It was going on to four AM when Gary got back from dropping off the dead henchmen, checked that the fence where they had come over wasn't cut, checked on the integrity of the alarm system and did a walk-though of all the building to make sure that no one else had sneaked onto the grounds and were waiting for him to let done his guard. He plopped down on the recliner he had claimed as a bed and was asleep without bothering to kick off his boots.

The sun arrived, on schedule at 7:00 am. Gary squinted into the too-bright room and tried to roll over. Not easy when sleeping on a recliner. But it was no good. With the sun up, with him awake, the inevitable thought filled his head: "What would Brock Sampson do?"

Well, obviously, he get up, do a hundred push-up - singled handed - run for 5 miles and get on with the rest of his life. Nothing he know about his idol ever suggested that Brock got tired, or tried to sleep in just because he had been up all night. Gary rolled off the recliner, went into the tiny restroom to splash cold water on his face, tighten his boots and set off jogging. A henchman's life was never easy.

Noon.

Gary opened the box on the table in his guard shack and dropped the softball they had been playing with that morning in it. He pawed through its contents trying to decide what he and Texas should play at during the afternoon. The basketball? A Frisbee? The hackysack was still too early for Texas. The reanimated henchman could barely stand on his two feet. Balancing on one and kicking with the other... Just not going to happen. He had been playing catch with Texas this morning, well, maybe something closer to Fetch. Venturestein wasn't very good at catching the softball no matter how softly or directly at him Gary pitched it. Maybe he should switch to the flash cards for the afternoon. Work on stimulating the brain a bit. While thinking about that, Gary opened a drawer under the countertop, took out a bowl of instant Raman noodles. He filled it with water from the restroom and popped it into the microwave. As it cooked he considered which sets of flashcards to use.

He was determined to rehabilitated his zombiefied former comrade, even if it took the rest of his life. Saving Texas was a project that diverted his thought from his former girlfriend. Or was she "former?" True she was determined to hench Hank Venture, and was on the run from the Blackheart assassins and from the OSI. But just because of that didn't mean that he didn't love her any less. And he assumed she continued to love him - as long as he didn't get between her and her hench.

The microwave dinged. As Gary turned to open the microwave door he saw the ghost of his dead friend, 24 standing near by, looking ignored. "Look, I'd help you, too, if there any way to help you," Gary said. "You know I tried to get Dr. Venture to clone you. And when he said the best he could do was create an infant age clone I was willing to do that, to adopt you as my son and raise you as my own."

The ghost of 24 turned away and walked across the room. It was a small guard shack so he didn't have far to walk.

"Come on, don't be like that!:Gary complained. "It's not my fault that Dr. Venture refused to accept what I offered to pay for the operation. That was a family heirloom. Marvel Tales #1 - in mint! It was worth a full half million dollars.! I could have sold that at any time and lived like a king. Only I would never have parted with that. But I was willing to do that for you!"

The nostrils of the ghost of 24 flared as if he exhaled in disgust. Then he disappeared.

"Oh, come on!" Gary pleaded but 24 would no reappear. "Be that way," he snarled then went to get his lunch out of the microwave.

He pulled off the cover, releasing a cloud of steam, and sat it on the counter to cool down, then went back to his box of goodies. He'd searched the Internet for studies on treating brain injuries. There were a lot of reports but little consensus on what was the best approach. So he had decided on a mix of physical training to improve Texas's coordination and mental training with the flash cards to awaken his mind.

Gary picked on the shapes set and laid it on the counter then quickly started slurping up the noodles. He checked the time. He had asked Hank and Dean to keep an eye on Texas while he was gone but they didn't seem excited by the prospect. He wasn't sure what was the matter. They had seemed excited enough when they first meet him, like finding an old, lost friend, which was how Gary felt as well. But they seemed to have cool to the creature Gary considered and dismissed as quickly the possibility that he was spending too much time with Texas. That maybe the boys resented him for that. But Texas needed him. Surely the boys could see that. They'd just have to learn to accept that.

He threw the empty Styrofoam bowl in the trash and was picking up the flash card when his wrist two-way chimed. Dr. Venture's name came up on the display. "Yeah, boss?" Gary answered.

"21 I need -"

"It's 'Gary,' boss. 21 is part of another life."

"Gary - 21? What does it matter, it's still you. Come over here I need the help of some of your special skills." He cut off the call before Gary had time to ask any questions.

