Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  Armageddon has arrived.

  CHAPTER 28

  The Physics of Magic

  “Shazam,” the Captain whispered, and the thunder sounded and lightning flashed. But Billy Batson did not appear where Marvel stood; Marvel suddenly stepped aside, and the lightning struck the furious hero in red and blue. Superman went down with the force of the magic lightning’s blow.

  Superman rose. Slowly. Reached for Marvel. And as the Kryptonian’s hand brushed the Captain’s sleeve, Marvel said again, “Shazam!” and vanished from the space he’d occupied, so the blow from the sky came down squarely on the Man of Steel. And Superman melted for a moment as Marvel appeared just a few feet away even before the image faded from where he’d stood a moment before.

  “Shazam!” Again the Captain declaimed the word and moved with the speed of Mercury before the blow transformed him. And the engine of his diverted transformation pummeled the Man of Steel again.

  Captain Marvel leaned in close to the rattled hero. Superman again pressed his knees and chest into the ground.

  “Shazam,” Marvel said again without malice or love, and battered the Man of Tempered Steel.

  “Shazam,” the boy-man said again. Lightning dropped from the sky and jangled Superman’s vision.

  And again, “Shazam.” And Superman’s body burned and his mind rattled.

  The Last Son of Krypton loosed the fetters of gravity to pull himself again to his feet. He put the pieces of himself together.

  “Shazam!” and the moment was gone again. The Kryptonian went down.

  There had never been a time in his vigor-bedecked life when Superman was more powerful than he was today. Even kryptonite, the rare remnant of his native world whose specific radioactivity often sapped his life force, was no longer a threat. He was a man of this place and time, growing in strength with every photon he drank in from the brilliant golden star that had been his most constant partner since his infancy. But there was something about whatever it was that people called “magic.” It was not one thing, magic, but a constellation of unknowns. It was almost as though by failing to understand the nature of a thing, that gave the thing a power over Superman. It was the unpredictability, like physics’ exclusion principle: by understanding something you subvert its nature. Superman could never understand Captain Marvel or believe in the gods that had given Marvel a power to rival his own.

  Superman had a thought.

  Then the lightning struck him again and it slipped away.

  He snatched back the thought: If he simply dismissed logic and tried to understand some aspect of this mysterious concept of “magic,” then to that extent it was possible that the power of the illogical could not hurt him.

  That was the thought, but every time he tried to grab at it—or at his adversary—the universe lit up to blind him, and the energy of the light swatted him down like a horsefly. Wait, he demanded of himself, this is important; this may be the solution to a weakness that has dogged me all my life. Got to think this out. And he would get up again, and go for his opponent again, and grab for that thought again.

  And he would drop again.

  Superman wondered: How many would die before he logicked out the illogical?

  The most stolid and clearly reasoning among them, this Superman who shrunk from the leadership that embraced him nonetheless, arrived a moment too late. Greeted on his arrival by the repeated unreasoning force of a brainwashed former ally slinging bolts of magic lightning, battered and bloodied, Superman saw his efforts gone to neutral.

  *

  I glared at the Spectre now. “It’s happening. Just as the visions foretold. Superman came too late. War has begun. Do something! For the love of God—make it stop!”

  “I cannot. I can take no action. Not yet,” my guide said.

  “Why not? What in God’s name has to happen? How much time must pass?”

  “There will be a reckoning, Norman McCay. Be prepared.” Now it was the Spectre who suddenly spouted from Scripture at me rather than the reverse: “Fear God and give glory to Him,” I heard him say as though he were whispering it into my ear, as though it were news to me as the battle raged around us, hand to hand, power to power, “for the hour of His judgment is come.”

  “Is that the only reason I am here? To watch some hideous judgment?” I demanded.

  He had no answer; strangely, I was not surprised.

  *

  Through the dust of the kicked-up ground, Superman snatched at the shadow of a waving limb as…

  “Shazam!”

