Last Son of Krypton (19 page)

"I'll take care of you in a moment," Superman heard the attendant say. The little six-armed, four-legged creature faced the wall pressing buttons and turning dials and scratching notations and punching holes at certain places in a plasticine tape running by his waist to his heart's content. Superman checked and found that the creature did indeed have a heart.

The attendant was a native of Rigel-9, as were about a third of the hotel's employees. The Rigellian had almost no reasoning capacity beyond that which was necessary to repeat something he had heard or copy down something he had seen. The size of the Rigellian's brain, however, was comparable with that of a human and until he approached senility, which was usually around 120 or so, he could remember the events immediately following his birth with the clarity of the present. Even the Guardians did not bother to keep an updated record of the race's history. The Rigellians used the surface area of the thirty-six largely worthless planets and satellites other than Rigel-9, which circled their star, for the purpose of storing the records of everything that happened to every Rigellian for the past seven million years. They were born to be clerical workers.

Superman did not particularly impress the Rigellian clerk, although it would probably be important for the Rigellian to record the celebrity's actions in his personal record. "I am ready now, Superman. What is it you want to know?"

"I am looking for a human who may have registered here recently. Would you remember if you saw him?"

"Of course I would remember. During what period of time do you estimate that this being appeared here?"

Superman indicated the Orician equivalent of twenty-four hours and gave the creature
a physical description of Luthor. Nothing of that nature, according to the clerk, had been to the hotel recently. But Earthmen, with their filtrums, were fairly conspicuous here. Was it possible he was disguised? Perhaps, the Kryptonian asked, he could see the record of who had been in and out in the past day?
 

"Of course," the Rigellian obliged. "Name: Cephula-332. Point of origin: Sirius-4. Name: Zoorpng. Point of origin: Delphinius-1. Name—"

"Excuse me. Hold on. Wait a minute."

"Did you get the information you wanted?"

"No, not actually. Maybe if I looked over your records myself."

"We are quite efficient. We do what we do better than anyone else in the Galaxy," the Rigellian insisted. "Perhaps you want only the names. Cephula-332; Zoorpng; The Draxyl Mount; Malthusan—"

"I'm sure you are very good at what you do." Superman smiled instinctively, although its meaning probably did not come across. "But what you do is not what I'm after right now."

"Do you want information?"

"Yes, I do."

"We are the most efficient repositories of information in the known Galaxy, I assure you." Superman did not care to devise a trick of logic to get at what passed in the Rigellian for a mind. "I am sure you will find what you want here. Cephula-332; Zoorpng; The Draxyl Mount; Malthusan; Seventh Horg..."

The wall console that the clerk manipulated was a little like a computer terminal, a little like a golf course. As Superman scanned its memory nodes with x-ray vision he was thankful that be did not have the opportunity to tamper with it physically. It had all sorts of sand traps into which an unwary alien might fall. For example, if he had been given access to the records, he now found as he scanned it and ignored the Rigellian's discourse, the first thing he would have done was apply body heat to certain sensors on the console and speak a command into a speaker of some sort behind the Rigellian. If he had done that—a perfectly logical action from the point of view of an Earthman after a cursory examination of the mechanism—the machine would have sent an impulse to the other consoles in the room and they would all have immediately begun spewing ammonia bubbles from their feed-out orifices. The mechanisms were simple recording devices and were not dangerous per se. They were dangerous only the way a telephone might be dangerous if there were an alien around whose natural response to the ringing of such a device might be to throw it into a filled bathtub and unwittingly electrocute the tub's occupant.

"Olin-Sang 2." The idiot savant clerk droned the colorfully bizarre names of the heterogeneous group of beings who had availed themselves of the hotel's services that day. "Gerstenzang Gryzmish; Squire Onorato Sgan; Cholmondeley..."

But now the Kryptonian had it licked. There was what appeared to be a chronological list of the hotel's recent patrons, scattered across the machine's memory in a pattern that at first looked random, then made sense only if one started to understand it by dismissing all Earth-born concepts of sequences and if-then relationships and the things that are taught in logic courses.

