I was having a bowl of cold cereal; Stella was reading a book and eating a salad. Trent had fixed a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce for Simon, who was making a mess. Trent had chopped it up with a knife and fork to make two-inch noodle segments, which he called worms. The word “worms” delighted Simon. I you hadn’t been around for “mama” and “dada” and the usual first sounds a baby makes over the past summer—and I had missed a lot of things for various aforementioned reasons—you’d have thought “worms” was Simon’s first and only utterance.
“You want some more worms?” asked Trent. He spooned some off the plate and “zoomed” them by aeroplane into Simon’s awaiting mouth. This would all be cloyingly nauseating, except Simon just loved it—he literally ate it up. Eating for Simon was a tactile activity—he was helping by getting tomato sauce and cheese all over his hands and squishing them between his fingers.
“Worms!” said Simon with glee. I wondered if that would naturally turn to “Woo!” at some point.
Since I happened to have both Trent and Stella—Ann Street’s resident retired megaheroes—sitting down at the same time together, I was eager to broach the subject of secret laboratories and unknown fathers with them. But I didn’t know quite how to go about it. I had no desire to disturb this archetypal scene—the Nuclear Family, no pun intended. They looked so normal—just a young couple with a baby—that their past careers as Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl seemed like they might as well have taken place in some other reality.
Luckily, it was Trent who brought up the subject.
“So, Clarissa, how’s the Ms. Megaton Man thing going?” he asked.
Stella looked up from her book and gave Trent a frown.
“I guess it’s okay,” I said. “I’ve been too busy with the new semester to worry much about it. But I did have some questions, though.”
“Oh?” said Trent. “Like what?”
“It’s just that Preston Percy has been so nice to me and all,” I said. “He had that official uniform custom-made for me based on Stella’s design”—I wanted to give Stella a stake in my Ms. Megaton Man career at every opportunity—“and I got those nifty new goggles, and a cape that flies by itself …”
“Don’t forget the burgundy hair,” said Stella.
I couldn’t tell from her tone if this was sarcasm; did she think it an extravagance? Was I getting above myself?
“Right, and the burgundy hair,” I confirmed. “So, my question is: Why is Preston—and the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning—doing all this for me? Why are they being so nice?”
“It’s his job to manage megaheroes,” said Trent. “He’s got to justify his paycheck somehow.”
“But I never entered into any kind of formal agreement,” I said, “or worked out any understanding at all—with ICHHL, the government, the White House, anybody. What are they going to want in return? How does anybody even know I’m a good guy?”
“That’s just it,” said Trent. “You never know where you stand with Preston. It’s not his style to spell things out. He prefers to keep things ambiguous and just manipulate you emotionally.”
“He’s just trying to be helpful, Clarissa,” said Stella. “To make sure you find you’re footing. He already knows you, through us, and he knows your dad.”
“But knowing Preston, he’ll want something in return,” said Trent, wiping Simon’s mouth. “He always does. It’s only a matter of time before he calls in some favor—then you have to drop whatever you’re doing and rush off and save the world. You have that to look forward to.”
“I just wish I knew my role,” I said. “I mean, what am I supposed to do? Am I just supposed to be on call, waiting beside the hotline so to speak, ready for anything?”
“You’re beginning to see what it’s like,” said Trent ruefully. “I hated that part of being Megaton Man. Flying and being strong and all that was okay; but I never knew what was expected of me. I never knew who I was or how I was supposed to live up to other people’s expectations.”
“It’s not like you’re in a union,” said Stella. “You don’t absolutely have to do anything you don’t want to do. There’s just a tradition that if you’re a megahero, you’ll naturally want to make the world a better place—fight crime and all that. But there’s no obligation that you have to make any such commitment at all.” Stella put her hand on mine. “Just try to have fun with it for now. What you want to do with your powers will become clearer over time.”
“How did you get along with Preston, Stella?” I asked.
