- 7 -
A promising young starlet, Dolores Winters had retired at the height of her fame a decade ago and without any truly memorable film roles to her name. Following her 'miraculous' recovery from cancer, she stopped attending those big Hollywood parties and premieres, turning her back on that whole lifestyle and marrying a businessman. Such fame as she had accrued lasted for a little while longer but not surprisingly it gradually faded away. She got pregnant, gave birth to twins, and so far as the public were concerned faded into obscurity. Which I knew was just how she wanted things. She really had turned over a new leaf, burying the Ultra-Humanite for good. I let Rita continue to believe Dolores was still secretly at the head of a criminal empire in order to keep her safe, of course.
In 1951 the Justice Society, the only remaining mystery men who hadn't retired or otherwise gone away appeared before a Senate committee looking into subversive activities. It was the era of Joe McCarthy, the Red Scare, and anti-Communist witch hunts. The hearings were televised, of course, and the JSA members present were asked by the chairman to demonstrate their loyalty to the country.
"If you are good Americans you will show this committee your faces," he said, "and then we may begin the process of clearing you."
I remember the shocked silence that followed, and then Hawkman got to his feet.
"We respectfully decline, Senator," he replied. "Our faces - our names - are our own business. Don't worry - you won't be hearing from us again."
With that there was a flash of light and when it cleared the JSA members had all vanished. There was pandemonium in the committee room, but the JSA had gone and it would be decades before they returned. Thus ended the first age of the masked hero.
In 1955 I received a shock of my own. It happened one evening when Rita was with me, having called in to discuss her next cosmetic surgery. She was now in her late-thirties but thanks to all the work I had done on her she could easily pass for someone in their early twenties. My techniques were light-years ahead of those hacks in Hollywood and I could have made a fortune there had Rita not insisted on keeping my skills for herself. Vain and selfish she might be, but she was also dangerous and knew how to control me. Sitting there on my couch, dressed all in black and smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, she was elegance itself in her pencil skirt suit, heels, fishnets, and pillbox hat with its little mesh veil. So why did I feel like I was Dr Frankenstein and she my monster?
"It'll just be a little maintenance, Marten," she was explaining, "a few running repairs to keep me looking perfect."
Which was when the doorbell rang.
"Are you expecting anyone?" asked Rita, frowning.
"No. It's probably just Jehovah's Witnesses," I said. "I'll get rid of them."
It wasn't Jehovah's Witnesses, but a youth I didn't recognize.
"I'm Neil," he said, "your son. Hello, Dad."
As soon as the words were out of his mouth it was obvious this was him, but what was he doing here?
"You'd better come in," I replied, completely blindsided at seeing him after so many years.
Only as I was ushering him into the lounge did I remember Rita was there. He was startled to see her.
"Oh, I didn't know you had company," he said. "I... I can come back later."
"And who is this handsome young man?" purred Rita, causing him to blush and smile bashfully.
I doubt if any woman other than maybe his mother had ever described Neil as handsome, and certainly never one as beautiful as Rita now was, because he wasn't. Sadly, he had inherited my looks.
"Neil, this is my, ah, colleague Rita Winters, and Rita, this is my son, Neil."
"Your son? Oh my, this is a momentous occasion. Come, sit next to me, sweetie," she said, patting the couch beside her, "and tell us all about yourself."
Which he did. It turned out that he was about to start medical school here in Los Angeles and so, in defiance of his mother, he had sought me out.
"I know you had your license revoked but I also know you're a surgical genius. So I want to learn from you, Dad."
"Have you found a place to stay in L.A. yet?" asked Rita.
"Not yet, no"
"Then you're staying with me," I said. "That way we'll finally have a chance to get to know one another."
- 8 -
Over the following few years we did just that. I schooled Neil in all my surgical techniques, which we practiced on animals. Eventually I decided to let him in on the secret of my success. Since I kept my car out on the drive and the garage was always locked he knew I must have something important in there, but to his credit he never asked what.
"It's a time machine," I said, pulling off the dusty tarpaulin covering it, "a prop from a movie I bought on impulse at an auction a few years ago. I really should get rid of it."
