The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun (7 page)

Marshall suddenly realized what he had let himself in for. “Oh, for chrissakes, no,” and then saw the hurt look of Julian at the rebuff and switched quickly, saying, “All right, all right, so you’re my kid brother.”

Julian felt a sudden strange thrill in the vicinity of his breastbone, warm and satisfying, going on inside him and recognized it as something that occasionally happened to him when he was happy or pleased. He looked up at the man next to him and was comforted by the mantle of Marshall’s protection and his last words repeated themselves delightfully in Julian’s mind.
All right, all right, so you’re my kid brother.
As an only child, Julian had often longed for a brother as a confidant. With a big brother such as this one could dare anything. And now his scrutiny was beginning to yield some clues. Julian asked, “Were you in Vietnam?”

Marshall shook his head in negation and a curious expression came over his handsome face which Julian was unable to interpret. “What makes you think so?”

Marshall had removed his khaki jacket and it lay across his lap. Julian pointed to it.

Marshall grimaced and said, “Army and Navy Surplus Store. I bought it.”

“Oh, no you didn’t.”

“What do you mean I didn’t?”

Julian pointed to the battle jacket which now folded inside out showed Marshall’s name followed by “SGT.”

Marshall was irritated. Behind those spectacles the kid had eyes. He was going to be even more of a nuisance than Marshall had foreseen. “Smart guy, aren’t you? Forget it, will ya, kid.”

Julian was not going to be put off. If his new found brother was going to turn out to be a hero he wanted to know about it. He asked, “What were you? Does SGT mean sergeant?” He indicated the jacket once more. “You’ve taken off all the—”

Marshall turned upon him angrily. “Oh, for chrissakes, I said forget it, didn’t I? That’s ancient history. Couple of years ago. So I came out of school. So they grabbed me. So I went. So I came out. Any more questions?”

Julian was not too upset by this sudden attack for he had learned that words, even shouted ones, cannot hurt a child too much. If he had been born into a prior generation he might have chanted, “Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” Adults were recognized as being wasteful of words, repetitive and only half meaning what they spoke. And so he replied, “No, sir.” And then immediately after inquired, “What are you doing n-n-now?”

Marshall was forced to repress a smile. Kids
were
funny and hard to beat. He replied, “What do you think? Looking for a score. Make me some bread.”

Julian asked, “What d-d-do you do?”

Marshall laughed. “What do you want done? You name it. I’m lousy at it. If something’s busted I can either fix it or fix it so nobody else can fix it.”

Julian laughed politely at the old joke.

Marshall said, “Okay, now I’ll ask you one. That was a lot of crap, wasn’t it, about your old man? I mean him not caring about you?”

The question drew back a curtain and allowed Julian a glimpse which, in the flash of time in which a thought takes place, opened the whole vista of his life at home, part fact, part fantasy, and with this came the memory of his perpetual pain, sometimes only surface but mostly buried deep, in knowing that his father was disappointed in him. Julian quickly pulled the curtain shut again and merely shook his head in negation. It was not a lot of crap but what was the point in trying to tell.

C H A P T E R
6

I
n the San Diego Police Headquarters and the office of a Lieutenant King, the sergeant who acted as his secretary was holding a telephone receiver delicately between thumb and forefinger. Enraged sounds were emerging from it.

The sergeant said, “You’d better handle this, lieutenant. And maybe you ought to hold this thing with tongs. Guy named West. He’s boiling.”

The lieutenant picked up his extension. “Lieutenant King speaking . . . yes, yes . . . who? . . . Mr. West? Aldrin West? . . . Yes, yes, sure Mr. West, I know who you are . . . about your boy . . . what? . . . Nineteen and a half . . . but . . . hang on a sec, sir.”

He covered the mouthpiece with a palm and said, “Oh, brother, somebody boobed! Phil, let’s see those last alarms that went out. There ought to be one on the West kid.”

The sergeant shuffled through a sheaf of papers, and said, “Here it is. Runaway. The alarm went out this morning. Why? What’s the matter?”

