At that point Mr. Piltdown shut off the satellite feed completely and launched an invective against affirmative action in general and the L*A*B in particular (citing its lost HUD security contract), finally referring to the L*A*B as the Lout-house of Australopithecene Bastards. Only seconds into Kareem’s rebuttal, Iron Lass threatened to depressurize the compartment and kill everyone unless the bickering stopped. Mr. Piltdown dropped his voice, muttering about my alleged breach of professional ethics by “coercing” them into an imminent reunion with their murderous ex-nemeses.
For me, Mr. Piltdown remained a fascinating figure, an omelet of a man, rife with the green onions of bitterness yet held together by the tangy Velveeta of integrity. Despite the Squirrel’s cantankerous persona, in the wake of Hawk King’s death and Wally’s resignation, much of the F*O*O*J had coalesced around Mr. Piltdown’s inspirational words (if not presence). In general Mr. Piltdown seemed fearless. Yet he, perhaps more than any of the group, appeared horrified at the prospect of setting foot on the prison planetoid.
Then we all saw it through the window, a few dozen miles away, little more than a black space blotting out stars. As we rotated slowly around it, we beheld its sunlit face, and it seemed to me that the silvery steel facility planted upon the dark rock resembled a Zippo lighter stuck into a soot-encrusted skull.
Asteroid Zed.
Our elevator thunked into the “top floor” Space Elevator terminal, and we unstrapped ourselves, cycled through the airlock, and floated through the station to board the Space Bee transport over to Asteroid Zed.
As I gazed back, the StarCase™ glinted in the darkness like a child’s tin can telephone, taut on its string. If anything were to go wrong, if the Destroyer were still the menace Kareem feared him to be, if he were indeed free of his mental restraints only to have assumed dictatorship over the asylum, then that tin can telephone would have transmitted our final conversation to our lost home and life itself.
The Legacy of Mental DisEase
Asteroid Zed had hardly changed since I first visited it in the early 1980s: a cold, gleaming, white-walled and steel-barred environment, sickly with the stench of boiled cabbage and baking soda. Walking its tiers, one had the impression of being entombed inside a giant refrigerator.
The prison’s very existence was a layer cake of irony, iced with the stale frosting of our society’s failures. An emblem of the triumph of superheroism in the Götterdämmerung, the Asteroid was originally conceived, designed, and constructed in 1971 by none other than Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid. Fourteen years later, those two champions would find themselves interred in their own creation after the F*O*O*J foiled their conspiracy to blow up the Fortress of Freedom and murder all the heroes inside it. Asteroid Zed, refitted in 1985 by Piltdown Dynamics to prevent an escape by its own designers, would soon house countless villains who’d once fought against Gamoid and the Kid.
Our guide through the tiers of the technological Tartarus was Warden Dr. Rudy Wells. On our way through the various holding units, Warden Wells pointed out to us the many prisoners put there by my own patients. In the Fish & Reptile Villains Unit were Codzilla, Monitor Lizard, Black Mamba, and Nemesaur, all captured by Iron Lass; in the Technovillains Unit were MicroCrip and his Nanogangstas and Robot-Stalin, defeated by the Flying Squirrel, as were incarcerees of the Crime Lord Villains Unit such as Pauli the Living Mafia and Tong Triad and the Iron Eunuch. Biovillains such as the Desiccator, the Devolver, and Zee-Roks the Imitator required special containment, Wells explained, which was why they were kept in Unit X on the other side of the asteroid, so as to minimize contamination of the orbital biocosm.
The only unit no one ever saw, of course, was the one that was invisible to the eye, the Metaphysical Villains Unit. The MVU was an upper-string-dimensional confinement zone at a right angle to our reality, specially designed by Hawk King himself for nemeses such as the Infinity Farmer and his Time Tractor. Technically, we were walking through it at the very moment its existence was being explained to us—but then again, we were always walking through it, and we never were, as it was everywhere and nowhere.
