When Excelsior wakes up, the first thing he sees is Edwin Windsor. Edwin sits in a plush leather chair. Next to the chair there is a small side table with a pot of tea and a video projector. Edwin takes a sip of tea and asks. “How are you feeling?” His concern almost sounds genuine.
“A little woozy,” says Excelsior. The room smells musty to him. He sees crude lights are strung on the ceiling. Excelsior tries to move and realizes that he cannot. This has never happened before. Excelsior is not happy. He struggles vigorously, but gets nowhere.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to do, Windsor, but when I break free, I’ll take care of you.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” says Edwin, placing the cup in it’s saucer. He crosses his legs and says, “but I thought we might have a little talk first.”
“There’s nothing to talk about, you’re a monster. Plain and simple.”
Edwin considers monstrosity. “Perhaps,” he says, “Perhaps I am a monster. But one thing is certain. I am not a barbarian.” Edwin removes a pristine white handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Then he leans down and wipes some of the grime from Excelsior’s face. Excelsior tosses his head from side to side but there is nothing he can do.
“Hold still,” Edwin commands. He pours a bit of tea into his handkerchief and rubs at a stubborn spot on Excelsior’s forehead. Excelsior gnashes at him with his teeth. It’s the only resistance he can offer.
Edwin avoids the bite. “With those manners, I will certainly not be offering you tea.”
“What have you done to me?”
“I have placed you in a cardboard tube, and then filled the tube with quick setting epoxy. It has tensile strength almost equal to titanium. Remarkable substance. Especially because, to unbind it, all I need do is apply this reactant,” Edwin says, holding up a small vial of liquid.”
“It doesn’t matter. You’re just a villain like all the rest. And someday I will defeat you.”
“Really? Why not today? Why not now?”
Again, Excelsior struggles against his prison. Again he fails to break free. Edwin wasn’t kidding, this stuff is strong. Excelsior thought he might break it if he were at full strength, but the beating had taken a lot out of him. More than he liked to admit. Excelsior scanned the strange room again. All he needed was a window, a little —
“Sunlight?” Edwin asks. “ I am afraid not. We are six stories underground. This is all that is left of my building. Sub basement three B, I think it is. I am certain this room has never seen the light of day.”
“How did you know?”
“You mentioned it in a magazine interview in 1974. It’s never wise to reveal the source of your powers. Actually, it’s never wise to reveal anything. It’s a mistake I’m sure you won’t be making again. Don’t take it so hard. Even without research it would have been easy enough to deduce. A simple order of magnitude calculation. Where else could so much energy come from? From what you eat? How many calories of energy would you have to exert to lift a battleship? No, it simply has to be the sun. Unless you yourself are a fusion reactor.”
Excelsior turns his head to hide his expression. The last thing he wants is Edwin gloating over his shame.
“There is no shame in defeat,” says Edwin, “There is only shame in avoidable defeat — in, to be perfectly honest, stupidity.”
Excelsior whips his head back and forth. “Your ass is mine Windsor. I’ll come for you. Nothing on earth is going to stop me from getting you.”
“You’re really not much of hero are you?”
Excelsior struggles some more. Sweat breaks out on his face. He yells at the top of his lungs. When he catches his breath he says, “I used to be.”
Edwin has another sip of tea. He tries to imagine what Excelsior would be like if he were really a hero. It is not easy. “You were never a hero. You just thought you were.”
“Great,”says Excelsior, “Now you are going to lecture me?”
“No.” says Edwin. “I came to offer you a choice.” He triggers a walkie-talkie and says “Go.” There is a slithering noise as a hose leading into the middle of the room swells and belches wet concrete onto the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“I am building a monument to your last battle.”
“You what?”
“Right up there,” Edwin says, pointing to the surface, “will be your memorial. A large bronze statue, with the legend, ‘Upward, ever upward.’“
“Why are you doing this?” asks Excelsior, eyeing the concrete as it oozes closer and closer.
“So no one will ever forget your sacrifice. I don’t see why you are so upset. This is your chance to die as a hero.”
“Is this because I destroyed your office?”
“No.”
“This isn’t fair. This ISN”T FAIR!” Excelsior pounds his head against the floor.
“Fair?” Edwin laughs. The concrete oozes across the floor. It has almost reached Excelsior’s face. “Fair has nothing to do with it. There is only what I can do, and what I will do.”
“Okay Windsor, what do you want?”
“You don’t have anything I want. You don’t seem to have anything at all.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
“I told you, I am here to offer you a choice. I can free you,” Edwin says, holding up the vial of reactant —
“Free me. Go ahead, that’s my choice!”
“Calm down. You haven’t heard the other option.”
“Are you insane?”
“I don’t think so. I think I am perfectly rational. I can free you, or I will generously agree to bury you in concrete.”
“What’s generous about that?”
“Well, I am doing all of this at my own expense.”
“That’s no choice, let me out of this thing,” Excelsior says as the concrete reaches the tip of his chin.
“I think burial is the way you want to go with this one. That is, if you’re serious about being a hero.” Edwin activates the video projector. Motes of dust dance in the beam and an image forms on the far wall.
On the wall Excelsior sees a picture of a candlelight vigil held in front of a memorial wall decorated with hundred of flowers.
“They’re holding a vigil for me? Because I’m gone?” Excelsior asks hopefully.
“No. It is not for you. Look closer.” Edwin advances to a picture of a young girl. “This is Stephanie Mills, 25. She worked in an office below mine. She and seventeen of her co-workers fell to their death when you knocked part of the top off Windsor Tower.”
Next, Edwin shows him a picture of a man with a plain, honest face. Now the projector shows that this picture is tacked to the memorial wall. Next to it the words, ‘Daddy, we miss you’ are written in crayon. “Thomas Sarah, bank clerk, father of three daughters. He is one of the people who was killed when Stephanie and her co- workers landed.”
“I didn’t kill them, I was fighting Lifto.” Even as Excelsior says it, it rings false in his ears. He has the feeling again. The feeling that everything is going wrong. The feeling of a plane falling apart in his fingers.
“You chose to fight Lifto in the city,” says Edwin. “You could have apprehended him at another place. Another time. You could have let the police do it.”
“None of the police are strong enough.”
“Not by themselves, but they could have maintained a cordon. Perhaps I could have talked him into surrendering.”
“But I had to save them. Save the people from villains like the Lifto and the Cromoglodon.”
“But you didn’t,” says Edwin, clicking relentlessly through pictures of the departed and the ones they left behind. A young girl, no more than three, but seeming ancient as she stands next to an open grave.
And next, an arm protruding from rubble. Cars, still on fire in the first light of dawn. The eerily peaceful face
