Minister Faust (25 page)

With greater delicacy than I’d ever seen him employ, Festus Piltdown wedged himself between Kareem and the microphone, saying, “On the authority of F*O*O*J General Security Order Number One, we are now at Defense Condition Cyan.”

With that, he clicked a button on his glove and the auditorium plunged into deep cyan.

Confused mumbling flooded the hall. Mr. Piltdown shook his head, finally shouting at the questions only he could hear: “No, no, no, you shankshaft, you put on scuba gear for Def-Con Mauve, not Cyan! Are you color-blind?”

“Why couldn’t it be L-Raunzenu?”
shouted somebody, slicing through the din.

Mr. Piltdown flushed darkly while the challenger railed on.

“Everything Kareem said about the attack, the plot against us, all of it could’ve been carried out by L-Raunzenu. Which you know better than anybody, Squirrel, since Piltdown Psychotronics synthesized the damn thing outta ten million neurocorded nightmares—”

“—at the cost of a billion dollars of defense-contract taxpayers’ money,” said Kareem, grabbing the microphone. “Look—HeliCop, isn’t it? Listen, I hear where you’re coming from, but L-Raunzenu has no need to free Menton, right? And I’m telling you, I was up there on Asteroid Zed, and Menton
wasn’t.
If you wanna pursue that as a complementary investigation, we can continue this conversation in camera. But for now,” he said, appealing to the crowd, “this is the angle I’m working.”

“That
we’re
working,” said Mr. Piltdown, glaring at HeliCop. “Def-Con Cyan, everyone! Action stations! Action stations!”

And off they all shuffled beneath cyan lighting. By then there wasn’t a hero in the Fortress who hadn’t been swept up in Kareem’s cyclone of neurotic panic. And when those heavyweights eventually hit the earth, inevitably the innocent would be crushed where they stood.

When the Hall was clear, I was alone in the cyan light except for one man. At six-five, he was hard to miss, but it was as if he’d been invisible until that point. Yet at that moment he was a lightning bolt of a presence in his dark blue suit and red tie, with his coal-and-silver hair greased into a single e-curl in front. His face looked as if it’d been dipped in tempura and yanked from the deep-fryer five minutes too soon.

“Doctor Brain, sir, ma’am,” he whispered, shuffling toward me as if his every bone ached. “I…I need y’hep.”

What Type of Sandwich Are You?

O
ne glance into Wally’s eyes communicated an epic of disorientation and dysfunction. If
you’ve
ever looked yourself in the mirror at three
A
.
M
. and seen such distress, felt so out of control, and been so desperate for answers, maybe it’s time to stop looking around you, and start looking behind you. Your pain and life-disorientation may seem to be the products of your present, but they’re not; your present is merely the effect of your past.

Just as a ham sandwich is composed of ham, bread, and condiments such as mayonnaise, mustard, and relish, and occasionally a slice of lettuce, avocado, or sweet pickle, every human being is formed of experiences. Some of them are supplemental, while others are primary. The tastes and textures of a smear of emotional relish and a leaf of psychic lettuce change drastically in relation to the bread and ham of your primary development.

Ask yourself honestly: are you two slices of rich, multigrain whole wheat sandwiching a fresh serving of organic country ham? Or are you two easily torn white wafers of over-processed flour mass-cooked into a lifeless loaf, trapping the fatty, cold, red-dyed sinews of a factory reconstituted swine product?

Only when you’ve answered that can you start asking the questions that will unlock the mysteries containing your misery. And if Wally couldn’t do that for himself, there was no telling how far he’d plummet, or if he’d even survive.

L
isten, Miss Brain—are you listening to me? Because so far I don’t think you’ve heard a goddamned word I’ve said about anything.”

I assured Mr. Piltdown that I was indeed listening, knowing how oblivious he was to the irony of his insistence, since he rarely listened to anyone. Because I sensed that Wally needed the comfort of meeting with his agemates, I’d sought out Iron Lass, who was unfortunately unavailable; the normally steely heroine had been so psychically fatigued by the events of the past few days that she’d been returning nobody’s telephone calls. And so I invited Festus Piltdown to join Wally and me.

