Last Son of Krypton (8 page)

"You have indeed been there, I see. The discoverer was named Einstein and he was in touch with the spirit of Sonnabend. I have heard that he left the secret of trisecting an angle."

"This is an amazing discovery then?
I fear it's importance is past my ken."

"I trusted it would be, poet."

For a bit more that a million years the Guardians had been experimenting with a standing corps of agents who acted as a sort of Galactic police force. The Green Lantern Corps consisted of one mortal for each sector of the Galaxy—which was mapped and divided arbitrarily into geographic regions by the Guardians. Green Lanterns were of different races, chosen for their honest and fearlessness, and were generally romantic, swashbuckling sorts of characters. They were each equipped with uniforms which varied with their respective physiologies and a power battery whose raw energy could be focused through a charm that each carried at all times. Humanoid Green Lanterns wore their charm as a ring.

A Green Lantern was finally appointed to patrol the sector of the Galactic Arm less than four thousand years ago in response to the atrocities perpetrated by the slave trade on Oric. This first Green Lantern of the Arm was a humanoid from the planet that orbited Antares, called Krypton. Not only did he manage to eliminate the slave trade, but he brought the first copies of Sonnabend's chronicles to the Arm and saw to it that a fundamentalist temple was established on Oric. Like the greatest of leaders this Kryptonian Green Lantern joined symbol with substance. The podium for the Chief Speaker of the temple was built out of the auction block from which slaves were sold on that spot. The presence of the temple brought about a following of the prophet Sonnabend that was quite fanatical. Consequently, society on Oric was among the most ritualized in the Galaxy, especially for a society so scrambled with exotic races. It would be necessary, the Guardians knew, for these people to pay a possibly undue lip service to the letter of the Ethics until they truly understood the spirit.

The immortal Guardians were a manipulative breed, and age brought with it subtlety. It was probably no coincidence that the Green Lantern of the sector that included most of the Galactic Arm was a humanoid from Superman's adopted world.

As the man from the center of the Galaxy ambled into the rushing crowd on this planet of great affairs he knew where his poet friend would be going next. The little gray
humanoid didn't look an eon over six billion.
 

I
ntelligent creatures could not be bought and sold on Oric. Nothing, in fact, could be bought and sold. Gifts were exchanged a great deal - it was the primary occupation of most of the creatures on the planet. It stood to reason, then, that he who had the most possessions, since possessions could only be given and not bought, must be most beloved by those with whom he comes in contact.
 

The poet Towbee was ridiculed and had trinkets tossed into his basket. The Master, who held court in a study at the apex of his pyramid-shaped home on Oric, acquired and dispensed worlds with the abandon of a traveling medicine salesman and was the most respected creature on the planet. He was the richest.

The Master lay at a 30-degree angle with his head lower than his feet, four arms hanging below him. His head was directly below the pyramid's apex and the point of light that shone through the open tip. Carlo rolled into the chamber, groveling.

"You may rise upon your wheels, Carlo." The Master's gracious grant of permission to rise was no less command than the unspoken one that moved Carlo to bow upon his entry. Anyone who entered this room had to swim through an energy that cauterized it, penetrated all within it. There was the conviction that here was greatness. Certainty. Decision.

"Your report, Carlo?" Commands, of course, were quite illegal on Oric, but the Master could hardly help the fact that his requests were strong ones.

"I have cajoled the holder of the last major expanse on the planet Rigel-12 to make a gift of it to you."

"See that he is promised an appropriate gift once our dividend operation has been carried out."

"Yes, Master. Is that all, Master?"

"No, Carlo. Are you aware that a theorist in a nearby predeveloped world has reputedly formulated a solution to the trisection of an angle?"

"Trisection? But that is impossible."

"Obviously it is not. My sources are quite reliable."

"Yes, Master. The simplification of that operation could free up untold time for designers, planners, surveyors."

"I am aware of the implications. I have chosen a plan to send a highly visible messenger to this predeveloped world. His visibility will serve to mitigate against suspicion of his actual purpose. You will prepare for his departure.

"Yes, Master. Is that all, Master?"

"You may leave."

The slave whizzed from the room on command.

Here is the way
the show was supposed to start:
 

At precisely 5:59 P.M. the rerun of whatever the network is rerunning in that time slot goes off and camera 2 in Studio B flashes on Clark Kent. Clark then reads a ten-second "billboard" from the teleprompter—a list of a few top headlines designed to entice viewers of the preceding show to watch the news fifty seconds later.

Here is what happened today instead:

At precisely 5:59 P.M. in the control room adjoining Studio B, Josh Coyle, the director of the news, pressed a button that put the image currently being immortalized by camera 2 over the WGBS-TV air. The teleprompter clearly showed Clark his well-timed 35-word billboard. The red light on the camera which served to alert Clark that he was on the air short-circuited out. So a million viewers across the Metropolis Area of Dominant Influence—a television euphemism referring to the communities a station's signal reaches—were treated to ten seconds of valuable television time during which the inoffensively handsome face of Clark Kent stared blankly out of their picture tubes.

It was not Clark's day.

Somewhere out in space, Clark often thought, there was someone who would receive these television broadcasts that flew off the Earth at the speed of light. Somewhere somebody would figure out that Clark and Superman were the same person. Somebody whose mind was not clouded by human perceptions and prejudices would notice without a touch of effort that two men were one. If that someone was also capable of grasping the idea that no one on Earth knew it, that this was a disguise and a very effective one, that someone would probably catch the irony in Clark's first words today.

"Good evening, this is Clark Kent of WGBS-TV News in Metropolis, on a day when Lex Luthor, the escaped criminal scientist, made a fool out of Superman."

