one or the other of the Captain's alter egos would have skills that might fall handy; fortunately he could imagine no purpose the surly were-porpoise Aquarius might serve, but the vainglorious coward Cosmic Traveler was another matter. And, even to save poor Doughboy from death in life, he wasn't ready to endure the Traveler again so soon.
He scraped his chair back and rose. "Let us go play detective together, you and L"
The kid had cammie pants and a Rambo rag, standing there on the corner of Hester and the Bowery trying to hold down magazine pages against the wind's tugging.
Tach glanced over his shoulder. The article was slugged, "Dr. Death: Selfmade Cyborg Soldier of Fortune Battles Commies in Salvo." The kid looked up as the two men took their places beside him at the newsstand, truculence tightening lean Puerto Rican features. His expression flowed like wax into awe.
He was looking at the center button of a yellow paisley vest. Out over his forehead an immense green bow tie with yellow polka dots blossomed from a pink shirt collar. To either side hung a purple tailcoat. A purple stovepipe hat, its green band embossed in gold peace signs, threatened the wateredmilk overcast.
Yellow-gloved fingers flashed a V "Peace," said the beaky norteamericano face hovering up there amid all that color. The kid tossed the magazine at the proprietor and fled. Captain Trips stood blinking after him, wounded. "What'd I say, man?"
"Never mind," chortled the being behind the counter. "He wouldn't have bought it anyway. What can I do you for, Doctor? And your colorful friend here?"
"Mm," said Mark, sniffing, nostrils wide, "fresh popcorn."
"That's me," Jube said. "That's how I smell." Tachyon winced.
"Far out!"
For a moment glass-bead eyes stared, blue-black skin rumpled up Jubal's forehead: orogenic surprise. Then he laughed.
"I get it! You're a hippie."
The Cap'n beamed. "That's right, man."
Blubber shook. "Goo-goo-goo-Jube," he bellowed. "I am the Walrus. Pleased to meetcha."
He did look like a walrus, five foot nothing, hanging fat, a big smooth skull.
with random hair-tufts sticking out from it here and there like rusty shaving brushes, flowing into the collar of his green and black and yellow Hawaiian shirt without the intervention of a neck. He had little white tusks stuck at either end of his grin. He pushed out a Warner Brothers cartoon hand, three fingers and a thumb, which the Captain eagerly shook.
"This is Captain Trips. An ace, a new associate of mine. Captain, meet Jubal Benson. Jube, we need from you some information."
"Shoot." He made a pistol gesture with his right hand, rolled his eyes at Trips.
"What do you know about the joker called Doughboy?" Jube scowled tectonically.
"That's a bum rap. Boy wouldn't hurt a fly. He even lives in the same rooming house I do. See him most every day-used to, before this came down."
"He didn't, like, hear people talking about an asteroid crashing into the Earth and get real worked up about it, did he?" Trips asked. A vagrant piece of newsprint had washed up against the backs of his calves on a wind that hadn't yet realized it was spring. He ignored it and the chill alike.
"If he'd heard anything like that, he'd hide under his cot and you'd never get him out till you convinced him it was a joke. IS that what they're claiming?"
Trips nodded.
"The one to talk to is Shiner. He rents the place, feeds Doughboy, and lets him stay there. He's got a shoeshine stand up Bowery almost to Delancey, up where Jokertown's more touristy."
"Would he be there now?" Tach asked.
Jube consulted a Mickey Mouse watch whose band all but vanished into his rubbery wrist. "Lunch hour's over, which means he's prob'ly knocking off himself to eat lunch right now. He should be home. Apartment Six."
Tachyon thanked him. Solemn, Trips tipped his hat. They started off.
"Doc."
"Yes, Jubal."
"Better get this cleared up quick. Things could get very heavy around here this summer if Doughboy gets a railroad job. They say Gimli's back on the streets."
An eyebrow rose. "Tom Miller? But I thought he was in Russia."
The Walrus laid a finger along his broad flat nose. "That's what I mean, Doc.
That's what I mean."
"I found him, oh, fifteen, sixteen year ago it was." The man called Shiner sat on his cot in the single room of the apartment on Eldridge Street, rocking to and fro with his hands clasped between skinny knees. "Back in 1970. Wintertime it was. He was sitting there next to a dumpster in a alley behind this mask shop, bawling his eyes out. Mama just took him there and left him."
"That's terrible, man," said Trips. He and Tach were standing on the meticulously swept hardwood floor of the apartment. Shiner's cot and a big mattress with stained ticking were the only furniture.
