Last Son of Krypton (10 page)

"Thank you, Joanne," he said. "You can go on with whatever you're doing now. I'll let you know when it's time."

They each went back to their particular enterprises. Luthor was in his heaven, all was right with the world.

In another place, under different circumstances, this man might have been a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Hitler, or an Archimedes, a Michelangelo, a da Vinci. A Gautama, a Hammurabi, Gandhi. But in this place, at this time, he was more. Superman made him more.

As an artist saw objects as an amalgam of shapes, as a writer looked upon life as a series of incidents from which plots and characters could be constructed, Lex Luthor's mind divided the Universe into a finite number of mathematical units. The Earth was
four billion people, a day was 86,400 seconds, the Zephyrmore Building was from 16,400 square feet in the penthouse to 62,500 in the lobby and in the first twenty stories. The time he had spent in jail so far this year was three months of thirty days each, three weeks, six days, two hours, and sixteen minutes. This included four weeks, one day, and three hours in solitary confinement during which time he could do nothing more useful than count seconds and scrupulously retain his sanity.
 

There were other super-criminal geniuses in the world; he had met some of them, dealt with them on occasion. They were chairmen of great corporations, grand masters of martial arts disciplines, heads of departments in executive branches of governments, princes, presidents, prelates, and a saint or two. Unlike Luthor, these men and women chose to retain their respectability. They had trouble coping with honesty.

Luthor was not motivated by a desire for money, or power, or beautiful women, or even freedom. In solitary Luthor decided that his motivation was beyond even the love or hate or whatever it was he had for humanity. It was consuming desire for godhood, fired by the unreasonable conviction that such a thing was somehow possible. He began by being an honest man. He was a criminal and said so.

He sat down next to the woman at the desk, Barbara Tolley, his clerical assistant. She insisted on being called "B.J." even though her middle name was Arabella.

"Anything pressing?" Luthor asked her as he poured them both a cup of coffee from a beaker rigged to a device that kept it constantly filled with exactly sixteen ounces.

"That gadget you dreamed up in the fall—y'know, the way of making pictures jump off the page like you're wearing 3-D glasses?"

"What about it?" It was a method devised by Luthor's inventor alias, Chet Horowitz, to make a holographic image possible on a flat surface so that a picture would appear to hang several inches off a page.

"Every major paperback company in town made a bid for the process. It seems there's this whole new group of people whose job it is to package books like detergents or political candidates or something."

"And they want to put this thing on paperback covers. Good idea. You walk down an aisle looking for a cookbook, and the one that catches your eye has a cover with lobster thermidor hanging into the aisle. So what's the problem?"

"Chet Horowitz stands to make a small fortune on it."

"Yes?"

"He made a small fortune on the gizmo that keeps electric plugs from shocking babies, and another small fortune on the new riveting gun. That's three small fortunes since January. Bernie that accountant says you're overspending and we won't have enough to pay Chet's income taxes this year."

Luthor smiled.

"All right, genius." B.J. gave him the indulgent look she kept as a defense against his. "If the solution's so damn obvious why didn't Bernie think of it himself?"

Luthor obviously had B.J. by the intrigue glands. This happened so seldom that he sat silently long enough to see her eyes crinkle. Then he solved the accountant's problem: "We don't have to pay Chet Horowitz' income tax at all this year. Let a process server try to find him. We're criminals, remember?"

"Right." B.J. uncrinkled herself and squeezed the bridge between her eyes. "But why
do you have to persist in making the rest of us feel so inadequate?"
 

"That's how I stay in charge, Lady-pal. Napoleon did it with conquest, Supes does it with pretension, my mother did it with guilt. I manage with brute competence."

Luthor reminded himself of a song he'd written which had a line that went: "To live outside the law you must be honest." He'd slipped the lyrics to a young singer he met in a bar in Minnesota. The guy had a lousy voice and Luthor felt sorry for him at the time. When he heard the line again he didn't recognize the song that surrounded it. He resolved, from then on, to be his own editor.

