Christmas Special 2015

by KING FELIX

Surely the only 'Superman versus...' story you'll need for at least the next twelve months?

Christmas Special 2015.

'I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament... a few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist - and yet 'he' was the most important reality in the world'.

-Karen Armstrong, 'A History of God'.

'Why are we talking about this –God and Heaven and everything? It's Christmas!"

-Jackie, Roseanne Christmas Special 1992.

The annual game of Trivial Pursuit lasted for hours, as it always did. Full of Christmas lunch, MK lay in Jon's arms, where she could've easily peeked at the answers if she'd wanted. Except for trust, honour, fun.

"In the nineteen eighties series of National Lampoon movies, what was the name of the hapless holiday maker played by Chevy Chase?"

"How on Earth is anybody supposed to retain information like that?", she complained.

"I know it", Jon was apologetic, "the last one was only about five years ago".

"Are you sure you don't know it just because we had the question in last year's game?"

"Nah. We didn't. But I mean, I'm not a particular fan of the film. It's just a memorable name".

He could sense the deeply rippled clenching of her brow; it was, after all, such a critical part of the game. Each with wedges full. Each just a space removed from the golden spot.

MK thought fiercely on the all-but-impossible question, or about nothing, falling back on the sound of BBC 2's seventies rock retrospective. The songs had nothing whatsoever to do with Christmas, and just for an hour or two, they hit the spot perfectly. Dreaming, bumping limbs, they reposed in the glow of the single studiolight, tranquil to ends of the earth. Now and then she'd take a swig of alcoholic ginger in that gulpy, hesitant way of hers. And how he loved that; it being anything-goes Christmas Day, it wasn't as if she even had to worry about getting drunk. As for himself, he' d lost count of how many units of Old Bizarro he'd downed. It was between two and three bottles, under normal circumstances, more than enough to get a head-long buzz. But protracted over the course of a day? He merely felt love.

MK caressed her bottle, but for a moment didn't drink, merely watching Phil Lynott crooning Whiskey in the Jar-o with disproportionate seriousness from his seventies trappings. It was all in the bag, anyway. Before evening came, she would ease into that sexy-inadequate dancing of hers. And wouldn't he feel like -not the luckiest man in the world, exactly. The luckiest version of himself.

"You know I'm not going to concede", she stated.

Jon pulled his mouth down. "I don't expect you to want to concede. But when I win, I'll be the most sainted benevolent dictator".

"Is it a common-sounding name?"

"Fairly common for a yank, I'd say. In the nineteen thirties".

"If you smell burning, it's the cogs in my brain jamming".

Actually, though her hair hadn't been shampooed for two days now, the only thing he could smell was follicles as naturally clean as tree bark, as clean as mountain rock. Still he roused himself clear.

"Are we gonna go for a walk? Might help clear our bellies for bed".

"Any excuse to wear your new jumper".

"Correct".

As MK went about finishing her beer, tying back her hair, Jon stood tall and stared with disgust at the TV. When she returned from the lav, he immediately complained, "I wish we had Sky".

"So do I. So does everyone. But we're only noticing now because we've got time on our hands. Normally we'd be too busy to notice how rubbish regular TV is".

He delicately eased the winter coat over her shoulders, smoothed it out playfully. "Don't give me that. I notice it all the time. BBC's meant to be about giving value for money to everyone, right? They should forget making all these serious dramas that're like overblown soap operas and buy up bandwidth for more channels, and then... what's the two things that people love most? Movies and sport. So dedicate to them".

"We're from the eighties. We should be grateful even for Channel 5. You ungrateful boy". His girlfriend put her hands on her hips. "In any case, TV? It's Christmas Day. We should be all about going outside and taking in the big white landscape, all artistic and nothing moving. We're like characters in a Christmas card".

Spoken like a true country girl, a girl who'd lived in the same village her whole life and miraculously didn't hate it. As she locked their rickety front door, Jon figured he loved the place simply because she did. Even in midst of the winter holidays, Hipton Mayle's sprawling farms still carried the smell of brewing molasses, only now mixed with frost-gnawed trees and the accumulated odour of sixty-odd houses all cooking Christmas roasts.

"Let's head out across the fields".

"OK", he said mildly. She could equally have said, 'Let's climb on the church roof' and he'd be equally willing.

As a universal coating for the whole country, the frost wouldn't shift for days to come. The crisp atmos allowed it to settle like graphite. As they edged through the nearest hedge, over the ditch-plank fortification, it was impossible not to peer down at the brown recesses, marveling at how the ice had shriveled into just two or three thick plates. Like fire-alarm pressure points. Like glass architecture in a richo's skyscraper. And onwards across the deceptively blank and uniform fields. Deceptively blank because there was still quite a bit to see. Lonely trees did their best to reach for the sky, always, never getting gnarled and bitter the way regular road-side elms did. Crows and robins alike, landing on the curved branches, were at a total loss on how to spend their Christmas Day.

They arrived at the narrow stile twenty acres across from their house. This was MK's arch-enemy of old because, four or five years ago, on a similarly icy day, her legs had slipped either side of the plank, down into the ditch, her coccyx hitting the wood in a deliriously violent impact. Jon had been horrified. He'd always believed, and been given to dwell on it by Derek and Clive, that a girl getting hit between the legs was at least as agonised as a man being hit in the scrotum. Indeed, MK had been open-mouthed in pain. And then open-mouthed in shock. And then in the end, she'd simply nodded, 'I'm alright'.

That night, under clinical examination, they'd found almost no bruising and everything working as well as ever. Presumably no internal damage. MK had been curiously unconcerned anyway -plenty of the girls Jon had been with had claimed not to want children. Statistically, they were lying. With MK, however, there was a sense that she really didn't want children, that she was content with just the two of them until the end of time.

He grasped her. She stared briefly at the unfeasibly tall spire of Etebury Church some three miles away, then at the skeletal mass of Malmsville Cathedral four miles in the opposite direction. It was somehow reassuring that, in such a peaceful-apocalyptic landscape, the nearest signs of civilisation were not mere houses but symbols of religion. Call it hope in the afterlife. Call it something bigger than rank society.

"Do you really want Sky?", she wondered.

"Well", he said thoughtfully. "Ollie Olsen at work told me they show League One games as a matter of course. Imagine being able to watch Unity City every weekend without having to shell out the six quid to go to the County Ground? The money I save, I could place bets at Ladbrokes. Might even pay for itself".

In his arms, MK neither properly tensed or properly relaxed. "I think I know how we can get the money, at least for a year or two".

"Get extra money? In this life?", he grinned.

"Remember how I told you my first boyfriend was Brinsley Canterbridge?"

It was a minor legend that, some time before meeting Jon, MK had spent a year of her sixth-form life dating Brinsley Canterbridge, then a fledgling RSC ham, nowadays the highest-paid English actor in Hollywood.

"There's something I never told you. But it's nothing bad".

Jon shrugged to show he trusted her, that their relationship was -steel. Was crazy religion.

"What aftershave did he wear, Canterbridge?"

"Hugo Boss".

"I kinda like Hugo Boss". Another shrug. "Glad I'm a CK man, though".

Explaining, "Brinsley wrote short stories. In long-hand, in A4 exercise books, which he gave to me to read. After we split up, I kept them, but I never told you about them for fear you'd be jealous. I was so worried you might be jealous that one day, about '90 or '91, I brought them out here and buried them under a tree. I didn't feel sentimental for them, it just felt like bad form to throw them away. Now I wonder. If we dig them up, surely they'd be worth something? If we took them to an auction house, or put an ad in Variety?"

Said Jon, staring at the fortyish elm trees dotted over the half-farm, half-prairie. "Are they buried far from here?"

"Two or three fields across the way. I chose somewhere secluded because you know how secretive I am". She swiveled in his arms, the friction pleasingly fierce. As her breath glided in deeply thin clouds, "But are you saying you wouldn't have been intimidated? Even at the start of our relationship?"

Jon needed only a second or two to think. "Maybe a bit".

"I feel guilty just keeping the tiniest secret from you", MK looked at the glittering earth, then into his eyes. "It's weird the two of us being even the tiniest bit conflicted".

"Róisín Murphy", reflected Jon.

"Who's that?"

Affably, "When we went to Sheffield for your birthday last year, in that swanky bar. A girl who looked like Róisín Murphy, the lead singer of Moloko. While you went to the lav, she started sexy-pouting at me. I felt guilty enough, just for that".

"Are you sure she wasn't pouting at the guy behind you?", joked MK.

"Bah. Look at this handsomeness", he inverted the joke. "Were Canterbridge's stories any good?"

"Technically they were good. But the plots were pretty unambitious. Also, he was too into dialogue with not enough prose to set it up. I guess that was a side-effect of him being a stage actor".

"Bloody dialogue", Jon's eyes twinkled.

Hypnotic stillness, the Christmassy absence of even distant road sounds; it brought them together in a crazy, mescalined pact. They stared into each other's eyes. The sky threatened heavy snow while the lovers stood transcendent. Jealousy as if. They stalked out with surprising ease over the waxy, frozen corn husks, all of them squeaking or crunching alternately. Other fields were a lot less groomed, really just overgrown grasslands kept in check by creeping, long-range cattle. Where the segments nearer the farm compounds of Hipton Mayle were interconnected by wide gaps big enough for tractors, now there were only mildewed gates, the most rickety old things Jon had ever seen.

You could say the horizon was not so imposing, at least for being more-or-less flat. But still there were enough troughs and recesses to hide anything. Reconnoitering foxes could come from miles, always finding places to duck down and commando.

MK told how she'd buried the books beneath a thick tree at the nearest edge of a furrow field, three quarters between some electricity pylons and the Bockrenbow Ridge. It was hard to explain exactly where they were, but she was confident the site could be reacquired. They headed deeper into the imperious steel of the horizon and the mysterious fields. The silence was profound, still more the conspiracy of low sunlight on brittle grass and reinforced by day after day of frost. While he hung back to fart, Jon appreciated the electrified-luminosity of the chill atmos above Urdsley Top, some ten miles and a dozen valleys away. He appreciated the matte silver haze around the gnarled tree branches. The brightness caused him to think on the luxurious, hologram-cover notepad MK had gifted him to use as his factory floor logbook. It sent him into daydreams about the way so many toys from his childhood had used hologram stickers and chrome-oil paint in order to draw the kids in. Visionaries. The Supernaturals. Kids like shiney things. But then again, kids are easily pleased with any franchise action figure. It seemed like overkill to actually try to make something that was aesthetically striking, unless the designers secretly had in mind some Doors of Perception-style heliotropic transcendence.

He looked a little way back towards Hipton Mayle. No sooner did he see the flash than he gasped massively. It had been a lurid, unearthly beam of red. At odds with the white-silver landscape? 'Unearthly' was an understatement.

"What was that?"

"What was what?", MK casually turned.

"There was -like a line of red light in the sky. Like a lightsaber".

From the start, MK was fascinated. He pointed as best he could. The line of red flashed upwards into the sky once again, slightly more blurred than when Jon alone had seen it, still eerie, unnerving. The source was less than a field away.

Possibilities on what it could be were few and far between, and equally unlikely. It could be someone who'd fallen in a ditch and was desperately firing a flare gun. Except the beam of light was, as Jon's first impression, constant like a lightsaber. It could, then, be someone with an unnaturally powerful laser pointer. This, too, seemed unlikely.

The best explanation MK could find, as they hesitantly spread out in the approximate direction, "It's probably a marker buoy accidentally dropped by a plane on the way to Kimble Airfield, or the landing strip at Harleton Park".

Jon pulled an enthralled face. Already quite a Christmas Day.

They arrived at a tight, asymmetrical field edge, always waiting for the flash of red to make them jump once more.

What they saw, in the tangled, frosty ditch: something a lot like the re-entry sphere of Vostok One, only arrayed with dozens of finger-size bumpers and around fifty times too small to possibly contain an astronaut. Plenty of the bumpers were bent at steep angles, and the surface was fearfully discoloured with burns. The uppermost section held a particularly deep, dramatic dent.

The couple drew in, hands on hips, ankles on high alert. Sheerest sixth sense warned that something was about to happen. The red light, the emergence of War of the Worlds. Sure enough, a fierce energy played along the pitted metal surface, between the disarrayed spikes, fizzing red, fizzing oxidized purple. They tried to understand.

Suggested MK, "It's got to be some kind of bomb, some kind of chemical weapon thing to poison Malmsville Water Tower. From Russia or Saddam".

Possibly. Jon looked keenly, and considered the sheer, animalistic frenzy of the energy contained within the capsule. He felt sure it was something living, but if so, the nearest sane suggestion was that it must be a tiny alien with a ray gun. If only clichés exist like hell.

For a time, silence ruled. Something impelled them to approach further, fearlessly, almost within arm's length. They watched in fascination as two red dots appeared at the uppermost point of the sphere. From the pits of their bellies, this was the most unnerving sight yet. Just two red dots ...less than two inches apart. They burned, they threatened to rend the metal before stopping dead.

In the winter silence, Jon and MK listened obsessively. They heard the faintest sound from inside the capsule -and were horrified.

"Jon? Do you...?"

Insanely, it was indeed the sound of a baby crying. Numbly, still at speed, Jon grasped two of the bumpers and braced himself. He nodded at some of the bumpers on the other side and motioned for MK to take up a clockwise position, "There's a seam. We've got to see if it'll twist open!"

Gulping, MK started to strain. There was no dramatic hiss of decompression, only a deeply-wrought vibration as the upper hemisphere started to unscrew. Surprisingly, they found the top-half wasn't particularly heavy, a variant of steel or galvanized composite, maybe. Similarly, in no time whatsoever, the top-plate was freed and they could thoughtlessly slide it away into the ditch.

A naked, humanoid baby was revealed. Immediately, he wailed. Accompanying the cry -by default and the place of tears- searing red heat beams fired from his eyes.

Super-tentative, or maybe with the burn-out-determination of any old-style factory worker, Jon felt around at the baby's shoulder. It was clear. On some deeply subtle, deeply animalistic level, the creature only needed comforting.

Some time was spent gently-gently encompassing the corpulent neck-and-shoulders with his calloused hands, still keeping clear of the laser-eyes. Wild intuition told that they'd surely stop soon. MK took off her scarf and was ready to wrap him.

"It's OK, then", Jon's voice was bizarrely calm. "It's OK, little space-man".

