Shadow of the Past

by Unknown Author

  For emphasis, he reached down and lifted one of the yellow backpacks, then swung it over his shoulder. Hank, easily the strongest of them, took charge of the second.

  Reluctant to let his X-Men do all the work, the professor was about to have Jeffrey pick up the third pack, however, the young man beat him to it. For the first time, it seemed, Jeffrey had taken an initiative.

  It took them a while to reach their destination-perhaps as much as twenty minutes, Xavier estimated. He couldn't be precise since Jeffrey wasn't in the habit of wearing a watch.

  But he didn't need any mechanical devices to recognize the entrance to the Quistalians’ facility. All the professor had to do was recall how the place looked to his astral projection ... while his true self was lying on a slab in the presence of Lucifer's hologram.

  Xavier saw it with Jeffrey's eyes exactly as he had seen it with his astral vision. Each detail came alive for him, separately and in tandem ...

  A pair of tall pine trees with an unusually wide space between them. An oddly shaped boulder protruding from the slope above. A smaller and flatter boulder below. A thick carpet of pine needles, the thickest of any spot on the entire slope.

  The professor had Jeffrey lay his heavy backpack down and brush away some of the pine needles. Underneath, there was only dirt... but it was freshly turned dirt. And as Xavier probed it with Jeffrey's fingertips, he felt something hard and flat below it.

  Looking back over his host's shoulder at his X-Men, he used Jeffrey's knuckles to rap on the metallic surface. It made a dull sound, but it got his point across.

  "Bingo," said Bobby.

  "In a matter of speaking," Hank added.

  Jean knelt beside Jeffrey and helped him clear some of

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  the dirt away. Her efforts exposed the same kind of dark, oily-looking metal that they had encountered before.

  Except there was no keyhole in it.

  "How do we get in?" Bobby asked.

  Xavier didn't know. He had been unconscious when Lucifer's drones brought him into the facility. However, it couldn't have been very difficult if a pair of ionic energy puppets had accomplished it.

  With his X-Men looking on, the professor ran his host's hands over the slab. He examined it that way for a minute or so without any luck. Finally, as he was about to rock back on Jeffrey’s heels and try to think of another approach, he felt something...

  A hole in the metallic surface.

  But Jeffrey's eyes told Xavier that it wasn't there. And as he pushed the tip of the young man's index finger into it, confirming its existence beyond any doubt, Jeffrey's fingertip seemed to vanish into the otherwise solid-looking slab.

  A hologram, he concluded.

  It was similar to the one Lucifer had made of himself to taunt the professor. However, this one was designed for a different purpose—to disguise the door's keyhole.

  "Jeffrey's found an aperture," Jean reported as Xavier withdrew the young man's finger from it. She glanced at Scott. "What do you say we give that key of yours a try?”

  Scott opened his pouch and removed the Quistalian device. Then he hunkered down and inserted it into the metallic surface at the point where Jeffrey's finger had disappeared.

  The key vanished from sight as well. However, it achieved the desired result. With a low, almost inaudible hum, the slab slid down into the side of the mountain.

  Xavier looked beyond it and saw a dark, poorly lit passageway. It expelled a breath of cool, stale air with a metallic tang to it-the same metallic tang he had smelled as Lucifer's prisoner.

  Hank nodded approvingly. "Good work, Professor."

  Thank you, Xavier thought, hefting his backpack again.

  With Scott leading the way, they ventured inside. It took Jeffrey's eyes a while to adjust to the gloom, but after a while he could make out the surfaces of the walls on either side of him.

  They were rife with slim, dark conduits arranged in serpentine patterns—a hallmark of Quistalian architecture, it seemed. Clearly, they were on the right track.

  The passageway was an unexpectedly straight and short one-no more than forty meters long. At its end, the X-Men found a man-sized, rectangular piece of metal-a door, by all appearances.

