Minister Faust (3 page)

“This mono
lith
ic level of ignorance about life in Stun-Glas,” said Kareem, imploring the ceiling itself, “is
exactly
why the F*O*O*J lost its HUD contract to police the neighborhood in the first place, and why the L*A*B picked it up and protected our homes, reduced crime to almost nothing, and earned the loyalty of the people there—”

“Maybe, Kareem,” said Festus, “if your L*A*B wasn’t such a bunch of spear-sharpening, whitey-hating, race-fixated reprobates, they would’ve kept in HUD’s favor. But then they wouldn’t be the League of Angry Blackmen anymore, would they?”

“You hear that, Doc? Where’s your whistle now? Festus, those sheets you ride around in at night—they made of satin, or silk?”

“I don’t have to take that from you, Edgerton!” said Festus.

I blew my Mind Whistle™, and the bickering ceased as quickly as the migraines sucked everyone’s hands to their skulls.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we went over the rules yesterday,” I reminded them, while resentment skittered across my group’s faces like silverfish across a dinner plate.

“I’d thought we might go a few
weeks
at least before the whistle first had to be used, but…well. While con
troll
ed venting is a necessary part of the therapeutic process, aimless unleashing of antihappiness merely blasts psychemotional shrapnel into the vulnerable underbelly of our healing community. Your real task inside the Id-Smasher
^®
wasn’t tactical training, of course, but to prepare you for postsimulation self-observation of how you are decapacitizing the life-potentials you seek.

“Your board of directors—pardon me, your Fantastic Order of Justice Leadership Administrative Council—was quite specific with me, and with all of you. Unless you six can resolve the problems that are making you, and I quote, ‘contentious in the extreme, dysfunctional, and impossible to work with,’ end quote, the F*L*A*C will terminate your employment with and membership in the F*O*O*J.”

I let the weight of my words rest like rhetorical cement blocks upon their psychemotional fingernails. Each hero was also still wincing from the beneficial operant conditioning of the Mind Whistle™.

“Now, while some of you are unconcerned at the prospect of losing your benefits and pension, either due to your personal fortune,” I said, nodding to the Flying Squirrel, “or due to your immortality,” I continued, nodding to Iron Lass, “I assume the real threat is that of dishonorable discharge from the Fantastic Order of Justice.

“And while such scandal might be a temporary boost in the ‘no press is bad press’ mode, dishonorable discharge from the F*O*O*J could severely damage a young heroine’s outside commercial endorsements,” I said, nodding to Power Grrrl, “distance oneself from the command of dedicated soldiers,” I said, nodding again to Iron Lass, “or from a community of friends and admirers,” I said to the young black man with the floppy transparent wings, bluebottled bug-eye goggles, and hairy antennae.

I finished by nodding to the thirty-four-year-old black man in his conservative black suit and tie. “And it would annihilate an ambitious man’s career aspirations.”

Everyone finally took their chairs in the circle, leaving the X-Man as the last man standing, since he’d been jockeying to avoid sitting near either Power Grrrl or Festus. Finally he sat on the opposite side of the circle from his implacable adversary, the Squirrel.

Perhaps ironically (for those untrained in psychoanalysis), the quietest of the group stood out the most. He’d made neither fuss nor folly during the just concluded mini-fracas, and he sat serenely resplendent in his blue suit, golden epaulets, red necktie, and cape. Were I not a highly perceptive practitioner of the healing arts of psychotherapy, I might have believed this man had no worries at all, with his massive brawn and his hands folded in his lap so immaculately they appeared to have been carved by Michelangelo himself.

But I did know better. For Omnipotent Man was as wracked with self-destructive pain as any of his comrades beside him.

Every Superstrength Is Also a Superweakness

A
s you just saw, conflict on a hyperhominid team is virtually inevitable. That’s because careers self-select for personality type. The irony, of course, is that success during the workday can mean severe interpersonal and psychological dysfunction at night.

