Power Woman, more direct by nature, blew along the coast, snatching up panicky prospective immigrants three or four at a time by the collars or the waist or whatever dangling article of clothing was handy, and depositing them a few yards back inland as softly as practical—which did not turn out to be very softly at all.
Still up in the sky the Flash, or rather the approximation of the Flash whose scant remaining three-dimensional image flickered in and out of phase, waved his arms and legs in concentric circles as he descended. This sent violent eddies of air outward in the direction of the three hokey scarlet-, silver-, and sapphire-jumpsuited hang gliders. Their weapons spun out of their grasp. Their trajectories spun out of control. Their artificial perceptions spun into the world of dreams, where the authorities would be kinder to them than they would be in the real world.
Wonder Woman’s eyes lit with the glow of a predator’s as she unloaded her Amazon fury on the Minutemen. A bullet flew and a silver bracelet diverted it up at the sky and into the water. And the shooter felt her fist across his cracking jaw before the lovely image of the savage warrior could register on his eyes. Beside him, a cohort in a helmet and coverall and white stars like those of a flag hiding his eyes had a gas mask attachment over his mouth. The mask was color-coordinated, to match the silver-gray of the rest of his costume. These fellows all were inordinately conscious of fashion, it seemed to me. The one in silver-gray turned toward his fallen friend to see, instead, the Amazon still dropping the last few inches from the sky. He raised a long-snouted weapon that was connected to a small gas tank—silver-gray color-coordinated—slung over his shoulder. Before he could raise the snout, before Wonder Woman was even flat-footed on the ground, the gas mask was embedded in his mouth, and he was rolling on the trampled grass before he realized he had four incisors to replace.
Hawkman came screaming, screeching from the clouds with wings spread just enough to catch some of the air and cushion his dive. He held a spear in one hand and waved an ancient mace in the other. I had no idea where he got these weapons, but whenever I saw him he held something that seemed centuries old. But almost on the ground, he flung his spear out to the right to catch one of the Americommando’s Minutemen and send him headfirst into a piling at the Statue’s pedestal. He hurled the mace out to the left, its chain pulling it up in a parabola on the air. The weight wove among several unwary innocents. It caught another of the henchmen on the underside of an arm. Now the beam of a ray weapon diverted from the crowd to the already cracked right arm of the Statue herself. He lowered his wings hard as he approached the ground and brought himself to a soft landing. And the wind from the rush of wings bowled over dozens of bystanders, whose tumbling chain reaction threw the last of the Minutemen off his feet and under a pileup of the members of a family of Persian refugees.
The Ray batted cleanup. He simply flew over the crowd taking out insurgents. He wafted back and forth over the island in his jagged golden suit, and when he saw a threatening-looking crackpot in a costume—or in something that used to be a costume—beginning to stir on the ground, he extended his fisted hands downward, and what looked to be a deadly bolt of golden power shot down at the suddenly hapless villain’s head. The first time he did it I thought it must be with murderous force. But in each case, the would-be aggressor simply let his head tumble back and lay down gently to surrender his consciousness for the foreseeable future.
Then there were others, like the “Braintrust” that the Americommando had cited as he hollered his way down the Statue. Did they have the metahuman gene or not? I do not know, but they were a pair of little cyberheads hiding out in the crown of the Statue. I found them in my mind’s eye as the Spectre expanded it, moments before their defeat. They looked to be an identical pair of developmentally retarded physical specimens, living in elaborate exoskeletons. Their oversized brains were wired to special communications equipment inside the metallic suits to which they were connected like turtles to their shells. It was they who’d coordinated the attack of the Americommando and the Minutemen, and they might have succeeded if they had managed to develop their heightened mental powers to a mature level. They had not seen the need. When the sky began to fall on the Minutemen and their rivals, the Braintrust went into a panic. When I came upon them they were fussing with one button and dial after another on the little consoles built into their arms, and on the internal controls of their exoskeletons, all to no avail. They were still fussing when a man in a black hood with an acrobat’s build poked his way through the stairs and into their secret room in the Statue’s crown. He wore an old red jerkin on his chest, boots, and tights, and sported a beltful of little chemical gadgets for which he had no need at the moment. It was Robin, the boy who’d once tumbled through the sky over Gotham City at the side of the Batman. He called himself Red Robin now, and wore what he fancied to be the true mantle of the Batman. I knew that. I have no idea how I knew that, but I did. Maybe the Spectre let me know it. Maybe it was the taste of angelic powers that I perceived only later that told me. But I knew this man, if only by reputation.
He emerged in the room holding a small radiation detector with which he’d found these two intrusive little overminds of the Braintrust. He came in the door, looked up at the two of them with their enlarged, hairless skulls and their soft bones. Red Robin looked partly revolted and partly sad at what he had to do. Then a blue flurry of static charges passed soundlessly between the two creatures’ skulls, and Red Robin moved quickly, going backward to the ground on both arms. He caught on the floor, kicking up both feet. One connected with the gut of the first, and the other with the metal-encased receding chin of the second. Both of his enemies dropped.
