Authors: Elliot S. Maggin
Luthor could no more bring inorganic matter among the nether regions through which he had to go in order to escape, than he could kill a rock. Luthor had teleported before, even to get out of prison. There were lots of ways to do it; all of them except this one was prohibitively expensive. Most of the methods Luthor knew for the transfer of matter through space, by other than three-dimensional means, involved equipment which was not produced on Earth, equipment that could only be manufactured in the total vacuum and zero gravitation of outer space. Luthor had never found it feasible to set up a major manufacturing operation in space. The enterprise would certainly give a massive boost to the American economy, but that was of little concern to him, and there were easier ways to break prison.
Luthor considered teleportation to be basically a waste of time and energy until he made his new discovery. Before this, he had generally regarded people who studied or promoted the various mystic arts—from meditation to astrology to demonology to whatever—to be charlatans, fools or madmen. He still believed this. The more he thought and studied and read, however, the more his mind summoned up an old image. It was an allegory in which a swarm of scientists, social theorists and scholars in their academic robes and laboratory coats carried heavy backpacks full of slide rules, significant survey samples and advanced degrees up the sheer face of a hostile mountain. Some fell off. When the survivors among the company of hard-nosed realists reached the summit, they were amazed to find a collection of mystics, sorcerers and wild-eyed prophets already there, engaged in pleasant conversation and the contents of a community hookah. The mystic had no idea where they were or how they had gotten there. They knew only that this was their destination and that one day sometime ago a giant hand had plucked them out of the darkness and gently deposited them on the mountaintop. The scientists and other realists, though, had the satisfaction of having climbed the mountain.
What Luthor had recently discovered, what was essentially going to make it possible for him to walk through a wall and emerge a free man, was the nature of the human soul. Lex Luthor, climbing the sheer face of a hostile mountain, had found positive evidence of the existence of the souls of every living thing.
He even knew what souls were made of. He called the material
gas-waves
—the state of Creation that lay between matter and energy. The three conventional states of matter, as far as anyone knew, were solid, liquid and gas. There was also plasma. No one was quite sure where plasma fit in. The other thing that the stuff that made up Creation could be, as far anyone knew, was energy. Energy and matter, broken down to their innermost parts, were made of the same stuff. The energy state of all matter was inherent in the matter, and the matter that energy could become was a part of the energy. Everybody knew that, even Robert Knodt. Matter could turn into energy—as it did in the process of nuclear reaction—and energy could turn into matter—as it did when no a star collapsed into a black hole—but as far as anyone knew, matter and energy could not be created or destroyed.
As far as anyone but Luthor knew, there was nothing for the stuff of Creation to be besides matter and energy. Souls were certainly examples of the stuff of Creation, but the stuff of souls was neither matter nor energy. Souls were made of gas-waves. The mystics and crackpots whom Luthor envisioned sitting serenely at the top of the mountain when he and the intellectuals got there had another name for gas-waves. They called them
ectoplasm
.
The crackpots, in their benign ignorance, had a name for just about everything Luthor had discovered or could postulate in connection with gas-wave physics. His ancillary discoveries and postulates were indeed so numerous that the possibilities were staggering. There was the possibility of other dimensions existing on different vibratory planes of gas-waves, in the same space as our own perceptible Universe. It was possible that the alteration of an individual's gas-wave pattern was the key to traveling backward and forward in time. It was now possible to manufacture antimatter. There might also exist, moving among the countless universes of Creation, angels, devils, demonic possession, miracles, leprechauns, warlocks, and other worlds seen in dreams. There certainly was, at the very least, a new universe to perceive, and Luthor knew the same kind of excitement that the man who had first tamed fire knew.
Luthor had told no one of his discovery. That was his way. Who was there to tell? It did not matter anyway, he knew now, if he did not transmit the knowledge to another mind before he endangered his life. He had realized, as a result of his discovery of gas-waves, that he would never die. There was a God.
This was news to him.
The discovery had started simply and innocuously, as such discoveries often begin, with a question in Luthor's mind. It was this: Where do thought go once they've been thought?
It was the sort of question a child would ask. It was the question of a neophyte, of a stoned junkie, of a moron, or of a genius. I mean it, he insisted to himself as he lay at four in the morning on his cot on the third level of Cell Block Ten. Where do thoughts go when you're done with them? Do they fly off into the ozone somewhere like a light beam or a radio wave? Do they drop toward the pull of gravity? What is a thought? Is it energy or matter? A tiny physical change occurs in the brain whenever it digests a new bit of information. Does that mean thoughts are organic? Is a concept a physical entity?
Luthor had gotten up from his cot in Cell Block Ten—slowly, carefully, so as not to joggle the ectoplasmic thought that had ridden the edge of sleep to his mind—and reached for his note pad.
What is energy? He had asked himself. He went through a list of prerequisites a thing had to have in order to be energy. Then he tried matter. This was more difficult and it took ten pages of tight calculations, but Luthor was able to prove that a thought was not a material object. Nor was it an immaterial construct of the brain, which, as far as anyone knew, was made of matter and energy. So a thought was made of something that was never before conceived of by the mind of a rational man.
Does any of this make sense? He asked himself.
Yes, it does, he answered. All of it.
Luthor spent the remainder of time he was in prison this time around figuring out that (a)thoughts were made of gas-waves; (b)so were souls, emotions and certain intangible needs; (c)all space and time that was not occupied by matter or by quanta of energy was occupied by some form of gas-wave; and (d)if Luthor made public or tried to publish any of his findings, they had no more chance of being accepted by the worldwide scientific community than a woman discoverer of a cure for cancer had of winning the Nobel Prize after she had posed for the centerfold of
Playboy
.