  . However, it didn’t require any kind of key. There was a metal pad built into the wall that responded to Scott's touch and slid the door down into a slot in the floor, revealing a large, brightly lit chamber full of dark, angular machines.

  The professor had Jeffrey lead the others into the room and look around. He could almost see Lucifer's drones attending him as he lay helpless on a cold metal slab, strangely mechanical in their movements and utterly expressionless. Without question, Xavier told himself, this was the place where he had regained consciousness.

  He looked for the semicircular doorway through which he had been carried, and found it at the far end of the room. The enclosure to which it led looked dark and ominous.

  "Careful, sir," said Hank, gently taking hold of Jeffrey's arm. "The other facilities we visited possessed rather formi-

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  dabie automatic defense systems. This facility may have one as well."

  "Maybe more than one,'1 Warren chimed in.

  The professor nodded Jeffrey's head to show he understood. He even allowed his X-Men to surround him, offering him protection if a defense system did respond to their presence.

  But after a minute had passed, Xavier was reasonably certain they wouldn't have any trouble. Either Lucifer's ionic energy puppets had disabled the facility's defenses when they kidnapped him, or there simply hadn't been any in the first place.

  "Looks like we lucked out," Jean observed.

  “Looks that way," Scott agreed, though his tone indicated that he would remain cautious despite appearances.

  Warren turned to Jeffrey. "Is this where they opened the interdimensional portal, Professor?"

  Xavier had his host shake his head from side to side. Then he used Jeffrey's hand to point to the semicircular doorway. There, he thought. That is where they opened the portal.

  Of course, the professor's proteges couldn't hear his thoughts-not when they were all being filtered through Jeffrey's consciousness. But they could follow his gesture.

  Scott put the fingertips of his right hand to the switch on his rounded, yellow visor-just in case the team ran into trouble after all. Then he led the way into the enclosure.

  Once across the threshold, Xavier's mind was flooded with unpleasant memories all over again. He only glanced at the serpentine tubes and glowing nodes on the walls, and the control panel in the midst of them. But he took his time studying the metal surface to which he had been bound and the lamp-like fixture hovering above it.

  In the bizarre reality of the Nameless Dimension, the professor felt a shiver, and thought: Unpleasant indeed.

  Fortunately, he grasped the basic principles of Quistalian technology-one of the few positive results of his earlier encounters with the aliens. And having seen Lucifer's trans-dimensional transport in operation, Xavier believed he knew how to use the three cylinders his X-Men had acquired to reverse the imprisonment process.

  If he was right, he would soon be restored to his rightful frame of reference. And if not...

  The professor didn't finish the thought After all, the alternative was too hideous to contemplate.

  Until a few hours earlier, Henry Ballard had been just a normal guy—one who worked as a bookkeeper for the lumber mill during the day and went home to his family at night.

  As was his custom, he had stopped to pick up some coffee at the River Rocks Restaurant on his way to work. When he came out of the place, there was an old, brown pickup sitting in the parking lot-a pickup full of people he had never seen before.

  And their eyes were flashing silver fire.

  Henry had dropped his coffee and tried to run back into the restaurant. But before he could get very far, a sliver of light came out of nowhere and passed through
him like a bolt of lightning.

  That was when he started hearing the voice. It spoke to him in whispers, telling him that he belonged to the voice's owner, that his life was no longer his own. It told him that he had to pile into the pickup with the others and do his new master's bidding.

  But it didn’t tell him what his master wanted of him.

  Now, Henry and his strange, speechless companions were

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  speeding up a winding, two-lane asphalt road that took them into the heart of Salmon River Mountain country.

  Their truck, which wasn't meant to carry such a load, was rumbling and whining and threatening to drop dead at any moment. In fact, it was a wonder the thing hadn't dropped dead a long time ago.

  Henry wished he knew where he was going. He wished he knew what he was going to have to do when he got there. But most of all, he just wanted his nightmare to be over.

