The Boy Who Invented the Bubble Gun Read online

  THE BOY WHO

  INVENTED

  THE BUBBLE GUN

  The author of the great best seller THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE has written a new tale that is both suspenseful and beguiling. It involves international intrigue, a nationwide search for a runaway nine-year-old boy, and a psychopath who holds the lives of a busload of people in his grenade-filled hand.

  The boy, Julian West, is a headstrong but endearing prodigy who decides to travel from San Diego to Washington, D.C., in order to patent his invention—a seemingly innocuous toy gun that shoots beautiful, luminous soap bubbles. Armed with the makings of tuna fish sandwiches, two changes of underwear and socks, a clean shirt, and a toothbrush but no toothpaste, Julian embarks on an adventure that will have repercussions in the Kremlin and the Pentagon and that will make him the nation's most unlikely hero.

  En route, Julian encounters a high school couple masquerading as honeymooners, a murderer on the lam, a cynical but congenial Vietnam veteran, a bungling Russian spy, a frustrated American counterspy, a passel of police, and two elderly British gun-toting sisters. And throughout this fast-moving story is interwoven a wise and heartwarming theme on the inviolability of innocence.

  Books by PAUL GALLICO

  Novels

  ADVENTURES OF HIRAM HOLLIDAY

  THE SECRET FRONT

  THE SNOW GOOSE

  THE LONELY

  THE ABANDONED

  TRIAL BY TERROR

  THE SMALL MIRACLE

  THE FOOLISH IMMORTALS

  SNOWFLAKE

  LOVE OF SEVEN DOLLS

  THOMASINA

  MRS. ’ARRIS GOES TO PARIS

  LUDMILA

  TOO MANY GHOSTS

  MRS. ’ARRIS GOES TO NEW YORK

  SCRUFFY

  CORONATION

  LOVE, LET ME NOT HUNGER

  THE HAND OF MARY CONSTABLE

  MRS. ’ARRIS GOES TO PARLIAMENT

  THE MAN WHO WAS MAGIC

  THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE

  THE ZOO GANG

  MATILDA

  THE BOY WHO INVENTED THE BUBBLE GUN

  General

  FAREWELL TO SPORTS

  GOLF IS A FRIENDLY GAME

  LOU GEHRIG, PRIDE OF THE “YANKEES”

  CONFESSIONS OF A STORY WRITER

  THE HURRICANE STORY

  THE SILENT MIAOW

  FURTHER CONFESSIONS OF A STORY WRITER

  THE GOLDEN PEOPLE

  THE STORY OF “SILENT NIGHT”

  THE REVEALING EYE, PERSONALITIES OF THE 1920’s

  HONORABLE CAT

  THE STEADFAST MAN

  For Children

  THE DAY THE GUINEA-PIG TALKED

  THE DAY JEAN-PIERRE WAS PIGNAPPED

  THE DAY JEAN-PIERRE WENT ROUND THE WORLD

  MANXMOUSE

  Copyright © 1974 by Paul Gallico and Mathemata Ansalt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First printing

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Gallico, Paul, 1897-

  The boy who invented the bubble gun.

  I. Title.

  Pz3.G13586B0 [PS3513.A413] 813'.5'2 73-20287

  ISBN: 0-440-01789-0

  To Cassian, Damien and Cary

  T H E B O Y W H O

  I N V E N T E D

  THE

  B U B B L E G U N

  C H A P T E R

  1

  The miracles of the moon walk had remained, in a sense, remote to Julian as something taking place inside the box of the big colour television set and reflected on the glass screen. The visible, workable magic of the electric eye that operated the entrance doors to the San Diego Bus Terminal, however, was something so differently enthralling that it almost drove from Julian’s head the enormity of the expedition on which he had embarked and which had brought him to the terminal at half past two in the morning.

  Aged nine and a half and a scientist himself, Julian was not unfamiliar with the principle of the electric eye, but encountering this phenomenon for the first time in his life coupled wonderfully the mixture of the practical and the dreamworld that animated him.

  He was carrying a small cardboard suitcase containing two changes of underwear and socks, a clean shirt, a toothbrush but no toothpaste, a hairbrush but no comb and, sealed in plastic containers or cellophane wrappings, the makings of tuna-fish salad sandwiches.

  The beauty of the functioning of the doors was that they turned Julian into a magician with powers over inert objects. He was startled and utterly enchanted the first time the portals swung open for him as he approached them. He passed through in a kind of daze and wonderment and they closed behind him. Even before the shock of noise from the busy bus station assailed him, he turned about, advanced, the doors immediately made way for him and he found himself on the outside once more, the possessor of a new and captivating magical power.

  Julian chose now to exercise it and changed himself from a small carroty-haired boy peering through steel-rimmed spectacles, clad in jeans, sneakers, a T-shirt and a leather jacket, to a wizard in a tall conical hat and a blue robe spangled with silver stars. With the imaginary wand clutched in his fingers he gestured towards the doors which obediently flew open.