The acrobat stood over the suddenly vanquished pair and mused. He looked at these aberrations and grew sick to his stomach, then bit the feeling back. Where had this man come from, I wondered, and then somehow I knew. He had been here already, among the immigrants. He’d had a tip from a source that something would happen on the island today, and he’d contacted three friends to help him put down the crime. Of the four who’d waited here for the Americommando to make his move, only Red Robin had moved quickly enough to contribute to the effort. The other three were there on the ground below, as dazzled and inspired as I and everyone else. Suddenly, up in the sky, seven angels were sounding their trumpets, and the music was sweet.
Already, Superman’s reemergence was prompting the initiative of those who once had contended at his side or in his shadow.
As the flurry of activity ended—even before some here knew that anyone had averted disaster—a great chunk of copper slag rose past Red Robin’s line of vision. It was the shattered arm of the Statue, now caught in the loop of a golden lasso and climbing. Holding the lasso, hoisting it far in the sky, was Wonder Woman. Below her flew a red-and-blue figure, to fix it in place.
“Hi, Kal,” Red Robin said through the thick glass of the crown’s windows, in a tone as though the hero were standing next to him.
Superman looked in Robin’s direction, and finally a smile lit his face as he nodded and continued to rise in the sky.
With the heat of his eyes and the pressure of his hands he welded and molded the arm and the torch back in place, in better shape now than they’d been earlier in the day. The Statue was still badly disfigured, though. Diana looked up, smiling, as the Kryptonian finished the job, and wondered how she could make sure someone completed the overhaul of Freedom’s Lady. I got the impression she was wondering whether she could get Kal-El to help her do it later on. Little bolts of intuition were beginning to drop into my mind—vivid and clear as the visions that had assaulted me in weeks past. It was a good thought, I told Wonder Woman in my mind.
*
“That was very good, Kal,” the Princess whispered at the air so only he could hear.
He lowered himself to join the others, puzzled as his eyes draped over Wonder Woman and moved on. He would not realize until she told him some time later that she was referring to the hous
ekeeping he’d done with the Lady’s torch.
“Great to see you again, Dick,” Superman said, and for a moment he grasped Red Robin’s hand. “Can you join us uptown?”
“Seem to have a hole in my schedule,” the man in the black hood and red jerkin said, smiling.
I found something in this exchange among old colleagues unsettling, as though these were matters reserved for the very great, among whom I was eavesdropping.
“Mary.” Superman allowed a wide grin at the approach of Lady Marvel from the sky. They hugged warmly when she landed. “Can you join us?”
“Of course.”
He clapped the Golden Guardian on an armored shoulder. “You too?”
Only a nod from the Guardian, but a certain one.
Superman turned from his splendid company to face the gathering cloud of grateful immigrants, law enforcement professionals, federal officials, the odd journalist or two. Helicopters, more journalists inside, began to breast the horizon to the east and west.
Crowd sounds punctuated the air:
“… haven’t seen them in years…”
“… looks older…”
“… looks great…”
“… really them…?”
“… really him…?”
“… story of the century…”
“I wonder,” Superman began. No one else said anything. What would he say? Why did they all return now? “I wonder,” he said, “if all of you would pass the word that we’ll be at the New United Nations in—what?”
He turned to the other costumed folks behind him. Wonder Woman shrugged.
“Ollie Queen, is that you?” He pointed at a tall, white-bearded bald figure among the crowd.
The Kryptonian hopped down in front of the man, seemed about to give him a bear hug, but the tall man put up two hands to ward him off.
“Coming with us?” Superman wanted to know. “Can we give you a lift?”
“I think I’ll beg off this ride, Supes,” Queen said to a perplexed Superman. “Just here to enjoy the Statue,” and he receded among the onlookers.
This man in the simple costume of blue and red wore his leadership and greatness as easily as he wore his hair. If the hundreds of onlookers had not been so flabbergasted to be in his presence, some of them might have noticed the comparable helping of love and awe that the colleagues who stood at his side measured out for him as well. He was beyond shrugging off such a phenomenon; he no longer noticed it.
To the bedazzled crowd again: “We’ll all be at the United Nations in a few minutes.”
Then Superman lifted slowly off the ground. Nine more took to the air behind him, in formation like birds heading home.
Sitting with his legs crossed among a group of Indonesian immigrants craning their necks and pressing against each other for a view, Oliver Queen tapped a flesh-colored collar strap under his shirt and said, “You hear me?”
“The question is, does he hear you?” came a voice from the tiny plug in his ear.
“I’m shielded by a wall of huddled masses. If he wants to hear me, though, I suppose he hears me.”
“How does it look?” the voice asked Queen.
“Like a blasted coronation. Turn on your tube and watch. We’re going to have to step up our schedule.”
“We can do that,” the voice in Ollie Queen’s ear said, and went dead.
As Superman and his growing company of thundering angels passed overhead, at least a hundred earthbound folks in lower Metropolis called: “Look! Up in the sky!”
