It crossed my mind that elements within the government might be using my grandmother as a ploy to kidnap me, but that seemed unlikely—and just plain paranoid. And yet, how could I be sure who was friend or foe in this alternate, Civilian Reality?
Instinctively, Avie and I got up and followed Seedy out of the restaurant, leaving Mama to quickly settle the bill with Nancy—I mean Aggie. Outside, the night air was frosty; tiny, sparkling flakes swirled down from the sky under the stark white streetlights of Woodward Avenue. The door of the plain, white van parked outside—of course Grandma Seedy had a plain, white van like everyone else I knew who was sinister—slid open. Gene Griffin, toting a submachine gun, appeared.
“Are you guys smuggling me to Canada again, Gene?”
“Not exactly,” he replied, extending his hand to help me up. “Pleased to meet you, finally, Ms. Megaton.”
“Oh, we already know each other,” I said, as he helped me in. “Quite well, back in my reality. Where’s Allan?”
I expected to find Allan Jordan, Gene’s trusty partner and Master of Disguise, either behind the wheel or in the passenger seat, but there was no one in the front of the vehicle.
Mama came rushing out of the restaurant as Avie started to climb in. “Where do you think you’re going, Avril?” Mama demanded. “You’ve got school, young lady.”
“Wherever they’re taking Sissy, I’m going, too,” Avie replied. “I’m not going to be able to concentrate, worried about Clarissa.”
“Where do you plan to take her, Mama?” Mama asked my grandmother.
“It’s better you didn’t know for now,” said Seedy. She gave Mama a hug and climbed into the front seat while Gene crawled behind the wheel.
I jumped out and gave Mama a final hug, too. “Don’t worry, we’ll be all right,” I said. I climbed back in and slid the door closed.
As we drove down Woodward Avenue, Avie and I settled into the back seat bench. I was expecting walls of Gene’s van to be lined with electronic surveillance equipment, but there were only the bare walls of an ordinary passenger vehicle, empty except for a stash of weapons under the back seat.
And, shrouded in darkness, an elderly man in a wheelchair sitting way in back. I could see him in silhouette in front of the back windows.
Gene snapped on the interior light so we could see. It was Stella’s adoptive father.
“I’m Seymour Sternlicht,” he said, extending his hand. “It’s quite an honor to meet you, Clarissa, and long overdue.”
“We’ve met before, Dr. Starlight,” I said. “At Stella’s and my big graduation party on Ann Street, remember?”
Of course, I was recalling the event as it had happened in my reality; Clyde Phloog, the Silver Age Megaton Man, had virtually served as the master of ceremonies, while Seymour held court on the front porch as the elder statesman. I had to remind myself this was the Civilian Reality; how things had transpired here was likely to be slightly different, assuming they happened at all.
“I’m sorry I had to miss that,” said Seymour. “But of course, I was called away to Washington, D.C. at that moment—because of your very appearance, Ms. Megaton. The president himself summoned us, didn’t he, Seedy? All of us they could find who were left from the old days.”
“Now it appears the old coot is being thrown out on his ear,” said Seedy, turning and speaking to us from the front seat. “We couldn’t have foreseen an election night like this when we met with President Lime last spring. Of course, we had no idea the career of Ms. Megaton would take the turns it has, or raise such ire. The way the vote is going tonight, it looks as though all our plans will be thrown into disarray.”
In my short time in this world, I had only caught a glimpse of the media coverage my Counterpart, Clarissa Too was subjected to as Ms. Megaton. But apparently she’d been the subject of intense scrutiny and controversy in the more conservative-leaning media for months.
I wanted to ask who all had met with the president—who “we” was—but I was interrupted by a black cat who jumped up and landed on the seat between me and Avie. The feline had unmistakable green eyes.
“Dr. Sax!” I cried. “This cat is like a shadow, turning up in the most unexpected places.” I stroked her fur as she preened.
“You know Dr. Sax, Clarissa?” said Gene, glancing back at us through the rearview mirror. “I shouldn’t be surprised. That cat sure does get around. How she has the time to know all the people she does is beyond me. It’s like she’s living nine lives simultaneously.”
