Last Son of Krypton (22 page)

Algren Eighteen was even more ambitious than all that. There was a windfall coming and Algren Eighteen knew that the Master was going to be sharp enough to be at the top of it. There were beings of great affairs flocking to Oric these days from the farthest reaches of the Galactic Arm, sometimes even beyond. What about that bareheaded humanoid with the filtrum, Algren Eighteen thought, he must be from clear out at the Central Cluster. He heard the chief speaker in the temple go on about the opening of a new age in our lifetimes. The educated beings those days spouted something about an eight-billion-year-old Prophesy made by Sonnabend himself. And bigwigs in the organization lurked in corridors muttering to each other about the Future, as if it were some corporeal presence to be awaited like a cosmic dust cloud or the guy who relieves you on the next shift. If they were all planning to be ready to move up, then so would Algren Eighteen. In his spare time he was teaching himself to pilot the Master's vehicles.

The problem was that when he finally figured out how to bank the surface cruiser into the magnetic lines of force somebody brought in the shuttle bus. Before he had the time to decipher the controls of the unwieldy machine that transported up to seventy five mediumsized beings from world to world there were the teleport casters. Teleportation itself was not hard to master, but there was the problem of making sure the object or creature that was teleported did not materialize in solid rock—or in the space of another creature. And then there was the fleet of interstellar jaunters, which were single passenger crafts piloted by remote control from Oric. Algren Eighteen finally caught up with his local technology and got a handle on all this machinery, and now he hoped to play with the new device, a black bulb surrounded by eight coiled arms, whose function he could only begin to guess. When night came he would have a chance to transport this vehicle up the undersea launch ramp and experiment. That was, if traffic down here let up by then.

The day's work was nonstop. Crafts were running in and out of the deck like communicable diseases. He was collecting written and oral coded authorization information and feeding it into his computer terminal for each entry and departure. He recorded the time, position of the planet with regard to Vega, course and purpose of each voyage. The data were an unholy mess, sitting inside that animate machine. When he was off duty, before he laid his three hands on that new vehicle, Algren Eighteen would organize it all into a coherent daily log.

"You there, you in charge here?" Algren Eighteen spun in the direction of the voice. It was the new humanoid. The bare-headed one with the filtrum.

"Yes sir. May I help you?" Algren Eighteen saw that the humanoid was accompanied by another larger one whom he should probably have recognized as one of the Master's attendants. He himself was in the uniform of a menial and of course had no filtrum. All these humanoids looked alike, it seemed.

"There isn't a moment to spare," the bald one rushed through his words. "We're taking the Black Widow."

"The what?"

"The Black Widow. This one. The vehicle with the bulb. We can both fit. Don't worry, my friend has top clearance." The two humanoids were upon the new vehicle.

"Halt. Hold it there. You need authorization. What is the purpose of your departure?"

"Listen to the pretzel brain, he wants authorization. Look, mucous-face, while you stand here playing petty bureaucrat Superman is zooming halfway to Oa to alert the Guardians and the Green Lantern Corps and the Galactic Tribunal and God for all I know to the fact that your boss, my boss, the boss of bosses who owns you and everything you see is up to something with a touch of unholiness. Get that weapon out of my face or you'll be scratching for worms with the rest of the turkeys before morning."

"Superman?"

"Right. Very good. Tomorrow we learn to spell cat. Superman's escaped. And don't tell me you didn't know the Master had him here. The news about how the boss and I captured him is probably halfway to the next Galaxy with that cockamamie clown poet by now."

"Yes, I knew that. But the alert systems—"

"—will very likely be in operation by the time the old flyboy's sprinting into the central Cluster. I'm the one who tracked him down before. It's only through the incompetence of some idiot like you that he's away now. And if you make me wait for your meshugenah coded authorization the best laid plans of prophets and kings are going the way of the tyrannosaurus and the Dodo, which seems to be making a dramatic comeback right here in this room."

