Minister Faust

by From the Notebooks of Dr Brain (v4. 0) (html)

  So unless you too want to devolve emotionally to the deranged, desperate, degraded depths of a Gil Gamoid, an N-Kid, or an X-Man during their final days, you need to make peace with your finitude.

  Visualization and trance-work can help. Try picturing yourself as a single grain of sand inside an hourglass. You are not the first grain of sand through the spout, nor the last, but the middlest. But once the hour is up and all the sand has fallen, the hourglass is smashed to pieces and left on the floor, and no one will ever clean it up. When you can trance-contemplate that image for an hour without sobbing, you’ll know you’ve successfully suffocated the influence of self-grandiosity and that you’re well on the journey toward psychemotionally integrative recovery.

  Unfortunately, as I was about to discover, my F*O*O*Jsters, especially the X-Man, were going to eschew integration in favor of paranoia…which ultimately led to a terrifying tragedy for everyone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Who Are You, Really? Secret Origins and Secret Shames

  TUESDAY, JULY 4, 3:59 P.M.

  Fallout

  Goddamned coach-class StarCase™ Corporation!” growled Mr. Piltdown while piloting us back to Earth.

  “If man were meant to conquer space inside a goddamned dumbwaiter he’d’ve been born looking like a room service tray and laundry! If not for me, all you ninnies would be vacuum-roasted and gut-burst right now, you hear me?”

  By that point, the tenth minute into our rescue, Mr. Piltdown had already explained to everyone several times the mortal debt owed to him for having a Squirrel Shuttle standing by on remote, and how the Space Elevator was not a dependable means of transit, whereas Pilt-Dyne Scramjet-Rockets held the proprietary “future of mankind” in their Pulsar-class engines.

  But our brush with asteroidal immolation wasn’t my focus. I was worried about Kareem, who was sputtering in zero gravity through the labyrinthine warps of his conspiratorial delusion, raving that Menton had orchestrated everything from the “assassination” of Hawk King to the destruction of Asteroid Zed itself.

  “What,” said André, “and get his own ass smoked?”

  “Menton,” snapped Kareem, “wasn’t even on Asteroid Zed!”

  Syndi exploded with the manic laugh-cry of having narrowly escaped death. “Really, Kareem? Like, who exactly were you interviewing, then, huh? Dracula?”

  Kareem snorted haughtily. I’d noticed his tendency to delight in moments like these: hoarding what he considered critical facts, like a dragon leering from atop a mound of cubic zirconia. “Figure it out,” he sneered. “That wasn’t Menton.”

  “Really. Like, who was it, then?”

  “I don’t know—yet. I haven’t gotten all my medu-kem back,” he said, referring to the logoids he’d dispersed in his frantic mantra of Find! Find! Find! “Probably stuck on the outside of the shuttle. But when we’re on the ground and I open the hatch, I’ll know for sure.”

  “Strap yourselves in and cut the chatter, scatterwits,” said Mr. Piltdown. “We’re entering the atmosphere.”

  Everyone complied with the strapping-in, but none with the command for quiet.

  “Kareem, uff course ze man I dispatched vuss ze Destroyer!” said Hnossi. Her face was flushed and puffy, the flesh under her eyes like raw steak. For a woman who’d seen combat on a global scale, she was taking these events much harder than I would have expected. “You yourself shriekt horribly in hiss cell unt collapsed ven he vuss usink his phagopsychosis on you!”

  The lights shut off, and our only illumination came from the flames beyond the portholes as we hurtled planetward.

  Kareem claimed he’d collapsed not due to any Mentonian attack, but because of a desperate telepathic gambit by Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid to warn him—an effort, he said, which had to have cost them the ultimate price.

  Their message: that Asteroid Zed was about to be destroyed.

  “They combined their Qosmic Qonsciousness,” he said, “and pushed right through their P-Imp hats. And it killed them. I smelled it inside my own skull, their brains burning into briquettes. Tasted like a tray of lasagna left in a kot-tam furnace.”

  The portholes were orange disks in the darkness while the heat shield ripped through the superheated air around the plummeting shuttle.

