What's gone before: The Silhouette is a prisoner on board a secret Nazi airship making for the Canadian rockies, as is the unconscious Blacklight. The Man-Fly had also been on the ship, but when last we saw, was plunging to his death, hundreds of feet above the ground...

Moments after the Man-Fly had raced out into the corridor of the Nazi airship, the Silhouette darted from the room in the opposite direction, stepping over the unconscious body of the Nazi super-agent, Blitzkrieg. The Man-Fly had told her to release Blacklight, and to find Professor MacCreary, if possible. She knew where Blacklight was, just as she knew he was probably unconscious, no doubt having been administered the same drug Major Strauss had given to her.

So perhaps it was more important to take advantage of the confusion the Man-Fly was trying to sow by locating the professor, she reasoned.

She hurried down the corridor until coming to a steel door. It was from here that she had heard strange sounds, almost animal moanings, earlier. It had panicked her, and she had failed to investigate. She told herself that was silly...perhaps even unconscionable. Reconsidered with hindsight, the sounds had obviously been human, a human in great pain, presumably being tortured. What other explanation was there? And since the Man-Fly had told her Professor MacCreary was on board, it seemed likely it was he.

She hesitated, just reaching for the door. If this was truly another cell upon the airship, why had it not been guarded? she wondered. Why was it not guarded still?

Steeling herself, she flung open the door.

"Professor MacCreary?" she whispered.

The room beyond was dark. After a moment, she realized it was also empty. Cautiously she entered. The room was no mirror of the Spartan cells to which she and Blacklight had been confined. Red curtains were over the porthole, the bed was more comfortable -- a true bed, not just a cot -- with an ornately woven comforter. An oak table was against one wall and, when she opened it, a small bar was revealed inside, with Scotch, whiskey, and other beverages. A bookshelf was against the opposite wall.

This was no prison, she realized. Yet why then had the occupant been moaning? Why had he sounded so...inhuman? She leaned over the bed and brushed aside the felt curtains. There were bars on the window.

Even her room had not had bars.

Perplexed by the mystery, and a little unnerved, she returned to the corridor. She heard footsteps approaching and, closing her eyes, vanished into the shadow at her feet. The slip of darkness that remained where she had stood darted down the corridor, beneath the feet of the unsuspecting German agents as they hurried on their business. The silhouette slipped under another door, and halted instantly on the other side.

An old man was strapped to a chair, his head lolling to one side in a state of only semi-consciousness. The room's only light, an overhead lamp, blasted him with withering illumination, while allowing darkness to congeal with thick malevolence in the corners. The old man's collar was loose, his sleeves rolled up. Near him, rubber gloves upon his hands, a short, dapper-dressed man stood by one wall. Discarded syringes lay on a metal table. In the far corner sat a young man at a fold-out table with a dictaphone. By the door, his booted feet planted upon the darkness that had slipped unobtrusively into the room, was the gaunt, towering figure of Major Strauss. With his black overcoat and black hat, he looked almost like a shadow himself.

"As you can see, Herr Major," said the dapper-dressed man. "There are certain advantages to science, to the rational, over simple brute terror. If I had allowed you to torture the good professor as you wanted, we might have acquired but a fraction of the necessary information, and the ravings of a man under...duress would be considerably less reliable."

"Why do you address me in English, Dr. Vogel?"

Vogel smiled at him, with cold, mocking humour. "Why, as a courtesy, dear Major. You were raised in Canada, after all. I assume speaking the German tongue would be difficult for you."

"You know that's not true. And I advise you to be careful...the Fuhrer himself is more comfortable with my so-called brute terror than your rationality. You and your kind serve a purpose, but in many ways, I am that purpose personified. Remember that...Herr Docteur."

Vogel frowned, his eyes narrowing, but said nothing.

"MacCreary could still be lying," Strauss went on, returning to the topic at hand. "You cannot know your truth serum works."

