"Castro, Adam-Troy - Crisis On Ward H!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Castro Adam Troy)

ADAM-TROY CASTRO

CRISIS ON WARD H!

Can it really be that Adam-Troy Castro's last appearance here was his novella
"The Funeral March of the Marionettes" in July of 1997? So it is. Well, Mr.
Castro has been busy with some longer proiects, including a forthcoming
Spiderman novel, The Gathering of the Sinister Six, and collaboraing with Tom
Defalco on a Spiderman/X-Men novel entitled Time's Arrows Book 2: The Present.
Fortunately, his immersion in the world of comic-book heroes hasn't affected his
way of viewing the world, as this new story demonstrates. Remember: when General
MacArthur said that "01d soldiers never die, they just fade away," he was
speaking of mere mortals...

WE WERE HAVING A PRETTY quiet day until the Olympian marched in to ruin things.
Jetstream and Plasmo were over at the card table to swap the same old boring war
stories they told each other every morning; AnvilMan was copping some z's, his
dog-cared issue of Superwoman lying centerfold-side down on his thick plaster
body cast; Enchanter was staring at the wall, mumbling to himself, making the
wallpaper do tricks for him; Jukebox, formerly Mento, was starting in on the
first few lines of "Under The Boardwalk," and The Crime-Stomper, pinioned upside
down in his traction bed, was watching Rush Limbaugh on a black-and-white TV set
staring up at him from the tile floor.

As for me, I was in bed reading. I've never been much of a reader {thanks to the
mugger that killed my parents when I was five, I've never been much of anything
except an Obsessed Creature of the Night) but the last four years on Ward H had
been so stultifying that I'd given some thought to writing down my life story,
just for the sake of having something to do. Not being overly familiar with the
genre, I was plowing through every other cape memoir I could get my hands on
just to see how the damned things were written. So far I'd read Your Worst
Nightmare, Punk, by the Noose, American Way by Flagman, and Obnoxious for
justice, by Major Buthead. They were no help at all, because apparently all you
had to do to write a cape memoir was lie through your teeth about all the
battles you lost in real life. And I couldn't do that because I'd sworn to
always fight for truth. At least the one I was reading now, Secret Identity, had
curiosity value to recommend it: I'd known Muscleman for years, back when we
were in the Liberty Squad together, and after his big change I'd always secretly
wanted to know the story behind his decision to get the operation that changed
him to Warrior Woman.

Anyway, I was well into chapter seven -- the one describing how saving Manhattan
from the death ray of Dr. Fiendish had persuaded him he needed to get in touch
with his soft, nurturing side-- when I heard the moans ripple through the room.
The Crime-Stomper muttered a bad word, Jukebox started singing Tom Perry's
"Learning to Fly," and Jetstream, who had a talent for belaboring the obvious,
said, `'Cripes, it's him."

It was. The Olympian. The super-fast, super-strong, invulnerable,
three-tons-of-solid-muscle, square-jawed, internationally overexposed last
survivor of the planet Mekton himself. The great big boy scout who was more
powerful than the next hundred heroes all put together, and lived only for
chances to show it. I have a contact on the Amazon Aces who says it's all
overcompensation for being hung like a thimble. He was standing in the doorway,
looking huge and heroic and mythic and huge, his titanium-blue hair glistening
in the light of the open window, his little cud carefully pasted to his
forehead, his great square jaw set in the determined grimace that his admirers
think of as heroic and those of us who're teamed up with him prefer to consider
constipated. As he surveyed the ward, hands on hips, as if waiting for somebody
to sculpt him, I said, 'Hey, Limpy! Save any stray cats from trees lately?"

His monolithic head swiveled on its sequoia neck. He focused on me. "Night Rat,"
he said. As I winced with the knowledge that I'd have to talk to him now, he
lumbered over and thrust out his great meaty hand. "I did not know you were in
here."

"Yeah. Right. Sure you didn't." I shook his hand anyway. Who the hell needs the
Strongest Man on Earth for an enemy?

He gave me the once-over with his famous Diagnostic Vision. "I see no physical
damage. What happened to you?"

"I ran into this costumed bad guy called Nervous Rex. Tried to poison the city
reservoir with a drag that causes permanent neural damage in its victims. I
managed to take him out before he dosed the water, but not before he hit me with
a dart dipped in the stuff. I'm fine most days. Other days..." I shrugged.
"Let's just say it's hard to fight a never-ending battle when you're quivering
on the sidewalk. What about you? Why are you here? Is this a photo-op? You got
some TV crew waiting outside to take pictures of you visiting the disabled
veterans of super wars?"

He blinked. Twice. Absorbed the question. "I brought in a new patient. They'll
be wheeling him in any minute."

That broiled my bottom. The Heroic Veteran's Administration was supposed to have
regulations about the number of patients allotted to a ward. We were already
past that limit, if you counted Enchanter, which we really couldn't, since he
uncontrollably faded in and out of existence anyway. But a new patient would
definitely put us over. I was about to complain when Plasmo stumbled on over,
his semiliquid legs bunching up around his ankles like baggy pajamas. Somewhere
in his half-melted features sat the eager expression of a lonely man happy for
somebody new to talk to. "Olympian!" He said. "Remember me? We took out Dr.
Fiendith together?"

"I remember," the Olympian said, in a voice that showed no trace of nostalgia.

Plasmo's neck elongated twenty feet, whipped his head back over his shoulders,
and extended the entire length of the room, just so he could face Jetstream from
a distance of six inches and shout, "HA! TOLD YOU!" Then his neck pulled taut,
yanking his head back to its previous position atop his misshapen shoulders, so
he could use it to beam self-satisfaction at the Olympian. "I keep telling him
you and I are partnerth, but he doethn't believe me. But you can tell him.
Rememberd. Fiendith had you helpleth under a paralythith beam? I burtht in and
heroically pulled the plug? You gave me that thpethial patch to thew on my
cothtume, that timid I wath your offithial partner from that moment on?
Remember? Huh?"

"Yes," said the Olympian. "It was a special moment. I think about it often."

The exchange so thoroughly nauseated me I had to turn away to avoid throwing up.
That was nothing new with Plasmo, of course; I don't know about you, but there's
something about stretching powers that's always made me physically ill. Sue me.
It's worse in Plasmo's case, since he's worn out all his connective tissues and
can't quite snap back all the way anymore.

Still, that wasn't what made me sick so much as the constant brown-nosing the
Olympian seems to get from so many people in our profession. Like the way they
call him Earth's Greatest Hero even though he's not from Earth. The way they
call him a hero at all when a man who can survive ground-zero nukes isn't really
putting his butt on the line in any way. And the way they simper like starstruck
teenage girls whenever he offers them even the slightest sign of recognition.
Take that stupid patch Plasmo was so excited about. I have one too. So does
everybody. The Olympian has them made in bulk. "Anyway," I said, just to change
the subject back to something relevant. "Who's this new roomie you're bringing
us? Somebody who's paid his dues, I hope?"

"Who didn't vote for Clinton!" The Crime-Stomper shouted, from his inverted
position on the traction bed, thus prompting Jetstream, a lifelong Democrat, to
hobble over in the buckets of bum-gel he uses for shoes and change the channel
from Limbaugh to Oprah.

The Olympian had always been opaque to irony. "I don't think he's a great
believer in democracy."

