The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination Part 30

They're a sweet bunch, raw and melancholy. As always, there's got to be one a.s.shole in the crowd, though. A barker named Niall. A pigeon-chested guy with a pencil moustache and a waist like a fas.h.i.+on model. His c.r.a.ppy yellow-and-white striped suit is cut a size too small, even for him. He makes a snide remark about my "swarthy, and exceptionally stout" personage in a smarmy English accent. He tells Cleo to "watch out, mate, she appears as if she could beat you out of a job." I'm relieved and grateful when Lila glares and he slinks off to his quarters.

As the group drifts apart, Lila grabs my arm and says to come with her back to the trailer. I'm privately questioning the wisdom of this, because I've never had another woman come on to me before, and more importantly, there's the Doctor to consider. He keeps strange hours. There's no telling what mood he's in. I might be punished for leaving the house without permission. But I'm in a perverse mood so I follow her.

We're surrounded by farmland and it's extra dark on account of it being a moonless night, which Lila tells me is perfect for stargazing. She says the constellation she's been monitoring is tricky to capture due to its distance. Light pollution only adds to the degree of difficulty. She spends a few minutes adjusting the rig and muttering to herself, and I steady her elbow as she sways on unsteady legs.

Finally, she says, "Okay, all right, here we go. I'm getting d.a.m.ned good at this- you have no idea how hard it is to nail down the Serpens galaxy." She guides my eye to the viewfinder and makes adjustments as I describe what I see, which at first isn't much but black s.p.a.ce punctuated by random lights.

Then, "Oh. It's . . . beautiful." And it is beautiful, an impossibly remote field of stars veiled in clouds of dust and gas, and at its heart, a wavering flame that illuminates from the inside out, like fire s.h.i.+ning through a smoky gla.s.s. I know it's old, old. Older even than my ancestors who scrabbled and clawed in the earliest days on this rock.

"Have you used a telescope before?"

"No," I say, slightly embarra.s.sed that Dr. Kob often visits the Deer Mountain Observatory just a few miles from our house and yet I've never once asked to tag along.

"Don't blink," she says. "Like my Pa used to say, 'You gotta hold your jaw just right' when he taught me how to fire his deer gun. You blink, NCG 6118 will go poof and you might not ever find her again."

"How do you find her again?" I don't need Lila to explain her fascination with the constellation, her fear of losing it forever. Its austere beauty stirs something cold in my breast.

"I memorized her position. Also, I've got a chart with the coordinates and the Dreyer description. Doesn't make it easy, though."

"You wrote it down? Where?"

"It's in my stuff. In my suitcase."

"I'd love to see it," I say.

"Yeah? Why? This some kind of trick to get me cozy in my trailer?"

I wrestle my gaze from the telescope and take her small hand in mine. "Something like that."

"Man alive, I'd love to see it through a real telescope."

I think about the mega-powerful telescope owned by the Redfield Observatory and tremble. "What about your family? Couldn't your dad pull a few strings?"

"Yeah, if I hadn't left him behind for all this." She laughs. "I haven't spoken to him in . . . a while."

"Father-daughter relations.h.i.+ps are the worst," I say.

We pack it in and meander to her trailer. She shares it with a couple of other girls, but one missed the trip, and the other stays with a boyfriend when she's in town. Nothing happens. We have a couple of Southern Comfort nightcaps. Then she falls asleep on her dumpy couch. After she's snoring, I rummage through her bags and find the astronomical charts she's gathered and stick the one I need into my pocket next to the cold, lethal smoothness of the prod. I smooch Lila's furry cheek on my way out the door.

The storm broadsides the estate an hour or so before dark.

The Doctor has sent word that I'm to report to the laboratory at once. He requires me at the crank that revs up the dynamo. Like all his gadgets, the crank is unwieldy and impractical and n.o.body else is physically strong enough to make it turn with sufficient speed. The combination of my efforts and the electrical storm are crucial one-two punches in the pursuit of scientific progress. To night's the night he jump-starts yet another patchwork corpse, and maybe this time it'll work and he'll snag the n.o.bel and show his lamentably deceased dad who the real scientist is in the family.

