Last Son of Krypton (23 page)

"What are you babbling about? You sure you're recovered from that stuff they had you doped up with?"

"Sure, I'm fine. Just making conversation. What about the Master's operatives in the real estate offices all over the settled part of the planet? They have some sort of linkup for communications, so that they don't give away the same planet to two buyers—or gift receivers, or whatever they call them here."

"Crazy foam."

"Crazy foam."

"You're reading my lips right. The atmosphere here is even better suited to flash fires than it is on Earth. The air itself burns, and an automatic safety system fills all enclosed spaces with some kind of foam to cool down fires. This foam can conduct life-sustaining operations itself—causes respiration of the skin, feeds intravenously if necessary—at the same time as it smothers ignition of the air."

"Sounds like a great regulation. If somebody could patent that process on Earth, he'd pull down a fortune."

"I was planning on it."

Superman located a dozen and a half little offices on Oric, each suited to a different set of environments, each equipped with crazy foam devices in the walls and ceilings—those that had ceilings. A little spark appeared in the air somewhere inside each one.

"Well," Superman grinned and clapped his hands together as he hung on the edge of space, "shall we go on to the time-snatcher now?"

"What? I thought you said—"

"A momentary aberration. You forget with whom you're dealing, old man."

"Son of a gun."

WAR

Humans were generally eager to go to war because they would rather die early among their friends than live with the prospect of dying alone.

E
arth humanoids kept each other prisoner all the time. They were constantly fighting and revolting and repressing each other effectively and enthusiastically. They were used to dealing with such things. The Master might very well learn from them. They were more practiced at it than he was, which was why, he supposed, the alarm sounded to signal Superman's escape. The Kryptonian was raised among the wolves and so took on their talents.
 

Superman would be conscious now, and sentient. It was fortunate that the Master was in his study at the tip of the pyramid. The escaped hero would not be able to see him from wherever he was through the lead sheeting that expensively but unostentatiously lined an inner layer of the study walls.

The Master ordered the reconnaissance satellites operational. All of them. The Tripedal guards began an exhaustive search of every corner and object in the pyramid large enough to hold a humanoid. It was probably Tripedals who were responsible for the escape, the dullwitted creatures. The individuals responsible would be singled out when the emergency was over and requested to offer the Master a gift of satisfaction, doubtless some standard form of self-torture.

The Master tuned one of his study monitors to the launch deck. His enforcement detail was already there.

Six Ceruleans presented the hybrid Algren Eighteen with their emergency traveling orders. They would each occupy one interstellar jaunter and have separate destinations. Their mission would be to find Superman, at any of the six Galactic locations where he might cause the Master the most trouble.

"Will this be in addition to the chase undertaken by..." Algren Eighteen jumbled through his mind for the names, for the record in his computer terminal had been mysteriously misplaced, "Lex Luthor and Abraham Lincoln?"

"Who?" the chief of the Cerulean unit asked.

"The hairless humanoid and his aide who took the new vehicle as the alarm was sounding."

"We have no time for explanations," the Cerulean barked

—as the row of teleporters along the wall activated themselves one by one and drew up everything in the huge hangar like powerful suction cleaners sweeping across a sandy shore.

The Master saw it all. He ordered every Gorgan in the pyramid to teleport immediately to the launch deck. These were very massive beings who would be able to function in that environment of high deadly winds. They were to salvage all valuable equipment not already destroyed and pull the six Ceruleans and seven guards on the launch deck out of there so the room could be sealed off until the teleporters were brought under control. That would take time. It would also take personnel, which seemed suddenly to be at a premium.

The Master got an order, via computer linkup, out to each of the offices of his real estate operations on Oric. "This is to alert you that our Major Plan is to go into effect
immediately, ahead of schedule. Chief Operational Officers at each facility are to consult their computer terminals for hitherto secret information about their respective functions in the coming extraordinary period. Code to obtain your orders is as follows: 'Landfill heliotrope.' You may obtain such information now."
 

The Master ended this message as his own terminal flashed its red light on and off several times for no apparent reason. He thought nothing of it, had no time to think anything of it, had more on his mind.

In eighteen office facilities on Oric the same thing happened to eighteen computer terminals. Eighteen Chief Operational Officers said, in eighteen different languages, "Landfill heliotrope," to their respective terminals. Eighteen terminals answered:

"Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go."

Before any of the officers had the chance to wonder if this was some sort of code, every real estate office belonging to the Master filled up with life-supporting, business-stopping foam.

The Master did not know what had happened in his real estate offices. It would not much matter, actually. Not now. These underlings would do no more than administer his operations on Oric while the Master was fulfilling his destiny across the sky.

A tremor rocked the planet. And another. A tidal wave lapped over the side of the pyramid and nearly reached its peak. The Master looked upward, out the open tip of his study, and saw a pair of what looked to be moons. Oric had no moons. The Master knew what they were, and now he knew where Superman was. The Kryptonian was doing something worse than wasting his own time, he was fate's tool, prodding the Master on to where the prophet Sonnabend said he must go these eons past. It was time to leave.

He had laid in his course long ago. Today was the beginning. A new age was born here and now. The few most trusted and obedient of his attendants were here; they were on their way.

A set of four triangular walls poked up from the open tip of the pyramid and met in a point, sealing the structure closed. The upper forty feet of the pyramid rose as if with a great piano hinge on one side until the tip pointed into the sky at a 60-degree angle with the ground. Then with a great soundless lurch it lifted off the surface of the rest of the structure and soared at the heavens.

The pyramid-shaped spacecraft gained speed and finally ignited as it passed out of Oric's atmosphere. There, ahead somewhere, hidden by the fiery mass of blue Vega, was the device that was causing a spate of worlds to materialize around Orie. Dead husks, duplicates of Oric itself. Oric could die today for all the Master cared, and it well might.

