by Greg James
James picked up the receiver, thinking to himself how marvelous modern technology was.
“James?” said a voice at the other end, which he recognized as Em, the head of the Secret Service. It was short for Emma.
“Please, sir, there’s no need to be so formal. Do call me James,” began James James.
“Shut up, and stop calling me ‘sir,’” Em snapped. She was in a rush and had no time to banter with idiots.
Neither did Jane Smith, who took this opportunity to sneak away and later enjoyed a long and successful career as an award-winning architect. But that’s another, more architecture-based story.
“It’s Doctor Nuke, James,” continued Em. “He’s planted a nuclear bomb underneath London and he’s threatening to detonate it unless we pay him ten million guineas, five shillings, and seven pence ha’penny. And a farthing.” (Money back then used to be more confusing.) “We’ve tracked him to the crypt at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Hurry, James!”
“Don’t worry, sir, I’m on my way to save Great Britain,” shouted James James into the phone unnecessarily loudly, causing some diners in the restaurant to look up irritably from their plates of boiled liver. (Food back then wasn’t great either.)
After only a five-minute pause, in which he tried to work out how much a farthing was worth, the world’s greatest secret agent dashed out of the door and down the stairs to his car. He then dashed back up the stairs and picked up his car keys before dashing back down again, unlocking his car, and getting in.
Gaston finished off the milkshake.
You may already know what St. Paul’s Cathedral looks like. If you don’t, then please draw a picture of what you imagine it might look like and send it to us. We could do with a laugh.
In any case, whatever it looks like in your head, James James pulled up outside it in his silver sports car and rushed to the door marked “Crypt.” There was a door next to it marked “Bathroom,” which he was quite tempted by after his long lunch, but there was no time.
Save the world first; pee later, thought James James, remembering page one of the Spy Handbook.
He eased open the first door and crept softly down the stairs like a stealthy panther wearing a suit because it was on its way to the Panther of the Year awards.
At the bottom of the stairs, the secret agent eased open the door and slipped inside. He found himself in a large, chilly stone room. It was lit by gas lamps on the wall. Stone coffins were arranged in rows across the paved floor. Toward the center of the room was a large metal box, and a man with a bald head was standing at it with his back to James James, fiddling with the controls.
The spy grinned to himself—this was going to be easy.
He stepped quietly forward, and tripped over a large white cat that made a noise like a cat that had been tripped over.
The bald man ceased his fiddling and spoke without turning around: “I’ve been expecting you.”
“Have you?” answered James James before he could stop himself.
“Yes, one margarita with extra cheese and garlic knots. Seven half crowns and four tuppence threp’ny, isn’t it? I’ve got the money here somewhere . . .” He started to rummage in the pocket of his gray villain suit.
“I’m not the pizza guy, Doctor Nuke, this is 1965,” the spy interrupted him. “It’s me, James James, the world’s greatest secret agent, here to put a stop to your evil schemes.” Immediately he regretted saying this—his cover was blown.
Doctor Nuke slowly turned around. His face was marked by a hideous scar that ran from his left eye all the way down his cheek. He’d drawn it there in pen to look more dastardly.
“Stop my evil schemes? I don’t think so.” Doctor Nuke chuckled, and before James James could move, the villain had whipped out a gun and pointed it straight at James’s handsome, chiseled face.
There was a moment’s silence, broken only by the distant sound of the cat limping around and saying bad words in cat language.
“What happens now, then?” James James wanted to know.
“What do you mean, what happens now?” snapped Doctor Nuke. “I’m going to shoot you in the face, then get on with my plan to blow up London with this nuclear bomb. What did you expect to happen?”
“Well, I thought there’d be dinner,” said the secret agent lamely.
“Dinner?”
“Yes, usually villains give me dinner, you know. Then they tell me their evil plans and tie me up and leave me unguarded, so I can escape using the fork I concealed in my sleeve while they served the chicken.”
