Soon I Will Be Invincible

by Austin Grossman

  I’ll have to hope nobody sees a miniature submarine come whirring up the Charles River by night. They’ve been one step behind me for a week, Elphin and Damsel and the cyborg whose name I keep forgetting, skimming over the coastal waters. But I’m shielded from their vision, and it holds, this time.

  The physics building used to be my second home, and slipping in a window is nothing to me. No one guards this stuff anyway; there are just a couple of padlocks to keep students out, and I shoulder my way through them with barely an effort. Practically my last work as a legitimate scientist, but it might as well be a stuffed polar bear.

  Inside, the air gets dustier, staler. How many years has it been? I’m in front of the last door, and beyond it I can see the silhouette of the familiar apparatus, shrouded in dust cloths.

  But there’s a dark figure leaning in the doorway, poised and elegant. This is the one I should have foreseen, the logical adversary. The most dangerous of the New Champions.

  Mister Mystic has the pencil mustache and jet black hair of a cartoon stage magician, with high cheekbones and a long, handsome face. He stares unruffled into the barrel of my homemade plasma rifle as if it were a bouquet of flowers. He smiles and tips his hat, defiant yet elegant.

  “I know what you’ve come for. But they’ve set me to guard it, you see.”

  In his long, graceful fingers he flourishes a long black-lacquered wand, with an inch of white tip. He invariably appears in full evening dress—a tuxedo, dazzling white gloves, and a cape made of a cloth that flows and drapes itself with impossible elegance, regardless of local atmospheric conditions. He’s older than most of us, at least in apparent age.

  I step forward and swing, and the fight is already over. He folds up at the first punch like any civilian, slumps to the floor, his cape settling over him. I prod the cape with my foot, half-expecting it to be empty, but there’s a warm body, and it’s him. He just lies there, breathing.

  But Mystic has a way of wrong-footing you. I step over him and through the doorway, and everything ceases to make sense. Instead of the lecture hall beyond, I’m in a small room with identical doors on each wall. God, I hate fighting magicians.

  Mister Mystic has always kind of bothered me. The Champions’ personnel database lists him as William Zard, a failed stage magician and petty crook. None of this explains why he thinks he’s a superhero.

  The true history of William Zard is hardly one to strike terror into his foes. No college education—he barely finished high school. For two years, he traveled with the Merchant Marine—Europe first, then India, then the Far East. He jumped ship in Hong Kong, and there’s a notation from the American embassy concerning vagrancy. He must have made his way inland, wandering through Tibet, learning from a little-known group called the Seven, a semireputable New Age cult. He popped up again in the United States almost four years later, under the name Mister Mystic. Then we have the first record of his crime-fighting adventures.

  At first, we thought he was just a hypnotist, one of those quiet, liquid-voiced masters of men. Eyewitnesses were vague, or they couldn’t remember meeting him at all, even when placed at the scene.

  He still used his fists as much as his voice. Hypnotism was a show-man’s flourish, window dressing for old-fashioned fisticuffs and detective work. But he never abandoned the elaborate accoutrements of the stage magician—the final phase of an arrest would be an elaborate coup de théâtre, a curtain jerked aside to reveal the culprit already chained up, the stolen goods already back where they belonged. He had a showy knack for staging his own apparent death.

  I back out, suspicious of what will happen next, and find him still there in the hall, collapsed.

  I don’t like magic. I think I’ve said that. There are too many frauds mixed up with it; it reeks of old-time vaudeville and stage shows and con men. It’s shadowy and psychological and too much like hypnotism, and nobody likes what it implies about the world. It goes against the whole premise of my—well, my whole thing. That we live in an ordered universe. That the stars and planets swing around one another according to laws. And that a smart-enough man, a man who is very, very smart indeed, can apply these rules at the right time in the right way, curving one orb just a few hundred feet closer to another, and thus make himself their master, and master of all. If Mister Mystic thinks he lives in a world different from that one, I have to prove that he’s wrong and I’m right.

