Minister Faust (29 page)

Keening, he tried spitting out an electron burst, but all he could manage was the sparks that a spent lighter could produce. He wailed, “I’m all out, Doc!”

Helping him to be as comfortable as I could manage, I had my secretary, Ms. Olsen, retrieve the containment suit I’d employed during my treatment of the Detached Man, whose body began crumbling into pyramids, cubes, and dodecahedrons without his conscious command. After opening the armor, Ms. Olsen and I hefted Wally and his parts inside it and sealed it shut, tightening the connections with everything in place except the boots and neck collar.

Just as I was calibrating the penultimate settings, I heard the telephone ringing in the other room. After running to answer it, Ms. Olsen informed me that the call was urgent. Since Wally and I had already been interrupted, I pressed the
ERECT
button on the containment suit so Wally could at least stand while I took the call. There was no point leaving the room for privacy, given Wally’s omni-hearing—assuming he still possessed it.

“Miss Brain,” said a voice as raw as a freshly killed deer, “it’s Festus Piltdown.”

Ordinarily I would have avoided using the man’s given name, but taking into account the direness of his tone and the fact that he was calling past eleven o’clock at night, I asked, “Festus, what is it?”

“It’s Hnossi,” he finally begrudged. “She, she wants you. To talk to you.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Apparently…the, the immortal Iron Lass,” he said, clearing his throat, “is dying.”

I heard and felt the clap of thunder. I spun, finding Wally back on the floor like a tipped mannequin, his feet detached and upright a yard away from him as if his legs had simply stepped out of them.

It’s Always Darkest Before the Dawn (or When You’re Blind or Dead)

What will it mean for your life, and for your view of yourself, if the glory days never return?

Omnipotent Man:
“For the first time I can remember…I’m totally afraid.”

One of life’s greatest paradoxes is that only when we see ourselves at our most naked, weak, foolish, ugly, disappointing, cowardly, broken, repulsive, selfish, and stupid, can we really appreciate just how special we are. For Wally to fill up the tank of personal reintegration, he was going to have to pull into the filling station of exhaustive self-assessment. And so will you.

Get a quiet space and writing tools, and block off enough time to write out all the occasions in your life in which you’ve been weak, foolish, ugly, disappointing, cowardly, broken, repulsive, selfish, and/or stupid. A day should be enough. Don’t hold back. Total honesty is absolutely necessary.

When you’re done, ask yourself the following questions:

1.
Who else other than I is to blame for what I’ve done?

2.
How did I personally choose to be a victim of myself?

3.
How did I enable myself to become a perpetrator against myself and everything I hold dear?

4.
How many of the psychemotional barnacles attached to the ship of my consciousness am I willing to burn off in order to sail freely across the ocean of well-adjustedness? And why am I too cowardly to burn them all off at once and be done with it? Is it because I’m confusing the barnacles with the ship?

As you’re about to see, the challenge to Iron Lass’s immortality would threaten not only her own survival, but Wally’s recovery…and Festus Piltdown’s soul.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 5, 9:16 A.M.

I
sat upon the immaculate silver sofa in the immaculate
bronze room across from the palace-owner, who was wearing his immaculate ivory suit and golden cravat. Festus Piltdown had no inkling of the reconnection—or confrontation—I’d already set in motion to bring him the peace he so desperately needed from a man he considered an enemy.

Yet the desperation and fragility Festus felt at that moment in his life demanded that I act, in secrecy, to bring to him a one-man intervention.

While Festus and I watched highlights from the 8:30
A
.
M
. Fortress of Freedom press conference on the wallscreen, his aged manservant placed a cappuccino on the marble coffee table beside me before disappearing.

NBC reporter:
—believe the destruction of Asteroid Zed to be in any way connected with the death of Hawk King?

X-Man:
I can’t confirm that, no. Not yet, anyway.

CBS reporter:
There are reports that Iron Lass is dying from unnamed causes, possibly connected with the orbital prison disaster. Can you comment?

X-Man:
That’s true—there
are
reports.

CBS reporter:
Yes, but, but what about them? Are they true? Is her condition connected with the bombing of Zed or the death of Hawk King?

X-Man:
I can neither confirm nor deny that at this time.

ABC reporter:
Are you investigating Iron Lass’s condition to see if there
is
a connection?

X-Man:
…All I can say is—and I’m not saying she even has a “condition,”—but I will follow to the ends of this solar system any lead that points to a threat to the F*O*O*J, to this country, or to our planet—

PNN reporter:
Following the destruction of Asteroid Zed, a Knight-Ridder poll put you fifty-five percentage points ahead of the Flying Squirrel for Director of Operations. How do you respond to those who say you’re exploiting the death of Hawk King, the resignation of Omnipotent Man, and allegations about Iron Lass’s health to advance your own personal political aspirations?

X-Man:
My—! Look here! My only
aspirations…
are truth, and justice! And let truth and justice prevail though the heavens fall!

“Can you be
lieve
that hyperactive hypocrite?” snapped the Flying Squirrel, and then, as the image switched, he moaned, “Oh, not this again!”

Onscreen rolled the by then infamous funeral footage of Festus punching Kareem and Kareem hitting him back, with the anchor’s voice-over about X-Man’s “meteoric rise.”

“Meteors never
rise,
you subcretinous discombobulators! They only fall, crash, and burn out!”

At that moment, Festus’s butler Mr. Savant, so ancient and withered he might conceivably have been an unbandaged mummy, returned to say, “Madame is ready to receive visitors now, Lord Piltdown.”

Noticing my reaction, Festus shrugged and said, “I acquired a peerage a few years back. Thatcher owed me for all the good press. Come on.”