It was times like this when Clark wished he were genuinely schizoid, not just a consummate actor. He had to sit here and challenge his own pride, his masculinity, by all that's holy, in front of over a million people. Could Olivier, Gielgud, Brando, Nicholson pull off this act as effectively? Probably not, Clark thought.

"Luthor turned up today, one week after his disappearance from the maximum security cell block at the Pocantico Correctional Facility, to steal secret documents belonging to the late Dr. Albert Einstein. Jimmy Olsen reports from Princeton, New Jersey."

There was the scene in all its diabolical brilliance. Luthor stepped out the door and through the solid wall as if he'd had super powers all his life. There was the pompous crud flipping back and forth in the sky waving the leather folder and thumbing his nose at the bullets. There he was fading out. And there was Jimmy's verbose, overwritten narration. Jimmy tried hard.

For a long time it was very difficult for Clark to notice when someone was trying hard. Most of what was important to American men in the twentieth century—surviving, prevailing, creating—came easily to Clark. All he ever needed was a good start. He had picked up the English language in a matter of weeks. He seemed to skip right over the single word stage and whole sentences poured from his infant lips. Grammatical rules did not much interest him at first, although his mind was frighteningly sharp. He often came out with statements like, "Me want finish reading
Tale of Two Cities
," and then he did precisely that.
 

The Kents decided early that at least for awhile they were going to screen his
influences very carefully. Martha Kent held, for example, that stories of cutthroats and street urchins of the type Dickens wrote were not the sort of things Clark should be exposed to. She put the Bible and lots of Horatio Alger on his reading list. If he were going to insist on reading, she thought, it might as well be decent material. Land sakes, he can wait for
Tom Sawyer
until he's assigned it in school.
 

By the time Clark Kent was old enough to start the first grade he had been exposed to the wisdom amassed over ten thousand years of human history on Earth. He was even able to extrapolate a bit on that wisdom. He could have discoursed with Descartes and Locke. In an apparent contradiction of his own condition, he held Hobbes and Nietzsche and their ideas of the natural superiority of certain members of society, in contempt. Martha Kent appreciated the influence of her reading list, but she suggested that he substitute simple rejection for the contempt.

The boy was quite aware of the world around him, but he did not yet know who he was. The Kents were careful to ease the knowledge into his mind that he was somehow different. He also knew that this difference was not something to be ashamed of, but it was to be kept secret.

When the time came, his hyperactive mind pondered all the questions his condition posed. There were certain fundamentals, however, that he did not question—axioms at the bottom of his thoughts on any subject that approached his mind: that there was a right and a wrong in the Universe, and that value judgment was not very difficult to make. They were the fundamentals that made Jonathan and Martha Kent who they were and they never seemed inconsistent with anything in Clark's experience.

By the time Clark started school he learned how to wear normal clothes without flexing his muscles through them every time he waved his arm inside a sleeve or took a step in a pair of pants. Jonathan Kent retired as a farmer and started a small business—Kent's General Store on Main Street in Smallville, next door to Sam Cutler's hardware store.

There had been rumors floating around the region about a super-powered tot almost since the day of young Clark's arrival on Earth. At parties, on hayrides, in local newspaper offices and the like, people would swear that they had seen a three-year-old boy punch a timber wolf and fly away. Or people would tell about others they knew who told some such story.

With each rash of new super-baby sightings there invariably seemed to follow an outbreak of tales of a werewolf in some cavern, or a 100-year-old Indian medicine man who hid out in the woods, or the old reliable flying saucers.

The child was the source of a number of unsolved mysteries until the day he revealed himself to the world. There was one point when he flew to London and helped Scotland Yard foil a plot to steal the Crown Jewels. He was the "messiah" once as far as a tribe of Bantu were concerned. He was probably among the most widely traveled children on Earth, even discounting his interstellar journey from a dying world.

When Clark was about ten years old he started wearing glasses and purposely acting timid in front of people other than his parents. That was the Kents' idea; it would allay suspicions that Clark was anything but ordinary.

There was even a girl-next-door romance of sorts in the boy's life. Lana Lang was Clark's age, and she was a sunshiny little red-headed girl. She tended to consider herself a notch or so above the rest of the people in Smallville. Her mother was editor of the local weekly newspaper and her father was a nationally recognized archaeologist who once made the mistake of telling his daughter that the family chose to live in Smallville so that Lana would grow up in a wholesome small town environment. Professor Lang often traveled to New York, London, Metropolis, Rome, as well as the sites of early American Indian excavations. Lana sometimes went with him, and no one in Smallville forgot it when she did.

When he was in his early teens Clark asked his foster mother to design a costume for him—an unforgettable one. He wanted to be recognizable instantly, even to people who had never seen him. The costume would have to be made of the material from the blankets in which baby Kal-EI was wrapped when he came from Krypton, as was the indestructible baby jumper he had to wear for most of his first five years. She unraveled the jumper and blankets, Clark cut the material with his heat vision and fused the hems when it was done. He would wear the cape, the skin-tight blue suit and red boots, along with the "S" insignia that would become his symbol.

His foster parents gave him permission to bore a pair of tunnels into the woods outside Smallville. One was connected to the basement of the Kents' home and one underneath the general store. He was going out alone a lot now, stopping fires, scooping people out from under falling trees, tripping up criminals, all from cover or at a speed so fast that the eye could not register his presence. Jonathan Kent told him that he was as ready as he would ever be.

A pair of bored, broke adventurers in diving suits tried to rob a bank in Smallville. The event came over a police band radio in the store. Lana was in the store at the time, and Jonathan Kent covered for Clark by asking him to go to the basement and bring up a package from storage. Clark brought back no package. He stripped to the costume he wore under his street clothes, dove through his hidden tunnel and found the robbers jumping into a lake from a pier outside of town. A police car was unable to follow them into the water.