"I do not understand the translation of what you just—"

"You do not understand a whole lot. It was all I could do to enlist this burly specimen in my aid." The outspoken one pointed to the dull-looking humanoid menial at his side. "How many vehicles left here in the past ten minutes?"

"Ten minutes? Computer," the red light went on, "How many vehicles left here in the past—"

"I don't want numbers, you loon. I want to know if you let anyone out of here in that time."

"They're coming and going all the time. At least six beings teleported somewhere, another three were authorized for the various—"

"That kills me. The creep got out right under your nose, or whatever it is you call that banana under your middle eye. Help us get this craft to the hydraulic launch ramp, and I'll think about going easy on you in my report. It's very lightweight. Bulky, but lightweight."

Algren Eighteen gulped, or did something like gulping, and chattered away at his computer terminal as he helped Luthor and the humanoid aide with the Black Widow. "Vehicle designated Black Widow departing coordinates 11:14:50 with reference Vega. Two occupants, both humanoid designated..." Algren Eighteen asked the two their names and fed them into the computer terminal... "Lex Luthor and Abraham Lincoln."

Bells sounded and lights flashed all over the room. It was the alert system.

"See?" Luthor said. "See? I told you he escaped. Quit feeding that gibberish into the dumbwaiter and set your dials to shoot this cruiser a thousand feet or so over the ocean surface."

Algren Eighteen did that, frantically, as the two humanoids climbed into the open bulb, ready for launch.

"Scramble pattern pipeline yellow," Luthor barked at the computer terminal which immediately began to flash lights and erase information from its banks as the launching ramp hatchway closed and the Black Widow lifted off in the direction of the star Vega.

"What?" Algren Eighteen asked.

"Not a bad escape plan for an amateur," Luthor told his companion as solar energy took over from inertia to fuel the Black Widow.

"Well, it was you who got all that computer information, like the pyramid's layout and the way to scramble the computer record of the escape," Superman complimented Luthor as he tore off the fake uniform and the wad of flattened building material he had scooped out of a wall and used to cover the cleft of his upper lip.

"And you're awfully cute when you smile. Now I suggest you get your bulk out of here so I have the elbow room to pilot this thing before those goons down there figure out where we went."

Superman opened the bulb hatch to do a swan dive upward, and raced the cruiser to the edge of space.

Luthor had an entire employee whose job it was to read huge quantities of published material and make daily lists of ideas that Luthor had not yet come up with. His name was Arthur Allen, and he was the most successful graduate of the Evelyn Wood School of Reading Dynamics in the year 1971, raising his reading speed from 630 to about 30 thousand words per minute. John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century philosopher, read about that fast and came close to going mad because he was incapable of turning pages quickly enough to keep up with himself. Allen read not only every science fiction story published—before publication, if possible—but every popular how-to publication, every professional journal, and every trade magazine he knew of. A magazine put out by the Sheet Metal Workers' Union had an idea for a kind of reflective sun deck, which Allen wrote down. It gave Luthor the principle for the camouflage device which caused his in-city headquarters to appear, from the air, to be the penthouse of a plant lover with bizarre tastes in art.

An idea in a fictional story by an astronomer named Arthur C. Clarke was not new. The concept of supplying oxygen to a spaceship with plants that breathed carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen was as old as the first fanciful plans for space stations and family-sized space arks. And when unimaginative little Arthur Allen wrote it down in one of his daily reports, Luthor winced at not having thought of it himself.

Here were some ideas Luthor did think of, but which did not work:

1—An elaborate chemical distillation system which would turn Luthor's exhaled carbon dioxide into oxygen and spray the carbon by-product over the black surface of the starcraft's sails. After two major flights, Luthor estimated, the carbon layer would be thick enough to make it quite impossible to roll in the Black Widow's arms.

2—An oxygen pill about the size of a thousand-milligram capsule of Vitamin C, which furnished Luthor's bloodstream with as much oxygen as he would need for an hour. It seemed to work on animals, but the first time Luthor tried it the pill made him higher than a weather balloon for hours.

