Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King (19 page)

They were seated in the Batmobile before either of them spoke again.

"The girl was very brave," J'onn said. "I hope she will be all right."

"She has no physical wounds," Batman told him. "I think it's just the effect of shock on her sensitive mind. I also think the risk she took may have paid off."

Batman had taken off his gauntlets and pulled a small plastic tube from his Utility Belt. He squeezed it into his palm and rubbed the cream into various parts of his body that had been cut or bruised.

"Synthetic shark cartilage," he told J'onn. "Speeds up healing."

Quickly, Batman ran over the whole story, from the disappearance of the rest of the team to the events that had led up to tonight's break-in.

J'onn was incredulous. "So the Stone King is the reincarnation of a five-thousand-year-old shaman who has possessed the body of a young student? And he has power enough to defeat Superman and the others?"

"He certainly did something with them." Batman's voice was grim. "He appears to be one of the most powerful enemies we've ever encountered. And he intends to kill everyone in the world . . . in just over twenty-four hours!"

The Moon, October 31–All Saints' Eve

The view of Earth was spectacular.

The planet hung in the velvet darkness of space. Behind it, the sun glittered like a fiery yellow diamond, a beacon of hope in the vast inky cosmos.

High in the Watchtower, Batman and J'onn J'onzz had no time to appreciate the beauty outside. Both were seated at workstations, punching in data for Oracle's computers to sift, appraise, and analyze.

One entire wall was taken up by a telecommunications screen that showed a map of the world. Twenty feet high by almost forty feet long, it dominated the room, dwarfing the two heroes. As they entered their data, lights representing various places throughout the world flashed on the giant screen.

"Satellite scans show seismic disturbances in Peru, Mexico City, Ireland, and eastern Europe," J'onn J'onzz reported.

"Infrared cameras show heat buildup in the following areas," Batman said in clipped tones. "Pacific Ocean–specifically at Easter Island. Japan–at Mount Fuji. Hawaii–several islands involved."

As he spoke, his fingers flew with speed across his keyboard. Every now and then he glanced up at the giant world map, as the sites he named lit up on it.

"And the computers' conclusion is . . . ?" Manhunter asked, not looking up from his own screen.

"Potential volcanic eruptions. Within hours, not days." Batman didn't dwell on the ominous thought. "I've already put all active and reserve League members on red alert."

"Perhaps we could use a few of them here to help monitor this data."

Batman shook his head. "If Cassandra's vision was correct, they're going to be needed all over the world."

J'onn J'onzz ran his eyes down the list of green figures and coordinates that filled his personal monitor. "Electromagnetic field imaging shows increasing anomalies at the following locations: Stonehenge in England, Delphi in Greece, three separate locations in India. Minor anomalies detected in the Tibetan Himalayas, at Angkor Wat, and the Forbidden City in Beijing." J'onn shook his head wearily, his bald, green pate reflecting the cool glow of the room's lighting. "And that's not all–there are predictions for further electromagnetic disruption at a whole series of secondary sites, including the Serpent Mound in Ohio."

Batman felt as if he was compiling a death list for planet Earth. "Increased seismic activity predicted," he read aloud. "Iran. Afghanistan. The Caucasus region of Russia. South America, from Ecuador to the Sacred Valley of the Incas in Peru."

He was silent for a moment as vivid memories impinged on his mind. Gotham City had suffered its own cataclysmic earthquake not so long ago. Whole streets had collapsed in piles of rubble. Subway tunnels were submerged. Entire districts had gone up in flames. Vermin and disease ran riot, and survivors were faced with no source of power and no functioning economy.

Tens of thousands had died, hundreds of thousands had been injured, and millions were turned into refugees overnight. And that was just one quake.

Several years ago now, and Gotham was still in a long, slow recovery.

Batman shuddered to think of the result if Oracle's extrapolations were accurate. Seismic disturbance could affect half the world, or more. The damage and loss of life would not only be colossal, but incalculable.

"And the missing pyramid?" J'onn asked.