I had no idea if the F*O*O*Jsters were pondering that intersection of physics, philosophy, and psychopathology, but it was clear that walking the ultra-bright corridors between cell rows of such monsters was exacting a psychic toll on my team. Iron Lass projected a gaze even colder than usual, surrounded as she was by the prisoners of the war she’d declared and led; Power Grrrl had resisted turning on the speakers of the most somber bustier I’d ever seen her wear; glowering at every cell door we passed; the Brotherfly flicked his gaze flylike from cell to cell, seemingly scanning everywhere for either spiderwebs or Venus flytraps (understandable, given that Spiderbyte and Venus the FlyTrap were both incarcerated there), as if he feared he’d be dragged inside a cell and ripped apart, antenna from antenna; X-Man’s jaw was clamped tightly enough that I could see his mandibular muscles bulging up along the height of his skull and disappearing into his short hair. His fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were rendered beige.
But no one looked more agitated than the Flying Squirrel, who was gunfighter-flexing his fingers beside his utility pouches, as if expecting to unleash any of his numerous high-tech weapons at a moment’s notice. Combined with the sweat glistening on his upper lip, he resembled no one so much as Humphrey Bogart’s immortal Captain Queeg, quivering with increasing paranoia at every second.
“Should’ve just put down the lot of them,” snapped Mr. Piltdown, cutting off Warden Wells in midlecture. “Would’ve, too, if not for the goddamned shyster queers in the ACLU. At any rate, Wells, other than by using the Psionic Impotence Helmets, how’re you keeping these hyper-freaks from staging a coup on this hell-rock?”
“Well, Mr. Squirrel, sir,” said Wells, anxiously huffing steam onto his spectacles and cleaning them with his tie, “the Psionic Inhibition Helmets do their job on all the most, well, disturbed cases, especially the psychics. But intensive use of psychoceuticals, mostly from Piltdown-Sorus-RX, keeps the bulk of our patients from hurting others. Or themselves.”
“Mighty nice racket for Pilty, Wells,” said Kareem, just as we entered the Political Villains Unit and glimpsed the Leninoids and the Eiffel Terrorists through the door monitors. “Piltdown-Sorus-RX created half this villain epidemic in the first place when it invented Nouitol—like we needed a cross between LSD and thalidomide—”
“Shut your crack-hole, Edgerton, when you don’t know the first thing about what you’re braying about—”
“Your company made the damn drug that got half these fruit bats addicted, mutated, and mind-smacked in the first place, Fasces—”
“So blame the goddamned FDA, not my company! If that gaggle of pink-eyed Poindexters can’t conduct a simple double-blind study—”
“—not when you’ve got a thousand lawyers and lobbyists hammering them and the kot-tam administration to fast-track all your junk into the veins of old folks and babies—”
“Mr. X-Man,” attempted Dr. Wells, “while it’s true that Nouitol can induce intense feelings of entitlement, superiority, megalomania, and homicidal rage, it can also push the very limits of mental acuity in otherwise limited intellects—”
“No wonder Festy had it invented. Must be injecting himself twelve times daily—”
“Why, you filthy little—”
Dr. Wells: “To this day, carefully monitored doses of Nouitol are a regular part of our treatment here.”
Kareem stopped dead. “You mean you’re still injecting people with that poison? Are you insane?”
“I assure you, Mr. X-Man, that all safety protocols—”
A technomusic dancebeat erupted down the corridor, bulging with raunchy samba-salsa-mambo-rumba “samples.” I rushed back to find the music blaring from Syndi’s bustier woofers and crotch tweeters. Through the door monitor, I could see the target of Power Grrrl’s HEAT Ray—she’d turned every member of the aging Mongoose Men, the Anti-Castro Cubanitos Crew w
ho destroyed much of Florida during the Götterdämmerung, into dancing versions of herself. In their cell they were gyrating in sync to her music, all twelve of them howling out her Top 20 hit from the previous year, “La Vida Cola.”
“Now Syndi,” I said, “we talked about this, and I said no.”
“Oh, ga-awd,” she whined. “Fine.”
Released, the Mongoose Men resumed their ordinary appearances, blinking at one another in dawning comprehension before turning away to slump in their respective corners.
Before I could catch up with the group, a frantic Dr. Wells ran back to me, telling me that Mr. Piltdown and Kareem had broken off on their own after insisting that they interrogate their intended targets immediately.