Two orderlies chose that moment to wheel in the new patient on his life-support
'bed. Plasmo gasped -- nothing new, since he goes through spells where he has to
hyperventilate to keep his lungs from deflating. The Crime-Stomper cursed, and
appealed to the spirit of America itself to heal him so he could leap across the
room and throttle the new arrival with his bare hands. Jetstream said, "Jumping
Jehosophat!," his pet exclamation, which to me always sounded stupid. Anvil-Man
woke blinking, a disquieted frown forming on his bland complacent features.
Enchanter shouted a series of nonsense words, summoning forth d flock of winged
pigs that instantly flew out the open window. And Jukebox, formerly Mento,
started singing "Behind Blue Eyes," starting with the famous first line about
how nobody knows what it's like to be the Bad Man. Of all of us, only I remained
capable of putting our horror into rational words, as I leaped to my feet:
"H-hey! This a hero's ward! You can't bring him in here! He's a villain!"

"And not jutht any villain," Plasmo slurred. "THE villain. Baron Death
himthelf!"

Temporarily forgetting where he was and what shape he was in, Anvil-Man tried to
leap out of bed. Bad move -- his bones were still knitting. Even constrained as
he was, it had to hurt. He aaarrrrghed.

I approached the new arrival gingerly, hoping the others would blame my
quivering gait on my long-standing nerve condition. Maybe that was affecting me,
a little. But there was also fear: Baron Death had spent the last thirty years
waging constant war on the combined forces of everything that was good and
decent, lust about every hero I knew had run afoul of his evil schemes one time
or another, and we all considered ourselves fortunate to have escaped with our
lives. The combined forces of all Earth's champions had just barely managed to
keep his threat at bay; up until now, even the Olympian himself-- the guy who'd
once worked out a kink in his back by spending the afternoon moving the entire
Himalayan mountain chain one yard to the left -- had never succeeded in
capturing him. The Baron looked pretty irrevocably defeated now; his trademark
shiny black armor had been crumpled like aluminum foil around the human form
inside, leaving him not only helpless, but trapped in there, alone with the
memories of his great evil, forever. Life-support tubes pierced his skin through
the chinks; the fluids passing both ways bubbled unpleasantly as the orderlies
wheeled the bed into the empty spot by the front door.

I whirled and approached the Olympian. "All right, so I'm fairly impressed you
caught him. How could I not be? But this is still a hero's ward! There's no
place for his kind in here!"

"That's right!" shouted The Crime-Stomper. "You want a place to put him, try the
bottom of the ocean!"

"Or the far side of the moon!" added Jetstream, perhaps the only time in living
memory that the two of them had ever agreed with each other.

"Or the thurfathe of the thun!" Plasmo said, probably just happy to contribute
in some way.

The Olympian was indomitable. "The jail ward isn't equipped to give him the kind
of care he needs. The usual facilities for super-villains are filled with people
who'd give their right arms to break him out. He's never actually been convicted
of a crime. I have no choice but to leave him here. The Disabled Heroes
Administration has already given its approval. With any luck, you'll all be a
good influence on him."

"'...good...' -- hey, listen, you! Come back here!"

But he was already gone, having leaped out the window in a single bound.

"Bastard!" The Crime-Stomper shouted.

"He'th gone," Plasmo informed him.

"Hell, I know that! But he's the Olympian! He's got super-hearing! He can still
hear us cussing him out! AIN'T THAT RIGHT, LIMPY? YOU ALIEN ... TURD! WE ALL
KNOW YOU'RE THAT NERDY REPORTER! WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT, HANNNH?"

That brought Nurse Kent running, in from the hall. She was a tough old bird,
built like a fortress of solitude, and about as kindly as an evil henchman whose
paycheck's been shorted for the week. She planted her malletshaped fists on her
great broad hips and demanded: "What's all this noise?"

"Nothing, ma'am," Jetstream said. "Night Rat's just blowing off some steam."

She tsked. And it was a powerful tsk, too; if tsking can be a superpower,
bestowed by a bite from a radioactive grandmother or something, Nurse Kent was
the most formidable tsker of them all. When she tsked, the disapproval just
radiated off of her in waves, capable of dousing all life from a room. She
waggled a long bony finger at the tip of my nose and said: "Now, you know better
than that, young man. You boys need your rest. I don't want any Titans Clashing
in here."

"Sorry," I said, my eyes downcast. "It was just my soul, crying out for
justice."

"And you know that's not good for you. You don't want to bring on one of your
episodes, do you?""No, Ma'am."

"That's better," she said. She looked at the others. "Does anybody need a
bedpan?

"I'll take one," said Anvil-Man.

She obliged, waited while he did what he had to do, gave us all stern looks, and
waddled back out.

It was Jetstream who broke the silence she always left behind her. "That'll do
it, Night Rat." He made a disparaging gesture of his flamedampening gloves.
"Thanks."

"You think this is some kind of joke.?" I said, sotto voce. "That's Baron
forgodsake Death in that bed, mister!"

"That's right!" Crime-Stomper cried. "I say we finish him off fight now! Do the
world a favor!"

That was par for the course. The Crime-Stomper's idea of fighting crime had been
leaping through a plate glass window firing Uzis with both hands. His body count
was supposed to be in the low thousands. Some of them even guilty. He became the
Quad he is today the first time he met somebody who could shoot back. I said,
"You know I won't be a party to that. I never approved of killing."

"I know. And that's why the same bad guys you fought on Wednesday always escaped
from prison on Thursday and had to be put away again on Friday. Pointless,
wasn't it?"

Jetstream, whose rogue's gallery had consisted of the same six costumed
villains, all of whom went on crime sprees with the same depressing regularity
as mine, said, "And ethics? Morality? Doesn't that mean anything to you, you
reactionary butthead?"

"Come closer and say that, you sorry excuse for a fizzed-out Roman candle. I'll
bite your nose off."

Jukebox started singing, "Turn, Turn, Turn."

Enchanter tried to levitate, but bumped his head on the ceiling with a painful
thwock that only Anvil-Man appreciated.

Jetstream said, "It doesn't matter anyway. None of us are really up to trim
these days. And he is wearing that armor of his. I don't think there's any way
we could kill him even if we wanted to.

"Anvil-Man said, "Well, I have a suggestion."

Nobody asked to hear it. We knew what his suggestion was. The only trick in his
reportoire was crushing bad guys with anvils from six stories up -- thus earning
him his famous nickname, "The Man With the Drop on Crime." He'd accidentally
leaned out too far over the edge of a roof one day, compounded the error by not
letting go of his anvil when he had a chance, and as a result had ridden his
trademark weapon all the way to the pavement. Unlike most of us, he'd be out of
here eventually; he'd just broken every bone in his body. The anvil in question
was now a counterweight providing tension for his elevated leg. Since he
couldn't turn his head, he had to stare at that anvil every single waking hour
of the day. Yeah, we knew what his suggestion was, all right. I said, "We'll
keep that in mind," and, more to escape the debate than anything else, joined
Plasmo at Baron Death's bedside.

Plasmo glanced at me sheepishly, the oddest expression on the runny muck that
passed for his face. "Peatheful," he said, "ithn't he?"

I looked down at the fiend who'd once locked me in a room with five
hunter-seeker robots. "Yeah," I said. "Peaceful."

