The Death and Life of Superman (5 page)

Over the past quarter century, LexCorp had grown from a feisty young aerospace engineering firm into one of the world’s largest, most diversified multinational corporations. LexCorp was into everything from banking and brewing to robotics and sanitation. Nearly two-thirds of Metropolis’s citizens were employed by companies owned—either in whole or in part—by LexCorp.

LexCorp had been named for its vainglorious founder, Lex Luthor. Luthor had generally been considered the most powerful man in Metropolis.

Until Superman came along.

That was the big problem,
thought Superman,
wasn’t it?
Luthor couldn’t stand being second best at anything, and he hated anything he couldn’t own or control. Taken together, those two qualities had made Luthor Superman’s greatest enemy.

During his first year and a half as Superman, the Man of Steel had been fortunate to avoid contact with the billionaire industrialist. Luthor had left the country to inspect business holdings in South America shortly after Superman’s public debut.

At first Luthor had dismissed reports of a superstrong flying man as media hype and exploitation. But in the course of his travels abroad, Luthor had become at first bemused and then intrigued by satellite news stories of Superman’s exploits.

Upon his return to Metropolis, Luthor received information that a terrorist cell planned to hijack his yacht, the
Sea Queen,
the next time he took it out of port. Where other men might have felt threatened or outraged, Luthor saw only opportunity and connived to provide an irresistible target for the terrorists. Luthor organized a lavish party aboard the ship, inviting the elite of Metropolis society. He ordered his security team to hold back in case of trouble. His hope was that Superman would show up, and that he could see for himself if all the wild stories he’d heard were true.

The terrorists went for Luthor’s bait, just as he’d planned, and Superman indeed intervened. The billionaire was greatly impressed and attempted to hire Superman on the spot, handing him a check for twenty-five thousand dollars. “Consider that a retainer. Everyone who’s anyone in Metropolis works for me. And you’re far too valuable a resource to leave undirected.”

He thought he could buy me. Luthor always treated people as commodities.

But Luthor had gone too far this time. Among the partygoers was Frank Berkowitz, the mayor of Metropolis, and he was outraged that they’d all been placed in jeopardy just to satisfy Luthor’s curiosity. “Superman, as mayor I hereby appoint you a special deputy. I want you to arrest that man. The charge is reckless endangerment!”

“Don’t be absurd, Frank!” The big, balding man hadn’t even tried to hide his contempt. “You can’t arrest me. I’m Lex Luthor. I’m the most powerful man in Metropolis.”

“No you’re not, Lex.” Mayor Berkowitz looked at Superman. “Not anymore.”

Luthor was photographed and fingerprinted like any common criminal. Despite the fact that he was one of the world’s wealthiest men, he was then locked up behind bars. His attorneys immediately sprang into action and arranged his release. All charges were subsequently dropped, but the public humiliation gnawed at Luthor. He again sought out Superman, confronting him privately outside Metro General Hospital.

“You’ve made a mistake, Superman . . . a big mistake. Metropolis belongs to me. Its people are mine, to nurture or destroy as I see fit. They’ve just forgotten that. They’ve looked at you, with your costume and your flashy superhuman powers, and they’ve forgotten who their real master is. Well, I intend to remind them, Superman. I’m going to show them that you’re nothing. I’m going to destroy you, but no one will ever be able to prove me responsible. I’ll not be arrested again, Superman . . . not ever again!”

From that day on, Lex Luthor had devoted much of his time and energy, and a considerable amount of his fortune, toward fulfilling his threat. The industrialist even went so far as to outfit an elite LexCorp security team with jet-propelled body armor, forming his so-called Team Luthor in a vain try to overshadow the Man of Steel. Superman survived countless attempts to discredit and kill him, but was never able to prove that Luthor was behind the attacks.

Then Luthor had gotten his hands on a chunk of kryptonite.

Kryptonite was the common ore of kryptonium, an unusually stable transuranic element which had been created in the thermonuclear destruction of Superman’s ancestral world of Krypton. The two-pound chunk of glowing ore was the only such specimen on the planet. Ironically, it had come to Earth on the tail section of the same drive vehicle that had brought Krypton’s last son to our world. The rock had passed through several hands before it came into Luthor’s possession and he discovered that its radiations were deadly to Superman.

