“You’re actually going to try to take extralegally procured prisoners across the border to Canada?” I asked. “I’d like to see how you’ll manage that.”
“Three of ‘em,” said Gene, although I couldn’t see behind me into the back compartment of the van, which was closed off.
“We have a special arrangement,” said Allan, who was driving through the streets like they were a war zone. “The Crime Busters almost have their own international treaty, of a sort.”
“Are the Detroit Crime Busters still a going concern?” I asked. “I heard they’ve been defunct since the seventies.”
“We’re on hiatus,” said Gene. “But we still retain certain privileges.”
“A license to kidnap, huh?” I remarked. “Ethics are just one of the reasons I’m reluctant to commit fully to this Megahero way of life, you know.”
“We have an infrastructure,” said Allan, who steered the van into a dark alley; I didn’t catch the street where we had turned. “And, we have the opportunity to make a difference when we can.” He pressed a button on the dashboard. “Let’s hope this entryway is in good repair.”
A garage door rolled up at the end of the alley to reveal an illuminated ramp slanting down under the street level. The van just cleared the rising door by inches.
“Allan’s being dramatic,” said Gene. “We use this all the time. I would have shown you last summer, but I’m not a show-off like the Master of Disguise here.”
We raced downward into the tunnel, barely wider than the van itself, until we were at least a hundred feet below the city.
“Are we heading to the salt mines?” I asked. I could feel my ears begin to pop from the pressure differential.
“Oh, no. That’s another thousand feet below us,” said Allan. “And millions of years back in time, geologically. When the Great Lakes was a saltwater basin, literally evaporating repeatedly over thousands of years. I’m not that old. But we are below the steam grid, which is modern.”
“Allan considers anything less than a century old to be modern,” said Gene, smirking. “And he does remember when the steam district was created. When was that, Allan? 1904? I’ll bet it seems just like yesterday to you …”
Allan Jordan had the look of a robust, virile man in his forties, and not a day older. Yet Gene implied he his partner in espionage had lived a much longer life, even several lifetimes.
“Why does he call you the Master of Disguise, Allan?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you in anything other than you what you have on—a plain dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves, and slacks.”
“Ha, that’s because he’s so well disguised,” said Gene. “You’re talking to the technical advisor to Lon Chaney, Sr., not to mention the prop man for Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“You’re putting me on,” I said. “Allan here can’t be any older than my dad. When were you born? 1935?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” said Allan. He pressed another button on the dash; up popped a screen behind the steering wheel with a computer screen, showing a three-dimensional model of the tunnel through which we were racing. “I am the very model of a modern major crime fighter.”
“Allan’s the original Wandering Jew,” said Gene. “Here, don’t miss our turn.”
“I know these tunnels like the back of my hand, Penetrator,” said Allan, using his partner’s code name. “Did you tell your lady friend how you got that name? Oh, I’m sure you have.”
I watched the screen; the tunnel suddenly branched off into several possible routes, suggesting a vast network under Detroit. Lights up ahead in the tunnel suggested we were coming to a considerable intersection.
“Holy shit,” I said. “How far west do these tunnels go? Ann Arbor?” I recalled my experience in the depths of Megatonic University, and the military robot B-50s mysterious disappearance down a tunnel that was blocked by debris. It was all beginning to make sense.
“We’re not heading in the direction of Mega-U,” said Allan. “We’re heading east, under the river.”
The river would be the Detroit River, cutting off the Motor City to Windsor, and the United State to Canada. Engineers had both crossed it with the Ambassador Bridge and tunneled under it for a two-way traffic just before the onset of the Great Depression. But the tunnel we were driving through appeared nothing like that; although wired up for lighting—and I assumed, ventilation—modernized, in other words, it appeared rickety, almost ancient. If I had guess, I’d have dated from half a century earlier. Like Megatonic University, initial construction might have begun not many years after the Civil War.
I couldn’t imagine the sheer scale or the enormous engineering involved to tunnel under a city just for the convenience of a handful of freelance crime fighters. These tunnels could only have been the result of some incredible government works project predating quasi-governmental spy agencies like the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning.
“I’m writing about this in my next city planning paper,” I said.
“If you want to be laughed out of academia,” said Gene. “You won’t find a scrap of information on the Ant Farm in any archive, manuscript collection, or microfilm. Believe me, I’ve gone looking.”