At the moment, I'm on the front porch, standing beneath the awning, goggling at nature's wrath. Thin, jagged bolts of lightning splinter in white hot strokes that repeat every fifteen to twenty seconds. Wind and rain crash upon the eaves like an avalanche. By some confluence of atmospheric forces, the air dims and reddens as the grounds have been transmogrified into the soundstage of a Martian epic. I swing my hand back and forth, fascinated at how it seems to float and multiply as it drags through the b.l.o.o.d.y light. I skip from the sheltering eaves toward the middle of the driveway, feigning carefree abandon as I throw my hands skyward and tilt my face so water streams from it. The reality is, the strikes are marching ever closer and I want to get the h.e.l.l clear of the house.

Pelt sits in a rocker by the rail of the third-floor balcony. He strikes a match on the sole of his cowboy boot and lights one of his nasty hand-rolled cigarettes I can smell from a hundred yards away. He eyes me with the cold intensity of a raptor studying a mouse and I wonder if his instincts are actually that d.a.m.ned sharp. Could he really know? The notion chills me in a way the deluge can't.

A second later none of that matters. Lightning flares directly overhead, and I feel in my bones that this is it, this bolt has been drawn into the array. And man, oh, man, had I screwed that over big-time earlier in the day. I clap my hand over my eyes. The blue-white flash stabs through the cracks between my fingers. The top of the house explodes and the effect is epic beyond my fondest dreams. The concussion sits me down, hard, as all the windows on this side of the building shatter. Fiery chunks of wood, gla.s.s, and stone arc upward and outward in a ring. Debris crashes to earth in the gardens, is catapulted among the waving treetops. It's glorious.

The house remains upright, although minus a substantial portion of the third story. Smoke pours down the sides of the building, thick and black, and chivvied by blasts of wind; it roils across the muddy yard and acres of lawn, lowering a h.e.l.lish, apocalyptic shroud over the works. I'm on my feet again and primed for violence. Pelt will be coming for me. Except, the sly b.a.s.t.a.r.d's vanished- his left boot is stuck in the mud near the front steps. I hope against hope he's dead. Servants stumble through the smoke, clutching each other. Their quarters occupy the ground floor, so I doubt any got caught in the explosion. This is their lucky day. None of them glance at me as they file past, moaning and sobbing like a chain of ghosts.

I have to be sure. The rain kills the worst of the flames, snuffs them before they can create an inferno. The grand staircase is in sorry shape. Several steps are gone. I hopscotch my way onward and upward while lightning flashes through the giant hole in the ceiling. Happily, the laboratory, its various sinister machines, have been obliterated. Upon closer inspection, I spy the Doctor's mangled and gruesomely mutilated person fallen through the floor where it lies pinned beneath a shattered beam. His body is burnt and crushed. He's quite mindless in his agonies, shrieking for his dead parents and the friends he doesn't have.

Yeah, I should finish the job. That's the smart move. Alas, alack, I'm too melodramatic to take the easy way out.

The Doctor keeps a machine in the cellar. When I'm feeling blue I sneak down and bathe in its unearthly glow. It kicks mad-scientist old school; a ma.s.s of bulbs and monster transistors, Tesla coils, exposed circuitry, and cables as thick as pythons going every which way. At the heart of this '50s gadgetry is a bubble of gla.s.s with an upright table for a pa.s.senger. Allegedly the bubble s.h.i.+fts through time and s.p.a.ce. Dr. Kob's grandfather built the prototype in 1879, powered it via lightning stored in an array of crude batteries. The new model still runs on deep cycle batteries Dr. Kob Jr. scavenged from backhoes and bulldozers.

