The Ultimate X-Men (28 page)

As soon as the door closed, Hank stood and gazed into the mirror above the sink. Slowly, unsteadily, his fingers made contact with the smooth flesh of his cheeks, then rode down to his chin, the nubs of his beard resisting the action like sandpaper.

“In the proverbial pink,” whispered Hank. Not a single blue hair or elongated canine tooth could he find—just the brown hair and ruddy complexion he’d once owned, before the experiment that gave him his feral appearance. He was staring at a face that belonged in old photographs.

He turned away, hissing between his teeth. He’d been

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taunted this way in the past, only to see his human form vanish—the last time stolen away by an evil mutant who called herself Infectia. But hands, not gorilla paws, still jutted from his sleeves, and his body no longer exuded the aroma or held in the heat of a thick indigo pelt. It didn’t feel like a trick.

The Beast had disappeared. In his place was a totally different Hank McCoy. He squeezed his temples, trying to force the unfamiliar, mid memories from the confines of his skull. The office in which he stood was his own, located outside Boston, shared with three other general practitioners. It was not the Brand Corporation labs, and he was not a biochemist. He was just a regular doctor, seeing ordinary patients in a peaceful suburban neighborhood. The memories were complete—all the way back to childhood, up through med school, and into private practice.

Nowhere in that life history was there any manifestation of mutant abilities in high school, no entry into a facility run by Charles Xavier, no charter membership in the X-Men, no details of a thousand incredible events since then. In fact, any recollection of being the Beast was growing muted, as if banished to the same place that had claimed his fur and the points of his ears.

He glanced at his watch. Another dozen people to see that morning. He stepped toward the door, to head to the next room, where another patient was no doubt waiting. Then, with a low, Beastlike growl, he stopped. Such a powerful, persuasive milieu. At every turn it was seducing him into forgetting who he was.

What could this be? Some sort of alternate universe? Another timeline? Certainly the X-Men had encountered

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those before. Yet every
⁷
other trip to such places had involved a transition of sorts, such as a jump through a portal. Even teleportation left momentary tingles. This time he had simply become aware, at nine fifty-one in the morning, that something was wrong with the context around him.

A dream? Dreams didn’t feel like this. The clipboard was firm in his grip, the floor solid, the sunlight out the window crisp and bright. Like his strange new memories, this place had the aspect of reality. Something told him whatever happened here would have genuine effects. This was no fantasy.

Desperate to break the routine that was making this place so compelling, he made his way to the nurse’s station, where he found a receptionist whom he’d never met before, yet whom, paradoxically, he’d known for two years.

“Developments have arisen,” he said, measuring the words out with forced calm. “Kindly cancel the rest of my appointments today.”

“Mr. Grauehe’s already in room three,” she said.

“My regrets,” Hank replied, and turned his back on her worried frown.

Back in the exam room, alone, he slid out of his shoes and socks. Bounding forward, he somersaulted onto the exam table. There. He still had his mutant agility. But his leg muscles quivered, overtaxed by the effort. He overbalanced, and had to hop to the floor to avoid falling. He had congratulated himself prematurely. Yes, his powers were there, but they had faded. Were fading.

He looked again at his human body. Perhaps miracles did occur, after all.

* * *

THE MATE Mltl

Scott Summers was walking across the campus when he tripped on the flagstone path. Suddenly the lawns, the landscaping, the vine-cloaked brick buildings of the university, took on a numinous clarity. That was all the more alarming, because he was certain the scene had to be false.

He sat down on a bench, trying to sort out particulars of two separate lives: one as Cyclops, co-leader of the X-Men, the other as Scott Summers, PhD, assistant professor in an excellent, but typical, chemistry department at a modest undergraduate school in Illinois. The former seemed more true, but the latter was more vivid. He recalled verbatim sentences from the class he had just taught; he could cite the names of pupils he’d had over the last several semesters, complete with the grades they’d received. He knew that his excursion was taking him to the library in order to pick up an abstract not yet available by modem. These were all the sorts of evidence he could easily track down and confirm. Their undeniability confronted him.

