Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  “I have seen this before,” I told the Spectre.

  “Where?”

  “Most recently? In my congregation,” I said, “the Sunday morning after Kansas.”

  “What can you tell me?” Bruce Wayne asked the Martian disguised as a man.

  J’onn raised a hand and lifted his eyes in the direction of the big man who smiled and circulated his tray of hors d’oeuvres among the crowd through a path that cleared for a yard or two on all sides of him. “I will attempt…”

  The tall man wore an eerie grin. He seemed a shark, trawling the room for prawn. “May I see that, please?” Billy said as he put down the tray and reached for Black Canary’s crossbow.

  The girl and both her parents looked up at him, each succeeding to a varying extent at masking his or her alarm. “Oh! I mean … sure. Help … help yourself.” Reluctantly, she handed the big man her weapon.

  He looked it over, sighted along its trajectory path, and handed it back to her.

  “Cool,” he said, and walked on with his hors d’oeuvres.

  “I can’t,” J’onn told Bruce Wayne.

  “Okay, okay, that’s fine.”

  “No, I can help you. I can tell you something you can use. What can I tell you?”

  “You can tell me you’ll go home and rest, J’onn.”

  “Too much noise. Too much. I can’t take the noise.”

  “Go home and rest. Dream of red sands and silent stars.”

  J’onn touched a hand to the Batman’s head, then withdrew it. “Yes,” he said, and when no one but the Spectre, the Batman, and I were watching, he walked through a wall and was gone.

  *

  Superman stood at the window of the big satellite, perusing the Earth from another room crowded with talented people in costume.

  “Germany is all clear,” he said.

  On his shoulder, a tiny woman—the Living Doll—with a tinier clipboard said, “Check.”

  “Italy, Austria, both okay,” Superman said. “Yugoslavia and the Balkan states are a little chaotic, but if there’s any activity, it’s scattered and ineffective.”

  “Let’s count on it,” Living Doll said. “So that covers metahuman activity in Europe. How about Africa?”

  Five old friends stood whispering across the room, on the far side of a navigational device.

  “He can hear you,” said Donna Troy, who once upon a time had fought at the side of these four men as Wonder Girl of the Teen Titans.

  “Listen,” Red Robin insisted. “I was all for the Gulag. But throwing Von Bach into that cauldron with those other jokers is like poking a hydrogen balloon with a match. Superman’s prison is a pressure cooker enough as it is. He thinks he can get everyone to behave like they did when times were brighter, but even he can’t turn back the clock.”

  “So tell him,” Garth the water-breather suggested.

  “Me? You tell him!” Red Robin said. “Look at him. Can’t a man with telescopic vision see the world around him?”

  “Shh! He can hear you!” Donna warned again.

  The Flash was almost standing still. The brief conversation must have seemed to him to take forever, but he liked these people. He could hear what they were saying, I understood, but given his speed, no one other than Superman himself could understand a word he said.

  “What do you think, Wally?” Red Arrow asked the red blur among them. “Is he listening?”

  They heard a high-pitched hum from their speedy friend’s direction, and the word “Yes” from that of Superman. He might have been talking to the Living Doll, but it still made Donna nervous.

  When earlier we’d left Luthor’s nerve center, it seemed to me that Zatara, the young man with the magical powers and the trademark top hat, had looked startled, just for a moment, as he gazed in my direction. Then I thought no more of it, but I should have. These are very perceptive people; they even occasionally perceive what to others may seem not to be there. The Flash—Wallace West—was a man too fast to be contained in one dimension of time or space. Apparently, entire strata of reality are open to him. I had grown so used to my role of silent, unseen observer that I did not realize what was happening when I poked my face into the conversation with his former Titan colleagues. What happened next was, for the first time, my own fault. Before I realized what was happening, the Flash threw his arms around me and tore me out of my own comfortable neoreality into his own.

  Suddenly I felt pinpricks all over my body, the way a foot feels when it is waking from sleep. I took several heavy breaths of filtered air and felt them in my lungs; felt my heart jump-start my blood again. An alarm sounded. A recorded voice said, UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY. Dozens of people, maybe a hundred or more, as colorful and vivid as ever, appeared in the room like a swarm of giant bumblebees. Wonder Woman vaulted over a balcony rail to stand by Superman’s side. Avia rushed toward me, but a blur of white beat her to me. Power Woman grabbed me by the shirtfront and demanded to know who I was and where I’d come from.

  “I … I…” Usually I am more articulate.

  “Answer me, dammit!” this extraordinarily powerful woman in white demanded. “What are you doing here?”

  She pulled back a blue-gloved fist. I had no idea that a woman’s fisted hand could look that huge. Superman took her by the wrist and gently led her away from me. I must have been a sight.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “I’m,” I said, then I did not say anything. Neither did anyone else, so I said, “My name is Norman McCay and I’ve been … I’m supposed to tell someone who is…” I paused.

  Certainly I could tell these people nothing that would surprise them. They reinvented surprise, each of them in turn. “This isn’t going to make any…” Then I remembered my prayer and lifted my eyes.

