Soon I Will Be Invincible (21 page)

He gestures, his cape swirls so close to my face that I blink, and then I’m back in the old physics building, alone. I look around and step through the door again, alert for the next trick, but nothing happens. At center stage is an enormous device, like a telescope, or a laser gun, mounted on a rotating platform. At one end, it bulges to contain a red sphere the size of a softball, the Zeta Gem itself. My first creation and greatest mistake. Everything is as I remember it, untouched.

I should have known it. Magicians are all talk.

I didn’t ask to have a nemesis. He chose me. CoreFire was a Peterson student, too. I remember him, of course, as Jason Garner.

I didn’t know he was my nemesis then. He was just Jason. All-state track, basketball team, editor on the
Peterson Star,
class speaker his junior year. He looked almost the same then as he did in his last public appearance. He never seemed to get much older after the accident.

He had started at Peterson a year earlier. The impression he made was instantaneous, a warm, genial, all-encompassing presence. Where I had to strain to be understood, his voice seemed to fill the room, audible and distinct even at the other end of a crowded corridor. Long before he got any powers, he seemed to walk through walls. Before I ever saw a human being glow, he seemed to.

At first, Peterson seemed like a new start for me, but Jason and his friends set me straight very quickly. Certain details I will pass over in silence, but, most unforgivable of all, they didn’t notice me. They didn’t care who I was. I was nothing to them, just another target.

I don’t remember seeing him behave with intentional cruelty. He didn’t so much participate in bullying as sanction it, skate over it. It was the norm there—he wasn’t the only one. Damsel and Blackwolf were there, a few years younger than I was, faces in the hallway that I noticed and cataloged, although it never occurred to them to learn my name. Heroes, even then.

Oddly enough, when Jason and I were alone, I became just another buddy of his. We sat next to each other in advanced math and biochemistry, and we even exchanged an offhanded friendly word or two, as if nothing had ever happened. He had a certain rote ability in the sciences that he parlayed into a decent GPA. We endured pop quizzes and extra problem sets together. The two of us were at the top of the class, rivals even then.

“We’re screwed now, huh, buddy?” he’d say.

“Got that right,” I’d reply in a voice I’d never heard from myself before or since, a voice I conjured suddenly for this new temporary moment of geeky camaraderie. “We’re sunk!”

Because I actually did like him a little. At least he treated me like a normal person. Of course I knew it was cheap coin—the whole world was Jason Garner’s friend; I just happened to be the part of it he was sitting near. Once or twice maybe I wondered whether I had a special place in his cosmos; whether he thought, in his private moments, If only I knew him better. If only we were closer. But if that were true, no sign of it ever came.

I studied him as I would an anomalous particle or a stellar fluctuation. I had always taken my unpopularity as a sacrifice, the price of my intelligence, but he seemed not to have to make that bargain. There was something he knew about the world, and I tried to learn it.

When he graduated, the school forgot about him—there were others to fill his place. But I never did. We met again at Harvard, and again much later on. By that time, we’d both had our accidents, and we were both wearing masks.

For Jason, Harvard was a steady march along a course that seemed already to have been prepared for him; he moved smoothly through the expected programs and girlfriends and collegiate chums toward a waiting career. But for me, it was a slow, inexorable drifting outward from any definable center.

We might as well have gone to different schools. On weekends, I caught up on my extra course load in the Science Center; I knew all the free hours on the campus mainframe, and how to sign out an oscilloscope. He knew…what? Parties and cheerleaders, I suppose. He cut a figure straight out of an admissions brochure.

Jason enrolled in physics, and at the beginning of each term I cringed to find his blue-eyed smiling face waiting in the seminar room, my fair-haired double. We still competed for the top of the class, he with his plodding intellect and I with my eccentric brilliance, sudden leaps and bursts of calculation that carried me alone into unknown planes of speculation. We paced each other—the oaf didn’t have the sense to give up, or even comprehend how far behind he was.

I might have stood it from a peer, or a new acquaintance. But I despised the idea of sharing my new life with someone from Peterson, the place that knew me as the lunchroom pratfaller. He would nod to me if we passed each other on the quad, recognition of a shared history. There was still that bond that—perhaps I should admit—I myself was unwilling to sever. Maybe because he had treated me as a friend, however briefly, as a member of that other world I had never known entrance to. Maybe he was still the standard for me, the one person I had to prove myself to. Maybe I knew even then that I would never have humbled the world until I had humbled him.

Jason’s accident happened in our junior year. I wish to be clear: The zeta beam was indeed of my own conception, and I can document that whatever Professor Burke says. I ran the simulations myself on campus mainframes late on Friday and Saturday nights when everyone else was out drinking, laughing, and who knows what else.

At first, I thought it was only a previously undetectable form of radiation. It would be years before I understood that it was a dimension, a literal space you could go to. But I had found a primitive way to channel that energy and project it.

At stake was the Whittier-Feingold Prize for Undergraduate Science, and an interview with Erica Lowenstein, raven-haired reporter for the
Harvard Crimson.
Of course I had met her by then, and my infatuation was in full flourish. He and Erica knew each other, I eventually discovered. Naturally, I suppose, they were attracted. People are.

Absurdly, Jason actually took the time to try to read and even review my work. I think he raised some churlish objection about Calabi-Yau manifolds. It was one of our last conversations, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have listened. That was probably the last time when I could really have done something differently. He’d done some calculations—feeble, but he’d worked on them—I might at least have looked. But I was intent on the moment of my triumph, and there was no way I’d let him undermine me. Not when Erica was involved.

“This is science, not one of your rugby scrums,” I snapped. The fool.

