Last Son of Krypton (17 page)

"Hey there, young fella, what're you doing prowling through the streets at this hour?" Whizzer had owned the General Store before Jonathan Kent bought it. He was retired now. He hung a smile from his sagging jowls as he let Lex in. "You're Julie Luthor's boy, right?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm Lex. Is Clark around?"

"I would think Clark's asleep by now, just like I'd think you ought to be. I was just puttering around in the basement looking for an old records ledger I think I left behind."

"Got any beer? I've gotta celebrate."

"Seems a man can't even do nothing at all if he's of a mind without some government fella asking where he made what money he's living on. You say beer, son?"

"Yeah, like in the fridge or someplace? Mr. Kent must keep something like that around." Lex swung open the door of a deep freeze behind the counter and found only ice cream. "How about tobacco?"

"Ain't been able to get beer in this town since nineteen and fourteen. Before
Prohibition."
 

"Yeah, a corncob pipe. Think Mr. Kent would mind if I grabbed this and paid him for it tomorrow?"

"That was the year they passed the income tax. Folks thought it'd be a good way to keep away the revenuers."

Lex stuffed the pipe in his pocket and clutched a two-ounce pouch of Flying Dutchman tobacco and flew out the door. "Thanks, Mr. Barnes."

"Appears folks was wrong, though."

Whizzer Barnes stood at the open door and stared after Lex for a long time. There was a look behind the boy's eyes he had seen only once before. He couldn't place the look until he remembered an old man who had come into this store, it must have been ten or fifteen years ago. The old man moved slowly, hardly had any cheeks for the wrinkles over his face. He had a mustache, as Whizzer recalled, and had a wool cap pulled down tightly over his head. Lex and the old man didn't move or sound or act the same. What was it about the two of them? Whizzer thought he remembered. The old man had bought a corncob pipe and tobacco too. Whizzer Barnes folded his ledger under an arm and shambled home.

When Superboy entered the atmosphere of the Earth there was smoke seeping out the windows of Lex Luthor's laboratory. Four thousandths of a second later the Boy of Steel crashed through one wall of the structure he had built three weeks earlier and out the opposite wall. The fire, with room to breathe, now spat its killing heat into the open air. Superboy scooped the unconscious Lex Luthor from the floor of the building, wrapped him in his cape to extinguish the flames licking at his clothes and hair and set him down on the open field. When Lex awoke two seconds later, heaving air in and out of his lungs, he saw Superboy emptying his own lungs at Lex's laboratory, his fire, his creation.

Lex raced at the falling building, howling his rage. He got far enough to feel the heat, to need to cover his mouth and nose with a hand as he ran, to feel a hot prickling sensation over his exposed skin, to see the bowlful of living protoplasm he had created with his mind and hands and livid soul die the death that Lex, at that moment, wanted to die.

Searing gas from the combustion of his artificial protoplasm killed the hair follicles of Lex's arms, face and head. Only the hand he was holding over his nose and mouth when Superboy plucked him up, kicking and writhing, for the second time, saved the cilia in his nostrils. He would never grow hair or a beard again. He would laugh or cry or become enraged when pansy philosophers wondered, in the future, whether laboratory life could have a soul. He knew that such life would have no less than the soul of its creator. Lex Luthor chose, from the moment his creation died, to hate the being who had saved his miserable life, who was responsible for the loss of his brown curls and his child. It was the only way he could walk slowly, one millimeter at a time, from the abyss of madness.

Superman came to understand, as Luthor did not, that while Luthor's soul might be as durable as that of any other creature in the Universe, the vulnerable and sensitive body of a mortal can withstand only a certain amount of greatness before it must balance that with venality. Superman occasionally thought to devise some way to give Luthor super-powers, then thought better of it. Luthor was damaged at the same time and with the same terrible efficiency that Superboy had been nurtured. Luthor had never killed a
human being, had never been directly responsible for a man or woman's death. The entire mass of his hatred was directed at Superman, who was thankful to take the hatred and leave only Luthor's disdain for the rest of the human community. The Kryptonian became upset whenever he thought of the man who had been his boyhood friend. Superman could only hope that someday God would have mercy on Lex Luthor's tortured soul.
 

