The view from the 86th floor was, as always, spectacular. From the east, the sun rising over the Atlantic, nothing could compare. Off in other directions the city stretched away, rousing from the sluggish night to an active day. He watched the transition as the darkness melted away, pondering the next move.
Retirement, perhaps? Certainly there was justification. There used to be plenty of work, seemed like every week there was some insane inventor with a megalomaniacal streak creating something that’d be perfectly at home on the cover of a ‘30’s science fiction magazine. Death rays, mind control rays, ‘infernal devices’ of a thousand types and twice as many ways to use them to take over the world. There was that one nutcase who created a ‘life extension ray’ – though what use THAT would be in conquering a city he never quite understood. They’d all gotten a good laugh out of that one – it felt like you were dropped into a vat of feathers, tickling like mad over every inch of your body, inside and out. It was very strange indeed to have your appendix force you to laugh… The madman was quite upset when the team surrounded him, chuckling as he did his worst.
Later on, he understood, the guy became a cartoonist – created a very popular series about a roadrunner and a wolf or something, and inventions that were always blowing up. He shook his head - that was what 60 - 75 years ago? Well, side effects were to be expected in this line of work. Sure couldn’t fault the guy’s work – he was only now able to spot the occasional gray hair.
Things dropped off quickly, though, after the War. There was the occasional mad scientist to deal with, but the spark of creative insanity just seemed to be absent completely in the mainland. Overseas was another matter – volcanoes and piranha pits were so much cheaper in South America and Africa that sometimes it seemed a marvel that there weren’t entire subdivisions of mad inventors springing up.
Rom had theorized it had to do with short-wave radiation – she’d graphed the incidents of mad genius against the commercialization of the higher frequencies, and the higher the wavelength the lower the creative madness rate. When they’d parked satellites in geostationary orbit and started broadcasting commercially, the bottom fell out of the curve completely. Theory proven, as far as could be determined. And truth be told, as the cities and population grew it really was something of a relief to not have to worry about someone with a disintegration ray deciding to raze a skyline they didn’t like.
The years had passed fairly quickly after that, pretty much uneventfully. Lots of research time, and it was always amusing to see what folks would do with the released ideas. The IPod, for example, and that thing called the internet. The right idea in the right ear at the right time… you could do a lot if you knew just where to give a gentle nudge.
At least, on the level of the sciences it was possible. Politics, both international and domestic, were stubbornly resistant to ‘gentle’ nudging. If it wasn’t for the landmarks, there were more than a few times he’d been tempted to unleash some of the more destructive things in storage on Washington and Moscow. (And wouldn’t THAT have caused problems! No, better they stay in storage.)
No, it took a bit more sometimes. The almost-war in ’77 – he’d actually needed to jam communications networks in the USSR to keep a crazy colonel from a missile launch. And when the generals tried to lock down the Russian Parliament – all it took was a few calls to the right number and the phones were turned off.
9/11 was a shocker – there’d been no advance warning on that one. The team had gone do to what they could when the planes hit, he’d hung back to get that grav-beam invented in ’33 going. The vacuum tubes were in bad shape – there were spares, but it took him a while to swap them out and get it up and running and aimed properly to keep the Towers from falling. Millions of tons of steel and concrete, held from collapse long enough to get thousands of people out - then some of the ancient, gassy spare tubes blew. The first tower collapsed while he was swapping the originals back – and they lasted a bare half-hour. He watched helplessly as the second tower dropped.
He hadn’t had the heart after that to try to reconstitute the team. There wasn’t really much point – he’d bootstrapped enough medical and physical innovations that the ball was rolling well without his help. Politically? Not so much… he’d outlived most of his contacts around the world, and after the first seven assassination attempts when personally trying to get the influence back, it was apparent that the ways that worked to build trust fifty years back weren’t going to be sufficient after the turn of the century.
So he wrote, and researched, and observed. The internet made the last a lot easier and communicating quickly. An email to the right person at the right time tended to be almost as effective as a face-to-face, but figuring out who was the right person could be … iffy.
So what was next? Retirement?