"Perhaps. But, then, he will still be alive for us to try again to elicit his secrets, perhaps even using your methods. Your way, we might not have that second opportunity. However, if you had managed to secure the documents I required, then we would have something to test the good professor's statements against. Regrettably, you bungled your assignment."

Strauss glared, but said nothing.

"Still, I am cautiously optimistic. His ramblings gell with what I have already extrapolated from my own humble experimentations along the same lines."

"Then I should inform the general that we can begin the process as soon as we reach our destination?"

Vogel nodded. "Yes. I will radio ahead...the preparations can begin before we even arrive."

"Good. I-"

Suddenly the door opened behind him, flooding more light into the room. The shadow beneath him seemed almost to cringe, to curl more carefully around Strauss' feet. A man rose on his toes to whisper into Strauss' ear. The major listened, stiffened, then hissed a couple of orders. As the messenger hurried off, he turned back to Vogel, anger blazing in his icy eyes. Still speaking English instinctively, he said, "There was another Canadian adventurer on board -- how he got here, I don't know. He has been dealt with, but the woman has disappeared."

"Again," remarked Vogel drily. "She seems to make a habit of that. Or is it that you make a habit of losing her? Find her, Strauss. There cannot be too many places to hide on this ship...and it's such a very long way down."

The Man-Fly awoke with a start, his body a mass of aches. That did not surprise him. What surprised him was that he felt anything at all.

With a groan he rolled over and tried to push himself from the ground -- grassy ground, layered with dead leaves, he realized thickly. He was outside. Somewhere.

"Easy, fella. Let me help you." Strong hands gripped his shoulders and helped him to sit up. Slowly, he looked into the purple-masked features of the adventurer, Mr. Amazing. "You've taken quite a pounding, but I don't think anything's broken." Sluggishly he perceived that Mr. Amazing's costume was torn in spots, exposing scratched skin beneath.

"You look like a canary the cat got tired of playing with," said the Man-Fly after a moment. "What the Hell happened to you? To me? I thought I was a goner for sure when I fell off the blimp." Clumsily he reached up and felt his fly-head mask still over his head.

"I considered removing it," said Mr. Amazing, "but I thought you'd want your privacy."

"Hell." He wrenched it off and tossed it to the ground, then inhaled of the cool, open air. "It can get a bit ripe in there." He dragged fingers through his chestnut hair. He was not an unhandsome man, but with a hard, weathered look, like a cowboy hero in a pulp magazine. A man who had seen a lot of life's less attractive side. He squinted up at the blue sky flickering through the breeze-tossed leaves of the trees surrounding them. Above and to his left, visible through the branches, loomed the mighty Rockies. The site momentarily took his breath away with its majesty. For a moment, everything he had ever seen or done dwindled in comparison to nature's great wall of stone. Then the moment passed and the needs of the instant came back to him. "How come I'm not paste by now?"

"I guess you must have fainted."

"I didn't faint...I passed out, there's a difference. The mask combined with the speed of the wind and the drop to momentarily starve me for oxygen."

"Of course," said Mr. Amazing. "Anyway, I and my companions-"

"Dennis is with you?"

Mr. Amazing's mouth dropped open, just for a second. "Uh, yeah -- yes. Wow, you don't miss a trick, do you? Anyway, we'd been tailing the airship using Dennis Welbeck -- Dreamstalker's -- um, I think he called it mentalism. Maybe I should step back. When we heard about the explosion at the army base, he got us into the air as quickly as possible in the hopes that he might pick up the brainwaves of the Silhouette and Blacklight. He couldn't hope to distinguish them on the ground, he said, not in the city, where there were so many other people. But he reasoned the Nazis would take to the air, and in the air the brainwaves would be less obstructed. It sort of worked. At least, it started us in the right direction. We'd been following his 'hunch' for a couple of days and only just spotted the airship a few hours ago. We moved in closer, just reconnoitering, when we saw you go plunging off." He shrugged. "I rescued you."

