The Further Adventures of Kid Lambda

The Further Adventures of Kid Lambda

Cody Goes to College

Around their twelfth year, most boys’ lives change a lot, just as they are changed by growing up. In 1941, Cody Mason had his twelfth birthday, and his life changed even more dramatically than most of his peers. He grew several inches and gained twenty pounds, his voice went from contralto to baritone, he almost became a bully until he developed a crush on his sixth grade teacher, who helped awaken his love of learning – and then he went from being a poor student to an exceptional one. (see: Dr. Boom, You Fiend!)

Cody Mason was born in 1930 and graduated from high school at seventeen in 1947. He worked for a year to save some money for school, and in 1949 he went on to college. He wanted to be a nuclear chemist, so he went to college at the school where atomic energy was first produced — the University of Chicago — and majored in physics and chemistry.

Cody Mason’s roommate during his freshman year was Tomas Thomas, who had lived all over the world while growing up thanks to his father being a United States ambassador. He was one of the older students in the freshman class, having put in a four-year stint in the Marine Corps directly out of high school before going to college. He was studying to be a nuclear engineer in order to design nuclear power plants, and was majoring in physics and engineering. Tomas had a flair for languages and spoke English and Spanish extremely well. He also had a good ear for accents, and he could usually tell a lot about a person’s history just by hearing that person talk. Cody and Tomas attended the same physics classes and shared an interest in nuclear power. They often did their homework together, and soon became best friends.

Tomas was a big man at six feet tall and two-hundred-and-ten pounds. His face was somewhat exotic, with a high forehead and high cheekbones, and his skin was somewhat swarthy, perhaps the color Cody would have been had he spent a couple of hours each day in the sun. Many folks guessed he had some Native American blood, while others assumed he was at least partly Hispanic. A thin mustache and a goatee completed his look. Cody liked hanging around with him, because a lot of women found Tomas’ exotic looks attractive.

Both Cody and Tomas wanted to try intercollegiate athletics. Cody was a good athlete, but he had never been selected early when he and his friends had picked teams, and thus never developed much interest in team sports. He had learned to fight from The Volunteer when he’d been Kid Lambda, and while he was in high school, he’d become an avid boxer – finishing 3rd in Indiana in his age group and weight class in the Golden Gloves tournament. The University of Chicago’s boxing team was mediocre, so he figured he had a good chance of making the varsity.

On the other hand, Tomas had always been a star athlete. But, having grown up almost entirely outside the U.S., he had mostly played soccer and had only played baseball, football, and basketball after joining the Marine Corps, and never really enjoyed them. But he had been an outstanding hand-to-hand combatant in the Marines, so he thought he would give boxing a try as well.

That year the varsity didn’t have anyone at the one-hundred-and-seventy-five-pound weight class, and Cody stepped right into a starting position. Tomas had more difficulty, as the team captain was in his weight class, and even though Tomas consistently beat him in practice bouts, he was a senior and the team captain. So the coach kept him on the varsity in the two-hundred-and-ten-pound class, and Tomas had to fight in the heavyweight class, which was up to two-hundred and twenty-five pounds. He was usually outweighed by up to fifteen pounds, but he won more than he lost. Cody, Tomas, and the senior captain all had good years, and the University of Chicago boxing team turned in their best season in school history.

Cody was always puzzled by Tomas’ refusal to talk much about his past, but then, Cody had a secret he wouldn’t talk about, either. They developed a kind of friendly rivalry over their grades, and as a result, both worked harder at their schoolwork than they might have otherwise. For the two, life as freshmen at the University of Chicago was pretty good.


They roomed together again the next year, even though only freshmen had to share rooms. A couple of weeks before the boxing season began, they heard about a great jazz club on the other side of town. Although they didn’t go to clubs often, they were looking for a change.

They either got their directions wrong, or someone had been playing a dangerous joke on them, because they ended up in a seedy dive full of scary characters. Cody wanted to leave immediately, but there was actually a pianist and a girl singing some torch songs, like Melancholy Baby, What I Wouldn’t Do for That Man, and He’s My Secret Passion. She was quite good, and quite pretty as well, so they stayed for a while. Neither was much of a drinker, so they didn’t spend a lot, but they sent a few drinks to the musicians, who came over and sat with them between sets. After the two had played their last set, Cody and Tomas decided it was time to leave, and Tomas headed to the men’s room.

As he passed the bar, someone jostled and shoved him, and he tripped over the outstretched foot of a second man, then stumbled into a third.

“Hey, buddy! Watch where you’re going!” said the one he’d bounced into. “What’s the matter? You drunk, or what?”

Tomas immediately recognized what was happening; these guys were looking for a fight. He’d seen it before, in seedy little bars all around the world, and the routine almost never changed. If he protested that he’d been shoved and tripped, the other two would call him a liar, and they would keep harassing him until a fight broke out. He suspected all three of them had knives — jerks like these almost always did — and they would have them out in seconds, too. But Tomas didn’t want to play this game.

“I’m sorry, pal,” he said to the man he had bumped into. “It was totally my fault. Can I buy you a drink as an apology?”

“You’re damn right it was your fault! You jerks got some nerve, coming in here and stumbling around like drunken bums. Somebody ought to teach you a lesson!”

Tomas still wasn’t biting. “Yes, sir, my fault entirely. I’ve already learned my lesson. Thanks! Tell you what, why don’t we have a drink and forget about it?” He shouted to the bartender, “Two boilermakers, with the best whiskey you got!” And he threw a five-dollar bill on the bar. The man looked kind of bemused; he hadn’t expected to get a free drink. He was willing to give up his beef, but his friends were having none of it.

The one who had shoved Tomas spoke up. “Hey, jerk, are you a coward, or what? You gonna let that guy insult you and then buy him a drink? What a momma’s boy!”

Tomas turned to him slowly and smiled. “I’m sorry, sir, but this is a private conversation between me and my new friend,” he said, indicating the man. His smile sort of vanished, and his voice turned cold and hard. “It’s really none of your business.” And he turned back to the man.

“I’m makin’ it my business. We don’t like cowards in here!”

This guy was really pushing things. Tomas was starting to get tired of this routine. “Well, friend, then you must really hate yourself, or do you think the three of you beating the crap out of one guy is the epitome of courageous heroism? Oops, sorry, that’s probably too many big words for you.” He called the bartender back over. “Bartender, two more boilermakers. Take it out of the five, and keep the change!” He turned to face the three of them, raised his own drink in salute, and walked back to his table with Cody and sat down.

“What the heck was that?” Cody asked.

“Cody, you had better leave. Those guys are going to sit there, finish off the drinks I bought them, and talk about how I just made them look like fools. And they are going to taunt and goad each other until one of them, probably the one in the middle, is going to come over here and find some reason to pull his knife.”

“What about you?” Cody asked. “Let’s both get out of here!”

“Nope. I can’t. If I head for the door, they’ll cut me off, and if I head to the restroom, they’ll follow me in. But you should be able to get away easily.”

“What about the bartender? Why doesn’t he do something?” Cody was starting to get a little worried. He didn’t want to get in a fight with someone he didn’t know for no good reason, particularly if they had knives.

“Oh, he will. Probably call the police five minutes after the fight starts, so they have time to beat us up, clean us out, and be gone. He probably gets a good cut of whatever they take from the guys they beat up, just for looking the other way and giving them time to get away from the police.”

“I’m not going, Tomas. I’m staying right here with you!” Cody declared stoutly.

“Cody, have you ever been in a knife fight?” Tomas looked more worried about Cody than he was about the three goons.

“Actually, I have — more than one, in fact.” Tomas looked at him oddly. Something about Tomas’ calm seemed false to Cody, and it suddenly struck him what it was. “Tomas, have you ever been in a knife fight?”

Tomas looked a little embarrassed. “Well, we were trained with knives in the Marine Corps, so I know what to watch out for. But, really, every time I ever thought I might end up in a knife fight, I made sure to be carrying my pistol.”

“You’re packing a pistol?” Cody asked, his eyebrows rising in surprise.

Tomas sighed. “Nope, not tonight. Actually, I stopped wearing it when I started school, and I never thought I’d need it tonight. Hey, head’s up! Here he comes! Too late for you to leave now!”

It was the man who’d shoved him, as Tomas had predicted. His two companions followed him over, although the man he’d bumped into looked kind of reluctant.

“Hey, pretty boy, I decided I don’t want a drink from you!” He poured the drink in Tomas’ lap.

Cody stood up and started to protest. The one who’d tripped Tomas pulled a switchblade, using his body and the bodies of his friends to shield it from the rest of the room. “Sonny-boy, you can walk out of here right now, or we’re gonna cut you up like your friend.”

“You won’t hurt me?” Cody said, a quiver in his voice.

All three laughed. “Git your ass outta here, little boy!”

Cody turned toward the door, and the three relaxed just a little. Then he whirled around and used the momentum of his turn to drive a backhand blow into the man’s cheek. His head was jerked around, and his body followed, and when he slumped to the floor, it was apparent that Cody had knocked him out with a single blow.

The one who’d shoved him lunged at Tomas, using his knife like a sword, trying to stab Tomas before he could get out of his chair. Tomas swung his right hand up from the table and used it to knock the knife aside. He was still holding his glass beer mug, and he swung it so fast, the beer and whiskey sprayed out into the man’s face. Unfortunately for him, so did the shot glass, which struck him flush in the mouth, breaking a tooth.

His right hand, which had been holding the knife, was numb from the collision with the heavy beer mug moving at high speed. In fact, he was lucky the mug didn’t break, or the broken glass might have seriously wounded him. He brought his left hand up to his face to try to clear his eyes. By this time Tomas was standing up, so he brought his knee up hard between the man’s legs, and then hit him with a two-handed blow to the back of the head when he bent forward in agony. The man’s shoulders and head struck the table, and he lay there not moving, and not even moaning.

The third man was already backing away, holding his hands up, sweating and talking fast. “Look, guys, I don’t want no trouble. I didn’t do nothin’ to you guys, did I? Please, I don’t want no trouble!” When he saw that neither Cody nor Tomas seemed inclined to pursue him, he turned and ran out the door.

Tomas turned to Cody. “Damn. We shouldn’t have let him go. We need to get out of here pretty fast, or he’ll be back with more friends.”

Cody shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think he won’t stop running for miles!” he said, grinning.

Tomas turned and headed out the door. “I know his type. He’s a rat, and rats always come back in a pack.” Thus, Cody followed him. The bartender yelled at them, “Hey, you ain’t paid me for the last round of drinks yet!”

Tomas turned and laughed. He pointed at the two unconscious men. “They’re paying. Or maybe we ought to wait for the cops to show up, and listen to your buddies spill the whole story.” He turned to face the rest of the bar. Cody was amazed at how quiet it was. “I don’t know how many of you guys have watched this guy–” He pointed at the bartender. “–and his ‘friends’–” He pointed at the two unconscious men. “–pull this little soft-shoe routine on other ‘poor slobs’ before. But if you’re not part of the set-up, think about this — is this the kind of place you want to be drinking? Is this the kind of guy you want to give your money to? Think about it!”

The two turned and walked out onto the street. Cody thought that if they were in a hurry, they ought to hail a cab, but Tomas insisted that they wait until they were several blocks away. They got home safe and sound, and agreed that they wouldn’t head down to that part of town again soon.

They were both too keyed up to sleep, so they sat up and talked for a while.

“Hey, man, where’d you learn that backhand? It sure wasn’t boxing!” Tomas asked, true admiration in his voice.

“Well, I know a little martial arts, too.” Cody was smug about it. If he ever saw the Volunteer again, he would have to thank him for that move. “But most of the moves I can’t use in boxing. I’m getting a little stale. Luckily for me, my adrenaline was pumping, and I hit him right the first time.”

“Geez, I wish you had told me before. They taught us that hand-to-hand stuff in the Marines, too, but it’s been tough getting a workout in since then. Say, there are a bunch of other students who are ex-military types, too. I’ll bet if we started a martial arts club, we could find a few other guys to work out with!”

“And maybe some girls, too!” Cody was enthusiastic, remembering Krista Tracy, alias Lady Lambda, and her enthusiasm for the martial arts. He had certainly enjoyed watching her work up a sweat, even when he was twelve years old. “What a great idea!”

Tomas was really interested in finding out more about Cody’s history of knife fights, but he sensed that Cody didn’t want to talk about that part of his past. Well, that was fine; there were things Tomas didn’t talk about, either.


In their junior year, Cody Mason and Tomas Thomas were the twin stars of the University of Chicago boxing team. The last league match of the season was with the University of Minnesota, and both teams were undefeated. The winner would win the conference title. As the teams had not met before this year, it was difficult to predict who would win. In the past, Minnesota had always dominated, but this year promised to be different.

As the season had progressed, it had become clear to every observer that something special was happening. College boxing was not the most important sport of the time, and the crowds rarely reached five hundred. But with each win, the crowds at the University of Chicago got larger, and a turnout of over fifteen hundred was expected for the match with Minnesota.

While he was writing a preview of the big match for the student newspaper, one of the student sports writers decided that Tomas needed a nickname. The name Tomas Thomas immediately suggested to him the nickname of “Tom-Tom,” and he thought it was a natural, since Tomas looked so much like a Native American Indian, anyway.

Even the Chicago city papers began to follow the college boxing team. It was a slow year for Chicago sports, and having two undefeated teams competing for the conference championship was a compelling story.

Somewhere along the way, the newspaper coverage magically transformed the match from an obscure sporting event into a big deal. Advance ticket sales forced the athletic department to move the match from the ratty little gym the boxers normally called home into the big fancy gym where basketball was played. To the amazement of everyone, when the bell was rung for the first match, there were over five thousand spectators in the stands, a good fifteen hundred of them from nearby Minneapolis.

The crowd was raucous, and the match was hard-fought and closely contested. When the Chicago fighter at the 175-pound weight class pulled out a victory, it put U.C. into a twelve to eleven lead, and it seemed certain that U.C. would win. Cody now fought at 190 and he was a cinch, and Tomas ought to win at 210, and after that it wouldn’t matter what happened in the 230-pound class.

Cody kept his part of the deal, winning easily and making the score fifteen to eleven. A win by Tomas would make it eighteen to eleven, an insurmountable lead. Anticipation rose — this could be his toughest match this year, but he was expected to win.


Tomas Thomas had read the story in the school paper yesterday, and Cody Mason had noticed that something in the story had upset him. Cody quickly reread the story, but there was nothing obvious in it that he could see that would upset Tomas.

He turned to his friend. “So you’re ‘Tom-Tom’ now, huh? That’s kind of neat! I wonder why I never thought of that?” Cody was the kind of guy who gave everyone nicknames. His nickname for Tomas had always been ‘Nuke,’ both from his major and from the power in his punches. In fact, the whole team and even the coaches all called him Nuke by now.

Tomas turned, and Cody was surprised to see real anger in his eyes. “Cody, do not ever call me that!” he growled. Cody was stunned to see his best friend react this way. But he knew one thing; he sure didn’t want to fight Tomas.

He raised both arms in surrender. “Sure, Tomas, no problem.” He hesitated for a few seconds. “Umm, can I still call you Nuke?”

The anger drained from Tomas’ eyes. He knew Cody was his friend, and in fact, he was quite proud of his Nuke nickname. “Please do. But don’t use that other — ever.”

“You got it, buddy! Tell you what, though, save your adrenaline for Minnesota!” The two had laughed and headed off to class.