The main reason the Master traps lightning to energize his devices is because they suck so much juice the electric bill would draw prying eyes sooner rather than later. There's a backup diesel generator gathering dust for a true emergency. The Doctor is sentimental about his methods, obsessed with the holistic nature of the process. He won't drive or fly, won't operate a computer, not even a typewriter. He scratches in his voluminous journals with quill and ink. In the mansion, every lamp runs on kerosene; the stoves and furnaces, coal; our black and white televisions and radios, batteries. We're like an evil alternate universe version of the Amish.

The T&S machine holds special significance for me, because that's the device of my genesis, my cradle and incubator. Dr. Kob reached back into the great dark heart of prehistory to pluck an egg from my mother's womb and fertilized it with G.o.d knows what. He effected a few cosmetic alterations to bring me marginally in line with the latest iteration of the species, dressed me up like a real girl, taught me to walk and talk and hold a spoon. He forbade my partaking in any sort of significant education- apparently he couldn't reconcile his anthropological interest with his fear that I might become too smart for his health. Indeed, I'm certain if he ever had the slightest inkling of my true intellectual capacity, he'd have sent Pelt to slit my throat in the night.

However, I learned to read, no thanks to him. Poor dearly departed Goldilocks took care of that on the sly. I was ripping through college level lit by the tender age of fourteen. Eliza Doolittle, eat your heart out.

The procedure hasn't been without unexpected complications, however. You wouldn't believe my psychedelic dreams, and if I'm ever caught and placed on trial for crimes against humanity, I'll get an insanity pa.s.s on the descriptions alone. genetic memory? I dunno; all I know is that in dreams I go for a ride on an astral carpet to a high desert wasteland that spreads under a wide carnivorous sky. The tribe kills with rocks and clubs; it a.s.sembles in caves and lays its feasts upon the dirt. They haven't invented fire, thus meat and skin is crushed and smeared on rocks, like fingerpaint and wet clay. The brutes, my people, see my apparition, doubtless grotesque in its familiarity, and hoot in alarm and outrage, jam-red mouths agape. Then, the large males, the killers, snarl and s.n.a.t.c.h up their clubs and their stones, and hop toward me with murder on their minds.

Nine times out of ten, I jerk into wakefulness, alone in my dingy cell with the television screen full of snow. The tenth time out of ten, I come to in a field, naked and covered in scabs of blood, with no memory but the dream memories.

Even the Doctor isn't quite mad enough to do what I've done. He's a lunatic, yes indeed. He's also a survivor. Better than most, he understands that one screws with the infinite at one's own peril. I'm sure the meticulously recorded results of those Victorian experiments with peasantry cooled his jets.

I, on the other hand, am a desperate sort.

Those nights the good Doctor and his toady spent drunk off their a.s.ses, I took the T&S Machine for joyrides. The calibrations weren't difficult- I simply plugged in the various sequences from Doctor Kob's logs. The wild part is, the machine goes forward and back and to any physical location in the universe, provided one has the coordinates. The places I've gone, weirder and more frightening than those Technicolor nightmares.

After Doctor Kob and Pelt murder me in that squalid alley, I give them a moment to wonder at my dying words. But it's only a possible me, a shadow. Travelers exist in duplicate during collocation. It's complicated; suffice to say, each of us unique snowflakes, aren't. We exist as a plurality. That old saw about meeting yourself . . . it's only kinda true. The universe didn't unravel when I skipped ahead and met one of my future selves, an inveterate alcoholic and aimless wanderer, one bound to run afoul of Dr. Kob's plots of revenge. If she's anything like me (ha-ha!), she won't mind making the sacrifice to even the score.

Pelt knows something's wrong, but even as he turns I tap him with the prod and he's gone in a belch of gas and flame. The Doctor takes it in stride. He's a hobbled sh.e.l.l of a man, yet arrogant as ever. He commands me to drop the weapon and submit to my well-deserved punishment. I slug him and he falls unconscious. That feels so good, I've revisited the moment a dozen times.

This is how it ends for Daddy dearest: I strap him into the machine and send him to the land of my ancestors, and once he's evaporated into the abyss of Time I take an axe to the machine. I've gotten my kicks. That con science I've been incubating stings like h.e.l.l. Who knows what havoc I might wreak on material existence were I to keep d.i.c.king around with the timestream.

