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of the new hero generation, deriving legitimacy from his Hawk King connection and credibility from his forward vision; these same panelists dismissed Festus Piltdown III as “yesterday’s man.”

At that point Mr. Piltdown shut off the satellite feed completely and launched an invective against affirmative action in general and the L*A*B in particular (citing its lost HUD security contract), finally referring to the L*A*B as the Lout-house of Australopithecene Bastards. Only seconds into Kareem’s rebuttal, Iron Lass threatened to depressurize the compartment and kill everyone unless the bickering stopped. Mr. Piltdown dropped his voice, muttering about my alleged breach of professional ethics by “coercing” them into an imminent reunion with their murderous ex-nemeses.

For me, Mr. Piltdown remained a fascinating figure, an omelet of a man, rife with the green onions of bitterness yet held together by the tangy Velveeta of integrity. Despite the Squirrel’s cantankerous persona, in the wake of Hawk King’s death and Wally’s resignation, much of the F*O*O*J had coalesced around Mr. Piltdown’s inspirational words (if not presence). In general Mr. Piltdown seemed fearless. Yet he, perhaps more than any of the group, appeared horrified at the prospect of setting foot on the prison planetoid.

Then we all saw it through the window, a few dozen miles away, little more than a black space blotting out stars. As we rotated slowly around it, we beheld its sunlit face, and it seemed to me that the silvery steel facility planted upon the dark rock resembled a Zippo lighter stuck into a soot-encrusted skull.

Asteroid Zed.

Our elevator thunked into the “top floor” Space Elevator terminal, and we unstrapped ourselves, cycled through the airlock, and floated through the station to board the Space Bee transport over to Asteroid Zed.

As I gazed back, the StarCase™ glinted in the darkness like a child’s tin can telephone, taut on its string. If anything were to go wrong, if the Destroyer were still the menace Kareem feared him to be, if he were indeed free of his mental restraints only to have assumed dictatorship over the asylum, then that tin can telephone would have transmitted our final conversation to our lost home and life itself.

The Legacy of Mental DisEase

Asteroid Zed had hardly changed since I first visited it in the early 1980s: a cold, gleaming, white-walled and steel-barred environment, sickly with the stench of boiled cabbage and baking soda. Walking its tiers, one had the impression of being entombed inside a giant refrigerator.

The prison’s very existence was a layer cake of irony, iced with the stale frosting of our society’s failures. An emblem of the triumph of superheroism in the Götterdämmerung, the Asteroid was originally conceived, designed, and constructed in 1971 by none other than Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid. Fourteen years later, those two champions would find themselves interred in their own creation after the F*O*O*J foiled their conspiracy to blow up the Fortress of Freedom and murder all the heroes inside it. Asteroid Zed, refitted in 1985 by Piltdown Dynamics to prevent an escape by its own designers, would soon house countless villains who’d once fought against Gamoid and the Kid.

Our guide through the tiers of the technological Tartarus was Warden Dr. Rudy Wells. On our way through the various holding units, Warden Wells pointed out to us the many prisoners put there by my own patients. In the Fish & Reptile Villains Unit were Codzilla, Monitor Lizard, Black Mamba, and Nemesaur, all captured by Iron Lass; in the Technovillains Unit were MicroCrip and his Nanogangstas and Robot-Stalin, defeated by the Flying Squirrel, as were incarcerees of the Crime Lord Villains Unit such as Pauli the Living Mafia and Tong Triad and the Iron Eunuch. Biovillains such as the Desiccator, the Devolver, and Zee-Roks the Imitator required special containment, Wells explained, which was why they were kept in Unit X on the other side of the asteroid, so as to minimize contamination of the orbital biocosm.

The only unit no one ever saw, of course, was the one that was invisible to the eye, the Metaphysical Villains Unit. The MVU was an upper-string-dimensional confinement zone at a right angle to our reality, specially designed by Hawk King himself for nemeses such as the Infinity Farmer and his Time Tractor. Technically, we were walking through it at the very moment its existence was being explained to us—but then again, we were always walking through it, and we never were, as it was everywhere and nowhere.

I had no idea if the F*O*O*Jsters were pondering that intersection of physics, philosophy, and psychopathology, but it was clear that walking the ultra-bright corridors between cell rows of such monsters was exacting a psychic toll on my team. Iron Lass projected a gaze even colder than usual, surrounded as she was by the prisoners of the war she’d declared and led; Power Grrrl had resisted turning on the speakers of the most somber bustier I’d ever seen her wear; glowering at every cell door we passed; the Brotherfly flicked his gaze flylike from cell to cell, seemingly scanning everywhere for either spiderwebs or Venus flytraps (understandable, given that Spiderbyte and Venus the FlyTrap were both incarcerated there), as if he feared he’d be dragged inside a cell and ripped apart, antenna from antenna; X-Man’s jaw was clamped tightly enough that I could see his mandibular muscles bulging up along the height of his skull and disappearing into his short hair. His fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles were rendered beige.

But no one looked more agitated than the Flying Squirrel, who was gunfighter-flexing his fingers beside his utility pouches, as if expecting to unleash any of his numerous high-tech weapons at a moment’s notice. Combined with the sweat glistening on his upper lip, he resembled no one so much as Humphrey Bogart’s immortal Captain Queeg, quivering with increasing paranoia at every second.

“Should’ve just put down the lot of them,” snapped Mr. Piltdown, cutting off Warden Wells in midlecture. “Would’ve, too, if not for the goddamned shyster queers in the ACLU.