  Mystic’s adventures take place in other dimensions, or concern legendary artifacts whose existence flatly contradicts the most basic understanding of the historical record. He seems most comfortable in his own milieu, up against werewolves or Indian fakirs—I don’t know these people—mystical menaces that never even crop up unless he’s around.

  What are his powers? Depending on who you ask, he’s a player on a cosmic scale, or a skinny man in a cheap tuxedo. But I know for a fact he has gotten out of situations that should have killed a normal man. I myself saw him enter the Mayfield Sanitarium before it collapsed, and we all know how badly that situation ended. If he is a fraud, he must be a very brave one.

  I tie him up in his own cape, then shake him awake.

  “Magic’s not going to save you, Zard. Fix whatever you did to the hallway.”

  “It’s not magic, exactly. Not the way you’re thinking of it.”

  That punch didn’t bother him as much as I thought it had. He lies there bound and blindfolded, but from the sound of it, you’d think he was holding me captive.

  “Tricks, then. Whatever it is you’ve done.”

  “You want to get through the door, don’t you? Go ahead. Try. After all, you don’t even believe in magic.”

  I look back toward the doorway, then nod. I can’t stay here all night. I grasp the cloth of his cape and pull him easily across the floor behind me. Whatever’s in there, he’s going to meet it, too.

  A second room, as before. Then a third, and a fourth. I count footsteps. We should have been in the lecture hall by now. We should be outside the building.

  “Be reasonable, Zard, or Mystic, whatever you call yourself. It’s the twenty-first century. Now where are we?”

  “When you were in the eighth grade, your guidance counselor told you you were a genius. Remember that?” He ought not to have known that. His voice rises and falls in a seductive rhythm, the voice of a hypnotist, but I know about such tricks.

  “So…so what?”

  “Well, mine did, too,” he says, laughing a magician’s stagy laugh. And then the spell precipitates out into the warm air, a pattern of frost and mist like a huge snowflake gradually becoming apparent, etched into the pavement. The charge in the air feels like the third act of a play, or the light on a playground a moment before sunset.

  The cape lies empty on the tiled floor, still tied.

  Never mind. Teleportation isn’t necessarily magic. He thinks the ordinary rules don’t apply to him, but they do. They apply everywhere, even at Harvard. That’s what science is. But when I step through the doorway, it’s not the same building. It’s not even Cambridge.

  This is wrong. I’ve seen this place before, but only from the outside. It’s Mister Mystic’s house, an ordinary, square-shouldered brownstone by a back corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Faded purple velvet curtains veil the dusty windows. Outside, tufts of grass grow in the neglected yard; plastic bags have snagged on the low wrought-iron fence facing Ocean Parkway. I’m breathing the exhausted air of the city’s late-summer evening.

  And it seems to have been abandoned years ago. From the front hall, I can see into the sitting room and the dining room, and the staircase leading up to a second floor. A feathering of dust lies on the coffee table, the Victorian ornamentation, the ashtrays.

  Tricks with time, I suppose. I try to remember when it was I left the submarine. But what am I afraid of? Ghosts? Witches? Ridiculous. But there is documented evidence of strange heroes who came from Europe in the war years, out of Dresden and Warsaw, things disturbed out of their long rest. Men wh
o could dissolve themselves, heat metal at a distance, shriek loudly enough to shatter buildings. But I’m obliged to ignore such things until they’re proven true. That’s science.

  A flicker in the dimness—he’s here. Taking no chances, I pull the trigger on my plasma pistol. But the beam strikes nothing but air and glass. The mirror shatters, and I’m alone in the darkening house. Where are his teammates? That half-alien woman, that cyborg who replaced Galatea, those are people I understand.

  I wave my flashlight across a line of bric-a-brac, souvenirs from Europe and the Far East. Maybe he brought something back, some trick or device I’ve never heard of. How much space can there be back here? A stuffed tiger looms in the angle between two hallways. I watch it carefully for a minute, but it doesn’t move.

  Sitting rooms, smoking rooms, a library, a music room. I lose count of the stairways; they go up and down in threes and sevens, according to no plan I can detect. I listen for traffic noise, but there isn’t any.