I sent the Doctor with a mint copy of Frankenstein, a dozen bottles of wine, and the prod with a full charge. It's the least I could do. The very least.

I track the Banning Circus to a show in Wenatchee. The owner, the great-great-grandson of Ezra Banning, is skeptical when I apply for the strongman job. He's got a strongman, he says, and I say I know. I also know his guy is getting long in the tooth and suffers from asthma, or emphysema, or what ever. Banning tells me to hit the bricks, he's a busy man, blah, blah. I walk over to the lion cage and tear the door off its hinges- naturally, I try to make it look casual, but the effort does me in for the day. The owner picks up his jaw. He sends one of his flunkies to break the news to poor Cleo. He doesn't even mind that it takes Armand the better part of two days and the a.s.sistance of local animal control to corral their lion and get him into his cage.

I knock on Lila's trailer door. A monster storm cloud is ma.s.sing in the north and that could be good or bad. It certainly sets the scene. My hair is standing on end. Lila screams and throws her arms around me. She's crying a little and there's snot in her beard.

"Hey, this is for you," I say and give her a small wooden coffer I bought off a guy at a garage sale where I also scored some dumbbells to get in shape for my strongman-strongperson-audition.

"What is it?" She lifts the lid and gasps. An eerie golden light plays over her face.

"Stardust."

"Stardust?"

"I hope it's not radioactive. Maybe we should get a Geiger counter."

"You're yanking my chain."

I smile. "Never happen."

"Well . . . my G.o.d. Look at this. Where . . . ?"

I take the folded, spindled, and mutilated piece of paper with the Dreyer entry for galaxy N1168 from my pocket and give it to her. Lightning parts the red sky like a cleaver. It reflects twin novas in her eyes. I grasp her free hand and press it against my heart.

Three, two, one. Boom.

Laird Barron is the author many short stories, many of which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in anthologies such as Inferno, Black Wings, Haunted Legends, Lovecraft Unbound, and Supernatural Noir. Much of his short work has been collected in the volumes The Imago Sequence and Occultation, both of which won the s.h.i.+rley Jackson Award for best collection. His work has also been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. His first novel, The Croning, recently came out from Night Shade Books.

Madness isn't limited to the pract.i.tioners of hard science. Although the most infamous of crazed creations have sprung from the brains of scientists dabbling in physics, chemistry, or biotechnology, our next tale draws on a far more nefarious branch of intellect: political science.

political scientists have a bit of a bad name. The lobbyists and a.n.a.lysts stalking the halls of the Senate and House are spurned by voters and legislators alike. Most people see them as manipulative schemers, twisting the power structure of the nation for their own benefit. For many, that scorn is probably undeserved, but the unnamed narrator of our next story lives up to that reputation and then some. He has great plans for the people of the North American continent- plans so large, they will shake the entire world.

The author says that this story was inspired by the events that led to his becoming the legislative director for a U.S. congressman and later political positions, and spending nearly twenty years in politics, government, and Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. So he speaks from a lifetime of experience in the twisted webs of political scientists.

Which makes you wonder: Just how fictional is this story?

A MORE PERFECT UNION.

L. E. MODESITT, JR.

Too many historians claim all the geniuses were mad, especially the ones who understood politics as an engineer understands structures, or a scientist understands his specialty. The key is to understand their genius and not fall prey to the slurs on their abilities. How do you think Hitler and Goebbels captured the heart of Germany, or Lenin Rus sia, or Rasputin the Czar's family, or Bush the younger and Cheney capitalist America, or Lester the North American Union or . . . ? The list is as long as history, and everyone dismisses each instance as an individual aberration, a political situation unique to that nation and time. And too many people focus on only the negative instances, unlike the positive examples, such as the American planters or development of the present-day NAU. But I digress. To understand how it all happened, it's necessary to go back a few years . . .

