by Alan Grant
The Watchtower rose from the pitted surface like a monstrous artifact left behind by an ancient alien civilization. A wedge of concrete and steel towering to a height of almost a mile, the Tower was the team's official headquarters.
In the spacious penthouse boardroom, the windows were darkened Plexiglas to shut out the sun's torturous heat. Oxygen was provided by a gaseous exchange membrane J'onn J'onzz had built. Artificial gravity was generated deep in the machine rooms under the lunar surface. And the boardroom interior was softly illuminated by light produced from solar panels on the building's sun-facing sides.
Batman had called this extraordinary meeting from his lair in Gotham, then teleported here to preside over it. He sat at the head of the vast conference table, in the convenor's chair, his face grim as he recited the official roll call.
"Wonder Woman. Green Lantern. Flash. Superman." As he read out their names, each hero nodded. "J'onn J'onzz was also requested to attend, but sends his regrets. He's engaged on other business."
"Just us five?" Superman queried. "What about Aquaman? Plastic Man? Zauriel?"
The JLA had around two dozen members and affiliates, but at any one time more than half of them were likely to be involved in their own personal crimefighting endeavors. However, that wasn't why Batman hadn't called them in.
"Each of us seated here was involved in something last night," Gotham's Dark Knight answered. "I had Oracle program everything I knew into her computers. There's a ninety-eight percent chance–virtual certainty–that all of last night's activities were connected."
Once, Oracle had been plain Barbara Gordon, niece of the Gotham City police commissioner. Inspired by Batman, she adopted the guise of Batgirl to fight crime. But the Joker, on one of his psychotic sprees, had put an end to that, leaving Barbara crippled. Now wheelchair-bound, she could no longer physically battle against criminals. Instead, she had turned herself into a high-tech wizard, and her high-powered bank of sophisticated supercomputers lay at the heart of the League's abilities.
Fed by a network of orbiting satellites, Oracle's system specialized in trawling through trillions of bits of seemingly random information, searching for underlying patterns and connections. Patterns that would have remained unseen by any individual showed up with startling clarity when exposed to her lightning-fast number crunching.
A monitor screen stood at each occupied place around the table. At Batman's signal, they flared into life, streams of data running down their green-glowing screens.
"Appearance of a mysterious blue light. Three of us faced a human foe who was apparently possessed, while Wonder Woman dealt with a pack of reanimated corpses." Batman enumerated the points of similarity as they lit up on-screen. "Murder and destruction for no obvious reason. All encounters took place within a very limited time frame. Temporary engagement with a super hero, leading to the defeat and disappearance of the foe. Further inexplicable blue lights . . ."
"Your point is made, Batman," the Flash put in, "Can we cut to the bottom line? Has Oracle fingered any particular villain for this?"
"It sounds like one of our more powerful enemies,"
Wonder Woman mused. "Dr. Destiny, maybe? The strange manifestations fit with his power to induce dreams and nightmares."
"Or Brainiac?" Superman suggested. "He certainly has the mental powers to produce last night's effects."
Almost imperceptibly, Batman shook his head. "Not according to the computers. While individual events might point to particular supervillains, the overall pattern does not support that hypothesis."
"I'm sorry, but then, what hypothesis does it support?" Superman asked, slightly exasperated.
In reply, Batman nodded toward his own monitor, where the computer bank's conclusions were scrolling down the screen: Unknown enemy. Unknown power source. Unknown motivation, though testing is indicated.
"Testing?" Green Lantern frowned. "Testing what, exactly?"
"Us." Batman's tone seemed to drop even lower than normal. "Whatever our foe was, it targeted the five of us. Not precisely, of course, but every one of its manifestations occurred within a one-mile radius of our presence, as if they were designed to draw us out, engage us in conflict."
"Only to be defeated and disappear?" Superman was skeptical. "Not much of a test."
