Once upon a time, in the days of Baron Ether and Doctor Mind, villains conducted their business amid a delicious combination of glamour and danger. A fiendishly clever and unscrupulous fellow could seek out swanky secret clubs in the heart of London, and glittering Chicago speakeasies full of jazz and tuxedoes, where Mephistophelian men and icily beautiful women conducted their scandalous intrigues. That was before everything went computerized, before they froze our assets and tracked our fingerprints in global databases.
But for some kinds of information, there’s only one place to go. I put on a pair of ridiculous sunglasses and take a late-afternoon Greyhound bus out into rural Pennsylvania. I’m alone and untouchable. Every hero in the world would love to collar me, and they haven’t got a clue. For just an hour or so, it feels good to be a gangster. Back at the motel, my Power Staff is taking shape—Nick Napalm got the job done.
According to my informants I’m looking for a half-built shopping mall, abandoned now, the kind of place where suburban teenagers smoke pot and throw rocks at bottles. This is where we meet one another, and like them, we’re always half-listening for police sirens or the sonic boom of a hero’s approach. This one has been running about three weeks, so it’s due to shut down in a week or two—the heroes will find out from some wannabe on the fringes of the scene. They’ll crash in and pick up a few stragglers, but by then there’s always a new place to meet up.
Word always spreads, and we meet to trade stories of our latest exploits, triumphs, and narrow escapes. There’s always something to pass on—who’s in jail and who got out, the inside story on this week’s costumed crusader. We get to see new faces, or just masks, after weeks or months in the laboratory or asteroid or submarine. People get drunk, hook up, I suppose. We share the mordant humor of our kind. It’s as much camaraderie as we get.
In better days, I would arrive in a radar-invisible helicopter, purring in silent and nuclear-powered, the envy of the underworld. Tonight, I’m on foot. I get off the bus at a Roy Rogers and hike four miles down the highway, my costume in a duffel bag. This could really fix things for me, I realize. There are things I need, which I can’t trust Psychic Prime to find. If I can get a line on where Laserator or Dollface is, or even the Pharaoh, that could tip things my way. I’ve let myself become too much of a loner. I need a cabal, a syndicate, a posse of some kind. The proverbial criminal fraternity.
It’s almost dark when I get there. I change outside in the bushes, getting ready for my entrance. The mall’s developers went bankrupt a few years ago and work just stopped. It’s mostly beams and plastic sheeting, but there are a few sections of functional ceiling. They’ve set up a makeshift bar, just planks on cinder blocks, and a cloaking device to keep any passing heroes in the dark, and a big light pole in what was going to be the lobby. It has the makeshift look of a movie set, or a campground. There’s a gas-powered generator running the lights and a boom box playing Thelonious Monk.
I step through a slit in the plastic sheeting and into the light. It’s going strong tonight, thirty or forty of us milling around, the usual assortment of half-brilliant, half-unlucky types sitting in twos and threes. A man made of rock. Something like a demon-woman, horns and a tail. A man clad in metal armor, holding an ax; a pale blue man, translucent. Half a dozen others in bright-colored leotards, some with golden or red auras, or glowing eyes, some displaying symbols of skulls, lightning bolts, animals. Losers and geniuses and Olympic-class athletes, with nothing much in common except the preference above all else to reign in his or her personal hell. And that feeling of menace, that vibe that tells you, somehow, these aren’t the heroes.
A few people look up, then pretend not to see me. I hear whispering. My face feels hot. I wish I’d gotten my Power Staff together in time for this. I hear somebody mention the Pharaoh, and a burst of laughter, and it occurs to me that I never particularly fit in at these gatherings. When I was on top of the game, when I was a world power, I didn’t bother with this scene. People came to me when summoned, or they read about me in the newspaper.
I’ve forgotten what it’s like out here with the smaller operators, people like the Pharaoh or the Quizzler, cutting deals for a few grains of plutonium or a high-tech crossbow. I’m not a natural mixer. And there’s the difference in education. I look around more carefully. Villains fight villains, too.
“Doctor Impossible! Hey, Doc!”
