Get a hold of yourself, Funck, get a hold of yourself!
There’s a little Clark Kent in the best of us, Funck thought.
That’s why Superman had long since passed into folklore. Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent were the perfect, bald statement of the human dilemma (Kent) and the corresponding wish-fulfillment (The Man of Steel). It was normal for kids to assimilate the synthetic myth into their grubby little ids. But it was also normal for them to outgrow it. A few childhood schizoid tendencies never hurt anyone. All kids are a little loco in the coco, Funck reasoned sagely.
If only someone had shot Andy Warhol before it was too late!
That’s what opened the whole fetid can of worms, Funck thought—the Pop Art craze. Suddenly, comic books were no longer greasy kid stuff. Suddenly, comic books were Art with a big, fat capital “A.” They were hip, they were in, so-called adults were no longer ashamed to snatch them away from the brats and read the things themselves.
All over America, meek, mild-mannered men went back and relived their youths through comic books. Thousands of meek, mild-mannered slobs were once more coming to identify with the meek, mild-mannered reporter of the Metropolis Daily Planet. It was like going home again. Superman was the perfect wish-fulfillment figure. No one doubted that he could pulverize 007, leap over a traffic jam on the Long Island Expressway in a single bound, see through women’s clothing with his x-ray vision, and voila, the Superman Syndrome!
Step one: the meek, mild-mannered victim identified with that prototype of all schlemiels, Clark Kent.
Step two: they began to see themselves more and more as Clark Kent; began to dream of themselves as Superman.
Step three: a moment of intense frustration, a rebuff from some Lois Lane figure, a dressing-down from some irate Perry White surrogate, and something snapped, and they were in the clutches of the Superman Syndrome.
Usually, it started covertly. The victim procured a pair of longjohns, dyed them blue, sewed an “S” on them, and took to wearing the costume under his street clothes occasionally, in times of stress.
But once the first fatal step was taken, the Superman Syndrome was irreversible. The victim took to wearing the costume all the time. Sooner or later, the stress and strain of reality became too much, and a fugue-state resulted. During the fugue, the victim dyed his hair Superman steel-blue, bought a blue double-breasted suit and steel-rimmed glasses, forgot who he was, and woke up one morning with a set of memories straight out of the comic book. He was Clark Kent, and he had to get back to Metropolis.
Bad enough for thousands of nuts to waltz around thinking they were Clark Kent. The horrible part was that Clark Kent was the Man of Steel. Which meant that thousands of grown men were jumping off buildings, trying to stop locomotives with their bare hands, tackling armed criminals in the streets and otherwise contriving to commit hara-kiri.
What was worse, there were so many Supernuts popping up all over the place that everyone in the country had seen Superman at least once by now, and enough of them had managed to pull off some feat of daring—saving a little old lady from a gang of muggers, foiling an inexpert bank robbery simply by getting underfoot—that it was fast becoming impossible to convince people that there wasn’t a Superman.
And the more people became convinced that there was a Superman, the more people fell victim to the Syndrome, the more people became convinced…
Funck groaned aloud. There was even a well-known television commentator who jokingly suggested that maybe Superman was real, and the nuts were the people who thought he wasn’t.
Could it be? Funck wondered. If sanity was defined as the norm, the mental state of the majority of the population, and the majority of the population believed in Superman, then maybe anyone who didn’t believe in Superman had a screw loose…
If the nuts were sane, and the sane people were really nuts, and the nuts were the majority, then the truth would have to be…
“Get a hold of yourself, Funck!” Dr. Felix Funck shouted aloud. “There is no Superman! There is no Superman!”
Funck scooped the comics back into the drawer and pressed a button on his intercom.
“You may send in the next Supertwitch, Miss Jones,” he said.
Luscious Miss Jones seemed to be blushing as she ushered the next patient into Dr. Funck’s office.
There was something unsettling about this one, Funck decided instantly. He had the usual glasses and the usual blue doublebreasted suit, but on him they looked almost good. He was built like a brick outhouse, and the steel-blue dye job on his hair looked most professional. Funck smelled money. One of the powers of Supershrink, after all was the uncanny ability to instantly calculate a potential patient’s bank balance. Maybe there would be some way to grab this one for a private patient…
“Have a seat, Mr. Kent,” Dr. Funck said. “You are Clark Kent, aren’t you?”
