Marvel Novel Series 09 - The Marvel Superheroes

by Len Wein

  She made a sputtering noise.

  “Don’t ask questions, Carole, just tell me.”

  “About five after, but—”

  “Exactly. I want it exactly,” he said. He was almost whispering.

  “Nine six, exactly,” she said impatiently. “Please, Matt! You’ve got to come with me—”

  “You’re sure that’s right?” he said.

  “Positive! Matt, for God’s sake!” She grabbed his arm. Even through his jacket, he could feel the coldness of her hand.

  “Now tell me,” he said, nodding toward the wall clock, “what time do you see?” But he already knew the answer. The silhouette images of the clock’s hands were in the position of 9:04. The clock was old, a Nelson family heirloom. Foggy wound it once a day. Just once, as compulsively as he did everything else. And each day, between one winding and the next, the clock lost one minute of time. Not more than one minute, not less, as if being Foggy’s clock had somehow made it compulsive, too.

  The clock was two minutes slow.

  Someone had tampered with the clock, and in resetting it he had been off by just one minute.

  Matt smiled ruefully. It was not something a blind man would notice—not immediately.

  Carole had stepped around in front of him. He could hear her heart pounding wildly.

  “Matt,” she said, her voice teetering on the edge of hysteria, “I have got . . . to talk . . . to you.”

  “So talk.”

  He started to reach out to the clock.

  “No, not here—” She must have seen his hand. She screamed at him. “Don’t touch that!”

  It was as if she had slapped him. Suddenly, it was all clear. How tired, how pain-wracked could he have been not to make the connection? He would have had to be . . .

  Blind.

  He rounded on her, shaking with fury. “You! It was you!” He was screaming at her. From a foot away, he thought he could feel the change in temperature as the blood drained from her face. “You work for Doyle!”

  Last night, in the helicopter, Burgess had spoken of “a man inside.” But that could just have been Burgess’ assumption. It didn’t have to be a man.

  He grabbed her arms roughly and began to shake her.

  “There’s a bomb in that clock, isn’t there? You came in here, you cased this place, you gave them what they needed—”

  “You knew?” She was hysterical now. “How could you know? You couldn’t—”

  “Never mind what I knew! I can’t believe this! You came in here with some crazy-assed story about being a widow, you made me fall in love with you, just to set up my partner? It’s insane!”

  “I came back, didn’t I? What do you think I came here for? I didn’t want it to happen, not to you.” She had shaken free of his grasp. He sensed her slump to the carpet, her face in her hands. “My husband, the will, that was all real. But I worked for Doyle . . . long time ago, and I couldn’t get out from under.”

  He could feel her gaze on his face. He knew she was looking into his glasses, forgetting he was blind, and reading meaning in the expressionless stare she saw there.

  “Matt, dear God, Matt, don’t. You don’t know what it was like. You don’t know what he knew, what he had on me. You don’t know what he could do to me, you can’t possibly know.

  “But I never lied to you. Not to you, Matt.” Her voice broke down into ragged sobs. Her words became unintelligible, even to him.

  He turned his back on her and picked up the telephone.

  When he finished with his calls, she had calmed somewhat. As if to prove she would never lie to him, she confirmed what he already suspected. Every day she had been there for an appointment with Foggy; she had come primarily to observe. Her appointments were always in the morning, and sometimes she would be there early enough to help Miss Meyerson with the coffee. She had had ample opportunity to observe Foggy’s morning ritual at close range.

  One morning, when Foggy had gone out to the reception area to take Miss Meyerson to task for some indecipherable message she had left, Carole had crossed around to the middle desk drawer and made wax impressions of two keys she found there: one of them wound the clock and the other opened the clock face, to reveal the delicate inner mechanism. She had not been able to find a key to the office itself.

  Foggy was to have arrived at 9:15, begun winding the clock, and detonated a charge that would have been sufficient to reduce both his office and the reception area to smoking rubble.

  Foggy arrived at 9:15 to find a tense Matt Murdock waiting for him in his office and a tearful Carole Lehrman sitting on his couch. Matt explained as best he could while they waited for the bomb squad and the arresting officer to arrive. If Foggy noticed any blood on Matt’s shirt, he didn’t mention it.

  They were alone, the three of them, for almost fifteen minutes. Last night, Foggy had gone home refreshed, called Miss Meyerson at home, and fired her.

  At 9:30, Foggy went into the largest room and met the seemingly unending stream of secretaries, paralegals, and 3-L’s as they arrived to tell them the office would be closed for the day. He was in there a long time, longer than he needed to be.

  Alone with Carole, Matt found the strength to sit beside her. He took her hand in his. It was limp.

  “I can refer you to someone who can give you a good defense,” he said.

  “I want you,” she said.

  “No you don’t. You’re not a complete fool, Carole. If you really wanted me, I finally would have a fool for a client.” He couldn’t tell how she reacted. “And if I took your case, you’d have a fool for a lawyer.” He wanted to hurt her with this play on her own words.

