by Len Wein
But not all of the current X-Men were really youngsters. Banshee, for example, was closer in age to Xavier than to any of his fellow students. In reality, he was Sean Cassidy, laird of Cassidy Keep on the Irish coast. A normal human, as far as the eye could detect, Banshee had the ability to create extremely strong sonic waves with his voice, waves so powerful that they held him aloft, letting him fly as long as he screamed. Unsure of how to handle his abilities, Cassidy had left the care of his lands and castle to others, briefly trying his hand at crime. Not happy with it, hunted by mutant enemies and normal humans alike, he’d eventually settled into the life of an anonymous drifter, until an appeal from Xavier had convinced him that the X-Men might hold a place for him.
Now, he stood before the professor, wearing the colorful costume he’d adopted, the green suit with the black- and gold-striped glider panels and yellow boots and gloves.
By his side stood the rest of the team.
Wolverine, or “Logan” (only that simple name was listed in the school records), was Canadian, and, like Banshee, he was no longer a youngster. He was short, only an inch or two over five feet, and wiry; and although the cowl he generally wore concealed it, he sported a pair of shaggy sideburns. His costume was yellow, with blue trunks, boots, and gloves, and his mask had very large, vulpine-looking black points on it, like ears. Nature had given Wolverine tremendous strength and stamina, a remarkable healing ability, and senses as sharp as those of his namesake. The Canadian government, hoping to create a national superhero, had given him a skeletal structure of Adamantium, the hardest metal ever conceived, replacing his bones one by one. They’d also given him retractable claws, nine inches long, three per hand, of that same substance. But the deadliest thing about Wolverine was his nature, as fierce and savage as that of his namesake. Not really a team player by nature, he’d jumped at Xavier’s offer of membership in the X-Men as an escape from the confining regulations of government work.
Peter Rasputin, called Colossus, was a contrast to his ferocious little teammate in almost every way. Whereas Wolverine was small, Colossus was big, incredibly big, tall, and powerfully built. While Wolverine was a loner, only too glad to leave the Canadian government behind him, Colossus had found it a terrible wrench to answer Xavier’s summons and say good-bye to his parents and younger sister, the farming collective where he’d grown up, and his beloved Russia. But most strongly of any of the X-Men did Colossus feel the sense of duty that motivated Xavier himself, and so he had joined the team. He was a tremendous asset to it, too. Not only were his gentle heart and quiet good nature welcome in a group whose members were often abrasive and bitter—wary of getting close to others—but Colossus was one of the strongest beings in the world. One moment he’d be standing there, Peter Rasputin, wearing hip boots and a colorful red-and-yellow costume; the next he could will a change to come over his molecular structure, so that his body was plated in a thick steel armor that fit as flexibly as it had while it was ordinary skin. This armor was virtually invulnerable, and it gave Colossus the strength of his namesake.
The one X-Man who really helped Colossus get over his occasional homesickness and longing for his family, the one he was closest to, was one of the few members of the team who could match him in power. In reality Ororo was not an X-Man at all, but a woman, whose control over the winds and rain had earned her the code name of Storm. Xavier had found Storm in the wilds of Kenya, living in a temple built by tribesmen who worshiped her as the goddess of the weather. Her life there had been a fantasy, sheltered and beautiful, and Storm had been a gentle and generous deity. It had been hard for her to give it up, and live instead the life Xavier had offered her: reality, harsh and dangerous, as a superheroine and a mutant in a world that fears them both. Storm’s costume was simple, gold bracelets, a black poncho, hip boots, and a rather ornate headband that she’d worn during her earlier life. The girl herself was breathtaking, as natural and beautiful as the forces at her command, but strange and unearthly, too, with café-au-lait skin, flowing, snowy-white hair, and crystal-blue eyes, tip-tilted like a cat’s—wise eyes as deep as a lake that has stood since time began.