Take Clifford David Stinson, HKA the Blue Smasher. His heroism demanded his willingness—indeed his eagerness—to smash anything, anywhere at any time. But during domestic disputes, he also smashed several of his own homes and vehicles as well as those of his neighbors in Los Ditkos’s upscale Royal Arch district. In 1988 he so flattened Bucksome Hills that the city council had to rename it Spinster Flats.

Eventually Clifford Stinson’s personal failings became professional ones. In 1983, when the Gasteroids threatened to infest the intestinal tracts of the entire population of Crystal City, Arizona, Stinson reduced its city hall, Jewel Museum, and 40 percent of its downtown to shards. No one doubted that smashing had its place—but never in Crystal City.

Similarly, Magna’s magnetic-seduction was powerful enough to sway even the Iron Eunuch and the Cobalt Castrati. But her overreliance on her erotipathic powers to the exclusion of all her others tossed her off the peak of her celebrated career and into a sewer of sexual addiction, facedown in the lap of
the capes,
the niche-porn market of ex-heroines and -heroes.

The chief social advantage of the Götterdämmerung had been its demand from all citizens, and certainly from the college of heroes, for self-sacrifice—that is, the development of the
superego.
But lacking an overriding threat, many in our society, including its former champions, had by now developed overactive ids. Such was the case with nearly everyone in my team.

Who’s That Whispering from Your Shoulders?

S
elfish desire and highest ideal—in the cartoons, they’re represented by a miniature devil and angel perching on our shoulders. In rare cases, these voices are literal, as with the tiny wizard Mage Mogdobnag and Lord Lizaard on the opposite epaulets of Noble Man.

But for most of us, these “voices” are expressions of our id and superego, our respective sub-and supercognitive urges toward selfish, violent gratification and altruistic self-actualization.

Our id isn’t evil. Its self-interest fuels our self-preservation and individual advancement. The id’s social defect is its incapacity to value the needs of others. And while the superego’s lofty goals might seem almost saintly, if left unmoderated a superego-controlled individual could starve to death from refusal to harm animals or plants, or be so possessed by her idealism as to slip out of our reality and into the Platon Dimension of pure Ideals.

That’s where the ego comes in. The ego balances selfishness and selflessness. But because the superstrength of most heroes comes from the interaction between super-ids and super-superegos, destabilization occurs when one capacity becomes stronger than the other. Unfortunately for several members of my team, a post-Götterdämmerung world has starved their superegos, letting their ids grow unchecked, like black-dripping toadstools on a yellowing psychemotional lawn.

Failing Checks and Balances Among Super Powers

F
estus,” I asked the Howitzer of a man after he’d stopped grimacing from the effects of the Mind Whistle™, “despite the simmering soup pot of rage which has just bubbled over onto your behavioral stove, you haven’t walked out. Why not?”

He leveled his eyes on me like twin turrets, silently.

“As one of the country’s wealthiest men,” I probed, “you’re at the head of a corporate empire of mass media, defense contracts, surveillance technology, and fast food. You’ve led a distinguished career as one of the nation’s finest investigators—”

“The World’s Greatest Detective
^®
,” growled the black-haired septuagenarian. “Period.”

Brotherfly: “Damn, Squirrelly. Takes balls to be trademarkin y’self as the world’s greatest dick, knawm sayn?
Bzzzt!
” Everyone ignored André while he laughed. “C’mon, y’all! All y’all can’t be that uptight, can ya? Who gon leave a brother hangin like that? Syndi-girl, snap me a
bzzzt!
from them bad girls!”

Syndi smirked and shook her fortified cleavage in tardy acknowledgment of his jape.

“That’s what I’m talkin ’bout!
Bzzzt!
”

“Kot-tam, André,” snapped Kareem, “would you please, for just five minutes, QC?”

“Whuzzat, Exxy?”

“Quit cooning!”

“Festus,” I refocused, “you’ve never been one to follow orders meekly. So why haven’t you defied the F*L*A*C and marched out the door?”

Festus Piltdown III sat back in his chair and crossed his gloved forearms over the flying squirrel silhouette emblazoned on the tunic covering his massive chest.

X-Man: “I can tell you why, Doc.”

“Kareem, ze doktor dit not ask you.”

