Frozen in position—with her now-empty hand still grasping for a phone at her ear—she followed in a stream of wind as he carried the kids out to the front lawn, deposited them gently on the ground, and caught her as she flew by, stopping her progress so that she would not break any bones on landing. He placed her down next to the kids, who, in the next moment when the Scarlet Speedster was already far gone, would realize they were safe.
Now the Flash was at the fire hydrant on the curb a few doors down the street. He unscrewed the hose nozzle with a million persistent little nudges of his hands, and twisted on the spigot the same way. It was bone dry in there as far as I could see, of course, but water simply did not blow out of a hole that fast. And he was off again.
Back at the fire station across town the sixteen men and women were in precisely the same positions they had been before. The alarm was still about to ring. They were all—though they could hardly have known it—about to turn to look at the address forming from lazy little pixels on the dispatch monitor. The Flash snatched up paper and pencil from under the face of a man filling out a time sheet and scratched out a message on it in graphite that would not fall off the trail of the pencil or affix to the page until the Flash again was gone from this place…
The message, when someone glacially turned his head to read it—just as the alarm sounded—would read, LATE AGAIN, BOYS.
… and back across town to the house afire and the mother and two kids still prone in odd positions on the ground. Neighbors and pedestrians in the area were statues in position just beginning to gather and watch the disaster. The slow-motion torrent of water came inching out of the spigot of the hydrant where the Flash began worrying it upward like a sculptor pressing on clay—
—and I was suddenly back in real time, and the waterspout flew up at the sky, in a snaking pattern through the limbs of an old tree, then winding around an electric line and up above the house. Every drop rained down on the fire to quench it as I lowered the wrist that held my watch from in front of my face.
The Fastest Man Alive was nowhere to be seen.
“What time is it?” the Spectre asked me.
“Oh,” I said, raising the watch again. “Seven thirty-two,” and I paused too long before I said, “and twenty-one seconds.”
“It took you two seconds to say that,” the Spectre observed.
“So all that we watched,” I said in wonder, “took place in the course of a second?”
“A little less,” the Spectre said, as I heard the fire hissing away and watched the train of water from the hydrant falling off to a trickle. “That is the way it is in Keystone City.”
“He must feel like a very old man,” I said, “years and years of experiences crammed into every day of his life.”
No one ever saw him, but everyone knew he was there.
*
In high Earth orbit, 22,300 miles above the planet, a large imposing man at least my age but looking quite a bit younger sat watching the sky. It was just high enough that the planet might be standing still if the great green satellite orbited on an equatorial path, which it did not. Alan Scott, Earth’s first Green Lantern, stood guard against a planetary invasion, and had fewer visitors even than Superman had when he spent his time plowing up the frozen Earth beside his Antarctic Fortress.
He sat and watched the skies in great black projections of light on the green walls of this city-satellite. He walked from one pod through a tunnel to another, carrying a sword of verdant light that projected images of the skies on the walls wherever he walked. He must be quite mad with isolation, I thought.
Then I saw him watering his plants and talking to his laboratory animals, and was sure he was as insane as I once thought Wesley was.
And finally he dictated a dispatch that typed itself on a screen and went directly to Earth as he talked: “Zero-gravity research into zinc alloy cell growth retardant is inconclusive but promising. Cancer cell remission in rhesus monkeys continues in eighty-eight percent of the cases. Standing by.”
He sent the message to Nevin Scrimshaw, a prominent nutritionist at MIT whom I happened to know. Nevin had been on the cover of every news magazine in the country when he’d reversed lymphatic cancer with vitamin and mineral supplements. Evidently Green Lantern spent a lot of his time functioning as Scrimshaw’s graduate assistant. Mad or sane, whether or not he was needlessly preoccupied with guarding against an alien invasion, Green Lantern was still fulfilling that oath that once was synonymous with his mission: “In brightest day, in blackest night; no evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil’s might beware my power—Green Lantern’s light.”
I have no idea why I remembered that, but I did—like every schoolchild.
*
On a Rapid Transit car underneath San Francisco about a dozen and a half people were growing increasingly worried. At opposite ends of the car, there slowly collected handsful of costumed teenagers, and neither the group at the fore end nor the group at the aft end looked as though they liked the other group very much.
“We’ve got Rapier,” a large, thick-muscled boy of perhaps seventeen said through enormous white teeth. As he said this, another dangerous child—a thin and quick little mongoose of a boy—spirited through the aft end door of the moving car to join his group.
“So, we got Automag,” a similarly large fellow at the fore end said, throwing open his car door and pulling in a humanlike creature four feet high, four feet wide, and four feet thick.
The two groups glared across the car at each other some more. The train was an express, barreling along the center track through one station after another. Moving at breakneck speed along the center rail, the two groups stared each other down. They called each other names. They brandished their weaponry and occasionally levitated something or tossed an energy pellet of some sort or melted something with a glance. The only ones intimidated were the passengers stuck between, sinking lower in their seats, digging deeper into their reading material, more and more concerned with seeming less and less concerned. Then unexpectedly the train was on the rightmost track and came to a stop in some station where hardly anything ever stops, and every civilian on the train stormed the sliding doors and poured out onto the platform as soon as the doors could release them.
