Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  “If fusion takes place readily at elevated temperatures,” the five-year-old had asked the professor, “wouldn’t it be easier to vary other conditions like pressure and mass to induce fusion in the laboratory, rather than try to reproduce an arbitrary level of heat?”

  “Pardon?” The professor had thrown back his random shock of white hair and asked the boy to elaborate on his question.

  “If everything is, in fact, relative,” the child had said, talking slowly so that the alleged greatest scientist in the world might not fail to understand him, “then is temperature not a variable like everything else?”

  The professor had sucked on his cherrywood pipe for quite some time before realizing it had burnt out. He had seemed perplexed by this realization, seemed to have forgotten what to do with an unlit pipe. Then he’d remembered and lit it and thought some more, puffing. Through this, little Adam Blake had sat patiently on the chair in the professor’s office.

  For amusement, Adam had looked out the window, counting the striations in the big frond of a nearby palm tree, and calculated its approximate surface area and how long he supposed it would take for a single inchworm to consume the whole leaf. Six years, four months, and two days, he’d concluded. Now considering the gestation period of an inchworm, supposing you had a fertile female inchworm, assuming moderate year-round California weather, the absence of inchworm predators, and around-the-clock munching, how long would it take the inchworm and all her progeny to consume the frond? About sixteen hours, little Adam had estimated, just as it looked like the professor was about to say something.

  He’d pulled the pipe from his mouth, looked at Adam, walked from one end of the room to the other, stopped by a rollaway blackboard, and said, “Cold fusion, eh?”

  “Yes sir,” Adam had said.

  “Interesting,” and the professor had wandered out of the room, never to remember to return that day.

  It is possible that if the professor’s attention had not wandered from Adam’s ideas to wherever they wandered that day, the whole world could have averted half a century of fossil fuel consumption and moved into the relatively clean energy generation we enjoy today. Maybe not.

  Adam’s mother, Martha Blake, eventually found her five-year-old son in the chemistry lab next door to the professor’s office, burning dismembered strips of palm fronds in a meeker burner and timing the combustion.

  Mom and Dad Blake had been rather appalled to find their boy alone, and relieved that in the near future the professor would have to return to Germany to retrieve his family and resettle on the American East Coast. “Perhaps you could recommend a mentor for our son,” John Blake suggested the following afternoon.

  “You mean someone who might be not only familiar with child prodigies, but more accustomed to the needs of five-year-olds?” The professor smiled, then introduced the Blakes to Emery Zackro, another physicist, teaching at the University of Michigan—one exhibiting the twin virtues of a relative dearth of absentminded quirks and physical closeness to the Blakes’ home. Emery thereafter became Adam’s teacher and collaborator. Perhaps Emery, like the older professor, might have won the Nobel Prize and been a renowned world figure one day, but Adam’s initiatives sideswiped any ambitions of Emery’s own.

  “He’s a mutant,” Emery told the Blakes, who first were horrified and then rather delighted, “an accident of genetic matching. He has the intellect and physical capabilities of a person on the next quantum level of development.” Human DNA—deoxyribonucleic acid, the encoding material of all Earthly life forms—effectively had remained unchanged for the past hundred thousand years, and showed no signs of evolving soon. To say that Adam was the posthuman prototype of, say, one hundred thousand years in the future would be only the most approximate of guesses.

  Adam’s curiosity and capacities had given both Zackro and the boy himself an entire constellation of knowledge simply beyond the reach of contemporary human capacity. A cold-fusion, antimatter, multi-lightspeed spacecraft of his own design eventually brought the teenage Adam Blake to the richest sources of information in this arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. By the time he uncovered an alien plan to invade Earth and strip it of its mineral and labor resources, Adam could speak uncounted dialects of hundreds of languages of sixty extraplanetary communications forms—if one could count Betelgeuseian aerial architectural signage and Rigellian facial tics, for example, as language arts—by the time, in the Nineteen-Fifties, that Captain Comet made his public debut and upended the threatened invasion.