A hundred kilometers from Oric the pyramidal spacecraft shimmered and swirled in a rainbow of smoky colors and seemed to vanish. It made the rest of the, trip disguised in an illusion of an infrared wave.

"T
hat button over there." The blue-sleeved hand darted to press one of the myriad dials, levers, heat-sensitive bulbs, and other controls lining the six walls of the cramped cab.
 

"Excuse me, bunkie. Don't you have anything useful to do? We're just a few light-seconds from Vega, why don't you take a steam bath?" Apparently Superman's helpful suggestions as to how the machinery worked were as welcome to Luthor as someone reading over John Stuart Mill's shoulder. It did not take Luthor long at all, for a mortal, to determine how the time-snatcher worked. Superman calculated that they could snatch a maximum of 21 facsimiles without permanently damaging the planet.

Luthor set about reaching a billion years into the future for a collection of Xerox-style copies of the dead husk of the planet Oric which he placed skillfully in orbit around the original like moons. As this process began, Superman slipped out of the airlock of the contraption and swam through space back to the planet. The idea was to create chaos, but avoid disaster.

Luthor was quite jealous of whoever it was that had designed this time-snatcher. The machine used no basic principles that were unfamiliar to Luthor. The thing simply used what Luthor knew so darned efficiently. There was no margin for error to account for imprecise borders between different dimensions. No energy-matter discrepancy. The time-snatcher dealt with only inorganic matter and could move virtually any amount of it across unlimited expanses of time or space, ignoring the physical laws of the three-dimensional Universe. The navigational equipment of the Black Widow compared to it as a kayak compares to an aircraft carrier.

The Master must certainly have stumbled on this piece of equipment, or stolen it and lost its inventor and anyone who completely understood its mechanism. There was nothing on Oric among the technology provided by a thousand advanced cultures to compare with it. If he could tinker with stuff like this all the time, Luthor, thought, he might be content to leave off the nonsense of his life and live out however many years he had as a traveling interplanetary fixit man, if there was such a profession.

The time-snatcher worked so quickly that by the time Superman arrived back at Oric there already were three facsimiles of the planet in orbit around it and a fourth taking shape like a film image coming into focus. The Kryptonian stole a glance at the Master's headquarters and saw nothing unexpected, although he could not see through the walls of the pyramid's upper chambers. Everyone seemed to be occupied with the crises Superman and Luthor had left behind. The teleporters were still turned on, and the computer terminals were still spouting the nursery rhyme, and the various races among the Master's employees were coping in their respective fashions. The first tidal wave was coming.

There were nine facsimiles drawn back from a -billion years in Oric's future, and the tides of ammonia water were heaving toward Cyber Island. There was a heavily populated community mostly made up of Lalofins and Gorgans on the undersea shelf directly in the tidal wave's path. Superman plowed into the putrid ocean like a dagger and swept back and forth along the border between the settlement and the open sea,
setting up a cross-current to meet the tidal wave that was half a kilometer away and building.
 

Superman spanned his 200-meter course twelve times a second, following a pattern through the liquid he mentally calculated as he was diving into it. But when the wave was 300 meters away, Superman sensed that he hadnot stirred up the ocean enough. It was not churning as it should be, and the undersea community was imminently threatened.

He swept into the sky over the ammonia sea and saw the wave coming, with no cross-current building to neutralize it. The only thing Superman seemed to leave behind was his own wake, foaming at the surface. There were seconds before the tidal wave would surely sweep over the settlement, onto the island itself.

Superman knifed back into the sea and flashed directly at the coming tidal wave. Before he reached it he felt himself swept around by the sea itself like a corkscrew and slammed at the ocean floor. He looked up in time to see the tidal pattern lumbering over his head and pacified by a collection of sonic generators that circled the ocean floor around Cyber for the purpose of doing just that. It was the sonic generators, no doubt, that had caught Superman in their vibrations and unexpectedly mashed him into the muck, that had calmed his cross current, and that would be routinely catching tidal waves before they reached any populated area of the planet.

Quakes. There would be quakes. There were sixteen Orics In the sky and there were hellish rumblings from thousands of kilometers around the planet.

Superman found one quake with his x-ray vision. He caught sight of the underground plates it was loosening. He traced the probable pattern of quakes to follow. He was ready for them to reach the planet's population, and so was the population ready.

Before the first sign of tremors on Cyber, alarms clanged and lights flashed. Creatures looked up with resigned expressions—those who could form expressions—and scores of entire buildings. raised themselves up on great collections of springs. The buildings on springs were equipped with expensive magnetic devices that homed in on the planet's immoveable center of gravity, and when the tremors started the buildings essentially stood still, relative to the planet, while the surface shivered.

The buildings not equipped with springs shot full of life-saving foam. There were nineteen Orics in the sky, and Superman felt quite useless here. The crisis he and Lutbor had brought about was certainly most inconvenient for the population of Oric, but hardly dangerous.

The only thing left for Superman to do was to flash through the pyramid and find MacDuff, Luthor's computer terminal, and see what the machine knew about flushing out the Master. This Superman did, swimming undersea through the closed hatch of the launch ramp and into the winds caused by the runaway teleport machines. Superman slammed into each of the machines, disabling and, nominally, turning them off.

MacDuff was inert in the corridor where Luthor's office had been. It would be quicker to fly the terminal to Luthor himself several million miles away than for Superman to figure out the codes that would reactivate it and then imitate Luthor's voice to do so.

All at super-speed to blur any sight of him Superman wrapped the computer in his protective cape and flew it up above the pyramid...