The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun (2 page)

Frank Marshall, with his square jaw, good brow, crisp curly brown hair and piercingly clear blue eyes, looked like a movie actor or the cartoonists’ version of the All-American Boy except for the sardonic curl to his lips which, in repose, were the weakest part of his features. He was clad in khaki trousers, a checked shirt and a khaki garment which any army man would have recognized as a one-time battle jacket except that all insignia—ribbons, rank, shoulder patches, collar badges—had been removed.

The twist to Marshall’s mouth was partially self-mockery. He looked out upon the world with half-humorous derision. He was not bitter or bugged by what had happened to him, the violent alteration of his life. When he had returned from Vietnam fourteen months previously with something of a bankroll, he had been lucky in the crap games and he had thought it would be to pie in the sky, adulation, welcome and a job. Four months later had been when he had removed the insignia which proclaimed him, as he was finding out, not a hero but a sucker. Vietnam? Nobody wanted to know. He could not remove the scar that ran from his left wrist to above his elbow, gashed by a Punji stick, but that did not show beneath his sleeve. As for jobs for veterans, that was a laugh. The West coast was in a slump, his capital was depleted. Maybe he could do better in the East. He knew a couple of fellows in Washington. It was too late to go back to school. He was twenty-five. He needed a break or a stake of some kind.

With some time to kill he sauntered over to the news-stand and thumbed over the supply of magazines and paperbacks.

A man by the name of Clyde Gresham was standing next to him watching him furtively out of the corner of his eyes. Gresham was soft. Softness was in every part of him. The shape of his mouth and rounded chin, the texture of his skin and the liquidity of the dark, moist eyes and the fondness that could come into their gaze. He was elegantly overdressed in loose summer clothes, négligée shirt with oversize collar and Givenchy tie, all in pastel colours to match a fawn lightweight suit. He carried his Panama hat to show thinning grey hair, silky in texture, brushed straight back from, his forehead. His hands were beautifully manicured but pudgy and somewhat shapeless.

When Marshall, fingering down an Agatha Christie from the rack, turned towards him, Gresham said with a warm smile, “Going far?”

Marshall examined Gresham fleetingly and got it in one. His cold eyes lingered on Gresham for no longer than another instant before he turned, without replying, made his purchase and walked away. Gresham remained standing there watching him go with a rather sad expression on his face.

The hands of the clock moved so slowly that Julian got up and wandered over to the coin-operated machine next to the drugstore, one of those movable cranes in a glass case with various valuable prizes embedded in a morass of jelly beans. The deposit of a coin activated the crane, which the player manipulated from without in hopes of getting the loose forks of the crane to latch on to a camera, radio or cigarette lighter. There were two people standing outside the drugstore not far from the machine and talking in whispers, a boy and a girl, but Julian paid them no mind. They were of high school age and hence inhabited an entirely different world from his. They stopped their whispering as Julian paused in front of the machine eyeing it. The push-in money slot called for a two-bit piece. Julian had some loose change in his pocket extracted from his tin box savings bank with the combination lock. Twenty-five cents was a stiff tariff, but the articles to be hooked were valuable and there was a camera that Julian immediately coveted.

He had his money already in his fingers when he examined the affair more closely and his inquiring mechanical mind looked it over and presented him almost at once with the sixty-four-dollar question. Why buried in all those jelly beans? Drag. Weight and surface. That was the catch against which the crane would have to pull. And all the prizes had either squared or rounded corners, nothing on which the forks of the crane could get a solid grip. Julian put the coin back into his pocket and turned away, grinning at the two high school students as he did so, but they did not smile back. When he had wandered back to his bench, the girl, whose name was Marge, whispered, “Oh, Bill, do you think he knew? I feel as though everybody is looking at us.”

Bill said, “Aw, don’t be silly. He was only a kid.”

Marge said, “I know, but I can’t help it. I’m frightened. I feel as though people could look right through me and know.”

The boy was frightened too, but wasn’t going to let on, or rather, he was nervous, worried and insecure, a virgin himself, as was she, about to explore the mystery which would make of him a man as all the others seemed to be.

