by Paul Melko
It wasn’t okay.
*
The next day, the entire class met in the MWD lab, and watched as we moved the hole up the line, three months at a time after the trans-Atlantic trip. Beth wasn’t there, and it bothered me enough that I almost ran the spyeye into the rigging of the North American’s ship.
After trading with the locals and provisioning, the ship turned around and headed back across the Atlantic, but not before taking a few of the English with them.
“Translators,” Dr. Elk said. “The first step toward understanding. This is most excellent.”
We watched the ship from high above, as it completed the two month voyage back home. But when it reached pseudo-Boston, we saw that the ship was battered and broken by sea storms; it barely limped into the harbor, and when we dove closer, we saw that half the crew was missing. And those that were left were diseased with a pox-like covering on their skin.
Disease.
I switched to the Bournemouth spyeye and was shocked to see the black smoke of funeral pyres clouding the sky. Plague.
“If we nuke pseudo-Boston, we can stop the spread,” Dr. Elk said. “We can contain it.”
Kyle and I shared a look.
“Dr. Elk, that’s impossible,” I said.
“I have enough money to send a bomb through.”
“We can’t nuke a city,” I said. “Even one in another universe.”
“We can’t let them destroy this world!” he cried.
Kyle picked up the phone, and dialed a number. “We’ve got a problem with the Maize-2 universe,” he said.
Dr. Elk ripped the phone from his hand and threw it against the wall.
I said to Kyle, “Move us ahead one year.”
“No!” cried Dr. Elk. “We can cauterize the infection.”
“You’ve caused the infection!” I said.
Kyle opened a new hole, and when the spyeyes went through, we saw that the entire world was filled with empty cities and ghost towns, both hemispheres devoid of civilization, and left with just a few scattered pockets of survivors.
The crowd diseases of America had been too much for Europe to handle, and vice versa. They had wiped each other out with their germs on first contact.
We had been party to 200 million deaths.
I stood, queasy, and left the lab, unable to look Dr. Elk in the eye. Unable to do anything but walk.
The sister who answered the door at the sorority house was cool.
“Yes?”
“I’m looking for Beth Ringslaught.”
The student frowned. “She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“At the hospital.”
“Which hospital?”
“St. Anne’s.”
I took a taxi and found her in the isolation ward. They wouldn’t let me in, but finally told me her status. The palsy had started months ago, but now the disease had reached her brain, and she had lost motor control of her body. She was unlikely to leave the hospital again.
“I’d like to see her,” I said.
“Who are you, just a boyfriend?” the nurse asked, clearly wondering if I was infected too. Maybe I’d infected her.
“I’m a good friend,” I said.
“Well, okay. Her family hasn’t been here.”
She was sleeping, so I sat beside her, took her hand in mine. She looked like she had the day before when we’d talked. But I knew she would start wasting away, that in a month she would be skeletal, her face a grinning rictus as the disease ate at her. I forced the thought from my mind, but it was never far away.
Her eyes fluttered open, filled with terror.
“Ryan,” she said, softly.
“Beth.”
“Sorry I missed the big day.”
“It was anything but.” And I told her that we had killed 200 millions of people.
She turned her head away and the tears fell down her face into her pillow.
“What did we do?”
“Nothing good.”
“I wanted you to continue this work . . . after.” She looked up at me, and I kissed her forehead.
“I’m sorry.”
*
They shut the universe down. Dr. Elk didn’t come back the next year; he disappeared completely, not just from academia, but from all contact with society. Perhaps the magnitude of his deeds penetrated his egotistical side.
The MWD was shut down for a year, and now there’s legislation in place to govern transfers of material between universes. If we did now what we had done, we’d all be up on manslaughter charges. That’s one good thing that’s happened, advances in the rights of parallel people.
Beth died six weeks after she entered the hospital. Her family had disowned her. Her sisters didn’t even send flowers. No one wants to have been associated with one of the Infected. Only a decadent lifestyle led to that disease.
