With a history of arrests like his, all poor Jensen needed to do was put on his silly little skintight costume that hugged his old jailbird’s wrinkles where it was not ripped and worn, or show up somewhere someone recognized him, or have a mild psychotic incident to attract the attention of Magog and his storm troopers. He did all of those things, apparently, and there he was on the enhanced audiovisual file from the reconnaissance satellite duking it out with the Justice Battalion in Saint Louis.
Magog in his gold breastplate and twisted-horned helmet and power sceptre was just looking for a fight, and he bulldogged his buddies to do the same. The Parasite, with his unpredictability, always gave them a good workout and ended up gibbering in a prison cell for resisting arrest. All he ever did, though, when the “heroes” came spoiling after him, was panic. It was never clear that this was a criminal offense.
He shoved someone and picked up the ability to fly. He stumbled against someone else and accumulated relative superspeed. He led the Battalion on a merry chase that ended up somewhere in central Kansas and left a trail that looked like that of a tornado in the wake of the brawl. And all along, the audio file kept sending back evidence of the Parasite trying to surrender.
“Leave me alone. Leave me alone!” he insisted.
“I’ll go quietly, just don’t touch me, okay?” he pleaded.
“No, don’t use your power near me, I won’t—” He cut himself off.
The visual image clearly showed Captain Atom hurtling across a corner of a field of grain with a fist extended at the little man. In a maneuver worthy of the Judomaster—from whose talents the Parasite’s capacity to do this certainly came—Jensen escaped Captain Atom’s blow and shoved against his chest as the Captain flew toward the ground…
… and the Parasite literally split the Atom.
As the Parasite sucked up Captain Atom’s power in such close proximity to him—mingled like strong drink with the powers of the others—all the undigested energy behaved like a horrible wail of feedback reverberating between a pair of runaway audio speakers. Captain Atom’s chest, where the Parasite had touched him, emitted a blast of white light. In the image delay and enhancement we could see Alloy stretching his malleable body over that of Magog, his leader—to protect him, one would presume—then the entire image vanished in the expanding shock wave.
Our technology allowed us to be witnesses to our own demise. There was no more visual or audio record discernible from the reconnaissance satellite, but sonar readings in the immediate region of the blast detected one figure moving through it all. It was an individual the size of a man with a pair of blunt protrusions extending from its head. The speculation was that because of Alloy’s protection, Magog survived Ground Zero. In fact, when high-level radiation inspectors and rescue crews dropped on the scene less than a day later, they found remains—eroded teeth and bone, ash impressions of figures, shards of durable costuming, pulsing white-hot slabs of Alloy, that sort of thing. These remains suggested that all on the scene were vaporized except for Magog himself and possibly Alloy as well.
Magog was nowhere to be found. Neither was most of Kansas.
Superman learned this here among his cacophony of broadcast equipment piled up in this room of the Fortress, two days after it had happened. I learned the details with him.
Immediate casualties hovered at a million as the dying Captain Atom’s radioactive energy swept millions of acres. Kansas was an irradiated wasteland, as were parts of Nebraska, Iowa, and Missouri. The sterilization of the agrarian culture of America’s Breadbasket threw the world economy into near-collapse in the face of global famine.
“Off,” Superman said when he’d had enough, and the din silenced.
*
“Nothing to be done now anyway,” he said.
“Excuse me?” she wanted to know.
“It’s over. What is there left to do?”
“Lead us back.”
“Me?”
“Who else?”
“I don’t believe in leaders.”
“Since when?”
He shrugged and walked back out into the hallway, toward the door that led into his domed wheatfield.
“Kal, please.” She took his arm, and he stopped to listen for a moment. “Our generation takes its lead from you. We always have. You must face this. If you don’t, neither will the rest of us. And it just goes on.”
He stood still for a moment, looking at her. He seemed confused about what to say or whether to say anything.
The moment was long enough for her to say, “Kal?”
“Open,” he said, and a whoosh of wind rushed through the sliding metal plates of the doorway that emptied into his Antarctic farm. As he stepped out he said, “There’s nothing I can do from here. Go back to your island, Diana. You’re safe there.” And the doorway clapped shut behind him.
“Safe?” she asked no one in particular, and then again, louder, “Safe?”
And the Spectre and I rematerialized high above the South Pole, where the Amazon Princess breasted the cold air in flight through the curtains of the Aurora Australis and twisted north in the direction of the distant Mediterranean.
“ ‘The rest of us’?” I asked the Spectre. “Who are ‘the rest of us’?”
“Indeed,” he said, “there are those who, a decade ago, felt the crush of Superman’s inability to perceive himself as the inspiration he was. The shock of seeing Superman abandon his never-ending battle took an immeasurable toll on his contemporaries, his peers.”
“I see,” I replied, but I did not yet.
CHAPTER 6
Where Are They Now?
“Here is where they have gone,” the Spectre said, and again he pulled aside the Aurora that hung like a curtain over the sky.