“You mean with the Quartet? We never had any government interference, that I recall,” she said. “The team never had any relationship with ICHHL at all. I never met Preston Percy until just before Pammy and I left New York. I suppose Rex had sufficient clout already with the government as a big-time scientist that they left us to do our thing; we were considered major independents.” She turned the page of her book. “Although we certainly could have used some government oversight within that fractious and abusive group.”
“Was it really that bad?” I asked.
“It was a boys club,” said Stella. She narrowed her eyes at Trent. “Boys will be boys.”
“I’ve been watching the headlines coming out of Megatropolis,” I said. “There’ve been one or two minor megavillains trying to make a comeback. I was kind of expecting Preston to call on me to handle the situation, but he didn’t. Why do you suppose that is?”
“I wouldn’t take it personally, Clarissa,” said Trent. “There are probably more experienced megaheroes to handle that stuff in Megatropolis already; Preston just didn’t want to disturb you at school. Maybe he feels you need some more seasoning. Be thankful you don’t have to bother.”
“But I’m America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero, ain’t I?” I asked. “Shouldn’t I at least be in training or something? What if ICCHL or the government of the country does need me? I want to be ready.”
“All in due time, grasshopper,” said Trent. “I understand your eagerness, and I’d say it’s commendable. Only I don’t think you fully appreciate what you’re asking for. Being America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero is a pain in the ass, if you ask me. Enjoy being off the radar. If you get on it, you’ll miss these good old days, believe me.”
“Maybe I should be on some team in New York, just to get some practice,” I said. “They’ve got special gymnasia and equipment and all that, right?”
“The Devastation Chamber,” said Trent. “I wouldn’t call that training. They just throw you into the deep end and see if you come out alive. It’s survival of the fittest, not training. I would call it them just trying to kill you.”
“How did you become Megaton Man, anyway?” I asked. “It wasn’t just a shot of Mega-Soldier Syrup the first time, was it?”
“Heck, no,” said Trent. “I was bombarded with enough radiation to kill every living thing in a town the size of Ann Arbor. That was in addition to the Mega-Soldier Syrup. It was a two-part cocktail, if you like. I’m sorry I can’t explain it any more technically than that. Ask Stella; she’s studying physics. What’s the term for measuring radiation?”
“Roentgen,” said Stella. “It’s not the exposure that kills you,” said Stella. “It’s the amount of radiation a cell absorbs that can be lethal.”
“Whatever,” said Trent. “The Mega-Soldier Syrup allowed me to absorb massive doses of radiation, and I became Megaton Man. Don’t ask me how it all worked.”
“Stella, that’s not how you got your megapowers, is it?” I asked. “When you explained it to me, you said…”
“I inherited my megapowers, such as they are, from my father,” Stella replied. “At least, that’s always been my assumption. Obviously, turning myself naked with but a thought is entirely different from the Meltdown Megapowers my father was known for, and that my half-brother Chuck developed. But I was certainly never zapped or injected with anything.”
I wondered if Stella’s powers were so different from her father and half-brother; I recalled how she was able to thaw out that Thanksgiving turkey.
“I wasn’t zapped or injected, either,” I said. “We have that in common, Stella. Like you, I seem to inherited my megapowers from my father…”
This was news to Stella “Oh, so, you didn’t catch them from Bing.”
“Nope,” I replied. “Mama must have hooked up with Roman Man or somebody else back in the day. But she’s never said exactly who.”
“Just as well,” said Stella. “Biological fathers are worthless.”
“At least it hasn’t embittered you toward men or anything,” said Trent. “That’s one good thing.”
“No, it has,” Stella admitted, not looking at Trent but looking at me. “But I adore my adoptive father. We have that in common, too, Clarissa.”
“So how many Megaton Men has Dr. Joe created over the years?” I asked Trent. “There’s been you and your Uncle Farley…”
“Actually, the Original Golden Age Megaton Man was created by Elias Levitch, Dr. Joe’s father,” said Trent. “That was during World War II. Elias, as I understand it, died in the process, when radiation leaked from the chamber. He absorbed so much—as Stella suggested—that it killed him. Joe, the son, adapted his father’s process—I suppose he made a few improvements of his own along the way.”