Which bothered me, a little. The Baron Death I remembered had always been a
pompous ass-- he'd capture you, chain you to a wall in some dungeon somewhere,
and rather than just let you rot there the way you'd expect a villain of his
intelligence to handle it, he'd put all his operations on hold so he could pace
back and forth in front of you speechifying about all his nefarious plans.
Muscleman used to say that the only reason the Baron never actually went ahead
and conquered the damn planet was that he knew he wouldn't have any nefarious
plans left to brag about once he did. Evil as he was, basically the only thing
he really cared about was talking.

I waved my hand in front of his eyeslits. He didn't blink.

"Really," Anvil-Man said. "I bet you, dollars to donuts, a good sock in the head
with an anvil would get past that helmet of his in a New York minute."

"How would you know?" Crime-Stomper said sourly. "The same way everybody knows.
I fought him once."

Plasmo and I whirled, to face a room suddenly drowning in stunned silence. Even
Jukebox was agape. We met each other's eyes, saw the shock and disbelief there,
and without saying a word came to the mutual conclusion that this was the single
most unbelievable thing anybody had said all day. Ergo, we knew it was true.
Crime-Stomper gave our incredulity a voice: "You? YOU ... of all people ... YOU
fought Baron Death?"

"Yes," Anvil-Man mimicked, "Me, of all people, I fought Baron Death. What's so
hard to believe about that.* You don't think I could have been a match for him?"

Enchanter turned inside-out and peered at us from in between his own teeth. The
rest of us knew exactly how he felt.

"I think we all need to hear this story," Jetstream said.

But Anvil-Man's feelings were hurt, now. "No. To hell with you guys. I'm going
back to sleep."

"Anvil-Man..." I began.

He started humming loudly, so we'd know his withdrawal was official. That set
off Jukebox, this time on "Sympathy for the Devil." Enchanter became a toy
truck, then a steam engine, then a unicorn. Plasmo and I looked at each other,
rolled our eyes, and turned back to the armored figure on the life-support bed.

I don't know. If it were the old Baron Death lying battered and broken, but
shouting his usual brand of megalomaniacal defiance, I think I would have sided
with Crime-Stomper. But this Baron Death didn't speak, didn't utter a sound,
didn't give any indication that there was anything inside his crumpled armor but
an equally empty shell of flesh. It was impossible to keep thinking of him as an
enemy. But it was also impossible to forget what it had been like to endure his
taunts while trying to escape his boobytrapped Maze of Death. I turned to
Plasmo, and saw the same troubled look in his eyes. "Do you think he's...all
there?"

"He'th Baron Death," Plasmo said simply. "He'th ethcaped from thertain doom a
thouthand timeth. It doethn't make any thenthe for him to end hith dayth here."

"So you think this is just some plot of his?"

"I hope tho," Plasmo said.

"Why?"

"Becauthe I think he dethervthe better."

And damned if I didn't agree with that. Because now that I thought of it, Baron
Death had been one of the most honorable bad guys I've ever encountered. He'd
attack you soon as look at you, of course -- that much was a given; in his
profession, he could hardly be expected to do any less B but for all his
supposed brilliance, for all the hard times he'd given people like me and
Crime-Stomper and Plasmo and the Olympian over the years, he played the game by
the rules.

Whatever could he have done, to make a big blue boy scout like the Olympian want
to reduce him to...this?

Deeply troubled now, I leaned in close. "Baron Death? You there?"

Somewhere deep within his armor, the arch-villain murmured incoherently.

I leaned in closer. "Come on, Baron. Say something."

He mumbled some more. But it wasn't just meaningless gibberish -though it could
have translated to anything, it was also definitely spoken from some deep well
of anguished desperation.

Only one word emerged clearly, and that one hit .the room with the force of a
thunderbolt: "...danger...,,

It sounded nothing like Baron Death's usual voice.

Crime-Stomper called from his bed: "I don't like the sound of that."

"Me either," I said. I turned back to Baron Death. "What kind of danger? Tell
me!"

The Baron's eyes rolled. "D-dangerous .... danger..."

Dangerous danger. The worst kind.

I gritted my teeth. "Something's terribly wrong here."

Plasmo nodded, his head bobbing from side to side atop an obscenely suggestive
five-foot neck. "I wath thtarting to get that imprethion mythelf."

"I agree," said the Enchanter, and that really cinched it, since as far as we
knew he hadn't spoken a coherent word since his epic battle with N'loghthl, Lord
of Phlarrrrg, five years earlier.

We looked at Baron Death again, then looked at each other, then at the others,
and finally, together, turned toward Jukebox.

Once, he'd been Mento, The Smartest Man on Earth, and I guess the name fit, even
if it made him sound like a breath mint. For the five years he ran around in
that ugly pink jumpsuit of his {the one with the picture of a brain framed in an
oval on his chest} nobody had ever succeeded in defeating him in a battle of
wits. And any number of criminals tried, not only devising ridiculously
elaborate crimes but actually {and I still can't believe how STUPID this is)
sending him CLUES about where they were going to strike next. You would think
that when Mento was finally defeated, it would be at the hands of somebody who
was even more brilliant than he was. But it hadn't happened that way -- he'd met
a bad guy who was DUMBER. A trucker named Earl, who was busting up a bar because
his girlfriend had just left him. Who, being too drunk and stupid to think up
any highly intricate deathtrap for Mento to cleverly escape from, just whopped
him over the head with a bar stool, thus instantly turning The Smartest Man on
Earth into the human oldies marathon he's been ever since.

Jukebox noticed us watching him and immediately segued into "Every Breath You
Take."

Plasmo and I glanced at each other, and between us decided that it couldn't
hurt. We left Baron Death behind and sat down by Jukebox's bed, one of us on
either side.

He started singing "Go Away, Little Girl."

Plasmo's arm slithered up and around the back of Jukebox's head and wrapped
itself around his mouth, effectively gagging him.

"Thank you," I told Plasmo.

"My pleathure."

I faced Jukebox again. "Listen. You've seen what's going on here. You know it's
important. You know that something about it stinks on ice. You know that if
there's something bad going down here, then we're probably the only people in
position to do anything about it. Finally, you know that this might be the last
chance most of us have to make a difference in this world again. But alone, we
might not be able to figure it out in time. Everything depends on you being able
to fight your way out of wherever it is you've been the last few years and give
us some kind of advice that makes sense. You understand?"

Was it just wishful thinking, or were his eyes regaining some of their previous
focus? I gestured for Plasmo to release him. Plasmo did -- and for just a second
Jukebox actually looked like he was trying to say something. He opened his
mouth, closed it, swallowed, made a choking noise, then opened his mouth.

And once again started singing.

This time in a deep, throaty hard-rock voice. Something about holding a girl in
his arms while the band played.

"Damn," I said.

"Brooth," said Plasmo.

"What?"

"Brooth," he repeated. When I failed to understand that, he amplified, "The
Bawth." When I failed to understand that too, he gave an exasperated look and
spelled it out for me: "Brooth Thpringthteen."

"Great. You can name that tune. Big hairy deal."

"No! I'm thaying I know thith thong! I have the thee-dee. It'th called
'Brilliant Dithguithe!'"

Jukebox cut off the song in mid-lyric. Blinked at us.

And with a visibly tremendous effort, somehow managed to avoid singing again.

