by Pratt, Tim
“Sure.” I hung up. I didn't have to pack a bag; I already had one ready, a change of clothes, travel-sized toiletries. Old habits die hard.
Walking to the car, an anonymous government sedan, I thought, “I'm like Orestes, trapped by cruel fate.” I had to smile at that. Such melodrama. Even if I had to play the part of secret agent again, I didn't have to ham it up.
Several hours and a plane trip later, I found myself back in the Facility. You never get away, I thought.
“What did you do to your finger?” Brady asked, bushy eyebrows raised over his boyish face. He motioned me into the elevator. “Nice face, by the way. Very Greek."
I grunted and stared at the elevator doors, listening to the Facility hum around me as we descended. Brady didn't speak again, didn't try to draw me out, and I finally asked the question that had been plaguing me. “Is this about Kelli? Has she done something else?"
“Yep. Makes the rainy day affair look like tea time, too."
I had a hard time believing that. Kelli, with the help of the mad Dr. Nefarious, had wreaked havoc with the world's weather the year before, until I stopped them. We'd captured Dr. Nefarious, but Kelli, the mastermind, had escaped. What could be worse than endless rain drowning the world?
The doors opened and Brady led me down a long white corridor. “Is that why you said I'd like this?” I asked. “Because Kelli is involved? You think I want another chance at her?"
Brady shook his head. “No. I know you aren't the vengeful type. There's another reason you'll like it.” Brady stopped at a reinforced door. He touched a palm reader, pressed his eyes to a retinal scanner, spoke his name loudly, and punched a long string of numbers into the keypad. I watched with interest and apprehension. Extreme security measures, even for the Facility, which meant—
The door slid open, revealing another corridor. Floor, walls, and ceiling were all the color of used motor oil, and cameras bristled every couple of feet. “Welcome to the Black Wing, Li."
I didn't step inside. “I heard you've got Bludgeon Man locked up in here. And Junior Atwater's brain, in a jar."
“Yeah, I've heard those, too,” Brady said. “People believe any damn thing, don't they? Now come on. If this door stays open too long, alarms go crazy, and we'll be neck-deep in very tense guards."
I stepped over the threshold. The Black Wing was like the inside of a tumor. No wonder mental institutions favor soothing colors to pacify the patients. These walls had the opposite effect; they could drive a sane person mad. The Black Wing surely held a few mental patients, the ones with extraordinary powers. The ones who could enforce their delusions on the world, if they got free.
“Is Kelli here?” I asked as the door slid shut.
“No, but we've got a room all picked out for her. She's been here recently, though. She broke someone out.” Brady smiled at my shocked expression. “That's top secret, you understand.” He pressed a finger to his lips.
“That's impossible!"
“Yeah, we thought so, too, until she did it. She had inside help, of course, and it couldn't happen again, but once was enough.” He led me around a corner, to a black golf cart. Brady got behind the wheel and I sat beside him. The cameras turned and followed our progress like the heads of watchful jackals. We drove past blank metal doors set at regular intervals.
“How many inmates are there?” I asked. I'd served with the Facility as a field agent for years, but I'd never seen the Black Wing. Metamorphs are masters of disguise, born impostors, and our usual assignments don't require access to the holding-cells for super-powered criminals.
“Way too many and not nearly enough,” Brady said. We turned a corner, and I finally saw something that broke the monotonous black. One of the cell doors, bent and twisted, leaned against the wall across from a gaping doorway.
I whistled. “How did that happen? I don't see any marks from explosives."
Brady stopped the cart. “Carl Spandau, one of our guards, a Strongman with a titanium-alloy skeleton. We spent a lot of money giving him a set of bones that could support the strain his power put on his body. Then he betrayed us. We found him with his arms broken from tearing off the door, crying, but not from the pain. He'd disabled the teleport-dampeners, the quantum-entanglement disrupters, all the failsafes. Stuff he shouldn't have known about, codes he'd spent months ferreting out. Kelli bounced in, snatched up our prisoner, and teleported away—without Spandau. That's why he was crying. He said he loved her, and refused to believe she'd just been using him."
I nodded solemnly. Kelli could make you believe anything. I didn't ask what happened to Spandau. I know how the Facility deals with traitors.
