Jasper and Fanny preferred to take the Dimensional Portal from Troy, which was instantaneous, and as things worked out, we all met at the former Y+Thems headquarters in the old Navy Yards around the same time. The place was abandoned, so we grabbed dinner at the nearby burger and brew, Burr, Ger & Broo. We wondered where Liquid Man and Yarn Man were, but when we got back to the shabby dormitories, there was a note for us to meet them on Fifth Avenue the following morning. I guess Jasper and Fanny had thought the Youthful Mutants had been exaggerating about the squalid conditions in the Navy Yards; they regretted not splurging on better accommodations.
The next morning, we made our way over to Manhattan and met Yarn Man and Liquid Man in front of the site of old Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters. Now surrounded by clapboard walls papered over with advertisements for musicals, there was still no sign of construction on the site, even though the skyscraper had been gone for almost four years—bombed to Kingdom Come by old foes of the Quartet and Megaton Man.
“Why bring us here, Rex?” asked Bing. “What is it, old home week?”
“This was the site of our most ignominious defeat, old chum,” said Rex solemnly, who was wearing his white lab coat over his Liquid Man uniform. “But a new team requires a new headquarters.”
“You can’t put old wine into new wine skins,” said Kozmik Kat. “What do you plan to do, pitch a tent?”
“Better than that,” said Rex. “Follow me.”
He led us to a section of the clapboard wall with a few loose planks. Prying those aside, we stepped into the plaza where once stood the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters. The Q-Mobile was already parked on the abandoned plaza, once the ritziest in town. Now strewn with garbage, abandoned box springs, assorted trash, and loose gravel, the cracked and weathered pavement was bursting apart from weeds that had grown several feet high. Two empty basins, once filled with pools where fountains flourished, sat dry and caked with mud.
We walked to the edge of the hollow foundation that sank eight or ten stories into the ground. The giant square encompassed the footprint of a skyscraper that once jutted some sixty stories into the empty air above us.
“This is where we nearly plunged to our deaths, last time we visited,” I said to Koz. “Remember how Yarn Man tried to park the Q-Mobile on top of a building that wasn’t there anymore?”
“You’re telling me,” said Koz. “If I didn’t catch you guys, it would have been splat, right down there where there’s three feet of standing water.”
“I remember helping a little bit,” I said.
“I didn’t try parking the Q-Mobile,” said Bing. “It decided to park itself, then the blamed thing shut off its engine—sixty stories in the air. For some inexplicable reason, it thought the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters was still there.”
“In a sense, it still is,” said Rex.
I could sense that Jasper and Fanny had no idea what Liquid Man meant, but I could guess.
“And I’m about to bring it back,” he said.
Professor Rex reached into breast pocket of his lab coat and pulled out the same glass rectangle he had shown us in the back yard on Ann Street. I was only slightly bigger than his palm. He began sweeping his finger along it and tapping it.
“I’ve been working on this device for months,” said Rex. “Someday, everyone will carry one of these things in their pockets; they’ll be able to watch reruns of Match Game ’76 any time they want…imagine it!”
He removed his hands from the device; the rectangle of glass floated in the air.
“What do you call that crazy gizmo, Rex?” asked Bing.
“I call it—a rectangle of floating glass.”
“How ‘bout: The Rextangle?” said Koz.
“Even better.”
Rex took the rectangle into his palm again and started tapping. “For years, we’ve had the ability to see other dimensions,” he explained. “For example, the Multimensional Transceiver I invented, in crude form, in 1940…”
“Winnie Wertz had something to do with that,” I said. Rex shot a sideward scowl at me.
“And thanks to my Time Turntable,” Rex continued, “we’ve had the ability to physically travel to other dimensions…”
“Winnie developed the Dimensional Portal, too,” I said.
Rex now openly glowered at me.
“But now, thanks to the…um…Rextangle,” he continued, “we have the ability to select the best of all possible realities in time and space, whenever and wherever we want, and make them all a part of this reality.”
“Hold on, Rex!” cried Yarn Man. “You’re not attempting to pull off what I think you are, are you? I mean, there were some powers mankind was never meant to have!” “What do you think he’s going to do, Bing?” asked Kozmik Kat.
“He’s going to try to bring back the Polo Grounds and plop it down right here in the middle of Fifth Avenue,” said Bing. “Isn’t he?”
“No,” said Rex. “I’m just going to restore the Quantum Tower to its pre-cataclysmic glory.”
“Oh,” said Yarn Man, visibly disappointed. “What about the Polo Grounds?”
I couldn’t see clearly from where I was standing, but it looked like Rex was scrolling through options on the little glass rectangle.
“Let’s see…” he muttered, settling on a selection. “There! A mint condition Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters….and only an alternate reality away!”
Rex tapped the rectangle and looked up into the sky. “Stand back, everybody,” he cried. “The sequence as begun!”
The ground began to shake beneath our feet. We all jumped back ten or twenty feet, then looked up.
In the blink of an eye, it was done. Towering above us was the sixty-story Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters, as if it had always been there.