  “Even if you’re mistaken about how zey diedt, zey are det,” said Hnossi, her eyes heavier than dumbbells. She touched her mouth with quivering fingers. Noticing the shaking, she grasped the digits with her other hand and tucked both hands between her thighs. It was an incongruously girlish, vulnerable image for a steely, immortal woman.

  “At least, at last…zeir Q-souls are hettet beck to qvasar Q-Nine-Sree-Nine, beck to ze Ur-Prime vich produced zem.”

  “Yeah!” yelled Kareem, his voice nearly swallowed by the roaring engine deceleration. “Hope that’s a comfort for all the families of the guards and the technicians! Looks like half the life-pods didn’t even eject! Last five minutes on the Asteroid was the dance called ‘prisoners’ revenge,’ and the band was on fire! So what we’ve got is an attempt to shut down my investigation and kill more heroes—us! Not to mention wiping out all the remaining villains!”

  “Kareem, is you crazy?” shouted André through the descent. The portholes were bright red heating elements atop a black stove. “You sayin Menton not only wanna kill Hawk King, he wanna destroy us an villains, too? Why? What’s in it for him?”

  “My god, doesn’t anybody have a kot-tam brain up here? Look! Hawk King’s dead! Omnipotent Man one day just up and resigns? We almost get slaughtered up there, and almost every remaining rival for anyone who wants to take over is wiped out in one shot!”

  “Take over what, Kareem?” howled Syndi.

  And Kareem shouted one last sentence before reentry wiped out his voice: “What do you think?”

  Inside the Fortress of Fear

  Conversation was dead until we’d landed safely inside the Fortress of Freedom, where scores of heroes crowded round their comrades to make sure they were all right. Outside the Fortress wall, dozens of camera crews awaited interviews, since by then satellite photography had beamed images of Asteroid Zed’s destruction around the world.

  Although I’d been inside the Fortress of Freedom several times, I was—even then, even after having survived the orbital disaster—awestruck by the stained-glass windows depicting the tragedies and triumphs of the F*O*O*J’s history, the vast 2.5-D mural churning with the chaos of the Götterdämmerung, and the titanic, soaring gold and platinum statues of the founding F*O*O*Jsters and the Flying Squirrel holding up the ceiling. (Although the Flying Squirrel didn’t join the F*O*O*J until 1946, he was able to add his own colossus to the Fortress’s Age of Heroes caryatids because the F*O*O*J was, in fact, his tenant. Mr. Piltdown not only paid for the construction of the Fortress, he remained the owner of the building and the land beneath it; to this day, the F*O*O*J pays rent from its federal operating grants to the Piltdomain Group.)

  I was about to enter Heroes’ Hall when the guards held me until Syndi vouched for me and I was let inside, where I saw a storm swirling with Kareem as its eye. F*O*O*Jsters, novices and veterans alike, seemed to have decided that the X-Man was the answer man. Mr. Piltdown looked none too pleased at the gravity wielded by his front-running rival for the post of Director of Operations.

  I scanned the assembly, sensing these heroes’ seething anxiety. At the back, Syndi was twirling and tugging at her hair hard enough to yank it rootless. On the far side, André affected detached cool while leaning against the wall, but he could not stop glancing upward constantly as if anticipating the collapse of the ceiling. I couldn’t see Iron Lass anywhere.

  Kareem eventually took to the stage, framed by a backdrop mural of F*O*O*J martyrs such as Captain Manifest Destiny, Doctor Patho, and Lady Liberty.

  “Menton the Destroyer,” said Kareem into the microphone, employing the profane name to shock everyone into shutting up, “was not on Asteroid Zed. I believe he had been replaced by an imposter. Specifi
cally, Zee-Roks the Imitator.”