There was something entirely eerie, and not at all earthly about the German, Kurt Wagner, called Nightcrawler. His appearance was as uncanny as his ability to teleport from one place to another in an instant. Xavier sometimes wondered how young Wagner had escaped being drowned at birth. He looked so strange, so . . . un-human, that he might easily have been taken for a changeling or a demon, rather than a mutant human, and so been killed. He was built like a man, and judging by his bone structure, might have been rather handsome, if his appearance had been normal. Instead, he had fangs, pointed ears, and glowing yellow eyes. A velvety blue fur grew over his otherwise-human features and over the rest of his body, most of it concealed by his red-and-black tights. Under white boots and gloves, Nightcrawler had only two large toes per foot, and a thumb and two fingers on each hand. What contributed most strongly to the strangeness of his demon image was Kurt Wagner’s tail—long, forked, and prehensile. Nightcrawler had protected himself for most of his life by joining a carnival, where his frightening traits were just part of the general odd atmosphere. While there, he’d shown considerable skill as an acrobat and had adopted a carefree, devil-may-care attitude toward life in general and danger in particular. It was only after he’d left the carnival that Nightcrawler had run into trouble. Wandering into a lonely European village one night, from the shadows of the mountains, Nightcrawler was taken for the demon he appeared to be. Too weak and tired to teleport, he might have died that night, at the hands of a mob, but for Professor Xavier, who, alerted by Cerebro, arrived in time to stop the entire village, with a powerful telepathic command, and escape with the young mutant he’d rescued. After this brief and unpleasant experience as a mutant alone in a human world, Nightcrawler was only too happy to start a new life as part of an American-based superhero team. If he was bitter about his past, Nightcrawler concealed it well, under the façade of carnival-acquired sophistication.
Xavier had no doubts at all about the bitterness in the heart of Scott Summers, better known as Cyclops, deputy leader of the team, whose worry about the dangerous nature of his power consumed him. Cyclops had been with the professor since the beginning. He was, in fact, the very first X-Man. He’d stayed with the school long after he himself had graduated, and his friends and classmates had gone out into the word to lead their own lives. Cyclops was invaluable in helping to select and train the new X-Men, and that was ostensibly why he’d stayed with the school, but Xavier, familiar with his students’ most private thoughts, knew the truth. Cyclops didn’t feel sure enough of himself and his deadly mutant power to go out and live among normal humans. Scott Summers was like a living solar battery, and when fully charged his eyes could generate a force beam powerful enough to rip through solid steel as if it were paper—or to kill, if Cyclops glanced at another human being in an unguarded moment. And so he, a normal-looking and handsome (if somewhat moody) man, remained hidden in Westchester, wearing a blue costume with yellow trunks, boots, and gloves, his eye beams contained behind the all-important ruby-quartz visor, helping his fellow X-Men and oppressed by fear of himself.
Still and all, they were a most satisfactory group, Xavier reflected as he surveyed them, careful not to let his pride show.
“Sir?” Characteristically, it was Cyclops who spoke first.
“What is it, Scott?”
“Why did you call us all here? I assume you must have had a reason . . .”
“Indeed I did,” Xavier said ominously. “My X-Men . . . prepare to enter the Danger Room.”
For the X-Men, the words “Danger Room” were always a portent. That name signified the ultimate test, of them as individuals, and of their work as a team, and the tests were usually performed under life-and-death conditions. Xavier never gave them a hint of what to expect when they entered the room, of what new traps and weapons he had installed, or whether this would be a
test for them all, or focus on the training and abilities of one particular member. Whatever was in store for them, any X-Man who entered that room while not at the peak of his performance was risking both his own life and those of his teammates.
• • •
The second missile disaster occurred that same afternoon. Alerted by the Americans to the mysterious accident that had occured that morning during their own phase of the test, the Russians were watching for it. Their own missile was being fired from the submarine Pravda, in an empty stretch of ocean far to the northwest of Hawaii.
The second bird was fired from the Pravda at five minutes after three. Twenty-five seconds later, it began to veer sharply off course. The Russian scientists noted the same pattern that the Americans had, the change in direction, minute at first, then growing rapidly, and the same sense that the missile had a will of its own, simply choosing to ignore all of its control systems, despite the fact that those systems were functioning flawlessly. Like their American counterparts, the Russians tried desperately to abort the flight and were making plans to intercept the missile with another rocket when its flight came to an abrupt end, in a nuclear holocaust in the ocean, halfway between Hawaii and Japan.
