Last Son of Krypton (20 page)

Luthor dismissed the Master as the latest in a long line of false Messiahs who ached to make an ancient prophesy come true about himself.

Here was something interesting, Luthor thought, as he pulled a plasticine tape from a feed slot on MacDuff. If his previous assumptions about the mathematical codes used in the Master's computer indexes were correct, then this piece of read-out had something to do with time travel. No, not time travel. Actual mass shipments of materials through time. What was this character planning? An import and export business with the Stone Age?

Luthor put the read-out on a growing pile of alien computer gibberish he was collecting in a corner of the room and sat down at his drawing board.

"MacDuff," Luthor addressed the machine, which responded by lighting a red signal on its front plate, "get me a three-dimensional projection of the planetary system of the star Delphinus immediately preceding the time it became a nova."

The robot wheeled out of the room. Luthor fiddled with his adjustable protractor trying to triangulate the location of a massive invisible body somewhere between Delphinus and a star yet undiscovered by Earth astronomers which Luthor named after himself. He looked up in the middle of ruling a straight line and his mouth fell open.

Nine hundred ninety-seven races, he thought. Sailing ship, he thought. Time shipments? Real estate? Black holes?

Somewhere Luthor had heard, or he had read, or he had reasoned, that the Guardians didn't consider wandering stars within their jurisdiction. They considered them outside the Galaxy because they did not orbit the Central Cluster as did the other stars. Wandering stars were just passing through, not held to the main body of the Galaxy by attraction to black holes or other stars' gravitation. The immortals apparently felt that anything not part of the actual Milky Way unit by permanent attraction was outside their concern.

Could it be that the Master had a practical concern with the location of the black holes Luthor was charting? He ran down the hall after the robot MacDuff, knocking down or pushing out of the way six or eight creatures from as many worlds who were the Master's slaves, or employees, or elves, or whatever they called them here.

"MacDuff!"

The robot stopped and spun around, flashing its red signal.

"Get back to my office. The request for the data on Delphinus is countermanded."

Luthor spent the night with no more thoughts of locating black holes. He had to decode as much information as MacDuff could intercept from other computer units with regard to Superman. Where was he? In what kind of condition? Has he ever been conscious at all since his capture? Maybe if Luthor could find the document, he could find Superman.

Luthor had dealt with the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Soviet KGB, and a score of other monomaniacal institutions across the Earth that had made a religion out of secrecy. The Master was a little-leaguer by comparison.

After several hours of feverish button-pushing, nonsense code-word repetition, and mathematical calculation Luthor learned that the Einstein document was in the interrogation chamber one level below the base of the pyramid. After a few minutes he was able to ask the robot what was in that decontamination chamber. As Luthor expected, the answer to that query decoded into the word "Superman."

Luthor established that the entrance to the room was guarded by a single Tripedal, so as to allay any suspicions by those who should not have any suspicions. Luthor obtained a psychological profile, such as it was, of the dull-witted guard. He also requested an account of Superman's physical condition. A combination of drugs and a bombardment of external sensory stimuli put the hero into a suggestible state. For about an hour each day he was left alone and dazed so that he didn't regress into permanent catatonia and become useless to the Master.

Luthor requested a series of chemicals from MacDuff. For safety's sake, he told the robot that he wanted them to mix a superior type of ink. It was true that the blue soup with which the Master provided him ran all over the paper and Luthor could not abide sloppy calculations.

A few minutes into the hour that was to precede Superman's fifth day of interrogation Luthor entered the interrogation room. He found his old enemy lying across a slab of what, on Oric, had to be a terribly expensive chunk of hard rock, his head propped up on a silvery pillow you could get lost in. If Michelangelo were here to see the massive alien lying helpless and motionless as a statue, he would drool with envy at the work of a superior hand.

Luthor tried to pick Superman's head up but a touch of the pillow gave him an unexpected electrical shock. He couldn't hold the Kryptonian's head up by the wiry hair, for he would end up with slashes all over his hand. He ended by clutching the terribly potent chemical mixture gingerly between two fingers as he pried the hero's jaws open with both hands. For the first time Luthor was glad that hard labor in prison had kept his arms in shape.

Luthor dumped most of the liquid between the deadly rows of bleach-white teeth before they snapped shut. He pounded and pressed on the man's throat until he could feel the mixture of antitoxins and amino acids passing by. This might bring him around; it would probably kill him.

T
his was the day Superman was introduced to God.
 

He was asleep. Dreaming. Dreaming dreams somebody else wanted him to dream. Dreams about a language he was practically born speaking and whose written form was poured into his mind one day in his infancy and which his young mind gulped down like mother's milk. Dreams about his mother Lara and his father Jor-El. He rarely dreamed about them anymore. And a dream about a pair of quatrains that sang themselves repeatedly at him, quatrains, he somehow knew, that were first written by Sonnabend the lawgiver:

Star Child will leave a deathworld
For the System of the Rings,
Where the child will grow to legend
As his life the singer sings.
When the conqueror wants his secret
With the Star Child he'll contend;
And when the day of battle's over
Then the legend's life will end.

Star Child. In Kryptonese that was Kal-El. He was Kal-El. He'd told somebody that. In his dream. Or did he say it out loud while he was dreaming? In any case, it made somebody happy. Superman liked to make people happy.

Usually.

Was it for days he dreamed? Minutes? Centuries? Who knew? There was something unusual about these dreams. There were more words in them than pictures. Kryptonese words.

He dreamed until a lump of liquid appeared in his mouth, and he felt, in his sleep, half the lump dribble down his chin and the rest pour into his body.