B.J. was on the verge of making small talk. Bad habit of hers. Luthor decided it was party time, so he hopped to his feet.

"Your attention, please!" he addressed his employees. There was immediate silence. "Would everyone please follow me into the Meditation Room?"

Luthor led a procession to the penthouse balcony where his fingerprints unlocked the door to a big room whose walls were completely covered with bright green curtains. He held the lead case under his arm like a minister's prayerbook as they filed in, all but one wearing intensely solemn expressions. Luthor sat in the room's sole piece of furniture, a swiveling stool.

"I have obtained," Luthor continued, careful not to look at B.J.'s smirk, "the last vestige of the life of a great man. The single thing from his life that he chose to leave for posterity after his death. If you will pay attention..."

Luthor turned to the curtained wall, placed the chair facing it, and put the case and the tools down in front of the chair. He walked to the corner and pulled the curtains' drawstring. They peeled away to reveal, larger than life, a magnificent portrait in acrylics of Albert Einstein. Luthor ignored his band of disciples and now spoke directly to the portrait.

"You see? I brought it, like I said I would. We couldn't let it fall into the hands of someone who couldn't appreciate it, right?" He was as sincere as an eight-year-old child talking to a gnarled tree. "Here, I'll show you."

Luthor held the lead case between his legs, huffing as he sliced off a corner with the saw. The others in the room looked on silently, afraid to change expressions because they only partially understood, as he painstakingly softened a piece of the casing next to the opening with the soldering gun, then ripped it open further, piece by piece, inch by inch, until two sides of the casing were disconnected and the corner could be folded down. Inside was a thin brown folder holding just a few pages.

Luthor looked at the cover of the folder, furrowed his brow at the neatly typed message on the card glued to the front. He opened the folder, blinked, and winced at what he saw.

"Gibberish. What is this nonsense? Code? This isn't English. Isn't German. What the devil's clawed hooves is this?"

B.J. flew into the vacuum Luthor's equanimity left behind. "What's wrong, Lex? What is it?"

"Look. Look at this. He must've gone nuts. He spent twenty years looking for a Unified Field Theory and it made him crackers. What is this chicken vomit?"

"It's writing. Calm down, Lex. Get out of here. Everybody out of here. End of the party. Back to work."

The audience all shuffled out, not daring to murmur, and the woman closed the door behind them.

"It's not writing. It's not Latin, not Greek, not Arabic. Never saw a code like that. What is it? What is it?"

She understood that he was used to solving problems. As a child his response to adversity was a tantrum. As an adult he revelled in the fact that he was outside the law. In his mind the totality of the Universe was as real as the drugstore down the block. When everything comes that easily, a setback is a trauma. All she had to do was to hold him down until he started coming back of his own accord. He was almost around.

"Code?" he asked.

"Yes. Or another language. A lost one, maybe."

"That code-breaker. The one I got the job for at the CIA. You know the one. Get him up here. Blindfolded. Right away. And the crooked philologist, the one serving the six-year term for trying to put a wiretap on the Kremlin hot line. Look over the jailbreak file and find one that'll work for him."

"All right. What'll you do, Lex?"

"You'd better leave me alone awhile." Luthor walked over to the portrait on the wall. "I've got to have a talk with the professor."

A world whose most public figure is a super-powered alien from a lost planet is not startled or horrified or even particularly curious at the visit of an eccentric, erratic character from somewhere in space. The world is amused.

Towbee visited Earth briefly a few years ago and caused some trouble for a day or so. Apparently this character was a minstrel of some sort, like the wandering troubadours who turned up in feudal courts, only Towbee traveled among the outposts of space entertaining the idle, the harried, the lonely. He sang, he clowned, he cast images with an instrument that formed clouds of air into corporeal shapes as well as made music. When he came to Earth then, he said, it was because he was in a creative slump and he was running out of stories to tell.

He'd heard stories about Superman and wanted to see if he was real. One day a repulsive flying lizard swooped down from the sky over Metropolis, snatched up Clark Kent in its claws, and dramatically dangled the hapless fellow over the city. Towbee would see what Superman would do and then go on his way with a story of the remarkable Kryptonian to add to his repertoire.

