Sleepless in Challenger Tower

Chemistra Investigates the Roman Mystery, Defends the Honor of Chemistry, and Puzzles over a Magic Doorway

Challenger Confidential: Mazes and Monsters
Part II

Sleepless in Challenger Tower

By Michael A. DiBaggio and Shell "Presto" DiBaggio

(If you’d like to start from Part I, click here.)

Mary Jo’s mind was too preoccupied to sleep, despite how much her body needed it. Instead, she drifted around the five secured floors of her skyscraper prison with a cup of coffee in one hand and a bundle of her anxieties in the other. Of course she hadn’t waited a year to verify if that first pot of daffodils she petrified would thaw. What if she had calculated the proportions wrong, or mistaken the ingredients? What if the reports of Yvain’s formula wearing off were lies? What if she had actually doomed fifty people to a living death?

The laughter of some late-night talk show audience echoed down the hallway. Against her grim worries, the carefree laughter sounded obscene. She barged into the lounge to silence the television and then nearly tripped over a small body stretched across the lacquered hardwood.

“Oh! I’m so sorry!” she yelped, halting her tumble with a hand on the back of the sofa. Hot coffee splashed over the rim and sizzled on the skin of her forearm, making her yelp again.

The young man rose up on his elbows and regarded her insouciantly before turning his attention back to his little briefcase filled with colored glass bottles and racks of beakers.

“I’m sorry!” Chemistra repeated. “I didn’t see you there.”

“S’alright,” said the boy. “No harm done.”

Chemistra smiled stiffly as she set down her coffee on the end table. “Only to me.” She gave a little laugh. The boy made no reply.

“My name’s Mary Jo. It’s nice to meet you.”

The boy belatedly turned, flashing her a look of irritation, but some deeply ingrained sense of manners did finally cause him to stand up and offer his hand. “I’m Blake Davenport. Dale’s kid.”

Mary Jo looked dazed. “Dale-?”

“Dale. Davenport. From Meridian Harbor.”

“Davenport! Yes!” Chemistra snapped her fingers. “With the submarines! He talks to dolphins!”

Blake rolled his eyes and sighed.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it! I just didn’t know he was a member of the Challenger Foundation…”

“He’s not. I’m here with my pop.” Blake added impatiently: “Hydroman?”

Chemistra feigned a chuckle. “Duh!”

“I’m spending the weekend with him. We’re supposed to shoot moose in Quebec, but he had to stop over here first.” Blake locked eyes with her, a creepy smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Did you ever shoot a moose before, Mary Jo?”

“Uh… no…”

Blake turned around with a shrug. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

Mary Jo cleared her throat awkwardly, desperately thinking of a way to change the subject. Her eyes settled on the box full of bottles and beakers. “Hey, is that an Uncle Atom’s Junior Chemistry Set? I had one when I was a kid! Well, it was my brother’s… my mom said girls don’t play with that stuff, but I did! Heh. Uh… what are you making?”

Blake screwed the lid back on the bottle and slammed the case shut. “Meh. Chemistry’s for losers.”

Mary Jo’s breath fled her open mouth. It was like a barb had passed straight through her heart. “No it's not,” she squeaked.

“Sure it is. You mix some stuff, get some different stuff. Who cares? It’s mostly a lot of bad smells.”

Mary Jo tensed up, her tone and posture defensive. “There’s a lot more to it than bad smells, let me tell you…”

“It’s dumb, but my mom wants me to learn. My dad tried to sell it to me by saying I could make gun powder and bombs and stuff, but it’s mostly iodine and alcohol.”

“Oh my, would you look at the time?” Chemistra cast a nervous glance out into the hallway. It would not look good if anyone overheard a young boy having this conversation with a convicted felon. “It’s got to be getting past your bedtime.”

Blake Davenport scoffed at the idea. “Lady, I’m twelve. I don’t have a bed time!”

“Of course. What was I thinking? Well, pleasure meeting you, Blake!” she called, almost running out of the room.

“You betcha.”

---

That night, sleep came only in fitful starts and was plagued with nightmares. Well before dawn, she lurched out of bed, bleary-eyed, and made her way back to the laboratory. She felt like a frayed shoelace, held together by its last thread.

And so she thought she was hallucinating when she heard the gruff voice of Pete Halstein, Bulwark, the construction worker she’d only half-petrified and so inadvertently made into a superhero that day at the Met, echoing down the quiet corridor. The voice was followed quickly by fierce shouts and banging. She backtracked to the source of the sounds, peeking discreetly around a corner. There, stooped in a narrow doorway, two very strange men were struggling with an even stranger burden.

“This guy weighs a ton! Literally!” Bulwark’s huge, flat teeth bared in effort.

“Watch his shoulder there! He’s caught on the threshold!” grunted Allen Adams, the Atomic Ranger, his hands supporting a pair of thickly muscled granite calves.

“You could drop a bomb on this guy and not hurt him! He’s practically a boulder!”

