Sunrise beat us to Bayonne, New Jersey the following morning, but only slightly. It was already daylight as Gene drove the white van up a gravelly path up Constable Hook, the promontory Avie and I had visited once before back in our reality. That time, we approached by air and from the east, in the flying Q-Mobile piloted by old boyfriend, Bing Gloom, also known as Yarn Man. This time, of course, we were climbing up the hill from the west. The sun seemed to rise anew as we reached the crest of the hill, casting the hulking old building in stark silhouette.
“The Doomsday Factory,” I said.
I recognized the outlines of the structure as the headquarters of the Devengers, or Doomsday Revengers, one of the two major megahero teams in the New York City area. As the path wound around the building, it became clear this building’s exterior was much different from the building I visited. Absent was the smooth, off-white stucco that had been applied to modernize the nineteenth-century textile factory in my reality; the aging, dirty red brick testified that little had been done to improve the building in over a century; the decaying Mansard roof, offering little more than shelter for bird’s nests six stories up, had all but completely disintegrated.
This must have been what the Doomsday Factory had looked like in my reality, too, when thirteen scientists had gathered there in 1940 to develop an Atomic Soldier for the American war effort. In my reality, however, the building had apparently undergone a facelift and been repurposed as a headquarters for the fledgling Doomsday Revengers, one of the first prototypical megahero teams. Here, it remained an unimproved and abandoned relic, at least from the outside.
“Why are we driving so slow?” asked Avie, who noticed the van was proceeding at a crawl.
“I don’t want to raise a dust cloud that can be seen from a distance,” said Gene. “I had hoped to arrive just before sun-up. But with you three ladies and your bathroom breaks …”
A unwieldy thatch of woods had grown up the side of the hill facing Staten Island to the east, an attribute that hadn’t been present in my reality. A number of vehicles were already parked behind bushes and trees, partially hidden, as if trying to be camouflaged.
Gene parked the van in a clearing closer to the building, and we disembarked. Mama and I hopped out, followed by Avie with her guitar case—since her electric was more valuable than her beat-up acoustic, it was second nature to her not to leave it in a parked vehicle.
I went around to the back of the van to help Gene hoist Seymour Starlight out in his wheelchair. “How’d you get him in here without a ramp or mechanical lift?” I asked.
“It was a two-man job,” said Gene. Apparently, a burly attendant at the nursing home had helped. Gene, who was big and strong, took one look at my relatively diminutive frame and said, “Are you sure you’re up to this, Clarissa?”
“I’m Ms. Megaton Man,” I said confidently. “I’ve got this, no problem.”
Suffice it to say, lifting an old man out of a van in his wheelchair and setting him on the ground was far and away the most strenuous physical task I had undertaken in many months. It required gentleness and control, neither of which I had, being so rusty. It was more like a quick, awkward drop. Seymour was a bit shaken up, and it nearly killed me. Afterward, Gene gave me a look that said, “Are you sure you’re a megahero?”
I was so embarrassed I couldn’t even look at Gene as he grabbed more gear from a duffel back in the back of the van and slung it over his shoulder.
The black cat, Dr. Sax, had already slinked out of the van and was prowling the grounds in front of the building. Avie and my grandmother followed her, stretching their legs cautiously in the new environs.
Seymour, recovered, wheeled along with the group. “It may not be much to look at,” he said, pointing to the building. “But it was a perfect cover for Burly Boy, Girly Man. We used to drive up here only at night in the old days, without headlights for fear of being observed by enemy subs off the coast. We lived in terror that we might accidentally drive over the cliff.”
Enemy submarines, if they existed, would have been keeping their eyes on the Port of New York and New Jersey, across the Bay of New York, to the north. In the run up to World War II, the port would have been active twenty-four hours a day with navy traffic and other important commerce; spies would have been interested in this, not a relic of a factory on a promontory to the south, unless it noticed activity there, too.
