Last Son of Krypton (14 page)

Luthor yanked back his other arm pulling back something in his pocket. A spark leaped at Superman's hand as he touched Luthor. "I said listen to me."

"Ouch. What was that?"

"An electrical charge strong enough to take out the whole Metropolis Police Department and a couple of platoons of Marines, if necessary. Unfortunately it affects you like a sudden attack from a bubble bath."

"No more tricks. Come on and—"

"No, dammitt! Listen to me. Don't you understand? Don't you see? I won't allow it."

"Tell me about it on the way up to—"

"Keep your paws off me, freak," as he pulled a tiny lead-encased pistol from his pocket and Superman froze. "I'm not ready for a fight, but you know I can put one up. I'll use this if I have to."

Superman could not see what the gun was. His x-ray vision, like any radiation, was unable to penetrate the heavy metal lead. He was wary. There was nowhere Luthor could go, although the criminal had fooled him before.

"This stuff was just to get out of any tight spots in case some over-eager cop recognized me on the street. I won't fight you. I just want to tell you I won't have
his
papers falling into the hands of a... a philistine."
 

"Just take it easy there, Luthor. You probably can't hurt me, but we're in the middle of a crowded city. Einstein, you mean? It's Einstein you're talking about?"

"
His
words. I won't allow it. And don't talk to me like some pimple-faced kid with a zip gun. I'm a pro."
 

"Offhand I'd say you already allowed it. I wouldn't have thought Einstein was one of your big heroes."

"Who did you think were my heroes, you pigeon-brained muscleman? Capone? Hitler? You? What do you take me for?"

"An escaped felon." In less than the blink of an eye Luthor suddenly saw his weapon lying at his feet and felt his arms being held motionless from behind him. The voice came from behind now, too. "And a misguided man, your heroes notwithstanding. What is that thing on the floor?"

Luthor let out a resigned breath. "A pipe lighter, if you must know."

"Let's go." Superman scooped the criminal up in both arms for a 35-minute flight of slightly less than sixty miles. Luthor caught a cold.

I
n a dark patch of space at the core of the brilliant Central Cluster, on a planetoid called Oa, sit the oldest humanoids in the Galaxy. They touch the existence of thousands of trillions of intelligent races, most of whom know them simply, in languages and dialects defying count, as the Guardians.
 

Average humanoid height in the Galaxy was somewhere between two and two-and-a-half meters. The nine Guardians were all an identical height of 124 centimeters. They also had filtrums.

Filtrums are rectangular clefts in the skin leading from the bridge between the two nostrils to the middle of the upper lip. Most of the humanoids in the area of the Central Cluster had them. The only known incidences of filtrums in humanoids outside that region of the Galaxy were on the planets Earth and Krypton. There were several theories on the reasons for this incidence of the apparently functionless birthmark, but one thing was known about them. Only humanoids with filtrums were capable of smiling.

The youngest of the Guardians was born within twenty years of the oldest, roughly eight billion years ago. Their blue skin was completely unwrinkled, they no longer had visible pores or prints in their skin, they each had a fringe of thick white fur around the sides and backs of their heads, they were virtually identical in appearance. What active communication they had with each other was instant, on a subliminal level. They no longer had any need for telepathy. Their functions were identical, their aspirations and jealousies were lost to the ages. Only one Guardian had actually left Oa in eight billion years, and he returned only briefly to be stripped of his immortality as punishment for some subtle breach of the group's ethical code.

Somewhere in the labyrinthine tunnels and towers and interconnecting halls of the Guardians' headquarters on the otherwise barren planetoid, two of the immortals were communicating.

Our wayward brother has located and induced a dream sleep upon the Earthman, the first Guardian told the second.

Is he equipped to feed tomorrow's experiences into the mind of the Terran? the second inquired of the first.

He will be, by the time our evaluation of his interview with the woman arrives at Earth.

The second Guardian passed his hand over a light on the wall as a spotlight from the ceiling bathed the first Guardian's head, feeding information directly into the immortal's mind.

