Last Son of Krypton (15 page)

Lois surely enough heard voices inside the subway car, although she could make out only snatches of the conversation. She heard things like, "last night's shipment . . . backfire soon as shoot . . . street value . . . sixty bucks a piece . . . move them by noon tomorrow . . . every high school in the city . . ."

Clark Kent looked through the wall of the subway car and found three men standing over two crates filled with cheaply manufactured handguns. He counted 288 pistols in the crates. A tall man in a three-piece suit was handing an attaché case filled with cash to another man in the uniform of a subway signalman.

Lois Lane had heard enough. She stuffed the stethoscope into her shoulder bag and tripped backward over a pile of discarded spray paint cans. She froze at the noise, crawled under the subway car, and waited there for a few minutes. They hadn't heard her, or thought anything of it if they had. She pulled herself, more warily now, out from under the train and made her way back toward the rip in the fence.

Clark Kent was no longer in the apartment.

First Lois would call Inspector Henderson. Bill was one cop who understood the concept of privileged information and he knew how to keep a story quiet until it was revealed to the world by a deserving reporter. Then she would call the
Daily Planet
city desk and tell them to leave a good-sized hole in the upper-left corner of page one. Then
she would call WGBS News and have someone drive out here to the backwoods of the city with a change of clothes and a portable typewriter. Then a hand grabbed her around the throat and threw her to the ground.
 

The two men stood over Lois with guns pointed at her face. These would be real guns, not the explosive Tinkertoys they were planning to sell to the children of Metropolis.

"All right, whaddya know, lady?"

No answer.

"Don't I know you?" the other one said.

Silence.

"Who told you where we'd be? You a cop?"

"Hey, she's no cop. She's a reporter." A hint of mortal fear in his voice.

"How d'you know?"

"I recognize her. Hey, we better get outta here."

"Are you nuts? Frisk her."

"Not me. That broad's got her own portable bodyguard."

"You're talkin' crazy. If you won't frisk her, I—" The man's pistol drooped like a wilting plant. The molten steel that used to be part of the stock left third-degree burns on his hand. He dropped to the ground screaming until he fell unconscious.

The other man tore off in the direction of the hole in the fence. Twenty feet before he got there, he ran into a colorful immoveable object and crumpled.

"Miss Lane, do you come here often?" Superman asked.

She thought to say that she could have gotten out of this fix herself. That she'd left a sealed envelope in Perry's Office, and that it would be opened if she wasn't at the office by ten. That maybe Superman was a little rough on those two. That it would have been nice to deserve credit for mashing a mass sale of Saturday Night Specials herself. But there he was, standing there . . .

Smiling.

"You've got to live until at least noon, Lois. I doubt Clark could handle that highbrow social theorist on his own."

He glowed with life and power, and sometimes he twinkled under the sun. He was a fallen star. She thought that all the time, but of course she couldn't say it. The phrase would be out of character. What she could do was hug him so hard he might feel the pressure and maybe he would kiss her.

The young man puffed serenely on his bent pipe and tried hard to explain the concept so that his interviewer could understand. "There was an illustration of my point on the radio news only this morning," Fellman Gordon said.

Camera 3 dollied in for a closeup of the sociologist.

"I heard an interview with a young lady," Gordon said, "who was allegedly saved by Superman from an assault attempt only last night."

Lois sat in the interviewer's chair. "Superman turned up lots of places last night. We reporters have noticed that there's a spate of unlikely reports for about three days every month or so. He supposedly does everything from fighting back an invasion of flying saucers over Mongolia to helping children with their long division, apparently at the same time."

"This happens to be a documented report. It was witnessed not only by the victim but by a police officer. A young lady of about twenty claims she had nearly persuaded a mugger to leave her alone when Superman intervened out of nowhere to save her."

"Have you ever tried talking a mugger out of pursuing his vocation, Professor Gordon?"

"I haven't had the opportunity, thank the stars, but neither did that young lady. Before she could get out of trouble herself, Superman saved her. What he has done, I believe, is ended despair."

