Dr. Venture, unaware that he had faced immanent death just seconds before. said "I need a sample of my father's DNA."

"No problem. I've seen the grave marker out back. I'll just get a shovel. I should have him exhumed by mid-afternoon."

"Uh-h-h-h" Dr. Venture said uncertainly.

"What? Is he radioactive? Poisonous? Carrying some infectious disease? Maybe a little zombieism? No problem we'll work something out."

"He's not there," Dr. Venture finally got out.

"Oh, secret burial! Good idea. Some of these Arches are pretty nuts when it comes to getting revenge on their Nemesises. Never know when one might decide he has to desecrate the corpse. So tell me where he is, and I still should have a tissue sample before supper."

"There is no body."

"Oh." Gary paused to think about that. "That is a complication."

"If I'd needed a body dug up I could have just have the boys do it."

"Isn't that something kind of gross to have the boys do, digging up their own grandfather?"

"It's not half as bad as some of the things my father made me do when he was alive." Dr. Venture said. "His dying was one of the best days of my life. Finally I was free from all his controlling ways. Of course, even in death he screwed me over," the doctor ended with a sigh. After a moment he continued. "All the OSI ever told me was that he was dead, and that there was no body. They'd bury any empty coffin for appearances sake but beyond that he was gone for good. I tried to find out what had really happened but no one was willing to tell me."

"You want me to use my contacts within OSI to find out?" Gary asked.

"Nah. I asked Brock Sampson to look into it years ago and he couldn't turn up anything, and no offense intended, but he had way better contacts inside of OSI than you have."

"No offense taken. So what 'special talents' did you expect from me? I'm not a magician, I can't make things appear out of thin air."

"That's more Dr. Orpheus' line of work! eh eh." Dr. Venture chuckled. "As it happens, long before he died, my father left a lock of his hair at the Museum of Coiffure Culture in New York City."

"Is that some kind of beauty salon."

"Close, it's a museum for hair dressers. Anyway, back in the 80s it made a big deal about collecting locks of hair from all sorts of famous people, Elizabeth Taylor, Fabio, Henry Kissenger, and for some reason, my dad. I was there when they had a big ceremony about his making the donation. Some fruit made a production about cutting off the lock and it was placed inside a display case in the museum. It's still there today."

"And you want me to steal it back?" Gary asked.

"Exactly. I'll only need a few strands. They won't even notice the difference. But it's something I figure you, as a former henchman, would know how to do."

"I'll have to case the place out." Gary pointed out.

"The place is just a ratty old tourist trap. I doubt that they have anything in the way of real security."

"Stll, if we're going to do this right, you're going to let me run the show." Gary insisted.

"Fine, whatever. Get the X-1 warmed up and we'll fly out right after lunch. I figure we can get the hair and be back by bedtime."

"Overnight."

"What?"

"I said overnight. Today we scope out the museum, see what kind of security it has, what kind of supplies we'll need then tomorrow we make the heist."

"Can't we do it all today? Do you have any idea how much it costs to rent a hotel room for one night in New York?"

"It's got to be less then the cost of running the X-1 up there." Gary suggested.

"Oh, please. The X-1 is atomic. All it's power comes from its reactor, and that sucker will be going strong decades from now. The X-1 is the cheapest way to travel. It's already been paid for."

"Overnight, boss. Minimum stay." Gary insisted. "Also make that reservation for three. Texas is coming with us."

"Are you nuts? he'll stick out like a sore thumb. I assumed we'd be doing this incognito."

"If we don't take him he's liable to wander off." Gary argued.

"That would be the best thing that could happen to us."

"No way! You can't abandon him just like that. You made him. You owe it to him to take care of him!"

"I don't owe him squat. I sold him to General Manhower. He should never have run away from the general. But he did and now he's on his own."

"But"

"He's not going and that's final. I'll compromise on the over night stay but that's as far as I'm going. Besides we'll only be gone 24 hours. How much trouble can he - or the boys - get into in that time?"

Gary thought about it for a moment. It would be easier if he didn't have to worry about Texas as well as Dr. Venture. And it might do the boys some good to be responsible for something for a short while. Give them some experience. "Ok, he conceded. "Met at the hanger in an hour?"

"One hour, sure," the doctor agreed absent-mindedly.

Gary started for the stairs, but at the door he paused and turned back to the doctor. "Hey, boss, normally I never asked why the Monarch wanted me do the things he did. It wasn't for a hanchman to question an Arch's plan but I'm not a henchman anymore so I can ask questions, like: why do you need a sample of your father's DNA?"

