They were enormous, each one big as a planet, hanging there at an angle to us in the firmament. As I looked at these looming figures the Spectre put a hand on my arm and changed our angle toward them. And as our angle changed, so did we become so much bigger—or they smaller; the notion of perspective is a meaningless physical concept in the spirit realms—that we momentarily stood aside them, and our scale was as massive as their own. Now they were just five curious, deep-visaged men who, as the Spectre joined them, discussed the doings of one of their little pet planets, this Earth.
“Who?” I asked him. “Who are these people?” The one speaking, the one with the long white beard to his waist, seemed the most passionate.
“Please,” said the long-bearded one—the one to whom the Spectre referred as an old wizard. “Please, I could love him no more if he were my own son. And he is lost. We must show him the way. We must take a hand, for the sake of all of them.”
“All of them, Brother?” said a thickset old man whose bush of a white beard hung in ringlets. “All seven billion of them?”
“Seven billion. Seven billion,” the first one said. “Perhaps only the ones we love.”
“And how do you propose to quantify love?” the smallest of them asked. He was a blue-skinned man with the emblem of the Green Lantern glowing on the red robe that draped him.
“Who are these people?” again I asked the Spectre, who seemed curiously distracted from me, rather than detached, as was his habit.
When I asked, they all turned to look at me.
“Are we a part of the grand tour, Spectre?” a taller one in a trench coat who looked younger—though there was not much of his face I could see, for the shadow of his hat—asked idly.
“This is my circle, Norman McCay,” the Spectre told me. “The Quintessence, we have been called by some who have sought us. The group does change somewhat with the centuries. These are Highfather, the progenitor of the worlds of New Genesis and Apokolips”—a wildhaired old man with a shepherd’s staff nodded to me—“and the Phantom Stranger.” The trench-coated one grunted my way. “This is Ganthet, survivor of the Guardians of the Universe”—the little one with the Green Lantern emblem smiled a kindly smile and nodded—“and Zeus, of whom you have no doubt heard.”
“The real Zeus?” I asked. “Lightning bolts and Mount Olympus Zeus?” So far, this trip was only a confirmation of the dearest of my beliefs. Was I now to go through some sort of painstaking reevaluation? Was there something to paganism?
“Well, of course there was something to paganism,” the thunderer thundered, certainly hearing my thoughts as clearly as my outward wonder. “Why would that involve reevaluating your beliefs? You mortals still have such narrow intellectual passageways. Do you still feel the need to dismiss an old notion every time you consider a new one?”
“Well, I—”
“And this is the wizard Shazam,” my host said huffily of Captain Marvel’s emotional advocate.
“Do not engage this child to his disadvantage,” Shazam scolded Zeus. “Have we not already enough senseless conflict?”
“I am sure they all know you, Norman McCay,” the Spectre assured me. I found this unsettling.
“Know me? How?”
“They watch,” the Spectre said.
Shazam the wizard was the one, I learned, who had given Captain Marvel his power. The age-old wizard was the synthesis of the particular talents of many of the greatest of Earth’s sentient creatures—physical and supernatural alike. Shazam took the power to import Solomon’s wisdom, Hercules’ strength, Atlas’ stamina, Zeus’ power, Achilles’ courage, and Mercury’s speed. A generation ago, Shazam found a boy pure of heart and bestowed all these magic powers on the child, making him Captain Marvel. Now that purity was twisted and perverted by Luthor, another human of great power, so that these eternals themselves—this Quintessence who watched over us all like paintings on an ancient wall—shuddered at the implications.
I had visions of trudging normally through life, slipping on banana peels, flunking French tests, giving bad advice, taking bad advice, picking my nose, so help me, with a small fraternity of godlike figures watching me do it all. This was far more disturbing than monotheism. I did not even know these guys.
They all laughed at me. Even Ganthet the Guardian. Even gloomy Shazam.
“Through the millennia,” the Guardian said, “we have often lent our wisdom to the Earthlings, only to watch them march proudly to disaster.”