Only a small blonde woman boarded. She carried the exaggerated figure of an old-time movie star, but crow’s-feet betrayed the fact that she’d traversed a crucial hill lately and might not be aware of it yet. No matter, into the conveyance she bounced, and, heedless of the nonsense collecting at the extremes of the car, she found a seat in the empty center and opened up a trashy magazine.
A few kids noted the ample proportions and slatternly appeal of the car’s sole civilian passenger. With a shove or a look from a crony, though, any curious hormone bag got a reminder of the passenger’s apparent age—certainly well over thirty—and evident cluelessness.
Then somebody—on who-knew-which side—said, “Rampage!” and the subway rumble was on.
The first kid to blow out of his corner leapt across half the length of the car to grab a vertical pole and swing once around it, extending his legs together as he swung up some momentum…
The passenger put up a hand—late—as if to wave away his swinging legs, and pursed her lips for a moment.
… and the kid swung off in a crazy direction, slamming his feet into a shatterproof plate glass window and his head onto a plastic seat back. He was out of commission.
Two came from the other end. As they approached the center of the car, the pair slipped and fell on their butts as if they were old-time slapstick players.
One flew across the space and touched down nose to nose with the leader of the opposing gang…
The woman glanced up from her magazine, then back down.
… and as the rumbler put a hand on the commuter bar above him to posture and huff out his territorial ultimatum, he suddenly yanked his hand away, blew on it, shoved it between his legs, and squeezed it, trying
to weather intense pain and heat.
And it went on like that. A comedy of errors afflicted every sniveling little metachild who arrogated himself into position to threaten another. Finally the express train came to a real stop where there were travelers who actually wanted to get on and go somewhere. By then, the troublemakers were tired of their troublemaking, and all got off to trudge home.
At the following stop the slatternly blonde got out of her seat and left the useless magazine in a trash bucket. Fluffing out her lovely hair and shaking her body—constricted by the illusion of the unfashionable—like a dog hopping out of a pool, she bounced up the subway stairs into the San Francisco sun.
“Power Woman,” I said to the Spectre, who nodded. “I thought I recognized her.”
*
“No problem,” Ray Terrill said. “I’m a colorful guy.”
It was a hospital in the eastern foothills of the Colorado Rockies, a little town called Smoky Hill. Here people still picked up the mail at the Post Office in the morning, and cowboys carried six-shooters, and traveling software salesmen kept their palmtops in their saddlebags and communicated from horseback with the home office in Sunnyvale. The nearest big city was Arapahoe. But it was here, in a valley bounded on the east by a pattern of three big calderas and a butte, where a hospital stood shielded from the fallout and ash of the Kansas explosion. It was the “clean” location closest to Ground Zero, and here was where Ray Terrill volunteered as a triage assistant tending the burned and sick refugees of Kansas.
“But it’s such a nice jacket,” the mother said. “We can’t take it. We may never see you again.”
The jacket he wrapped around the shivering boy was leather, with one yellow and one red sleeve and an orange collar. This was Ray’s speed. He was lost in adolescence, though he approached fifty.
“I’ve got six years to go in my forties, and I swear my thirties lasted longer than this,” Ray insisted to the shivering little boy—victim of vicious third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body. The burning was the least of it.
Ray might have thought twice about alluding to his advanced years, considering the prognosis for this child. Mom had been away in Kansas City at the time of the blast and escaped unhurt. Dad, two sisters, thirty head of cattle, and the family dog all had died. No one could figure how this boy had made it, but his mother found him the day after the blast, huddled under a heat blanket in the barn. Who knew how Mom had gotten past the authorities into the burn zone so quickly, either. They were new arrivals here at the hospital, and both would have to undergo radiation testing—especially Mom, who’d gone into the zone with only the piecrust roof of her Jeep hovercraft to protect her from ravening gamma rays.
Ray Terrill leaned over the boy—he did not even ask the kid’s name; there were so many, he would never remember, and mostly it did not matter—and pretended just to muss the hideously burned child’s sparse hair to distract him. What Ray actually did was suck up every iota of dormant radiation poisoning from the child’s system with that one sweep of his hand. He did the same thing to the boy’s mother—a recent widow and, he thought as he did it, something of a babe too—and felt even more radiation leave her and disperse through his own system.
Ray told the mother that he was sending her son to the burn ward and that she should expect his recovery—assuming he was clear of radiation poisoning, which had yet to be tested—to last a little more than a year. She looked at her son, his persistent smile, his crusted skin, the colorful leather coat over his quaking frame—and she was actually relieved to hear this. They were two of the lucky ones. They would make it, Ray knew.