Rushing me along to the Secure Room, Dr. Wells signaled the guards to let me through, and I dashed in past the security checkpoint to see the Squirrel and X-Man staring through the letho-glass at two of the most beloved—and most feared—figures of the twentieth century.
When Heroes Go Bad
Even sans their glorious armor and clad in simple orange jumpsuits with faces ravaged by their decade-long sedation, these two superbeings were unmistakable.
Francis Ford Coppola was often compared to the elder of the two, given his wild beard and eyes, although, to my knowledge, the talented director never reached a height of eight feet, achieved arms like a bodybuilder’s thighs, or had a mouthful of teeth like gleaming metal rail spikes. His younger companion, while shorter at a mere six feet, was every bit as remarkable, with his opalescent ram’s hooves and horns, his golden body-fur like the mane of a California model, and his smell pungent enough that even through the letho-glass I felt as if I were bathing in coconut milk.
Heroes and villains in the same bodies.
Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid.
Of course, there were obvious changes. The N-Kid no longer carried his heralded Grail Pail, and both ex-champions were fitted with specially designed Psionic Impotence Helmets to accommodate horns or oversized head. Their psionic restraints looked like football helmets made of black glass, detailed with silicon circuits and frizzed out with flickering, brain-draining psiber-optic filaments.
With nothing on their side of the glass to sit on but the floor of the featureless white cube, they stood, their faces rigid with faltering self-control.
Mr. Piltdown stepped forward, opening his hands in anxious supplication.
“If there’s anything you need, Gil, Kid, just name it,” he said quickly. “If it were up to me you’d be at the Squirrel Tree being tended to by my personal physicians, not up here in this ghastly—”
“Get out get out get out GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT—” screamed the N-Kid, leaping from his seat and hurling himself against the glass, kicking his hooves against the barrier, while at every contact the glass seared his fur with awful purple arc light.
Dr. Wells yelled, “This isn’t going to work, Mr. Piltdown, sir! I think we should leave—”
“NO, HUMAN,” intoned Gil Gamoid, his voice like it was in his glory days, a love child of tuba and gong.
Even the N-Kid stopped long enough for us to focus. Gil said, “DR. WELLS. GO. FESTUS. GO. OTHERS, STAY.”
Dr. Wells gestured toward the door as would a maître d’, but Mr. Piltdown refused to look at him, glaring instead at his former teammates. Finally, he said, “I just want you both to know…that I forgive you. Both of you. We’re even.”
The N-Kid emitted a horrible goatlike b-a-a-a, a b-a-a-a of rage, a b-a-a-a of vengeance. Mr. Piltdown backed out of the room so slowly as to be almost comical, but the mood was nothing short of tragic. Dr. Wells sealed the cubic chamber on his own way out.
I leaned toward Kareem, whispering that he should beware; while he might have gained personal satisfaction by seeing the Flying Squirrel ejected, he needed to remember that the two converts to sociopathy before him were master manipulators. Ejecting their greatest defender, the man who had paid their multimillion-dollar legal fees and refused to denounce them for conspiring to kill him and blow up the Fortress of Freedom, seemed calculated not only to wound Mr. Piltdown, but to create the illusion of alliance between them and Kareem.
To my surprise, Kareem actually whispered back, “Good call, Doc. Thanks.”
“Why you here?” jabbered the N-Kid. “What you want?”
Kareem sat in one of the two chairs. “Information.”
“About what, X-Man-man?”
An eyebrow from Kareem. “So you know my name?”
“Of course know your name. Who you think you dealing with? Celebrity nitwit? President of country? No. You X-Manman, formerly of League of Angry Blackmen-men, currently seeking information.”
“Okay. You’re obviously as insightful and intelligent as your reputation suggests,” said Kareem, sliding into the trick-bag of the interrogator. “So why don’t you tell me…why am I here?”
The N-Kid b-a-a-aed a chuckle, horribly. “Gil, him try flatter me. Think that get him information.”
Gil Gamoid narrowed his eyes at his smaller companion. “TELL HIM ANYWAY,” rumbled the voice that roared inside my skull as if it were a dragon chick hatched and trapped there, booming like a sledgehammer slamming into girders. “WITHOUT WASTING TIME.”
“You want know,” said the N-Kid, wincing from the rebuke, “how Hawk King die.”