The soul—the gas-wave nature, the ectoplasm, whatever one felt like calling it– of every entity of organic matter was as much a part of that entity as the energy that drove Luthor's digestive system was a part of his body. Furthermore, any entity with a consciousness was capable, if it knew how to steer that consciousness, of temporarily transforming its matter and energy into pure gas-waves and transporting it through a prearranged route to rematerialize as matter and energy at the conscious entity's destination– through any physical barrier. Walls, fire, nuclear radiation, Superman, any power of this world could no more stop the motion of a gas-wave entity than a hand could swat starlight out of the sky.
So now Luthor was prone on the cot in his super-security cell underneath Pocantico, oblivious to the guards and the electrician checking the heating system, although he was quite conscious. What he was doing was what the crackpots at the summit of his allegorical mountain might call "meditating," or "finding his center." What Luthor would say he was doing was exercising his consciousness in such a way as to transform the energy and matter of his being into gas-waves, so that he could walk through a hole in space at the end of the room where the workman was checking the heat, and emerge whole and healthy somewhere far away from the Pocantico Correctional Facility.
Less than an hour after the workmen and the three guards, thinking Luthor was asleep, left the room and wove their way through the checkpoints between the underground super-security cell and the outside world, Luthor got up from his cot. Walking with tiny steps, almost floating, Luthor made his way to the point in space where, that afternoon, he had stood and declaimed at the representatives of the press who had come to hear what he had to say.
Then he walked through the wall.
It may have been that Superman was an alarmist by nature, but this sort of thing infuriated him. He seemed forever to be slugging it out with the forces of Chaos. For example, the evening before Luthor's escape - the evening Clark Kent complained of an upset stomach over the plight of lobsters being boiled alive, and Warden Haskell seriously began to fear for his job - Superman made his way thorough the sky over Metropolis. There was a nutshell-sized explosion, a pop of gas caused by a cigarette tossed off by a merchant marine on a tanker, the Monrovia II, holding a cargo of liquefied natural gas in Metropolis Harbor.
Things like liquefied natural gas amazed Superman. LNG, as it was commonly called, was one of the most volatile substances known to humanity. If it leaked out of a tanker, which, Superman had to admit, it had never done anywhere until today, its fumes could spread through the air for miles and any miniscule spark - a match, a skidding rim against a worn brake lining, the flint of an empty pocket lighter - would ignite the very air into a hellish conflagration. What would follow would be, without doubt, a holocaust whose like has gone unseen since the leveling of Nagasaki. Yet this substance was shipped by the truckload and the tankerful to the harbors and through the streets of the densest population centers of the country.
Superman avoided making value judgments on any issue short of blatant criminality or imminent disaster. He had never endorsed a candidate for public office, though there had been those he would have liked to repudiate. He had never taken an active hand in any war, though he had saved lives about to be taken up in war, and he did not think he would stand for the use of nuclear weapons. When the Metropolis Convention Center was built with faulty roofing materials he simply let it be done; later, he caught the chunks of roof when they came down under the weight of the first blizzard of the center's first winter, and delivered a chunk of the roof along with its forged stress analysis report to the district attorney. He did everything he could in order to avoid interfering in natural social and scientific mistakes of humanity, the mistakes by which the race learned. But in a case like this he did not know whether it was good or bad to rein in his better judgment.
Superman was convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that if he, Superman, were not around to bail people out of spectacular disasters, then industrialists and shippers would not take the air-headed chance of transporting LNG through the places where children played. They would not fly jumbo jets that had cracks in the engine mounts. They would not build skyscrapers in earthquake zones. They would not operate nuclear power plants without sufficient technological information. They would not put whales, snail darters and blue-green algae in danger of extinction. He was sure that his presence on Earth was the reason they took those gambles, and that was why he was infuriated.
At dusk a skeleton crew of nine men mopped and sniffed and hung around and envied those who had shore leave from the tanker Monrovia II. As the big ship bobbed in Metropolis Harbor, a gathering whistle dropped from the sky. Crewmen on the deck jumped and spun around and fell on their stomachs when the bright human figure careened through the starboard hull and shattered a steel plate sixteen inches thick as he flew through it.
Superman flew into the hold as though its walls were onionskin, and out behind him belched a pillar of flame, curling like cables of muscle into the sky. The petrochemical atmosphere in the hold was catching fire and there was a man inside. Superman had to risk letting the burning gas into the atmosphere in order to get the man out.
The young ensign was lying facedown on the catwalk grid in front of the leaking cargo compartment. For the moment, he was lucky. The liquid in the hold was gradually steaming into its gaseous state and seeping out a pinhole in the compartment wall. Falling down under his first burning breath of LNG fumes, the man had scraped his belt buckle against the guardrail of the catwalk. Superman, with his special visual perceptions, could see waves of the escaping gas rolling over the man's back and catching fire from the spark of the belt on the railing.
Superman knifed through the spreading spit of flames, simultaneously examining the pinhole. To a degree that would be imperceptible to any instruments on Earth less sensitive than electron microscopes, the hole in the steel alloy wall was pulsing. Pressure was building on it from inside, and the container was about to burst into snips of metal.
Facedown, at the level of the hole, the ensign's nostrils were just out of the stream of the rising gases, but his body would not be spared from either the spreading vaporous flame or the shrapnel of the shattering container. The fire and the explosion raced each other for the ensign's mortality, and Superman joined the race.
Superman's sense of smell, always attuned to the entry of a molecule of LNG fumes when such a tanker was in town, had led him to this hold at the instant Hell was about to shake free here. Superman had a thousandth of a second lead on Hell, and by all the stars of Creation that was not nearly enough time.
The bits of thought, the electronic impulses racing back, forth, and elsewhere through Superman's brain at the speed of light, lost all concern for anything else and measured time in microseconds.