Avie had never met Dr. Sax before; I had to explain she was constant visitor to our apartment back in my reality, if not exactly our pet—or, apparently, anyone’s. The cat’s sudden appearance in Gene’s plain, white van made no immediate sense, although it didn’t surprise me. On the other hand, the surprise appearance of Dr. Seymour Starlight made a great deal of sense to me, and a number of things began to fall into place.
Looking out the side windows, I noticed we were getting onto I-75 south for Toledo. “You’re not taking me to Ann Arbor?” I asked.
“Why would we take you to Ann Arbor, Sissy?” asked Grandma.
“Because that’s where you have your lab,” I replied. “A secret lab, deep underground—where you’re working on the Atomic Soldier formula.”
“You told her all this, Seedy?” asked Seymour. “It’s understandable that you’d want to fill in your granddaughter, but we agreed this was all to be kept as secret as possible. Does she really need to know …?
“I didn’t tell my granddaughter anything,” said Seedy indignantly. “She’s smart enough to guess things for herself, based on what your daughter, Stella must have spilled to her.” Then she noticed my hair, and a flicker of recognition appeared in her eyes. “Then again, this isn’t exactly my granddaughter, are you, dear?”
Gene looked at me through the rearview mirror. “You mean we picked up an imposter? Shucks, I thought I was meeting the genuine Ms. Megaton.”
“No, not an imposter, exactly,” said Seedy, looking me up and down. “Just not the Clarissa James from this reality, are you, dear? You’re the Ms. Megaton from the other timeline, the one I met before, briefly. Or should I say, Ms. Megaton Man—that’s what they call you in your reality, isn’t it?”
“Now you have me confused,” said Seymour. “Someone’s going to have to fill me in.”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “First, why don’t you answer my question: Where exactly are you taking me?”
“Someplace safe,” said Gene. “Someplace where this new President-Elect won’t be able to find you before we can discern what his intentions are.”
“We all know what his intentions are,” said Avie. “He said so on national TV. He plans to kill my sister and all Megaheroes the moment after he takes the oath of office.”
“Including any Megaheroes ICHHL’s planning to create,” I said, “before they’re even hatched. That’s why you were meeting in Washington, D.C., last spring, wasn’t it? To create an army of Atomic Soldiers based on the enzymes and proteins and whatever else you isolated in my blood sample—my Counterpart’s blood sample, I should say.”
“We’re not directly involved with Stella’s little project,” said Seymour. “My daughter’s a chemist, while Seedy and I are physicists. Although we share the same goal, perhaps for different reasons. Let’s just say that we approve of Stella’s work—if only for the sake of science at this point—and have tried to support it indirectly, from a distance.”
“Is Stella Starlight in danger, too?” I demanded.
“Not at the moment,” said Seedy. “Don’t worry; Preston is more than capable of handling security for us on Ann Street for the time being.”
“Does Preston work for you, Grandma?” I demanded. “Are you certain that he’s working only for you?” Preston struck me as the type of agent who always worked both sides of the street, and would double-cross his own mother, if the price were right.
“I thought I was following this, but I’m not,” said Avie. “Somebody’s going to have to explain it all to me, from the beginning.”
“I wouldn’t mind hearing a long-winded, convoluted origin story myself,” said Gene, taking a sip of coffee from a Styrofoam cup. “The secret origin of Ms. Megaton. I’m going to need something to keep me awake; we have a long drive ahead of us.”
Dr. Sax, by this time, had gotten tired of me and Avie stroking her, and leapt into Seymour’s lap, settling onto the quilt that covered his legs.
“I suppose we do owe you girls an explanation,” said Seymour, mindlessly stroking the cat. “Only, where to begin?”
“Why not with how you met my grandmother for the first time?” I asked. “Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James and Dr. Seymour Sternlicht—that must have been a momentous occasion. If I had to take a wild guess, it took placed more than forty years ago—on the eve of World War II.”
“It wasn’t just the two of us,” Seymour replied. “It was a baker’s dozen—thirteen of the youngest, brightest minds, the most eminent in our field. I suppose we were a bit full of ourselves, flattered to be drafted into the war effort—even though it disrupted our fledgling academic careers. We were convinced it was up to us to save the world from tyranny. At least we gave it the old college try. But why don’t you begin, Seedy? You know more about some things than I do.”