Kareem leaned back, both eyebrows creeping up before he returned them to default position. “Well then?”
“DENIED RIGHT TO ATTEND FUNERAL,” gonged Gil. “HUMILIATING. EMBITTERING.”
“That wasn’t my call,” said Kareem. “But you—you wanted to be there? Despite your two-man conspiracy to murder Hawk King and the rest of the F*O*O*J in 1985? Why? So you could finish what you started?”
“EARTH YEAR 1985, UR-PRIME YEAR BILLION-AND-SEVENTEEN, WHAT ALL MEAN? CROSS ALL THAT SPACE-TIME TO CAUSE HURT? WHY? TOO CREDULOUS, X-MAN.”
“So why’d you want to come to the funeral?”
“PAY RESPECTS,” said Gil Gamoid. “AND FINISH WHAT STARTED, YES.”
Grasping at Straw Men
So you’re admitting—”
“Admitting nothing, X-Man-man! Separate issue! Never want hurt Hawk King. Never! Wouldn’t!”
Kareem leaned forward. “So you’re saying…you had a different target? You weren’t trying to kill Hawk King either in 1985 or last week?”
Silence.
“Then who—”
“Enemy among you…not what seems.”
“Who? How? A shape-shifter? Mind control?”
Silence.
Kareem stared at the two prisoners, trying to out-wait them.
A minute clambered past, like an ant across a salt heap.
Then a second minute.
And a third.
The glitter in the eyes of the two aliens had disappeared; their faces were calm enough to appear waxen.
Finally Kareem leaned toward me, whispering, “I thought they were refusing to talk, Doc, but…is it just me, or are they actually zoned out?”
“I think you could be right, Kareem.”
“Their speech, their grammar, the difficulty with pronouns—they haven’t talked like that since they first came to Earth. Is it the drugs? The P-Imp hats? Both?”
“Both, I suspect. Their charts indicate substantial decline in language and social skills since incarceration here ten years ago…but that could be part of a long-term deception, Kareem. Be careful not to—”
GONG! GONG! PING!
The sound was like someone hammering the pipes of a cathedral organ, but it was Gil. Having broken free of his momentary catatonia, he’d begun flicking his metallic fingernails against the iridescent horns of the N-Kid. One horn maintained its basso drone, while Gil flicked the other one into trilling treble.
WHERE’ER BLASPHEMING LIARS RAIL
TO SMOTHER TRUTH BENEATH LIE’S VEIL…
chanted Gil Gamoid, the crispness of his language once again what it was in his prime:
…LET INNOCENTS REFUSE THE
IR TALE
FOR JUSTICE MUST ALWAYS PREVAIL!
UNFURL THE SAIL!
SEEK OUT THE GRAIL
SO GLORIOUS HOPE
MIGHT NEVER FAIL!
FOR EVERY BREATH THAT WE INHALE
LET EVERY VILLAIN E’ER BEWAIL
THE POWERS STRONG OF HEROES FRAIL
WHO DRINK THE MILK FROM N-KID’S PAIL!
The gong-and-chiming ended, but hung in the air, like a cruel sentiment.
Once upon a time, millions of cape fans and cape card–collecting schoolchildren knew that oath by heart as well as Gil Gamoid did. Upon reciting that creed, the uncanny N-Kid would be transformed into a Q-939 creature resembling an Earth goat, complete with teats protruding from the apertures of his goat armor. Continuing his incantation, Gil would kneel, and taking the N-Kid’s Grail Pail, “milk” his companion, the rhythmic motion resounding like an underwater didgeridoo. Thus was produced the awesome ultraviolet Q-ichor that, drunk, would grant the two titans twenty-four hours’ worth of their cosmic Q-powers or, refined into Q-cheese, a week’s worth.
But for ten years both the Grail Pail and the star-emblem armor of the duo had been locked far away from Asteroid Zed inside the armory of the Fortress of Freedom, while prison authorities daily injected N-Kid with lacto-suppressants. And despite Gil Gamoid’s invocation of his pledge, the N-Kid stood in front of us untransformed, a humanoid goat-man with a perpetual young child’s/old man’s face, gouged by the aching tragedy of a life consigned to nothing but the long, long wait for death.
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