  “I need to warn you,” I finally said to Superman.

  “Warn me.”

  “Please understand. A catastrophe comes! I see armies. I see them. Armies raised against you and an eternal night and rising storms of dust and shards of metal and treachery.”

  His was somehow the only face before me.

  “I see this as clearly as I see you. A golden eagle contending with a flying bat in the sky, and a flag in the shape of a man pounding at the wretched ground in sorrow and despair until the very Earth shatters under his blows.” I could think of no more to say, so help me.

  He stared at me with X-ray eyes that, for the life of me, began to glow, then faded, looking for meaning to my babble.

  My mouth dry, I could find no words save those I myself have heard before: “And the third angel sounded,” I said, “and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters. And the name of the star—”

  “ ‘Is called Wormwood,’ yes, I’ve read the book, too,” he interrupted me.

  He spoke to me indulgently, as if I were some crank who’d tripped into a space warp. And I had to continue, though for all the world and all the firmament, I knew in my soul that all I could do by continuing would be to look like a fool in front of the people I admired most. “And the sun and the air were darkened,” I said. “Fear God and give glory to Him,” and I whispered because I had no more breath to speak but had to, “for the hour of His judgment is come.”

  We both were silent for a moment before Superman said, “Listen to me.”

  Like an idiot I nodded.

  “I don’t know who you are or where you came from, but your words are meaningless. Armageddon is hardly on our calendar. Let me assure you, sir, that while these are dark days, we have matters fully under control. Can we talk about how you—”

  “Holy God!” Red Robin called from across the deck, and I was sure he was calling, in fact, to God, but everyone here looked in his direction nonetheless.

  “Word just came in from Scott at the Gulag!” he said. “There’s a riot going on! The prisoners have gone berserk!”

  Wonder Woman took a step back from Superman—a sig
nal to the others that the commander was in the room.

  “Any more information?” Superman’s was the only collection of neck muscles that did not snap to attention and contract for battle.

  “No,” the man in the black hooded cloak said. “Superman! What do we do?”

  PART III

  … A Fit Place

  for Heroes

  CHAPTER 23

  Partial Law

  “All right,” Superman said in that calm reassuring way, “first we keep our heads about us. Next we sit down and consider how best to—”

  “Flash! Green Lantern! Power Woman!” Wonder Woman interrupted in a steely bark. “To the Gulag. Now. Take control. Report directly back here at your first opportunity.”

  They all looked away from me, unaware that I was still there. And sometime in the course of the exchange I no longer was there. The Spectre spirited me back and I was just a watcher again. “You are finished here.”

  “No, not quite,” I pleaded, but his hand settled me.

  The person to whom the others looked was Superman.

  He thought a second. A full second. A second of indecision. They—even I—could feel him considering how or whether to countermand Wonder Woman’s sudden seizure of control. Certainly no one here would stand for a mutiny against Superman’s will, but there was that second of indecision and everyone saw it. And at the end of it he said, “Through peaceful means, of course,” and effectively confirmed Wonder Woman’s order.

  “By any means necessary,” she said to the three order-takers who bolted out to the airlock. She would just keep shoving at him—at Superman. She was the only one who would ever do that. He could counter her at any time, but on some level he knew she was right.

  She was the one who gave the orders that he could not bring himself to give.

  “Ray!” she called across the big satellite conference room. “Phoebus! Stand by to join them if called. Everyone, monitor your individual responsibilities. Wherever possible, stay within eyeshot of your backup monitor. You’ve all got your assignments. As those assignments change for emergency duty, you must see that your stations are covered. Be aware of and advise me immediately of any potential communications gaps.”

  Those remaining scurried to their positions—to their commlink consoles, their spreadsheets and databases, their scenario generators.

  “Red Arrow,” the Amazon barked, “project scenarios based on the most up-to-date data at one hundred four percent of capacity. Robin, strip archived memory and divert it to the operating system. Now. No resources for nonessentials.”

  “Umm,” Superman interrupted, finally, “we need the archives for a history file. If there’s an inquiry later on into our actions, we’ll need documentation.”

  “Documentation’s for historians to write when we’re all dead. Strip the archives, Robin.”

  Red Robin looked at Red Arrow. It was the archer who said, “We can run scenarios at a hundred percent without diverting the archives. The disparity would be negligible.”

  Wonder Woman glared darts at Superman, who was never intimidated by a threatening look. He was impassive. It was she who blinked, as she had to do.

  “Fine. A hundred percent. No maintenance goes into archive documentation. Let it run on automatic. Robin, prepare the launches for the nonflying members.”

  That was the only audible strife that scraped through New Oa as the vanguard of the Justice League joined Captain Comet and Scott and Barda Free to lock down the Gulag on the planet far below.

  The inaudible strife, however, was thick as a dwarf star’s core.

  “The old man,” she said. “Where did he go? Who was he?”

  I stood just inches—and a dimension of reality—away from her.

  “I don’t know and I don’t care,” he said, and he took her arm and turned her around and demanded, “Why did you undermine my authority?”

