Mercury Man Read online

  “Of course I would, Grandpa. It would be terrorists, though, or neo-Nazis. This is so … out of date.”

  “That’s the point, kid! It’s historical. And don’t qualify everything to death! Some things are best taken in a gulp.”

  Bad-tasting things, Tom wanted to say, but he knew better than to push his grandfather too far.

  “So it’s the date that makes these valuable, right, Grandpa? And the mint condition?”

  “It’s all that, Tom, but it’s something else. You see, most comics were created in Metropolis itself, in the original Gotham City. You know what I mean? New York cornered the market in this field like it did for almost everything. But there were some exceptions. Like Mercury Man. You know where Mercury Man was created and printed? You’ll never guess, I’ll wager that.”

  “I don’t know. L.A., maybe?”

  Jack harrumphed mightily and shook his head. “Not a chance! In fact, these little babies were made right here in West Hope. Yes, sir! They were a crazy dream on the part of one of our local characters, a schoolteacher of mine, he was, by name of Marvin Cormer.”

  “Wow! That is amazing.”

  Tom was thumbing carefully through the comic. Sure enough, even a few of the ads had West Hope addresses. It was almost unheard of.

  “This place wasn’t always the back of beyond, you know. It had signs of spunk, once. Marvin was a bright guy and a good artist who got fed up with school teaching, and since he knew a lot about the Greek and Roman myths he decided to try to launch his own comic, based on the god Mercury. As you can see for yourself, the product was very good. DC Comics got wind of it and was debating whether to sue him or buy him out when he was drafted. After that the whole thing went on hold, only Marvin didn’t come back; he was killed at the Battle of the Bulge.”

  “And that was the end of Mercury Man Comics.”

  “That was it, except that I remembered these issues. As a teenager I was stupid enough to trade mine away and it’s taken me decades to find them again. I’ll never sell them now, not if I starve because of it. They’ll be with me when I die, I can tell you.”

  “I don’t know if I feel that way about anything, Grandpa.”

  Jack shot him a piercing glance. “Time for some pie, I guess. You can look at the comics, but keep them away from the food and drink.”

  While his grandfather set the table, Tom flipped through the comics. They were very slick, but with a few interesting touches, places where the hero broke out of his frame and smashed a grinning spy with a fist that was larger than life. At the same time, his adventures seemed pretty familiar. After saving the Panama Canal from a Japanese assault team, he was on his way to prevent a super-U-boat attack on the Statue of Liberty.

  Mercury Man’s most formidable enemy was Dr. Dark, a hideously evil genius whose life had changed for the worse after he’d been scarred by the experimental chemicals he worked with. Mercury Man wasn’t completely invincible — none of the superheroes was. In one adventure Dr. Dark learned that Mercury Man could be made helpless by dousing him with mercury. Luckily, as they were about to unmask the helpless hero, Mercury Man’s sidekick, Tom Strong — a high school kid whose life Mercury Man had once saved — arrived to rescue him.

  “Want gravy with your pie?” Jack called out.

  “Sure,” Tom managed to reply, although his attention had been suddenly caught by a page of ads at the back of one of the comics.

  “SEND AWAY FOR MERCURY MAN’S OWN RING,” one of the grubby boxed-in notices read. It pictured a boy, bent over and staring at his own hand. “WITH THE MERCURY MIRROR HIDDEN IN THIS RING YOU’LL BE ABLE TO FOOL YOUR FRIENDS. USE IT TO SEE BEHIND YOU. HIDE MESSAGES INSIDE. LIKE MERCURY MAN, YOU’LL FIND A THOUSAND USES FOR THIS HANDSOME RING. JUST SEND THIS COUPON WITH 25 CENTS AND WE’LL RUSH YOUR OWN PERSONAL MERCURY RING. MONEY BACK GUARANTEE!”

  Tom shook his head and smiled. But he noticed that the ad gave a local address: Mercury Enterprises, Second Floor, 221 Harbour Street, West Hope.

  Harbour Street — he knew where that was all right.

  “OK, so sit down and let’s eat!” Jack said.

  He stood up quickly. No, it was ridiculous.

  “I told you those comics were good,” Jack said. “It’s got hold of you, I see, despite your cynical ways. What’s that you’re looking at like a zombie there?”