One fact stunned him more than any other.
He wore no visor or glasses, yet he was viewing the world with eyelids wide open.

“Can’t be,” he muttered. He peered at a blade of cut grass lying on the flagstones, examined an individual petal of a flower growing beside the walkway, and scanned a leaf in the nearest tree, a young Japanese elm. Not only did his gaze lack its usual destructive effect, what he saw only affirmed the palpability of the place. He recalled, for instance, that the tree had been planted two years before. The campus’s handsome American elms had succumbed to the infestation that was destroying the variety throughout the continent. The details couldn’t have been more clear.

Suddenly he began to chuckle. How blue the sky was.

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Clouds hung like decorations placed by a divine hand. How fine the architecture of the campus buildings—such handsome lines of brick and mortar, laced with shrubbery.

To see. To see as he had not seen since childhood. It was grand, potent, compelling. . . .

But it was not right. He was Cyclops, and long ago he had become reconciled to living without normal vision. He struggled to his feet, fighting off the complacency this environment evoked.

Keening his mind for the telepathic whisper of Jean or of Professor X, he heard nothing. Was he the only X-Man affected? He reached out, but even his psionic rapport with his beloved proved insufficient to achieve contact.

One obvious test remained. He concentrated on the building site across the quad. The new student union. The structure was unoccupied; the construction crew had suspended work, unable to do more until a state inspector made a visit. There. That spot—where the upper-story window was due to be installed.

A familiar, momentary blindness seized him. He heard the moan of an optic blast. As his vision returned, he saw girders and concrete collapse within the building site. Dust poured out of the window he’d aimed through.

Students nearby gawked and pointed. Fortunately the burst had been too fleeting, and its effects too distracting, to mark Scott as the cause. He listened to the outbursts, taking strange comfort in the tones of dismay, fear, and excitement. The reaction was familiar to the part of him that remembered being an X-Man.

He waited for the inevitable exclamations—“Must be mutants! What are those freaks up to now?” No one uttered

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them. Instead, the talk buzzed with phrases like, “Political protest?” and “Gas leak?” and “Never seen anything like it.”

Brows furrowing, Scott headed for the newspaper dispenser outside the library doors. The headlines contained no references to X-Men or their splinter teams, to renegades such as the Mutant Liberation Front or the Acolytes, or to any mutants at all. He pored through the entire edition page by page. There weren’t even any articles about the latest doings of the Avengers, Spider-Man, or the Fantastic Four. The only thing that seemed right was the date on the masthead.

Shifting to the phone booth in the foyer, he began leafing through the Yellow Pages, but under “Attorneys,” he found no ubiquitous advertisements by shysters offering to file personal injury claims on behalf of bystanders caught in the crossfire during fights between super heroes and super-villains.

“Can’t be,” he said again, and called Information.

“What city, please?” asked a voice that might, or might not, have been a recording.

“Salem Center, New York. I want a number for the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning.”

“I’m sorry
¹
. No such listing.”

“Thanks anyway,” Scott said, the sinking feeling in his heart advising him not to protest. He waited a moment, breathing unevenly, and punched in the number he knew should work. An obnoxious mechanized voice began, “We’re sorry. The number you have dialed . . .” He clanked down the receiver.

The rules were different here. This was a reality in which

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mutants, super heroes, and their powers were unknown. He shook his head, trying to deny what his surroundings were telling him, but the more time that passed, the more convinced he was that these new conditions were how things should be.

His optic blast had not been as powerful as usual. Given the amount of focus and intention, it should have pulverized objects that had only been dislodged. The suspicion grew that if he were to try again, his powers would prove to be reduced even further.

Leaving him as what? A human?

If only it could be true.

While there was any vestige of Cyclops left, he couldn’t just stand by passively. He had to contact the others. How, he didn’t know. Perhaps if he . . .

Llis concentration faltered. Shouldn’t he just go upstairs and pick up the abstract, make some photocopies, and prepare the handouts for his one o’clock class? No, that wasn’t right. There was something nagging him—an image of a red-haired woman.