“Golly! That crazy gizmo really works!” said Yarn Man, staring up at the sleek, white, Quantum Tower.
More startling, the gravel and weeds around us had disappeared, along with any cracks in the slabs of pavement. The square pools to either side of us were now filled with glistening, blue water, their fountains spurting geysers dancing twelve or fifteen feet into the air. Around the perimeter of the property, the graffiti-covered clapboard wall had disappeared; pedestrians crowded the sidewalks; traffic coursed along Fifth Avenue, honking loudly. Vendors on the sidewalk sold hotdogs; old ladies took to the plaza benches flanking the pools, feeding the pigeons.
“How on Earth did you do it, Rex?” asked Jasper in astonishment. “A moment ago there was an empty hole in the ground; now you’ve completely resurrected a whole doggone skyscraper! It’s a miracle!”
Rex tucked the glass rectangle into his breast pocket. “No miracle, Rubber Brother,” he said. “Just good old fashioned American know-how! I right-clicked, hit control-Z, then a quick control-C followed by a deft control-V! Works every time! Decades from now, everyone will be doing it.”
“What kind of strange voodoo is this?” asked the Phantom Jungle Girl.
“The ol’ history-undo cut-and-paste feature!” said Koz. “What will Professor Rex think of next?”
We strolled into the spacious, glassed-in, travertine-veneered lobby.
“Howdy, Smitty,” Rex called out.
Smitty, an old, bushy white-mustachioed security guard sat hunched over his solitaire game behind the front desk. “Howdy, Professor Rex,” he said, not looking up. “Takin’ the front door this mornin’, I see. Didn’t feel like flyin’ in and landin’ on the roof?”
“Wanted to keep you on your toes, Smitty!” said Rex. “Thought we’d hop on an elevator for a change.”
“Should be one there waitin’ for you, Professor,” said Smitty, pointing backward with his thumb. We passed straight to the elevators, a dozen of them, waiting for us, and all climbed into one. Jasper whispered to me, “How did he do it? How did Rex restore the Quantum Tower in the blink of an eye?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “He musta found one in another reality that was still intact, and just…brought it here.”
“Precisely,” said Rex, as the doors closed on the car. He pressed a button and the carriage slowly rose. “It was really quite simple, actually. A parlor trick…unworthy of my talents. I don’t know why it never occurred to me before.”
“But what about all the other occupants of the building?” asked Fanny. “Haven’t you brought them along from the other dimension, too?”
“The Quartet only occupied the top three or four floors,” Rex explained. “The rest of the sixty floors just sat empty. The only other person who ever set foot in this building was Smitty, and he’s practically a fixture.”
“You have an entire skyscraper on Fifth Avenue,” said Jasper, “the highest-priced real estate per square foot in the world, and you mean to tell me the only tenant was a megahero team on the top three floors? Sorry, but I find that a little hard to believe.”
“See for yourself,” said Rex.
He pressed a couple of random buttons. The elevator slowed to a stop on the fourteenth floor.
The doors opened to a view of busy office workers scurrying between cubicles, delivering files, and carrying paper cups of coffee.
Rex was clearly taken aback. “That’s odd,” he said. “Where did they come from?”
He pressed a few more buttons. The doors closed, and the elevator rose a few more floors, to the twenty-eighth. The doors slid open again; it was another open-plan office, this one also filled with busy works in shirtsleeves and ties or smart skirt-suits.
“Good Lord!” said Rex. “Somebody rented out the Quantum Tower from another dimension…when I wasn’t looking!”
The elevator finally brought us to the top floors of the Quantum Tower and the Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters proper. We walked out into a spacious, sleek scientific lab, every wall covered in panels of blinking circuitry and controls of every sort.
“That’s better,” said Rex. He sniffed the air. “Dust free and immaculate…untouched since the day the group disbanded four years ago.”
Over by a computer console, Yarn Man picked up a newspaper section. “The crossword puzzle in The Manhattan Project from 1973 I left unfinished,” he said, suddenly nostalgic. “What’s an eight-letter word for condiment? …Anyone?”
Rex took the rectangle from his pocket again and tapped in some instructions. A great hydraulic jack holding a round platform to the roof slowly lowered. When it reached the floor, we could see it was a giant letter “Q,” the tail of which formed a ramp. We all stepped onto the platform, which at Rex’s command slowly rose again toward the opening in the roof. When it stopped, we found ourselves standing atop the Quantum Tower, with a commanding view in every direction of all of Manhattan.
Rubber Brother craned his neck around. “Gosh-a-rooty! All five boroughs, and then some!”
It was exactly the view I’d seen a year and a half earlier from the flying Q-Mobile, when it seemed to park itself on a phantom Quantum Tower that wasn’t there anymore.
“This is impressive,” said Fanny. “A jungle girl from the sticks could get used to this luxurious lifestyle.”
“And here’s the Q-Mobile now,” said Rex, waving his rectangle. From the plaza below, the flying car flew toward us by remote control. We stepped aside as it made a perfect, soft landing in the middle of the giant Q.
“Yeesh!” said Koz. “Reminds me of us nearly falling to our deaths when the engine cut out.”