“Ganthet is not wrong,” the one named Highfather responded. “The humans are not our responsibility. They are but motes in the cosmos. An insignificant factor in the grand life equation.”
The Spectre bristled. “How interesting that you insist upon this. You are all so concerned with how unconcerned you should act. Do you dwell on the Earth’s problems because you are cosmically bored? Or do you congregate in order to prevent each other from interfering?”
I felt this conversation was not for my ears. I turned away, embarrassed, I suppose, with the assault on my mortal senses.
“Hiya. Have a little faith, Padre,” a voice from behind me said, and I turned around to see the face of a dead man. Smiling. Through a skull.
I think I said something like, “Yow!”
“Boston Brand’s the name,” was what came from the flapping lower jaw of the skeleton in the tattered red flying suit. “I’m a ghost. Nice to meet you.”
I guess then I said, “Excuse me?” which was better, but I was not being very coherent. It seemed the Quintessence had matters of Earthly influence to discuss, and the subtlety of what they were talking about, along with the bizarre environment of this outer-space netherworld, was too much for me to integrate all at once. I found my sensibilities welcoming this obstreperous new being.
“They’re talking about the pros and cons of intervening. It’s actually pretty boring,” Boston Brand said. “Cosmically boring,” and he laughed. “These guys just hang out here with one another so each can keep the others from doing anything.”
“Why?” I asked him as the Spectre joined in a heated discussion among his peers.
“I don’t get it myself. Guess I haven’t gotten used to being a former self yet after all these years. I used to be a daredevil in the circus. Now I’m an agent of a higher power. Can you imagine?” and he laughed some more. “Oh, of course you can. I forgot who I was talking to.”
I had no idea how he could “see” me with no eyes or “talk” to me with no voicebox or “laugh” with no air pumping through no lungs.
“You’ve got to stop trying to think with your brain, Pastor,” he told me. “Your body’s just there to slow you down. You can see only when you get beyond—what did you guys call it?—optics. Determining reality by telling the difference between lights and shadows—that’s like drawing a stick figure and thinking you’ve created life. It’s ludicrous.”
I was not following this. “To tell you the truth, Boston, I can’t imagine any of this. I have yet to understand why I’m here.”
“To add to the greater glory of the Creator of the Universe. It’s why any of us are here, natch.”
“Is the Spectre really an angel?”
“I suppose,” Boston said. “An angel of death is more his speed. Used to be a regular guy. A cop detective if I remember right.”
“Corrigan,” I said. “Yes, Jim Corrigan. He told me that.”
“Well, then he got tapped by You-Know-Who for this special detail—which goes to show you it could happen to anyone. He started getting detached, like. Out of touch with whatever in him used to be human. That’s why he needs you, at least that’s what the others figure.”
“Can he use his power to stop this coming disaster?”
“Disaster? Oh, you mean the one on the critical path down back with the physicals. Yeah, sure. But he can’t avert it altogether. And if he stops it for now, he could change its eventual outcome, almost certainly for the worse. That’s why Zeus stopped playing that game after Tro
y fell. Ever get the itch to be a god, Pastor?”
“Oh, for Heaven’s sake.”
“I don’t mean God,” he said, and I actually saw the capitalization of the word in his voice. Was I hearing without my ears now? “I mean like these guys. Look at the Phantom Stranger. Heck, look at Zeus. Story is he was just a guy who found some kind of magic rock from near the beginning of Creation, and he right away started in waging wars and founding nations and things. Freaky.”
“People become … become what you call ‘gods’ by chance, you say?”
“No, not by chance. But not on purpose either. What turns a cop into an avenging spirit? Probably the same thing that turns a nose-picking kid into a minister.”
“It must take a lot of courage,” it occurred to me.
“Not that much. No more’n you’ve got, Padre. No more’n he ever had, either.” Boston Brand gestured in the direction of the Spectre, who was leaving the conference of the Quintessence to rejoin me. “Hey, you get to the other side sometime—don’t hurry it along or anything—but look me up, will you? Like to see what you think of it after you’ve been through all this.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I told the ghost as he faded off at ninety degrees to perception.