By the time his shift was over, Ray secretly had rebuilt the radiation-tainted DNA patterns of fourteen people and dissolved dormant but potentially carcinogenic free radicals from the bloodstream of thirty-seven more. He pulled sheets over the faces of four who’d died on arrival.
Ray Terrill then fired up the Sturm und Drang of his remarkable physiology, poured himself into his shiny golden body suit, and flew off unseen over Kansas to clear the land of radiation poisoning. Ray Terrill was the Ray, the walking, breathing, high-flying anthropomorphic lightbeam. He was a solid mass not of cells but of photons, an energy being living among humans. He could sense and change the nature of matter at its very molecular level.
Kansas, however, was a job and a half. If only he were getting paid by the acre.
*
Where were the rest of them? The Amazons, I learned, still lived on Paradise Island, a remote cay with no fixed location. The mermen and -maids still swarmed deep in the Atlantic and mostly made their homes in the sunken ancient city of Atlantis that settled askew on the floor of the Chronus Trench. The Legionnaires of the Thirtieth Century occasionally appeared here and there, mostly with futuristic historians in tow to gather around historic events and document them. There would be none of these latter on Earth in the coming months, however. This time, according to the Spectre, was a rippling labyrinth of probability fields, and no time traveler in his or her right mind would give it anything but a wide berth.
*
“There was someone else,” I told the Spectre.
“There are many more,” he said.
“No, I remember another one,” I said, “whose real identity we all learned some years ago and who dropped from public view like a discredited character witness. He made his home in Gotham City.”
“Yes.”
“What has become of the Batman? Of Bruce Wayne?”
“You will see him soon enough.”
“When?” I asked the Spectre, not sure whether I really felt the need to know, or whether it was simply morbid curiosity.
Suddenly, I was in a very dark place. I saw nothing. All I heard were rhythmic irregular tappings and the murmurs of a whispered icy voice.
“Maneuver twelve,” the voice said, clearer now, and gradually a figure materialized in my line of vision.
Broad metallic shoulders shifted back and forth against a high-backed chair on top of a platform.
“Variation D-sixteen,” the voice said, and the light shifted.
Beyond the figure was a monitor, and on the monitor was the dim image of a man with a gun looking upward in fear. It was a robbery, aired on this monitor. Then I saw that it was a battery of small monitors, maybe ten of them, each trained on the gunman from a different angle. He dropped the gun. Surrounding him were a company of twelve-foot-high robots, each with a black bat stenciled on its chest. The Bat-Knights. One robot held out a hooked arm to the frightened gunman.
Eventually, the man gathered enough presence to pick up the dropped weapon and hang it by its trigger guard from the hook of the fearsome robot’s extended claw.
“Vehicular mishap on Gotham Bay Bridge. Dispatch ten,” the Batman said, and on the monitors I saw all the robots but the one with the gun take to the air.
“What is he?” I asked the Spectre. “An android?” There were metallic frames all down his arms, legs, and shoulders. His neck was in a brace, yet he moved with the agility of a twenty-year-old.
“He abused the gift of his body for decades,” the Spectre said, “and now needs artificial means to support his musculature.”
“You mean he used his body,” I corrected. I was always in awe of how the Batman moved, even deep into middle age. I could not be anything but jealous still of the sensation in that man’s bank of memory. His hair was white and finally thinning just a little. His muscles seemed well exercised, despite or perhaps because of the metal framing. And he wore what seemed to be a perpetual sardonic grin on his face.
“What is he doing here?” I wanted to know. “Isn’t he as alone as Superman was in the Tundra?”
“No,” the Spectre said, “not as alone, but more confident than Superman of his own counsel.”
“Quiet night, then.”
“In Gotham City all the nights are quiet now. Batman has his city under control.”
“Maneuver nineteen, units three and four,” Batman sa
id, and, one would presume, the flying Bat-Monitors complied.
“Why?” I wanted to know.
“It makes him happy,” the Spectre said.
*
“Confident of his own counsel,” was how the Spectre described this aged Batman. I wondered what that meant. My mission—the Spectre’s mission, really—demanded that I too be confident of my own counsel. I had never been. Always had I questioned my premises. Always was I looking at the Devil’s side of every argument. Why not ask the Batman along on this quest? He was used to judging. He was one well acquainted with the approaching night.
“Have faith, Norman,” Ellen used to tell me whenever I woke up in the middle of the night wondering about a decision I had made, or doubting the efficacy of the advice I’d given someone.
“Faith in what?” I always asked her.
“God, of course,” she always said.
“It isn’t God’s judgment I doubt,” I always replied.
And always, she smiled—an indulgent smile a lot like Bruce Wayne’s smile, now that I think on it—and kissed me and rolled off to sleep while I was stewing. It was not as though I did not know what advice Ellen would have given me. It just would have been comforting, in this most perplexing moment of my life, to hear it again.
CHAPTER 7
Scrooge Me Not
“I don’t think so,” I said.
And he said, “Pardon?”
Kingdom Come Page 9