  “I never meant it to turn out like this,” she said. “I loved you, Matt, in spite of myself. I wanted to love you. I wanted to take care of you.”

  He stiffened. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?”

  “And what’s wrong with it?” she said. “It comes out of love, isn’t that enough?”

  He shook his head.

  “I have to go,” he said, and as he stood up he knew it was truer than he realized. He needed to collapse, he would collapse. But most of all he wanted to lock a door behind himself somewhere and stay there for a very long time. Instead, he must invent an explanation for why a blind lawyer would have a dislocated shoulder, pulled ligaments in both legs, and four deep puncture wounds under his left rib cage. A hospital would want to know how this happened.

  He had his hand on the doorknob when she ran to him. They embraced. He reached for her face, and this time she did not turn away. She let his fingertips trace the contours of her face.

  They reminded him of Karen’s.

  THE

  X-MEN

  CHILDREN OF THE ATOM

  by MARY JO DUFFY

  Inside the bunker, it was almost completely silent. The only sounds were the soft whir of monitoring devices, the blips and pings of radar and sonar, and the low-voiced murmurs of the men and women operating the equipment. The tension among them all was noticeable; not that there was any real reason to be nervous, of course. General Waverly knew that better than anyone. This morning’s missile test was completely safe, absolutely routine. But that didn’t change what the people around him were obviously feeling. Ah, well, the general supposed philosophically, people would always react like that to atomic weapons, as long as the specter of the thousands who’d died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki still haunted human memory.

  But, despite his presence, this morning’s test was not military in nature. It was a practice test, being performed with the knowledge and cooperation of the Russians and the Chinese, each of whom was even now preparing to launch similar missiles from different locales. Their purpose was to test out new systems for the guidance, or if necessary, abortion of nuclear weapons in case of sabotage. That is why what happened next was clearly impossible.

  The general glanced at his watch impatiently. The missile had been in flight about thirty seconds, arcing up and over the desert wast
es, before he noticed the first signs of trouble. Not with the missile itself. He couldn’t see anything amiss there; nothing was visible through the highly shielded glass, of the bunker’s window, and the blips and signals on the various pieces of monitoring equipment meant nothing to him. What did mean something was the first sign of genuine anxiety among the men and women reading those monitors—the looks they were exchanging.

  “What is it?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”

  At first none of them answered him, more intent than ever on their equipment. Then one technician, whose name tag read “Benson” shifted uneasily in his chair. “It may be nothing, sir.”

  “What may be nothing?”

  “The missile, sir, it’s . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well, sir, it seems to be veering slightly off its course; nothing to worry about yet. I don’t know if it’s a malfunction, or if the calibrations were slightly off.”

  “You don’t know? Now listen, soldier . . .” (In the heat of the moment, Waverly had forgotten that Benson was a civilian, and not under his command.) “A minute change in direction at this end could put that bird miles off its course before it lands. Do you want to see it end up in a populated area? Use your radio controls now, before it’s too late. Override the missile’s programming and guide it down from here.”

  “I’m already trying that, sir,” another technician told him unhappily. “I don’t understand this. All of our equipment indicates that the missile is still functioning perfectly. It doesn’t . . . it doesn’t seem to want to respond.”

  “Jesus, God!” Benson interrupted devoutly. Waverly turned toward the radar monitor. Now even his untrained eye could follow the change in course as the “blip” that represented the missile curved across the screen. “We have no other choice. We’ll have to destroy it.” Benson slipped open the box marked “abort,” and punched the button inside it.

  Nothing happened.

  Close to panic, Waverly shoved Benson aside and punched the button himself, several times.

  “It’s as if it had a mind of its own,” the second technician repeated quietly. “All systems still read green. It just doesn’t want to respond.”

  “It’s going down,” someone else added.

  Now all was silent in the bunker, everyone watching the monitors as the missile turned groundward, toward its own destruction.

  The nuclear pyre it set off on landing was spectacular, visible for miles, but miraculously, no one was there to see it, or be consumed by it. The bird had come down into empty desert, twenty miles from its intended target.

  And the world could only wonder why.

  • • •

  Salem Center, New York, was a fairly typical town in Westchester County, quiet and clean and rather small, little more than a dropping-in spot for the residents of the area, most of whom came from nearby colleges or from one of the large, peaceful estates that dotted the countryside. That was what Westchester was famous for, of course. Its pastoral “quietude,” and the number of small schools and large green estates scattered throughout.

  A few miles outside of Salem Center was a large tract of property that doubled as a private college, Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, if one read the school charter, and an estate, home of Professor Charles Xavier.

  The estate was much like all the others in that area, spacious, with extensive lawns, trees, and rolling hills. Xavier’s home, the only structure on the property, was a large white mansion, with tall pillars in the front and gardens in the back. The home was set far back from the main road, accessible only by a narrow, winding driveway and almost hidden by trees and shrubs, so that few of Xavier’s neighbors had ever seen it. And none of them had any idea what its façade might conceal. In fact, such was the air of mystery surrounding the place that few people ever knew that it was a school. Those who lived there seldom came into Salem Center, and the neighbors hardly ever saw any of them, but there were rumors that the number and identities of the other people in the house changed from time to time. It didn’t really matter. In Westchester, and in Salem Center in particular, people minded their own business. They knew Professor Xavier, and they knew he owned the house, and that was enough.