We sped through the tunnels for several minutes; I had lost all sense of direction. Momentarily, we began to rise. Before I knew it, we were on a moonlit road heading east of Windsor, Ontario. The lights of Detroit, the Detroit River, and the United States were miles behind us. After a short stretch of dirt road, the van jumped onto the pavement of King’s Highway 401, with signs reading “180 km [111 miles] to London.”
“You’re right, no one would believe it,” I said. “A private—at least, a secret—tunnel system, miles of it, under the Motor City, even before the invention of the automobile. Why aren’t there any rails? The state of the art would be the locomotive—a subway.”
“They had a heck of time pulling up all those rails,” said Gene. “Allan remembers the days when he had to pump a handcar, just to get around.”
“Very funny,” said Allan. “We were civilized; we had bicycles back then.”
“I don’t believe it myself,” I announced. “The whole thing’s crazy—capturing petty criminals on the streets of Detroit, and taking them over the border to Canada to have their memories wiped clean so they can lead law-abiding, productive lives. It’s like something out of a dime novel, literally—a Jock London dime novel.”
“Who’s she talking about?” asked Allan. “Does she mean Jacques Londres? No one’s seen that guy for decades.”
“You expect me to believe that there was a real person behind all those Jock London pulp adventures?” I asked. “Just like you expect me to believe that Allan here is immortal, I suppose.”
“No one expects you to believe anything,” said Allan. “In fact, Gene promised me you wouldn’t find any of this credible, or else I wouldn’t have stopped to pick you up. It’s easier for all concerned if you don’t believe anything. You’ll find that credibility gap is something we crime fighters, costumed or not, count on so as to keep operating without unwanted attention from the public or the media. Since we can’t exactly bump off Ms. Megaton Man, our secret is safe as long as she doesn’t believe, you see?”
“Ever been to Canada before, Clarissa?” asked Gene, changing the subject.
“Just when I accidentally overflew Detroit that one time,” I said. “And once before, as a little kid. My parents took us to see the geese in a field near London as they were heading south for the winter.”
“The geese, or your parents?” asked Allan.
“The geese,” I said. “But we did use to visit New Orleans every winter back in the late sixties.” The memory brought me happy thoughts.
It was almost a two-hour drive, with Allan telling stories of being not only a makeup artist in silent-era Hollywood, but also a stuntman, and before that, a performer in Thomas Edison films in New York. I didn’t necessarily believe a word of it, not that I could focus. I was more tired than I thought, and soon conked out, my head on Gene’s shoulder. I dozed off with Allan talking about being a spy behind enemy lines in World War I … or was that that the Crimean War?
When I woke up, we were parked outside some nondescript brick building that appeared to be a warehouse. On the cinderblock wall was painted in big letters, “La Plata Trading Company.” Allan backed the van up to a loading dock, and someone was busy removing our cargo—presumably the captives—from the back of the van. I never saw the prisoners the West Forest Knight Riders had captured.
“You want to see the inside of the lab, sleepy head?” asked Gene. “May as well; we’ve already come all this way and paid for parking.”
“Oh, great, another crime fighting mad science lab,” I said, groggily. “What would the state of research be in North America without Megaheroes and pulp adventurers?”
Gene and I climbed out of the van; Allan stayed behind the wheel, pulling a book from under his seat. “I’ve seen the place a million times,” he explained. “I’ll just sit here and read Proust, if you don’t mind.”
Gene and I went in through a door next to the loading dock. We walked through a long, barren hallway and came to a steel door. Gene pushed a buzzer. We heard the door unlock remotely.
Entering, we saw a vast warehouse, brightly illuminated and humming with considerable activity for such a late hour. “Must be the night shift,” I said. It looked like any warehouse you could imagine, with forklifts stocking and rearranging boxes and boxes on towering steel shelving.
Gene led me to what looked like the offices of the place, up a short stairs and behind plate glass windows. Inside, tall, beautiful woman, perhaps more stunning than Stella Starlight, stood in jodhpurs, calf-high boots, and a khaki safari shirt. The masculine clothing did nothing to conceal her gorgeous Amazonian physique. Her collar-length hair was a brassy dark red, and her skin a tawny golden copper.
“You’re up late, Trish,” said Gene, smiling. “I’d like you to meet Clarissa James.”
“When you radioed ahead that you were bringing America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero, I had to stay up to give her the tour,” said Trish, “Clarissa, I’m Tricia Londres.”
“You can’t possibly be the Trish London,” I said. “Not the one they wrote about in the thirties. You don’t look a day over twenty-five.”