He knew every cubic centimeter of his body, inside and out. He could check out his pancreas by simply looking at it. But he couldn't do that in his dream. The liquid compound slid down his esophagus, through his intestines, decomposed into single huge molecules and a single molecule grabbed at each cell in his body; they fanned in all directions to his toes, to the follicles of his steel-hard hair. It made them high. Higher than flying. Higher than the time barrier.

This compound, or mixture, or nightmare, was doing something to him he couldn't control. Something nothing had ever done before. The dreams were gone, the feelings were gone, the powers were gone.

He was dying.

When the dreams about the words were gone he was somewhere new, and maybe someone new, and he was being propelled through time and space and something besides time and space by a power that was certainly not his own, into a tiny white light at infinity. The light grew and became something more than white, more than colors. There were colors that even Superman, with his heightened perceptions, had never
before been capable of seeing. But he could see now that this thing he was approaching was a kind of grid with crosspieces of all colors against which there tumbled thousands, millions, trillions of beings of nearly as many races and conditions. Each one—each creature, flared into a rainbow explosion as it hit the grid and vanished. And that was where Superman was going.
 

He recognized some of the races of these beings. A humanoid here and there. Some Rannians, Arachnoids, Chloroplads. He could not watch them quickly enough. He felt he had to stop moving, to stand still, to go the other way. When the grid tumbled up into his face...

...and the Universe turned white.

"Kal-El."

The voice was very close.

"Kal-El, you are all right."

There seemed to be a face and a form that went with this voice. A friendly feeling as well.

"Kal-El, please. We have a great deal to do, and I believe you have a decision to make."

"Who?" Superman asked approximately.

"I am an old friend." It was a man, an Earthman, also approximately. "We have very little time for the protocol to which everyone else coming here is entitled. I hope you will not require that sort of nonsense; you have always seemed most capable of acclimating to new conditions fairly quickly."

It was an old man. A man who seemed always to have been old. With a furry white head of hair and a mustache. His face was an infinity of wrinkles holding a corncob pipe.

"Pardon my simplicity," Superman said, "but have I by any chance died?"

"Possibly," the old man said. "That is not for me to explain. I am an intermediary. My job is to see that the transition from your previous place of existence to this one is smooth, although in your case there are extenuating circumstances."

"Please," Superman said, "I'm very confused. Tell me what's happened to me and what happens next."

"You have already deduced what has happened to you. Next you are to meet your Creator."

"My—"

"It is not common procedure, of course."

"God?"

"You are better at words than I am, Kal-El. It is I who am supposed to come to the point, and you seem to beat me there. Yes, God."

"There is a tradition, sir, in every religious culture I have ever encountered, which holds that anyone who looks upon the face of God will certainly die."

"We have all seen the face of God, as well as that of His Adversary whom He created. We are born with both in our hearts because they live in our souls forever."

"Thank you," Superman believed he was smiling.

"For what, Kal-El?"

"Your last couple of sentences very simply answered a handful of basic questions that tend to perplex us mortals through our whole lives."

"Do not make the assumption that you can group yourself among mortals, Kal-El. Not yet."

Superman could have no idea what the old man meant by that, but he was getting used to the idea of meeting God. He didn't want to spend much more time thinking about that before it happened. It would likely drive him mad.

It seemed probable to Superman that this particular event was at least as significant as stories of visions and prophesies and such as they were recorded in sacred writings of the various religions. He often wondered if the people in those stories were as forthright and no-nonsense in their dealings with one another as the writings made them out to be.

In the Bible, for example, nobody messed around. If somebody wanted to say something to someone, he said it. There were no arguments. If somebody disagreed, there was a big fight, no preliminaries to waste time. No wonder those people lived so long. But here Superman was, on the threshold of Eternity, with enough questions to fill up most of that time in the asking.

"Why are you here to meet me? Have I met you?"

"We have several friends in common."

"Luthor?"

"In a way. I was thinking, actually, of Police Chief Parker, your foster parents the Kents, and your natural father Jor-El."

There was another thing that never seemed to happen in Bible stories: somebody was confused by something someone else said. "Huh?" Superman asked.

"Kal-El, it is time," the old man said. "Prepare to meet your Creator."

Superman felt weak as the white turned whiter. He felt his mind blending with his body and his soul growing to the size of the Universe and his consciousness becoming aware of everything that he ever was and a head glowing with something more than light filled his sight and spoke:

—I am the Lord—

It was the face of Jor-El he saw.

—More than any other of My creations in your Galaxy you, the man called Star Child, are able to determine your own destiny—

"My destiny? What is my destiny?"

—If you had only one destiny I would not have given you powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men... your destiny and that of the Galaxy, indeed, the destiny of all you touch, are one—

"Doesn't everyone determine his own destiny?"

—An electron that is part of an atom in an ocean may determine on which energy level it orbits, but it does not affect the coming and going of the tides... a man may decide when to sleep and eat, but not when to be born or die, or when his star sun goes nova... only you have such a choice—

"The choice of when to die?"

—The choice of whether to die—

Superman stared into the face of his father.

—If you choose to die, the Galaxy will certainly follow its appointed course which I illuminated to the one called Sonnabend these ages past... if you choose to continue, your future is your own... you may defeat the plans of him who plots to divide your Galaxy, or you may fall at his hands... whatever you choose, your reward will be the same... you have nothing to gain, in Earth or Heaven or Eternity, by opposing the inexorable flow of history, save the peace and freedom of your fellow beings... you are as a wild card in the scheme of Creation... there have been few I have sent to your Galaxy whose power of destiny was as great as your own—

Superman did not notice the apparent unseemliness of the wild card analogy coming from that Source until later. Now the only thing he was capable of noticing was the intent and significance of it all. "Tell me, please," he asked, "who was the last one like me?"