"That depends on what it wanted to learn," Batman continued, no trace of emotion in his voice. Although Batman had tremendous respect for Superman, it was tempered with caution. Unlike every other member of the League, Batman had no superpowers of any kind. Everything he knew, every skill he possessed, had been won through hard work and determination. It made him extremely wary when dealing with beings whose phenomenal powers were a gift, like Green Lantern, or a confluence of nature, like Superman.
But Batman had no hesitation in calling on their powers whenever it was necessary.
He turned to Green Lantern. "If all of last night's attacks were made by one central source, Oracle has been unable to locate it. Perhaps your ring might achieve more success?"
Under his mask, Green Lantern's eyes twinkled. Less than a year ago he had been an unknown, struggling artist. Now, he routinely rubbed shoulders with the greatest heroes on the planet. And his abilities were just as integral to the team's functioning as anyone else's.
Lantern rose to his feet, for a moment swaying under the Watchtower's artificial gravity, which was slightly less than that on Earth. He walked across to the huge electronic map of the planet that dominated one entire wall of the penthouse, and pointed his ring at it. The rest of the world disappeared in a twinkling of electronic lights, to be replaced by an expanded map of the United States.
A needle-thin beam of emerald light lanced from the ring, pointing in turn to each of the heroes' base cities: Gotham City, Metropolis, Keystone City, Boston, New York. A fine tracery of green appeared around each location, expanding and contracting as tendrils shot out seeking to establish connections.
Green Lantern shook his head in wonder, still awed by the power ring's abilities.
The others watched in silence as green lines quickly formed, joined up, split apart, and vanished again. Less than a minute later, a single image was frozen on the map. Lines joined each city to the others, with one finer line–barely noticeable compared with the others–leading back to a single location.
"According to the ring, we have our source." Lantern had turned his back on the map to face the others around the table. "Just outside Gotham City."
"Yes," Batman said emphatically. "It's the last place the five of us gathered together. Remember Gotham Dam?" He paused for a moment, ensuring that he had their attention. "If Lantern's ring is right–"
"And I've never known it to be wrong!" Green Lantern interrupted, grinning.
"The source of all last night's misfortunes is here," Batman finished, "in the stepped pyramid uncovered by the dam burst."
Dark clouds scudded across the night sky, blocking out the moon's light.
It was well after midnight, but the lights of the surveying teams working on the remains of the Gotham Dam still burned. The dam had provided water for most of western Gotham, and the electricity generated by its giant turbines brought heat and light to almost a million people. It needed to be up and running again as fast as possible.
A half mile away, the truncated pyramid was a black, undifferentiated mass protruding from the scoured valley side. Following Robert Mills's tragic death, and Peter Glaston's disappearance, the Gotham Police Department had closed off the entire site for forensic analysis. Though Commissioner Gordon himself had spearheaded the investigation, his inquiries led precisely nowhere.
All they could suppose was that Glaston had suffered some sort of mental breakdown, murdered his tutor, and then fled–taking Professor Mills's heart with him. A photograph and a description of Glaston had been sent to every police force in the state, but so far there hadn't been a single sighting.
In deference to Professor Mills, the university authorities had abruptly cancel
ed all further excavation. The murder attracted the worst type of publicity they could get, and the university's president was worried that it might affect future funding levels. Better to withdraw from the public eye–for a while, at least. The pyramid was potentially the single most important find ever uncovered in North America, and it merited long and indepth study. The digging teams would return, but only when the furor had died away.
Now, the pyramid was deserted and lifeless, hardly even visible beneath the foreboding sky. Had anyone been watching, they'd have seen a flash of light from the flattened summit, ten times brighter than the cloud-obscured moon.
As the light from their teleportation device died away, the five Justice League heroes found themselves standing atop the pyramid. The Flash breathed a quiet sigh of relief; every time he used the teleporter he remembered the movie about the fly and the man whose disassembled molecules had become jumbled up beyond repair. Still, even he couldn't run from the moon to Earth.
