Koz and I landed on the roof while the helicopter returned to the helipad behind the building. By the time everyone rejoined Seymour, Simon, Grandma Seedy, and Dr. Sax in the attic meeting room, the air was thick with smoke; Preston Percy, pacing the floor frantically, had been chain-smoking filtered cigarettes.
“Nice work, Doom Defiers,” he said, crushing out the latest of severl butts under his shoe. “I leave you folks on your own recognizance for twenty-four hours, and you nearly drown the President-Elect of the United States.”
“They should have let the mug drop into the drink,” said Koz. “I don’t know what crazy, humane impulse overcomes you human megaheroes. The guy’s a no-good schnook.”
“Bartholemew Gamble’s criminality is beside the point,” said Preston. “He’s still the duly-elected president of the United States, if not yet sworn in.”
“What became of him after Liberty Island?” asked Avie. “He seemed pretty out of it.”
“One of our ICHHL boats, under the cover name of the Inlet Coastal Hydro-Hovercraft Livery, picked up the President-Elect,” said Preston. “The medics aboard report he’s showing symptoms of amnesia, no doubt from having gained and lost his megapowers in such a short span of time, not to mention a few blows to the head that left him a bit punchy. The upshot is he doesn’t seem to remember anything about his visit here this evening, or the subsequent battle with Mr. Megaton.”
“Woo!” said Trent.
“As long as he’s in your custody, can’t you wipe his memory completely clean?” asked Seedy. “Then at least the country would have just your average, vacuous politician—rather than a criminal mastermind—in the White House.”
“ICHHL, as a quasi-governmental organization, is still bound by law,” said Preston. “Besides, you had the news media there, recording the whole thing. The best we can do is ship him off to Walter Reed for observation.”
“Over time, he’ll likely get his memory back,” said Seymour, “along with his profound antipathy for megaheroes. We’ll be right back where we started, with an evildoer on his way to the White House.”
“It’s not that dire,” said Koz. “Bart Gamble’s on record with the national media as being indebted, if not supportive, of megaheroes—thanks to me. And Mr. and Ms. Megaton here are America’s newly anointed Nuclear-Powered Power Couple.”
Stella shot me jealous scowl and stroked Trent’s massive, muscled arm. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” she said.
“Woo!” said Trent.
“How in the heck did you let Bad Guy get megapowers in the first place?” demanded Preston. “I thought the experiments conducted at this site failed forty years ago.”
“Not in my reality,” I said. “I told the Burly Boy, Girly Man scientists they weren’t complete and utter failures in the hopes of cheering them up; Rex must have taken heart, recalculated his numbers, and realized he could make the experiment work here as well. I never dreamed he would test out his theories on the president-elect the first chance he got…. Where is Professor Rex, anyway?”
“Secret Agent Percy here let him go,” said Seymour, glowering at Preston. “Said he had nothing to hold him on, although I could think of a few things: treason, reckless endangerment, aiding and abetting known criminals…”
Preston shrugged and lit another cigarette. “Unlike the others, Rex Rigid has no criminal record; seems he’s kept his nose clean all these years as an orthopedic shoe salesman from Schenectady, and there’s no law against helping the President-Elect gain megapowers, even if it’s expressively to become a megavillain—especially when he lost those powers only twenty minutes later. There’s no evidence of any wrongdoing.”
“As long as it’s temporary,” said Trent. “Speaking of which ….” He looked at Stella.
“Don’t worry, I have more antidote to return you back to civilian form,” she said, still holding his arm. “Although I’d rather not do that just yet.”
This seemed to me a striking development. In my reality, the See-Thru Girl and Megaton Man had hooked up on the roof of a skyscraper in Megatropolis; that’s how their little boy Simon was conceived. After Megaton Man lost his megapowers, Stella Starlight showed very little romantic interest in the civilian Trent Phloog, beyond having a platonic parenting partner to help out as she got through school.
In this reality, after a drunken hook-up, Stella Sternlicht had similarly cast off the father of her child as an unschooled farm-boy good-for-nothing. Later, he became the abusive boyfriend of Clarissa Too, my counterpart. But since my first visit to the Civilian Reality, and after the passing of his cousin Clyde, Trent had spent more time in Ann Arbor and wormed his way into Simon and Stella’s affections. Now that Mr. Megaton was all muscly and hot, Stella seemed romantically interested in Trent Pflug again.
Was Stella really that shallow? I wondered. She did Mr. Megaton, after all; I suppose even a brainy gal was entitled to her boy toy now and then.
“I guess this means the end of the Doomsday Factory,” said Avie, who had picked up Simon Pflug and was balancing him on her knee. “President Bad Guy will eventually recover his memory and put an end ICHHL’s plans to create an army of Mega-Soldiers.”
“Not to mention the underground labs of Megatonic University in Ann Arbor,” I added.
“Not necessarily,” said Preston. “As president, Bad Guy will be hemmed in by laws and an entrenched government bureaucracy; he won’t be as free to act on his criminal impulses as you might think. Are you familiar with the twenty-fifth amendment?”
“That’s when a president can be removed from office by his cabinet or the congress, should he or she become incapacitated,” said Koz. “Don’t look so surprised; I’ve read the constitution.”
“But Preston, you said Bart Gamble is merely amnesiac, not brain damaged,” I pointed out. “Once he recovers, he’ll be just as ruthless and bloodthirsty as he ever; but being a criminal mastermind aren’t necessarily grounds for removal.”
