Jason, I knew, was running a parallel track, only somewhat behind me, his conventional good looks and inexplicable confidence carrying him past the real complexities of the work. His all-embracing good nature even extended to me—the few times we passed in the quad, I was the recipient of his benevolent nod and smile, the not quite focused eyes never quite acknowledging the humiliations of the past.
I won the Putnam Prize without straining ( Jason, by some accident, took third, but I still beat him by a respectable margin). I remember the day I took it, the first Saturday of December, having just that morning flunked the mandatory swimming test for the third time, the smell of chlorine still on me. My ideas on the Zeta Dimension were still just a few random notes in a notebook, and as yet there was no shadow of my split with Professor Burke, only a sense of unguessable potential.
Once I’m in the museum area, the security is a joke. A stuffed polar bear and oscilloscopes and obsolete models of the atom loom side by side in the darkness.
Laserator’s mirror is kept in the back, in the research section, the high-security wing. I met him once, a midwesterner with a mild expression. He only wanted his theories to be given wider recognition.
I’m taking a risk, but a piece like this is one of a kind. They’re not going to figure out what I want it for until it’s too late—Blackwolf has some technical training, but they don’t have any real scientists. Which is sad, because they’ll never truly appreciate what I’m going to do.
Even half-finished, the new Power Staff is a marvel, a magician’s wand of solid circuitry, packed with unpleasant surprises. Da Vinci beams down at me from his life-size display, the very image of the well-adjusted, well-meaning scientist. The plaque goes on and on about his contributions to the welfare of humanity, his selfless devotion to knowledge. Sucker.
At that time, I thought I knew everything that was going to happen to me. It didn’t occur to me that I might fall in love.
I don’t know why Erica started talking to me. Something I said struck her as funny, I guess. She was a junior, and I was asked to speak in her economics seminar about the pure-math ramifications of the game theory they were studying. We walked to her next class as I sweated profusely and expounded on the differences between Dutch-and English-style auctions. She was a political science major, with hazel eyes, a low, throaty voice, and a steady gaze that held mine.It may have been the first full-length conversation I had had since arriving at college.
I read her columns in the Crimson and sat near her in the Cabot House dining hall. She would usually come over and talk to me for a few minutes, and then more and more often put her tray down next to mine.
I felt as if I had stepped through a doorway, that for a moment it was possible for me to become a regular person. To step out of the trap, the Zeta Dimension in which I lived. I sensed another chance to change myself, a last opportunity to become a kind of Jason Garner myself.
There was a short time, maybe a semester or two, when we would have lunch in the early afternoons, laughing and chattering together in the dining hall. I listened to her talk about her family, her private school. She was smart, and she had the confidence to spend time with people like Jason. But I fancied she saw through them, that there was something more acute, more critical in her. And that maybe she would see through to me.
Years later we would become a joke, the perpetual damsel in distress and the fiendish love-struck villain. Even other villains thought it was funny. I suppose it was obvious to everyone but me what was going on, but I wasn’t part of Jason’s circle. I didn’t even know they knew each other.
That summer I was asked by Professor Burke, the departmental elder statesman, to work in his high-energy physics laboratory. It was a signal honor—Burke was the department’s Nobelist and his advanced particle physics seminar defined the undergraduate elite. I was the youngest student ever to attend it. I told Erica because I had no one else to tell aside from my parents.
I was even permitted to book a little time on the particle accelerator for my own simple tests. I was given just enough access to allow me to discover the Zeta Dimension, and enable the accident that would bring about the end of my academic career, and introduce CoreFire to the world.
When I reach the storage room, I can see something’s amiss, the flooring a fraction of an inch higher than in the corridor—pressure-sensitive. I touch a stud on the Power Staff, and rise three inches from the floor. A second touch, and I drift slowly out into the middle of the room. Laser trip wires bend silently around me.