  Tom closed the comic quickly and moved to the table. “Nothing, Grandpa. Let’s eat.”

  “Careful now. We’ll just put my treasures over here on the table. Don’t want them all splattered with ketchup and Orangina.”

  They finished the pie quickly and continued with ice cream and iced coffee. His grandfather lit up a pipe and offered to put on Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but Tom explained that he couldn’t stay that long. His mother would expect him to be there when she got back from work.

  “You know you said Marvin what’s-his-name was killed at the Battle of the Bulge, Grandpa?”

  “Marvin Cormer, yeah, damn shame. I think he could have made it with Mercury Man. Of course the big companies would have bought him out, or he would have set up shop somewhere else, but he might have put this place on the map, too — you never know. Look how well the computer companies are doing now. Oh well, times change.”

  “What happened to his equipment and stuff after he died?”

  “No idea. He had a wife, but she didn’t follow up on any of it. Married the operator of the amusement park right next door — fella by the name of Daniel — an oddball, I guess. Anyway, she died and her husband still lives in the old Mercury House. Can you believe it? The guy never moved! The park’s been shut down for years, though. One of the computer companies is trying to buy him out, I hear, but Daniel has some crazy idea that the dump is worth big money. If he’s not careful the city will declare it a nuisance or something and he’ll practically have to give it away.”

  “That isn’t Harbour Street, near Boone Jetty?”

  “Sure. Just down from Fabricon, the squeaky clean computer folks. Hang on, will you? This cheap tobacco stinks. I’ve got to find my Sobranie.” Jack hustled the lunch plates into the sink and left the room.

  Suddenly Tom had an idea: what would happen if he sent away for one of the Mercury Man rings? He knew it was ridiculous, and he wouldn’t dare tell his grandfather, who would roar with laughter. But the notion had taken hold of him, and it teased and tempted him for no reason he could think of.

  He jumped for the pen on the counter, tore off a piece of paper roll, and scribbled down the Harbour Street address of Mercury Man Comics.

  He knew if he sent away he would just be wasting a stamp and the post office might not even send his letter back. Or else it would go to the wrong address, or to the old man in the amusement park, who would probably throw it away. But Tom didn’t care, because the idea had suddenly taken hold of him that if he sent to the old address he might find a portal that led into the past!

  He knew all about portals — or portholes, as he liked to call them — crossing points where you could go from one world to another. Of course they were just in stories; you wouldn’t come across them, except as black holes or some weird aspect of physics. Even so, if they existed in physics they might exist in the world around him, even though no one had ever found one.

  Maybe the only way you could find one would be to tap into the right time warp. Without that, you couldn’t do a thing. And how would you know if the warp was there unless you tried?

  He shoved the scribbled paper into his pocket. I must be losing my mind, he thought.

  Some mumbling and groaning preceded his grandfather’s return to the kitchen.

  “Damn it all, where the hell’s the Sobranie got to!”

  “Want me to go get you some, Grandpa?”

  Jack laughed. “Thanks, but you’d have to walk pretty far to get a tin of that stuff.”

  Tom helped his grandfather wash up the lunch dishes. In the middle of this there was a knocking at the door — one of the old women own
ers had come about some problem. He heard Jack joking with her in the background. Carefully wiping his wet hand on his cut-offs Tom pulled out the scrap of paper and read the address.

  Harbour Street. The old amusement park. And Fabricon Computers. An up-and-coming firm, people said, and its motto was Read the Future in Us. Tom winced. He felt suddenly ashamed of his crazy notions, of his thoughts of the past and time warps. With a sigh mostly of relief he crumpled up the paper and threw it into the garbage.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Weird Kids

  When he got back to the apartment Tom found a note pinned to the door. It was from his friend Bim Bavasi.

  “Pete told me he got a job,” it said. “I need the money and I came back to check it out. Can’t spend the whole time shovelling cow dung, can I? See you later.”

  Tom smiled, but at the same time he was a bit puzzled. Bim back in the city? Complaining about being at his uncle’s farm? That didn’t make sense at all. His uncle didn’t make him work that hard and there was swimming and fishing and shooting squirrels, and, above all, an escape from the heat. There was nothing to do in the city that you couldn’t do any time. Bim must have come back because someone was pressuring him — his dad, maybe — to earn some money.

