Soon I Will Be Invincible (23 page)

Years of therapy followed, and explanations piled on explanations for what had happened to them—hidden caves; a drop in the water table; drugs.

“There are still things that need explaining. The clothes we were wearing. The sounds that were heard in the woods that first night we were back. Wendy had a whole new way of speaking, and she looked straight at you instead of ducking her head. And I had the long scar on my inside right forearm, which my mother claims was already there, but I will never believe it, ever, until the day I die.

“People couldn’t resist the charm of the whole idea, and it snowballed once that clinician went on NPR. Then there was
Four Children in Elfland,
the case study that became the children’s book, and those sequels that the other guy wrote. And then we were on T-shirts. I changed my name when I turned eighteen, and again at twenty-three. People dressed up as us and ran web sites and held conventions. They all hate me now, too. I’m sorry, but I’m a little tired of defending myself.

“We did try to go back, you know. The first time was only a week afterward. And on the one-year anniversary, we spent a whole day there, combing the wet grass for any sign of the marker stone. I must have gone back a dozen times alone or with David, whenever we were feeling especially depressed or bored, or felt like cutting school. I know Sean camped out there for two weeks one summer. But time runs much faster in Elfland, and it must have run a long time there by now.”

I can see the last cocktail taking effect, and she keeps going, gesturing a little more broadly. The eldest had been a king or emperor of something, and he tried to take control of the group. They fought endlessly; not all of them even agreed on what had happened, or if anything had happened at all. There was a lot of talk about the gifts they’d received, and whether Linda had stolen one of them. In the end, they vanished together, leaving Linda under a somewhat farcical “decree of exile.”

And what could she do then? Linda reemerged in her public persona as Regina, Queen, Crusader of Elfland, one of the first and most successful female superheroes. She’d married Stormcloud after Damsel’s mother left, and retired from active life.

“I wouldn’t even be in therapy if I could just forget about these things. The court dances, men and women crossing the pink-and-white tile of the ballroom on autumn nights. Going out onto the terrace to cool off, the night air icy on my face, and looking up at the Moon to wonder if the Earth were real at all. Stopping one morning for an hour by a wooden bridge while David and Sean argued over whether we had lost the way. Wendy and I sat and played a game with a pattern in the carvings on the wooden railing. I would know it if I saw it tomorrow. I could draw it now. Believe me.”

“But the staff?” I ask. I can’t resist. “The Scepter, I mean. It works, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s proof. That you went.”

“Agatha’s wand. Sometimes I don’t even know if I saw it in Elfland, or if it’s something from a game we played afterward, or a dream. Here, I’ll show it to you. I keep it with the costume.”

She disappears, then comes back with a small wooden case, maybe twenty inches long.

“It was weakening on my last adventure. It had become something else, just a stick, or maybe that’s what it always was. The ruby doesn’t even look like a ruby anymore. Just colored glass.

“Maybe it’s the curse. Or maybe it’s Sean’s fault; maybe his silly decree actually did something. Doctor Impossible won’t be coming here if he knows what he’s doing. Tell Damsel I’m sorry.”

Out of its case, it looks like a stage prop, and I wonder if it ever was magical. It must have been…I guess. I’m out of my depth here. I thought the Super Squadron was the one thing you could trust, the real heroes, if there are any. Now it’s just us. I wonder how long Damsel has known that.

I thank her and walk quietly down the walk. It’s dark as I leave. As I start the engine, I see her on the front step, looking down at us, peering to see Elphin through the tinted windows. I press down on the accelerator and we pull hastily away before I even notice that Elphin is weeping, tears pouring unheeded down her face. I manage to pretend not to see as I drive us back to the airport, and the waiting ChampJet takes us to our next mission.

Blackwolf’s scheme isn’t working. It’s 6:14 a.m. by that ever-blinking clock, and none of us has slept all night. I sag in my harness, tired of clinging to the museum roof. The Nightstar sits untouched in its leaded-glass display case at the Institute for Advanced Thought. Doctor Impossible didn’t come. No one is coming. And Blackwolf has managed to direct the whole operation without speaking to me once.

Disgusted, Blackwolf tears off his hat and tosses it in the trash, walking away from his role as a fake security guard in a lifelike rubber mask. In a few minutes, the regular staff will get here, and we’d rather be gone.

The rest of us are concealed around the chamber. Lily, cast as a fake statue, lowers her arms with a loud sigh and follows him, brushing plaster dust from her face and hands. The rest of us keep to our places and watch them go, sensing a showdown.

Sure enough, their conversation gets louder and louder, until we can hear Blackwolf from the lobby.

“Wait. You say you saw him?”

“I’m sorry I told you any of this. What did you want me to do?” says Lily.

