He thought of his children as he spoke, and of how he’d feel if he were to discover one of them was a mutant. Could he stand by and see them condemned? How fiercely would he resist? And yet, it was only by the smallest yet most profound of miracles that the world had survived at all. Did not the needs, the very survival, of the many justify the sacrifice of a few?
Stryker’s indictment of mutantkind was damning, but that’s what indictments were supposed to do, make the case for conviction. McKenna would have felt better, though, if someone had been able to mount a defense.
Maybe he needed one more bust on his desk, of Pontius Pilate. Or would old Ramses be better, condemning the Hebrew firstborn?
Movement caught his eye, but it was only his chief of staff pouring a glass of water.
“. . . in this time of adversity,” McKenna read, “we are being offered a unique opportunity—a moment to recognize a growing threat within our own population, and take a unique role in the shaping of human events.”
He took a deliberate look at the pile of folders Stryker had given him.
“I have in my possession . . . evidence . . . of a threat born in our own schools, and possibly even in our own homes. . . .”
He jumped, just a little, as a surprise burst of thunder rattled the room. Staffers moved quickly to the door and windows out of camera view, to close the curtains. Unfortunately, the broadcast was live; there was nothing to be done about the windows right behind him as a sky that the Weather Channel had guaranteed would be clear suddenly darkened with angry clouds from horizon to horizon. Lightning flashed spectacularly and often, and the glass was pelted by a torrential downpour of cold and driving rain. Nothing would be flying today, not in the vicinity of Washington. If people had half a brain, they wouldn’t even try driving.
“. . . a threat we must learn to recognize, in order to combat it . . .”
A display monitor was mounted to one side of the camera, allowing him to see how he looked. But with another, even more daunting burst of lightning and thunder like the wrath of God, that screen abruptly dissolved into static.
“What the hell?” McKenna demanded, as much a reaction to the atmospheric display outside as to what was happening here. The lights had flickered as well. Just perfect, just dandy, the most important speech of his administration gets skunked by wild weather that just whistled up out of nowhere.
“What the hell?” he repeated, rising slightly from his chair, because he’d just then noticed that the red light atop the camera was no longer glowing. The camera was off, he wasn’t broadcasting. He was about to call to the cameraman, only to realize that the man was standing stock-still, as if he’d been flash frozen.
He looked around the room and saw that the same applied to every person present. They weren’t moving, not a one. And yet it wasn’t time that had stopped, only the people—water was still pouring from the pitcher Larry Abrahms was holding, overflowing the cup and pouring over his leg to the floor.
McKenna grabbed for his phone but couldn’t find a dial tone on any of the lines, not even the direct, secure, untappable link to the National Military Command and Control Center in the Pentagon. He pressed the crash button, to indicate an imminent threat inside the Oval Office. By rights that should have set off alarms throughout the building and brought armed agents at a dead run.
Nothing happened. In a room crowded with people, he was suddenly quite alone.
Something stirred over by the fireplace, but because of the bright TV lights right in his face he couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing until they stepped forward.
Six in all. Three men, three woman. One man in a wheelchair, everyone but him clad in form-fitting leather that bore the look of a uniform. He wore a suit, as conservatively respectable as McKenna’s own.
“You,” he said to the man in the wheelchair, immediately recognizing the familiar face from various news programs, the networks’ go-to talking head when it came to the subject of mutants. Stryker’s file had made the reason plain.
“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” said Charles Xavier.
“What are you doing here?” McKenna demanded, rising to his feet.
“We’re mutants,” Xavier said, “but we aren’t here to harm you. Quite the contrary. My name is Charles Xavier. These are the X-Men. Please sit down.”
“I’d rather stand.”
He had names for all of them, mainly from Stryker’s files: the redhead, whom he’d met when she testified before Congress, was Xavier’s associate, Dr. Jean Grey. The silver-haired woman was one of the teachers at Xavier’s School, Ororo Munroe. The younger girl had been referred to in Stryker’s files only by a code name: Rogue. One of the men was also a mainstay of the School, Scott Summers; the other, surprisingly, as McKenna remembered from some particularly nasty CIA files, shared ops with, of all organizations, the Canadian Special Intelligence Operations Executive. He was Logan. He hung a little back and apart from the others, his eyes never resting as they ceaselessly swept the room for any signs of trouble. He was the team’s cover, just as Alicia Vargas was for her President. If there was a problem, McKenna understood that he’d be the one to deal with it.