  He never had felt quite at home among “the ancestors”—his private term for normal Earth people. With the coming of Superman and that generation of colorful heroes, the metagenetic phenomenon asserted itself, and he began to spend more time here. He’d been devastated when, after an extraplanetary absence of a few years, he returned to find Superman retired and the world in the thrall of a wanton club of metahuman juvenile delinquents. Captain Comet was among the first to rally to his side when Superman declared the reformation of the Justice League.

  *

  Despite their clash of personal styles, the cerebral Captain Comet worked dutifully and carefully with Scott Free—the erstwhile showman, Mr. Miracle—to fit together the intricate pieces of the city-sized prison that would be the Justice League’s Gulag. Nonetheless, when Scott told him he was in the pod of a trap, Captain Comet was too engrossed to take the warning seriously.

  Then came a sequence of events that even Adam Blake’s remarkable mind could not have predicted. Comet sat in his booth on top of the big cherry-picker with three keyboards, two small lapel microphones—one for communication with Scott and the other connected to the central server for verbal orders to the automated assembly system that he’d designed to put together the Gulag—and four monitors connected to four little hovercams that Comet directed by microphone to various sections of the construction site. A quarter-mile away, a gust of wind scattered the ash of what was left of a nuked-out tree trunk into the desert sky and eventually landed, draping a thin blanket of dust over the lens of Captain Comet’s hovercam number three. At that moment, hovercam three was trained on a section of one of the Gulag airlocks that Scott called the “tiger trap.” The tiger trap was a nifty piece of New Genesis technology for stopping anyone trying to leave the compound in an unauthorized manner; it encased the person in a globe of energy that first enveloped and eventually contracted around the quarry until he or she pulled all his or her limbs together at the midsection and twisted into roughly the position of a roped pig. One of the nifty little qualities of the trap was that it consisted of a membrane capable of discriminating between biological and inorganic material. It could actually snatch a person out of an escape vehicle, or a suit of armor, or his clothes, and render the escapee helpless and motionless on the ground.

  Ambient radiation from deep below the ground regularly blacked out one or another of the hovercams for short periods of time. Comet ignored the problem. On his observation platform Scott became more and more uncomfortable—unaccountably so. He mentioned the “trap” about to spring on Captain Comet once more, and listened to the old man snort at him over the voice mike. Then Scott looked down to see that the arm of Comet’s cherry-picker was snapped off at the shaft, and Comet and his engineering booth were nowhere to be seen.

  Comet had ignored Scott’s warning, usually dismissing as baseless anything that was a result of inexplicable intuition. In fact, Comet believed, intuition is not always baseless, but to the extent that it is inexplicable it is generally more trouble than it is worth. So was Scott.

  “Down,” he said into the central server microphone at his throat. The booth lowered into the rising structure of the Gulag. “Bearing eighteen vertical seventy.” Comet estimated his position and then ordered, “Angle thirty-five deep, angle eight long, angle zero high,” to effect the three-dimensional direction in which he moved to be able to see in the construction site what he could not see on his monitors.

  Comet tapped the one blank mo
nitor in his booth, hoping that it was perhaps a localized problem. It was not. He tapped it again, illogically he supposed, to make sure, and the next thing he knew he was in a very small, dark place. And it was getting smaller.

  “This is going to take a while,” Scott Free’s muffled voice said.

  “Well, I haven’t got a while,” Captain Comet said, prone on the ground with the membrane of the tiger trap contracting around him. His clothing—it was most of his Captain Comet suit, absent only the helmet—already lay on the ground in shreds, among the shattered remains of the booth and all the monitors and data processing equipment that were inside it.

  “Just hold still and keep your mouth shut, or it’ll immobilize you with your mouth open,” Scott said, stepping off his lowered hover platform and yanking a tool chest, full of hardware rarely seen on Earth, along with him.

  “You’re an escape artist, aren’t you, Free?” the trapped Comet bellowed from inside the membrane. “Escape me, will you?”