Ecstatic over his find, Luthor had a fragment of the kryptonite cut, polished, and set in a signet ring which he wore for many months. He taunted Superman with the ring and used it to keep the last son of Krypton at bay. But the kryptonite was not as harmless to terrestrial lifeforms as Luthor’s physicists had thought. The ring’s radiation slowly poisoned him. His doctor was forced to amputate Luthor’s right hand, although even that drastic measure proved in vain. He managed to avoid a slow, wasting death from kryptonite poisoning, however, when his plane crashed in the Andes. Superman himself recovered Luthor’s remains, but he could never determine whether the crash had been an accident or if his old enemy had planned it.

I never thought of Luthor as being the kind to take his own life, but you just never know. He was a complicated man,
thought Superman. He stared long and hard at the LexCorp Tower but was unable to discern much. The old man had retrofitted the building with a fine mesh of lead that frustrated Superman’s X-ray vision and installed elaborate sound baffles to keep him from hearing sounds spoken inside. Still, it was a different world without Lex Luthor around. Without the first Lex Luthor, anyway.

LexCorp had momentarily floundered in the wake of Luthor’s death, the value of its stock plummeting on the open market as members of its board of directors vied for power. The corporation was looking like a prime candidate for downsizing and restructuring when Luthor’s son arrived to take control.

Accompanied by Sydney Happersen, the elder Luthor’s chief aide, Lex Luthor II had taken the city by storm. As his father’s only heir, he had access to both a personal fortune and a controlling interest in LexCorp, and he used both to put the recession-strapped Metropolis back to work. Young Lex proved every bit as wily as his father in handling the board of directors, and within days he had himself approved as LexCorp’s chief executive officer. It was now generally acknowledged that he had turned the company around. Just twenty-one years old, Lex Luthor II was a genuine wunderkind. Until he had been recognized as both heir and son in Luthor’s will, it was claimed, his existence had been kept hidden for his own protection. The boy had apparently been fathered by Luthor with his personal physician, Dr. Gretchen Kelley, and brought up by LexCorp employees in Australia.

A son, raised in secret.
Superman shook his head at the thought.
Even now it sounds like something out of a soap opera. But, Lord knows, Luthor had plenty of enemies from whom he might need to protect a son. It was just the sort of Byzantine scheme he and Happersen would concoct.
Superman had personally flown overseas, using both his powers and the contacts he’d made over the years as Clark Kent, to investigate young Luthor’s background. All the stories checked out.

When young Lex became aware that there’d been bad blood between Superman and his father, he had gone out of his way to apologize to the Man of Steel.
He seemed utterly sincere, but . . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s still something about the man that bothers me. He’s almost
too
good.
Superman turned away from downtown, trying to put LexCorp Tower and its young owner out of his mind.

Straight ahead of Superman lay a ten-square-block area known officially as Hob’s Bay. Named for Elias Hob, an early Metropolis landowner, it had been a prosperous, middle-class neighborhood at the turn of the century. With the beginning of the Great Depression, it began a slide into poverty and decay from which it never recovered. Now only City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce referred to the neighborhood as Hob’s Bay. To the rest of Metropolis, it was Suicide Slum.

Suicide Slum was a hellhole. Its most famous sons and daughters were those who had escaped to a better life. Despite numerous attempts over the years at urban renewal and Superman’s best efforts, it remained a venue for X-rated theaters and adult bookstores, for run-down tenements, and for crime-infested streets. Life was cheap in Suicide Slum. On the other hand, so was the rent.

On the edge of Suicide Slum stood a blocky five-story brick building whose single distinguishing characteristic was an oversized satellite dish. The sole tenant of the building’s top floor was an eccentric former college professor by the name of Emil Hamilton.

