Last Son of Krypton (6 page)

Lana Lang was the second-to-the-top English student. Clark was second in everything else. Luthor decided that Clark kept his friends by being the eighth grade's top nerd. Lex would rather keep his dignity. Clark Kent grew up to be a mindless mouthpiece for some petty fiefdom in the American Corporate Empire. Lex Luthor built an empire of his own.

Yesterday, Luthor tromped out to the terrace. A moment later the man behind one of the taping units called, "Rolling!"

Lex Luthor, resplendent in purple and green, collar raised, sashes holding vials and bizarre weapons, small jets in his boots belching flame, flew into the room cackling like a rabid hyena. He waved in front of him a rolled-up leather folder as he burst in, did a pirouette in midair, bounced gracefully off the wall with both hands and feet, and hopped to the floor as he snatched back his composure and said, "Cut!"

"Think we got it?" the boss asked his six cameramen. They all thought so.

"All right, take your places for the next shot."

That was yesterday.

"S
low down, boy," Jimmy Olsen told himself for the fourth time since he got up this morning. He said this to himself out loud when he was bored, frustrated or excited. This time it was the first. The reason he told himself to slow down when he was bored was that he tended to get worked up over the fact that he had a dull assignment today, and he probably would not get to show off his go-get-'em, let-'em-have-it, boy-wonder reporting on the air. He had dazzled the world yesterday and the day before; he would probably do it again tomorrow. At twenty-three Olsen was the youngest on-the-air reporter in Metropolis. He was also probably the most worried about his career.
 

Jimmy Olsen found himself orphaned and alone at sixteen, supporting himself as a copy boy for the
Daily Planet
. By eighteen a series of freelance news stories written on speculation earned him the position of "cub reporter." By twenty-one Perry White, the paper's editor, had made him a full member of the
Planet
staff. Beside being an electronic journalist, now he wrote a feature column for the Planet Newspaper Syndicate three times a week. Somewhere along the line Jimmy picked up a high school diploma from the back of a matchbook, led a South American safari to locate his father who had been sitting in the jungle for years with a form of amnesia induced by malaria, learned to operate every newsgathering gadget from the typewriter to the WGBS-TV newsvan, entered the
Guinness Book of Records
for being thought killed in the line of duty more times than anyone else in any profession, became world famous, and convinced himself his life was headed absolutely nowhere.
 

A few more days like this one, covering the opening of a vault holding a notebook written by a man dead twenty years, and someone might sympathize with Jimmy's frustration. Jimmy thought of himself as the last of the Vikings, maybe a direct descendant of Leif the Lucky and Eric the Red. He certainly had the hair and complexion for it. So he was only five feet seven, nobody's perfect.

The Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton was a nice place to put a housing development. It was said that Albert Einstein himself designed the layout of the place. Some layout. One brick baronial mansion housing the Institute, surrounded by a parking lot, a lawn the size of six or eight football fields and a hundred or so acres of woods which were punctuated by circuitous walking paths stretching for miles but leading back approximately to where they each started. The great man used to spend hours, days plodding over these paths trying to figure out exactly what gravity was. Jimmy could have told him. It was the stuff that kept the Australians from falling off the Earth. Jimmy had learned that from the back of a matchbook.

It was a little after eleven in the morning when Jimmy, his cameraman, and his sound technician pulled up in front of the Institute. The "camera" was actually a videotape recorder and needed no sound man, but try to convince the union of that. The only people in sight were half a dozen other reporters, two camera crews, and a few college students walking dogs on the big lawn.

"Hey, man." Jimmy motioned to a reporter in a turtleneck shirt and an awfully obvious rug on his head. "Anybody tell you when this show gets moving?"

"What?" He jumped.

"Seen any eggheads around? When do they open the safe?"

"Oh. Noon." The guy was terse.

"Then why'd I get up so early?"

He shrugged.

"I'm from WGBS. Who're you with?"

"Philadelphia Enquirer."

"The
Enquirer
. You know Evy Wuener? She's on staff there now, isn't she?"
 