  “Calm down. Calm down,” Scott said to the man who soon would have little alternative to calm. “You tripped a random entry port and activated the tiger trap.”

  “I already know that.”

  “Figured that out with that amazing famous stepped-up intellect of yours, did you, Comet?”

  Comet did not reply. Scott was not sure whether that was because the trap was not letting him, or because his dignity was forfeit.

  “I’m usually inside the trap when I do my escaping, after all,” Scott said, working on getting Captain Comet disassembled from the multidimensional maze of this deceptively complex membrane. “Told you I felt a trap springing, didn’t I?”

  Grumbling and muffled expressions of disapproval came from inside the decreasingly writhing mass that slowly contracted on the desert floor.

  “It’s a gift,” Scott said.

  *

  The Gulag rose. The residents came. Some of them came kicking and screaming. Some of them came cooperatively. A few here and there came voluntarily. Mostly, they came unconscious.

  For example: About twenty miles east of Odessa, in a little town called Krivotzer, Green Lantern, Hourman, and Avia quashed a rumble and failed at first to recruit a young four-armed man named Shiva who’d fashioned his persona after that of the Hindu god of destruction. Whether this Shiva actually believed he was a Hindu deity, I did not care to determine. With Ibis the Invincible from North Africa and a Red Brigadier—he’d called himself by the anachronistic name “Iron Curtain” so long, he virtually forgot what his mother called him—from among the loons training for a restoration of communism on the Russian steppes, Shiva terrorized the skies over Krivotzer. Avia tackled Shiva in the sky, and Green Lantern clapped a cage of energy around the other two. Hourman made the pitch for the Justice League—in Russian, as it happened—and the three of them dismissed out of hand the notion of changing their ways. Shiva, Iron Curtain, and Ibis spent the following week in a state of suspended animation induced by a little chiropractic maneuver Avia had learned from her mom, until these three became the first inmates at the Gulag.

  *

  It did not take long for Von Bach, the would-be dictator of a reunited Yugoslavia, to join them. Von Bach was another strong-armed metahuman whose most visible “superpower”—other than strength that rivaled that of Wonder Woman—was his sociopathy. His whole body was tattooed—again with that same slate-blue fashion statement—except for the image remaining in flesh-tone of the martial cross on his chest and the two words in German on his right and left forearms, respectively: LIEBE and HASS—“LOVE” and “HATE.” When Superman and Wonder Woman came upon Von Bach, he was whipping up a barroom crowd in Montenegro to go down the road to visit a family of Serbian Muslims who were building a new house on the edge of a small town. The idea was to burn these people out of the trailer they were using as temporary housing.

  “There’ll be no burning today,” Superman said in a perfect High German accent as he stepped out the kitchen door of the beer hall and faced Von Bach from across the room.

  “Übermensch.” Von Bach smiled, as though honored to have the celebrity visit his little gathering. It was the last word he spoke in German. With Von Bach stood a few allies, all distinctively costumed: Germ-Man, in an armored trench coat and a shoulder tank containing enough of some nightmare venom to start a pandemic, and three other young heavily armed fellows with the rudiments of cockamamie tattoos of their own. In English as good as Superman’s German, Von Bach said, “You have no place here, Superman. This is an internal matter.”

  “Internal to what?” Superman answered, continuing in German so the afternoon beer crowd would understand as Wonder Woman stepped out the same door to stand beside him. “You dwell on externals and exploit the most marginal of differences among people in order to turn them against each other. Like every racist propagandist.” The men in the hall looked around uncomfortably, perhaps out of fear of the seemingly inevitable battle brewing among the titans or perhaps with trepidation at the presence of the outlandishly fierce-looking Amazon warrior, the only woman in the room. The afternoon revelers suddenly sought a means of graceful escape, but of course there was none.

  “This is a Yugoslavian matter,” Von Bach insisted, “for Yugoslavians pure of ancestry. Not displaced offworlders or pagan throwbacks.”

