The Death and Life of Superman (41 page)

Scrapper broke free from Flip and shot past the Guardian, just narrowly avoiding the big man’s grasp. The other Newsboys swiftly followed suit, scrambling to within a few feet of where Dubbilex stood by the cold storage unit.

“You boys should not be here.” The DNAlien looked deeply troubled.

Probably annoyed with himself for not having sensed the boys earlier,
thought the Guardian.
He hates to be caught unawares like this.

Jim Harper ostentatiously cleared his throat. At the sound, Big Words jerked his head around to stare with disbelief at the Guardian. “With all due respect, sir . . .” He paused and nodded back to Dubbilex.
“Sirs,
I request an explanation for the presence of the late Superman in this chamber.”

“Yeah!” Scrapper belligerently pushed his cap down onto his forehead. “What’s Cadmus doin’ wit’ Superman’s body?!”

“We’ll discuss this later, boys.”

“No!” Tommy defiantly stepped up to the Guardian. “No, ‘later’ isn’t good enough. A week ago, you made a big deal out of stopping Mr. Westfield from claiming Superman’s body. Now, we turn around and here it is. Big Words is right; I think you owe us an explanation.”

“Yeah!”

“I’ll say!”

“You tell ’im, Tom.”

“We all concur, sir.”

One by one, the other Newsboys lined up beside Tommy.

Just like his father. Tommy Tompkins always was the leader. Well, the cat’s out of the bag now. And maybe that’s a blessing in disguise.
Harper squared his shoulders. “All right, you deserve to hear the truth. Perhaps, if we all talk about this, even Dubbilex and I will start to make sense of it.”

The Guardian smiled; it was the first time these young clones had ever stood up to him on a matter of principle. He was proud of them for that, but there was a trace of melancholy in his smile, just the same. Through them, he could see his boys growing up . . . all over again.

Early the next morning, Lois Lane stepped up to the curb outside her apartment building and flagged down a passing cab. As she pulled open the door, she made a mental note to stop at Dooley’s for coffee and bagels on her way in to work. With all the interviews she’d scheduled for herself, she was certain that she’d be expending a lot of calories today.

“Where to, ma’am?” The cabbie was a pleasant-faced African-American in his late twenties. He had a nice deep voice, the sort of voice you could listen to for hours, but Lois scarcely noticed. Her attention was drawn to the small Superman emblem sculpted into the right side of the man’s hair and his black armband with a matching scarlet S.

“Ma’am?” He half-turned toward her.

Lois started slightly, suddenly aware that she was staring.
“Daily Planet
Building, please. And hurry.”

“I’ll do what I can, lady, but the streets are gettin’ seriously messy.” He adjusted his rearview mirror before pulling back into the street. A twisted piece of metal hung from the mirror. For Lois, it was as if the other shoe had finally dropped. She looked at the cabbie’s license; Marlon Brown, the card said. Clark had told her of this man.

That hunk of metal was a “souvenir” from what had been left of Marlon’s old cab after a drunk in a pickup truck had plowed into him. Superman had pried the wreck open with his bare hands and eased Marlon out. They’d crossed paths sometime later, after the cabbie’s ribs had healed, and Superman had been very touched by the man’s profound gratitude.
No wonder he still wears his black armband. And the hair . . .
Lois felt her throat tighten.
Clark said that when they met that second time, Marlon had already had the Superman emblem cut into his hair. I hope he doesn’t want to talk about Superman, because if he does, I might just break down and cry.

As if on cue, Marlon glanced at her in the rearview mirror, and his face brightened in recognition. “Say, you’re that reporter, aren’t you? Lois Lane?”

Lois admitted that she was, and the cabbie beamed at her in the mirror. “I thought so! Listen, you’re a
real
good writer. I read your stuff all the time.” His face clouded suddenly, and Lois had an awful suspicion she knew what he was going to say next.

“That story you wrote after Superman died. That was—that was—” Marlon shook his head. “Sorry. Whoever heard of a cabbie at a loss for words, right? I cried like a baby when I read it. I even
framed
my copy of that story.” He shook his head again and looked back sympathetically into the mirror. “Must’ve hurt like hell to write that. I dunno how you did it.”