“Are you rested, Norman McCay?” the Spectre asked me.
“Was that what I was supposed to do here?”
“Mortals rest when they have the time, I have observed,” he said.
“I suppose I’m rested,” I said. “Why?”
CHAPTER 21
Stone-Skipping
Suddenly, a little boy was running for his life.
I was this boy, and I could see this boy, too. And my belly roiled.
He was a beautiful boy, no more than eight or nine, in a red-and-yellow sweater and jeans and eyes like Michelangelo’s David. Like David of the sculpture, his face was frozen in a mask of terror, and no one of his world was here to set a table for him in the presence of his enemies.
A giant robot with a pointy skull and a single cyclopean window where an eye belonged, stomping over the landscape, rained searing licks of flaming light. They made steamy black footprints in the dirt around him, in front of him, in the very steps through which he ran.
Others ran. Other children, big people, regular folks, people the boy would have thought could stand up to anything. Lions and tigers and bears would have run.
Tentacled monsters dropped from the sky without warning, planting themselves—splat!—in the ground and snaking in all directions. One grabbed a big man and made him scream. One grabbed a kid, and there was no sound.
Flying people—in armor and helmets and in just plain muscles that would ping when you flicked them—collided in the sky. They threw each other through the air and at the ground to make long irregular ditches, and they’d get up and rise in the sky like vampires and slam each other again. One of them smashed down in front of the boy and made the ground rattle, and the boy fell over him and he got flipped up in the air and fell on his face when the flier lifted back up in the sky, ignoring him.
The boy got up and tried to remember how to make it stop. There was something he had to say.
A laughing little man with a hooked nose and no hair hung out on the horizon. Out where everyone was headed—being herded—he cackled like an evil hen. What was his name? The boy knew it: Sivana. He was an enemy from another life.
And what was the word? The magic word?
The boy opened his mouth to scream. Spits of hot light kicked up divots of the Earth. What was the word? Monsters snatched up running kids as if they were hunks of meat and squeezed them until they popped. The word. The scream. The horrors chewed up the Earth. Rolled over the ground like they had to lay new carpet.
He knew the word. He opened his mouth to say it. It was: “Shaz—”
—and a bolt of heat pierced his chest.
—and a blinding light appeared in his path and faded to leave a blackened hole.
—and the boy could not reach even the darkness in front of him because there was another hole where his heart and his lungs used to be.
—and he knew the word and he could not summon the air to scream it.
—and he went down.
—and the world continued to howl all around him.
*
“That’s what it’s like out there, Billy,” Luthor told the boy when he was a man again.
“That didn’t really happen,” Luthor’s valet—his name was Billy—told him with a pout.
“Oh, it happens every day, Billy. It’s happening now.”
“Every day,” Billy said, more quietly now.
“It’s what the superhumans do all the time. To all of us. But you don’t have to participate, do you, Billy?”
“No.”
“No, you don’t. Not if you do just as I tell you. Isn’t that right, Billy?”
“But there’s something I want to know, Mr. Luthor. How come if I’ve got all these—” but he did not finish because of the pain at the center of his head, and he wanted to scream again but he could not finish a word. Certainly not the magic word.
“There there, Billy,” Luthor said. “Let me help you with that.” And Luthor snapped on surgical gloves from his pocket and whipped a long pointy pair of tweezers from his lapel pocket and stroked Billy’s hair to stop his shaking.
Then Luthor pulled open the drawer of a small toolchest by the side of his film projector and lifted out a petri dish full of what looked like inchworms.
“He was a genius, wasn’t he, that Sivana?”
And Billy quaked at the sound of the name and tried to say, “Shuh—shuzzuh—”
“No no no,” Luthor said quietly, like Father Abraham gently tying his son to the altar. “We’ll get that all settled down now, won’t we? It was the left one last time, wasn’t it?” And Luthor took a lively wriggling worm from the petri dish and dropped it into Billy’s right ear. “Now turn around, Billy,” he said.
