Soon I Will Be Invincible (13 page)

The battle lasted only forty-one seconds, but the filmmaker plays the frames back one by one. The Enderri warriors were each eight feet high, seemingly part insect, part machine. There was no way to hold a perimeter against numbers like these. The group was swallowed up instantly, six fighting points in a sea of green and black. The footage shows Damsel and CoreFire sending the first wave flying back into the crowd, but it barely makes a dent. Blackwolf is a blur, kicking out at alien joints, cracking hard shells. Elphin and Mister Mystic have stuck together in the crowd. She’s aloft and wreaking havoc, spear point flashing; light blossoms from his hands, his mouth moving in some terrible invocation, already knowing he’ll never finish it. Behind him, the Enderri are pulling up heavier weapons.

Then Galatea rises into the air, and the last frame is solid white. Whoever built Galatea included an autodestruct mode, and she knew exactly how it worked and how far the blast would extend. She was gone, and the Enderri departed, beaten and cowed, never to return.

After Titan, the team fell apart into twos and threes. Cliques formed. Damsel and CoreFire worked together, usually with Elphin; but there were a lot of solo missions, too. The Champions Call, when sounded, would produce at best four rather testy heroes, who went about their business with a minimum of crosstalk and departed in different directions. Finally Damsel called a meeting, put it to a vote, and it was over.

The last time they were all in a room together was at the press conference where Damsel read a short statement announcing their dissolution as a team. A few weeks later, CoreFire appeared in his new costume, and the era was over. A few second-tier teams stepped up their operations to fill the void. The documentary spends a little time on the postteam careers, but there just isn’t much to say. Damsel left Earth for a while, reportedly in search of her mother, but came back months later empty-handed. She joined up for a while with the Reformers, while the rest went on to solo careers. Blackwolf went back to solo crime fighting, and Elphin enjoyed a brief vogue as the figurehead for a New Age movement.

The divorce was made public five months later, reaching the public as a kind of aftershock. A year later, Elphin, CoreFire, and Damsel reformed very briefly to take down Antitron IV, but there was never serious talk of a new team, not until now. Publishers rushed to offer them millions for the tell-all memoir, but none of them ever cashed in. CoreFire did a few fund-raisers with Damsel, but that was pretty much it.

Lily yawns. “Is it almost over? We have to keep looking for Dudley Do-Right tomorrow.”

“Isn’t that…do they really have those cartoons in your future?”

“Learned it in ancient civ class. I was a whiz.”

“You know we’re going to that island, right? Aren’t you nervous about meeting your old boyfriend?”

“He won’t be there. He’s too smart for that.”

“Blackwolf seemed pretty sure.”

“You never go right back to your fortress after jail. He’s hiding out somewhere else. Trust me.”

Lily heads off to bed, and I clean up the popcorn as the denouement rolls. No one on the team would even talk to the filmmakers, so
Titan Six
closes with a faux interview sequence, video clips rigged up to sound like they’re answering questions from the omnipresent voice-over.

Even considering the sound bites come from different decades and press conferences, the effect is jumbled. Elphin babbling about Oberon and the rest of her fairy friends, Damsel’s boilerplate truth-and-justice rhetoric, Mister Mystic’s portentous nonsense. Blackwolf comes off the scariest—they must have caught him right after the divorce. It makes you wonder how these people ever spent ten minutes together, let alone ten years. Or how they can ever hope to beat the smartest man in the world without CoreFire.

Afterward, I go back and watch a few sequences again, and this time the breakup seems to begin earlier. Well before Titan they had stopped grinning at one another the same giddy way; on second hearing, some of that banter looks awfully strained. I keep coming back to that handsome, enigmatic face. Smiling in team photographs, serious and statesmanlike in an address to the UN, grim and determined in battle, clobbering Doctor Impossible or whomever. That unshakable confidence that saved the team time and again. No one ever lost faith in him; the polls prove it. So whatever happened to the perfect superhero?

CHAPTER NINE

MY MASTER PLAN UNFOLDS

         Laserator was a great scientist but his work was wasted on conventional thinkers. There has to be a little bit of crime in any theory, or it’s not truly good science. You have to break the rules to get anything real done. That’s just one of the many things they don’t teach you at Harvard.

I haven’t been back since graduation. I take a deep breath and do an equipment check. See that the mask is on straight, the cape flows. I’m dressed for the occasion, as befits the most famous graduate of my year. I never went to any of the reunions, not even in disguise. I never had anything to come back for.

The first phase of my world takeover begins tonight, but you have to do these things slowly or you get caught. Security is tight around the Institute for Advanced Thought. I wait in the alley across the street for security guards to change shifts. I wait for the moon to rise; for the tide to go out and expose outflow channels on the Charles. Then I tense, spring, and catch the bottom rung of a fire escape ladder.

