Authors: Elliot S. Maggin
"Oh, now you're going off the deep end. Really." It was Jimmy Olsen, and it was immediately clear that he was sorry he had said it.
"What deep end is that?" Dan Reed asked, doing his job.
"No, I was just—" Jimmy hesitated but saw it was not going to work. "Well, maybe I'm wrong, but she hasn't done anything but try to get Superman's goat, as you said. She's just more unfriendly about it. She hasn't killed anyone, right?"
"Except Clark." It was the first thing Lois had said since she said hello to Reed at the show's opening.
"Clark. Well, yeah, but there wasn't an actual murder involved. Hey, what's with everyone feeling like somebody really died? I mean, Clark was one of my best friends—maybe my best friend—and I'm kind of really happy for him that he turned out to be Superman. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I mean, that's confusing, I guess, but I'd really like it if he'd come by sometime for lunch or coffee the way he used to. I don't know why he doesn't."
"What would you call him?" Reed asked.
"Call him?"
"What would you call Clark Kent if he came by for a cup of coffee with you?"
"Oh, I get you, I'd say, 'Hi, Superman.'"
"That's part of the point I was making," Perry White said, picking it up again. "If Superman masquerades as Clark secretly, he's living among us as a natural Earthman. If, on the other hand, he puts on those glasses and we all know it's really Superman, he becomes grotesque, a dangerously schizoid personality. Maybe one of the purposes of this Kristin Wells is to discredit Superman, to drive him past the brink of sanity. Who's to say?"
During the next few thoughtful moments Dan Reed decided to bring Lois into the conversation.
"Can you shed any light on this speculation, Miss Lane? Have you spoken to Superman recently at all?"
It was a mistake. Lois looked as though she were about to say something when, instead, she gulped hard and ran from the studio.
The remainder of the interview foundered in Dan Reed's unstudied ineptness, Jimmy Olsen's combative melancholy and Perry White's thinly veiled depression. The veteran editor, square-jawed and veiny-eyed, went on in an uncharacteristic rambling fashion until he reached the conclusion of his speculation and reminiscences. When he did reach the conclusion, it was quite a conclusion indeed.
"For the sake of argument, then,"—Perry was speaking in a quiet tone that suggested inevitability—"let's say that this girl is possessed by some kind of satanic entity. What then? Obviously, the demon needs her human form in order to work his—
its
—spells. One must assume that the girl is gone, as gone as someone already dead, as one of the hapless victims bitten by Dracula in the old stories. Superman has no alternative but to destroy the essential tool of this creature, to kill the body of Kristin Wells."
Reed was silent. Jimmy Olsen's eyes were watering.
It was the Sunday before the third Monday in May and there was still frost on the windows of Metropolis and a cold front was moving south. Power was out through most
of the city. Food supplies were getting low. Businesses were closed and stores were
gutted. This was the last program that WGBS would broadcast until further notice. Only seventy-eight televisions in the Metropolis area received the broadcast anyway, but Superman was watching one of them.
For a few minutes after the program Jimmy Olsen allowed himself to hate his mentor a little bit for advocating the murder of a young woman Jimmy liked. He hated the crusty self-assuredness; hated the argument that was so well constructed that logical disagreement was nearly impossible; hated the brutish experience of the man. But Jimmy was the only one among the stage crew and the hundred or so viewers and participants in the discussion from whom Perry's sorrow at his own words was effectively veiled. Jimmy Olsen hated Perry White until after the broadcast, when the young reporter walked into the men's room on the twentieth floor of the Galaxy Building and realized that the sounds of gentle and private disgust in the stall against the wall were those of that great gray mastodon of a newsman surrendering his latest meal.
A generation, still alive and still young, grew up in the United States, Europe and the Soviet Union, continually reminded of the apocalyptic circumstance that rode shotgun with civilization. The more intricate and refined life became in the twentieth century, the closer rode violence and the spectre of mass death. The nightmare of unbridled power came to pass on the morning of the third Monday in May. As everyone who grew up in the days of ice-cold war and white-hot visions in the dark had always known it would, it happened not by the hand of any human, but by that of a devil!