I'd recently finished the last oral examinations on my dissertation from one of the very well-known universities of North America and been granted the relatively worthless Ph.D. in political Science, despite the opposition of the most senior member of the PoliSci faculty. A "chance encounter" of a- shall we say- pa.s.sionate nature, he had with a young lady acquaintance of mine removed that obstacle. Shortly after that fortunate resolution I first encountered William Lester.

As part of my research, I'd become a member of the Conservative Populist party, and even served as a ward committee-person for Plymouth- not Ma.s.sachusetts, but another Plymouth. Being the ward's t.i.tular head for the party was a position few wanted, especially when that year's elections were only for local offices and for the regional representatives to the North American Union, then far more of a coordinating body than what it later became, thanks in large part to my highly successful and unacknowledged (as well as unappreciated) efforts.

On that Tuesday night in 2067, only a few handfuls of voters attended the ward caucus to be addressed by two of the candidates for the NAU a.s.sembly. The first candidate was Johnstone Byron III, the youngest son of the Byron family of ZipZap fame and fortune, and the second was one William Lester, barely five years older than I was at the time, but already working on his second billion. Lester was a perfect 198 centimeters, tall enough to stand out amid the rabble, but not tall enough to be thought a less-than-intelligent athlete. His father had been a builder who'd lost almost everything in the successive American financial meltdowns in the early part of the century, and Lester could claim to be a self-made man from his foresight in purchasing northern Saskatchewan marshes and swamplands before the acceleration of global warming created a land-run. He sold out before the subsequent crash, retaining some holdings in the event of the inevitable resurgence that would come with the next wave of global warming, when the last lingering benefits- and profits- of cap-and-trade were exhausted.

Lester's voice was deep and mellifluous. His face was pleasant, with a touch of authority beyond the grown-up-boy-from-next-door image he cultivated, and his chin was just square enough to proclaim solidity, but not pigheadedness. His logic was impeccable when he addressed the thirty-odd folks with little else to do on a Tuesday night . . . and that was the problem. While he understood finance, he clearly didn't comprehend certain aspects of motivating people to tap the touchscreen next to his name in the voting booth. Part of that, I later learned, was because he'd always dealt with people who actually cared about the intricacies of systems such as politics and business, rather than, put politely, the general public.

So immediately after he finished speaking, I went out on the already half-sawed-off and spruce-beetle-killed limb. From that precarious perch, I addressed the handful of ConPoppers still in the multipurpose room of the west Plymouth Library. "My friends, we've heard from both of these fine candidates- the distinguished and noted scion of fame and fortune, the most highly educated and multiply-degreed, the honorable Johnstone Byron, the third . . . and the hard-working Bill Lester, who has made every new dollar the hard way with his own two hands. A round of applause for them both, before you make your way to the voting screens . . ."

I did have the foresight to hide Lester's Turnbull & a.s.ser black cashmere overcoat so that he had to wait until everyone was lined up to vote- and so that no one saw it. That enabled me to lead him out to the foyer, where I offered him back his coat.

"Mr. Lester," I said, because all politicians want to be the one to tell you to be less formal, rather than having you take that initiative, "I think I can help you."

He didn't tell me "no," but he didn't agree, either. He also didn't tell me to call him "Bill." That came later.

Even with my efforts, Lester only won the ward by nineteen to ten. He did win enough wards, if only by the application of a great deal of effort and tangible financial a.s.sets and, I have to admit, his own mellifluous voice to get on the ConPopper final slate for the election of delegates to represent the old northeast USA in the NAU.

I did more research before I attended the regional NAU convention, and, before the votes were taken at the convention, I cornered William Lester while he was talking to a sandy-haired and ruddy man dressed in a cranberry-maroon Harris Tweed jacket far too loud for the tastes of most ConPoppers, and a deep solid-maroon tie that was too conservative, not that all ties were suspect to the bedrock ConPoppers.

Lester saw me coming, and he didn't quite roll his eyes. "Why don't you talk to Anderson, here? He's my campaign manager. He's the organization man." Lester eased away graciously and charmingly. I have to admit that he did that well.