Some clever University of Chicago students had also read the story, and they had come to the match prepared to root for their favorite. Two dozen of them pulled out small drums and started chanting, “Go-go, Tom-Tom, go-go, Tom-Tom, go-go, Tom-Tom!” while beating out that same rhythm on their drums. Within seconds, all of the other U.C. fans were chanting the same thing. They started stamping out the same rhythm with their feet, and in a few more seconds, the entire gym was rocking. All except for Tomas.

Tomas had been approaching the ring when the cheering started, but now he stopped. His face turned chalk white, as if he had just had an unsuccessful encounter with a vampire. He turned slowly, and his gaze swept over the crowd. The anger in his face stunned those who noticed it enough that they stopped chanting, but he couldn’t silence nearly enough people to even make a dent in the din. He then started walking toward the locker room.

The coach and Cody intercepted him. “I’m sorry, coach, but I can’t fight tonight.” He tried to push his way past the two. As the crowd noticed what he was doing, the chants and the drumming died out, leaving the gym in silence.

Cody grabbed him and whispered in his ear, “Tomas, if we forfeit your match, you know we lose! We’ve worked our butts off for over two years for this night!”

Cody wasn’t exactly sure why the nickname Tom-Tom bothered his friend so much, but he was at least sensitive enough to realize that it was the nickname. “You get your ass back out there and beat this guy, or am I gonna have to fight him for you?”

Tomas smiled feebly. “Fat chance you’d have! You just barely beat the other guy!”

Cody was pleased that Tomas was getting back a little spunk. “Oh, yeah? Wanna make a little wager? Five bucks says I beat my guy worse than you will yours!”

Tomas had his eyes closed, and he seemed to be praying. He opened them again, and laughed. “You’re on!” He shook himself all over.

Cody took a few steps toward the crowd and yelled, “His name is Nuke!”

The rest of the guys on the team jumped up and started chanting, “Nuke! Nuke! Nuke! Nuke!” Once again, the crowd picked it up, and within seconds the place was roaring again.

Tomas didn’t fight very well. When he had first heard the Tom-Tom cheers, his anger had surged, and adrenaline had flooded his system. But he had then been inactive for several minutes, and now he was coming down from the adrenaline high. He was slow and sluggish, and he didn’t seem to be thinking very well, either. He was outscored badly in the first round.

The coach was worried, and didn’t want to see him get hurt, so he told Tomas he was going to forfeit the match, letting the University of Minnesota win by a technical knockout. That would make the score sixteen to fifteen in favor of Minnesota, and U.C.’s inexperienced heavyweight would have to beat last year’s National Collegiate Athletic Association champ for U.C. to win. The coach was willing to lose the match to keep Tomas safe. But Tomas wasn’t ready to give in just yet.

“Coach, I’m OK now. You gotta let me go!” he pleaded. Since he didn’t appear to be too badly hurt so far, the coach relented.

“OK, Nuke. But if you don’t fight better’n you did before, I’m stoppin’ the fight, got me?” Tomas nodded his head, stuck his mouthpiece back in, and answered the bell.

And this round he did better. He started off slowly, but his speed returned to him, and his defense got better. About a minute into the round he landed a punch, and then another, and he unloosed a flurry, driving the other into constant defense and retreat. When they reached the corner, his opponent grabbed him, and the referee broke the clinch, leading them back to the center of the ring. Before Tomas could attack again, the bell sounded. Tomas had won that round, but he was still far behind.

When the third round started, Tomas slipped on a wet spot on the canvas, and while he was recovering his balance, he left himself open. His opponent, no slouch, stepped in and hit him with a left-right combination that whirled Tomas around and knocked him down. He was back up in an instant, but the referee stood over him for the mandatory standing eight count. It had been a lucky knockdown, but it all but sealed the victory for the Minnesota fighter.

Or, at least, some people in the crowd thought so, and they were very vocal in their disappointment.

“Hey, Tom-Tom, you coward!”

“Hey, Tonto, you’re a loser!”

Those were just two of the loud, ignorant comments, though there were a variety of other, unrepeatable pejoratives.

Cody got off the bench and walked to the edge of the stands, trying to see who it was that was spewing those words. It wasn’t students, he was relieved to see, but a bunch of older men, none of whom looked too savory.

“What you looking at, kid?” one of them yelled at him. He just looked back, silently. “G’wan back to your bench before I come down there and mess you up!” Cody didn’t say anything, but he raised his hand slightly and waved the loudmouth to come ahead. The loudmouth and his friends looked at the crowd around them and thought better of starting something just then, going back to yelling at the match. They were clearly hoping that Tomas would lose.

Tomas had heard some of the ignorant remarks, and once again his anger was rising. With his hands raised high, he began stalking his opponent. He didn’t even try to defend himself, and he got hit three or four times, but he didn’t even flinch, as he just continued relentlessly moving forward. Knowing he had the fight won, the Minnesota fighter was just trying to cover up for the last thirty seconds. But Tomas didn’t let him.

Ignoring the other’s attempts at defense, he punched with precision, power, and a savage anger that no one had ever seen in him before. Two savage body blows forced the Minnesota fighter to drop his guard to protect his body, and Tomas was waiting for that moment. A hard right cross, as devastating a punch as any fight fan had ever seen, caught him on the right cheek and knocked him back into the ropes. The ropes bounced him back into the ring, but he was stunned and unable to get his guard back up, and a left jab to the point of his chin finished him off. He was counted out, and only a couple of seconds later the bell sounded to end the fight.

Tomas had won — and by a knockout. That put U.C. so far ahead that the results of the last bout wouldn’t matter.

Helping the other fighter to his feet, Tomas shook his hand. The referee raised his own hand to signal the victory. His teammates all cheered and slapped him on the back as he headed for the bunch, but he said nothing. He picked up the traditional sliced oranges, and headed for the other bench.

While the final bout of the evening took place, he talked with the Minnesota fighter, whose name was Terry. Tomas handed him an orange, and they shook hands again. Before Tomas could start talking, however, Terry spoke up enthusiastically.

“Wow! Tomas, I spar with Billy-boy, there, everyday.” He pointed to the Minnesota heavyweight out on the mat. “And he’s the national collegiate champion, but I ain’t never been hit like that before! You really oughtta think about going pro — right now, in fact, so I have a chance in the tournament!” He had a big smile on his face, and he clearly respected Tomas for what had just happened.

Tomas was amazed. He had been planning to apologize for losing his temper. But here was his beaten opponent, acting as thrilled about Tomas’ victory as his own teammates were. He really didn’t know what to say. “Um, thanks, Terry. I got in a couple of lucky shots there at the end, but you know you had me all the way.”

“That’s a load of bull-crap, Tomas! I’ve seen you fight before, and something was bothering you. And I admit I’m pretty damn pleased with most of that fight. But the accident was the first two-and-a-half rounds, not the last thirty seconds, and you know it, too. You are good, Tomas. Whatever was bothering you? Let it go.”

Both men stopped talking as cheering from the crowd interrupted them. They turned to see that Billy had won on points, making the final score University of Chicago at twenty, and University of Minnesota at fourteen. It was certainly the biggest win in U.C. boxing history, and the first school championship in boxing ever.

Cody watched the loudmouths leave the gym. They looked a lot more depressed than most of the Minnesota fans. His long-dormant crime-fighting instinct told him these guys had lost more than a friendly wager on this match. Well, he figured, that’s what they deserved for gambling on a college sports event.


The coaches had set up a buffet dinner in one of the school cafeterias, and the team and some of the best friends of the fighters got together for a small victory party. It broke up about an hour later. Tomas had never showed up. Cody looked for his friend, and when he couldn’t find him, he made a half-dozen sandwiches, and then he, too, left the party, looking for Tomas.

He found Tomas in the first place he looked, a small campus park on the shore of Lake Michigan. Tomas was just sitting, watching the small waves roll in. Cody wasn’t trying to be sneaky, but he was surprised when Tomas spoke up.

“Well, Cody, I’m surprised! I didn’t figure you’d be here for another half-hour or so!” Cody was still twenty feet away and behind Tomas. Tomas had never turned his head. “Oh, come on!” Tomas continued. “We’ve lived together since we were freshmen; you think I don’t know your walk by now?”

“And you can read my mind, too?” Cody was astounded. “Anyway, Tomas, what’s bothering you? What’s the deal with this Tom-Tom thing?”

“Sorry, I’m not ready to talk about it. You ought to go back to the party. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be in later.”

“As if! You gonna sit here all night?” Cody asked him. “Could be sort of boring… especially if you aren’t talking!”

“Actually, I wanted to get a little more exercise tonight. You can come along — if you can keep up!” Tomas stood up and walked back toward the middle of campus.

They approached one of the oldest buildings on campus, at four stories tall, with a library on the first three floors and a gym on the top floor. It was a very ornate marble building. Tomas walked right up to the corner of the building and started climbing. He swarmed up the wall almost as fast as he could walk.

Cody shook his head. Tomas must be part cat, or squirrel, or monkey to climb like that. Cody had never done any serious climbing in his life, having never really been interested in climbing things. But he was determined to stay with Tomas tonight. And heck, if Tomas could do it, Cody could at least try.

It turned to be much easier than he had expected. The many decorations carved into the building wall almost made a ladder for him. He reached a big wide ledge that ran all the way around the building, just below the window level on the fourth floor, and found Tomas perched on the ledge, waiting for him.

Cody reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the bag of sandwiches and a pint of whiskey. He used the cap as a shot glass, and knocked back a shot, then began to pour a second shot for Tomas, but Tomas stopped him.

“Sorry, Coddles, but we have to climb back down, too, remember!” he chuckled.

“Not me,” Cody replied in a growl. “I only got up here because it’s so dark, I couldn’t see the ground when I looked down. I’m going through that open window there, and down the stairs. Anyway, what’s bugging you?”

“Well, it’s a long story. If we’re going to take the stairs when we leave, how ’bout that shot, before I start?”

Cody looked at the bottle, then the open window, and then down at the ground, so far below. “Tell you what, let’s go inside before we talk – or drink.”

Sitting in the dark gym, Cody Mason and Tomas Thomas ate sandwiches and talked. They didn’t bother with any more whiskey; that one shot had felt good going down, like liquid fire burning toward the stomach and then exploding into the rest of the body. It was just what they needed after an emotional roller coaster of an evening at the boxing match, followed by the slightly unnerving climb up the outside of the building.

Cody wanted to know more about why Tomas was acting the way he had. “OK, Tomas, what’s the deal?”

Tomas thought for a while. “Sorry, I still need to calm down a little bit before I can tell that story. But I’ve got an idea. You have some kind of secret in your past. I think I’ve figured it out.”

Cody shook his head; he had been really careful to protect his secret, and he was sure Tomas couldn’t possibly know the real story. But it would be fun to hear what he had come up with. “OK, go ahead! This should go good!”

Tomas began to lay out his case. “OK, the first time I met you, I knew you had grown up on the East Coast and then moved to Chicagoland sometime in your teens — your accent is a dead giveaway. When you told me about the move later, and how much it had disrupted your life, it only confirmed what I already knew.

“It was a weird move. The war was on and everyone was learning to deal with rationing and death and employment difficulties, with so many places closing down because so many workers enlisted, but your parents were trying to get away from something. And your dad left a good job at the shipyard in Marble City that he really liked. And the new job he got, he didn’t like, and it didn’t pay nearly as much money.”

Cody remembered telling this whole story to Tomas, so there was really nothing new here. But he was stunned by what came next.

“Something about that move created a major rift between you and your folks, and you hated and resented them for several years. You still have some lingering resentment, you know?”

“How did you know that?” Cody asked. “I’ve never told anyone that!”

“Don’t forget, I’ve met your folks,” he said, referring to the time when they had spent a Thanksgiving at the Mason’s house, “and the three of you were walking on eggshells the whole time I was there. And, when you first told the story, you had no sympathy for your dad being unemployed. In fact, you swore about it. ‘It’s his own damn fault. He didn’t have to quit the old job!’ Of course, you muttered this under your breath, but I have a way with language, you know — I can even read lips pretty well.”

Cody suddenly became very thoughtful, wondering what else he may have whispered to himself over the past few years that Tomas had been able to understand. He decided his conscience was clear; if Tomas had ever been upset about Cody’s mutterings, he would have said something.

“I also learned a lot from the way you fight at our martial arts club workouts.” Tomas had acted as the main instructor over the first few meetings, but he hadn’t kept the job long.

Most of the club members had learned a lot of the philosophy behind the martial arts in their past training. Tomas, on the other hand, had been trained in the physical skills without any of the philosophical underpinnings. The physical skills of the martial arts were just another type of weapon for a Marine. They figured they didn’t have time for the philosophy stuff, and if the basic martial arts training provided by the Corps helped keep a Marine alive, he could learn martial arts philosophy after his enlistment was up.

The other students missed the mental and philosophical training and discipline they were used to, and the instructorship passed to a martial artist with a more traditional background. What was amazing to Tomas was just how effective a fighter this new instructor was, and how his own physical skills improved as he began to accept the mental discipline and the philosophy behind the art.

“Somebody taught you to fight, and taught you very well. But, like me, you were only taught the ‘martial’ part of the martial arts. Somebody was teaching you to fight as quickly as possible.”

Cody thought back on his training with the Volunteer. As he reviewed his memories, he realized that Tomas was correct. the Volunteer, he was sure, had rushed his training, probably because Cody had already had a few adventures as Kid Lambda before Dr. Lambda had been able to arrange the training sessions. It was only Cody’s power of flight and his partners subtly protecting him that had saved him from some serious beatings in his first couple of outings, and probably more.

When he was younger, he hadn’t realized this. He had always thought of himself as a great fighter and never thought about how unusual it was for a twelve-year-old, even with the Lambda gear, to fight against adults and not end up battered, bruised, and seriously injured — or even killed. And he had never bothered to go back in his mind and review these battles.

Through the filter of all of his more recent fighting experiences, Cody realized just how lucky he had been back then to avoid serious beatings. No wonder his folks had been so upset.

While Cody was coming to this stunning realization, Tomas was still talking. “The other thing that is odd is that the moves you use — blocks, throws, punches, counters, holds, whatever — come from several different disciplines. Whoever taught you was clearly familiar with a lot of different styles and schools. You use elements of karate, judo, kung fu, taekwondo, aikido, jujitsu, eskrima, savate, and some that I’ve been unable to place. It seemed like a random mishmash, until I figured out that every element was selected because it was designed for a fighter whose opponent is both larger and stronger. Your sensei was teaching a boy to fight adult foes!”

Cody’s head was spinning now. It seemed that he was right — he had not given away any obvious clues. And yet Tomas had found clues that were so much a part of him that he couldn’t hide them, and these clues had given him away.

“There are a couple of other things. You don’t seem to realize it, but I’ve noticed that whenever we talk about mystery heroes, you get really animated, and you often talk as if you’ve met the big names — Dr. Lambda, the Volunteer, and Major Power, and Flux — in person. And you’ve got a hero complex, always doing what you think is right, even when it puts you in danger. You don’t know how often you’ve scared the pants off of your friends by butting into someone else’s business, like the time you gave that mobster a hard time for smoking in a crowded elevator, or the time you chastised that all-pro linebacker for littering.”

Cody remembered both incidents well. “You weren’t scared, too, were you? When you backed me up, they both backed off.”

“Cody, if you aren’t a little bit scared in situations like that, you’re a fool. But I’ve always been told to stand up for what’s right, too.” He grinned, and reached out to grasp Cody’s shoulder. “We make a good team, you know!” Cody grinned back.

“The final clue, or really the first one, was that autographed picture of Dr. Lambda and Lady Lambda you nailed up on our wall the first day they assigned us to a dorm room! So, put it all together, and my conclusion is that you, Cody Mason, used to be Kid Lambda!”