Having reconvened at my Mount Palomax offices, I quickly tucked away the
Elect X-MAN Director of Operations, F*O*O*J!
pamphlets Kareem had somehow managed to leave around—whether for electioneering purposes or simply to antagonize Mr. Piltdown, I was not sure, although by then it was clear that antagonizing the Flying Squirrel was difficult to avoid, even for someone with my training.

“You were expressing,” I mirrored to Mr. Piltdown reassuringly, “your reservations about Wally’s performance in the Id-Smasher
^®
simulation we ran last week.”

“Expressing my—did you say ex
press
ing my reser
va
tions? I was detailing the eight hundred and twenty-three reasons why that man is an unapologizeable cock-up!”

He tugged at his neck straps, removed his squirrel mask and put it on the leather of the sofa seat beside him, then ran his fingers through the chalk streaks of his blackboard hair.

“He’s a
fraud,
Miss Brain. Earth’s greatest superhero, my colon. He’s a panty-willed, ‘aw-shucks, ma’am,’ unmitigated ultraninny. Times got tough, he resigned. And at Hawk King’s funeral, no less, stealing the spotlight for himself. He’s a serial spotlight-stealer, I hope you realize—has been for decades. And now that the destruction of Asteroid Zed is capturing the headlines he wanted for himself, he’s back here whimpering to
un-
resign himself—”

“I didn’
un
resign, I’m still resigned-ified, an you’re just sore cuz y’almost got blowed up t’day an I couldn’be there t’save ya for the eightieth time on accounta m’health!”

“Save me?” yelled the Squirrel. “
Me?
I’m the one who saved the entire mission! But go out to any tin-kettled flapjack shack and ask Charlie Spam Sandwich and Edith Dishsoap who’s saved this
republic
more times than there are stars on the flag and
your
name’ll be the first on their slack-jawed lips…So if that assembly of brain-stemmed dinklewits that dares call itself the F*L*A*C wants to address efficiency and diminished morale in this time of Cyan-level crisis, they might first try addressing the profound misallocation of credit foisted upon the galactically undeserving. That’d be one man’s modest proposal.”

Throughout Mr. Piltdown’s venting, Wally sat surprisingly placidly, as if he was listening to delightful, faraway oompahpah music only he could hear—of course, with his omni-hearing, he might very well have been doing just that. I returned him to our world by asking him how he felt about what Mr. Piltdown had just said.

“Wellsir, I respect Festus’s opinion, and I respect his right to have an opinion, ma’am. Which is what makes our country great.”

“Yes, I see, Wally. However—”

Mr. Piltdown: “Do you even
listen
to the pap that dribbles out of your mouth, Wally? You respect my opinion? My opinion just burned you down to a primary-colored cinder, and you respect it? Is there so much as the
smell
of a thought inside that high-density skull of yours?”

For the first time, Wally smiled, opening his hands in concession.

“Wellsir, Festus, you’ve got me there. I’m still an old-fashioned man. It’s how I was raised. I b’lieve you should be able to disagree without being disagreeable, and, wellsir, I admit, I’m a might taken aback when you start, well—”

“No, Wally. You’re not taken aback. You’re weak. And stupid. You were a liability to this team since it formed, and in the years since then you’ve only deteriorated, and, QED, you’ve cast this country into jeopardy, including through your capricious crybaby resignation—”

Suddenly Mr. Piltdown shuffled himself in his chair, reaching inside a utility pouch at the armpit of his left flap as if he were itching from ants.

“Good goddamnit! How in the hell did that Congo coon—”

“Whatcha got there, Festy?”

“I take my cape off for two minutes at the Fortress to use the damned rest room and that sociopathic sleeping-car porter stuffs it with one of his mau-mauing election pamphlets! If that switchbladed
Australopithecus
gets on our F*L*A*C, I’m telling you, we’ll all be speared in our sleep!”