He rose, and instead of continuing into the library, as Professor Scott Summers would have done, he wandered outside, unsure where he was going, or what he was doing.

Jean Grey set her fork down on her plate, swallowed the bite of mashed potatoes she had taken, and tried not to show the alarm she was experiencing.

At the table with her sat her parents, John and Elaine, and her sister, Sara. The familiar walls of her childhood home enclosed her, the dining room arrayed with family photos. It was all as it should have been. She was a lawyer

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specializing in environmental issues, enjoying a lively but not overly taxing career, home for a long weekend with the folks—a regular occurrence, now that she had passed the bar and set up her practice only a two-hour drive away.

The part that didn’t fit was the recurring impressions of another life, far removed from this calm, nurturing scene. She closed her eyes and saw starships explode, buildings crumble, colleagues fall, witnessed a woman with white hair riding the winds, and a man with claws slash through steel cables. She remembered the tug of a uniform against her skin, and the highly trained muscles beneath that fabric. When she asked herself who she was, she was tantalized with names like Marvel Girl and Phoenix.

“Jean? Are you all right?” Sara asked.

Jean flinched. Her gaze roved over her sister’s face, noting the tiny mole on her right cheek, the precise shade of her irises, the sheer . . . health ... of her complexion.

“Sara? You’re supposed to be dead.”

Sara’s mouth dropped open. “Jeannie!” blurted her parents simultaneously. And Jean, blushing, suddenly had no idea what had prompted her throat to produce such a statement.

“I’m . . . sorry. I was recalling a dream I had last night,” she lied. “Didn’t know I was saying anything out loud.”

As the heat dissipated from her cheeks and the meal resumed, the cordiality
¹
and sense of security Jean had felt earlier took on a brittle quality. The X-Men identity solidified, and though it was as faint as the nightmare she had invented to excuse her
faux pas,
it didn’t waver. It was no hallucination. Jean guarded her reaction carefully, until the plates were cleared and she could excuse herself.

“I think I need a nap,” she said, and disappeared into her bedroom.

First, the tests. She gestured, trying to telekinetically lift a chair. It rose. Frowning, she deposited it where it had been. Six inches? She had meant to raise it to the ceiling.

Still, even a minor amount of levitation proved she couldn’t be plain old Jean Grey, attorney-at-law, no matter what her memories said. Time, then, to explore the “dream,” and come up with some explanations.

She lay back on her bed and focused. Her last distinct memory of her existence as an X-Man surfaced: she and Scott had shared a cup of coffee after breakfast, savoring a little domestic ritual before suiting up for a session in the Danger Room. Professor X was out of town. The X-Men in residence that morning included herself, Cyclops, Wolverine, Archangel, Psylocke, Iceman, Beast, and Rogue.

That group would be easiest to make contact with, assuming they were still in close proximity. If that failed, she could try the Professor or more distant comrades, but given her depleted resources, she didn’t want to attempt too much.

Naturally she tried Scott first. All that came back was an odd sort of echo—enough to confirm that he was alive and unharmed, but not enough to permit verbal messages, and not enough to fix his location relative to her.

She sagged back on the mattress, already wearied by the attempt. What was it about this world that sapped her powers so insidiously?

She had to try the others. No choice about that. Either she would succeed, or she wouldn’t, but she couldn’t go

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down without a struggle. One by one, she reached for them. .. .

Logan crashed through the front window of the hardware store/lumberyard, landing on the balls of his feet on the sidewalk, defdy avoiding the shards of glass he’d caused.

Flaring his nostrils to take in scents, he glanced about, requiring no more than the span of a heartbeat to orient himself. To his left the main street led to the town square and courthouse. To his right the community trailed off into the taiga forest of northern Canada.

He sped off toward the forest, snarling at the storefront facades beside him, the electric lines snaking from poles to the eaves of the buildings. The call of native, untamed spaces overwhelmed any coherent thought he might have.