“He is a wanted criminal. This is exactly the reason your membership is probationary.”

“He wasn’t doing anything!” I look at Damsel, still in her own place as a carved Madonna. Elphin, probably the only convincing-looking art object among us, is still posed by the door, watching curiously.

“Except gloating. Except laughing in our faces,” responds Blackwolf.

“We just talked for a second. It doesn’t always have to be a superfight.”

“He would have surrendered.”

“With Phenom there? And Salvo? It would have been murder.”

“CoreFire was murdered. He could be coming for you next. Did you ever think of that?”

“You don’t know any of this for sure. Doctor Impossible was in jail.”

“But you weren’t, were you? Where were you before CoreFire disappeared, anyway?”

“For the millionth time, I had nothing to do with it.”

“This would all be easier if we could establish—”

“Bullshit! I know who CoreFire was looking for, and it wasn’t Doctor Impossible, I’ll tell you that much.”

“He escaped right after CoreFire disappeared. He hates CoreFire; we know that. And now he’s trying to take over the world. Just what is missing for you?”

“You ever think about what you look like to us? You’re just a gang of high-tech thugs and bullies and…and weirdos.”

Blackwolf, for once, is silent.

“Just don’t follow me.” I can tell from her voice that she’s already walking away, heels clicking on the polished floor.

Blackwolf comes back, a uniformed silhouette against the arched doorway. “I told you she was a mistake.”

Damsel, Lily’s plaster double, looks after her thoughtfully. “I wonder whose?”

Lily is gone when we get home. She must have visited the tower on her way back—she took off her transponder and left it in her room. I find it sitting on what was CoreFire’s old bed.

I guess I thought we were going to be friends, and now I don’t know what we are. Do we have to fight now? Has she gone back to Doctor Impossible? She could have been tipping Doctor Impossible off for weeks, I guess—that’s what Blackwolf thinks. But then how did we surprise him at the funeral? I can’t really believe it.

I go back to the computer, hoping for some detail here that I missed before. If CoreFire wasn’t looking for Doctor Impossible, then who? His old girlfriend, maybe?

I’m browsing through early file photos when I see the thing I shouldn’t see. CoreFire’s only a year or so out of college, at a black-tie fund-raising dinner. He’s wearing his costume, a little incongruous-looking, but it’s the woman next to him I notice, a raven-haired woman in glasses, smiling and directing a sly-seeming remark to the hero over an expensive-looking steak as he grins into the camera.

She’s smartly dressed and wearing glasses but even under the makeup, I recognize her. Solidly visible, and a good seven years before she arrived from the future and committed her first crime. Lily.

My communicator beeps and Damsel cuts in.

“It’s happening. Turn on NPR.”

I do, and immediately I hear Doctor Impossible’s voice. He’s surfaced at last to make a public statement, and they’re rebroadcasting it all over the country. Probably the world.

It begins with “Greetings, insects!” and goes on from there, and I don’t listen to the whole thing. Not exactly a prose masterpiece, but the message is clear. He’s found whatever it was he needed to find and he’s going to be taking over the world soon—surrender or be destroyed. I guess he didn’t need the Nightstar after all.

The tower hums with tension; I can hear the jumpjet revving its engines over my head.

Everyone’s calling for the Champions to save them, and it’s giving me a funny feeling in what’s left of my guts. He’s been a step ahead of us the whole time. I bet he planned this entire thing.

I haven’t had time to think very much about what this means for me. I wasn’t joking with Blackwolf, I really could be a spy, or a traitor, or a bomb, and I might not know it.

I wonder if this makes Doctor Impossible my nemesis, and what exactly I should do about that. Maybe Doctor Impossible will know—he’s had nemeses before. In fact, he should be in the market for a new one right about now. I wonder if he’ll know who I am, and whether we met before the operation, if we talked at all. I’ll have to ask him about it if I get the chance. He may be the last man in the world who can tell me who I am. This could really turn into something.

It makes me feel better, having my own reasons for being on the island. I picture our big showdown, brain against brawn with the rest of the New Champions looking on in awe. When he’s at my mercy, I can demand things, tell him things, make him explain. I should probably start working on my speech, just in case.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

JOIN ME AND WE CANNOT BE DEFEATED

         Two days now. Two days before the world falls beneath the heel of my red patent-leather boot. The New Champions know it and I know it. The game, as they say, is afoot, and I must return to my island, or what’s left of it.

Forty thousand feet over the Pacific Ocean, a red-and-gold flier sails silent and radar invisible; the sun is setting beneath a perfect sea of clouds. Alone in the cockpit, I can take a minute to watch my island come into view. Below, invisible, a homing beacon wakes to guide me in, spiraling down into the dusk.

