Last Son of Krypton (21 page)

—There have been many who chose to maintain neutrality when the choice came to them, many of whom you have never heard... one, however, was the one called the lawgiver, Sonnabend... the time is come... choose—

Superman decided whether to live or die.

"Coming around?" were the words the hero heard.

"Where am I?"

"Somewhere in the pyramid, imprisoned." Luthor's hands were beet red from slapping the Kryptonian's steely face. It was a dumb thing to do, but he had to do something with his hands.

"Daddy?" Superman asked.

"Come on. You're fighting it," the voice said. "It nearly got you for a moment, but you're fighting it."

Superman was coming back into his body again. He felt the familiar organs of his chest and stomach appearing back where they belonged, the dark viscous blood coursing through his arteries faster than a speeding bullet. It was Luthor's voice he was hearing now, rooting for him, urging him back to the world of three dimensions and energy-matter relationships, where there was a good and an evil and where the distinction was not very difficult to make.

"I saved you!" Luthor grabbed his sometime enemy's shoulders, jumping up and down. "I don't believe it. I saved your life!"

"No, you didn't." Superman smiled. "I think you finally managed to kill me."

"L
isten," Luthor said. "Listen, this is important."
 

"What?"

"I found out the Master's racket. I don't think even the Guardians know this plan, and it's reprehensible."

"Reprehensible? For a guy who once posed as a Korean guru just to attract thirty three thousand impressionable teenage kids to a rally in Metro Stadium and hold them for ransom, he must be going some for you to call him reprehensible."

"I nearly went broke that year. Besides, you'd be surprised at how many followers I still have. What this clown's doing is worse. Much worse."

"Yeah?"

"Tell me, Muscles, how far does the Guardians' jurisdiction extend?"

"To the Areas of Dominant Gravitation of all stars and black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy."

"And when's a star considered to be in the Milky Way Galaxy, according to that definition?"

"That's any star subject to the cohesive forces that make the Galaxy a definable physical unit. Is this an astronomy test? I thought you've got some kind of secret to tell me."

"I do. What about wandering stars? The rogue stars that are just passing through along the edges of the Galaxy. What power do the Guardians have over them?"

"They have absolute power, physically, they're pretty much the most powerful creatures ever known. But they're morally banned from extending their powers to certain areas, and they can only interfere with rogue stars if they somehow jeopardize the rest of the Galaxy—if they're about to incinerate an inhabited world or something. It's one of the laws that goes back to the Guardians' founding, apparently to make sure they didn't become absolute rulers of the Galaxy."

"Okay, now tell me the verse that lunatic singer Towbee quoted from this Sonnabend's prophesies, the one about what would happen before this Czar of the Galactic Arm would emerge? What was it? You've got total recall."

"When the minions of immortals spread Galactic,
When a thousand cultures dwell in Vega's flow,
When a sailing ship for starflight is a tactic,
When these things all—"

"That's enough. The immortals' minions, they're the Green Lanterns. Are they all over the Galaxy? Is there any place that isn't covered by them?"

"No. They're in every sector, have been for about four thousand years."

"And the sailing ship for starflight. I brought that here. The Black Widow, right?"

"That would probably qualify."

"And a thousand cultures. Could Sonnabend have been estimating? Would he possibly have meant, say, nine hundred and ninety-seven races living here?"

"No. I understand he is quite precise. A thousand only turns out to be a round number in our decimal system."

"Whew, then we've got time. According to the portable computer terminal the Master's stooges issued me there are nine hundred and ninety-seven distinct races as of the last census. We've come here so that makes nine hundred and ninety-eight."

"I'm a Kryptonian, remember, not an Earthman."

"Oh, right. Well that only makes nine hundred and ninety nine."

"The Old-Timer. The defrocked Guardian," Superman said. "He told me he was the first Guardian to leave Oa. He was here. He makes a thousand."