Bill said, “Don’t be scared, Marge. Look, I had an idea.” He reached into his pocket and fished out a Woolworth’s wedding ring. “I thought maybe you might—see, I got this. Here, put it on.”

Marge took it and thrust it on to her finger. Bill said, “There you are. Nobody’ll think anything now.” She looked up into his face gratefully.

But they were not eloping. They were only slipping out of town to end the tensions that had developed through their liking one another and going together, but for them the step was more as an act of conformation. All the other kids of their age group, the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, had slept with someone or seemed to have, and talked and whispered and giggled in the locker rooms putting up a kind of barrier that, under the constant sexual pressures of the times, seemed to have become unendurable.

Marge was plain in the sense that she was no startlingly great beauty, but she had a sweetness of expression, trusting eyes, gentleness and a downfall of fine, soft chestnut hair. She was sixteen. Bill, a year older, was loosely put together, tall, with the big hands and speed that won him his position of wide end on the San Diego High football team. The coach of the team was an old square left over from his day in the bygone thirties who preached that sex was weakening and therefore you kept yourself and your energies for the game. Elsewhere Bill was assailed by sex, sex, sex and a certain shame that at his age he had not yet participated. Also, since he and Marge both came from fairly well-to-do middle-class homes, opportunity had been a problem. The adventure upon which they were embarked was filled with excitement tempered by apprehension.

Back on his bench Julian watched the woman with the brood of seven counting her luggage and her children for the fifth time. The baggage checked but the kids were one short, for she stopped at the sixth finger, looked wildly about and yelled, “Johnny, where are you?” She spotted him with his nose pressed to the window of the candy shop. “Johnny, you come back here at once.”

Johnny, a grubby boy of eleven, slouched sulkily back to the fold. Julian wondered what it would be like to have that many brothers and sisters. He had none.

A foreign-looking man, olive skinned, dark, with thick black hair passed by carrying an intriguing and extraordinarily shaped instrument case. Julian could only wonder what was inside it.

Next his attention was attracted to the man sitting diagonally opposite him beside a fat and perspiring woman. A black flat briefcase obviously belonging to the man was between them and at this point Julian became witness to an international plot going awry. He had naturally no knowledge that the coming incident constituted a fiasco and, of course, no participation in it. The latter was only to come later.

The name of the man with the briefcase was John Sisson, a full colonel in the United States Army Ordnance temporarily attached to Military Intelligence in liaison with the CIA. He was clad in civilian clothes of lightweight seersucker which could not conceal his soldierly bearing. Tall, his short-cut hair greying, he had the stamp of authority and command. The lines about his eyes and firm mouth did not detract from what appeared to be a pleasant personality. One could not look at him without knowing that he was “somebody”.

The drama got underway with the loudspeaker bawling, “Attention please. Calling Colonel Sisson. Colonel John Sisson, please. Will Colonel Sisson please come to the Dispatcher’s Office. Repeat. Will Colonel Sisson please come to the Dispatchers Office.”

The colonel waited until the repeat before he arose and hurried off in the direction where the terminal offices seemed to be. In his rush he forgot his briefcase, which remained on the bench where he had been sitting.

And now the action speeded up. A man whose false passport proclaimed him as being one Philip Barber, born in Waukegan, Illinois, and whose other equally false papers identified him as a plywood salesman, arose from behind a newspaper from whence he had been watching the colonel. His real name was Nikolas Allon and he was a Russian spy connected with the KGB, a sleeper planted twelve years before in the United States for just this one moment. He was small, unobtrusive, nondescript with the toothbrush moustache of the travelling salesman, the type no one would look at twice, one of the faceless who pass by. He was moving not too quickly, not too slowly in a line towards the vacated bench, when the fat woman noticed the briefcase next to her and looked up at the back of the retreating colonel. She arose, picked it up and hurried after him calling “Mister, hey Mister, you forgot something.” She was already ten feet away in pursuit of the colonel when Nikolas Allon arrived where the colonel had sat. To have picked up the abandoned article saying, “Sorry, I left my briefcase here,” to have walked off with it would have been one thing. To have initiated an incident now by snatching it from the fat woman and running was unthinkable in terms of the entire operation. Nikolas Allon just kept on going.

