Minister Faust (24 page)

Escape pods piloted by surviving staff fell into the darkness all around us, like jellyfish fleeing the moonlight at the roof of the ocean…

And then I saw it above us: a Squirrel Shuttle descending upon us, its robotic bushy tail scooping us up into its underbelly.

As soon as the airlock pressurized, Iron Lass ripped open our emergency bubble. Through the window and across the chasm of the vacuum, we witnessed the prison asteroid convulsing, sprouting tumors of blue and purple fire before finally cracking and spilling rubble and debris and wriggling bodies into space.

“So do you
fi
nally see what I was talking about?” yelled Kareem at his fellow F*O*O*Jsters. “You think I don’t know what you were saying about me? And now somebody blew up the whole kot-tam asteroid! Why? To stop my investigation, or wipe us all out, or both!

“Any of you freaks wanna call me paranoid
now
?”

Paranoia: When the Underworld Is So Dark You Can’t See Yourself in the Mirror

P
aranoia is, ironically, a defense mechanism. Learning to deal with pain, disasters, and the loss of loved ones means accepting that we can control neither life nor death. Because they control us.

The self-delusion that mysterious forces and persons unknown are conspiring against us is, surprisingly, a
comforting
belief, because it means we’re significant enough in this anarchic world to warrant someone’s enmity. That delusion saves us from the far more difficult to accept reality: that we’re not that important to anyone. That the universe just isn’t “into” us.

Paranoia is the emotive-psychestructure’s response to feeling ignored, unloved, or forgotten in an existence filled with random acts of destructive indifference emphasizing the inherent futility of life and struggle. If you’re ever to achieve serenity, ultimately you must accept that in such a vast cosmos, you simply don’t matter very much.

The F*O*O*Jsters’ journey to the archetypal Underworld, and the chance to employ their enemies’ faces as crystal balls to their own future, should have been enough to show all my patients how they could end up, unless they renounced their failed vision and bankrupt misconceptions about the meaning of their “heroism.” At the moment of our return to Earth, it still was not clear whether any of them had learned their lesson—and in the case of Kareem, it
was
clear that his condition was actually deteriorating.

So unless you too want to devolve emotionally to the deranged, desperate, degraded depths of a Gil Gamoid, an N-Kid, or an X-Man during their final days, you need to make peace with your finitude.

Visualization and trance-work can help. Try picturing yourself as a single grain of sand inside an hourglass. You are not the first grain of sand through the spout, nor the last, but the middlest. But once the hour is up and all the sand has fallen, the hourglass is smashed to pieces and left on the floor, and no one will ever clean it up. When you can trance-contemplate that image for an hour without sobbing, you’ll know you’ve successfully suffocated the influence of self-grandiosity and that you’re well on the journey toward psychemotionally integrative recovery.

Unfortunately, as I was about to discover, my F*O*O*Jsters, especially the X-Man, were going to eschew integration in favor of paranoia…which ultimately led to a terrifying tragedy for everyone.

G
oddamned coach-class StarCase
™
Corporation!”
growled Mr. Piltdown while piloting us back to Earth.

“If man were meant to conquer space inside a goddamned dumbwaiter he’d’ve been born looking like a room service tray and laundry! If not for me, all you ninnies would be vacuum-roasted and gut-burst right now, you hear me?”

By that point, the tenth minute into our rescue, Mr. Piltdown had already explained to everyone several times the mortal debt owed to him for having a Squirrel Shuttle standing by on remote, and how the Space Elevator was not a dependable means of transit, whereas Pilt-Dyne Scramjet-Rockets held the proprietary “future of mankind” in their Pulsar-class engines.

But our brush with asteroidal immolation wasn’t my focus. I was worried about Kareem, who was sputtering in zero gravity through the labyrinthine warps of his conspiratorial delusion, raving that Menton had orchestrated everything from the “assassination” of Hawk King to the destruction of Asteroid Zed itself.

“What,” said André, “and get his own ass smoked?”

“Menton,” snapped Kareem, “wasn’t even
on
Asteroid Zed!”

