Last Son of Krypton (16 page)

Superman landed noiselessly on the Truman Balcony of the White House. There, unnoticed, he slept for nearly an hour, until he was awakened before dawn by the sound of the President of the United States brushing his remarkable collection of teeth.

L
ex Luthor did not sleep the way most people slept. Experience had taught prison officials how unwise it was to allow their star inmate unsupervised access to tools or chemical materials of any kind. The only objects in Luthor's cell after ten o'clock lights out were a legal pad and a ball-point pen. This was a foolish precaution, of course. The prison would hold Luthor for as long as Luthor chose to be held, and not a moment longer. Meanwhile, B.J. was perfectly capable of seeing that the boss's diverse enterprises did not crumble in his absence.
 

One night, in a loose moment, Luthor figured out how to melt the plastic cap of the pen, let a certain amount drip into the ink refill, extract a substance from the glue that bound the legal pad, wrap it all in half a sheet of yellow paper and make an explosive powerful enough to blast out a wall of his cell. Luthor would never do that, of course. If he did, the next time he was in jail the warden wouldn't give him his pen and pad.

Luthor was adept at writing in the dark. He would sleep for a minute, or an hour or two, or not at all, and as an idea struck him he would scrawl it on a clean sheet of yellow paper. He replaced his pad about twice a week. This was a particularly productive night, for his cold kept him from sleeping. From the position of the full moon that shone through the window opposite his cell it looked to be about 6:10 in the morning. On the eighth page of a pad that was new when night fell Luthor drew by moonlight a sketch for a new kind of barometer whose design was based on the shell configuration of a certain extinct mollusk. Then a shadow fell over the moon.

"I need your help, Lex," said the startling, reverberant voice of the shadow.

"You." The reaction wasn't clever, but its tone was eloquent enough.

"I've cleared it with the warden and the Justice Department," Superman explained. "We can leave immediately and the next time the Parole Board meets, your release will be granted retroactively."

"What do you want me to do, microbe-head? Teach you how to tie a shoe without missing and putting your hand through the floor?"

"This is important."

"I know. If your shoe falls off while you're flying faster than sound it could go into orbit and somebody at the Federal Aviation Administration would have to fill out a form in triplicate."

"Will you calm down? There are people sleeping."

"What's the matter? They're all heinous criminals. Bank robbers. Jaywalkers. Potential Nobel Prize winners. Hey, do you want to see how a Kryptonian ties his shoe?"

"Lex."

"He does it like this." Luthor put his right foot up on his metal cot and bent over to fiddle with his left shoe on the floor. "And what's with the first names, Supe? Soup? May I call you Turkey Noodle?"

"I want to know if you'll accept my terms."

"I've accepted lots of your terms. A term for kidnapping. Six or eight for grand
larceny. A couple for sabotage of government property."
 

"Don't give me a hard time, Luthor. I want you to help me get the Einstein papers back."

"Einstein? Didn't he play Clark Gable's best friend in
Boy Next Door Saves the World
? Big picture about a guy that works in a sporting goods store who finds a secret Nazi code camouflaged on sleeping bag warranty labels. You remember it." Luthor sneezed and gave Superman an opening.
 

"All right, I've had it. This is what I want. You go with me to a planet circling Vega where the document is now, and you help me get it back. For that you get either a parole or transportation anywhere in the Galaxy you feel like settling down. Take it or leave it."

"Make it a full Presidential pardon and you've got a deal."

"That's a pretty stiff order."

"You can do it, you're Superman."

"That's true." The big man produced a document from the pouch in the lining of his cape. It was a pardon for all federal offenses—the only ones with which any prosecutor thought it necessary to charge Luthor—effective immediately. It was signed not half an hour earlier by the President and the Attorney General.

"This won't change anything, you know," Luthor said.

Superman said, "I know."