Brilliant Disguise. Interesting. I clapped him on the shoulder. "You done good,
Ju--I mean, Mento. We'll get back to you.

"He nodded, his eyes glistening.

Jetstream had wandered over in the interim, his flame-retardant buckets scraping
metallically against the cold tile floor. "What's it mean?

"I'm not sure," I said. "But think on this: it doesn't make sense for the man in
that armor to be the real Baron Death. He's the Elyis of bad guys; if it was
really the Baron, they wouldn't just dump him in some hole-in-the-wall ward to
rot, for his people to eventually swoop down and rescue. No matter what the
Olympian said. They'd bury him in the deepest hole they could find, build an
army base around it, and have the entire membership of the Niceness League, the
Terrific Ten, and the Good Eggs guarding him twenty-four hours a day. He can't
be Baron Death. And that means -- terrifying as it might be to admit this --
that the man who brought him in couldn't have been the real Olympian."

"Jumping Jehosophat!" Jetstream exclaimed, making me wince. "If somebody's come
up with a way to disguise himself as the Olympian, then the world's in serious
danger!"

"Prethithely," said Plasmo, sounding proud of himself.

Jetstream began shuffling toward the outside corridor. I grabbed him by the arm.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?"

"The phone," he said, in the tone of somebody speaking to an idiot. "We have to
call The Danger Squad."

"To hell with them," I said fervently.

"What?"

"You know the rules of engagement. Whoever catches the crisis fights the bad
guy. No matter what the odds. No matter how high' the stakes. This one...belongs
to us."

Silence reigned in the ward around us.

Enchanter's eyes were saucers. Literally. He even had coffee cups on them.

Crime-Stomper spoke first. "No doubt about it, Night Rat. You've lost it."

"I can't believe I'm agreeing with him for the second time in one day,"
Jetstream said. "But he's right. Look at us. Two of us can't move, two of us can
barely think, the three of us who can both move and think can't be trusted to
make it down a flight of stairs. We're not in any shape to go into battle. We
couldn't take out an arthritic pickpocket, even if he wanted to surrender to us.
And you want us to take on the Olympian.? Or Baron Death.? Or whoever's behind
this scheme, even assuming you're right about this being a scheme? Get real."

There was a moment of uneasy silence, during which I came very close to
admitting that they were right.

And then Anvil-Man laughed.

It was a pained laugh, mostly because every chuckle strained the ribs still
healing beneath his full-length body cast; every robust "ha!" was followed by an
equally robust moan. But the laughs seemed more powerful than the moans,
somehow. And they filled the room with that mythic sense of destiny that I'd
long since come to associate with the turning point of any battle.

We all felt it. Deep in our bones.

I had just enough time to reflect that if Anvil-Man was capable of inspiring us,
then we were even more pathetic than I'd thought, before Crime-Storeper
whispered the set-up line: "Uh? Anvil-Man.? What's so funny.?"

"Don't you see it.?" Anvil-Man shouted. "If we really wanted to GET REAL, would
we even BE in this business.? Winning against impossible odds is what we're all
about!

"That did it, for us.

The Enchanter summoned his mystic cloak from the closet. CrimeStoreper let out a
battle cry. Plasmo fanned out to all four corners of the room and gathered us
together for a group hug. letstream removed his flame-dampening glove and shot
off a celebratory burst of fireworks. Jukebox led us all in a rousing rendition
of "We Are the Champions," which predicably brought in Nurse Kent a second time.
I felt a seizure coming on, and for the first time since being shut away in this
starched white prison actually managed to fight it off.

And just as the celebration started to pall, with everybody facing the stark
realization that they didn't even have the beginnings of an idea what we were
expected to do next, Jukebox sang out a ten-second medley of the Jags' "Back of
My Hand {I've Got Your Number}," Steve Miller's "I'm Gonna Grab Ya," Ritchie
Valens's "Come On Let's Go," the Supremes' "Nowhere to Run," and, oddly enough,
Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park."

He'd thought of a plan...

IF YOU READ any newspapers at all, you know what the explanation was. How the
man in the armor wasn't Baron Death, but a small-time villain called The Leech,
who had the ability to absorb and store the powers from any unwary superheroes
who happened to be in the vicinity. We all knew the Leech, having encountered
him once or twice, but he'd never been a real threat, since it took him days to
absorb enough power to make a difference, and us only thirty seconds, to put him
away with a good right hook. But Baron Death had seen in him a good way to
gather up all the world's superpowers for himself -- he'd just welded the poor
guy into a junked-up version of his own armor, fitted him with a neural
paralyzer so he wouldn't be able to tap into all the power he was getting, and
ordered a robotic Olympian impersonator to usher him from one superhero hangout
to another, as his "prisoner," arranging for him to "escape" every time he'd
drained the well dry.

A brilliant plan. One so obvious in retrospect that it's hard to see how come we
didn't see it right away. I guess that's why Baron Death's number one in the
villain business. But this time he made the mistake of choosing us as his first
helpless victims.

You know the rest of it, too -- how we escaped the hospital in a makeshift
flying machine hastily constructed from our beds, and how we fought the robotic
Olympian impersonator in an epic battle that flattened six square blocks of
Manhattan, how we faced Baron Death in his secret laboratory beneath Disney
World, and how, at the end, when the bomb that would blow up North America was
ticking down its last thirty seconds and the rest of us were trapped by the
Baron's evil paralysis ray, the immobile plaster-encased form of Anvil-Man saved
the day by plummeting from the rafters where we'd left him at the precise moment
the Baron removed his protective helmet to mock us with the sight of his
hideously scarred face.

This may not strike you as a great way to regain one's lost dignity, but it sure
as hell worked for us.

And then, when it was over, we piloted our makeshift flying machine high over
the city. Jetstream had welded the beds together, Jukebox and I lay side-by-side
in two forming a U, cushioned by blankets, peering down at the city through the
wire mesh of the bedframes, and singing "Born to Be Wild." We'd mounted
Crime-Stomper's traction bed at the head of this construct, making him resemble
one of the wooden figureheads that fronted nineteenth-century sailing ships. He
liked that. Anvil-Man's bed rode on top of the U, forming the upper deck -- we'd
given him some weighted bedpans to drop in case we ran into any trouble out
there. letstream straddled his body cast, flaming hands held aloft to inflate
the hot air balloon we'd made of Plasmo. As for the Enchanter, he floated along
beside us, once again insubstantial, neither helping nor hindering our
progress...but though I couldn't see him from where I was I somehow knew he was
smiling. Eventually, letstream asked, "Where to? Back to the hospital ?"

"No," I said. "We can't go back to the hospital. Not while evil still
flourishes. Not while there are still wrongs to be righted. Not while they still
expect us to eat that trap they serve. No -- it's time for bad guys to beware.
Because a new breed of crime-fighter is in town."

That started a whole new round of cheering, which continued unabated until
Crime-Stomper used his nose to ring the buzzer that he'd used for so many years
to ring the nurse: "All right. Listen up, people, I just spotted something. A
rehearsal for the big time. A dark alley between a peepshow parlor and a
homeless hotel. Mugger holding two tourists at gunpoint."

"Take us down!" I shouted. "This is a job for --"

We all shouted it together.

"... THE DIFFERENTLY ABLED!"

And Jetstream and Plasmo took us into a power dive, with lukebox performing a
soundtrack straight out of Wagner.
This one's for Julius Schwartz.