My grandmother took a deep breath and began recounting events that took place two decades before I was born.
“I was living in Chicago at the time, teaching at Bynum University on a post-doctoral fellowship,” she said. “I wasn’t long out of Cass State University here in Detroit, trying to raise your mama Alice and your uncle Rodney by myself in a strange city. It never occurred to me to marry Henry—it never would have worked out. Two ambitious scholars. Anyway, they summoned us all to a secret location on the East Coast …”
“Who’s ‘us,’ Grandma?” asked Avie. “The government?”
“Let’s just call it the War Department,” Seedy replied, “since we may never know who all within the government was aware of our experiments. In any case, thirteen of the most brilliant young minds in physics and chemistry at the time, if I do say so myself, were assembled. It was a shabby place, but isolated at least. Our task was to build an Atomic Soldier—if possible, a whole army of them, before our enemies could do the same. But we quickly broke down into two schools of thought …”
“Megaton and Meltdown,” I interjected. “You’re talking about the Burly Boy, Girly Man project.”
“None of us ever spoke of it to another living soul,” said Seedy. “Mostly because it ended in ignominious failure. It was a mistake for us to go down two separate paths, half a dozen of us pursuing fusion, codenamed Burly Boy; the other six, fission, codenamed Girly Man. We should have poured our resources into one solution; then, we might have had chance at success. But instead … two, three people dead.”
“Everyone knew the risks,” said Seymour. “There’s no need beating yourself up, Seedy. They were patriots, all.”
“You mentioned thirteen scientists, Grandma,” said Avie. “If you had six working on one idea and six on another, that only makes twelve. Who was the thirteenth?”
“Willard Helveticus Brainard,” said Grandma. “Perhaps the most brilliant among us.”
“Dr. Braindead,” I said. I reminded my sister, “Remember that nut job in the back yard chasing after the Cosmic Cue-Ball that one Halloween?”
“Oh, yeah, I forgot about him,” said Avie. “That crazy old guy was on your team, Grandma?”
“Willard Helveticus Brainard was a wunderkind,” said Seedy. “Perhaps more brilliant than the rest of us put together. We actually couldn’t keep him engaged in either fusion or fission; he occupied himself by toying with that Mutanium Particle he’d isolated. Then, while tinkering around with it one day, he and it disappeared into thin air … just like that.”
“Something a little different happened in my timeline, as I understand it,” I remarked. “But go on, Grandma. Tell us about the two individual experiments.”
“My team worked on the fission project, the so-called Girly Man side of the street,” Seedy continued. “We were going to call our Atomic Soldier something like ‘Major Meltdown,’ or ‘Mortal Meltdown,’ or something like that. Only the test subject … he didn’t survive. His foolish son almost got himself killed in the bargain, too.”
“Stella’s grandfather and father,” I said. “Burston Coltrane and ‘Trigger’ Flintlock.”
“She would have been orphaned before she’d been born,” said Seymour. “As it was, she’d have been better off an orphan, with that good-for-nothing Trigger, her reprobate father. I married Serena, Stella’s mother, because I loved her, of course, despite the difference in our ages. But I also felt a sense of responsibility, perhaps guilt, about her upbringing. You see, Seedy and I both worked on the Meltdown project together.”
“Who were the other four scientists?” asked Avie. “And who were the six who worked on the Megaton experiment? And what does it have to with my half-sister, Ms. Megaton? Or is it the name just a coincidence?”
“Clarissa Too got her Megapowers by touching the Cosmic Cue-Ball,” I explained. “That’s the object Doctor Braindead was after that Halloween—what Grandma Seedy just referred to as the Mutanium Particle. She named herself Ms. Megaton because I had asked Grandma to fashion a costume after my own—the one I have on, in fact.” I pulled off my hoodie and shirt and showed my Grandma the torso of my uniform.
“What is this material?” asked Seedy, astonished, as she stroked my forearm. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Quarantinium-Quelluminum, I understand,” I explained. “A fiber developed by Rex Rigid. At least, the Rex Rigid in my reality.”