"Oh, I guess maybe I can understand. He was eleven or twelve, already twice as big as me, stronger'n most men. Must have been powerful hard to take care of."
He was small for an Earther, shorter than Tach. From a distance he looked to be an unexceptional black man in his fifties, with gray-dusted hair and a gold right incisor. Up close you noticed that he shone with an unnatural luster, more like obsidian than skin. "I do my own advertisin', like," he'd explained to Trips when Tachyon introduced them. "Drum up business for my `shine stand."
"How well could Doughboy find his way around the city unaided?" Tachyon asked.
"He couln'nt. Find his way around Jokertown all right, always be jokers looking out for him, you know, seeing he didn't wander off." For a moment he sat and stared at a spill of sunlight in which a tiny metal Ferrari lay on its side.
"They say he killed this scientist dude up by the Park. He never even been to the Park but twice. He don't know nothin' about no astronomy."
He squeezed his eyes shut. Tears leaked through. "Oh, Doctor, you got to do something. He's my boy, he's like my son, and he's hurtin'. And there nothing I can do."
Tachyon shifted weight from boot to boot. The Captain plucked a daisy, rather the worse for wear, from his lapel, squatted down and held it out to Shiner.
Sobbing, the black man opened his eyes. They narrowed at once, in suspicion, confusion. Trips just hunkered there with flower proffered. After a moment Shiner took it.
Trips squeezed his hand. A tear fell on his own. He and Tachyon quietly left.
"Dr. Warren was not just a scientist," Martha Quinlan said as she guided them back through the apartment, "he was a saint. The quest to get the truth before the people was never ending for him. He is a martyr to man's quest for Knowledge."
"Oh, wow," Cap'n Trips said.
As far as Tachyon had been able to learn, the late Warner Fred Warren had had no next of kin. A legal battle was shaping up for possession of the trust fund which had enabled him to keep a penthouse apartment on Central Park and devote his life to science--his grandfather had been an Oklahoma oil millionaire who attributed his success to dowsing and died claiming he was Queen Victoria-but in her capacity as managing editor of the National Informer Ms. Quinlan seemed to be acting as executor for Warren's estate.
"It's so good of you to come pay your respects to a fallen colleague, Dr.
Tachyon. It would have meant so much to dear Fred, to know our distinguished visitor from the stars had taken a personal interest in him."
"Dr. Warren's contribution to the cause of science was unparalleled," Tachyon said sonorously. . . since Trofim Lysenko, he emended mentally. Ah, Doughboy, may you never guess what I endure to gain you justice. It was a reflexive bit of Takisian misdirection, the story Tachyon had given Quinlan when he called to see about looking over the murder scene.
"It's a terrible thing," Quinlan warbled, leading them along a hallway hung with framed prints of hunting dogs from 1920s magazines. She was a little taller than Tach, wearing a dress like a black sack from neck and elbows to thighs, scarlet tights, white shoes, and thick plastic bracelets. Her gray-blond hair was styled straight and cut at a bias. Her eyes were made up like Theda Bara's; she wore no lipstick. "A tragedy. So fortunate they caught the fellow who did it. Not right in the head, they say, and a joker to boot. Probably some kind of sex deviant.
Our reporters are looking into this story very carefully, I can assure you."
Trips made a sound. Quinlan stopped at the end of the .hall. "Here it is, gentlemen. Preserved as it was the day he died. We intend to make this a museum, against the day poor Fred's greatness is at last acknowledged by the scientific establishment which so persecuted him." She gestured them grandly in.
The door to Dr. Fred's lab had been wood, solid even for a ritzy New York apartment. It didn't seem to have slowed down his last visitor. Conscientious gnomes from the forensic lab in the brick tower at One Police Plaza had swept up most of the splinters, but a shattered stub of door still hung on bent brass hinges.
Tachyon still had a certain difficulty fitting his eyes around the utilitarian, rectilinear shapes of terrestrial scientific equipment. Science on Takis was the province of the few, even among the Psi Lords; their equipment was grown of geneengineered organisms even as their ships were, or custombuilt by craftsmen concerned to make each piece unique, significant. Here he didn't have much trouble. The gear that occupied the rubber-topped workbenches had been busted all to hell. Papers and shattered glass were strewn everywhere.
"Did he have, like, his observatory here?" Trips asked, craning around with his stupendous topper in hand.
"Oh, no. He had an observatory out on Long Island where he did most of his stargazing. He analyzed his results here, I suppose. There's a darkroom and everything." She rested a long fingernail on the line of her jaw. "What exactly was your name again? Captain . . . ?"