  … he heard the word, and it was not soft flesh below cloth but the impossibly dense cabled arm of Captain Marvel wrapped in its gold cuff that he grasped. He squeezed tightly, not very effectively, but squeezed nonetheless. A Cheshire-cat smile under squinting eyes poked out at him through the roiling air. And every time he said it…

  “Shazam!”

  … the mad grin vanished and appeared somewhere else, and Superman was down and trying to struggle to right himself.

  “Damn it, Marvel!” Lungs of Reproved Steel expelled in pain. “Snap out of it. You can’t do this!”

  “Shazam!” A bolt blew Superman backward—

  —and Marvel said “Shazam!” and threw him down to his back.

  “Too much is happening too fast,” Superman gasped. “We have to work togeth—”

  Marvel delivered not a bolt from the sky but a blow of his foot to his adversary’s rising chin and, with energy born of the same mystical source as the lightning, tossed him flat against a growing sand dune where once wheat had waved and perhaps tomorrow a slaughtered hero would lie dead.

  Marvel tumbled after Superman again, and the Kryptonian heard “Shazam!” and “Shazam!” again and felt his tortured mind skitter to the outer edges of temporal reality.

  *

  On all sides and to an expanding perimeter the battle raced over this barren wilderness. As in the rumbles back in the city, heroes and villains were hard pressed to tell one another apart. On and around and through the borders of this ill-contrived walled city, across a plain once verdant and lately gone to fire and dust, the greatest of the Earth came like locusts to a patch of grass—to annihilate one another.

  Red Robin, cowled and intent, spun to catch the fashionably tattooed Swastika square and hard on the chin. Swastika came up from it; he had to be slowed. Tokyo Rose bounced end over end to the scene. Through the smoke she recognized a Batman-like figure. Her enemy was a known quantity, but a formidable one. Martial skills, to this thickly muscled man, were second nature, a lifestyle. He did not so much acquire them as the skills acquired him. As a child he’d swung from trapezes without a net and flown through empty space to grasp the limbs of loved ones as often and as easily as drinking milk. As a youth he’d bounded among the rooftops of Gotham at the side of the Batman, startling and flattening men and forces of nature multiples of his size. As a man he was a brick wall. There was no surprising him. Tokyo Rose knew that to overwhelm Red Robin was the only option. Calculating her speed and force, she leapt through the air over the head of her ally Swastika, the balls of her feet propelling through the air at Robin’s barrel chest.

  I have no time for this, Red Robin snarled to his inner self, banishing the laughing demon-child he’d played as a youth and summoning the spirit of that old craggy bat.

  Red Robin shoved his hand up underneath Swastika’s rib cage, lifted the man, and tossed him to the left. Then he had just enough time to thrust upward with both feet…

  … to catch Tokyo Rose coming at him in midflight, squarely in the belly.

  I turned and saw the armored Wonder Woman, a javelin in her fist, the Sword of Hephæstus at her hip, and a war cry discharging from her throat. Half a mile away, Mr. Terrific stood on the head of a statue of Hestia, the fair-minded sister of Zeus. It used to be the mall where Captain Comet had confronted 666. Mr. Terrific unloaded a loud whistle.

  The whistle was the activator for a program deep in archived memory of the robot N-I
-L-8. Dormant in a depression in the back wall of a building that bordered the mall, the eyes of the big automaton came alive with flashing red lights. It peeled itself out of the wall, then took to the sky above. It flew through the spreading storm directly over the heads of both Mr. Terrific and the family anomaly Hestia. And as it flew over the man who’d summoned it, the robot’s enormous mechanical arm—the arm outfitted with a gun the size of a cannon, whose firing mechanism Scott Free carefully had disassembled upon Hawkman’s delivery of the machine a few weeks before—fell off into Terrific’s outstretched arms. The robot continued flying slowly out to nowhere until, eventually, a shock wave caught it.