Superman slept in flight these days, with only one hemisphere of his brain at a time. He careened in a twilight of consciousness around the world from day to night to day to night and around again, keeping his mind healthy with what dreams he could gather from his few minutes per day of rest. He had a dream today of Jonathan and Martha Kent coming to dinner in the home of his parents on Krypton. Infant Kal-El seemed to recognize the farm couple when they walked in and wanted to introduce them to Jor-El and Lara, who did not speak English. No matter, he realized. Jonathan Kent had learned Kryptonese for the occasion and brought the Kryptonians a Sara Lee cheesecake and a fresh cabbage from Mrs.Kent's garden. Cabbage went very well, as it turned out, with braised gryzmish, which was what was waiting in the dining room of Jor-El's house. Lara flushed the head of cabbage through the thresher and it came out cole slaw. Jor-El lent Jonathan a headband so that he could say grace, and Jonathan translated for Martha. Martha was under the impression that Kal-El had somehow helped prepare the meal and praised him copiously. The baby swatted his food around the surface of his separate table and energy fields and caught it in midair before it soiled the grasslike carpet of the dining room. Jonathan joked that he could have used energy fields like that back when he used to keep pigs, and Jor-El and Lara laughed. Martha Kent slipped and called the baby Clark and Kristin Wells woke Superman up.
"I have turned loose the holocaust, Superman," said the inhuman voice that came from the beautiful young woman with the freckle on the tip of her nose. Superman opened his eyes and saw the unholy leer that profaned Kristin's face as she sat cross-legged before him, her back shielding the wind in their course over the roof of the world.
Superman had no use for recriminations. He supposed that what scant effect even the most economical of oaths might have would certainly slip past the demon Saturn and slap the poor enslaved consciousness of Kristin Wells—whatever was left of her—squarely across the corpus callosum. Below, the world was going up in flames, and if it did, Superman would go with it.
The hysterical obscene cackle, ancient beyond words, that came from Kristin Wells's distorted throat, followed Superman wherever he went on this mission of undignified necessity. This was the worst one yet. Silos, bunkers and torpedo tubes all over the world had come alive and, with one will, had shot off every armed nuclear warhead in the world at its target. Saturn did not want to destroy the Earth, although if that happened in the process that would be fine with the demon. What the Hell spawn wanted was for Superman to allow the world to end. It was as simple for C.W.Saturn to explode every atomic nucleus on the planet as it was to unleash the weapons built by men. It was simply more dramatic this way. Saturn was living not on death itself, but on rancor, fear, and the promise of death.
The first problem would be the bombs for which nobody but their builders had any record. They were the ones most likely all along to bring about the end of the world, whatever that was. Secure in the knowledge that only he, of all the life on this planet, knew what the end of a world looked, felt and tasted like, he dove in the direction of Pakistan.
The small nation was a mass of humanity surrounding the opulence of a building that went by as many names as there had been despots to occupy it. With each despot came a new wave of inhumanity and a new caretaker for the obscenity in the basement. The mass of garbage and wires as big as a two-car garage with a globule of plutonium at its core was one of Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's more specific recurring nightmares. The bomb was aimed at nowhere; no one among the generations of bureaucrats and toadies and potentates who passed this way in the course of a year could remember how to explode or disarm the thing. No one but Superman knew that the chain reaction had begun, and when the outer roof of what was currently called the Presidential Palace spewed apart, the bomb was what everyone in the building first thought of.
Superman crashed through the roof, through a succession of floors of marble, granite, steel and wood to the wall that contained Pakistan's nuclear device, which was already beginning to glow red.
With the infrared rays of his eyes, he fused the hairline cracks in the corners of the steel container so that it was one solid piece. He burrowed underneath it and lifted it onto his back, and plowed back up in the direction he had come, widening the holes in the floors and the ceilings on his way back up. He prayed that not too much radiation would spew out in his wake.