The scientist put down the clipboard he had just picked up, fidgeted and finally sad, "Something you said a while back has been gnawing at me."

"What?" Gary asked.

"You know, that thing."

"What thing?"

"You're going to make me say it, aren't you!"

"I'm not trying to make you say anything. I don't recall saying anything to you remotely interesting."

"It was about my father. There! Are you happy?"

Gary could see that Dr. Venture was very embarrassed about something but nothing suggested itself as the cause of his embarrassment. Then he had a glimmer of recollection. "Was it about your father banging all those women?"

"Yes, yes, yes." Venture agreed angrily. "And never got one of them pregnant! Never! While ever single time I've had sex with a woman they got pregnant!"

"So you're no longer claiming to have had sex with Dr. Mrs. The Monarch?" Gary asked.

"She was Dr. Girlfriend back then, single and free. Of course I had sex with her. I think. I'm just not sure she's a woman. Brock always said she was a post-op tranny."

"She's all woman," Gary insisted, a knot growing in his stomach. Although Dr. Girlfriend had broken his heart, teasing along his crush on her as part of some joke between her and the Monarch, he still felt incredibly loyal to her. The thought of her withering in the clutches of his skinny, bald-headed employers turned his stomach. "I should know, I was the one she sent into town each month for her feminine hygiene products. Doctors may be able to give transsexuals a working vagina but they can't give them a womb. And without a womb they don't menstruate! But she always said nothing happened and if she said nothing happened then nothing happened!"

"Of course, she had to say nothing happened. After she married that jerk. The Monarch is insanely jealous."

"He said they were swingers."

"And you believed that?" Dr. Venture snorted. "I've had my face slapped enough times to know that woman say cone thing in the present of their husband and another when alone. And most swingers only swing in the present of their spouse, or with their spouse's approval. She came on to me, picked me up in a bar in an attempt to get past my defenses so she could inject me with the Monarch's vile bug serum. I remember the injection. Everything after that is pretty vague until I woke up the next morning. And when I woke up she was sleeping next to me. Naked. She was sleeping next to me naked!

"So, maybe she was waiting to make sure the injection had taken effect?" Gary suggested.

"And maybe she was having hot monkey love with me! She hardly needed to get undressed to monitor an injection,. You do for sex!"

"Whatever." As much as he doubted that Dr. Girlfriend would ever want to have sex with Dr. Venture, the doctor's logic about her staying with him till morning made a lot of sense. He recalled, too, the times he'd met her after quitting the Monarch. There had been a sense of ... friendship? A sense of something more than ex-henchman and former Arch. He shook off the thought. "So how does your father come into all this?" he asked, hoping to change the subject.

"You were the one who suggested that my father was sterile. and that he cloned me to have an heir."

Gary nodded. As he understood it Venture's Grandfather and Fantomas had formed the Guild of Calamitus Intent back in the 19th century. Soon thereafter the two family were fighting for control of the Guild While Fantomas had taken over the Guild's day to day operations, Venture had remained as it's titular Sovereign. That crown had passed from Venture's grandfather to his father and eventually to his Son, Dean, who had been necessary to crown David Bowie the Guild's operational sovereign. As long as a Venture were the hereditary sovereign of the Guild none of the many monomaniacal super-villains in the Guild would fight for control over of it. A war of super-villains could easily destroy the world. So it was critical that Jonas Venture produce an heir.

"It's a ridiculous idea, but I can't get it out of my head," Venture was saying. "The only way I'll ever know for sure is to sequence my father's DNA and compare it to mine. If I'm not a clone then half the DNA ought to be different from my father's. But if I'm clone them all if it will be his."

"Except where he fixed his sterility problem."

"With a vengeance." Doctor Venture said gloomily.

"You don't have any memories of a mother?" Gary asked.

"Dad said she'd left when I was young. And after he died I couldn't find any references among his papers to a Mrs. Venture. Well, father was always intent about throwing out personal stuff so i guess he could have thrown away any record of who my mother was. But I looked all around the country for a marriage licence or a birth certificate for me. All I could find was a certificate that dad filled out and submitted on my birthday. I wouldn't know how to act if I found out I had a mother but it would be nice to know i had one. Don't you think so."

"I joined the Monarch's operation to get away from my mother." Gary said.

[]

Gary was flying the X-1.

