“What just happened?”
The captain—tall, broad-shouldered, stoic, her hair brushed back from a strong forehead—stood calmly, hands clasped behind her back. But impatience was evident in her darting eyes as she watched her crew scramble for answers she already knew.
“Have captured our quarry?”
The captain already knew the answer: Negative. Despite arriving early to the distant past, despite weeks of preparation, of careful calibrations of sensors and tractor beams, despite advanced knowledge of the exact moment when the Rory Smash would arrive from the future with two renegade scientists …
“The hotrod evaded our grasp.”
The answer came from a younger woman with stern, Asiatic features, her fair hair also brush back from an intense expression. She was more demonstrative with her emotions than the Captain, pummeling a gloved fist into her other gloved hand.
“Damn!”
“Engineering, status report,” demanded the Captain.
“Orbit holding steady, Sir.”
“Tactical: status.”
“Shields fully operational; cloaking one-hundred percent, Captain.”
“Ops.”
“Um … may we get back to you, Sir?”
“No, you may not get back to me,” replied the Captain tersely. “Status. Now. Did we or did we not apprehend our intended quarry?”
“Um … no, sir.” “And why not?”
“Um …”
The Captain cast a steely glance at the younger woman. “Lieutenant Pinsen, prepare your away team.”
“Already standing by, Captain.”
The Captain used her normal tone of voice, one the entire bridge could hear: “Meeting, Conference A, five minutes.”
Officers quickly assembled around a long, trapezoidal table, tablets hastily set down in front of them. They were even more uncomfortable in their stiff, high-collared uniforms of the Domain Fleet than usual.
“I don’t have to remind you, gentlemen,” said the Captain to her half-female retinue, “that we arrived in this temporal era weeks before our objective, precisely so we could quickly capture him and the two renegade scientists, Drasin and Cody Revell, and be gone from this time period by now. Who can tell me what went wrong? Special Ops?”
“With all due respect, Sir,” said a nervous young man, “it was the cloaking device.”
“Like hell it was,” cried a portly man with a trim mustache. “The cloaking systems worked flawlessly.”
“Yes, but they interfered with our tracking sensors,” said the nervous man, more confidently. “We couldn’t lock onto the hotrod. They must have used their own cloaking device at the last minute, just as a precaution; we missed them by a fraction of a second. If our cloaking had been running within normal parameters, perhaps …”
“We had no choice but maintain cloaking at full strength,” said the mustachioed officer. “That strange object … that thing that looks like a blow-dryer …”
“The satellite orbiting the earth,” said the first officer. “The one that’s been tracking our presence. Earth in this time period is not supposed to have such technology. Not for another quarter century, according our histories, at least.”
“They’ve been fairly tenacious,” said engineering. “We’ve had to project multiple phantom images of ourselves to through them off. Sensors indicate they have no weaponry to speak of that could penetrate our shields, but still, it’s been an added headache.
“So you’re saying because we’ve had to play cat and mouse with that … that blow dryer as you call it, we let the hotrod slip through our grasp?”
The Captain’s query was met with silence.
“Where is the hotrod now?” demanded Lieutenant Pinsen.
Tracking fielded the question. “Somewhere down on the surface of Ancient Earth, obviously. There are no other human habitations in the solar system at this time—not on the moon, certainly not on Ares, or Mars, as they called it then.”
Pinsen stood up, leaned forward, splayed her gloved fingers on the table before her.
“It’s a big planet.”
“You’d better get started, then,” said the Captain.
Clarissa walked down the curving, green street of the subdivision, noting the same three models of modernist ranch house repeated again and again. Only slight differences in shade of paint, composition of shrubs, and recent model cars in the driveways offered variation. She wondered what it would have been like, growing up in such a homogenous place, instead of her older, more architecturally varied, ethnically diverse neighborhood in Detroit—what they called here the “Inner City.”
She also wondered what it would be like to live here instead of just visiting her friend, Donna Blank, whom she was sure she was developing a crush for, even though she never got crushes on girls, only guys, although she slept with both. She wondered what it would be like to call the Lily White Suburbs home, if such a thing could even be possible without being white.
As she walked along the sidewalk, a light blue squad car pulled up alongside her on the concrete, winding street. On the door was the slogan, “Avondale Police, Your Friendly Neighborhood Guardians.” A window rolled down. The expression of the white cop riding on the passenger side seemed puzzled. “It’s just a girl,” he said to the other white cop driving.
Clarissa kept walking, but turned and glanced at the squad car, now pacing evenly with her.
“Lost, miss?” asked the cop.
Christ, thought Clarissa. I’m only out for a walk. One of Donna’s neighbors has already reported a suspicious black person in the neighborhood? Probably those kids on the sidewalk while we were playing hoops sounded the alert. The cops were clearly expecting a man—more threatening—and now don’t know what to make of a black girl. Really, I know I look butch when I’m wearing layers of clothing—a hoodie and baggy pants—in the fall; but it’s summer, and I’m wearing a tight tank top and gym shorts. Can’t they see I have a woman’s ass from a block away? Jesus Christ.
Clarissa controlled herself; better to not respond with anger. “I’m babysitting for the Stelmoczaks,” she lied. “Just heading to the drugstore for a couple things.”
“We can check on that,” said the cop, who wrote something down on a clipboard. “The drugstore’s in the other direction; you’re heading toward the elementary school.”
“Thanks,” said Clarissa.
The squad car slowly rolled off slowly, disappeared around a corner. They probably weren’t going to check.
Clarissa allowed a her anger to boil to the surface. She clenched her fists, tightened her jaw, cursed under her breath.
I could have taken them, she thought. Even without my Ms. Megaton Man uniform. I could have kicked their asses, guns and nightsticks and all; could have tossed that squad car fifty feet, left it upside down on some white homeowner’s front lawn.
