Minister Faust by From (html) (librera reader txt) 📕

execute down in Dixieland! You heard of the China Syndrome? A nuclear reactor burning all the way down to China? This is Piltdown’s Syndrome—burning us all down to nothing. To nothing.”

He threw up his arms, aiming his tirade like a wrecking ball at all the empty buildings.

“But people are deaf, dumb, and blind. You can scream the truth in letters ten miles tall, and still the only thing they’ll notice is nothing. Whole reason Brother Larry opened the Dark Star was so people’d have suh’m tasty and healthy to eat after Squirrel Burger drove everybody else outta business. You know you can buy and get stoned from a whole bag of maki in this neighborhood easier and cheaper than you can buy a kot-tam salad? But if it weren’t for the L*A*B and a few others, Larry wouldn’t even be able to keep his doors open.”

Slicing Through the Gordian Knot

Kareem’s rant veered wildly, even into how the L*A*B operated its own “social programs to counter white influence,” including “Free Breakfast for Shorties,” “Africa Medallions for Homies,” and “Free Fades, Flat-Tops, and Afro-Picks for Soul Brothers,” the last of which was undermined by something Kareem called “the Jheri curl plague,” which left what he claimed was “Jheri bags and activator empties lying in the gutters of the MLK Boulevard of dreams deferred.”

Suddenly Kareem turned on me with accusation burning in his eyes like lit cigarettes.

“I sure hope you aren’t planning to turn this conversation or any of our sessions into one of your books, Doc!”

“Well, Kareem, I’m sure if you actually were to read any of my—”

“I checked out your stuff after we got sentenced to your therapy. All of it. I pity the poor mopes you psychocatalyzed. I read what those suckers said—although I had to read between the lines to deduce what you’d cut out since the way you edited everything was so self-serving—and then I’d read your diagnoses and speculations and bizarre psychosuperstitious slop. Damn. The least insightful, most outrageous conclusions, like you couldn’t see cute on a puppy—”

“Be that as it may, Kareem—”

“I mean, in the dictionary, next to the definition of ‘unreliable narrator,’ there’s gotta be a picture of your degree. I hate to think how you’d be framing anything I’ve ever said. You take one little word of what people say, then psychopontificate the hell out of it until you’ve got readers thinking the afflicted are the afflictors, and the afflictors are the afflicted! No different than the F*O*O*J helping destroy New Atlantis while protecting the people bringing maki into our neighborhoods—”

It was time to cut through the Gordian Knot of Kareem’s white-persecution complex. “If everything you’re saying is true, Kareem, why did you even join the F*O*O*J? Why not remain in Stun-Glas full time, fighting alongside the L*A*B?”

“What, remain ghettoized, cut off from the reach that only the F*O*O*J has, unable to effect change past my own neighborhood, prevented from joining a wider cause? Then you’d accuse me of—”

“Did the L*A*B expel you?”

He stopped, his jaw half-open.

He closed it, then opened it again only long enough to say “No.” He shook his head. “No.”

“André said you weren’t welcome at the Dark Star. You didn’t rebut him. What did he mean?”

“Look!” he yelled. “We are in serious danger, Doc—can you get that through your head? Omnipotent Man’s resigned! Hawk King’s dead by causes unknown! The F*O*O*J is a kot-tam disaster! This morning, at the funeral, the appearance of the Netjeru—that was a warning to us all, a harbinger that if we don’t—”

“The what? Natcheroo?”

“Netjeru, Doc! Don’t you know anything? The so-called gods who took Hawk King’s sarcophagus away! They haven’t appeared on Earth in five or six thousand years. You think they don’t want his killer caught? What do you think they’ll do if we don’t avenge his death?”

“Are you saying that these gods are inferior as detectives to you?”

“I’m saying that…Look, even if they don’t, I dunno—whatever—what do you think’s gonna happen if we don’t bring his killer to justice? Who’s next, and how many after that? Because if you can kill someone of Hawk King’s power, then nobody’s safe! How can you not see that?”

“All right, Kareem.”

“All right, what?”

“You believe that Gil Gamoid, the N-Kid, and/or the Destroyer could be behind this alleged crime, correct?”

“Yes, for the ninth time!”

“Then let’s go ask them.”

“What’re you talking about? Thanks to you jailing me in therapy, my investigation’s barely started! And a detective doesn’t tip his hand to a suspect until he’s—”

“I’m worried that you’re manifesting a vast, disabling paranoid fantasy, Kareem, and that’s what’s jailing you. I’ll go to Asteroid Zed tomorrow to interview them myself, if you won’t, so we can rule out Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid as suspects—”

“You do that and you’re gonna destroy the element of surprise and blow the one chance I’ve got with them!”

“So I’m going to Asteroid Zed, Kareem, to speak with your triumvirate of terror myself. Unless you want to go with me to rule them out yourself.”

He flailed his arms, yelled at me, explained his case a dozen times, pleaded with me not to go. I wouldn’t budge.

Finally, after haranguing me for a full ten minutes, he fell silent, his shoulders drooping while his gaze scoured the weeds creeping out of the cracks in the concrete.

He shook his head, chewed his lip. “When?”

“First Space Elevator up. Five A.M., if memory serves.”

“Kot-tam. Fine. Five A.M. lift to the kingdom of the damned.”

How will you face knowing that you will never exceed, or even equal, the accomplishments of your predecessors?

X-Man: “Catching this superassassin is all the glory I need.”

The Face of the Foe Is a Crystal Ball

Whether I chose to combat the RNPN of the X-Man and his comrades or the end-of-epoch ennui of the mainstream F*O*O*Jsters, an ascent to the orbital penitentiary where the worst supercriminals in history were entombed alive seemed at that moment to be the only path toward mental clarity. The death of Hawk King had so damaged the already