In Brightest Day, In Darkest Night
by Gary D. Snyder
Part 7:
After Calamitous' defeat Dyno Lad gave the admiring crowd a few polite comments and a heroic wave of his hand and then sped away too swiftly for any eye to follow. A few moments later Ernest emerged from the crowd, adding his share of oohs and ahs to the excited buzzing and pretending that he had been with the others the entire time. Cindy and Libby seemed particularly impressed.
"Did you ever see anything so heroic?" Cindy sighed.
"Or do dreamy?" added Libby. "I'll bet under that watermelon-sized cowl he's really cute." Ernest smiled to himself at that.
"Oh, big deal," Sheen said jealously. "I bet I could be a better superhero than him."
"Oh, yeah, right," Libby laughed scornfully. "What could you do better?"
"Well, for one thing, I could pick a better name," Sheen retorted. "What kind of name is 'Dyno Lad'? It sounds like someone out of a caveman movie!"
"Speaking of movies," Jimmy quickly interjected before Sheen and Libby could get into a fight, "I'm afraid the hovercraft is shot. We won't be able to make it to 'Tomorrow Never Says Never Again' after all."
Cindy sounded incredulous. "A movie? Get real, Nerd-tron. Who wants to see a make-believe hero when you've seen the real thing?"
Jimmy almost let slip that Jet Fusion really was a top agent for the Big Top Secret Organization, and not just an actor playing one, but caught himself in time. "Yeah, okay, if you say so," he said, walking towards the ruin of his hovercraft. "I really don't see what the big deal was."
He had apparently struck a nerve, because both Cindy and Libby turned on him with the fabled wrath of an offended female. "Hello!" Cindy snapped. "He saved your life, Neutron!"
"And heroically defeated Dr. Calamitous' battle machine single-handed!" Libby added angrily.
"He made a toilet back up!" Jimmy shot back. "And that was my idea anyway!"
"Here we go again," Cindy sneered. "You just have to hog the glory, don't you? Heaven forbid that anyone else take the limelight from the great Jimmy Neutron for even a second."
"That's right," Libby agreed.
"That's not true!"
"Whatever, Neutron," Cindy called over her shoulder as she and Libby walked away. "Even if you had the abilities, Dyno Lad is someone you could never hope to be. I'll bet that you couldn't recognize a real hero if he were standing here in front of you." At this Ernest fidgeted nervously and edged a little further away from Jimmy, who was glowering after the girls..
"Could so," Jimmy muttered darkly.
Without motorized transportation the six were forced to walk back home. Fortunately it wasn't far and a short time after that, with the aid of Goddard and his hypercube, Jimmy was in his lab attempting to sort out both the shattered remains of his hovercraft and the situation with Ernest.
"I don't understand it, Goddard," Jimmy remarked as he removed the engine manifold from the debris. "Somehow whatever happened last night gave Ernest superpowers. But what? And how?" He sighed heavily and began to detach the seats from the crushed interior of the hovercraft. "And why was just Ernest affected? We were all there."
He succeeded in getting the first seat out and stopped for a moment to pick something that looked like a laser pointer off the floor. "Hey, my 3-D holocorder. I was wondering what happened to this. I should really clean under the seats more often." He pocketed the tiny device and continued to disassemble the wrecked craft while musing over the origins of Dyno Lad. "Everyone was together when that explosion happened, so –"
He suddenly paused. "No, we weren't all together. Ernest was looking through the telemonitor and I was nearby at the controls, and the others were further away. Ernest was knocked out the longest, I was out almost as long, and the others weren't affected quite as much. It wasn't just a freak incident. Whatever caused that explosion last night must have had something to do with the telemonitor."
Excited at the prospect of solving the mystery Jimmy dropped the screwdriver he had been using and rushed over to the telemonitor to examine it. Although everything seemed normal a few minutes of inspection confirmed that things were not as they should be. The night before he had adjusted the device to pierce the couple hundred miles of distorting atmosphere so that they could have a clear view of the heavens. The controls were now set so that the hypermagnetic fields used to create the vacuum tube extended beyond that – far enough to reach the Van Allen radiation belts trapped in the Earth's magnetic field.
It must have happened when he had wiped the controls after Cindy had looked through the device, Jimmy suddenly realized. When the intense magnetic tube had extended into the radiation belts it must have been like poking a plastic straw into a pouch of fruit drink. The tube had provided a tunnel for the trapped radioactive particles to channel down to the telemonitor. The bright light had been the effect of the particles reacting with the hypermagnetic fields, much like an aurora borealis. When the radiation had reached the telemonitor the machine's built-in safeties had shut the machine down, causing the vacuum tube to collapse. The noise had not been the result of an explosion, but an implosion as air had rushed in to fill the vacuum column. Ernest, standing at the telemonitor, had received the full brunt of the radiation. If the telemonitor's safeties had not kicked in the stream of radiation through the vacuum tube could have been lethal not just to Ernest, but to them all.
Okay, everything seemed to fit. But how did the radiation give Ernest superpowers? For the next several hours Jimmy pored over hundreds of articles on physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, nuclear medicine, and similar topics while Vox ran innumerable simulations using the data Jimmy collected. At last, after a dozen checks and re-checks of his final result Jimmy sat back and rubbed his tired eyes, wondering how he could tell Ernest what he had discovered.
Ernest's superpowers hadn't simply made him a superhero.
They were killing him.
End of Part 7.