In three or four tremulous minutes, the crying ceased. The red heat rays stopped completely, revealing an average, contemplative baby-face. There were no immediate clues to his heritage. At best, Caucasian skin bulbed in around his chin, suggesting in later life he'd be unusually square-jawed. MK prepared herself. Gasping, she carefully swaddled her red scarf up and around his crawling limbs.

Thirty seconds in, a minute in, all the couple could do was stare. MK had swaddled the baby out of necessity. It was a different proposition, somehow, to pick him up. But Jon had determination outright, holding him, crack-mouthed, only marginally afraid of another burst of the heat-ray. MK stared at her boyfriend for answers. A suggestion that the immediate danger was gone had seeped cleanly into their subconscious, to be replaced by... what?

A strange sense of peace unnerved everything, leading to a bold statement from MK, "We can't keep him. We should call the police".

Regarding her steeply, "For better or worse, we've got a connection. We'll keep him for the minute. In all the world, he fell down right next to us; that's a hell of a thing. It'll only feel weird for us if we say goodbye already".

MK, very practically, peered inside the capsule. "He's an alien. Look, alien writing!"

The brush-metal plating near the end section of the space-cot was etched with letters, heavy with triangles and a strange absence of curved serifs. The only other item of interest was a five-inch finger of cut diamond. Small ventilators spoke of some kind of life support system, though it seemed minimal.

"I don't think he's alien exactly", Jon breathed. "If he was, he wouldn't look like us. Maybe there's ancient tribes of humans all across the galaxy".

"But how does that explain the red laser from his eyes?"

Jon shook his head and looked fearfully at the baby. "Could be an ancient cultural thing, like the Spartans sending their kids to either live or die in the wilderness. Maybe the laser eyes have been genetically engineered into them, to give them a fighting chance".

"Or he could equally be Moses", worried MK, "in the water reeds, hiding from the Pharisees".

"Maybe", Jon could only shrug.

"Is this a dream?", MK stared hard into the blue-black sky. It was starting to snow, and what's more, the deep stillness was being destroyed from within by crazy-vibrating air-pressure.

John drew close and passed the baby over to her. "It's no dream".

There was indeed a connection. It was humane, it was natural. It was still a lot more sophisticated than anything that might be written about in conventional mothering magazines or psychological textbooks. From his thick, pink eyelids, the baby regarded the world with deep doubts, while on the whole brave and pragmatic. For a determined stretch of time, he tolerated the snow flakes, then let out a tight little cry.

He cried, but no fresh lance of laser-fire erupted. MK counted this as a personal victory.

"Let's get him back home".

To show his consent, Jon remained silent, merely placing his hands on his hips and twisting around to assess things. "I think I can carry the entire pod. Whole thing's gotta be less than forty kilos".

"Forty kilos is too heavy", MK decided. With the baby in one arm, she retrieved the upper hemisphere from the ditch and placed their swaddled ward in the centre, where she could carry him like a Viking chieftain, Jon with his eyebrows queasily raised. The load divided, they proceeded home across the fields.

Paused at the extremity between the last field and Hipton Mayle's outlet lanes, the question of whether it was all a dream once again piped up, this time in the mind of Jon. He forced himself to look away from the snowy starscape drifting next to upwards-swirling oak branches, surely the most distracting backdrop possible. Doubt be damned, the mesmerised muscles in his neck had enough give to properly survey the edge of Hershton Lane and the Triangle. He decided eventually that the angles favoured them, and the sense of Christmas peace was strangely protective.

They bustled down the hasty concrete slope and through their front door. The baby slept. He woke, danced his limbs just slightly once they'd laid him on the sofa to make a fresh examination. For the first time, as they fitted an ad-hoc nappy, a proper assessment was made of the dermal-electrical sensor stickers across his body, apparently no more sophisticated than NHS-issue. They delicately brooded over the shape of his limbs, his bones, the way his anatomy looked utterly human. On his head were a few strands of black hair.

MK returned with a glass filled with microwaved chicken soup, ready for when the baby was hungry.

"How would we square him as our baby when I've got brown hair and you've got blonde?", she worried.

"Dye it, maybe? Maybe just cut it?"

Jon folded out the scissors from his Victorinox and attempted to cut it, just to see how intrusive the operation might be. No crying accompanied the touch of the steel, perhaps because the child knew instinctively-

"I -I can't cut it! It's like solder wire!"

MK was relatively calm as she wondered, "What could account for that? What kind of biology?"

"Something to do with different kinds of gravity? Different levels of radiation in our atmos?"

A new problem -MK looked dubiously at the glass of soup. "What if his digestive system can't cope with our food? What if there's germs he's got no resistance to?"

Jon exhaled, decided there was nothing for it but to say confidently, "Everyone gets on with chicken soup".

Indeed, in super-sensitive increments, MK wadded tiny sections of white bread into the soup and worked them into his mouth. He gulped, and was tranquil. Next, with time ticking, there was a need to make some kind of cot; as snug as it was, it would have been bad form to simply place him back in his capsule. In the corner of their living room was a lightweight cupboard unit; Jon removed the shelves, kricked free the runners and filled it out with cushions. Baby disliked his new home only for a moment, giving two or three distinctive cries. But, they noted, no more heat blasts. Theorised Jon, were the eye lasers specifically designed to draw in prospective parents, and then stop thereafter?

Once the crying stopped, whether as a reward or to ensure further peace, MK reappropriated the fairy lights from their ceiling and decorated the cot rim.

Time crept and sped. For Jon and MK, their labyrinthine pushing-and-pulling thoughts gave way to deep fatigue. They scooped up their ward, took him to the bedroom, where he slept easily between them. The eye of the storm, then. The dream within the dream, trailing off into every kind of unconscious purpose. Absorbed in the impressive snow storm just beyond their curtains, Jon phased out, content.

C.

MK woke, regarded the luminous green figures of their bedside clock, as if they mattered. Memories of her childhood in the mid-seventies: the sudden vogue for digital watches had led to a fierce debate on whether it was better to use a twelve or twenty-four hour format. For MK, there was no question that the more expansive twenty-four hour set-up was superior. Every hour was precious and must be monitored. It was as if she'd always known that one day she'd fall in love with a factory worker on twelve hour shifts, and their time together and apart must be measured as a single whole.

For now, the baby was tightened-up and resting, the sound of his breathing like an impossibly distant snowdune being stirred. And Jon... he'd been awake for a while, in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips.

"Jon?"

"It's Boxing Day now. It didn't occur to me to gift him something. But what have we got around here that'd be interesting for a little baby?"

Pointed out MK, "We rescued him from getting covered by four inches of snow. That's a fairly good gift".

Except Jon brooded on. "Maybe something he can look back on in the future, and know he was always welcome on Earth".

"A Power Ranger toy?", she wondered, making him belly-laugh.

Jon clicked his fingers and lifted something from the end bedpost, wrestling it free from the wad of MK's hairbands and bracelets. "My Accurist. It was only fifty quid in Fine Fare, I think. But it's what my Dad got me, so there'll be a sense of history there. Family heirloom. I'll just have to fit a strap, though, instead of these links, so he can actually wear it some day".

As he once again got to work with his Victorinox, a brisk little question crossed his mind, "I haven't double-checked yet, are you up for this thing?"

"I could ask you the same thing", she shrugged.

Confessed Jon, "I can see how it could go either way. We could call the cops. But giving control of him to the state? You know how I feel about the government and bureaucracy. They know s- about real life, honour, love. They'd put him with some geek foster parents like every kind of Biker Grove gone wrong. But what about you? I know you never wanted to be a mam".

Leaning back against the bedstead, looking away from the baby, MK felt pouty. "It's hardly 'being a mam'. I'm as likely to start lactating as I am to grow cloven hooves. But we can maybe make this thing work".

Almost through fixing up the watch, Jon took time out to violently scratch the back of his neck, thinking earnestly, "I always figured bringing up a baby is a lot easier than people make out. Don't believe the hype, you know? What else have they got to take up their time these days besides work behind a desk administrating nothing? Probably, us looking after some hermetic, alien baby will just balance it out to being genuinely hard".

MK continued the theme, "It's like, you hear people say, 'If you worry you're a bad parent, that automatically makes you a good parent'. What? By that logic, you could get a permanent marker and write on your baby's forehead, 'I HAVE BAD PARENTS', and he'd be automatically protected by some invisible force field".

Laughing, "Well maybe that's what happened to him".

MK leaned up on her forearm. She considered combing her hair and tying it back, the better to get to work. But not yet.

"That's one of the reasons I get put off ankle-biters, besides my biological clock having a load of hands missing. People are so awed just by the novelty of babies, they straight away go on autopilot. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but -sheesh. It's weird. They plan nothing for the kid's life past age nineteen for fear of being self-indulgent or domineering, but oh yeah, it's fine to live vicariously through ages one to eighteen".

"But like the Murphy's, I'm not bitter", Jon nodded, smiled mischievously.

The day passed into a mix of preparation and long-term planning, all of it gentle and cheerful. Things like choosing some background music that was soft, not in the least bit jarring, that would help the baby coast in and out of sleep. The only albums they had that remotely fitted the bill were by the Divine Comedy, and periodically, MK would move the needle back because she liked, 'Ten Seconds to Midnight'. As Jon went about fixing home-made nappies or examining the tiny space capsule for clues.

"You thinking about selling that?", asked MK, as her boyfriend examined the five inch shard of diamond that had been sitting beside baby's head since space. "It could be the reason they put it in there, so whoever found him could get revenue to bring him up".

"I don't think so. Look at how complex the refractions of light are. I'll tell you what I think-", he pointed to a tiny round slot in the fuselage. "I think it was designed to feed into this thing and play a message, maybe cast a hologram. Only it's too beaten up to work".

"Well that's frustrating!", said MK.

"If they knew they were sending him specifically to Planet Earth, it might've given us tips on how to help him blend in".

Normally in their dynamic, it was Jon who exuded confidence. Only for now, it was MK that hit him with a blinky kind of optimism, "We'll have to manage anyhow".

"If necessary, your dodgy brother can rustle us up a phoney birth certificate, the same way he did your City and Guilds and my reference from Honda. Once we've thought up a name..."

They debated it, right up to a natural lull at Two O'Clock -the guardians having eaten sandwiches, the baby full-up on liquidised apple. All was peaceful, the trio leaning easily against the ankle-plate of their old sofa, eyes snatched up by the sight of...

"God almighty. Imagine never having seen it".

Indeed, regularly the baby's eyes would focus on the cathode to give very adult-style attention to The Great Escape. Jon laughed, as everyone always does, when James Coburn and the French Resistance Waiter emerged after the drive-by Nazi assassination to pop a celebratory toast. The baby cooed in satisfaction.

But very quickly they arrived at the all-important final dash, the hauntingly beautiful, hauntingly open valleys of the Swiss Border. The unrepentant diesel sound of a Triumph 650 nigh escaped from hell.

"What do you reckon, little man? Is he going to make that last jump? I can't even think what you'd imagine's gonna happen, never having seen it..."

The baby danced his chubby arms and seemed to wonder. Finally, though, "Maybe next year".

The ceiling light and various strings of fairies created a room-wide glow, not that the peripheral winter gloom didn't hold its own with a sense of peace; eerie, or maybe not. MK let a tingly relaxation wash into her bones. Soon she realised that she'd drifted off, and that her snooze had overlapped with Jon's by a long way.

What she woke up to made her skin freeze. It was the sound of his electric razor. It could only mean one thing, though that one thing was... almost unthinkable.

After checking on their guest, she moved to the bathroom to confront him.

"Tell me you're not planning what I think you are".

Fixing her, for just a second, in the reflection of the bathroom mirror, "I have to get rid of this dirty stubble".

"You know what I mean".

Jon made a show of flipping out the precision razor. "I'm due back there. I've never missed a day's work in my life, you know me and my crazy working class vibe".

MK felt her neck and shoulders grow numb with shock. There was no inclination to catch Jon's reflection. She merely reeled. In the end, via gulpy breaths, "You can't be serious. There's six inches of snow and everything's covered in black ice... and besides that, I need you! You know who's in there in the living room?"

"You two'll be alright for twelve hours", Jon's eyes were steady.

"No I won't! What if he fires those lasers again?"

"He won't. He knows he's safe now".

MK decided to go all out and fight her corner, "Jesus, Jon! What's wrong with you?"

Her boyfriend tightened his lips and faltered. She fully expected the usual two-edged eulogy on working at Lyson Domestics. Since his invention of the revolutionary ultraviolet window screens in 1990, Lex Lyson had been the epitome of a kindly philanthropist to the people of Malmsville, at least a quarter of whom worked at his electronics plant on the outskirts. No one could deny that he was really only a socially-blinkered eccentric whose garden-shed hobby had coincidentally paid dividends. He had no real obligation to employ the Malmsville townsfolk on such high, disproportionate wages, and for that reason, the arrangement must be honoured forever.

But today, Jon had a more sophisticated outlook, "I've been thinking about what you said, that he's like Moses".

MK frowned. She'd completely forgotten comparing the baby to Moses, though she guessed it must have happened.

Coolly, scissoring away at his fringe, "Think what this world is gonna be like in the future. At best, densely overpopulated. And Tony Blair is making a mess of politics by tryin' to be a panacea for all people. Whereas really, Labour should just be another name for bluecollar industry, even if they never get elected again. Anyone can feign optimism and equality. Not many people can exemplify the kinda discipline that's needed for civilisation to exist".

"Jon...", MK felt herself getting desperate. "We can talk about the politics later. I need you to stay with me!"

Washing off his face, he rubbed and twisted his nose to dispel the last of the clipped hairs. Clearly, he didn't care for the situation, but he couldn't yield, either. The thin blue light of the bathroom grew oppressive, a horrible frictionless void and incredibly tight. As he moved to the kitchen area to scoop up his check shirt, he frequently looked round at her. Reassurance failed to materialise.

"That young fella in there. He's all but impervious to damage. He can fire death-rays from his eyes. God knows what else he'll be able to do when he grows up; could be enough to take over the world. Morally? We need to go beyond good role models. We need to be faultless. When he finds out I skived off work just to-"

Without realising it, MK had squared up to him. "Skived? Looking after your girlfriend just hours after she's had a baby is not skiving! Can you look past your pride?"

"It's not pride. It's about being part of the world".

"You're not listening to me!", fury plain and simple flared from MK's eyes. She felt it. She didn't hold back.

