Ralph Hardy stood at the balcony of his high-rise apartment and talked to the animals.

“Aren’t you done yet?” asked Jill.

“Barely begun,” said Ralph, softly, both his eyes closed.

It was a sight Jill, his secretary and lover, had almost gotten used to in the years that she’d known him.  In a way, she envied him.  After all, she loved animals almost as much as he did (well, not counting snakes, which she’d never gotten used to, poisonous or not). But he was the one who could communicate with them telepathically.

He could still draw on that much of his power without changing physically into the Jaguar.

After another few seconds, she said, “What are they saying, Ralph?”

The mustached, black-haired man sighed and opened his eyes.  “So much, Jill.  So very, very much.”

“Nuts,” she grumped.

“There’s so much I need to do for them, Jill,” he said, turning to face her.  “So many of them being poisoned, stalked, shot, driven from their homes...or just needing comfort.  They give me so much, and I can’t give enough back.”

“Speaking of needing comfort, Ralph.”

“I’m sorry, Jill.  I know I’ve been neglectful, lately.”

She stepped outside in her short dress and bare feet and wrapped her arms about him.  “It’s not like I don’t know who you are, Ralph.  But you’ve got to put up some barriers, you know.  You’re the Jaguar, not Dr. Doolittle.”

“Yes,” he said.  “He had it easier.”

Jill pressed herself against him.  “Care to try some of that animal magnetism on me, tiger?”

“Don’t think I could resist.  But you know how it is, Jill.  Most vets, or zookeepers, even, they only have to deal with the animals people bring to them, or the ones they keep.  And we do.  But to be aware of all the fauna kingdom out there...to be able to talk to them.”

“Oh, hell,” she groused, stiffening a bit.  “Are you going to start getting sentimental over a pond of frogs some developer drained again?”

He smiled.  “Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish your friends on two legs from the ones with more than that.”

“Each to his own species, Ralph.  Which we are, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“They expect so much from the Jaguar.  They’ve got a right to.”

“I’ve got a right to expect something from you, too.”

“So you want to get married, too, Jill?”

She smiled.

“All right,” said Ralph.  “Just as soon as we finish up this case.”

She stopped smiling.

“Jill,” he said.  “This is important.  We’ve just discovered that parts of our memories may have been tampered with.”

“Oh, I can believe it, Ralph,” she said.  “Like your memories of me, for instance.  Remember?  Jill Monroe, girl Friday, secretary, and the gal who warms your bed whenever you’re home long enough to warm it?”  She stood away from him.  “Or maybe you don’t care about me because I’ve only got two legs?”

“Come on.  I care about you more than anything else.  And your two legs are the best I’ve ever seen.”

Jill tried to smile but couldn’t.  “Ralph.  I know it’s a cliche, I know, but when are you going to make more time for us?  I have needs, too, you know.  I’m not just talking about sex.”

“I know, Jill.  So do I, believe me.  But the world has needs, too.  Not just the people in it, either.”

“Oh?  And I suppose Kim and Tom are going to have to make time on their honeymoon for all the orphaned flies in the city?”

“You’d have to ask them about that.”

“Don’t bother.”  She turned and walked into the house.

“Jill,” Ralph called after her.

She pivoted, and her look was not kind.  “Ralph.  Do your stupid change.  Turn into the Jaguar.  I don’t care.  I’m getting my things and I’m staying somewhere else tonight.  And if you really care about me, I’d better not see some hoot-owl outside my window keeping tabs on me.”

He moved towards her, too quickly.  She shrank back.  “Don’t come closer.”

“What do you expect me to do?” he snapped.  “First you want me to make love to you, then you put up a wall and tell me you’re leaving.  I swear, female ocelots are a hell of a lot easier to understand than you.”

“Fine.  Get one of them for your mate.”  Jill turned again, stamped off to her room, and slammed and locked the door.

He knocked on it, twice.  “Jill, come on.  We can talk about it.”

“Tomorrow we can talk about it,” she said from within.  “Go away, Ralph.  I don’t want you there when I come out.  I’ll give you a call tomorrow.  Go do what I told you to do earlier.  The animals are waiting.”

“Damn it!”

“Go away, Ralph!”