I also let Seymour touch it. “So, you really are from another reality?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied. “And in my reality, the name Ms. Megaton Man is no coincidence. I’m a direct descendent of your Atomic Soldier. You see, in my reality, Burly Boy, Girly Man was a success. You created both a Megaton and a Meltdown.”
I put my shirt and hoody back on as the passengers contemplated this staggering fact. We were nearly all the way to Toledo before Seymour broke the long silence.
“But how? We were so close—each experiment coming within a hair of success. What went right in your reality that went wrong in ours?”
“I couldn’t tell you precisely, Dr. Sternlicht,” I said. “I wasn’t there, nor am I a scientist. But it seems to have everything to do with your Dr. Willard Helveticus Brainard—in your reality, you say, he simply disappeared; in mine he set the stage for the success of the experiments that resulted in Megaton Man and Major Meltdown.”
“But how?” asked Seymour. “We all thought he was a bit off, obsessed with that Mutanium Particle of his. He thought he could split it, releasing tremendous energy, not unlike Uranium or Plutonium. But if that particle was powerful enough to give Ms. Megaton her powers, perhaps Brainard was right …”
“Instead, it swallowed him up,” said Avie.
“Poor Willard,” said Seedy, still sympathetic to her colleague. “Chasing that object through all time and space ever since his disappearance.”
“It didn’t swallow him up in my reality,” I said. “At least, according to what I’ve been told.”
“You mean he succeeded in splitting the Mutanium Particle?” asked Seymour.
“Not exactly,” I said. “More like … he succeeded in splitting reality in two. And then he disappeared.”
A glimmer of understanding appeared on my grandmother’s face. “In your reality, the Burly-Boy scientists went off into one dimension, the Girly Man scientists went off to the other,” she surmised. “In each separate timeline, the government could fully fund the Atomic Soldier experiment; therefore, each had a greater chance of success.”
“Something like that,” I said. “In the decades since, the two timelines seem to be fusing back together—but you don’t need to hear about my problems. So you see, you weren’t really failures at all.”
“When do we get to meet these Burly Boy, Girly Man scientists?” asked Avie.
“You’ll be meeting them soon enough,” said Seedy. “At least, those who are still around.”
At this point, Gene drove onto the Ohio Turnpike, heading east.
“I think I have a pretty good idea where they’re taking us,” I said to my sister. “Do you remember our road trip a couple of winters ago, Avie?” I reminded her. “With Kozmik Kat, when we met the Y+Thems and Devengers?” Then I remembered that happened in my reality, not necessarily in Avie Too’s.
“Kozmik Kat?” asked Avie. She was still at a loss. “Y+Thems? Devengers?”
I noticed Dr. Sax, still in Seymour’s lap, staring at me with her penetrating green eyes.
“You have to understand,” I explained to everyone, “that the success of Megaton Man and Major Meltdown led to whole spate of Megaheroes—not just Atomic Soldiers, but costumed crimefighters of every stripe, like they depict in your comic books. There’s also a Megapowered, wisecracking feline named Kozmik Kat.”
“You have cats that talk?” asked Seymour, who was beginning to think I was putting him on.
“No, honestly,” I explained. “We have cats that talk where I came from, as well as the usual kind—like Dr. Sax here. Kozmik Kat is an indirect offshoot of your own experiments, you’ll be happy to know.”
This only convinced Seymour that I was making fund of him. “The objective of the Atomic Soldier project wasn’t to create cats that talked, Ms. James.”
“Yes, but there are always unintended consequences, aren’t there?” I said. “And some of them, I have to say, have been somewhat comical. Your own daughter’s testing her Mega-Soldier Syrup on mice, isn’t she?”
“That’s true,” said Seedy. “A few of them escaped.”
“So, we’re going to go and visit Kozmik Kat and the Y+Thems and the Devengers?” asked Avie.
“No,” I replied. “Only because those folks don’t exist in this reality. But we’re going to a place they know only too well back in my reality.” I turned to Seedy. “You’re taking us to the Doomsday Factory, aren’t you, Grandma?”
Next: Return to Doomsday
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