The Never Ending Battle (The Actual Conclusion … Really … Finally, Even)

“Wanda, Daniel; we’re needed at the White House.  Clark, keep the evacuation going, but this gizmo doesn’t show any radiation.  Have your men search the underground garage and basement, but I’m betting we didn’t rate any bomb.  Keep me advised and we’ll talk about all this later.”  I held out my hands to my roommates and we all flew out the ruined window.

I saw the Force criss-crossing the capitol in pairs, so there must have been at least four more radiation detectors in the box.  Tech said that live bombs would be easy to spot and with only – I glanced at my watch – five minutes to go before the deadline, chances are that everything would be live by now.

My detector started beeping like a metronome when we neared the White House.  We landed in a hail of small arms fire, which continued until I presented my identification to the lead Secret Security agent.  After confirming that the President, et al, were still safe, I started racing around the building, looking for the bomb.

Within a few seconds, the three of us were standing in front of a footlocker sized box and the detector was having hysterics.  I tossed it aside and, discovering that my comm unit had been destroyed by the friendly fire, borrowed Daniels to put an all call to the Force.

“Guys, this is Doctor Socks.  Wanda, Daniel, and I have found the White House bomb and – Tech? – it’s around four feet by two feet by two feet, so we’re talking about a city killer.  Papa must have meant that the White House would go first simply because it’s at ground zero.  Evacuate the city, starting at the White House and moving out.  Get as many people out of the danger zone as you can.”

Daniel opened the lid and located the timer.  ”Al!  The timer says 203 seconds.”

“Daniel says the timer reads less than two hundred seconds, gang, so get moving.  Friction burns are better than death, so take ‘em out at top speed.  We’ll handle the bomb the best we can and it’s been a honor knowing you people.  Doctor Socks, out.”  I tossed the comm unit into the corner and said, “Okay, two questions, lovers:  First, do either of you have any idea how to disarm one of these things and, second, what’s our chances of surviving ground zero?”

“Nope and I sure hope so!”

“Ditto … Al, you ever cover anything like this at MIT? 127 seconds, by the way.”

“Nope, not in any of the classes I took, but let’s take a peek under the hood.”

We three peered into the interior of the case.  The only parts I recognized were the timer and what must have been the radioactive material, which took up a goodly part of the case.  Wanda said she recognized the wires as wires, but that was it.  Daniel said eighty-three seconds.

I suggested just pulling wires at speed and hope for the best, since we could pull almost all the wires in an instant.  Daniel pointed out that, if any of the wires were booby trapped to detonate the bomb when pulled, it really didn’t matter how fast we pulled them.  Wanda calmly said, “Fifty-six and counting, boys.  We have less than a minute to come up with something.”

“Okay, let’s beat the crap out of the plutonium or whatever that stuff is!  I remember reading somewhere that it has to be like perfectly matched to get any reaction … or something,” Daniel suggested.

“Would that stop the explosion or just make it dirtier?” I asked, trying to find any red wire in the gazillion or so available.  I mean, it’s always the red wire in the damn movies, right?

“Twenty-eight seconds,” Wanda announced, slamming the lid on my search.

“What the hell?”

In answer, she threw herself on top of the bomb.  ”Washington is built on a swamp, so there’s no bedrock for quite a ways.  If we can smother the blast, maybe we can spare most of the city!”

Daniel threw himself onto part of the exposed lid.  ”Yeah!  Like laying down on a hand grenade!  Muffle the blast, limit the destruction.  Hell, we might even survive!”

I looked at my two best friends, sighed, and laid down on the remaining part of the box.  ”If we don’t survive this, people, I loved working with you every second.”

“Me, too, Al.”

“I love you two very much, you know that, right?”

“Well, you damn near crippled me proving it the other night, so I guess so.”

“Huh.”

What?  ”What?”

“Well,” Daniel drawled, in an odd tone, “it just dawned on me … couldn’t we have simply picked the fucking thing up and flown it … oh, I don’t know … maybe into space?”

‘WHAT!!”

The world disappeared in a silent blast of white light, as my optic nerves either disintegrated or overloaded, and I lost all sensation of weight or mass.  The box no longer existed … logical … and I couldn’t feel Daniel next to me … also logical, I suppose.  I saw … well, visions would be the best word, I suspect … I saw visions of my life, both before and what might have been; memory and possibilities, presented equally for maximum regret.

