I agreed to go back up to Troy a few nights later, on a night when I wasn’t scheduled at the Union Stripe Café. But it had been so long since I’d used my megapowers I really had to psyche myself up. The last time I had tried pulling on Avie’s weight machines, I could barely do ten reps at forty pounds, flabby civilian weakling I had become. But when I put on my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, my courage came back and I managed to fly to Detroit’s northern suburbs without any problem. I had no choice, since I don’t drive and I didn’t want Avie hanging around dangerous scientific machinery any more than was necessary. In fact, I was hoping she’d get so busy with school and her theater group that she’d forget about joining the Troy+Thems altogether, so I never even let on to her that I was going.
The Phantom Jungle Girl was right about one thing: Megaheroes don’t need front doors since we rarely use them. We almost always enter and exit a building from the roof, or a window on a top floor, to avoid disrupting street traffic and gawking pedestrians. In the case of the Troy headquarters, which entirely surrounded by a glass membrane, the roof was my only option.
The building was located near the intersection of Big Beaver Road—I kid you not—and Livernois Avenue. The latter was the name of one of the French farmers, François l’Ivernois, who settled downtown D’étroit (“of the strait”). Beavers, of course, were the indigenous dam-building animals the French fur trappers hunted for their coveted pelts, which they sent back to Europe by the ton. Thus the intersection retained some trace of local history, although from the air it just looked like another busy intersection that I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish without my visor’s computer map readout. Some wit decided to dub the office park the building was part of Beavernois Business Park, and the building itself Beavernois Tower. Perhaps that’s why the Teen Idols got lost in another dimension and never came back, just to avoid the big beaver jokes.
As I made my landing, I spotted a large, round helipad on the roof I hadn’t noticed when I had taken off from the building before; it now had a copter parked on it with a couple guys in ICHHL jumpsuits polishing and cleaning it. On the side of the copter was the logo “In-flight Chopper-Hopper and Helicopter Livery,” which seemed tortured, even for them. They waved as I walked into the stairway and down to the top floor.
On one side of the huge, open-plan floor, Kav and Jasper flipped switches on control panels of some of the larger gizmos and were checking off items on a clipboard. Jasper apparently had located the operating manuals for some of the equipment and had them open on a table and was referring to the specifications contained therein. He looked comical all stretched out and around some of the pieces; Kav, being smaller, tended to crawl under things to make his inspections.
On the other side of the floor, a couple more ICHHL technicians were busy installing carpeting while another one ran a vacuum sweeper and two more peeled tape from freshly-painted walls. They looked about ready to have the equipment moved over so they could carpet the other half of the enormous space.
It wasn’t until I walked over to Jasper and Kan that I realized another man in a lab coat was assisting them in their diagnostics. He was kneeling behind a bank of computers, so I only heard his voice talking to the others.
“Oh, good, Clarissa’s here,” said Kav, crawling out from under a machine like some car mechanic on a creeper, hopping to his feet and setting down the clipboard on nearby flat surface.
Jasper elongated himself around the control console to greet me. “You’re just in time, Ms. Megaton Man.”
The large man behind the control console stood up. He happened to be enormous. At his full height, he was more than eight feet tall if he was an inch, and he made the high ceilings seem low. He wore an oversized lab coat that was open in the front, and underneath it a standard-issue megahero body suit with trunks, a belt, boots. He wore a visor his eyes that was like mine except that it was opaque; he had neatly-feathered sandy hair that swept across his forehead.
Across his chest as a simple em dash or minus sign.
I immediately recognized him as one of the megaheroes in the strange photograph I had seen at Doctor Messiah’s. “You were in the Detroit Crime Busters,” I said.
He extended his hand. “That’s right. My name’s Andre Revell. I’ve heard wonderful things about you, Ms. Megaton Man.”
Jasper introduced us. “You can call her Clarissa James now,” he said. “We don’t have any secret identities here.” He explained to me, “Andre’s an old friend of mine. We brought him in to check out the more complicated gizmos. He’s a pretty brilliant inventor in his own right, aside from being the Anti-Matter Man.”
“On occasion I’ve been called the Negative Man,” said Andre, “although honestly I don’t really have a preference. It’s been a long time since anybody’s mentioned the old Detroit Crime Busters, though—you must be an historian. Mostly, I run a nuclear power station up in Saginaw these days. Here, can you help me move a few things?”
Between me and Andre the giant, we made short work of most of the equipment that had to be moved. Naturally, Kav or Tempy had already worked out a floor plan, which we had to obey down to an eighth of an inch, with Jasper and his tape measure at the ready to check and double check. “Who knows when this stuff will get moved again, so we’d better do it right,” said Jasper.
Ordinarily, a couple perfectionists like Kav and Jasper would have driven me nuts, but I was so taken with the Negative Man’s stern, cool good looks—made only more mysterious by his opaque visor—that picking things up and moving them over a hair repeatedly didn’t seem a chore.
