Read Online Wild Cards V by George R. R. Martin - Free Book Online

wires, Joey, not circuit boards, twenty-year-old wires. Obsolete cameras with limited tracking capabilities, blind spots, black-and-white sets, vacuum tubes, a fucking gas heater, the worst ventilation system you’ve ever seen. How I got it over to Jokertown back in September I still don’t know, but I was in shock from the crash or I never could have tried such a fucking moronic thing. So many of the tubes burned out that I was flying half-blind before I got back.”
    â€œWe can fix all that stuff.”
    â€œForget it,” Tom said with more vehemence than he knew was in him. “Those shells of mine, they’re like some kind of symbol for my whole fucking life. I’m standing here thinking about it, and it makes me sick. All the money I’ve put into them, all the hours, the work. If I’d put that kind of effort into my real life, I could be somebody. Look at me, Joey. I’m forty-three years old, I live alone, I own a house and an abandoned junkyard, both of them mortgaged up to the hilt. I work a forty-hour week selling VCRs and computers, and I’ve managed to buy a third of the business, only now the business isn’t doing so great, ha ha, big joke on me. That woman in the bank today was ten years younger than me, and she probably makes three times my salary. Cute too, no wedding ring, the secretary said Miss Trent, maybe I would’ve liked to ask her out, but you know what? I looked into her eyes, and I could see her feeling sorry for me.”
    â€œSome dumb cunt looks down at you, that’s no reason to get bent out of shape,” Joey said.
    â€œNo,” Tom said. “She’s right. I’m better than I looked to her, but there’s no way she could have known that. I’ve put the best part of myself into being the Turtle. The Astronomer and his goons almost killed me. Fuck it, Joey, they dropped napalm on my shell, and one of them made me so sick I blacked out. I could have died.”
    â€œYou didn’t.”
    â€œI was lucky,” Tom said with fervor. “ Damn lucky. I was strapped into that motherfucker, every one of my instruments dead, with the whole fucking thing, all umpteen tons of it, headed straight for the bottom of the river. Even if I’d been conscious, which I wasn’t, there would have been no way to get to the hatch and open it manually before I drowned. That’s assuming I could even find the hatch with all the fucking lights out and the shell filling up with water!”
    â€œI thought you didn’t remember this shit,” Joey said.
    â€œI don’t,” said Tom. He massaged his temples. “Not consciously. Sometimes I have these dreams … fuck it, never mind about that, the point is, I was a dead man. Only I got lucky, incredibly lucky, something blew the goddamned shell apart, blew me right out without killing me, and I managed to make it to the surface. Otherwise I’d be down in a steel tomb on the bottom of the Hudson, with eels slithering in and out of my eyes.”
    â€œSo?” Joey said. “You’re not, are you?”
    â€œWhat about next time?” Tom demanded. “I been breaking my back trying to figure some way to finance a new shell. Sell my share of the business, I thought, or maybe sell the house and move into some apartment. And then I thought, well, great. I sell my fucking house, build a new shell, and then the goddamned Takisians show up again, or it turns out the Astronomer had a brother and he’s pissed, or some other shit goes down, the details don’t matter, but something happens, and I wind up dead. Or maybe I survive, only the new shell gets trashed just like the last two, and I’m right back where I started, except now I don’t have a house either. What’s the fucking point?”
    Joey was looking into his eyes, Joey who had grown up with him, who knew Tom better than anybody. “Yeah, maybe,” he said. “So why