  Xavier was a good neighbor. He kept up his property very nicely, and was kind and courteous when he came into contact with other people (which seemed to be only when he couldn’t avoid it). He was confined to a wheelchair, poor man; had been for as long as any of the townspeople could remember, although no one had ever heard him complain about his disability. He was in his late thirties, quite handsome too, despite the fact that he was bald. Somehow, his lack of hair served only to emphasize his fine features, and make him seem even more like a professor.

  Of course, his attitude helped his academic image somewhat. Although Xavier was always polite to people, he seemed to be slightly disinterested in them. He was aloof, cool, and controlled, as if he constantly drew upon some core of inner strength. There was something uncanny about him, too, that people could feel while they talked to him, as if he could see the truth behind what people were saying—as if he could read their minds.

  What none of Charles Xavier’s terribly nice, terribly friendly neighbors realized was that he really could read their minds.

  It amused him, occasionally, when he ran into people, to scan their thoughts and realize how close these fancies of theirs, quickly discarded as outlandish, sometimes came to the truth. It was easier for people to attribute anything eerie they might notice about the professor to bitterness over his disability, to his high intelligence, even to his baldness, than to accept that they might, in fact, be dealing with a man of extremely strong telepathic abilities. If any of them ever began seriously to consider Xavier’s oddness, then he very subtly planted in their minds the idea that they were right in the first place, and that any guesses they might make about the professor or his students were mere foolishness.

  Xavier’s superhuman mental abilities were not something he had acquired; they had been born within him, the result of a minute alteration in the structure of his genetic material. The cause of this change was unknown, but it made him different from either of his parents, from any of his ancestors, indeed from the rest of the human race. Charles Xavier had risen above the category of Homo sapiens to be classed with the new group: Homo superior, that small, but growing minority whose very name struck fear into the hearts of the public. He and all of his students were mutants.

  It was Xavier’s realization that he was a mutant, and that he could help his fellow mutants to cope with their own special abilities and with humanity’s unreasoning fear and hatred of those who were different, that had led him to found this school. He called the young people he trained there “X-Men,” not only for “Xavier’s Men,” but also for “Men with eXtra Power.”

  In the beginning, it had been difficult for Xavier to find students. He read the papers and watched for news of young people who seemed to have unusual abilities, particularly in areas where nuclear power had been in use. Radiation has always been a primary cause of genetic mutation, and instances of mutation had been on the increase since the discovery of atomic weapons. But even after Xavier found a mutant, his fight was only half over. Some young mutants didn’t realize what they were, didn’t want to admit that they were different, even to themselves, and became angry when Xavier approached them, unwilling to change their peaceful lives on the word of this crippled stranger.

  The lot of the other group was even more unhappy. These were the mutants who’d revealed their powers to those around them, and had been hounded for it, pursued and frightened until they were afraid to trust anybody.

  That was the one thing common to every mutant. Happy or unhappy, until they met Charles Xavier, each one thought he or she was alone.

  The knowledge that they were not alone, that there were, in fact, others like them, and the sense of responsibility that he tried to instill in them, toward each other and toward the whole human race, were Cha
rles Xavier’s greatest gifts to his students. The training he gave them, in working with each other as members of a team, and in the perfecting of their own unique abilities, was what helped them to meet that responsibility whenever the need arose.

  The current group of X-Men were not Xavier’s first students. There’d been other young mutants in the past. These included the failures, the ones who died using their abilities or who went wrong somehow, became evil, striking out in greed and bitterness, making Homo sapiens pay for making the mutants’ lot that of outcasts. There were also the graduates, those students who’d completed their training and left the confines of the Westchester School. When that day came, they went out into the world to stand as heroes, protecting mankind from natural disasters, or its own acts of folly, or threats posed by other mutants. Humanity, of course, seldom knew of or appreciated, their vigilance, but Xavier never thought of these students or of all he’d done to help them without a glow of pride.

  And yet, he was as proud of his present X-Men as he’d been of any of those in the past. Never had a team shown such tremendous power and potential. Never had the membership been as diverse. These were the first X-Men who were truly capable of protecting the world, because they were its citizens, international in their origins and allegiances.

  Cerebro was the breakthrough that enabled Xavier to bring such a group together. Cerebro was his greatest achievement. Gone now were the days of painstaking trial and error, reading the papers, hoping he’d correctly guessed the identity of a new mutant. Gone now the heartache of finding he’d arrived too late to help a fellow mutant, because he hadn’t heard of him or her in time. After years of study and work, he had developed a computer so sophisticated that it could detect the output of the type of energy unique to the use of mutant power and pinpoint its location anywhere on the globe.

  With Cerebro, he was able to find new mutants, wherever they were, and reach them as soon as the first signs of their powers manifested themselves, usually during the critical period of early adolescence.