He had never flown a nuclear-powered, super-sonic airplane before. Or any airplane for that matter. But when they had boarded Dr. Venture had plopped down in the co-pilot's seat leaving Gary in the hot seat. He throw a resentful eye at Dr. Venture as he looked at the immense panel of dials, switches and levers surrounding the pilot's seat. Well, a henchman survives by learning to do a lot of things, often while on the job. He set about trying to identify the various controls.

Brock Samson had had full-on OSI agent training before coming to work for the Ventures so he probably already knew how to fly any airplane ever made. Gary had piloted the Monarchmobile a time or two and hadn't crashed so assuming the X-1 was just a big a bigger version of the Monarchmobile maybe he could pull this off. Still you would think Dr. Venture would offer to fly the damned thing knowing that Gary had never flown it before. But it was just like Dr. Venture to sit down and expect to be chauffeured where ever he went. He never drove anywhere himself. He expected Gary to drive.

But then maybe he didn't know how to fly the X-1. From what he had read about Jonas Venture, and confirmed by the occasional comment by his son, Jonas Venture had dragged his son everywhere around the world, placed him in peril countless times but had never actually let him do anything. If he had been anything like Gary's Old Man, not that Gary had much memories of his Old Man, he probably have never let Dr. Venture touch, let alone fly any of his planes, boats or submarines. And a lifetime of never being in charge had leave Thaddeus Venture an angry but painfully passive man. Even when the X-1 passed into his possession it probably never occurred to Rusty Venture to get a pilot's license. Gary's OSI license-to-kill not only allowed him to kill people with immunity but also covered things like flying planes, driving cars, trucks, piloting dirigibles, spaceships, and captaining boats.

He found a toggle labeled ''wheel lock' and figured that would be a good thing to set to off. The throttles to the jets were where he'd seen them before in airport movies. He movies them forward and the X-1 slowly rolled out of its hanger. The runaway lead straight out from the hanger so he just increased thrust until they were bumping along the concrete at a good clip. He pulled back in the wheel and the plane rose lumberingly into the air. He avoided clipping some power-lines across the road from the Compound and kept on gaining altitude. He grinned to himself. Someone who didn't know any better might actually think he knew what he was doing.

When the altimeter reached 40,000 feet he eased off on the wheel until the altitude stabilized. Then, finding the compass he turned the wheel until they pointed east and flipped on a switch labeled "auto-pilot". Carefully letting go of the controls Gary waited for the plane to plunge into a spiral but it held steady. The auto-pilot must be working. With a sigh of relief that ended up sounding more like a gasp, Gary leaned back in the pilot's chair and relaxed. When his heart stopped thumping an 180 beats a second he reached into his duffel bag and pulled out the OSI's cribsheet on FAA regulations. It was only a hundred pages long, printed on both sides. While his OSI license exempted him from most regulations he still needed to know what the proper protocols were, and how to avoid running into all the commercial aircraft that assumed they had the right-of-way up there. Gary looked over at the jackass he worked for. Dr. Venture was already asleep or maybe just listening to his iPod with his eyes closed. Just as well. Gary had a lot of reading to get through before landing at JFK.

[]

Landing at the New York airport was a lot harder then the take-off had been. Gary had by then contacted the air traffic controllers, filed a belated flight plan and been cleared to land at JFK. A section of the large airport had been set aside for the huge experimental craft to park. Gary had eased the plane down to the runway and made contact with the pavement after only one hard bump. But killing the engines and applying the brakes on the wheels wasn't slowing the plane nearly enough. The buildings at the end of the runway were looming up fast.

"Use the Reverse Thrusters!" Dr. Venture suddenly cried. he waved towards a part of the control panel where Gary made out a switch cryptically labeled ""REV THR" He flipped that up and suddenly the planed jerked backwards, throwing him forcefully against his shoulder harness. Gary had no idea what the 'reverse thrusters' were and how they worked but they brought the great airplane to a quick halt, just shy of running off the runway.

"Any landing you can walk away from," Gary muttered.

"Idiot!" Dr. Venture reminded him. Venture was soaked in sweat from every pour in his body.

A lineman directed the X-1 to its parking space. By the time Gary had set the wheel brakes and shut down the engines and nuclear reactor (fortunately the reactor shut down automatically) he was as cramped and tense as Dr. Venture looked. Gary grabbed his and Dr. Ventures overnight bags and followed the scientist down the ramp the extended out of the back of the plane. As the walked towards a private entrance to the administration building Dr. Ventured snapped, "where did you ever learn to fly?"

"I didn't," Gary confessed, and a moment later had to drop their bags and catch Dr. Ventures as he fainted.