Superman had reached forty kilometers over the surface of the Earth when his burden caught fire. The atmosphere below shielded the cradled world as it was supposed to, and most of the impact bounced off into space. New Haven, Connecticut, and then nearby Cambridge, Massachusetts, were next.
The physics faculty at Yale University had spent three years petitioning the New Haven municipal authorities for permission to build a basement nuclear reactor. They pointed to Columbia University which had operated a reactor for educational purposes for years in one of the densest population centers on Earth. When the department got the permission they had fought for, they cleverly rubbed their hands together and built a bomb instead. It would be much more educational then a mere reactor, and no one, not even the University administration, needed to know what it really was.
Fortunately, Superman knew. It was smaller, and not as crude as the Pakistani device. It had fewer wires hanging out where wires did not belong. It would go off sooner, however.
Superman plummeted from the sky into the institution that had seen fit, over the years, to give a voice to the likes of Eli Yale and William Sloanne Coffin. Through the greensward of the Yale campus the man who had ridden a falling star to Earth bored, kicking up a storm of moss and loam behind him. His trajectory took him through a basement compartment under a physics building, and he followed a trail of burning nitrogen to his destination.
He scooped up the football-shaped object and continued on course, through the floor, through the crust of the planet, through the mass of molten soup on which the east coast of the United States rides, into a vast cavern miles below what humans think of as the world, from which an explosion sent tremors along the coast from Narragansett to Red Bank.
By the time anyone realized the sky was falling, Superman was in Cambridge where, overlooking the Charles River where a flurry of white sails refused to recognize the fact that winter had decided to stay around for a while, a man at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had the makings of a Nobel Prize winner had constructed something that was excessively stupid. It was a nuclear device whose trigger mechanism was operated by the stimulation of reproduction of cells of recombinant DNA.
The physicist who had designed it had figured out the idea in a dream. He supposed that although nuclear radiation was capable of wiping out virtually all forms of life now on the planet, he could stimulate the development of altogether new forms of life by placing their seeds at ground zero of a nuclear explosion. He had a lot of grant money left over the year before and, in a fit of irresponsible silliness, he actually built the thing.
The life-defining chemical at the trigger of the MIT bomb was already forming into something that was neither plant nor animal, and may not have been alive by any rational definition of the term. The bomb, however, was quite alive by the time Superman snapped it up in his cape, knotted it shut and flung it like a bolo in the direction of Polaris.
The package rose only a few kilometers before the bomb burst, but the cape of Kryptonian fabric stretched out of all proportion and contained it, continuing to rise until, on the edge of space, the knot finally flew out of its corners and the heat that was the only thing left inside the red sack poured into infinity. Superman would pick up the cape from its orbit later.
There were thousands more, but they were all the "responsible" bombs, aimed by the governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, France, China, and India at one another's strategic locations and population centers.
They were all on course and, one by one, in order of their closeness to their targets, Superman disarmed them with the ringing cackle of the demon C.W.Saturn haunting his consciousness.
He threw missiles into space.
He tossed warheads at each other.
He drove the heat-seeking devices driving multiple warheads crazy by heating up the tail of the missile carrying the warheads with his hit vision so that the steering devices wore out before the bombs let go of them.
He took direct hits on his chest.
He gulped down several ounces of hot plutonium and let his own underworked antibodies deal with the heat.
He caught giant armloads of deadly weaponry as if they were pickup sticks and threw them like darts into the sun.
It took an hour and forty-two minutes to rid the world of its various nuclear arsenals, and still he heard the ringing of primeval laughter from the throat of Kristin Wells. Emotionally spent and knowing he would have to gather his moral strength as quickly as he had gathered the mega-death that he had banished from the world, Superman turned his torso to his left and pointed his extended fists in the direction of the city of Metropolis below him.