  With all eyes rapt on him, Kareem reported what we saw in the space prison and laid out his “evidence,” such as it was: that he fully expected Menton to be a terrifying figure, yet he felt no fear of the man whatsoever; that his interrogation plan was to state incorrect knowledge about Menton’s career and crimes to lure the egomaniac into “correcting” him, yet his subject affirmed Kareem’s inaccuracies without hesitation; that his last-minute logoscopic investigation of Asteroid Zed’s computers revealed microgaps in the data—so small only his logoids could find them—indicating an attempt to erase all record of at least two unauthorized prisoner transfers: one to and one from Unit Z, three years ago; that the “comatose body” occupying the cell assigned to Zee-Roks the Imitator in the Biovillains Containment Unit was actually synthesized from a combination of medical waste, rhinoplasty, and Swanson’s Hungry Villain Dinners™; that contrary to early supposition, Asteroid Zed wasn’t destroyed by any outside force, but instead annihilated by a malfunction in its gravity reactor, “unquestionably” due to sabotage; and that since Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid proved they could overcome their P-I Helmets, the more psionically powerful Menton could have developed the same skill, without burning out his own brain…and if he had, only he would have had the means, motive, and opportunity to overcome prison authorities, escape, kill Hawk King, terminate Omnipotent Man’s career, and wipe out his enemies, his potential rivals, and his tracks all in one shot.

  It was a thrilling, intoxicating, highly speculative, totally circumstantial concoction Kareem had brewed, and the hundred or so terrified F*O*O*Jmates in attendance, still reeling from the loss of Hawk King and Omnipotent Man, were all too willing to snort it up by the mugfull. But unfortunately for sanity’s sake, Asteroid Zed’s destruction (which by Kareem’s own admission was due to a structural defect) meant no one could verify X-Man’s claims. And lack of verifiability was a paranoiac’s playground paradise.

  But what happened next stunned even me.

  “I agree with the X-Man,” announced Mr. Piltdown, taking a step onto the stage.

  Every head swiveled toward the Flying Squirrel. Kareem was agog.

  “Our organization is under threat,” called the Squirrel, moving toward the microphone. “Perhaps its gravest threat since the Götterdämmerung itself. And whether we’re facing an escaped Destroyer, or person or persons unknown of similar threat level—my own investigation, which for reasons I’m not yet at liberty to reveal, points to none other than Warmaster Set—we are clearly being hunted by a shadowy foe of enormous cunning, power, and danger.”

  With greater delicacy than I’d ever seen him employ, Festus Piltdown wedged himself between Kareem and the microphone, saying, “On the authority of F*O*O*J General Security Order Number One, we are now at Defense Condition Cyan.”

  With that, he clicked a button on his glove and the auditorium plunged into deep cyan.

  Confused mumbling flooded the hall. Mr. Piltdown shook his head, finally shouting at the questions only he could hear: “No, no, no, you shankshaft, you put on scuba gear for Def-Con Mauve, not Cyan! Are you color-blind?”

  “Why couldn’t it be L-Raunzenu?” shouted somebody, slicing through the din.

  Mr. Piltdown flushed darkly while the challenger railed on.

  “Everything Kareem said about the attack, the plot against us, all of it could’ve been carried out by L-Raunzenu. Which you know better than anybody, Squirrel, since Piltdown Psychotronics synthesized the damn thing outta ten million neurocorded nightmares—”

  “—at the cost of a billion dollars of defense-contract taxpayers’ money,” said Kareem, grabbing the microphone. “Look—HeliCop, isn’t it? Listen, I hear where you’re coming from, but L-Raunzenu has no need to free Menton, right? And I’m telling you, I was up there on Asteroid Zed, and Menton wasn’t. If you wanna pursue that as a complementary investigation, we can continue this conversation in camera. But for now,” he said, appealing to the crowd, “this is the angle I’m working.”

  “That we’re working,” said Mr. Piltdown, glaring at HeliCop. “Def-Con Cyan, everyone! Action stations! Action stations!”

  And off they all shuffled beneath cyan lighting. By then there wasn’t a hero in the Fortress who hadn’t been swept up in Kareem’s cyclone of neurotic panic. And when those heavyweights eventually hit the earth, inevitably the innocent would be crushed where they stood.

  When the Hall was clear, I was alone in the cyan light except for one man. At six-five, he was hard to miss, but it was as if he’d been invisible until that point. Yet at that moment he was a lightning bolt of a presence in his dark blue suit and red tie, with his coal-and-silver hair greased into a single e-curl in front. His face looked as if it’d been dipped in tempura and yanked from the deep-fryer five minutes too soon.

  “Doctor Brain, sir, ma’am,” he whispered, shuffling toward me as if his every bone ached. “I…I need y’hep.”

  What Type of Sandwich Are You?