The pair stood outside the walls of the prison as dawn broke, Superman telling what nothing he knew about the situation, Luthor insisting that they should go to Oric separately and that he was perfectly capable of getting there almost as quickly as Superman. For a man with an amazingly creative intellect, who had been turned out of the family by his parents at the age of fifteen, who was completely bald at thirteen, who had no formal education beyond trade school at a juvenile detention home, but who was still considered the world's foremost technical physicist, who had almost never had anyone around him intelligent enough to hold his own in conversation, let alone be his friend, and who consequently spoke to pictures and statues of dead geniuses, Luthor was scrupulously sane. When he said he could navigate a distance of 26 light-years in a reasonable length of time, Superman was inclined to believe him.

On the trip to Metropolis Superman did Luthor the courtesy of wrapping him in his cape so that he didn't catch a worse cold than Superman had already furnished him. They could also make the trip faster that way. The cape protected Luthor from burning to a cinder with friction. They landed in the central courtyard of the Metro Modern Art Museum. The city was a ghost town early Sunday morning.

"Do you appreciate art, Noodles?" Luthor asked as he unraveled himself from the red cape.

"I think so. But my taste is a little more offbeat than these pieces."

There was a big round St. Bernard with the look of a monk standing by a fountain. It was carved from redwood. There was also an aluminum rectangular prism twelve feet long and bent in three places. Its title was "Crushed Cigarette." There were several stabiles, the most interesting of which was a silver-and-black structure made from several materials. In its center was an ovular plastic bulb whose top half was clear and whose bottom half was smoky black and opaque. It was surrounded by eight coiled flat silver surfaces, each maybe thirty feet long if it were unrolled. The sign accompanying the object called it "Black Widow" and noted that the piece was on indefinite loan from the artist, one Jeremy McAfee.

"There it is," Luthor swelled with unabashed pride, "my flying sailboat."

"What?"

"It's supposed to be lifted like a glider by a mother craft of some sort, but you'll serve the same purpose."

"You're telling me that this three-dimensional test pattern is your starship?"

"Well, you don't think it's art, do you? Just fly it up about twenty thousand feet and let go." Luthor pressed several unmarked points on the apparently smooth surface of the sculpture's central bulb, and the clear portion opened on a hinge like a cracked Easter egg.

As Luthor climbed inside, Superman became apprehensive. "What about McAfee? He's a very well-known artist."

"He's a sententious phony. If you like, I'll get a letter from him granting permission to use his sculpture for space flight as soon as we get back. The minute we touch down on Earth."

"Are you telling me that Jeremy McAfee is you?"

"I didn't say that."

"Who else are you?"

"Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Einstein. Do I ask you your secret identity? Everyone knows you're Morgan Edge, anyway."

Superman watched himself do a double take.

"Gotcha."

Superman lifted Luthor and his Black Widow four miles into the sky and let go. Majestically as a butterfly coming out of its cocoon the eight arms uncoiled as it fell. From each of their surfaces rose four triangular sails, black on one side and silver on the other, as if some old sea captain were pulling the strings all at once from outside the bottle. Everything but the pilot bubble was thinner than writing paper and as it fell, its speed approaching two hundred miles an hour, the silver sides of all thirty-two sails glowed with soaked up sunlight. Its descent slowed. Stopped. It rose. It gained speed. The arms and deceptively fragile sails railed against the rushing wind, but they held. And the wind diminished as the air thinned and the speed increased. By the time it crossed the edge of space the Black Widow flew faster than a comet. It streaked toward the sun.