A familiar red costume waves to me. He’s sitting at the bar with a few guys I don’t know, but I know Bloodstryke from the Thailand days. He’s basically okay, for a guy whose armor drinks blood.
“Bloodstryke. Long time.”
“Doctor Impossible, everybody.”
They nod, three of them in masks—falcon mask, plain domino, and a full-face helmet with glowing eyes. No one seems to feel like giving his name.
“I heard you put Phenom in the hospital.” This from the domino mask. He wears a blond goatee and has muscles like a martial artist. Behind the mask, his eyes have a watery quality. Psychic?
“Just part of the job.”
“Not like fighting the Super Squadron, was it? Bet you miss that blimp.”
“It worked, didn’t it?” No one ever lets me forget that thing.
The mask guy speaks up. “You know Damsel just did a press conference? They want you to give yourself up.”
“Idiots.”
“They want you for CoreFire’s disappearance. They got hold of Nick and those guys out in Russia. Word has it you’re a marked man.” The helmet muffles his voice slightly, like he could use a few more airholes in there.
“Born that way,” I reply, rote villain bravado, but they laugh and make a ritual toast. Like the rest of them, I was born in a suburban hospital, a healthy and not particularly fated baby.
“Any of you seen Laserator lately?” I ask casually enough. I wonder if I should tell them I don’t know where CoreFire is. Maybe it’s better if they think I took him out.
“Harvard, right? Guy had tenure, lucky bastard. One grad seminar in the—” the helmet guy starts to say, but suddenly my four tablemates seem to flinch, cringing away from me, and something jars me half out of my seat, spilling my drink. It feels like a pickup truck backing into my chair.
“Hey.” A deep voice, electronically filtered. I can feel cold coming off the metal behind me. Suddenly I’m alone at this end of the bar.
“Who dares?” I demand, rising from my seat. You have to let people know who they’re dealing with.
Kosmic Klaw dares. He was a Ukrainian mercenary until he found the Klaw armor in a wrecked spacecraft. It’s about eleven feet tall, black iron, but one arm is hugely swollen, a great scythelike claw like a fiddler crab’s.
“Damsel just trash the Kosmicar. She say she look for CoreFire. Say she look for you.” He stands over me, half-crouched, the claw resting on the tile in front of him.
“I’m sorry, Klaw.” I spread my arms. “That’s just terrible.”
I peer upward, but there isn’t much of a face to look at, just the three tiny LEDs mounted on the front of his helmet. It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. They say he sleeps in the armor.
“Bounty pretty good, I hear. Maybe I turn you in myself.”
“Are you threatening me, Klaw?” I summon all the villainous hauteur I have available, staring up at where I hope his camera is. I can feel heads turning, eager for some mayhem. This is getting out of hand.
“Oh, I not afraid of you, Doctor Impossible. You want go to jail again? Or maybe I just crush you here, what you think of that?”
In an instant, he’s got me in that stupid claw of his. The iron is cold, pinning my arms. The crowd forms a circle around us.
“You dare touch me? A man of science?” I wish I were enough of one to know what to do now, to figure the angles with my arms pinned to my sides. Close-up, the iron is pitted and scarred, and I wonder how old it is. I push a little, but it’s no contest, and now everyone can see me wriggling, helpless. My hand is inches away from my ut
ility belt, but my fingers can barely brush it. One EMP charge would settle this.
Bloodstryke tries to step in. “Come on, Klaw…”
Klaw hoists me higher. “You smart. You think you smarter than…Klaw?”
Laughter. Someone shouts, “Do him! Do it for Psychic Prime!”
“Shut up!” I turn and scream at them. “I’ll crush you, too! All of you!” God damn it.
My feet are dangling six feet off the ground, and my cape is getting engine oil on it. Finally, he makes a decision and tosses me to the far end of the bar, where I sprawl in a pile of plastic garbage bags. Everyone’s laughing now, and I hear a little applause.
“Doctor Impossible, everybody! He here all week!”
I manage a petulant little flourish with the cape and walk off, legs shaking a little.