“So, you were Dr. Joe’s first megahero,” I said. “The second Megaton Man.”
“No, I was Joe’s second megahero,” Trent corrected me. “I was the third Megaton Man.”
“Who else was there?” I asked, playing dumb.
“There was Clyde Phloog,” Trent said. “He was Uncle Farley’s nephew. That would make him my…what?”
“Cousin,” said Stella, who had returned to her book.
“Cousin,” said Trent. “But he was born quite a bit before me—half a generation. I hardly knew him, growing up. He was the Silver Age Megaton Man.”
The Simpler-Era Mugging Strong-Man. “The Silver Age Megaton Man,” I said. “Gee, I forgot all about him. Do you think there was any chance he ever met my anyone in my family?”
“I don’t know,” said Trent blankly. “He was rock-ribbed and very right-wing, by all accounts. At least until his legendary conversion. I don’t think you’d have gotten along with him. Avie would’ve hated him.”
The Silver Age Megaton Man was ultra-right-wing—I wondered how my Mama could have ever fallen for a guy like that. “Is he still around?” I asked.
“He vanished in the late sixties or early seventies,” said Trent. “I was Megaton Lad for the longest time. They refused to promote me as long as there was a chance he’d return. It was only after they gave up all hope that the Silver Age Megaton Man was ever coming back that they went ahead and made me Megaton Man.”
“Where did he disappear to?” I asked.
“Like I said, I was always told he had had some kind of spiritual conversion and went off to the Far East on some mystical quest. Nobody’s seen him since.”
“Did Clyde inherit his Megaton megapowers from Uncle Farley?” I asked. “Did the Original Golden Age Megaton Man pass along his megapowers to the Silver Age Megaton Man?”
“No, I don’t believe so,” said Trent. “Each of us Phloogs had to be zapped and shot up and whatnot. It’s just that we had the—whaddyacall—metabolic predisposition, to use Dr. Joe’s phrase—that made us strong candidates for the Megaton process. That’s what we inherited—the right genes.”
“They’re never going to zap Simon,” said Stella. “Or shoot him up—not if I can help it. Simon’s going to remain a normal, healthy, natural boy.”
I studied Stella for a minute. I knew she had been conscious in the hospital room. She must have seen Simon flying around in the goggles, cape, and buttons provided by Preston Percy as a gag gift. Could she have been on so much medication at the time that this never registered as a reality? Or had she pushed this particular memory so far out of her mind that she convinced herself it never happened?
“Stella, you don’t remember Simon flying around the hospital room in his diapers, don’t you?” I asked. “He’s already demonstrated Megaton megapowers.”
“You’re joking, right?” said Stella, straight-faced. “Very funny.”
I looked at Trent. He shrugged his shoulders.
But I knew Megaton megapowers could be inherited. I had inherited mine, and so had Simon. That was something the baby and I had in common.
“Worms!” said Simon.
That fall of my second junior year, both Trent and Stella had classes on Tuesday nights. Since I didn’t have class, and things were usually slow early in the week at the Li’l Drown’d Mug Café, Kozmik Kat and I stayed home and babysat Simon while his parents were in school. Koz and I also got tired of picture puzzles, so we started a little project.
We took the stack of Detroit Days that accumulated near the front door, went through them, and cut out any newsworthy articles concerning megaheroes. We did the same with the stack of Manhattan Projects that Pammy subscribed to but somehow had lost interest in, or at least never picked up, failing as she had to transfer her subscription to her pad in Dearborn. On weekends, I brought back as many newsweeklies that sat stacked up at my parents’ house in Detroit as I could stuff in my duffel bag, and lugged them back to Ann Arbor under my cape.
So, on Tuesday nights, instead of picture puzzles, Koz and I pawed through these recent publications and clipped away, carefully noting the page number and date of each item, as per The Chicago Manual of Style, 13th edition.