Gary cursed. He left the cards on the counter, checked his appearance in the bathroom mirror and hurried out.

He stopped at the hanger for the X-1 to tell Hank and Dean that he would be a while getting back to them, then headed to the Venture residence. He expected to find Dr. Venture lounging in the living room, something he often did, but the scientist wasn't there. Nor was he upstairs, or in the panic room or any of the usual labs. Gary was about to give up and call the doctor for directions but that, it seemed to him, was admitting defeat. How hard could it be to find one hunch-back, lazy super-scientist? But as he raised his communicator to make the connection he remembered one place he hadn't looked.

He took the stairs into the basement, then opened the concealed door into the sub-basement and descended another set of stairs. From a window in the door at the base of the stairs lights shone. Gary smiled. Once again he had found the evasive Dr. Venture.

Gary pushed through the doors at the bottom of the stairs into a vast room, dimly lit except for the spot at the foot of the stairs where Dr. Venture had set up some kind of work station. There was a large, long, low machine the size of a refrigerator, set up on a rolling table. Next to it was another smaller table filled with scattered piles of paper, plus a computer hooked to the large machine. It displayed a confusing series of panels filled with numbers, graphs and digital meters. Dr. Venture was sitting on a a stool in front of the monitor as Gary came through the door. "Took you long enough," he snapped.

Beyond the lighted area was large room, dimly lit by a few emergency lights mounted over exits. The room was filled with row upon row of odd machines, man-sized tanks mounted on waist high consoles. All the tanks were empty. Some was broken as well. Elsewhere there was scorching on the consoles. This was where Dr. Venture had operated his secret, illegal clone factory, maintaining an army of Hanks and Deans so he could replace them, as he had so often, if they died.

"Someone didn't bother to tell me where they were!" Gary snapped back. Though he was assigned to protect the super-scientist, Gary found that the man just rubbed him the wrong way and it was hard to maintain a civil attitude around him. He pointed to the large machine. "What's that? Oh, by the way you're not supposed to be down here."

"Like hell! This is my house and I can go anywhere I damn well please!" the doctor snapped back.

"Not according to the consent agreement you signed with OSI," he reminded him. Gary walked around close to the big machine. He noticed it had a shelf running all along it's length filled with dozens of small bottles, and a few not so small jugs, each carefully labeled with what looked like cryptic chemical formulas. capillary tubes ran from the various bottles into the machine. On the floor were several large carboys where waste fluids drained into.

"That's just a piece of paper. Doesn't mean anything."

"Not according to Col. Gathers, the new director of OSI. He took me aside personally to brief me on this matter. The agreement says you're to seal off this area, not make any repairs to the cloning equipment or sell, license or transfer any of this technology to any other person. Part of my assignment here was to make a monthly inspection to see that you were living up to your agreement." After a moment he turned back to the scientist and said "I know about what's going on in the back room."

Dr. Venture paled. "You're not going to tell Colonel Gather's are you?"

"That you're rebuilding a couple of clone-tanks? I wanted to talk to you first."

"And so the blackmailing begin!"

"Hardly. You couldn't afford the kind of blackmail this calls for." He circled the big machine, came back to the front. He reached for a dial on the console only to have his hand slapped by the scientist.

"Don't touch things you don't understand," Venture snapped. "For all you know that could have been the self-destruct command.

"Who puts an self-destruct device in a commercial piece of hardware? What is this thing?" Gary asked again.

"It's an automated DNA sequencer."

"Does it have anything to do with cloning the boys?"

"No."

"So why's it down here?"

"I - I didn't want the boys to see it. The first thing they's do is ask a lot of questions. Questions I don't want to answer!"

"Like about them being clones."

"They never let things go," Dr. Venture went on, ignoring Gary. "You show them a DNA sequencer and the first thing they want is to have their DNA sequenced."

Gary picked up the top sheet from one of the piles of paper on the sidetable. "Dean Venture" he read, "and dated this month. So you've already sequenced their DNA. Why not let them see?"

"Because then they'd want to run my DNA."

"So? You are their father, so your DNA would look like theirs, right?"

"Not quite." Gary looked at him quizzically, put the sheet down and picked up the top sheet from another pile. It had Hanks name on it and a date a week later. Dr. Venture looked ready to slap hands again. Instead he said, "Look, to clone the boys it was necessary to place certain markers into their DNA. It kind of shows up noticeably when you look at a DNA sequence - if you know what you're looking for."