I took in the view. It wasn’t hard to imagine the menace and mystery. Beyond the port, in the middle of the bay, sat the Statue of Liberty, over which I had battled the Human Meltdown; this was after he abducted my sister and had attempted to rape her. In the distance were the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan, where I finally beat the snot out of him and he vanished.
“We’re on a straight line with the statue,” remarked Avie Too. “How patriotic. I suppose if you’re going to defend democracy, the location may as well have some significance.”
I turned to look up at the façade of the building. Barely legible, in painted letters almost completely obliterated by time, was the legend, “Bayonne Tapestry Manufactory — Est’d 1876.”
I tried to picture the costumed characters I had met here in my native timeline. “There aren’t any megaheroes headquartered here,” I said, to no one in particular. “Not in this reality.”
Meanwhile, Gene had thought better of parking in the open and had moved the van behind some brush, then rejoined us. He had a lethal-looking submachine gun strapped over his shoulder and a pistol strapped under his armpit. Unless I missed my guess, he had another pistol and knife strapped near his ankles, under his pant legs.
I was still too embarrassed about my inexplicable weakness to look him in the eye, but I felt him hovering close to me. It wasn’t attraction; I realized he was Ms. Megaton’s bodyguard.
“Let’s not just stand here admiring the architecture,” said Grandma Seedy. “Let’s go in. They’re waiting for us.”
***
It wasn’t until we got to the front doors made of steel with their new locks that I realized what a sound, formidable structure this seemingly dilapidated Doomsday Factory was still. Despite its shabby, unadorned exterior, it looked solid enough to withstand an aerial bombardment.
Naturally, Gene had keys. Inside, fluorescent lights flicked on automatically. The small lobby and empty guard station was surprisingly modern, clean, and dry.
Dr. Sax led the way down a hall that stretched nearly to the rear of the building, followed by Seymour in his wheelchair. The rest of us marched behind, Avie and Seedy in front of me and Gene so close behind I could feel his hot breath on the back of my neck.
A rat scurried past us, causing Avie to scream. We all froze, and I felt the hard barrel of Gene’s submachine gun poke the small of my back. “Excuse me,” he said politely. In this reality, Gene and I were strangers, but in my native reality we’d been torrid lovers. His cool gallantry notwithstanding, I realized it’d been hoping to feel something harder of his poking against my butt.
At the end of the corridor we came upon a large freight elevator. Seymour pressed a button and the gates separated; he rolled himself on first. There was ample room for all of us; Gene, who was last, was careful not to invade my space again. Once we were all on, he turned and Gene pulled the gates back down and operated the controls.
“I guess we’re going up, right?” he said.
“The top floor,” said Seymour. “That’s where we always met in the old days.”
The elevator, however, began a slow descent. Puzzled, Gene pressed the buttons again.
“Must be a short in this control,” he said. “The buttons aren’t responding.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” said Seymour, who was pressing a hidden set of buttons in the back of the carriage. “I just thought we may as well give Seedy’s granddaughters a little tour first. Frankly, after all these years, I’m a little curious to see the scenes of the crime again myself.”
“You want to take the long way?” said Seedy, shrugging. “I suppose Glenn and the rest can wait. After ten hours, what’s a few more minutes?”
“I didn’t know there was a basement to this place,” I remarked. “When Avie and I visited in my reality, we only saw the upper floors, where the Devengers were headquartered. And your costume shop, Grandma Seedy, on one of the floors that still had textile works. That’s where you made my uniform.” My Ms. Megaton Man costume underneath my clothes felt too warm in confined elevator car.
“Hmm, that’s an idea that never occurred to me,” said Seedy. “All those weaving machines, just sitting up there; it would make a nice little shop.”
We slowly descended past several sublevels. As we did so, harsh lights flicked on automatically for each. We glimpsed storage areas filled with surplus equipment, scientific and otherwise, and a floor that appeared to be a library and archive, not unlike the rare book and manuscript collection I knew so well at the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute.
“I count thirteen levels,” said Avie.
“That’s about right,” said Seymour. “Girly Man. Lucky thirteen.”