“Ah-ha! It worked! All those little clues I planted worked. You’re close, my friend, really close. But you got the wrong kid sidekick! I was really Buster, the Teenage Fury, partner of the Fighting Fury.”

Tomas looked startled for a second, then smiled again. “Nope! Your accent is wrong. ‘Fess up, you are Kid Lambda, right?”

“I guess there’s no fooling you, eh? Well, you’re right. I didn’t know I was giving so much away. Do you think anyone else might know?”

“I don’t think so; nobody knows you as well as I do, and I haven’t told anyone. How about telling me more? Why did the Lambdas pick you? What’s it like to fly? Why’d you quit? Are you ever going to go back into the mystery hero biz? What’s Lady Lambda really like? Is she as sexy as her pictures?”

Cody broke out laughing at all of these questions. “You did some good detective work, roomie! Tell you what, though, now it’s my turn. Let’s see if I figured out as much about you as you did about me!”

“Before you start, Cody, we really ought to get out of here before the place opens in the morning. The campus police are pretty relaxed about most things, but they might think we were breaking and entering or something.” So the two cleaned up their mess, and headed out of the building. As they walked back to their dorm, Cody took his turn at being a detective.

“Ever since I’ve met you, you’ve said nothing about your life before you joined the Marine Corps. You’ve never once mentioned your parents, or what you did in high school, or old girlfriends, or anything like that. It’s almost like you’re pretending that you didn’t exist before you joined the Marines.

“Given all the weird things that I saw when I was Kid Lambda–” He looked at his friend and shook his head; he still had trouble believing that Tomas had figured it out. “–that’s the first thing I checked into once I noticed your strange behavior.

“I had all kinds of wild ideas. Maybe you were some kind of magical creature, like a genie or a golem or something, or maybe you were an alien, come to Earth as an advance scout for an invasion fleet, or maybe you were a robot or an android! Or maybe you had a criminal past you were trying to hide from, or maybe you were a Nazi, or maybe… As you can see, my imagination was running wild!”

Tomas didn’t know whether to laugh at some of these wild ideas or to be insulted. He decided he was glad his best friend trusted him enough to tell him about these crazy thoughts, and he just nodded his head and kept listening.

“One thing Dr. Lambda tried to teach me, as both a detective and a scientist, was that you shouldn’t theorize without facts. Keep an open mind, gather all the facts you can, and then come up with a hypothesis that explains the facts. And then test the hypothesis against the real world. I calmed down a lot at that point.

“Here are some of the facts I gathered. You are an American citizen — you have a U.S. passport, you were a Marine, and you voted in the election last November, I think for Ike. You have a talent for languages and accents, not just for different American dialects, but also foreign accents, which suggests that you moved around to a lot of different countries when you were growing up. I thought you might be a military brat, but I heard Dr. Lambda in the back of my head telling me to do more research first!

“Once a month, regular as clockwork, you send a long letter to someone. It almost always goes overseas. You’ve always been careful never to let me see the address, even when we would go to the post office together. But you asked me to pick up your mail for you a few times, and once you got a letter from John and Amitola Thomas, care of the U.S. Embassy in Cameroon.”

“I figured these must be your parents, and your mom’s name was so unusual, I tried to learn more about it. Amitola is an American Indian name that means rainbow, isn’t it? After that, I came to the conclusion that this was really none of my business, and I stopped snooping.

“The only other thing I know, I learned by accident, really. Remember that time you lost your dog tags?” Tomas was superstitious about some things, and he wore his dog tags all the time as a good luck charm. During their sophomore year, he had taken them off before a boxing match. After the match, he had been unable to find them. He and Cody had searched the locker room for over an hour, before Cody found them under a bank of lockers. Someone had apparently accidentally kicked them there. “As I was pulling them out from under the lockers, I noticed your middle name — Deganawidah. Sorry, Tomas, but I couldn’t help looking that up. Deganawidah was a Wyandotte, and he helped found the Iroquois Confederation, didn’t he?”

Tomas smiled. “He was, and he did, and he was a great prophet, besides. His name means ‘two rivers running together,’ and he was a prophet of peace. Our family records show that he is my great-to-the-fourteenth grandfather!” There was real pride in his voice as he said this.

Cody nodded. “My hypothesis, based on the facts I have, is that you are half-Wyandotte Indian, your dad works for the State Department as a diplomat, and for some reason you prefer to forget your childhood. So far, the hypothesis has stood up under all the real-world situations I’ve been able to test it against. But it’s far from a complete explanation.”

Tomas nodded, and then started talking. “I don’t talk about my past a lot because… well, because… um, I had some pretty painful experiences because of my ancestry.

“It’s like this… In the mid-twenties, my dad worked for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. The government was attempting to renegotiate yet another of the umpteen failed treaties between the U.S. and the Wyandotte Nation when he met my mother.

“While the Wyandotte Nation has a council of chiefs, and all of our chiefs are men, the heads of most families, and the wisest advisers to the chiefs, are all women. My mom was one of the most respected diplomatic advisers in the Wyandotte Nation. Many of the Indians she represented felt that she must share some part of her thirteen-times-great-grandfather’s soul. Anyway, dad and mom met over the negotiating table, hit it off, got married, and guess what? Here I am!

“The reason I don’t tell anyone about my background is the amount of crap I had to deal with when I was growing up. Dad is really great at solving diplomatic problems, and he was always being transferred to another diplomatic hot spot somewhere around the world. It seemed like in every embassy, wherever we went, some clever white kid would find out I was half-Indian and decide to nickname me ‘Tom-Tom.’

“I got in a lot of fights, and everyone decided I was a problem child. I won more’n I lost, and after a couple weeks at a new place, the other kids would usually leave me alone. But I didn’t have many friends. I was probably headed for big trouble ’till Mom convinced Dad to take a leave of absence from the Diplomatic Corps. We moved back to Kansas, where a lot of the Wyandotte live. I thought I’d have a problem with them, too, because of being half-paleface, but not a single Wyandotte ever treated me as anything other than a family member!

“I learned something then that I think was really strange. There’s a lot of people with at least a little Indian blood in them, and it seemed like the worst, meanest bastards were the folks with just a few ‘drops’ — you know, as maybe their great-great grandmother was part-Indian. It’s like they hate themselves and take it out on everyone else, or maybe they think that they will be accepted by the ‘pure-blood’ white folks if they show just how much they hate us ‘half-breeds.’ It’s kind of like the idea of Hitler secretly being part-Jewish, I guess, and trying to purge the world of Jews.

“Tonight, when all those folks were beating drums and chanting, it really got to me. I was so mad I couldn’t see straight! All I could think of was all the times I’d get taunted with those words, usually by five or six other kids, and how many times I got beat up when I couldn’t keep my temper any longer.”

Cody interrupted. “Tomas, they weren’t taunting you; they thought they were cheering for you. Well, except for those creeps in the mobster suits.”

“I know. That’s why I came back to fight. I’m sure there were some haters in the crowd, but most of the folks wanted to see a good fight, and an awful lot of them wanted to see me win.”

Cody looked at his friend thoughtfully. “You know, Tomas, I’ve never been the victim of discrimination and hatred just because of who my parents were. But I don’t see how you can hide who you are. It really isn’t like you at all. I’ve been your friend for a long time, and I’ve seen how uncomfortable keeping your past a secret has made you sometimes. You can’t keep it up forever. Somebody might think you were ashamed of your past.” But Cody realized he might be treading on pretty dangerous turf here when he saw anger flash in Tomas’ eyes.

“You can’t have any idea what it’s like!” Tomas realized who he was yelling at, and stopped, abashed. When he started talking again, he was very subdued. “Sorry, pal! I guess you’re right. You’re probably the best friend I ever had, and it is ridiculous for me to get mad at you when you’re just telling me things I already know. I have to get over this anger!” He stopped and thought for quite a while. There were a lot of things Cody could have said, but he decided that keeping quiet was probably the best choice for right now.

Tomas finally spoke again. “I’ll have to think about it some more. I’m definitely not ashamed of my background, but there are a lot of ignorant people in the world who would never let me know peace.”

Cody was pretty sure how Tomas would finally resolve this issue. He wasn’t the kind of guy to run away from his problems.

They reached the dorm. Instead of heading for bed, they sat up even later, swapping stories about their youth. Cody had some pretty exciting adventures as Kid Lambda to share, and Tomas had lived all over, and his stint in the Marines had not been dull. Luckily, it was early Saturday morning, so just before dawn they finally had breakfast and then hit the hay for a few hours. Later today, they were scheduled to do some lab work for a special seminar they were taking.


The University of Chicago was the site of the first working atomic reactor on Earth, and Cody Mason and Tomas Thomas had both chosen this school because U.C. was the acknowledged leader in atomic energy-related fields. Many of their labs were held in rooms in the building where that reactor was built. U.C. was also the safest place to learn about atomic energy.

Enrico Fermi, who had been one of the chief architects on the atomic pile, had been obsessive about safety and safety precautions. The “Atomic Building” had special safety features such as alarms, various types of movable radiation shields, emergency showers, protective gear in lockers throughout the building, and a lead-lined holding tank for containing radioactive waste. U.C. had a fairly standard campus police force, but not many campus police forces could boast that they had an eight-officer squad especially trained to deal with a variety of radiation hazards.

One big perk for both young men was a seminar called Advanced Topics in Atomics. It was largely unstructured, and participants designed their own curriculum. Tomas and Cody wanted to contribute to the medical field, so they decided to build an instrument to deliver highly calibrated doses of gamma radiation (the most dangerous, and potentially the most useful type) to a very specific localized target. It was essentially a gamma ray projector, and the details were somewhat complicated.

The less dangerous forms of radiation, alpha and beta, consist of very small charged particles moving at high velocities. The alpha particle is a helium nucleus with no electrons and a charge of +2, while the beta particle is a free electron with a charge of -1. However, gamma radiation consists of photons very similar to the photons in x-rays. The difference between gamma rays and x-rays is a difference in energy. X-rays are very high energy, which is why they can be dangerous. Gamma rays have even higher energy and are even more dangerous.

In the standard x-ray machine, x-rays are produced by aiming a beam of high-velocity electrons into a target of some kind. The beam is aimed by controlled electromagnetic fields, the same principle behind the television.

In an x-ray machine, the target is made of metal, such as copper. The interaction between the electrons in the beam and the metal atoms in the target causes the fast-moving electrons to slow down. Under the correct conditions, when an electron slows down, it releases a photon. A beam of electrons, aimed at the target, produces a shower of photons emitted from the target.

The energy of the photons depends on how much the electron slows down. The faster the electrons are moving when they hit the target, the more energetic the released photons will be. If the emitted photons have high enough energy, they are called x-rays. If the emitted photons have even higher energy, they are called gamma rays. Gamma rays are dangerous to living things — they damage living tissues, and a large enough dose can cause enough damage that the exposed tissue dies. There are many unpleasant side-effects, and radiation sickness is extremely painful.

On the other hand, if the gamma radiation could be tightly focused, and would only strike tissues designated by a physician, what a fantastic surgical tool it would be! Instead of cutting out a cancer, you could just aim your gamma ray scalpel at the cancer, and it would die — and the tightly focused radiation would not damage the other tissues around it.

The problem with building gamma ray surgical tools like this was that it was extremely difficult to produce gamma radiation, much less control it. The electrons had to be going much faster than in an x-ray machine, which required more power, and more power was not just harder to generate, it was harder to control. And, since the shower of photons from the target flew off in all directions, not just the same direction as the electron beam, this meant that whenever the gamma ray projector was working, it would be spewing dangerous radiation in all directions. The x-ray machines got around that by producing the x-rays in a spherical chamber which only had a small hole in it, and all the x-rays flying around in other directions were blocked, but it was difficult producing a chamber that would block gamma rays.

Cody and Tomas had a plan for dealing with these problems. They thought that an electromagnetic target might be able to slow the electrons down more efficiently than a metal target, and also control the scattering of the emitted gamma rays. It was easier to generate pulses of high power than continuous high power, so they thought of using a pulsed electron beam rather than a continuous electron beam. The higher power produced faster electrons, the electromagnetic target slowed them down more efficiently, and Cody and Tomas’ instrument was able to generate controlled bursts of gamma radiation. Their design was not a great improvement over the current devices used to produce gamma radiation, but the new techniques that the two had developed promised rapid improvement in the years to come.

For reasons of safety, none of the students was allowed to actually work with radiation of any kind, except during specified periods during the week when the hazard team was assigned to the lab building. Last week’s test of their prototype had been the first time that they had actually produced measurable pulses of gamma radiation, and the two were cautiously pleased. But the pulses varied widely in both intensity and duration. They had to improve the reliability of the device.

On Saturday, the day after the boxing match, Cody and Tomas headed to the lab and began making changes to their existing power supply and the pulse-generating circuits. They would make their modifications today and tomorrow, have them approved on Monday by their faculty adviser, and then do another smoke test on Tuesday. Then they would go back to the drawing board and go through the cycle again.

Suddenly, the door to their lab was kicked open so hard that the window shattered. Four men with drawn guns rushed into the room. Cody recognized them from the group of loudmouths who were at the match the night before. Tomas noted that the guns all had silencers. To him, this was ominous — if these guys were planning on only threatening them, they wouldn’t need silencers.

The one that Cody had challenged to a fight the night before seemed to be the leader. “Look what we have here, boys! The Lone Ranger and Tonto! Looks like we got the drop on them, and the Ranger ain’t got his silver bullets ready. Ain’t that a shame.”

“You boys lost us a lot of money last night, particularly you, Tonto!” He waved his gun at Tomas. “We’re gonna take payment outta your hides! Now, boys, get your hands up!”

Tomas had already raised his hands. Cody was watching him closely. Tomas looked at the guns, and then at Cody, and saw Cody start when he noticed the silencers. Seeing that Tomas was now watching him, Cody snatched a solder pot from his lab bench and threw it at the criminals. He and Tomas immediately dropped to the floor and rolled behind lab benches. As hot solder splattered the bad guys, two of them fired wildly. One of the rounds hit the irradiation projector.

There was a brilliant flash, and the projector exploded — and every Geiger counter in the room went crazy. Cody was out of line-of-sight of the explosion behind his bench, but debris from the explosion battered the gunmen.

Scared witless by the explosion and the Geiger counters, the four turned and ran, leaving a trail of blood. Cody opened the cabinet in the bottom of the bench and started pulling out the contents, which were lead-lined blankets, and immediately draped one over himself. These things were heavy, but that hardly mattered now. He picked up several others, and, holding one up between himself and the gamma ray projector, he advanced until he could lay a blanket over Tomas, then dropped several others over the wreckage on the lab bench. The clattering of the Geiger counters had dropped significantly the first instant after the explosion, and with the radioactive remains of the gamma projector covered in several layers of lead, they quieted further, reaching a level that Cody knew from his training was safe for a short time.

He quickly ran into the lead-lined emergency room and slapped the big red panic button. Immediately, alarms started going off throughout the building, letting everyone within hearing range know that there was a potentially deadly radiation hazard in the building. Cody went back out into the lab, picked up a Geiger counter, and started examining Tomas. But since Tomas was more radioactive than was safe, Cody needed to do something to help him in a hurry. Fortunately, Tomas was unconscious.

Pulling the blankets off of himself and Tomas, Cody tossed them over the pile that was already on the bench top, and the Geiger counters slowed down a little more. He put on a pair of work gloves, then carefully pulled Tomas into the emergency room and into the small shower, then turned the shower on. Pulling a protective anti-radiation suit from a locker, he quickly pulled off his clothes and put on the suit.

