It's Real

"I am called C. W. Saturn," the white figure said to Lex Luthor.  "Do you know of me?"

"I have heard of C. W. Saturn," Luthor said, "and I have also heard of the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, but I don't generally see people dressed up as them making a scene on a public street.  Aren't you afraid you're going to get arrested?  I certainly am."

The demon, or apparition, or whatever it was, stood nearly on Luthor's toes, looking down into his face.  Even its eyes were white.  It had a big white widow's peak and hair that was swept back, a white goatee, and white flowing clothes over bleachy skin.  Luthor scrunched up his eyes in order to make out the thing's features, but the face was so ghostly it seemed to glow.

"No one among the passersby sees me, Lex Luthor," the thing that called itself C. W. Saturn said in an eerie whisper, "only you.  The only eccentric display they can witness is your own.  You might wish, therefore, to converse in a place hidden from the senses of the residents of this place."

It appeared to be true.  People certainly were walking by as though there was nothing untoward happening in their icy way.  Luthor thought of asking the woman making her way along the sidewalk if she saw a tall white-shrouded person with a widow's peak standing there, but he thought better of it.  What if she saw nothing there?  Worse, what if she recognized Luthor?  It was fairly clear that the people on the street saw nothing.  Then again, these people were Metropolitans.

"Please walk this way," Luthor suggested.  Luthor led his demon to a small unused park a block away that was once a school yard.  Now it was furnished only with broken bottles, pet droppings and structures suggesting the stationary parts of ancient playground equipment.  Luthor and his spectre stood behind the ruins of a wooden dome-shaped jungle jim.

"So," Luthor said, "now prove it."  The big white thing pointed at the ground around Luthor, and as its white finger moved, a circle of flames surrounded the two where the finger pointed out the path of combustion.

"Oh!" Luthor started as though with surprise, lost his balance and fell onto the demon, who caught him.

"Very good, Lex Luthor," the apparition said.  "Evidently you do know of me."

"Just a prudent safeguard," Luthor said, self-satisfied as all hell, as he untangled himself from the demon's grip.

"Prudent indeed," said the hollow voice, "so that I could have no claim to your immortal soul, having laid hands upon you before we transacted any agreement."

"I did a lot of reading on you before my last prison break, Saturn.  I figured out that part of the Dracula legend traces back to you.  As with the fictional vampire, a person must enter your power willingly, of his own accord, before you can claim his soul.  You just put your hands on me before I made such an agreement, and now you forfeit any claim to me you may have had as a result of any agreement we make.  Am I right?"

"Correct, although we still hold out hopes that you will join us when your time comes, Lex Luthor."  There followed a horrible cavernous laugh that would have been more than worthy of Lamont Cranston.  "May we talk business now, Lex Luthor?  It is not yours, but the soul of another that I require."

Luthor wanted further proof of this entity's identity before the two could talk of business.  Luthor was very prudent indeed, for there were things Luthor wanted that other men could not possibly have.  He was as prudent as he was bold.

There was a time, years ago, when all young Lex Luthor wanted was to be President of the United States.  This seemed an admirable enough route to immortality.  For a little while in Smallville, everything Lex did - getting good grades in school, writing letters to the Smallville Times-Reader which were usually published, reading books by Arthur Schlesinger and Irving Wallace - was directed toward the end of someday being President.  So the year of the Presidential primaries, when the senator from that state to the north came campaigning through Smallville, Lex decided to meet him.

The senator's idea, in this campaign, was to be identified with youth, and it seemed to the senator that there was nothing better for him to be seen with than a precocious teenager.  The senator sent an advance man to Smallville to find him some precocious teenagers with whom to be seen.

"The commercial for the campaign will be filmed this coming Friday afternoon," the advance man told Miss Roberts's eighth-grade social studies class, "and your principal has been gracious enough to allow us to use this room after school.  The senator will be coming right here, right where I'm standing."

The class suffered two or three seconds of undirected excitement before the advance man continued.

"So what I would like to do here today, with your teacher's permission, is pick four students from among you, and bring those four back here Friday at three-fifteen for a conversation on film with the senator."

"Oh, can I do it?" somebody said.  "Me, me, me," somebody else said.  "You want volunteers?  I'll volunteer." There was no shortage of enthusiasm for the idea.

