Last Son of Krypton (7 page)

"Six seconds."

He swept between two gliders over two adjacent buildings at a speed just under mach one. The reduced air pressure in his wake dragged the two of them together before they could think. A blast of heat vision Superman tossed back over his shoulder fused the roof doors of the adjoining buildings closed. These two would have nowhere to escape.

"Five seconds."

The lunchtime crowds on the streets hadn't yet figured out what was going on overhead. And an irresistible force came barreling out of the sky at the thronged plaza faster than any eye could possibly follow. He banked toward a scrawny tree standing on the sidewalk in a four-foot round concrete flower pot. Arcing upward, he snatched the plant with him pot and all. By the time he was six stories above the ground he was moving slowly enough so that the pilot of the glider above could see him coming.

"Four seconds."

Seven down out of the dozen. The eighth knew what was coming and couldn't get out of the way. His kite was about to get caught in a tree. Superman pronged his prize like a jouster and continued upward to drop the pilot with the other two on the Galaxy Building ledge.

"Three seconds."

X-ray vision beamed at the earpiece of one pilot filled his head with hellish static. An ultrasonic squeal at the highest D-flat Superman could reach was the right pitch to vibrate another pilot's footrests and handlebars out of his grip. Once the two realized that they were disoriented they would fall to the roofs fifteen feet below them.

"Two seconds."

One of the last two pilots was a few blocks away. He could hear the police loudspeakers playing town crier and feel the diminishing of the vibrations his friends
were sending at their assigned bank buildings. He had reached one hand down to a boot holster and was taking aim at the nearest police helicopter.
 

tchok-tchok-tchok

Superman caught the three .22 shells in his mouth like jellybeans and spat them out at the three guy lines connecting the pilot to his kite.

ping-ping-ping

The pilot was unconscious on his back.

"One second."

Superman quickly inspected the earphone attachments on the pilots with telescopic and x-ray vision. He had to be sure it was Luthor behind this. He threw his voice, disguised as Luthor's the way it would sound through a radio, at the left ear of the last remaining pilot. "Scrub the mission. Surrender to the police according to our contingency plan," said Luthor's voice.

"Zero."

Swinging over the city for the benefit of those on the ground who were finally catching on to what was taking place, the Man of Steel caught one at a time the three pilots tossed into the air ten seconds ago. They were mercifully unconscious.

And when the police in the four helicopters went to open fire they found, to their surprise, that there wasn't a glider left in the sky. They would collect three suspects from a ledge of the Galaxy Building, three unconscious under a potted tree on the plaza, two in a pile of crashed fiberglass on one roof, and so forth, each armed with a .22-caliber pistol whose firing pin was melted like grilled cheese.

Janet Terry, the new girl in the newsroom, had the presence of mind to get a camera at the window to catch the tail of Superman's performance. Someone always did. By the time Clark Kent walked into the newsroom with a detailed account, the place was a volcano of activity.

Lombard was in the corner of the room with his feet on the desk smiling as somebody frantically answered the phone and somebody bit a pencil in half as a bulletin came over the newswire and somebody pounded out new copy and somebody demanded that at least one phone line be kept free. Steve had nothing to do until his interview subject showed up.

"Steve, will you talk to me?" Clark asked.

"I'll tell you anything you want to hear."

"What's going on here?"

"Jimmy called up from Princeton and everybody went bazonkas."

"Why? Did you get Superman on film?"

"Sure sure sure. Hey, do you have any idea why he always manages to pick the emergency that's going on near a TV camera?"

"Will you stop it? What did Jimmy say?"

"Well, y'see, it seems there's a big joke on Superman."

"Superman? Joke?"

"Yeah. While Luthor's guys were keeping him busy playing tag the boss was down in Princeton stealing the papers from Albert Einstein's vault. Pretty funny, huh?"

"He what?"

"Stole the papers from Einstein. You don't hear too good, do you, Clarkie?"

T
owbee's audience was nearly as heterogeneous as the planet itself—as heterogeneous as his own ancestry. It was the crowd coming out of the temple. The Chief Speaker of the temple was terribly impressed with Towbee's talent, was continually after the minstrel to chant the verses of Sonnabend's prophesies at the services. After a while Towbee finally agreed that his singing at the temple entrance would consist of the verses, along with Towbee's own introductions and transitions. One day of every ten, according to law, had to include attendance at one temple service. That law included anyone who spent more than six consecutive days on Oric, but it did not include Towbee. Towbee was insane.
 

Among those lingering a moment after the service to listen to Towbee were an arachnoid from Polaris, a tripedal from the Septus Group, even a humanoid all the way from the Central Cluster somewhere. They certainly came a long way these days to get a piece of the action. There must have been sixty or more listeners and no more than two of the same race. And they all very likely thought Towbee was a fool. A mad poet. A singer of silly songs. A diversion from the serious work of slicing up chunks of the Galactic Arm and selling them to the highest bidder. These petty usurers and moneychangers might think more of Towbee if they stopped to notice what he was singing:

It was old when the Guardians had mothers
And Arcturus only glowed in God's eye;
When dominion of the spaceways was another's,
When angels were the only souls to fly.
The prophesy of Sonnabend was tendered,
Bid by Him who did fold the Spiral's tips
For us whom His handiwork has rendered,
To guide us by words of prophet's lips:
When the minions of immortals spread Galactic,
When a thousand cultures dwell in Vega's glow,
When a sailing ship for starflight is a tactic,
When these things all come to pass then we will know
That a hybrid born to Vega has been spreading
Massive strength through an empire built on trade,
And a path to an Arm's rule he is treading;
'Gainst his rule need for freedom sure will fade.

But the heathens would not notice the message, only the medium. They would toss trinkets or treasures into the minstrel's basket according to their station and wealth—this was not payment, actually, but gifts—and they would go back to work.