  Mr. Terrific kicked off a boot. From a pocket in a thick callus that started at the back of his heel and stretched halfway up his Achilles tendon, he pulled a narrow tool that he fit into a slot in the doomed robot’s dismembered arm. He twisted it a certain way and yanked the tool out again like the pin of a grenade. The costumed fellow slung the refitted weapon up to his shoulder as he listened for the distinctive click of a secondary ammunition clip tumbling into place. His shoulders dropped as he sighted the big weapon—somewhere on the little strip of ground between Power Woman and the Ray who fought back to back, flinging an unending succession of the temporary residents of this place into walls, into the ground, into each other—

  —and from out of the sky, Wonder Woman’s javelin pounded into the hull of Mr. Terrific’s big gun to shove it from his thick hands. As it fell he reached for it, forgetting himself for a moment, and he tumbled to the ground. He landed at the base of the statue of the peacemaker of Mount Olympus, out cold. Even when Wonder Woman retrieved her javelin to puncture the shoulder of the flying insurgent, she would not notice Mr. Terrific behind Hestia’s pedestal. He would lie there, unconscious and unnoticed, for the remainder of his life.

  Everywhere, the conflict grew. Emotion gave way to action. I had seen this before, all of it. There were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings, and an earthquake. It was my own fever dream no longer. It unfolded here.

  *

  Through the flashing images of his haze-encumbered fight with the World’s Mightiest Mortal, and the dreamy unconscious flashbacks from his own colorful past, Superman could only wonder how it had come to this. I shared the terror. Whatever Solomonic wisdom once suffused the mind of his adversary lay dissolved or befogged by the artifice of the megalomaniac Lex Luthor. The Captain, who had once been among Superman’s most valued allies, was now an agent of chaos. This was the one warrior who could counter Superman’s every move.

  Superman held the power to contain this battle and, because of his hesitation, had fumbled it. Now he believed he could stop it all were it not for the obstruction before him repeatedly coaxing magic down over his head. About this, Superman was right.

  Superman believed as well that he was the only one who held power sufficient to avert the gathering war. About this, he was wrong.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Security Council

  At the New United Nations fortress, in a conference room on the fourth floor of the Secretariat Building, the Secretary-General dismissed his senior staff and asked his assistant to send in the ranking representatives of the Security Council states. Secretary-General Wyrmwood’s advisors left through a hallway door as the Council delegates came in from the outer office. Only young Chief Jean-Paul Kasavubu of the Congo River Federation was fleet enough on his feet to make it in the room in time to see any of the staff leave.

  “Apparently the news is bad,” the young Chief said in his Chestnut Hill Boston accent to the Secretary-General as the far door shut and his colleagues filed in behind him. Then he repeated to the nine other Council delegates in general, “The news is bad.”

  “There’s no news yet,” Wyrmwood snapped, “not until this Council makes its decision.”

  “I saw the look on your military attaché’s face as he ducked out,” the young Chief from Brazzaville and Brandeis University insisted to the rest of the Security Council. “He was as white as I’m black.”

  “Don’t infer,” Wyrmwood insisted.

  “Cut the crap, Leonard,” the British ambassador Lord Wainwright told Wyrmwood through wattles of flesh, as with great pain he lowered himself into a seat at the conference table.

  Now the youngest and the eldest of the Security Council delegates had weighed in with their first impressions. Wyrmwood was a good politician who recognized consensus when he saw it. He would feed them no crap today.

  “There’s a rumble in the Gulag,” Wyrmwood said. “The walls are breached. It’s going on now.”

  “Oh mon Dieu,” Consul-General Diefenbaker, the French delegate, said.

  Chief Kasavubu sat back in his seat, chastened.

  “When? How long?” U Chua, the no-nonsense retired Prime Minister of Myanmar who now served as his country’s United Nations ambassador, wanted to know.

  “Minutes ago, as far as we can tell,” Wyrmwood said. “We intercepted an emergency flight path clearance from Gotham that could only have been Bruce Wayne. The seismic data began a minute or two before that.”

  “What was the flight signature?” Ambassador Yevgeny Posner, the former cosmonaut from Kiev, wanted to know.