One piece of equipment was a 9-track reel-to-reel computer bank that looked like it had come from the early Mercury program. As we lugged it across the room, I said, “You must know my friends Audrey and Wilton. I saw a photograph of you all in a big group with the other Crime Busters the other day.”
“Yes, old B-50,” said Andre. “He’s almost as old as some of this equipment. But he was way ahead of his time technologically, as far as robots were concerned.”
I told Andre where I had seen the photograph, but he had never heard of Professor Joshua bar-Joseph—Doctor Messiah—or his teaching fellow Michele Selket, the Asp, let alone the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute. I didn’t mention the “future” version of the same group photograph, the one in which I had seen myself, along with a giant woman who wore a costume with an em dash or minus sign across the chest, similar to Andre’s. But I did ask him, “You don’t have a sister, do you?”
“No…why do you ask?”
“Oh, nothing.”
***
After the Teen Idols had vanished in the seventies, all the equipment in the room had been pushed over to one side and had drop cloths flung over them. Now, tested and operational again, Andre and I dropped set them in place over the new carpeting. ICHHL technicians reconnected the power cords and cables in floor outlets or along the concrete-encased girders that ran up into the drop ceiling that were spaced intermittently around the floor. As we cleared equipment from one side of the room to the other, different ICHHL technicians tore up the old carpeting and laid down new carpeting with record speed. Automatic air filters, newly installed in the drop ceiling, drew up all the air, minimizing dust.
“This is going to be one fine megahero headquarters,” said Jasper, admiringly.
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“More than we’re ever going to need,” said Kav, looking around with disdain at all of the scientific equipment we’d already moved and meticulously placed into position. “Although I’ll grant you, it does look impressive—it your idea of décor is early Houston Control.” He rolled his eyes at me and tilted his head at a couple of pieces we’d just spent twenty minutes moving, but that he still hoped would be discarded.
We took a twenty-minute break for the ICHHL technicians to catch up with us with their carpeting and sweeping. Jasper left for a nearby Burger Castle to pick up dinner for the lot of us, including the ICHHL guys. Kav was eager to show me the dormitory floor, “Where I had a little more say in the interior design,” he told me. But I was too pooped. So we just pulled up some rolling office chairs and took a load off.
If I was taken with Andre Revell, I wasn’t the only one. Kav and I both gazed admiringly at the Negative Man’s rippling physique, especially after Andre took his lab coat off to inspect the Dimensional Portal, which was going to be the last thing we moved. He had some kind of handheld electromagnetic current meter, and was waving it all over the thing and taking readings.
“Is he always this big?” I asked.
“No, he can change sizes,” said Kav. “From six feet to about eighteen. He can also make himself smaller, but that’s kind of an effort for him. He did it the other night, to look into some of the more intricate equipment, but it really takes it out of him. Eight feet is usually the default.”
“Have you known him for long?” I asked.
Kav shook his head. “No, I just met him the other night. You wouldn’t know it from looking at him, but all the skin you see, the hair…fake. Rubber. His real body is pure anti-matter underneath. Jasper told me he helped create Andre’s skin to contain him. Jasper knows all about elastics and protective coatings and stuff—that’s how he accidentally became Rubber Brother, you know. Believe it or not, that thin layer of artificial material keeps Andre Revell’s anti-matter body from coming into contact with the outer air, else his entire body would explode, taking much of the metropolitan Detroit area with him.”
“Wow,” I said. “No wonder he’s kind of cool and distant. He’s a hard one to read. Did you happen to find out whether he’s into men or women?”
“I don’t know,” said Kav, sighing. “I sure wish he was into men, or at least me. But then, I’m not sure how that would work, doing it with a being made of anti-matter. At least I wish he and I were of opposite genders. Did I tell you, I was thinking of transitioning?”
“No,” I said, gravely. “What is transitioning?”
“You know how all those tennis stars that disappear and go to Denmark and come back a different sex?”
I didn’t think there were all that many, but I nodded. “Uh-huh.”
“Well, it’s becoming more common, and you don’t even need to leave the country.”
“Oh,” I said, as what he was telling me began to sink in. “You mean transitioning from a man to a woman. You’re thinking of getting a sex change?”
That’s how we talked back in the eighties, before it became common to think of sex and gender as separate.
“It’s a long, drawn out process,” Kav explained. “There’s a period of counseling, and you have to live your chosen gender, then hormone therapy. It can take a couple of years.”
“Wow,” I said again. “And then…the surgery?”
“You don’t have to go through with the surgery to be a gender different than what you were born with,” Kav explained. “In some sense, it’s a label society puts on a person at birth, but you’re always free to change it. I’ve always felt like someone else inside my body. I’ve always considered myself female.”
I had about a million questions, but I didn’t want to seem like I was launching an inquisition. So, I just asked. “Tempy, what would you call yourself if you were to become a girl?”
“Kavanaugh,” said Kav. “My real name is Kevin—I never cared for it.”
We both burst out laughing.
“So you’re already a girl,” I said. “Why didn’cha tell me? Here I’ve been calling you him, his, when I should have been calling you she, her.”
“I’m not hung up on pronouns,” said Kav. “Although I think of myself as she.”