Clark Kent sat down on the edge of the chair, his broad back ramrod-straight. “Why, yes, Doctor!” he said. “How did you know?”
“I’ve seen your stuff in the Metropolis Daily Planet, Mr. Kent,” Funck said. Got to really humor this one, he thought. There’s money here. That dye job’s so good it must’ve set him back fifty bucks! Indeed a job for Supershrink! “Well just what seems to be the trouble, Mr. Kent?” he said.
“It’s my memory, Doctor!” said Clark Kent. “I seem to be suffering from a strange form of amnesia!”
“So-o…” said Felix Funck soothingly. “Could it possibly be that… that you suddenly found yourself in New York without knowing how you got here, Mr. Kent?” he said.
“Why that’s amazing!” exclaimed Clark Kent. “You’re one hundred percent correct!”
“And could it also be,” suggested Felix Funck, “that you feel you must return to Metropolis immediately? That, however, you can find no plane or train or bus that goes there? That you cannot find a copy of the Daily Planet at the out-of-town newsstands? That, in fact, you cannot even remember where Metropolis is?”
Clark Kent’s eyes bugged. “Fantastic!” he exclaimed. “How could you know all that? Can it be that you are no ordinary psychiatrist, Dr. Funck? Can it be that Dr. Felix Funck, balding, harried head of a ward in a great metropolitan booby-hatch is in reality… Supershrink?”
“Ak!” said Dr. Felix Funck.
“Don’t worry, Dr. Funck,” Clark Kent said in a warm, comradely tone, “your secret is safe with me! We superheroes have got to stick together, right?”
“Guk!” said Dr. Felix Funck. How could he possibly know? he thought. Why, he’d have to be… ulp! That was ridiculous. Get a hold of yourself, Funck, get a hold of yourself! Who’s the psychiatrist here, anyway?
“So you know that Felix Funck is Supershrink, eh?” he said shrewdly. “Then you must also know that you can conceal nothing from me. That I know your Secret Identity too.”
“Secret Identity?” said Clark Kent piously. “Who me? Why everyone knows that I’m just a meek, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan—”
With a savage whoop, Dr. Felix Funck suddenly leapt halfway across his desk and ripped open the shirt of the dumbfounded Clark Kent, revealing a skin-tight blue uniform with a red “S” insignia emblazoned on the chest. Top-notch job of tailoring too, Funck thought approvingly.
“Aha!” exclaimed Funck. “So Clark Kent, meek, mild-mannered reporter, is, in reality, Superman!”
“So my secret is out!” Clark Kent said stoically. “I sure hope you believe in Truth, Justice and the American way!”
“Don’t worry, Clark old man. Your secret is safe with me. We superheroes have got to stick together, right?”
“Absolutely!” said Clark Kent. “Now about my problem, Doctor…”
“Problem?”
“How am I going to get back to Metropolis?” asked Clark Kent. “By now, the forces of evil must be having a field day!”
“Look,” said Dr. Funck. “First of all, there is no Metropolis, no Daily Planet, no Lois Lane, no Perry Wh
ite, and no Superman. It’s all a comic book, friend.”
Clark Kent stared at Dr. Funck worriedly. “Are you feeling all right, Doctor?” he asked solicitously. “Sure you haven’t been working too hard? Everybody knows there’s a Superman! Tell me, Dr. Funck, when did you first notice this strange malady? Could it be that some childhood trauma has caused you to deny my existence? Maybe your mother—”
“Leave my mother out of this!” shrieked Felix Funck. “Who’s the psychiatrist here, anyway? I don’t want to hear any dirty stories about my mother. There is no Superman, you’re not him, and I can prove it!”
Gark Kent nodded his head benignly. “Sure you can, Dr. Funck!” he soothed.
