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Witness

Walter Jon Williams

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Author’s Note: “Witness” is a contribution to the Wild Cards shared-world series, but it stands largely on its own. In order to understand its premise, only a few things need to be explained. An alien, known on Earth as Dr. Tachyon, developed the gene-warping wild card virus, which killed most of its victims horribly, which mutilated most of the survivors, and which, to a lucky few, granted genuine superpowers. In an alternate 1946, Jetboy, a famous World War II ace, died in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent terrorists from detonating a wild card bomb over Manhattan. The story begins only a few minutes after Jetboy’s death, as viral spores begin to rain on the city.

The part of the story I didn’t make up consists of the HUAC persecutions of the late —40s and ‘50s. A depressing feature of this story was hearing from young (and a few not-so-young) readers who assume that I invented the McCarthy Period for the purposes of this alternate-worlds story. I can only hope that this disbelief is a measure of how far we’ve come since the days of HUAC, that it really can’t happen again, rather than an indication of the political naivetA(c) that allowed it all to occur in the first place.

W. J. W.

* * * *

When Jetboy died I was watching a matinee of The Jolson Story. I wanted to see Larry Parks’s performance, which everyone said was so remarkable.

I studied it carefully and made mental notes.

Young actors do things like that.

The picture ended, but I was feeling comfortable and had no plans for the next few hours, and I wanted to see Larry Parks again. I watched the movie a second time. Halfway through, I fell asleep, and when I woke the titles were scrolling up. I was alone in the theater.

When I stepped into the lobby the usherettes were gone and the doors were locked. They’d run for it and forgotten to tell the projectionist.

I let myself out into a bright, pleasant autumn afternoon and saw that Second Avenue was empty.

Second Avenue is never empty.

The newsstands were closed. The few cars I could see were parked. The theater marquee had been turned off. I could hear angry auto horns some distance off, and over it the rumble of high-powered airplane engines.

There was a bad smell from somewhere.

New York had the eerie feeling that towns sometimes got during an air raid, deserted and waiting and nervous. I’d been in air raids during the war, usually on the receiving end, and I didn’t like the feeling at all.

I began walking for my apartment, just a block and a half away.

In the first hundred feet I saw what had been making the bad smell. It came from a reddish-pink puddle that looked like several gallons of oddly colored ice cream melting on the sidewalk and oozing down the gutter.

I looked closer. There were a few bones inside the puddle. A human jawbone, part of a tibia, an eye socket. They were dissolving into a light pink froth.

There were clothes beneath the puddle. An usherette’s uniform. Her flashlight had rolled into the gutter and the metal parts of it were dissolving along with her bones.