“Well,” chuckled Doctor Nuke, “tough nuggets Mr. James James,” which wasn’t bad considering he thought of it on the spot. And he pulled the trigger . . .
There was a bang and flash from the muzzle of the gun.
But James was surprised and delighted to discover that he wasn’t dead. The bullet seemed to have hit an invisible wall in the air halfway between the two men. It tinkled harmlessly to the ground.
“Looks like it’s tough nuggets for you, Doctor Nuke,” drawled James James. Then he squinted: he thought he could see some kind of disturbance in the space where the bullet had stopped—a bluish person-shaped haze. It was see-through and indistinct.
“That’s my joke. You can’t just steal my lines and say them back at me,” raged Doctor Nuke. “Just for that, I’m going to blow up London anyway.”
He turned back to his bomb, and on a control panel saying “Blow Up London” he flicked the switch to On. A display lit up, and numbers started counting down from TEN.
Doctor Nuke threw himself at James James and knocked him over backward.
NINE.
The two men wrestled on the floor, making grunting noises.
EIGHT.
“Your name’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?” mused James James from the crook of Doctor Nuke’s elbow.
SEVEN.
“How do you mean?” asked the supervillain, digging his knee into the spy’s back.
SIX.
“Well, you’re called Doctor Nuke,” said James James, hitting him over the head with a wooden chair, “and you try to blow things up with nuclear bombs.”
FIVE.
“Do you know, I’d never even thought of it like that,” said Doctor Nuke, leaping from the edge of the battle arena onto the secret agent’s back and clinging on as he thrashed around.
FOUR.
“I mean, imagine if you’d have been called Doctor Tortoise,” laughed James James, hooking his fingers into the doctor’s nostrils.
THREE.
“I’d never get anywhere fast, would I? Ahahahaha,” guffawed Doctor Nuke.
TWO.
“But instead,” Doctor Nuke went on, “I’m about to wipe out London with a huge devastating explosion in about one second. Ahahahahahaha . . .”
ONE.
Click.
Nothing exploded.
Both men stopped their wrestling—which they had actually just been starting to really enjoy—got to their feet, and turned to the bomb. The bluish outline of . . . someone . . . could now be seen beside the control panel, hand outstretched to the control switch, which had just been flicked to Off.
As they watched, the figure solidified into the shape of a person in a blue costume. Its face was hidden behind a silvery-blue helmet and its torso protected by armor in the same color.
“That armor’s bulletproof,” realized James James, and whistled in admiration. “And you can go invisible.”
The helmeted figure nodded.
“You got between me and the gun,” he marveled.
The figure nodded silently once again, then looked sharply to the right. Doctor Nuke was making a run for the door.
Like a total legend, the blue-clad Hero leaped athletically over the nearest stone coffin, turned a perfect somersault in midair, and brought the bad guy to the ground with a flying scissor kick. Doctor Nuke’s head hit the stone floor with an extremely satisfying noise, knocking him out cold.
His silve
ry-blue attacker, still crouched in a combat stance, looked back at James James expectantly. Not sure what to do, the spy gave a thumbs-up sign and a slight nod, as if to say: “Well done on taking down Doctor Nuke with that awesome display of hand-to-hand combat, but I actually had the situation perfectly under control.”
The mysterious figure gestured impatiently to Doctor Nuke, who was now snoring like a drunken sea lion, then pointed toward the door that led to the stairs.
“Ah yes, quite right, let’s get him outside,” said James James. “It’s time for Doctor Nuke to have a long stretch of, um, doctor’s surgery . . . in prison.”
He’d been trying for a pithy one-liner but had fallen woefully short. Instead he’d talked total gibberish for two precious seconds. His silvery-blue rescuer indicated this with a pitying wiggle of the hands, then helped him carry the limp form of Doctor Nuke up the stairs.
As they burst into the fresh air, James James gasped. Parked beside his silver sports car was a vehicle that quite frankly made everything else within a two-mile radius, including the cathedral, look trashy.