Jon did something unexpected then. He laughed, quite broadly.

"I always wondered if it would ever happen. Under what circumstances. Jonathan Swan. Martha Kent. Fighting. All these years, and this is the very first time we've rowed".

"If you want to go, go! Come back when you're thinking straight".

Niggling free the batteries from his charger, loading his insoles, choosing a paperback to read in the midnight lunch-break. His routine prior to leaving for work always ran the same, and on a subconscious level, MK had assumed she had plenty of time left to emissary good sense. Except. Through a lurching feeling in her stomach, she realised he'd already finished these chores while she'd dozed. All that was left, horrifically, was to walk out the door and assess how badly the snow had swamped their little Honda.

Clearing the windows. Scowling at the laden road. Without a doubt, his journey to work would be an undercarriage-crunching, wheel-spinning crawl, and she saw the alternatives weighing in his mind. Walking the two-and-a-half miles across the fields, on top of being exhausted from a twelve hour shift, was out of the question. Because MK had so often failed the fear-of-pedantic-authority kow-tow that masqueraded as a British driving test, she couldn't drive the car by herself. But then, she never minded walking to and from just to chauffer her boyfriend. But today? While carrying the baby? Jon would have to go alone. It was another reason the whole business was insane.

Super-thin snow wafted onto his shoulders as he slung his bag onto the passenger seat, then turned to face her. By now, the array of falling granules seemed largely ceremonial, the damage to the landscape already having been done.

"If there's any trouble with him, call Lyson front desk and I'll come home".

MK shook her head numbly, in disbelief.

As he tapped at the cold metal of the car door, "Do I get a kiss goodbye?"

"You're crazy".

"I'm a working class, Union-Jack-waving patriot", he conceded with a smile. "Look after our space-baby".

Many internal winces matched the violent cracks across the undercarriage as he drove clear. As she watched him disappear around the tight curve of Owl Lane, the first of half a dozen. Gingerly, she moved inside the house to stare at the kid -Jon was right. Everything he said was true, and it was fascinating how she immediately knew this in her bones only now that it was too late to tell him. People really don't think straight once they have a kid, and more than one kid, doubly so. Neediness and protection get exaggerated into greed and nepotism. For all anyone knew, it was the very worst problem of the human race.

But no more, not today. She tightly focused on the deep blue surface of baby's eyes, searching for any peculiarities that might become burning red. Nothing. Of course, the fear of his lancing red fire would be dispelled completely once he'd learnt how to smile. It was the next best thing, however, the peering thoughtfulness that peeked out, chugging down ideas, random bits of ambience, odd impressions of primordial consciousness. She used her fore and index fingers to make the outline of a duck, and he accepted it with good grace. She picked him up, walked in circuit through the small rooms, soon to find herself humming Whisky in the Jar-o, thinking about Jon.

Weird, jangly stretches of time matched her tumbling thoughts almost exactly, on how to frame her apology when the time was right, on how to spend the night -assuming neither she or the kid would sleep well. It wasn't exactly true that there was nothing in the house which might entertain a babe-in-arms. In the attic, she fancied there were some of her own childhood books to hand. Things like 'Run, Bosco, Run!' and a first edition Babadook, the pop-ups only partially mangled by her infant hands.

It was far too much hassle to climb into the hatch, tho. She wondered. The TV seemed far too impersonal, and too s-, as well. She needed something-

Sandwiched between a stack of CDs, more or less the same dimensions of the thin little spines, there it was: that unassuming little book that had so dominated the planet up until a few years ago. Even its harshest detractors had to admit that, compared to the Bible or the Koran, it was amazing how such a concise little book had achieved so much.

Placing the baby in the crook of her left-side elbow, it was no trouble to wield and turn the small pages. But before the main story, an explanation, for the most part smirk-free.

"This is your father's favourite fairy tale".

She cleared her throat and assumed a tone, dreamy-yet-probing. She added her own, hushed exclamations as required.

"The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism!"

It was an easy read. The baby appreciated the sound of syntax, the flow of the syllables, maybe, maybe not. Maybe just the distracting nature of her voice. It worked well enough for both of them, anyhow. An hour later -all the tight, focused examinations of old-worldy struggle become synonymous with background daydreams of Jon, 7 AM, his coming through the door with a look of dreamy surrender in his eyes. His arms, when moved at a certain angle, would shake like an ancient diesel genny. Usually, a massage was given, and the touch of her fingers on his shoulder blades felt like putting a fused robot to rights, getting his electricity to flow -steadily.

As if describing the character of a moustache-twirling vaudeville villain, "All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation -under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it!"

Briefly, MK smiled to herself. Perhaps getting 'Run Bosco, Run!' from the attic would have been a better option after all. Poor Jon. And poor baby, for the world he was duty-bound to save one day. If there was a schizophrenic aspect to all human nature, even in something as noble as Communism, it was here in Marx's book. It was small, but the truth was more concise still: who would actually chose to be anywhere on the capitalist scale, who had even trace amounts of empathy? Similarly, how could any Communist allow a single capitalist to exist, even conceptually? For capitalism to be there as an idea was already a fundamental defeat of human self-awareness. In fact, it was a schizophrenic nightmare you should simply put out of your head, the way MK had trained herself not to think about abattoirs while eating a bacon butty.

She busied herself in the kitchen, heating up milk in a saucepan and wondering if there was anyway to stop it curdling before her boy was ready to drink. It smelt sweet. Thinking of Jon. Thinking of war, and dreams, and love, head on one side.

A sheepish-sounding rat-a-tat-tat came from the thin front door. MK frowned. Turning off the gas, she peeked through the side window. A Police Panda lay at a slightly antisocial angle in the snowy ridges above their house. Her first thought was that their appropriation of the space-baby had been rumbled somehow. In the back of her mind, however, an even scarier idea held court. She witnessed Oliver Olsen, Jon's best friend from the factory, taking the lead as the police men held back slightly.

The expression on his face already confirmed what had happened. In the long, reeling period that followed, life became an exercise in psychic detective work. She didn't actually process what Ollie told her, except in odd fragments, insights into a numb, hellish world she had no option but to accept -but slowly. What remained of her sanity -like jazz, or the translucent Channel Five logo always there in the top left of the screen.

He'd been queuing on the bypass road, awaiting admittance to the skidding ice-rink of the Lyson worker car park. An articulated Laersk wagon had overshot the Parts-In entrance and impacted the car head-on. Jon had died instantly. John had died, apparently, and -well, why would they make something like that up? How could there be any confusion? But -'died'? 'Instantly'? She knew the meaning of the words, but it seemed that maybe there could be room for negotiation within the semantics. Perhaps 'died' meant...

Ten minutes in, maybe twenty, she snapped back into full consciousness, looking up to see Ollie leaning sharply forward in their old settee, hands clasped.

"I'm sorry, Martha".

"Jon died", she noted to herself.

"You're going to get through this".

It was a testament to reserve that her emotions didn't fly to extremes. Mourn. Quietly rage at God. But a resolve came that there'd never be any drama, or resentment, not while she had such a precious young life to protect. She shakily stood in order to fetch the baby his hot milk.

Peeking down at his thoughtful-unconscious face, she stated for the record, "We all will".

C.

Father Christmas sat contentedly in the easy chair, finger of sherry supped barely once an hour. It was in these midnight hours of down-time that he chose to settle back and brood on past successes. Not that the clustered grey of the North Pole sky was much different whether it was Hour of the Wolf or Pimm's O'Clock. He was entirely at peace, rapt at the metronomic nature of the top-of-the-world air currents which buffeted his observation port.

One of his favourite memories of the modern era was George Benzo, nowadays one of the most brilliant novelists in England. At the time of the early nineteen eighties, his father was a worksite laborer. His mother was a primary school teacher, and what might be called a progressive liberal. This, of course, was the type of dynamic Father Christmas excelled in: for although little George's father loved him deeply, he worked long, exhausting hours and didn't really know his son at all. His mother knew him a little better, but her ideas of modern child development had led her massively astray. Christmas 1982, and she'd been planning to get the five-year old lad a hand-carved ethnic maze, and a wooden flute, both from the Early Childhood Company in Birmingham. Nice enough gifts to be sure -but not for George. December 21st, and Mrs Benzo sent out her husband with a bill-clip of money, queuing at the bourgeois toy shop as if he was something other than an easy-come bluecollar.

And at this point, Father Christmas had entered his mind, and impelled him to march clear of the twee, progressive chainstore and straight into Woolworths, where he promptly bought for his son a Death Star playset and a dozen Star Wars figures.

George had loved them, but then, it was 1982, and this had been an easy enough prediction since Star Wars was both a zeitgeist and a beloved phenomenon. It was the exact nature George's appreciation, though, that had proved so defining. At the end of Christmas Day, with the Benzo's relatives securely seen off to distant parts, George drifted off into the Sleep of Princes. To wake again in the early hours of Boxing Day, so magically random, whereupon he tip-toed across his bedroom floor to stare at the chipped mahogany table where he'd assembled the Death Star chambers. The figures were arranged, not quite in a straight line, directly in front of the Imperial docking bay. Their tiny faces, George noticed, were still front-facing from where they'd only recently been removed from their blisters. A tiny, humane flourish made him incline their heads-

Trooper Disguise Han took in the whole of Princess Leia's face, but was still mysteriously self-absorbed. Leia directed her gaze almost completely beyond him, though still saw enough to appreciate his wavering grin. The Caucasian Cloud City Guard examined with profoundly glum acceptance the face of Chewy, whose open mouth was delivering some kind of animal sermon to anyone who'd listen. Lobot wished he was somewhere else, as some other toy, and this made the black Cloud City Guard feel infinitely better about himself. Baask and Luke, meanwhile, were staring at each other directly, as if they were patient and psychiatrist in the most successful, albeit very ambient, therapy session in the world. Haggard old Obi Wan, Cloud City Leia, IG188 and the AT-AT Officer all stood close beside each other, tensely waiting for -something.

And in this way, twenty years later, little George Benzo wrote his debut novel, a delicate ensemble drama that was instantly shortlisted for the Prince Kurvis Award for Innovative Fiction.

So often, Father Christmas wondered if his own existence worked by the same principle, roughly. The whole thing; perhaps it was a symbol, or a kind of cachot hantée, for his calling on Earth. The people of all nations stood before him, outwardly either heroes or villains, while in reality morally neutral. Once a year, he'd turn their heads to face one another, hopefully in love, at the very least acknowledgement. But to what end?

He took an unprecedented two sups of sherry, allowed his chin rest on his belly.

"There's a man in the snow".

The first thing he heard was the word 'man', not as contemporary civilisation might use the word -post-man, police-man-, but 'man' as a variety of animal, as opposed to fauns and leprechauns. Elves.

Gentry's form slid from hyperspace, over-shot his mark into a mere two-dimensions, then finally righted itself in a semblance Father Christmas could see. Mxyzptlk appeared shortly after, but was content to let the younger elf do the talking.

"Alive?", said Father Christmas enthusiastically.

Gentry glowered. "That's the thing, Isfaoir. He'd been laying there for moments into hours. Bylar-covered. His brow should be mottled grey, black, dauourfjólublátt. Yet he still lives".

"I think we'd better make haste, then", the old man decided.

Gentry quickly stood aside, respectful and deferential, all other body-language signaling a distinct wariness. Humans, to the elves, were small children one and all -always to be treated kindly, never to be trusted. All the same, the three of them hiked their bodies to one of the compression doors that opened out into snowy bedlam. The man, it transpired, was less than a hundred yards away, face down in the white. The three rescuers rushed outwards, Father Christmas bounding, Gentry and Mxyzptlk flighty above the dunes, the boundless dark horizon that seemed so much like a springtrap.

The solstice air pressure sifted into distinct strips across their bodies; a cold wind up about their heads, a savage whip around their torsos, then a relatively warm ebb-and-flow at ground-level. It was through this death-like gloaming that the elves moved in an arc above the figure. That frighteningly thin arrangement of hair, skin, leather, all but consumed.

Confirmed Gentry, "He did not fall from a sky-ship. Their sky-ships I sense whenever they pass through the himinnvindur. Neither is he a ríkur-leioindi explorer. See, where is his equipment?"

The night sky absorbed light in a flicker, the fallen snow eerily dim, storm-blue airborne particles swirling away to nothing. Father Christmas intended to do something practical like seize the man's shoulders and pull him upwards. Instead, an ugly fascination made him scrape away the hardened snow that had waved-up around the man's face.

"This", said the old man compellingly, "is Clark Kent of Malmsville, England".

He stared at the boy, miraculously alive as he was, but in the most forlorn state imaginable. His frost-hardened features presented strange emotions all round. Such a chiseled face; it was like a novelist writing extensively the origin story of a villain. The character might be unlovable, with no redeeming qualities, but still the novelist had put such a mysterious effort into creating the image...

"How can he still be breathing?", demanded Gentry.

"I have no idea!", Father Christmas said with no small passion. "All I know is that -the first present he ever received was a black-on-gold Accurist watch on a strong canvas strap. This he received from his adoptive father. The most recent present, though, was a lovely vintage hunting knife from soviet Russia, which he received for Christmas 2014".

"What did he get this year?", asked Gentry, searching for a clue.

Father Christmas peered at the frozen, locked-down face. "Nothing. He got nothing. We can only assume that he's recently lost everyone who might have loved him. That is, until fate delivered him to the three of us".

The elves looked dubiously at their friend. He smiled broadly, almost winning them over, or at any rate setting in motion the concerted effort of hauling the ice-chewed body back to base. Mystery Man.

Wind lashed violently, never quite damaging, always psychological. They arrived in the Master-Snug, the best-heated chamber in the citadel, the centerpiece of which was a colourful Minster bookcase. On his arrival on Earth several thousand years ago, for a long time, Father Christmas had only been able to decorate his home with animal skins, primitive rugs, pieces of neolithic art scribed with flint and bone. No help came from his elven friends, who spurned physical trappings, apart from a few pieces of gold jewelry and clothes that aped genteel finery. But as latterday civilisation grew up around him, there was a far greater selection of trinkets and furnishings to adorn his home. He appropriated a huge, papal bookcase with intricate latin serifs which otherwise would have fallen to Henry VIII's ravages. He took several Lakota totems, considered 'booty' by General Whitside's army and destined for desecration. Now, how they towered above the pulsing atmos of the open fire, as vibrant and alive as any living soul. And then there was the transdelible rugs and drapes invented by Howard Stark in 1956. A significant variation on the fifties vogue of easy and self-cleaning fabrics, they went one better by having polywoven engrams that not only laundered themselves, but tailored and matched outgoing photons in order to sustain ultimate primary colours. The reds were not merely shades of cherry or fire engine red, they were cherry and fire engine red as pictured in the mind of some lurid, mescalined god. At any rate, the resulting colours were too gaudy for the Stark Industries board members, ditto the cost of actually producing such complex fabrics, and the project was scrapped. 'Red-lighted'. Gone, apart from the prototype mats and throws that had been liberated by Father Christmas.