Of particular interest were the columns that appeared in the Day by John Bradford, a columnist for whom both Pammy and Preston had worked with as journalism interns years ago. His long-running column, The Bizarre Files of John Bradford, covered not only stray megahero sightings around Metropolitan Detroit, but other weird and inexplicable phenomenon, including UFOs, the occult and supernatural, loose robots—things that were to play an important role in my life a few years later.
There were even a pile of clippings about sightings of me, from the Arbor State Gazette. These were instructive; if nothing else, they cautioned me about how inaccurate the coverage of megaheroes could be in the popular press.
Initially, I bought one of those red-tag accordion folders to store the clippings. But as the collection grew week by week, we switched to a system of manila folders using one of the hanging file drawers in Pammy’s unused study nook desk.
Of special interest to me was anything concerning Roman Man—his current exploits, his mystery-shrouded past, the conflicting rumors surrounding his obscure origins. Among megaheroes, Roman Man was most often categorized as a solo act—usually not affiliated with any particular group or team over a long period of time. The characters he most frequently teamed up with were the Devengers—a contraction of Doomsday Revengers—a group operating out of their base in New Jersey. But Roman Man was never considered one of the team’s core members, among whom numbered the Lens, Colonel Turtle, and the Angel of Death. But along with the Silver Sylph and the Retro Vanguard, Roman Man’s most frequent non-solo adventures since the 1960s occurred with the Devengers.
“I guess the rest of the time he was booked in Vegas or Atlantic City,” quipped Koz.
As to his secret identity, there seemed to be a number of conflicting theories. One alleged he was really a scholarly classicist and antiquarian named Romney Manning. According to this account, Roman Man gained his megapowers—which included the strategic mind of Octavius, the wisdom of Minerva, the speed of Mercury, the grace of Apollo, the strength of Hercules, and the omnipotence of Woden (how a Norse god got in there is anyone’s guess)—the initials of which, when said backwards, formed the magic word “Whammo!” (Another account had it that Romney simply uncovered a suit of armor in an archeological dig on the outskirts of Rome, and just went a little funny in the head.) Technically a reincarnation of the mythical Romulus, founder of the city of Rome, Roman Man fights a never-ending battle to preserve all manner of historical minutiae, and ceaselessly dredge up the past.
According to another account, Roman Man is actually washed-up fifties Hollywood star Romano Montefiore, who, when his last “swords and sandals” epic The Scroll and the Sea flopped at the box office in 1965, simply never returned his costume to storage. Never really gaining megapowers but relying mostly on cinematic special effects—and, needless to say, going a little nuts—Montefiore began an endless war on organized crime as Roman Man. This happened to be the story favored by my sister Avril, although personally I can’t see how I could have inherited special effects.
Yet another account casts Roman Man as a mild-mannered poet-philosopher who writes odes in Latin when not adopting the guise of the Centurion-Swordsman. But when he uses some kind of magic quill on the right kind of parchment, the quill turns into a sword and the parchment into a shield forged by the god Vulcan himself, and Mark O’Reilly becomes the immortal reincarnation of Emperor Marcus Aurelius. This is the version most favored by academics.
Although these stories were often mentioned in news accounts, reporters never failed to point out their vast discrepancies. Each version had its followers, but each was also widely disputed by commentators, not the least of whom was Pamela Jointly.
These criticisms aside, my problem was that none of these accounts particularly appealed to my imagination, least of all as a plausible account of my own parentage. If Roman Man was my father, why didn’t I ever have any interest in classical architecture, or in Italian food other than canned spaghetti? Why did Trent trying to croon Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, or Tony Bennett songs in the shower always make me cringe? If Roman Man was indeed my father, he didn’t seem to have passed any of his traits on to me.
Among the many nemeses associated with Roman Man was the Grecian Urn; the Trojan Horse; Ramses and the Mummy Legion; the Goths, Visigoths, and Vandals; and of course, Lysistrata and the Lepper Colony. I didn’t know who any of these people were, but all such information was duly noted and filed away for future reference.