"Thanks," he said grudgingly. "I didn't know you can fly -- the paper's never said. They call you the Spirit of Decency, the world's oldest Boy Scout, but no one ever said you can fly."

"I can't."

The Man-Fly made to speak, stopped. He scowled at his rescuer, trying to decide if he was jesting with him. "Then how the Hell-?"

"I'm just lucky."

"That's no answer."

"Actually, it is." Mr. Amazing leaned back on the grass next to him, and winced slightly from pain. "Actually, that Boy Scout crack -- although I think you meant it a little derisively -- is kind of apropos. When I was eight years old I was camping in Banff National Park-" He stopped, and looked around a little wide-eyed. Slowly a smile touched his lips. "That's probably not too far from here, I'll bet. Anyway, I became separated from my parents, lost, and wandered for hours. Strangely, I wasn't scared. Not because I was stoic, or brave, but because I felt curiously as though I knew where I was going -- which was ridiculous. Or so it should have been. And then I came upon an old Indian in the woods, all alone. He knew my name, and he said that he had been waiting for me. I still wasn't scared, though I was aware of how bizarre it was. He gave me this scarf." He pointed to the Indian handicraft around his neck. "And told me that as long as I devoted myself to justice for everyone, to simple decency, it would bring me luck in whatever I did."

The Man-Fly plucked a blade of grass and stuck it between his lips. "And that explains us being here...how?"

Mr. Amazing grinned. "The scarf brings me luck -- generally. I knew you were plunging to your death, but I reasoned that if I could grab you, if we fell together, the scarf would protect me and, by extension, you. So I leaped out after you, streamlined my body so that I fell faster and was able to catch up to you, and I held on. Lucky for us, we were over those trees there, so that when we hit, the branches broke our fall."

"Lucky?"

"That's the only way I can describe it. Things just happen to go my way, more often than not...sometimes in quite extraordinarily unusual circumstances. I didn't even realize those trees were there, and evenso, it was a hundred to one, a thousand to one, that we wouldn't just break our necks crashing through them."

"And this always happens?"

"Well...not always. It was a calculated risk."

The Man-Fly pursed his lips. "Brother, that's the most cock-and-bull story I've ever heard. You want me to believe you're practically invulnerable thanks to a magic scarf?"

"I never said invulnerable." Mr. Amazing grimaced, more visibly than before, and looked down at his cut and bloodied form. "Maybe the scarf's just a superstitious affectation, maybe it really is just run-of-the-mill luck I experience. Whatever, I've stayed out of the grave, but not always out of the hospital."

"Yeah, well I-Aahhh." The Man-Fly collapsed to the dirt, curling his body slightly. "Jeezus," he hissed, practically spitting the word. "Not now!"

"Wha-?" Mr. Amazing leaped to his feet, unsure what to do, what was wrong. The Man-Fly, though bruised, had seemed to emerge from their ordeal relatively unharmed. He watched as the other man forced himself to sit up, his face a mask of agony that was painful just to look at, his features reddening with the strain. Teeth locked, eyes wild, the Man-Fly began to massage his left thigh, stabbing his fingers periodically. After a moment, slowly, the fit seemed to pass.

Wearily, he wiped sweat from his brow. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he looked at Mr. Amazing, who's features were a mix of concern...and curiosity. "You try walking away from a Sopwith Camel."

"I don't understand."

He sighed. "After it's smeared itself across No Man's Land and there's hardly anything left to identify it even as a plane. It was messy. I got better, sort of, but the docs figured I'd spend the rest of my life on painkillers. In Tibet, though, a Lama taught me techniques, accupressure and the like. I can deaden the pain periodically. If I couldn't, there'd be no Man-Fly, he just couldn't function without a cane and some drugs. The limb goes sort of numb, though. It took me months to train myself to move normally after a nerve pinch."