*
Where once the great forests of the Pacific overgrew a national border, now stood a large wooden structure with a corrugated aluminum roof thirty feet over its floor. It was a weekend, and, at the main field mill of Mercer Bainbridge Paper Products, only the company’s executives met over brandy and cigars to consider a strategic business plan for their future. Log steps led up to a genuine sawed plank deck at the entrance of this building. In the days before my life had begun—not long, in fact, before my time—a building of wood might have appeared to be a poor person’s structure. Then during my young adulthood, it had been the fashion among many of the more affluent to build and live in constructions of such a design, out of nostalgia for the vanishing rusticity of the past. Now, with the loss of the world’s virgin forests and the wide use of ceramic and plastic to substitute for real wood in building materials, only the fabulously wealthy had even sheet-wood paneling. This building put mere paneling to shame. It had an actual log-and-beam frame and exteriors of piled logs with diagonal tongue-in-groove pine interior walls. Inside, on a loft that served as a conference room overlooking a battery of enormous saws and pulping vats, the board of directors considered the problem of setting the prices that wholesalers would pay during the next year.
The paper business had been good to them. Their graphs and projections showed them precisely how much of the forest to slice away and at what rate to allow for adequate timber growth. By their definition, “adequate” growth meant the forest would replenish itself long enough so that the board could take the company bankrupt and leave the shareholders, employees, and pensioners with as little as possible. This would still allow each of the nineteen men in this room to parachute away with enough cash to see them and their families through the next century in spite of any natural or artificially induced disasters that might assault the world or its economy. Now that the world’s Breadbasket was gone, however, their options suddenly expanded.
Mercer Bainbridge held millions of acres of pasture and enormous herds of cattle on land that once had been forest, from the Amazon River Valley to the Canadian Klondike. Cattle pasture was the major byproduct of deforestation, which was actually the principal activity of the Mercer Bainbridge Paper Comp
any. A few days before, there had been quite enough cattle in captivity to render the natural protein market effectively saturated. Part of this group’s plan was simply to unload the land and herds in the course of liquidating the company’s assets when the time came. Now, however, there was chaos in the markets for all forms of food.
Always, there was profit in chaos.
Then a big chunk of the profit came careening through the corrugated ceiling and tumbled along the diagonal through the inside wall before it smashed down on the floor of what once was riverside forest land. The wall splintered. Beyond it, among the stumps of what once was the Pacific Northwest Rain Forest, settled the twisted metal of one of the backhoes that had been dredging the banks. Impossibly, the big hunk of machinery had come crashing from above.
“What’s going on here?” the President of Mercer Bainbridge Paper demanded because he felt he should.
And a cast-iron, spiked mace the size of a watermelon came riding a clattering chain through the hole in the ceiling to smash into the mill’s biggest pulping vat and instantly transformed it into an impressionistic sculpture.
No one asked any more questions. The nineteen members of the Board of Directors of Mercer Bainbridge Paper Products scrambled out of the big wooden building—some through the doors, some through the walls that were no longer standing. Only then did they see him, meticulously dismantling their paper mill. His wings extended, their tips pulsing rhythmically against the air like a swimmer treading water, he hung in the sky:
Hawkman.
He was a man the size of an ox, with golden wings three times as wide as he was tall. With cabled arms he held the mace as with the wings he held the sky. What looked like a feathered helmet came down over his face, but there was no gap between what seemed to be a decorative hooked beak and his chin. Then the beak opened and out of it came the loudest, shrillest, most horrendous cry ever to crease an Earthly sky. The aquiline beak was no decoration, these men realized. This strange visitor from another planet, this Thanagarian policeman, identified more closely with the birds who lived on Earth’s natural skin than with the humans who meant to tear it away.
Hawkman was taking it back.
Like an angry angel, I thought, solemn and splendid. He looked far more like an angel than the angel who led me through this little adventure. As the nineteen cigar-puffing, brandy-sniftering directors looked on, the enormous winged man slammed his mace over and over again into and through the building. He crushed and splintered the wood of the structure itself on the forest floor, and the metal ended up twisted into small chunks, like steel rocks. It was comical to watch the silly suited men caught with their dignity down in mid-wheel and dirty-deal. This large fellow had wings growing out of his back, and feathers so thick on his chest and legs, they could be fur. Perhaps in some small way he could put a stop at least to this corporate carnage, I thought. Perhaps not. At any rate, he would continue to try.
Slats came free of posts and splintered on the ground.
Steel saws fell apart into loose teeth that the rushing waters of the river would file and make dull.
Papers, desks, skitters, and heavy vehicles and equipment went flying and scattering into loose parts and tumbling into the water.
Piece by piece, the works of Man by this riverbank were being reclaimed by the Earth. This flying alien who rode the wind was feeding it back with Man’s own ancient weaponry.
Beside the deconstruction of the mill flowed the Chumash River, wide and deep and filled with the waste and foam of the belching mill. Once, before the coming of Hawkman, this river had been puzzled by the taming effect of a complex of dams. They were gone now, and the Chumash was wild again. The wood that had made up the Mercer Bainbridge building would break down on the forest floor, enrich the insulted soil, and perhaps give birth to new forest. The steel rocks were now the final waste material of the mill, and, with a savage wind from the flapping of his great wings, the man-bird swept these into the river to pile across the bed and slim the pitch of the water at this point.