He waited silently for several seconds.  Then he stepped away, loosened the belt he wore around his regular pants, and laid his hands on the very special one that lay below it.  As he did so, he spoke two words.

“The Jaguar,” he said.

There was a moment of transit and then a red-costumed figure, borne on the power of two jets attached to the belt about his waist, flew from the balcony into the sky with a speed so great few could have tracked him with their eyes.

The Jaguar, master of the animal kingdom, was on the prowl.

 -M-

Even Ralph Hardy had to admit that it sounded like a dream.  He sometimes doubted his own memories of the event.  But they were so vivid, and the outcome so concrete, that he had to finally admit to himself that it had to be all true.

He had been in Peru at the time when It Happened.  The nation was noted for its earthquakes, and had obliged him by having one while he was there.  Of all things, a dinosaur had emerged from one of the crevasses.  How it had gotten there, he had no idea, but the notion always reminded him of Groucho’s line about shooting an elephant in his pajamas, and how it got in his pajamas, he’d never know.

When one sees a dinosaur liberated from a crevasse, the best course of action is to go where it isn’t.  Ralph Hardy had run his legs off.  The dinosaur followed.

To this day, he wasn’t certain that the dinosaur didn’t end up herding him in the direction of the ancient Inca temple.  All he knew was that it was a pretty good place to hide out from a hungry saurian, so he sprinted inside it.  The dinosaur, still wanting lunch, howled outside, thrust its maw against the doorway, and waited for its meal to come outside.

The thing was, Ralph Hardy found a belt inside the temple, as if the thing had been calling to him.  Which, all considered, it well might have been.

The belt was made of some mysterious sort of material that wasn’t quite leather, wasn’t quite plastic, wasn’t quite animal hide, and felt something like a cross between all three.  It had strange little metal tubes at its sides, and was imprinted with something in an alien language on its reverse side.

Somehow, touching the belt translated the language for Ralph, mentally.  It was an efficient sort of Berlitz course.  The inscription told him that the belt had been created by the great Primal Powers, who had ruled animals before the era of Man, and that, if he wished, he could gain supreme powers over all the animals in Creation by holding the belt and saying the words, “The Jaguar.”

Why “the Jaguar”?  Why not “the Owl”, or “the Camel”, or “the Australian Duckbilled Platypus”?  Ralph never knew.  But the belt said “the Jaguar”, so “The Jaguar” is what Ralph said.  It stood to reason that power over all the animals in Creation might be of good use against Mr. Ugly poking his snout into the door.

Whammo.

In a brief nimbus of light, Ralph Hardy was transformed into a powerful man (minus Ralph’s trademark mustache) wearing a skin-tight red costume with a jaguar’s eyes and mouth on the chest.  His muscles bulged with the power of a hundred elephants, give or take a couple.  He had a sense of smell that would shame a dog, hearing that could pick up and interpret the pleas of a mouse, the speed of a dozen cheetahs, and all sorts of nifty animalistic powers.  Plus the little tubes on the side of his belt were jets.  He could activate them mentally.

The Jaguar flew outside and gave the dinosaur a punch in the nose.  The dino slumped unconscious.  That made it a lot easier for the Jaguar to bundle him into the crevasse and seal it up again.  Later, Ralph came back to America and decided to become a super-hero because, well, it just seemed like the thing to do when this sort of thing happened.  After all, there had been the first wave with the Shield and the Web and the Comet and all of them.  Now there were these two second-wave guys, the Fly and the new Shield, and with powers like these, he could justifiably hobnob with them.

Well, the new Shield didn’t stay around long enough for Ralph to meet him back then.  But he did, in time, meet with the Fly and Fly-Girl, and hit it off well with them.  They had an insect thing, he had an animal thing. They understood each other.  By that time, of course, the Jaguar had battled his share of super-villains and alien invaders and had made a name for himself.  He had also collected a couple of recurring villainesses, namely the Cat-Girl and Kree-Nal, one of whom was an ancient sorceress who had been the model for the Sphinx, the other of whom was a green-skinned mer-woman.  Both of them had great legs and were nifty distractions from his secretary, Jill Monroe.

