“You need to slip out of those grass-stained clothes,” said Preston. “Especially that bloodied Abyssinian Wolves sweatshirt, Trent. My people are bringing over a replacement even as we speak.”
We were standing in the living room of the Ann Street house. Trent did look a bit disheveled; he tried to console Simon, who was still more than a bit upset, having narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by some of Megaton Man’s old adversaries. My back was pretty stiff, having shielded them from one exploding missile and diverting another—more exertion than I was used to as Ms. Megaton Man. I stood there rubbing my back as father and soon took off their ruined clothing; my civilian clothes had been blown off, so I had nothing to change into.
Meanwhile, a white van drove up in front of the house with the by-now familiar ICHHL abbreviation on the side. This one read:
Insubordinate Childhood Harm and Hurtful ‘Limination
“We Will Cheer Your Kid Up, Pronto, and Make Things Right”
A guy in a white jumpsuit jumped out and hurriedly brought a big corrugated cardboard box with similar markings up the porch and in through the front door. Setting it down on the living room floor, he quickly opened it, and pulled out a box that was almost as big, gift wrapped. “Who’s been a big for not crying because he was nearly blown to pieces?”
Amazingly, Simon stopped crying all at once. The guy tore open the package and Simon helped out; from inside came outfits that were identical in color, size, and even state of wear to what Trent and Simon had had on before the attack. There was even an outfit for me, indistinguishable from the one the Arms of Krupp projectile had incinerated from of my body. There was even a big, stuffed toy for Simon. “Can you say ‘dinosaur’?” said the man.
“Dinosword!” said Simon, hugging the toy. This seemed to cheer him up considerably.
Trent grabbed the clothing and took Simon with his stuffed dinosaur upstairs to change and attend to his own minor cuts he’d sustain from flying shrapnel. In the meantime, the guy in the white jumpsuit gathered up the wrappings and removed the empty box, threw it in the back of the van, climbed back in, and disappeared.
“Don’t just stand there,” said Preston to me. “Put on your outfit. We don’t want Stella coming home to see Ms. Megaton Man all scorched in her living room. She’ll already have heard about the commotion at the foot Alberti Tower, no doubt, the way word spreads in this town; she mustn’t ever know it involved the three of you in Broadway Park.”
“You mean the assassination attempt by some of Megaton Man’s old adversaries?” I said. “Or perhaps even Rex Rigid, her jealous ex-husband, or some other mad scientist who would like to see Trent or even Simon Phloog dead? I didn’t want to say anything in front of Trent, but you yourself told me how ICHHL views the child of a Megaton and a Meltdown with apprehension because he might grow up and become the most powerful being in the world someday. Isn’t it possible that others see the son of Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl similarly as a threat? Maybe because he’s also holding together two universes that don’t belong together?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Preston. “The Arms of Krupp never worked with any mad scientists, let alone Rex Rigid…they’re just garden-variety international purveyors of mayhem—and inept, bumbling morons, obviously. They’d be after Megaton Man in any case, not his kid.”
“They seemed pretty lethal for bumbling morons, and they weren’t so easy to foil this time, were they?” I said, rubbing my back under my cape where the ballistic missile had hit me.
“You now Stella would freak out,” Preston said sternly. “If she thought Ann Street wasn’t safe anymore, she’d likely bolt and take Simon into hiding somewhere—which would make my job impossible. Here on Ann Street at least, we can afford them some measure of protection.”
“But it is unsafe here,” I said. “They’re a civilian family of former megaheroes living in off-campus housing in a college town, not some hyper-protected megahero headquarters. Their lives are all in danger.”
“They would be in even more danger if she fled with the kid, and we couldn’t find them,” said Preston. “Here, we have our spy satellite monitoring them constantly. And, we have the facilities of Megatonic University at our disposal.”
“What good is that?” I demanded. “You can’t keep them prisoner in an underground bunker. If Ms. Megaton Man hadn’t happened to be in this neck of the woods, they’d have been blown to smithereens.”
“I admit we were a bit sloppy,” said Preston. “And we got lucky; then again, maybe it wasn’t just luck.”
“What do you mean?”
“You noticed the scorch marks in the grass?” Preston asked. “A force field was thrown up around Trent and Simon at the last second, protecting them.”
I really hadn’t noticed; I was kind of intercepting a couple missiles. “It didn’t do such a great job, did it? Trent still sustained a cut or two. I suppose you beamed that force field down from your ICHHL orbiting killer satellite?”