“Look! Look! If you were Superman you wouldn’t have any problem. You’d—” Funck glanced nervously about his office. It was on the tenth floor. It had one window. The window had steel bars an inch and a quarter thick. He can’t hurt himself, Funck thought. Why not? Make him face reality, and break the delusion!
“You were saying, Doctor?” said Gark Kent.
“If you were Superman, you wouldn’t have to worry about trains or planes or buses. You can fly, eh? You can bend steel in your bare hands? Well then why don’t you just rip the bars off the window and fly back to Metropolis?”
“Why… why you’re absolutely right!” exclaimed Gark Kent. “Of course!”
“Ah…” said Funck. “So you see you have been the victim of a delusion. Progress, progress. But don’t think you’ve been completely cured yet. Even Supershrink isn’t that good. This will require many hours of private consultation, at the modest hourly rate of a mere fifty dollars. We must uncover the basic psychosomatic causes for the—”
“What are you talking about?” exclaimed Gark Kent, leaping up from the chair and shucking his suit with blinding speed, revealing a full-scale Superman costume, replete with expensive-looking scarlet cape which Funck eyed greedily.
He bounded to the window. “Of course!” said Superman. “I can bend steel in my bare hands!” So saying, he bent the inch-and-a-quarter steel bar in his bare hands like so many lengths of licorice whip, ripped them aside and leapt to the windowsill.
“Thanks for everything, Dr. Funck!” he said. “Up! Up! And away!” He flung out his arms and leapt from the tenth-floor window.
Horrified, Funck bounded to the window and peered out, expecting to see an awful mess on the crowded sidewalk below. Instead:
A rapidly-dwindling caped figure soared out over the New York skyline. From the crowded street below, shrill cries drifted up to the ears of Dr. Felix Funck.
“Look! Up there in the sky!”
“It’s a bird!”
“It’s a plane!”
“It’s SUPERMAN!!”
Dr. Felix Funck watched the Man of Steel execute a smart left bank and turn due west at the Empire State Building. For a short moment, Dr. Funck was stunned, nonplussed. Then he realized what had happened and what he had to do.
“He’s nuts!” Felix Funck shouted. “The man is crazy! He’s got a screw loose! He thinks he’s Superman, and he’s so crazy that he is Superman! The man needs help! This is a job for SUPERSHRINK!”
So saying, Dr. Felix Funck bounded to the windowsill, doffed his street clothes, revealing a gleaming skin-tight red suit with a large blue “S” emblazoned across it, and leapt out the window screaming “Wait for me, Superman, you pathetic neurotic, you, wait for me!”
Dr. Felix Funck, who is, after all, in reality Supershrink, turned due west and headed out across the Hudson for Metropolis, somewhere beyond Secaucus, New Jersey.
Subjectivity
Interplanetary flight having been perfected, the planets and moons of the Sol system having been colonized, Man turned his attention to the stars.
And ran into a stone wall.
After three decades of trying, scientists reluctantly concluded that a faster-than-light drive was an impossibility, at least within the realm of any known theory of the Universe. They gave up.
But a government does not give up so easily, especially a unified government which already controls the entire habitat of the human race. Most especially a psychologically and sociologically enlightened government which sees the handwriting on the wall, and has already noticed the first signs of racial claustrophobia—an objectless sense of frustrated rage, increases in senseless crimes, proliferation of perversions and vices of every kind. Like grape juice sealed in a bottle, the human race had begun to ferment.
Therefore, the Solar Government took a slightly different point of view towards interstellar travel—Man must go to the stars. Period. Therefore, Man will go to the stars.
If the speed of light could not be exceeded, then Man would go to the stars within that limit.
When a government with tens of billions of dollars to spend becomes monomaniacal, Great Things can be accomplished. Also, unfortunately, Unspeakable Horrors.
Stage One: A drive was developed which could propel a spaceship at half the speed of light. This was merely a matter of technological concentration, and several billion dollars.
Stage Two: A ship was built around the drive, and outfitted with every conceivable safety device. A laser-beam communication system was installed, so that Sol could keep in contact with the ship all the way to Centaurus. A crew of ten carefully screened, psyched and trained near-supermen was selected, and the ship was launched on a sixteen-year round-trip to Centaurus.