  “Unknown. Faster than anything we’ve got. Or than we’re able to track, for that matter. Practically instantaneous. The only way we know it moved was that the same signature appeared both over Gotham and above the Gulag.”

  “A prototype from Wayne’s flight shop, no doubt,” said Shanna but Yitzchak, who had been chief of the Israeli Mossad before coming here. “If it is a plane at all.”

  “Do your people know anything about it, Shanna?” young Kasavubu wanted to know.

  “Heavens, no,” the Israeli protested. “When we get a mole into the Batcave, we’ll send out a news release.”

  There might have been a few smiles or chuckles, but they seemed out of place.

  “Is this ‘rumble’ expanding, Leonard?” the Chief asked.

  “We have no data on that,” the Secretary-General said, “but we can only assume it is. Simulation models suggest that such a conflagration could cross state lines in less time than this meeting has already taken.”

  “What has the President said?” the Englishman wanted to know.

  “I haven’t said anything yet,” came the voice of Jennifer Capper. The sound from the small speaker built into the center of the conference table surprised everyone other than Wyrmwood. “But I plan to say lots.”

  “Madame President.” Lord Wainwright began trying to gather himself to his feet, but he was the only one who did, and Wyrmwood motioned for him to settle himself.

  “Morning, ladies and gentlemen,” the President said, and most of them answered politely.

  “Do you have any further information, Madame President?” Diefenbaker of France asked.

  “No, Monsieur le General,” the voice from two hundred miles away answered, “just options. I’m loaded with options.”

  “Options,” Ambassador Jiang Jiang of China asked, “such as?”

  “We’ve run every endgame scenario that the Pentagon’s substantial data projection systems can generate,” Jennifer Capper said over the secure line. “They’ve run over ten thousand variations in the past few minutes, and I’ve told them to rerun all of them as data continues to come in, but the end result is always the same: destruction of the biosphere. The only variation is that of time. Without direct intervention on our part, our analysis gives us maybe hours, at best a month or two. My latest report shows that only eight possible scenarios out of—what is it here?—eleven thousand four hundred fifty-seven variations gives the human race as much as a year to survive after this day.”

  She paused. Every delegate around the table knew that these contemplative moments were expensive.

  “We all have seen their rumbles in the cities.” Jiang, to everyone’s surprise, was the impatient one who broke the calculated silence. “We do not need empirical projections to know that
this is not a conflagration that is destined to die out of its own weight. This is wildfire. You have a proposal, Madame President?”

  “Well, to start with,” she said from her office in Washington, “we must seriously consider launching Abraham, Martin, and John.” Again, the costly silence.

  Then Jean-Paul Kasavubu leaned to the right and whispered to Posner, “Abraham, Martin, and John?”

  “Operation Holy Martyrs,” the former cosmonaut answered.

  The Frenchman crossed himself. The others reacted similarly, each after his or her own fashion.

  *

  “Hold it right here,” I told the Spectre.

  Suddenly the Secretary-General and the delegates of the Security Council froze in whatever awkward positions they occupied at the moment. Dust stopped flowing through the air. Light in fixed shoots of photons hovered like long fingers lancing through the windows and from the lamp behind Wyrmwood. Limp objects like electrical wires and the delegates’ clothing seemed fixed in place like papier-mâché. “Why did you do that?”

  “It appeared to be an order,” the Spectre said. “Time continues as it ever did, but our own rates of consideration have become relatively faster.” This must have been how Flash viewed eternity, in a series of little disasters about to happen. I realized for the first time what a lonely hopeless time he must be having, as he watched distant Armageddon creeping inexorably closer with the expanse of every moment. “What are you, the genie in the lamp?” I demanded.

  “I have far more power than that, and far less opportunity for initiative.”

  “Are they talking about some sort of preemptive strike?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you take orders from me now?”

  “When it is consistent with my mission.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You guide my path, Norman McCay.”

  “I what?”

  “Your human sensibilities provide the metaphorical signposts of my course. You are humanity’s witness. I need you, or I will fail.”