“Who'd she break out?” I asked, not irritated at Brady's vagueness, simply needing to know so I could do my job. Seeing the Black Wing breached, hearing about poor stupid traitorous Carl Spandau's arms, had changed my resentful resignation to acceptance. I'd do what I had to.
“Josef Mengele got away,” Brady said.
I stared at him, as uncomprehending as if he'd said Rasputin had escaped, or Vlad Tepes. “Mengele? The Angel of Death, the mad doctor of Auschwitz? But he's dead, they found his skeleton in ‘85, it was all over the papers!"
“People believe any damn thing,” Brady said quietly. “We've had him for years. He's almost 90 now, frail but physically healthy, considering."
“Why?” I demanded. “He should have been tried at Nuremburg! He was the worst of the war criminals, so cold, and the experiments—” I broke off, staring at Brady.
Brady looked away. “Yes. The experiments. Mengele studied the limits of special powers, did things no ethical scientist could, but the knowledge...” He shrugged. “We needed it."
I nodded, disgusted. The Facility depended on people like me and Spandau, Metamorphs and Strongmen, as well as mind-readers, Pyrokinetics, Teleporters, Invisibles, all the extraordinary ones, and Mengele had studied our kind, dissected us, tested us to destruction. The Nazis, fascinated with the concept of supermen, had a special interest in such individuals. Just like the Facility did. “You want me to bring Mengele back."
“In a nutshell."
“But why me? What, I disguise myself as the Fuhrer, say ‘I didn't die in that bunker, Josef, come with me?’ Why do you need a Metamorph?"
“We need you to impersonate someone, of course.” Then, sounding doubtful for the first time: “That's the part you'll like.” Brady drove past the torn door. “I want you to meet somebody."
“Who else do you have in here? Stalin? Genghis Khan? Colonel Kurtz?"
“You don't want to know,” Brady said.
Even without the familiar costume, I recognized him immediately. Hearing about Mengele had stunned me. Seeing this man, here, left me literally incapable of speech.
The Captain looked just as he had in the old pictures and newsreel footage from World War II. He should have been at least 75, but he looked no older than 30. He doesn't age, I thought, chilled and awed at the same time. No one had ever known the full extent of Captain Fantasy's reality-altering powers. In the war, he and his sidekick Spaceboy had routed the Germans time and again, though Baron Von Blitz managed to kill Spaceboy near the end of the war, and they said the Captain was never the same after that.
Captain Fantasy sat behind a white table. He was a massive red-haired man dressed in green clothes that resembled intern's scrubs. A red and blue plastic top spun before him on the table. He stared at the toy intently, his teeth clenched in concentration.
“Oh Captain, my Captain,” Doolittle said.
The Captain looked up, and I glimpsed his bewildered expression, quickly replaced by a broad smile. “Why, you must be a doctor.” The top fell over.
I looked at Brady, unease crawling like a worm in my stomach. In his jeans and black t-shirt, Brady looked nothing like a doctor.
The Captain lowered his voice. “Was it a mortar, doc? From Baron Von Blitz's artillery?” He tapped the side of his head. “I heard Spaceboy yell, and then, poof! Everything bla
ck. I must have taken one right to the head, huh?"
Brady didn't say anything, just stood with his arms crossed. I looked at Captain Fantasy, my childhood hero, and my throat closed up. Spaceboy had been dead for forty years. I remembered watching Captain Fantasy deliver the eulogy on television. That was before my time, of course, but even in the ‘60s, when I grew up, Captain Fantasy was a celebrity, with films and books, cartoons and lunchboxes, all chronicling his wartime glories.
When Brady didn't answer, the Captain's grin faltered, and that disturbing look of naked confusion returned.
Doolittle turned on his heel and left the room. With a last look at the Captain, I hurried after him.
“Is it amnesia?” I asked when Brady closed the door. But that didn't seem right. The Captain remembered Spaceboy and Baron Von Blitz, and I didn't doubt that he remembered Goebbels and the Hitlerbot and Mengele's homonculi ... just nothing after the battle when Spaceboy died. I narrowed my eyes. “Or did the Facility do this to him?"