ADAM-TROY CASTRO

CRISIS ON WARD H!

Can it really be that Adam-Troy Castro's last appearance here was his novella
"The Funeral March of the Marionettes" in July of 1997? So it is. Well, Mr.
Castro has been busy with some longer proiects, including a forthcoming
Spiderman novel, The Gathering of the Sinister Six, and collaboraing with Tom
Defalco on a Spiderman/X-Men novel entitled Time's Arrows Book 2: The Present.
Fortunately, his immersion in the world of comic-book heroes hasn't affected his
way of viewing the world, as this new story demonstrates. Remember: when General
MacArthur said that "01d soldiers never die, they just fade away," he was
speaking of mere mortals...

WE WERE HAVING A PRETTY quiet day until the Olympian marched in to ruin things.
Jetstream and Plasmo were over at the card table to swap the same old boring war
stories they told each other every morning; AnvilMan was copping some z's, his
dog-cared issue of Superwoman lying centerfold-side down on his thick plaster
body cast; Enchanter was staring at the wall, mumbling to himself, making the
wallpaper do tricks for him; Jukebox, formerly Mento, was starting in on the
first few lines of "Under The Boardwalk," and The Crime-Stomper, pinioned upside
down in his traction bed, was watching Rush Limbaugh on a black-and-white TV set
staring up at him from the tile floor.

As for me, I was in bed reading. I've never been much of a reader {thanks to the
mugger that killed my parents when I was five, I've never been much of anything
except an Obsessed Creature of the Night) but the last four years on Ward H had
been so stultifying that I'd given some thought to writing down my life story,
just for the sake of having something to do. Not being overly familiar with the
genre, I was plowing through every other cape memoir I could get my hands on
just to see how the damned things were written. So far I'd read Your Worst
Nightmare, Punk, by the Noose, American Way by Flagman, and Obnoxious for
justice, by Major Buthead. They were no help at all, because apparently all you
had to do to write a cape memoir was lie through your teeth about all the
battles you lost in real life. And I couldn't do that because I'd sworn to
always fight for truth. At least the one I was reading now, Secret Identity, had
curiosity value to recommend it: I'd known Muscleman for years, back when we
were in the Liberty Squad together, and after his big change I'd always secretly
wanted to know the story behind his decision to get the operation that changed
him to Warrior Woman.

Anyway, I was well into chapter seven -- the one describing how saving Manhattan
from the death ray of Dr. Fiendish had persuaded him he needed to get in touch
with his soft, nurturing side-- when I heard the moans ripple through the room.
The Crime-Stomper muttered a bad word, Jukebox started singing Tom Perry's
"Learning to Fly," and Jetstream, who had a talent for belaboring the obvious,
said, `'Cripes, it's him."

It was. The Olympian. The super-fast, super-strong, invulnerable,
three-tons-of-solid-muscle, square-jawed, internationally overexposed last
survivor of the planet Mekton himself. The great big boy scout who was more
powerful than the next hundred heroes all put together, and lived only for
chances to show it. I have a contact on the Amazon Aces who says it's all
overcompensation for being hung like a thimble. He was standing in the doorway,
looking huge and heroic and mythic and huge, his titanium-blue hair glistening
in the light of the open window, his little cud carefully pasted to his
forehead, his great square jaw set in the determined grimace that his admirers
think of as heroic and those of us who're teamed up with him prefer to consider
constipated. As he surveyed the ward, hands on hips, as if waiting for somebody
to sculpt him, I said, 'Hey, Limpy! Save any stray cats from trees lately?"

His monolithic head swiveled on its sequoia neck. He focused on me. "Night Rat,"
he said. As I winced with the knowledge that I'd have to talk to him now, he
lumbered over and thrust out his great meaty hand. "I did not know you were in
here."

"Yeah. Right. Sure you didn't." I shook his hand anyway. Who the hell needs the
Strongest Man on Earth for an enemy?

He gave me the once-over with his famous Diagnostic Vision. "I see no physical
damage. What happened to you?"

"I ran into this costumed bad guy called Nervous Rex. Tried to poison the city
reservoir with a drag that causes permanent neural damage in its victims. I
managed to take him out before he dosed the water, but not before he hit me with
a dart dipped in the stuff. I'm fine most days. Other days..." I shrugged.
"Let's just say it's hard to fight a never-ending battle when you're quivering
on the sidewalk. What about you? Why are you here? Is this a photo-op? You got
some TV crew waiting outside to take pictures of you visiting the disabled
veterans of super wars?"

He blinked. Twice. Absorbed the question. "I brought in a new patient. They'll
be wheeling him in any minute."

That broiled my bottom. The Heroic Veteran's Administration was supposed to have
regulations about the number of patients allotted to a ward. We were already
past that limit, if you counted Enchanter, which we really couldn't, since he
uncontrollably faded in and out of existence anyway. But a new patient would
definitely put us over. I was about to complain when Plasmo stumbled on over,
his semiliquid legs bunching up around his ankles like baggy pajamas. Somewhere
in his half-melted features sat the eager expression of a lonely man happy for
somebody new to talk to. "Olympian!" He said. "Remember me? We took out Dr.
Fiendith together?"

"I remember," the Olympian said, in a voice that showed no trace of nostalgia.

Plasmo's neck elongated twenty feet, whipped his head back over his shoulders,
and extended the entire length of the room, just so he could face Jetstream from
a distance of six inches and shout, "HA! TOLD YOU!" Then his neck pulled taut,
yanking his head back to its previous position atop his misshapen shoulders, so
he could use it to beam self-satisfaction at the Olympian. "I keep telling him
you and I are partnerth, but he doethn't believe me. But you can tell him.
Rememberd. Fiendith had you helpleth under a paralythith beam? I burtht in and
heroically pulled the plug? You gave me that thpethial patch to thew on my
cothtume, that timid I wath your offithial partner from that moment on?
Remember? Huh?"

"Yes," said the Olympian. "It was a special moment. I think about it often."

The exchange so thoroughly nauseated me I had to turn away to avoid throwing up.
That was nothing new with Plasmo, of course; I don't know about you, but there's
something about stretching powers that's always made me physically ill. Sue me.
It's worse in Plasmo's case, since he's worn out all his connective tissues and
can't quite snap back all the way anymore.

Still, that wasn't what made me sick so much as the constant brown-nosing the
Olympian seems to get from so many people in our profession. Like the way they
call him Earth's Greatest Hero even though he's not from Earth. The way they
call him a hero at all when a man who can survive ground-zero nukes isn't really
putting his butt on the line in any way. And the way they simper like starstruck
teenage girls whenever he offers them even the slightest sign of recognition.
Take that stupid patch Plasmo was so excited about. I have one too. So does
everybody. The Olympian has them made in bulk. "Anyway," I said, just to change
the subject back to something relevant. "Who's this new roomie you're bringing
us? Somebody who's paid his dues, I hope?"

"Who didn't vote for Clinton!" The Crime-Stomper shouted, from his inverted
position on the traction bed, thus prompting Jetstream, a lifelong Democrat, to
hobble over in the buckets of bum-gel he uses for shoes and change the channel
from Limbaugh to Oprah.

The Olympian had always been opaque to irony. "I don't think he's a great
believer in democracy."