Batman gave a small sigh of frustration. "Location still unknown."

He added, "Location of our four colleagues still unknown, location of the Stone King also still unknown."

J'onn had tried tracing the heroes with his telepathic powers before he and Batman used the teleporter to return to the moon. Eyes closed, mind focused to a single point, he'd tried sending out waves of mental messages. Theoretically, the range of his telepathy was unlimited, but in practice his mental emanations could be affected by a variety of things. Electromagnetic activity was capable of throwing him completely off, while even strong radio waves could set up interference patterns that turned any message into random noise.

Despite his best efforts, J'onn was unable to contact any of the missing members of the Justice League. No sign of the Stone King had shown up on his "mental radar."

It was as if they, and the pyramid, had disappeared into thin air.

"Perhaps they have been transported to another dimension," J'onn stated, as a sudden idea occurred to him. "That would explain the failure of my telepathy–and also why none of our instruments detect them."

"It's possible," Batman admitted, "but unlikely. The Stone King's quarrel seems to be with people. The energy increases are taking place on Earth, where we can observe and measure them. I find it hard to imagine the shaman doing this from any place except the planet's surface."

The cool, measured tones of one of Oracle's programmed computer voices broke in on their discussion. "I
am intercepting a transmission from the space shuttle
Lincoln.
It appears to have relevance to your current search. Shall I patch it through?"

"Yes," Batman said curtly, and at once the grainy voice of Martin Spears could be heard over the Watchtower speakers.

"Houston?" the shuttle commander was asking, a note of disbelief in his voice. "Are you getting this? We can see what appears to be a column of bright blue light streaming up from some place in the Arctic Circle. Our orbit's not in synch with it, so we can't pinpoint the map coordinates."

Both Batman and J'onn were already on their feet, hurrying over to the plasticized glass viewing balcony. Steel panels slid automatically aside at their approach, triggered by the floor-set motion sensors. Naked sunlight streamed into the enclosed balcony as the duo slipped filter shades across their eyes.

"This is incredible! It must be twenty miles high now," the commander's voice went on. "Can you back us up on this, Houston? It's not some kind of space hallucination, is it?"

There was a long silence, as if the ground team in Houston were as stunned as the astronauts at this unprecedented phenomenon. Orbiting craft often reported unusual light displays, both in the upper atmosphere and on the planet's surface. Spectacular auroras had been filmed by previous shuttle crews. But in over thirty years of manned space flight, nothing like this had ever been seen before.

Batman squinted beneath his shades, narrowing his eyes against the sunlight, trying to make out anything abnormal near the earth's North Pole. The moon was nearly a quarter-million miles away from the earth, while the space shuttle orbited not much higher than 350 miles. He was going to need the telescope.

"There!" J'onn J'onzz breathed, his keen Martian vision zeroing in on the pulse of light. "By the souls of my ancestors . . . look at that!"

The light column must have been ten miles in diameter, a massive pillar shooting ever higher. As it reached the upper limits of Earth's atmosphere, almost a hundred miles from the planet's surface, its top spread out in a blue-sparking canopy that grew at amazing speed to cover half the planet.

Then, suddenly, it was gone.

"Did you see that, Houston?" Even dampened by the operations room speakers, there was no mistaking the urgency in the astronaut's voice. "I repeat, Houston–do you copy? The whole column just vanished, like somebody switched off a light!"

"We copy,
Lincoln," a
voice from NASA crackled. "Over."

Batman removed his eyeshade, more troubled than impressed by what he'd seen. He hit the button that controlled the shutters, and as they slid silently back into place, he and J'onn returned to their workstations.

"You don't think . . ." J'onn began. He hesitated, as if unwilling to put the thought into words, before finishing slowly. "You don't think the Stone King has started early?"

Batman ran his eyes over the columns of data that constantly flowed across his screen. "According to this, the light was a visual phenomenon only. None of the other instruments picked it up."

He closed his eyes, deep in thought. When he spoke again, it was with a slight shake of his head. "No, I don't think he's started early. I think he's testing whatever powers he has, awakening the ancient energy centers. He's making sure that he'll be ready . . . when the time comes."