“No, it wasn't us,” Brady said. “Demonstrations work better than explanations. Come on.” He went back into the Captain's room.
Feeling like an extra in a Chaplin film, or a Keystone Kop running in circles, I followed him.
The Captain still sat, his top spinning. He looked up, smiling. “Hey there! You must be a doctor!"
I gasped. The scene was too strange, too eerily similar to the first time we'd come in. Like someone had hit a great “Reset” button and started the whole encounter over.
The Captain looked at me. “Is Spaceboy all right? The Baron really got the drop on us, huh?” He ran a huge hand through his hair.
“Have you ever seen us before?” Doolittle asked.
The Captain laughed, a scattered sound. “Oh, I meet lots of people, you know, I've never been good with faces."
“Have you seen anyone else in the last few minutes?"
The Captain shook his head. “No, sir. I've been sitting right here since I woke up."
“Just take it easy, Captain. We'll bring you some food and fill you in on things."
“But Spaceboy, is he all right?"
“Oh, yes. He's fine."
I stared at Doolittle. Was he being cruel, or kind? And what had happened to Captain Fantasy?
Doolittle motioned me back into the black hallway. “Karsakov's syndrome,” he said. “A rare neurological disorder. It's a nasty form of amnesia. Basically destroys the brain's ability to hold short-term memories. Long-term memory is unaffected, so he knows who he is and remembers his life, but he can't hold onto new memories for more than a few minutes. He lives in a perpetual present. He's met me dozens of times, but he can't remember. He doesn't even know anything's wrong, or if he does suspect that something's amiss, he doesn't know what."
I nodded, trying to process the information. It was like being a child and learning my parents were mortal, that they could make mistakes—a blow to my whole worldview. I'd always thought of Captain Fantasy as, well, invincible. “Why doesn't he remember anything after that last battle?"
Doolittle shrugged. “Sometimes Karsakov's is retrograde, and destroys a portion of the long-term memory, too. The Captain's memories stop in 1945."
“What causes it?"
“I'm no doctor ... bad brains, I guess. I understand that if you're predisposed anyway, heavy drinking can lead to the onset of Karsakov's. You probably didn't know, they kept it out of the media, but the Captain went downhill after the war, and drinking was only part of it. He wanted to come out of retirement and help with the China problem back in ‘55, but then all that mess with Bludgeon Man and the Atwater Coup happened ... then, in ‘75, we got word that Captain Fantasy had shown up at a pub in New York, dressed in full costume, demanding to know where Spaceboy was. The Facility picked him up, and he's been here ever since."
I sat on the golf cart. “This is a lot to absorb. He even looks the same."
“He doesn't think he's any older, so he isn't. We think that's why he's invincible, too. Most kids think they're invulnerable, they take stupid risks and get hurt. But the Captain never got hurt, because while he believed himself invincible, he was. He grew up that way, and never had a reason to believe differently. I guess he just never worried about his mental health ... or, hell, maybe his power has a negative effect on his brain chemistry. Who knows?"
“This is sad,” I said at last. “But what does it have to do with Kelli, and the rest of it? The Captain could help us with Mengele, I guess, if he were healthy..."
“This is the part you'll really like,” Brady said. “You're going to impersonate Spaceboy, and, with the Captain's help, apprehend Kelli and Mengele."
I put my head in my hands. “You'd better explain how that's going to work."
“All in good time. First, let's get you to wardrobe."
Silver tights. Silver boots, even the laces. A silver shirt with long sleeves, accordioned at the elbows. Silver gloves, fortunately, to cover my damaged forefinger. A silver domino mask. Spaceboy's famous skintight costume, tailored perfectly to fit me.
I looked in the mirror and watched my facial muscles bunch, move, and tighten. Occidental eyes. A rounder chin. Snub nose. That rosebud, almost girlish mouth. I leached the pigment from my face, changing the Greek cast I'd affected for my part as Orestes. I compared my face in the mirror to a small photograph and nodded, satisfied. “I've got the face right, and the hair's okay, but I'm three or four inches too tall. There's nothing I can do about that."
“Close enough for jazz,” Doolittle said. “The Captain is desperate to see something familiar, to find his bearings. We could wrap you in aluminum foil and he'd believe you were Spaceboy."