“Maybe, but I don’t want to find out what’ll happen if you damage this door frame.” Atomic Ranger’s deep and vaguely uncanny timbre carried a note of apprehension.

“Crap.” Suddenly Bulwark paused and looked up at the door frame, and the huge, stony man’s voice took on the proportions of a school child. “This magic doorway stuff really wigs me out.”

Only then did Chemistra’s fatigued brain begin to make sense of what she saw, and her eyes widened in recognition at the gray steel door being held open by the broad back of the Atomic Ranger. The door had no handle, no lock, and no decoration, nothing to call attention to it besides the ornate brass mechanism of sixteen dials inscribed with odd geometric patterns mounted on the wall next to it. It reminded her of the combination padlock she used to lock up her bike as a child, only baroquely beautiful and inscrutable. She had asked the Promethean about it and the strange glyphs on the dials when she had first seen it weeks ago, only to be met by a sharp rebuke.

“That,” he had said, “is none of your concern.” His reticence certainly piqued her curiosity, but her interminable hours in the laboratory buried the incident in her memory.

She stared beyond the two struggling supermen, looking for some clue of what was in the adjoining room, but all she could see was a stone wall and some thick wooden braces. And the view was odd, distorted in some way that her mind couldn’t quite process. Hours later, the concepts and words would become clear to her: the scene was ever so slightly out of perspective, like looking through a bead of water running down a curved glass. ‘Magic doorway,’ she repeated Bulwark’s words in her head. The hair on the back of her neck prickled.

The pair cleared their burden from the threshold and lumbered into the hallway. Bulwark’s rock-slab feet clapped noisily on the carpet as he shuffled past the strange door, which snapped shut with terrific speed. The ratcheting of the heavy locking mechanism snapping into place shook Chemistra from her reverie. Automatically, she darted out from the corner, standing on her tiptoes to look over Bulwark’s shoulder at the wall dial. In the instant before the green LED blinked off and the brass wheels spun back to their initial positions, she committed the strange sequence to memory:

“Well, well! If it isn’t Medusa, Mistress of Mayhem and Larceny!” Bulwark’s uncanny, resonating voice was thick with contempt and menace. “Skulking and creeping around like usual.”

Chemistra brushed back her bangs and pouted, trying her best to look innocent. “I was on my way to the lab. Where I work. Every day.”

“Wanting a good look at your latest handiwork is more like it,” said Bulwark.

“I had nothing to do with this one!”

The marble-skinned giant snorted. “Likely story, lady.”

Atomic Ranger scowled, shifting his end of the statue. “Let’s hurry this along. My shoulder’s still not one hundred percent.”

“Hey, when are you going to lay off, you big clod!” Chemistra snarled. “I’m paying off my debt to society! Besides, you don’t seem to mind too much those superpowers I gave you, do you? You wouldn’t even be here if not for me!”

“Yeah, right! I guess I should thank you, ya demented little psycho! Maybe when my stone-cold buddies can stretch their legs and go home to their wives and kids, I’ll consider—”

“Knock it off!” barked the Atomic Ranger. “I can’t lug this thing all day!”

Bulwark, growling, hefted his end of the granite man higher, eliciting a sigh of relief from the Atomic Ranger. In a calmer but no less snide voice, Bulwark added. “You mind stepping aside so we can get through, madam? Or are we inconveniencing you?”

Mary Jo flattened herself against the wall. “This man,” she said.

Bulwark and Ranger halted, and Range narrowed his eyes at her. “Come again?”

She fixed her eyes on the Atomic Ranger, drew in a deep breath to swell her comparatively tiny frame in defiance of the two giants. “He’s not a thing. He’s a man. And I’m going to save him.”

Atomic Ranger clenched his jaw and tilted his head at her quizzically. Then he offered, quietly, dispassionately: “I hope you do, Chemistra.”

Bulwark groaned. “Don’t let this little humanitarian-come-lately con you, Range! Let’s go, before I start getting misty-eyed!”

---

---

Futile hours crawled by in the lab. Finally unable to resist the tug of exhaustion, Chemistra’s eyelids drooped closed. She was on her feet, her body slanted against the corner made by the wall and the pedestal of the electron microscope. She had stood up specifically to avoid dozing; she didn’t think it was possible for a human being to fall asleep standing up — except, perhaps, for the dreamless slumber of her petrified subjects — but an endless morning comparing spectrographic readings was as good as nepenthe. But her respite was brief, and she jolted awake, her heart pounding at the sound of a sharp whip-crack and a gust of wind that tossed her hair.

The Promethean stared at her, leaning in, his hands folded behind his back and bearing the thin, antenna-like cylinder of metal he had been using to probe the petrified figure. “I had asked,” he began after clearing his throat, “what our ambitious young sculptress thinks of Roman handiwork?”

She offered a weak apology. “I’m sorry, I didn’t sleep well.”

“So you’ve come to no conclusions?”