It all led to one question, though, which had been haunting him for several hundred years now. Was he an eccentric? On one hand, any homely items that were purposefully transported to such a utilitarian environment as the North Pole must automatically be deemed eccentric, simply as a default. Then again, he knew he was really just a man alone, shamelessly dismissive of whole gulps of both good-and-bad culture. Again -eccentric, self-absorbed, useless.

He watched Clark Kent's unconscious face carefully, ready to note his first reaction to the ornate surroundings. Throughout his ordeal in the snow, whatever it had been, his haversack had remained firmly affixed to his shoulders. Gentry stared at it fiercely.

"Should we search his belongings?"

Father Christmas thought for a moment or two, "No, I don't think so. Not at this time. We should respect his privacy".

"He may have a weapon", Gentry glowered.

The two of them brooded while Mxyzptlk looked between his friends, utterly calm and reserving judgement.

"We'll wait to see what his temperance is like", Father Christmas decided.

Except Gentry persevered. "I already know what his temperance is like. Djöfullinn Illur. His face is etched with evil. Irreparable cruelty has in turn laid waste, he".

On the surface, in some queasy realm of undeniable truth -yes, Clark Kent's unconscious face had anger and torment folded deep into his brow. The relatively softer skin around his lower eyelids displayed an emotionless chill that might indeed condone violence and evil.

But Father Christmas reminded himself that, even in the face of their own self-destructive nature, the humans must be given the benefit of the doubt, always.

They waited. Gentry half-stalked, half-paced in a giddy spin-cycle around the oversized humanoid. Mxyzptlk sometimes moved from foot to foot, but that was all.

Finally, Clark Kent's eyes opened, Father Christmas fancied as two beacons of clear innocence in an arid gulf. Swings-and-roundabouts, though; he tried not to let his partial vindication over Gentry's pessimism go to his head.

"There, there, friend. Slowly-slowly-catchie-monkey".

"Who are you?"

Father Christmas wondered how best to answer this. He resolved not to play down the bizarre dynamic of his own existence; there was even a cathartic humour in saying it aloud, smiling, "You must think of me as Father Christmas".

Perhaps this was the easy part. His eyes focused on the figures just across Father Christmas' shoulder, understandably causing him to recoil like Jaoquin Pheonix in 'Signs'.

"There's no need to be afraid. I am Father Christmas. Those are my elves".

Clark Kent hardly calmed down, toiling up onto his forearms on the edge of the Beaumont, staring with selfless horror at the three bizarre entities. Interestingly, when he grasped the headboard to scramble free, it disintegrated like a vaudeville wrestling prop. Father Christmas noted the unnatural strength. When the zip of the haversack hissed open, he noted also the Kryptonian data crystal which clinked out along with photo books and liquor bottles.

"It's alright", the old man felt a strange shame at his own tone of voice. Calm, commanding -as if he had the right to make guarantees or promises, least of all in front of a Kryptonian. But at least explanations were forthcoming, now -a Kryptonian: it explained his resilience to the sub-zero winds. It explained the lines of sorrow across his face, even though he looked to be only twenty years old. The knowledge he came from a dead race, the fear that at any time the people of Earth might apprehend and dissect him for his biological secrets.

And in the heady and dramatic moments of the showdown, Father Christmas disliked himself intensely. He was making fine, lightning-fast deductions like Sherlock Holmes. A shameless eccentric. Awake for only a few seconds, Kent's eyes fluttered slightly, contemptuously, a sure sign that he saw the old man's flaws and limitations as well as anyone.

"We're like you!", said Father Christmas simply. "So there's nothing to be nervous about. Use that magnificent Kryptonian x-ray vision. My friends, you'll see, have no skeletons. Are barely even present on this level of reality. And myself? Note my rather funny metabolism. Or lack of!"

The wildness in Mr Kent's eyes didn't subside, but at least he stopped recoiling against the wall, which he must have assumed he could tear an escape through if push came to shove.

"Kryptonian. What does 'Kryptonian' mean?"

The old man felt his mouth go dry. Like too many sherries, like a man confounded in the middle of a Christmas game, he struggled to find a way forward.

C.

While Clark Kent drooped his body against the snow-swirling porthole, some kind of explanation was given on how Father Christmas recognised the Kryptonian data crystal. Though he said nothing, it was clear that the young man himself had no idea it was a unit of audio-visual communication. In fact, just in general, Mr Kent gave away nothing and was still less cognizant of the hell-fire anger that lived on his face.

Eventually, however, came demands. "Where is Krypton? How far away? What's the time difference between here and there? How many years?"

Amid deep, kindly, exasperated breaths, Father Christmas tried to take the edge off his guest's pent-up emotions. "I will tell you the story of Krypton, my friend, but... try to be calm. Fate brought you to us, this is a new life for you".

Clark Kent laughed bitterly. It was a genuine sort of laugh... but not in the least healthy. Playful whips of snow, always there on the glass behind him, now seemed to be desperate for attention in the most spasmodic way.

"Father Christmas, why exactly do you suppose a man would walk away from civilisation, into the middle of this icy hell?"

Not for a second did Father Christmas like the mocking parenthesis that was placed on his name. He didn't truly expect Mr Kent to believe in the validity of Earth's most famous legend, but at the same time, there was such darkness aimed at him, aimed at the world.

Optimistic, "I should say, I don't know why you'd walk. The cellular vibrations that are placed inside you by this planet's low gravity, versus their reinforcement by yellow sun rays, means that you should be able to fly! Move at a speed disproportionate to anything else in Earth's nature. There should be no need for you to merely walk anywhere".

Darkness continued to glower from the figure in the top half of the chamber.

"You talk of flight, and moving at speed unnatural to anything else, as though they aren't fearful ideas. I know you can fly, and move at crazy speeds, because you need to deliver all the toys on Christmas Eve-"

Father Christmas didn't correct him, since it was a near-enough understanding of what he did on Earth. Also, it struck him, floodgates were opening-

"-imagine you had no frame of reference. What would you think was going on inside your body, to give you such gifts, or apparent gifts? I'll tell you. In my life, I've had specific reasons to believe that God exists. I've had specific reasons to believe that God doesn't exist. Wouldn't that make me a prime candidate for demonic possession? Taking to the sky like nothing else in nature -how would a guy know if it was truly him flying or just a demon synched exactly to his thoughts? I've got news for you, Santa, with your blatantly anagrammed name. I've also got eyes that burn red and shoot laser beams, and I'd ask you: where does it end? To what purpose, eh, mate? I walked out here to die. Or try to die. What do you think about that?"

At once, Father Christmas focused beyond his usual dislike of being called 'Santa', whether it was a conspiracy-theorist anagram or not. He longed to remove his spectacles and massage his face, except for the fear that it might detract from the look of empathy that had numbed his mouth, brow, raggedy eyes. Maybe it was unfortunate that Gentry and Mxyzptlk had taken their leave and left him to deal with their guest alone.

"You've suffered anguish. But I can see that you're a good man. Demonic? No. I can see you're -striving for hope, just like everyone. Perhaps I can help?"

Mr Kent rolled his head from within a world of defeat, at the blank snowy landscape behind the aged glass. It was starkly beautiful. No one could deny or evade that.

Looking back, he rubbed his eyeballs. "You're a psychiatrist, are you? So what do you know about yourself? Why would anyone claim to be Father Christmas?"

He shrugged. "I am Father Christmas".

"And what good comes of that, in this wonky-materialistic day and age? Are you sponsored by all the tramps that run Lid'l and Aldi? Do you get back-handers from all the German and Chinese manufacturing bases?"

"Perhaps", the older man narrowed his eyes, "I simply call myself Father Christmas so I can have the satisfaction of confounding people's expectations?"

Mr Kent instantly laughed at this. It was almost infectious. Presently, Father Christmas did his best not to smile at his own cleverness. Moments later, a frown came, a worry that it might only have been dull fighting talk after all, a goonish inadequate with flashes of self-insight so microscopic they could only be humourous.

Looking squarely across the chamber at the youngster, he tried to focus out the formalthahyde coelacanth, the mermaid sculpture made from structured 1987 fairy lights, the 20" TV unit playing his one DVD - Men in Black II. Mr Kent cut a stark, very aloof figure, still completely 'in your face' as the modern vernacular had it.

When the smiling died down, Father Christmas tried, "So would you agree we have a rapport now?"

His guest brooded. The observation port told of a land that was the darkest of dark blues, a sky sinisterly lit by forces unknown, down by the horizon, while immediately above - a black eternity with all the stars molested away. Dramatic though it was, Mr Kent didn't once turn around to lose himself. Instead, he stared fiercely at Father Christmas. 'Eyes that burn red' might even have been preferable to the creeping, inhuman shadows that currently moved on his face.

Distant and near flurries of snow whipped the glass, trying hard to distract -not least in the way they suddenly looked mulch-grey instead of white.

"That depends what you think of my predicament. Whether you even understand it at all. My mother was careful to teach me the strictest, most unambiguous moral code the world has ever seen, and I'm as far away from The Dali Lama or The Archbishop of Canterbury as they are from Charles Manson and Hitler. She knew I'd grow up to be the most powerful man on Earth, with every chance to enslave the world.

"Fine. Against every inclination to take charge of a world that's -let's be honest, mate- arrogance incarnate, I became a good man. Meek, mild-mannered, accepting. With just one problem.

"I have an arch-enemy that I hate. And I'm mutually exclusive to a world where he's still breathing, still walking around thinking, alive. It's either me or him. And so, my moral code being what it is, I chose to walk out here and die in the snow, even if it takes a thousand years. What have you got to say to that?"

Interactions with mortals, always overwhelmed, mutually strained. Father Christmas dimly remembered the gentle, theatrical motions he'd developed to set them at ease. It wasn't the sort of finesse one forgot. Also, it helped if one actually believed in the concept of empathy, as natural as breathing.

He exhaled, slumped his shoulders, cast his thoughtfully-flickering eyes roughly in Clark's direction. "The thing I've got to say to that is, you're not alone".

Came a voice from the wintery dusk, "Is that all?"

"No. No quite all. I can dimly imagine that you've grown to dislike this planet. It's changed. Evil picks up people like a giant snowball rolling down a mountainside. The people who fancy themselves as good are often just conceited.

"But Mr Kent, there are other worlds that have avoided the rot. Not least, worlds up here", he tapped the side of his head.

Clark Kent nodded, at least a trace-benevolently. "But let's start with Krypton".

"No. I have no business talking to you about Krypton. The best I can do is lend you a machine that can play the message on that crystal that you've guarded all these years".

Sardonically, "Then lend away, whatever you are".

C.

Clark peered at the long, elegant crystal through fresh eyes. During the first few years of his primordial memory, it had been stowed in the attic along with the two halves of his space capsule. Later, he'd been allowed by his mother to play with it in a nonchalant, almost disrespectful way, along with his dead grandfather's World War II memorabilia. The Desert Rats sun-hat, the brown-metal bayonet that could no longer cut anything, least of all his impervious skin. Sometimes, though, when he and Jimmy were playing Subuteo and the match was going particularly badly for him, he'd place the crystal squarely on the pitch, with the suggestion that the County Ground was being visited by a bizarre space entity, all the players gathering round in hesitant fascination. Before Danny Invincible slyly scored from 50 yards.

Come that mid-noughties midnight, when his mother had taken the decision they should carry the space capsule up to the lagoon beside Upton Garden Centre and throw it in. She'd developed a worry that all along it might have been emitting harmful radiation, and Clark wondered now if this coincided with the doctors first telling her she had cancer. She'd ummed and ahhed about whether it would be safe to keep the crystal, before deciding it was probably harmless. As long as he never tried to sell it, or tell anyone where it had really come from.

As if he would.

The small radio room which the nutjob Father Christmas had left him in was clean and pleasant, though bizarrely adorned with the pressed Roman fresco of a hunting wolf, coloured blue, red, yellow. Things like this were reassuring, maybe. During his late teenage years, he'd once found himself in the Portsmouth boarding house of a nightclubber, Lori, about to lose his virginity -when a crippling doubt had set in. The place had been so clean, and barren, with so few lived-in touches. Could she be a form of entrapment by the government, who'd learnt his secret and sought to subdue him through God-knew-what Samson and Delilah intrigue?

So often he felt like he was having a panic attack, hyperventilating -if only his tiniest breath wasn't compressed inside alien lungs to sustain him for hours. The curious thing, however, was that he really trusted 'Father Christmas'. No government stooge in the world lived in such an eccentric funhouse comprised of heliotrope jukeboxes and vintage pinball machines.

It bode well for the Kyptonian crystal-reading device which sat in an old-fashioned bureau at the tight end of the room. He'd often wondered, might he one day encounter a device similar to the one that had been smashed to pieces upon his impact with Earth? And if he did, could it be trusted, even then? For sure, modern technology could construct a machine that seemed to read from the crystal while all along giving him its own insidious message. Turning him into this super-powered reactionary, that right-wing demi-god. For that matter, who was to say if whoever placed the message-crystal inside his crib in the first place had his best interests at heart?

But today, within this Christmassy Fortress that may or may not be a deathly endgame, Clark felt confident. He felt mindful of the numerous ways fate could trick him, but was certain he was equal to it all.

There was a chair, into which he lightly bent his muscular body. He swiveled the crystal between his fingers, then inserted it into the hole. A beautifully depth-filled hologram appeared on the wall.

And he frowned, blinking steadily, sadly. The fortyish man who owned every inch of the projected image, at first, bore no resemblance. Then on deeper reflection, taking in so many abstract details, Clark realised they were actually deeply, spookily matched -by the same dimples of the brow. The same bulwark nose. The same Bruce Campbell chin. His father?