I plucked at the seat of the silver costume. “Foil wouldn't be so tight."
“If the Captain had a girl sidekick, she couldn't have gotten away with wearing something like that,” Doolittle agreed. “Your costume's better than Spaceboy's original. Bulletproof, shock absorbent, and made of smartcloth, with its own musculature.” Brady grinned. He looked like a wolf at a lamb-shearing. “To help you do the somersaults and shit."
I groaned. I'd kept in shape, but Spaceboy's famed speed and acrobatics were beyond me. Spaceboy had trained as a teenage gymnast, and during his three years with Captain Fantasy, he'd pushed his flexibility to the limit. “So we tell the captain that Mengele's hiding out, and we have to bring him to justice. Then we ride out in the Fantasy-copter and apprehend the villainous et cetera."
“You should write briefings,” Brady said. “You're so good at abstracting the essentials from a plan.” He led me out of wardrobe to the elevator.
“But he forgets everything after five minutes,” I protested. “How is he supposed to remember the mission?"
Brady turned a key in the elevator and punched the buttons that would take us to the Black Wing. “In some cases of Karsakov's, surrounding the victim with familiar things provides a sense of continuity. In one case, a patient was driven to his old neighborhood. He perked right up, wanted to know how they'd put up a supermarket overnight, but otherwise he thought things were fine. They took him to his old house, and he sat in his favorite chair, tapped his barometer, read a book. He wondered why his wife had changed the drapes, but he didn't notice that his wife had aged five years.” Brady looked at me pointedly.
“Close enough for jazz,” I murmured. “So seeing me, and riding in a replica of the Fantasy-copter, you think that'll keep him in the present?"
“He'll still believe it's 1945, but that's okay. He's willing to fool himself a lot."
The elevator stopped. As we stepped into the hallway, I asked “What happened to that guy you were telling me about when he had to leave his house?"
“They took him back to the hospital. He cried and screamed, asked his wife why she'd brought him to such a place, why she was leaving him."
“God,” I said, chilled by the image.
“Pretty awful. But ten minutes later he'd forgotten all about it.” We entered the Black Wing and
returned to the golf cart.
“Where do we begin?” I asked, sitting down.
Doolittle handled me an envelope. I wasn't surprised to find it addressed to me. The Facility had intercepted my mail. I opened it and removed the little card inside, decorated with balloons and party hats. “Come to My Party!” it read, in festive blue and red letters. Inside, it read “Join the Secret Masters in celebration of Kelli's birthday!” Under “Time” it read “As Convenient.” Under “Place” it gave a set of coordinates.
“In the Atlantic Ocean,” Brady said.
“Is she on a boat?"
“Not that our satellites can see. But we figure it's not a wild goose chase."
“Kelli likes to play games, but not that kind,” I said. “What's this ‘Secret Masters’ stuff?"
“Well ... It's just speculation, but a lot of high-powered fugitives and crazies have been inactive, dropping out of sight lately. Thunderhead, Brainchild, The Teacher, Broadside, Svengali Briggs ... no activity for months. We think Kelli's gathering the bad guys together. The old Legion of Supervillians gag, you know?"
I nodded. “Seems like her style. Into the viper pit, huh?"
“At least you'll have the greatest hero in history at your side."
“I'd rather have a crack Facility squad."
“They'll be nearby. If things get out of hand, they'll try to contain the situation."
“Why take the Captain at all? I mean, if he had full possession of his faculties—"
Brady handed me another envelope. “Because she invited him, too. And Kelli's promised to do some nasty things if he doesn't show up. As a demonstration, she bombed Easter Island. Wiped it out, and we didn't even see how she deployed the weapon, though fortunately it seems to be a clean bomb. Some toy Dr. Nefarious made for her, probably, during the rainy day affair. She said Christmas island would go next, then a little town called Thanksgiving, Pennsylvania.” He tapped the Captain's invitation. “In keeping with her holiday theme."
“That's crazy,” I said. “What does she want with Captain Fantasy?"
“What does she want with Mengele? He's almost totally senile. Why does she do anything? Crazy's right."