It’s a long walk back to the Greyhound stop, but no one thinks to offer me a ride. I change out of my costume in the bushes outside. Out here under the stars, it’s very quiet. Overhead, the new moon is just a thin sliver; I can see the whole solar system turning like a merry-go-round, or a ticking clock. Time’s running out.
Baron Ether is old. He lost an eye fighting Paragon, and replaced it with a mechanical device of his own construction. Whatever gave him his original superpowers has mostly faded, except in the elongated shape of his skull and a coal-like glow behind his remaining eye. He’s an old man—no one really knows how old—and he’s been a villain a long, long time. He started out robbing railroads. He fought Victorian adventurers and American whiz kids, wore a mustache and carried a trick cane whose jeweled head bulged with concealed gadgetry.
In the late 1940s, he came to America and founded the first League of Evil. He fought the Super Squadron long before I did, even cruised the timestream and fought the SS three thousand centuries from now. One time, he threw in with his own alternate-dimensional self to steal a fortune in gold, only to cheat his double out of the proceeds. Classic.
In the fifties, he blazed a trail of infamy. He did it all, robbed the Freedom Force of their memory, swapped bodies with them, cloned himself. Lost one set of powers and gained another, was set adrift in time and spent six years in the Cretaceous before building his own time machine. He came back from that one twenty years younger, a side effect of the chronon particles.
In the sixties, he reinvented himself again as a Mephistophelian master of illusion, and stayed out of prison for a while. As recently as 1978, they thought they’d seen the last of him, when a stolen space shuttle disappeared into the void, outbound from the plane of the ecliptic at a perilous angle. But a year later he returned, only to be defeated again in the waning days of the Carter presidency. But he never lost his panache—by the end, he was using hardware with gears and brass fittings against mutants with fusion-powered hardware.
I should have gone to him first. We’ve only met a few times, but I guess I consider him a kind of mentor or a kindred spirit. To be honest, I patterned my costume on his. He’s a gentleman, a genius, not like those small-timers out at the mall. I guess I made a mistake, thinking they were worth my time. The Baron is the real thing. If anyone can help me, it’s him.
He lives by himself in a Gothic house in New Haven. When they caught him for the last time, they let him stay at home, in deference to his seniority. He just can’t leave, ever. His old foe the Mechanist is spending his retirement years seeing that he doesn’t.
So it isn’t easy to get in to see him. The house is screened by a line of oak trees and sits on a low rise, overhung by oaks and elms, a shadowy blot on the neighborhood even on a sunny day. No one mows the lawn. Dull silver spheres circulate endlessly through the grounds, a few feet in the air, watching. I come in high, buoyed by a little gravity generator, hovering level with the treetops and jamming every frequency I can think of. The house itself is a gabled Victorian monstrosity. I alight on the roof, crimson boots scuffing for a second on the sharp peak before I catch myself and swing down into an open window.
I’d heard he’d fallen on hard times, but seeing him is still a shock. He hasn’t been out much lately, and rumor has it one of his last experiments went badly—a mutation ray. This is the first time I’ve seen the results. His right arm ends in an insectile claw, and the skin on the right half of his body looks puckered and angry. At the interface, you can see where his body’s metabolism is fighting the effects of a halfway transformation.
I step down from the window and try to assume a dignified attitude. We haven’t met lately, and it occurs to me to wonder what he might think of me, arguably his successor in the realm of villainy. It’s odd to think that for once I may not be the evilest man in the room.
“Doctor Impossible. I heard you were out of jail.” His voice is a gasping wheeze emanating from the depths of the wheelchair.
“Baron Ether.”
He fingers his cane with his good hand, thinking. You never know what you’re going to get when you meet a fellow villain. People have different styles. I try to keep things collegial.
“I…I’ve always admired your work.”
“I appreciate that, Doctor Impossible. It’s nice to think one’s work is admired.”
We’re in a study of sorts, all books and globes of different sizes, some of great antiquity, painted with alchemical codes. There are framed newspaper clippings from the glory days, mostly London tabloids: BIG BEN VANISHES; ELGIN MARBLES MISSING; PRINCE ETHER?; HYPNOTIZED QUEEN WEDS SCOUNDREL. In a paparazzi shot, a young Ether (née Kleinfeld), diabolically handsome in evening dress, winks at the camera as he’s led away in handcuffs. His clothes are exquisite. Cars in the background date the photo to the 1930s. One wall is given over to a detailed android schematic.