  One glance into Wally’s eyes communicated an epic of disorientation and dysfunction. If you’ve ever looked yourself in the mirror at three A.M. and seen such distress, felt so out of control, and been so desperate for answers, maybe it’s time to stop looking around you, and start looking behind you. Your pain and life-disorientation may seem to be the products of your present, but they’re not; your present is merely the effect of your past.

  Just as a ham sandwich is composed of ham, bread, and condiments such as mayonnaise, mustard, and relish, and occasionally a slice of lettuce, avocado, or sweet pickle, every human being is formed of experiences. Some of them are supplemental, while others are primary. The tastes and textures of a smear of emotional relish and a leaf of psychic lettuce change drastically in relation to the bread and ham of your primary development.

  Ask yourself honestly: are you two slices of rich, multigrain whole wheat sandwiching a fresh serving of organic country ham? Or are you two easily torn white wafers of over-processed flour mass-cooked into a lifeless loaf, trapping the fatty, cold, red-dyed sinews of a factory reconstituted swine product?

  Only when you’ve answered that can you start asking the questions that will unlock the mysteries containing your misery. And if Wally couldn’t do that for himself, there was no telling how far he’d plummet, or if he’d even survive.

  Paying the Power Bill

  Listen, Miss Brain—are you listening to me? Because so far I don’t think you’ve heard a goddamned word I’ve said about anything.”

  I assured Mr. Piltdown that I was indeed listening, knowing how oblivious he was to the irony of his insistence, since he rarely listened to anyone. Because I sensed that Wally needed the comfort of meeting with his agemates, I’d sought out Iron Lass, who was unfortunately unavailable; the normally steely heroine had been so psychically fatigued by the events of the past few days that she’d been returning nobody’s telephone calls. And so I invited Festus Piltdown to join Wally and me.

  Having reconvened at my Mount Palomax offices, I quickly tucked away the Elect X-MAN Director of Operations, F*O*O*J! pamphlets Kareem had somehow managed to leave around—whether for electioneering purposes or simply to antagonize Mr. Piltdown, I was not sure, although by then it was clear that antagonizing the Flying Squirrel was difficult to avoid, even for someone with my training.

  “You were expressing,” I mirrored to Mr. Piltdown reassuringly, “your reservations about Wally’s performance in the Id-Smasher® simulation we ran last week.”

  “Expressing my—did you say expressing my reservations? I was detailing the eight hundred and twenty-three reasons why that man is an unapologizeable cock-up!”

  He tugged at his neck straps, removed his squirrel mask and put it on the leather of the sofa seat beside him, then ran his fingers through the chalk streaks of his blackboard hair.

  “He’s a fraud, Miss Brain. Earth’s greatest superhero, my colon. He’s a panty-willed, ‘aw-shucks, ma’am,’ unmitigated ultraninny. Times got
tough, he resigned. And at Hawk King’s funeral, no less, stealing the spotlight for himself. He’s a serial spotlight-stealer, I hope you realize—has been for decades. And now that the destruction of Asteroid Zed is capturing the headlines he wanted for himself, he’s back here whimpering to un- resign himself—”

  “I didn’unresign, I’m still resigned-ified, an you’re just sore cuz y’almost got blowed up t’day an I couldn’be there t’save ya for the eightieth time on accounta m’health!”

  “Save me?” yelled the Squirrel. “Me? I’m the one who saved the entire mission! But go out to any tin-kettled flapjack shack and ask Charlie Spam Sandwich and Edith Dishsoap who’s saved this republic more times than there are stars on the flag and your name’ll be the first on their slack-jawed lips…So if that assembly of brain-stemmed dinklewits that dares call itself the F*L*A*C wants to address efficiency and diminished morale in this time of Cyan-level crisis, they might first try addressing the profound misallocation of credit foisted upon the galactically undeserving. That’d be one man’s modest proposal.”

  Throughout Mr. Piltdown’s venting, Wally sat surprisingly placidly, as if he was listening to delightful, faraway oompahpah music only he could hear—of course, with his omni-hearing, he might very well have been doing just that. I returned him to our world by asking him how he felt about what Mr. Piltdown had just said.

  “Wellsir, I respect Festus’s opinion, and I respect his right to have an opinion, ma’am. Which is what makes our country great.”