"I don't know her. I'm new."

"Should meet her, man. Girl's got the best pair of typing hands this side of Poughkeepsie. Tell her Jimmy Olsen says hi."

"Sure."

Jerk, Jimmy thought. All those middle-aged guys struggling to write a lead paragraph for some backwater rag were jealous, that was it. Well, so the
Enquirer
wasn't a rag. So why didn't this guy want to say more than half a sentence to a colleague who was a legend in his own time? And who cared, anyhow?
 

At a quarter to twelve a little man in a tweed suit appeared at the main door of the building. Jimmy scribbled in his notebook—more teeth than Carter—sleeps in his suit—academic type born at the age of eighteen.

"I wonder if you'd all be so ki—uh, nice as to co—uh, step into the Inst—uh, the building here."

The notebook: Needle scratches on his larynx.

"I'm Mist—uh, Doctor Donald Ackroyd. Any questions gent—uh, ladies and gentlemen?"

The guy from Newark, of course, wanted to know if there were free drinks for the press. Jimmy remembered his asking that same question at that Alcoholics Anonymous convention last year. Creep.

Apparently, no one knew what Einstein had left in this vault. Everyone figured it might be pretty valuable or the greatest genius of the twentieth century wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of locking it away for twenty-five years. Geniuses were pretty weird guys, though. People thought Luthor was a genius, and no one ever knew where he was coming off. And Superman had to be a genius. Talk about crazy lifestyles. A secret fortress carved out of a mountain in the arctic; everybody said he dressed up as a normal guy during the day and went around sniggering at people who couldn't fly. All the time chasing after gangsters and flash floods and waving at the tourists. If Jimmy were a super-powered alien, he thought, he wouldn't waste time piddling around on Earth. There was a Universe out there.

Notebook: Three armed guards—one to open the vault and two to look tough—lotsa spooky guys with dark glasses and bulging lapels—taking no chances.

The guy from Newark ogled the girl from CBS. The fool from Philly with the wig hung from a corner snarling at the world. People got out of the way when Jimmy wanted his cameraman to get a closer look. It's great to be a star.

The guard in the middle pulled open the door of a vault about the size of a refrigerator. Before anyone could get a close enough look to see if a light went on when the door opened, out flew Lex Luthor, cackling like a bad dream.

Jimmy was the only one who kept his head. That was the way it always worked. He elbowed past the reporter with the eyeballs hanging out of their sockets, hopped over Dr. Ackroyd who was on his way to the floor, grabbed the .38 out of the shoulder holster of the plainclothesman who was screaming, and let loose two shots in the direction of Luthor's cue ball head as the criminal passed through the wall like smoke through a window screen, waving a rolled-up leather folder—the treasure from the vault.

A few composures caught up to Jimmy's as the laughing ghost did a midair pirouette on the other side of the window. Jimmy led everyone—reporters, cameramen, officials, guards—through the door. Now some of the spooks had drawn guns and were firing at the jet-powered thief.

How did he get into the vault?

How did he pass through the wall?

How can he be so sure of dodging the bullets?

Why did he want the Einstein document?

Only Jimmy's cameraman was recording this. Every station in the country would pay a mint to get copies of that tape. The students on the lawn came running into the melee. Their dogs all galloped off into the woods.

Luthor waved his prize in the sky. Jimmy dropped the gun and grabbed his microphone.

"The door of the vault seemed open not even enough for a man to pass through the crack when Luthor scrambled out over the heads of reporters, waving the priceless papers and laughing louder than life. He went through the wall of the Institute like a ghost, and as you can see, instead of leaving the scene he swings back and forth in the sky like a man on a trapeze—"

Good simile. Wouldn't need much editing.

"—as if defying Institute guards to pick him out of the air like a clay pigeon. Ladies and gentlemen, what you are witnessing—"

Jimmy felt more like a ringmaster than a newsman.

"—is the daring theft by the greatest criminal scientist of our time of the last artifact from the life of possibly the greatest scientist of all—uh—oh."

