by Mike Ramon
another super-strong type. Any questions?" Dannan shook her head, a mystified expression on her face.
We walked to the entrance. I motioned to her to open the steel door. She turned the knob and pushed on it.
"It's stuck… uh, Hood."
"You'll have to push a little harder, that's all." I smiled. Powerman didn't have a security system. In fact, he didn't even have a lock for the door. What he did have was a 750-pound block of concrete right behind it. Dannan pushed and the sound of concrete grating on concrete echoed across the lot. The two of us entered the building and slid the concrete piece back into place. The warehouse itself was empty. We walked over to a freight elevator. We boarded it, I shut the grate, and we descended into the gym.
The gym was deep underground. From a safety standpoint, it was best if Powerman's had nothing else near it. The elevator ground to a halt. I swung open the gate and let Dannan take in the scene.
Powerman's had been built by a few heroes from Powerman's old team, Company A: The Architect, Fusionne, and Particle. Company A had been one of the superhero organizations of the late Seventies and early Eighties. When Powerman retired from active superhero duty, he recruited the other two heroes to help him set up his gym. The Architect was gifted in shaping materials with his thoughts, whereas Fusionne could use her gravitational abilities to compress matter almost infinitely. She had provided the raw material for the gym by compressing the mass of a small island in the Aleutian chain that nobody would have missed. Particle had used his shrinking powers to transport the superdense material to Powerman's chosen location. The floor, walls, and weights in the gym were hundreds of times as dense as the heaviest man-made radioactives. The foundation ran over three miles into the bedrock, spreading out the thousands of tons of mass over nine square miles.
Dannan's eyes bugged out as she recognized some of the people currently working out. I knew all six of them, and the list read like a Who's Who of parahumans. Powerhouse was benching a few thousand pounds with Clydesdale spotting him. Mount Vesuvius and The Amazon were taking turns doing flies with the ten-ton dumbbells in spite of the fact that they fought against each other in the field. They were glaring at each other with naked hatred, but respected each other's personal space. Captain Lunar, who like me worked out in a full-face mask, was just finishing loading up a straight barbell with six of the eight-ton weights. He called out to us in greeting. "Hey, Hood, just in time. I was waiting for a spotter." Off in one corner of the room stood a man doing shoulder presses by himself. His muscles bunched like knotted rags as he balanced the most weight anybody had ever lifted across his shoulders. His bald head was glistening with sweat and his goatee was soaked with it. Everybody in the world knew this man, or at least his alter ego.
"Is that… Giant?" Dannan whispered in my ear.
"Yes, but here he prefers Steven. He's exempt from the spotters rule." Giant was unquestionably the strongest man in the world. I would never forget watching on live television when he'd pulled a stranded aircraft carrier into dock by its anchor chain. "Come on, let me introduce you around." I took her elbow and led her into the room.
The next hour was one of the most enjoyable I had ever spent at Powerman's. Everyone took to Dannan right away. Powerhouse helped show her the right way to perform different lifts. Mount Vesuvius spotted her while we found her maximum bench press, which was something on the order of twenty-eight tons. The Amazon offered to teach her some useful dirty fighting tricks. Captain Lunar made a bad joke and everybody laughed. Even Giant came over and solemnly shook her hand, saying he was pleased to meet her.
Later, I took a short break with the Captain while we watched Dannan flirt with Clydesdale. I must have reacted unfavorably because Lunar put his hand on my arm. "Don't worry, Hood, nothing will come of it. Clyde's a straightforward fellow. As much as a mercenary thug like him can be, at any rate." He handed me a water bottle. "She moves very much like you. You and your wife must be very proud."
I jumped, coughing as water ran down the wrong pipe. "How did you know that?" I spluttered.
"Relax, Hood, I'm not going to tell everyone your secrets. You forgot to take off your wedding ring once, so I knew you were married. You move like a married man and a father instead of a bachelor, and I ought to know." I had forgotten that one of Captain Lunar's powers was his ability to obtain information by observing objects and people in motion. He could identify the pilot of a plane by how it flew, or tell what a man was probably thinking by how he jingled his keys. "I've seen your daughter fight with the rest of the Young Guns. She's undisciplined, but she always wants to do the right thing. You've been a good father and role model to her, in spite of what she tells you."
The man really could read people like open books. "Man, cut that out. It's creepy."
Under his mask, he smiled.
Dannan and I finished our workouts and said our goodbyes. Everyone invited us to come back. Clydesdale told her to come by on a Saturday so she could meet Powerman himself. The Amazon gave Dannan her phone number and told her to call so they could go shopping sometime. As we waited for the elevator to return to the gym level, Giant stepped up to us. The man had the presence and authority of an earthbound god, a strength and power so tangible that you could feel it when he spoke to you. It was like the Earth rumbled in sympathetic vibration with his voice.
"Bombshell," he said to Dannan. The silver cross around his neck glinted in the overhead fluorescent lighting. "You're doing good work. Never let that change." With that, he took a deep breath, turned his eyes toward the ceiling, and vanished.
Dannan let a word slip from her mouth that I had forbidden her ever to say. I couldn't blame her; I'd said the same thing the first time he did it in front of me. "Don't say that," I said, but without much in the way of parental authority behind it. Having Giant speak to you was a lot like it must have been for Moses on Mount Sinai.
We stepped onto the elevator and rode back up to the surface. "How do you feel?" I asked.
She flexed her shoulders and arched her back. "A little sore, I guess. It was fun. Can we come back again?"
"As often as you want," I said. I felt a bit stiff in the arms myself, and decided that a hot shower with my wife would be just the thing to wind down the evening.
"Dad?" Dannan asked me as she buckled her seatbelt.
"Hmm?" I pulled the car out of the lot and headed for home.
"Some of those guys, those people, were super-villains, right?"
I nodded. Clydesdale and Mount Vesuvius both had warrants out and were wanted for everything from petty larceny to assault in several states. Captain Lunar was wanted for questioning in connection with a couple of dead gangsters we'd found in rather unusual circumstances that would have been tough for anyone else to arrange.
"I couldn't tell who was and who wasn't. Is that wrong? I mean, does it make me a bad hero?" Dannan twisted her hair around one of her fingers.
"Of course not, sweetheart," I said. "It just means that under the right circumstances, even the most diverse people can get along with one another."
She looked wistfully out at the city lights passing by. "It's too bad that can't happen all the time."
I looked over at her and saw simultaneously a great superhero, self-assured and powerful, and the little girl who had tumbled into bed begging for a story from me. Face it, Harry, I said to myself, she's growing up faster than you like. "Maybe someday, kiddo. Maybe someday it will."
###
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