The elevator stopped. We got out and entered a large laboratory space.
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“Looks just the same as the day we closed up shop, eh, Seedy?” remarked Seymour.
In the middle of the floor were two large, cylindrical glass chambers large enough to hold a man; these were connected by wires, hoses, and machinery on an elevated metal platform. On the periphery were lab benches and monitoring equipment. An imposing wall of lead stood on one side, evidently a protective barrier to the radiation; although the experiments conducted here happened long ago, the place still felt dangerous.
Dr. Sax slinked up onto the platform and sniffed around the base of the cylindrical chambers.
“This is where you created the first Meltdown, isn’t it?” I asked. “Major Meltdown, I guess.”
“We tried to,” said Seedy corrected me ruefully. “All we got for our effort was a puddle of pyroclastic protoplasm. And all Burston Coltrane got was … well, he was the puddle.”
“I blame myself,” said Seymour, ruefully. “We should never have gone to human trials before we were ready.” His eyes fell on Dr. Sax. “Who knows, maybe we should have tried it out on a cat first.”
“Nonsense,” said Seedy. “Everyone knew the risks. Beside, you recall the pressure we were under. We were in competition not only with the Nazis but with the folks downstairs, don’t forget. The first team to make a breakthrough were promised more funding. That was Kendall’s way of incentivizing us, the bastard.”
“Fools,” said Seymour. “We were fools. All of us. Young fools.”
***
We gathered back onto the elevator, with Dr. Sax the last to climb aboard. I was expecting it to rise, but the carriage resumed its descent. I almost forgot that another experiment had taken place at the Doomsday Factory.
“Four more levels,” Avie counted. “Sublevel seventeen now, by my count.”
“Project Megaton,” said Grandma Seedy. “Burly Boy.”
I had an uneasy sense as we disembarked. As on the thirteenth, this sublevel was also a lab. But in the center of the floor, instead of cylinders, stood a large, circular pad, reminiscent of the Time Turntable except that it was more of a ring with a depressed center. Huge electrode guns on wheeled stands resembling ancient television studio cameras stood pointing at it, waiting to bombard whoever stood on the pad with enormous amounts of energy. On the periphery were arrayed requisite lab benches and monitoring equipment that looked to be from the set of a gothic horror movie. Off to one side of the lab was a large, safe-like metal chamber that I guessed housed radioactive materials.
In the background, a soft, almost inaudible crackling murmured, like rain drops on a tin roof or the slow sizzle of a frying pan. It was a Geiger counter set to a low volume, indicating that decades later, this place was still “hot.”
“We shouldn’t stay here too long,” said Gene. “Not unless we want to eat iodine capsules for breakfast.”
“This was the birthplace of the Original, Golden Age Megaton Man,” I announced, mostly to myself, as if I were a tour guide.
“It was a still birth,” said Seymour. “The Burly Boy team had no more luck than we did with Girly Man. Not to mention they beat our one fatality with two. At least they had dead bodies after all was said and done; we couldn’t show even that much to show for our efforts.”
“Is this where you were created, Ms. Megaton?” asked Gene.
I actually shuddered at the suggestion. I had inherited my Megapowers from someone else whom I suppose was created in a place much like this, though: my father, the Silver Age Megaton Man. Although, I realized, I’d always imagined a space more modern, more sanitary, more clean and well-lit.
“This Frankenstein lab?” I replied. “Me? No. I’ve never seen this place before in my life.”
Gene was a little dashed by my rudeness.
“We’d best not stay here too long, as Gene said,” said Seedy, listening intently to the Geiger counter. “Thank the Lord this place is buried far underground.”
***
The elevator rose seventeen floors back to ground level, then continued six more to the topmost floor. The gates opened onto a cluttered hallway filled with shelves of documents and boxes, illuminated by a single, naked bulb, at the end of which was a door. Behind the door could be heard boisterous voices.
“They’ve already started the argument without us,” said Seymour, wheeling eagerly toward the door.