Two orderlies chose that moment to wheel in the new patient on his life-support
'bed. Plasmo gasped -- nothing new, since he goes through spells where he has to
hyperventilate to keep his lungs from deflating. The Crime-Stomper cursed, and
appealed to the spirit of America itself to heal him so he could leap across the
room and throttle the new arrival with his bare hands. Jetstream said, "Jumping
Jehosophat!," his pet exclamation, which to me always sounded stupid. Anvil-Man
woke blinking, a disquieted frown forming on his bland complacent features.
Enchanter shouted a series of nonsense words, summoning forth d flock of winged
pigs that instantly flew out the open window. And Jukebox, formerly Mento,
started singing "Behind Blue Eyes," starting with the famous first line about
how nobody knows what it's like to be the Bad Man. Of all of us, only I remained
capable of putting our horror into rational words, as I leaped to my feet:
"H-hey! This a hero's ward! You can't bring him in here! He's a villain!"

"And not jutht any villain," Plasmo slurred. "THE villain. Baron Death
himthelf!"

Temporarily forgetting where he was and what shape he was in, Anvil-Man tried to
leap out of bed. Bad move -- his bones were still knitting. Even constrained as
he was, it had to hurt. He aaarrrrghed.

I approached the new arrival gingerly, hoping the others would blame my
quivering gait on my long-standing nerve condition. Maybe that was affecting me,
a little. But there was also fear: Baron Death had spent the last thirty years
waging constant war on the combined forces of everything that was good and
decent, lust about every hero I knew had run afoul of his evil schemes one time
or another, and we all considered ourselves fortunate to have escaped with our
lives. The combined forces of all Earth's champions had just barely managed to
keep his threat at bay; up until now, even the Olympian himself-- the guy who'd
once worked out a kink in his back by spending the afternoon moving the entire
Himalayan mountain chain one yard to the left -- had never succeeded in
capturing him. The Baron looked pretty irrevocably defeated now; his trademark
shiny black armor had been crumpled like aluminum foil around the human form
inside, leaving him not only helpless, but trapped in there, alone with the
memories of his great evil, forever. Life-support tubes pierced his skin through
the chinks; the fluids passing both ways bubbled unpleasantly as the orderlies
wheeled the bed into the empty spot by the front door.

I whirled and approached the Olympian. "All right, so I'm fairly impressed you
caught him. How could I not be? But this is still a hero's ward! There's no
place for his kind in here!"

"That's right!" shouted The Crime-Stomper. "You want a place to put him, try the
bottom of the ocean!"

"Or the far side of the moon!" added Jetstream, perhaps the only time in living
memory that the two of them had ever agreed with each other.

"Or the thurfathe of the thun!" Plasmo said, probably just happy to contribute
in some way.

The Olympian was indomitable. "The jail ward isn't equipped to give him the kind
of care he needs. The usual facilities for super-villains are filled with people
who'd give their right arms to break him out. He's never actually been convicted
of a crime. I have no choice but to leave him here. The Disabled Heroes
Administration has already given its approval. With any luck, you'll all be a
good influence on him."

"'...good...' -- hey, listen, you! Come back here!"

But he was already gone, having leaped out the window in a single bound.

"Bastard!" The Crime-Stomper shouted.

"He'th gone," Plasmo informed him.

"Hell, I know that! But he's the Olympian! He's got super-hearing! He can still
hear us cussing him out! AIN'T THAT RIGHT, LIMPY? YOU ALIEN ... TURD! WE ALL
KNOW YOU'RE THAT NERDY REPORTER! WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THAT, HANNNH?"

That brought Nurse Kent running, in from the hall. She was a tough old bird,
built like a fortress of solitude, and about as kindly as an evil henchman whose
paycheck's been shorted for the week. She planted her malletshaped fists on her
great broad hips and demanded: "What's all this noise?"

"Nothing, ma'am," Jetstream said. "Night Rat's just blowing off some steam."

She tsked. And it was a powerful tsk, too; if tsking can be a superpower,
bestowed by a bite from a radioactive grandmother or something, Nurse Kent was
the most formidable tsker of them all. When she tsked, the disapproval just
radiated off of her in waves, capable of dousing all life from a room. She
waggled a long bony finger at the tip of my nose and said: "Now, you know better
than that, young man. You boys need your rest. I don't want any Titans Clashing
in here."

"Sorry," I said, my eyes downcast. "It was just my soul, crying out for
justice."

"And you know that's not good for you. You don't want to bring on one of your
episodes, do you?""No, Ma'am."

"That's better," she said. She looked at the others. "Does anybody need a
bedpan?

"I'll take one," said Anvil-Man.

She obliged, waited while he did what he had to do, gave us all stern looks, and
waddled back out.

It was Jetstream who broke the silence she always left behind her. "That'll do
it, Night Rat." He made a disparaging gesture of his flamedampening gloves.
"Thanks."

"You think this is some kind of joke.?" I said, sotto voce. "That's Baron
forgodsake Death in that bed, mister!"

"That's right!" Crime-Stomper cried. "I say we finish him off fight now! Do the
world a favor!"

That was par for the course. The Crime-Stomper's idea of fighting crime had been
leaping through a plate glass window firing Uzis with both hands. His body count
was supposed to be in the low thousands. Some of them even guilty. He became the
Quad he is today the first time he met somebody who could shoot back. I said,
"You know I won't be a party to that. I never approved of killing."

"I know. And that's why the same bad guys you fought on Wednesday always escaped
from prison on Thursday and had to be put away again on Friday. Pointless,
wasn't it?"

Jetstream, whose rogue's gallery had consisted of the same six costumed
villains, all of whom went on crime sprees with the same depressing regularity
as mine, said, "And ethics? Morality? Doesn't that mean anything to you, you
reactionary butthead?"

"Come closer and say that, you sorry excuse for a fizzed-out Roman candle. I'll
bite your nose off."

Jukebox started singing, "Turn, Turn, Turn."

Enchanter tried to levitate, but bumped his head on the ceiling with a painful
thwock that only Anvil-Man appreciated.

Jetstream said, "It doesn't matter anyway. None of us are really up to trim
these days. And he is wearing that armor of his. I don't think there's any way
we could kill him even if we wanted to.

"Anvil-Man said, "Well, I have a suggestion."

Nobody asked to hear it. We knew what his suggestion was. The only trick in his
reportoire was crushing bad guys with anvils from six stories up -- thus earning
him his famous nickname, "The Man With the Drop on Crime." He'd accidentally
leaned out too far over the edge of a roof one day, compounded the error by not
letting go of his anvil when he had a chance, and as a result had ridden his
trademark weapon all the way to the pavement. Unlike most of us, he'd be out of
here eventually; he'd just broken every bone in his body. The anvil in question
was now a counterweight providing tension for his elevated leg. Since he
couldn't turn his head, he had to stare at that anvil every single waking hour
of the day. Yeah, we knew what his suggestion was, all right. I said, "We'll
keep that in mind," and, more to escape the debate than anything else, joined
Plasmo at Baron Death's bedside.

Plasmo glanced at me sheepishly, the oddest expression on the runny muck that
passed for his face. "Peatheful," he said, "ithn't he?"

I looked down at the fiend who'd once locked me in a room with five
hunter-seeker robots. "Yeah," I said. "Peaceful."