“We won’t have to go that far,” said Preston. “Buried in subsection 17a, paragraph 13 of the amendment is a secret, ancillary clause known as the Coup Détente; it’s part of our system of checks and balances.”
“Never heard of it,” said Koz.
“Briefly stated, if the chief executive turns out to be criminal mastermind, a megalomaniac, or a dictator with global ambitions—of if there is a reasonable suspicion of any such thing—the government-within-the-government is compelled to fight fire with fire,” said Preston. “It’s a safeguard designed to prevent the total destruction of American democracy until the next election. In that regard, ICHHL stands for Insurrectionist Coup Head-offers and Law-abiding Literalists. According to the statute, we’ll be fulfilling our constitutional duty by conducting a secret war against Bad Guy for the next four years; we have an army of lawyers working out the precise language for the legal memoranda right now. They’re called the Intergovernmental Constitutionalist Hermeneuticists and Litigious Legalists, by the way.”
“Then we still have a window of opportunity,” said Seymour. “The next President of the United States will have to pay lip-service to megaheroes in public, if only for having saved his life. By the time he regains his memory, even if he works behind the scenes against us, the Atomic Soldier program will be too far along to be stopped.”
“You plan to keep the Doomsday Factory and Megatonic University open?” I asked. “Even when you know President Bad Guy will stop at nothing to shut you down?”
“We can expect him to do more than try to shut us down,” said Preston. “In fact, I’m sure he’ll be dreaming up creative ways to kill Mr. Megaton and Ms. Megaton, and make it look like an accident. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rex Rigid was scheming right now to create an army of megavillains.”
“Woo!” said Trent.
“If Rex can find belated success with Project Megaton,” said Seedy, “perhaps there’s still hope for Project Meltdown. What do you say, Seymour? Looks like we have work to do.”
It had been a long day since our grueling road trip from Detroit, and I retired to my dorm room exhausted but unsettled at the realization that the Civilian Reality was on its way to becoming another convoluted universe of megaheroes and megavillains just like my own. Perhaps it was my innocent little astral visit with Doctor Messiah that had caused it to go awry. On the other hand, with the Cosmic Cue-Ball ricocheting around the Multimensions—and Dr. Braindead after it and the Partyers from Mars chasing after them—the megahero virus was bound to infect all realities sooner or later. After the advent of Ms. Megaton in this timeline, it was perhaps inevitable that Bad Guy and Mr. Megaton would not be far behind, kicking off another never-ending cycle of origins and crossovers.
Not that I went to bed with a bad conscience; I’d never asked to have megapowers in my gene pool in the first place. Still, I wondered: What had been the Original Sin of Megaheroics?
As I fell asleep, I had a weirdly erotic dream. First, it involved Michele Selket, a former lover and the woman who had sent me to the Civilian Reality instead of Clarissa Too by mistake. In my dream, we were making out to beat the band, in between her apologies that she almost had the problem fixed; then, she morphed into Gene, who even more weirdly morphed into civilian Trent, who then turned into Mr. Megaton, and finally Megaton Man. I suppose they were all trying to make up for the father I had missed throughout my childhood, and were doing a fairly good job.
Then my dream stopped being a dream, or feeling like dream; it felt more like a vision. I saw myself standing on the banks of the Nile, looking across at my counterpart, Clarissa Too, who was still hobbled on crutches.
“How are you doing back in my reality?” I asked.
“Oh, I’m getting along,” she replied. She related how Dr. Joe had made several attempts to develop a Mega-Soldier Syrup that would work for her metabolism, to no avail. “Looks like I’m stuck here for a while,” Clarissa Too conceded.
Ironic, I thought, that Stella had developed a Meg-Soldier Syrup from Clarissa Too’s blood plasma, and it had worked on Trent Pflug in this dimension. Maybe Trent’s bodily fluids back in my native reality held the key.
“Remember how you felt drained after you hugged Trent Phloog?” I asked. “The Extanium dissolved in his metabolism after he swallowed the Cosmic Cue-Ball must have sucked your megapowers out of you. Maybe there’s some way to suck the powers back out of Trent.”
I had in mind Dr. Joe drawing blood from Trent and separating out the megapowered stuff in his plasma from the Extanium, much as Stella had done in the Civilian Reality, and shoot the resulting Mega-Soldier Syrup back into Clarissa Too.
But Clarissa Too leapt to another conclusion entirely.
“You mean I should ask Trent out? Like on a date?” asked Clarissa Too. “Come to think of it, Trent always used to like it when I used to …”
“No, just have Trent meet Dr. Joe at Megatonic University,” I said. “He’s a mad scientist; he’ll know the proper medical procedures to perform in the lab.” But Clarissa Too wasn’t paying attention to me.
“Trent seems pretty tight with Stella in this reality, domestically speaking,” she said. “I’ll have to make it casual …”
“Oh, they don’t sleep together,” I said. “I mean, hardly ever. Besides, Stella’s not the jealous type, except when Trent’s in Megaton Man mode. But you don’t need to contact him at all; just tell Dr. Joe …”
But Clarissa had already hatched some scheme her mind.
“It’s worth a try,” she said resolutely. “Thanks for the suggestion, Clarissa One! Hopefully, the next time we speak, it will be in the flesh.”
I awoke from my dream having to go to the bathroom real bad. On the way to the lavatory, which was down the hall, I heard the unmistakable sounds of passion from where I knew Simon’s parents were bunking.
In this reality, for the moment, Trent and Stella seemed very much into each other indeed.
Next: Trading Places [Link available Friday, October 8, 2021, 10:00 AM, EDT]
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