The minstrel hovered twenty-two thousand miles above the city in his one-man flying toychest for several minutes before he caught onto the fact that while Superman wore civilian clothes he pretended not to have his powers. This was a cultural idiosyncrasy, Towbee thought, which to understand would require more study of Earth's society than Towbee cared to undertake. The storyteller quickly fashioned a stand-in Clark Kent. The real Clark Kent immediately ducked into a real cloud, became Superman, and disposed of the illusion menace in characteristically flamboyant fashion. The Man of Steel found the source of all the trouble and gave Towbee a threatening lecture on social responsibility. Towbee happily left the Solar System and wrote his own equivalent of an epic poem about the incident.

Anything for his art.

This latest trip to Superman's city, Towbee decided, would be worthy of Earth's greatest showmen. Ringling Brothers' Barnum and Bailey Circus was in Metropolis at the time. The circus was managed by a young animal trainer named Gunter Gabel Williams who entered the center ring standing on the back of a galloping elephant and holding a leashed leopard.

At ten-thirty
A.M.
two days after the theft of the Einstein document all vehicular traffic in midtown Metropolis came to a honking halt. Necks craned and jaws dropped and heads hung out of windows as the zany four-armed singer from space materialized on Fifth Avenue.
 

Pulled by a herd of seven Indian elephants each in a different color of the rainbow was a 90-foot-long transparent fishtank. The tank was filled with water which in turn was filled with a great blue whale floating calmly on the surface. On the whale's back was Towbee rocking in an easy chair with his feet up on the edge of a tub in which a large baboon was bathing. With one pair of hands Towbee played a melody on his instrument as he sang "Annie Laurie," and with the other pair he held a copy of the previous day's
Daily Planet
and read. And curled up under his legs was a Siberian tiger, sleeping like a fallen redwood.
 

Police cordoned the entrances to Fifth Avenue from traffic. Thousands of people followed the procession past Governor's Plaza toward the park. Towbee and his bizarre litter passed within sight of the offices of all the city's television stations and by the time he had rolled a block the swarm of newsmen and police who were following him were in danger of being trampled by the calm elephants as they mechanically pulled their load.

The alien wailed "Annie Laurie" gradually louder and louder. When he was finally loud enough so that his voice drowned even the din of midtown, the elephants and the aquarium ceased their progress up the street, and the grand marshal rose from his seat to address the world from the back of his whale.

Towbee's instrument fashioned other-worldly sounds into a haunting, buoyant melody, and he and his pets and the faces and minds of everyone who saw him were clouded with remarkable shapes and colors in an ineffable random pattern as he sang:

A clown has come
A splash of rum
I'll make you grin
Halibut's fin
And send your tears
Out of your day
Apples and pears
Hurrah and hooray
With shape and sound
Cashews by the pound
And colors flying
Laundry drying
Dreams and streams
A clock you wind
Gleams from themes
An organ grind
You'll surely leave your mind behind

And in a swirl and a splash of colorful clouds Towbee leaped from the back of his whale, defying gravity to float to the ground. Meanwhile, the whale and its tank, the water, the tub, the baboon and the sleeping tiger and the seven elephants of seven different colors melted into a three-dimensional kaleidoscope that dispersed like smoke. And Towbee, this street dream's creator, bowed low in all directions to the cheers of the breathless crowds.

Towbee motioned with his four hands for his audience, including the reporters, to draw closer as he explained himself. (
"I've brought myself to this, your Earth/To give a new career its birth."
) He explained that this world was in a very exciting stage of its civilization, one in which art and technology were intersecting like parallel lines at infinity. Communication was worldwide and nearly instantaneous, he said, and what people chose to communicate, mostly, was art: songs, plays, performances of all kinds. (
"I've traveled from my homeworld far/In order to become a star."
) The self-proclaimed clown intended, he said, to see the city's most successful starmaker and ask for a recording contract.