The words were translated into English, somehow -

"Citizen of Earth. My name is Jor-El of Krypton, a world distanced from your star system by a prohibitive complexity of solar junctions, whether one travels by light-speed, wormhole or quantum plate. But regardless of all that. You now have in your care -my son, Kal-El. I would ask that you show him compassion and acceptance. A probability of social statistics across all your inhabited continents shows that, if a baby were to appear suddenly within the vicinity of any of your ethnic subgroups, it would be treated well, it would flourish. Your species is admirable in many, many ways. In certain other respects, you're a strange and illogical people -but I would not judge you. It's a phase nearly all civilisations go through.

"Kal-El, son of Lara, comes from a world perhaps five hundred years in advancement of your current era, technologically speaking. Most notably, we have colonised the other worlds of our solar system, even as we struggle with the same economic and social problems that plague Earth. And I mention this in the hope that we might understand each other.

"Krypton and its brother planet Knorel are sourced by a red sun many times the size of the Earth's. Studies show that the tightly focused rays of such a small, yellow sun on our physiology would -empower us, make us titans in your midst. One day, it's likely that Kal-El will be the most powerful, indestructible man on your planet. This being the case -I would appreciate your teaching him temperance, at all times, in all matters. You have a proverb on Earth that loosely fits, 'Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely'. It's encouraging that your species should have stumbled on such a messianic concept, but I'm afraid you still don't understand the full implications. Usually, you use the 'Power corrupts...' concept in relation to a religious or political leader who oversteps his remit. This is very old-fashioned. As your civilisation ages, you'll find that totalitarianism and religious terror are no longer such dire threats. Where they exist at all, it's merely as a psychological counterpoint to a deeper problem.

"I'm talking about -personal freedom. Isn't personal freedom a form of absolute power? How on earth would you gauge whether it's corrupting you, and in turn corrupting your society? There is a simple test. In your home, go to your food stores. Pick up the nearest item. Did you grow it yourself? Go to your lounge and look at any domestic electrical product. Did you make that? Look at the dwelling itself. Look at your street, the shops, the supply chain that feeds your nation. By the probability of the early twenty-first century life, you had nothing whatsoever to do with the supply of these fundamental provisions. Even if you did, you tacitly agreed to the profoundly low remuneration given to your fellow production workers.

"How do you reconcile this with your self-respect?

"Your artificial political rhetoric tells of people being entitled to anything at all, as long as it tallies with the phrases, 'aspirational young people', 'those wishing to get on the housing ladder', 'hard working family'. But do you work hard? In proportion with people who sacrifice fifty or sixty years in repetitive, manual work?

"You might like to cite the advance training you've done, or the complexity of your work. I would ask you, was your university education really an imposition? Do you like your work? Work is universally disliked by the non-skilled, manual workers who supply the most tangible and indispensable resources of a society. Emphatically and without a doubt, they loathe it. But they do it because they understand, if only subconsciously, the manual nature of the world. And yet they get paid a hateful fraction of the money you get for sitting behind a desk.

"I would ask that you completely insulate my son from the sordid mess your society has become. Do not let him become a capitalist, but similarly, don't let him brood on communism. If he were to become the freedom fighter your world so desperately needs, there is every chance it would prompt a new holocaust, or destroy whole continents in the process...

"There is a further danger, too. The genetic character of my family, and of my wife Lara, is that we are selfless, obliging, and loyal. Kal-El will grow to love you. As you age, and succumb to disease, organ failure, it may occur to him to donate himself to your scientists in the hope that they may be able to find something in his alien physiology that will save you.

"Don't allow this.

"It's a simple matter to distil Kryptonian solar-cells and use them to treat damaged organs. Your scientists would indeed find cures for cancer, heart disease, any infection or illness you care to mention. But on Krypton, we've made a comprehensive study of your society. Very simply, your economic structure could be a dozen times stronger and you still wouldn't have the resources to allow people to live beyond eighty or ninety. It is too late to try and repair your world from the top down..."

All shakey and full of tears, Clark stood up and walked a little way clear across the deck. Some motion sensor activated and the screen showing his biological father temporarily clicked into a pause. He breathed and felt profoundly numb. Gatgun-quick thoughts raced down a labyrinth, always claustrophobic and airless. Firstly, that if the crystal-reader on his pod hadn't been damaged in the crash, whoever found him probably would have been justified in dropping a rock on his head after getting such a bleak lecture.

But at the same time, it spoke of unbelievable providence, unbelievable coincidence. The sense of morality his mother had instilled in him tallied exactly with Jor-El's message. Distrust personal freedom. Distrust of rhetoric, whether it's political or the osmosed thought-processes of the working class Brit suddenly deciding not to be working class any more, just because... because... uh...

And when his mother told him she had cancer, his first reaction was indeed to volunteer himself for research. It was hard believe he wasn't an instrument, used by the universe to heal society, blocked only by the Stockholm Syndromed bourgeois.

For now, at a loss for what else to do, he rubbed his face and ducked down on the chair once more. The recording continued, along with a playful numbness in Jor-El's lips.

"I am the bearer of bad news. And at this point, you'll be thinking, 'Who are you to teach us ethics, who would so easily abandon your boy to an alien world?'

"The story of my life. I wasn't always an inhabitant of Krypton. For the first twenty years of my life, I was native to Knorel, its larger, older brother planet. Some might say, luckier. My job, I won't deceive you, was a petty administrator for a domestic appliance company. I was promoted out of all proportion to my actual usefulness, and I had no problem because at that time I had so little self-insight.

"I told you there were certain parallels between our civilisation and Earth's. For instance, Knorel was highly decadent and averse to hard work, and we outsourced our physical production to Krypton, merely because the inhabitants were willing to do it for an incredibly low wage. Increasingly, it was part of my executive duties to tour the factories and sure-up working conditions, as if there was some inherent link between acquiescing to manual work and accidently turning into a battery hen. It's funny, isn't it, how a decadent society can concern itself with every liberal injustice except the one they found their own lives on?

"And then, seemingly overnight, a scourge of religious extremism developed on the eastern continent of Krypton; a brutal army of zealots began to advance across the rest of the planet. Some commentators on Knorel suggested they were religious in name only, and were using their god as an excuse to rape and pillage. Others speculated that they were the epitome of organised religion itself: irrational, intolerant, unsophisticated. Personally, I had no opinion one way or the other, though of course I cared deeply about the innocent Kryptonians who were being subjugated.

"Perhaps it was this open-heartedness on my part that caused my superiors to give me the job of travelling to Krypton and decommissioning our factory before the continent was invaded by the zealots. Mild-mannered fool that I was, complete with an executive briefcase under my arm, I did my best to move around the abandoned factory, making an inventory of all the machines, estimating which were cost-effective enough to move off-world, which to sell to brokers, which to abandon outright.

'There were certain electrical boards that I simply didn't have the know-how to activate, and in some chambers I had to work by the light that was emitted beneath the outer roller doors. But on the whole -the atmosphere was warm, relaxing. I talked to myself nervously like a permanently rat-racing business man, but perhaps still less like the business man everyone thought I was. Passing through the one side of the warehouse complex, out onto the other-

'I saw a girl. From the start, I concluded she was looting the place, but it never occurred to me that I should call in the provisional security force. She was leisurely loading up a power-assisted handcart with industrial parts. Very business-like, but obviously a thief. Loose, rustic shirt and a sunhat, all intriguingly clean.

'All the time I stood assessing her, she'd known I was there. Still, as she looked up, probed about in my eyes, there was tension as thick as you like. Me, perfectly magnanimous. I pointed out to her that our world government had invested some eight hundred million ptonas, and many housing units, in assisting Kryptonian asylum seekers, and it might be just as beneficial for her if she was to go to one of the evacuation ports.

'She ignored me, anyway. There was a tight body-language that drew me to her like a drug. Standing there limply, I searched desperately for ways to resolve the situation.

'"You're not in any trouble", I said. "Not from me".

'Still a measure of cool disregard came from her. Never oblivious, though.

'"They'll be entering this continent shortly, commandeering everything in their path", I warned. "Subverting everything you know. Raping, murdering. You should leave; it would make sense".

'She just -wagged her head at me. "It wouldn't make sense at all".

'I asked why not.

"'Because the concept of guerilla warfare exists'".

HD hologram failing, or maybe just Jor-El's muscular face receding into cavernous shadow, the image grew desaturated. He eased further and further backwards. It was obvious that he'd fallen in love with this young guerilla fighter who'd broken into his factory. Clark gasped -'Lara', his biological mother.

'In later years, she always said that the thing I loved most in all the world was snappy repartee. That I'd been denied it in the bourgeois lifestyle before meeting her, and now it was like a drug to me. Taking serious things lightly, taking light things with a pinch of crazy-dark nihilism, and always punkishly dismissive of conventional thinking. Thinking back, she was probably trying to prove it with that very first conversation.

'"You can't expect to survive against an army of bloodthirsty zealots moving street to street".

'I'd said this with my default smile, because I didn't know how else to act. It was absolutely deadpan that she replied, "Have you seen the way they go to sleep? After sundown, they put aside the raping and go to a bedwin tent where they sleep in a big circle, holding hands and clutching their laser rifles. It's so sweet, no one has the heart to creep up and cut their throats".

'I smiled quite a bit, and had no answer, so she explained further, "Any army in history develops stragglers. Any army in history has weaknesses in their security where they can be picked off by guerillas".

'Warned I, "Surely the price is too high? They take their prisoners, force them from the top of high buildings".

'Lara shrugged, "That might be true. That might be apocryphal. But as they led you up the stairwell, wouldn't you be secretly punching the air that they weren't just torturing you to death?"

'"Maybe they've badly tortured you already?"

'"Would it be as slow and painful as this conversation we're having right now?"

'"Probably not".

'"Besides which", she shrugged from within her thick shirt, "Think on evolution. If they throw enough people off tall buildings, sooner or later one of them will fly".

'While I laughed at this, her eyes twinkled just enough to show she wasn't serious, was just playing with me. I told her that, all the same, she should let me take her to one of the refugee camps where she could be evacuated off-world -simply because, currently, the superpower nations of Knorel were clambering over each other in a desire to send their armies to rid Krypton of the caliphate.

'Lara's assessment of this? "Typical Knorel liberal claptrap. Sending your army off-world, to defeat an enemy that will never pose any threat to invading your own planet. It's foolishness. We shouldn't need them, they shouldn't need us. It doesn't lessen the ire of the looney zealots, it disconnects everyone from their own responsibilities".

'I said, "But we want to help. Is that such a bad thing?"

'She said, "Frankly, yes. What is it that motivates all the post-working-class family units of Knorel to want to help us? The misconception that life is easy, and abundant".

'"You've got me there", said I.

'"It's a misconception. Like trying to walk on molten lava".

"I understand, but you can tell me more metaphors if you want".

'She was wrong about me, incidentally -it isn't necessarily our clever repartee that draws me to her. It's the little things like her lip-chew. The way she can't read more than a dozen lines in a book before squinting up at the sky in contemplation, at odds with her action-girl credo.

'To collapse a long narrative, I resigned from my company via a solar-range communications array. I fell in with Lara's band of guerillas, a group that was swelling, absorbing smaller cells, training with knives and swords, always waiting for the onslaught of zealots to start. Supply runs were made hundreds of miles out into the abandoned countryside. Increasingly, we always returned to the Kandor Valley, though, a pastoral little city just beneath a huge ridge that looked out onto the Eastern seas of Krypton, presumably the direction the enemy would call from.

'Some of the guerillas pored over the enemy transmissions, which were just-and-just undisciplined enough to give useful intelligence. Lara and I were content to simply wait, in the meantime -falling in love. Acting if we were on holiday, in a way! We commandeered a white-masonry cottage set within an ancient line of sandstone walls, at first look the most vulnerable part of the city we could possibly have chosen should the tide of zealots come pouring over the cusp from the sea. But the idea was that we could force them into disarray even if there weren't too many places we could immediately fall back to.

'Lara had set a huge Ton-Larbas beside the most outward-looking wall. I'm not sure what the analogous Earth instrument is called. Xylophone? Steel drum? In any case, she'd now-and-then hit it, bang the keys in a huge, complex pattern. My wife has zero musical talent, but it's impossible for a Ton-Larbas not to sound beautiful.

'I was inside, seeing to my stubble. I heard her hit a few keys, but then -there was a strange resistance to playing any more. As I went outside, I saw that she was staring at a clustered group of figures moving and chattering through one of the sides-streets from the main port. We coordinated ourselves with the look-out station set in the highest point of the opposite valley. Some guerillas had personal communicators, some had trade radios, some had to rely on what you on Earth call Morse Code. We received help from the crow's nest through a ping-based single frequency receiver. One long burst meant we had to stand by to learn which location to move to, then a single ping for location one and so on. We were sent to a small arcade of hardware stores and a bazaar that may or may not have looked bountiful to a newly-arrived invader.

'And really, no sooner had we crept over the threshold, dug ourselves down, than our radio told us what to expect. Two regular pings told of a pair of enemies incoming with their weapons not immediately ready. A third, slower ping indicated a third militia man with his carbine held aloft.

'I hid behind the door. Lara was a little way off behind a counter, looking horribly vulnerable, though I didn't have time to worry about her.

'On Earth, as on Krypton, people often talk of that phenomenon, your life flashing through your mind in the precise moment you fear you're going to die. It struck me then, the same thing happens the moment before you kill someone. I thought of my working life, if 'work' you can call it without casting your head at the ground in shame. Lazy capitalist society has no goals to aim for except a kind of nexus point of arrogance, conceit. That's bad enough, but it felt to me like even within the mass delusion, my bosses had tried to exploit me. Circles within circles of unconscious evil. I had such hatred inside me. I had such a low opinion of human life. It scared me to death to think that I might project this hatred onto the Dabbatin-kel, who really had nothing to do with it. In the same way that they were projecting their own human inadequacies onto God. I thought it was pretty inevitable that I'd develop a taste for killing, in spite of the fact that I fancied myself an unusually moral man. Perhaps because of it. It petrified me.

'The three militia men entered the floorspace of the bazaar, fanning out slightly, but nothing we couldn't handle. We waited patiently for the armed man to enter fully behind his two comrades and close the door behind him.

'I put a hand over his mouth and put my knife through the whole of his throat. Lara carried out a similar act of the man nearest her. The man in the middle was apparently unarmed. He looked alarmed, not particularly afraid, but at no point did he make eye-contact with either of us.