"They could have come up with something a bit more plausible than a glass bubble," said Neil, coughing because of the cloud of dust I'd stirred up. "Still, imagine what you could do with it if it was real."
"Yeah, wouldn't that be a thing?" I agreed. "But this is what I actually wanted to show you."
Next to the time bubble was a pile of canisters,
"Is that...?"
"Biogel, yes. And as you've seen you only have to smear it over most wounds for them to close up and heal, so there's enough here to last a lifetime."
"Where did you get it?"
"Ah, that I'm afraid must remain my secret. For now this is the only stock of it anywhere, and I want things to stay that way."
Neil graduated in the summer 1959, by which time I'd taught him everything I knew, but skill is skill and not everyone can achieve the same level. Try as he might he couldn't master brain transplants. Ever since their first meeting Rita had taken a great interest in Neil's progress, something he was understandably flattered by but about which I felt uneasy.
In the autumn, she summoned me to the warehouse where I carried out surgeries for her in the meticulously maintained operating theatre she had set up there years earlier.
"It's time," she told me when I arrived.
"Time? Time for what?"
"Another brain transplant. I may look as if I'm in my early twenties on the outside but we both know I'm actually twice that age, and those years are beginning to weigh on me. I need to not just look young but to be young and be filled with the energy of youth again."
I was appalled. For this to happen a donor would be needed, an innocent victim who would sacrifice their life for the sake of Rita's vanity. Unless I took a body from the cloning facility that is, which would take some explaining and reveal to Rita that I had the means to travel in time, a secret I was determined to keep from her.
"It's been years since I last performed that surgery," I said. "I got very lucky when I transplanted Ultra-Humanite's brain into your body, and your brain into this one, but I know a lot more about rejection now. Unless the donor was a close relative it would be too risky to attempt."
This wasn't entirely untrue, and I thought that Rita had no such relatives.
"Do you remember Johnny Hartigan?" she said.
"The hood you hooked up with who later tried to kill you? What about him? I mean I know he got shanked in jail a few months later and died."
"Johnny was ugly and I was beautiful. You may have wondered why beautiful women sometimes hook up with ugly men. The main reason is usually their money, but it's also because we shine more brightly next to them. I dated good-looking actors when I got to Hollywood and discovered I didn't like how their beauty took attention away from my own. Another advantage to dating ugly men is how pathetically grateful they can be. That's how I was able to wrap Johnny around my little finger. I had to put out when we were together, of course, which I expected, and unfortunately I got knocked up. Having a kid out of wedlock would have torpedoed my career before it got started. So, a couple of months after she was born I split for Hollywood and left the brat with Johnny. What seemed unfortunate then is now a godsend. Come with me."
She led me through to the operating theatre where a pretty young woman lay on the table, already sedated. Beside it, ready to assist in the surgery, stood Neil.
"This is my daughter Miriam," said Rita, facing her rather than me and so not noticing my shock on hearing that name. "Fortunately, she favours me in the looks department and not her father. After Johnny went to the slammer she was raised by his sister Florence, who died last year. When Neil told me the same thing about rejection you just did I had him abduct Miriam. She'd just started at university studying physics. Physics? What sort of a thing is that for a girl that pretty to waste her time with, I ask you?"
"You helped abduct this girl, Neil?" I said. "Why would you do that, son?"
"Because I'm in love with Rita, Dad. I'd do anything for her, anything at all. And now we need you to perform this surgery. You've done it before, so you can't have any moral objection to doing it again."
I hadn't had a choice then, but I did have one now. And yet, there was the girl's name and what she was studying. Could it be...? If it was, I had a decision to make.
"I'll do it," I said.
The surgery was long but it went flawlessly.
Afterwards, while Neil was helping Rita up, I carried Miriam's brain - in the fluid that was keeping it alive - into the side room where they believed I'd be disposing of it. As I'd gambled would happen someone was there to meet me, a young woman. She was wearing a red, 1940s dress but her hair was incongruously long and centre-parted.