Carefully taking off Tomas’ clothes, Cody then stuffed the contaminated clothes and gloves into a lead box designed specifically for that purpose. He made sure that the water from the shower was streaming over as much of Tomas’ body as possible, hopefully to carry some of the radioactive particles down into the special emergency holding tank below the building.

Cody could see no external injuries. Tomas had been below the trajectory of the flying debris, but he had been closest to the exploding gamma projector and had taken the biggest dose of radiation. The lead-lined blankets in the bench he was hiding behind had protected Cody, more or less. Cody’s worst dose had occurred when he was moving Tomas, and he was certain that he was well below the limit in which he would even notice anything. He was equally certain, as dread crept into his heart, that Tomas had received a fatal dosage.

By this time the hazard team, wearing protective gear, had entered the lab, first cautiously and then more quickly as they realized that the lab itself was empty and the radiation levels were fairly safe. As his men cautiously searched the room, the team leader saw the two of them in the emergency shower and came over to ask some questions. Before he could say anything, Cody spoke up.

“There were four men with guns in here, and they were all exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Did anyone see them?”

“Not as far as I know, but we did see blood on the floor. They went out the back!”

Cody gave the man orders, his urgency making him sound hoarse. “Call your captain and tell him that those gunmen need to be decontaminated as quickly as possible, along with anyone who touches them. With the radiation dosage they took, they’ll be sick in a few hours, and without treatment, they will probably die within a week!”

The policeman blanched under his headgear. He hadn’t signed up for the campus police with this type of thing in mind. “What about the people who touch them?”

“Secondary radiation is unlikely to hurt them, but they ought to take a good long shower and burn their clothing. You had better alert the Chicago Police as well, and they ought to make sure that the radio and TV stations broadcast a warning. And get a doctor here as soon as you can!”

The squad leader ran to do these things. Even though his team was trained, this was the first actual emergency they had faced, and he was relieved that there was someone involved who seemed to know what needed to be done. Before he picked up the phone, however, Cody yelled at him again.

“You and everyone else who enters this room before we get the mess cleaned up needs to stay here, so we don’t spread the radioactivity any further. As long as the blankets stay in that pile, and we keep the suits on, we’ll be safe, but we need to wash the suits down with decontaminate solution before we take them off!”

Cody was absolutely devastated. He couldn’t think of any way that their device could have emitted such an intense burst of radiation. The wild bullet must have somehow dumped the five-thousand-volt, 500-microfarad capacitor they were adding to the power supply directly through the pulse generator. But they would never know, as the explosion had destroyed the prototype beyond recognition or recovery.

But it didn’t matter how it had happened. What mattered most to him was that his best friend was already dead, but didn’t know it yet, and there was nothing Cody could do to help him. He supposed he might someday take a little consolation in knowing that the bad guys would soon be very, very sick, and if they didn’t get to a doctor in a couple of hours, they would all likely die. But that sure didn’t help Tomas Thomas.

Within a few minutes, a team of physicians and their assistants, also wearing protective gear, had arrived and were examining Tomas. Several of the doctors who taught at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine were doing advanced research in radiation-related health issues, so Tomas would get the best possible treatment without even having to leave the campus. When the doctors determined that the level of radiation Tomas was emitting was reasonably safe, they put him onto a stretcher cart, and gently but quickly transferred him to a special suite in the medical school’s teaching hospital. They were attaching him to an IV and putting some type of salve on his emerging blisters even as they started pushing the cart out of the room. Two of the doctors stayed to check out the others in the room.

Cody told the whole story again, and then one of the doctors started to question the hazard team. Cody and the other doctor went into the emergency room in the next lab, and decontaminated and removed their suits. Cody took a shower and scrubbed with decontaminate cleaner, then put on a clean lab robe. The doctor tested him with a Geiger counter and pronounced him to be clean and safe. Cody then asked him more about Tomas.

“He must have taken a fatal dose, Doc. What did you think?”

“I can’t tell you for sure, son, but the blast of radiation was enough to knock him out, right? We’ve found that when that happens, the dosage is invariably fatal. All we can do is make him as comfortable as possible.” Now the doctor looked angry. “What the hell were you guys doing? It’s against the rules to work with radioactive materials without supervision. You’re lucky you aren’t dead, too! And what are you doing working with that level of gamma radiation, anyway?”

Cody shrugged. Under normal circumstances, he might have been angry at being falsely accused, but he was tired and worried, and too upset about Tomas to get too worked up for this man.

“We haven’t violated any rules, Doc. We were working on the electronics in our prototype, and the device wasn’t even turned on today. And that blast of radiation was an order of magnitude higher than anything we expected. The bullet crossed circuits or something; I haven’t figured it out yet. But I guarantee we weren’t doing anything wrong!”

The doctor knew that any research into the unknown could be dangerous, and he realized that the device that the two men had been working on could potentially revolutionize some kinds of surgery. But he was never happy when faced with death; he saw it as a personal failure in his battle to help the living.

The head of the hazard team came out of the emergency shower in a lab robe, and the doctor examined him. When he was pronounced safe, he used the phone in the lab to contact his deputy who was keeping people out of the building, and let him know that people could come in if they avoided the lab where the explosion had been. The deputy reported that he was sending up some Chicago City police.

Once again Cody told his story. One of the cops smiled at him. “I thought you looked familiar. I’m really sorry about your buddy. I saw you guys fight last night, and you won me a bundle. We’ll get those mugs, I promise!”

Cody’s attention picked up. “Say, do you remember the guys in the stands who were such jerks last night? Did you recognize any of them?”

“I know who you mean. I saw your confrontation with them, and I was getting ready to come out of the stands myself. But no, I didn’t actually recognize them. It was those same guys, right?”

“Yes, and they said they had lost a lot of money on the match. Where did you make your bets?”

The cop suddenly looked very uneasy. If the police force officially knew that he was gambling on sports events, he would probably get fired. And if he told Cody about it with his partner here, his partner would probably feel compelled to report it. “Just some friendly wagers with some of my brother officers,” he said. “No bookies or nothin’ like that.”

“Darn! I was hoping you could give me a name. Those guys need help, fast!”

“Well, son, why don’t you come down to the station and look at some mugshots? Maybe you can identify them that way.” He noticed that his partner was talking to the doctor, so he reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. “Talk to this guy,” he whispered. On the card was a name and a phone number. Cody nodded his thanks, and pocketed the card.

At just that time, the door to the lab opened again, and the president of the university, Dr. Phillip A. Grenco, bustled into the room, followed by Dr. Jonas Wright, who was the facilitator for the Advanced Topics seminar. Wright looked angry and worried. Grenco just looked angry. He spotted Cody and immediately started yelling at him.

“You! Mr. Drake! You and Mr. Thomas are expelled from U.C., effective immediately. I will not have this kind of careless accident on my campus! And I’ll make sure the two of you are blacklisted from any other colleges, too. I want you off campus before nine P.M. tonight.”

Cody was tired, upset, and distraught about his friend. He wasn’t about to take any crap from this idiot.

“Mr. Illustrious President,” he responded, sarcasm dripping from his voice. “Perhaps you don’t know the whole story yet. You don’t need to expel Mr. Thomas — he will be dead in less than a week.”

Clearly the president was looking for someone to blame. “That’s even worse!” He turned to the policemen. “Officers, I demand that you arrest this man for murder of a student at U.C. And this man should be arrested as an accomplice!” he pointed at Dr. Wright.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Cody started.

Grenco, shouting, interrupted. “Your gross negligence in violating our rules, experimenting with radiation without supervision, and working with dangerous radioactive substances without permission or the knowledge of the university is ample grounds for negligent homicide, at best!”

Now Cody was yelling, too. Anger and adrenaline had overcome his apathy. “We have a complete description of our entire planned development program, as required by the university, on file, and it includes the signatures of Dr. Wright, Dr. Perlman, and the president of the university, who just happens to be you, Dr. Grenco!” Cody pointed out hotly. “If there is any negligence here, it is on the university’s part. Four men, armed with silenced pistols, were able to come onto your campus and slip unnoticed into your high-security atomic building. The university has, over the years, told us many times that the campus was as safe as our homes!

“But no posse of armed men has ever just walked into my home and shot my friend before! Where was your highly trained campus police force? Oh, yeah, not to forget: even bloodied and radioactive, and with radiation alarms going off, they managed to get away without anyone other than us even seeing them!

“Go ahead and expel us, Mr. President. And I’ll see you in court! Betcha I’ll win, too! It’ll cost you, and just think of all the wonderful publicity. I’ll bet every family will want to send their kids to U.C. after that!”

Grenco sputtered, but finally settled on, “I do not take kindly to being threatened, you damn punk kid!”

“And I–” said Cody, in his coldest voice, “–do not take lightly being accused of murdering my friend by some idiot who has no idea what he is talking about. Or, being expelled from school on trumped-up charges. Anyway, I’m not threatening you, Mr. President.” A sneer crossed his face as he used that word. “I’m just telling you some things you may want to consider before expelling me — or Tomas!”

Cody turned to the policeman again, who had recognized this argument as a good opportunity to keep quiet. “Officer McGuire,” he said, reading the name off the officer’s uniform, “let’s go take a look at those mugshots.”

With that, Cody turned around and marched out the lab door, with McGuire following him, while President Grenco just stood and fumed, his face turning redder and redder. Just as Cody was about to close the door, Grenco turned to Wright, and Cody could see he was about to explode again. Wright ignored him and followed Cody and the police out of the room.


Krista Quest was curled up on the couch, comfortable in a sheer teddy, sipping a mixed drink and reading a thrilling Harlequin bodice-ripper, wishing Dr. Lambda would get back from whatever he was doing. She had some very interesting plans for tonight, but they required two people.

She could hardly believe what she was reading. Nowhere in the book was there anything explicit, but the unmarried heroine in the book wasn’t spending many nights alone. And while her practices were mostly left to the imagination, they were most unconventional and sounded like a lot of fun. Kris had an excellent imagination. As Lady Lambda, she had seen some pretty wild things in her career, so she wasn’t exactly shocked, but she had never expected to buy books like this in mainstream bookstores. To be honest, though, her plans for the evening had been pretty nebulous until she had read Chapter Three. There were people who thought the romance genre was just a fad, and that Harlequin would be just another bust, but she suspected they would have a long and profitable history.

Just as she started Chapter Four, the phone rang. She hoped it wasn’t Ned with some lame excuse for working late, or telling her that Dr. Lambda was needed someplace else. If it were, she would tell him a thing or three.

“Hello?”

“Hello, this is the long-distance operator, and I have a collect call for anyone from Cody Mason. Will you accept the charges?”

“Of course, operator. Thank you!”

“Thank you! Sir, please go ahead.” And she heard the click of the operator hanging up.

“Kris! I need Ned’s help! Can you get him to come out here right now?” Cody sounded worn out and really worried.

“What’s the matter, Cody? You sound awful!”

“I feel awful, too! You remember my roommate, Tomas? He’s in the hospital and not expected to live. He’s dying of radiation poisoning. Some gangsters broke into our lab and took a shot at us. Our prototype blew up, and Tomas took a fatal dose of gamma radiation.”

“Cody, that’s horrible! Are you OK?” Kris asked, worry in her voice.

“I’m OK, just really tired. But I want to catch the bad buys. Ned is the best detective I know, and I need help tracking them down.”

“Cody, it sounds like a police matter to me. The police will catch them sooner or later.”

“No, Kris, you don’t understand. If somebody doesn’t find these guys fast, they’ll probably die of radiation sickness, too. The police seem to feel that there’s no hurry; if these mobsters die on their own, it’s four less bad guys in town! But I want to see these guys stand trial, so I’m going to find them myself, fast! So, will you help me or not?”

"Captain Catapult operates out of Chicago. It sounds to me like this should be his case," Kris suggested.

"No!" Cory snapped back. "I don't know him, don't know how to get in touch with him, and I don't want to waste time explaining everything to him! Really, Kris, I want you guys here. Please?"

'Well,...' Kris thought to herself wistfully, '...I suppose I can wait until some other time to try The Dragon’s Lair.'

“What did you say, Kris?” Cody’s voice showed that he was very puzzled.

'Oops! I hope I didn’t say that out loud!' she thought, a roguish grin flashing across her face.

“I’ll call Ned, and we’ll be there as soon as we can. I’m coming too! Until then, don’t you be a fool.” This phrase caused Cody to listen very carefully. “Wait for us before you do anything!”

Ned Quest and Kris Kent had taught Cody a couple of secret codes that they used whenever they had to discuss Lambda matters in their civilian identities. “Don’t you be a fool” was a catchphrase that indicated a coded message would follow in a specific code. Kris was about to tell him when and where they would rendezvous. Cody knew that, at top speed, it would take them about five hours to fly here from New York, and he hoped he could get a little sleep in during that time. Kris’s next words surprised him.

“It will probably take us two hours or so to get plane reservations, but we’ll see you tomorrow! Maybe you can meet us, like you did last time?” Two hours, in a little park by the lake where they’d met the last time the Quests had come to Chicago. How were they going to get here that fast? Well, they had never let him down before; he was willing to trust them one more time.

“That would be great, Kris! Thanks very much! Umm, I know it may seem like a strange thing to worry about right now, but do you remember that hat you guys gave me when I left Marble City? It was my favorite, but it doesn’t fit any more. Do you remember where you got it?”

That wasn’t part of the code, but Kris understood it, anyway. He wanted his Lambda gear; he was planning to join Dr. Lambda in the search for the bad guys. Well, she had a surprise for him – Lady Lambda would be joining the two of them!

“That’s funny! I just bought your birthday present, and it’s one of those very hats! I’ll bring it with, and I’ll get you something else for your birthday. Cody, don’t worry, we’ll be there before you know it. I’ve gotta call Ned! See you soon!”

After she hung up, she hurried down to the basement and through the secret door into the hidden room they called the Armory. She sat down by the shortwave radio, tuned to the wavelength that she and Ned used when he was in costume, and gave him a call. Even though their channel was encrypted by one of Ned’s inventions, she spoke in code. “T6 to CC, come in,” she called (T6 for 6th grade teacher, CV from the equation for calculating frequency and wavelength). “VC., where are you? I just talked to our old college friend and promised him we’d meet him in that little park near his dorm in two hours!”

“CV to T6, are you crazy? We can’t possibly get there in less than five hours, even if we could leave right now and fly straight through!” His top speed carrying Kris was about 150 miles; he didn’t know he wouldn’t be carrying her. But her next words gave it away.

“Don’t worry, VC, I have it covered. Meet me at Millard Tydings Park in twenty minutes, five-hundred feet straight up over the lagoon!”

“CV to T6., Roger. I’m just finishing up my business now. See you then. I won’t spoil your surprise by asking! Over and out!” She later found out that his business that night had involved busting a dope-smuggling ring.

Kris smiled. Sometimes he was infuriating, but there were times, like now, when he said exactly the right things. He trusted her enough that he didn’t even question what she had in mind.

Though she only wore it on rare occasions, Kris’s Lady Lambda gear was in perfect condition and ready to go. She changed in seconds, and in spite of her rush, she spared an instant for a smug grin when the skin-tight costume fit as well as ever. She then found civilian clothes for herself and Ned. Cody’s Kid Lambda gear was already in a carrying case, along with his vial of alien potion. Ned had updated the electronics in the Lambda gear at least a dozen times since he had built the Kid Lambda version, so she grabbed spares of the most recent versions of the belt, helmet, and Stellar Scepter, and a spare Dr. Lambda costume, and stuffed everything into a backpack. She almost folded the teddy and put it away in a drawer, but then shrugged her shoulders and tossed it into the pack as well. Maybe she and Ned could fly over to Michigan and find a nice romantic motel along the rocky shores of Lake Michigan before they came home? She added her purse and Ned’s wallet, got a bundle of cash from the safe, then strapped on the backpack, flew out through their secret tunnel, and zoomed off toward Millard Tydings Park. She didn’t want to be late.