It never came back.
Two years out, the ten near-supermen became ten raving maniacs.
But the Solar Government did not give up. The next ship contained five near-supermen, and five near-superwomen.
They only lasted for a year and a half.
The Solar Government intensified the screening process. The next ship was manned by ten bona-fide supermen.
They stayed sane for nearly three years.
The Solar Government sent out a ship containing five supermen and five superwomen. In two years, they had ten super-lunatics.
The psychologists came to the unstartling conclusion that even the cream of humanity, in a sexually balanced crew, could not stand up psychologically to sixteen years in a small steel womb, surrounded by billions of cubic miles of nothing.
One would have expected reasonable men to have given up.
Not the Solar Government. Monomania had produced Great Things, in the form of a c/2 drive. It now proceeded to produce Unspeakable Horrors.
The cream of the race has failed, reasoned the Solar Government, therefore, we will give the dregs a chance.
The fifth ship was manned by homosexuals. They lasted only six months. A ship full of lesbians bettered that by only two weeks.
Number Seven was manned by schizophrenics. Since they were already mad, they did not go crazy. Nevertheless, they did not come back. Number Eight was catatonics. Nine was paranoids. Ten was sadists. Eleven was masochists. Twelve was a mixed crew of sadists and masochists. No luck.
Maybe it was because thirteen was still a mystic number, or maybe it was merely that the Solar Government was running out of ideas. At any rate, ship Number Thirteen was the longest shot of all.
Background: From the beginnings of Man, it had been known that certain plants—mushrooms, certain cacti—produced intense hallucinations. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists—and others less scientifically minded—had begun to extract those hallucinogenic compounds, chiefly mescalin and psilocybin. The next step was the synthesis of hallucinogens—L.S.D. 25 was the first, and it was far more powerful than the extracts.
In the next few centuries, more and more different hallucinogens were synthesized—L.S.D. 105, Johannic acid, huxleyon, baronite.
So by the time the Solar Government had decided that the crew of ship Number Thirteen would attempt to cope with the terrible reality of interstellar space by denying that reality, they had quite an assortment of hallucinogens to choose from.
The one they chose was a new, as-yet-untested (“Two experiments for the price of one,
” explained economy-minded officials) and unbelievably complex compound tentatively called Omnidrene.
Omnidrene was what the name implied—a hallucinogen with all the properties of the others, some which had proven to be all its own, and some which were as yet unknown. As ten micrograms was one day’s dose for the average man, it was the ideal hallucinogen for a starship.
So they sealed five men and five women—they had given up on sexually unbalanced crews—in ship Number Thirteen, along with half a ton of Omnidrene and their fondest wishes, pointed the ship towards Centaurus, and prayed for a miracle.
In a way they could not possibly have foreseen, they got it.
As starship Thirteen passed the orbit of Pluto, a meeting was held, since this could be considered the beginning of interstellar space.
The ship was reasonably large—ten small private cabins, a bridge that would only be used for planetfalls, large storage areas, and a big common room, where the crew had gathered.
They were sitting in All-Purpose Lounges, arranged in a circle. A few had their Lounges at full recline, but most preferred the upright position.
Oliver Brunei, the nominal captain, had just opened the first case of Omnidrene, and taken out a bottle of the tiny pills.
“This, fellow inmates,” he said, “is Omnidrene. The time has come for us to indulge. The automatics are all set, we won’t have to do a thing we don’t want to for the next eight years.”
He poured ten of the tiny blue pills into the palm of his right hand. “On Earth, they used to have some kind of traditional ceremony when a person crossed the equator for the first time. Since we are crossing a far more important equator, I thought we should have some kind of ceremony.”
The crew squirmed irritably.
I do tend to be verbose, Brunei thought.
“Well… anyway, I just thought we all oughta take the first pills together,” he said, somewhat defensively.
“So come on, Ollie,” said a skinny, sour-looking man of about thirty years.
“O.K., Lazar, O.K.” Marashovski’s gonna be trouble, Brunei thought. Why did they put him on the ship?
The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 20