Chemistra rubbed her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know. It’s close, very close, but his composition is different enough that I have to wonder. The massiveness is substantially more than the samples from—than the people—,” she corrected herself, “at the museum. Outwardly, of course, the appearance is—”

“Almost identical,” the Promethean interrupted. He paused for a spell, turning his head toward the petrified man. His brow was furrowed and his jaw muscles twitched, a tell-tale tic of intense mental analysis. At last, he observed with significance: “He’s naked.”

Chemistra glanced up at the ceiling, her cheeks beginning to redden. She had been trying to avoid the appearance of staring at the fossilized Latin’s almost shockingly prodigious genitals.

“I had wondered about that,” she said. “He must have been naked when sprayed. There were no synthetic fabrics back then, surely. Yvain’s formula and my own both affected organic fibers. It should have fossilized the wool or linen or whatever togas were made of.”

The Promethean smiled. “They did not always wear togas, my dear. But look, he wasn’t originally naked.” He gestured with the probe at the man’s clenched scrotum. “Clearly, he had girded his loins. You can be forgiven for not noticing, not being so equipped yourself, but the scrotum and penis do not rest in this manner naturally. He was wearing underclothes, at least.”

“Semper ubi sub ubi,” Chemistra laughed.

“I hope you don’t actually find that abominable pun funny.”

“So what do you think happened? That the clothes were never fossilized and they were removed?”

“Or rotted off.”

For the first time in several days, Chemistra saw a reason for optimism. She bounced excitedly on the tips of her toes. “That means it can’t be the same formula! Whatever happened here was obviously similar, but it wasn’t Yvain’s formula! That’s why he’s been stuck this way for a few thousand years.”

“A hasty presumption, and one we dare not make with fifty lives in the balance,” the Promethean cautioned. “We still don’t know why Yvain’s fossilization formula wears off. If it is something as simple as exposure to the atmosphere— certain levels of oxygen, exposure to humidity, and so on— that may very well explain why our current subject, sealed inside the stale air of a catacomb, remains entombed. Nevertheless, the lack of clothing is an intriguing clue.”

Chemistra had been biting on her fist, contemplating her options while the Promethean lectured. She stood up straight, brushed her black hair back behind her ears. “We should check the catacomb,” she said. “There will probably be other clues, maybe even a sample of the formula preserved in a sealed container.”

“I’ve already spoken to Dr. Templeton about that.”

“Great! I’ll get ready!”

“Out of the question,” declared the Promethean. With a stern shake of his head, he added, “under the terms of your release, you’re not to leave the city.”

“Oh, come on! How are they even going to know? It’s no more than a trip down the hall with that magic portal of yours. Well, don’t look surprised! I saw Bulwark and Ranger carrying him through it! How does that work, by the way?”

“Out. Of. The Question,” the Promethean said, with great finality, and Chemistra understood that it was his answer to both of her queries.

“Come on! What’s the harm in explaining it? It’s like a portable wormhole, isn’t it? Would it have imploded if they bent the door frame?”

The Promethean turned his back on her. “I assure you, the phenomenon is quite beyond your comprehension.”

Mary Jo let out a little gasp. Her cheeks prickled like she’d just been slapped. ‘Who the hell does this guy think he is?’ she thought, and she would have shouted it, too, only she realized how ridiculous it would have sounded. She accepted the Promethean’s imperious bearing as a matter of course, and took his constant challenges as part of a high-level initiation, an intellectual hazing of sorts. Casual disdain was something else entirely. She was starting to take it personally.

Mary Jo knew she was a first-rate genius. Everyone knew it, from her father to her professors, and even her ridiculous advisor at Columbia who jealously laughed at her thesis about converting living tissue to silica. If morons like that could see it, the great Matteo Mancini had to see it.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I think,” she began, fairly bursting with the defiance of wounded pride, “that you don’t know how it works, either. I think you don’t know how a lot of things work, only that they do, and you know how to use them. I think the world is almost as mysterious to the towering intellect of the great Don Mancini as it is to Miss Cartalucci, the tavern maid.”

The Promethean turned on her sharply. Once more his gaze washed over her with its tide of contempt, but this time Chemistra did not drown. Thus the two strove motionless against each other, the old master with his cold, inexorable will to dominate, and the stripling upstart with her hot, implacable need to overthrow. Amid the silence, the white noise of electric instruments and the tick of the wall clock soon rang like hammer blows.

Suddenly, the Promethean’s glacial countenance melted into laughter. “At last! A remark of some intelligence!”

“Stop talking down to me!” she screamed, her clenched fists quaking in nitrile gloves.

“I can’t help it.” The Promethean sighed, and he no longer smiled. “I’m afraid you bear a striking resemblance to someone who greatly grieved me for many years.”

Chemistra yanked off her gloves and flung them on the floor. “Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

She brushed past him angrily, seeking the fresh air under the overhead vent.

“Me,” he said.

“Ha! Should I take that as a compliment or an insult?”

“That, my dear,” the Promethean replied, “is a matter of controversy.”

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Want to read Bulwark’s version of his first encounter with Mary Jo? Read it here!