The light went off as the Guardian integrated the information and noted, I believe you have done a good job, but I have one possible improvement.

Might I consider it? the second suggested without apprehension.

The point at which the woman Lane asks, Have you ever tried to talk a mugger out of pursuing his vocation, Professor Gordon?

Yes, where the man Gordon responds, I haven't had the opportunity, thank the stars.

Exactly. It is with the response that I have a question. Perhaps he could respond with
an attempt at levity. For example, God parted the Red Sea for Moses, the Colonials beat back the British Empire, the Mets won the pennant in '69, and a mugger can be talked down, Miss Lane.
 

That is quite in keeping with the Terran penchant for light humor, and I considered such a response, but I determined that in Professor Gordon's case it would be out of character.

I concede to your superior acquaintance with the subject. I shall begin to feed the experience into the young man's somnolent mind. He will believe himself to have been functional during this entire period.

A
fter Superman had left Luthor in the prison in Pocantico, Clark Kent made one more appearance in Studio B so that he could be roped firmly into his bet with Steve Lombard—and in Lois Lane's office so that he could make a lunch date for the following afternoon. Superman was busier.
 

Clark was walking down the sixth-floor hallway with Jimmy Olsen toward the elevator, and he accepted the offer of a ride to his apartment in Jimmy's new TR7. In a moment Clark's time sync changed, as it occasionally did.

"Listen, Jimmy. Let me take a raincheck on that ride home. I think I'll walk."

"Yeah, sure, Clark. Watch out for the wall. Hey, where you running? You sure are in a hurry to take a leisurely stroll uptown." By now Jimmy was talking to himself.

Less than a minute later, a whistling filled the air over an uncommonly choppy Lake Superior and crew members near panic on a threatened cargo ship looked up into the sky. Then all fifty-two of them fell flat on the deck, holding onto their shifting centers of gravity as the big ship was lifted forty feet into the air and flown to port.

On the way back to Metropolis, Superman spotted an ambulance with its siren whirring and red light spinning, stranded immobile in the middle lane of Route 80 between Totowa and Fairfield, New Jersey. He lifted this stranded ship out of dead calm seas and delivered it to the hospital whose name was on the side. The coronary patient inside was spared the experience by unconsciousness, although an intern taking his electrocardiogram fainted.

In Hillside a cat was stuck in a tree, and her owner was too big to crawl on the branch after her and too small not to cry. At the instant Superman heard the cat yowl, the wrist of a young woman on Greene Street in Metropolis was grabbed by a man who had been waiting in one of the standard dark alleys peppering the neighborhood.

"Hey, man, what're you doin?" the girl squeaked.

"Come in here, you."

A beam of heat vision snapped the branch of the tree and the cat fell.

"Get your hand off me or—"

"Or what? Whatcha got there, girlie?"

She calmed down and found her misplaced equilibrium. "Listen, man, why doncha buy me a drink and do it right?"

A thin stream of super breath from above bounced off the concrete and softened the kitten's four-legged landing.

"I mean, why do you wanna force yourself on a girl like that, hey? I don't bite, do you?"

"Look, don't go tryin' to snow me, girlie," he snarled, but his grip of her arm loosened just a little.

And a blinding streak of red and blue from out of the sky left an indentation on his jaw. In a moment, a bewildered patrolman was dropped out of the sky and the girl gave the cop her account of the incident. The man woke up in a jail cell.

Here are some other things Superman did the night before the full moon:

He melted, confiscated, or otherwise neutralized a collection of knives, chains, and shoddily assembled handguns carried around by a group of twelve teenaged boys roaming through Metropolis Common.

He spun a water current, diverting a school of sharks which were about to attack some tuna congregated around the lifeline to a research bathyscaph. There was every possibility that the sharks would accidentally have severed the line.

With the super pressure of his hands he fused shut a hairline crack that was forming in one of the pontoons underneath Oceania, the experimental floating city 250 miles east of Montauk, Long Island.