Which bothered me, a little. The Baron Death I remembered had always been a
pompous ass-- he'd capture you, chain you to a wall in some dungeon somewhere,
and rather than just let you rot there the way you'd expect a villain of his
intelligence to handle it, he'd put all his operations on hold so he could pace
back and forth in front of you speechifying about all his nefarious plans.
Muscleman used to say that the only reason the Baron never actually went ahead
and conquered the damn planet was that he knew he wouldn't have any nefarious
plans left to brag about once he did. Evil as he was, basically the only thing
he really cared about was talking.

I waved my hand in front of his eyeslits. He didn't blink.

"Really," Anvil-Man said. "I bet you, dollars to donuts, a good sock in the head
with an anvil would get past that helmet of his in a New York minute."

"How would you know?" Crime-Stomper said sourly. "The same way everybody knows.
I fought him once."

Plasmo and I whirled, to face a room suddenly drowning in stunned silence. Even
Jukebox was agape. We met each other's eyes, saw the shock and disbelief there,
and without saying a word came to the mutual conclusion that this was the single
most unbelievable thing anybody had said all day. Ergo, we knew it was true.
Crime-Stomper gave our incredulity a voice: "You? YOU ... of all people ... YOU
fought Baron Death?"

"Yes," Anvil-Man mimicked, "Me, of all people, I fought Baron Death. What's so
hard to believe about that.* You don't think I could have been a match for him?"

Enchanter turned inside-out and peered at us from in between his own teeth. The
rest of us knew exactly how he felt.

"I think we all need to hear this story," Jetstream said.

But Anvil-Man's feelings were hurt, now. "No. To hell with you guys. I'm going
back to sleep."

"Anvil-Man..." I began.

He started humming loudly, so we'd know his withdrawal was official. That set
off Jukebox, this time on "Sympathy for the Devil." Enchanter became a toy
truck, then a steam engine, then a unicorn. Plasmo and I looked at each other,
rolled our eyes, and turned back to the armored figure on the life-support bed.

I don't know. If it were the old Baron Death lying battered and broken, but
shouting his usual brand of megalomaniacal defiance, I think I would have sided
with Crime-Stomper. But this Baron Death didn't speak, didn't utter a sound,
didn't give any indication that there was anything inside his crumpled armor but
an equally empty shell of flesh. It was impossible to keep thinking of him as an
enemy. But it was also impossible to forget what it had been like to endure his
taunts while trying to escape his boobytrapped Maze of Death. I turned to
Plasmo, and saw the same troubled look in his eyes. "Do you think he's...all
there?"

"He'th Baron Death," Plasmo said simply. "He'th ethcaped from thertain doom a
thouthand timeth. It doethn't make any thenthe for him to end hith dayth here."

"So you think this is just some plot of his?"

"I hope tho," Plasmo said.

"Why?"

"Becauthe I think he dethervthe better."

And damned if I didn't agree with that. Because now that I thought of it, Baron
Death had been one of the most honorable bad guys I've ever encountered. He'd
attack you soon as look at you, of course -- that much was a given; in his
profession, he could hardly be expected to do any less B but for all his
supposed brilliance, for all the hard times he'd given people like me and
Crime-Stomper and Plasmo and the Olympian over the years, he played the game by
the rules.

Whatever could he have done, to make a big blue boy scout like the Olympian want
to reduce him to...this?

Deeply troubled now, I leaned in close. "Baron Death? You there?"

Somewhere deep within his armor, the arch-villain murmured incoherently.

I leaned in closer. "Come on, Baron. Say something."

He mumbled some more. But it wasn't just meaningless gibberish -though it could
have translated to anything, it was also definitely spoken from some deep well
of anguished desperation.

Only one word emerged clearly, and that one hit .the room with the force of a
thunderbolt: "...danger...,,

It sounded nothing like Baron Death's usual voice.

Crime-Stomper called from his bed: "I don't like the sound of that."

"Me either," I said. I turned back to Baron Death. "What kind of danger? Tell
me!"

The Baron's eyes rolled. "D-dangerous .... danger..."

Dangerous danger. The worst kind.

I gritted my teeth. "Something's terribly wrong here."

Plasmo nodded, his head bobbing from side to side atop an obscenely suggestive
five-foot neck. "I wath thtarting to get that imprethion mythelf."

"I agree," said the Enchanter, and that really cinched it, since as far as we
knew he hadn't spoken a coherent word since his epic battle with N'loghthl, Lord
of Phlarrrrg, five years earlier.

We looked at Baron Death again, then looked at each other, then at the others,
and finally, together, turned toward Jukebox.

Once, he'd been Mento, The Smartest Man on Earth, and I guess the name fit, even
if it made him sound like a breath mint. For the five years he ran around in
that ugly pink jumpsuit of his {the one with the picture of a brain framed in an
oval on his chest} nobody had ever succeeded in defeating him in a battle of
wits. And any number of criminals tried, not only devising ridiculously
elaborate crimes but actually {and I still can't believe how STUPID this is)
sending him CLUES about where they were going to strike next. You would think
that when Mento was finally defeated, it would be at the hands of somebody who
was even more brilliant than he was. But it hadn't happened that way -- he'd met
a bad guy who was DUMBER. A trucker named Earl, who was busting up a bar because
his girlfriend had just left him. Who, being too drunk and stupid to think up
any highly intricate deathtrap for Mento to cleverly escape from, just whopped
him over the head with a bar stool, thus instantly turning The Smartest Man on
Earth into the human oldies marathon he's been ever since.

Jukebox noticed us watching him and immediately segued into "Every Breath You
Take."

Plasmo and I glanced at each other, and between us decided that it couldn't
hurt. We left Baron Death behind and sat down by Jukebox's bed, one of us on
either side.

He started singing "Go Away, Little Girl."

Plasmo's arm slithered up and around the back of Jukebox's head and wrapped
itself around his mouth, effectively gagging him.

"Thank you," I told Plasmo.

"My pleathure."

I faced Jukebox again. "Listen. You've seen what's going on here. You know it's
important. You know that something about it stinks on ice. You know that if
there's something bad going down here, then we're probably the only people in
position to do anything about it. Finally, you know that this might be the last
chance most of us have to make a difference in this world again. But alone, we
might not be able to figure it out in time. Everything depends on you being able
to fight your way out of wherever it is you've been the last few years and give
us some kind of advice that makes sense. You understand?"

Was it just wishful thinking, or were his eyes regaining some of their previous
focus? I gestured for Plasmo to release him. Plasmo did -- and for just a second
Jukebox actually looked like he was trying to say something. He opened his
mouth, closed it, swallowed, made a choking noise, then opened his mouth.

And once again started singing.

This time in a deep, throaty hard-rock voice. Something about holding a girl in
his arms while the band played.

"Damn," I said.

"Brooth," said Plasmo.

"What?"

"Brooth," he repeated. When I failed to understand that, he amplified, "The
Bawth." When I failed to understand that too, he gave an exasperated look and
spelled it out for me: "Brooth Thpringthteen."

"Great. You can name that tune. Big hairy deal."

"No! I'm thaying I know thith thong! I have the thee-dee. It'th called
'Brilliant Dithguithe!'"

Jukebox cut off the song in mid-lyric. Blinked at us.

And with a visibly tremendous effort, somehow managed to avoid singing again.

Brilliant Disguise. Interesting. I clapped him on the shoulder. "You done good,
Ju--I mean, Mento. We'll get back to you.