  I stop in a paneled hallway by a bust of Schiller. I need to draw him out.

  “Why not make this a fair fight, Mystic? Because you know you’re a fake. You have to hide and play tricks! I know your secrets! I know about the Seven!” My voice sounds weak, lost in all this darkness.

  But he calls back, the voice coming from anywhere and nowhere. “You think I found something. You think the Secret Seven gave me something, some device. Is that your theory?”

  “A gadget, some trick. You’re not a magician, Zard. It’s not possible!”

  “Relax, Doctor. Enjoy the show. Didn’t you ever want to believe in magic?”

  His voice is a perfectly refined baritone, a theater voice, nothing like what you’d expect from a petty crook from the suburbs. It sounds noble, and a little sad.

  I follow it into another darkened room. I’m starting to lose focus—a drug in the air, in the candles? Am I back at Harvard now? Or still under the ocean in the submarine? I grope for the submarine’s steering wheel, then remember. I’m in Mister Mystic’s house. It’s dark outside now.

  “I can see in the dark, Doctor. Did you know that?”

  “No. No, I didn’t,” I reply under my breath.

  “You think you have secrets from me. But I can see in your darkness, too, down below the dungeon you once built. The fire beneath the world, and the magical winter. The snake that ate your heart.”

  Lights come up, blinding for a moment; then I see him in front of me. I’m just in time. He’s on the pocket stage of the old lecture hall, the one where CoreFire was born. The lecture hall is an enormous domed room, empty for years. Breathing in the dusty air is like drinking in memories.

  Old-fashioned footlights illuminate him from below, and he’s set up what appears to be a little magic act. A chalk line forms a circle around him, and a small folding table displays the accoutrements of a children’s magic show—a hat, a deck of cards, a birdcage. And inside the cage, glowing from within, the Zeta Gem.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, our show begins.” He gestures and a phantasmal audience begins to appear, holograms perhaps. I even see myself as I was in college, standing before the zeta beam device, waiting expectantly for my cue. Almost a caricature in my glasses and lab coat; nearby stand Erica and Jason himself, looking on, just as they did in my memories.

  Enough. I draw my pistol and hold it on him. “Give me what I came for.”

  I gesture with the gun, advancing on him, and the phantoms vanish. “Last warning.”

  He shakes his head and covers the birdcage. I fire at him point-blank, but the plasma bolt stops short in midair above the chalk line. Impossible.

  “This is a magic circle.” He gestures at the floor.

  He taps the covered cage with his stick.

  “This is a magic wand.”

  He whips the cover off of the cage, and it’s gone; in its place, a dove explodes into the air. When he turns back to me, his eyes seem enormous, black.

  “Look deep into my eyes….”

  I can’t help myself. I do, and when he looks back, his eyes are unnervingly clear and deep. A magician’s eyes should be heavy-lidded, misty, and deceptive, but his eyes seem to see to the bottom of things, and catch something that I missed. He laughs his hysterical booming laugh one more time. A laugh that knows something.

  He gestures, his cape swirls so close to my face that I blink, and then I’m back in the old physics building, alone. I look around and step through the door again, alert for the next trick, but nothing happens. At center stage is an enormous device, like a telescope, or a laser gun, mounted on a rotating platform. At one end, it bulges to contain a red sphere the size of a softball, the Zeta Gem itself. My first creation and greatest mistake. Everything is as I remember it, untouched.

  I should have known it. Magicians are all talk.

  I didn’t ask to have a nemesis. He chose me. CoreFire was a Peterson student, too. I remember him, of course, as Jason Garner.

  I didn’t know he was my nemesis then. He was just Jason. All-state track, basketball team, editor on the Peterson Star, class speaker his junior year. He looked almost the same then as he did in his last public appearance. He never seemed to get much older after the accident.

  He had started at Peterson a year earlier. The impression he made was instantaneous, a warm, genial, all-encompassing presence. Where I had to strain to be understood, his voice seemed to fill the room, audible and distinct even at the other end of a crowded corridor. Long before he got any powers, he seemed to walk through walls. Before I ever saw a human being glow, he seemed to.

