didn't know,' said Earl. 'It sure comes in handy. It ain't a bridge you're blowing. It's just dirt.
You blow the levee and head back onto the river. While you're doing that, I will head down the road to the Screaming House. There is some business there I have to take care of. I will meet you all in the morning by the river.
'Now let me tell you who to watch for special. They got one man there I will honestly tell you I fear. Kill him, and the job is ninety-five percent over, for he is the guts and strength of Thebes. His name is Big boy; he runs the place. Guard sergeant. Big white boy, so white he glows. He's an albino, but that doesn't make him weak and scared.
It makes him tough as hell and twice as determined. He will rally his men, he will bring fire, he will fight a hard fight. So I am warning you, he is not to be trusted. See a big white man glowing in the dark, strong as a bull, he's the one you drop first, you hear?'
'If I bring his head, Earl,' said Charlie, 'will you give me a nickel and a piece of bubble gum?'
'Mr. Earl?'
It was Sally, sitting next to the old man.
'Yes, sweetie?'
'Grandpap wants to know his job.'
'Grandpap will be in the town. I will get grand pap in the town and he will set up at a little bar they have there. That will draw a bunch of deputies, I know. He will deal with them. In fact, that'll be the start of the whole thing. When the deputies come to arrest Mr. Ed.'
Mr. Ed will take care of them.'
Mr. Ed listened politely. Then he whispered something to Sally.
'How many?' she repeated, louder.
'Five, I'd say.'
Agitated, the old man whispered something again to Sally.
'Grandpap says that since he'll have six bullets, what's he supposed to do with the extra?'
After the laughter died down, Jack had a question.
'Earl, if everything goes to plan?'
'It won't.'
'I know. And I know that all evidence we leave behind us goes under the river, so there's nothing to trace anybody by.'
'That's right.'
'But my question is, we're supposed to burn all these buildings down.
Are we supposed to carry torches? Can't see running through the dark with torches while hillbillies are shooting at me.'
'That's a very good question. My answer is: Who wants to watch a cowboy picture?'
There was silence.
'I have Hoppy, lots of Hoppy. I have Sandy the singing cowboy, and Buck and Hoot and even some William S.? Who's interested?'
Again there was no answer.
'Well, look here,' he said, and pulled out an Italian canteen.
'Know what this could be? A World War I canteen. But it ain't full of water. No sir, it's full of chopped-up cowboy picture.'
Stupefaction reigned.
'Come out on the porch with me.'
They followed him out.
'Old-time movies were made on a kind of celluloid coated with a chemical called silver nitrate. The nitrate's fine; the celluloid is unstable, particularly as it grows older. Hell, it's explosively incendiary, which is why if you look, most projection booths are more like bank vaults than rooms. I got each canteen loaded up with bits and pieces of chopped-up movie film, and I rigged a kind of primitive match fuse.'
He unscrewed the lid and unfolded a cord wedged in the spout.
'You just pull on this thing, and toss it fast. Don't be holding it.'
He pulled the cord and deep inside the canteen, a match pulled against a striker board, lit, began to burn excelsior packed loosely about it, and in two seconds, by which time Earl had lobbed it, burned through a cardboard tube.
'Jesus Christ!' somebody said.
The canteen burst not into flames so much as into hell; the incineration spurted outward not in an explosion but in a kind of blossom, jurning so white-hot and fierce it hurt the eyes of those who looked at jkit and they had to twist away.
'Burn through anything. Melts the canteen in a tenth of a second. liburns for a solid five minutes, white-hot like that, and spreads and {oozes all about, blazing like a blowtorch, setting the world aflame.
Burns under water, burns in the wind, just burns and burns until it's 1'gone.' 'I always say,' said Charlie, 'nothing like a good cowboy picture.'
Sam sat in the medical library at the University of Texas at Austin, just a few miles up the road from New Braunfels, and watched a life swim into existence. The first spottings were tentative, in obscure journals.
'Certain predispositions toward distribution in an Asian strain of Treponema pallidum' by D. Goodwin, M. D.' was the first, from a 1936 issue of the journal of Canadian General Medicine. Then, quickly, a second: 'Treponema pallidum: some Malaysian adaptations.' This was from Lancet, the British medical journal.
In both cases, the identity of the contributor was a minimal amount of information. 'D. Goodwin is a medical researcher' was all it said.
But D. Goodwin, M. D.' flourished, if David Stone, M. D.' disappeared.
D. Goodwin, M. D.' was like some kind of mounted knight in combat immemorial against Treponema pallidum, whatever that was, the world over. Where it appeared, he appeared to rush off and study it.
'Burma: A new strain of Treponema pallidum.'
'Treponema pallidum: variations on the lower Indian subcontinent.'
'Influence of temporal variation on distribution patterns of Treponema pallidum in sub-Saharan Africa.'
D. Goodwin, M. D.' wouldn't stop working, wouldn't stop writing.
He had given his life over to this illusive spray of germs or whatever they were, which seemed to cast such a long shadow through the world, and which seemed to exist everywhere.
By 1941, he had published thirty-one papers; then the war came.
But D. Goodwin, M. D.' was intractable.
He even found time to publish while running the 2809th Tropical Disease Research Unit.
'Prevalence of Treponema pallidum among southern rural Negroes, Mississippi, 1943' appeared in the Harvard Medical Journal, though now the ID of the author simply read 'is a serving officer of the Army Medical Corps.'
Then 'Similarities between varieties of southern rural Treponema pallidum and certain strains in Borneo'; this in the Journal of Medicine of the University of Chicago.
Sam sat in a great room. He scanned the articles, but it was mostly Greek to him. He was at a large table outside the stacks, and the place was crowded with students, all working intently, their eyes firmly fixed on the future. Outside, the famous tower of the University of Texas stood guard.
Then the documents ran out. There were none after 1946.
He looked around. He felt he was in a sacred place.
He turned, and two seats away from him a young woman pored intently through something called Aspects of Brain Chemistry with almost desperate intensity.
Yet there was something vaguely approachable about her.
'Miss.,' he whispered, 'are you a medical student?'
She looked up, fixed him with a pretty American smile. She had freckles.
'Sir,' she said, sweetly, 'actually, I'm a nursing student. Second year.'
'Oh, I see. Well, possibly you could help me just a second.'
He slid his card over, and she looked at it.
'I am in way deep over my head. I am researching the career of a doctor involved in some litigation, and I