“Mr. Piltdown,” I said, “let’s stay focused on—”

“He’s got no respect for private property! This is my
cape,
for God’s sake! You don’t touch a hero’s cape! My life depends on this thing operating properly—”

“Festy, calm down—it’s just a lil ol’ brochure—”

“Wally, while illiterates such as yourself may not care about the power of the written word—”

“Mr. Piltdown, let’s focus on what you were saying about Wally. The words you chose carried an intense…certainty, and by your own description, they defy common wisdom. Why do you feel that Wally hasn’t earned his fame? He was, after all, a founding member of the F*O*O*J, whereas you joined only after the original seven members had returned from Germany.”

“Actually, ma’am, Festus tweren’t a member till the next year—’46.”

“Thank you, Wally. Yes. So what is the nucleus of your concern?”

Mr. Piltdown laughed, coldly. “Ah, Miss Brain. Further proof that initials after one’s name mean nothing insofar as intellectual credentials, or even a child’s capacity to peer through the viscous veneer of venerability. During the war, Earth’s champion, there—”

“The war—you mean the Götterdämmerung?”

“World War Two! Two seconds ago you were talking about Germany, so why would I be talking about the Götterdämmerung? I don’t expect you to keep up with me, but at least muster the cognition to keep up with yourself, if you don’t mind.”

I paused, allowing him to continue.

“—
As I was saying,
this man is celebrated for having somehow put the kibosh on that mustachioed Austrian misanthrope in ’45, when in reality, as a result of his staggering incompetence, before Wally even got to Berlin he’d already destroyed a dozen Allied refueling ships and actually protected a U-boat by mistake!”

Omnipotent Man chuckled. “Well now, that there’s kind of a funny story—”

“A funny story—helping the Nazis. Here’s a funnier story, Miss Brain. Wally’s entire origin is a sham. You’ve got yard-chimps from Bangor to Buckskin Falls collecting trading cards and memorizing statistics about this atomic-powered flatworm, and every last one of them knows the messianic story of his origin: baby Karojun-Ya, rocketed to Earth from the exploding planet Argon by his philosopher-king father Jobuseen-Ya and gaining powers over mortal men—half Hercules, half Jesus.

“But has anyone ever actually
seen
this planet Argon?”

He let the question smolder, his baleful eyes burning like heaps of garbage.

“No, you see,” he resumed just before Wally could defend his origin story, “because it just happened to be destroyed before anyone on Earth could ever take a picture of it, even though his rocket got here faster than the speed of light. Nothing but snake-milt.

“Wally, there—what’s the expression?—he’s ‘sexed up’ the truth. He’s no extraterrestrial. He’s nothing but white super-trash. Have you ever seen a picture of his real family, Miss Brain? They’re trailer-trolls from Fried Possum, Kentucky!”

“Wellsir, if I’m not from the planet Argon, Festus, then where’d I get my omni-powers?”

“People acquire powers for any number of reasons, Wally! Genetics, childhood trauma, cell phones…Maybe you got yours in one of those Mexican clinics—I really don’t know. Some of us don’t depend on powers to do our damned jobs—which you don’t manage to do anyway—we actually have to
work,
understand? Be productive? Actually possess our own working testicles?”

“I’m a—now, you see, Doctor Brain, sir, ma’am, this is where Festy has a tendency to take his horsing around a bit too far outta the barn—”

“You know what this keen little patriot did during the OPEC crisis?”

“—I’m a very hard worker, always have been, been working hard since I was nothing but Omni-Lad—”

“—eating omni-grits, no doubt. During the
OPEC
crisis—”

“—been savin folks in this here country since I was old enough to—”

“
During the goddamned OPEC crisis
Wally promised Carter he’d use his ‘omni-power’ to create a new energy source to free us from the tyranny of those tablecloth-headed hand-choppers. You know where Wally tested his brainchild? You recall a little gem of real estate called Three Mile Island? To this day the entire country still believes that was a nuclear power plant, instead of the argonium processor it actually was. Now
that’s
PR, when the president himself covers up for you. Covers up for you being a filthy junkie!”

“Now Festus, you wait just a gollyshocking minute! I aint never had no problem with argonium—”

“What she ever saw in you, I’ll never understand—”

“ ‘What she’—? Who ya talkin bout, Festy? Princess Astra?”