Mark took a breath. “I’ll have to think about it.”

Sobel’s mouth tightened. He was not a man accustomed to being put off. He relaxed with a visible effort.

“All right. Hell, I understand. You know this isn’t the kind of commitment to be entered into lightly. I respect that.”

He rose. “I’ll be in town for a day or two yet. If you come to a decision” – he pointed with his head – “the boys at the bar know where to find me.

“But just remember, if you’re serious about helping the cause of the wild cards, not just here but around the world, this is your best shot at it. Gentlemen.”

He nodded to Whitelaw and walked away. He paused to speak to Brew and Luce and the others and left the bar.

“Bloody hell,” Whitelaw said. He signaled Rick for another gin.

“So, like, what do you think?” Mark asked. Brew and Luce were looking at him appraisingly, and without any real obvious friendliness.

“It’s not my decision, cobber,” Whitelaw said.

“I know that, man. But I could use, like, some perspective.”

Rick arrived with a tray bearing a gin and another Tashkent melon drink. He set the glasses down and left without speaking. Whitelaw sighed.

“Fair enough, mate, fair e-bloody-nough. Turning down our friend the colonel is not a decision to be taken lightly either; as I think I mentioned, he and Colonel Vo of the not-so-secret police are thick as thieves. And you’ve been rattling around Saigon – sod a bunch of giai phong – for days now trying to get the government to give you something to do for your fellow wild cards. Well, old son, I think you can regard this as a clear and unambiguous signal of what it is the government has in mind for you to do.”

“Which means -”

“You’ve got damn-all of a chance they’ll give you any kind of Cholon Jokertown Clinic, unless you can convince the American government to pony up some serious loot – unlikely in view of President Bush’s avid desire to bestow a hundred billion dollars to keep Comrade Gorbachev the Tsar of All the Russias, not to mention your own status as a federal fugitive.”

“So you think -”

“I think you’d be bloody daft to go marching off with Colonel Up-the-Revolution Sobel and his merry men. On the other hand, I can’t say it would be right sane to tell him to piss off, either.”

He leaned his thick forearms on the table. “If that strikes you as ambiguous, lad, then welcome to the real world.”

Whitelaw’s flat was in a gerrymandered old French villa in a rundown part of Saigon giai phong, not that Mark had yet found any parts that weren’t. Mark was wandering in the general vicinity and the rain, with a newspaper held over his head. A procession of ancient black Chevies, huge and bulbous, cruised solemnly by. Mark caught a glimpse of a timidly lovely woman in Western bridal white in the back of one.

He was having what you call your crisis of conscience.

If Starshine had still been alive, Mark would have said yes to Sobel in a second. Starshine had constantly been after Mark to use his skills in the service of social justice and had taken whatever opportunities he got to crusade against a world of ills. Mark had of course begun the whole psychochemical quest in order to become a fighter for the good, to walk once again the path of the Radical. But once he’d succeeded, if not exactly the way he wanted to, once his “friends” had started to manifest themselves, he had found it wasn’t quite that simple to save the world. Much of the world didn’t really want to be saved, and it was hard to bull your way in there and save it anyway without lots of the wrong people getting hurt – nor was Mark, the Last Hippie, comfortable with the notion that there were right people to hurt. And Starshine had proven, by his occasional one-hour flyers at stamping out injustice, that there wasn’t necessarily all that much even the most powerful meta-human could do.

By himself, anyway.

The crusading part of Mark was gone, now, though, the tough-love part determined to save the world despite itself So Mark had thought. Yet Sobel’s words had struck something within the soul of him and made it ring like a great brass bell.

An iron core of stupidity is more like it, Jumpin’ Jack Flash told him.

He shook his head, which caused the paper to buckle, dumping a load of water stained black by printer’s ink down the back of his neck. Sobel was right in a lot of ways. The world was turning savage toward the wild cards, anyone could see that. Mark’s own flight, across space and across the Earth’s own tortured surface, was proof of that.

But Mark couldn’t help remembering – with a little help from his friends – words of old songs, words about money for people with minds that hate, and how revolution was just power changing hands. Did he really want to buy into everything Sobel was saying? Wasn’t there some other way to help the wild cards?

About then he looked down the street to see a man walking toward him. A stocky man who, while much shorter than Mark, stood tall among the Vietnamese pedestrians. A man with a dark-blue polymer rain jacket around his square shoulders and a New York Yankees cap on his square head, shedding the rain from his fine waxed seal-brown mustache.

A man Mark Meadows recognized as Randall Bullock.

Mark wasn’t carrying his vials of powder, but he had much the longer legs. He turned and made good use of them.

Two hours later he was huddled in the back of a venerable American deuce-and-a-half with a half-dozen damp and apprehensive jokers, listening to the monsoon beat on canvas as the truck ground north toward Fort Venceremos, the Joker Brigade’s stronghold at the base of the Central Highlands.

Chapter Twenty-two

This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.

Mark Meadows sighed, dug the point of his shovel into red clay still slimy from the rain that was giving them a brief respite, and leaned on the handle.

Quit your bitching, Jumpin’ Jack Flash said in his mind. You make a pretty ridiculous Oliver Hardy, Trav. It’s not like we’re doing the actual digging.

It’s our body becoming unduly exhausted, our body being callously abused, the familiar and seldom-welcome voice of Cosmic Traveler persisted. Look at your hands, man. They’re a mass of blisters.

I can heal them. It was Moonchild, her thought-stream cool and soothing as the waters of a stream. It is my power to heal us.

Yeah? Traveler thought savagely. God knows what kind of horrible infections there are in this cesspool. You can heal wounds, you addled Asian bimbo. You aren’t Ms. Immune System…

“For God’s sake,” Mark said aloud, “will all of you just shut up?” From the furthest recesses of his mind he could detect the formless surge and mutter of Aquarius. He was lost in his dolphin-dreaming again, which was fine with Mark: Aquarius would disapprove of what he was doing now, on the grounds that he disapproved of everything landlings did. At least Mark didn’t have to hear about it.

Starshine, on the other hand, would have unleashed a tirade about the inherent nobility of manual labor and damned them all as spoiled materialists; for once Mark would have welcomed his bombast as he raked the Traveler roundly over the coals… he felt an emptiness within, a sense of teetering on the edge of some abyss. It was a mystery to him, and no less to the mind doctors of Takis with their accumulated millennia of lore and experience, how he could have survived the violent death of one of his “friends.” He had the feeling, when he permitted himself to dwell on it, of living on borrowed time, living within his own bubble of virtual reality that might contract back to nothingness at any moment, taking him – or at least his mind – with it.

– A hot drop of rain struck him on the cheek. Well, he hadn’t done a black-hole dive over the event horizon just yet. The others attacking the earth with pick and shovel and filling sandbags with the excavated soil were all jokers and had yet to speak a word to him, civil or otherwise. The way they were eyeing him now suggested they didn’t appreciate him taking a break with most of the bunker left to dig and the monsoon rain about to squat on them again.