Minister Faust by From the Notebooks of Dr Brain (v4.0) (html) Read Free Book Online

I’m sayin?”
    He scanned the faces of his two older colleagues, but neither met his eyes.
    And in words so childishly pathetic I will never be able to forget them, Wally W. Watchtower looked imploringly at his comrades, his hands upturned and empty on his knees, and, with voice cracking, asked, “And now…what’re we sposta do if suh’m goes wrong… an we don’know how t’fix it ?”
    Saturday morning sunlight fell into Wally’s eyes, twinkling wetly. Wally leaned over and picked up André’s entire uncut apple strudel. As soon as he sank his teeth into it, the strudel began crumbling over his suit and cape. He blew on the dessert, crackling the entirety of it into a strudel-cicle, crunching chunks between his teeth in mournful mastication.
    “Good fritter, Br’erfly,” he said, looking at the floor and chewing. “I should show y’all m’recipe for fried peanut butter–banana–and–candy bar samwidges.”
    By then, not even the younger heroes would look at him.
    I asked Kareem to share his thoughts.
    “Since there’s no reason to believe Hawk King could have died of natural causes,” he said without hesitation, his voice as raw as an abrasion, “we’re dealing with a murder.”

    Stages of Grief: Obsession

    A ll eyes clutched Kareem, like a loan shark’s hand on the neck of an overdue lendee.
    “The murder of the world’s smartest man, by the very nature of such a crime,” said the X-Man, “indicates threat on a scale we may never have seen before. Despite my persistent warnings, this organization has been overconfident, stuffing its belly with its own myths. And we’ve been acting as if all our enemies were dead or locked up on Asteroid Zed, as if all the ones up there now have been rendered totally harmless—”
    “This is not the time for your postseason quarterbacking, Edgerton!” said Flying Squirrel. “Difficult F*O*O*J decisions were being made on a daily basis by heroic men facing death for decades before you were born. You’re going to choose a time of planetary mourning to let loose your astigmatic recriminations?”
    “Look, Festus, unlike some people around here, I actually cared about Hawk King, which is why I’m putting my energy into investigating, not mourning. Now look at this.”
    Kareem closed his eyes, enunciated the word suspects, and a rotating rogues’ gallery glistened blackly into shadow-shapes above us.
    “These,” said Kareem, pointing to the lower ring and the upper ring in turn, “are the Beta-and Alpha-level foes of the F*O*O*J who are still unaccounted for. The Heavyweights,” he said, gesturing to the lower ring.
    Although the images were devoid of any color save black, we could make out the forms as Kareem announced their names: the glinting man-lizard called the Crystal Crocodile, the oversized crushing hands of Key Grip and Best Boy, the robed and lightning bolt–excreting Shockrates, and the obviously shaped Specially Relative Einstein Baboons.
    “And the Superheavyweights,” said Kareem, pointing to the nuclear-armored dictator Baron Von Drako, then to the horned head of the star-consuming titan Cosmicus and his herald the Gold Glider, then to the swirling miasma of horror called L-Raunzenu, then to the aardvark-faced sociopath Warmaster Set, and finally to the shambling mass called Ymir the Planet-Corpse.
    “How is it possible,” asked Kareem, while his audience gazed up at the rings of terrors orbiting above their heads, “for someone of Hawk King’s power to have been killed? And how could he have failed to see such an attack coming in the first place?
    “His Udjat —that’s what you people call the Eye of Horus, what should be the Eye of Heru if you could bother to learn the Afro-Egyptian name—should’ve alerted him. So what we’re looking at is someone with soular-invisibility, dimension-shifting, or counter-remote-viewing.
    “On the Heavyweights list, it’s possible Shockrates could’ve generated a strong enough electrical