  At first, Peterson seemed like a new start for me, but Jason and his friends set me straight very quickly. Certain details I will pass over in silence, but, most unforgivable of all, they didn’t notice me. They didn’t care who I was. I was nothing to them, just another target.

  I don’t remember seeing him behave with intentional cruelty. He didn’t so much participate in bullying as sanction it, skate over it. It was the norm there—he wasn’t the only one. Damsel and Blackwolf were there, a few years younger than I was, faces in the hallway that I noticed and cataloged, although it never occurred to them to learn my name. Heroes, even then.

  Oddly enough, when Jason and I were alone, I became just another buddy of his. We sat next to each other in advanced math and biochemistry, and we even exchanged an offhanded friendly word or two, as if nothing had ever happened. He had a certain rote ability in the sciences that he parlayed into a decent GPA. We endured pop quizzes and extra problem sets together. The two of us were at the top of the class, rivals even then.

  “We’re screwed now, huh, buddy?” he’d say.

  “Got that right,” I’d reply in a voice I’d never heard from myself before or since, a voice I conjured suddenly for this new temporary moment of geeky camaraderie. “We’re sunk!”

  Because I actually did like him a little. At least he treated me like a normal person. Of course I knew it was cheap coin—the whole world was Jason Garner’s friend; I just happened to be the part of it he was sitting near. Once or twice maybe I wondered whether I had a special place in his cosmos; whether he thought, in his private moments, If only I knew him better. If only we were closer. But if that were true, no sign of it ever came.

  I studied him as I would an anomalous particle or a stellar fluctuation. I had always taken my unpopularity as a sacrifice, the price of my intelligence, but he seemed not to have to make that bargain. There was something he knew about the world, and I tried to learn it.

  When he graduated, the school forgot about him—there were others to fill his place. But I never did. We met again at Harvard, and again much later on. By that time, we’d both had our accidents, and we were both wearing masks.

  For Jason, Harvard was a steady march along a course that seemed already to have been prepared for him; he moved smoothly through the expected programs and girlfriends and collegiate chums toward a waiting career. But for me, it was a slow, inexorable drifting outward from any definabl
e center.

  We might as well have gone to different schools. On weekends, I caught up on my extra course load in the Science Center; I knew all the free hours on the campus mainframe, and how to sign out an oscilloscope. He knew…what? Parties and cheerleaders, I suppose. He cut a figure straight out of an admissions brochure.

  Jason enrolled in physics, and at the beginning of each term I cringed to find his blue-eyed smiling face waiting in the seminar room, my fair-haired double. We still competed for the top of the class, he with his plodding intellect and I with my eccentric brilliance, sudden leaps and bursts of calculation that carried me alone into unknown planes of speculation. We paced each other—the oaf didn’t have the sense to give up, or even comprehend how far behind he was.

  I might have stood it from a peer, or a new acquaintance. But I despised the idea of sharing my new life with someone from Peterson, the place that knew me as the lunchroom pratfaller. He would nod to me if we passed each other on the quad, recognition of a shared history. There was still that bond that—perhaps I should admit—I myself was unwilling to sever. Maybe because he had treated me as a friend, however briefly, as a member of that other world I had never known entrance to. Maybe he was still the standard for me, the one person I had to prove myself to. Maybe I knew even then that I would never have humbled the world until I had humbled him.

  Jason’s accident happened in our junior year. I wish to be clear: The zeta beam was indeed of my own conception, and I can document that whatever Professor Burke says. I ran the simulations myself on campus mainframes late on Friday and Saturday nights when everyone else was out drinking, laughing, and who knows what else.

  At first, I thought it was only a previously undetectable form of radiation. It would be years before I understood that it was a dimension, a literal space you could go to. But I had found a primitive way to channel that energy and project it.

  At stake was the Whittier-Feingold Prize for Undergraduate Science, and an interview with Erica Lowenstein, raven-haired reporter for the Harvard Crimson. Of course I had met her by then, and my infatuation was in full flourish. He and Erica knew each other, I eventually discovered. Naturally, I suppose, they were attracted. People are.