The lieutenant took one glance at the sheet, murmured, “Oh Christ,” and then spoke into the telephone, “I’m sorry, Mr. West, you’re right. I’m afraid we’ve goofed. We’ll send out a correction immediately . . . Yes, sir, we’ll keep you informed. I’ll be giving it my personal attention.”

He hung up the receiver and said to the sergeant, “That lame brain Cassidy sent out the wrong age on that runaway West kid. Nineteen and a half. He’s only nine and a half.”

The sergeant said, “It ain’t Cassidy. It’s that goddamn teleprinter. It’s always doing that. It ought to be fixed.”

The lieutenant said testily, “I don’t care who did what. Put out a correction and get it right.”

Julian was happy. Travelling by bus was like finding oneself watching two movies simultaneously. There was the one flashing by endlessly outside the window and always changing and the other inside the bus, all the people and what they were doing, the music from the strange instrument and people visiting and making friends. The tires sang their whining song as they rolled through the wild, tumbled Arizona landscape, tortured into mesas, dry arroyos, sudden rock formations like cathedrals, and deep ravines. Marshall was deeply engrossed in his book.

Towards the front of the bus, Fate, the eternal playwright, was preparing the first of the dramas it had decided to weave about the small boy with the red hair, the steel spectacles and the stammer.

The plot, neatly worked out, surrounded the man with the false passport who was Nikolas Allon, the Russian KGB intelligence agent, and Colonel John Sisson. Allon was worried and upset. The moment for which he had been planted twelve years before in the United States to assume a false identity had come. He had had his instructions and through a moment of bad luck which had led to an attack of nerves he had failed. He had blown two chances at the colonel’s briefcase and was certain that there would not be a third and yet he dared not fail or return to his superiors without some results. A change of plan was called for.

The colonel was equally frustrated. Everything that had been so carefully worked out and set up, all his instructions on how to carry the plan out, had gone wrong. Unless he could improvise or in some way bring about what was wanted he was in for a record-breaking chewing-out back in Washington. He put his briefcase on his lap, took out one of the blueprints therefrom, extracted a pencil from his pocket and for want of a better idea at the moment, began to work over it, aware that he was partly visible to Allon in the driver’s central rear vision mirror.

The seat next to Colonel Sisson, who was by the window, was empty. So was the one in front, but the back cut off the colonel just below the shoulders. However, by the movement of the colonel’s arm Allon was able to see and reconstruct that he was working on one of the blueprints in which Allon was vitally interested. He therefore prepared to put into operation a second gambit, the first having failed. To do this he had to reach up into the rack over his head, take down his small satchel, open it, search inside it and make certain preparations which took several minutes. This done he closed his satchel, replaced it in the rack and sat back to await his opportunity. In so doing he had missed the entrance of one of the principal, though wholly unexpected, members of the cast of the play. Julian had come strolling up the aisle and, standing by the empty seat next to Sisson, had queried timidly, “Sir, c-c-could I ask you something?”

Sisson, looking up and seeing an eager-faced small boy, had replied, “What? Oh sure, sonny, sit down.”

As Julian did so, the colonel quietly removed the diagram marked
TOP SECRET
on which he had been working and slipped it back into his briefcase.

Allon, glancing once more into the rear vision mirror, saw only what he had seen before since the height of the seat covered Julian. The racket inside the bus effectively covered conversation. As far as Allon was concerned the colonel was still doing exactly what he had been before.

The colonel queried, “Now. What’s on your mind?”

Julian said, “It’s about my Bubble Gun invention, sir. Marshall said that you . . .”

“Your Bubble Gun invention?” The colonel was startled because he had not expected to be tackled on a subject connected with his own department—hardware. And then he added, “Who is Marshall?”

Julian nodded with his head in the direction of the rear of the bus. “He’s my—my friend back there. He said you’d know all about guns.”

Again the colonel was startled, for his nerves were not all they should have been. “Oh, he did, did he? How—?” Then, reflecting for a moment, he remembered the ruse of his papers scattered all over the floor. “Oh, yes, of course. Stupid of me. Well, what about your invention?”

Julian said, “S-s-something d-d-doesn’t work right. Can I show it to you?” And he had the diagram half out of his pocket.