  Through clenched teeth: “Why did I? When—

  “—did—

  “—you—

  “—exercise—

  “—it? I saw a crisis. I reacted in a confident and unqualified manner. The others need to see that sort of authority—” She paused. “From someone.”

  “All right, calm down,” he told her when he realized she needed it said to her more than he needed it said to him. “We’re juggling enormous forces here. If we have a difference of opinion over tactics—even over the appropriate use of our own power—we discuss it first. We work it out. All right?”

  She let out a breath. This was what passed, for him, as a concession, and she knew it. “All right,” she said. “But you have to take firm positions and issue decisive directives. Can you agree to that?”

  “Yes, I can. You and I work together. But you let me know what’s on your mind before you impose presumptive authority. Agreed?”

  “I don’t need to agree to it,” she said. “It’s an order. I can take orders.”

  “Good.”

  *

  The satellite was a beehive of activity. Everyone covered his or her station, monitored, fed information, or processed data. There were thirty-one people aboard New Oa when the news of trouble at the Gulag arrived, and someone here was in touch with another hundred fifty members of the Justice League before Superman initiated his dispute with his first officer. The roster of Justice League members, as the organization’s concerns grew more specific, was growing more formalized every day. Members were putting their lives on hold all over the world and arriving both here and at the Gulag even as the two to whom they looked for leadership debated the issue.

  “Pull yourself together. We are overdue for a meeting with the Secretary-General,” Wonder Woman told Superman. “We can be sure the United Nations is aware by now that we’ve built and populated the Gulag.”

  “Then I guarantee they’re going to be wondering on what authority we have begun to decree and enforce our own laws within the borders of the United States,” Superman said.

  Wonder Woman started to leave. “Come, we have to convince them that we are the good guys.”

  CHAPTER 24

  The White House

  American politics, at the dawn of the Millennium, became world politics. Like Superman, its longtime symbol and standard-bearer, the United States had shied away from its inevitable role on the world stage every chance it got. Yet time and again, crisis and necessity pushed leadership upon the nation.

  A major point of contention among foreign nationals was the fact that only Americans got to choose the President of the United States, who was effectively the emperor of the rest of the world. If this President was to be a democratically elected leader, should not all the people governed by the President have a voice in the choice of that President? some reasoned.

  “Just now it’s a moot point, Ambassador Jiang,” Jennifer Capper told the Consul-General from China who brought it up again at a meeting under a tent on the White House lawn. “Notwithstanding that, however, the next time your government directs you to inquire after a voice in internal American elections, you might ask them when the people of China will finally begin to have a vote regarding their own leaders.”

  “I protest, Madame President.” Ambassador Jiang rose from the chair to her full six feet one inch, towering over all of the men in the tent with the exception of five of the six Secret Service agents who hovered around the meeting. “I protest most resolutely. The reforms in my country have given such a voice to a wide range of persons.”

  “As long as they own businesses or have a family history of correct political activity,” the President debated gamely.

  “The agenda for today, however”—Leonard Wyrmwood rose, smiling for the guests whom he’d brought to lunch today—“does not include that. The President’s time is at as much of a premium as our own, so we need to get back to the matter of international foodstuffs redistribution.”

  The White House was more than two hundred years old now and was in constant use, not only as a family home but as a large off
ice building, every moment of every day. It had not seen a structural overhaul since Bess Truman had insisted on one at the midpoint of the last century. Last year, when a large gray rat had tumbled through an upstairs kitchen air vent while President Capper’s teenage son, Bryan, was rooting through the refrigerator on the fourth floor of the White House, the President had decided that it was time to get Congress to gut and rebuild the old mansion again from the inside out.

  Artwork went to storage and information went to archive. Walls and fixtures were carefully tucked away around the city. Today the entire stripped-to-the-rafters White House was under a fumigation tent, and the President’s meeting with the Secretary-General and the delegates to the United Nations Security Council was under another tent on the rambling South Lawn. Also under this tent was a gourmet meal from the temporary White House kitchen in the partitioned-off lobby of the Old Executive Office Building across the street. A four-piece orchestra played Bach fugues as the diplomats ate and talked.

  “General Wyrmwood,” the President said, “thank you. In the next two months, ladies and gentlemen, I will be traveling with the chief executive officers of the three major agricultural corporations who still have extensive land holdings outside the irradiated areas. Also traveling with me will be Dr. Nevin Scrimshaw of MIT, the nutritionist. My office will make a public announcement of the trip next Monday. Any countries whose governments want them on my itinerary, let me know by then.”

  “Excuse me, Madame President,” the Englishman Lord Wainwright said, “but are you interested only in countries with historic malnutrition problems? We in Britain are heavily dependent on American produce and already feel the pinch. And I’m sure Their Majesties would love to see you again.”

  “I’ll pencil you in. Get confirmation, please,” the President said.

  “We would hope,” the Israeli delegate said, “that this trip is not just a—what do the schoolchildren call it?—a booster club for American produce and processed foods. Does it truly have a substantive purpose?”