I waited for the moment of truth.  Would it be a gently smiling Jesus or a demonic Satan I saw next.  Was my final reward for my life Heaven or Hell.  For that matter, what would be hell to a chemist?  Fields of undergrads who keep blowing up the classroom?  Elements that never act properly?

I wondered if our sacrifice was enough, if it saved part of the city.  I wondered how many the Force had managed to evacuate and what condition the evacuated people were in.  I wondered how Papa had managed to smuggle such a huge bomb into the White House, for pity sake!

I wondered who’s hand was in mine and who was slapping me on the cheek.

I braced myself and opened my eyes.

Instead of Jesus or Satan, my blurry vision revealed Wanda looking down at me and saying something.  My ears were still not working, so I said, “What?” in flat tones.  She repeated herself slowly, shaping the words carefully with her full lips for me.  ”I … Want … To … Kill … Daniel?  You want to kill Daniel?  Is Daniel alive, too?  Are we all alive?”

The room slowly came into focus.  Perversely, it insisted on being the same normal White House sub-basement it was when we’d come in.  I struggled to my knees, looking around in shock.  Had we managed to smother … no, that would have been impossible!  There’s no way.  Then I noticed Daniel, sitting on the trunk and gently slapping himself on the side of his head, like he was trying to coax water out of an ear canal.

I fell over onto my ass … my bare ass.  I looked again.  Daniel and Wanda were also naked … and damn near hairless!  My hands flew of their own accord to my scalp, where only fuzz welcomed them.  ”DAMN!”

Wanda sat back and laughed at me.  Daniel stopped hitting the side of his head, peered at us, then grinned and ran his hand over his own bald head.  There wasn’t any hair longer than fuzz anywhere on their bodies, so it was a fair bet I was equally denuded.  I sat back, shaking my head, and thought about it.

We’d obviously survived, but only that which was invulnerable had, which meant that any dead hair was incinerated along with our clothes and shoes.  Naked and with a head to toe crew cut was still better than dead.

But why was the case still in one piece?  I asked that out loud and was astonished to head my voice, somewhat.  Daniel looked over at me and shrugged, replying, “I dunno; I just got here myself.”

Wanda told him to get his stupid ass off the case (“Why didn’t we just fly it up into space,” she added in a mutter and with a glare) and then opened the box.

Nothing.  No bomb.  Some stuff, wires and various electronic looking crap, were inside, but no bomb.  I said as much as Wanda held up a small gizmo, saying, “Look familiar?”

I took a good look at it.  It was the timer.

“What the hell’s happened?” I asked out loud, tossing the timer back into the box and struggling to my feet.  ”We just survived a ground zero nuclear blast and the bomb simply disassembled in shame, or what?”

Neither of them had any answers, so I went looking for the comm unit I’d tossed aside.  Yeah, stupid, but it made sense at the time.

Finally, I reminded my colleagues that the laundry room was only one story up and a couple doors down … we could make it at speed, invisibly, and borrow whatever they had available to cover up with.  Then we could check on the rest of the city.

I wasn’t really all that simple.  It took us a couple of false starts before our powers finally kicked in and we could race, unseen, through the hallways of the White House.  We stopped outside the laundry room door (can’t open doors at speed without destroying them) and slipped inside.  Nobody was there, so we started rummaging.  Daniel and I found some cooks whites, and Wanda looked fetching in some sort of maid’s outfit (although she grumbled, more or less good humorously, how come the black woman had to be the maid).

We walked out (bare footed, by necessity, since shoes were not laundered) and headed back up to the main Secret Security offices.  Nothing was damaged.  Windows weren’t even cracked.  Daniel kept whistling the theme from the Twilight Zone (a twentieth-century television show that had something to do about strange stories and events that befell vampires that glittered) and Wanda kept asking if the hallways had been the same color when we’d raced down them earlier.

An agent was speaking on his wrist comm ahead of us, so I asked him the status of the evacuation.

He stared at me blankly, said, “Evacuation?  What evacuation?”  Then he noticed my bare feet.

A few hours later, we were escorted into the office of the Vice President, my old college buddy, Charlie.

He was looking good … too good.  I peered at him closely and then asked, in as clear a voice as I could, “Charlie … what’s the date today?”