Laserator’s device glistens in a wire-fronted cabinet at the back of one of the laboratory rooms. The idiots have forgotten all about it! Light drips and runs off of it; it’s almost weightless. They say he could throw back visible light as a solid force, and reflect even gravity. With the mirror in my hand, the first stage of my plan is complete.
In the end, it took the Champions, Battalion, and Stormcloud himself to stop him; the mirror looks just as it did the day when it fell from his hand in the middle of Broadway, just at Forty-first Street. Now it waits forgotten on a shelf, pregnant with brilliance and ruin.
Jason’s accident changed everything for me. I was banned forever from the high-energy test lab. It wasn’t my fault, I told them; he stepped into the test area. Never mind that the underlying ideas were completely sound—no one, even Burke, wanted anything to do with me. Even though no one got hurt; in fact, hey, someone got superpowers.
It’s surprisingly easy to cross over from being a prodigy to being a crank. The zeta beam problem obsessed me, and, determined to solve it, I began failing classes in earnest. Still a sophomore in my seventh semester, I walked the icy pathways of Harvard Yard in the one sweater I owned, muttering. People I’d never met before seemed to recognize and avoid me; Jason was off on his way to stardom by then, jauntily renamed, college forgotten. Erica would soon follow, intrepid reporter/girlfriend to the world’s newest superhero.
I was halfway to being a campus legend; people would point me out when they saw me in the windowless snack room on the fourth level, sipping coffee and eating Skittles. I lived in the libraries doing my own research, hunting in the card catalog. Every night the security people ushered me out at midnight, and found me waiting every morning when they came to unlock the glass doors. I lived in the hum of the fluorescents, the muted rustling of paper and rumble of movable stacks. I began checking out older and older books, books whose call slips had not been stamped for decades; books with odd but informative notes scribbled in the margins by undergraduates from the twenties and thirties. It was in this way that I first became acquainted with the name of Ernest Kleinfeld. But no one listed in the libraries of America’s oldest, wisest institution had ever answered my questions.
I moved off campus, but not very far. I found a basement apartment in Davis Square in Somerville, I haunted cafés and bookstores. Once, on the street, I heard someone point me out to a group of incoming freshmen as “the Zeta Beam Guy.”
At night, lying on my bunk, I felt as if I were lying at the bottom of a river of dark water. Where was all my potential now?
After a while, I was asked by the university to take time off, counseling recommended. I refused. I went down to the library as I usually did, where I studied and read all day. At midnight, the stacks closed, and I sat down on the front steps. The long winter had passed, and it was a warm, misty night in May. Here and there, students were hurrying back to their dorms, laughing and talking about trivial things that I could no longer imagine.
My last stop is in the museum annex across the street, but I’m going to have to hurry. Sirens sound outside—one of the guards must have woken up and identified me. They know they’re dealing with a costume now, so it won’t take them long to bring in the posthuman element, vectoring in from up and down the East Coast.
And here it comes: Damsel glides above me, black against the sky like a nightmare goddess, uncannily weightless, laser eyes shining in the darkness. The crescent moon symbol on h
er chest is dimly visible by starlight. The field damper should keep her from spotting me. I clutch Laserator’s invention to my chest.
Rainwater is soaking into my costume, seeping through the steel and nylon fibers onto super-hardened skin. I wish I were anywhere but here; I wish I were home. But I’m a supervillain, and I don’t have a home, just a space station, or a jail cell, or a base, or a sewer tunnel. I don’t have a secret identity; I’m Doctor Impossible just about all the time now.
The annex is just a big warehouse, most of it underground. The fire stairs are at the back, locked, but I crouch down and aim Laserator’s device at the sheet metal. Starlight is enough; reflected, amplified, and focused, it burns right through. The aluminum stairway booms as I pound down five flights, arms out, cape flying. I already know where I’m going. Wherever he is, CoreFire isn’t around anymore to stop me.
