He’d gone into semi-retirement a decade before, but there were disturbing rumors. His powers had changed, fermented within him, curdling in their long disuse. His force field used to be invisible, clean, but now it was visible as a blue flicker. When he struck, there was a blue flash and an ozone smell. He found a new costume, called himself Cerulean for a while, then Gaslight. But the change was ongoing.
He was older than he looked. The evil in the Nightstar was coming back to haunt him, change him. Whatever it was he found was so long ago, he could only barely remember it, a nineteen-year-old corporal called upon by the military to test something neither of them ever understood.
By the time the Champions arrived, it was too late for anything but a demolition job, but the Super Squadron wouldn’t stand for it. CoreFire sided with them and an all-out fight seemed inevitable, Stormcloud against Damsel, CoreFire against Blackwolf, Regina versus Mister Mystic. At the critical moment, Paragon escaped Mystic’s temporary bonds and attacked, leaving them no choice. It was a grim task, but it made the Champions era official—the Super Squadron’s aura of invincibility was gone, and the Champions reigned. But back at Champions HQ, I’m sure no one forgot that moment before Paragon burst in on them. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have come next.
On the screen, it’s the golden age. In a montage of headlines, supervillains fall like wheat before them. People like Slimelord and the Visage were taken off the streets for a long time.
“You worried about tomorrow?” Lily asks, munching popcorn. Mercifully, it goes transparent almost as soon as she bites down on it. Enzymes in her saliva?
“A little. I’m used to drug dealers. All this weird tech—”
“You’re kind of a weird tech person yourself. But I don’t think we’ll see any action.”
“Are you sure? Blackwolf thinks this is the one.”
“Trust me. This stuff looks different from the other side.”
Even Doctor Impossible lost to them, again and again. His face looms on the screen, imperious in his early-eighties high-crested helmet. Now we’re being treated to a montage of Impossible’s captures. The caped villain is throwing up his hands in surrender in a sequence of control rooms, cockpits, and city streets. I gather my nerve and ask what I actually want to know for a change.
“Lily? Were you really in love with him?”
She sighs. “It wasn’t like that. He’s smart, you know? And he made me laugh.”
We move on to the third DVD in the set. The fourth and fifth episodes focus on the mature years, when major crises tended to center around individual members. An interdimensional incursion from a demon overlord Mister Mystic had humbled one too many times. An ancient fairy curse. A crime lord from Blackwolf’s past, maybe connected to his siblings’ disappearance. An alien overlord sought out Damsel, taking revenge against her father for some off-world exploit. And, of course, CoreFire’s endless go-rounds against Doctor Impossible.
There must have been other moments, ones the cameras didn’t capture. I still feel as if I’m missing something, the real story: the first time they confessed their secret identities to one another; the moment they learned Galatea’s real nature, or CoreFire’s secret vulnerability. I try to watch with a detective’s eye, looking for what’s been buried.
When did Blackwolf and Damsel fall in love? Damsel and CoreFire were the obvious couple, matched in power and fame. Early on you see them together a lot, always soaring above the others, chatting, sparring. It’s hard not to wonder, especially after CoreFire’s girlfriend drops out of the picture. And then…am I wrong to detect a hint of unease between the two of them? Maybe it’s just the Paragon episode, the way the team split.
I stop and contemplate that famous face. Classically handsome, prominent chin, never a hair out of place. He could always say the right things, always knew what to do. For all that muscle, he was smart. He didn’t have Blackwolf’s sense of humor or his sense of mission, quite, but he never wavered, always did what was right. With all that power he could have been the worst villain of the age, but he always chose truth, and justice.
Damsel crosses through the computer room from the roof deck. “Are you really watching that thing? God, look at my eighties hair.” But she doesn’t hang around. I wouldn’t either, knowing what was coming.
I feel like skipping the wedding spectacle, but Lily makes us watch every treacly second of it. It was practically a national holiday at the time, but watching it now feels painful, the way the two of them glare at each other. CoreFire was the best man, Galatea the maid of honor.
