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 tides, 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 makes 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.