Tex and Rock traded barbs all the way back to Long Beach. Sun Ra used one of the onboard computers in the rear compartment to study in depth the medical/legal ethics of surgical personality alteration. Cap and Tex might need his advice when it came time to dezombify Dandridge’s victims. Leila Weir—after Tex treated her bullet wound—spent the time in the co-pilot’s seat, watching the moon shimmer on the sea and imagining great floating cities resistant to wind, water, sun, and rust. She occasionally conversed with Flash, whom she filled in on the details of their recent exploits.
Jonathan and Julius Madsen simply held each other, grandfather and grandson, happy that a mysterious red-bearded enigma named Captain Anger had saved their lives and vanquished a madman. The freed prisoners conversed among one another, wondering what would happen next.
What happened next was a night landing in Long Beach Harbor followed by disembarkation. The Seamaster was left to its ground crew and everyone took refuge in a dockside hangar. Cap dispersed the crowd with a few quick directions.
“Rock—take anyone with implants back to the institute. Leila— the same goes for the Madsens. Put them up in the guest quarters.
Tex—you’ve got your work quite literally cut out for you. Sun Ra—handle all the legal problems for our prisoners and find out how to remove quietly that imposter at the United Nations.
“As for our visiting professor.” He turned toward the huddled mass that had once been the arrogant and self-possessed William Arthur Dandridge. In a mock TV announcer’s voice, he said, “Well, Bill, you didn’t win the world this time around, but you did come in second. Wait till you see the lovely parting gift you’ve earned.”
Dandridge, bloodied, shot up, black and blue, cringed at what might come next.
What came next was being dressed in a high altitude pressure suit and strapped into the cockpit of Cap’s SeaDart. Ground crew used thick zipcuffs of an odd-colored plastic to fasten Dandridge’s wrists and ankles to the ejection seat so that he could not cause any further mischief during the flight.
Captain Anger—dressed in a similar flight outfit—slapped a helmet on Dandridge’s head, locked it down, and climbed into the pilot’s seat.
Like the Seamaster, the SeaDart used the Los Angeles harbor as its runway, but this jet was a two-seat fighter capable of supersonic flight. Based on the design of the Convair F2Y-2 (officially designated the F-7), its multi-compartmented lower fuselage sat in the water supporting a pair of delta-shaped wings.
Cap sealed up his own helmet, cycled shut the acrylic canopy, and strapped in for takeoff. He ignited the single Pratt and Whitney J-75 turbojet engine, sending a bright orange flame shooting across the water and up the concrete ramp leading from the hanger to the harbor. Steam roiled upward in the pre-dawn air, glowing from within like a ghost. The jet immediately surged forward, breaking the still waters with its prow.
Throttling up, the engine roared to its full 15,000 pounds of thrust, pushing the plane up onto a single extended ski. Shaped like a thin titanium surfboard, the ski lifted the plane out of the water, supporting the entire aircraft on three oleo struts.
Dandridge gazed blearily out the canopy to observe sea spray race past with hurricane speed just inches from his face. The pilot controlled the plane with deft ease, making the bizarre liftoff procedure smooth and certain.
Screaming across the LA harbor at nearly 200 knots, Cap eased the
control stick back. The elevons on the rear edges of the delta wing moved slightly and the plane nosed up twenty degrees. Suddenly, the mild buffeting of ski-on-water ceased and the SeaDart’s delta wing took over. With a whine of motors, the ski retracted into the hull of the sea-jet. The SeaDart became a jet with its all-important supersonic area-ruled fuselage. Blazing into the sky with sunrise at his back, Captain Anger raced upward out of southern California at climb rate of 17,100 feet per minute.
William Arthur Dandridge blacked out from the g-force of the climb. Richard Anger III felt nothing but exhilaration.
Leveling off at 36,000 feet, he coaxed the jet to Mach 1, ripped through the sound barrier, and cruised over the sun-goldened Pacific at Mach 1.1, far below the jet’s Mach 1.5 potential.
Over his headphones, Anger heard a tired voice from the rear seat ask, “Am I so evil that you have to dispose of my body at sea? You could have just shot me through the head and thrown me in a grave. Or let some scavengers at me.”
Cap said nothing.
“I know I’ve killed people,” he continued. “But so have you, Anger. I’m sure you claim to kill for the sake of some floating abstraction such as ‘Good’ or ‘Justice.’ That’s funny, because those are the names I give to my reasons for killing. That’s the great thing about abstractions—they can mean anything you want.”
Cap, in a low, even tone, said, “I don’t kill people for sport, or to gain power over others, or to shock the world with terror. When I must kill, it is to defend the innocent against the aggressor. Justice takes care of itself. And Good will triumph with or without my help, because—and you must face this, Dandridge, if you want to survive on this earth—good people far outnumber the likes of you. And for every evil genius that some chance wiring of the brain creates against all odds, there are a dozen—a hundred—good genii in the world to oppose you.”
Dandridge sounded mystified. “You believe in genies and magic lamps?”
Cap smiled a smile unseen by his captive. “I believe you’re a genius who doesn’t know the real plural of the word ‘genius.’”
Away from Pacific shipping lanes lay a mysterious volcanic island. On ocean charts, its coordinates—near 141° W latitude, 28° N
longitude—revealed nothing, yet it existed nonetheless.
Cap circled around the island once as a precaution. Since he had raced the sun westward at nearly 900 miles per hour, it was still just shortly after dawn one time-zone away from Los Angeles. The long shadow of the steep lava cone reached miles westward. Clouds ringed the summit, and the slopes that reached to the shore supported only a few patches of greenery. He saw nothing alarming, so he throttled back to descent speed and extended the hydro-ski. Within moments, he touched down feather-lightly onto the shimmering surface of the sea. He idled the engine and the SeaDart slowed and settled into the water, floating on its belly, nose slightly up, slender conformal wingtip floats keeping the sea-jet steady.
The swells topped out at less than two feet in the calm morning hour. The two men sat a thousand yards offshore. Cap opened the canopy, removed his helmet, and took a deep breath of clean ocean air. It smelled of salt and sun.
Unstrapping, he stood and stretched. “Say hello to your new home, Dandridge. It’s a little more hospitable than your fractal island, and I’m sure you and the other guests will have a lot to talk about.”
With that, he removed Dandridge’s helmet and set it on his own seat, then flipped a protective cover up from a red switch. The eyes of his prisoner widened in terror.
“I’m tied down!” he shrieked. “I’ll drown!”
Cap smiled. “Your bonds are water soluble. Whether you make it to shore or not is a function of your will to live.” He lay his finger on the switch and covered his face with his arm.
Angrily, Dandridge cried out, “You’re just as much a cold-blooded ki—”
Cap pressed the switch and the rear ejection seat blasted into the morning air, shoving Dandridge upward at hundreds of feet per second. Specially designed by the Anger Institute to cause minimal damage to the aircraft, the low-flame rocket exhaust barely warmed the pilot as he shielded himself, then turned to gaze upward at the soaring scientist.