Syndi exploded with the manic laugh-cry of having narrowly escaped death. “Really, Kareem? Like, who exactly were you
in
terviewing, then, huh? Dracula?”

Kareem snorted haughtily. I’d noticed his tendency to delight in moments like these: hoarding what he considered critical facts, like a dragon leering from atop a mound of cubic zirconia. “Figure it out,” he sneered. “That wasn’t Menton.”

“Really. Like, who was it, then?”

“I don’t know—yet. I haven’t gotten all my
medu-kem
back,” he said, referring to the logoids he’d dispersed in his frantic mantra of
Find! Find! Find!
“Probably stuck on the outside of the shuttle. But when we’re on the ground and I open the hatch, I’ll know for sure.”

“Strap yourselves in and cut the chatter, scatterwits,” said Mr. Piltdown. “We’re entering the atmosphere.”

Everyone complied with the strapping-in, but none with the command for quiet.

“Kareem, uff course ze man I dispatched vuss ze Destroyer!” said Hnossi. Her face was flushed and puffy, the flesh under her eyes like raw steak. For a woman who’d seen combat on a global scale, she was taking these events much harder than I would have expected. “You yourself shriekt horribly in hiss cell unt collapsed ven he vuss usink his phagopsychosis on you!”

The lights shut off, and our only illumination came from the flames beyond the portholes as we hurtled planetward.

Kareem claimed he’d collapsed not due to any Mentonian attack, but because of a desperate telepathic gambit by Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid to warn him—an effort, he said, which had to have cost them the ultimate price.

Their message: that Asteroid Zed was about to be destroyed.

“They combined their Qosmic Qonsciousness,” he said, “and pushed right through their P-Imp hats. And it killed them. I smelled it inside my own skull, their brains burning into briquettes. Tasted like a tray of lasagna left in a kot-tam furnace.”

The portholes were orange disks in the darkness while the heat shield ripped through the superheated air around the plummeting shuttle.

“Even if you’re mistaken about how zey diedt, zey are det,” said Hnossi, her eyes heavier than dumbbells. She touched her mouth with quivering fingers. Noticing the shaking, she grasped the digits with her other hand and tucked both hands between her thighs. It was an incongruously girlish, vulnerable image for a steely, immortal woman.

“At least, at last…zeir Q-souls are hettet beck to qvasar Q-Nine-Sree-Nine, beck to ze Ur-Prime vich produced zem.”

“Yeah!” yelled Kareem, his voice nearly swallowed by the roaring engine deceleration. “Hope that’s a comfort for all the families of the guards and the technicians! Looks like half the life-pods didn’t even eject! Last five minutes on the Asteroid was the dance called ‘prisoners’ revenge,’ and the band was on fire! So what we’ve got is an attempt to shut down my investigation and kill
more
heroes—
us!
Not to mention wiping out all the remaining villains!”

“Kareem, is you crazy?” shouted André through the descent. The portholes were bright red heating elements atop a black stove. “You sayin Menton not only wanna kill Hawk King, he wanna destroy us an
villains,
too? Why? What’s in it for him?”

“My god, doesn’t anybody have a kot-tam brain up here? Look! Hawk King’s dead! Omnipotent Man one day just up and resigns? We almost get slaughtered up there, and almost every remaining rival for anyone who wants to take over is wiped out in one shot!”

“Take over what, Kareem?” howled Syndi.

And Kareem shouted one last sentence before reentry wiped out his voice: “What do you
think
?”

C
onversation was dead until we’d landed safely inside the Fortress of Freedom, where scores of heroes crowded round their comrades to make sure they were all right. Outside the Fortress wall, dozens of camera crews awaited interviews, since by then satellite photography had beamed images of Asteroid Zed’s destruction around the world.