He stands, painfully, and pretends to examine one of the globes. What he could be thinking about, I have no idea—this is a man who claims to have arranged the Korean War. A screen door bangs. Out in the real world, people are coming in for Wonder bread and Diet Pepsi.
Finally, he sits back down and wheels himself around to face me.
“What do you want?” he asks.
Steepling my hands, I reply, “Baron, I was hoping to confer with you on a technical matter.”
“You understand the conditions of my incarceration, I hope.”
“As well as you do.”
“Very well, then.”
“I need a power source. Very large output, very compact. I need it in three weeks.”
He sighs, and takes a moment before responding. “I’m a bit surprised you would come to me for help, Doctor. I understood you to be a fairly sharp individual.”
“You know I do robots. Robots take time. They’re looking for me.”
He goes on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I heard about CoreFire. You chose an infelicitous moment for your escape.”
“It’s not as easy as it used to be.”
“Did you do it?”
“What?”
“Did you do it?”
“I didn’t do it,” I reply.
“Do you know who did?”
“No. You?”
“No.” Glowing red eye.
“Portable?” he asks.
“Well, not necessarily. But time is a factor.”
He stands slowly, walks to the bookshelf, and faces it for a long while, but he doesn’t take down any books. I glance outside; the countermeasures I set up aren’t going to fool the Mechanist forever.
“I’m also looking for a man called Laserator. Do you know him?”
“Laserator. Wore a hat with a kind of…” He gestures vaguely.
“Mirror, yes. That’s him.”
“Retired. Bright chap, turned out to be a Harvard professor. They’re holding him up at McLean.”
He doesn’t turn around, but adds, “Have you heard from your friend the Pharaoh recently?”
“Not for years now. He’s out of it now. Why?”
“Just thinking.”
Another pause, then a slow shake of his head.
“I can’t help you. I�
��m too old, son. These things”—vague motion toward the window—“they watch me like hawks. I had my best chance, and it blew up in my face.” In the dimness, I can’t see his expression. “What are you going to do next? Another Power Staff? Going to make yourself invincible?”
“I’m going to move the m—” I start to lay it out for him, but he gestures sharply with the nonclaw hand.
“Don’t tell me! Don’t explain your schemes. You’ll depress me. You worked on that—what was it?—zeta energy? Whatever happened to that? Didn’t pan out?”
“Not yet.”
“Forget it, son. It never does. They always win, you know.”
He coughs and signals for his attendants, and I start to leave. Going to the window, clambering out, I must look like an overage leotarded Peter Pan. I don’t have a potbelly, but you can see where one might be starting.
I rise out of the shadows. The houses on their tree-lined streets fall away below me. I touch down a quarter of a mile away, in a parking lot behind an Applebee’s, put on my sunglasses, and start the drive home. I’m on my own then. I guess I always knew that.
CHAPTER EIGHT
EARTH’S MIGHTIEST HEROES
I come home to Galatea’s suite and find a jumpsuit laid out on my bed, its colors the Champions’ yellow and orange. That’s how they tell me I’m a Champion. A New Champion, to be exact.
I sit down, hard. I’m a little stunned. No, a lot stunned. I close my eyes for a little bit. I guess something at the back of my mind expected my stint as a superhero to end pretty soon, one way or the other. Not this. This wasn’t in the script.
I sit for a while first just holding it, letting the high-tech cloth slide and pool in my hands. It’s stiff in places, suggesting embedded circuitry; the stitching is perfect.
I start to change into it but then stop halfway. Looking at myself naked in the mirror is like an aching feeling. You can see every place the damage happened. And you can see all the enhancements, hinted at when I’m wearing clothes, the complete design where woman’s flesh melds with plastic and metal. Appreciate the technological sea change that turned crippling injury into something else. What’s gone came back in silver and chrome, titanium and silicon, a map of catastrophe.
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