“Sure,” said the colonel. “Let’s have a look.” He took the drawing and spread it out upon the flat of his briefcase. In an instant his practiced eye took it in and a smile touched the corners of his mouth but it was not one of derision—rather, of interest with even a tinge of admiration.

He asked, “You dreamed this up all by yourelf?”

“Y-y-yes sir, b-b-but there’s a problem.”

“What is it?” the colonel asked. “Looks all right to me.” And he examined the sheet more carefully as Julian explained and then the colonel reached into his pocket for a pencil.

Allon stole another glimpse into the rear-vision mirror and the movements of the colonel’s shoulders and the angle of his head told him that his quarry was still working on a diagram.

Over the loudspeaker the bus driver announced, “We’ll be in Tucson in twenty minutes, folks.”

Allon had an accomplice in Tucson, another in El Paso and a third in Dallas, but the farther away the bus moved from the Mexican border the more difficult became the assignment. The time to move was now. He would have preferred the entire contents of the briefcase which were known to the KGB as details of a new type of weapon, but failing that, one clear picture of a diagram or blueprint of a significant part and the ordnance experts in the Russian army would be able to reconstruct the rest. The moment was at hand.

Too, conditions were right. The bus was barrelling along at some sixty-five miles per hour on a not too perfect piece of roadbed that caused an occasional bump or sway. One would not be able to walk too easily down the aisle to the lavatory without clutching from time to time quite naturally at the sides of the seats to steady oneself.

The Russian interest in what the colonel was carrying was such that they had been prepared to risk the hullabaloo that the stealing of the entire briefcase would set off. The other alternative was to secure a facsimile of one or more of the diagrams without the Americans being aware that this had been done. Allon knew that if he accomplished the latter now, there would certainly be a decoration ceremony at the Kremlin, possibly even the Order of Lenin.

And now that the time had come even his years of training could not overcome the onslaught of nerves that assailed him as he made his final preparations. Sweat poured from his armpits and began to bead his brow and most embarrassing was that it made the palms of his hands slippery. He wiped them dry carefully several times on a handkerchief.

At the rear of the bus Marshall had put his book down and had seen Julian speak to the colonel and then slip into the seat beside the man and he thought to himself,
Kids! They can get away with anything. They just go barging in and because they are young and innocent looking or have freckles or red hair they get away with it.
And then, with an inward smile, he wondered to himself what would be the reaction of an army ordnance bigshot when confronted with a gat that purported to shoot soap bubbles instead of bullets.

The smile died away as something niggled at Marshall. What the hell kind of colonel was that who spilt blueprints and diagrams marked
TOP SECRET
all over the floor of a public conveyance? Memories of the past came crowding in rapidly before he could shut them out again but they remained long enough to remind him that the higher the rank, the greater the quota of imbeciles. He wondered how Julian would make out. If the colonel was busy he would probably be sent packing.

From his viewpoint Marshall saw an unobtrusive little man several seats ahead of the colonel get up and prepare for a march down the aisle of the swaying bus, or rather he did not really see but was merely aware of him for he was not interested in the movements of other passengers as he was in what the colonel’s reaction would be to Julian’s diagram.

The colonel was saying, “You invented that? Ingenious. And you say the problem is . . . wait a minute. I think it’s a matter of the ratio of distance, isn’t it?”

“Sir?” said Julian.

Colonel Sisson studied the diagram for a moment with intent concentration, and then, tracing with his pencil, said, “Well, see here now, take your figure six, the rubber air bag. You’ve got it too close to the muzzle, I’d say. You’ve got your soapy solution hose okay and there’d be a buildup at the muzzle so when you first pull the trigger you might get some nice good sized bubbles, but your connection from the rubber air bag and the air nozzle is too short for you to get a buildup for the next, so when you squeeze the trigger you’d be getting that whole stream of little ones,” and then he added, “Did you ever try to make a working model?”

Julian nodded his head in assent and his hand stole to his right-hand pocket and yet he hesitated for if he had made a serious mistake with the gun he was ashamed to let the colonel see it. But Sisson had not noticed, having become fascinated with the simplicity of the gadget. He sketched lightly over the diagram with his pencil, saying, “Move the rubber air bag back to here, shorten your trigger action and lengthen your air hose.”