But I was with her at the end. Three years later, she’s still in my thoughts. My thesis is complete, and I’ve taken a professorship here at the University, adjunct to the Macro Quantum Mechanics Department and the History Department both. Yeah, I changed majors again.
Dr. Elk’s senior project was the basis for my thesis in technological morality. It came at a heavy cost, 200 million and one lives.
We are rebuilding Dr. Elk’s universe. We are helping the survivors, and I am directing the effort, making certain we do not play god again. Making certain we do not use entire universes as laboratories.
I wonder if someone farther ahead is watching us. I wonder if we are playing out some scenario to test someone’s pet theory. I hope they’re watching closely and they learn something from us. Something from our mistakes.
DOCTOR MIGHTY & THE CASE OF ENNUI
Doctor Mighty noticed the malaise right around the time he captured Auntie Arctic in her lair in the back room freezer at a local Giant Eagle. Actually it was the fifth straight time he’d captured her in a Giant Eagle. Every time she escaped from the Institute, her first stop was the freezer of grocery store, never a Kroger, never a Big Bear, always a Giant Eagle. First it was the one in Plymouth. Then it was the one on Grant downtown. Then in Crestview.
“Doctor Mighty! You’ve cunningly tracked me down to my lair!” Ms. Arctic cackled. “Get him, boys!” A fine sheen of ice crystals covered her skin, and he could see the blue veins in her neck as she screamed. She was a young aunt, trim in her tight, blue leotard and matching cape. Her dark hair framed her sharp, pale face. If she had been a woman he’d met at a party or in the produce section during his off-hours, he might have been tempted to ask her out or at least talk to her. Alas, he mused, she wanted her henchmen to kill him, and that wasn’t a good basis for any relationship.
F and C didn’t have superpowers, so Doctor Mighty had to carefully adjust the strength of his punches as he laid them low. They bounced across the non-skid surface of the freezer and thwacked into a pile of frozen lima beans and corn: succotash with a side of henchman. Ms. Arctic he dispatched with his hair drier. He’d figured that out a few months earlier, when Ms. Arctic had nearly speared him with a giant icicle, and only in desperation did his hand fall upon the bathroom appliance. If he’d latch onto his electric shaver, he’d have been dead.
“No!” screamed Ms. Arctic, as she shriveled up and fell to the ground. “You’ve foiled my plans to freeze all of Ohio . . . again!” Sweat burst out on her forehead, and she struggled to breathe.
Mighty didn’t even bother to retort with witty banter. What did it matter when they would go through the whole maneuver again in six months? Hot enough for you? Evil fades before the warmth of justice, villain! My hair drier of law will feather your bangs of evil! It was good form, he knew, but it all seemed so lame.
He dragged her to the Mightimobile and drove her to the Institute for the Criminally Insane.
“Thanks, Doctor Mighty!” cried Doctor Gestalt.
“Do you think you can keep an eye on her this time?” Mighty asked.
“Uh, sorry.
We’ll try. She’s slippery. Like, um, ice.” Even the layperson wanted to get in on the witty banter. Mighty could have reported him to the Guild, but he chose to ignore the illegal witticism.
“This is five times so far this year. Can’t you use a . . . a . . . heat lamp or something in her cell?”
“That would be painful for her.”
Doctor Mighty threw up his hands and drove back to his lair, the abandoned hospital in Mechlinberg. There he crashed on an old gurney instead of programming the crime computer. The computer watched for anomalies in the price of butter, disappearances of key scientists, their daughters, or their current top-secret projects, and fluctuations in the listing prices of local supervillian lairs. The correlated information shined a spotlight on the doings of the criminally insane. Villains were so . . . so predictable.
Doctor Mighty folded his fingers behind his head and shut his tired eyes. He should have been up and at his heroic duties. There were newspapers to be scanned, parole hearings to attend, and The Violet Penumbra was taking a pension after forty years, and he needed to pick up a gift for the retirement party. So much to do, yet he just didn’t feel like doing anything.