I smiled politely at Anderson LeBrun. He'd been the staff director for Senator Claxton until the senator had lost his reelection bid after his links to the failed Northcoast Golf and Rugby Club had been revealed by his mistress. Then, it might have been that his mistress had been later revealed to be an transvest.i.te, and Claxton had protested that he hadn't known.

"Bill said that you rounded up a few votes for him in Plymouth," offered LeBrun, "and gave a good pitch for him."

"I'd like to think so, but he's a very good speaker. I do think we could focus his speeches to be more effective." I meant that I could, of course, but you always use "we" when trying to become part of an organization, however small.

"You're one of those academic types."

"No. I use academic and other research methods to gain the maximum positive emphasis for whomever I work for, and the maximum negative exposure for his opponent. That's the polite way of putting it. Everything's aboveboard and clean in the dirtiest way possible with no fingerprints."

"Oh?" LeBrun wiggled his bushy eyebrows. "What advantage would that provide, beyond fancy language?"

"Old-fas.h.i.+oned results with no legal fuss."

"Why don't you explain?"

I did, and LeBrun hired me on the campaign as researcher and strategist. I didn't get paid as much as I'd made as a teaching a.s.sistant at the university, but I wasn't in it for the initial pay. The first thing I got to work on was a position piece- a Web-based info-slam or Webchure- flooding the Net and letting everyone know just how good a man William Lester was. Of course, the hidden tags about "s.e.x," "free money," "scandal," and "reducing your utility bills"- among others- didn't hurt.

Neither did all the doc.u.mentation on Wikipedia, Armsapedia, s.e.xapedia, Publicapedia- all of the targeted online "encyclopediae"- because all of what we posted was scrupulously true. That was to play up the lawsuit we filed when our opponents tried to claim we were electioneering on public communications systems.

By the time we were finished, Lester came out as the leading ConPopper candidate in the eastern USA- and in early 2068, he went to Ottawa as a delegate and a politician to watch, mainly because no one could figure out why he'd worked so hard and spent more than a few millions of his own funds to get elected to what amounted to being a delegate to an advisory a.s.sembly.

The NAU wasn't totally advisory, although most people thought so. It could set mandatory continental shelf fis.h.i.+ng quotas as well as patrol the Arctic Ocean against foreign mineral-nappers, supported by the Offsh.o.r.e Patrol- what was left of the U.S. Coast Guard that had been transferred to the NAU, along with the less-than-adequate funding to support it. The NAU also had just completed the integrated intraborder security system between the U.S. and Canada, effectively erasing all border patrols there. The Congress had acquiesced in that in order to s.h.i.+ft U.S. Homeland Security forces to the Mexican border, where they could expand their free-fire zones. Besides, since more and more U.S. citizens had migrated northward, and very few Canadians wanted to move south, there wasn't much point in the U.S. border checkpoints anyway, and the Canadians still wanted U.S. new dollars.

For the first year, Lester made speeches and attended debates, and offered high-sounding propositions- but only the ones I told him wouldn't come back to bite him. Anderson LeBrun didn't like Ottawa. That was what he told Lester, anyway, nothing about his not wanting his dalliances to come out, given his prenuptial agreement with his fourth wife- something about a different resource division if that occurred. I did counsel Anderson that leaving was probably in his best interests. I even smiled. He didn't.

Before long, Lester proposed letting the NAU Offsh.o.r.e Patrol take over anti-smuggling duties along the North American coastline. With the adoption of the low-cost MS integrated sonar/radar imaging systems and the RPV-towed balloon limpet mines, the Offsh.o.r.e Patrol effectively reduced sea-borne smuggling by 90 percent, and Lester was hailed as innovative and cost-effective.

That wasn't enough for him, but I'd known that from the beginning. Fame and adulation are far more addictive than money or s.e.x, or even money and s.e.x combined.

He sauntered into the staff office in Ottawa on that June fourteenth and looked at me. "I've done all I can do here. It's time to get ready to make the Senate run."

I gave him a polite smile, the one that he knew meant I had reservations.

"You don't agree. Why not?"