Although I’d been inside the Fortress of Freedom several times, I was—even then, even after having survived the orbital disaster—awestruck by the stained-glass windows depicting the tragedies and triumphs of the F*O*O*J’s history, the vast 2.5-D mural churning with the chaos of the Götterdämmerung, and the titanic, soaring gold and platinum statues of the founding F*O*O*Jsters and the Flying Squirrel holding up the ceiling. (Although the Flying Squirrel didn’t join the F*O*O*J until 1946, he was able to add his own colossus to the Fortress’s Age of Heroes caryatids because the F*O*O*J was, in fact, his tenant. Mr. Piltdown not only paid for the construction of the Fortress, he remained the owner of the building and the land beneath it; to this day, the F*O*O*J pays rent from its federal operating grants to the Piltdomain Group.)

I was about to enter Heroes’ Hall when the guards held me until Syndi vouched for me and I was let inside, where I saw a storm swirling with Kareem as its eye. F*O*O*Jsters, novices and veterans alike, seemed to have decided that the X-Man was the answer man. Mr. Piltdown looked none too pleased at the gravity wielded by his front-running rival for the post of Director of Operations.

I scanned the assembly, sensing these heroes’ seething anxiety. At the back, Syndi was twirling and tugging at her hair hard enough to yank it rootless. On the far side, André affected detached cool while leaning against the wall, but he could not stop glancing upward constantly as if anticipating the collapse of the ceiling. I couldn’t see Iron Lass anywhere.

Kareem eventually took to the stage, framed by a backdrop mural of F*O*O*J martyrs such as Captain Manifest Destiny, Doctor Patho, and Lady Liberty.

“Menton the Destroyer,”
said Kareem into the microphone, employing the profane name to shock everyone into shutting up, “was not on Asteroid Zed. I believe he had been replaced by an imposter. Specifically, Zee-Roks the Imitator.”

With all eyes rapt on him, Kareem reported what we saw in the space prison and laid out his “evidence,” such as it was: that he fully expected Menton to be a terrifying figure, yet he felt no fear of the man whatsoever; that his interrogation plan was to state incorrect knowledge about Menton’s career and crimes to lure the egomaniac into “correcting” him, yet his subject affirmed Kareem’s inaccuracies without hesitation; that his last-minute logoscopic investigation of Asteroid Zed’s computers revealed microgaps in the data—so small only his logoids could find them—indicating an attempt to erase all record of at least two unauthorized prisoner transfers: one to and one from Unit Z, three years ago; that the “comatose body” occupying the cell assigned to Zee-Roks the Imitator in the Biovillains Containment Unit was actually synthesized from a combination of medical waste, rhinoplasty, and Swanson’s Hungry Villain Dinners™; that contrary to early supposition, Asteroid Zed wasn’t destroyed by any outside force, but instead annihilated by a malfunction in its gravity reactor, “unquestionably” due to sabotage; and that since Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid proved they could overcome their P-I Helmets, the more psionically powerful Menton could have developed the same skill, without burning out his own brain…and if he had, only he would have had the means, motive, and opportunity to overcome prison authorities, escape, kill Hawk King, terminate Omnipotent Man’s career, and wipe out his enemies, his potential rivals, and his tracks all in one shot.

It was a thrilling, intoxicating, highly speculative, totally circumstantial concoction Kareem had brewed, and the hundred or so terrified F*O*O*Jmates in attendance, still reeling from the loss of Hawk King and Omnipotent Man, were all too willing to snort it up by the mugfull. But unfortunately for sanity’s sake, Asteroid Zed’s destruction (which by Kareem’s own admission was due to a structural defect) meant no one could verify X-Man’s claims. And lack of verifiability was a paranoiac’s playground paradise.

But what happened next stunned even me.

“I agree with the X-Man,” announced Mr. Piltdown, taking a step onto the stage.

Every head swiveled toward the Flying Squirrel. Kareem was agog.

“Our organization is under threat,” called the Squirrel, moving toward the microphone. “Perhaps its gravest threat since the Götterdämmerung itself. And whether we’re facing an escaped Destroyer, or person or persons unknown of similar threat level—my own investigation, which for reasons I’m not yet at liberty to reveal, points to none other than Warmaster Set—we are clearly being hunted by a shadowy foe of enormous cunning, power, and danger.”