*
Sometimes Curt wished he’d opted for a surgical mask to hide his face. But when his powers had manifested during his first year of medical school, he’d felt no need for an alter ego. He’d just started fighting crime in some scrubs he’d picked up at a used clothes store. A mask had seemed such a bother. It constrained his field of vision, messed up his hair, and made it hard to brag at the singles bar about his deeds.
Of course, once he started getting good at superheroing, he’d seen the benefit of being able to walk down the street and not be mobbed by autograph seekers and old ladies who wanted to describe their pancreas for him.
“I’m not a real doctor,” he tried to explain, but they always brushed that aside. He wished he could help them. He wished he did know what to do about that goiter.
“I dropped out of medical school,” he said. “I don’t have a degree.” But still they described the pain in their arm when they moved it just so.
“Then stop moving it like that,” he said, and they laughed.
What always worked though was, “Hark! I think I hear someone in peril!” And then he would sprint down the street until he was out of sight. No one knew he didn’t have super-human hearing. In the parlance of the Guild, his was a uni-power. Unlike the Dread Snark who could jump fifty feet from a standing position and turn invisible, Doctor Mighty only had super strength. Multi-powers got much better endorsement deals and better match-ups with villains.
Curt wasn’t interested in endorsements or cage-matches with the Angry Motorist or the Sharper Shooter. In fact, he wasn’t sure what he was interested in all. It became such a bother going out that he started staying in all the time.
There were other superheroes on duty, heroes with multi-powers, heroes who enjoyed signing autographs and cutting ribbons. Let them handle the Split Infinitive and Dirty Dunkirk and Nuclear Winter. Then Curt could sleep in for once. Let Doctor Mighty take a break. He wasn’t on call anymore.
*
“Don’t you see?” said the Intern. “It’s the Skinner Boxer’s plan to get you to give up superheroing!”
“I don’t think he has anything to do with it,” Doctor Mighty said. Steve, dressed in burgundy scrubs, complete with booties over his shoes, had brought him a six-pack of KryptoLite and pizza. He’d had to wipe a six-inch layer of debris off the operating table to find someplace to put the pizza.
“Sure you don’t. It’s all part of his mind game. Well, I’m here as your trusty sidekick to help you snap out of it, man! He shot you with his doldrum ray, Mighty.”
“Steve, you’re not my sidekick. I thought you had something going with Alligator Joe? You were Crocodile Kid, or something.” Curt had gone through a few sidekicks early on; there’d been the Human Ambulance, who was as big as an ambulance, but had trouble keeping up; he would arrive, heaving, at the scene after the villain had been subdued. Once they’d had to call an ambulance for him. Then he’d tried out the X-Ray Boy, but his vision only seemed to work through woman’s clothing. The Defibrillator couldn’t work near water or in the rain. Steve the Intern had no super power at all; he was a pure sidekick, which meant Curt spent a lot of time freeing him from traps, pushing him out of the way of death rays, and explaining the villains’ plots slowly and in small words.
Steve the Intern looked stricken. “Did you know he uses real alligators to fight crime? You at least don’t throw dirty syringes or iron lungs at people. I thought we could team up again, you know.”
“Listen, Steve. I really don’t feel like fighting crime today. It’s not a plot of Boxer or Sigma Freud. I’m just . . . tired.”
Steve the Intern seemed ready to argue, then he said, “Yeah, yeah, I understand. I feel that way sometimes too.” He pulled his cape back on, and adjusted the drape of it in the glass window of the abandoned operating theatre. “Have you talked to someone about it? You know, maybe someone at the Institute could help you . . . whatever.”
“I don’t need anyone at the Institute to help me out, Steve.”
“Well, you get some vitamin C, and you’ll feel better. And stop by the Guild some night, okay? Have a few beers and some laughs with the heroes.”
