Five weeks later he had been put aboard a ship sailing for Liverpool.

"Le pauvre." A large matronly woman with two small girls at her side stood looking down at the slumped figure on the bench. She rummaged through her purse, and withdrew a coin. It fell with a dull clink into the violin case. Gathering her children to her she moved on, and Tachyon retrieved the coin with two grimy fingers. It wasn't much, but it would buy another bottle of wine, and another night of forgetfulness.

Rising, he packed away the instrument, gathered up his medical bag, and thrust the folded page of newsprint into his shirt. Later, during the night, it would shield him from the cold. He took a few weaving steps, then stumbled to a swaying halt. Juggling the two cases in one hand, he extracted the page, and took a final look at the headline. The cold east wind was back, tugging urgently at the paper. He released it, and it went skirring away. He walked on, not pausing to look back to where it hung, flapping forlornly, against the iron legs of the bench. Cold it might be, but he would trust to the wine to insulate him.

Interlude One

From "Red Aces, Black Years," by Elizabeth H. Crofton, New Republic, May 1977.

From the moment in 1950 when he declared in his famous Wheeling, West Virginia, speech that "… ave here in my hand a list of fifty-seven wild cards known to be living and working secretly in the United States today," there was little doubt that Senator Joseph R. McCarthy had replaced the faceless members of HUAC as the leader of the anti-wild card hysteria that swept across the nation in the early

50s.

Certainly, HUAC could claim credit for discrediting and destroying Archibald Holmes's Exotics for Democracy, the "Four Aces" of the halcyon postwar years and the most visible living symbols of the havoc the wild card virus had wrought upon the nation (to be sure, there were ten jokers for every ace, but like blacks, homosexuals, and freaks, the jokers were invisible men throughout this period, steadfastly ignored by a society that would have preferred they not exist). When the Four Aces fell, many felt the circus had ended. They were wrong. It was just beginning, and Joe McCarthy was its ringmaster.

The hunt for 'Red Aces' that McCarthy instigated and fronted produced no single, spectacular victory to rival HUAC's, but ultimately McCarthy's work affected many more people, and proved lasting where HUAC's triumph had been ephemeral. The Senate Committee on Ace Resources and Endeavors (SCARE) was birthed in 1952 as the forum for McCarthy's ace-hunts, but ultimately became a permanent part of the Senate's committee structure. In time SCARE, like HUAC, would become a mere ghost of its former self, and decades later, under the chairmanship of men like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph Montoya, and Gregg Hartmann, it would evolve into an entirely different sort of legislative animal, but McCarthy's SCARE was everything its acronym implied. Between 1952 and 1956, more than two hundred men and women were served with subpoenas by SCARE, often on no more substantial grounds than reports by anonymous informants that they had on some occasion displayed wild card powers.

It was a true modern witch-hunt, and like their spiritual ancestors at Salem, those hauled before TailGunner Joe for the non-crime of being an ace had a hard time proving their innocence. How do you prove that you can't 8y? None of SCARE's victims ever answered that question satisfactorily. And the blacklist was always waiting for those whose testimony was considered unsatisfactory.

The most tragic fates were suffered by those who actually were wild card victims, and admitted their ace powers openly before the committee. Of those cases, none was more poignant than that of Timothy Wiggins, or "Mr. Rainbow," as he was billed when performing. "If I'm an ace, I'd hate to see a deuce," Wiggins told McCarthy when summoned in 1953, and from that moment onward "deuce" entered the language as the term for an ace whose wild card powers are trivial or useless. Such was certainly the case with Wiggins, a plump, nearsighted, forty-eight-year-old entertainer whose wild card power, the ability to change the color of his skin, had propelled him to the dizzy heights of second billing in the smaller Catskill resort hotels, where his act consisted of strumming a ukulele and singing wobbly falsetto versions of songs like "Red, Red Robin,"

"Yellow Rose of Texas," and "Wild Card Blues," accompanying each rendition with appropriate color changes. Ace or deuce, Mr. Rainbow received no mercy from McCarthy or SCARE. Blacklisted and unable to secure bookings, Wiggins hanged himself in his daughter's Bronx apartment less than fourteen months after his testimony.

Other victims saw their lives blighted and destroyed in only slightly less dramatic ways: they lost jobs and careers to the blacklist, lost friends and spouses, inevitably lost custody of their children in the all-too-frequent divorces. At least twenty-two aces were uncovered during SCARE's investigatory heyday (McCarthy himself often claimed credit for having "exposed" twice that many, but included in his totals numerous cases where the accused's "powers" were established only by hearsay and circumstantial evidence, without a shred of actual documentation), including such dangerous criminals as a Queens housewife who levitated when asleep, a longshoreman who could plunge his hand into a bathtub and bring the water to a boil in just under seven minutes, an amphibious Philadelphia schoolteacher (she kept her gills concealed beneath her clothing, until the day she unwisely gave herself away by saving a drowning child), and even a potbellied Italian greengrocer who displayed an astonishing ability to grow hair at will.

Shuffling through so many wild cards, SCARE inevitably turned up some genuine aces among the deuces, including Lawrence Hague, the telepathic stockbroker whose confession triggered a panic on Wall Street, and the so-called "panther woman" of Weehawken whose metamorphosis before the newsreel cameras horrified theatergoers from coast to coast. Even that paled beside the case of the mystery man apprehended while looting New York's diamond center, his pockets bulging with gemstones and amphetamines. This unknown ace displayed reflexes four times as fast as those of a normal man, as well as astonishing strength and a seeming immunity to handgun fire. After flinging a police car the length of the block and hospitalizing a dozen policemen, he was finally subdued with tear gas. SCARE immediately issued a subpoena, but the unidentified man lapsed into a deep, comalike sleep before he could take the stand. To McCarthy's disgust, the man could not be roused-until the day, eight months later, when his specially reinforced maximum-security cell was suddenly and mysteriously found empty. A startled trusty swore that he had seen the man walk through the wall, but the description he gave did not match that of the vanished prisoner.

McCarthy's most lasting achievement, if it may be termed an achievement, came with the passage of the socalled "Wild Card Acts." The Exotic Powers Control Act, enacted in 1954, was the first. It required any person exhibiting wild card powers to register immediately with the federal government; failure to register was punishable by prison terms of up to ten years. This was followed by the Special Conscription Act, granting the Selective Service Bureau the power to induct registered aces into government service for indefinite terms of service. Rumors persist that a number of aces, complying with the new laws, were indeed inducted into (variously) the Army, the FBI, and the Secret Service during the late fifties, but if true the agencies employing their services kept the names, powers, and very existence of these operatives a closely held secret.