Blackjack Villain (40 page)

Ed smiled again, trying to put me at ease.

“That’s a pity,” he continued. “You seem like such a nice fellow.”

“Mr. Waters,” she started, “are you involved in all of this?”

He seemed confused. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Blackjack and the others are involved with Doctor Retcon in some sort of-“

“Alec?” Ed interrupted, and then asked me, “How is the old man?”

“In jail, last I checked,” I said.

“Well, he is now. But you know his trick, right?”

I nodded.

“He came to visit when Teresa passed last month. We had a nice visit.”

“I hadn’t heard. I’m sorry,” Apogee said.

Ed smiled, “We knew it was coming for a long time. And she was at peace in the very end.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I managed.

“Thank you, kindly,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “So you’re here on behalf of Alec. I’m sorry to say it’s a bad time. Ricky is watching her, and he doesn’t like being interrupted.”

“Ricky?”

“Oh, he’s right there,” Ed said suddenly excited, giggling with a strange toothy laugh.

“Ricky is Nostromo?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s what I meant. I’m sorry. I’ve known him for sixty years, you know. It’s hard to call him by anything else.”

He looked at me, studying my clothes.

“Why don’t you, and them, have any costumes? I love colorful costumes, with long flowing capes. It’s the only thing that enticed me about trying to be a hero once we got back. You know, after they decided to save the world.”

Ed motioned us in and walked us towards Nostromo’s pedestal. My companions were standing beneath him, facing us, and I could see Cool Hand and Mr. Haha gesticulating while talking to him, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Zundergrub stood behind them, a surprised look on his face, and despite the distance, our eyes met.

On either side of the hallway was a veritable museum of superhero history. Devices of all sorts lay against the walls, including some robot prototypes like the ones below, some smashed to pieces, others fully functional. All discarded and dusty, forgotten relics of an age long past.

One machine in particular drew my attention, because of its similarity to the designs of Nikola Tesla. It sported two opposing Tesla coils each ten feet-tall, and a complicated device, about the size of a small car engine on a platform in the middle. Pausing to study it a second drew a chuckle from Ed.

“You have a discerning mind, Mr. Blackjack,” he said.

“What is it?”

“That’s the contraption that took us there. It’s the device that started everything,” Ed answered enigmatically.

“Did Tesla build it?”

Ed shook his head, “No, Alec did. Dr. Retcon.”

Upon further investigation, I could see that the device was somewhat different from Tesla’s Spartan designs, and it indeed showed some of the flair that Retcon was known for. The central device was within a red and white metal frame, sporting a few dozen small cathode ray tubes, and was decorated with fifties-styled flare and trim, as if created by a more extravagant mind.

As I knelt beside the machine, Haha strolled over.

“Is this machine of interest?” the robot asked.

“I think so,” I admitted, though its form and function much a mystery to me.

“Curious,” Haha said, trailing off.

“What is it?” Apogee asked and I saw Ed smiling mischievously.

“The specific location of this device is peculiar,” the robot answered.

“It looks like a piece of junk that doesn’t work anymore,” she scoffed.

“I don’t know,” I said, opening the two small doors within the box that revealed a strange, maw-like cradle, from which cables led into a tangled mess in the rear of the machine.

“Do you recall that note you gave to Cool Hand earlier?” Haha asked. “The note Dr. Retcon gave you with a set of coordinates?”

“Yeah, what about it?” I crawled almost into the machine, moving behind the cradle, and following the cabling to a highly modified Tesla unipolar generator turbine. In theory, this device was self-sustaining, but the cables from the cradle led to another device I couldn’t identify. I could see the power output cables from the unipolar generator, so I wondered what the add-ons were for.

“Those coordinates on Earth correspond to an area in the middle of the Sea of Okhotsk, west of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East.”

Ed seemed to delight in the detective work I was doing, the tinkering, and he also was quite interested in Haha’s train of thought.

“So he sank some bit of junk for us to pick up in the middle of the ocean.”

“The specific coordinates are near a trench almost 3,300 meters in depth. That would make it quite difficult to retrieve anything of importance.”

“No problem. I tie a really long rope to one of your ears and toss you in.”

Haha and Ed laughed. It was a strange combo of Haha’s recorded mechanical bellow/guffaw, and Ed’s nerdy air-sucking chuckle. Even Apogee flashed me a smile.

“But what if I was to tell you that those coordinates, when interpolated to the surface of the Moon (not an easy feat, unless you make many assumptions), corresponds with the very location upon which you are standing?”

Interesting. I came out of the machine a moment, regarding the rabbit man.

“Are you for real?”

I looked at Ed, whose sheepish grin decried his terrible poker face.

“What is this thing, Ed?”

“Well, frankly I don’t know how it works. The details, that is. I was brought on to the project as an accountant at first, but then I guess I helped in the lab wherever I could,” he said.

Cool Hand and Zundergrub joined us, though the doctor stayed conspicuously back and away from me. The doctor did a bad job of concealing a smile on his face, probably noting the bruises and scrapes on my face. I stood and faced him, my clenched fists dug tightly into my waist, waiting to see if he would have the courage to do anything while I was facing him. But he did nothing.

Thankfully, Cool Hand stepped between us and said, “Fucking guy is zero, B. Nobody’s home.”

“Nostromo?” I asked.

“That’s right. Guy’s like worse than the babe here. You should see it. What was that guy who built that really big plane that never flew?”

“Are you talking about Howard Hughes?” Haha volunteered.

“Yeah, that dude. The guy from the movie.”

“His plane actually flew once,” Haha corrected.

“Didn’t he like turn into a monkey man? With long-ass nails and eating his own shit?”