Lois managed to return a sad smile. “Neither do I.”

Marlon glanced at the twist of metal hanging from the mirror, and Lois felt her hands clench into fists.
Please, don’t talk about how you got that. I already know, and if you say anything more about Superman, you’ll have to pull over because we’ll
both
be crying.

Marlon seemed to sense her silent plea. He took a deep breath and fell silent, leaving Lois alone with her thoughts.
I wrote the story, and Clark died. And now, here I am, trotting off to cover another story. Why do I even bother?

All those words, what good do they really do?
Lois stared out the window and tried to lose herself in the noise of the city.

Jonathan Kent slowly shuffled into the kitchen, planting a weary kiss on his wife’s cheek. “Morning, love.”

“Morning, dear!” Martha brought the kettle over and filled his mug. “I’m trying something new today. I mixed a little regular coffee in with your decaf. See how you like it.”

Jonathan took a big sip. “Tastes all right. Why the change? I thought we were supposed to be cutting back on caffeine an’ fat an’ such.”

“Well, we are, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to put just a little more zip in our day.”
At this point I’d try just about anything to brighten you up.
Jonathan was sleeping later and later every day, but he seemed less rested each morning. “You know, I wish you’d talk to Doc Lanning about your sleep.”

“Oh, I probably just need a nap in the afternoon is all. Gettin’ old, y’know.”

“Well, here’s some nice hot oatmeal.” She set a steaming bowl down before him. “Lois calls it comfort food, and Lord knows we could use some comfort. I made it with raisins—just the way—the way
he
always liked it.”

“That’s nice, Martha.”

Martha looked at Jonathan as he numbly swirled his spoon through the oatmeal. She had the distinct feeling that she could have set a boiled gum boot in front of her husband and he still would have said, “That’s nice, Martha.”
Did he hear me at all? The way Jon’s acting, it’s as if I wasn’t even here.

In fact, it was Jonathan who wasn’t quite there. As he sat at the table, he was reliving a breakfast from over thirty years ago.

Clark was four and was interested in getting the maximum enjoyment out of his breakfast. “Here comes the oatmeal plane, Pa.” Little Clark swung his spoon through the air. “It’s comin’ in for a landin’! Power-dive! Rrrrr-zooomp! Open the hangar door!”

Into his mouth went the spoon.

“Yum! I love airplanes with raisins! But I wish I had a real airplane!” Jonathan reached down into a bag by his feet. “Well, I was saving this for later, but if you think you can spend more of your flight time
away
from the table . . .”

Out came a long, slender balsa wood glider.

“Wow! Hey, Ma! Pa made me an airplane! Thanks, Pa!” Clark jumped up from the table and ran around the room, waving his new toy through the air. “Up, up an’ away! ’Bye, Pa. I gotta fly now!”

Jonathan sat playing with his oatmeal, chuckling under his breath. “Gotta fly. Someday, son . . . someday!”

Martha looked up from the refrigerator; she couldn’t believe her ears.
Jonathan was never one to talk to himself.
Her great-uncle Conrad had started doing that one day, she knew, and he was never the same again. Martha shook her head. If anything like that happened to Jonathan, she just didn’t know what she’d do.

In Cadmus Lab Seven, Drs. Tompkins and Johnson rolled Superman’s body out of the cold storage unit as Dr. Rodrigues checked the calibrations on a sophisticated electron microscope. With a soft plastic probe, the doctors gently held open their subject’s eye as a fine beam of coherent light was directed through the pupil and into the retina.

Sitting down at his computer keyboard, Rodrigues logged into a genetic analysis program and began entering the special entry codes:

DIR H:
\\
OPERATION KRYPTON

INITIATE ELECTRON-CAPILLARY SCAN.
27
/READ

TRIAL.
012

The monitor suddenly came alive with color, as twisting, interlocking helixes swirled across the screen. Walter Johnson nearly dropped his pen. “My God, is that—?”