Standing upright on the gravel surface of the roof, moonlight illuminates the whole city. Anyone looking up could see me, but although it’s only eleven, the world seems asleep. I recognize landmarks from years ago—Memorial Hall, Thayer Hall. The padlock on the skylight is the same as it was twenty-five years ago, and I reach for my utility belt. I manage to pick it silently, even in gloves.

A campus guard passes below me, and he could see me if he looked up. I pause to wait while a square of moonlight on the floor below travels a few feet to one side. I’ve been up here before—there used to be a way up from the computer lab. One of the senior CS majors showed it to me, his spot to think or smoke pot unmolested. After he graduated, I would come up here late at night and listen to the sounds of drunken revelry coming up from the dorms on weekend nights, or just cool off during long summer nights of coding.

If there’s anyone at all like me reading this, take note: I’m breaking a self-set rule by returning to the scene of the crime. The first time I came here, I had a different mission in mind—when I was in eighth grade, my guidance counselor told me I was a genius. I wanted to know what that meant.

If you think of a genius…well, you can picture Mozart, or Einstein. Someone who can do a thing better than anyone else. Not just anything, but a particular subject, like math or music, a specific topic they seem to have been born for.

I waited to find my subject. To see a thing—chess, physics, dance, a painting—and recognize it. I was a stranger in the world. I waited to see something and know it, to say, “This is me.” And I would know that it was now, that one day in my life when the fumbling, the false starts, all the little trials and failures, would stop. I pictured the moment, the rush of excitement, the sure-handed swiftness of apprehension, the stunned look on the teacher’s face. There’d be silence, and I’d feel for one second that I was standing at the center of the universe.

I read books, biographies of men and women in the past who had actually experienced this. And now I had learned it was going to happen to me. I waited for the moment when I would be picked. I was a shy, homely child. Unless something changed, I was going to grow up into a dumpy postdoc who never knew the touch of fire. I wondered what shape it would take, because I couldn’t see it.

But that woman said I was a genius. If only she’d known.

A micro-winch of my own design pays out cable at my belt. Above me, the rectangular skylight dwindles; below, my red leather boots dangle, descending foot by foot to rest on either side of the sleeping guard’s body, the only witness to my return. I used to fantasize about being asked back as a commencement speaker and returning, unmasked, to tell them all the Truth.

Parts of the Institute are open to the public. A sign in the lobby announces the current exhibits: “The Genius of Leonardo,” “The Magic of Geodes,” and “What Makes the Weather?” The café is closed and dark, but I can still see the table where I used to wait for Erica Lowenstein. The smell of this place after hours makes me remember what it felt like the first time. When I was here and had everything ahead of me. I drop a thousand-dollar bill into the “Pay what you can” admissions box and walk in through the turnstile.

My first year was the year of an enormously cold winter. I was a thin, shy freshman, and college was a new landscape to me, brick and dark wood, like an enormous Georgian mansion owned by a distant relation, where I had been left to explore on a long Sunday afternoon. I would eat alone in the dining hall, with my glasses steamed up from the warmth of so many happy, healthy bodies.

I had nothing to say to my roommates. They were charmingly ordinary people, now two doctors and a lawyer who have no idea what their forgettable onetime roommate has become. I’d sleep, fitfully, through whatever social events went on at nights in the common room, fluorescent light and beery laughter leaking in under the door. I’d go whole days without speaking except in the classroom, where my sharp impatience with the other students seemed to disrupt an unspoken patrician agreement not to seem too smart or try too hard, an agreement that I would have no part of. I wanted to blaze.

I sat in on graduate-level seminars and carried twice the normal course load, and there were ripples of awareness of my abilities running through several departments.

At night, I would go to sleep and dream of teaching in a vast arched lecture hall, and great leathery wings unfolded from my back and spread out through the warm, hazy air of the classroom as I spoke of a fantastic heretical knowledge. And I would wake shivering to my own misplaced self, floundering among smug, knowing prep school students.

Jason, I knew, was running a parallel track, only somewhat behind me, his conventional good looks and inexplicable confidence carrying him past the real complexities of the work. His all-embracing good nature even extended to me—the few times we passed in the quad, I was the recipient of his benevolent nod and smile, the not quite focused eyes never quite acknowledging the humiliations of the past.

I won the Putnam Prize without straining ( Jason, by some accident, took third, but I still beat him by a respectable margin). I remember the day I took it, the first Saturday of December, having just that morning flunked the mandatory swimming test for the third time, the smell of chlorine still on me. My ideas on the Zeta Dimension were still just a few random notes in a notebook, and as yet there was no shadow of my split with Professor Burke, only a sense of unguessable potential.

Once I’m in the museum area, the security is a joke. A stuffed polar bear and oscilloscopes and obsolete models of the atom loom side by side in the darkness.

Laserator’s mirror is kept in the back, in the research section, the high-security wing. I met him once, a midwesterner with a mild expression. He only wanted his theories to be given wider recognition.