She wasn’t, but Dr. Lambda was early, too. “Good to see you, partner! But I still don’t see how we’re going to get to Chicago in 90 minutes?!”

“I guess you still haven’t figured out how I can fly faster than you?” she laughed at her partner. He snarled silently; he _hadn’t_ figured it out yet, and had been hoping that she would have let the secret slip by now so he could pretend he’d figured it out on his own. “Well, head for Chicago at top speed, and then watch and learn, Buster!”

She paced him until he topped out at his current top speed of around 450 mph, then announced “Eat my dust, Dr. Slowpoke!”

She commanded her Stellar Scepter to make her force field visible. After it had faded into misty visibility, she adjusted the shape to one that she knew from trial and error produced less drag, and shot ahead. Years ago (on the first day they’d met, in fact!) Ned had told her that making the field visible helped to control it – but she knew he rarely followed his own advice. But Ned was a scientist – when he was slapped in the face with new facts, he adapted. His own field faded into misty visibility and the changed shaped, and he started to catch up. She had done this experiment long ago, though, and she wasn’t through yet… a few minor changes and he was falling behind again! Finally satisfied that she had proved her point, she slowed slightly until he caught up again, then increased her speed to match his, and they flew through the sky at over 600 miles per hour.

They were probably over Pennsylvania already when she began filling him in on the details. “Good idea, brining the vial, partner!” Ned complimented her. “We don’t _know_ that it will help, but given the circumstances, it couldn’t hurt! We’ll get it to him after we catch the bad guys.”

“Of course, dear, and once we’ve to the bad guy situation all cleared up, I expect a short vacation in upper Michigan! You KNOW you owe me – you better not try to weasel out!”

“Of course, dear!” Ned knew when he was licked and besides, they hadn’t had a vacation in a long time. This sounded like a good plan to him.

On the way, Ned contacted Captain Catapult via their Alliance of Mystery Heroes communicator.  He told him that Dr. and Lady Lambda were coming to his city in a few hours and would be tracking down some criminals. Catapult asked if they wanted some help; Ned replied that he wasn't sure yet, but they would contact him again later if they needed to. It wasn’t too much longer before the lights of Chicago became visible, and not much longer before they were zooming down to the little park near the lake that Kris had specified in their secret code. True to his word, Cody Mason met them there.

Cody greeted his friends with hugs and warm handshakes. He looked awful, though he really perked up at the sight of Lady Lambda – he’d expected Kris, since Lady Lambda had been retired for years. He told his story again for probably the fifteenth time that day, he reflected ruefully, but hopefully also the last. But he now had more information than during his earlier recitations. He had been able to pick out the pictures of two of the gunmen from the police mugshot albums. He knew their names (or at least the names they had given to the police at the time of the photos) but not much more. Each man had been busted once, a few years ago, for some minor crime, and neither had come to the attention of the police since. So they had no way of knowing how to find them.

Cody pulled the business card out of his wallet. “I think we ought to start by calling this guy. He’s apparently a bookie, and the cop who gave me this implied that he might be able to help us find those thugs.”

Ned Quest shook his head. “We should definitely contact this guy, but not on the phone. He won’t tell us anything over the phone, and if we try to find him after the call, he’ll be gone. We need to learn his real name and where we can find him. What say we check with Captain Catapult and see if he can give us any more information?"

"I've lived in Chicago for a few years, and I've always wondered about the guy!" Cody was interested. "I want to work with you guys to find those thugs - but it would be great to meet Chicago's greatest hero!"

Krista Quest gave Cody the spare Lambda gear and costume. Cody went behind a bush and discreetly changed into the costume and helmet. He had thought that maybe his attitude toward being a mystery hero had changed, but it almost seemed to him as if he were going back to a childish pastime that he had long outgrown. Well, he might feel differently if the circumstances were different, and anyway, this was the best way to accomplish his current goals.

When he returned to the Lambdas, Kris looked him over. He cut a very handsome figure in the revealing costume that Ned favored. “Cody, we sure can’t call you Kid Lambda any longer! And we can’t call you Cody all night, either! Any ideas for a new code-name?”

Cody thought about it, and realized he didn’t care. He doubted he would ever need a mystery hero code-name again after tonight. If he ever changed his mind, he could worry about a code-name then. But Kris was right — they needed something to call him, just for tonight. “I don’t know. How about Red Rocket?”

The Lambdas exchanged amused glances. They had often been referred to as the Human Missiles in news stories, so this seemed as good a code-name as any. “Red Rocket it is, then!” Ned answered heartily. “Well, let’s get going. Cody, can you stash most of the stuff from Kris’s backpack in your dorm room?”

The three flew toward Cody’s dorm. It had been about five years since Cody had flown on his own as Kid Lambda, and he realized that this was what he missed the most about being a mystery hero. He was pretty rusty, but he was so exhilarated he forgot his fatigue, and by the time they reached the dorm, he was doing rolls and loops just as if he’d been flying all along. He still didn’t have much interest in being a mystery hero, but he knew he could never again give up flying like this.

The three landed discreetly behind a high hedge. Ned pulled his civilian clothes from the pack, while Cody put on his own clothes over his costume. He stashed his helmet in the pack, then went into the dorm and up to his room. He emptied the pack into a drawer in his dresser, took off his street clothes, put on his Lambda helmet, and jammed the window open with a yardstick to be sure he could go in and out freely. He flew out and rejoined the Lambdas, and Ned led them across town to a small residential suburb. They in a small park.


“Short walk. Hope he’s not too upset about us waking him up this late!” Dr. Lambda said. The three put on street clothes over their Lambda costumes and dropped their helmets into a back pack Cody was carrying. Ned Quest led them to a neatly maintained house on a quarter acre, then walked up to the door and rang the doorbell. There was a single light on the ground floor in a window at the rear of the house. Someone must have been awake in that room, because lights started coming on in other rooms, and within a couple of minutes, the front door opened slightly.

"Ned Quest! You're up late at night!" Tom (Captain Catapult) Manley greeted Ned with a handshake. He was tall and broad, with his black hair in a military cut.

“Sorry to bother you this late, Tom. I believe you know Kris already, and this is Cody Mason. Cody is a student at Chicago University studying nuclear medicine. Yesterday, some mobsters broke into a lab where they were working and in an accident they caused, were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation - and they will die if someone doesn't get them to the Chicago University hospital, where they know how to treat radiation exposure. I don’t quite know where to start, but I have one lead.” He pulled out the card. “If I can ask this guy some questions, I think I’ll be able to track them down. But I don’t want to call him, and I don’t know where to find him. Can you help?”

Tom took the card, and then gestured his visitors inside. He quickly got on the phone, using his secret connection to the Chief of Police, and they spoke for about 15 minutes. After he hung up, he wrote something on the back of the card, then returned it to Ned.

“Sorry it took so long; I had to call in a few favors. You'll find the guy you want at this bar - he's the owner and will probably be working in his office upstairs. Are you sure you don't want me to come along? This is in a pretty tough neighborhood."

"We're pretty tough too, thanks for the offer. But no, we'd like to do this on our own," Ned replied. Tom noted the determined look on the faces of Krista and Cody as they nodded agreement. 

He shrugged, "Well, Chicago IS my town - I don't want you guys getting into any trouble here. Tell you what, you've got until 8 tomorrow - I'll check with the Chief, and if we haven’t turned in prisoners by then, I'll pay this place a visit myself. Or, if you run into anything I can help with, give me a call!"

They all shook hands again and took their leave. Back in the vacant lot, they changed back to their mystery hero identities. Once again they took to the air, and followed Ned as he slowly traced out the directions he was given. A couple of times, they had to descend to look at street signs, but they finally reached the place Manley had described.

Chicago had a bustling port. It was a transshipment point for cargo being shipped throughout the Midwest. Virtually everything that could go by water came into Chicago on trucks and trains and was loaded onto ships that plied the Great Lakes and even carried cargo across the Atlantic via the St. Lawrence Seaway, or to New York City via the Erie Canal and the Hudson River. Marty had sent them to a seedy bar down in the warehouse section of the port. The three weren’t surprised to see that the bar was filled with patrons, even this late at night; it was the kind of place where you could get a drink round-the-clock. The patrons appeared to be a mix of longshoremen, merchant sailors, and denizens of Chicago’s underworld — definitely not a place any of them would enter on their own.

The bookie they were looking for reputedly owned this bar and had his office on the second floor. The bar was a good way for him to launder the profits he made; much of that money showed up in the till every morning and was recorded in the bar ledger as legitimate profits from the night before. He also paid the cops on the local beat to leave him alone, and as long as nobody got killed in his bar, they mostly did leave him alone. There were always a half-dozen or so well-armed patrons in the bar, and all the regulars knew that they were actually paid security.

That made it a relatively safe place to drink — all the regulars had seen what happened to troublemakers in the bar. Not that an occasional drunk didn’t make trouble and get thrown out after a minor beating, but nobody was ever killed or badly hurt while actually in the bar itself. Of course, none of the regulars had ever seen three mystery heroes walk through the door, either.

Suddenly, the crowded room was dead silent. The three red-clad heroes walked slowly toward the bar. They heard whispers start up behind them, although the folks still in front of them remained quiet.

“–shouldn’t be here!”

“–will ya look at the–”

“–didn’t know there were three of ’em!”

“–on that broad!”

“–throw them outta here!”

“–damn do-gooders! I say we–”

“–wonder if she wants to have some fun?”

Lady Lambda turned when she heard that last one. Looking right at the man who had said it, she replied, “You know, I wouldn’t mind some fun tonight! I always love sending jerks like you to the hospital!”

That started some more muttering. “Uh-oh,” Red Rocket whispered. “I don’t think you should have done that!”

Dr. Lambda answered for her. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve done this before, though not since you ‘retired’. Whether she said something or not, sooner or later, trouble is coming our way. Her warning might keep a couple of these guys out of the fight, and out of the hospital, so we always did it this way. Never seemed to work, though — I’ll bet the one she talked to is the one who starts it.”

The trio walked up to the bar, and Lady Lambda talked to the bartender, while Dr. Lambda and Red Rocket watched the crowd. Lady Lambda often got answers from men who would never tell Dr. Lambda anything, even when he was clearly listening to their conversation. “We’d like to talk to Lenny.” That was the name on the business card.

The bartender was nervous, but he knew his lines. “Lenny who? Ain’t no Lenny works here. Might be a Lenny in here.” He swept his arm, indicating the bar. “But I don’t know most’a dere names. Want I should ask?”

Meanwhile, Dr. Lambda was using the radio in his helmet to whisper to Red Rocket. “Pick out the ones who work for the bar; they’re the ones who are going to start it. And they are probably the toughest. Most of these guys are here to drink, but the security is here to fight.”

Red Rocket scanned the room and picked out several men who were watching them more closely than the others. Dr. Lambda watched where his eyes rested. He was impressed. “Four of them?” Rocket whispered back.

“I think there’s actually six. I thought there were only four as well, but you picked up on two I missed. And I think you missed those guys at the last booth.” Rocket had discounted them, because they had seemed to be pretty intimately involved with a couple of women who were sharing the booth.

Lady Lambda leaned closer to the bartender and motioned for him with a finger to come closer as well. His view was spectacular, and under other conditions he would have been thrilled, but now it was all he could do to keep from shaking. He glanced around once, wildly, for help, but so far, the crowd had not yet worked itself up enough to take action.

Dr. Lambda turned to Red Rocket and commented, “Another minute or so. It’s usually a thrown beer mug, so be ready to move fast. Lady Lambda and I will handle the ones with knives — you take care of the unarmed idiots. But watch out for broken bottles!”

The bartender heard that, and quickly responded, “Hey, we don’t want no trouble here. If you let me, I kin git most’a da troublemakers outta here. Da boss’ll fire me if da place gits busted up. I really need dis job, see?”

Lady Lambda smiled — one of the sweetest and most welcome smiles the bartender had ever seen. “Y’all know, honey,” she drawled slowly “Ah really luuuv smart may-en.” Red Rocket was surprised — he had never heard her do that Southern accent before, but, boy, she did it well. “If y’all kin do thay-at, why, this eve-nin’ will be evah so much more pleasant.”

The bartender almost changed his mind. But the boss would be even more upset if he didn’t get rid of these guys than he would if the bar got busted up a little. He was more scared of the boss than the mystery heroes. Piss off a hero, and you ended up in jail; piss of the boss, and you ended up on the bottom of the lake, wearing cement boots — after a little friendly torture, naturally.

“OK, babe!” At the look on Lady Lambda’s face, he hurried on. “I’m gonna move real slow, like, and signal my boys to clear out da place. Dat OK wit you?”

“No suh-prizes, hun? Go ahay-ed.”

The Lambdas weren’t fooled, and Dr. Lambda nodded his head toward the closest bouncer. “He’s yours,” he whispered to Red Rocket. This gave Rocket a split-second advantage on the bouncer.

The bartender turned toward the crowd, and as he did, he “accidentally” knocked over a glass. This was the signal to the security, and they attacked. Dr. Lambda was right; the first attack was a flying beer mug, and it came from the man that Lady Lambda had talked to. Red Rocket dodged easily.

Lady Lambda grabbed the bartender by his collar. “Naughty boy! Momma’s a-gonna spank you latah.” She slammed his head into the bar and knocked him unconscious. “Boy, I’ll bet that’s going to hurt later!” she said, losing the Southern drawl. She turned to the brawl, which was already in full swing.

The thug nearest the bar had kicked his table at the heroes, hoping to trip them. He surged out of his chair and leaped at Red Rocket. He assumed he had the advantage of surprise, and he intended to knock Rocket to the ground. However, he was wide open, and Rocket’s short right to the jaw, backed up by the speed of the man’s leap, knocked him out, and he collapsed to the floor.

When he turned his attention back to the fight, it was no longer possible to separate the security from the other patrons. At least half the patrons had headed for the door, but there were still a lot of people in the room, all trying to reach the three heroes.
Lady Lambda zoomed quickly into the air. This bar, like many bars, had a high ceiling in order to try to keep the floor level relatively clear of smoke. Her nose twisted in distaste as she flew through the smog. When she was as high as she could get, she dived toward the fight, picking up as much speed as possible, and slammed into a group of thugs at high speed. She managed to hit the first one with her helmet in the chin, and he flew backward, knocking down the two thugs behind him. He was out of the fight. She passed between the next two, and her shoulders impacted them in their chests, causing to to both stagger backward. She thought she heard some ribs break, but didn’t have time to worry about it right now. She lowered her head just in time, and smashed into the stomach of a final opponent, driving him backward into a wall.

Her momentum was used up by this time, and she landed. Two thugs fired pistols at her. “You guys don’t know much about us, do you?” she said, laughing at them. They were stunned when their point-blank shots bounced off the force field around her. She turned to the first one and slammed a swift right to his chin. He staggered away, temporarily dazed.

Before she could turn around, the other man jumped on her back. He swung his right arm down over her right shoulder and tried to drive his knife into her stomach. The strike was deflected by her belt buckle, and instead of stabbing straight into her stomach, the knife slid across her right thigh. If she had been wearing the uniform with the long pants, she would have escaped unscathed, as the material in their costumes was designed to resist knives. But she had on her short pants outfit, and the blade sliced into her upper thigh, cutting a long laceration. Still, it wasn’t the first time she had been cut in the line of duty.

