The Death and Life of Superman (49 page)

The reinforced body armor went on first, with its miniature servomotors designed to amplify his strength tenfold. Next, he stepped into the rocket boots, feeling the satisfying click as they locked into place around his feet, ankles, and calves. Then he slipped the power gauntlets on over his hands and secured them at his wrists. The larger of the two, fitted over his left wrist, was equipped to fire steel spikes with fearful accuracy.

Henry took a few tentative steps across the room, hearing the hard pounding sound of metal on concrete.
Well, I won’t have an easy time sneaking up on people, but then I didn’t design this suit with stealth in mind.

He reached down into a newly opened parcel and pulled out a thick red cape made of tightly woven Kevlar. The cape had cost him plenty to have made to order, but he felt it was necessary. He fastened the cape to special mountings set into the collar of his armor, letting it drape back over his shoulders. He then tightened a pentagonal shield of burnished steel to his chest. Machine-tooled into the shield was the familiar stylized letter S.
If I’m going to dedicate myself to keeping the spirit of the real Superman alive, I have to wear his colors and his insignia.
He inspected his reflection in an old mirror that had been propped in the corner and forgotten years ago.
It looks all right. Now all I need is a helmet.

As Henry strode back across the room, a stolen car motored slowly past the back of the building, driven by two members of the Sharks.

“That’s the place, brother.” The Shark behind the wheel sneered. “That’s where that Johnson mother lives.”

“Well, I hope the man’s home.” The other Shark reached into a bag at his feet. “ ’Cause I got a few little presents for ’im.” He pulled out a liter bottle filled with gasoline, a rag wick stuffed down its neck. He lit the wick and hurled his homemade bomb through a basement window. He lit and hurled a second one, then a third, and then he snarled at his driver. “Go!”

As the car streaked away, the incendiaries erupted in the apartment building’s furnace room. On the other side of a cinder block wall from the furnace room, Henry heard the whoosh of the firebombs and swiftly locked his masked metal helmet into place, switching on its emergency air supply. John Henry grabbed up his long-handled sledgehammer, but before he could take another step, the bomb blaze ignited the furnace’s fuel oil reservoir.

In seconds, fire swept up through the old building. As he walked unharmed through the burning basement, John Henry heard a wail come from Rosie Jakowitz’s apartment one floor above. He charged up the smoke-filled stairwell to the first floor, only to find the door to Rosie’s quarters and most of the lobby engulfed in flame. He could still hear Rosie inside, screaming hysterically. She was unable to get out through that door, and he suspected that she’d lost the key to the security bars over her windows.

His tongue tripped a microswitch inside his helmet and his amplified voice boomed above the roar of the fire. “Stand back from the door!”

One mighty swing of his hammer reduced the door to burning embers. He stalked into Rosie’s apartment and swept the tiny woman up in one arm, wrapping his cape around her. Then he flew through the fire, setting her safely down on the sidewalk across the street.

Rosie looked up in wonder at her steel-clad rescuer. She was a self-taught theosophist who spent her nights studying the cabala and her days supporting herself by reading tea leaves and advising people on their horoscopes. She had never foreseen anything like this armor-plated man. “Who are you?”

“You can call me the Man of Steel.” His voice was like thunder.

“But who are you”—she put a hand out to his metal chest plate—“inside?”

“You’re the fortune-teller. You tell me!” He then turned and dashed back into the building to help others escape the blaze. By the time fire fighters arrived on the scene, everyone had been rescued, and the Man of Steel had vanished.

The next morning was dark and murky. Rain poured down on Metropolis, turning the city’s potholes into water hazards and further eroding the streets. Lois had been up half the night, unable to sleep and—worse still—unable to write. Her encounter with the visored Superman had left her so rattled that she hadn’t trusted herself to write it up for the paper.
What do I say? That he’s Superman returned from the dead? Do I really believe that?
She’d finally given up in despair and phoned in a greatly abbreviated eyewitness account of the airplane rescue to the
Planet’
s night news desk.

At seven-thirty in the morning, Lois was sitting in an all-night diner, staring blankly at her fourth cup of coffee, when the cellular phone in her purse rang.

“Hello?”