J'onn defocused his vision, allowing himself to drift into the calm center of his being.

"We're fast running out of time," he said softly, "and I still don't understand what this is all about." He garnered his ragged thoughts, men went on. "The spirit of a Stone Age shaman has possessed a university student. Now he's going to destroy the world. But
why?"

"Presumably because he doesn't like what we've become," Batman countered. "Peter Glaston was a highly intelligent young man. There's no saying what the Stone King might have extracted from his memories."

This was a scenario League members often adopted when faced with a problem that baffled them. Talk about it, toss it back and forth, all the time looking for some tiny fact that had until then escaped their notice.

"Pollution, environmental destruction, global warming," Batman went on. "They didn't have these problems five millennia ago."

"He has access to seemingly unlimited power," J'onn said musingly. "The energies of the planet itself."

"And he can discharge those energies in highly destructive ways."

Batman gestured to the huge electronic map, his unconscious mind releasing what he'd learned in his reading at the university the day before.

"Almost all of the sites shown there were sacred to one or another human culture or religion. According to Jenny Ayles, Peter Glaston believes they stand on points of power, part of a grid or network that once covered every continent. It's probable from the increased activity hat the Stone King is trying to kick-start the grid again, and use it to annihilate modern society."

Under his craggy brows, the Martian's blue eyes stared fixedly. He remembered the red dust wastes of his homeworld, the rock-strewn deserts that covered all that had once been green and fertile. He remembered a world once thronging with people, now dead and barren, a planetwide graveyard.

J'onn J'onzz had come to love Earth. It twisted him up inside to think his adopted home was slated to suffer a similar fate.

"But in the final analysis," J'onn said at last, "the Stone King is a foe like any other we've faced. Somehow, he can be beaten. What we have to do is discover his mind-set. If we can think like him, we can anticipate his actions . . . and beat him."

"We
can't
think like him," Batman said flatly. "Our brains are wired differently. I've learned the hard way, from battling the likes of the Joker these many years."

"Many scholars consider that prehistoric peoples were barbarians," J'onn persisted. "If that is the case, surely we can outthink him."

"That paradigm is changing quickly," Batman told him. "Rock art of thirty thousand years ago is highly sophisticated. There were flint factories in Czechoslovakia twenty thousand years ago. The city of Jericho was inhabited in 8000 b.c. Who knows how much people learned before Neolithic times?"

He paused for a moment, allowing his conscious mind to retrieve more of what he'd read in the university library. "Their knowledge of stellar events predated ours by thousands of years. We still haven't duplicated the building techniques that let them move two-hundred-ton blocks of stone, the way they did at Ba'albek in Lebanon. Some accounts claim they had mastered sonic energy and knew how to use the earth forces for teleportation–"

"Which might explain the pyramid's disappearance," J'onn pointed out.

"According to one theory," Batman went on, warming to the subject, "the mind of ancient man was very different from our own. It was bicameral–two-chambered. Commands issued by the dominant right hemisphere of the brain were heard as audio hallucinations by the left brain."

"Voices in the head?" J'onn looked doubtful. "Isn't that one of the defining symptoms of schizophrenia?"

"It is. It's also what happens to me when you establish your telepathic link. There's something very powerful about hearing an internal voice. It instills obedience much more strongly than any external order ever could."

Which was precisely why Batman disliked the telepathic link procedure so much.

"So if the Stone King is controlled by an internal voice," J'onn asked, "he'd be impervious to anything we might say to him?"

"Yes," Batman agreed.

"Unless, of course," J'onn added hurriedly, "my telepathic powers can affect him."

"To do that, we have to find him." Batman continued to think aloud. "How can we save the others when we don't know where they are–or if they're even still alive? Where do you hide something the size of a pyramid?"

"Where indeed?" J'onn nearly leaped out of his chair as a sudden thought overwhelmed him. "Think back to the archaeology room. I was there, but you couldn't see me."