Unfortunately, there were no references at all to the Silver Age Megaton Man that I could locate in the current media, and only a few scattered mentions of the last Megaton Man, whom Trent would have been glad to know was already rapidly being forgotten. Even I was incorrectly described as Megaton Girl, which pissed off Avie even more than the name I had chosen for myself, the patriarchal—in her view—Ms. Megaton Man.
But I always had recourse to other sources of information, including microfilm in the Arbor State University library system, and the Eye of Horus, the second-floor walk-up comic shop on State Street. Although they paid cash for old comics, no more back-issues of No-Brand Yuck had come in recently, but I located a few issues of the Velour Vibrator and Admiral Eel—apparently, they were a duo. Unfortunately, they also struck me as a repressed gay couple, so I tentatively ruled them out as potential biological father, although Avie thought that was narrow-minded. I also scoured family-owned party stores around the Detroit area for more bagged coverless comics, which were cheap and provided much-needed context of the era,
Koz thought I should cut out key panels from the comics, at least the coverless ones, and paste them into a scrapbook for handy reference. I thought this would be a desecration—and one of my teachers advised against it as a violation of research protocols. So, I soon purchased a comic book box with bags and backing boards; I officially became a geeky collector. Although paradoxically keeping each comic book in its own plastic bag sealed with tape made it difficult to access them easily for research.
With all the documents I accumulated, I easily did the equivalent of an honors research paper—this in addition to all my other coursework in my double-major. I only wish I could have gotten credit for it in one of my classes.
Although the amount of data Koz and I compiled was impressive, it was spotty and skewed toward recent years; it was material that I just happened to run across at random and culled from current events. None of it was going to reveal to me any secrets about my past or my parentage as I sought.
Even when I found time to consult periodical bibliographies, vertical files, and other scholarly, archival resources in the school libraries, there still remained tremendous gaps in my knowledge. I simply wasn’t going to become an expert on megaheroes, so I had to think about consulting someone who was. Koz and I drew up lists of names.
“Pammy has certainly written a good deal about megaheroes,” I said, “albeit from a very tendentious point of view.”
“Ten what?” said Koz.
“Tendentious,” I repeated. “That is to say slanted, polemical.”
“Oh, polemical,” said Koz. “Now you’re talking my lingo.”
“There’s you and Stella,” I pointed out. “But neither of you have much information beyond your immediate experience; Preston knows a lot, but he’s not talking; nor is my mother.”
“I’ll bet Professor Rex knows everything,” said Koz. “Rex Rigid was there before the earth cooled; I bet he could fill you in on everything.”
“Yes, but as Stella’s ex-husband, he’s kind of persona non grata,” I said. “And his whereabout at the moment are not particularly well established; he seems to slink from place to place.”
“Liquid Man can be hard to nail down,” said Koz. “But Bing would have his last known address. And we know where Bing is—in New York—unless he’s gone off on another bender with Colonel Turtle.”
“Maybe there’s a way to get Liquid Man to come here,” I said.
“You just said yourself Stella can’t stand him,” said Koz. “How do you plan to lure him to Ann Arbor knowing his ex-wife has it in for him?”
“Maybe he’d visit Trent,” I said. “Captain Megaton Man was on the Quartet for a while.”
“Yeah, Rex is gonna wanna visit the guy who’s shacked up with his young wife,” said Koz.
“I guess you’re right,” I said.
“Face it, Missy—you’re going to have to go to New York sooner or later.”
Koz was right, of course, but the semester wasn’t even at the midway point, and there was no way I could get away to New York before the holiday break. So, for the time being, I put it out of my mind, and concentrated on more mundane concerns.
One of my biggest regrets in the long run about my delayed freshman crisis was that I missed baby Simon’s first steps when I was down in the rec room with Yarn Man. I may have missed his first steps, but he was now, at almost a year and a half, walking around the Ann Street house like he owned it. That meant we had to keep the basement stairs and second floor stairs closed off with baby gates.