"Bingo, There isn't a moment to lose. Listen, you know how the Master made his real-estate killing?"

"On an offhand guess I'd say he cheated."

"You bet your super-ass he cheated. He ripped off this Delphinian scientist's prototype time-snatcher. He's got this machine that can reach into the past or the future and pull inorganic matter into the present or place things in another time. He built a time-snatcher powerful enough to manufacture duplicate planets."

"You're telling me he buys a planet—"

"Buying things is taboo here. They exchange gifts."

"And he reaches, say, a hundred years or so into the future and brings back the planet from there so he's got two of them to sell?"

"Or three or a dozen or a hundred. And he goes and sells them all as if they were real planets—completely lifeless and good for nothing but housing developments-when all but one is going to disappear a hundred or so years later, leaving the inhabitants floating in empty space."

"That'll upset the whole space-time continuum for light years around. It'll kill billions. He's mad."

"That makes him nothing worse than a dishonest businessman—like those guys that sell land in the Poconos, only on a bigger scale. He had me in this back room here figuring out where all the black holes are on the border between the Galactic Arm and the main body of the Galaxy."

"What's that got to do with it?"

"He's got the capability to grab every black hole on that border and throw it a billion years into the future. He's planning on dismembering the Arm from the rest of the Galaxy. The Guardians will be powerless to stop him from taking a conquering horde across every star system that rejects his tyrannical rule. The old guys will even be obligated to disarm the Green Lanterns already here. The Arm won't go anywhere right away, but it'll no longer be physically a part of the Galaxy. In a billion years it'll be spinning off, a mini-Galaxy of its own, but before that all Hell will break loose with the Master playing Satan."

"Oh, my God."

I
n the secretarial pool on the eighth floor of the Galaxy Building was a rather amazing machine built and leased to Galaxy Communications by the Xerox Corporation. The function of this machine was simply to reproduce what was written on paper. That is, if a sheet of paper with something written on it were slid into a certain slot of the machine, the images on that paper would have a bright light shined on them and then the images would be momentarily recorded inside the machine. The machine would then grab the top sheet of blank paper from a pile of its own supply, print the information in total from the first sheet on this second sheet of paper, belch the new copy out into a neat little pile of such copies, and immediately forget the information it had just recorded, ready to copy a fresh sheetful. To the machine, of course, this information it recorded and copied was not writing or drawing or anything meaningful at all. It was gibberish. Lines, points, curves and such had no significance to the machine. The machine did nothing to the information, it simply recorded this for the benefit of the machine's operator, exactly as it appeared on the original copy.
 

Xerox Corporation did not sell these machines, or any of the many similar models which they manufactured. This equipment was only leased, and the corporation kept scrupulous track of their products. Occasionally certain illegal and morally questionable things were done with these remarkable machines. For example, Earth people would use a Xerox copier to reproduce several copies—in effect, publishing written material legally protected from such free publication by unenforceable copyright laws. Another problem with Xerox copiers was that they disappeared with alarming frequency. They mysteriously vanished, from time to time, from the offices of companies which leased them, from shipping trucks and from the factories in which they were manufactured. Xerox Corporation hired scores of private detectives, over the years, to track down this phenomenon of the vanishing Xerox machines, with no significant results. What the officials of the Xerox Corporation did not realize was that if they stopped only leasing machines and started selling them outright, this problem would be largely solved.

It seemed that nowhere else in the immediate Galaxy were there machines constructed which were capable of doing what Xerox machines did as efficiently as they did it. Hence, any wealthy individual with any interplanetary connections at all and who had some use for the Xerox Corporation's products, did business with a group of pirate Xerox exporters based in the Alpha Centauri star system. These pirates also legally bought and sold huge quantities of Earth photographic, recording and amplification devices which were also without peer in the immediate Galaxy. They would have been happy simply to buy Xerox copiers as well, but since these machines were not for sale stealing seemed their only reasonable recourse.