Superboy was impressed by the increasingly erratic nature of Lex's behavior even before the Jefferson-Baker Science Contest. The young hero was even more impressed, though, by the hologram project in progress and supposed that Lex's behavior was part of the pressure that comes from the process of creation. There is a high incidence of emotional instability, Superboy knew, among people in creative fields like the one Lex was clearly entering. This deviance generally comes to an end, however, when the creator is reinforced by recognition. When Lex won the Jefferson-Baker scholarship, as he inevitably would, he would once again become the old, moderately tolerable fellow that he was before he became obsessed.

Meanwhile, Lex's aberrations were jarring loose the collective emotional stability of the high school. During the time Lex was building his project he evidently had some trouble creating a holographic image flawless enough to fool people who were standing nearby. His early efforts seemed as though they were flapping in the wind or rippling as if underwater. He thought at first that people might overlook poor quality if what they saw did not appear to be a person standing on a stage, but in a tank of water. One day, when Coach Norm Levine led his first period Smallville High School swimming class into the indoor pool area he saw, lying at the bottom of the pool, the figure of a young brown-haired boy in a crew-neck sweater, smiling cherubically. Alarmed, Coach Levine dove to the bottom of the pool and spent fully a minute and a half grasping at the rippling figure, trying to figure out why he couldn't get hold of it, before he found himself on his back beside the pool with one of his students giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

A week or so later, in a history class, Miss Carol Roberts asked Lex Luthor what Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson's attitude was toward the Whiskey Rebellion. Lex said that Jefferson was quite adamant in the belief that the federal government should put down any local rebellions before they spread to other areas like a virus. This was, of course, precisely the opposite of Jefferson's feelings and Miss Roberts said so.

"You've obviously been too preoccupied with other things, Lex, since you did not read the assignment. Is there anyone who can tell—"

"Excuse me, Miss Roberts," Lex interrupted, "but I did read the book. I read the whole book the first week of school and I remember just about everything in it."

"I wish you would stay with the class, then, because you've got Jefferson mixed up with Hamilton. Is there someone who—"

"If you look in the book, Miss Roberts,"—Lex was sweet as frosted flakes—"I think you'll find that I'm right."

"Lex Luthor, that's twice in a row you've interrupted me. I think I'll do just that, since you seem so intent on embarrassing yourself. Let me see, that's—"

"Page 213, Miss Roberts."

She would have lost her temper at the third interruption if she weren't so sure of having the last word. "Yes, page 213." The book lay open on her desk and Lex's finger under his desk pressed a pair of wires together as she read:

When asked if he thought Hamilton's actions were wise, Thomas Jefferson said, "If I were Hamilton I would douse the leaders in their own whiskey and set fire to—

Miss Roberts squinted, looked closer at the page and mumbled, "Jefferson couldn't have said anything like—"

She looked up and saw Luthor lose the restraint with which he had held his mouth closed, fall out of his seat and roll on the floor laughing. She sent Lex to the principal's office, looked again at the page of the text which now said something quite different from what she had read aloud, and had trouble finishing sentences for the rest of the day.

Unknown to Lex, Superboy interceded on his behalf on both these occasions. Superboy even asked the principal to ignore it when, following the incident with Miss Roberts, Lex laughed uncontrollably through the first ten minutes of his half-hour detention period, stopped abruptly, mumbled something and, with a wild look in his eyes, ran home for the day. Even Superboy had trouble accepting his behavior the next day when Lex showed up for first-period algebra, red-eyed from lack of sleep. The teacher had asked Lana to do a fairly difficult problem at the board in front of the class, and when she made an error Lex jumped up and screamed something unintelligible. He pushed Lana out of his way, scribbled the solution to the problem and angrily banged a fist on the blackboard, cracking it down the middle of his equation. No one in the room knew quite what to do, so no one moved. Lex stared at all of them during a forbiddingly painful two-and-a-half seconds of utter silence and then howled, "Why do I have to put up with this crap?" He exploded into tears. Clark Kent hopped up to put a hand on Lex's shoulder. Lex hurled away Clark's hand and left the building. His parents didn't see him for two days.