This Billy did, and Luthor put on a little pair of glasses with a tiny halogen light on its bridge and carefully tweezed another inchworm—this one was sluggish and fat with fluid, hardly moving at all—out of Billy’s left ear.
“Oh Mr. Mind,” Billy called in a squeaky voice. “It hurts.”
“Mr. Pain will be gone, Billy, in just a moment.” Luthor cradled the perfect head of this massive, perplexed, magical being in his arms. We have a special job to do, don’t we?”
“Shuh … shuh … zazzash,” the imposing six-foot, five-inch boy-man whispered, and then he was quiet.
“Yes, we do.”
Up in a dark corner of the lab ceiling, a tiny Robobat hung upside down taking it all in. Elsewhere, on a catwalk, a man in titanium framing watched and listened to the monitoring device on his wrist.
*
The first time ever in his life that Superman had tried to skip a flat stone over water was after he was already grown. It’s a kids thing, no doubt, and as a result there’s a terrible shortage of flat stones on the land surface of the Earth. Ever since the invention of kids, after all, kids have skipped flat stones over the water and lost them in the drink. Stone-skipping is a discipline far older than geology, for example, and surface-dwelling geologists have a skewed view of the percentage of flat stones on Earth, because the stones kids find in the pursuit of the diminishing flat type are overwhelmingly rounded. This is not true for Atlantean kids, and Atlantean geologists have a much more accurate perspective on the flat-to-round stone ratio. So Superman’s forbearance, as a boy, from skipping stones was probably an ecological decision after a fashion. The first time he’d tried it, sitting with Lois by the reservoir in Centennial Park, he’d gotten the thing to skip thirty-seven times. His skill level increased significantly afterward.
Today, on a ledge in airless space outside the navigation deck of Alan Scott’s satellite, Superman flicked fingernail-sized meteoroids across the void to see how many space rocks he could hit before sending his stone careening into space. Th
is required skills that were a combination of those that one needed for stone-skipping and for billiards. The satellite was passing through a thin cloud of space rocks caught over the centuries, orbiting Earth for maybe a hundred thousand years. Superman wore a radio headset built into an oxygen feed so Diana could hear what he said. She sat next to him wearing only a pressure helmet and radio in addition to her royal Amazonian costume and tiara, trying to figure out the rules of his game.
“… so then I flew him up to about, oh, here, and I said, ‘Do you see that beautiful blue marble, Brainiac? That’s my world. Return it. Now.’ ” These were the stories he used to tell Lois. They accounted for at least one of the Peabody Awards in the Kent condominium.
“Did he hear you?” Diana wanted to know.
“Actually, not in airless space, no. But he got the message. NORAD was back online within five minutes.”
“Where is he now?”
“I buried some of the circuitry on Saturn, some on Argo. The motherboard is in the back of the frame of one of Clark’s Pulitzers.”
“Oh that’s funny. You never told me that story before. Gods, those were better days.”
“Easier anyway. Diana, what’s this about being ousted by your own people? How did you let that happen?”
“My Amazon sisters, my own mother herself came to suggest that I had perhaps failed,” she said into the speaker.
“What’s that like?”
“Having your mother bring you the negative judgment of the nation you always had hoped to serve? What do you think it’s like? You had a mother.”
“Well, my mother was just a mother. She taught me how to ride a bike and fly, but being judgmental was something she tried to avoid.”
“Must have broken a lot of bikes.”
“Yeah. After a while my father started bringing home bike frames whenever he went to the dump. So what’s it like having a mother who’s a Queen?”
“Mostly it’s just like having a mother. She spent afternoons with me. She worked at home. She taught me to shoot arrows. She interviewed my teachers. She was never much like a Queen is supposed to be, except when all the women were around or when there was a crisis. You’re much more like a King than she ever seemed.”
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