“I wish we had such technology,” said Preston. “But no, it wasn’t us.”
“Then, who…?”
“I don’t happen to believe in guardian angels,” said Preston. “But some unknown third party wants to keep Phloog père et fils alive.”
Preston left. I paced around the living room for some time, trying to figure things out, but my mind was still too foggy and in shock. Finally, I took my replacement clothes upstairs to my old room. By then, Trent and Simon had brushed their teeth; Trent then put Simon to bed with his new dinosaur stuffed toy and had gone to bed himself in his own room. I took off my costume and put it in my duffel bag, and tucked the replacement clothes into my replacement shoulder bag. I lay on top of the cot and sleeping bag in my underwear for quite some time, too unsettled to sleep. Soon, I heard Trent snoring; how could he relax so easily after so much excitement? True, he hadn’t flown to the top of Alberti Tower and witnessed to Arms of Krupp henchmen leap to their deaths, but he had endured an explosion that could have killed him and his only son. Maybe after being Megaton Man all those years, you become inured to little things like that.
But I sure wasn’t. Being a megahero involved too many responsibilities, it was becoming clear to me. And what good was it anyway, having megapowers, when thirteen scientists could ere create Megatons and Meltdowns on a whim, and split and recombine the universe whenever they felt like it? What good was costumed crimefighting when the very stuff of reality could be manipulated by the human mind through technology and science, subsidized by the federal government?
I heard Stella come home after midnight and climb upstairs. She must have checked in on Simon, who was fast asleep, because I heard her footsteps out in the hall and the creaking of the door. Then, more footsteps; she paused to listen to Trent snore. Finally, she went into her own bedroom and went to bed. She must have forgotten about me.
I tossed and turned for hours that night in a fitful sleep. I dreamt of Cosmic Cue-Balls flying through the air, being swallowed by Megaton Man and then swallowed by me, then penetrating my every orifice. I dreamt of my once-dead Grandma Seedy coming back to life and bringing back my dead Uncle Rodney and introducing the Mod Puma to Mama and the Silver Age Megaton Man, my biological father, riding on the Time Turntable and waving at us from a distance. I dreamt he used it to cross over into myriad dimensions that operated under entirely different principles than the world I knew. And I dreamt of Simon Phloog, growing up to become a more powerful megahero than all the rest of the Megatons and Meltdowns that ever lived combined…
I awoke drenched in sweat. It was still dark, but a vaguely greenish glow filtered through the gloom. I was in my underwear, and when my bare feet hit the floor, I felt a strange vibration. My hearing hadn’t fully returned yet, or perhaps I would have heard the sound first: an odd, almost inaudible hum, like someone running the dryer in the basement. I was terrified.
I crept quietly down the creaking stairs as softly as possible; they wouldn’t cooperate, which told me I wasn’t having a dream. I moved slowly down the hall toward the kitchen. The sound was clear now, but no dryer was running in the basement. The hum—and a greenish light—was emanating from the back yard.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The grass was cold under my feet, and my sweat turned clammy against my skin; it was late September, after all. I made my way past a small pile of firewood—the old, towering stack having been replaced with a smaller, fresh cord—and made my way along the side of the garage. I turned the corner; between the back fence and the back of the garage was a gap of several feet, a patch of lawn large enough to park a car. It was from that the greenish glow—and the hum—was emanating.
There was nothing there except more grass and a telephone pole stuck in the corner formed by the chain-link fences. Except I could discern a four-foot wide depression in the grass, as if something heavy but invisible were pressing down upon it.
“I wish I’d brought my visor,” I said out loud. “If I had, I’m sure it would detect your presence—Partyers from Mars.”
In a moment, a green-domed flying saucer materialized before my very eyes, resting on the grass, no doubt having been rendered invisible by a sophisticated cloaking device. In another moment, an elfin girl with pointy ears appeared in front of it. I had seen her before—along with a Labrador retriever, a tortoise, a skull guy, and a cyclopean-eyed, tentacled squid girl, all led by a male elf who was their captain—as they dropped off Yarn Man who was dead drunk from a bender a couple Thanksgivings ago. This time, however, the girl was alone.
“We meet again, Clarissa,” said the girl. “I don’t believe we’ve ever been introduced. I’m Apollonia Parsec, media officer of the George Has a Gun. But you can call me Polly.”