"Full Hand Band," the Rigellian continued. "Scorpio Bearing 32 Degrees Sirius (That was somebody's name, based on the position in space of the cargo ship where he was
born); Ptang-Ptang Click..."
 

There it was. Superman didn't stop to figure out the odds for some extraterrestrial creature's being named Abraham Lincoln. Luthor was a clever fellow; Superman was glad to have him on his side this time around. The scientist was playing on his own well-established weaknesses. He was playing the role of a person on the run who needed to assume an alias and who could not resist the joke on a world where no one could possibly recognize the name, of taking a very famous name from Earth. But in doing that, Luthor gave his new-found ally a signal of his whereabouts that did not have to be prearranged.

Superman would go to this suite at the southern end of Cyber Island where this Abraham Lincoln was registered and he would find Luthor there. Luthor would make a convincing show of hostility, Superman would pretend to be caught short by whatever gadget Luthor used on him, and together the hero and the scientist would be taken into the Master's complex as captive and captor. Superman stopped the Rigellian clerk's catechism and thanked him with the gift of a lump of coal the Kryptonian pulled from the pouch in his cape where he kept his Clark Kent clothes compressed into little wafers. He squeezed the coal in his hand and put it under enough pressure to turn it into carbon's purest state, that of a raw diamond.

The costumed humanoid strode smiling back to the entrance of the big referral office. At the entrance he leaped up at the sky, through a ring of red light that surrounded the doorway like a globe. The light caught him like a bug in a spiderweb.

He should have noticed it. He would have seen it on Earth, but his perceptions were off. Colors and shapes under the blue star Vega were not quite what they were on Earth, and Superman's visual perceptions were weakened, anyway. Somehow, from somewhere, a mesh of filtered light was beamed across his path and he was caught in light of the frequency generated by a red star—the kind Krypton orbited—the kind that left him without super powers. They were slipping away.

The last thing Superman saw was the ground, where Luthor stood surrounded by a group of four creatures of different races. Each raised a gun-like device of Luthor's design and squeezed back on the trigger.

And the last thing Superman heard himself saying was, "Stupid!
Stupid! STUPID!
"
 

MORTALITY

Superman had witnessed the deaths of living creatures in conditions beyond imagination, of natural balances beyond counting, of several stars, of two pairs of parents, of his childhood and of the world of his birth.

He was terrified into heroism by the possibility of his own death.

T
he Tripedal at the entrance to the decontamination chamber was a pushover. All Luthor needed to cajole him into giving passage was a good word and one of the diamonds Luthor found in Superman's cape pouch when they brought the Kryptonian down outside the hotel. Substances of dense matter were, as a rule, considered valuable on Oric. In the pouch Luthor also found some colorful trinkets in the shape of wafers. They were apparently some compressed material placed there for safekeeping, some sort of woven plastic, maybe. Luthor had no time to analyze the wafers chemically, and he did not even stop to wonder what Superman would want with the pair of eyeglasses he found there also.
 

Luthor had no time to worry about that sort of trivia now; he was too busy being horrified. There was an urgent matter to take care of, and Superman, unconscious in the interrogation room beyond the decontamination chamber, was the only hope for a solution.

The past three days for Luthor were among the finest he could remember, and he had no scruples about letting his old enemy spend some time getting his mind homogenized by the Master and his merry men. Luthor was doing what he did best: science with undercurrents of intrigue. At this point the Master claimed to trust Luthor, but still had not shown the Earthman his face. It was probably grotesque. The Master was reputedly a hybrid of more races than anyone had ever accurately determined. It was the boss's slaves who stashed Luthor in a room outfitted to his specifications with a blackboard, a desk, a drawing board, a robot calculator that followed him through the halls as he paced and was activated by voice commands, a big garbage can, and reams of paper for filling it up. Also, Luthor now wore a copy of his purple-and-green flying suit, complete with all sorts of neat gadgets for blasting through walls, delivering electric shocks, injecting deadly serums, and that sort of thing. Luthor never ever, not even once, told anyone the fact that he took secret delight in the fact that he was born under the sign of Scorpio.

