Authors: Elliot S. Maggin
Kristin Wells stood at a place Superman had once considered to be something like his home, on the roof of the Galaxy Building in the city of Metropolis. Around midday on the third Monday in May, he went there to meet her.
So far, since C.W.Saturn had taken active control of Kristin Well's life, the young woman had been moved to commit, among others, the following acts of destruction:
The disintegration of the steering wheels of the cars in midtown.
The attacking of pedestrians by the twenty-one statues in Central Preserve.
The growth of roaches until they were so large they scared rats.
The rising of killing winds across the countryside.
The division of families and friends by causing them to speak different languages.
The forgetting by people of the faces of their own children.
The disarray of the mass media by turning all the rubber insulation in the television and radio network buildings into highly conductive silver.
The emptying of the digestive systems of a horde of citizens so that they became hungry enough to steal food from the city's grocery stores and supermarkets.
The explosion of a fuel tank of every airplane to leave Metropolis International Airport during a certain two-hour period on the tenth of May.
The incitement of the planet's most powerful governments to the edge of nuclear war.
And she had stolen Clark Kent.
Max Maven the expert and Lena Thorul of intuitive near-infallibility agreed that Kristin Wells could not be exorcised of the arch-demon by physical or mystical means. The spiritual power of Superman and the entire human community could not trip C.W.Saturn out of Kristin Wells against Saturn's will without leaving Kristin a tattered mess of lifeless flesh.
There were those who claimed that the death of this pawn, this innocent child without family or past, was the only way to save the world. All she had to do was succeed in one act of destruction, according to that powerful argument, while Superman had to succeed in defusing her every try. Her demise was certainly one solution, Superman knew.
Now, he asked himself, what were the other alternatives?
Were there any?
The world cried out for the death of Kristin Wells before she succeeded once. This man who stood in space facing the roof of the Galaxy building where this possessed girl stood, soft and human and as vulnerable as any creature wrought by the hand of God, this man was the only power capable of carrying out that final solution.
But for one fact, he would have done it. The fact was that although it made perfect sense to the entire sentient population of the world with the exception of Superman, the logic of killing Kristin Wells honestly eluded him.
Other than the other murder of the exquisite fiction of Clark Kent, she had done nothing and was likely, as far as Superman could tell, to do nothing that Superman could not reverse. Certainly the arch-demon C.W.Saturn could kill or disparage, could scar living sensibilities, but that was not what Saturn had used Kristin's body to do. Superman suspected that it would not serve Saturn's purposes, whatever they were, to destroy anything in this world outright, any more than taking Kristin's body was his final purpose.
What Saturn was interested in doing was not destroying life and liberty, but destroying innocence. If Saturn, through Kristin, tore down a building, then only the building and presumably its occupants were destroyed. If, on the other hand, Kristin were to prompt one of the building's inhabitants to destroy the building, then Saturn would win the soul of the destroyer.
And if Superman killed Kristin Wells in order to stop her reign of terror, then it was Superman, along with all he stood for, that was destroyed.
"What will you do now?" the shrill, horrible voice of the possessed woman called to Superman from the roof of the Galaxy Building.
"Who wants to know?" the big man responded.
"Will you stand by and allow me to do as I would? You cannot confine me effectively, or stop me from committing whatever caprices I care to. Or will you kill me, good Superman?"
"You're talking nonsense."
"Nonsense?" She held up an open palm to the big Radio Corporation building across the plaza and a bolt of heat energy burst through the air in the building's direction. Superman met the bolt halfway with his chest and the force dissipated into the air. "Is this destructive power nonsense?"
"No," Superman said, "Your power is not nonsense. The idea that I would kill you simply because you misdirect it, however, is ridiculous."
"You prattling, idealistic fool. Do you expect me to stop of my own accord?"
"No, I don't. Unfortunately, I don't expect that at all."
"Then what do you expect to do about me?"
"Whatever I do with criminals and destructive forces like you. I'll follow you," Superman said, casually unshakable in his conviction that there was a good and an evil in the Universe, and determined to be a force for the good.
"You would follow me to the bowels of the Earth?"
"Certainly. Wherever you choose to vent your spleen I'll be there to stop you. It's as simple as that."
"To the rim of the Universe?"
"I think you're being melodramatic. I'll follow you to the ends of Creation. I look forward to seeing places where I've never been, and I don't suppose there could be a nobler mission for a Superman."
The clouds rolled over the city. Thunder roared without a crack of lightning. The air shook. The eyes of Kristin Wells widened and, for the moment before they snapped shut, they glowed red.
Superman looked on, his own eyes widening against his will as he realized what was going on. The body of Kristin Wells dropped on the asphalt and a great black pillar of energy swirled upward from her head and toward the sky. A grotesquely obscene scream of pain and a great voice, equally unearthly, cut through the chaos of the third Monday in May.
"Stop, damn you. Now you'll answer to me."
The voice was monstrous, harsh, inhuman.
On the Saturday that was two days before the third Monday in May, there was no broadcasting coming out of Metropolis, and very little news by other means. The food supply was dwindling because truckers refused to come into town. The cost of fuel in the coming summer, if the unseasonable cold did not break down soon, promised to set new records. Private motor vehicles were banned from the streets. For fear of vulnerability to the arch-demon, gasoline was drained from the tanks under all the city's stations and was totally unavailable. Mass transit, even subways, had ceased to function. People were staying home from work. Strangely, the hotels were doing phenomenally good business. Dr. David Skvrsky walked down the steps to the empty subway platform under the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Second Street.
Skvrsky walked to the far end of the platform, then hopped down onto the track and walked on beyond the station. He pulled off the mustache and the shock of iron gray hair and became Lex Luthor again. He stuffed the hair into the right inside pocket of his coat, and before he entered total darkness he checked once more for the hair in the left inside pocket.