“George Has a Gun?” I said.
“Where?” said Polly, suddenly looking around.
“You just said, George Has a Gun,” I said.
“That’s the name of our ship,” she said, relaxing. “You had me startled for a moment.” She knocked on the green dome of the saucer. “It’s traveled from the far side of the galaxy, George has.”
“You guys have been camped out back here for the past two years?” I said, incredulous.
“We needed a base camp,” said Polly, “and Ann Arbor has proven as good as any, offering many interesting cultural diversions while we keep watch over our asset.”
“Your asset?” I said. “You’re the ones who threw the force field around Trent and Simon, weren’t you? But, it wasn’t foolproof; shrapnel got through.”
“Nobody’s perfect,” said Polly. “Besides, it isn’t essential that the host organism remain in pristine condition—just the Mutanium Particle it harbors. If we lose track of that again, we’ll be here another forty solar cycles.”
“What’s a Mutanium Particle?” I asked.
“Only the very thing we were sent here to retrieve, lo these many decades ago, of your Earth time,” said Polly. “Mutanium is a substance our race mines in the far quadrant of the galaxy—we export it to distant, advanced cultures in other parts of the universe who use it in manufacturing industries that are beyond your imagining. Even a tiny, virtually invisible speck of it is capable of splitting reality in two and fusing it back together. This particular particle has already done both, in your Earth history.”
My Grandma Seedy had mentioned a particle the Thirteenth Scientist had fiddled around with before World War II—he had tried to split it but accidentally split the universe instead.
“You mean this Mutanium Particle you’ve been after is here, in Ann Arbor? How do you know?”
“We’ve been tracking it across dimensions and realities,” said Polly. “The little bugger’s nearly impossible to detect. Luckily, one of your species managed to isolate it in a small sphere of pure Extanium, the most powerful buffering agent in the universe. This mitigated its most awesome energies, but it’s still highly mobile. Now it leaves behind a trail of colorful, ephemeral shapes in its wake. That’s how we’re able to detect it.”
A small, white sphere that leaves behind a trail of colorful, ephemeral shapes—where had I heard such an object described before? The elfin Partyer from Mars could only be describing one thing…
“The Cosmic Cue-Ball!” I cried. “You’ve been after it ever since you landed in Central Park…before Megaton Man accidentally swallowed it. Doc Levitch theorized it contained some unknown substance—some active ingredient—that neutralized Megaton Man’s megapowers, leaving Trent an ordinary civilian. But it’s gone, isn’t it? Or do you mean to say the Mutanium Particle is still inside his metabolism?”
“We’d been able to predict the particle’s appearances in this dimension with some accuracy,” said Polly. “But just when we’re about to capture it, always some mishap or unexpected accident seems to intervene. In this case, yes—it flew down the gullet of the Man of Molecules—yet another setback in our quest to return it safely to our home planet. Megaton Man did lose his megapowers as a result, but he’s still intimately connected to the Mutonium Particle. First Science Officer Pup could explain it better than I; I’ve never been any good at quantum mechanics.”
“Forty solar cycles,” I said. “That’s what the tortoise crewmember said when you guys dropped off Yarn Man two years back. You mean to tell me you’ve been on earth for forty years—since World War II—trying to catch that thing? Yet you look barely out of your teens…”
“And we’ll have to stick around another forty solar cycles if we screw up again,” said Polly. “Luckily, we’re not on the same time-continuum as you Earthlings, Ms. Megaton Man, although we are starting to get a little bored. We’ve had several good opportunities to catch the ‘Cosmic Cue-Ball,’ as you call it—a 1955 Elvis performance at a drive-in was probably the best, in my view—but we’ve somehow found a way to screw it up each time.”
“What went wrong?” I asked. Then I remembered these intragalactic aliens called themselves the Partyers from Mars—with good reason.