It was made of gleaming polished chrome. Its long, delicately curved hood led up to an airplane-style cockpit. Behind that, stretching across the top of the fuselage and supported by metal struts, was a single silver wing. Huge, polished black tires shone at each corner. And on either side of it, just behind the doors, were two long, thin jet engines.
James James looked at his own car, of which he was unreasonably proud, and realized that compared to this vehicle it might as well have been a cardboard box with “car” written on the side in crayon.
The door of the beautiful contraption opened, and the silvery-blue Hero who had just rescued him from certain death darted over to it and disappeared inside. Just before the door closed, a gloved hand reached out and flicked out a small white card.
With a roar, its jets started up and the machine rose swiftly into the air. It hovered there for a moment, and then, just when you thought it couldn’t get any more awesome, the engines swiveled smoothly so they were pointing backward, and the vehicle disappeared above the cathedral’s roof, leaving a faint, curved vapor trail of different shades of blue in the cool early evening air.
James James walked over to the scorched patch of road where the incredible vehicle had rested and picked up the card. As police sirens grew louder he turned it over and read, in neat, cursive handwriting:
You just got saved by The Blue Phantom
13
The Captain and the Weasel
For the rest of the semester, Murph and his friends tried everything they could think of to persuade Mr. Flash to tell them more about the mysterious Blue Phantom. Hilda seemed especially fascinated. “What was his armor like?” she asked Mr. Flash the next day. But he pretended he hadn’t heard her. She tried again a few times, but eventually he roared directly into her face, “You’ve had your little history lesson. Now get on with some work!” He seemed, if anything, a little embarrassed that he’d allowed himself to get so caught up in his reminiscences.
The Christmas break passed fairly uneventfully for Murph, if you didn’t count all the jokes from Andy about his secret school. Apparently they were never going to stop being funny.
“Is there a Yule Ball in the Great Hall, Smurph Face?” he’d asked every day, pirouetting around the kitchen. “Will you daaaaaaance with Professor McGonagall?”
The other notable thing about winter that year was the unusual number of wasps. The local newspaper had run a story about it before Christmas, under the headline BUZZ-CEMBER, which was not especially clever on any level.
In the article, which Murph read over breakfast one morning, they quoted a pest control expert who said he’d never been called out to so many wasp sightings in winter before, and that the wasps seemed to be of unusual size and totally impossible to catch. One old lady rang up the local radio station, trying to insist that they weren’t actually wasps but robots sent to spy on her. The presenters just laughed and played another song.
It was on their first day back—an iron-gray January afternoon—that the subject of the Blue Phantom was raised again. As Murph walked toward the first CT lesson of the New Year, he ran into Hilda, who had clearly been doing a lot of thinking over the break.
“I mean,” she puffed, trotting alongside him, “I don’t understand what happened. If, years ago, there used to be real superheroes . . .”
“Yes?” Murph prompted her.
“Then . . . why aren’t there superheroes anymore?” asked Hilda.
“Well, there are,” replied Murph, stopping to think. “But they’re, you know, secret now. No more costumes, like Mr. Flash said.”
“Well, it’s a shame about the costumes,” sulked Hilda. “I think a real Hero should have a costume. If I make it into the Heroes’ Alliance I’m totally having one. And what happened to the Blue Phantom? He was the coolest of them all. What if he’s still out there somewhere? Just waiting to swoop in and rescue people?”
“Wouldn’t the Blue Phantom be, like, eighty years old or something by now?” Murph reasoned. “He’s not going to be swooping anywhere at that age.”
But Hilda clearly had a bee in her bonnet about this. Mr. Drench was taking them for CT that morning, and as soon as the class began to settle down, her arm was waving in the air.
“Yes, Ms. Baker?” said Mr. Drench in a bored voice, folding up a newspaper and stuffing it into the pocket of his tweed jacket.
“If there used to be superheroes,” asked Hilda stridently, “why aren’t there real superheroes any more?”