To his left in the darkness there was a small red light marking the entrance to a tunnel that had not been used for anything by the Transit Authority since 1942 when President Roosevelt came to town and it was secretly converted to a combination bomb shelter-command station to be used if the Nazi Air Force attacked the city while the President was in town. Luthor had not known about the bunker in the tunnel until he was told that it was to be his meeting place.
In the abandoned tunnel he found a wallpapered room whose eerie light seemed to have no source. There were three comfortable-looking chairs and a large empty desk behind which sat the large white figure who had ordered a lock of Superman's hair.
"I trust you have the item we discussed, Lex Luthor." The apparition's voice seemed even more cavernous than it had been at their first meeting.
"I have it right here." Luthor pulled a small envelope from his coat pocket and held it away as the white figure leaned across the desk for it. "You ought to know these things. You claim to be a supernatural being."
"I hardly need to claim it. Certainly you used to read the city's newspapers before I disrupted their production," and the thing laughed a horrible laugh. The Shadow used to laugh that way.
"Actually, I rather think you are who you say you are, or rather what you say you are. I am satisfied that you are bound by any contract you make. I wonder, however, if you could tell me what your game is. You've evidently managed to possess this girl Kristin Wells, is that right?"
"She is acting under the dominion of C.W.Saturn, that is correct."
"Then what keeps you from simply destroying the city, or taking over, or whatever you came to do?"
The white figure laughed again. Luthor hated that laugh. "In your world, Lex Luthor, you are a very powerful being, is that not so?"
"I believe it is."
"As I am in the Netherworld. But do you remember anything of the land you passed through in order to escape from prison?"
"Almost nothing. I saw some shadows, and I knew how many steps I had to take in each direction, but mostly I remember being in pain."
"As I was in pain when I entered your world at the time you made your escape. As you would have grown in power had you remained, so do I become stronger here in good time. It is not my intention to destroy your world, Lex Luthor. But my power here is still limited. For example, I do not even know where your gateway to the Netherworld is located."
Now Luthor laughed, not as menacingly. "Why would a phony demon admit to a foul-up like that? Here's your hair from Supie. You owe me now."
"Indeed I do," and the ghostly figure gestured in the direction of the surface of the desk, where the standard puff of black smoke heralded the appearance of a single clothbound volume. "All the technical information on the physics of alternate dimensional universes that you will ever require," the creature said and handed Luthor the book in return for the envelope with the lock of hair.
Luthor coughed from the smoke. "What is that stuff, burnt rubber?"
"Pardon the histrionics. It is brimstone, actually. Traditional, you understand."
"Of course. What are you going to do with that hair anyway, make some kind of Superman voodoo doll?"
The laugh again. "You seemed rather unimpressed that I did not know the location of your 'demonpass,' Lex Luthor. The information would be rather useful to me. I propose a trade. You answer my question and I shall answer yours."
"Oh, I think I can get more out of you than that. Your information would do me no good at all, I'm simply curious."
"Very curious. You are a scientist, Lex Luthor, among the most curious creatures in all Creation. You want to know the answer to your question quite a bit more than I want the answer to mine."
"All right. I never was very good at bargaining. Demonpass empties out in the area of the New England Pontoon Reactor. The vicinity of a nuclear reactor was the easiest place to put it because the plant itself softens space in proximity to it. When Earth scientists realize that, they may stop building them. I came out under the reactor floor, on top of the easternmost pontoon. Now it's your turn, Saturn. What do you want Superman's hair for?"
"Oh, I don't know." The voice became clearly softer, more Earthly as he spoke. "Maybe I'll see if I can glue it back or something."
And the lights went out.
Luthor began his howl of frustration under the city, and by the time he finished it, he was wrapped in Superman's cape, flying north toward Pocantico Correctional Facility. Superman had used his visual and flying powers so creatively that Luthor thought the demon was using powers that Superman did not have. Superman had reflected his X-ray vision through a collection of hidden mirrors to make the eerie light of the underground room; he had appeared and disappeared by flying in and out of sight at super-speed. The book was actually a freshly bound copy of
Catch-22
.
It was all in order to find the location of the demonpass, and now Superman would be able to plug it up against the entry of any more of Saturn's minions.
"You did very well," Superman told Luthor before turning him over to the new warden of the Pocantico Correctional Facility. "You might have put it over on me if it hadn't all been my idea."
Heroes, above all, are people who succeed. They sometimes fail in their immediate goals—staying alive, for example—in order to succeed in their ultimate goals—saving the Union, making the world safe for democracy, obtaining civil rights for their people. Ultimately they succeed, and generally this is because they set out on purpose to succeed. They keep control. The key, then, to success, and therefore to being a hero, is to be in control of surroundings, always to know what happens next.
The encounter between Lex Luthor and Superman disguised as C.W.Saturn ended the Saturday before the third Monday in May. All of this is by way of explanation for what happened next on the third Monday in May.
"Stay, damn you! Now you'll answer to me!"
The voice was monstrous, harsh, inhuman. It was a voice that Superman had never before realized that he owned. He used that voice, rippling with righteous power, to order the demon escaping from the girl's body to a halt.
"I've won, you Hellspawn. You owe me. Stop where you are."
The Man of Steel hurtled up into the sky beside the rising pillar of luminous blackness, and at these words the pillar stopped rising.
Below, the city ceased its motion and the elements no longer roiled. Above, the sun no longer burned, saving its energy until this moment was over. The sky lost all light. Photons hung still in space. The very heat of the Universe stopped its flight toward entropy. Everything seemed to freeze in place, but nothing actually stopped except for time.