3—An environmental recycling system which would start with the Black Widow's water supply being broken down into component parts of hydrogen and oxygen. Luthor would breathe the oxygen that he extracted from his excess and excreted water, while the carbon dioxide that was the result of his respiration had nothing to do except suffocate the pilot. In any natural ecosystem these substances would combine to form hydrocarbons in organic matter, the building blocks of new life. The only way there would be new life in this craft was if Luthor gave birth.

It all came down to Arthur Clarke's idea of lining all unused surface space inside the bulb of the craft with green vegetation. In jail, about a year ago, Luthor convinced prison officials that it would be a fine idea for him to teach other prisoners a course in horticulture. While preparing for his various lectures on rhododendrons and backyard tomatoes and wild berries, the scientist managed to clone a seed for a new species of moss which would have the heaviest respiration rate of any living thing known to man. When he became tired of teaching his course, Luthor sprayed the prison greenhouse with a fertilizer he developed once as a teenager. It caused the plants to sprout overnight like Jack's beanstalk and rupture several walls of the prison so that Luthor could escape quite sloppily. His moss now lined every square inch of the inner black surface of the bubble and spat out oxygen as fast as Luthor sucked it up. His entire water supply consisted of a three-quart canteen slung over the arm of his pilot's seat.

When Superman stopped moving and started downward from twelve hundred kilometers over Oric, Luthor had to continue upward for another 65 kilometers before he could slow down and circle back. The cushioning system that absorbed the inertia in sudden maneuvers was only so strong, and it was how much inertia Luthor's body could stand which was the main limitation on the Black Widow's speed and performance. Luthor could hear Superman "talking" when the hero was actually vibrating the air inside the capsule a certain way with the power conveniently labeled super-ventriloquism. Superman, however, had to read Luthor's lips to understand what he was saying; the air here was not thick enough to carry sound waves even to Kryptonian ears.

"What're you looking at?" Luthor asked.

He kept looking.

"Hey, Hot Pants, I'm talking to you."

No response.

"Will you turn your lousy head and answer a simple question?" Luthor banged on the wall of his craft.

To no avail.

"For years I've been trying to sneak past him and now I can't get his attention. Is that justice? Maybe there is a God."

Superman turned to face Luthor and projected the words into the bubble: "We've got trouble."

"Hark. I hear a voice."

"The pyramid is past chaos. They're mobilized. If we don't do something fast, they'll spot us before we get where we're going. The sky is being scanned by satellites, which is why I dropped back down into the upper atmosphere."

"What do you suggest we do?"

"Initiate chaos down there."

"From up here?"

"Chaos has always been one of your special talents, Luthor. How would you cause it if you were still inside the pyramid somewhere?"

"Well, I'd start in the launch ramp," Luthor mouthed through his bubble wall. "I'd have to put that out of commission because that would be their first way to follow us."

"How would you do that?"

"Easy. You know that row of teleportation gadgets in there? Teleporting is like going through locks in a canal. Just as you have to equalize the water level in a canal, you have to equalize air pressure to teleport from one place to another, or else you'll have air rushing through the hole you dig in space to teleport at the speed of a cyclone. You can throw the whole launch ramp out of kilter by turning on all those teleport gadgets to a point in deep space. So much air will be rushing out through them into the vacuum that they'll have to seal off the launch ramp like an airlock."

"Brilliant idea."

"What good does it do us up here?"

"What else would you do?" Superman asked as he directed a series of beams of heat vision, melting a series of control bypass switches over a thousand kilometers away.

"Well, next I'd get to their computer linkups. That one would be easy if we were down there. They have no lockout mechanisms, all you have to do is link up to one terminal with the right codes. Like in this case you'd feed the phrase, 'preempt procedure emerald iodine violet,' and then follow it with whatever nonsense phrases you want all the terminals to spout instead of real information. You just feed it into one terminal."

Superman spoke to Luthor with his ventriloquism, as he simultaneously threw his voice elsewhere: "Preempt procedure emerald iodine violet. Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow, and everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go."