Dr. Grey’s eyes were strangely milky, lacking iris and pupil, and McKenna realized with a start that she must be blind. She made a small gesture with a hand, and an imposing stack of files floated through the air to McKenna’s desk, landing right beside the folders already there.
“These are files from the private offices of William Stryker.”
“How did you get them?”
“Let’s just say I know a little girl who can walk through walls.”
“Where is Stryker?”
“Regrettably,” and Xavier sounded like he actually meant it, “no longer with us.”
“You killed him!”
“He was killed, yes. While trying to annihilate every person on this globe who possessed the mutator gene.”
McKenna’s eyes flashed to his left, to Alicia Vargas, as he remembered how shockingly she’d collapsed, writhing on the floor as if in the throes of a grand mal epileptic seizure, blood gushing horribly from her mouth and nose and eyes and ears and the pads of finger- and toe-nails, as though her whole body had suddenly become obscenely porous. She hadn’t moved from her post, but he could see that, unlike everyone else in the room, she was aware of what was happening. She could hear Xavier and see him. She had her hand on her gun, but she hadn’t yet drawn it. To his credit, McKenna didn’t once doubt her loyalties. Mutant or no, she would be true to her oath.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “My God.” He shook his head, vainly trying to grasp the enormity of Stryker’s ambition. “Do you think I would—do you think I could—sanction such a thing?”
“If I did, sir,” Xavier told him, “we wouldn’t be here talking.”
McKenna flipped through the dossiers, speed-reading enough to make him sag atop the desk, resting his full weight, plus that of the office, plus that of the world, on hands and shoulders. Atlas had nothing on him when it came to bearing burdens.
“I’ve never . . . I’ve never seen this information.”
“I know,” Xavier said quietly.
McKenna glared up at him from lowered brows.
“But I don’t respond well to threats.”
“This is not a threat, Mr. President, of any kind. This is an offer.” He rolled forward in his chair and indicated the bust of John Kennedy. “I remember those days, as you do, and the fear that came with them, that through no fault or action of our own, the world would end. It wouldn’t even be a matter of someone’s choice. It could just as easily happen as a mistake.”
McKenna nodded, thinking of how he’d helped his father dig a bomb shelter in the backyard and how utterly futile that shelter would have been if the worst came about.
“You and I, Mr. President,” Xavier continued, “and the people we represent have had a taste of our own version of doomsday. How close did we all come to the abyss? And what have we
learned from that terrible experience? John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev found a way to lay the foundation for a lasting peace between their two nations—or at least a way to lessen the possibility of outright war. Can we not try to do the same?
“I realize”—he indicated the files Stryker had provided—“you may have information about me. About my school. About our people. Grown mutants like me, like the X-Men, like . . . Magneto, are but a comparative handful. Most mutants are children, and what are children but the promise of the future made flesh? What shall we promise our posterity, sir? A world based on hate and fear, whose ultimate outcome is a genetic Civil War that will likely be the death of us all? Or can we find a better way?
“I’m willing to trust you, Mr. President, if you’re willing to return the favor.
“As we both have seen firsthand, there are forces in this world, mutant and nonmutant alike, who believe that a war is coming. That it is inevitable. You’ll see from these files how diligently some have worked over the years to start one.
“If we wish to preserve the peace, to guarantee our posterity, we must work together. Do you understand?”
McKenna looked at his chief of staff. The pitcher was empty, the flow of water reduced to a trickle of drops. Larry was such a fashion plate, he was sure to go totally berserk when he discovered his sodden trousers and ruined shoes.
Then he looked back at Alicia Vargas. There was such a look of longing, and apprehension, in her eyes that—as father and grandfather both—he wanted to take her in his arms and reassure her that there really was no bogeyman in the world, nothing she need ever fear, save as Franklin Roosevelt warned, fear itself.
“Yes,” the President said, after a long pause for thought. “I think I do.”
He held out his hand across the desk, and from his chair, Xavier took it. He had a strong grip with calluses that told McKenna that, like himself, here was a man who liked to work with his hands. Clearly the man was a good teacher, and George McKenna hoped he wasn’t too old and too set in his ways to learn.
“I’m glad,” Xavier told him. “We are here to stay, Mr. President. The next move is yours.”