Julian watched the fat woman catch up with the colonel and thought, “Haw! Grownups! Oh, boy, if I forgot my school satchel like that.”

The colonel, checked momentarily by the fat woman’s cries, hesitated, and was lost. Puffing and panting she caught him by the sleeve. “Mister, Mister, you forgot your briefcase.”

The colonel since he came from Louisiana, turned and accepted it with Southern grace. “Why, thank you, ma’am. That’s mighty thoughtful of you.”

The fat woman toddled off. The colonel, clutching his briefcase, turned away. Nobody saw the black look of baffled rage come over his face or heard him grate to himself, “Goddamn effing busybody bitch!”

The episode over, Julian now reached into his pocket and pulled out a page torn from a popular science magazine, smoothed it out and examined briefly an article headlined
ANYONE CAN PATENT AN INVENTION.
Suddenly he became aware of a bustle and looking up at the ticket window saw that the ticket seller had arrived behind it and was arranging his gear preparatory to opening. There was a general surge in the direction of the window. Julian put away his article, got up and made for it.

C H A P T E R
2

J
ulian had to detour, for the special policeman was on one of his rounds and heading in the direction of the news-stand on the other side of the terminal and, now that actual departure was becoming imminent, Julian was even more undesirous of attracting attention. When he reached the ticket window there was already a line, several of them people he had noted before.

The two high school kids were at its head and then the colonel with his briefcase and the man with the toothbrush moustache, the dark foreigner with the strange instrument case and two unidentified passengers. Julian got behind them and back of him the queue lengthened, including Frank Marshall, Clyde Gresham and a dozen or so others.

The ticket seller queried Marge and Bill, “Where to?”

Bill gave Marge a look of sudden panic, of which she was unaware. The phony wedding ring had given her confidence, but Bill, now faced with ultimate decision, had lost his cool. He was momentarily unable to reply.

The ticket seller said sarcastically, “Any time. We got all morning.”

Bill looked at Marge for help but only found an expression of trust as she said, “You say.”

Bill gulped and made his decision. “Two. El Paso. Round trip.” The ticket seller repeated the order, stamped and handed out the tickets. Bill paid.

Colonel Sisson appeared next at the window. He said, “Washington, one way, please.”

The ticket seller droned, “Washington, one way.”

As the colonel put down his briefcase on the floor for a second to reach for his wallet, Allon, directly behind him, twitched, momentarily so close to giving way to his impulse, that he broke into a cold sweat. He could have bent down, whipped up the case and been away in seconds, yet in time he realized that a hue and cry was not part of his assignment. At the ticket window he had recovered sufficiently, once the colonel had departed, to say, “Washington, please. One way.”

And then there occurred an incident which basically did not either surprise or discomfort Julian since he was used to grownups overwhelming or pushing kids about and accepted this as a fact of life. The cowpuncher in the filthy dungarees and stained jacket who suddenly appeared out of nowhere and thrust himself in front of Julian did not worry him except that the man smelled bad and Julian was used to clean things. But what happened immediately afterwards was strange and exciting.

Frank Marshall, three passengers back, saw the action of Sam Wilks and it irritated him. He stepped out of line, strolled forward, picked up Julian by the elbows and set him down in front of Wilks.

Confused and bewildered by what was happening, Julian looked up to see a young, tall, handsome man, with the strangest, brightest blue eyes ever, confronting the filthy, ugly-visaged cowboy. A veteran of television conditioning, Julian knew that here it was, in real life, a confrontation between a baddie and a goodie. What would happen?

The goodie had the sweetest smile upon his face, behind which Julian was unable to read the slight hint of derision and challenge, but there was no mistaking the anger and truculence on the face of the baddie, though Julian had no inkling of the man’s rising gorge or how dangerously near he was to a fatal explosion. But the bulk of the special policeman now suddenly appeared within corner-of-eye-sight and the fury went out of the baddie’s face, his lips mouthed something unheard and he became utterly impassive and accepted what had happened.