From that moment on, by international agreement, testing of atomic weapons anywhere on the globe was suspended.
• • •
So far, the test seemed to be an easy one, but in the Danger Room, appearances tended to be deceiving. Things really happened quickly, keeping the X-Men off balance. All of their attention was given to staying alive, to helping their teammates do the same, and to neutralizing, by whatever means necessary, all of the weapons and deadly devices that appeared so unexpectedly from out of the walls. Xavier was constantly refining the room’s armaments, adding new traps, and giving the old ones new twists, so that the X-Men could never slip into carelessness or overconfidence.
Five minutes into the test, however, Nightcrawler was beginning to show signs of both. He seemed to be alert to every new threat that arose, evading machine-gun bullets with practiced ease and then leaping out of the way of a flamethrower that had suddenly been activated on one wall. Just as his feet hit the floor, a trapdoor opened beneath them. Before Nightcrawler could fall through, he was suddenly . . . elsewhere. With a puff of brimstone-scented smoke and a sound like a small explosion, he teleported to the far side of the room, laughing.
Wolverine, alert for attack by a small force of tiny drone planes that had been harassing him, wrinkled his nose as the stench of sulphur from Nightcrawler’s reappearance reached him, offending his animal-keen senses. “Cripes, don’t distract me,” he muttered, still watching for the planes. Almost before the next one appeared, he was upon it, ripping it into shards with his claws.
Banshee sailed through the air, held aloft by the sound waves of his wailing cry, which cut a path before him as he negotiated his way between the sharp spikes and pylons that sprang up in his way. He couldn’t resist sneaking a peek at the rest of the X-Men to see how they were doing.
Fine, by the look of things, especially Storm. Rockets were being fired at her from all sides, and she maneuvered among them, riding the winds she created as casually as if she were out for a Sunday stroll. But then the girl was like that, always calm, almost never panicking. It was probably part of the image she’d learned to project when she’d been worshiped as the goddess of the weather. Of course, all those years in the wild had had a few undesirable side effects as well. There was one thing Ororo couldn’t tolerate, Banshee knew, and one situation that he’d seen was likely to make her hysterical—Storm couldn’t stand to be shut in. Simply put, she was claustrophobic. Poor lass . . . if she didn’t set the better of that fear, soon, then someday it was likely to . . .
Too late. Banshee realized his mistake: he hadn’t been paying enough attention. Now, a steel panel slammed shut in front of him. He was already too close to turn aside, and if he slammed into it at the speed he was flying . . . Desperately he tightened his vocal chords, and when there were only a few yards separating him from the barrier, he unleashed his most powerful scream, narrowing it into a tight beam of sonic energy that shattered the wall at the last second, enabling him to pass through it unharmed.
He didn’t have much time to savor his victory, however. Looking around him, at Storm, shaken in her flight, and Wolverine, down on his knees, his hands over his ears, Banshee realized that the voice blast had taken its toll on his teammates—and on the room around them. Nightcrawler, his ears still ringing from the shriek, didn’t hear the crack of machinery above him as a section of the spike-and-pylon device, damaged by the sound waves, started falling directly toward his head.
“Saints alive, there’s no way I can reach the lad in time,” Banshee thought, streaking toward him. The others had already noticed the danger, Cyclops and Colossus going into action together. A force blast from Cyclops’ eye beams destroyed most of the falling metal, and Colossus, darting forward, pulled Nightcrawler out of the path of the shrapnel, shielding his teammate with his own armored body as the fragments bounded harmlessly off his back and shoulders with a little “plinking” sound.
“Banshee, get down here!”
The test was over, and, from the sound of things, Cyclops was not too pleased with him. Silencing his scream, Banshee landed, philosophically preparing for the lecture. Sometimes Cyclops took himself, and his role as deputy leader of the team, too seriously.
“Just what in blazes did you think you were doing up there, having a picnic? You should have been ready for that panel, seen it shutting early enough so you wouldn’t have had to resort to a blast like that!”
“Cyclops,” Storm interposed, moderately, “there’s no need . . .”