Eventually things cooled down with Cat and Kree and heated up with Jill, and she moved in with him.  He had crashed a Mighty Crusaders meeting once because just about every hero in America was doing so, got to meet a bunch of other super-heroes, and, like them, almost got killed by the Wizard and the Hangman.  When that case wound up, the five Crusaders told the others to get packing.  The Jaguar joined a three-man group that went nowhere fast.  Finally, when the Crusaders made a comeback years later, he was asked to join and did so.

Those were fun days, fighting the Brain Emperor and all the rest.  Hanging out with the Black Hood, the Comet, two Shields, and the Web, as well as Fly and Fly-Girl.  But he always had his solo life to go back to, and it was hard–sometimes very hard–to make Jill understand when he had to get up and answer the summons of a mama rabbit who was having trouble with a breech birth.

To be the Jaguar, you had to be on call to help more than just humans.

It was this unique perspective that Jill Monroe never got her mind around, even though she was always there to help him splint a dog’s leg or help a foundering cow.  He tried to give her the analogy of a doctor’s wife having to put up with emergency calls in the middle of the night, but she didn’t want to buy it.

He had tried to serve both communities well, the humans by fighting supercrime and the animals by doing what he could when he needed them.  He had saved German shepherds from being sacrificed by a weird cult.  He had liberated a tribe of gorillas from neo-Nazis who wanted to experiment on them.  He had, on occasion, opened the back of a dogcatcher’s wagon when nobody had seen him, after ascertaining that none of its occupants was rabid.

But there were things the animals couldn’t understand, either. Such as why, if animals had to be experimented upon by scientists for human benefits, humans could not be experimented upon for animal benefits.  None of them seemed to like the idea of Dolly the sheep when he told them about her.  At times, he was accused of being speciesist.  He had come to a working accommodation with them all, and found that George Orwell’s Animal Farm was of no help in understanding their politics.

He went on being the Jaguar.  No other seemed willing or capable to be the bridge between two-legs and four-or-more.  Nobody else even seemed to give a damn about it.

But when it got too frustrating, he could usually find a gang of crooks to pound into the ground.  Thinking of new animal powers to employ was also a trip.  Slapping the ground with the force of ten thousand beaver tails, for instance, or hanging from a tree with the power of a regiment of opossums.

And yet, and yet...

Jill had told him that if she ever caught him taking a whiz to mark the boundaries of his property, she was leaving, no questions asked.

It was tough to be the Jaguar.

 -M-

“Okay, Shield–Joe–you knew him when.    Where do you think we should start?”

The Comet, John Dickering, was the one who had spoken.  He was wearing his red-and-white uniform now, the one with the rainbow helmet from his days on the planet Altrox.  The man he addressed was the elder Shield, Joe Higgins, in a red-white-and-blue uniform with an impenetrable metal chest plate.  His son Bill wore a duplicate of the uniform.  Lance Strong, who also, confusingly enough, called himself the Shield, wore a different costume with, naturally, the same colors.  All of them were assembled in the Crusaders’ HQ, along with the Black Hood, John’s brother the Hangman, and the Web.

“The last time we worked together, the Wiz was operating out of Boston,” said the first Shield.  “I doubt that he’s listed in the phone book, though.  My best guess is, contact the coroner’s office and see if anybody named Blaine Whitney kicked off in the last forty years.  That’s the Wizard’s real name.”

The Web, alias criminology professor John Raymond, turned to the Hangman.  “Bob, you worked with the criminal Wizard for a long time when he had that mind-spell on you.  Ever find out where he lived?”

The Hangman, in green-and-blue costume and blue mask, shook his head and toyed with his rope.  “We didn’t exactly mix socially in between our crimes,” he said.  “When the Wiz wanted me for a job, he either popped up out of nowhere or gave me a mind-message.  After that last fight he had with Fly-Man, I didn’t hear from him again.  That’s when I kinda came out of my trance.”

The Web stroked his chin.  “City records ought to tell us where Blaine lived, when he stopped living there, and so on.  Somebody must still be there who knows him.  We’ll have to do the detective bit.”

“Before we do that,” suggested the Black Hood, who was a cop in his civilian i.d., “try this for size.  You remember when Zambini and Kardak brought back the Wizard’s kid partner through that time-warp, and the kid brought back the old Wizard to fight the new one?  What if he’s still around?”

