There was a gunshot, and the receiver bounced off the desk.
"He-he shot-it-himself," said Jones. "I'll be right out," said Tod.
After the cleanup, Tod stood in his office again. It had not been pretty. The canister was still intact. Whatever the accident had been had been with a sample. The other animals were okay. It was only the people. Three were dead outright. One, Thorkeld, had killed himself. Two others he and Jones had had to kill. A seventh person was missing, but had not come out any of the doors or windows.
Tod sat down in his chair and thought a long, long time. Then he reached over and pushed the button on his desk. "Yeah, Doctor?" asked Filmore, stepping into the room with a batch of telegrams and brokerage orders under his arm. Dr. Tod opened the desk safe and began counting out bills. "Filmore. I'd like you to get down to Port Elizabeth, North Carolina, and buy me up five type B -limp balloons. Tell them I'm a car salesman. Arrange for one million cubic feet of helium to be delivered to the south Pennsy warehouse. Break out the hardware and give me a complete list of what we have-anything we need, we can get surplus. Get ahold of Captain Mack, see if he still has that cargo ship. We'll need new passports. Get me Cholley Sacks; I'll need a contact in Switzerland. I'll need a pilot with a lighter-than-air license. Some diving suits and oxygen. Shot ballast, couple of tons. A bombsight. Nautical charts. And bring me a cup of coffee."
"Fred has a lighter-than-air pilot's license," said Filmore. "Those two never cease to amaze me," said Dr. Tod.
"I thought we'd pulled our last caper, boss."
"Filmore," he said, and looked at the man he'd been friends with for twenty years, "Filmore, some capers you have to pull, whether you want to or not."
"Dewey was an Admiral at Manila Bay, Dewey was a candidate just the other day Dewey were her eyes when she said I do; Do we love each other? I should say we dol"
The kids in the courtyard of the apartment jumped rope. They'd started the second they got home from school.
At first it bothered Jetboy. He got up from the typewriter and went to the window. Instead of yelling, he watched. The writing wasn't going well, anyway. What had seemed like just the facts when he'd told them to the G-2 boys during the war looked like bragging on paper, once the words were down:
Three planes, two ME-109s and a TA-152, came out of the clouds at the crippled B-24. It had suffered heavy flak damage. Two props were feathered and the top turret was missing.
One of the 109s went into a shallow dive, probably going into a snap roll to fire up at the underside of the bomber.
I ease my plane in a long turn and fired a deflection shot while about 700 yards away and closing. I saw three hits, then the 109 disintegrated.
The TA-152 had seen me and dived to intercept. As the 109 blew up, I throttled back and hit my air brakes. The 152 flashed by less than 50 yards away. I saw the surprised look on the pilot's face. I fired one burst as he flashed by with my 20mms. Everything from his canopy back flew apart in a shower.
I pulled up. The last 109 was behind the Liberator. He was firing with his machine guns and cannon. He'd taken out the tail gunner, and the belly turret couldn't get enough elevation. The bomber pilot was wigwagging the tail so the waist gunners could get a shot, but only the left waist gun was working.
I was more than a mile away, but had turned above and to the right. I put the nose down and fired one round with the 75mm just before the gunsight ashed across the 109.
The whole middle of the fighter disappeared-I could see France through it. The only image I have is that I was looking down on top of an open umbrella and somebody folded it suddenly. The fighter looked like Christmas-tree tinsel as it fell.
Then the few gunners left on the B-24 opened up on me, not recognizing my plane. I flashed my IFF code, but their receiver must have have been out.
There were two German parachutes far below. The pilots of the first two fighters must have gotten out. I went back to my base.
When they ran maintenance, they found one of my 75mm rounds missing, and only twelve 20mm shells. I'd shot down three enemy planes.
I later learned the B-24 had crashed in the Channel and there were no survivors.
Who needs this stuff? Jetboy thought. The war's over. Does anybody really want to read The Jet-Propelled Boy when it's published? Does anybody except morons even want to read Jetboy Comics anymore?
I don't even think I'm needed. What can I do now? Fight crime? I can see strafing getaway cars full of bank robbers. That would be a real fair fight. Barnstorming? That went out with Hoover, and besides, I don't want to fly again. This year more people will fly on airliners on vacation than have been in the air all together in the last forty-three years, mail pilots, cropdusters, and wars included.
What can I do? Break up a trust? Prosecute wartime profiteers? There's a real dead-end job for you. Punish mean old men who are robbing the state blind running orphanages and starving and beating the kids? You don't need me for that, you need Spanky and Alfalfa and Buckwheat.
"A tisket, a tasket, Hitler's in a casket. Eenie-meenie-Mussolini, Six feet underground!" said the kids outside, now doing double-dutch, two ropes going opposite directions. Kids have too much energy, he thought. They hot-peppered a while, then slowed again.
"Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep,
Where old Hitler lies asleep.
German boys, they tickle his feet,
Down in the dungeon, twelve feet deep!"
Jetboy turned away from the window. Maybe what I need is to go to the movies again.
Since his meeting with Belinda, he'd done nothing much but read, write, and go see movies. Before coming home, the last two movies he'd seen, in a crowded post auditorium in France in late '44, had been a cheesy double bill. That Nazty Nuisance, a United Artists film made in '43, with Bobby Watson as Hitler, and one of Jetboy's favorite character actors, Frank Faylen, had been the better of the two. The other was a PRC hunk of junk, jive junction, starring Dickie Moore, about a bunch of hepcats jitterbugging at the malt shop.
The first thing he'd done after getting his money and finding an apartment, was to find the nearest movie theater, where he'd seen Murder, He Says about a house full of hillbilly weird people, with Fred McMurray and Marjorie Main, and an actor named Porter Hall playing identical twin-brother murderers named Bert and Mert. "Which one's which?" asks McMurray, and Marjorie Main picked up an axe handle and hit one of them in the middle of the back, where he collapsed from the waist up in a distorted caricature of humanity, but stayed on his feet. "That there's Mert," says Main, throwing the axe handle on the woodpile. "He's got a trick back." There was radium and homicide galore, and Jetboy thought it was the funniest movie he had ever seen.
Since then he'd gone to the movies every day, sometimes going to three theaters and seeing from six to eight movies a day. He was adjusting to civilian life, like most soldiers and sailors had, by seeing films.
He had seen Lost Weekend with Ray Milland, and Frank Faylen again, this time as a male nurse in a psycho ward; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; The Thin Man Goes Home, with William Powell at his alcoholic best; Bring on the Girls; It's in the Bag with Fred Allen; Incendiary Blonde; The Story of G.I. Joe (Jetboy had been the subject of one of Pyle's columns back in '43); a horror film called Isle of the Dead with Boris Karloff; a new kind of Italian movie called Open City at an art house; and The Postman Always Rings Twice.
And there were other films, Monogram and PRC and Republic westerns and crime movies, pictures he'd seen in twenty-four-hour nabes, but had forgotten about ten minutes after leaving the theaters. By the lack of star names and the 4-F look of the leading men, they'd been the bottom halves of double bills made during the war, all clocking in at exactly fiftynine minutes running time.