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

At any rate, Wells, other than by using the Psionic Impotence Helmets, how’re you keeping these hyper-freaks from staging a coup on this hell-rock?”

“Well, Mr. Squirrel, sir,” said Wells, anxiously huffing steam onto his spectacles and cleaning them with his tie, “the Psionic Inhibition Helmets do their job on all the most, well, disturbed cases, especially the psychics. But intensive use of psychoceuticals, mostly from Piltdown-Sorus-RX, keeps the bulk of our patients from hurting others. Or themselves.”

“Mighty nice racket for Pilty, Wells,” said Kareem, just as we entered the Political Villains Unit and glimpsed the Leninoids and the Eiffel Terrorists through the door monitors. “Piltdown-Sorus-RX created half this villain epidemic in the first place when it invented Nouitol—like we needed a cross between LSD and thalidomide—”

“Shut your crack-hole, Edgerton, when you don’t know the first thing about what you’re braying about—”

“Your company made the damn drug that got half these fruit bats addicted, mutated, and mind-smacked in the first place, Fasces—”

“So blame the goddamned FDA, not my company! If that gaggle of pink-eyed Poindexters can’t conduct a simple double-blind study—”

“—not when you’ve got a thousand lawyers and lobbyists hammering them and the kot-tam administration to fast-track all your junk into the veins of old folks and babies—”

“Mr. X-Man,” attempted Dr. Wells, “while it’s true that Nouitol can induce intense feelings of entitlement, superiority, megalomania, and homicidal rage, it can also push the very limits of mental acuity in otherwise limited intellects—”

“No wonder Festy had it invented. Must be injecting himself twelve times daily—”

“Why, you filthy little—”

Dr. Wells: “To this day, carefully monitored doses of Nouitol are a regular part of our treatment here.”

Kareem stopped dead. “You mean you’re still injecting people with that poison? Are you insane?”

“I assure you, Mr. X-Man, that all safety protocols—”

A technomusic dancebeat erupted down the corridor, bulging with raunchy samba-salsa-mambo-rumba “samples.” I rushed back to find the music blaring from Syndi’s bustier woofers and crotch tweeters. Through the door monitor, I could see the target of Power Grrrl’s HEAT Ray—she’d turned every member of the aging Mongoose Men, the Anti-Castro Cubanitos Crew who destroyed much of Florida during the Götterdämmerung, into dancing versions of herself. In their cell they were gyrating in sync to her music, all twelve of them howling out her Top 20 hit from the previous year, “La Vida Cola.”

“Now Syndi,” I said, “we talked about this, and I said no.”

“Oh, ga-awd,” she whined. “Fine.”

Released, the Mongoose Men resumed their ordinary appearances, blinking at one another in dawning comprehension before turning away to slump in their respective corners.

Before I could catch up with the group, a frantic Dr. Wells ran back to me, telling me that Mr. Piltdown and Kareem had broken off on their own after insisting that they interrogate their intended targets immediately.

Rushing me along to the Secure Room, Dr. Wells signaled the guards to let me through, and I dashed in past the security checkpoint to see the Squirrel and X-Man staring through the letho-glass at two of the most beloved—and most feared—figures of the twentieth century.

When Heroes Go Bad

Even sans their glorious armor and clad in simple orange jumpsuits with faces ravaged by their decade-long sedation, these two superbeings were unmistakable.

Francis Ford Coppola was often compared to the elder of the two, given his wild beard and eyes, although, to my knowledge, the talented director never reached a height of eight feet, achieved arms like a bodybuilder’s thighs, or had a mouthful of teeth like gleaming metal rail spikes. His younger companion, while shorter at a mere six feet, was every bit as remarkable, with his opalescent ram’s hooves and horns, his golden body-fur like the mane of a California model, and his smell pungent enough that even through the letho-glass I felt as if I were bathing in coconut milk.

Heroes and villains in the same bodies.

Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid.

Of course, there were obvious changes. The N-Kid no longer carried his heralded Grail Pail, and both ex-champions were fitted with specially designed Psionic Impotence Helmets to accommodate horns or oversized head. Their psionic restraints looked like football helmets made of black glass, detailed with silicon circuits and frizzed out with flickering, brain-draining psiber-optic filaments.

With nothing on their side of the glass to sit on but the floor of the featureless white cube, they stood, their faces rigid with faltering self-control.

Mr. Piltdown stepped forward, opening his hands in anxious supplication.

“If there’s anything you need, Gil, Kid, just name it,” he said quickly. “If it were up to me you’d be at the Squirrel Tree being tended to by my personal physicians, not up here in this ghastly—”

“Get out get out get out GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT—” screamed the N-Kid, leaping from his seat and hurling himself against the glass, kicking his hooves against the barrier, while at every contact the glass seared his fur with awful purple arc light.

Dr. Wells yelled, “This isn’t going to work, Mr. Piltdown, sir! I think we should leave—”

“NO, HUMAN,” intoned Gil Gamoid, his voice like it was in his glory days, a love child of tuba and gong.

Even the N-Kid stopped long enough for us to focus. Gil said, “DR. WELLS. GO. FESTUS. GO. OTHERS, STAY.”

Dr. Wells gestured toward the door as would a maître d’, but Mr. Piltdown refused to look at him, glaring instead at his former teammates. Finally, he said, “I just want you both to know…that I forgive you. Both of you. We’re even.”

The N-Kid emitted a horrible goatlike b-a-a-a, a b-a-a-a of rage, a b-a-a-a of vengeance. Mr. Piltdown backed out of the room so slowly as to be almost comical, but the mood was nothing short of tragic. Dr. Wells sealed the cubic chamber on his own way out.

I leaned toward Kareem, whispering that he should beware; while he might have gained personal satisfaction by seeing the Flying Squirrel ejected, he needed to remember that the two converts to sociopathy before him were master manipulators. Ejecting their greatest defender, the man who had paid