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Lois Lane walked into Alex's office without an appointment. This was nothing new—Lois had a healthy contempt for the word 'no' and an adamantine focus that she mostly used in the service of truth and justice (Alex had once had an honest-to-god nightmare about her turning to evil and his failing to notice until it was too late)—but usually she demanded his backing for some project or investigation, and a couple of times she'd barged in just long enough to get a single quote. (Why didn't you just call? he'd shouted after her. 'Your secretary screens your calls, and I wanted to see your face when you answered.'
Lois would probably never completely trust him. He'd given her his direct phone number anyway.)
"Good, you're not busy," she declared, striding up to his desk. He held up one bemused hand because he was very obviously talking on the phone, and he actually did need to hear what his Japanese head of distribution was saying. Lois arched an eyebrow and slapped a bulging manila folder on top of the reports he'd been reading. Alex sighed.
"Sumanai, Nakata-san…iie, iie. Ima wa jyotto…hai. Ashita de tsudzutte kudasai. Hai, douzo. Shitsure." He set the phone down and arched his eyebrows right back. "I hope this is important, Miss Lane. Getting through pleasantries with that man is an exhausting process."
"No wonder, if you insist on using his language. Don't tell me he doesn't speak English."
"No, he does, but—well, it's worse than my Japanese, and if he doesn't understand me he won't admit it, just agree with everything. This way, the worst that can happen is I'm inadvertently offensive. My point being, I was in fact busy."
"You weren't in your lab. That's the only work you take really seriously. Find someone else to run this mess before you forget who you are."
Alex pressed his lips together. Lois was unpleasantly incisive sometimes. "If you interrupted me to tell me business isn't my business—"
"Don't be stupid. Now, who do we know who's indestructible and broke out of prison two months ago?"
Alex sat up sharply, heart thudding. Why had she wasted time bickering? "He's been spotted?"
"No." His heart rate dropped, simultaneously relieved and cheated. "But I think I've tracked him down," continued Lois.
"You've found his base?" Before me? Alex muffled his wounded pride as best he could, and then found he'd wasted the effort when the reporter shook her head impatiently.
"No, I still think it's somewhere North, but I haven't gotten any further on that front. No, I tracked him back."
Alex drummed his fingers on the paperwork he should be doing, fading adrenaline sparking in his blood. "Is there a reason we should care how he got here from Krypton?"
"You are batting zero today, Luthor. I've paid close attention to this man. He's American."
Alex raised a mild eyebrow at her. "Did you know there's a betting pool running on whether you'll die or be committed first?"
"Luthor." Lois Lane's large dark eyes glared at him, and Alex clicked his jaw apologetically. "You're intelligent enough to see it, if you'd just let yourself consider the facts. He's been hoodwinking us for years. All that 'by Rao' and 'the ways of Krypton,' but he does it backwards. The Kryptonian stuff is all top-level. If you pay attention, all his basic assumptions are the same as ours—well, besides the obvious racial prejudices—and he's demonstrated familiarity with figures ranging from Benedict Arnold to Michael Jackson.
"Have you ever seen him stumble over a cultural difference, or have to convert something from alien units or terminology?"
"He once gave me a five-minute lecture on why any machine containing a wire solenoid would be considered hopelessly backward on his homeworld." Alex felt compelled to be dry, but that didn't mean he was dismissing her point. Because that was the best example he could come up with of Ultraman acting like he came from a really alien background; his scornful irritation had seemed entirely sincere.
Lois blew her hair out of her eyes. "He swings that cape around and throws out his catchphrases, but it's like…have you ever been to Boston around Saint Patrick's Day? It's emigrant chic. Krypton was destroyed decades ago. Ultraman grew up on Earth."
If she was right, this was…well, it didn't have any immediate combat applications, but if she was right this could be huge. Fighting someone with that kind of power required you to think as many steps ahead as possible, because if you had to stop to plan in the middle of open conflict, he'd already melted your face off and ripped out your spine. If Lois had figured out part of the key to Ultraman's thought processes…. "And you think you know where?"
"Here," she said. Flipped open the manila folder and withdrew an actual, physical newspaper clipping. Freak Accident Kills Seven, Maims Four! "Smallville, Kansas. Population 7,000. They had an unexpected meteor shower thirty-three years ago, several deaths, and are the source of some thirty percent of all Kryptonite known to be in circulation on Earth."
"I assume you have more than this." He tried not to sound supercilious. Obviously this wasn't all; Lois wasn't an idiot. And the folder was very full.
"There were a few sites that got hit around that time—some kind of plume of stone must have blown our way after the planet cracked, I don't know, I'm not an astronomer. I pulled records from all of them, even the site in Nepal, but this is where I struck gold."
She flipped several more clippings and photocopies of clippings aside—this was real paranoia, when you wouldn't keep electronic records of your research—and pulled out what was by its format some kind of formal report. Police? "Twenty-five years ago, a 911 call brought first responders to a farm in the Smallville area, where they found the middle-aged homeowners dead in their kitchen, which also notably contained an overturned table and a large hole in one wall.
"Hiding in the pantry they discovered the couple's eight-year-old son, who reported that a 'big hairy monster' had smashed its way in and killed his parents. No other sightings of the creature or tracks were ever reported, but the sheriff closed the case as a mutant attack within a week. Apparently they have a fairly high monster population in that part of Kansas."
"Parents," Alex repeated, focusing on the salient point.
"Adoptive. The records there are rather irregular, too; he seems to have been a foundling." Lois continued spreading out documentation of her research without giving him the chance to read it, simply to prove it existed.