Hawkman used the nonbiodegradable waste of the mill to rearrange the river itself, making a patch of whitewater here. Adventurous canoers passing through this place in days to come would call it “Papermill Rapids.” Certainly with the new behavior of the Chumash River, this no longer would be a place suitable for the alluvial wastes of such a mill.
The man-bird treading the sky spread his wings to their enormous span. And the onlookers calmed themselves and stared like field mice in the path of an eagle. He loosened a cry from his throat that shattered the din of confusion over who ruled this place.
Hawkman fought the lonely battle against the despoilers of the planet and specifically the Northwest of this continent. He shattered logging equipment. He destroyed buildings and building materials in the dwelling places of his winged brothers and sisters. He smashed dams and made the stone and metal of their structures part of the new environment he left behind. It was a lonely battle, and, in truth, he was losing it.
Once more the thunderstruck and stranded men who had made an enemy of Hawkman saw him draw down those great wings. The air that single motion harnessed propelled him high above the nearest cloud and sent a wave of wind to tumble the nineteen men over and into one another like tenpins. I stood, myself a wraith, detached from the plane of existence wherein that wind blew, but I do swear it chilled my blood.
*
“Look at your watch,” the Spectre said.
I looked. It was not moving. Imperiously the Spectre swept his hand over my wrist, and the watch worked again. Who knew what sort of physics applied here in this nether-plane? Certainly not a physics that supported biological clocks or even wristwatches. But now my watch temporarily ticked away, approximating the snail-like pace of the timekeepers of the corporeal world.
We descended to a city: slick narrow towers, glistening façades, little civic art, and virtually no vegetation on the streets and sidewalks. This was not a Nineteen-Thirties Deco city like Gotham or a City of the Future That the Future Left Behind like Metropolis. This was a city of the Seventies, full of monolithic Philip Johnson skyscrapers and people in wide lapels and polyester.
“Note what your timepiece says,” the Spectre urged.
“Seven thirty-two,” I said, accurately, I thought.
“It measures time in seconds, does it not?”
“Yes.”
“What, then, is the time?
“Seven thirty-two,” I said, then added, “and eighteen seconds. Now.”
I was not done saying that last word when the most remarkable sensation came over me. I was frozen stiff. I was not cold or in pain or at all uncomfortable, but suddenly I was no longer moving and felt somehow incapable of moving. Space careened by me at some unutterable speed, and I was in the city itself and in my line of vision was—beyond the watch on my arm that I was unable to drop to my side—the blur of a human figure in scarlet. In the moment suspended between the eternity of now and the next second, I knew that this was the Flash and this must be Keystone City.
He had been wholly out of sight for years. Maybe his speed was the reason.
The walls and barriers of the city sped through my vision, but this hazy being—slipping in and out of dimensions and frames of reality as if the continuum and all Creation were a singularity—stayed in the frame of my sight.
He raced up the side of a building to catch a falling cat and deposit her behind a window high on the fifty-seventh floor, and then closed the window behind him.
Racing over the top of the building, he straightened six loose or cracked tiles in the perimeter of the roof, seeing to the safety of anyone who in the future might be walking below.
Through all this the Flash stayed clearly—as clearly as such a blurry and indistinct fellow could stay—in my line of sight, along with my watch, on the arm I seemed unable to lower. My senses were speeded up but my reactions, even though I was unbound by physical reality, did not catch up. I suspect I was too tied up with m
y humanity—still—to manage such a dislocation of my conventional perceptions. Yet I could not turn back the tide of lightning-fast sensation that poured through my line of sight as, beyond the figure of the Flash, the city of Keystone became a smudge over the landscape.
He breezed into a firehouse where an alarm was about to clap on. Sixteen firefighters sat around the hall doing pull-ups, playing video games, doing clerical work. At least that was what the virtual statues of firefighters I saw seemed to be doing. Meanwhile, the Flash slowed just enough to see the pixels on the dispatch monitor spell out an address…
… across town. We were there in the same instant, where licks of flame made a colorful still picture from an upper window of a tidy little two-story house on a tree-lined street. Standing still—or, rather, suspended between two moments—a fire is not a coherent thing. It is a thousand little sparks of red, yellow, and green, making a fading chiaroscuro pattern against the sky. Light slowed as we approached, to let its brother fire through.
Up the façade of the house and through the breaking wall and broken window we went, through the fire too fast for the heat of the flames to make an impression. Into the fiery room we went, and my red-streaking quarry lifted a child trapped by a wall of flames at her bedroom door and tucked her under his arm. And through the flames he took her, down a hall into a playroom, and he whipped another terrified child, an older one, into his other arm. He skittered down an “obstructed” stairway—obstructed only if you moved slowly enough to be concerned that it was falling to pieces and some of the steps were little more than charred splinters. In a collapsing living room the frantic mother, unaware of her immediate danger, stood with a phone to her ear, wearing a rictus of horror on her face as she strained to see beyond the conflagration. She was yet unaware that the Flash had safely brought her children to her side. Kids still under his arms, he ran around the mom and swept her up in the wake of his passing.
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