I’m taking a risk, but a piece like this is one of a kind. They’re not going to figure out what I want it for until it’s too late—Blackwolf has some technical training, but they don’t have any real scientists. Which is sad, because they’ll never truly appreciate what I’m going to do.

Even half-finished, the new Power Staff is a marvel, a magician’s wand of solid circuitry, packed with unpleasant surprises. Da Vinci beams down at me from his life-size display, the very image of the well-adjusted, well-meaning scientist. The plaque goes on and on about his contributions to the welfare of humanity, his selfless devotion to knowledge. Sucker.

At that time, I thought I knew everything that was going to happen to me. It didn’t occur to me that I might fall in love.

I don’t know why Erica started talking to me. Something I said struck her as funny, I guess. She was a junior, and I was asked to speak in her economics seminar about the pure-math ramifications of the game theory they were studying. We walked to her next class as I sweated profusely and expounded on the differences between Dutch-and English-style auctions. She was a political science major, with hazel eyes, a low, throaty voice, and a steady gaze that held mine.It may have been the first full-length conversation I had had since arriving at college.

I read her columns in the
Crimson
and sat near her in the Cabot House dining hall. She would usually come over and talk to me for a few minutes, and then more and more often put her tray down next to mine.

I felt as if I had stepped through a doorway, that for a moment it was possible for me to become a regular person. To step out of the trap, the Zeta Dimension in which I lived. I sensed another chance to change myself, a last opportunity to become a kind of Jason Garner myself.

There was a short time, maybe a semester or two, when we would have lunch in the early afternoons, laughing and chattering together in the dining hall. I listened to her talk about her family, her private school. She was smart, and she had the confidence to spend time with people like Jason. But I fancied she saw through them, that there was something more acute, more critical in her. And that maybe she would see through to me.

Years later we would become a joke, the perpetual damsel in distress and the fiendish love-struck villain. Even other villains thought it was funny. I suppose it was obvious to everyone but me what was going on, but I wasn’t part of Jason’s circle. I didn’t even know they knew each other.

That summer I was asked by Professor Burke, the departmental elder statesman, to work in his high-energy physics laboratory. It was a signal honor—Burke was the department’s Nobelist and his advanced particle physics seminar defined the undergraduate elite. I was the youngest student ever to attend it. I told Erica because I had no one else to tell aside from my parents.

I was even permitted to book a little time on the particle accelerator for my own simple tests. I was given just enough access to allow me to discover the Zeta Dimension, and enable the accident that would bring about the end of my academic career, and introduce CoreFire to the world.

When I reach the storage room, I can see something’s amiss, the flooring a fraction of an inch higher than in the corridor—pressure-sensitive. I touch a stud on the Power Staff, and rise three inches from the floor. A second touch, and I drift slowly out into the middle of the room. Laser trip wires bend silently around me.

Laserator’s device glistens in a wire-fronted cabinet at the back of one of the laboratory rooms. The idiots have forgotten all about it! Light drips and runs off of it; it’s almost weightless. They say he could throw back visible light as a solid force, and reflect even gravity. With the mirror in my hand, the first stage of my plan is complete.

In the end, it took the Champions, Battalion, and Stormcloud himself to stop him; the mirror looks just as it did the day when it fell from his hand in the middle of Broadway, just at Forty-first Street. Now it waits forgotten on a shelf, pregnant with brilliance and ruin.

Jason’s accident changed everything for me. I was banned forever from the high-energy test lab. It wasn’t my fault, I told them; he stepped into the test area. Never mind that the underlying ideas were completely sound—no one, even Burke, wanted anything to do with me. Even though no one got hurt; in fact, hey, someone got superpowers.

It’s surprisingly easy to cross over from being a prodigy to being a crank. The zeta beam problem obsessed me, and, determined to solve it, I began failing classes in earnest. Still a sophomore in my seventh semester, I walked the icy pathways of Harvard Yard in the one sweater I owned, muttering. People I’d never met before seemed to recognize and avoid me; Jason was off on his way to stardom by then, jauntily renamed, college forgotten. Erica would soon follow, intrepid reporter/girlfriend to the world’s newest superhero.

I was halfway to being a campus legend; people would point me out when they saw me in the windowless snack room on the fourth level, sipping coffee and eating Skittles. I lived in the libraries doing my own research, hunting in the card catalog. Every night the security people ushered me out at midnight, and found me waiting every morning when they came to unlock the glass doors. I lived in the hum of the fluorescents, the muted rustling of paper and rumble of movable stacks. I began checking out older and older books, books whose call slips had not been stamped for decades; books with odd but informative notes scribbled in the margins by undergraduates from the twenties and thirties. It was in this way that I first became acquainted with the name of Ernest Kleinfeld. But no one listed in the libraries of America’s oldest, wisest institution had ever answered my questions.