"It feels barren–empty," Wonder Woman pointed out. "Not at all what you'd expect if it's the nexus of me energies we encountered last night."
"Use your telescopic vision," Batman told Superman. "Check out the whole site."
The others waited as the Man of Steel stood, swiveled a few degrees every second or two, his gaze directed down at the structure beneath their feet.
Superman had been conceived on the distant planet Krypton, a world circling a giant red sun that was slowly dying. When the energies at Krypton's core threatened to destroy the planet, the scientist Jor-El built a rocket to carry his unborn son to safety.
So Kal-El, who would come to be known as Superman, had come to Earth, where the radiation of its much younger and more active yellow sun resulted in many of his godlike superpowers.
"There's one small interior chamber," Superman announced at last, "and that's it. The rest of the pyramid is of solid construction, alternating layers of granite and chalk." He studiously avoided meeting Batman's gaze as he went on. "Looks like we may be here on a wild-goose chase."
The words were barely out of his mouth when the small plateau beneath their feet started to shudder and shake.
"Fall back to the edge!" Batman called out.
The center of the summit had begun to heave violently. Either a very localized earthquake . . . or something was trying to burst its way through from the interior.
"Lantern, see if your ring can tell us what's going on here," Batman shouted.
"But there's nothing in there," Superman said, puzzled.
"Nothing tangible, maybe," Green Lantern agreed, "but it would seem there's some kind of unusual energy configuration. Might take me a few minutes to find out more–"
But he didn't have those few minutes. With a roar like crashing storm waves, the center of the plateau erupted in a fountain of rock and debris that shot fifty feet in the air before falling back on the League.
"I'll try to contain it!" As he spoke, Lantern's ring sent out a stream of energy that coalesced into a dome-shape, a smaller version of the trick he'd used last night to subdue the blaze at the museum.
The violent eruption stopped, but only briefly. As if it had been conserving itself, the energy again surged upward, blasting into Green Lantern's capping dome with such force that the dome was blown aside. The Emerald Guardian himself was knocked off his feet.
"Whew," he breathed, taking Wonder Woman's proffered hand and hauling himself upright "Have to admit, I wasn't expecting that!"
A thick column of cobalt-blue light extended a hundred feet or more into the air. The energies within the column swirled and roiled, crackling with flashes of a strange electricity that seemed to throw off little globes of fading light.
The five heroes stared soundlessly at it for a long moment, at a loss over what to do next.
"I see . . . something in there," the Flash said at last. "Look at those patterns."
The light inside the column writhed like a living thing, tortuously weaving this way and that as it gradually began to acquire a faintly humanoid form. But mere was something animal about it, too. As horns began to sprout from the giant figure's head, Batman suddenly realized why it seemed so familiar.
"The same figure I saw at Gotham Cathedral!" he exclaimed. "The monster that killed all those people!"
"It's not a whole lot different from the thing that attacked me, too." Green Lantern nodded in agreement "About ten times bigger, is all." He remembered the feeling of looking into the eyes of the shamanic mask, the mesmerizing power that had seemed to sap his will and replace his thoughts with . . . something alien.
"You told us it tried to hypnotize you?" Batman asked.
"What of it?" Lantern said curtly.
Batman shot his companion a puzzled look. It wasn't like Green Lantern to be so snide. "Everybody go careful," he cautioned. "We don't want it happening again."
Without warning, the light column expanded in width until it covered the entire summit, enveloping the startled heroes before they could react.
Suddenly, they found themselves fighting for their lives.
Green Lantern was astonished to find himself surrounded by a thick, blue-green mist that seemed to cling to his body.
He ordered his ring to clear it, but as fast as the green beams dissipated the mist, more appeared, so thick he could barely see his hand in front of his face.
I could be at this for days and not make any difference, Lantern concluded, futilely trying to brush away the dull turquoise tendrils that wafted round his face. Time to try a different tack!