"Dolores Winters," I said.
"Not really," she chuckled, taking the brain from me. "Now you need to get back to the others. I'll see you again soon."
I returned to the operating theatre to find Rita preening in front of a mirror, delighting in her new body. She had no clothes on, but this was hardly the first time I'd seen her naked.
"Where's Neil?" I asked.
"Disposing of the body. You can put a brain down the waste disposal but a body requires more effort. What do you think of my face? It's pretty, but it'll need some work to bring it up to the standard of beauty I'm accustomed to. How are you feeling, Marten?"
"Tired. I always am after a brain transplant. That many hours of intense concentration really takes it out of me."
"You should go home, get some rest. I'll call in on you in a few days to plan the work that needs doing."
"Yeah, I think I need to crash out. I'll see you in a couple of days, Rita."
My Buick was parked outside the warehouse. I drove home slowly, yawning a lot because I really was beat.
On reaching my house, I pulled up onto the drive, got out, opened the trunk to retrieve something, and received the shock of my life. Lying there curled up was Rita's previous body, the top of her skull lying beside her and the scalp missing, her empty brain pan exposed for all the world to see. I heard a police siren in the distance getting louder and louder, and realised what was happening. There was only one explanation. My son had betrayed me, and was framing me for her murder! A patrol car appeared at the top of the street and was fast bearing down on me. There was no way I could explain away the body, so I raced into the house and through the connecting door to the garage, slamming the drop bar into place. I hauled the tarp off the time bubble, and spun it around, by which time one of the cops was at the connecting door, the other at the fortified garage door, neither of which they could open without assistance.
"Come on out with your hands up, Dr Marten," said the one at the connecting door. "You're trapped with no way out."
"Yeah, you sick bastard" shouted the other from outside. "You'll pay for what you've done to that poor woman."
I climbed inside the time bubble and activated the preset that would take me to the cloning facility, dematerializing into the timestream and so evading arrest. I needed time to make sense of what had happened, time to recover from my shock, and I could think of no safer place to do so.
Which is how, on September 12th, 1959, suspected murderer Dr Richard Marten fled before police could apprehend him, having mysteriously vanished from a locked garage.
He was never found.
- 9 -
COPS HUNT BRAIN-STEALING DOCTOR read one headline. IMPOSSIBLE ESCAPE OF HOUDINI DOC, 'Cops Baffled' read another. The newspapers were now three months old. Hearing the front door open, I laid them back down on the coffee table where I'd found them.
"Hello, son," I said when he appeared, "take a seat."
I motioned to an armchair with the gun I was holding, and Neil did just that.
"Are you here to kill me?" he asked, licking his lips nervously.
"Not unless you force me to. What I'm here for is an explanation. Why, son, why did you betray me?"
"You really don't know, do you?"
"No, I really don't."
"I did it because you were never there for me," he snarled. "A boy needs a father and you were missing for my entire childhood!"
"Your mother wouldn't let me see you."
"You were my Dad! You should've found a way!"
He was shouting now, angry and upset.
"So the father-son relationship I thought we'd built over the past four years... was any of it real?"
"Not on my part. I just needed you to teach me your techniques so I could take over from you."
"Take over from me?" I said, puzzled.
"As Rita's personal surgeon, of course. You don't think it was a coincidence me showing up on your doorstep while she was visiting do you? I couldn't master brain transplants but I excel at everything else, so as soon as you'd performed that operation we got rid of you."
"So Rita's in on this as well, but why?"
"Why? Have you forgotten you gave her real body to a criminal? Rita never did."
So she'd been fooling me all this time as well. God, how gullible must I be?
"Where's the biogel?" I asked. "It wasn't in the garage when I got here."
"Rita has it all now. Looks like you'll have to get more from wherever you got that batch."
I stared at him for a moment, then got to my feet.
"I'm going now," I said. "Don't try to follow me."
"The garage again," he said. "How do you get out of it? The cops tore it apart last time but couldn't figure it out."
"That's because I'm smarter than them and smarter than you. Good luck working out how when I've escaped from it again."