At least we get to fast-forward through a compilation of painful Saturday Night Live appearances—there was no way to make Galatea funny. The best part was John Belushi in a red leotard and plastic cape, expectorating mashed potatoes all over a gamely smiling CoreFire. I think he was supposed to be Doctor Impossible.
It’s all good fun. But superteams are about personalities, and I can’t help noticing how over time the team starts to withdraw into its own little groups. Blackwolf and Damsel; Elphin and Mister Mystic. CoreFire and Galatea were more and more often alone.
Then the music darkens. They’re getting to the Titan incident, and even the voice-over finally shuts up. Lily may be the only person who didn’t grow up with this, but even so, she gets a little quiet.
Damsel ran the press conference at the UN. “This is real; it’s galactic. We need the full team here.” CoreFire was pulled in from Cabo; Mister Mystic from a shadowy intervention in Khartoum.
The galactic wars we used to hear about from the Super Squadron had come to find Earth. The Pangaeans and the Enderri together ruled about 15 percent of the Milky Way, but they were locked together in a slow, incomprehensible alien war. In the past, heroes from Earth had served on one side or the other, but never with Earth in the balance. Apparently, the Enderri had decided to take us out of the equation.
Damsel showed slides in the situation room, shots from the space probe that had caught a dark mass out by Saturn, where no such mass should be. Magnification and spectrum analysis gave out results too bizarre to believe at first. But confirmation came from off-planet sources, courtesy of old Super Squadron contacts.
By the time the Champions got there the Enderri fleet had been gathering for days, shadowed by the massive planet. They arrived under a diplomatic flag, and there was an audience with the Enderri overlord; the Champions were our planetary ambassadors. Damsel’s legendary self-possession held up well, perhaps one benefit of her off-planetary lineage. But it was Blackwolf who discovered and invoked an obscure section of their martial code, and demanded a trial by combat; he was probably the first to guess what it would mean. The six active Champions set down on Saturn’s largest moon to face the assembled Enderri ground force. They had a force field that ensured atmosphere and warmth as they stood to watch what had to be their final opponents assemble on the frozen plain.
No one can forget that moment as the five Enderri troop carriers disgorged their entire elite occupation force to face them. One of Blackwolf’s remote bugs recorded the event, sending a frame back once every second or two. In the first few images, the heroes can only watch as the alien horror encircles them. The camera pans across a single panoramic frame of Damsel, the powerhouse, squaring up against an army of ten thousand alien warfighters. She stands back-to-back with Blackwolf, who is grimly readying his Special Forces moves to haul the first miscreant out of the crowd. CoreFire’s smug air of invincibility is for once checked, those movie-star cheekbones tinted red in the light of the fleet’s fusion engines. Elphin, the consummate warrior, utterly unfazed, raises her spear against aliens in powered space armor. Mister Mystic is readying himself for the performance of a lifetime. Galatea’s face, unreadable, gives no hint of what is coming next.
The battle lasted only forty-one seconds, but the filmmaker plays the frames back one by one. The Enderri warriors were each eight feet high, seemingly part insect, part machine. There was no way to hold a perimeter against
numbers like these. The group was swallowed up instantly, six fighting points in a sea of green and black. The footage shows Damsel and CoreFire sending the first wave flying back into the crowd, but it barely makes a dent. Blackwolf is a blur, kicking out at alien joints, cracking hard shells. Elphin and Mister Mystic have stuck together in the crowd. She’s aloft and wreaking havoc, spear point flashing; light blossoms from his hands, his mouth moving in some terrible invocation, already knowing he’ll never finish it. Behind him, the Enderri are pulling up heavier weapons.
Then Galatea rises into the air, and the last frame is solid white. Whoever built Galatea included an autodestruct mode, and she knew exactly how it worked and how far the blast would extend. She was gone, and the Enderri departed, beaten and cowed, never to return.