As Mr. Savant led us on the motorized pedway like a guardian mummy through its pyramid, we wound our way through the labyrinthine corridors of Festus’s legendary crimefighting headquarters, the Squirrel Tree. Every hallway was actually the interior of one of the Tree’s “branches,” and each chamber the interior of a giant “leaf.” Vast hydrogen-powered magnetic counter-gravity generators kept the entire assembly, minus the trunk, suspended aboveground. With the facility’s “smart garage,” Trashbots™, Lawnbots™, air traffic dominance, and DETHscan security system coordinated by the Squirrel-Brain 9000X, the Squirrel Tree made Bill Gates’s “smart house” seem like a Fisher-Price play set.

Passing through the cavernous Vehicle Hollow containing the Squirrel Copter, Squirrel Sub, and Squirrel N-ICBMs, and a fabulous five-story-tall replica of the one-dollar bill, we finally entered the Medical Hollow. Mr. Savant led us to the room, pulled back the curtain, stood aside.

From her bed, Hnossi Icegaard looked up at us.

The whites of her eyes were like filthy old pennies. Her face and neck were splotched ashen red and brown. In the worst sections, her skin was flaking off like the scales of a dead rattlesnake dropped into a campfire.

“Rust poisoning,” muttered Festus. “Advanced.”

“Ja,”
rasped Hnossi, chuckling out of a bravura smirk. “But you shudt get a look at ze uzzer guy.”

“When the cells opened on Asteroid Zed,” explained Festus, “the Desiccator attacked her, that goddamned bastard.”

“He dit not suffer long—” she said, only to pitch forward in a hacking fit, grating out a sound like someone repeatedly hitting the ignition on a running car. Finally she slowed, cleared her throat, and finished her sentence: “…vizzout his torso.”

I approached her, gingerly touched her wrist. It felt like phyllo pastry. I told her Festus had passed on her wish to see me.

Mr. Savant left the room. Festus sat in a corner chair.

“
Ja,
Doktor. I am a varrior deity. Ein Aesir gott. My people…haff no Apollo, no Sos,” she said, I believe meaning
Thoth;
both were deities of science and medicine. “Unt Festus’s human doktors, for all zeir learnink, cannot heal vun uff
us.
So I am now facink my own personal Götterdämmerung. My own private tvilight uff ze gotts.

“Unt I haff been sinkink…about our sessions. About your qvestioning uff my, my rel
a
tionships…viss my children. Unt now zat apparently…zere is no more
time…
I vant you to broker—”

Hnossi snapped forward and back, exploding her coughs like a car backfiring repeatedly. Festus leapt from his chair, yelled into his wrist comm for the doctor, then grabbed Hnossi’s hand and roughly rubbed her neck and back to loosen her potentially lethal congestion. A doctor and nurse appeared, swept us out, and drew back the curtain.

Festus and I stood in the hallway not looking at each other.

Silence sandpapered a minute off the clock.

With his gaze nailed to his toes, the battle-hardened billionaire stooped before me, his six-foot-four frame fragile, faltering.

“She beat every villain on the planet,” he whispered, then captured and released a long, hissing breath. “She’s gonna beat this.”

I stifled my professional duty to ask him
And what if she doesn’t?
long enough for Festus to say, “And then, then, then that bastard…Warmaster Set…he’ll pay for this.”

“You’re sure he’s the one responsible?”

He glared at me.
“Everyone responsible will pay.”

The withered Mr. Savant appeared once more.

“Your…
other
guest…has arrived, Lord Piltdown.”

“My what? I wasn’t scheduled for any—”

“Master Festus,” said the old man, his watery eyes trembling with sympathy, “it’s Master Tran.”

Festus straightened up. His spine crackled audibly. He swiveled his face to level his blast-furnace gaze upon me.

“Now why in God’s good hell,
Eva,
” he growled, “would I be visited this morning…for the first time in fifteen years by my ungrateful…insubordinate…backstabbing…
renegade
of an ex-protégé,
Chip Monk?
”

Sidekicked: Prodigal Punishment

B
eneath the grandiose high ceiling of the Allen Dulles room, Tran stood by the mantel examining a framed sepia photograph of a little boy wearing a suit and fire helmet and wiping away his tears. He turned his forty-five-caliber eyes on Festus as we entered.

“Hard to believe you were ever this young,” said Tran to his former alpha-hero, putting the photo back on the mantel. “Or that you ever cried. For anyone.”

“So,” said Festus, his colossal frame regaining its lethal rigidity. His arms crossed his chest like battering rams. “You’ve returned after all these years just to abuse me, then? My, how your imagination has failed during your supplicant service to that Marxist menace.”

Tran, although elegant in a cream-colored suit, was more obviously his fifty years in the full light of the drawing room than he’d appeared in the shadows of the Stun-Glas restaurant Dark Star. Wince-lines crinkled the amber skin around his eyes; while he still had a swimmer’s build, his movements were deliberate, as if he were consciously confronting arthritic agony. Given Festus’s unusually youthful appearance, Tran appeared even older than his former mentor.

“I’m not here to abuse anyone,” said Tran at last. “I’ll leave the abuse to experts like you.”

“This is pointless, Miss Brain! What possible good did you think would be produced by this pathetic pup’s point-blank petulance?”

“I’d hoped, Festus, to see you finally able to aim the extinguisher of healing upon the kitchen grease fire of your relationship with Tran. And you can only do that when the sous-chef of your most important recipes—”

“I
get
it, all right?”

“All right, then. Let’s begin.”

I took a seat, gestured for both men to sit facing each other. Neither did.

“Both of you men are clearly suffering,” I said anyway. “You were once the most celebrated superhero partnership on the planet. For the entire 1960s, no duo got more magazine covers than you two. You were the model. You took down Pauli the Living Mafia, Black Mamba, the Iron Eunuch, the Monitor Lizard, Standing Buffalo…The list goes on.