My flier comes to rest in the ruined courtyard, and I step out, smelling the familiar smells of jungle and burned oil. This was my home.

Looking around at the devastation, I can still feel the aches of when they brought me in last, two years ago. The last battle was a messy one, but even so, I can tell they’ve been back here. The footprints make it plain—Blackwolf’s athletic step, like a dancer’s, next to that cyborg’s metal tread. One of mine, I think—a promising idea, but one of the software people I hired ratted me out. I got her out of the hospital anyway; you’d think she’d go easy on me.

And Lily’s been here with them, picking through my things with the rest of the heroes. I wonder if she thought about the last time she’d been here, when I flew her in after her Paris fight, and watched the coverage on CNN. I wonder if she showed them my control room. And I wonder where she is now.

Sighing, I begin checking over systems. There’s a little power left in the reserve generators. The front entrance opens to my touch, and I step into the entrance hall. There’s a musty smell. A lot of water got in during the rainy season, but it’s still impressive, if only the scale of it.

This was the one I built first, and the one I came back to. Before the space station, before the blimp, before anything, I was younger and hungry for recognition, with just a handful of minions and my first billion dollars in a Swiss account. We set down by helicopter, flattening the wet grass. As the rotors spun down, I stepped out into the warm, moist air dressed in full regalia, cape and helmet. A group of young technicians scrambled out afterward, toppling crates of equipment out onto the forest floor.

At the first encampment, robots began digging out the foundations of my fortress, the centerpiece of my great empire of crime. The first holes we dug filled with water, and the jungle got in everywhere it could. But slowly the towers rose, far from the shipping lanes, in a tiny footprint where the satellites never crossed overhead. Tropical birds circled among the girders.

Walking there now under the shattered ceiling, the moment comes flooding back, all the romance of one’s first truly historic crime. One never forgets it.

The centrifuges whirled day and night, performing the slow alchemy of genetic modification. The sharp tang of the preservative chemicals; the coolness and hush of the sterile chamber; the daily ritual of decontamination. Keyboards clattering in the early mornings, test after test, ranks of green CRT screens displaying collated data.

The laboratory never ceased to be a place of mystery for me. Science blurred into religion, into necromancy. I worked long into the night, feeling at times as if the whole of the Earth had fallen away outside, leaving only the darkness, the work, the endless questing into the past. Then the first stirrings of life.

They beat me that time, too. But I came back.

The doomsday device is spread out on the laboratory floor, ten thousand square feet of world-threatening ingenuity. It isn’t my largest outing (unless you include the Moon), but surely my grandest (
especially
if you include the Moon).

Dollface’s work is the heart of it. The little fat man shines his gravity ray, only barely strong enough to pin a G-man to the floor, or loft a few bars of gold out of a vault. But Laserator’s lens catches, magnifies, and focuses it upward
—240,000
miles upward. The bulkiest part of the apparatus is the power source, a new version of my old zeta generator. I lack Dollface’s gift for concision, but I feel I give things my own flair—arching buttresses, arcing bolts of electricity, tubes and flashing lights. It doesn’t have to look like that, but it works, and I like it. At least you can see what everything does.

The Moon is full tonight, very full, and the tides are unusually strong. As the Moon grows heavier, it distorts the Earth’s orbit ever so gently. This is where the math comes in, the equations Baron Ether worked out decades ago to prevent the stress from tearing the planet apart or any similar nonsense. The net result is that I control the motion of this planet everyone is standing on.

As has been shown (cf. Kleinfeld, 1928), tiny adjustments in the Earth’s position in the solar system can have far-reaching climatic effects—it won’t take long for Earth’s leaders to get the message. It’s Kleinfeld’s math, but it took Doctor Impossible to put into practice. Doctor and Emperor-elect, I should say.

But—and I stress this—it’s not enough. You can be as smart as you want to be, you can be the smartest man in the world, but if you try something like this, a Special Forces reject is still going to rappel over the wall and punch you in the stomach. And then you’re going to be the smartest man on the floor sucking wind. You need to prepare for this stage—I know that now. Hence my return to Baron Ether’s humble home.

“Yes, I made her. Didn’t you ever suspect?” He’s lost in the past, making some point I can’t follow.

“Baron…” I try to interrupt, but Baron Ether’s mind wanders as he potters around in the dark corners of his study in the old dark house in New Haven. I try not to fidget. The top of my helmet nearly grazes an enormous mobile depicting an antiquated conception of our solar system. A reminder that the planets are still moving, and time is running out on my plan.

“She was my finest creation. Those emerald eyes…Oh, the methods are lost now. You can’t get pure ingredients anymore. She was built to explode, you know. Just not on Titan.”

“Baron. You know what happens now. There’s going to be a fight, and I need protection. I need power.”