“Arguing?” asked Avie. “About what?”
“What you would expect old scientific colleagues to argue about,” said Seedy. “The same old, same old—about which paradigm for the Atomic Soldier had the best chance of success: Burly Boy or Girly Man, fusion or fission, Megaton or Meltdown. Or, about who made the coffee too strong.”
Through the door was a large, open space, obstructed only intermittently by girders encased in concrete. A large, round table dominated the center of the room—a ring, actually, thirty feet in diameter—with a four-foot wide table top and a twenty-two foot hole in the center. This imposing piece of furniture must have come apart in sections but gave the impression of being one solid, solitary piece. It flanked by more modest folding tables, drawing boards, chalk boards, and chairs. Overhead was a dim, dirty skylight, the only illumination in the room that was shrouded in gloom around the periphery. The room had the dry, musty air of a space that had been sealed up for decades, unsealed only for this occasion.
Already, half a dozen aged people were gathered around the table, four men and two women who gave the impression they had been sealed up in the room all along. Two males stood on opposite sides of the table; they were in the midst of a heated discussion. One of the gentlemen seemed very fit and quietly robust for his age; he had a lustrous head of dark-grey hair and trimmed beard and puffed on a pipe. He wore a nattily tailored three-piece suit and checked his watch fob intermittently. He had the air of a diffident college president who could afford to patiently wait for his colleague to bluster until he ran out of steam.
The other, also with a full head of dark hair streaked with strands of silver, was clean-shaven and wore a rumpled tweed jacket. His eyes were magnified by pop-bottle lenses; he leaned forward with the knuckles of one hand on the circular table while gesticulating with other, which held a cigarette that flung ashes in every direction. The full ashtray on the table and crumpled, empty cigarette packs—along with the hazy, acrid cloud of smoke that hung in the air—indicated he was a chain smoker and had been at it for some hours. He also seemed to spit a lot as he yammered on.
Seated at the table was a regal-looking woman, her hair done up in a pile atop her head like some decadent aristocrat. She wore a kind of chiffon wrap around her shoulders as if she’d been to an elegant dinner party in the city the night before. Thoughtfully, she puffed on a cigarette in a long, elegant holder as she listened quietly and intently to the discussion.
Another woman, more butch in slacks and a corduroy jacket with elbow patches, paced impatiently along one side of the room like a caged animal. For some odd reason she kept looking at the wall, even though there were no windows for her to peer out of. She chewed gum and ran her fingers through her short hair, greying hair compulsively; she always seemed poised to interject a sardonic remark into the discussion, but could never seem to formulate her thought or find an opportunity to get a word in edgewise with the two alpha males.
Another man stood off to the side, his back to us, facing a chalkboard. I couldn’t see his face at first, but he was of slight build, balding, with a fringe of unruly grey hair around his ears. He seemed preoccupied with a formula probably he himself had scrawled on the black slate decades ago, that had been preserved in this room untouched. From time to time he would pick up a piece of chalk and hold his hand as if about to amend the formula in some way; but then, after a pause, he would think better of it and set the chalk back down, leaving the formula untouched.
Finally, another man sat at the table, lost in thought. He was portly with thinning hair and a grey beard; her wore a kind of dark cape and one of those flat, brimmed hats you’d in a Toulouse Lautrec picture, or that Italian movie directors are supposed to wear. Something about him seemed well-traveled but beaten and world-weary. Before him on the table was a tall, stemmed, clear mug of black coffee that he slowly rotated between his fingers, regarding it as if it were a glass of fine wine.
“This megahero business is none of our concern,” insisted the chain-smoking man with pop-bottle glasses. “This ‘Ms. Megaton’ doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with our Atomic Soldier program, save for her appropriation of one of the proposed names …”
“My proposed name,” said the man at the chalkboard with his back to us. “Megaton Man was my project, the claims of that deceased thief Elias Levitch notwithstanding.”
“It was our Atomic Soldier program,” the regal-looking woman interjected. “Or should I say failed Atomic Soldier program—our collegial pipe dream of 1940.”