"The mother had some extended family, but they didn't want him, so he wound up in the system. He broke a foster-father's arm when he was nine and was moved to a group home, where he seems to have become socially dominant despite being one of the youngest children there. There was a suspicious death in the first year, though maybe the other boy really just drowned. He's listed as a runaway at the age of thirteen. After that point, all record of Clark Kent ends."
"You think he murdered his parents?"
"I think he threw the table at his parents, breaking his father's skull and crushing his mother's larynx. I think he then came up with a story, punched a hole in the wall, and called 911."
"At the age of eight?"
"A big hairy monster is about in line with the kinds of things kids blame stuff on." She sighed. "I don't think it was murder, really. Probably just a tantrum, but he was too powerful to be able to afford the kind of acting-out kids usually do around that age. Whatever was usual for Krypton, anyway.
"Look, I read over the forensic report on the Kent home, and the hole in the wall was made from the inside, after the couple was killed. No one considered that terribly suspicious at the time because many monsters can use doors, so it could have snuck in and then made a violent exit, and the boy wasn't specific about when the smashing started. I don't know if he felt guilty then, or if he feels guilty now—I've never been completely sure just how much of a psychopath Ultraman really is. Alien, after all. But it all fits."
Alex nodded slowly. "Lois, you're a genius. I have told you that before, right?"
"No. I've got some other stuff that might be connected to him—mostly records of burglary and assault. There was a guy bullets bounced off of at a series of bank heists starting in Ohio, when Kent would have been seventeen. It links up pretty well with the assassination jobs he started picking up a few years later under the Ultraman name; we already knew about those."
Alex nodded. Broken necks and that distinctive heat-vision pair of cauterized holes through the face, mostly. One instance of a fist right through the chest cavity.
"Then he goes back to Kansas." The latest piece of paper was the first unofficial one; it seemed to be a transcript typed up in Lois' personal shorthand. Alex was sure he could decipher it if he had to, but courtesy had prevented him from ever trying. She tapped the page with one ragged nail.
"The people from the next farm over, the Rosses, they bought a lot of the Kent land, and when I interviewed them they said they'd seen Clark once since 'the tragedy.' Apparently he came back to visit about ten years ago; they said he was acting pretty strange and basically demanded that they let him go over the property for some things of his that got left behind. They felt sorry for him, of course, and wished him the best of luck. Apparently he dug up most of one of their fields looking for an old root cellar, but they're not sure what he took from it. He set fire to the abandoned Kent house and hasn't been seen since."
Alex shook his head in amazement. It did all fit. "And a year later, Ultraman came on the scene as the Last Son of Krypton."
He'd taken control of Metropolis quite handily the first time, and seemed poised to conquer outward from there—only a lucky coincidence of the precise shade of red laser Alex had happened to use against him turning out to be the exact wavelength that weakened Ultraman's powers, after inducing prolonged artificial darkness had turned out to be useless because his solar storage capacity was far higher than anticipated, had taken him down.
A result of this defeat had been a fixation on Metropolis—almost all Ultraman's schemes since then had centered or at least started there, and when they didn't it was usually a sign he was working with someone else. This was equal parts frustration and relief, since Alex hated seeing his hometown in the crossfire of a madman's plans all the time, but on the other hand it would have been so much harder to defeat the man if he'd taken full advantage of his personal mobility to conduct operations somewhere new every time, and Alex had needed to track him to Kazakhstan or wherever.
…at some point, the damn alien had become his personal business.
Good thing so many other people were willing to help with that, because Mr. El (as he was called on most paperwork, to his annoyance, but Alex was sure if they started filing him under 'Kent' he'd have conniptions) broke out of prison so often that dealing with him took a lot of time away from running his actual business, and Wayne kept muscling in on major development contracts if he let his guard down. Luckily Luthorcorp played the commercial sector much better; Alex had a feel for what people needed and wanted that Wayne just couldn't match.
Also, a surprising number of the things he developed to combat Ultraman turned out to have commercial applications. (Bright side of fighting unstoppable alien menace: excellent justification to pull all-nighters and necessity as mother of invention.)
Alex rubbed at his face. Ultraman had run away from foster care at thirteen. That wasn't power and fury or alien malice; that was something he understood. He caught Lois' eye. "Do you ever pity him?"
"No," she said, flat and hard. "He's made his choices. He threw away all his opportunities, including the ones that only he had, to be just another bully. Why would I feel sorry for that?"
Alex steepled his hands on the desk. "You're lying."
Lois deflated slightly. "Maybe a little," she admitted. "Being the only survivor of your species is pretty wretched, and he doesn't seem to have had a nice life. But he has made his choices. What he did when he was eight was a mistake, but everything since then is character. And I'm not going to excuse him by blaming the system, because that's a disservice to everyone who comes out of foster care without turning into a self-involved murderer, powers or not."
A photocopy of a photograph was teased from the bottom of the stack—some sort of community picnic in the background; foreground middle-aged man, middle-aged woman, dark-haired, blue-eyed little boy, smiling cozeningly up at the indulgent look on the woman's face and the plate of cookies she was holding just out of his reach. "I got this from the Rosses. I think it's the only picture of that family that still exists."
She looked up at him. "If a nice couple had adopted you when you were a kid, after your father died, and you'd accidentally blown up the house doing science a few years later and killed them, what would you have done?"
Alex stared at her.
"You'd have spent the rest of your life trying to make up for it," Lois answered herself. "He didn't. That's all I need to know."