As he’d been in far too many matters of speculative science, Robert A. Heinlein called this one, too.  Kinda.  In Farnham’s Freehold, he suggested that a direct hit of an atomic bomb on a sufficiently well made bomb shelter would result in the shelter being tossed hundred of years into the future.

Maybe he was right.  However, if you lay three stupid superhero wannabe scientists across a very powerful nuclear device and then detonate it, they’ll get tossed a couple of years into the past.  Naked.  And with no hair to speak of.

Charlie made a few phone calls and, to his utter shock, confirmed that we three were still in the old labs.  As a matter of fact, all three of us were there right that moment, working on what would end up being the very process that permitted us to survive a nuclear blast.  The Secret Service confirmed that there was a largish case of possible bomb parts in the sub-basement we’d claimed to come from.

Charlie asked me if I expected him to believe, really and truly believe, that we’d somehow survived without injury … and that it somehow tossed us through time, too?

I asked Charlie if he remembered my old project, the one that he’d been nice enough to manage funding for?  Project Up, Up and Away?

He nodded and I rose to accept the cup of coffee from the agent, then kept rising for a few more feet, sipping on it while hovering halfway to the ceiling.  ”Well, Charlie, it worked.  The good news is that, in just a few years, you’ll have an American superhero team.  The bad news is that you’ll end up with a bomb in your basement a few months later.  Now,” I settled back down into my chair, ignoring the drawn pistols of the agents in the room, “let’s discuss a new budget.  With two of each of us working side by side, I suspect we’ll end up with even better results.”

We live in the Catskill Mountains, now; Daniel, Wanda, and me.  Our younger selves still work in the capitol, but – as you all know – the project took a much different turn in the beginning this time around.  No grand announcement, no flashy costumes, no college kids for the first subjects … although I do miss the sarcastic good nature of Chuck Nabori, Artist, and the relentless Boy Scout attitude of Tom Marshall.  No, this time we used professionals, recruiting from the military and NASA, and bypassed the difficulty Barbara presented, as well as the flashiness that public superheros caused.

They’re still there, of course, but only as a new security force, a new quasi-military branch of the government, answerable only to the White House, via my younger self, and only used whenever there is an emergency of Biblical proportions.  Most of the world isn’t even aware of their existence, yet, and the parts that are, are very tight lipped about it.  As far as the vast majority of the world’s population is concerned, the Force is simply a couple of dozen incredibly well trained and equipped men and women who have dedicated their lives to working for the greater good, who seem to be on the scene of any natural or man-made disaster within minutes, achieving almost super-human results.

Wanda, Daniel, and I, in the meantime, spend all day going over the process; improving this bit, changing that bit of subliminal conditioning, and trying to come up with some sort of off switch for the process, without which there still isn’t any way to retire from the Force.

Oh, they caught Papa in the act.  The Secret Security decided, since they had a deadline date already, to simply install a few video dots in the sub-basement and keep track of who came and went.  Remember how Clark was able to effortlessly pull up a diagram of the bomb on his terminal?

Yeah, he was involved.  He wasn’t the head, but he was responsible for getting clearance, via his old position, for those who put the bomb together.  The Lex Luthor of the affair was Clark Kent.  It took awhile, but he finally gave the names of all the members of PAPA, who turned out to be more interested in laundering their own finances than in cleansing the country.  (I broke cover for Clark, again, when he finally announced that he wasn’t going to say anything.  I simply flew him out the window and up to the lower levels of the atmosphere, where I tossed him up and down until he agreed to start speaking.  I wasn’t proud of myself, but – hey – with that name, he betrayed more than just his country.)

But all that’s old news.  The big news nowadays is that Wanda is pregnant!  There’s no telling if it’s a boy or a girl, but it’s certainly strong!  I felt it kicking the other day.  Wanda says that it kicks so hard that it would have already beaten it’s way out of any normal woman by now.

Will it be a meta?  I sure hope so, since only a meta baby has a chance of surviving a trip down the birth canal of a meta woman.  Daniel is working overtime to come up with something to use if this isn’t the case, but I’m betting that it is.  (Else how could we have all felt the kicks?)

That means we’ll be the parents of the first meta child on the planet … and then we’ll learn the true meaning of “The Never Ending Battle!”

End