Just as Jimmy felt the words rolling, he choked off. Luthor faded from the sky, along with his booty, as if he had never been there, and the guards were left seeding the clouds.

At that moment, the toupeed man who said he was from Philadelphia was slipping out a back door of the emptied Institute building carrying a soldered lead case the size of a geography textbook. Luthor tore off the fake hair as he plopped into his confederate's car, laid the sealed document on his lap, and headed for the New Jersey Turnpike.

The vault door hung wide open with nothing beyond it but a small empty table and the glow of a single 40-watt bulb. No one would be surprised to find Luthor's fingerprints all over the tiny room.

N
obody heard the whistling in the city sky until it was all over. This was business.
 

There were three gliders still in formation, heading in a wedge over midtown. Nine more were at a standstill fifteen to twenty feet over the roofs of nine major banks, each hovering under the power of a trio of small rotors on the points of the triangular kites. Waves of infra-sound beat downward from little plastic boxes on the pilots' legs. The one-man craft were masterpieces of simple design and fuel conservation. There was only one technician in the world with the talent and resources to design and build a squad of them. The pilots of the vehicles wore heavily padded outfits along with helmets that had a small monopole antenna over the left ear. Police helicopters—four of them—beat onto the scene with loudspeakers blasting.

"Attention—land your craft on the roof of the nearest building—" The three pilots in the three gliders still soaring toward their respective destinations laughed. They were the Queen's clipper ships against the Spanish Armada. They rode stallions while the police chased on the backs of dinosaurs.

"No charges will be pressed if you debark immediately—"

One of the three glider pilots banked left toward the Banco Internacionale building. His vehicle vanished and he found himself hanging eighty feet over the sidewalk, and he told himself he was going to die.

"If you do not cease unauthorized activity within ten seconds—"

The doomed pilot looked at the spinning sky and saw that the pilots of the two other gliders in his formation were following him down and their gliders were nowhere in sight. He looked down and in the time since he last saw the ground a huge red cloth had been stretched over the street with two corners tied around two lampposts.

"You will be fired upon—"

plop-plop-plop

The pilot fell on the red cloth, and the two others followed. He was alive. The cloth gave way like a trampoline. He rolled across a red valley, felt himself bump into one of the other pilots, and tried to get to his knees. He felt nauseated.

"You have ten seconds—"

He saw the far ends of the cloth and what was holding onto the corners there. The man in blue. He felt the surface below him give way like a beach blanket as he was thrown by an irresistible wave against the sky and several times the pressure of normal gravity mashed his face in.

"—starting NOW"

Superman calculated that the force with which he flung the three men into the air put their initial velocity at 160 feet per second. They would rise 400 feet into the sky and it would take them five seconds going up and five dropping back down. These thoughts flew through his head as he untied the corners of his red cape from the lampposts and fastened the clips inside his shirt as the cloth snapped back to its normal size. And the helicopter loudspeakers filled the air.

"Nine seconds."

Superman directed a narrow blast of air between his two front teeth. A block away one of the three rotors keeping the glider stable began to spin too fast. The front end of the craft nosed down, dropping the pilot out. A red-and-blue streak drew a parabolic curve under the glider as Superman snatched the falling criminal from his fall.

"Eight seconds."

As he swooped through the sky, the last son of Krypton threw a glance in the direction of a glider hovering over another bank building less than a block away. Banks were thicker in midtown than Cadillacs in Teheran. It was more than a glance that Superman shot at that glider. Its pilot felt unsteady; he looked up and saw his fiberglass kite crackling with intense heat over his head. It was bubbling, becoming disfigured into little globules of molten silicon that could not hold the wind, much less the pilot. As the craft began sailing into the nearest street the pilot made a whirling leap at the bank roof, hoping to land on a particularly padded part of his suit. He didn't land at all.

"Seven seconds."

The flying man carried his two charges by their padded trousers up toward a high ledge of the Galaxy Building and set them down. The ledge was at the level of the building's air conditioning system, so the only way off was by air. On the way down Superman went into a 300-foot power dive at his new targets, his arms flung behind him like the wings of a falcon.