“She it is,” I said. I put my arm around him. “surgery or no surgery, I’ll love you just the same whatever you decided to be, to remain, or to become.”
***
The Dimensional Portal, as I mentioned, was a tall, oval-shaped contraption with a short, slanted ramp that lead up to it, with another ramp on the other side. I was over ten feet tall, and the ring of white metal that made up the oval was about a foot thick. It was sculpted in a way that was aesthetically pleasing, but intermittent panels and plates held on by screws seemed unavoidable. I imagined that all lit up and working it would look even scarier than it did unplugged, which was menacing enough.
Andre connected a thick bundle of cables from a stand-alone console that was the portal’s control panel, marking off items on his clipboard. Without his lab coat, he appeared as I imagined Winnie Wertz might look in real life: a heroic adventurer about to leap through the portal to some distant dimension or time period. Except that Winnie, as they drew her in those coverless Devengers comics I had accumulated, wore a much more elaborate costume as Gargantuella. She also had sleek, black hair, prominent nose, and full lips the artists stylized into an exotic, ethnic sort of beauty.
One of the ICHHL technicians was vacuuming the concrete floor on that far side of the room where his colleagues had ripped up the old carpeting and were preparing to lay down the new. He finished his task and started wrapping the cord onto the vacuum.
Jasper returned carrying three or four bags full of cheeseburger sliders and fries, and those cardboard things that hold milkshakes and whatnot. His stretchy arms were wrapped tightly around the food, of which there appeared to be enough to feed a dozen people. Sure enough, the ICHHL crew working on the floor below came up to share, along with the helicopter crew on the roof. They called to the guy who was sweeping to come over.
“Just a second,” he called back. “Let me hook this back up.”
Suddenly, Jasper dropped all the food, which splattered all over the new carpeting. Eyes wide, he stretched his neck, arms, and torso, desperate to reach across the cavernous room.
“NOOO!” he cried. “Don’t plug that in!”
We turned to look at the ICHHL technician, the one who had finished vacuuming. In the wall outlet where he’d unplugged the vacuum from the wall, he was now plugging in another cord. Apparently, he had seen the second cord just lying there, and assumed it had been unplugged to make way for the vacuum. He was only doing the polite thing by plugging it back in—or so he thought.
Andre, who stood crouching inside the oval ring of the Dimensional Portal, hadn’t been paying attention to the ICHHL guy. The cord the ICHHL guy was now plugging in ran to the control panel console, which was now connected to the Dimensional Portal.
Lights on the control panel instantly flickered on. In second later, lights on the oval ring began to blink. A humming sound began to vibrate throughout the room.
Andre, once he realized with the ICHHL guy was doing, called out, “Wait a second…” But it was already too late.
Rubber Brother, as I said, tried to run across the room, but only managed to jog in place. He was impeded by all the Burger Castle food he’d dropped at his feet. Instead, he was sliding over the spilled milkshakes and greasy cheeseburgers and fries, which were ground indelibly into the brand new carpeting.
I leapt up from my seat with the thought of flying across the room. Kav—Tempy—put his forefingers to his temples, which I took to be an effort to stop or roll back time, although frankly I had no precise idea what his megapowers were.
The ICHHL guy turned and saw what he had wrought and cursed an expletive that couldn’t be heard over the hum of the Dimensional Portal, which was now a roar.
I’m not sure that it mattered, but Andre Revell dove from where he was standing inside the oval ring to the far side of the machine instead of the side facing us, just as energy bursts ricocheted around inside the oval.
The ICHHL guy tried to pull the power cord from the wall, but was thrown back by an electric shock when he touched it.
The energy bursts subsided. Andre Revell was nowhere to be seen. We could all see through the oval to the wall on the other side of the room. No one was there.
“The Negative Man!” said Jasper. “We’ve lost the Negative Man! He’s been pulled into some other dimension or zone or reality…”
I suppose the plan was to check the coordinates on the control console to see if we could bring him back, but before the three of us—Kav, Jasper, and I—could get across the room, the portal crackled to life again.
More bursts of energy ricocheted inside the oval, until a giant figure was flung out in our direction, splayed at our feet.
We gathered around the figure but dared not get too close; steam was rising from the still body almost as thick as smoke. Jasper motioned to the ICHHL guy, who picked himself up and finally managed to pull the plug on the machine.
The figure at our feet stirred, strained to rise off the floor.
“My artificial skin seems to have protected him,” said Jasper. “I was afraid…”
“Him?” I said.
The figure wore the same costume as Andre Revell, with the em dash or minus sign across the chest, and was also a giant. But the wide pelvis and modest but definite breasts gave the figure an altogether different silhouette. Behind the opaque visor, the face and especially the jaw line was slighter, less masculine. The sandy hair, still swept across the forehead, was longer, near shoulder-length.
“I don’t think this is the Negative Man any more, Jasper,” I said. “Or even a man at all anymore…”
“No,” said Kav. “She’s Andrea Revell now…the Negative Woman.”
Tempy looked like she was about to cry.