The God Experiment

Chapter No.73. Service.

Chapter No.73. Service.

Robert answered the land line phone and was surprised it was the President. "We need your help as soon as possible. We've received a report that one of our carriers in the Persian Gulf has been torpedoed."

"Do you have an exact coordinate? Oh wait, I can see it. Okay, we'll take care of it." He no sooner hung up the phone when he had his entire family assembled ready for action.

They teleported to the location and discovered that the USS Hamilton had already sunk. Two destroyers were busy picking up crew members.

"I think we're too late," Janet said.

"Not really," Robert said. "We can refloat it and repair the damage."

They followed him into the water and down 160 feet to the bottom where they found the ship sitting in a murky bottom. Fortunately the ship was sitting upright.

"Okay, let's surround it and pull it up to the surface," Robert said.

"It looks like the torpedo blew out the side of the ship near the engine room," James said. "I can seal that off with a new section."

"Good," Robert said. "If we pull the ship up out of the water and tilt it towards the hole before you do that, we'll have most of the water out of the ship."

The destroyers that had obliterated the attacking sub were standing by. When the sailors saw the carrier rise out of the sea into the air and then tilt, they were literally blown away. They cheered when the ship was lowered and then allowed to settle. However, the real work was to come.

"You and Sylvia can go down and recover the bodies of the sailors that have drowned and were killed by the explosion. Your mother and I will begin resurrecting and curing the sailors who are still on the ship."

James saluted before he and Sylvia flew up and then down into the water to begin the hunt for those who were killed.

Robert and Janet entered the ship proper and began a search for those still on the ship. One of the dead was the captain, Admiral Justin Roberts, an older male with very short hair. When Robert placed his hand on his forehead, he began to cough up water out of his lungs. After a few moments of struggle, he looked up at his savior. "How are the others?"

"Spoken like a true leader, sir, who is more concerned about his crew. We are in the process of resurrecting your crew. Your ship has been repaired enough to be seaworthy."

"How is that possible. We were hit with two torpedoes that sank us."

"You can thank the president, sir. He informed us of your situation, and we came to rectify it."

Just then, an officer came into the bridge, and he was excited. "There are two people bringing bodies up from the sea and resurrecting them!" he looked at Robert. "You're the superheroes, aren't you?"

Robert gave him a salute. "Yes, we are."

"Why are you doing this?" Roberts asked him. "You could conquer the world and rule it."

"We have no interest in doing that. I was a Marine combat medic in the Iraq War. I fully understand what service means." He saluted. "I am honored to be of service in this situation."

"The two officers returned his salute. There really wasn't anything else they could say.

The superheroes resurrected all of the crew and repaired their ship well enough to get it underway. The two destroyers escorted it out through the Strait of Hormuz and back on its way to America.

Robert appeared in the White House Oval office. "We saved the crew and the ship, sir. They're on their way back."

"Yes, I just got the news." The president stared at Robert for a few seconds before responding. "What you've done is beyond anything I could ever imagine."

"We're happy to be of service, sir."

The president nodded.

Robert returned home and joined his family.

"That was fun," James said. "Imagine actually saving a sunk carrier."

"I'm surprised that they called us to do this," Janet said. "I'm sure that this was the result of a botched diplomatic effort."

"We probably stopped a war," Robert said. "I'm sure the United States would have retaliated with bombing runs, killing civilians in the process."

James looked at Sylvia. "Let's go work on our project."

"We need to go get more diamonds," Sylvia replied.

Janet's eyes grew larger for a split second before she squinted. "Diamonds?"

"Yeah, Sylvia and I have started a new business. We go to Neptune and farm diamonds from under its atmosphere. Sylvia cuts them into beautiful gems that we can sell online."

Sylvia snickered. "Yeah, we called our enterprise 'Cosmic Gems'. No one will know where we get them."

"You're running a business out of our house?" Janet asked, her brow furrelled

"Where else could we do it?" James said. "No one will know what we're doing."

"Why do you need to run a business?"

"We're never going to change. We're comic book characters. We need the dough to pay for our college courses."

"Can't you just create money?"

"You, of all people, should realize that banks won't accept big cash deposits. We've opened accounts in banks not associated with your credit union. All of the money we make is transferred online."

"Yes, I forgot about that. I suppose it doesn't matter. My salary isn't going to cover all of our expenses."

"So, you're able to extract diamonds from Neptune's atmosphere," Robert said. "I've heard about the theory but didn't really believe it."

"The diamonds are huge, but they yield really beautiful gemstones, thanks to her expert gem cutting abilities." He pointed to Sylvia.

"If we're going to be perpetual comic book characters, Sylvia and I have to consider that getting jobs after college will be problematic. We can't get married, and yet we have a child."

"That's not unusual." Janet said.

"True, but we're not normal by any criteria. We're brother and sister."

"But not genetically related."

"True, but add the fact that we're superheroes and it puts us in a very odd class."

Janet sighed. "I don't really understand why we were frozen as comic book characters."

"It's probably the only way we're going to be tolerated," Robert said. "People accept us because they fantasize us as being a superhero family like the Incredibles. If we were just a gang with no relation to fiction, they would be suspicious of our motives. It's the perfect disguise."

"In some ways it's great and in other ways it's a pain in the ass," James said. "We'll eventually become an enigma and people will go nuts trying to figure out how we got this way."

"I've explained it several times," Robert said. "For some reason, people don't get it."

"They're idiots. So far you stopped a nuclear war between Russia and the US, we've stopped a large asteroid from striking Earth, destroyed a demon army hell bent on taking over, stopped a coronal mass ejection from destroying Earth's electronics, and prevented a gamma ray burst from annihilating all life, not to mention many other things we've done to save people, and yet we're vilified. I don't get it."

"I don't either," Janet said. "You would think that people would be grateful for what we've done."

"It's almost as if people hate us," Sylvia said.

"And yet, we prevail because God has given us the ability to do so," Robert said.

Everyone agreed with that assessment, but they were dismayed by the existential effects of it.