'There was something about that -when you're weaponless and cornered, surely the best, most natural option is to try and gain mercy by at least glancing into the eye of your enemy? You never know, there might be such a thing as a collective, shared humanity after all. But the desire to see a civilised human race, and at such a minimal cost -it's either there or it isn't. You can't mourn something that's fundamentally absent, can you? He made for the door, shrieking for help from his genocidal friends, and I killed him.

'And so began our guerilla war, house-to-house, street-to-street, sewer-to-sewer. That first day, we retreated back to an anonymous line of houses, within an anonymous estate, hopefully hidden from the militia by their total ubiquity.

'I didn't want to talk about my guilt over the killings because I wanted to look strong and pragmatic. Lara knew I was troubled, though, saying that I was just like her. In my gut, I knew the killing was perfectly justified because they were crazy and evil. And when you stop to think about it, the thing that gnaws you the most -the act of taking another life is the most unpleasant thing in the world, whether you hate that person or not, whether they deserve to die or not. So what you're really troubled by is that, once you've done it, you'll no longer be able to co-exist with anything innocent. A dog wagging his tail and putting his head in your lap. The sight of a child flying a kite. The phenomenon of thought itself. All these things you'll start to equate with the people you've killed, not what their corrupted lives were like, but their infallible, innocent souls.

'It's an insoluble problem, don't you think? Natural evolution demands arrogance. Arrogance leads to lack of empathy. And after that, lack-of-empathy begets lack-of-empathy endlessly, not even in your subconscious but tacitly woven into the fabric of society itself. At best you can say to yourself, 'If you're going through hell, keep going', but that hardly gives any comfort.

'Even those who fancy themselves initiates get side-tracked. Distracted by scale. After all, what's the difference between a caliphate warlord sweeping across a continent taking slaves, and an apparently enlightened, democracy-blessed capitalist who pays his workers hundreds of times less for work that's hundreds times more tangible and useful than anything he does himself?

'At best, you can daydream that one day some freedom fighter might come along and methodically rearrange things. Finally. Permanently. But the killing that would be involved -would be too big a stain on the collective soul of the humanoid race. It might even wipe out the concept of innocence forever.

'Lara, from infanthood onwards, always loved listening to the Krypton World Anthem. And by the way, it's nothing like the anthems you have for your individual nations on Earth. Nothing that's tailored to saluting or marching -just a noble, inspiring theme. Which was the problem. After the war, on the mantle of our humble cottage, Lara kept a vinylíou recording, which she never once played, because the conflict had sucked every little bit of nobility from her soul. No more the lilting orchestrations so evocative of -some majestic spirit soaring over the continents of our home, dipping low to play, tilting to soar back above the clouds. I barely remember what it sounds like myself...

'The type of music which was favoured in the years following our victory was a variety of blunt, soulful ballad. Most of the singers were young men who were just-and-just old enough to have a legitimately anguished voice. A lot of them had grown four-day-groomed beards to look like Zod.

'And how to describe General Zod, our post-war leader and one of the main instigators that sees my son now four hundred thousand light years removed on Earth? I suppose, at heart, he is a good man. I'd go so far to say that he suffers from the same tragedy that afflicts most revolutionary war leaders throughout history; no one could deny that action had to be taken, and no matter how he'd chosen to fight, from then on, he'd be embroiled in politics.

'For sure, he isn't an evil man as a good proportion of the population, both Kryptonian and off-world, have come to opine. I'll believe that, even if the worst comes to the worst. No leader or statesman can be blamed for anything, really. Ask yourself, how many ordinary Germans would have failed to see the immorality of fascism if the Axis powers had prevailed? Right now on Earth, as we speak, the evil brew of human nature and capitalism goes unquestioned merely because it blesses anyone who wants to opt out of hard work and accrue money disproportionately.

'Krypton was almost back on its feet. Before our recent decline into martial law, we had a single law enforcement constable for each town, which was more than enough. We have a health care system that seems too good to be true, but isn't, and more than anything marks out human nobility as a concept which -exists! Against the odds! Our pastures and orchards look luminous in the summer sun, and the farming activity like notes in a symphony.

'From a modest talent using reconnaissance drones in the war, my civilian life saw me take a position repairing crop dusters across a number of districts. I occasionally work at the long-range satellite division of Krypton's Space Centre. Hence my son's sojourn to your planet. Kal-El's mother is a seamstress, and a gardener, and wields her scythe in a way that fascinates and scares me equally.

'Zod -rebuilt our infrastructure carefully. Dotted around our planet, mostly in private collections prior to the end of the war, there were two-hundred-year-old soil-probes which had fallen to Krypton when it was still an empty planet, long before any colonists had arrived. They'd been intended to scan the soil of each continent in turn, the idea being to decide which was the best place for settlers to disembark. Zod had a scientist working under him -Dr Faora- who became fascinated by the modern applications the probes might offer our society. That is to say, as mining tools, the helioylamic x-rays scanning deep under the surface and finding Unobtanium, Pakyris, Dilithium, numerous other compounds that would help our industry and which we could sell back to Knorel, oh they of little faith.

'General Zod led the mining operations personally, I think, because it took him away from the horribly overzealous politics that develop around any up-and-coming planet. In the World Council Citadel, we had delegates from Knorel, Autonomous Safety Assessors, union leaders who retained their working class accents only as a bitter little neurosis. Pressure groups and unknowable pseudo-philanthropists demanded universal access to specialised training for the world's population. General Zod was adamant no taxes would be used for this purpose. If someone needed to be taught how to use a certain irrigation technique, then the skills must osmose through word-of-mouth. Krypton, he said, had a simple creed. At its core, civilisation and democracy working at their smoothest could be equated to a network of single towns, each with a hospital, each with a farm, each surrounded by prairie. The farms expanded based on the needs of the town. New homes were built on the prairie as children came of age and needed space of their own. Maybe there would be training centers, research plants, office blocks, but these were completely optional; there was no need to assume the state had any need to provide them -or even opine that they should exist. To get the population excited over the chance of getting academic or administrative jobs was to risk Krypton's economy becoming as strange and fragile as Knorel's. All that 'I want' freedom rhetoric swooping down -pecking your eyes like a cloud of dragon-bats in a bad dream.

'Subtler political problems came in the form of service providers insisting that they should be allowed to seek investment from off-world sources. Always bringing forth a kind of airy shrug from Zod. It wasn't even that the money-men of Knorel represented a domineering influence, he said. The true danger came in the form of the several layers of committee-based bureaucracy that would necessarily spring up between the manufacture of tangible products and the shareholders off-world, the upholding of arbitrary financial intrigues, the stamp duties. A strong wage and a job-for-life should be guaranteed by three things and three things only; people keeping their bellies full, people having a roof over their head, people being medically cared for. These are all simple propositions, he argued. To put any intervening requirements between people providing these services and their being paid for them was to invite evil, disarray, institutionalized insanity.

'In recent years, some people have speculated that our leader has become tyrannical, or else his stoney face represents a well-concealed nervous breakdown. Perhaps there's traces of truth in both of these views, but if so, they're still only small traces. Having read a lot of Earth literature, I'd equate Zod with the victim-protagonist focal-character of a Shakespearean tragedy. Self-reflection? Surging inside of him, there's nothing but self-reflection.

'Take, for instance, the involvement of Brianiac into the affairs of Krypton. Two hundred years ago, at the time of Krypton's colonisation, Braniac was a worldwide corporation that controlled many aspects of life on Knorel, though in Earth terms, they were also analogous with local councils. They'd been sanctioned by the world government of Knorel to build domiciles for the colonists arriving on Krypton. Unfortunately, before they could start work, one of their world's periodic recessions put pay to their plans. The colonists built their own little camps. Now, however, owing to Krypton's renaissance and sudden profitability, Brainiac took it upon itself to contact General Zod, telling him that, technically, legally, they still had development rights to several large landmasses.

'Zod pointed out that their development plans involved bungalows or two-story, space-squandering brochure-bait. His own plans were equally cultivated and luxurious, but involved multi-unit towers and subterranean lounges, which would maximise space, give people very desirable homes but not pretend they're money-breathing kings and queens. People shouldn't be fooled into thinking they're wealthy when in reality they're simply bourgeois units of debt, either to themselves or the planet.

'The row went on for months. Our press enjoyed suggesting that Zod had passed from left-wing freedom fighter to right-wing dictator. Publicly, civil war stirred lazily to a real possibility. Emphasised by the rise of a Kryptonian opposition leader called Ked Korbynus. At first, he was a joke, celebrated and derided in equal measure for being an exaggeration of the dreamy, left-wing past. Myself, I found the whole business ridiculous. Left-wing and right-wing politics are exactly the same, after all. They both exist via rhetoric, which in turn is just a way of -worshipping the conceit of lowest common denominators.

'Opposition armies have arisen, dangerously, at speed. Most of them, it's plain to see, are the work of land-owning fiefs, seeking to sure up the property value and interest rates on land they've owned for hundreds of years -and painted into a corner, because the financial systems of Knorel involve dozens of different pieces of legislation created solely to manufacture money-making intrigue between huge, privately-owned collections of capital. In short, they don't have anything to do with anything. General Zod's ultimatum; you can no longer sit by with undeveloped property deeds. Either start building publically useful dwellings or your land will be confiscated by force.

'Over this, and the institutionalized favouritism shown to non-skilled, manual workers, there have been riots. Plus military skirmishes, protests by lazy students willing to die for the chance of getting academic, office jobs once more -really just whining mouths until the end of time. Once or twice, certain sullen-eyed mercenaries have almost succeeded in assassinating Zod...

'And then the endgame started. Last year, he announced that his scientists had discovered strange, crystalline ore traces fused in the bedrock of every square inch of Krypton's oceans and landmasses. The ore was a highly condensed mixture of hydrocarbon fissures and ionised compounds which had been irradiated some time when the planet was still being formed.

'For want of a better name, he dubbed it Kryptonite, since it was so fundamental a part of our world. Lara has a joke, "It can't be that harmful to us, since no one can even decide what it really is. Just listen to the name, 'Kryptonite ore...?'

'Gallows humour? Perhaps. In the same nightmarishly sudden global speech, Zod told how the Kryptonite was extremely dangerous when exposed to certain levels of heat and solar radiation. A rocket, fired at a precise trajectory into our sun, would release a solar flare. The resulting emission, on any normal planet, would merely result in localised satellite disruption. On Krypton, however, it would activate the trinitrotoluenic fission and lead to a chain reaction of 6.5 megatonnes for every square foot of the planet's surface. Quite simply, Krypton would be destroyed outright, reduced to mere fragments dissipated across the universe.

'Unless people reject their lazy, capitalist impulses once and for all, he will give the order to purposefully scuttle the planet.

'The remainder of Zod's speech -it's not something I can paraphrase. But truly, it is a legitimate ultimatum. A proportion of the population are against it, as you can imagine. On the surface, certainly, it's unacceptable in any sane, moral terms. But just think on it for a moment.

'All sentient creatures instinctively know that greed and laziness are wrong, or at any rate they can't verbalise a defense that balances civilisation and tacit slavery. People live their lives as institutionalised slave owners. Slave owners that watch national holobroadcasts about ballroom dancing and baking -but slave owners nonetheless. It isn't too big a stretch of the imagination that the only way out of this mess of ours is a kill-or-cure. The price is high, until you consider... the chance to remove arrogance as a humanoid characteristic, forever? Such a hope is second only to defeating death itself...

'Kal-El's mother and I started our life together in a joint decision to stay and fight, against the odds. We choose to continue just the same. It is unlikely, my friend on Earth, that you will ever discover whether Krypton prevailed. I can only hope that the people of your planet some day develop a greater sense of social justice than we could aspire to.

'In the meantime, protect my son. Teach him goodness and honour out of all proportions.

'And I leave you with the Kryptonian World Anthem'.

C.

Time lurked massively, guiltily, in front of them all. Father Christmas' practice, once the business of arranging presents for Earth's population was out of the way, was to immediately lose himself in an Airfix, or a Revell, sometimes a Skyform. The previous year, a new Messerschmitt had been released -a fiendishly precise 1-in-15-scale. Since reading about it in the email newsletter, he'd grown increasingly excited at the prospect of crafting such a beauty; the individual gears of the labyrinthine engine, the subtly dented framework of the wings, the pilot's dash like a tiny glowing Christmas tree...

But now it was no imposition at all to set this aside in order to aid Mr Clark Kent in his turmoil. It had been many centuries since there'd been an opportunity to directly help someone; Father Christmas found it faintly inspiring to have been thrown in at the deep end, and now more than ever since the man's sorrow would only have been exacerbated by news of Krypton's destruction. There was an oblique tension that, alone in the small communications room, he might have found some inspired way to commit suicide, alien imperviousness or no. Though perhaps this was ruled out by the burning look that was forever dancing in his eyes, something like a quest, far beyond life and death.

Father Christmas stared intensely along the curved corridor, waiting for the young fellow to emerge from one strange world to another.

"Clark Kent is a liar".

The old man looked sharply to see Gentry, enfolded into manifest human form at his elbow once more. The motion was soundless, subtle, but usually he was able to detect it somehow. A weird tension, it seemed, was blunting everything. The edges of the lounge seemed clearly defined where normally the encompassing light of the Northern solstice made them fuzzy. Thinking.

"You don't like Clark, do you?", Father Christmas began.

Elves could not shrug; Gentry made an equivalent gesture by bearing his strange teeth neither happily or sadly. "Like, dislike. He is a liar. Claims to have walked all the way here, to die in cold. Claims to dislike flying. Look-peer across telling-mirror in Surveillance Camera Room. Surveillance Camera Room neglected foolishly by you. He did not walk. He fell from the sky".

"The cold and the snowfall confuse people. He may not be lying outright".

Presently, they were joined by Mxyztplk, who merely listened respectfully, as was his nature.

Speaking on, Gentry attempted to put the matter to bed with his surly pragmatism. Father Christmas: quietly annoyed. Surely he must have known he couldn't succeed in changing his mind on Mr Kent?

"Beautiful, innocent útlendingur, Clark. Calls his self human. No, no. Power-fierce únglingur do not allay in distanced lands by error or refugee status. He is an invader. And who might vanquish his evil? Near enough you. Near enough. So target. Come here. To destroy you, Isfaoir".