She kept walking in the same direction, and calmed down.
Wouldn’t that be something? she thought to herself. The first appearance of Ms. Megaton Man in months, and it would be to fight the good guys, not some street criminals or megavillains. Some world we live in.
Clarissa continued in the same direction, away from the drugstore. She rounded a corner at the end of a long block. The elementary school, closed for the summer, came into view.
Only it wasn’t an elementary school anymore; as the Baby Boom subsided, it was converted to a special needs center for the Avondale Public Schools. Still, there were no cars in the parking lot and no sign of anyone inside.
A nice new school, less than thirty years old, already semi-abandoned, Clarissa thought. So much different than the aging inner-city elementary and junior high schools, and even the more well-preserved Boswick-Addison High School, that she attended. Those were all two-story buildings of turn of the century vintage with constricted, black-topped playgrounds; this was a sprawling, horizontal, one-floor affair in the middle of an open meadow that blended seamlessly into the surrounding, tree-line subdivision.
Clarissa walked past a sign announcing Meadow Park, found the one swing on the swing set that still had a seat, and sat on it. She gazed at the forlorn merry-go-round, the broken teeter-totters, the grey, pipe-like monkey bars, two telephone poles laid flat that once served as crude balance beams for schoolchildren to get injured on.
They abandon their city to us, Clarissa thought. The white people. They turned it over to us, didn’t even bother locking the doors—just fled. To black, Hispanics, Asian, Arab. Now their already abandoning this ring of suburbs, pushing outward past arable farmland to wooded lakes out toward Brighton, Pine Knob, Ann Arbor. The white people won’t feel safe until they reach the shores of Lake Michigan, and cross the waters to Chicago. Then they’ll be right back where they started, with more black people.
A Pinto pulled along Deering Road, just on the other side of a tall, chain-link fence. Donna Blank, now showered and changed, no longer wearing the mask and wig of the Phantom Jungle Girl but the short, freshly shampooed hair of a punky social worked, called across the field to the swing set.
“There you are. Want a ride?”
Clarissa rounded the fence, climbed into the hot front seat. The plastics was sticky next to the skin of her legs, still sweaty from dribbling and shooting baskets on the driveway.
“I thought you’d want to take a shower after me,” said Donna.
I wanted to take a shower with you, thought Clarissa.
The Pinto reversed directions on Deering and proceeded half a mile before turning onto Six Mile Road. They crossed Inkster into Redford, a slightly older, more densely wooded community. Clarissa glanced down the long, passing streets. They reminded her of Cherry Street, the ideal, all-white avenue of the “See Sam run. Run, Sam, Run” readers from first grade.
Six Mile turned into West McNichol after Telegraph Road, and Chinese Restaurants and party stores appeared after Grand River, along with old TV repair storefronts still burned out from the ’67 riots. They were heading into Detroit.
“That flying vehicle must have come in for a landing somewhere around here,” said Donna, who quickly glanced to the north and the south. “Somewhere just past the Brightmoor District. My Jungle Sense is rarely wrong.”
Clarissa mused on the irony of a white woman claiming “jungle sense” in the majority-African-American city of Detroit. It was almost as insulting as the squad car harassing her for her black skin in an all-white community.
“No time to look for it, though,” continued Donna. “Probably parked in a garage or warehouse by now anyway. I have some appointments this afternoon. Maybe I’ll scout for it later. Unless …”
She glanced at Clarissa.
“Are you saying this is a job for Ms. Megaton Man?” said Clarissa. “Sure, I can handle it. Maybe it’s time to air out the old uniform after all this time.”
In case I run into any more cops, she thought.
“Captain, about the crew …” said the ship’s surgeon.
“A moment, Rodriquez,” answered the Captain, who was seated in her throne-like chair. “Communications, has Lieutenant Pinsen left the ship?”
“Yes, Captain,” came the reply. “Her shuttlecraft and detail launched moments ago. She’ll be landing on the surface of the Earth in twenty minutes.” “Keep me posted. What is it, Rodriguez?”
“About the crew,” said the mature woman. “They’ve been couped up in orbit here for weeks. We were expecting to apprehend the renegades and return to the present—the future—by now.”
“What’s your point, Rod?” said the Captain.
“Kate, I’m concerned about the psychological well-being of our crew. Not to mention the historical interest of a visit to Ancient Earth …”
“What are you proposing, Rod?”
“Shore leave, Captain. In limited numbers, of course.”
“Rod, Pinsen’s down there now, looking for Smash and the Revells—a delicate operation …”
“But who knows how long it will take? She could be searching for weeks. Our people are all trained, Domain officers and crew members, some cadets. They understand the principle of non-interference.”
“Shore leave while we’re in pursuit of criminals wanted by the Chancellor himself? Sounds risky, Rod.”
“A trial balloon is all I’m suggesting, Kate,” said the surgeon. “Half a dozen, at most. Our most able, capable officers, experts in various sciences, disciplined. Then, if it looks we’re in for a long haul, maybe a few more. We only have four hundred personnel couped up in this crate …”
“The U.S.S. Bogdanove is not a ‘crate,’ Rod,” said the Captain. “Do you have a list?”
The surgeon produced a tablet she’d been hiding behind her back. The Captain looked it over.
“These are all trustworthy men and women,” said the Captain. “As soon as we hear from Pinsen, you can send them off. But they are to stay out of Pinsen’s hair at all costs.”
“We’ll give them a wide berth,” said Rodriguez, smiling. “Sir.”
Next: The Blow Dryer
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Archival Images:
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| Lieutenant Kaarn Pinsen, from Border Worlds #7 (Kitchen Sink Press, August 1987). |
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| Donna Blank, the Phantom Jungle Girl, from The Megaton Man Weekly Serial (1997). |
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