  Suddenly, the pickup pulled over to the side of the road. Its tires screeched as it came to a stop, jolting everyone in the truck bed. Then the driver's side door opened and a pudgy, baby-faced fellow with greasy blond hair got out.

  A moment later, Henry knew he had to leave the truck too. No one told him to-he just knew.

  When his feet hit the ground, it occurred to him to try to run away. More than likely, it would be his last chance to do so. But Henry had a bad feeling he wouldn't get very far. And even if he did, it was an awfully long trek back to civilization.

  Before the bookkeeper could think anything else, he heard the whispering in his head again. So did everyone else, judging by their expressions.

  Listen carefully, the whispers told him. I know who you are. I know the things you have done in the course of your miserable existences... the things of which you are ashamed to speak....

  Inwardly, Henry protested. He hadn't done anything he was ashamed of. He was a good employee, a good husband, a good father. He even helped deliver turkeys to poor families on Thanksgiving.

  Of course, there were the Friday nights he spent at Emmett Dodge's place, watching his pitbull Sonny tear those other dogs apart. But that was just Henry's way of letting off steam. And besides, fighting was what those animals were meant for.

  I know you, the whispers repeated. And I know you will stop at nothing to survive. That is why I offer you a proposition.

  So there was a way out after all, Henry thought. He listened carefully, not caring what it was he would have to do. If it meant going home again, he would do it.

  I have enemies on the mountain. They are powerful, without question—but I have made you even more powerful.

  For a moment, Henry didn't know what the whispers were talking about. Then he felt a surge of energy so intense that it threatened to rip him apart. He felt as if he couid do anything, move anything ...

  Destroy anything.

  You will battle my enemies in my name. If you win, I will let you go free. If you lose____The whispers faded ominously.

  Henry followed the fir-covered sweep of the mountain up to its summit. It was a long way up, he thought. A normal guy would never make it without stopping for food, drink and rest.

  But Henry Ballard was no longer just a normal guy.

  Scott Summers often thought about the genetic quirks that had made the X-Men what they were.

  Almost as amazing as the powers they wielded was the fact that those powers varied so from individual to individual. Warren could do what Man had dreamed about since he watched his first bird wheeling in the sky. Jean could pull and push the physical world with the power of her mind. And Bobby, who was standing outside at the moment serving as their lookout, could create an icy version of anything his imagination could devise.

  Hank, of course, had been blessed with incredible strength and even more incredible agility, and was able to absorb an extraordinary amount of punishment. However, from Scott's point of view, those were hardly his friend's most imposing talents.

  It was Hank McCoy's mind that had always most impressed the leader of the X-Men-a mind that grappled with the most compleV and arcane concepts as if they were nothing more challenging than grocery lists.

  Was Hank's elevated level of intelligence a mutant ability, linked to a rogue gene like his more obvious powers? Or would he have been bom a genius even if his genetic makeup was basically normal?

  Even Professor Xavier hadn't been able to answer that question with any certainty. And in the long run, of course, it had no practical significance. But that didn't keep Scott from wondering.

  Especially at times like these, when Hank applied his remarkable intellect to a task so complicated and so alien that Scott wouldn't even have known how to approach it.

  Back at the professor's estate, the furry, blue X-Man had embraced the technological gifts of the otherworldly S'n'iar with the eagerness of a child on Christmas morning. He had adapted Sh'iar technology, to every possible use-including an analysis of the star it had come from.

  And now, confronted with what was an equally alien and no doubt equally intricate scientific system, Hank seemed more than happy to sit cross-legged on the floor amid a landscape of exotic components and create what men would once have called impossible ...

  A doorway between dimensions.

  To be fair, the professor had mapped out the basic approach he wanted Hank to take. But trapped as he was in another man’s body, Xavier couldn't be very precise in his instructions. His student was forced to fill in what were necessarily a great many blanks.