After Titan, the team fell apart into twos and threes. Cliques formed. Damsel and CoreFire worked together, usually with Elphin; but there were a lot of solo missions, too. The Champions Call, when sounded, would produce at best four rather testy heroes, who went about their business with a minimum of crosstalk and departed in different directions. Finally Damsel called a meeting, put it to a vote, and it was over.
The last time they were all in a room together was at the press conference where Damsel read a short statement announcing their dissolution as a team. A few weeks later, CoreFire appeared in his new costume, and the era was over. A few second-tier teams stepped up their operations to fill the void. The documentary spends a little time on the postteam careers, but there just isn’t much to say. Damsel left Earth for a while, reportedly in search of her mother, but came back months later empty-handed. She joined up for a while with the Reformers, while the rest went on to solo careers. Blackwolf went back to solo crime fighting, and Elphin enjoyed a brief vogue as the figurehead for a New Age movement.
The divorce was made public five months later, reaching the public as a kind of aftershock. A year later, Elphin, CoreFire, and Damsel reformed very briefly to take down Antitron IV, but there was never serious talk of a new team, not until now. Publishers rushed to offer them millions for the tell-all memoir, but none of them ever cashed in. CoreFire did a few fund-raisers with Damsel, but that was pretty much it.
Lily yawns. “Is it almost over? We have to keep looking for Dudley Do-Right tomorrow.”
“Isn’t that…do they really have those cartoons in your future?”
“Learned it in ancient civ class. I was a whiz.”
“You know we’re going to that island, right? Aren’t you nervous about meeting your old boyfriend?”
“He won’t be there. He’s too smart for that.”
“Blackwolf seemed pretty sure.”
“You never go right back to your fortress after jail. He’s hiding out somewhere else. Trust me.”
Lily heads off to bed, and I clean up the popcorn as the denouement rolls. No one on the team would even talk to the filmmakers, so Titan Six closes with a faux interview sequence, video clips rigged up to sound like they’re answering questions from the omnipresent voice-over.
Even considering the sound bites come from different decades and press conferences, the effect is jumbled. Elphin babbling about Oberon and the rest of her fairy friends, Damsel’s boilerplate truth-and-justice rhetoric, Mister Mystic’s portentous nonsense. Blackwolf comes off the scariest—they must have caught him right after the divorce. It makes you wonder how these people ever spent ten minutes together, let alone ten years. Or how they can ever hope to beat the smartest man in the world without CoreFire.
Afterward, I go back and watch a few sequences again, and this time the breakup seems to begin earlier. Well before Titan they had stopped grinning at one another the same giddy way; on second hearing, some of that banter looks awfully strained. I keep coming back to that handsome, enigmatic face. Smiling in team photographs, serious and statesmanlike in an address to the UN, grim and determined in battle, clobbering Doctor Impossible or whomever. That unshakable confidence that saved the team time and again. No one ever lost faith in him; the polls prove it. So whatever happened to the perfect superhero?
CHAPTER NINE
MY MASTER PLAN UNFOLDS
Laserator was a great scientist but his work was wasted on conventional thinkers. There has to be a little bit of crime in any theory, or it’s not truly good science. You have to break the rules to get anything real done. That’s just one of the many things they don’t teach you at Harvard.
I haven’t been back since graduation. I take a deep breath and do an equipment check. See that the mask is on straight, the cape flows. I’m dressed for the occasion, as befits the most famous graduate of my year. I never went to any of the reunions, not even in disguise. I never had anything to come back for.
The first phase of my world takeover begins tonight, but you have to do these things slowly or you get caught. Security is tight around the Institute for Advanced Thought. I wait in the alley across the street for security guards to change shifts. I wait for the moon to rise; for the tide to go out and expose outflow channels on the Charles. Then I tense, spring, and catch the bottom rung of a fire escape ladder.