Koz was scared of the little tyke—not just of having to change his diapers, but scared that the kid might somehow express his latent megapowers and start tearing the place apart. “I saw him fly around the hospital room,” he reminded me. “That whole scene could have turned out quite differently. Thank God for Doctor Quimby—whoever he was.”
Koz reminded me that he had only been Kozmik Kat a very short time—just about two years before I became Ms. Megaton Man. “I was a stray that Professor Rex Rigid had found on the street; he souped me up,” he recalled, “bombarding me with radioactive cataclysmic rays. The process made me sentient, articulate, and literate, as you can see”—he was cutting up pages of the Detroit Day as he recounted this—“but my sense of history is fairly weak.”
Koz had joined the Megatropolis Quartet only after Stella Starlight had left the team in New York and came here to Ann Arbor with Pammy Jointly. “The team then was Liquid Man, Yarn Man, the Human Meltdown, and Captain Megaton Man—Trent Phloog in a slightly different persona. I didn’t even get along all that well with Bing at first; I kept snagging Yarn Man’s fabric with my claws.
“The reason I had been called into existence in the first place was to go after an infestation of Megaton Mice that had somehow been spawned by accident. My first job was to route them out. But the first one I chomped was my last; I didn’t like the taste. There were five of them, originally, but now there were four; the four survivors retaliated by sending Bing to the Forbidden Future on the Time Turntable. I was sent after Bing to bring him back.”
Koz didn’t offer much detail about the Forbidden Future, but it had been quite a trauma. A post-apocalyptic world several centuries from now, he managed to find Yarn Man, but had to evade killer drones, various robots and other forms of pestilence, and group with the few human survivors they came across. With the aid of one enlightened scientist, Yarn Man and Kozmik Kat were able to return to the present, just in time for the Partyers from Mars landing in Central Park, and for Yarn Man to accidentally release the Cosmic Cue-Ball once more.
After Megaton Man swallowed the Cosmic Cue-Ball and became civilian Trent Phloog once more, Koz continued, “Me and Bing just kicked around, homeless, until we showed up on your doorstep here in Ann Arbor, on the eve of Baby Simon’s birth. So, you see, I don’t have a long, first-hand experience with all of the megahero traditions you are so interested in now. These clippings are helping me to understand the past as much as you, if not moreso.”
I knew that after Bing and Koz left Ann Arbor, they joined the Youthful Permutations, an ill-fated enterprise with Professor Rex Rigid at the helm, with the Original Golden Age Megaton Man and a bunch of youthful permutations, obviously. “Why didn’t Bing get along with Rex and Farley?” I wanted to know.
“Rex had just gotten old and cranky and set in his ways, I suppose,” Koz replied. “He had some very definite ideas about how to run a team of megaheroes, and I think the others viewed him as a bit autocratic. What do I know? I understand less about human group dynamics than I do about the history of megaheroes.”
The general situation Koz sketched out made sense, and I could fill in the rest. Professor Rex was trying to head up a group of oversexed young megaheroes, and at the same time, constantly had to reinvigorate Farley, who required almost daily doses of electromagnetic radiation to keep him youthful. Then there was Chuck, the Human Meltdown, who visited from France—apparently he was having marital problems with his wife back in Paris. The three former Quartet members—Liquid Man, Yarn Man, and the Human Meltdown—along with Farley, didn’t hit it off with some of the youthful permutations, who felt stifled by the old regime. Bing started hanging out with his old crony, Colonel Turtle, and things went from bad to worse.
“The problems started when Bing began hanging out with a bunch of old-timers from the World War II generation,” said Koz. “They got together in some bar in Manhattan to incessantly reminisce about their collective Glory Days. They would take turns telling and retelling their origins, over and over.”
“Did you ever go to these gatherings?” I asked.
“Bing dragged me to one, and it was boring as hell, so I never went again. For someone whose life consists of little more than reading and taking naps, it takes some doing to bore my pants off.”
He gathered up the clippings from The Detroit Day and carefully tucked them into a manila folder.
“I suppose I should have more adventures; I just don’t care to exert myself.”
Next: Dr. Joe’s Lab
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