Lady Lambda was unable to stop herself from shrieking from the shock and pain, but she was in no way disabled by the wound. She quickly grabbed the arm draped over her shoulder and pulled down hard, bending further forward as she did so. The thug’s arm was pulled out of his shoulder socket, and he was screaming as he started to fly over her shoulder. At just the right instant, Lady Lambda straightened up with all her strength, pushing the thug forward and into the air. He slammed into the wall back-first, feet high, his head about two feet off the floor. He then fell onto his head and collapsed into a crumpled heap. Kris hoped he hadn’t broken his neck in the fall, but she was already turning her attention to her leg.

It was a long, ragged slash, not deep enough to have caught an artery, but she was going to have trouble walking on that leg for a while, and she would need stitches for sure. She could worry about that later, but she realized she was going to be in trouble if she didn’t stop the bleeding soon. She flew behind the bar and found some clean bar towels, which she used to make a temporary compress. She pulled the belt from the unconscious bartender and used it to hold the makeshift bandage in place, then turned back to the fight. As she had half-expected, it was over.

She had left three men unconscious and her other two opponents had fled. She had rammed her helmet into the stomach of another, and he was still rolling on the floor, moaning. By her count, she had taken out sox in exchange for a slash on her thigh; her retirement had made her careless! Dr. Lambda had apparently accounted for just about the same number, and Red Rocket, even without the enhanced strength and agility of Dr. Lambda, had knocked out three more.

There was a door behind the bar that led into the rest of the building. Dr. Lambda kicked it open and the three of them were through it quickly, and found a short hallway, with two other doors and a stairway. Dr. Lambda flashed up the stairs, so Lady Lambda and Red Rocket each smashed open one of the doors. There was a storage room on one side, and an office on the other, but nobody in either. So they headed up the stairs, and found that Dr. Lambda, as usual, had more luck.

A man had been sitting behind a big desk on which there were half a dozen phones. Papers were scattered all over, and there were a couple of ledgers that had been knocked to the floor. The man behind the desk seemed to have a broken wrist, and there was a gun on the floor. Dr. Lambda was standing in front of him in the act of picking him up by the front of his shirt.

“I hope you’re Lenny!” Dr. Lambda said to the man, shaking him slightly.

“Ow! Ow! Ow! Oh, $#!*! Stop!” the man screamed, then began moaning, holding his injured wrist against his body with his other hand. “Please stop! I’ll give you anything! I’ll tell you anything you want to know!”

“Thank you,” Dr. Lambda said gently. “You know, if you had been that agreeable in the first place, we could have avoided this unpleasantness.” He set the man back down in his chair. Opening the bottom drawer of the desk, he found the whiskey bottle he had been sure would be there, popped it open, and handed it to the moaning Lenny. “This might help.”

Lenny put the bottle to his mouth and upended it. After a couple of seconds, Dr. Lambda took it away from him. “You can finish this off later, Lenny-boy. But now we’ve got some questions for you.”

Lenny’s face was as white as a sheet, and he was shivering, crying, and moaning. Lady Lambda stepped closer. “Umm, partner, maybe I can ask the questions instead of you? I don’t think he’s going to give us any more trouble, are you Lenny?” Lenny started to shake his head violently, but that jolted his wrist, and he screamed again. When he quieted down, Lady Lambda spoke again.

“We don’t want much from you, Len, and we aren’t looking to hurt anyone. All we want to do is save some lives — probably some friends of yours. You believe me, don’t you?” Lenny just barely nodded his head. He didn’t believe, but he didn’t dare contradict her, either.

“Good, because that means we’ll be able to get out of here soon, and leave you alone. In fact, we’ve even already called for an ambulance.” When Dr. Lambda heard that, he went outside the room and used his helmet radio to call for an emergency team. He had to use the special Alliance of Mystery Heroes code-word for the day to convince the radio dispatcher he was on the level. When the dispatcher finally realized who he was talking to, he quickly notified a hospital.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Dr. Lambda, but I get calls from kooks all night. The ambulance will be there in fifteen minutes. Say, if you come by police headquarters, could you look me up and give me your autograph for my kid? Just ask anyone for Sparks!” Dr. Lambda didn’t think they would be stopping by, but he promised that if they did, he would.

“Sparks, make sure that at least a dozen cops get here before the ambulance! Some of these guys are just groggy, and they could be dangerous. We’ll make a sweep for obvious weapons before we leave, but we don’t have time to tie anyone up.” In the distance, Dr. Lambda could hear police sirens. Leaving Red Rocket and Lady Lambda to question Lenny, he headed downstairs to do the promised sweep for weapons.

Meanwhile, Lenny wanted to shake his head no regarding the ambulance, but he quickly thought better of it. Not only would it hurt like hell, he realized that it was already too late for him to escape the consequences of this evening. Injured as he was, with three mystery heroes in his bar and no protection anywhere, he couldn’t possibly get away before the police showed up. So he might as well get treated by a real doctor as soon as possible. Maybe, if he told these awful people what they wanted to know, they’d even go away sooner.

Red Rocket showed him the two pictures. “These two guys lost big betting on the U.C. boxing match last night. Today they busted up an atomic energy research lab and took a critical dose of radiation. If they don’t get to a hospital as soon as possible, they’re going to die of radiation poisoning. If we can find them, they have a chance to live. Big betters like this, you probably know them, don’t you? Where can we find them?”

Lenny moaned in pain. He took a deep breath and visibly attempted to pull himself together. The whiskey was starting to ease the pain a little bit. He tried to make a bargain. “I can’t tell you how to find them, but I can show you. They’s part’a the DeLucranto mob, and they got a sawbones workin’ for ’em. But youse gotta take me wit’ youse! If you leave me here, I spend da next ten years in da big house!”

Red Rocket spoke up. “You know, Lady Lambda, that sounds like a good idea to me. What do you think? That way, if Lenny finks on us, he’ll be right there with us when we find out!” Lenny, who had no intentions of finking on them, tried to smile.

“OK. Lenny, let me wrap your wrist real quick — it might hurt when I do it, but it will save you some pain on the trip. Oh, I really wish you hadn’t tried to pull that gun on Dr. Lambda!” She busted the bottom out of a drawer in Lenny’s desk and ripped his jacket into strips. Surprisingly gently, she straightened the broken wrist and wrapped it tightly. Even with the whiskey, Lenny screamed in pain and almost passed out. Dr. Lambda came back upstairs to see what was wrong, and Lady Lambda told him about the deal they’d made. He wasn’t pleased, but he did help Lenny out onto the fire escape, where he picked him up, and the three took to the sky. The flashing lights of the squad cars and ambulance seemed to be three or four blocks away.

The cold night air rushing past his face revived Lenny somewhat, and the whiskey made the pain seem more bearable. He was slurring his words, but he was able to point with his left hand, and within a few minutes, they were approaching a brownstone building with a sign out front, showing that “Austin Valentine, M.D.” lived and practiced here. They landed on the front stoop, and Red Rocket knocked on the door.

A few minutes later, an older gentleman answered the door, wearing wrinkled butler’s attire and still rubbing sleep form his eyes. He was very surprised to see a trio of mystery heroes at his door, but he was used to midnight visitors.

“Oh, my, I sincerely hope you have the wrong address!” Then he saw Lenny and the splint on his hand, and the pain still showing through the alcohol. “Come in, come in! Lay him down here–” He led them into a small examining room that contained a bed and sink. “–and I’ll go get Dr. Valentine!”

“If you don’t mind, Jeeves, I’ll come along with you,” said Dr. Lambda.

The gentleman’s gentleman sniffed haughtily. “My name, sir, is James, and I certainly do mind!”

“Sorry, James, I was just trying to be nice. You’ve got no choice in the matter. Let’s go find Dr. Valentine.”

James wasn’t about to argue with Dr. Lambda. He led the hero deeper into the house. Apparently the doctor and James resided on the upper floors. The back half of the house was fitted out as a clinic, and four of the beds were occupied. Bingo! Dr. Lambda could hardly recognize the two men from the photographs, but he did recognize the symptoms of severe radiation sickness. These men were not getting the treatment they needed from Dr. Valentine. Dr. Lambda made another quick call on his helmet radio.

Dr. Lambda grabbed Dr. Valentine before James could explain anything and pulled him into the examining room. “See to his broken wrist!” he pointed at Lenny. “And don’t try to run away; I’ve got ambulances coming to pick up your patients and take them to the U.C. Med School radiation clinic, and you’re going with them.” Valentine paled and moaned a little himself, but with three mystery heroes around, he wasn’t going to have a chance to get away. “Red Rocket, go with James, here, and see if you can find any medical records for the sick thugs, and bring them back here.” The two went off to do those things.

Once again, they could hear sirens approaching. A lot of citizens of Chicago were having their sleep interrupted tonight. Valentine looked over the splint on Lenny’s wrist. “He needs a cast. Do you want me to do that now?”

Lady Lambda asked, “How long will it take?”

“About twenty minutes.”

“Can it wait until we all get to the hospital?” She was sure it could.

“Yes, this splint was expertly applied. He might do a little better with morphine, though.”

“Not on top of all the whiskey he had, Doc. We don’t want to kill him!” The doctor nodded reluctantly. “Good!” she continued. “Now I want you to do something about this!” She showed him the bandage on her thigh.

Red Rocket noticed how white she was. “Lady Lambda, why don’t you sit down? Lenny’s too drunk to cause us problems, and I can make sure the doc doesn’t run out on us. You need the rest.” She agreed, and gratefully sat down. She had been running on adrenaline for the last twenty minutes or so, and she was close to the limits of her endurance.

Valentine was a good doctor, even if he did treat mobsters in secret. In fact, he had to be; if too many of his mob patients died, he knew he would end up wearing concrete shoes on the bottom of the lake. He had started the practice for the money, and now he wanted out, but he knew he couldn’t get out on his own. Perhaps this was his golden opportunity — the Lambdas might be able to set up some kind of protection for him if he treated them straight.

He disinfected and bandaged Lady Lambda’s leg. He wanted to put in stitches, but she refused anesthetic, and he refused to do it otherwise. She could live with it the way it was for a while longer, and she would be in a hospital where she trusted the doctors shortly. She noticed that Valentine did an excellent job, and did things carefully and gently, causing her the minimum possible amount of pain.

As they waited for the ambulances, he discussed his situation with her, and she promised to help him as much as she could. He would eventually do some prison time, but with the minimum sentence and in a prison where the mob was unable to reach him. A few years later, when he would be released, the government would help him establish a new identity, and he would remain an honest citizen throughout the rest of his life. Was there magic involved? Lady Lambda was a friend of Dr. Aeon, the most powerful magic user on Eorth and a member of the Alliance of Mystery Heroes, so it was possible, or perhaps Lady Lambda had a magic of her own.


About midway through Sunday morning, the three heroes returned to Cody’s dorm. The Lambdas recovered their clothes and headed out to find a hotel. Cody called the hospital and found that Tomas Thomas was awake right now, and he was there in just a few minutes. He was still wearing the new Lamda gear, and carrying the package with the Kid Lambda gear and the vial. When he walked through the door he stopped, stunned by shock and dismay. Tomas was mostly wrapped in bandages, and there were dark red, almost black spots dotting the bandages. Cody could see open sores on the patches of skin that were still exposed. However, Tomas was awake, and he smiled when he saw Cody.

“Hi, hero!” he whispered. “Say, I heard that Dr. Lambda, Lady Lambda, and somebody else in a Dr. Lambda costume brought in those thugs. Thanks!” He stopped talking; the effort of saying that much had worn him out.

Cody walked up to him. “Tomas, I just talked to the doctors. They have no hope. They are giving you another day, no more.” Cody saw the question in Tomas’ eyes. “Nope, I’m not saying this just to depress you even more. I may have a way to help you! I can’t guarantee that it will work, and even if it does, there could be some serious side-effects. I just think you need to know exactly what your situation is, so you can make an informed decision. What do you say?”

Tomas could barely whisper. Cody bent over and put his ear near Tomas’ mouth. He could barely make out the words, “Tell me.” It was painful just to watch him, and Cody had to wipe away tears before he could start talking. He set the case on a table next to the bed, and, as Tomas watched, Cody pulled a vail from the case. He held up the vial so Tomas could see it more clearly.
“Tomas, this is a dose of the drug that gave Dr. Lambda is super powers. Dr. Lambda was given a dose by an alien, and it saved his life, and it occurred to Lady Lambda that this drug might be able to save you, so I talked to Dr. Lambda about it. He’s not sure if it will help or not, but he agreed that it was worth trying. But I have to tell you about it before you use it.”

Tomas tried to protest — if the choice was dying in agonizing pain or unknown side-effects from a super drug, that was no choice at all. But he was still worn out from his last efforts, and Cody didn’t realize he was trying to agree, so Cody went on talking.

“This drug gave Dr. Lambda his super powers – and one of those powers is incredibly increased ability to heal. He’s come back from hopeless injuries several times since then. It’s possible that it will help you heal. As far as he has been able to determine, there aren’t any short term side effects – at least when it was given to him. But he’s still uncertain about possible long term side effects. He thinks there is the possibility that the improved healing will lead to a much longer than normal lifespan… and…” he paused a second; this one could be the show stopper “…and possibly make it impossible for you to father children… And, just so you have all the facts, Dr. Lambda claimed that the drug made him smarter, too. But he was already a genius before he took the drug, and sometimes he doesn’t act very smart at all, so I don’t know if that’s true. So there you have it. What do you think?”

Before Tomas could respond, Cody added, “Oh, yeah, it also doesn’t work immediately. Dr. Lambda didn’t see the results until the next day. If the doctors are right, you don’t have any time to worry about the decision. I assumed you would want to try it, so that’s why I brought it with me. All you gotta do is say yes, or nod, or something, so I know it’s what you want.”

Actually, even if Tomas said no, Cody was planning to dose him with the drug in his sleep, anyway. But Tomas gathered all his strength and whispered, “Yes!”

“I knew you were still fighting! Good luck, buddy!” He opened the vial, brought it to Tomas’ cracked and bleeding lips, and slowly poured it into his mouth, making sure that none was lost. He saw that the effort of drinking had finally exhausted his friend’s fading strength, and he was closing his eyes to sleep. “It’s in the hands of God now, pal! I’ll be praying for you!”

Cody turned and left. The Lambdas were going to stay in town at least until tomorrow to see what effect the drug would have on Tomas. He was going to meet them for dinner. They had a lot of things to talk about, but he was sure it was going to be one of the longest nights of his life, anyway.


Nobody enjoyed dinner very much. There was a minor sense of accomplishment in capturing the guys who had put Tomas into the hospital, but that was tempered by the condition of Cody’s best friend. Cody told his mentors about giving the alien drug to Tomas. Ned stopped talking when he heard that, and his attention left them as he stared at the ceiling for several minutes. Just about the time that Cody wondered if something was wrong, he smiled.

“Great going, Cody! I predict that Tomas will make a full recovery and be ready to check himself out of the hospital by midnight or so tonight! Boy, won’t that cause a ruckus! Aside from the side-effects, did you tell him what else to expect?”

This announcement cheered everyone up considerably. Cody was intrigued by the question, however.

“I told him that this was the drug that gave Dr. Lambda your super-powers. So I assume he expects to get super-strength and super-agility like you guys got. What else is there?”