  In an attempt to accomplish that, Hank had dismantled not only the lamp-like fixture—obviously, a key piece of the puzzle-but also a large portion of the conduit-laden wall behind it. As Scott, Jean, Warren and Jeffrey stood by and watched, their friend pondered one strange-looking Quistal-ian gizmo after another, scratching his furry jaw with his claw-like nails and muttering incessantly to himself.

  Suddenly, he slapped himself in the forehead with the palm of his left hand. "Of course,” he said. "Why didn’t I see it before?”

  See what? Jean wondered, her voice whispering in her husband’s mind.

  Scott shook his head. I don't think Man was meant to know.

  Without warning, Hank launched himself into a flurry of single-minded activity, rummaging among the alien parts he had piled on the floor around him and fitting them together in new combinations. In a matter of minutes, he had created one of the most bizarre, sinister-looking devices Scott had ever seen-and he had seen some doozies in his day.

  The machine was Hank's height and roughly hourglassshaped, festooned with dark tubing and amber nodes that had until recently graced other surfaces. Some of its cables were stili connected to an alien energy source the X-Men had located deep within the walls.

  The only component of the apparatus that remained from its earlier version was the part that looked like a heat lamp. Apparently, that was still needed to focus certain energies on its subject.

  His work completed, Hank cast a self-conscious glance at his teammates. "It took a little longer than I anticipated," he said with a hint of embarrassment in his voice.

  "Several minutes, at least," Scott noted wryly.

  Warren smiled. "Whoever said Rome couldn't be built in a day never met the likes of Hank McCoy."

  Jean approached the transdimensional transport device and gave it the once-over. “At the risk of wishing I'd never asked," she said, "just how does this contraption work?"

  Hank shrugged his massive shoulders. "Quantum theory predicts a multiplicity of universes or dimensions, each as valid as any of the others. What we wish to do is open a door from one dimension into another-and only briefly.

  “In order to accomplish that, we're going to draw on the differential in quantum energy states between our frame of reference and the Nameless Dimension. Then we-or rather this machine-wili utilize that differential to create an area in which there is no differential, the scope of which is determined by the machine."

  Warren looked confused. “You lost me at the bak
ery," he said.

  But Scott had followed his friend's line of thinking. At least, he believed he had.

  "But if it's creating an area of no differential," he began tentatively, "doesn't that affect the overall energy differential that's powering the machine in the first place?"

  Hank's eyes lit up as he warmed to the topic. "A good question, mon eapitan. However, the area of zero differential is so small, its effect on the total dimensional differential is negligible. What's more, time is passing at a different rate in the area of zero differential, so its effects aren't felt for some time in either dimension."

  Jean looked at Scott. "And that," she said, "is why I shouldn't even have broached the subject."

  But Jeffrey didn't seem to feel that way. To Scott, it seemed seemed Jeffrey was hanging on Hank's every word. Of course, it was actually the professor who was intent on his protege’s explanation-and for good reason. Xavier wanted to make certain Hank knew what he was doing before he subjected himself to his X-Man's creation.

  Hank indicated the apparatus with a sweep of his powerful arm. "It's ready when you are, sir."

  Jeffrey nodded. But for all its simplicity, the gesture spoke eloquently of Professor X's gratitude.

  Scott was glad they had been able to come through for the man. After all, Xavier had sheltered them from a cruel and often dangerous world and given their lives a positive focus. If they had repaid the favor even a little bit, it was well worth the risks they had taken.

  Hank moved to the side of the device and flipped one of the several toggles he had built into it. The apparatus came to life, humming merrily with power. He moved to a second toggle and was about to flip that too ...

  Until a cry came from outside the enclosure. It was thinned by distance and muddled by a host of tinny echoes, but there was no mistaking its urgency-or its source,

  "Bobby!” Jean declared.

  Warren was the first one out of the room, his body flying parallel to the ground and his great wings beating furiously. Hank was next, propelled by his mighty arm and leg muscles. Scott and Jean came last of all.

  At least, that was what the leader of the X-Men initially believed. Then he noticed that Jeffrey was close on their heels.