Within half an hour Luthor was rolling in an arc around Sol, his ship itself glowing as brightly as a tiny white dwarf with a black egg at its core. It soaked energy from the star, whipped around it like an arm winding up to a pitch. It sprung out of orbit into the northern sky as fast as a photon. As it crossed the threshold of lightspeed it entered negative space. Lex Luthor had all time and space at his disposal. What was the difference, he wondered, between himself and a superman?

The last son of Krypton followed the sailing ship into the sky, fascinated as its sails swelled with solar energy and disappeared from real space. Superman followed under his own power. There was no way to say where in space he overtook Luthor, since neither was traveling in the visible Universe. They swam the catacombs of a thousand planes of existence and if during the trip they occasionally intersected with the three dimensions of their familiar perceptions it was by chance. As the first trickle of internal combustion engines began their inevitable Sunday flood over the streets of Metropolis, Superman dropped through the green skies of Oric.

C
lark Kent had seen this phenomenon on Earth once, when Robert Redford was starring in a movie being filmed in Metropolis for Galaxy Studios and the studio gave him an office in the Galaxy Building. Clark noticed Redford in the lobby buying a copy of the
Daily Planet
. Redford, nosing through the paper, didn't notice that although it was mid-morning when the lobby was generally empty, the population of the area where he was standing had increased several hundred percent since he walked in. During a period of nine minutes absolutely no one who walked by him either stepped out of the lobby or onto an elevator. Apparently Redford noticed none of this until a middle-aged woman walked up to the newsstand to buy a magazine, looked at him absently, and quite against her will she squealed. Redford looked around at the scores of people trying to be part of the decor, smiled nervously, and darted into the nearest elevator.
 

Similarly, Superman quickly decided that as long as he was on Oric he should not stand still in any public place.

The world was a wasteland, mostly. Four-fifths of it was liquid, primarily water and ammonia, which was adequate for the gilled Lalofins from the Sirius system, but the sea did not even support life of its own any more, if it ever had. Most of the land was under a great equatorial glacial belt which grew and shrank only slightly as the seasons changed. Oric was tilted nearly 80 degrees to its orbit. There was only one collection of land masses on the planet in a region temperate enough so that hundreds of diverse races could adapt and function with relative equality. This region was on a tight group of islands referred to simply as the Archipelago, since it was the only archipelago on the planet and needed no more specific name.

The largest of the islands did have a name in most languages. The English equivalent was probably some variation of the word
cybernetic
, like Cybernia or Cyber Island. Cyber would have been an architect's nightmare and a technocrat's wet dream. Fortunately there was nowhere in the known Galaxy other than Earth where the craft of architecture was anyone's sole professional concern. There were lots of technocrats—as well as inventors, industrialists, engineers and salesmen—many of whom were considered successes in their field because they did most of their business here.
 

The island was tear-shaped, 78 kilometers long and 43 kilometers at its widest point. Presumably the ground under Cyber Island's city was mostly granules of silicon and green clay, as was the land surface left visible on the six other large islands in the Archipelago, as well as the scores of smaller ones. There was not a square centimeter of uncovered land anywhere on Cyber, and the paved surface extended several kilometers beyond the shore at all points in order to provide living and working facilities for creatures better adapted to liquid than gas respiration.

When Earthmen reached the stars—that time would be no longer than two generations, Superman knew—and moneymakers inevitably followed in the trail of the pioneers, this world of Oric would be a fine home away from home for them. In all his travels Superman had seen only one society more encumbered by rituals and traditions than the civilization of Oric, and that was Western society on Earth. The tradition and ritual here were a kind of artificial bond holding together an artificial society of
disparate forms of life.
 

Most of the ritual, naturally, had to do with trade, which was the essential purpose of this society. Wandering over the byways of Cyber Island, leading a crowd of the curious, Superman paused to watch a merchant who apparently had just returned from the Spice Shower. This was a collection of meteoroids streaming through the void a little over a light-year from Sirius, which were rich in elements that could be refined into taste-enhancing food additives. These spices were very popular among bulk feeders like humanoids who had taste faculties.