The day of the demonstration arrived. The hall was packed with milling students, faculty, and the media—the
New York Times
sent a reporter, as did
Scientific American
and
Nature.
The Department of Defense had sent half a dozen people. Jason was there, I suppose on the strength of our old friendship, resplendent in his ROTC uniform (years later, I found out he was a scholarship student). And Erica herself, right there in the front row, her gray eyes only on me.

Professor Burke gave a brief introduction on the theory of zeta power, while I sat at the control console in my white lab coat, playing my role of protégé to the hilt. Both of us were in the shadow of the enormous zeta apparatus. For once, I was the center of attention, and Jason sat in the audience, unrecognized. The lights dimmed. I activated the controls with a theatrical flourish, and a buzz arose in the hall as the three-spoked zeta attractor began to move.

I wish to make it clear that, positioned as I was to monitor the machinery, my back was to the crowd. I couldn’t possibly have prevented the accident. If the shielding proved inadequate, if Erica wandered into the path of the zeta particles, if human lives were at stake, I had no way of knowing.

And if Jason hadn’t been there, I’m sure someone else would have stepped in to save her. He just happened to be standing there, right in position to play the hero and push her out of the way. The zeta beam caught him full in the chest, and he was silhouetted in a shimmering golden haze of particles, penetrating his body, infusing him with the limitless power of zeta energy. They made a big deal of it, but really, it could have been anybody laying down his life like that. Me, Professor Burke, anybody. And then someone else would have gained the power of CoreFire. Someone else would have won her heart forever.

I have never asked him what it felt like, that thunder-crash moment when the zeta energy entered his body. The last thing I remember is Erica lying in his arms, their faces close together, tinted red in the glowing light of my parallel dimension.

It was the last time I saw Jason as Jason. He had been young and likable; now he could fly and lift a bus. His strength was matchless; he had bland, predictable good looks, and a bland, predictable mind. He was the perfect superhero; he even had heat vision. It was a short trip from Harvard to international stardom, propelled by forces I alone could have summoned.

And I? The one who made him what he was? His buddy, arguably, yes. His pal from way back. I was a foot note to the legend, the goofy lab assistant who happened to be at the controls. At best, the Zeta Beam Guy.

Imagine my surprise when, years later, CoreFire turned up on my doorstep. No one knew my identity as Doctor Impossible; so as far as I knew, there was no one who knew of the link between us.

He looked different but also the same. The accident hadn’t changed him much—even behind that stupid domino mask, there was no mistaking Jason Garner. He wore a brilliant white leotard and a gold cape. Blond hair and square jaw. The leotard was tight, outlining every curve of a musculature I can only call perfect. He could fly. He drifted through the air like a wisp of smoke, but he was, I knew, the most solid thing to be found on this Earth.

“Looks like I’ve come to the right place,” he observed to no one.

He walked through the grand entrance hall as if he owned it, footsteps echoing off the marble. He cocked an insouciant eye at the enormous Art Deco statuary—myself, triumphant, one foot resting atop a submissive globe. Yes, I’d had plans, dreams, just like anyone else. It was the first time my mind had run absolutely wild; everything I had ever scribbled in my old notebooks had sprung to malevolent life. In the lower caverns, I had found DNA traces of unprecedented antiquity. I was shattering paradigms monthly, my robots were getting better, and in the basement labs there were hints of greater things, other dimensions, interstellar travel. Thoughts so brilliant, it was criminal just to think them.

I was a supervillain, a supergenius, and I couldn’t see anyone stopping me. I was going to be another Alexander the Great, Fu Manchu, Professor Moriarty, all rolled into one. I issued my very first global threat, demanding obeisance. And in response, CoreFire arrived.

There I was in my control room, a glass and steel wonder built into a cliff side, overlooking a snowy Arctic landscape. I built it myself. I had given some little thought to defense. I knew, sooner or later, the authorities would get tired of just fighting me off and would come looking for me. I’d be ready.

But no one told me it was going to be like this. Bullets bounced off of him. He walked over trapdoors like solid steel floors. Robots shattered themselves on him. He punched through doors, melted walls with his eyes. His body absorbed radiation like a black hole, or reflected it. If anything, he seemed to get stronger as he went on. It was a blowout.

Did he know who I was? By the time he tore the doors off of my control room, I already had my mask and helmet on; there was no way he could have recognized me. My costume then was a powder blue one with red trim. Red utility belt, red helmet. Red fins on the forearms, and a long red cloak. On the chest, my old symbol, the imperial crest I had imagined for myself, a red planet ringed with gold. For an instant, there was something mortifying about his presence there, an uninvited guest in the room where I ate my lunches and dinners alone.

But when our eyes met, a moment confirmed what I had thought. He didn’t know me.

“Stand back, villain!”

That close, his physical presence was even more impressive. The zeta beam had done its work. My powers are good, but they aren’t my primary asset. CoreFire was an M-class being, and I’d never seen that before. Up close, he was unearthly, crystalline power in the depths of those eyes, waiting to explode outward. A smell in the air, ozone, a storm coming.

The truth is, my plans for this stage were a bit sketchy. I hadn’t figured on anybody getting that far, and, well, I did think the freeze ray was basically infallible. I never worked out a coherent vision for what would happen at this moment. Always so busy; just like I never got around to finishing that throne.

Three basic contingencies for this scenario. Unfortunately, he’d already walked through the first of them, the electrocution field, in essence a superhero bug zapper, without noticing it. My finger hovered over the button that would turn my command console into a rocket-propelled escape pod. In just about fifteen seconds, I could be a dot on the horizon, on my way to a cover identity in the Azores. But no, I thought. Let’s try this. I’ve got powers of my own. How bad could it be?