Father Christmas thought about this. It wasn't out of the question that Gentry was right. He peered along the corridor, where just a few feet behind the tempered superstructure door, Clark Kent was almost certainly fully restored, every UVB cell primed to the utmost in superpower. True, it was unlikely, if push came to shove, that he could be defeated. By the old legend that lives at the North Pole. By anyone.

So let goodwill be hoped for.

"My friend", Father Christmas looked a little way from Gentry, while still addressing him specifically. "I simply don't believe that Clark Kent is a bad man. And it's worth pointing out that his Kryptonian physiology being what it is, he can attune his hearing to impossibly precise degrees, meaning there's every possibility he's listening to us right now. And even if what you're saying is true, we have a responsibility.

"Consider the worst tyrants of recent times. Hitler, Stalin. Both had their evil exacerbated by a fear that people were plotting behind their backs. But what would they have discovered, if they could have only looked directly into people's minds, the way I can? People aren't intrinsically evil, are they? Any more than animals.

"Gentry, Mxyztplk, think about the way your own race seceded from its relationship with the humans, the better to surveil them. Yes. Perhaps, overall, their strange nature warranted it. But was the mood of the average human half as dangerous as you ever feared?"

Gentry looked at the old man pityingly, "Farewell, Isfaoir. Remember that I warned you".

Before folding up his corporeal form and vanishing.

Sighing, Father Christmas peered at the remaining elf.

"What of you, Mr Mxyztplk?"

The small creature moped, a little like Harpo Marx, before animatedly thinking, straightening himself, touching Father Christmas' arm in a gesture of solidarity. Henceforth, he blinked and twitched, stealing every scene like Eric Morcombe. And silence won over tension, for a little while. Expressions: brave if ambivalent.

Mainly, Father Christmas continued to look towards the low, futuristic door, while also flicking his eyes for fractions-of-seconds at the shadowy wall struts where Mxyztplk ingratiated his body, there to observe the coming drama as a wholly innocent soul. Outside, just beyond the nearest observation window, floodlights stared tersely across the snowy dunes. The reflection, the refraction, made eerie crumples of luminous light on the room fittings, to the Nth degree yellow.

Brooding, his mind twirled around on the Christmas dynamic. The pools of light on the wall, exotic yet utterly peaceful, evoked one of the best truths from his festival, the ability to lose yourself in colourful lights, a mysterious and mescalined talisman against the cold atmosphere. Or was it a way of masochistically celebrating, with a subconscious wisdom, all the cold and death? Peace and goodwill on Earth could almost be secondary.

He waited, wishing he had a sherry in his hand, until finally Mr Kent emerged.

Looking on with an expression that was not-quite-numb, "They destroyed it, didn't they? Krypton".

"Yes, I'm sorry".

"Not your fault", Clark said emphatically. "Nice speech, by the way. Just now. Are you Sheriff Rick Grimes?"

"I don't know who that is", Father Christmas tried to speak on steadily without gabbling in wrong-footed panic. "I don't think I'd make a very good cowboy, though".

"You might have to learn. We've all got our own little high-noon showdowns coming".

"Do you want to talk about what you've learned today?"

Mr Kent wondered, "Do you have any answers? About the human condition that always causes this f-ing mess?"

"Come and sit down", invited the considered twinkle-of-the-eye, the image from a billion Christmas cards. Dryly, "I do have answers of a sort".

Clark crept in low, sat shoulder-heavy on the small Geppetto-style stool, there to speak with a creeping intelligence that was -unnerving, profound. Amid clean, finely-crafted furniture, there was clearly a temptation to think of old-world Swedish woodcraft, now made sinister as an vanished counterpoint to Ikea's sterile weirdness.

"What's happening here can't be a coincidence. My father on Earth -Jon Swan- was killed within a day of my arriving, killed in the service of a capitalist factory. It's the same factory where I took a job myself, when I was old enough. I didn't expect any special treatment from Lex Lyson just because my Dad died in his factory car park. And though I -obviously- grew to hate Lyson when I found out he was shifting production overseas to Bucktoothrickshawland, pardon my racism, it was still something I could live with. Just. But when the guy gets knighted? When Call Me Ed gives him a government post as 'Technology and Industry Tsar'? When Weltsbury Council gives the c- planning permission to dominate Malmsville's skyline with a 'Research and Development Hub', the way they never did when he wanted to expand our factory? That's too much salt rubbed in too big a wound.

"And how I want to grab him. Heat-vision off his head and stick it on the flagpole of Buckingham Palace, all at superspeed so the country thinks it's being haunted by some vengeful working class poltergeist. How I just want to see the look in his eyes as I strangle him using a hundredth of my strength, just on the off-chance that his eccentric, autistic brain might understand the idea that there's something happening. A single working class man with a single shred of social conscience left in the whole of Britain...

"If only I could do that, instead of being a 'good man'.

"And now this, yeah? Krypton was killed by exactly the same thing. Blank-minded capitalism. What am I to make of it? It's like a fever-dream. Are you honestly telling me that I wasn't sent here from one doomed world to another, into this exact circumstance, by fate? It's more than a coincidence, mate".

"Yes it is", Father Christmas confessed. "Follow me".

They arose, Mr Kent's expression, it's true, the precise opposite of the mindless smile given by Lex Lyson in his TV commercials. Across every millimetre of his dark eyes, specks of light carried so much coded information: 'I came here to die. I'm hyper-observant. I know you better than you know yourself'. And perhaps he did. Father Christmas had no idea what would happen.

As originally constructed in the Year -human prehistory, maybe 4000 BC, maybe earlier- the complex had been arranged in a vast circle, the better to gain access to the core should there be an emergency. Should it need sudden maintenance or to be scuttled in the midst of an invasion. Of the one or two native tribes who'd accidently stumbled on it, Father Christmas felt a secret horror that their cultures had carried a subconscious understanding down through the centuries -to replicate it in Doric capitals, the Nepalese Caitya, Stonehenge, or more tellingly, the space station in Tarkovsky's Solaris. Eric Von Daniken vindicated, as one slowly admits that HS1 and euro skeptics are unerringly correct.

What lay at the core of ethnic rug and Airfix-strewn chambers was something -he wondered how contemporary eyes would identify it: not quite a vast satellite dish, not quite a transmitter or an electro-sensitive node, but carrying elements of all three. And for what purpose? As Mr Kent lay eyes, Father Christmas felt a new and overpowering guilt across his strange old body.

Maybe he should have painted the whole thing green, or orange, to lessen the effect of a Iranian or North Korean missile strut. That the observation port set inside the link corridor was decorated with the neon tubes of a sixties Americana diner didn't exactly help. The three foot mounted marlin, the jivey foot-mats. These were just aspects of a diorama to be hastily described in the early section of a novel, and look at me, I'm Stephen King, read by everyone, hated by no one, still never quite beloved.

Spooked, Mr Kent stared through the glass at the colossal transmitter, exactly as though it was the focal point of the universe.

Explained the older man, "It's called Cerebro. It's the device I use to enter the minds of all Earth-bound mortals at Christmas Time".

"You really are Father Christmas", the young man noted dispassionately.

"It would be a bizarre claim to make if it wasn't true!"

"I thought you were just Camilla Batmanghelidjh's brother".

"The problem, which I identified -many, many years ago- parents don't really know their children. Children don't really know their parents. A friend might know another friend, but not as well as they'd like. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It's just the human condition. But I thought I might -step in. Cerebro is capable of scanning the mind of every sentient being on Earth, rooting their subconscious to find the perfect present, then secretly redirecting that information into the subconscious of their parent, daughter, friend. The computer program maps into their primitive mind where the present might be found, all without the conscious mind ever being aware something has occurred. Beyond their being lucky".

Mr Kent rubbed his youthful face, his muscular jaw. "But your computer must make mistakes sometimes. I've received rubbish presents in the past".

"Well, there's always a margin for error", Father Christmas smiled quaintly.

"But -you've got a machine that can enter the subconscious minds of everyone on Earth. Wouldn't it be better to adapt that technology to -bring world peace? Etcetera?"

'Etcetera'. For some reason, the implication made him go weak in his stomach and visibly sag. No cosy conception of a red-felt-wearing patriarch pottering around a Lapland toy factory here.

"Cerebro has already been adapted from its original purpose. It happened centuries ago when I first arrived on your planet. And therein lies a story. I wouldn't presume to call it 'tragic', in the face of what happened to Krypton. But... it's pertinent".

And henceforth, some kind of horrible, post-sympathetic awkwardness floated in the air. Through the mugginess, Clark waited. Father Christmas looked sadly at the deck. Clark grew impatient. All of a sudden, perhaps, the densely linked corridors seemed like a network of NHS walkways, futuristically curved or no.

"People tell stories at Christmas", he invited darkly.

"My world, Colu, existed ten times the distance that Krypton lay from Earth. The fact that I'm here, as a ranger of sorts, is a testament to my civilisation's advanced quantum plate technology, theoretical and risky as it was, long since abandoned. They warned me at the time that it was unlikely I'd be able to return home, even centuries hence. Huge numbers of tests were carried out on me to be sure I had the psychological strength to see it through. Maybe you can imagine... a NASA training program... crossed with a CIA recruitment interview... crossed with a child care diploma?"

He waited patiently for Clark to answer. "I take it you passed, though".

"Oh", the old man felt himself grow unabashed. "Yes. I was up for anything. You see, I'd recently suffered a bereavement".

Dry-mouthed, "Parent?"

"No, my parents died when I was small. Which probably says something for the classic, benevolent Father Christmas mythology which I've overcompensated with".

Clark's eyes twinkled. Not quite a smile. Father Christmas chuckled all the while when he said, "Orphans. We're like two peas in a space-pod".

"My wife developed a disease analogous with cancer, spreading, wrong-footing the doctors. It attacked the brain and the nerves themselves which meant that there was... intense pain involved. I was two hundred years old at that point, but it was the first time I felt like I'd come of age".

Mr Kent, "So you came from a futuristic space society -but they had no cure for cancer?"

"It was a little more sophisticated than cancer. A horrible, unremitting disease, and highly resistant to pain relief".

"Sorry", Kent shrugged, and was breezy.

"Anyway, in the final days, I was totally observant of my wife's every breath, every flicker of her closed eyes. But I was also given to dwell on the doctors and nurses. They were ordinary people. But good people. Eerily good. How was it that they could deal with such bleak scenarios as mine, day in day out -and still retain that inherent caring? I became obsessed".

Clark Kent stared through the expansive port hole, at nothing, sometimes at the super-grainy snow. "Perhaps most people are inherently good, and you and I are just bizarre psychological aberrations, mired under layers of bitterness and self-obsession?"

"That view is a bit masochistic in itself", chuckled Father Christmas.

Clark shrugged.

"Anyway, when the time came for me to leave for Earth, I had nothing to leave behind. You mention just now that we were peas in a space-pod. This is more true than you could possibly know.

"There is a psychological cancer just as real as its medical counterpart, sweeping all the planets of the universe, from Krypton to Earth and everywhere. Wherever conscious life develops, it's there. It was my mission as a ranger to journey to primordial Earth and use Cerebro to vanquish it before it could take hold. Subtly, the psychic array would beam coded information into less than one percent of Homo Erectus' mind, nonetheless reprogramming him with enough of a conception of nobility and self-sufficiency that Earth's civilization would flourish indefinitely. The disease I was trying to cure was capitalism".

The blue-tint lights of the link were clearly meant to be all-encompassing. They were not. Horrible swollen shadows were laid beneath Clark Kent's eyes, memories dragging him back to his daily life in England, no doubt. A thousand days as a shift-working expendable. Whole days phasing out, perhaps even phased out until this very moment, and who could be shocked when he emerged from his survival mode to stare angrily at 'Father Christmas'?

"This machine, Cerebro. You used it on me. You used it to bring me here".

"No", said the old man quickly.

"Of course you did. You brought me here to be your successor or whatnot. I'm the most powerful man on Earth and I hate capitalism with a passion. It's more than a coincidence that I should just arrive here by accident. How do you explain that?"

"I can't". Intense reverie, thought Father Christmas, was the very best shield he had. "But how could you survive and make landfall on Earth through the gulfs of space? Such luck one could call God".

Flicking his eyes at the more oppressive corner of the walkway, "I don't believe in God. And I don't believe what you're telling me, mate. It's like Jane Campion being abducted by aliens, and they want her to write the perfect film about women being oppressed. It's like Prince Charles getting a pink Valis beam to tell him that he really should put all his effort into seeing off ugly architecture".

Father Christmas creased his face, wincing. He squared up to Clark with all the meekness of a man squaring down. "Perhaps you'll come to believe me in time".

"Yeah, perhaps".

"Would it help persuade you if I said that I'd long ago abandoned my mission?"

"Why would you do that? Haven't you seen the state of this world under capitalism?"

"Yes", the older man's body floundered around. "Though I like to think my reasons for abandoning communism are solid, and varied. Pragmatic, but also from the heart".

"You abandoned communism because it's easier for them to love you if they're allowed to be lazy".

"No".

He was being patient with Clark, determinedly so. He wondered if it was being noticed at all.

"I abandoned Cerebro's original use more or less straight away because I looked at them ...the primordial savannah-dwellers, and I saw elements of those wonderful, selfless doctors and nurses who'd treated my wife back on Colu. An inclination of the neck here, a caring twinkle of the eye there. Oh, I knew that given a few centuries, they'd degenerate into yuppies and housewives, but in the meantime, what possible right did I have interfere with their minds? And then there was the love affair I had with a mortal lady, followed by this and that continental war dragging my loyalties this way and that. You see, I became too biased to follow my mission through objectively".

Dark, painfully focused glints probed forth from Clark Kent's eyes. All of a sudden, he no longer needed to think about anything. Judgement followed, calm and collected. "What you're saying makes no sense. Your planet was an all-communist affair, right? Well then, you should believe in it. You should be grateful to it. And even if you didn't overtly use your machine to alter our brains, what about all those times in history when communism almost succeeded on its own? The space race? What about when Trotsky almost trumped Stalin to become party leader? Just the tiniest little nudge from you would have seen a completely kinder Soviet Union, one that would've lasted, one that would've saved the world. Why didn't you intervene?"

A horrible truth occurred to Father Christmas. He stared out at the vastness of Cerebro. The speckled-snowy gantries that had been prefabricated by people who actually worked and believed in something. How things are inevitably squandered. "I don't know. I believed I was being humane".