One of the listeners was listening. The little gray humanoid from the Central Cluster dropped his gift into the minstrel's basket—a modest chip of rare granite—and waited
for the rest of the crowd to disperse.
 

This planet, Oric, was becoming the economic center for this sector of the Galaxy. The world was significantly larger than Earth, but made of lighter material. It's gravity was consequently slightly less strong. No one quite remembered what intelligent race, if any, was native to Oric. The Guardians kept records of such things, but no one else was sufficiently concerned to find out. Three of four thousand years ago by Earth measure of time—which is of dubious value among hundreds of intelligent races whose life spans vary from about twelve years to near immortality—Oric first became a hub of the expanding slave trade in the Galactic Arm. The Arm was that sector of the Galaxy that swung out at the outer tip of the spiral of stars that was the Milky Way. It included all the stars visible to the naked humanoid eye from Earth as well as a few more. It was the last sector to approach the state of civilization.

There was a right and a wrong in the Universe, and that distinction was not very difficult to make.

Slavery, of course, was wrong. This was not to say that there were not certain races or certain individuals among races who were best suited to serve the needs of others. The concepts of right and wrong in the Universe, however, were closely tied with the concept of consistency. Servitude as a commercial commodity is inconsistent, a contradiction in terms. In the practice of buying and selling—or giving and getting, as it was looked at on Oric—a certain freedom of choice is implied on the part of the parties to the transaction. Mandatory servitude does not fit in with that scheme.

No one but scholars in the Ethics of Sonnabend ever went through that thought process when wondering what was right and wrong. Most beings simply knew. The rules were there, had been since Sonnabend laid them down eight billion years ago. The power of the great prophet was such that most of his principals, in some form, found their way into nearly every developed or developing culture in the Galaxy. The principals were not always followed, but they did in fact define very clearly the difference between right and wrong. Loosely translated into English, some of Sonnabend's ethical standards could be stated like this:

Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

We are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

No one had any reliable memory of Sonnabend himself. There was no reliable record left of his exact origins, although there were legends. He so transformed the Galaxy that there was no longer any concept of that the Galaxy was like before him, even among the few who were alive then. That was probably just as well.

It was the voice of the prophet that inspired the founding of the Guardians, a collection of nine immortal humanoid males whose purpose it was to keep order in the Galaxy. That purpose brought them to Oric and the Galactic Arm. The Arm was the last sector of the Galaxy into which the immortals extended their active interest. It was always in their power to come here; there was simply never anything going on here before that demanded their attention. Only wanderers, rogue stars, were outside their jurisdiction.

The Guardians were also inveterate record-keepers. Over eight billion years they recorded the births and deaths of stars as well as the fleeting histories of various forms
of life on worlds spinning around those stars. When the star sun Vega was born they watched; when the profusion of black holes provided intelligent beings with power for travelling beyond the speed of light they watched; when Krypton died they watched and they waited.
 

The little gray humanoid hovered in a corner impassively watching the mulligan stew of bodies zoom this way and that. The minstrel's audience was dispersing, and the grinning, mustachioed, four-armed elf hopped in front of the humanoid. This was Towbee the mad minstrel.

"You're a Malthusian, aren't you, Man?
Of anthropology I'm a fan."

The grinning leprechaun sounded preposterous in any language. The remarkable intentional translators everyone on Oric wore around their necks like amulets decoded the intent of any speaker into the language of the listener, and since Towbee talked in the Orician equivalent of what in English is the entrancing technique called rhyming, so was it translated into whatever was the humanoid's native tongue. The minstrel was always onstage, often jabbering and nonsensical, but always rhythmic.

"I am a native of Malthus," said the impassive face. "You are adept at distinguishing the origins of beings of similar races?"

"A bow in the backbone of fifteen degrees,
A small ball-and-socket joint down in your knees,
Both made my conclusion one of great ease."

Towbee was sounding too intelligent, he thought. It would be a good idea to allay the stranger's suspicions before they had a chance to form. As he spoke he absently caused his instrument—a device capable of making cloudy images from light as well as musical sounds—to form the image of a surface with a round hole. Over the next several minutes an imagined creature of Towbee's own design seemed to try from every conceivable angle to slide his square body into the round hole. The forms Towbee spun were of directed light, not subject to gravitational force, but of apparently infinite mass. They could not be moved or dispersed except by the command of one adept at playing Towbee's instrument. It was simple for the minstrel to feign madness. All he needed to do was appear to open his mind to those around him.

"You've traveled from Galaxy's center to here.
What brings you to Oric, a distance not near?"

"A rumor. I am stopping off on a journey to a star on the rim. A dwarf called Sol. Have you heard of it?"

"I have been there myself, seen remarkable things,
Like a giant world girdled by colorful rings."

"That would be Sol-6, the reason that area is often called the System of the Rings. You are that widely traveled within the Galactic Arm?"

"From Spiral's tip to the shores of sight
I've rode the interstellar night.
So tell me, sir, this rumor queer
That speeds you journey on to there."

"I go to the world Sol-3, called Terra by the beings who inhabit it."

"World of chaos, without plan,
And legendary Superman."

"Yes, the refugee from the destroyed world that orbited Antares. Quite an underachiever, would you say?"

"You've dodged the question, changed our course.
Can Sol-3 hide some great resource?"

The gray being allowed his first faint smile. Towbee could charm the thumbs off a humanoid. "What harm could possibly come of telling one like you? There was a brilliant Terran who died recently and it is said that he left a final mathematical discovery in a secret hideaway designed to open a generation after his death. A generation of Terran's has since passed."

"Terrans contend with rocks and sticks,
With fossil fuels they're in a fix.
How could one of brilliant mind
Be one of those most wretched kind?"