  Tom had no real sense of what it would be like to have a dad around. Sometimes when he thought of his own dad taking off like he did, he felt as if he could kill him. But there were times — when he felt free and easy and content — that he was glad not to have anyone around to push him. He saw how some dads leaned on their kids, making life hell over nothing, and he was glad to be out of it, although he knew it made things hard for his mother.

  Tom stripped off his shirt, went into the bathroom, and washed his face with cold water. The Mercury Man comics and the magic ring came into his mind. He had thrown away the piece of paper but he remembered the address. Frowning at his own image in the mirror, he thought, What’s the point of having blue eyes with dark hair? He rubbed his cheeks with his fingertips, checking the acne scars from his bad time, searching for the stubble that never seemed to come. Bim, who was eighteen, was shaving already, making jokes about Tom’s baby face. And Tom was always being taken for younger than he was. Even the new kids at Blanchard High looked older than he did.

  He stalked out of the bathroom and his eye caught the little table that held the telephone and his mother’s notepaper.

  Get it over with, a voice from within said. Who’s going to know? If you want to do it, go ahead!

  Tom hesitated, then with a sigh he sat down at the table and began to write out the necessary words: “Please send one Mercury Man Magic Ring. I enclose 25 cents. Yours sincerely, Tom Blake.”

  He wrote his address on it, stuck a quarter to a piece of cardboard with Scotch Tape, and found an envelope. He wrote the Harbour Street address on it and stuck on a stamp. Retrieving one of the Heavy Metal magazines from the floor, he carefully hid the letter in it.

  If there’s a porthole, I’ll find it, he told himself. He smiled at his own obsession. Maybe he didn’t really believe there were such things as portholes, but the idea fascinated him, and the game of trying to find one was irresistible. Tom loved the thrill of pretending. He remembered a few weeks before in the city park, throwing a stone at a tree trunk. If the stone doesn’t hit the trunk I’ll die tomorrow, he had told himself. My mother will die. Terrorists will take over the world. The planet will be hit by a huge meteor. He didn’t believe any of this, but there was a fascination in pretending. It invested the act of throwing the stone with huge excitement. The throw suddenly took on an awesome significance and put him in touch with supreme power. He was transported to the world of the Greek gods, powers who could change human lives by a single gesture and who made up their own rules about the universe. (When the stone missed, he decided on a best two out of three — a godlike privilege.)

  In the tiny kitchen he began to wash up the lunch dishes. This was one of his jobs on his days off. Take out the garbage, sweep the floor, keep the kitchen in decent order — his mother wasn’t very demanding. Karen Blake worked five days a week, got home at six, and made dinner for them both. On many days she used the microwave, bringing something from the supermarket, but sometimes she spent an hour doing the cooking. Tom didn’t like those times — he was happier with the microwave food — and she was always disappointed when he got impatient or disliked what she fixed for him.

  They got on pretty well, although they sometimes had problems. She was always complaining that he never talked to her, but what was he going to talk about? She wouldn’t want to hear jokes about sex or any filthy story — which is what the guys passed around — and she wasn’t interested in the movies he watched, or in the science fiction books he read. There wasn’t much left to get into, really, although they sometimes had talks about his “plans.”

  “Do you have any plans, Tom?” she would ask, meaning what did he want to be when he was thirty-five, but of course he had no idea.

  He was hoping that Grandpa wasn’t kidding, that he really had the money to pay for college or university. Of course he didn’t know what he wanted to study — it was too soon for that. And there were still some roadblocks up ahead — calculus and economics, for example.

  The thought of calculus made him feel a little sick, so he was glad when the phone rang.

  “Hi, it’s Pete,” the voice said. Tom perked up. He and Pete played pool, and he waited for the usual “Wanta go for it?” It didn’t come, though. Pete had something else on his mind.

  “I got a new job,” Pete told him. “Bim might get one, too.”

  “I can’t believe he came back to the city,” Tom said. “Where are all these jobs coming from? A new McDonald’s?”