Another thought, and the ring responded at once, creating a green spotlight that shone brighter than the noonday sun. It penetrated the mist, but only partially. Not enough for Lantern to see what was happening to his companions.
How come I can't even hear them? he wondered anxiously. Surely this thing hasn't managed to kill them?
The thought tailed away, to be replaced by a feeling of what he could only call dread in the pit of his stomach. Something was moving through the mist toward him, something ancient and powerful and unspeakably hideous.
It walked on all fours, its feet scaly and clawed. Its body was massive, covered in armored plates like a dinosaur. A knob of sharp spikes bristled on the end of its long, heavy tail. Huge jaws opened wide, showing foot-long teeth festooned with scraps of meat and rotting flesh. And its cobalt-blue eyes blazed with a hatred that he could actually feel.
Obedient to Lantern's every whim, the power ring armed him with a double-bladed battle sword. As the monster lunged at him, its drooling jaws snapping, Lantern swung the sword with all his might.
His blow embedded the blade deep in the huge beast's skull. Blue sparks flew, and a wild shriek of pain assailed Green Lantern's ears.
He raised the sword to strike again, but already it was too late. The beast's nightmare jaws snapped shut around his torso. In agonized disbelief, Lantern felt the creature's teeth puncturing his flesh as if the ring's protective field was no longer in place.
Burning pain, the likes of which he'd never felt in his life, scorched through him. And the whole world seemed filled with his own terrified screams. . . .
The bull-headed figure's massive hand had closed around Superman's body, lifting him high off the ground and squeezing with a power the Man of Steel found hard to believe possible. Bracing himself, he flexed every muscle in his body in an effort to break free, with scant success.
At any moment, he expected to hear Martian Manhunter's telepathic voice inside his head, detailing what he and the others must do to overcome mis predicament But J'onn wasn't here, and the only thoughts in his head were his own.
Exerting all of his fantastic strength, Superman managed to pry the figure's treelike fingers apart for a fleeting moment. Everything was swirling blue-green light. He could see no sign of his comrades.
Superman blinked, bringing his heat vision into play. He trained the focus of the narrow beam on the fingers that held him in their unbreakable grip, the heat quickly
mounting until it felt like the surface of the sun. Black smoke poured from the creature's charred flesh, and Superman seized his opportunity as its hand relaxed its grip slightly.
With one superhuman effort, the Man of Steel broke free. Powering into flight, he tried to put distance between himself and the sixty-foot-tall bull-headed figure. But no matter how hard he tried, he could only move a few inches. The air was thick and viscous, and the more Superman struggled against it, the harder the air seemed to ding to him and slow him even more.
"Batman? Superman?" Wonder Woman's voice sounded thin and hollow as she narrowed her eyes and tried to pierce the weird turquoise fog.
Can't see anything . . . but they were right beside me only moments ago!
There was a spine-tingling roar behind her and she whirled, instinctively dropping into defensive pose as she braced for attack. Nothing there. Another roar, closer now, but coming from somewhere off to her right. Wonder Woman turned quickly. There was nothing but thick mist.
Like the sea mist in the mornings off the coast of Themyscira, she thought, with a sudden, uncharacteristic stab of homesickness.
Suddenly, from out of the fog, a stone club smashed into her skull, thrown or swung with such force that it disintegrated into dust on impact. Normally impervious to physical violence, Wonder Woman staggered and almost fell. Recovering her balance, she heard a low swish as something cleaved through the air toward her.
This time she raised both hands, and a second heavy club ricocheted off the silver bracelets she sported on each wrist. Wielded by hands she couldn't see, the weapon swung at her again and again, and Wander Woman's own hands became a blur as she fought to anticipate and ward off the blows.
Thoughts chased chaotically through her head, tumbling over each other How long have I been here? Where are the others? What in the name of Themyscira is going on?
Her mind seemed to be seizing up, crammed full of a million thoughts all clamoring to express themselves at once. Grimly, she shook her head, trying to clear it. And that was all the opening her unseen foe needed.