"What I'd like to do," the advance man continued, calming the group, "is find the four most informed students in the class and have them come.  My idea is simply to have each of you take out a pen and a piece of paper" - Lex's desk was the first one to have the necessary equipment - "and write down the three questions you would most like to ask the senator.  Put your name at the top of the page and list three questions.  I'll look over the lot of them and I'll come back tomorrow - tomorrow's Thursday, right? - I'll come back tomorrow and let you know which four of you will get to be on television with the next President.  Fair enough?"

Lex thought up the three most pointed and relevant questions he could devise: Do you believe that we have a "missile gap" with the Russians?  Do you think the owner of a restaurant should be required to serve a person he does not want to serve, if that person can afford to eat at the restaurant?  Would you order American agents to try to overthrow the government of another country if the other country's government did not agree with us?  If those three questions, well-rounded and issue-oriented, did not impress the advance man, Lex thought, then the guy didn't know his job.

The advance man happened to know his job very well, and he was very impressed with Lex's three questions.  If Lex had been an adult the advance man might have asked him to lend his talents to the campaign.  Nevertheless, the four students he chose to meet with the senator were Lana Lang, Pete Ross, Brad Herman and Clark Kent.  Lex had no idea why.

"Hey, Clark!" Lex called through the hallway during the four minutes between his social studies and physical education classes on Thursday.  "Clark, wait up."

"What's up, Lex?"

"Lissen, Clark, lemme see your three questions, willya?"

"For the senator?  Sure, Lex, they're in here somewhere." Clark held his pile of books in his left arm and riffled among the papers hanging out the ends with his right hand.  Clark always seemed to carry more books than anyone else did.  Lex ignored the fact that when Clark pulled the folded page with the questions out of his history book, he splattered his armload all over the hallway.

As Clark regrouped his books, Lex read the questions: What do you think of conservation?  Do you think the Russians should get out of Cuba?  Of all the laws you ever wrote, which one makes you the proudest?

Bland, Lex thought.  Evidently Clark watched the news sometimes, maybe he even read a newspaper once in a while.  But the questions were boring as cornflakes, just like Clark.

Lex simmered a bit as he walked with Clark to the gymnasium.  He did not understand that all the senator wanted was to be seen with a bunch of wholesome-looking young people who would look at him admiringly while he gave them generalized answers to nonspecific questions.  All Lex understood was that this was unfair, just as many things turned out to be unfair when you played by rules that other people laid down for you.  Of course the senator thought the Russians should get out of Cuba, Lex thought.  Everybody except the Russians thought the Russians should get out of Cuba.  What kind of a dumb question was that?

In the wrestling room, where the gym class went that day, Lex Luthor paired off with Clark Kent and played by the rules, even though he threw Clark around the room a little.  Having demonstrated to Clark that even wholesome-looking and bland kids like Clark sometimes get knocked on when they play by the rules, Lex was able to ask his friend a civil question.

"You're an old farm boy," Lex said.  "How much do you know about cows?"

"Cows?  They give milk."

"Oh, that's where it comes from.  I always thought it grew in those little wax cartons.  I mean what they're like - the cows.  Like, for example, how do you keep them from kicking you when you milk them?"

Evidently, Lex learned, the productivity of a cow depended on its sedentary nature.  The less a cow moved or became excited, the more of its energy it was able to use in the production of milk.  It was very easy to excite a cow.

His plan was simple.  That afternoon after school, Lex would rig up a few little remote-control milking gadgets out of party balloons and wire mesh which he would control electronically by altering the wiring in his father's remote television controls.  That was the easy part.  Tomorrow, shortly before dawn, he would sneak into the Herman barn, which was the closest cow stall to the school, and pick out two hefty cows to play with.  Lex would wear Indian war paint and dance around in the barn waving two flashlights.  That should scare most of the milk out of them.  Their innards would be all tensed up and they'd have constipation of the milk glands.  When old Leon Herman came to milk them that morning, they'd be all stopped up and save most of their milk for that afternoon.  Then in the afternoon, when they were all relaxed and bloated, Lex would gently walk them from their grazing field through the fence to the school.  He could get them there without anyone seeing him if he did it as soon as the first classes let out for the day; all the spare teachers would be on the far side of the building making sure everyone in the first and second grades got into their buses all right.  Lex would slip his little balloon devices onto the cows' udders and get the cows into Miss Roberts's classroom before the goody-goody kids got there with the senator.

Then, hiding in a supply closet, Lex would press his remote control device, pointing it through the closet door at the cows just when the advance man was likely to be the most embarrassed in front of his boss.  The signal to the balloons would squeeze the cows' nipples and spurt unpasteurized milk all over the classroom floor.  If Lex was lucky and the camera technicians had set up their equipment before the senator or anyone else got there, Lex could work it so the senator's fiasco was on film.