  “Are you kidding? Those are joe jobs. Naw, this is with Fabricon. Haven’t you heard? They’re hiring all sorts of kids. Steady work, discounts on computers. It’s the greatest. You should go for it — all you have to do is call them.”

  “I can’t believe this. Don’t you remember when we tried them at the beginning of the summer? They practically threw us out. They said they only hired through the work-study program. They weren’t even friendly.”

  “Everything’s changed. They’re looking for high school students now. Not only the nerds — everybody. You should quit that smelly diner and get over there.”

  “I can’t do that. They gave me the job because my grandpa asked them to. I can’t just walk out on them.”

  “Give them two weeks’ notice.”

  “Naw. … So are we going to a movie tonight?”

  “Can’t. Gotta go over to Fabricon. There’s a presentation. Getting to know the firm. I have to take Bim. Why don’t you come? You could get a job. You’re crazy to wash dishes in that dump when you can be at Fabricon.”

  “I told you, I can’t. Hey, I hear my mum. Gotta go now. See you tomorrow, Pete.”

  Tom swung the phone down and made a dash for the kitchen. He’d left the water running in the sink and it was nearly overflowing. He cleaned out the slops, and as the water swooshed away, leaving a pile of half-clean dishes, he heard the door open and his mother call his name.

  “Hi, Tommy, you here? I’ve got someone with me tonight.”

  Tom stiffened. He turned off the water, ran his hands across a towel, and almost vaulted out of the tiny kitchen.

  There stood his mother, smiling uneasily, and beside her, to his dismay, he saw the stocky, bearded figure of Chuck Reichert, the assistant manager of the A&P store where she worked.

  Reichert, despite his loosened tie and his rolled-up sleeves, looked uncomfortable and seemed to be sweating heavily. He cradled his sports jacket in one arm and glanced around the untidy room.

  “Hi, guy,” he said, not looking straight at Tom. Reichert, Tom noticed, seemed to have an aversion to doing that, just as he had an aversion to using people’s names. Instead, he favoured impersonal substitutions: it was “Hi, guy!” or “Right, love!” or “Sure, pal!” as the occasion might warran
t. A man in his mid-thirties or early forties — about his mother’s age — he had a beer belly and wore flashy ties. Tom hated to come too close to Chuck Reichert because his aftershave smelled like insect repellent.

  “We’re going to have a bite to eat, then Chuck and I are going bowling,” his mother told him. “I brought you a triple-cheese pizza and some Orangina. I guess you’re going to a movie, are you?”

  “Good way to beat the heat,” Chuck called out. He had tossed his jacket on an armchair and was already in the kitchen, rattling around in the fridge in search of a beer.

  “Maybe. I was at Grandpa’s all afternoon and I ate a ton,” Tom lied. “If you don’t need me I’ll go and play some pool with Pete. He just called me.”

  Tom had learned that white lies sounded better if you spiced them with a bit of truth. He would have loved the pizza but there was no way he was going to hang around the apartment with Chuck Reichert there. He could walk around for a while, and when they took off for bowling he’d come back and eat in peace.

  “You’re going to put a shirt on, I hope,” his mother said. She looked at him intently, as if she was trying to read his mind — it was a look he knew, and it always made him feel uncomfortable.

  “Sure.”

  He retreated into his room, grabbed a T-shirt from a peg, and slipped it on.

  “How’s Grandpa?” his mother called out. Then: “Oh, you didn’t even finish the dishes!” She was already in the kitchen, tearing open parcels and shifting pots and pans. He mumbled an excuse and moved back into the living room, where Reichert had settled down with a beer. He was watching the television news and scooping handfuls of chips from a bowl.

  “Mets losing again,” he announced. “Why don’t they get their act together?”

  “See you later, Mom,” Tom said. “Sorry about the cleanup.” He could see her in the kitchen, busily making their dinner while Reichert flipped channels and munched.

  She turned quickly and came to him. His mother was tall and slender, and she was pretty for her age, he knew. Her dark hair was stylishly cut and, as Grandpa Sandalls boasted, she had “poems instead of eyes.” Tom noticed that she looked nervous and tired, however — her face was unusually pale and her greenish eyes dark-circled. He couldn’t understand why she would waste her limited energy on a guy like Reichert.