“Morning, Lois. It’s Jimmy. I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

“No, Jim.” She stifled a yawn. “Actually, I’ve been awake for some time. What’s up?”

“We just got a hot tip on a new Superman sighting—at S.T.A.R. Labs, no less! The caller told me that he saw Superman fly into the main lab complex just a few minutes ago, and then all sorts of alarms started sounding. We haven’t been able to raise anyone at S.T.A.R. for confirmation, but the Chief thought you’d want to know.”

“Thank Perry for me, Jimmy. I’ll call in if I learn anything!”

When Lois arrived at the west side facility of Scientific and Technological Advanced Research Laboratories, the entire complex was still in an uproar. The security guards refused her admittance until she managed to catch the eye of a technician she knew who was willing to vouch for her. Grudgingly passed through, Lois found the main laboratory corridor full of confused people, most of them wearing lab coats. Everyone she buttonholed had seen something, but no one could quite agree on what they’d seen. Eyewitness accounts varied wildly,
and these are experienced scientists and technicians,
thought Lois,
people who are trained to observe.

Slowly, a halfway coherent story began to emerge. Apparently someone presenting himself as Superman had arrived just ahead of the morning support staff and demanded Doomsday’s body, which S.T.A.R. xenobiologists had been attempting—without much success—to study. When technicians attempted to bar him from entering the xenobiology lab, he’d tossed them aside and located the body on his own. He then left with the body, and that was about all that anyone knew.

Most disturbing of all was their description of Superman. No one made any mention of his wearing a visor, but most seemed to agree that this Superman looked hard, as if partially made of metal.

“Metal?” Lois found that puzzling. The only metal she had noticed on the Superman she’d met the night before was in the insignia he wore on his chest. “You mean like a shield or helmet or something?”

Her witness was apologetic. “He moved so quickly, it was hard to tell. But, no. I got the distinct impression that he was wearing some manner of prosthesis.”

Three-quarters of a million miles from Earth, a caped figure landed upon a meteor nearly ten feet across. Slung across one of his shoulders were great lengths of heavy chains and thick cables; slung over his other shoulder was the body of the monster Doomsday. Neither the mass of his burdens nor the vacuum of space seemed to cause the caped figure any trouble.

He tamped Doomsday into the meteor, taking care to bury the creature’s bone spurs as deeply as he could. With the chains and cables, he then secured Doomsday tightly to the rock in a virtual cocoon of metal. Beams of radiant heat shot from his eyes, fusing the bonds into the metallic core of the meteor. And to the creature itself, he attached a sophisticated sensor device designed to transmit a warning signal to its maker, should the bonds be disturbed in any way.

The caped figure then stared off into the vastness of space, calculating a safe trajectory. Once those calculations were complete, he swung about and hurled the meteor bearing the body of Doomsday off into the void.

On a hillside overlooking S.T.A.R. Labs, Lois walked through the drizzling rain, trying to make some sense of what she had learned. At least two men were trying very hard to pass themselves off as Superman; of that she was certain. Both men could fly, both were very strong. Both wore red capes and pentagonal insignia, and both had unruly forelocks. One covered his eyes, the other didn’t; it had been that second man who’d gone into S.T.A.R. and carried off Doomsday.

Part of her hoped and prayed that Clark had somehow come back to life
. . . or maybe he never really died. Maybe it was just that his heart stopped like Jonathan’s had and he’d gone into some sort of coma.
Lois shook her head. “I wish I knew.”

“Pardon me. You are . . . Lois Lane?”

The voice seemed to drift down out of the rain. Lois whirled around to see a tall, broad-shouldered man striding toward her through the foggy mist. His features were obscured by the branches of a tree, but she could see a cloak or a cape furling behind him. His voice, uncertain at first, took on a more confident tone. “Yes, it is you. You’re the one who first called me Superman.”

Lois froze in her tracks. “Superman?”

“Yes, Lois. I am Superman. I’ve come back.” The tall figure stepped clear of the tree and stopped a few paces away from her.

Lois took a step back, her knuckles pressed hard against her teeth. She examined the caped figure from head to toe and stared back up at the horror that was his face. “Oh, my God!”