The Master was the proud owner of six Xerox copiers of various models, including a duplicate of the one that stood in the secretarial pool on the eighth floor of the Galaxy Building. At this moment, Superman was acting a great deal like this Xerox machine.

Luthor would unwind his rolls and flash his piles of plastic and paper readout material past Superman's face. Superman would glance over them much more quickly than any Xerox copier could. A major difference between Superman's behavior, and that of a Xerox copier was that once Superman imprinted all of what was apparently nonsense on his mind he would not forget it.

"Can you make any sense out of it?"

"Ssh!" Superman sat on the bed with two fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. It was the first time he had felt safe in Luthor's presence with his eyes closed since they were teenagers. "I think—"

"Everything's there, right? All the stuff I said? Was I right about it?"

"I'm trying to figure out the mathematical code. I think I've got it."

"Are you familiar with the twenty six brands of Moroccan coffee?"

The Kryptonian didn't question the crack, probably didn't even hear it. After a few moments he said, "I think I know where the time-snatcher is."

"Where?"

"In a tight orbit around Vega, maybe forty or forty two million kilometres from the star."

"Do you know exactly where it is now? Can we get there?"

"It's small enough and close enough to the star so that it can't be seen from any observatory in the star-system. It's camouflaged by the-overpowering light of Vega. I can find it."

"Want to sabotage it? Do you know how it works?"

"You can figure it out when we get there. It's got a control cab that reproduces the atmosphere of Oric."

"I can stand a little more ammonia for a while."

"If you found out all the Master's secrets, can't he ask the computer banks what information you asked for and figure out what we're up to?"

"I told you, as an intelligence gatherer he's strictly bush. You feed this gibberish code into a computer terminal and it automatically forgets the last command it carried out. You just say, 'scramble pattern pipeline yellow' and nobody knows you've been snooping unless he was monitoring you at the time."

"You're a good man, Lex Luthor. Ever thought of going into the hero business?"

"Nah, you never get a chance to sleep late. Listen, Supes, I can get out of here easy, but have you given any thought to smuggling yourself to the nearest exit?"

"I've got an idea. This data gave me a pretty good picture of the layout of this pyramid. We're on the first level below the ground level, right?"

"I think so."

"Is there anyone guarding this room? Someone about my size?"

"One guy almost as big as you, but he's got three legs."

"Here's where I show you some super-speed tailoring. Can you mug him and bring me his clothes?"

"Piece of cake. He doesn't look like he's ever worked on a rock pile."

A
lgren Eighteen liked to think that the Cerulean third of his personality was the dominant one. That was where he got his ambitiousness. The other two-thirds of Algren Eighteen was Tripedal, which was why when he entered the service of the Master he started as a library guard. Tripedals were dexterous and fiercely responsible, though not noted for their intelligence. Ceruleans, on the other hand, were among the shrewdest races on Oric, and probably the wealthiest. It was only their remarkable lack of any racial loyalty to speak of that allayed any fears among the general population that the seven or eight hundred thousand Ceruleans on Oric might pool their wealth into one of the Galaxy's most powerful economic cartels.
 

The Ceruleans had six sexes, the Tripedals had three. Consequently the mating exercise that produced Algren Eighteen was composed of two Tripedals and two Ceruleans. The Tripedals undoubtedly thought the entire proceeding was a touch kinky. As a result Algren Eighteen turned out trisexual. Be that as it may.

He was now chief of the attendants at the Master's launching deck two levels below the pyramid's base. He was still only guarding things, but he was rising fast. Apparently his position would become more important as time passed, at any rate the deck was being used a lot more than it used to be when Algren Eighteen was first transferred here.

He supervised six other guards and kept records of the comings and goings of the Master's vehicles with the assistance of his very own assigned portable computer terminal that followed him on wheels while he was on duty and whose red light flashed on to activate it at the sound of Algren Eighteen's voice. He did not give his Computer a name.