Mr. Drench screwed his face up. “What on earth do you mean, ‘real Heroes’?”
“You know.” Hilda was on a roll. “Real ones with costumes, like the Blue Phantom? You know about him, don’t you?”
“Of course,” the teacher replied slightly reluctantly.
“Aha! Well, what happened to him, then?” asked Hilda triumphantly. “Did he die? What was his costume made of? No, don’t worry about the costume for now. But what happened to him? What was his catchphrase? No, don’t worry about that either.”
Mr. Drench paused and glanced around at the expectant class, looking a little like a sleepy zoo animal surrounded by wide-eyed onlookers.
With his inquisitive mind whizzing, Murph forced the issue.
“Why was the Blue Phantom the greatest, Mr. Drench?” he asked.
The teacher sighed, trapped. “Look. Let’s just say that the Blue Phantom was . . . different. A hero for heroes. The sort of character who saved the people normally doing the saving.”
There was a pause.
Murph, at the back of class, got an inkling that there was more of a story here. “Did he save you?” he asked quietly.
Mr. Drench looked even more uncomfortable. “Well,” he said, finally, “you could put it like that.”
“How? When?” asked Hilda and more or less everyone else.
“When else?” replied Mr. Drench simply. “When all hope was gone.” He sat down, looking thoughtful and serious.
“I haven’t always just been Mr. Drench the CT teacher, you know,” he began. “We’ve all got a past. The day I first met the Phantom was also the first day I came into contact with the most dangerous enemy of them all. A day I wish to forget. The day I lost . . .” He trailed off.
“Lost what?” breathed Hilda eventually.
“The day I lost . . . everything,” said Mr. Drench dejectedly, “and the day I realized the true role of the sidekick. Tough job being a sidekick, you know. People don’t understand the sacrifice. Certainly not Captain Alpha, anyway.”
“Who’s Captain Alpha?” asked Hilda, hardly daring to believe they were finding out so much.
Murph suddenly remembered when he’d first met Mr. Drench, and something else clicked into place in his brain. “It’s Souperman!” he exclaimed.
Mr. Drench raised his eyebrows in surprise. He seemed slightly annoyed with himself for giving the game away. “Yes, he was Captain A
lpha, the strongest man on this or any planet. And I, well, I was known as the Weasel.”
“Weasel?” asked Hilda incredulously.
“Yes, Weasel,” he said defensively. “Weasels are actually fascinating animals. They’re, um, very wily. And cunning.”
“That’s foxes.”
“No, it’s definitely weasels. And they have astonishing hearing, which is, of course, my own Capability. Although my hearing has never been quite as exceptional since that day.”
“So that’s what you lost?” Murph wanted to know. “You lost your . . . Cape?”
“Part of it,” said the Artist Formerly Known as the Weasel sadly. “That’s what happened to anyone who came up against . . . him. Luckily, the Blue Phantom saved me before my whole Capability could be stolen.”
“Did Captain Alpha lose part of his power, too?” Hilda asked in a hushed voice.
“Oh no,” said Mr. Drench. “We’d split up, and I was the one who encountered our enemy first. But maybe I was thought to be the expendable one. Not all Capabilities are considered equal, as you are no doubt learning from Mr. Flash. It’s certainly a lesson I learned that day.”
Mr. Drench fidgeted. A few beads of sweat had appeared on his brow; clearly he was uncomfortable talking about this subject.
“Let’s leave that discussion there, shall we?” he asked, eyes flitting around nervously. “What’s done is done—and there is no point going over old ground. But that’s what happened: it was I who was sent in alone to face Magpie.” He’d definitely said too much this time.
“Magpie? Who on earth is that?” said Murph.
“The worst nightmare of everyone in this room, apart from you, Mr. Cooper,” replied the teacher drily. “But not the subject of this lesson, I’m afraid.” The class let out a groan of protest as he turned and began to write on the blackboard. “Today we’ll continue our discussion of how to prevent accidental Cape activation.”