Standing upright on the gravel surface of the roof, moonlight illuminates the whole city. Anyone looking up could see me, but although it’s only eleven, the world seems asleep. I recognize landmarks from years ago—Memorial Hall, Thayer Hall. The padlock on the skylight is the same as it was twenty-five years ago, and I reach for my utility belt. I manage to pick it silently, even in gloves.
A campus guard passes below me, and he could see me if he looked up. I pause to wait while a square of moonlight on the floor below travels a few feet to one side. I’ve been up here before—there used to be a way up from the computer lab. One of the senior CS majors showed it to me, his spot to think or smoke pot unmolested. After he graduated, I would come up here late at night and listen to the sounds of drunken revelry coming up from the dorms on weekend nights, or just cool off during long summer nights of coding.
If there’s anyone at all like me reading this, take note: I’m breaking a self-set rule by returning to the scene of the crime. The first time I came here, I had a different mission in mind—when I was in eighth grade, my guidance counselor told me I was a genius. I wanted to know what that meant.
If you think of a genius…well, you can picture Mozart, or Einstein. Someone who can do a thing better than anyone else. Not just anything, but a particular subject, like math or music, a specific topic they seem to have been born for.
I waited to find my subject. To see a thing—chess, physics, dance, a painting—and recognize it. I was a stranger in the world. I waited to see something and know it, to say, “This is me.” And I would know that it was now, that one day in my life when the fumbling, the false starts, all the little trials and failures, would stop. I pictured the moment, the rush of excitement, the sure-handed swiftness of apprehension, the stunned look on the teacher’s face. There’d be silence, and I’d feel for one second that I was standing at the center of the universe.
I read books, biographies of men and women in the past who had actually experienced this. And now I had learned it was going to happen to me. I waited for the moment when I would be picked. I was a shy, homely child. Unless something changed, I was going to grow up into a dumpy postdoc who never knew the touch of fire. I wondered what shape it would take, because I couldn’t see it.
But that woman said I was a genius. If only she’d known.
A micro-winch of my own design pays out cable at my belt. Above me, the rectangular skylight dwindles; below, my red leather boots dangle, descending foot by foot to rest on either side of the sleeping guard’s body, the only witness to my return. I used to fantasize about being asked back as a commencement speaker and returning, unmasked, to tell them all the Truth.
Parts of the Institute are open to the public. A sign in the lobby announces the current exhibits: “The Genius of Leonardo,” “The Magic of Geodes,” and “What Makes the Weather?” The café is closed and dar
k, but I can still see the table where I used to wait for Erica Lowenstein. The smell of this place after hours makes me remember what it felt like the first time. When I was here and had everything ahead of me. I drop a thousand-dollar bill into the “Pay what you can” admissions box and walk in through the turnstile.
My first year was the year of an enormously cold winter. I was a thin, shy freshman, and college was a new landscape to me, brick and dark wood, like an enormous Georgian mansion owned by a distant relation, where I had been left to explore on a long Sunday afternoon. I would eat alone in the dining hall, with my glasses steamed up from the warmth of so many happy, healthy bodies.
I had nothing to say to my roommates. They were charmingly ordinary people, now two doctors and a lawyer who have no idea what their forgettable onetime roommate has become. I’d sleep, fitfully, through whatever social events went on at nights in the common room, fluorescent light and beery laughter leaking in under the door. I’d go whole days without speaking except in the classroom, where my sharp impatience with the other students seemed to disrupt an unspoken patrician agreement not to seem too smart or try too hard, an agreement that I would have no part of. I wanted to blaze.
I sat in on graduate-level seminars and carried twice the normal course load, and there were ripples of awareness of my abilities running through several departments.
At night, I would go to sleep and dream of teaching in a vast arched lecture hall, and great leathery wings unfolded from my back and spread out through the warm, hazy air of the classroom as I spoke of a fantastic heretical knowledge. And I would wake shivering to my own misplaced self, floundering among smug, knowing prep school students.
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