I saw Fanny and Jasper were confused, so I explained, “When we visited New York over a year ago, Bing flew us around in the Q-Mobile. Even though the Quantum Tower wasn’t here then, the vehicle’s memory thought it was, and actually landed right here on this pad. Only, there was no pad, because there was no building; Koz and I had to catch it after plummeting sixty stories to the ground.”
Yarn Man was already stroking the vehicle, even though he’d just driven it earlier that morning. “Just like old times,” said Bing. “We’re getting the old band back together!”
The platform lowered once again, and we were back inside the laboratory. By the time it had reached the floor, Bing was already polishing the Q-Mobile and checking under the hood, refilling the oil and wiper fluid. Rex stepped off and busied himself studying the computer equipment. Jasper, Fanny, Koz, and I were left to our own devices.
Koz took us downstairs and gave us a tour of the residential floor. Rubber Brother stretched his elongated body all through the layout, which featured a modern kitchen-counter island, a living room, and comfortable apartments for each member of the Quarter, a study with bookshelves, and other amenities.
“This is fabulous,” said Fanny. “It’s got the Troy+Thems dormitory floor beat, hands down. You have to wonder why the team ever left the Quantum Tower to have adventures.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “But it’s ripped off.”
“What do you mean?”
Koz fielded the question. “She means it was appropriated from another reality. This Quantum Tower is identical in every respect to the Quantum Tower that was destroyed four years ago, down to the atom. But it’s not ours; it belongs to another reality. All those people working in the floors below us are a testament to that. What I wonder is, how did the Quantum Tower manage to survive in that other timeline and not in this one.”
“That’s simple,” I said. “In this timeline, Stella Starlight quit the team; she ran off with Pamela Jointly. Megaton Man joined the team, so the Megatropolis Quartet continued, with Captain Megaton Man instead of the See-Thru Girl. Only, all of the old foes of both Megaton Man and the Megatropolis Quartet joined forces, and bombed the building to Kingdom Come. In the other reality, the alternate reality this building came from, Megaton Man must have never joined the team; instead, the Megatropolis Quartet must have disbanded when the See-Thru Girl quit, then and there. The building was never bombed by the evildoers, because the megahero team had already vacated. Eventually, some enterprising realtor rented out the office space on the floors below, while the old Megatropolis Quartet Headquarters floors up here at the top remained sealed off.”
“That would explain why I can’t find my kitty bed and litter box anywhere,” said Koz.
That night, we settled into our respective compartments, but I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I kept tossing and turning. Although I should have been thrilled to be a member of the Reconstituted Quartet, all I could think about were the thousands of office workers below who had knocked off work for the day, flooded out of the building onto Fifth Avenue, hopped onto busses, and then couldn’t find their way home—because home was in another dimension. And then I thought of all their loved ones in the other dimension who would be wondering what had happened to them, and how New York in that other dimension was dealing with the sudden disappearance of one of its most prominent Midtown office towers in the middle of a busy working day.
Rex hadn’t seemed disturbed by his theft; I could hear him snoring from down the hallway on the residential floor. But I thought about what his old wunderkind colleague, Winnie Wertz, had told me, about the ethical dilemmas of Multimensional travel. Those same ethical quandaries affecting travelers would also certainly apply to the practice of plucking an entire skyscraper from another realities and plopping it right into your own.
Unable to sleep, I got up, put my Ms. Megaton Man uniform back on, and went out for a night flight. I flew around Manhattan, which was all lit up spectacularly, for an hour or so. I landed on one of the Twin Towers Stella had once told me had been the place where she and Megaton Man had hooked up, conceiving Simon Phloog, who was now three. There was nothing but concrete slabs and air ducts and a giant broadcast antenna jutting dozens of stories into the sky. I tried to imagine it as a romantic scene. I suppose if you were really into a guy, and you were sneaking out on your creepy husband, I said to myself; whatever turns you on.
“Oh, Clarissa,” said a voice behind me.
Startled, I turned around. It was Roman Man; he must have just landed, carrying a top-heavy blonde in his arms. He let her down. She stood on her own two feet, atop the highest, spikiest heels I’d ever seen.
“This is, uh, Miss Bombshell,” said Roman Man. “Miss Bombshell, this is Ms. Megaton Man.”
“Just Bombshell,” said the blonde. “How do you do, I’m sure.” Roman Man looked around to see if I was with anybody. The top of Tower Two must have been a popular spot for megaheroes to rendezvous for a little illicit nookie.
“I was just leaving,” I explained. “Nice to meet you, Miss Bombshell; nice seeing you again, Roman Man.”
“Wait…are you in town for long?” asked Roman Man. “We’ll have to do lunch.”
But I had already taken off.
Next: Crown Heights
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Archival Images:
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| The Reconstituted Megatropolis Quartet: Liquid Man, Yarn Man, Rubber Brother, and the Phantom Jungle Girl, as seen in The Savage Dragon vs. The Savage Megaton Man #1 (Image Comics, March 1993). |
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All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures on this page are ™ and © Don Simpson 2020, all rights reserved.
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