“And the Squirrel didn’t
an
swer her, Hnossi!”

“Gawd, Kareem, would you, like, shut up?” said Syndi, stamping her boots, one-two, and putting one hand on her hip-strung backlash. “You want her blowing her, like, whistle-thingy again?”

Finally Omnipotent Man put up his hand.

“See now, ma’am-doctor, maybe Festy’s a might modest, but as y’all probably know, he’s fixin’ to run in th’upcoming election for Director of Operations. You knew that, din’tcha?”

“I think I recall having heard it somewhere, Wally, but as I don’t follow politics, it must’ve slipped my mind.”

“Wellsir, an as y’can pro’ly guess, if the F*L*A*C shows ol Festy out through the F*O*O*J saloon flappers, he caint run for D.O.O. Then his dreams’re hooched, knowuttamean?”

“I, uh…I think so, Wally.”

“An Festy pro’ly figures, an I agree with im, that he’s earned this goldang job. He was in the F*O*O*J almost since the beginnin, he’s served almost evra other p’sition on the F*L*A*C—Director of Personnel, of Finance, of Investigation—he was even Chair once. So y’can unnerstan if the F*L*A*C sendin im to your woodshed an threat’nin to turn im loose altogether has got his fur up an hackled.”

I asked Festus how he felt about Wally’s remarks.

He glared back at me with all the glowering, terrifying, predatory intimidation of his mammalian namesake.

On the Receiving End of F*L*A*C

F
or a group of men and women who had devoted their lives to saving others, my six psychemotional journeyers were stunningly incapable of saving themselves. That many of them despised one another was obvious to anyone; that each one despised him-or herself was unknown to all of them.

And that is why the F*O*O*J’s F*L*A*C had ordered them into my care and analysis, since the infighting and dysfunctionality generated by their mutual-and self-loathing threatened to vaporize their organization at a time when the F*O*O*J was particularly vulnerable: election time. Three of the six directorships were up for grabs, and for the first time since the F*O*O*J’s inception, so was the post of Director of Operations.

In theory the most powerful position on the F*O*O*J Leadership Administrative Council, the DOO was responsible for setting long-range mission goals, determining strategy and vetting tactics, outlining long-term needs for staff and matériel acquisition, and, potentially, reforming the obese F*O*O*J bureaucracy. The retirement of Colonel Strom Flintlock from his grandfathered, unelected position meant that the F*O*O*J was poised for potentially massive change. And while many people had assumed that Festus Piltdown III, HKA the Flying Squirrel, was destined for the DOO post which was the de facto commander-in-chieftancy of the F*O*O*J, there was a surprise buried beneath the election field like a land mine in a miniature golf course.

If the F*O*O*J had been a vehicle for national and even global change, the F*L*A*C was the front axis of that vehicle’s wheels. So the candidate—or candidates—in our therapeutic sessions were in desperate need of a good greasing.

Back Issues: The Origins of the F*O*O*J

F
orged during America’s now mythical Golden Age of Heroism to counter the threats of rum-running, communism, juvenile delinquency, and marijuana, the (then) Fraternal Order of Justice was Earth’s foremost and finest fighting force of fury. Delivering the decisive blow against the German war machine following the Soviet invasion of Berlin, the F*O*O*J became a planetary icon for justice and freedom. Its founding members’ names are synonymous with glory:
Omnipotent Man, Iron Lass, Lady Liberty, Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid, Captain Manifest Destiny,
and their brilliant, mysterious, mystical mentor, the incredible
Hawk King.

Returning to America and the expansive East Coast metropolis of Seagull City, the F*O*O*J moved into its first legendary headquarters, the Mando Mansion, and began recruiting among the nation’s growing ranks of costumed avengers.

Thus began the F*O*O*J’s Silver Age, whose new stars would shine as brightly as the originals—
Siren, the Evolutionist, Flying Squirrel,
and
Chip Monk
—defending our country and our planet against some of the worst scourges imaginable: Nemesaur, the Leninoids, Codzilla, Black Mamba, Standing Buffalo, Cosmicus and the Hordes of Entropy…truly an unlimited series.