McKenna nodded—and wasn’t surprised to see, when he looked up a moment later, that Xavier and his X-Men were gone.
He turned to the window and saw that the storm was passing. Just as in the “Pastoral” sequence of Disney’s original Fantasia, the gods of thunder and lightning, having had their fun, were moving on, leaving a bright and beautiful day in their wake. He wondered which of Xavier’s—what had he called them?—X-Men was responsible, and for no reason he could articulate, fixed on the image of the black woman, Ororo Munroe, tall as he was, with the most incredible blue eyes and hair of burnished silver.
Alicia coughed, ever so gently.
Larry Abrahms yowled with fury, just as McKenna expected, which made the President smile.
Immediately in the room, there was a ripple of surprise and agitation. As far as anyone else was concerned, the President had been making his speech and then—presto!—suddenly he was standing where he’d been sitting, and everything was in a small kind of chaos.
McKenna took his seat and waited for a semblance of order to be restored, a matter of some hurried and small-voiced exchanges between the camera crew and whoever was handling the network feeds. The commentators and anchors had evidently been vamping like crazy since the signal was lost.
Nobody noticed the new pile of folders on the desk, and as McKenna took his chair, awaiting his cue to continue, he looked from one to the other.
The stage manager held up five fingers, then quickly folded them one by one into a fist. At the last, the red light above the camera blinked on again, and the Oval Office was once more live and broadcasting.
At first George McKenna didn’t say a word, a silence that began to make those watching start to feel distinctly nervous, unaware that he was marshaling thoughts and arguments and rewriting frantically in his head. Nobody understood the quirky, self-deprecating smile he made, or the look that accompanied it toward the bust of Lincoln. Nobody, save perhaps Charles Xavier, caught the wayward thought that came to him then: At least you had a train ride and the back of an envelope handy when you wrote the Gettysburg Address; me, I’ve got to wing this! Extempore and live to the whole damn country !
But he had no doubts. He knew now what he wanted to say, and as with all such moments, this was something best said from the heart and from the soul.
Taking the files Xavier had given him, McKenna placed them on top of Stryker’s and, looking straight into the camera, and into the homes and offices of the American people and, he prayed, especially into their hearts, the President of the United States began to speak.
Along Pennsylvania Avenue, tourists and locals began hesitantly to venture once more out of doors, commenting to one another about the downpour and collectively grumping about the miserable state of weather forecasting.
A family from Utah gathered on the grass of Lafayette Square for what they figured was a spectacular Kodak moment, with the White House as a backdrop and not another pedestrian in sight to mar the photo. Dad gave everyone their cue, they all said, “Cheeeeese,” with grins galore, he clicked the shutter . . .
. . . and nobody moved. Not here, not anywhere within a radius of blocks. Flags flapped in the crisp autumn breeze, fountains burbled, birds fluttered through the air. All the mechanical elements of life in the nation’s capital functioned as they were supposed to. But none of the people noticed.
Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sleek ebony aircraft rose into the sky from the helicopter landing stage on the South Lawn of the White House. The Blackbird held position for a moment above the executive mansion, then rocketed silently away.
In its wake, Washington woke up and continued with the normal course of what had started as a normal day. Only a few would ever know the truth, of how a handful of heroes had stood between the world and those who would leave it a wasteland, of how their struggle would inspire a leader to achieve greatness and an immortality all his own, to rival those of the predecessors he so admired.
Decent people, striving to do the right thing. That’s all it takes to save the world.
Some call themselves human, others mutant.
And some of those mutants are the X-Men.
Thanks to them, their world has a future.
With their help, that future may be glorious indeed.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Stan Lee & Jack Kirby, for coming up with the concept in the first place; to Len Wein & Dave Cockrum, for revamping it and then handing over the writing reins to a young punk who probably didn’t know any better; to Louise Simonson & Brent Eric Anderson, for “God Loves, Man Kills”; to Eleanor Wood, for reasons that need no explanation; to Betsy Mitchell, for having faith; and Steve Saffel, for keeping both book and writer superbly on-track. Sometimes, it takes a “village” to write a book, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Also available from Del Rey Books:
X-MEN by Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith
SPIDER-MAN by Peter David
HULK by Peter David
A Del Rey® Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
TM & copyright © 2003 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
X-MEN character likenesses: TM and copyright © 2003 by Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.
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