The story goes that Archimedes, for lack of parchment, used to work on the beach, drawing polyhedrons and circles and writing formulas in the sand. During the two days Lex was missing Superboy saw him scrawling in the sand on the shore of Stafford Pond a few miles outside Smallville. One of the two nights Lex spent there he took three hours out to sleep under a clump of bushes, but other than that he did not sleep at all. Almost catatonic, he stared at the lake for hours at a time. He paced. He banged his fists on trees. He laughed. He hid from people who occasionally came by. He cried. He drew intricate diagrams in the sand. Secretly, Superboy uprooted clumps of poison ivy from where Lex might walk in the dark, and otherwise left him alone.

Superboy did not pretend to understand any of this, but he did believe that if the world was lucky, he was witnessing the blooming of a genius. Superboy did not know, Superman did not know, whether genius is a capacity with which some are born, or if it is a product of a peculiar juxtaposition of wonder and terror in a person's education and environment. Whichever was the case, it was happening here and the hero wanted to be sure the process was allowed to run its course. After the contest, Lex came back to the lake and for a week he did very little other than sleep.

Lex was falling asleep, as a matter of fact, when Superboy plucked him off the beach and presented him to his new laboratory. Lex's eyes welled up, he lavished Superboy with thanks and no one saw him for another three weeks.

Some of Lex's classmates and a few of the teachers he had not yet intimidated left food outside the laboratory door. Clark Kent, the only student that the Smallville High faculty trusted not to copy answers that were often more accurate than teachers' answer keys, got the job of leaving Lex's tests and homework in the laboratory mail slot. Some days the food was gone in the morning, but it generally remained. Twice during the two weeks the accumulated assignment pages were tugged in through the mail slot. The next morning, both times, they were in a neat pile, correct and completed, on the ground outside under a basket of rotted fruit. No one ever saw the door open, not ever. Even Superboy had no idea what was going on inside. He had lined the walls and venetian blinds with thin lead sheeting. For three weeks Lex was very like a mystical medieval hermit living in a cave.

Legends say that the First World War was caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, that an apple falling on the head of Sir Isaac Newton brought about the discovery of gravity, that his murder of an Egyptian slave-master in an instant of righteous madness sent Moses into exile to discover the wonders of God and the desert. The world might be much more orderly and interesting if these things were so, but it is likely that they are not. It is likely that the world would have gone to war had Ferdinand lived, that Newton would have noticed gravity if he had been sitting under a flagpole, that Moses would have recoiled from oppressive Egyptian society even had he witnessed one fewer act of wanton brutality.

When newspapers or magazines publish biographical profiles of Luthor the arch-criminal, when students in social studies classes discuss Superman's greatest enemy on Earth, when convicts who have served time at Pocantico talk about the singular, brooding man with the red-lit eyes, they invariably get around to telling the story of the day he decided to live outside the law, the day the laboratory burned down. Actually, it was coming for a long time.

It was about ten-thirty one night and Lex Luthor appeared outside his laboratory door and yelled, "I did it!"

No one was around to hear him. He had his favorite audience.

"I did it, didja hear? I did it! HOT
DAMN
!"
 

Smallville went to bed early. Sometimes only Superboy was awake, flying over the village, or over a nearby city, or to the moon if he felt like being even more bored. When Lex took off in a dead run across the field where his laboratory stood, tripped in a rut, rolled over and onto his feet without noticing he had fallen, screamed through the streets howling, "The gametes are coming! The gametes are coming!" Superboy was, in fact, on the moon, staring full-face into the vicious sun, wondering what it meant to be a Superboy, or some such matter teenage boys traditionally ponder. Superboy was going through the familiar identity crisis period of adolescence and was trying very hard not to bother anyone else with it. Today he would learn about guilt.

Lex saw a light in the basement of Kent's General Store and pounded on the door until it opened. Lex expected to see Jonathan Kent, or Clark, being diligent about the books or the inventory or something. Instead, old Whizzer Barnes pulled the door open.