  Julian entered once more, but now the scientific investigator, eternally in search of the truth, or whatever it was that made things go, came uppermost, and by discovering the source of the beam and edging gently backwards and forwards, he determined the exact spot where the doors could be kept open. This spot being rather central to the passage, people coming and going had to make their way around Julian which certain parties in a hurry did rather testily to the point where a slight disarrangement in the normal procedure of entrance and exit to the waiting-room caught the eye of a huge guardian armoured in light blue, with the silver badge of a special policeman who strolled over casually to inspect what was holding up the works. His shadow, or rather the aura of his leisurely and ponderous approach fell upon Julian in sufficient time before his actual arrival to make the scientist-wizard realize that he was not there to explore the mysteries of the electric eye or the joys of supernatural powers. Instead he was on his way to Washington, DC to patent an invention, having stolen away from his home in the well-to-do Floral Heights section of San Diego, and from the sleeping household, with one hundred and fifty dollars in crisp bills in his pocket, constituting his grandmother’s birthday present to him. He had no wish to be interrogated by any arm of the law. He was not frightened by the enormity of what he was doing; he was not in any sense running away from home. He was simply carrying out, or bringing to life, a dream that had become imperative. He had no desire to handicap himself. He therefore picked up his suitcase and trotted further inside the bus terminal where, having crossed its threshold, he immediately and irrevocably made an alteration in the lives of a number of people gathered there, some watching the electronic bulletin board of arrivals and departures. Moreover, Julian’s crossing of this line of demarcation was to have repercussions affecting the two most powerful nations on the face of the globe.

  But of this Julian was both too young and innocent to be aware. He could not know that every human action, literally almost every move made by people, acts upon the principle of the stone thrown into the still pond and originating the ever-widening circles that reach the shore.

  He had never before been inside a bus station and the sounds and sights and the smells
would ordinarily have terrified him had he not been armoured by the importance of his mission. He had been a tinkerer ever since he could remember; every toy bestowed upon him he had taken apart and put together again. He had been a manufacturer of grandiose imaginings of wealth conferred upon him to reward his benefaction of mankind. Mechanically inclined, he had made things, but now for the first time he had invented something, an adaptation it was true, but nevertheless something which had never existed before. He had planned it, drawn it, machined some of the parts in the school shop, put them together, and it worked—well, except for one minor defect not essentially important. His school mates had seen it and coveted it. And his father had laughed at him.

  The bus station is the crossroads of the masses too poor to travel by more luxurious means. It smells of them and the orange peels and banana skins and sticky candy wrappers with which they litter the floor and the fumes of the exhausts drifting in through the entrance and exit gates. They made their own music with the shuffling of their feet across stone floors, the shouts of children, the crying of babies against the antiphonal thunder from without of the engines of the big transcontinental vehicles and the overall metallic voices of the loudspeakers bawling information, directions and warnings to them unseen from on high like the voice of God.

  Julian thus moved into this world where the neon tube turned night into day, where there appeared to be only a kind of shattering chaos of coming and going until as one moved into the midst of it one saw that it resolved itself, too, into long benches on which sat men and women with resigned, expressionless faces or nodding with half-closed eyes; and there was an information booth and a number of ticket offices and that there were shops on the periphery—drugstores, news-stands, souvenir and candy stores.

  Julian also saw people of his own age travelling, accompanied by grown-ups it was true, but nevertheless reassuring. On one bench, he noted, there was even a mother with a brood of seven, four boys and three girls ranging in age from about six to fourteen. They were surrounded by piles of luggage which the mother kept checking by counting on her fingers. She kept track of her family in the same manner as one always seemed to be toddling or running off, to be called back shrilly and slapped. They fascinated Julian who had never seen anything like this before.

  Julian moved through this now more ordered confusion to consult the electronic bulletin board which listed the Washington, DC departure for 3.10 a.m., but he wanted more verification and so he went to the information booth where two girls in uniform wearing caps with gold badges were looking bored and tired. One of them was manicuring her fingernail the other was handing out a folder of some kind to a passenger.

  Julian said, “I want to go to Washington.”

  The girl without looking up, asked, “DC?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The girl now looked up from her manicuring but saw nothing to interest her very greatly and said, “3.10 from Gate Nine. It’ll be announced. The ticket office will open in about ten minutes. Over there.” And she nodded with her head in the direction of a window that was unoccupied by a ticket seller. Thereupon she returned to her cuticle.

  Julian noted the location of the window, spotted an empty space on a bench where he could keep it in view and went and sat down.

  Sam Wilks was keeping a low profile. He sat off in a corner where he could watch the closed ticket window for the east-bound bus. He was unprepossessing looking and knew it. He had not shaved or washed or slept in a bed ever since he had fled from Carlsbad two days before. He doubted whether his description or what he had done had yet been broadcast or he would surely have been picked up. He was clad in worn Levis, a soiled shirt, leather jacket and a ten-gallon hat, sufficient of a uniform for that part of the country not to attract too much attention. And yet he had the kind of dark, surly and sour visage that the public had been educated to connect with the baddie and which led policemen almost automatically to stop him for interrogation. He knew what he wanted to do, must do, to break out of the trap into which he had got himself by killing a gas station attendant. He was aware of the blue-uniformed special policeman on duty in the terminal and, without seeming to be watching, always knew of the policeman’s whereabouts. He was relieved that the officer did not seem to be looking for anyone and that there were no city cops about. Once on the bus, with a certain two articles concealed about his person, he would be all right, but in the meantime he did not want to be jostled by anyone. He sat chewing a toothpick, his pale eyes never still, planning and thinking hard about exactly what he would do.