Clark Kent, watching the taping of
Sunday Forum
from the control booth with the director, needed no cues to keep a blank look on his face.
 

"It is my contention, and I expound upon this in my book,
Age of Dependence
," Fellman Gordon continued, "that Superman may be singlehandedly bringing the social development of our entire human race to a grinding halt."
 

"How do you explain the strides over the past twenty years in science? Space exploration? Food production?"

"These are not social phenomena. They are scientific and, to some extent, political developments. Let me give you a hypothetical case, Miss Lane. You, it is well known, have a sort of personal relationship with Superman. I take it he has actually saved your life more times than you can count."

"I'm perfectly capable of counting that high, it's just that I wasn't keeping score." It was a lame crack, but it helped Lois avoid blushing.

"Say you were somewhere really out of the way, Miss Lane. In Zaire. In the abandoned shaft of a diamond mine. The mine caved in. You had about an hour's supply of air. Absolutely no one knew where you were, and even if they did there would be no chance of getting you out in time. What goes through your mind?"

"I wish Superman would stop stalling. I've got a deadline to meet."

"Exactly. You don't make your peace with your God or your conscience. You don't cry. You don't go mad. You wait impatiently for Superman to save you. That possibility now exists. No one need despair any more. Superman plays adopted father to the world, ready to bail anyone out of trouble the way his father Jor-El bailed him out of a dying planet. The only evidence of significant social growth over the past ten years, I have found, has been among those outside law-abiding society."

Where would someone like Luthor be if Superman had never come to Earth? Probably, Gordon supposed, in a research laboratory somewhere discovering a cure for cancer. Or maybe in a mental institution following a childhood spent in a succession of reform schools. Certainly there would have been no consuming ambition, no enemy impossible to overcome, to teach him to aspire. Without Superman, Luthor might have grown up lonely. And what of the occasional outlandish creatures from outer space who happen to touch down in Metropolis to pick a fight with him every so often? If Superman had never come, would Earth people even be aware that there was life elsewhere in the Universe? Maybe we knew too soon, before we were strong enough to face the interlocking cultures of the Galaxy on equal terms. It was taken for granted in scientific and political circles that one day the people of Earth would compete for power and recognition among Galactic society as did any young civilization reaching into space. Would we really be equipped to do that when the time came?

It was an idea that Clark Kent pondered occasionally. No one had ever expressed it publicly before; maybe no one else had bothered to think of it before Fellman Gordon. Well, now it was in print and that was just as well, Clark thought. It was.

After the taping Lois grinned at Clark in the booth with that we-know-something-this-
guy-doesn't-know grin. Clark wondered what it was he and Lois both knew. The only concern of the director was the fact that the show ran an extra thirty seconds and that would have to be edited out. Fellman Gordon followed Clark down the hallway toward Clark's office.
 

Gordon didn't call to Clark, so the newsman didn't turn around to see why he was being followed. The sociologist was a dark man in his early thirties, of medium height and build. He wore a mustache that was trimmed so as to look unkempt. As Clark walked he perceived a slight change in the quality of Gordon's footsteps, a lightening somehow. As he reached the office the voice came from behind Clark.

"Kal-El, may I speak with you a moment?"

Clark turned around and where Fellman Gordon belonged there stood one of the immortal Guardians.

C
lark Kent closed the office door behind himself and his visitor, leaned back in his chair, and allowed himself to smile Superman's smile. If anyone barged in at that moment, the glasses and blue suit would be no disguise.
 

"First question," Superman's smile asked, "are you really here or are you some kind of astral projection? I thought you fellows didn't leave Oa."

"I am very real, Kal-El. You may notice that my skin is nearly as peach-colored as yours, a bit browner like the humanoids of Malthus, the world of the Guardians' birth."

"I assumed that was part of your disguise."

"Regrettably not. You see I am no longer immortal. If you observe you may notice that I have skin pores, also, and look." The ancient pressed his palm on Clark's desk, "I leave fingerprints, as well.