“Maybe so,” said the gentleman in the three-piece suit who had the air of a college president. “But the principle undergirding this arriviste megahero is the same. We were attempting to give a human being extraordinary powers; this person has come along, proving our theory, and, in a way, fulfilling our prophecy.”
“This Ms. Megaton proves nothing,” said the butch woman in slacks. “Allegedly, she got her powers from Brainard’s damn orb—that so-called Cosmic Cue-Ball. It’s the realm of magic, not science. She might as well be a visitor from an alien planet. As for that formula Sternlicht’s daughter is dabbling with …”
“I’ve never trusted serums,” said the man at the chalkboard. He turned on his heel and faced the group, and I finally got a look at his face.
It was none other than Rex Rigid—slimmer and less sloshy than Liquid Man appeared in my reality, and for lack of a better phrase, generally in much better shape. His voice, too, was also clearer, less muffled, which is perhaps why I hadn’t recognized it at first.
“Serums were always the province of that idiot Levitch,” Rex continued. “Served him right to die the way he did—never did know how to properly handle an isotope. If I’d had my druthers, we’d have bombarded those poor bastards with enough radiation to …”
At this point, the group finally noticed we had entered the room, emerging as we did from the peripheral darkness at the far end into the illuminated center. Dr. Sax led the way, slinking into the portly man’s lap as if they were old friends. Seymour wheeled himself forward with Grandma Seedy and Avie right behind him. Gene and I brought up the rear.
The college president took his hands from his pockets. “Seymour, it’s good to see you,” he called out. “Mercedith! So glad you could make it. But where is our prototype megahero?”
“Right here, of course,” replied Seedy. “You don’t think I would forget.”
The group all seemed to take Avie, who was at Seedy’s side, for Ms. Megaton—probably because of Avie’s long hair and shapely build. She seemed to more readily match the idea they had built up from low-resolution, blurry wire photos. I suppose I appeared too unprepossessing in my jeans, frumpy hoody, and close-cropped hair to be the glamorous megahero they imagined they’d glimpsed in the media.
I didn’t correct this perception right away; I was still ashamed in front of Gene, and bashful under the circumstances.
“Is this all of us?” asked Seymour. “Where’s Hyacinth?”
“Too frail to leave D.C., poor dear,” remarked the regal woman. “And Kendall of course, passed away now, along with Elias. And no one’s seen Winnie for years …”
Everyone looked to Rex, who shrugged. “Search me,” he said. “Just because we were the pre-teen wunderkinds of the group didn’t mean we were pen pals. I haven’t been in touch with Winnie since the Atomic Soldier experiments came to an end …”
I could have told them all that Dr. Winifred Wertz was alive and well and living in the Forbidden Future; I’d visited her there earlier that year. But since I’d been accompanied by Kozmik Kat, and the visit included an encounter with the Megaton Mice, I feared Seymour would think I was spoofing again, so I thought better of it.
In the meantime, the butch woman, had been sizing up Avie. “So, this is our Atomic Soldier, in the flesh,” she said. “Not bad; I’m a little disappointed she’s not all rippling muscles. But at least she’s female; if only we’d been so progressive forty years ago.”
“Yes, we should have included a female test subject,” the regal woman agreed. “Then at least one of our corpses would have been a woman—assuming death is your idea of equality.”
“Are you from outer space? We’re dying to know,” said the man with pop-bottle lenses. “Are you a Megapowered being from a dying world come to save our planet?”
Avie, who was beginning to realize the assembled scientists mistook her for Ms. Megaton, stammered, “I, uh, I um …”
“That’s only in the comic books,” said the college president. “I’m sure our Ms. Megaton has a much more down-to-earth origin story.”
“Oh, no, I’m not Ms. Megaton,” Avie finally spit out. “I’m just a college student. And a musician.” She clutched her guitar case. “You have me confused with my sister, Clarissa. Although she’s my sister from another reality.”
Everyone turned to look at me.