That morning, just before dawn, a boy in Indian war paint, carrying a flashlight in either hand and a handful of wired party balloons in his pocket, stole into the Hermans' cow barn.  He slipped through the barn door, picked out a corpulent pair of sleeping cows, and shone a flashlight into both of their faces.

Just then, from the vicinity of the barn entrance which Lex's back was now facing, came an awful crash of metal and rock and clanging and a human voice howling in pain.  All the cows woke up and mooed for all they were worth.  Through the gauzed-over window at the rear of the barn Lex saw a hallway light in the big Herman farmhouse flash on.  He spun to face the barn door.

"I wasn't doing anything, I swear!" Lex edged closer to the figure near the door, scared witless.

"Lex?" the boy's voice said.

"No, it's not Lex.  Lex who?  It's just - who is that?  Is that you?"

"Yeah.  Sorry, Lex," Clark Kent said, scratching his feet on the ground like an embarrassed bull.

"You turd, Kent.  What's with you?"

"I just saw you walking around.  I got up early, see?  And I figured you had something neat to do.  You're always doing all this neat stuff.  I had to walk Chief Parker's dog because the chief had to go to a convention, see?  So when I brought the dog back and saw you in war paint, I followed you here because I thought maybe you were going to do some neat stuff.  What kind of neat stuff you think you're going to do?"

"A rain dance, you dunce."

"Can I watch?  You know about - "

"Oh!" Seeing the porch light come on and the door start to open, Lex shoved Clark aside and ran out of the barn.

"Hey," Clark called after him with as vacant a voice as he could find, "you dropped a balloon."

Mr. Herman appeared at the barn door, however, as quickly as Lex had disappeared through it, and he wanted an explanation for Clark's presence.

"I was just walking around," Clark said, "and I really like barns.  Dad doesn't have a barn anymore and I just came around because I like barns.  Isn't that all right?"

It was not all right, as it happened, since none of the cows yielded up very much milk that morning.  Meanwhile, Lex waited through his classes for most of that Friday for someone to drag him into the office of the principal or the police chief or the mayor or the senator - that would be nice - or someone in authority, so that Lex could be chewed out for his aborted plan.  Lex did not see Clark until fifth period and Miss Roberts's social studies class.  The room was cluttered with film equipment.

Clark was downcast.  Lex sniffed a hello and got a less articulate response from Clark.  Then Miss Roberts said, simply, "We are going to need another person for the group who is to meet with the senator this afternoon.  Jacqui, will you be free after school today?"

"Boy, I sure will!" the girl in the fourth row said.  "When?  Where?  How?"

Immediately, Lex caught on.  Was Clark Kent a total moron, he wondered, or some self-sacrificing nincompoop?  It did not matter.  He had not even mentioned that Lex was in the barn that night.  He took the entire blame for scaring the cows milkless.  He had probably even pocketed the wired balloon that Lex had left behind, so that suspicion would not fall on the young inveterate tinkerer.  Clark's inadequate explanation for his presence in the barn - in light of his stature as a model bland and wholesome-looking young midwesterner - had brought no more punishment than his exclusion from the great man's acquaintance.  What a guy - the jerk!

On the way out of that class was where and when Lex said to Clark, "I might've forgot to tell you this before, Kent, but don't trust me."

"Wasn't planning on it," Clark said.

"Am I supposed to trust you?" Lex Luthor asked the creature who claimed to be the arch-devil of cross-cultural fable.

"Certainly not," the apparition answered.  "Simply adhere to your half of any bargain we strike, if we can come to an agreement on terms."

"Ah, yes.  The bargain.  I hope it doesn't involve my having to believe that you are who you say you are."

"That is not necessary either.  I am aware that you are a cautious enough man to feel comfortable simply adhering to the rules we set.  First tell me - assuming I am who I say I am - what would you like from me?"

"That's simple.  I want you to teach me enough about the physical laws of your realm - the Netherworld or whatever they're calling it these days - to construct a cheap, practical source of energy from the interface of the two worlds."

"You want to run turbines and generators by harnessing the clash between Earth and Hell, the same way a dam harnesses the clash between rivers or a windmill harnesses the clash between land and sky - "

"Or the way a nuclear reactor directs the energy from the conflict between Order and Chaos."

"That is simple enough.  In return, I would like you to procure for me a lock of Superman's hair.  Do we have a bargain?"