"You're the Old-Timer. The Guardian fallen from grace."

"I am."

"All right. The obvious question is, where's the real Fellman Gordon?"

"Asleep in his home. I have already caused his mind to experience the events which I live today in his identity. He will awaken this evening after what he felt to be an afternoon nap, and he will be most pleased tomorrow when he watches the broadcast of Miss Lane's interview of him."

"Don't tell me the answer to my next question. I'll tell you. The reason you came here designed as Fellman Gordon was that the sociologist has stumbled upon some Universal Truth and you wanted to emphasize it to me and the television audience so that the message comes across properly."

"He approached a new idea, at least new for the civilization of Earth. I should like to point it out for you—that for every social force there is an equal and opposite social force, that we each live in vibratory patterns, and that the only reason we do not discern these patterns we live in as readily as we see radio waves or the ripples left by a pebble in water is that the frequencies we travel are too large to measure in one human lifetime."

Clark lost his Superman smile quite unconsciously. He tried very hard, every time he encountered one of these aged beings, not to be as impressed as he was the last time. Clark had no idea how the contention that his presence interfered with Earth's social growth evolved into the concept of vibratory patterns and frequencies and immortality and the role of humankind in a complex and confusing Universe. He didn't pursue the question.

"These are merely tertiary matters," the Old-Timer said, as if taking Clark's faded smile as a cue to get to business. "You have been concerned recently with an epistle left by your eminent Professor Einstein."

Clark was startled again. "What was in the document? What do you know about Einstein?"

"A bit more, I suspect, than you do. We took quite an active interest in his career."

"Where can I find the document?"

"In the custody of the Master of Oric."

"Oric. Fourth planet of the Vega system. I've never been there, it's a blue star sun. Isn't that the home planet of Towbee the space minstrel?"

"That is by an accounts the place of his birth."

"Was he the thief?"

"That would be a logical suspicion."

"What do you suggest I do?"

"You have reduced powers, Kal-El, on a planet whose star sun is blue. Your optical abilities are restricted and your invulnerability to physical assault is not as apparently limitless. You have no familiarity with the planet, whose technology and consequent dangers to you draw on contributions from nearly a thousand independent cultures from hundreds of light-years away. Your unknown adversary, the Master, is apparently particularly interested in some supposed discovery of Einstein's. It would be advisable, therefore, for you to go to Oric with an assistant who qualifies as a creative technician of the first magnitude as well as an expert on Einsteinian physics."

Predictably, Clark/Superman could not dispute the Old-Timer's logic.

The night of the full moon, Superman quietly incapacitated a hired hit-man who was on his way to Lois Lane's apartment. He had the assassin charged with major offenses unrelated to Lois, for which he guaranteed proof within the week. Superman also raced midnight over half the globe, foiling a jewelry robbery in Marseilles and destroying a footbridge in Rhodesia before a group of armed civilian raiders could cross to a racially segregated area in order to incite a disturbance. He rescued a child falling from a third-floor window in Liberia. He anonymously whipped up an easterly wind to help a seventeen-year-old boy trying to sail across a becalmed Atlantic Ocean on the last leg of a solo voyage around the world. He located the twin daughters of an Argentinian government official in the apartment of a kidnapper and spirited them home minutes before police arrived on the scene, so that the kidnapper could not negotiate an escape using his hostages. In Baja California he dragged two cars, stranded in the same desolate mudhole, back to a major artery and then compacted the mudhole to the consistency of asphalt. On the southeastern outskirts of San Francisco he dived underground to ease the pressure on a certain section of the San Andreas Fault and delay the inevitable earthquake for another month or so. In Alaska he fused shut a growing leak in the central portion of the oil pipeline and burned up the black mess that had leaked over the wilderness before anyone saw it. When he was 130 miles south of the North Pole, he wrote an entry in his journal. Then Superman leaped seventeen hundred miles into the Aurora Borealis and saw the day's first hint of sunlight on the eastern horizon. He dived like a missile at Washington, D.C.