“Powers. Of course you would. A bit late now to fall into a vat, you know, something nicely irradiated.”

“Yes, a bit.” I try not to snap at the Baron, but I’m feeling inexplicably tense.

“There was a magic ring somewhere, don’t you know. Prophecy, if I can just think of it. I’m sure I can find the reference….” He makes a shuffling motion in the direction of one of the bookshelves, but I cut him off.

“God damn it, Baron!”

He freezes. No one talks to Baron Ether like this, I guess, especially not pissant upstarts who weren’t even alive for the bulk of his career. Who’d never known the days before the Super Squadron. Outside, I can hear children yelling and playing kickball out in the street.

“We’re better than this. In two days, the Champions are going to show up and smash everything I’ve built, my priceless scientific inventions, just like they’ve done to you. How many times is it going to happen? How long are we going to be under their thumbs?”

I wait for him to reach for his cane, to press the ruby stud or the diamond, but instead he answers me.

“Yes, of course. Living like this…one forgets.” The Baron’s accent is unplaceable. Not quite Germanic. Somewhere in the Balkans, perhaps. His eyes are lost in the darkness, in the unfathomable past. “I had my reasons once, too, you know. They cast me out. All because of my work. The galvanic principle…But I returned.”

His right hand, the insect one, clenches. “I showed them their master.”

For an instant, I can see the anger that once cowed the world, and it’s frightening, even to me. Wherever Baron Ether came from, it was probably a lot worse than the suburban Midwest. He falls silent again.

“Baron?” I venture. “Is there anything else? Something you’ve got left over. Even a death ray would help.”

He seems to emerge from his reverie. “Yes. Yes, a letter came for you.”

“What do you mean?”

He wheels himself over to where I’m standing and closes the window. “It was on the table one morning. I don’t know how you people keep getting in. I think the Mechanist must be a bit out of date.”

He shows me the envelope. The outside simply reads “Doctor Impossible.” I hesitate, but the Baron has already opened it. Inside, there is simply a card with a precise latitude and longitude, and a name: Nelson Gerard.

A sudden hope—maybe the Pharaoh is coming out of retirement! Maybe he heard I’m back in the game, and wants in on the action. He might be useful in the crunch, properly directed. Doctor Impossible and the Pharaoh. Back-to-back in the arena, we’d been a force to be reckoned with. I’m surprised at how much I’ve missed him—maybe I’ll even give him Egypt once we’ve conquered the world. It would be good to have company for a change.

But it isn’t his handwriting. Underneath the numbers is written another message:

Good luck.

L.

Doctor Impossible and the Pharaoh, together again, in an arena fight to beat the world. Could it happen?

I never managed to piece together all the rest of the Pharaoh’s story. CoreFire’s search records helped, and Baron Ether filled in the rest. Ambling down through Mexico, he’d fetched up at a surf shack in Costa Rica. An invulnerable man can afford to take his time, sleeping rough and hitchhiking. When the Pharaoh went missing, no one came looking for him. The Pharaoh’s Return? The Revenge of the Pharaoh? No one cared. No one gave a damn.

The coordinates in the note are precise, but once I get close, it’s obvious where he died, even from a thousand feet up. The sea is frozen solid out to a hundred yards from shore, spreading out from a cave in a cliff face.

I still don’t understand it. Superfights rarely go to the death, very rarely—even Feral holds to that line. This one had, and unleashed something strange.

As I get closer, the temperature drops; inside the cave, it is the Arctic. When I find the Pharaoh, he is sitting on a chair of ice, his flesh blue-white. The hammer has cracked, fused—the explosion must have been lethally intense, but the air was unnaturally cold, well below freezing, chilled by the magic emanating from the weapon he still holds. Even I can smell the power in it.

He used to have these cheesy sayings, things like “By Ra!” or “Isis preserve us!” like he was really an Egyptian king, who just happened to speak English. His hieroglyphics looked like they’d been copied off a cereal box or a King Tut T-shirt. And he used to sing that Steve Martin song under his breath during a fight, call out “He’s an Egyptian!” at the wrong moment, and I’d crack up just when I was defusing a bomb or breaking a particularly tricky lock. And that idiotic headdress, like a giant papier-mâché television antenna.

It must be the hammer. Cracks show on it now—whatever kept him alive all these years finally failed him at the critical moment. But here he sits, sole monarch of a strange and fanciful realm, enthroned at last. His flesh is ice-cold.

Now I know why I’m here. The hammer is still glowing faintly. Gently, I slide it from his frozen hand. I’ve seen what this hammer can do, and I’ve got a use for it. Someone’s going to pay for what happened here, oh yes. I’m starting to have a tiny suspicion who that is. I return to the island, my doomsday device complete.