*
The New United Nations fortress stood aside the river, fifteen minutes’ walking distance downtown of the Outerborough Bridge where—was it a moment or was it a thousand years ago?—I had begged off the Spectre’s mission. The New United Nations complex was a lot like the old destroyed one except for the original’s architectural grace. The replacement made up for that with exterior walls reinforced like those of the containment dome of a nuclear power plant, and with pass-and-checkpoint armed security that made the Pentagon look like a tourist trap.
Already, the original company of seven angels was growing.
As they approached from the sky, one nervous guard on the roof of the General Assembly building raised his weapon. Then it grew red and heated up in his hands, so he dropped it from his white-hot padded gauntlets. Furiously he blew on his suddenly blistered palms. The weapon melted into a pile of slag on the roof. The other guards did not raise their weapons as they saw who led the approach.
“Holy crap,” one of them said, and dropped his weapon, too, though its temperature was unchanged.
The crowd that milled along the river drive outside the fortress barricades was already large. Sound trucks parked and hovered in the air along the street. Journalists from all over the city asked everyone they could stop—mostly one another, as it turned out—what to make of the second coming of Superman.
“… making a statement…”
“… think they’ll take questions…”
“… got any ideas?…”
“… shh!”
And then they landed.
It was on the city side of the big Secretariat Building, where a six-foot-high retaining wall served as no-man’s-land between the delegates’ working campus and the security arrangements that protected them from the world they represented. Superman, Wonder Woman, and their colleagues assembled on the wall so the world could see them. The Kryptonian would wait a minute or two before he looked at the sky, impatient over the time it was taking the security guards to open the gates to allow the reporters onto the grounds. With a few seconds’ exposure to intense thin beams of heat, the slats that held the locks began to fall off the gates and the metal doors swung open of their own accord.
Wonder Woman glared.
“They’ll just need new locks,” he told her. “It’s in their budget.”
She would have to talk with him about that.
“Good afternoon,” he said.
Suddenly even traffic seemed to stop.
“Many of you may remember us,” he said. “We have been away for a while. That was our mistake.”
There was pain in those great glowing eyes. He was unused to this, I realized. In years past, Superman’s occasional impromptu news conferences had conveyed the ease of a seasoned politician, of the biggest star on the street, of a confidence that only your best friend could offer. In those days he’d been one of them, I now knew, a journalist in his mortal guise. No wonder he always had been so at ease with words, with appearances in public.
For so long had he kept his own counsel that now he was restive sharing it with others. He paused a lot. He seemed conscious of the need to make eye contact with the cameras, to keep his pupils visible to these witnesses. His body language was no longer that of a capable journalist, no longer that even of one who has had extensive commerce with humans. I remembered his quiet rebuke, back in his Antarctic wheatfield, of the notion that he belonged anywhere else. “Here things grow,” he’d said to Wonder Woman then. Had he seen how, surrounded by growth, he so contracted in on himself in that place?
“In our absence,” he continued after a pause that lasted just a moment too long, “a new breed of metahumans has arisen, effectively a separate nation without borders or laws. They have grown into a vast phalanx of self-styled ‘heroes,’ unwilling to preserve life or to defend the defenseless. Among you…”
Another uncomfortable pause, but he regathered it.
“Among us now live a legion of vigilantes who have perverted their great powers, who have forsworn the responsibilities that such power entails. We have returned to…”
How to word this, he seemed to wonder.
“… to teach them the meaning of truth, justice, and the American way. Together we will guide this new breed—our children, our grandchildren, our heirs and successors—with wisdom. And if necessary, we will guide them with force, as a good parent must occasionally force truth or discipline on a child. To this end, we are r
econstituting the Justice League and, owing to our burgeoning numbers, applying to this body—to the New United Nations—for recognition as a duly constituted state. We will restore order. Above all…”
He looked around as if to make sure everyone was paying attention. There was, however, no question of this.
“Above all,” he concluded, “we will make things right again.”
He did not move or change the resolute expression he had grown during the past few minutes, but he paused long enough to signal the reporters that he would entertain questions.
“Will there be others?” the Cable News guy called out.
“There already are others,” Superman motioned in the direction of Red Robin, Lady Marvel, and the Golden Guardian. “Certainly there will be more.”
“Are you prepared to shut down those who don’t honor these principles and cooperate?” a man shouted. His microphone had the old Daily Planet logo on it.
“We don’t anticipate anyone acting without our sanction,” Superman answered.
Someone had claimed the Daily Planet trademark not long after it had expired a few years before, with no one left to challenge the claim. It was little more than a network of web stations claiming to be a wire service on which the venerable old label now sat, but it was nonetheless particularly jarring to Superman that it was the guy from something that called itself the Daily Planet who followed up with: “What about Magog?”
No one said anything. Superman only glared.
The kid found either the nerve or the stupidity to continue, casually, “Superman, are you truly prepared to confront Magog, in light of what has gone before?”
Kingdom Come Page 12