Bill Higgins, the Mark III Shield, snapped his fingers.  “Hey, you got it!  Roy the Super-Boy!  We never did find out what happened to him.  Funny–we never tried.”

“Not so funny,” put in Lancelot Strong.  “The evil Wizard was damping down your curiosity.  What was Roy’s last name?”

“Rossman,” answered Shield I.  “He used to pal around with my partner, Dusty.  They had a two-man, well, two-boy team going, called themselves the Boy Buddies.  And before you ask, no, I don’t know where Dusty is right now.”

“I have a feeling that before this thing is over, we’ll learn, Pop,” said Bill, who had met a time-travelling Dusty in the aforementioned Crusaders case.  “The thing is...”

“Yes, son?” asked Joe Higgins, patiently.

“Okay,” said Bill.  “If we’re positing the Wizard had a line into our minds back then, was perhaps feeding us a mental tap or something, how do we know he doesn’t still have it in there?  How do we know he isn’t tapping us, right now?”

“We don’t,” said the Comet, quietly.

After a few moments, Joe said, “Let’s see if we can track down Roy Rossman.”

 -M-

Thomas Troy and Kim Brand were traipsing across one of the beaches of Tahiti, which took a considerable amount of money for each traipse.  He considered it worth every dime of his and Kim’s money to be there, ogling her in the black bikini she’d worn in Tenth Configuration, his favorite one of her flicks.  From the way her arm around his back kept its hand straying towards his hips, he figured she’d found something to admire as well.  Lucky for him.

The only things they wore besides their bathing suits were their rings.  Both pair of them.

“Mrs. Thomas Troy,” she said.  “Mrs. Kim Brand Troy.  Mrs. Kim Troy.  Nope.  I don’t like the last two.  Can I just be Mrs. Kim Brand?”

“You can be anything you want, as long as you keep sharing space with me,” he said.  “As long as I don’t get introduced as Mr. Kim Brand.”

She grabbed the belt of his trunks and grinned.  “You should live so long.  Tom, tell me one thing.”

“I’m finished with the other girl.  I’ve let her know.  I let you know.  Is that it?”

“No.  No, it’s not.”  She walked with him a few more paces.  “How much longer can we keep on being the Flies?”

“Um.”  He looked straight ahead, glad the beach was as uninhabited as it was at that point.  “As long as we want to, I guess.  Are you, uh, thinking of quitting?”

“No.  Not yet.  Maybe.”  She said.  “Women have babies, you know.  I want to have one of those between two of my pictures.”

“Well, if you don’t, it won’t be from lack of trying.”

“If last night was any indication, Tom, I’m probably already underway.”

He smiled, looked at her briefly, and kept his arm about her shoulders.

“But I’m worried about something more now, Tom.  Can I tell you?”

“Sure.”

“You won’t get mad?”

“Try not to.  What is it?”

She didn’t look at him as she said, “It’s occurred to me now that you might get killed.”

They stopped, right there on the sand.

Thomas Troy looked at his bride.  “It’s occurred to me, a few times over the years, that you might, too.”

“Yeah.”

“As we both darn near did, multiple times.”

“Yeah,” she said, softly.

“So, now you’re worried about–“

“Now I’m worried about having a husband that I can come home to between shoots, Tom, and that you will have a wife to come home to at the end of the day.  Also that our children will still have parents.  Does that make sense, Tom?”

“Yes.  Oh, yes.  Definitely.  But I’m not ready to stop being the Fly.”

She propelled them back into a forward walk with a pressure of her arm against his back.  “Don’t know that I want to quit being Fly Girl, Tom.  That’s the bad part about it.”

“That’s supposed to be bad?”

“Uh huh.  Living for the battles, risking our rear ends every time we get called out, spending time with the Crusaders.  I...well, I’m not big on fighting idiots with names like the Brain Emperor or Phantasmon and his Alieog-Laboids, but I...”

“Listen, if I have to fight something called an Alieog-Laboid again, I’m getting out of the business!  I wouldn’t be able to stop laughing long enough to aim my buzz gun.”

“You and me both!  But at the same time, Tom, I...dammit, I like it.  I like that rush of power every time I rub the ring.  I like that feel of being able to bust bricks in my hands.  I love, my God, I love flying.  Even the stuff like firefly radiance, and spinning the steel cocoons, and leaping over buildings like a girl grasshopper...it must be like coke addiction.  I’m a ring addict, Tom.  I really am.”