Rodrigues nodded. “The Kryptonian genome, gentlemen—or rather, a minute fragment of same. After cross-correlating a dozen scans, we’re finally starting to see some results.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Tompkins was frankly spellbound. “It’s—big . . .”

“Yes, truly remarkable, really, that given such different genomes, the Kryptonian phenotype was so similar to that of
Homo sapiens.”
Rodrigues’s fingers danced across the keyboard, calling up additional screens of mathematical calculations and analyses of chemical compounds. “The program has already found ninety-eight chromosomes, and this is just the beginning. I believe we may need more memory before this is all mapped out.”

“If
it’s ever all mapped out.” Walt began flipping the button on his pen. “And even if we do succeed in mapping the whole thing, are we really going to be able to do anything with it?”

Several corridors away, Paul Westfield and Carl Packard sat in the administrator’s office watching as Rodrigues’s figures and computations played over a tapped-in monitor system.

“Remarkable. Absolutely remarkable.” Packard marveled at the growing data. “We could spend years studying this information.”

“The world can’t wait years, Doctor, and neither can I.” Westfield got up from his desk and started pacing. “We need a Superman now.”

“But—but this . . .” Packard ran his hands around the edge of the screen as he groped for the right words. “It’s revolutionary! It’s all so complicated. Ninety-eight chromosomes! And there may be more. It would be different if we could obtain a tissue sample, but you’re talking about trying to simulate an alien genome in terrestrial cells! How are we to determine which chromosomes hold the triggers to which powers?” Packard tugged at one corner of his mustache. “I mean, I suppose we could test theoretical models on the supercomputer array, but—”

“Then do so.” Westfield picked up his phone. “I’ll arrange authorization immediately. I’ll provide whatever support is necessary to ensure our success.”

As the Project administrator got on the line to the computer wing, Dr. Packard turned back to the monitor, mesmerized by the figures on the screen. Neither man was aware that their preparations were being observed from a ventilation duct in the wall behind Westfield’s desk.

The observer was dressed all in black, from the goggled ski mask that covered his face to the two layers of wool socks on his feet. He listened silently as the logistics of Packard’s work were mapped out, occasionally jotting down key words in a small pocket notepad. And then, with infinite care, he slowly slid away, taking care to make not a sound. For nearly five minutes, the masked observer worked his way through a maze of ductwork until finally he came to an open ventilator. He then swung down into a dimly lit bunkroom and was greeted with a chorus of questions.

“How’d it go? Did ya find it? Were ya able to see anything? Geez, I don’t know why the rest of us couldn’t go with ya. We could’ve been witnesses and everything and—”

Scrapper slapped a piece of duct tape over Gabby’s mouth and around his head, effectively silencing the boy. “Yeah, an’ Westfield woulda heard us comin’ from a mile away. So pipe down already, an’ give Words a chance to catch ’is breath.”

Flip and Tommy climbed up on chairs to replace the ventilator wall grille as Big Words divested himself of his ski mask and heavy socks.

“How did it go, Words?” Tommy hopped down from his chair and turned it around to face the taller boy.

“Yeah, what’s goin’ down?”

“Plenty, Flip.” Big Words adjusted his glasses. “To answer Gabby’s queries—yes, I was most successful in locating the administrator’s office. It appears that Mr. Westfield is conspiring with Dr. Packard to utilize the fruits of our fathers’ studies, though whether with or without their knowledge, I was unable to determine.”

“Then the bum is goin’ ahead wit’ plans to make his own Superman.”

“So it would seem, Scrapper. And the longer the
corpus Kryptonus
resides at Cadmus, the greater the chances are that our esteemed administrator will see his Frankensteinian scheme to fruition.”

Tommy smacked his hands together. “Then we have to get it out of here.”

“Yeah, right.” Flip just rolled his eyes. “I can just see the five of us trying to sneak a body out of the Project.”

“Nrrr whrm ghrr frr drr crr!” Gabby gestured wildly with his elbows as he tried to ease the tape off his mouth.