"He nodded, his eyes glistening.

Jetstream had wandered over in the interim, his flame-retardant buckets scraping
metallically against the cold tile floor. "What's it mean?

"I'm not sure," I said. "But think on this: it doesn't make sense for the man in
that armor to be the real Baron Death. He's the Elyis of bad guys; if it was
really the Baron, they wouldn't just dump him in some hole-in-the-wall ward to
rot, for his people to eventually swoop down and rescue. No matter what the
Olympian said. They'd bury him in the deepest hole they could find, build an
army base around it, and have the entire membership of the Niceness League, the
Terrific Ten, and the Good Eggs guarding him twenty-four hours a day. He can't
be Baron Death. And that means -- terrifying as it might be to admit this --
that the man who brought him in couldn't have been the real Olympian."

"Jumping Jehosophat!" Jetstream exclaimed, making me wince. "If somebody's come
up with a way to disguise himself as the Olympian, then the world's in serious
danger!"

"Prethithely," said Plasmo, sounding proud of himself.

Jetstream began shuffling toward the outside corridor. I grabbed him by the arm.
"Where the hell do you think you're going?"

"The phone," he said, in the tone of somebody speaking to an idiot. "We have to
call The Danger Squad."

"To hell with them," I said fervently.

"What?"

"You know the rules of engagement. Whoever catches the crisis fights the bad
guy. No matter what the odds. No matter how high' the stakes. This one...belongs
to us."

Silence reigned in the ward around us.

Enchanter's eyes were saucers. Literally. He even had coffee cups on them.

Crime-Stomper spoke first. "No doubt about it, Night Rat. You've lost it."

"I can't believe I'm agreeing with him for the second time in one day,"
Jetstream said. "But he's right. Look at us. Two of us can't move, two of us can
barely think, the three of us who can both move and think can't be trusted to
make it down a flight of stairs. We're not in any shape to go into battle. We
couldn't take out an arthritic pickpocket, even if he wanted to surrender to us.
And you want us to take on the Olympian.? Or Baron Death.? Or whoever's behind
this scheme, even assuming you're right about this being a scheme? Get real."

There was a moment of uneasy silence, during which I came very close to
admitting that they were right.

And then Anvil-Man laughed.

It was a pained laugh, mostly because every chuckle strained the ribs still
healing beneath his full-length body cast; every robust "ha!" was followed by an
equally robust moan. But the laughs seemed more powerful than the moans,
somehow. And they filled the room with that mythic sense of destiny that I'd
long since come to associate with the turning point of any battle.

We all felt it. Deep in our bones.

I had just enough time to reflect that if Anvil-Man was capable of inspiring us,
then we were even more pathetic than I'd thought, before Crime-Storeper
whispered the set-up line: "Uh? Anvil-Man.? What's so funny.?"

"Don't you see it.?" Anvil-Man shouted. "If we really wanted to GET REAL, would
we even BE in this business.? Winning against impossible odds is what we're all
about!

"That did it, for us.

The Enchanter summoned his mystic cloak from the closet. CrimeStoreper let out a
battle cry. Plasmo fanned out to all four corners of the room and gathered us
together for a group hug. letstream removed his flame-dampening glove and shot
off a celebratory burst of fireworks. Jukebox led us all in a rousing rendition
of "We Are the Champions," which predicably brought in Nurse Kent a second time.
I felt a seizure coming on, and for the first time since being shut away in this
starched white prison actually managed to fight it off.

And just as the celebration started to pall, with everybody facing the stark
realization that they didn't even have the beginnings of an idea what we were
expected to do next, Jukebox sang out a ten-second medley of the Jags' "Back of
My Hand {I've Got Your Number}," Steve Miller's "I'm Gonna Grab Ya," Ritchie
Valens's "Come On Let's Go," the Supremes' "Nowhere to Run," and, oddly enough,
Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park."

He'd thought of a plan...

IF YOU READ any newspapers at all, you know what the explanation was. How the
man in the armor wasn't Baron Death, but a small-time villain called The Leech,
who had the ability to absorb and store the powers from any unwary superheroes
who happened to be in the vicinity. We all knew the Leech, having encountered
him once or twice, but he'd never been a real threat, since it took him days to
absorb enough power to make a difference, and us only thirty seconds, to put him
away with a good right hook. But Baron Death had seen in him a good way to
gather up all the world's superpowers for himself -- he'd just welded the poor
guy into a junked-up version of his own armor, fitted him with a neural
paralyzer so he wouldn't be able to tap into all the power he was getting, and
ordered a robotic Olympian impersonator to usher him from one superhero hangout
to another, as his "prisoner," arranging for him to "escape" every time he'd
drained the well dry.

A brilliant plan. One so obvious in retrospect that it's hard to see how come we
didn't see it right away. I guess that's why Baron Death's number one in the
villain business. But this time he made the mistake of choosing us as his first
helpless victims.

You know the rest of it, too -- how we escaped the hospital in a makeshift
flying machine hastily constructed from our beds, and how we fought the robotic
Olympian impersonator in an epic battle that flattened six square blocks of
Manhattan, how we faced Baron Death in his secret laboratory beneath Disney
World, and how, at the end, when the bomb that would blow up North America was
ticking down its last thirty seconds and the rest of us were trapped by the
Baron's evil paralysis ray, the immobile plaster-encased form of Anvil-Man saved
the day by plummeting from the rafters where we'd left him at the precise moment
the Baron removed his protective helmet to mock us with the sight of his
hideously scarred face.

This may not strike you as a great way to regain one's lost dignity, but it sure
as hell worked for us.

And then, when it was over, we piloted our makeshift flying machine high over
the city. Jetstream had welded the beds together, Jukebox and I lay side-by-side
in two forming a U, cushioned by blankets, peering down at the city through the
wire mesh of the bedframes, and singing "Born to Be Wild." We'd mounted
Crime-Stomper's traction bed at the head of this construct, making him resemble
one of the wooden figureheads that fronted nineteenth-century sailing ships. He
liked that. Anvil-Man's bed rode on top of the U, forming the upper deck -- we'd
given him some weighted bedpans to drop in case we ran into any trouble out
there. letstream straddled his body cast, flaming hands held aloft to inflate
the hot air balloon we'd made of Plasmo. As for the Enchanter, he floated along
beside us, once again insubstantial, neither helping nor hindering our
progress...but though I couldn't see him from where I was I somehow knew he was
smiling. Eventually, letstream asked, "Where to? Back to the hospital ?"

"No," I said. "We can't go back to the hospital. Not while evil still
flourishes. Not while there are still wrongs to be righted. Not while they still
expect us to eat that trap they serve. No -- it's time for bad guys to beware.
Because a new breed of crime-fighter is in town."

That started a whole new round of cheering, which continued unabated until
Crime-Stomper used his nose to ring the buzzer that he'd used for so many years
to ring the nurse: "All right. Listen up, people, I just spotted something. A
rehearsal for the big time. A dark alley between a peepshow parlor and a
homeless hotel. Mugger holding two tourists at gunpoint."

"Take us down!" I shouted. "This is a job for --"

We all shouted it together.

"... THE DIFFERENTLY ABLED!"

And Jetstream and Plasmo took us into a power dive, with lukebox performing a
soundtrack straight out of Wagner.
This one's for Julius Schwartz.