“Know what you mean,” he said.  He held up his hand, the one with the fly ring on it.  “This thing helped me survive the orphanage, got me through school, gave me the courage to do all those things.  Helped me become a lawyer.  All of that, because I knew if I could be the Fly, I could be anything.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said.  “Then you saved me from that monster, when I was just plain old Kim Brand–“

“Plain old Kim Brand, right.  Hollywood starlet, daughter of the Brands of San Diego, plain old Kim Brand.  Like the Taj Mahal is a hot dog stand.”

“You’re sweet, Tom.  But then, right afterward, Turan showed up and gave me the ring.  He said you needed me to help stop a problem while you were taking care of something else, in another place.  That’s why he said he did it.  But I don’t think that’s why he really did it.”

Tom hesitated.  “So tell me.”

“I think he really did it because he knew you’d fallen in love with me.  And that maybe I was in love with the Fly.  Because he didn’t want you to be alone.”

His arm tightened a bit on her shoulder.  “Well, if he really did that, Kim, for that reason...though I think he did, indeed, want an aide to the Fly, too...don’t you think he made a wise choice?”

“I do, Tom.  More than anything else in the world, I do.”

He stopped, halting her as well.  He looked around, at sand, sea, and sky, and saw no one besides themselves.  Looking at him, she knew what he was considering.

“We won’t have this to ourselves forever,” she breathed.  “Somebody’ll show up.”

“We can manage,” he said, his hands at the back of her bikini top.

“Tom, wait.”  She pushed him away, gently.  “I want to try something.”

His hands went to his waist, tentatively.  “Such as?”

“We’ve made it as...as ourselves.  Aren’t you curious to know what it’d be like if we made it as the Flies?”

His eyebrows raised, briefly.  Then he smiled.

They rubbed their rings, briefly, and said the names of their other selves.

If there had been observers, they would have seen the half-naked forms of Thomas Troy and Kim Brand becoming clothed again, in yellow and green skin-tight garments.  Clothing which was known, over a large portion of the world, as the uniforms of the Fly and Fly Girl.

Then these, too, were shucked, buried quickly under the sand, the tips of the wings sticking out of the yellow grains a bit.  Their owners were busy with other things.

Hero and heroine fell into one another’s arms, and occupied themselves with the doings of a man and woman who have just been married.

In her peak of passion, Kim Brand would have testified that she heard a strong, insectoid buzz.

She wasn’t sure which of them it came from.

 -M-

There was a mystery the Shield had never been able to figure out, and it disturbed him mightily.

In the 1940's, his greatest enemy had been the Hun.  That Nazi paragon, the deputy of Adolf Hitler himself, who wielded powers given to him by the shade of Attila the Hun himself, who wielded a shield of his own with a swastika emblazoned on it.  Many times had the Hun fought the Shield and Dusty, and just as many times had he been beaten.  Then, finally, the Hun had died.  His son had succeeded him, and died as well.

So how was it that, in recent years, the Hun came back to battle the first Shield?

No answer could be fitted to that question, even when the Shield beat him again and had him imprisoned.  The Hun would not answer any questions as to how he had come back from the dead, even when threatened or bribed.

Then, after a month or two in jail, he died.  His corpse rotted almost before it could be enbalmed.  The authorities made doubly sure that the Hun was dead, placed him in the ground, and that was that.

Except that a hooded figure made a trip to the potter’s field, exhumed him under the mantle of a dark knight and a catatonic guard, and made off with the Hun’s body.

Now, that same clay was on a table, surrounded by rune chalkings and various articles of necromancy.  Necromancy, the magic of the dead.

The necromancer himself said things, did things.  He said, “As I raised you before, so I raise you anew.  You live for me.  You serve me.  And in this, you serve yourself.  Is that not so, Hermann von Hesse, who is called the Hun?”

The putrid flesh had ceased to smell.

The skin, muscle, nerve fiber, and all the rest of the tissues reknitted themselves over realigned bone.  Blood pumped through the arteries and veins.  At least, it was something like blood.

The Hun, with some effort, opened his eyes.

“Ja, Wizard,” he agreed, in a sepulchral voice.  “It is so.”

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