Aces High Page 0,84

cameras were scanning, giving him views from more angles than he could possibly need. Tom glanced restlessly from screen to screen, watching the passersby. They scarcely noticed him anymore. A quick glance up when the shell hove into their peripheral vision, a flicker of recognition, and then they went back to their own business, bored. It's just the Turtle, he imagined them saying. Yesterday's news. The glory days do pass you by.

Twenty years ago, things had been different. He'd been the first ace to go public after the long decade of hiding, and everything he did or said was celebrated. The papers were full of his exploits, and when the Turtle passed overhead, kids would shout and point, and all eyes would turn in his direction. Crowds would cheer him wildly at fires and parades and public assemblies. In Jokertown, men would doff their masks to him, and women would blow him kisses as he went by. He was Jokertown's own hero. Because he hid in an armored shell and never showed his face, a lot of jokers assumed he was one of them, and they loved him for it. It was love based on a lie, or at least a misunderstanding, and at times he felt guilty about that, but in those days the jokers had desperately needed one of their own to cheer, so he had let the rumors continue. He never did get around to telling the public that he was really an ace; at some point, he couldn't remember just when, the world had stopped caring who or what might be inside the Turtle's shell.

These days there were seventy or eighty aces in New York alone, maybe as many as a hundred, and he was just the same old Turtle. Jokertown had real joker heroes now: the Oddity,

Troll, Quasiman, the Twisted Sisters, and others, joker-aces who weren't afraid to show their faces to the world. For years, he had felt bad about accepting joker adulation on false premises, but once it was gone he found that he missed it.

Passing over Sara Roosevelt Park, Tom noticed a joker with the head of a goat squatting at the base of the red steel abstraction they'd put up as a monument to those who had died in the Great Jokertown Riot of 1976. The man stared up at the shell with apparent fascination. Maybe he wasn't wholly forgotten after all, Tom thought. He zoomed in to get a good look at his fan. That was when he noticed the thick rope of wet green mucus hanging from the corner of the goat-man's mouth, and the vacancy in those tiny black eyes. A rueful smile twisted across Tom's mouth. He turned on his microphone. "Hey, guy," he announced over his loudspeakers. "You all right down there?" The goat-man worked his mouth silently.

Tom sighed. He reached out with his mind and lifted the joker easily into the air. The goat-man didn't even struggle. Just stared off into the distance, seeing god knows what, while drool ran from his mouth. Tom held him in place under the shell, and sailed off toward South Street.

He deposited the goat-man gently between the worn stone lions that guarded the steps of the Jokertown clinic, and turned up the volume on his speakers. "Tachyon," he said into the microphone, and "TACHYON" boomed out over the street, rattling windows and startling motorists on the FDR Drive. A fierce-looking nurse popped out of the front door and scowled at him. "I've brought one for you," Tom said more softly.

"Who is he?" she asked.

"President of the Turtle Fan Club," Tom said. "How the hell do I know who is he? He needs help, though. Look at him."

The nurse gave the joker a cursory examination, then called for two orderlies who helped the man inside. "Where's Tachyon?" Tom asked.

"At lunch," the nurse said. "He's due back at one-thirty. He's probably at Hairy's."

"Never mind," Tom said. He pushed, and the shell rose straight up into the sky. The expressway, the river, and the rooftops of Jokertown dwindled below him.

Funny thing, but the higher you got, the more beautiful Manhattan looked. The magnificent stone arches of the Brooklyn Bridge, the twisting alleys of Wall Street, Lady Liberty on her island, the ships on the river and ferries on the bay, the soaring towers of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, the vast green-and-white expanse of Central Park; from on high the Turtle surveyed it all. The intricate pattern of the