Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive. Thank you. |
Stories from the Verse
Con Version
Chapter 139: Cooper 45
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Takano 127
After spending the day working through the rigorous logic of circuit design, Brian looked forward to some light reading and research. Opening the door, he walked into the library. Quietly greeting the librarian at the front desk, he asked for the last year’s newspapers.
“Sir, follow me.” The elderly woman briskly got up and showed him the last six months of stored newspapers, and then the microfilm.
“Anything older than six months, we store on these.” She pointed to four machines along the far wall. Two were in use.
“I think that will do admirably.” He spoke softly with a grateful smile. She patted, well almost, on his arm.
“I can tell another lover of learning. We have readers who seek escape from the pains of the world, and puzzle solvers who often like the mysteries, and the students who wished they were anywhere else. But we have a few who find the whole world fascinating like I do. I think you’re one of us.”
“Thank you, ah--”
“Missus Gilbert. I’m the head librarian. Others have mentioned you, and how you always treated the books with care. Not everyone likes a Black man, but we like any man who respects books.”
“Brian Barrelmaster, ma’am. Thank you so much for your welcome.”
She primped her smile, and strode away, mistress of her domain. Brian turned back to study. It was true that if he could he’d read almost every book in the library, but right now he had more focused goals. Gathering up the local Berkeley Bulletin, he began scanning them. Occasionally something jumped out at him, and he just had to read it even if it was not in his field of research. Disciplining himself, he was able to get through the last six months of newspapers before the library closed for the night. He was fifteen minutes early, but that was not enough time to get started on the microfilm.
Microfilm was an ingenious solution to the problem of data storage. Take a photograph of a sheet of paper, reduce it in size, and store hundreds of such pictures on a reel of plastic film. Using a specially built machine, only available in places where microfilm was in use such as libraries, banks, universities, and corporate offices, which would hold the reel, project a light through it, and magnify the part of the page on which one focused, a sitter/reader could read the once tiny print. It allowed perhaps a-hundred-to-one storage space on a much more durable storage medium than newsprint.
Compared to googling data and the hypertext links of the world wide web, it was eating rice by catching thrown rice kernels out of the air with chopsticks, but it was a vital technology much used by researchers in this time, and even afterwards. He recalled using one three years ago, back in his first Earth, for a particularly obscure book on Zwingli. So it was not yet a dead tech even in 2019.
He had found numerous articles on William Tell Junior and The Eagle. Also, superheroes known as Fisticuff and Sensei Sam dotted the pages. He supposed that Major Pain might have preferred to fight those. Sensei Sam was thought to be recovering from a battle against Rayonic and Lightning Lieutenant. There were more recent articles on Truth and himself as well, and some about Mister Justice from before his arrival.
There were supervillains such as the brother-sister team of Mister Slippy, who could generate wide or small area no friction zones on anything wet (and so he carried a pressurized spray bottle), and Sister Slidey, who could produce momentum energy in whatever she touched. The two used it to rob banks, and then slip and slide away at speeds best used by cars.
When he saw Punisher, he expected something from the comic books of his own world, but instead this was a comedian who had pun-themed booby traps that he used in his ‘attempt to overthrow the boring clowns of the American government, and replace them with Rule by the Funniest, a Clownarchy.’ No one was sure if he was serious or not, but like Mister Slippy and Sister Slidey, he was non-lethal. The next one was not so much.
Doctor Mordenslice, an article explained, was responsible for the death of Timothy Campbell the Third, the previous Mister Justice, and also the death of Shieldarm four years earlier. Shieldarm had been a much loved hero, the article had said, who was known mostly for protecting civilians, although he had used his expandable shield in many fights against supervillains as well. It had been Mordenslice’s first use of his ‘new, improved, giant Energy Scalpel’ which had cut through the Shield and the man behind it. The article made it clear that it had required multiple strikes, and was thus a deliberate murder.
Best of all, he had found a retrospective ‘over the years’ type article that took a full page with multiple pictures. Earliest ‘superheroes’, if you disregarded the earliest legends, were the brother team of Mountaineer and Minejack, and an unnamed girl in the days around the First World War. Later, the first Mister Justice in the area (there were considerable reports of earlier ones elsewhere) was followed by Mister Max Mighty, a giantish strongman; Sockajawea, an American Indian girl with superhuman speed and strength who was still working, being ‘gifted with the length of life of a Ponderosa pine’; and then Green Hawk with a handkerchief mask who had been known for his tracking and detective skills and his shapeshifting. Brian noted that no mention of ‘seeing through masks’ or of some kind of precognition was mentioned. He supposed that with Native tracking skills, plus the other two, one might be quite a good detective in this world.
Charles ‘Lucky’ Lindbergh stayed for a few years, and he was known as Captain Eagle. He was known for his combat luck, having many pistols jam when they were aimed at him and numerous accounts of enemies slipping and falling and knocking themselves out to the point where some villains refused to fight him. One common speculation was that he had an invisible helper. His plane, the first to cross the Atlantic, had been named ‘the Spirit of St. Louis’, and some thought that he had the spirit of the City helping him. Cooper snorted. The idea of an incarnated spirit of a City helping someone in combat was a stretch. Of course, there were genus loci, but still--
There were mentions of other possibilities, but it did seem some superheroes eschewed the Press. Putting the papers back up, even though the librarians said he did not have to, he exited and walked home. Once there he arranged a call with Tell as Keller.
“An apartment for the two of you? All right. I’ll put my wife on for that. She handles my real estate deals.”
Now conversing with Belle in her secret identity on the phone (in case anyone was listening in) he explained.
“I need a two bedroom apartment, close enough to the City to get a cab for my day job, and of course my night job as well.”
“Right. Right.” A sharp intake of breath. “Sir, I will have someone call The Paris with a list of suitable places tomorrow, or the day after. I’ll leave the message at the front desk because I know you are very busy.”
This left him hanging, but since nothing else seemed able to be done at the moment, he graciously thanked her, and hung up.
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #516: Versers Stymied. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
