George Martin - Aces High

He walked past two of the older shells to the latest model, punched in the combination, and pulled up the hatch. Crawling inside, Tom sealed the shell behind him and found his chair. He groped for the harness, and belted himself in. The seat was wide and comfortable, with thick padded armrests and the friendly smell of leather. Control panels were mounted at the ends of both arms for easy fingertip access. His fingers played over the keys with the ease of long familiarity, turning on ventilators, heat, and lights. The interior of the shell was snug and cozy, covered with green shag carpet. He had four 23-inch color televisions mounted in the carpeted walls, surrounded by banks of smaller screens and other instrumentation.

His left index finger jabbed down and the outside cameras came to life, filling his screens with vague gray shapes, until he went to infrared. Tom pivoted slowly, checking the pictures, testing his lights, making sure everything was functional. He rummaged through his box of cassettes until he found Springsteen. A good Jersey boy, Tom thought. He slammed the cassette into the tape deck, and Bruce tore right into "Glory Days." It brought a flat, hard smile to his face.

Tom leaned forward and threw a toggle. From somewhere outside came a whirring sound. That garage door opener would have to be replaced soon from the sound of it. On the screens, he saw light. pour into the bunker from overhead. A cascade of snow and ice fell down onto the bare earth floor. He pushed up with his mind; the armored shell lifted, and began to drift toward the. light. So Barbara Casko was getting married to that asshole Steve Bruder, so what the hell did he care; the Great and Powerful Turtle was going out to kick some monster butt.

One thing Tom Tudbury had found out a long time ago was that life doesn't give you many second chances. He was lucky. He got a second chance at Barbara Casko.

It happened in 1972, a decade after he'd last seen her. The store was still called Broadway Television and Electronics then, and Tom was assistant manager. He was behind the register, his back to the counter while he straightened some shelves, when a woman's voice said, "Excuse me."

"Yeah," he said, turning, then staring.

Her dark blond hair was much longer, falling halfway down her back, and she was wearing tinted glasses in oversized plastic frames, but behind the lenses her eyes were just as blue. She wore a Fair Isle sweater and a faded pair of jeans, and if anything her figure was even better at twentyseven than it had been at seventeen. He looked at her hand, and all he saw there was a college class ring. "Barbara," he said.

She looked surprised. "Do I know you?"

Tom pointed at the McGovern button pinned to her sweater. "Once you nominated me for president," he said. " I don't," she began, with a small puzzled frown on that face, still the prettiest face that had ever smiled at Tom Tudbury in all his life.

" I used to wear a crew cut," he said. "And a doublebreasted corduroy jacket. Black." He touched his aviator frames. "These were horn rims the last time you saw me. I weighed about the same then, but I was maybe an inch shorter. And I had such a crush on you that you wouldn't believe. "

Barbara Casko smiled. For a moment he thought she was bluffing. But her eyes met his, and he knew. "How are you, Tom? It's been a long time, huh?"

A long time, he thought. Oh yeah. A different eon. "I'm great," he told her. It was at least half-true. That was at the end of the Turtle's headiest decade. Tom's life was going nowhere fast-he'd dropped out of college after JFK had been shot, and ever since he'd been living in a crummy basement apartment on 31st Street. He didn't really give a damn. Tom Tudbury and his lousy job and his lousy apartment were incidental to his real life; they were the price he paid for those nights and weekends in the shell. In high school, he'd been a pudgy introvert with a crew cut, a lot of insecurity, and a secret power that only Joey knew about. And now he was the Great and Powerful Turtle. Mystery hero, celebrity, ace of aces, and allaround hot shit.

Of course, he couldn't tell her any of that.

But somehow it didn't matter. just being the Turtle had changed Tom Tudbury, had given him more confidence. For ten years he'd been having fantasies and wet dreams about Barbara Casko, regretting his cowardice, wondering about the road not taken and the prom he'd never attended. A decade too late, Tom Tudbury finally got the words out. "You look terrific," he said with all sincerity. "I'm off at five. You free for dinner?"

"Sure," she said. Then she laughed. " I wondered how long it'd take you to ask me out. I never guessed it'd be ten years. You may just have set a new school record."

Monsters were like cops, Tom decided: never around when you really needed one.

December had been a different story. He remembered his first sight of them, remembered that long surreal trip down the Jersey Turnpike toward Philadelphia. Behind him was an armored column; ahead; the turnpike was deserted. Nothing moved but a few newspapers blowing across the empty traffic lanes. Along the sides of the road, the toxic waste dumps and petrochemical plants stood like so many ghost towns. Every so often, they'd come across some haggard refugees fleeing the Swarm, but that was it. It was like a movie, Tom thought. He didn't quite believe it.

Until they made contact.

A cold chill had gone up his spine when the android came streaking back to the column with the news that the enemy was near, and moving on Philly. "This is it," Tom said to Peregrine, who'd been riding on his shell to rest her wings. He had just long enough to find a cassette-Creedence Gold and slide it into his tape deck before the swarmlings came over the horizon like a black tide. The fliers filled the air as far as his cameras could see, a moving cloud of darkness like a vast onrushing thunderhead. He remembered the twister from The Wizard of Oz, and how much it had scared him the first time he'd seen the movie.

Beneath those dark wings the other swarmlings movedcrawling on segmented bellies, scrabbling on meter-long spider legs, oozing along like the Blob, and with Steve McQueen nowhere in sight. They covered the road from shoulder to shoulder, and spilled out over its edges, and they moved faster than he could have imagined.

Peregrine took off. The android was already plunging back toward the enemy, and Tom saw Mistral coming down from above, a flash of blue among the thin cold clouds. He swallowed, and turned the volume on his speakers all the way up; 'Bad Moon Rising' blasted out over the dark sky. He remembered thinking that life would never be the same. He almost wanted to believe it. Maybe the new world would be better than the old.

But that was December, and this was March, and life was a lot more resilient than he'd given it credit for. Like the passenger pigeons, the swarmlings had threatened to blot out the sun, and like the passenger pigeons, they were gone in what seemed like no time at all. After that first unforgettable moment, even the war of the worlds had turned into just another chore. It was more extermination than combat, like killing especially large and ugly roaches. Claws, pincers, and poisoned talons were useless against his armor; the acid secreted by the flappers did fuck up his lenses pretty badly, but that was more a nuisance than a danger. He found himself trying to think of new, imaginative ways of killing the things to relieve the boredom. He flung them high into the air, he ripped them in half, he grabbed them in invisible fists and squeezed them into guacamole. Over and over again, day after day, endlessly, until they stopped coming.

And afterward, back home, he was astonished at just how quickly the Swarm War faded from the headlines, and how easily life flowed back into the old channels. In Peru, Chad, and the mountains of Tibet, major alien infestations continued their ravages, and smaller remnants were still troubling the Turks and Nigerians, but the third-world swarms were just page-four filler in most American newspapers. Meanwhile, life continued. People made their mortgage payments and went to work; those whose homes and jobs had been wiped out dutifully filed insurance claims and applied for unemployment. People complained about the weather, told jokes, went to movies, argued about sports.