Ned smiled. “I think there’s a possibility that the drug alters your physical appearance of the one who takes the drug to match that person’s mental ideal. Overnight I grew several inches and gained more than forty pounds. I was scrawny and out of shape when I took the drug, and now I look like I always dreamed I should like when I was growing up. But Tomas is already a superb athlete in tip-top physical condition, so who knows how it will affect him? I assume he wasn’t too worried about the possibility of not being a father, given that it was a certainty if he hadn’t tried it.” He paused. “So, Cody, you know Tomas well. If the drug does alter one’s appearance to become one’s ideal, what should we expect to see tomorrow? He’s a pretty big guy already; if he grows like I did, he’ll have trouble walking through doors.”

Cody thought it over carefully. He and Tomas worked out together often, and Cody thought he knew the answer. “We do a lot of conditioning and endurance work when we train. We are both of us pretty strong, and we do some strength work, but we are both very careful about putting on bulk. I don’t want to gain weight, because then I’d be in the same weight class as Tomas, and I don’t know if I could beat him. But he really likes the weight he’s at. So my guess is, he’ll look pretty much the same tomorrow as he did last week. Say, he’s going to have to quit the boxing team, though.”

Ned laughed. “That is probably going to be the least disruptive effect on his life, Cody. Think of the uproar at the hospital when a man dying of a terminal dose of radiation is suddenly healed overnight! And as far as his doctors know, it must be spontaneous, because no one knows you gave him the drug. Then, suppose someone finds out he took a wonder drug. Can you imagine the public reaction to a drug that can cure a man in a condition like that? Everyone would want that drug. And if people found out it could change them into physically perfect specimens, and then they found out that you were the one who gave him that drug… well, I predict you wouldn’t have any peace for a long time.”

Cody’s face turned white as he started to think about the consequences of his act. He had saved his friend’s life, but what kind of Pandora’s box had he opened? “Ned, you’re not mad at me, are you? What else could I have done? I couldn’t let my friend die.”

“Of course I’m not mad, son. I would have done the same thing. But, now that it’s done, you need to think about the consequences, and how you and Tomas are going to deal with them. Just as a quick example, when you go to the airport tomorrow to pick up Tomas’ parents, how are you going to break the news to them? They’ve been traveling pretty much non-stop for the last thirty-six hours, and they’ve been told that the chances of them arriving before Tomas dies are only about thirty percent. And you’ve never met them! How are they going to react when you tell them that not only is Tomas still alive, but he is totally cured?” Ned shook his head. “Nope, I’m not mad. But your world may be about to change radically, and I think you’d better think about how you are going to deal with it.”

Cody was now looking a little fearful. “What can I do? What should I do?”

Kris looked at him and smiled. “I think you should probably see if you can convince your two best friends to help you make some plans, Cody!”

“Gee, Kris, it would be great to sit up talking with you and Tomas all night. But Tomas isn’t here. Do you think Ned might help us instead?”

Kris laughed out loud at that, and after a couple of seconds, Ned joined in. When she finished laughing, Kris winked at Cody once more, and then turned to her husband. “Lucky you, dearest one. It looks like I’m going to have to wait for some other time to collect your next installment.” And then she reached out to ruffle Cody’s hair. “As long as you keep your sense of humor, Cody, you ought to be able to deal with anything.”


Cody Mason got back to his dorm room very late, but he couldn’t sleep. In spite of Ned Quest’s assurances, he couldn’t be sure Tomas Thomas would live until he actually saw him. Since he couldn’t sleep, he tried to get some work done instead. What had caused the massive burst of gamma rays the damaged projector had emitted? Since it had happened, it must be possible. But the schematics weren’t helpful; there had to have been massive voltage surges in certain places, but the big capacitor was located too far away on the schematic, and there seemed to be no way to get the charge from one place to the other.

So he moved on to the details of the construction. They had built the device of independent modules and interconnected the modules with a single connection strip. That had to be it. Several locations, though widely separated on the schematic, used adjacent terminals on the connection strip. The bullet must have actually struck that strip and somehow bridged those various circuits in the exact order necessary. It took a lot of study, but he was eventually able to identify the exact places the bullet must have produced a short.

As Cody considered this, he slowly realized that, in fact, this accident had solved the very problem that he and Tomas had been wrestling with earlier – dumping a very high powered surge of electricity into their electron gun. If he could find some way to reliably duplicate the momentary circuit connections the bullet must have created, their device would be operational. After he totally rebuilt it, of course!

He studied the problem for close to an hour, but no solution presented itself. Vacuum tubes could not be turned on and off quickly enough, and it would be virtually impossible to get three relays to work in such perfect synchronization. Those new transistor devices were the closest thing to an answer, but they couldn’t control that much current without burning up. He was getting too tired to concentrate, but he had made some notes, and he could investigate this more fully at some later time.

Cody was still unable to sleep, but he was able to doze off a bit. His thoughts drifted back to how unlikely this accident had been, and he drowsily realized that there had been a number of other unlikely events leading up to the accident. The publicity the boxing match had received, turning it into the largest University of Chicago sporting event in years; the student sports-writer using Tomas’ hated nickname; Tomas almost losing the boxing match; the gangsters managing to sneak into their lab without being caught, and Cody earlier deciding not to follow up his Kid Lambda career, so his vial of the alien medicine was still available for Tomas to use.

If any one of these unlikely events had not happened, either Tomas wouldn’t have been dosed by the radiation or he wouldn’t have been saved by taking the wonder drug. In his half-asleep state, Cody considered ideas he would have instantly dismissed if he had been wide awake. Could there have been some mystical force guiding him and Tomas to their current states?

Cody’s training in physics, chemistry, and engineering generally meant that he didn’t consider the mystical side of life, but he had ample proof that beings with mystical powers occasionally interfered with human destinies. Look at Major Power and the Stormbirds, for example — ordinary humans given great powers by deities and higher spirit powers. Could there be some similar power guiding his and Tomas’ lives? Had it just been an unlikely accident? Maybe Dr. Aeon could tell him… His thoughts continued to drift, and he was finally on the verge of true sleep when the phone rang.


For a split second, as he was jolted back to full wakefulness, Cody was annoyed. Who the heck would be calling him at this hour? Then he realized that, given Tomas’ condition, there could be any number of people calling him. Was this the hospital with the worst news possible? He was suddenly trembling; it was a result of his emotional and physical exhaustion, combined with his worst fears. He forced his rebellious hand to pick up the phone. “Hello? This is Cody.”

“Cody, it’s me, Tomas! Greatest stuff in the world, what you gave me! I’m better — I feel great, and all the sores are healed. But this stuff is really messing with my mind!” His voice suddenly lowered, and Cody could hear him muttering to himself. Suddenly, he was talking to Cody again. “I can hardly think, Cody. You gotta come over and get me out of here! They’ll think I’m crazy and lock me up!”

“Geez, Tomas, it is awfully good to hear your voice. I’m glad the potion helped. But visiting hours don’t start for several hours.”

“So land on the fire escape! You can fly, Mr. Red Rocket! Cody, it’s urgent! I need your help right now!“

“On my way,” Cody said, hanging up the phone. Within seconds, he had on his new costume and was using his Stellar Scepter to rocket out the window. It only took him a few minutes to get to the hospital. Finding the right room from outside was another challenge, but Tomas was watching for him with his window open and the room light on.

Cody was delighted to see his friend looking so well, after being so close to death only hours before. He embraced his friend, then stood back and shook his hand as well.

“Cody, am I glad to see you! Something has happened to my memory, and it’s overwhelming me! Everything I ever seen, heard, read, or thought is filling my head, and I’m losing the present!” Tomas appeared to have just reached a limit of some kind, and he just sort of ran down, then stopped talking. He stood, swaying gently with his eyes closed, sometimes muttering, sometimes moaning, apparently lost in his memories.

Cody thought quickly. Ned’s logic and reasoning abilities had been enhanced by the alien drug. It seemed as if perhaps Tomas’ memory had been enhanced in a similar fashion. Imagine what it would be like if, suddenly, all the memories you had filed away, all the things you had forgotten, all the things you had thrust from your mind and never thought about any longer — all were suddenly recalled, as vividly as the day they had happened. Tomas must be lost in the past; Cody had to give him an anchor in the present.

Pushing Tomas down into a sitting position on the bed, Cody sat down next to him. Not wanting to alert the entire hospital as to what was going on, he leaned close to Tomas’ ear and spoke. “Tomas, I’m the real Cody, and I’m in the real present. Tomas, focus on my voice, and let me lead you out of the past. Tomas, listen to me — you are lost in your memories, and only by listening to me will you find reality again.” He continued to repeat the same themes over and over again.

Tomas suddenly snapped to attention and looked around him. “Cody, is this real? I can’t tell anymore! Keep talking to me — don’t stop!” Again, he stopped talking. This was hopeful, and Cody kept up his conversation. He kept repeating that he was real, this was the present, and the rest were only memories. He had an insight, and he started to add comments about what Tomas had to do to save himself.

“Tomas, you have to relearn how to put your memories away and ignore them unless you want them. You’ve always had a superb memory, so you must know, somewhere in your mind, how to do this. You just have to put these memories away again. I’m the real Cody, and this is the real present.”

Cody repeated these things over and over. Tomas kept snapping back into the present, and he and Cody would talk sensibly, and then he would fall back into his trance-like condition. The moments of reality came more often, and closer together, and about an hour after he had arrived, Cody thought that Tomas might at least now be out of danger.

He still lapsed into dazes as they talked, but shaking his shoulders and speaking to him seemed to reach him quickly and draw him back from whatever lost land of memory his mind was roaming. He was relearning how to recognize the present and differentiate it from his memories, and he was growing less overwhelmed by the gigantic store of readily accessible information that was now available to him.

Finally, he turned to Cody. “I’m absolutely exhausted! I don’t think I’ve ever done anything harder. I thought I was lost in my own mind forever, and everywhere I turned, all I could find were more memories! Some of my memories aren’t so good, either! You know, I had a photographic memory when I was younger, and it caused me so much trouble that I deliberately forced myself to be able to forget things. It’s a good thing I had that practice, because that’s what I had to do all over again. Remember how to forget! And, all the time, I could hear you talking to me from the present, and every once in a while I found the strength to follow your voice and escape!”

“For a guy who looks so good, you sure look awful!” Cody quipped. Compared to last night, Tomas looked great. But there were heavy rings under his eyes, he was sweating, and he was still wrapped in bandages dotted with blood spots.

Tomas ruefully looked at his image in the mirror. “You got that right! Say, did you bring any of my clothes with you? I really want to get out of here!”

“Don’t you think you ought to see a doctor first?” Cody asked.

“I don’t know — what if they don’t want to let me go?” Tomas was reluctant.

“How can they keep you here, if you don’t want to be here?” Cody wondered.

“Boy, for a smart guy, you sure ask some dumb questions!” Tomas responded sharply. “I would have thought one of the first things you learned in mystery hero school was how the real world works!”

“Tomas, you’re not a realist, you’re a cynic! Besides, all the mystery heroes I know are idealists.” Cody was thinking about Major Power, the Lambdas, and the Volunteer in particular. “I have always tried to exist somewhere between idealism and cynicism. Why wouldn’t they just let you go?”

“Yesterday they diagnosed me as being terminally ill of radiation poisoning,” replied Tomas. “If they pronounce me healthy right now, what will it do to the credibility of the hospital? How will it affect the credibility of the U.C. Medical School, and of U.C. itself? And that’s just for starters.

“Those doctors who correctly diagnosed me are going to want to investigate and find out why I got better, and see if there is any way they can duplicate the process with other radiation victims! They’ll want to run hundreds of tests on me — up to and probably including vivisection!

“And if I tell them I got a wonder drug from you, no doubt you’ll be arrested for practicing medicine illegally, and they’ll try to make you tell them more about the drug. And if you tell them you got it from Dr. Lambda, people are going to be upset that he created a drug that is so effective, then kept it for himself. Side-effects be damned, there are millions of people who would give up everything they had for a single dose of the stuff. They aren’t going to just forget it when they find out!”

Cody nodded his head slowly. “I guess that’s what Dr. Lambda was hinting at earlier, when we were talking about consequences. We spent all evening talking about how to tell your parents, but I never thought beyond that.”

Tomas was immediately interested. “My parents? Why are you going to have to tell them anything?”

“Well, the university notified them when you ended up in the infirmary, and they caught the next plane out of Bora Bora, or wherever it is that they were assigned. I’m supposed to meet them at O’Hare later today, about 3:30. They’ve been told there is only a fifty-fifty chance that you’ll be alive by the time they get here, and that your chances of living out the next few days are nonexistent. I’ve been spending most of the night thinking about how to break the good news to them.

“Anyway, I’m going to go get the on-call doctor and have him release you. Then we’ll get some sleep, and then we’ll figure out how to deal with your parents.” Cody was relieved that he would have Tomas with him — he had never met Tomas’ parents, and Tomas’ presence at the airport would be far better than trying to explain things to them himself.

“Hold on, boy! You ain’t heard a word I said. He won’t let me out; he’ll lock me up under the tightest security they have here!” Cody had a stubborn look on his face; Tomas could see he wasn’t going to listen to reason. “OK, let’s do it this way. Find us some of those white doctor’s outfits, and you and I will go find him. We’ll carry my paperwork with us, and get him to sign it, and then just walk out the door. OK?”

Cody smiled. He was sure it wouldn’t be necessary, but he wanted to humor his friend, who had just come through some incredibly rough times. Tomas lay back down in the bed to rest, while Cody sneaked through the corridors, looking for a changing room. He was back in a few minutes with two sets of white hospital doctor’s attire. The two put on the outfits, and Cody put his clothes into a laundry bag, which he brought with them. Tomas gathered up his bed sheets, bandages, and everything else he had touched and stuffed them into another bag and used a marking pen to write the word radioactive on the bag. The secondary radiation from his body had probably not been dangerous to anyone, but there was no use taking chances. He noticed that Cody had left the case he’d brought with him on his first visit (with the Kid Lambda gear in it) and appeared to have forgotten about it, so he picked it up and brought it along too.

They walked to the nursing station, and Tomas addressed the nurse on duty. “Good evening, Nurse Williams. I’m Dr. Amato, one of the new staff doctors. It’s my first night shift. I’m looking for Dr. Van de Carr; do you know where he might be at the moment?”

Nurse Williams hadn’t been expecting a new doctor on the night shift — they usually mentioned things like that in the weekly staff meeting, but she hadn’t really paid much attention at the last one. The doctor did look familiar; she was sure she had seen him before, or at least a picture of him. “He’s on his rounds, Dr. Amato. Right now he’s probably over in 4B, that way.” She pointed helpfully.

“Thanks for your help, nurse. I already like working here!” He smiled, and he and his intern walked away, toward 4B.

They eventually found Dr. Van de Carr making rounds. Neither man knew him, but he was wearing an I.D. badge. Tomas walked up to him and said, “Dr. Van de Carr, I need your opinion on the Tomas Thomas case, if you don’t mind. I’m a radiation specialist, and I just arrived from Los Alamos. Do you have a minute?” Van de Carr nodded, but Tomas had already walked into an empty room. Van de Carr followed him in.

When Dr. Van de Carr was in the room, Tomas turned and handed him the clipboard he was carrying. “I’m sorry I misled you, doctor. Actually, I am Tomas Thomas, and I’d like you to sign the release form so I can go home.”

Van de Carr looked shocked and then angry. “I don’t think this is at all funny! I just saw Thomas about four hours ago, and he’ll be lucky to live through the end of tomorrow. I don’t know who you are or what you are trying to do, but you had better be out of here before security gets here!” He moved toward the phone in the room, but Tomas stepped in front of him.