I nodded, recalling the stories of Howard Hughes’ last days, his descent into a madness of obsessive-compulsiveness.

“You should see this guy, man. He’s sitting there, watching some weird holo thing with the alien. He’s watching the alien that almost fucked us up.”

“The same one?” I asked and Cool nodded.

“For sure. Shit was on the same planet we went to.”

“Callisto is a moon,” Haha corrected.

“Whatever,” Cool shot back.

“Ricky was always a bit over-dedicated,” Ed admitted.

“Fucking clean the guy then,” Cool spat, disgusted with what he had seen. “Shit, if you’re going to take care of your friend, take care of him.”

“I came here to say goodbye to him, not to take care of him.”

Cool dug into his pockets and pulled out a note, in the same style of envelope that Dr. Retcon had left for Apogee and I in the hotel room a few days before.

“Then give him this when you say goodbye, and we can be on our way. The guy fucking smells.”

Ed opened and read the note. It was a series of numbers, in typical Retcon cryptic fashion, along with a date and time. The date corresponded to two days from now.

“We will be ‘on our way’ momentarily,” Haha interceded, “But Blackjack has made an interesting discovery.”

“Then be fast, man,” Cool Hand snapped as he thrust his hands into his pockets in frustration. “I don’t have all day.”

I could feel Zundergrub’s eyes boring into me, but I didn’t want to look at him know, even to acknowledge his existence. Instead, I turned back to the Tesla/Retcon device and put my hand into the cradle, pressing down the contacts in the circular construction. It was spring loaded, with arms like a spider converging on a central axis from the inner edge of a circular hub. The arms were independent, and as well as retractable due to the springs, they had several copper contacts along their edge. As I pressed down on it, I surmised that the contacts would all connect as each segment of the individual arms extended fully, almost like a failsafe while putting something into the cradle.

But whatever went there couldn’t be a power source, as it was tied into the Tesla unipower generator. The cradle and its attending structure and cabling were an add-on with Retcon’s fingerprints all over it, so it had to be a crucial component.

“What could be so important about a pile of metal and shit?” Cool Hand whined, his impatience reaching a boiling point.

“Well,” Ed explained. “This machine is what caused us to...you know…” he paused, trying to find the right words.

“No, I don’t know,” Cool snapped. “Just fucking say it.”

“It was an accident,” Ed said. “At least that’s how Alec explained it to us afterwards. It was an accident.”

Then it hit me, the size of the cradle was awfully similar to something I had seen a few days before. “Haha, doesn’t this cradle look like it could fit that red gem we had? The first thing we stole?”

I looked over at Ed, but his face divulged nothing.

“Perhaps,” Haha said. “The diameters are quite similar, yes.”

“Damn it!” I raged and leaned back away from the machine.

“What?” Apogee asked.

“Yeah,” Cool Hand added. “What is it?”

“The red gem,” I said, sighing in defeat. “The one we stole in L.A. It goes here, on this machine. And we gave it to Retcon.”

“Who gave it to Retcon?” Haha asked.

“Well, I assumed...” I managed but the rabbit robot pulled the gem out of his chest compartment.

Haha handed it to me and I held it in my hands like a child holding an egg. I looked at Haha, as if looking for permission to put the gem in the cradle. He nodded and Cool Hand waved his arms impatiently for me to carry on. Zundergrub narrowed his eyes.

“I don’t think we should-” Apogee managed, but I was already placing the gem onto the cradle. As I had surmised, the individual arms slowly extended, the contacts in their joints one by one coming online. The gem fit exact and I was slow and deliberate as each of the contacts clicked.

The final set of hinges opened, a split-second from connecting their contacts, when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and looking up, I noticed Ed Waters, scurrying backwards, and almost in slow motion, waving ‘bye’ at me.

When the contacts were all in place, the machine groaned and hummed to life with a sudden electrical torrent that erupted from the two towers. Charged air and lightning surrounded us, except for Ed, who was now almost a dozen paces away, and Nostromo, even farther in his perch.

The electricity enveloped us, growing from a small vortex, to a fully encompassing storm, and in a flash, we were gone.

The final explosion of light still lingered in our eyes, like the memory of a camera’s flash endures, but one by one our eyes adjusted, and we realized what the Tesla/Retcon machine was.

A teleportation device.

We were atop a tall, flat-topped mountain of dry rock, with sparse shrubbery and grass. At the edges of this mountain, the world fell off, with nothing on the horizon save a whirlwind curtain of angry red, orange and black, like if someone had stretched a living Van Gough painting across the sky.

I could breathe and so could the others, but it was Zundergrub who looked up first, and saw where we were. It was as if being inside a nebula, with what appeared like an exploded planet in its midst, primal and volcanic, torn asunder as if by godly forces. Surrounding it were dozens, even hundreds of small mountains and island shards, much like ours, like slices of worlds torn off and set to hover as satellites would around the destroyed world.

“Fuck,” Cool Hand spat. “Why does it always have to be an alien planet?”

Part Four

CALM SEA AND PROSPEROUS VOYAGE

Chapter 18

We soon learned that our mountain top was actually just an island, a splinter of a planet, no greater than a few hundred yards in each direction, floating around the central destroyed world. Some distance beneath us lay another shard of land that dwarfed ours, floating in a swirling abyss of thermals and cross-currents, like a large drifting peninsula. Despite the distance, we could discern a bustling mountain top village denoting some sort of civilization, and even a large lake where small sailing ships crisscrossed the landscape. There also were larger creatures flying through the swirling skies. Great creatures that resembled floating whales, or soaring swarm of jellyfish-like creatures some many miles long that soared in the breeze, high above and beyond.