  “Really?” Superman insisted on continuing in German, playing to the crowd as well as his quarry. “Is that what the last leader to unite the Balkans would have said? Your hero, Tito?”

  Marshal Tito was indeed Von Bach’s acknowledged hero, though the only thing they really had in common was a belief in absolutist rule. Tito had supplanted the German fascists here at the end of their occupation of Europe, first aligning with the Russian communists of the Soviet ruler Stalin. But when Stalin’s security had proved more costly to the chronically conflicted people of the Balkan Peninsula than his animosity could ever be, Tito had promptly banished the Soviets from his newly liberated country, becoming a leader among nonaligned heads of state and spending most of the remainder of his life-—about thirty years, as it turned out—keeping the Serbs and Muslims and Croatians and other trace ethnic groups from burning out one another’s homes and families. He succeeded in this until his death, at which time Yugoslavia began to break down into ethnic conflict, and within ten years the nation built by Tito had become a land without a country.

  For all his repression and absolutism, Tito was still revered as a hero in these parts. For decades, every would-be dictator who sought to reunite Yugoslavia—tinhorns all, from the murdering crew who carved out spheres of influence in the Nineties to this super-strong tattooed Von Bach—first had invoked the spirit of Tito and then had flown in the face of all his accomplishments. I had to have at least a little sympathy for Von Bach and his henchmen trying to go chin to chin with the Last Son of Krypton and the Princess of the Amazons. They had such a lousy heritage of role models to emulate.

  “Do you think Tito would have begun a revolution by turning his own people against one another as you have?” Superman asked Von Bach across the sea of sinking heads of afternoon beer swillers. “Come with us, Von Bach. Join the Justice League and you will have the world as your stage, and even your own country will be the better for it.”

  And this time Von Bach answered in Elizabethan English: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

  Superman and Wonder Woman looked at each other, weary of the diminishing returns they were experiencing. There should be more joining us, he’d insisted to Diana. When they had started out on this quest, most of the superfolks they’d encountered were excited to join them, to mend their ways if appropriate. Now with the public’s identification of the Justice League and Superman as champions of the American Way, whatever that really meant, there was more resistance to it every day. Superman was no longer used to the indefatigable drive he had brought, in his youth, to his never-ending battle. He was showing his strain, but it was only his adversaries themselves who resisted,
he realized, not the people over whom they sought to lord.

  “He is right, the American,” Superman heard a patron at a nearby table whisper in German to a friend, and the friend nodded.

  “The Justice League is the way,” the friend said.

  Von Bach heard it, too, and he turned from his verbal joust with the Man of Steel, directing his rage and, heaven forbid, his strength on this poor brew-logged pair with the loose lips.

  Von Bach raced as fast as a glance across the beer hall, and an enormous fist whistled through the air on a dead course intersecting the mere mortals’ midsections. And before the two men realized what danger they were in, Von Bach’s fist landed with a thunderclap in Superman’s extended palm. The men felt a gust of wind, saw the hammer of a fist for a moment in the hand at the end of the blue sleeve, and that was all…

  … before Von Bach left the ground and arced, with his captive hand at the center of the circle, out across the room and through a wall, through a kitchen, through another wall, to land on a cobblestone street outside.

  Superman clapped his hands together lightly, walking after Von Bach through the holes he’d left in the shattered walls and kitchen equipment. The four confederates—Germ-Man and the others, whom I still did not recognize—launched themselves after Superman with a clatter and a pounce, but Superman did not seem to notice. Wonder Woman caught all four of them, one at a time, with the speed of Hermes, and yanked them—out of the sky—off a table top—out of midlunge—down from swinging from one ceiling beam to another—until they realized that surrender was their only option.

  With some weariness at the inevitability of it all, Superman loaded Von Bach, clearly flabbergasted by the ease with which the Kryptonian dominated him, over his shoulder and took off with him into the sky in the direction of the Gulag half a world away.