Whitelaw gave him an eye like a sacred carp’s, which Mark did not notice.

“You’ve nothing to be afraid of, man,” Whitelaw settled on saying. In their several days’ association the expatriate American had displayed a propensity for saying in an offhand way things which were decidedly unsettling even for a journalist with upward of twenty years’ experience in Southeast Asia. Despite his journalist’s instincts – which gin and years of party-line subservience evolving gradually into encompassing cynicism had not entirely dulled – Whitelaw was not certain he always wanted to know exactly what Meadows was talking about.

Mark was still struggling feebly, restrained more by the need not to draw attention to himself than by Whitelaw’s grip. “You said he wouldn’t come in here!”

“That’s not what I said. I said it didn’t matter where you were, because if the estimable Colonel Vo of the PPSF wanted your skinny Yank posterior, he’d send his bullyboys to fetch it back no matter where you were; you’re not precisely inconspicuous. So you are as safe here in the comparative cool of Rick’s absorbing the benefits of my extensive experience as anywhere else.”

Mark allowed himself to be pulled back down in his chair. “But to have him here -”

“The same things I said about Vo apply, my nervous young son. In the matters at hand, Sobel’s will and Vo’s are one. They are like” – he held up crossed fingers – “this.”

“Well… okay. If you say so, man.” His tone made it clear that it would all be Whitelaw’s fault if Sobel set his pit-bull jokers on him.

As Mark was nervously eyeing the bar, where Sobel, Brew, and Luce had been joined by the feathered man, the joker with the purple skin and hair, and the one who seemed constantly to drip with oil, the television suddenly drew his eye.

He swallowed. There was the red-bearded face of Thomas Marion Douglas. Except it wasn’t; it was Kurt Russell, starring in Oliver Stone’s new film Destiny. He was onstage, dry-humping the mike-stand in his trademark leather pants before throngs of screaming fans. And suddenly his head and shoulders blurred, became the king-cobra hood of the Lizard King.

And there it was, the inevitable confrontation in People’s Park: Douglas bending the barrel of a.50-caliber machine gun mounted on a National Guard armored personnel carrier – Douglas struck down from behind by the wrench of the ace called Hardhat, played by Charles Bronson – the wrench upraised again, abruptly entangled by a golden peace symbol at the end of a golden chain. A quick cut to Jeff Fahey as Douglas’ unexpected savior, the radiant golden ace, the Radical.

Which was to say, Mark Meadows in his first drug-induced ace persona.

He was sitting there feeling dislocated again when a sense of presence invaded the table. Both men turned to see the colonel himself looming over them.

“Comrade Whitelaw, Dr. Meadows,” Sobel boomed. “May I sit down?”

“Certainly, Colonel,” Whitelaw said as Mark looked daggers at him. “Be our guest. Take a load off.”

Mark clamped his lips shut. There was nothing to say, and he didn’t want Cosmic Traveler saying it.

He could feel both the Traveler and J. J. Flash ripping at him for leaving his powders back at Whitelaw’s digs again. But his “friends” could only protect him for an hour at a time, and if he summoned them too frequently, the physical and psychological aftershocks became severe in a hell of a hurry. If ever he used the powders to escape an official arm of the Socialist Republic – which the American Sobel, somehow, was – he was a fugitive again. And he had no place left to run.

If he was unsafe in this official preserve of the wild cards, he had decided, he would simply have to face his fate.

Which was now settling itself in a chair with its back turned toward the table and its arms resting across it – a jarringly folksy touch in one who cultivated such frosty military dignity.

“Dr. Meadows,” Colonel Sobel said, “I owe you an apology. If you ask Comrade Whitelaw, here, he’ll tell you how rare that is.”

“Almost unheard of,” Whitelaw intoned, with an undertone of irony that Mark caught but which seemed to elude the colonel.

Sobel nodded grandly. “We simply were unsure who and what you were, Doctor. If you were what we were afraid you were, you would pose an intolerable threat to the revolution here. You understand that, surely?”

“Sure,” Mark lied.

“The Wild Cards Bureau has your blood tests hack. We’re satisfied you’re who you claim to be. I understand you’re looking for a way to serve the revolution, son.”

“Uh, I’d like to be of help to the Republic somehow. I’d like to help the jokers -”

“I’m here to offer you the opportunity to do just that, my boy. What better way than by lending your unique talents to our New Joker Brigade?”

Mark blinked. “But I – I’m not a joker. Sir.”

“No. But we’re not prejudiced.” Mark knew damned well better than that, but he was also not about to interrupt Sobel in order to contradict him. “We’re fighting for the rights of all wild cards; we’re making our first stand here, and in the end we will rise up and take the world by storm. We also offer a chance to atone for our collective guilt as Americans, for our rape of this land and its people, and our crimes against their great revolution.”

Mark’s throat was dry. Sobel’s words buzzed in his head like bees, like the head rush from a whiff of coke. Face-to-face, the man had a compelling quality, an emanation that swept objections away.

“I’m a lover, not a fighter, sir,” he managed to stammer.

“I understand you were a peacenik, boy. And God knows you were on the side of the angels, opposing America’s making war against the righteous revolution here in Vietnam. But la lucha continua, boy, especially now with the forces of reaction apparently triumphant on every side: we’re in a war, a just and historically necessary war. Under these circumstances pacifism is bourgeois decadence. It’s a luxury the committed can’t afford.”

“Oh, wow,” Mark said.

Sobel leaned away from the chair back with an indulgent chuckle. “Besides, I understand some of your ‘friends’ – perhaps I should call them comrades, eh? -”

In a pig’s ass you can call me comrade, J. J. Flash thought furiously, with Traveler a beat behind.

“- have been known to show a pugnacious streak, have they not? You’ve struck blows in the good fight before, my boy. Why not join us, where those blows can do some good?”

“Now, Colonel,” Whitelaw drawled, “surely you’re aware that in order to exercise his powers, the ace known as Captain Trips made use of certain chemicals whose very possession is looked on most unkindly by the Socialist Republic. Dr. Meadows is a man intent on living fully within the laws of the Republic. You wouldn’t be trying to set him up, now, would you?”

“What are you driving at?” Sobel demanded. Mark could feel the officer’s glare through his glasses.

Whitelaw bore its full force with fine alcoholic insouciance. “I don’t think Dr. Meadows can take your offer very seriously without a few guarantees as to his legal status, Colonel.”

Sobel barked a laugh. “You’re not trying to bargain, here, are you, Whitelaw? I know your political credentials are beyond reproach, but you’re still a damned journalist.”

“Yes, and I know you still blame journalists for making you lose a war you claim should never have been fought. You Yanks are a complicated lot, Colonel. As for me, let’s say that Meadows is an innocent – though he’s not a fool, and you judge him so at your risk. Innocence is a rare commodity in this bad old world, Colonel. By trying to keep innocence from injury I’m looking to atone for a few sins of my own, perhaps.”

“But you’ve always been a loyal friend of the revolution,” Sobel said uncomprehendingly.

“Precisely.”

Sobel shook his head, shedding Whitelaw’s words like water. “Dr. Meadows, this isn’t like back home, where the bourgeois bleeding hearts are always interfering with the doing of what’s right. If you join the revolution, in the form of my joker Brigade, what you do in service of the revolution is your glorious duty, not a crime. If you’re an ace, we want you. We need you. What do you say?”