A written memorandum from the Master himself gave Luthor the problem he was to solve. He had to calculate from gravitational data the number of black holes along the inner border of the Galactic Arm, as well as each hole's size and mass. It was a delicious game of mathematical cat-and-mouse. And so as not to get bored with momentarily insoluble questions, Luthor spent spare moments collecting data from his robot computer about the Master's base of operations here with an eye to getting clues as to the whereabouts of the Einstein document.

Here was how the Galaxy was held together:

All matter was effectively the same. Matter's basic elements were protons, electrons, neutrons, and such smaller particles as helped certain atoms and molecules to specialize. Even among the specialized atoms and molecules, the major function of any matter was to expend energy. Most of the energy expended by matter was a cohesive force called gravitation. It was gravitation that not only held the molecules of planet-bound objects together and attracted objects to planets and stars in a very orderly fashion, but gravitational energy also held planets and other bodies in orbit around stars and held stars fairly close to each other so that there was a well-defined Galaxy. Stars attracted
each other with gravitation and stuck together in their various orbits. But with simple computation it became clear that there was not enough matter in all the stars and planets to attract bodies across expanses of light-years and hold something as big as the Galaxy together. The visible heavenly bodies, in fact, provided only about half the cohesive force necessary to hold the Galaxy together. The rest was provided by black holes.
 

Black holes were bodies of very heavy matter that once were stars. Young stars, like Earth's yellow sun, burned themselves up with reckless enthusiasm for tens of millions of years. Old stars, like Krypton's giant red sun Antares, were no more than amorphous masses of gas and vapor without anything that could be called a solid surface, but which were so large that once they burned themselves down and the stuff that made them up fell cold toward the core of the dying star, the particles of mass exerted so much gravitational force on one another that their very molecules intersected. The resulting object, the dead husk of a once flaming star, was a black hole, an object ranging in size from several cubic centimeters to a few thousand miles in diameter, and so dense that even pure energy could not escape its gravitational force. What little starlight they still generated never got off the surface. The black holes were the glue of the Galaxy.

As Luthor played hide-and-seek with the black holes over the expanse of space that separated the Arm in which Vega and Sol burned from the rest of the Guardians' sphere of influence, that silly little doggerel of the space minstrel played handball off the back wall of his mind:

When the minions of immortals spread Galactic,
When a thousand cultures dwell in Vega's glow,
When a sailing ship for starflight is a tactic,
When these things all come to pass then we will know
That a hybrid born to Vega has been spreading
Massive strength through an empire built on trade,
And a path to an Arm's rule he is treading;
'Gainst his rule need for freedom sure will fade.

Luthor asked his computer friend—he had named the machine MacDuff—how many distinct races, at the last count, frequented the markets of Oric. The answer was 997. From what he could decipher from data he coaxed out of the computer he could see that the Master's biggest concern was real estate. He apparently specialized in subdividing the surfaces of totally dead planets and setting up communities dependent on his shipping and teleportation operations for their life-support. Luthor could actually coax a lot of information out of MacDuff using various computer codes he figured out. Most of what he got, though, seemed to be gibberish. Somebody would understand it. Superman probably would, he grudgingly admitted, but not because he was any great intellect. His intelligence was above average, and that along with total recall would make it possible for Superman to explain the meanings of all these alien symbols which certainly held the answer to the location of the Einstein document. But locating either the document or Superman seemed a problem of great difficulty.

The scientist wondered, not a lot, because he was enjoying the other complex matters on his mind, exactly why this character with designs on the rule of an entire sector of the Galaxy was interested in the location of black holes. Industrialists, politicians, bureaucrats, Luthor knew a lot of them and this faceless Master was all those things. People like that were so concerned with the trappings and textures of the empires they sought to build that they wasted valuable commodities like Luthor's intellect on self-indulgent matters like mapmaking. That was certainly the only reason the Master was so inordinately concerned with the uncharted black holes that were sprinkled over his prospective kingdom.