Chapter 8:

Plan B

Back at command, Jake Jenkins chortled. Everyone else froze, terrified at what they had witnessed. All the lights on Nathan’s suit—all of them except power—ticked from green, to yellow, to red.

All talk stopped. Command was silent except the mechanical clicks and hum of computers. The only sound was of Jake Jenkins chuckling, as everyone else absorbed what had happened. Nathan Marvelous—scourge of the boxing ring, destroyer of small rental cars, and savior of elephants—was dead.

Seconds stretched on. Finally someone spoke.

“Did we get the externals online?” a voice called.

“About an hour ago,” someone answered.

“Pan around, see if you can find him,” came the order, followed by mumbling. “...if there’s anything to find…”

“How are we looking on the TIMs? Did he get them all set?”

“All are online. Seveteen are set and ready to go, five are drilling, and two are stabilizing,” was the reply.

“Good. We have plan B online?”

“Prepped and set for launch.”

Emery, the head of the mission, looked at the clock. They had hours before the TIMs ignited, almost a day before the asteroid had to be destroyed. There was no reason to panic. “Alright everybody. Look sharp. Time for Plan B. Neptune’s Trident is go. Commence countdown. T-minus two hours, twenty-nine minutes, and… seven seconds to launch,” he said as he read the counter.

Someone was at Emery’s back. He turned to see whom. It was Jake Jenkins.

“Glad it wasn’t you?” Emery asked.

Jenkins harrumphed, “I guarantee that idiot killed himself.”

Emery shrugged. He didn’t really want to talk about it, especially with someone as oily and self-absorbed as Jake Jenkins. “If he’s still alive, Plan B will kill him for sure,” Emery started.

Jake waved at the status lights on main display. “Do you see this? It’s all red. Red, as in dead. There is no ‘if’!” Jake said with zeal.

Emery sized up Jake. If Marvelous was dead, Jake surely wasn’t mourning. With a sigh, Emery flicked the one green light on his display. Marvelous may be dead—but even in death he seemed to have no want of power.

*Flashback (Asphyxiation and Other Pool Games)*

As a youth, Nathan spent a fair share of time at the bottom of pools. He found he could hold his breath for quite some time, far longer than anyone else he knew, a fact that he bragged about to his friend and confidant, James Wellington.

One day, irritated by Nathan’s bluster, James bet he could hold his breath longer. James went first, jumping under the water and settling on the bottom of the pool. Having been in swim classes since the age of two, he was able to reach an astounding time of 39 seconds. And so the competition began.

For some time, the two went back and forth taking turns. James managed to stretch his best time to 44 seconds, then 58 seconds, and eventually to 1 minute 17 seconds; but even so, it wasn’t close to anything Nathan managed.

After posting times of 56 seconds, 1 minute 13 seconds, 2 minutes and 46 seconds, Nathan announced he was going to stay under until he absolutely had to come up for air. He sank to the bottom of the pool then proceeded to sit there.

Worried that his friend was drowning, James repeatedly swam down to check on him, opening his eyes to the sting of chlorine and holding his breath as long as he could. Nathan stared back at him, smiling and waving and doing somersaults, which James tried to copy, but had to abandon after he got water up his nose.

Some time later, Anna Marvelous came by the apartment’s pool to tell the boys that their lunch was ready. She waited for Nathan to surface, anxiety growing the longer she stood at the edge of the pool. After a good twenty seconds or so, she asked James how long Nathan had been underwater. James, who had long since grown bored of the bet and had started a game of individual wallball, only shrugged and postulated, “Maybe half an hour?” he shrugged, which wasn’t far off the mark.

James knew Nathan was fine since only moments ago he’d seen Nathan swimming along the bottom of the pool, doing lazy laps, stopping, rolling over on his back, and stretching before settling down yet again. But Anna did not know. Panicked, Anna jumped into the pool fully dressed and pulled her son to the surface, sure that he was dead.

Nathan was fine, of course, and rather surprised by the sudden rescue. He tried to assure his mother he was fine, as he was eventually able to do, but only because all evidence supported his claim; at which point, Anna’s anxiety turned to a cold rage, and she forbid him to ever go swimming without her in attendance.

After pulling Nathan out of the pool, Anna left to get a dry change of clothes and told the boys to gather their stuff and follow. To her chagrin, they loitered at the pool until she returned yet again.

Unwilling to let Nathan’s feat go unchallenged, James made one last attempt to match his friend. Obstinate to a fault, James blacked out in the attempt, and would have drowned had Anna not returned, dried and warm, to announce lunch was still waiting ever-so-patiently for them. Anna waited for James to surface, arms crossed, considering how she would punish the two. Simultaneously, James’ body began the slow systematic process of shutting down, for good, forever. Worried, exasperated, and with a pronounced, “for God’s sake”, Anna jumped into the pool once more, her clothes just changed and hair not yet dry. Lucky for James, Anna Marvelous had taken CPR classes and remembered enough to revive the boy.

This time, Anna dragged the two boys by their ears back to the apartment, and told them not to trifle with water. It was not a toy.

James, who had turned a convincing shade of blue, understood and suffered the chastisement with true remorse. For his part, James was mad at his friend for not checking up on him as he remained at the bottom of the pool. After all, didn’t James repeatedly check on Nathan during his final attempt? For his part, Nathan did not understand why either was vexed. Did most people drown after mere minutes?

Through the words of his mother, Nathan was informed that few things were actually toys and little was to be trifled with. Life was filled with so many dangerous things—yet, as the years passed, despite the persistence of his mother, Nathan found that little—perhaps nothing—threatened him, and so he constantly pushed himself to do something more daring, more harrowing. More and more, he found himself alone in these absurd endeavors. When others did compete, Nathan was the only one that ever came out of these stunts without any wounds, fractures, internal bleeding, or at the very least a deep and impacting insight into the precarious nature of life. Most of these occasions left Nathan surprisingly frustrated that he should feel so different, so untouchable.

The last stunt Nathan pulled, simply for sheer excitement, involved borrowing a motorcycle from a friend, who said he could keep the bike so long as he actually went through with the stunt, as the friend suspected the bike wouldn’t survive it anyway. It was an old bike, and the friend wasn’t too worried if Nathan actually went through with the dare, a thing the friend doubted. He might have been worried for Nathan, if he believed Nathan was dumb enough to go through with it—which indeed Nathan was dumb enough. He jumped the bike off a remote cliff in Southern Oregon, some three hundred feet into the uncertain depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Come to find out, those uncertain depths were quite shallow, and rocky to boot. Nathan survived the jump unscathed, although the specifics of the impact are sketchy. He hit water, and then rock, at which point, he blacked out.

Some time later, Nathan came to, face down on the thin beach next the cliff. The waves had pushed him on shore and also carried fragments of the bike to a slight stretch of sand and rock. Afterward, he gathered the shattered metal and plastic that remained of the bike and left what he scavenged in a neat little pile. With a salute to this mechanical cairn, Nathan made his way to the top of the cliff, where his horrified friends looked on. As he approached, Nathan gave a weak smile, and suggested they all go for beer. Ill at ease with what they’d seen, his friends agreed to beer, but the occasion was not festive, as Nathan was distant, and the friends were unsure what to make of it all.

Nathan hovered over his drink, wondering why he felt cheated, why he didn’t feel much at all. His friends were drunk and raucous, yet avoided Nathan’s gaze. Nathan was sober and bored out of his wits, even after five beers. Without the threat of danger, the touch of the sublime, Nathan was dulled to the joys and wonder of life and achievement. Without the constant strain of his own mortality, Nathan’s feats were cheap; and since they cost him so little, they held such little value.

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