"Would the boys know what to look for?"

"No but they don't have to since the markers are non-amino acid compounds. Even with their education they're know that those compounds aren't supposed to be in DNA. And they'll keep asking and asking, picking at the scab until they pull it open."

"And this has nothing to do with cloning them?"

"I told you, no it doesn't. So look, are you going to Col Gathers about the - the backroom? I can write you a very nice check if that will help you make up your mind."

"Boss, your checks bounce all the time. If I wanted blackmail I'd want it in negotiable commodities. Blood diamond, maybe a couple tons of molybdenum. But I'm not trying to blackmail out. I feel conflicted about all this," he said, turning away so the scientist wouldn't see his face. "Part of the unwritten code of the Henchman is to not snitch, unless your life is on the line, in which case babbling is to be expected. But it's more than that. I'm here to protect the boys, and to a lesser extent, you. For most of their lives you have been the worst possible father in the world." Gary shook his head in disdain. "But you're also their only father. I don't think it serves them any good to send you away to some OSI Black Site. to be never seen again."

"So you're not going to report me?"

"Not for now. But you can't keep working on those machines in the back room."

"I can't do that. The boys need them. You know what they're like, their death-prone. If I don't have a pair of back-ups they'll end up dead and all my work for nineteen years, all the damnation I'm committed, will be for nothing."

Gary turned back to face the scientist. His face was stern and implacable. "No more cloning. Period. Got it?"

"But..."

"Wait a minute," Gary interrupted. "When I asked you to clone my friend 24, you said the clones could only grew at a natural rate so the best you could do was produce an infant 24. The boys are 19. You don't have any 19 year old grubs. How were you going to back-up the boys when all you have are babies?"

Dr. Venture began sputtering, throwing out half sentence explanations.

A thought came to Gary and suddenly his blood began to boil. "You've figured out how to accelerate the grubs growth? Thought you said that only caused it to turn all cancerous?" Gary had had a long lecture on why cloning was illegal technology before coming to the Venture Compound. Cloning itself was bad enough when people could arrange to stay alive for ever, but the real fear had been the possibility of a super-villain uncorking a clone army after only a few weeks or months time. As long as a clone took twenty years to develop that wasn't a serious problem for world domination, but continued research into cloning, it was feared, would eventually solve that problem and that wasn't good.

"There have been a lot of advancing to biochemistry since my father's day. We've learned a lot about how the cell ages and what causes them to turn cancerous. It wasn't hard to figure out that if I applied a growth accelerator for a month than discontinued it for two the cells would advance but still have time to knit into the communities of cells in the body and not turn into cancer. I'll have the grubs caught up with the boys in three, four years. Five tops."

Gary closed his eyes so he wouldn't have to look at the loathsome little man. He had been given authorization to kill Dr. Venture if he ever got into the position where he could destroy the world. This so sounded like just such a situation. His chest rose and fell in great stentorian breaths and he prepared to launch himself at the scientist and twist his diseased brain from his body. But then a thought occurred that calmed him. Dr. Venture was many things, vain, treacherous, self-absorbed but most of all lazy. He was one of the few people who could invent a way to literally take over the world and only think of it as a crutch for his boys. This secret was probably safe for now. He let out his breath slowly, forcing his rigid muscles to relax.

As he struggled to regain control, it came to him that his reaction had been all too extreme, since he basically didn't care if the world was destroyed or not. He wasn't and never would be a model citizen. He wasn't some globe-saving hero like Captain Sunshine. He was a henchman. All he cared was whether he would survive. This had to have been some kind of post-hypnotic command implanted in him while training at OSI. Usually a post-hypnotic murder command doesn't work because people only do things that they normally would do. But as a henchman he was used to killing people so such a post-hypnotic command would work on him. Gary discovered that he really didn't like the idea that OSI was trying to program him without his permission. Since quitting the Monarch he had savored his freedom. Sure he still thought of himself as a henchman. Some habits are so deeply engrained that it would be years before he stopped thinking that way. But he liked being his own henchman, not someone else's. He struggled with his conditioning and after a moment he was able to straighten up and ask in a calm voice that showed none of the emotion he'd felt a moment before, "so what did you want to see me about?"