  Frank Marshall, with his square jaw, good brow, crisp curly brown hair and piercingly clear blue eyes, looked like a movie actor or the cartoonists’ version of the All-American Boy except for the sardonic curl to his lips which, in repose, were the weakest part of his features. He was clad in khaki trousers, a checked shirt and a khaki garment which any army man would have recognized as a one-time battle jacket except that all insignia—ribbons, rank, shoulder patches, collar badges—had been removed.

  The twist to Marshall’s mouth was partially self-mockery. He looked out upon the world with half-humorous derision. He was not bitter or bugged by what had happened to him, the violent alteration of his life. When he had returned from Vietnam fourteen months previously with something of a bankroll, he had been lucky in the crap games and he had thought it would be to pie in the sky, adulation, welcome and a job. Four months later had been when he had removed the insignia which proclaimed him, as he was finding out, not a hero but a sucker. Vietnam? Nobody wanted to know. He could not remove the scar that ran from his left wrist to above his elbow, gashed by a Punji stick, but that did not show beneath his sleeve. As for jobs for veterans, that was a laugh. The West coast was in a slump, his capital was depleted. Maybe he could do better in the East. He knew a couple of fellows in Washington. It was too late to go back to school. He was twenty-five. He needed a break or a stake of some kind.

  With some time to kill he sauntered over to the news-stand and thumbed over the supply of magazines and paperbacks.

  A man by the name of Clyde Gresham was standing next to him watching him furtively out of the corner of his eyes. Gresham was soft. Softness was in every part of him. The shape of his mouth and rounded chin, the texture of his skin and the liquidity of the dark, moist eyes and the fondness that could come into their gaze. He was elegantly overdressed in loose summer clothes, négligée shirt with oversize collar and Givenchy tie, all in pastel colours to match a fawn lightweight suit. He carried his Panama hat to show thinning grey hair, silky in texture, brushed straight back from, his forehead. His hands were beautifully manicured but pudgy and somewhat shapeless.

  When Marshall, fingering down an Agatha Christie from the rack, turned towards him, Gresham said with a warm smile, “Going far?”

  Marshall examined Gresham fleetingly and got it in one. His cold eyes lingered on Gresham for no longer than another instant before he turned, without replying, made his purchase and walked away. Gresham remained standing there watching him go with a rather sad expression on his face.

  The hands of the clock moved so slowly that Julian got up and wandered over to the coin-operated machine next to the drugstore, one of those movable cranes in a glass case with various valuable prizes embedded in a morass of jelly beans. The deposit of a coin activated the crane, which the player manipulated from without in hopes of getting the loose forks of the crane to latch on to a camera, radio or cigarette lighter. There were two people standing outside the drugstore not far from the machine and talking in whispers, a boy and a girl, but Julian paid them no mind. They were of high school age and hence inhabited an entirely different world from his. They stopped their whispering as Julian paused in front of the machine eyeing it. The push-in money slot called for a two-bit piece. Julian had some loose change in his pocket extracted from his tin box savings bank with the combination lock. Twenty-five cents was a stiff tariff, but the articles to be hooked were valuable and there was a camera that
Julian immediately coveted.

  He had his money already in his fingers when he examined the affair more closely and his inquiring mechanical mind looked it over and presented him almost at once with the sixty-four-dollar question. Why buried in all those jelly beans? Drag. Weight and surface. That was the catch against which the crane would have to pull. And all the prizes had either squared or rounded corners, nothing on which the forks of the crane could get a solid grip. Julian put the coin back into his pocket and turned away, grinning at the two high school students as he did so, but they did not smile back. When he had wandered back to his bench, the girl, whose name was Marge, whispered, “Oh, Bill, do you think he knew? I feel as though everybody is looking at us.”

  Bill said, “Aw, don’t be silly. He was only a kid.”

  Marge said, “I know, but I can’t help it. I’m frightened. I feel as though people could look right through me and know.”

  The boy was frightened too, but wasn’t going to let on, or rather, he was nervous, worried and insecure, a virgin himself, as was she, about to explore the mystery which would make of him a man as all the others seemed to be.

  Bill said, “Don’t be scared, Marge. Look, I had an idea.” He reached into his pocket and fished out a Woolworth’s wedding ring. “I thought maybe you might—see, I got this. Here, put it on.”

  Marge took it and thrust it on to her finger. Bill said, “There you are. Nobody’ll think anything now.” She looked up into his face gratefully.

  But they were not eloping. They were only slipping out of town to end the tensions that had developed through their liking one another and going together, but for them the step was more as an act of conformation. All the other kids of their age group, the sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, had slept with someone or seemed to have, and talked and whispered and giggled in the locker rooms putting up a kind of barrier that, under the constant sexual pressures of the times, seemed to have become unendurable.