I moved on to graduate study at Tufts, the physics department, squeaking in with a stipend on the basis of early work and the fact that when I tried, I could still do pure math better than anyone. But I remember wandering down to the student center one afternoon to take the GREs, startled at how young all the seniors looked, and how slowly they worked. When I wandered up the aisle, completed test in hand, they asked me if I was taking a rest room break.
My adviser at Tufts was an ancient chemist, a man who didn’t expect to understand my research, and didn’t ask about my progress. The work was not going well. Experiments produced null results, or random. I seemed on the verge of a thing that would not materialize. Kleinfeld’s monographs haunted me, his insights decades old but still out of my reach.
Erica, oddly enough, still found the time for an occasional lunch with me when she came up from New York, where she was already making her name as a writer. But apart from these rare glimpses of sunlight, my human contacts were with lab assistants and systems administrators. Boston is a rainy city that peters out into suburban strip malls and office parks at the extremities, and this is where the high-tech laboratories flourished, at which I found work and enough lab space to push forward with my ideas. I daydreamed on the long bus rides to and from the suburbs.
And no one knew what had been entrusted to me. At night, I stared at the television, feeling the seasons go past at unfathomable velocity. I felt myself growing older and fatter, my power languishing, flickering, while Dimension Zeta grew ever clearer, its red radiation glowing just behind the visible world. At times I felt close to that discovery again, the one that would make my name, prove them wrong. A genius languishing alone and undiscovered.
Down three, four, five flights, into the reserve archives, then past the government seals into the proscribed section—fiddling the locks takes only a few seconds. Downstairs in the stacks, the shelves run endlessly on, mostly cardboard boxes with miscellaneous lots, donated or bought at auction. I’m looking for a piece of a private collection, brought to America and broken up after World War II. Luckily, I know my way around the archives.
It’s right where the catalog said it would be. Tactical Climatology, 1927 edition in two volumes, Neptune Press, copious illustrations, fair condition. Officially proscribed by a wartime council of generals, senators, and scientists, only four people alive know it even exists, which makes it one of the better-known works of Ernest Kleinfeld, aka Lianne Stekleferd, aka Lester Lankenfried. Better known as Baron Ether.
Inside, beautifully drawn diagrams illustrate what needs to happen; columns of meticulous equations prove their effectiveness. “What Makes the Weather?” indeed. I do, now, and it’s going to get a lot colder soon. The book goes in my satchel, two items in one night and I’m halfway there—it’s almost too easy. I don’t fight fair, not hero-fair anyway, but it’s not like I cut corners. Anybody could do what I do, anybody at all, if only they’d do the homework.
By the end, even other graduate students were starting to avoid me. I was older than they were. Our first semester, there was a welcoming party, and I was shocked at how young they seemed. I stood there limply for an hour in my tweed jacket before slipping out and going to a movie. I thought that at graduate school I would finally meet people like myself, but my fellow students looked like ski instructors, drinking and dancing like people on MTV. A few of them even knew who I was, the screwup, the Zeta Beam Guy.
My roommates in college had gone on to become entertainment lawyers, theater directors, physicians. I always thought that being smart would excuse everything—the $11,000 per year lifestyle, the dreary walk-up apartment in Somerville, the deferred hopes.
Maybe there are no other people like me, even in the sciences. I don’t know what they want from it, how they can be satisfied with the petty round of grant money, publication, and prizes. Whereas I have always known, deep down.
I spent endless hours in the stacks, looking hopelessly for the one book that would show me the way forward, that would unlock Dimension Zeta. I wanted things I saw only dimly—fluids that glowed, and electricity that arced and danced like a living thing. I wanted science inside of me, changing me, my body as a generator, as a reactor, a crucible. Transformation, transcendence. And so, of course, they called me mad.
They laughed at me, and that I would never forgive or forget. I would, to use the old phrase, show them. I would find it, and not for anyone else’s sake. Save the world? I don’t think so. I have my reasons. The world was lost a long time ago, and nothing’s going to fix it, maybe not even science.