“Maybe,” Curt said, but he didn’t really want to face any other super heroes.
“See ya.”
Doctor Mighty rolled over, grabbed one of the KryptoLites, and popped it open in a spray of foam. Vitamin C was not called for in this case. He needed some vitamin beer.
*
Doctor Mighty took to wandering the halls of the abandoned hospital, putting on dark phantom airs, and pulling rebar steel from the concrete walls and bending it into pretzels. He sent back the supervillain challenges he received through the Guild. He didn’t bother programming the crime computer, but loaded an illegal copy of Tetris on it instead. Instead of patrolling the streets, he patrolled the hospital, bending steel in his bare and heavily calloused hands.
Curt found he could bend five bars at a time. Six was impossible, but five he could do every time. Loop, loop, twist, and he had a twenty pound pretzel.
Super-strength really was his only power, and he began to wonder if he could enhance it if he worked out. Maybe he could better himself as a superhero. It wasn’t that he wanted to be a multi-power. He just wanted a change.
He started bending bars in the morning, five sets of eight pretzels, another three sets after lunch, and then five sets before dinner. He lifted the x-ray machine in a bench press. He drank a protein drink after every workout. It was good to have a routine. Doctor Mighty considered going after some more villains.
Then he realized after a month that he could still only bend five bars. His power was static, as is, unalterable. He was Doctor Mighty and no more.
He stopped working out, and just read comic books, played Tetris, and ordered pizza for every meal.
*
Doctor Mighty would have remained forever in the abandoned hospital if Auntie Arctic hadn’t escaped from the Institute and managed to freeze his favorite pizza place. No one else would deliver to his lair.
He found her at the new Giant Eagle in Dublin, sitting in the refrigeration unit in the back room on a pallet of frozen strawberries, tossing bags of french-cut green beans into a box with amazing precision.
“Oh, hi,” she said. “I was waiting for you to show up.”
Doctor Mighty looked around for the henchmen, but the frozen food locker was empty except for the two of them. Auntie Arctic kicked the strawberries with the back of her booted heel in an arrhythmic patter.
“Where are your henchmen?” Curt checked the ceiling and glanced behind a stack of chicken breasts.
“I traded Centigrade to the Copyright Infringer for a death ray. F and C retired, said the business wasn’t for them anymore. Moved to Arizona for the weather.”
“Yeah, hot, but no h
umidity.”
“Whatever.”
Doctor Mighty stowed the hair drier in his belt and sat on a pallet next to Ms. Arctic. She was looking sad, the icicles on her elbows dripping a bit, the frost on her cheeks a little more blue than usual.
“You seem down,” he said.
“You don’t seem yourself either,” she said.
“No, I . . .”
“Yeah, I know.”
Curt found himself tapping his foot in time with Auntie Arctic’s. He stopped his foot, worked up his courage, and said, “Hey, do you want to get some dinner before I take you back to the Institute for the Criminally Insane?”
She raised her eyebrows at him, then she smiled with blue lips, made bluer with cyan lip gloss.
“Yeah, sure. Can we get ice cream after?”
*
They got take-out and ate it in the Mightimobile, with the air conditioning cranked up on her side and the heat on on his.
“So, yeah, I did the whole career quiz thing, and my empathy was zero and my megalomania was like 100, so I went with supervillain,” Auntie said around a mouthful of pad thai. “It was either that or homemaker. What about you?”
“I was in medical school . . . when the whole mess happened.”
“Thus the name.”
“Yeah. But it was just my first year, so I’m not really a doctor.”
“Really. I always thought you were like an ER doctor when you weren’t superheroing.”
“No, I dropped out,” Doctor Mighty said.
“Yeah? Radioactive scorpion? Blast of gamma rays? Glowing meteorite from another planet? Artifact of the Old Ones?”
“Well . . .”
“Come on, give. I told you all about how Empress Evil’s perfect heat sink from her freeze ray got lodged in my sternum.”