Only the upper right side of the figure’s head looked human. The rest of his face and the rest of his hair were simply gone, exposing a skull of dull gray metal.

His right eye was the warm, friendly blue that Lois had seen so often in her dreams of Clark. The other eye was mechanical, of metal and glowing crystal, with no more warmth than a camera lens.

He wore what appeared to be Superman’s old familiar costume, or at least part of it. His left leg was a robotic limb of the same cold, hard alloy as his skull. Where his right arm and the right side of his chest should have been there was more metal.

Lois wanted to run, to scream, but found that she could do neither.
This must be a nightmare. I finally fell asleep, and this is what I get for wanting him back so badly.

The tall machine-man gently extended his human arm, palm up. “I know that I appear very different.” He tilted his head forward earnestly. Suddenly, his whole stance and voice were very much like Clark Kent’s. “I realize that I am . . . unpleasant to look at; even ugly. But you must believe me, I
am
Superman.”

Before she could even realize what she was doing, Lois took a step forward.
I’m walking toward him.
The thought came to her slowly, as if from a great distance.
Does this mean I’m waking up
?

The Superman bowed his head, turning the human side of his face toward her. “I am pleased that you didn’t run away. It is very important to me that you not be afraid of me.”

Lois took another step.
What would Sam Lane say if he could see me now? Would the Captain finally be impressed with his firstborn? Would he say that I was taking this like a man, or would he think I was out of my mind?

Whether brave or reckless, Lois came right up to the Superman. Up close, his face was even more terrifying. His robotic arm and leg were at least covered with a smooth metal “skin,” but the machined part of his head was frightfully skeletal,
like some kind of cyborg.

It seemed impossible that this creature could ever have been Clark Kent. Better, she thought, to have believed the visored Superman when he insisted that Clark Kent was simply no more.

And yet, this machine-man—this Cyborg Superman—seemed so happy that she hadn’t run away, so pleased and relieved. In his small fragment of a face was more feeling, more humanity, than the other Superman had allowed to show through his visor.

Lois raised one hand, as if to touch his face, then drew back. “But how? How did you come back?”

“I don’t know. When I woke up, I was already as you see me now.” He gestured to his face. “Somebody, I don’t know who, brought me back and rebuilt the damaged parts of me—made me into this thing. It’s far from perfect, isn’t it?” He looked down at his robot arm. “Still, given the alternative, I suppose that I should be grateful to be back in any form.”

The Cyborg tried to smile, but only for a moment, as if he were aware that it made his face look even more horrible.

Lois felt her heart clench. She raised her hand again, and this time she did touch his face—carefully—along his right cheekbone at the juncture of the skin. “This looks so . . . I mean, does it hurt? It looks like you must be in pain!”

“No. The pain was in the dying.” He tilted his face slightly, leaning very gently into her touch. “The pain is long gone—like a faded memory. Strange as I may look, now I’m alive again.”

“But how? Tell me how I can know it’s really you.”

The Cyborg’s shoulders sagged. “That may be difficult. There’s so much I can’t remember. So much of my past is a mystery to me. I know that I’m Superman. But I’m not sure how I can prove that to you. The things I do recall are fragmentary. I’m afraid that the beating Doomsday gave me caused some memory loss.”

Lois stepped back from him at this, her reporter’s instincts sounding a warning.
Amnesia? That sounds just a little too convenient.
“You say you remember me giving you your name, but that’s public knowledge! Tell me something that isn’t. Tell me something that will prove you’re Superman.”

The Cyborg’s one human eye became distant, his expression very thoughtful. “One of my earliest memories . . . is a farm in Kansas. And some people who were there for me. I am not sure, but I seem to feel that that information was not common knowledge.” He looked at her anxiously. “Is that right?”

Lois hoped she was keeping the shock from her face. “It’s—well, it’s heading in the right direction.” She shook her head.
Why did I say even that much? I mustn’t give anything away until I can be sure! What can I say now?

She hesitated, trying to think of a safe question. The Cyborg clenched his metal fist in very human-looking frustration. “It’s so agonizing, not to remember—or even worse, to remember only bits and pieces. I’m trying to remember, but so much eludes me.”