"Trips. "
"Like in that Stephen King book? What was it? The Stand."
"Uh, no. It's like, they used to call Jerry Garcia that." When she showed no signs of enlightenment, he went on, "He was the leader of the Grateful Dead. He, uh, he still is. He didn't draw an ace, you know, like Jagger or Tom Douglas, and . . ." He noticed that her eyes had gone glassy and focused on oblivion, trailed his words away, and wandered off around the perimeter of the largish, cluttered, ruined room.
"Say, Doctor, what're these dark splashes all over the walls?"
Tach glanced up. "Oh, those? Dried blood, of course." Trips paled and his eyes bulged a bit. Tachyon realized he'd run roughshod yet again over Earther sensibilities. For a folk so robust, Terrestrials had such tender stomachs.
Still, even he was amazed at the savagery vented on the penthouse lab. There was a mindless quality to it, a palpable psychic emanation of fury and malice. Given the limited imagination of most police he'd encountered, Tachyon was no longer surprised they found Doughboy a plausible suspect; they thought him a demented freak, a caricature from a slasher flick, and that certainly described Dr.
Warner Fred Warren's assailant. Yet Tach was more convinced than ever that vast gentle child was incapable of such an act, however provoked.
The Informer editor had vanished, overcome with emotion no doubt. "Hey, Doe, come look at this," Trips called. He was bending over a drafting table scattered with star-speckled photographs, peering intently at one edge.
Tach bent down beside him. There was a thin patch of gray, wrinkled, like a bit of tissue paper that had been wetted, stretched on the plastic surface, and left to dry. There was a curious membraneous quality to it that tickled the fringes of cognition.
"What is this stuff?" Trips asked.
"I do not know." His eyes skimmed curiously over the photographs. A date penciled on the edge of one caught his eye: 4/5/86, the day Warren was murdered.
From a pocket Cap'n Trips produced a little vial and a scalpel in a disposable plastic sheath. "Do you always carry such implements?" Tach asked as he began to scrape up a few flakes of the gray stuff.
"Thought they might come in handy, man. If I was gonna be a detective and all."
Shrugging, Tach turned his attention to the photograph that had caught his eye.
It was the top of a small stack. Picking it up, he discovered a dozen or more photos which to his untrained eye all seemed to show the same star field.
"All right, Doc, Captain," an unfamiliar voice blared from behind. "Give us a big smile for posterity."
With a dexterity that surprised even himself, Tach half-rolled the photos and slipped them into one voluminous coat sleeve even as he spun to face the intruder. Martha Quinlan stood inside the door beaming while a young black man dropped to one knee and bombed them with a camera flash that could have driven a laser beam to Mars.
With a certain reluctance Tach let his fingers slip from the outsized wooden grips of the .357 magnum neatly concealed in a shoulder rig beneath his yellow coat. "I presume you've an explanation for this," he said with fine Takisian frost.
"Oh, this is Rick," Quinlan warbled. "He's one of our staff photographers. I simply had to have him come down and record this event."
"Madam, I'm afraid I do not do this for publicity," Tach said, alarmed.
Unfolding himself, Rick waved a reassuring hand. "Don't sweat it, man," he said.
"It's just for our files. Trust me."
"Tezcatlipoca," Dr. Allan Berg said, tossing the print back on top of the mound of books, papers, and photos under which his desk putatively lurked.
"Say what?" Trips said.
"1954C-1100. It's a rock, gentlemen. Nothing more, nothing less."
The little office smelled strongly of sweat and pipe tobacco. Trips stared out the window at the afternoon Columbia campus, watching a gray squirrel halfway up a maple tree cussing out a black kid walking past with a scuffed French-horn case.
"A curious name," Tachyon said.
"It's an Aztec deity. A pretty surly one, I gather, but that's the way it goes: you find an asteroid, you get to name it." Berg grinned. "I've thought about hunting for one to name after me. What the hey-immortality of a sort." He looked like a goodnatured Jewish kid, eager eyes, long oval face, big nose, except that his curly unkempt hair was gray. He had a blue shirt and brown tie under a sweater so loosely woven you could just about fish with it. His manner was infectious.
"It's big enough to, like, do some damage if it hits?" Trips asked. "Or is that more exaggeration?"
"No, ah, Captain, I can assure you it's not." He stumbled a little over the honorific. "Norms, especially in the New York area, had pretty well had to accustom themselves to the ways of aces, especially those who chose to emulate the comic-book heroes of yore and don colorful costumes. And Cap'n Trips was weirder than most."