“Those pulp magazines got a lot of details wrong,” said Trish. “Why my brother ever licensed his likeness and life story to such disreputable literary characters as Simon & Solomon, I’ll never understand. I thought he should have held out for slicks—or the same outfit as the Ephemeral Phantasm, at least. Too bad Hemingway and Dos Passos were otherwise engaged. They were kind of preoccupied with Spain.”
“I’ll say they got a few details wrong,” I said. “Like the fact that you’re very nearly ageless. How old were you in the thirties? Not even born would be my guess. And according to the science fiction author Juan Philippí Herder, the real Jock and Trish were cousins in a secretly incestuous sexual relationship.”
“Herder has a filthy mind,” said Trish. “We were twins. But it’s true, I’ve never found a man whose satisfied me like Jock—present company excepted.” Trish gave a lascivious look to Gene. “So, you want to see the Criminality Clinic in action?”
Behind the offices was another hallway with plate glass windows looking into a sterile-looking laboratory. Various technicians with white coats monitored three scruffy looking characters who were strapped into what looked like dentist’s chairs. Helmets completely covered their heads with wired that connected to various sinister-looking machines. Judging from the shape of the visors and bulges over the ears, each helmet provided audio and visual sensory input. Other electrodes were fitted over their fingertips.
“Are these the guys you just picked up in Detroit?” I asked Gene.
“No,” Trish answered. “Our clients here at the Criminality Clinic go through weeks of counseling first before we bring them to the Reconditioning Room. We have a very humane process in which we coerce them into the program voluntarily, or else subject them to excruciating torture.”
“She’s exaggerating,” Gene whispered to me. “I think.”
“I understand you use electromagnetic pulses to alter their brainwaves,” I said. “The crooks’ grey matter is reduced to decorticated canine preparations—a psychically malleable mush—so they can be reformed into productive, civic-minded citizenry.” Frankly, I imagined a much more spectacular laboratory setting, farther north in the woods. This fluorescent-lit back office lab looked like the cross between a dentist’s office and conference room to test-market pilot TV programs.
“All an invention of Sylvester What’s-His-Name, who never set foot in the place,” said Trish. “This isn’t our original location, anyway; we have several branches now throughout the Dominion of Canada. Besides, we’ve refined our techniques since those primitive, bygone days.”
“Just what do those contraptions do?” I said, referring to the helmets. They reminded me of the Multimensional Pinpointer prototype Andrea, Kav, and Jasper had worked up in Troy that enabled me to visit the alternate reality where everyone was a Civilian except my Counterpart.
“They simply show our clients another reality, one they could have led before turning to a life of crime. Once they realize what could be, they simply choose to live better lives.
“It’s exactly like Winnie Wertz’s invention,” I said. “How utterly Aristotelian. Do you really think that works, just showing them a glimpse of what life could be like under different, ideal circumstances? Don’t they just have to return to whatever underprivileged backgrounds and hostile streets they originally came from? What’s your recidivism rate?”
“I don’t know, I’m not a theorist,” said Trish. “Jacques and his aides worked out all this stuff years ago. We have behavioral specialists from Montreal who monitor all this stuff these days. I can tell you it’s several weeks of treatment, and successful graduates work in our warehouse for several more weeks before being inserted back into society. It’s covered under our generous Canadian healthcare system. We’ve grandfathered the Crime Busters and except a few clients from the U.S. only for old time’s sake. Any other questions?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why do you white adventurer types all aspire to such deep tans? Is this your idea of being savage or what?”
The sun was coming up as we emerged back on Cass Avenue, my head again on Gene’s shoulder. “Whoa, did I have a weird dream,” I said.
“Let me guess,” said Gene. “Was it about some crazy Criminality Clinic left over from the days of authoritarian pulp adventures?”
“No, I’m pretty sure that part was real,” I said. “It was about New Orleans.”
Allan circled back down Woodward and pulled the van to stop on East Jefferson, not from John Portman’s brutalist Reconstitution Center. Parked undisturbed in front of us was a black Lamborghini-class sports car, so matte as to almost be invisible.
“This is my stop,” said Allan, egressing from the van. “Catch you later, pardner.”
Gene shifted over to the driver’s seat as Allan climbed into the sports car and raced off down the early morning streets. “Does he always leave his priceless sports car parked on the street in Detroit overnight?” I asked.
“Nobody would mess with that vehicle if they knew what was good for them,” said Gene. “You don’t want to mess with the Master of Disguise.”
Next: I Was a Grad School Sex Addict!
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Archival Images
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| Patsy Megaton (a clear analog to Trish London), from The Return of Megaton Man #2 (Kitchen Sink Press, August 1988). |
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