He caught her in midair, without thinking, without hesitating, without wondering whether he could do it. He just did it, caught her and held her and lowered her gently to the ground. The firemen surrounded her, put out her dress, and hustled her into an ambulance. And now, Tom saw, everyone was looking up at him, at the strange dark shape floating high in the night, with its ring of shining lights. The police band was crackling; they were reporting him as a flying saucer, he heard. He grinned.
A cop climbed up on top of his police car, holding a bullhorn, and began to hail him. Tom turned off the radio to hear better over the roar of the flames. He was telling Tom to land and identify himself, asking who he was, what he was. That was easy. Tom turned on his microphone. "I'm the Turtle," he said. The VW had no tires; in the wheel wells, Joey had rigged the most humongous speakers they could find, powered by the largest amp on the market. For the first time, the voice of the Turtle was heard in the land a booming "I'M THE TURTLE" echoing down the streets and alleys, a rolling thunder crackling with distortion. Except what he said didn't sound quite right. Tom cranked the volume up even higher, injected a little more bass into his voice. "I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL TURTLE," he announced to them all.
Then he flew a block west, to the dark polluted waters of the Hudson, and imagined two huge invisible hands forty feet across. He lowered them into the river, cupped them full, and lifted. Rivulets of water dribbled to the street all the way back. When he dropped the first cascade on the flames, a ragged cheering went up from the crowd below.
"Merry Christmas," Tach declared drunkenly when the clock struck midnight and the record Christmas Eve crowd began to whoop and shout and pound on the tables. On stage,
Humphrey Bogart cracked a lame joke in an unfamiliar voice. All the lights in the house dimmed briefly; when they came back up, Bogart had been replaced by a portly, round-faced man with a red nose. "Who is he now?" Tach asked the twin on his left.
"W C. Fields," she whispered. She slid her tongue around the inside of his ear. The twin on the right was doing something even more interesting under the table, where her hand had somehow found a way into his trousers. The twins were his Christmas gift from Angelface. "You can pretend they're me," she'd told him, though of course they were nothing like her. Nice kids, both of them, buxom and cheerful and absolutely uninhibited, if a bit simpleminded; they reminded him of Takisian sex toys. The one on the right had drawn the wild card, but she wore her cat mask even in bed, and there was no visible deformity to disturb the sweet pleasure of his erection.
W C. Fields, whoever he was, ofered some cynical observations about Christmas and small children. The crowd hooted him off the stage. The Projectionist had an astonishing array of faces, but he couldn't tell a joke. Tach didn't mind; he had all the diversion he needed.
"Paper, Doe?" The vendor thrust a copy of the Herald Tribune across the table with a thick three-fingered hand. His flesh was blue-black and oily looking. "All the Christmas news," he said, shifting the clumsy stack of papers under his arm. Two small curving tusks protruded from the corners of his wide, grinning mouth. Beneath a porkpie hat, the great bulge of his skull was covered with tufts of bristly red hair. On the streets they called him the Walrus.
"No thank you, Jube," Tach said with drunken dignity. "I have no desire to wallow in human folly tonight."
"Hey, look," said the twin on the right. "The Turtle!" Tachyon looked around, momentarily befuddled, wondering how that huge armored shell could possibly have gotten inside the Funhouse, but of course she was referring to the newspaper.
"You better buy it for her, Tacky," the twin on the left said, giggling. "If you don't she'll pout."
Tachyon sighed. "I'll take one. But only if I don't have to listen to any of your jokes, Jube."
"Heard a new one about a joker, a Polack, and an Irishman stuck on a desert island, but just for that I'm not going to tell it," the Walrus replied with a rubbery grin.
Tachyon dug for some coins, found nothing in his pockets but a small, feminine hand. Jube winked. "I'll get it from Des," he said. Tachyon spread the newspaper out on the table, while the club erupted in applause as Cosmos and Chaos made their entrance.
A grainy photograph of the Turtle was spread across two columns. Tachyon thought it looked like a flying pickle, a big lumpy dill covered with little bumps. The Turtle had apprehended a hit-and-run driver who had killed a nine-year-old boy in Harlem, intercepting his flight and lifting the car twenty feet off the ground, where it floated with its engine roaring and its tires spinning madly until the police finally caught up. In a related sidebar, the rumor that the shell was an experimental robot flying tank had been denied by an Air Force spokesman.
"You'd think they'd have found something more important to write about by now," Tachyon said. It was the third big story about the Turtle this week. The letter columns, the editorial pages, everything was Turtle, Turtle, Turtle. Even television was rabid with Turtle speculation. Who was he? What was he? How did he do it?
One reporter had even sought out Tach to ask that question. "Telekinesis," Tachyon told him. "It's nothing new. Almost common, in fact." Teke had been the single ability most frequently manifested by virus victims back in '46. He'd seen a dozen patients who could move paper clips and pencils, and one women who could lift her own body weight for ten minutes at a time. Even Earl Sanderson's flight had been telekinetic in origin. What he did not tell them was that teke on this scale was unprecedented. Of course, when the story ran, they got half of it wrong.
"He's a joker, you know," whispered the twin on the right, the one in the silver-gray cat mask. She was leaning against his shoulder, reading about the Turtle.
"A joker?" Tach said.
"He hides inside a shell, doesn't he? Why would he do that unless he was really awful to look at?" She had taken her hand out of his trousers. "Could I have that paper?"
Tach pushed it toward her. "They're cheering him now," he said sharply. "They cheered the Four Aces too."
"That was a colored group, right?" she said, turning her attention to the headlines.
"She's keeping a scrapbook," her sister said. "All the jokers think he's one of them. Stupid, huh? I bet its just a machine, some kind of Air Force flying saucer."
"He is not," her twin said. "It says so right here." She pointed to the sidebar with a long, red-painted nail. "Never mind about her," the twin on the left said. She moved closer to Tachyon, nibbling on his neck as her hand went under the table. "Hey, what's wrong? You're all soft."
"My pardons," Tachyon said gloomily. Cosmos and Chaos were flinging axes, machetes, and knives across the stage, the glittering cascade multiplied into infinity by the mirrors around them. He had a bottle of fine cognac at hand, and lovely, willing women on either side of him, but suddenly, for some reason he could not have named, it did not feel like such a good night after all. He filled his glass almost to the brim and inhaled the heady alcoholic fumes. "Merry Christmas," he muttered to no one in particular.
Consciousness returned with the angry tones of Mal's voice. Tach lifted his head groggily from the mirrored tabletop, blinking down at his puffy red reflection. The jugglers, the twins, and the crowd were long gone. His cheek was sticky from lying in a puddle of spilled liquor. The twins had jollied him and fondled him and one of them had even gone under the table, for all the good it did. Then Angelface had come to the tableside and sent them away. "Go to sleep, Tacky," she'd said. Mal had come up to ask if he should lug him back to bed. "Not today," she'd said, "you know what day this is. Let him sleep it off here." He couldn't recall when he'd gone to sleep.