"Tezcatlipoca's a nickel-iron oblong roughly a kilometer by a kilometer and a half, weighing a good many million metric tons. Depending on the angle at which it struck, it could create devastating tidal waves and earthquakes, it could produce effects such as those hypothesized for a nuclear winter, it could quite conceivably crack the crust or blow away much of the atmosphere. It would almost certainly be the greatest catastrophe in recorded history-I might give you a better estimate if I took time to work it all out on paper."
"But I won't. Because it's not going to hit the planet." He sipped coffee from a cracked mug. "Poor Fred."
"I admit I was rather startled that you spoke so sympathetically of him when I called you, Dr. Berg," Tachyon said. Berg set the cup down, stared at the tepid black surface. "Fred and I went to MIT together, Doctor. We were roommates for a year."
"But I thought everybody said Dr. Warren was just some kind of crackpot," Trips said.
"That's what they say. And he was a crackpot, much as I hate to say it., But he was not just any crackpot."
"I fail to see how a trained scientist could espouse the theories for which Dr.
Warren was so, ah-"
"Notorious, Doctor. Go ahead and say it. You sure you won't have any coffee?"
They refused politely. Berg sighed. "Fred had what you call a will of iron. And he had a romantic streak. He always felt there should be fantastic things out there-ancient astronauts, alien machines on the moon, creatures unknown to science. He wanted to be the first to go out and rigorously prove so many things respectable scientists scoffed at." His mouth slipped into a sad smile. "And who knows? When Fred and I were kids, people thought the idea of intelligent life on other planets was farfetched. Maybe he could have pulled it off."
"But Fred was impatient. When he didn't see the results he wanted-why, he started seeing them anyway, if you know what I mean."
"So it was as Dr. Sagan said in his article in the Times," Tachyon said, "Dr.
Warren fastened upon a rock which falls by the Earth at regular intervals and embued it with menace."
Berg frowned. "With all due respect, Dr. Sagan got it wrong this time.
Gentlemen, Dr. Warren had an infinite capacity for self-deception, but he wasn't just some fool the Informer dragged in off Seventh Avenue. He knew how to use an ephemeris, was surely cognizant of 1954C-1100's history."
"He was a trained astronomer, and as far as technical and observational details go, a damned fine one." He shook his shaggy head. "How he could talk himself into believing this nonsense about Tezcatlipoca, God alone knows."
Trips was polishing his glasses on his fantastic bow tie. "Any chance he could've been right, man?"
Berg laughed. "Forgive me, Captain. But Tezcatlipoca's newest approach was spotted and plotted eight months ago by Japanese astronomers. It does in fact intersect the Earth's orbital path, but well clear of the planet itself "
He stood up, smoothed down his sweater, which had ridden up to the center of his stomach. "That's the pity, gentlemen. Oh, not this"-patting incipient paunch-"but the disservice Fred performed his fellow scientists. Our instruments are so much more sophisticated than they were even last time Tezcatlipoca passed, in 1970. And yet any astronomer who dares twitch his telescope in its direction will wind up lumped with von Daniken and Velikovsky forevermore."
The night was well advanced. Tach was sitting slumped in a chair in his apartment in a maroon smoking jacket and semidarkness, listening to Mozart in violins, bibbing brandy, and getting far gone in maudlin when the phone rang.
"Doe? It's me, Mark. I've found something."
The tone in his voice cut through brandy fog like a firehose. "Yes, Mark, what is it?"
"I think you better come see for yourself."
"On my way."
Fifteen minutes later he was on the floor above the Cosmic Pumpkin, gaping around in stoned amazement. "Mark? You have a whole laboratory above your head shop?"
"It's not complete, man. I don't have any real big-scale stuff, no electron microscopes or anything. Just what I was able to piece together over the years."
It looked like a cross between Crick & Watson and a hippie crash pad circa 1967, shoehorned into a space barely larger than a broom closet. Diagrams of DNA strands and polysaccharides shared wall with posters of the Stones, Jimi, Janis, and, of course, Mark's hero Tom Marion Douglas, the Lizard King-a twinge here for Tach, who still blamed himself for Douglas's death in 1971. A Terrestrial biochemist's tools were more familiar to Tach than an astronomers, so he recognized here a centrifuge, there a microtome, and so on. A lot of it had obviously seen hard use before passing into Trips's hands, some was jerry-rigged, but it all looked serviceable. Mark was in a lab coat, looking grim. "`Course, I didn't need anything too fancy, once I saw the gas chromatography on that tissue sample."