And what if I did find something back in those stacks, way back, a book so old it’s not in the card catalog, moldering in the last reaches of the library system, a sub-sub-sub-basement, so old that the title could not be distinguished. I took it from the shelf and sat down on the floor and read. I found it. I looked where no one thought to look. I read a book no one else thought to read.
No ordinary book. A book of leaves, a book of rain, a book of parking lots and college quadrangles and all the long walks and lonely afternoons of my days and nights. What is a genius? I read and read and read, until I saw in that summer landscape of strip malls and parking lots and high school auditoriums a grand design laid out like a printed circuit in grass and asphalt, a strange rune of mysterious import, shining and telling the true story of the slow closing of the last great age.
Getting out is easy. Never guessing my target, they didn’t even follow me to the archives. Heroes don’t concern themselves with things like libraries and research. Once they’ve had their origin, they don’t try to think anymore, just fly around. Books, inventions, discovery—they leave that to us.
Damsel will be zooming south again to her luxury suite at the Champions’ Tower. I steal a car out of a rental lot, my prizes on the passenger seat. The car has tinted windows, so I don’t even have to change.
It’s another thing I used to do. Driving home from the laboratory late in the night, I would detour onto the highway just to feel like I was going somewhere. The drive takes four hours this time. I stay carefully under the speed limit for most of the way, racing the rising sun at the end, book and mirror on the passenger seat beside me. The master plan is well on its way to completion.
They say you never forget your origin, but most of that evening is gone for me, no matter how many times I return to it. Fragments of it come back to me at odd times.
I’d been having dinner with Erica—I remember that much—and we talked afterward, walking back to my apartment, but most of that night is still missing. I went back to the lab to work late. When I hurried across the road from the bus stop, the air smelled like rain. There was a haze around the street lamps and the car headlights as I waited to cross the expressway. I was still commuting to an office park in Lexington, pulling long hours and nursing along the last of a series of failed experiments.
The rain was pounding the parking lot outside. It was a Friday night, the best time to do my own work, and the parking lot was empty of anything but the lights glowing orange-yellow and the empty white lines drawn on the pavement like a cartoon skeleton. Out beyond the la
st parking spaces, there’s nothing but swamp, bulrushes and tall grass and frogs and chirping insects and the black suburban night of Massachusetts. I stared out at it from tinted-glass windows, breathing climate-controlled air as another deadline slipped away. I was losing my funding. This was my last chance to prove my ideas.
The target solution was a unique fluid. A revolutionary new fuel source, infused with the zeta radiation only I understood, a fluorescent cocktail of rare poisons, unstable isotopes, and exotic metals, it roiled in the beaker, swirling purple and green. Toxic isn’t the word for it; it was malign, practically sapient. A single drop would have powered an ocean liner for a thousand years. One evening, on impulse, I stripped a glove off and touched a sample. It was cool and luminous, and the end of my finger went instantly numb.
The temperature went on rising. Spiderweb cracks formed on the glass of the containment chamber an instant before the explosion. The pain was like burning or drowning, and it went on and on, unbearable. I wanted to faint, to leave my body. When you can’t bear something but it goes on anyway, the person who survives isn’t you anymore; you’ve changed and become someone else, a new person, the one who did bear it after all. The formula saturated my body, and I changed.
CHAPTER TEN
WELCOME TO MY ISLAND
Golden Age, then Silver Age, then Iron. There must be a Rust Age as well, an age when even the base metals we’re made of now will have changed again. By what, into what, I don’t know. All cyborgs have to think about rust—high-tech alloys or no, the metal parts of me will eventually oxidize. People call this the Information Age, the Silicon Age, or the Nuclear Age, but I think they’re wrong. They don’t have the temper of it. When the world’s metal changes to iron, it changes for the last time.
Soon I Will Be Invincible Page 13