Mr. Amazing stared at him for a moment, slowly realizing a greater respect for this man -- this man with no "super" powers, yet who was easily as notorious as the rest of them. He began to understand why. Then he shook himself, realizing that a man like the Man-Fly was not the sort to welcome, or even appreciate, pity. "Uh, well, look, I'm-"

"So if you jumped off a plane," the Man-Fly interrupted curtly, obviously not wanting them to wade into sentimentality, "where's Dennis?"

"He had to find a clear spot to land the plane. And it's not just Dennis, there's this amazing girl who -- hullo. What's this?"

Man-Fly twisted his head and saw a man approaching through the gnarled trees. He was a weathered character, in a straw hat and overalls. His skin was tanned from days in the fields. Behind him came a half dozen other men and women, all equally typical farmer-types. The Man-Fly made to hurriedly pull his mask back on, then thought better of it. The mask, after all, was used to scare people. Instead, he tucked it into his pocket.

Rising to his feet, Mr. Amazing smiled disarmingly. "Hello. Didn't realize anyone was around." He stopped. The lead farmer said nothing, just stared at him without expression, his eyes dark, unreadable. The others began to spread around them, forming a circle with the two costumed heroes at the centre. "Uh...Man-Fly-?" cautioned Mr. Amazing.

Suddenly the farmer began to shimmer, subtlely at first, then his whole body began to ripple, to distort. Nor was he alone.

"Oh my God," gasped the Man-Fly.

Panting, Dennis Welbeck pushed his way through the branches and low lying ferns. He was dressed in form-fitting green, a magician's cloak spilling over his shoulders. On his head he wore a curious helmet, shining silver, not unlike an old Roman centurian headpiece. At his side came Roberta, the robot.

Dennis Welbeck -- the Dreamstalker -- stopped and looked around. They were in the forest at the foot of the Rockies where Mr. Amazing and the Man-Fly had fallen. He had circled the area twice in the plane until spying Mr. Amazing through a break in the branches, waving and giving him the "thumbs up" sign. Beyond the trees stretched the huge Rockies, majestic, immutable...and just a little foreboding. Somewhere amid those ancient crags lay the Nazi airship's destination...and he dreaded what they would find there.

For the moment, though, he was more concerned about what he wasn't finding.

"This is damn peculiar," he muttered. "I'm sure this is where I saw them."

"It is," said Roberta, kneeling. "There are depressions in the grass, the leaves are disturbed -- they were here. It looks like there was a struggle."

"Nazis?"

"I don't know. The footprints are not soldier's boots." She rose and looked at him. "The trail is well concealed, but I think I can follow it. I can try, anyway."

He put his hands on his hips, then stiffened as something caught his eye. "Look!" he pointed up. "Is that what I think it is?"

"The airship," Roberta confirmed, her robotic eyes more easily picking out the camouflaged shape of the ship through the trees, obscured by the misty clouds hugging the mountains.

"I thought it'd be long gone by now." He looked at the ground, at the trampled grass, then back at the dwindling ship. In his heart, he wrestled for what seemed like eternity, literally beading sweat on his lip with the horror of the decision he knew had to be made. Finally, though it could only have been a second or two later, he said, "Come on, back to the plane."

"But Mr. Amazing?"

"Don't you think I know that? I'm the one who got him into this -- I got them all into this. And the Man-Fly's my friend. But, dammit, we can't let that airship get away. No matter what. Remember, Professor MacCreary -- your father -- is on board. Our friends will just have to fend for themselves, whatever danger they face." He turned, trying to seem sure, trying to seem brave and confident. Instead, his limbs trembled and he thought, to himself: And may God forgive me.

He started back toward the plane.

Next: Dreamstalker and Roberta close in, but who, or what, are those people in the woods? The Silhouette is loose, but can she stay that way, and free Blacklight as well? Be here in seven days for "The Great Escape(s)". Plus, the final destination of the airship!

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