He slammed through a half-ton of heroin being loaded onto a ship in Le Havre in four boxes marked "Toys."

He spotted a train in Northern Ireland about to tumble into a canyon through a bridge weakened by saboteurs. He substituted his own body for the weakened portion of rail, and when the train was gone he built a new rail from iron ore and coal he found in nearby deposits.

In northern Greenland he lifted a dogsled, a dozen huskies, a young doctor, and a supply of vital flu serum over an avalanche to a secluded military outpost on the Davis Strait.

Superman spent most of the rest of the night at his Fortress of Solitude carved out of a mountain 130 miles south of the geographic North Pole. There was a gold-colored airline marker pointing the way to the pole, but if one saw the arrow from the bottom—which is something no one but Superman ever did—it became apparent that this was the 30-ton key to a door camouflaged by the constant inclement weather and the indented face of the mountain. In the fortress the Man of Steel checked bacterial cultures with which he experimented. He was no medical genius, but he did, after all, have immediate total recall and he was the only being of whom he knew who could safely handle the Regulus-243 strain which caused a violent chemical reaction in organic matter, turning it on contact into particles of a saline crystal. Superman occasionally wondered if the only recorded incidence of Regulus-243 contamination on Earth was the death of Lot's wife during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Superman fed and groomed the fearsome menagerie of domesticated extraterrestrial creatures he kept and studied in one of the lower levels of the fortress. He wrote an entry, in the Kryptonese language, in his personal journal. He painted a landscape in acrylics—he favored the vistas of Jupiter and its moons, but this was a Martian plain—while he listened to a recording of sonic flare patterns as performed by a musician of Polaris-4.

He slept for half an hour, which was something he did because he needed a certain amount of dreaming to maintain a psychological balance. Then he took off, straight up, to plunge through the molten crust of the sun 93 million miles away in order to sterilize himself. It would be bad form, after all, to carry any Regulus-243 cells back to Metropolis.

It was a bit under seventeen minutes to the sun and back traveling at the speed of light—which was the fastest he could travel through "real" three-dimensional space. He looked down as dawn hit Metropolis. Morgan Edge was sprawled on the fold-out couch in his office. For a multimillionaire he certainly didn't allow himself much recreation.
Jimmy was just arriving home after a long night of rigorous leisure. Steve Lombard was not at home, and Superman could not begin to wonder about where he might be. Lois had been awake for at least an hour. It had to have taken at least that long to get from her apartment to the subway car on which Superman found her. She was up to something.
 

Superman kept a telescopic x-ray eye on the lady as he landed on the roof of the apartment building at 344 Clinton Street. He scanned the sky for planes overhead. Once a Soviet satellite 103 miles up took a picture as he was changing to Clark Kent. A crew of technicians wasted a week before the Russians decided it wasn't worth the effort to find out how film could be overexposed in the void of space.

As Clark Kent walked down the roof stairway to the thirty-third-floor landing, Lois's train was pulling into the old World's Fair grounds, the last stop on that line. As she stepped off the train he stepped into the elevator and pushed the button for the third floor. As he stepped off the elevator she walked down the stairway toward the subway graveyard where hundreds of inanimate subway cars lay in wait for rush hour or the scrap heap, vulnerable to the inarticulate expression of graffiti artists armed with spray paint.

Clark Kent walked down the third-floor corridor and unlocked the door of apartment 3-D, twisting his neck in the opposite direction all the way. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him, loosened his tie, opened his shirt, dropped his jacket and glasses on a chair, and put two eggs up to boil.

Lois Lane squeezed through a rip in the hurricane fence and counted the rows of subway cars. She tried to remember which car her source had told her to check. It was too hot a piece of information to write down. She found the seventh row and counted sixteen cars in the direction away from the fairgrounds. She crept between the ranks of cars to her target and pulled a stethoscope from her purse. She fitted it to her ears and listened to the hull of the train.

Clark picked at his eggs and buttered toast. Breakfast was a habit from his school days. He sat in his living room reclining chair as he peered across town.