Professor Hamilton was an inventive genius whose unorthodox work habits had resulted in his being fired from a score of commercial research laboratories. Like his boyhood idol Nikola Tesla, Hamilton was able to design circuitry in his head, visualizing it so vividly that he sometimes neglected to commit his preliminary notes to paper. While still a young man, Emil had conceptualized a magnetic field generator that he theorized could provide protection from nuclear attack. He spent much of the next twenty years laboring on his own to develop a working prototype. During that time, he repeatedly tried to interest the Defense Department in his proposed generator but was able to obtain only an occasional small federal grant to continue his work. For the most part, government bureaucrats considered Emil a crank and dismissed his work as impractical. The one man who had seen possibilities in his work was Lex Luthor.

Luthor began funding the professor’s work through a dummy corporation with an eye toward eventually discrediting him and claiming full ownership of his device. Under extreme stress from the pressure put on him by Luthor’s people, Emil had suffered a nervous breakdown. He became obsessed with proving the effectiveness of his invention, and irrationally set out to test its power against that of Superman. In doing so, Hamilton pushed his prototype device beyond its limits, requiring Superman to use his own invulnerable body to protect the professor from the explosion of the overloaded generator.

Hamilton was remanded to a mental health facility for treatment and counseling. He later served a few months of a sentence in a minimum security prison before being paroled on Superman’s recommendation. Upon his release, he managed to secure enough funding to set up a small, independent lab in the old building, where he began to eke out a modest living as a technical consultant. In that capacity, the professor had aided Superman on numerous occasions and had eventually come to serve as the Man of Steel’s unofficial science advisor.

The big double windows on the fifth floor swung open, apparently of their own volition, at Superman’s approach.
That’s new,
he thought, landing silently inside the lab. As the windows began to ratchet closed, he heard the whir of tiny servomotors mounted onto their hinges. Looking more carefully, Superman saw where the new wiring connections passed through the wall into a conduit leading to the roof, and from there to a new array of equipment mounted just under the eaves. A glance at the circuitry within confirmed what he already expected. “Ah-ha! Infrared motion detectors!”

“What about them?” The voice came from beneath a nearby computer console and was immediately followed by the squeaking of wheels. A gray-haired figure emerged from beneath the console astride an old mechanic’s dolly, soldering gun in hand. A quizzical look beneath the man’s safety glasses quickly brightened. “Superman! How good to see you!”

“And you, Professor!” Superman reached out a hand and pulled the lanky scientist to his feet. “Overhauling the mainframe?”

“Just making a few alterations.” Emil ran a hand through his beard, discovering a few flecks of solder.

“I was just admiring your new window opener.”

“Like it, do you?” Emil beamed. “I noticed that you usually fly in from that direction when you visit, so I decided to make things a bit easier. I’m glad to see that it worked so well.” He winced as a clump of hair came out with the solder from his beard. “I had the devil’s own time getting the proper setting for the motion detectors. When I first installed it, it admitted a flock of pigeons to the lab. What a mess!”

“I can imagine!” Superman tried mightily to stifle a laugh but was only marginally successful. If his host noticed, he did not mention it.

“So,” asked Emil, “what brings you here?”

“I was wondering if you’d finished analyzing the data we’d compiled on my powers.”

“Ah, yes! Your physical! Come right this way!” Emil led his visitor past several cluttered worktables.

“Professor? What the devil is this?” Superman paused before a lathe, upon which was centered a ruby-red translucent tube, six inches in diameter and nearly four feet long.

“Eh? Oh, that. Just a new synthetic I’m experimenting with, as a component for a laser cannon.”

“A laser cannon? Who are you working on that for?”

“Oh, nobody. The idea just intrigued me . . .” Emil let that thought trail off. “Watch your footing. I upset a box of ball bearings around here the other day, and I’m afraid I still haven’t recovered them all.”

Superman shook his head.
Same old Emil. He just can’t let an idea pass him by without exploring it.

The professor came to yet another console. Plopping down into an old swivel chair, he hit a series of switches and pushed his safety glasses up onto his forehead. Graphs began to appear on the monitor screen as Emil’s fingers danced across the keyboard.

Superman stared intently at the screen. His “physical,” as the professor called it, had been a series of tests they’d put the Man of Steel through over the past few months, in an attempt to determine just how his powers worked.