“There’s every need. If Banshee ever pulled a stunt like that in a real battle, he could end up incapacitating his own teammates. That’s what these Danger-Room sessions are all about, you know, honing our skills, teaching us teamwork, so we don’t have to resort to boneheaded tricks like . . .”
“Mein Gott, Cyclops,” Nightcrawler began, “Banshee didn’t do it on purpose.”
“Well, you didn’t do much better,” Cyclops retorted harshly, rounding on him. “If you’d seen that machinery falling, you could have simply teleported out of its way and saved Colossus and me the trouble of rescuing you. Your Danger-Room performance has been a little too showy lately as it is. You could be injured, or even killed if you continue to treat this place like your own private circus.”
“Here, come on, what’s the big deal?” Wolverine interrupted. “The elf did okay.”
“ ‘Okay’ is what’s the big deal. That just isn’t good enough; not when we all go out and risk our lives together, depending on how well we can use these powers of ours.”
“And I say we’re doing okay,” the feisty little Canadian persisted. “I’m gettin’ sick of you an’ your ‘leader of the team’ routine.”
“Well, you’d better get used to it, because that’s the way it’s always going to be, and if you don’t like it, then you have no place with the X-Men.”
“Back off, Bub.” There was an audible snick as Wolverine extended his claws, waving one hand under Cyclops’ nose for added emphasis. “I know what’s really bothering you. It’s yourself, your own performance. You’re always afraid you may hit someone with those eye beams of yours an’ kill ’em, if they ever get out of control, and, Brother, it just might happen. Now, me . . . if I kill someone, it’s gonna be ’cause I want to, ’cause he crossed me.”
That will be quite enough, Wolverine.
If he was an X-Man until he died, Banshee doubted that he’d ever get used to the weird, disembodied voice echoing in his mind, in all their minds, although Xavier constantly used his telepathic powers to monitor the X-Men, to give them commands, and to refine their teamwork.
I am very pleased with your performance this afternoon, my X-Men. Particularly with yours, Colossus.
“Thank you, Professor.” The Russian accepted the
praise modestly, seemed to glow with pride from it.
This test is now over. You may return to your rooms and rest. Later, we’ll discuss your performance and how it might be improved on, and I’ll give you your grades.
“Terrific.” Almost before the thought cast was completed, and the steel door of the Danger Room unlocked, Wolverine was tugging at his costume to remove it. “Right now a smoke and a couple o’ beers would about do for me . . .”
There was a crackle, and the armor-plated Colossus converted back into the flesh and blood Peter Rasputin, falling into conversation with Banshee and Storm as the three of them left the room together. They completely blocked the door, and Nightcrawler, waiting behind them to get out, suddenly cast a mischievous look at Cyclops. “I’m sorry, my friend, but once a showman . . .” And with the characteristic “bamf,” he vanished.
Cyclops, waiting in the room until his teammates had left, sighed and shook his head. Why hadn’t it ever occurred to him before? As long as Nightcrawler could teleport through the walls when he found things getting too tough, the Danger Room would never be a real test for him. Cyclops didn’t really think that Nightcrawler was likely to do anything cowardly; it was just that he was never sure what might happen when his teammate decided to show off. He wondered if the professor had ever thought about the problem. Probably. It was likely that if Nightcrawler ever did decide to pop outside of the room while a test was going on, he’d find some kind of little surprise waiting for him. The professor thought of things like that. Still, Cyclops reflected, pausing in the doorway, it wouldn’t hurt to mention the idea to Xavier.
But not now. The test, and the reprimand he sensed in Xavier’s thought-voice afterward had depressed him. He hoped that Xavier wasn’t reading his mind just then. These were the kinds of thoughts he preferred to keep private.
Cyclops turned around for one last look at the room before he flicked off the lights. It was a shambles. There were cracks in the walls from Banshee’s sonic blast, pylons and metal beams were pitted and charred from Storm’s lightning bursts. The drone planes that had attacked Wolverine had been reduced to so much metal confetti, and he and Colossus, between them, had left even less of the machinery that had nearly killed Nightcrawler. Xavier would have to have about sixty percent of the room and its contents cleaned, repaired, and replaced before the X-Men could use it again. Cyclops allowed himself one small smile.