“Better to ask what went right, which was nothing,” replied Polly. “Equipment malfunction, overly-optimistic astronomical forecasts, poor training. Besides, have you taken a good look my crewmates? Reprobates, addictive personalities, arrested adolescent cases, every one of them. Not to mention, your popular culture provides countless distractions against which our species has no natural defense—Bebop jazz, trashy novels, chewing gum that keeps its flavor on the bedpost overnight, to name just a few. Modernity is all but toxic for us—it seems to have been engineered purely to maximize cognitive dysfunction. And, we’re just kind of lazy. All I know is we’ve had to be patient between sightings of the Mutanium Particle, and your myriad earthling diversions have helped us kill a lot time, and then, when it’s spotted, it’s hurry-up-and-panic time, and we’re asleep at the wheel, caught with our pants down, and a day late and dollar short. One of these days we’ll capture the blamed thing and take it back to our quadrant of the galaxy, where it belongs, but who knows how many more failed attempts we’ll have to make.”
“But you know exactly where this Mutanium Particle is,” I pointed out. “The particle responsible for this whacky Everything-but-the-Kitchen-Sinkverse is embedded in the metabolism of Trent Phloog. Why don’t you just pluck it out and be on your way—back to Mars or whatever distant part of the galaxy you’re from?”
“It’s not that simple, dearie,” said Polly. “Would you want our skull-faced physician to perform sub-atomic, cross-dimensional surgery on your friend? These things have to work themselves according to certain uninterrupted historical processes. Or would you rather we cause irreparable harm to the organism you call Trent Phloog?”
“No! I certainly wouldn’t want that.” It was awful enough seeing Trent slightly bloody because I couldn’t protect him completely.
“Besides, the Astral Fleet has a non-interference clause,” said Polly. “Disrupting your Earth history could cause all sorts of untold calamity. I’d explain it all to you, but like I said, I’m not an historian.”
Like a flying saucer landing in Central Park hadn’t disrupted Earth history. In fact, it had set off a sequence of events—a titanic battle between Megaton Man and Bad Guy—that utterly destroyed Manhattan Island, from which the city somehow instantly regenerated. But Polly had a point; I wasn’t considering the consequences or implications of my suggestion.
“Never mind me,” I said. “I was just thinking out loud.”
“Captain Anton just wanted you to know we’re in the neighborhood so you wouldn’t be overly concerned—we’re keeping an eye on things on Ann Street. He advises you to rest easy and tend to your studies back in Detroit.”
“Thank Captain Anton for me—that’s very thoughtful of him,” I said. But I wasn’t at all sanguine, even if both the Ivy-Covered Halls of Higher Learning and the Partyers from Mars were watching over Trent and Simon—they’d done such a demonstrably lousy job. Somehow, I wasn’t as worried for Stella; based on what I’d seen that Thanksgiving in the kitchen—when she’d nearly had a complete meltdown, literally—I suspected the Earth Mother could take of herself.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a party to get back to,” said Polly, thumbing toward the dome of the saucer. Polly tapped some tool on her star-belt—presumably, this was the device that enabled her to teleport outside the saucer—and began to fade away.
“Wait!” I cried. ““You can’t just appear for a chat and then vanish! I still have like a zillion questions! Like, how this Mutanium Particle can split reality apart forty years ago, and then can just fuse back together of its own volition! Or, how New York and Megatropolis can be destroyed then instantly regenerate! Or, how my grandma can still be alive…”
“Like I said, I can’t explain everything,” said Polly. “I’m not a historian; I majored in communication—little more than advanced high school in your culture. Not exactly the most rigorous of academic disciplines…”
She was almost gone, although I could still hear an echo of her voice:
“Good luck, Ms. Megaton Man. We’ll be watching…and waiting.”
The next instant, Polly Parsec was gone, followed by the saucer, which also faded and disappeared. All that was left was the circular depression in the grass.
I stepped forward and waved my hand through the space where, only moments before, Polly had stood and knocked on a solid object. Like the phantom Megatropolis Quartet headquarters I glimpsed on the Manhattan skyline through my visor, I supposed the George Has a Gun did not exactly exist in the same dimension I did.
I was alone, standing in the cold grass behind the garage in my bare feet and underwear, knowing that it hadn’t been a dream only because I was freezing to death.
I went back into the house and tread softly up the stairs. I could hear Simon breathing, sound asleep in his room. Likewise, Stella was fast asleep in her room. Trent—I could hear from the hallway—was still snoring in his room.
I didn’t feel like climbing back into my cold cot in the spare bedroom, so I opened the door to Trent’s room and slipped into bed next to the organism that had absorbed a Mutanium Particle.
“Woo!” said Trent, rousing from his slumbers. “You’re toes are like popsicles!”
I kept my feet away from him but continued to hug his body. He relaxed; soon, we were both fast asleep.