“Dr. Van de Carr, I’m not joking. Check my picture.” He handed the doctor the clipboard, which had his name and picture on it, a copy of his student photo I.D. Van de Carr compared the photo with Tomas’ face. His anger slowly changed to puzzlement. As he continued to start at Tomas’ face, he mentally updated his memory of Tomas, removing the sores and bandages, and he realized that he was really talking with the terminally ill man he had checked up on only hours ago.

“This is impossible! You can’t be well.”

“Why not, Doctor? Isn’t that what hospitals are for?”

“Well, yes, but there was nothing we could do for you except make you as comfortable as possible. You can’t possibly be healthy! It must be some kind of hoax or trick!”

“Dr. Van de Carr, I guarantee you this is neither a hoax nor a trick. A miracle has occurred, and I am totally healed, and I want to go home. I’d like you to sign the paperwork, but if you don’t, I’m just going to walk out anyway.”

“But you can’t! We need to study you and find out what happened!”

“Told you, Doc, it’s a one-of-a-kind miracle. Studying me won’t do you any good; all you’ll find out is that I’m healthy! Besides, I don’t feel like being studied. Now, sign my papers, and I’m gone.”

Van de Carr started to protest again, but then he changed his mind. He took the clipboard and signed a form approving the discharge. Tomas took his copy, laid the clipboard down on the bed, and headed toward the elevator.

As soon as he judged Tomas was too far away to hear him, the doctor picked up the phone and connected to the hospital operator. “Jill, please connect me with security! We have a sick patient wandering around the halls!” Cody stepped into the room and quickly pulled the phone cord from the wall. “I’m more than a little disappointed in you, Doc! You just lost me five dollars. I thought this was a hospital, not a prison!”

Cody hurried out of the room and caught up with Tomas. Tomas had already known what was going to happen, so he had called all three elevators, and he blocked them open. He and Cody hurried to a window and climbed out. Cody pulled the Stellar Scepter from the bag, Tomas grabbed him around the waist, and they were gone. The next stop was their dorm.


Back at their dorm, Cody hit the sack immediately and assumed that Tomas would do the same. However, as soon as he could hear snores coming from Cody’s room, Tomas went back out into the small common room they shared, carrying his tool kit. He opened the kit carrying the Kid Lambda gear that he’d retrieved from the hospital and considered where to start. In a few minutes he had disassembled the smaller gravity control belt, the one Cody had worn as Kid Lambda. Cody had left it in Tomas’ hospital room, so Tomas assumed it was supposed to be his, especially since Cody now had a new one that fit correctly.

He worked very carefully, and sketched as he worked. About the time it started getting light outside, he had a pretty complete schematic of the two different functional units in the belt: the gravity regulator and the magnetic controller. He had never been a whiz with electronics before, but now, when he could instantly recall anything he had ever read, he realized he was developing a much better understanding. He didn’t feel any smarter, per se, but if he was trying to solve a problem, and there was, anywhere in his memories, the information he needed to address that problem, he had instant access to those memories.

The problems he now encountered came when he had information from more than one source, and the information conflicted — he had to stop and work out which was right and which was wrong. This happened several times, and slowed him down considerably, but he realized he was still working much more quickly than he had been able to before.

He did discover that once he had mentally accepted a certain piece of information as being correct and conflicting information as being false, the next time he needed that information, only the correct information was recalled, unless he deliberately tried to recall the false information as well. He realized this could be a great tool for him, but it also had the potential to narrow his thinking. He would have to be very sure before he mentally labeled something as false.

The belt was a study in contrasts. The physics it made use of were advanced beyond Tomas’ level of understanding, but the circuitry that implemented the physics was built using the technology available in 1941, which was practically ancient history by now. Through the sponsorship of their seminar, he and Cody had access to cutting edge electronics, and they had often designed and built their equipment right on this table. Tomas realized he could replace some of the older style valves (vacuum tubes) and relays with transistors without changing the functionality at all.

He was so tired he had to fight to keep his eyes open, but something was driving him to finish his work. He drank several cups of coffee. He was surprised when he looked up and saw Cody watching him.

“Hey, I thought I was supposed to be the electronics wizard! That’s some pretty complex stuff, there! What are you doing, anyway?”

“You’re still the whiz kid, buddy. That drug did something to my memory, and if there is something I need to know, and I’ve read or heard anything about it, that information seems to automatically pop up where I can use it. But I don’t seem to be any more creative than I used to be. If I don’t already know something, I’m not any better at figuring it out than I used to be. All I’ve been doing is updating the old circuits to use transistors.

“It seems to me that it wouldn’t be too difficult to enhance these circuits here and here–” He pointed at the schematic. “–to improve the magnetic controls. But it would take me several hours to figure those enhancements out, and for some reason, I don’t think I have the time.”

Cody looked at the areas Tomas indicated. By the standards of today, those designs were pretty crude. Cody felt sure he could improve on them fairly easily, but he was going to need some source books that they had left at the lab. When he mentioned going to get them, Tomas suggested that Cody just ask him for whatever information he needed. If Tomas had looked at the correct pages, he would be able to remind Cody of what they said.

As Tomas finished his update of the rest of the circuits, Cody redesigned the areas Tomas had indicated. Several times he had to stop and ask for transistor specifications and parameters from Tomas, who ended up drawing several graphs and well as regurgitating a lot of information that he hadn’t understood the first time through.

Finally, Cody’s design was finished. He and Tomas rebuilt the last two sections according to Cody’s new design. Tomas had built the two controllers into two separate disks each about a half-inch thick and six inches in diameter. He attached these to a belt so that one disk lay on either hip. A small power pack was planted in the middle of his back, connected by wires to the disks.

Tomas grinned at Cody. “Now for the smoke test! Hope it fails!” This was a standard joke between the two of them — a smoke test was successful if there was smoke. He lifted slightly off the floor and remained, hovering. “Yee-hah!”


Suddenly, there came the sounds of feet tromping down the hall and raised voices, claiming to be the police, telling students to stay in their suites. Tomas ducked into his room and shut the door, just as somebody started pounding on the front door to their suite.

“Open up! This is the police!” Cody looked around. The tools were still on the table, along with some test equipment; he ducked into his room and came back with a partially completed electronic something or other and placed it on the table. Through force of long-standing habit, he had stashed his Red Rocket gear in a secret hiding spot before he turned in — behind a loose brick in the shower down the hall.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” he yelled. The pounding stopped, but someone yelled through the door to hurry it up.

When he opened the door, four police officers pushed their way into the room. They were city police, not campus police, and they were accompanied by two campus policemen who were apparently trying to calm them down, but not succeeding.

Cody was angry, and he let it show. “What’s going on? Why do you think you can–?” That was as far as he got.

“Shut up, kid. Your roommate was kidnapped last night from the hospital, and the doctor that reported it says it was you what took him! So you just keep your yap shut while we look around!”

“Kidnapped? C’mon, he was too sick to even get out of bed. I would have had to carry him. And what would I do with him? He was going to die in less than a few days. Why would I take my best friend away from the best care he could get?”

“Shaddup! Say, you don’t mind if we look around, do ya?” The four spread out to search, one going into each bedroom. They didn’t wait for his answer. “Thanks!”

A few minutes later, the four cops gathered once again in the common room of the two-bedroom suite. “Nobody here but the joker, Sarge. The big guy’s bed ain’t been used. Checked out the window, too; no fire escape in that room. And no way to climb up or down. The guy ain’t here!” One of the campus policemen went back into the hall to radio what was going on. The Chicago city cops were clearly annoyed about this, but they couldn’t do anything about it — the school and the city had an agreement about which police force could do what on campus, and they were already exceeding the limits in the agreement. The University of Chicago was a pretty powerful political force in the city, and the mayor was a U.C. grad. Any further provocation from them, and they might find themselves looking for work. But they weren’t about to leave without the last word.

“All right, kid, looks like you’re clean this time. But we’ll be watchin’ ya!” The four left the room and clumped back down the corridor, swearing at any students who stuck their heads out to watch.

The older of the campus cops turned to Cody. “Sorry, son. Sometimes there’s nothing we can do to keep them out of here. Look, your roommate disappeared from the hospital last night. From what they tell me of his condition, without medical treatment, he has probably died by now. I know this is rough on you; sorry we couldn’t keep them out of it.”

Cody reached out to shake the officer’s hand. “Thanks, Lieutenant! I appreciate you trying to protect me. I know you guys are underappreciated.”

“And underpaid!” the other officer interjected. They all smiled, and then the campus cops left, too. Cody sat down at the table and started studying Tomas’ schematics. A few minutes later, Tomas walked into the common room from his room.

“Well, the flying part still works!” he said with a grin as he slapped Cody on the back. “Who would’a thunk that somebody would kidnap a terminally ill radiation patient? I guess they have to explain my going missing somehow!”

Cody was uncomfortable with the whole situation. He had to admit that Tomas and Ned had called it right. Tomas’ recovery really had caused a brouhaha. He realized they couldn’t tell people the whole story, but he was also very uncomfortable about being in conflict with the police. Yet he didn’t see any way to clear it up right then. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Ned and Kris Quest at their hotel. The hotel had a Sunday all-you-can-eat brunch buffet, so the four decided to meet for breakfast.

There was a crowd of other residents of the dorm in the hall outside their door. Tomas didn’t want to walk through that crowd — even though they were all his friends, some of them would probably tell the campus police where he was. He didn’t like this secrets game. But until he and Cody could come up with a story, he was going to have to try to avoid people he knew.

As Cody left the room, everyone crowded around him, demanding to know what was going on. He told them the same story the police had told him, that Tomas was missing from the hospital, and they somehow thought he was involved. It took him a good twenty minutes before his friends would let him go, and the crowd around him continued to grow. Tomas slipped out the window and hoped nobody would see him. Eventually they joined up again at the hotel, which was on the north side of the city, miles from the university. A hearty breakfast was had by all, and with the help of the Barrs, they were able to come up with a pretty convincing cover story.


Shortly after World War II, John and Amitola Thomas had been assigned to Paris for six months to help set up diplomatic relations between the United States and the new provisional government of France led by General Charles de Gaulle. The Marie Curie Museum in Paris was a wonderful treat for Tomas, who had spent a lot of time there, studying the exhibits and even helping to catalog some of her personal papers. He had to learn to read Polish, but he was a quick study.

It seemed quite possible that he had read a formula of some kind, created by Madame Curie and overlooked since her death, that hadn’t meant anything at the time, but that he might have recalled recently, his subconscious returning it to the surface in an attempt to save his life. He could have passed the formulation on to Cody, who mixed up a batch for him. And then, when it worked, the two had been (rightly, as it turned out) paranoid about getting Tomas out of the hospital. The only problem was the formula itself. Cody would certainly have written it down, and almost certainly would not have thrown away his notes. And any formula they came up with had to be plausible, at least, because it would be scrutinized heavily as soon as they revealed it.

Fortunately, Ned was a genius in chemistry. He engaged his super-intellect for several minutes. “Sorry, I can’t quickly formulate a cure for radiation sickness,” he told them. “But we may not really need a cure, just an approximation. And I’ve got that.”

Cody and Ned headed for the Atomic Building and used Cody’s master key to get access to one of the chemical storerooms. Cody gathered together the chemicals, lab equipment, and other things Ned told him they would need. He carried them all into an empty lab, where he wrote down the formula Ned gave him, and started mixing it together.

He made notes every step of the way. There were some steps he didn’t understand, but Ned had him gather various reference books and open them to the correct pages, then gave him step-by-step instructions, which he again wrote down. When he was finished, the lab looked as if a very intelligent amateur chemist had used a bunch of reference books to develop a fairly simple procedure to create a fairly complex compound, and that this compound would be very useful in treating radiation sickness. Leaving the books and apparatus, they took the notes and the compound, which was in a liquid form, and flew back to join Kris and Tomas.

“It’s not a cure, but it is a useful medicine.” Ned explained the rest of his plan. “Here’s what should happen next. You two go to the airport and meet Tomas’ folks. There may be police looking for Tomas, but I doubt if they will bother the son of the top ambassador in the State Department. You may have to give the police the cover story, then you guys should all go to the hospital to complain to the director about the bogus kidnapping charge. Show him the signed release, if you need to. He’ll want some assurances that Tomas is well and that the hospital won’t be sued. Arrange a deal with him — give him the formula and the notes in exchange for the university and the hospital leaving Tomas alone. Get it in writing! Cody, you can tell him your suspicion that some mystical power is involved and point out the many coincidences you noted. Mystical powers have interfered in human affairs often enough that, though unlikely, it still can’t be discounted out of hand.

“The hospital can announce that they have uncovered a secret formula developed by Madame Curie, and they’ll get lots of good publicity, and another story will be added to her legend. If they never uncover the formula in her papers, everyone will just assume it got lost in the last few years. Tomas, you may be sort of a celebrity for the next few days, but it will die down.”

“So what do we do with this?” Cody held up the beaker.

“Drink it?” Ned suggested. Everyone laughed. “Don’t laugh!” he quickly responded. “While this stuff wouldn’t have actually cured Tomas, I predict it will almost immediately become part of the standard treatment for radiation overdose! Everything in it was selected to help a human body recover from radiation — there are a variety of electrolytes, a moderate pain reliever, chemicals to stimulate the healing process, anti-inflammatory agents, and a variety of vitamins, nutrients, and proteins that a body would need in order to restore damaged tissues.”

Those around him still looked dubious. Ned was a little peeved that nobody appeared to believe him, so he took the beaker from Cody and knocked it back, drinking the whole thing in three big gulps. “After all, I am a genius!” he said, a little annoyance showing in his tone.

He quickly opened the refrigerator and pulled out a soda. “Why do things that are good for you always taste so awful?”

Kris smiled at him sweetly. “It’s because they are usually created by men, dear! It’s part of the male psyche, I think. Men seem to feel that if something is easy, it must be wrong.” She and Ned had had this argument before, and he didn’t really want to continue it now.

Tomas was a little uncomfortable. “Everyone comes out of this winning except you, Ned. Why, if you patented this medicine, you could get richer, but you’re giving it up for nothing!”

“Not for nothing, Tomas. I’m giving it up to protect our secret identities — and it’s well worth it. Besides, if we really wanted to be richer, I could easily patent some new developments. But we’ve never really been interested in being richer – we never expected to be rich in the first place!” Kris looked at him with a funny look, but Ned didn’t see it. Cody figured it was a good time to keep silent.

Tomas stood up. “Hey, anyone else want a soda?” He took a step toward the fridge, and bounced about three feet off the floor. He flailed about for something to grab on to, and managed to grasp one of the shelves on the bookcase. The wood splintered in his grasp. He allowed himself to fall to the floor, then lay still. “Wow! What’s wrong with me?”

Ned smiled. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you. You forgot that this drug also gives you super-powers. Your strength and agility are being increased significantly, and it will take you a little time to regain your coordination. You should have seen me — I smashed a table and shoved my dresser through a wall before I figured out what was going on! Here, let me and Kris give you a hand.”

They helped him up, guiding and supporting him as he slowly walked around the room. His steps became increasingly more steady, and he soon regained his confidence.

“Say, you know it’s time to go to the airport?” Cody remarked. So far, he figured, they had handled all the crises that had faced them. If he could get through this last ordeal, and then events proceeded as Ned predicted, he could get back to his normal life. Although he had an idea that normal might have a different meaning for him soon.

The meeting at the airport was much simpler than Cody had imagined. Tomas met his folks at the gate, and, once they got over their disbelief, their joy at seeing him was almost beyond description. After that, things went pretty much as predicted by Ned. The biggest change for Tomas was that he felt he had to quit the boxing team. With his new powers, it wasn’t really fair. He told everyone that his health was still fragile. This made him unpopular for a while, but eventually people got over it.

And life went on pretty much as before… at least for a while…