Mr Kent reacted by blinking, once, twice. The most subtle method actor in the world, behaviour dictated not by any earthly conditions, but by how close a man is to claustrophobic hell. Burning, flesh-shredding hell; a thousand days of travelling to the nearest honour-bound bluecollar job, on a council bus that detours endlessly to pick up yuppie college students. Father Christmas saw it all.

"I'm going to bed down in a corner. I'll be leaving in the morning", Mr Kent decided.

Cc.

On New Year's Days, it always felt like an act of positive thinking to sit back and leaf through the calendar of the year ahead. The individual months, represented by clever, professional photography, seemed like such quantifiable things. You could almost believe that a man had a nigh-unlimited allocation in his life. 2016: Dogs in F1 cars.

It helped that Father Christmas didn't sleep. Sometimes he'd go into a twinkle-eyed reverie, and maybe this was his version of REM. Sometimes his aged bones would relax as if in a bubble-bath, but bleary-eyed human slumber? No.

An Aussie Shepherd sat in the cockpit of a Honda RA168E, smiling as if he'd just eaten his fill in a sausage factory, a solid little paw resting securely on the minimalist steering wheel. Father Christmas' eyes moved quickly and closely over the big matte image, but he didn't really process it. Through flickery, highly uncomfortable short-term memory, it was hard to remember exactly the conversation which had just passed with Clark Kent, portentous though it was. It was like -all those Hugo Danner and Doc Savage strips that ran across just three or four panels in daily newspapers. The action sequences were interesting enough, but the dialogue exposition? Always too tight, frantic, clumsy.

The belief that he'd been controlled by Cerebro. In truth, Father Christmas had never used it on anything other than propagating yuletide good cheer, not once. Not to curtail dictators and not to avoid holocausts. He knew it must seem odd to a mortal. Who could blame the distrust?

Moreover, why had he told Kent about his true mission on Earth in the first place? Guilt?

'I don't believe in God', the boy proudly stated, as a way of decrying how he might have fallen to Earth merely by coincidence. And how to explain that Father Christmas came from an advanced, socially honourable civilisation that did? In its infancy, Colu hadn't rejected religion the way Earthly communist societies had, simply through fear of having its power usurped. They'd run smoothly in parallel. One could gnash and rage at the evils of organised religion, but truly it missed the point: people always organise themselves, as a matter of course, based on the bizarre conceits that are forever present in the humanoid mind. Whether it became an evil religion, evil capitalism, evil fox hunting, the evil gangs of post-middle-class children now found on every school bus in the western world -well.

Perhaps it had helped that, for Coluan society, the inherent mystery of religion was always emphasised. People hadn't talked about it because it was simply too big a subject to be probed by a collective group. Indeed, Father Christmas hardly even thought about it. One day, he would see Mary again. He was aware of this is in the core of his being. One could hardly even call it a 'belief' because that suggested a pressure or a desire, one way or another, rather than an intrinsic phenomenon. Psychologically, he could -just-understand how this knowledge of the afterlife might have been contrived; watching her die had been -vicious, maddening. The irrational pressure to believe in the afterlife could have funneled into his subconscious so subtly it could have remained hidden, barely existing but utterly fundamental.

Still again, he knew he didn't deserve to see Mary again. It would be better if he just exited this world to spend a season in Hell. Nevertheless, he sensed Heaven was coming, and so was she.

Father Christmas envied the humans their research into the subconscious and quantum entanglement. One day, they might even surpass the work that had been done on Colu, to find some... mortally-pleasing answer to the unpleasantness of reality. Increasingly, he doubted that a two week festival, once a year, with gifted presents between loved ones, was really enough.

Profound sadness at Clark Kent's predicament tore his attention away from the novelty F1 calendar. Palpably focusing his eyes, he activated his own long-dormant x-ray vision to stare across the links and subchambers to where his guest had hunkered down on a rinky-dink bed. The way he slept: knitted blankets dragged heavily across fetal limbs and tense shoulders. For all his muscles and strength, he was somehow a vulnerable, boyish figure, yet Father Christmas knew he'd would be entirely resistant to sympathy. It was quite a problem.

In the wave-shape cockpit of a Mercedes W06, a waggy-tongued fox terrier turned his head to smile at the V6 vents, as if he'd just won the Hungarian GP and was intensely pleased about his car's performance. Someone had tied a Benjy-style neckerchief around his shoulders, and it looked pleasingly like something Kay Petre or Maria de Filippis might have worn in 1950. Father Christmas smiled sadly. He casually looked back to the sleeping Clark Kent.

To find that he was gone.

He let the calendar fall to his lap. A numb frown started to develop across his thick old cheeks- and never to form. A vengeful figure loomed suddenly above him. In the foreground, at the extremities, Clark Kent had captured Mxyzptlk and was holding him savagely. One arm, effortlessly, was stretched across his collar bone, the other grasping his jaw and the small of his neck, wholly satisfied by the trace impetus that would be required to snap his neck.

"Clark?"

"This little game is over. You're going to activate that machine of yours, at full force. You're going to use it for what it was meant for. Capitalism is going to fall. Today".

Father Christmas tried to speak consolingly. "You don't understand. How would the humans feel if they knew we'd interfered with their minds on such a fundamental level? There are other ways".

"'How would they feel?' Cute. Whereas normally you only have to worry about how a f-ing eight year old feels when he gets a Furby instead of a Kevin Levin".

Not struggling, but with his elf eyes twinkling, Mxyzptlk reacted tensely to their words. He could, of course, fade from Clark's grasp any time he wanted. Father Christmas wondered why he didn't. Was the Kryptonian really so incredibly tensed that he could snap the elf's neck as fast as he could use his magic to escape?

"You're right, Mr Kent. About your society being damaged. I can see that now. But consider the power we have between us. There are better ways, nobler ways".

"Get up", warned Clark. "Get to work. Don't make me count to three, because you know I'll kill him on one".

The old man simpered. "What happened to the Clark Kent so noble he refuses to take even his arch-enemy's life? You were proud, and resolute, that not even a man as destructive as Lex Lyson should have his life interfered with".

Calmly, "Grow up. I'd still find a way to kill him even if I didn't have my powers. If I was a Diving Bell and a Butterfly, I'd devote the rest of my life to stockholming my nurse with blinks to bludgeon him with a mace".

And yes, it was testament to the power of Kent's death-grip that he could maintain such a close turn of phrase, even through the strain. Father Christmas saw the muscles in his forearm twitch but remain infinitely ready.

Thinking that it was sure to be just like throwing himself into a precipice, a chasm, a Niagra Falls full of vicious punches and instantly broken bones, "There is a better way, Mr Kent. I'm sure of it. If we can only talk this through, we can make the problems of the world just -vanish!"

Mxyzptlk teleported away in a motion that seemed painfully slow, the beat of a swan's wing, a Morrison's bag taken by the wind. The eerie, dominant power of Kent's hands -snapped!- but apparently with the elf surviving, somewhere. As a quantum surprise, an act of luck so at odds with the doomed feeling in the pit of Father Christmas' stomach.

He rushed Clark, presumably to fight. The younger man was immediately ready. A swirl came, an upper cut that delivered agony and partially winded him, even protected by the jagged base of his ribs. Bear-like dynamism allowed him the suggestion of having the upper-hand, briefly, as he pushed the Kryptonian down, lashing out to the side.

Clenched and unclenched fists searched for targets. In panic and the unhelpful rush of adrenaline, testosterone, their eyes drifted as lazily as cataract motes. It was the same fight the old man had always seen, in car parks outside Christmas Eve nightclubs, in Saxon garrisons, between cavemen who were arrogant. One man's springy limb fought to subdue the other, while the odd fist or limb drifted around in an orbit, always hoping for a lucky strike.

It wasn't the most frightening part, either. As savage as the violence was, it wasn't so intense that Clark Kent didn't have the time to curse him.

"Who are you to lecture me about morality? When have you even thought about it, you fat old f-?"

Father Christmas struggled to lift him free, fighting through a terrible, ingrained wheezing he'd never noticed before. Sudden death through precision violence seemed to be seconds away -all except for the very involved monologue that was being delivered by his enemy. The old man, the non-interventionist, felt guilty as never before.

"When I fell into the snow, and you c-s found me, I was on my way to the Black Knight satellite being built by the British Government. Know what that is? It'll be able to float over any Arab country and fire a pencil-thin death beam into the head of any terror suspect they want. And round and round it goes. Terror breeding terror, controlled by little spods behind desks as desperate to find work for themselves as any County Council gravy-trainer the world has ever seen. I was going to grab Black Knight and smash it down onto Lex Lyson's yuppie HQ in Malmsville. Two c-s with one stone. But if you want to defend either one? Do it from your coffin!"

Keeping Kent at bay brought a horrible tingling sensation, also a feeling that some huge, confusing world was collapsing down. The old man made a pathetic noise in the top of his throat. As a kind of miracle, he threw the Kryptonian a good number of metres away, then crawled to his feet. He was bleeding from his mouth, he discovered, which was interesting, since he couldn't remember taking any blows to the jaw.

"All of human life is sacred! All human freedom must be protected!"

At ten or fifteen metres away, at a broad outcrop of purple-colour metal, Clark Kent was instantly on his feet. He didn't seem to be considering what Father Christmas had said. Instead, he started to mime. Flipping down a switch, lifting a hood, pulling a lever away.

"Sorry. Just changing the record a sec".

He examined the imaginary LP. "Peace Train, Cat Stevens?"

He threw it away, then flipped through an imaginary record box. Carefully sliding free the outer sleeve, he placed his own record of choice on the turntable, pulled the stylus into place -before advancing on Father Christmas at a crisp turn of pace.

"That's better. Firestarter".

The first lance of heat-vision, when it struck him around the neck and shoulders, was so intense, unusual, Father Christmas could barely even register it as pain. Curiously, he could still stand firm on braced legs, for a time. The Kryptonian closed in on him and the resulting intensity of red fire started to gnaw, scar, gouge. Reflex made him pull up a hand to try and deflect the agony. Evocations of some harried Christmas Lunch preparation, an out-of-water husband absent-mindedly picking up the ultimate hot oven pan.

Kent was screaming in apparent victory. Maybe catharsis. The old man focused on this, choosing to move forward as best he could. Counter-intuitively, he pulled his outstretched hands free from the lasers, momentarily taking their full force to his torso -before riotously clasping the younger man about his ears and jaw -but now what to do?

With his inhuman strength at maximum, in an expenditure that hadn't been used in centuries, he managed to angle Clark Kent's lasers away from him. Momentarily, they both tumbled against an inner wall. Flaring and flashing red mingled with age-old prefabricated metal, as the deadlock was resolved; the wall cleaved and they tumbled through.

Singed and irradiated as it was, Father Christmas' damaged skin could hardly detect the rushing air as they fell the two floors into the next chamber. Certainly he felt the bone-splintering impact in full force, but didn't have time for fear or awe. He ranged his limbs, assumed some approximation of readiness. Whether he had the strength to fight was an intensely ponderous matter; the sense of doubt, however, soon merged with an offensive rush, his legs surging him quickly on to punch Clark Kent neatly, mid-face. Though there was reeling, no rolling, it was hardly a step towards victory. The younger man lashed out and sent his opponent crashing through some antique masonry.

They were in one of his numerous lounges, decorated with aubusson carpets, lined with varied Amaterasu, Greco-Roman and Hindu statues. In the back of his mind, Father Christmas had always known it was ostentatious to have so many living rooms, particularly filled with ancient demi-gods. Perhaps psychology had prompted him to collect the statues as a reminder that mankind would always exist as a quaint, collective whole. Joyfully abstracted beyond their primal nature of greed and reproductive glee. Except where were the aesthetic, attention-grabbing religious statues being made today?

If one can't be snarled at by Yaldabaoth or Nergal, one will be snarled at by terrorists.

The old man felt himself awkwardly smashed against a Songye idol. He hauled over a flower-shaped Taoist shrine, but it did nothing to stem the scrambling advance of the Kryptonian. The dodges and shoulder barges felt horribly numb, though still effective at keeping him alive. Intensely foolish-looking blocks were employed, falling far inside the nook of Kent's frenzied round-houses, diminishing their power -hardly at all. No sooner did he realise he was about to be hit squarely in the face, at full force, than he was hit a second and a third time.

An oozing, woozy pain at the back of his neck told that a sudden death was imminent. Unconsciousness beckoned like something that had always been there, in the background, unspeakably peaceful and benevolent.

Perhaps as an incidental happenstance, nothing more, Mxyzptlk appeared to the left and slightly behind Kent. He was dragging an Aneyoshi stone tablet. Father Christmas watched, lips parted, wheezing. With some effort, the elf lifted one end, lifted the entirety, then brought it down fiercely in the small of Kent's knee. The man buckled and collapsed onto his huge shoulders.

Retaining his ad-hoc weapon, the elf smashed it repeatedly onto the bridge of Kent's nose, into his eyes, until it was dust. Joyfully, he sang in imitation of a bourgeois pop-singer, "Only came for a while, got his face beat in style. He wasn't expecting that!"

Pleased with himself, the tiny creature ran energetically to where Father Christmas sagged.

"Further punch-time at Christmas time? While Clarky-cat is weak?"

"No", the old man rasped. "Help me away".

One of the consecutive chambers held Santorinian artifacts, famed for their pioneering usage of lead as means of insulation. Father Christmas explained that they would be safe there, or at least temporarily hidden from the Kryptonian's x-ray vision. Together they clung fast and scuttled at pace into the darkness.

Beneath a very austere alcove, depicting the defeat of Attuma after a protracted battle with Titan, they made their plans. The fish-like gaze of the Atlantian gave everything an determined feel, but nothing inspirational.

"We should fell Mr Clarky-cat. Gentry vindicated. Goodbye Jaw-jaw Corbynite pansyism. Hello there, victory!"

Gruffly, Father Christmas was immediately dismissive. "There may not be a victory. He's too powerful. Mxyztplk, my friend -we can't risk both of us being here. If Mr Kent should defeat me here today, you will be entirely responsible for saving the world. You have to go. Only return - perhaps five years from now. If I live, we'll have truffles. If I'm dead, you have to defeat Clark Kent yourself".

The elf tilted his strange, albino head in the darkness. "You are injured, Isfaoir. You will be defeated".

"I have a healing factor!", the old man breathed affably. "Just because I haven't given it a work-out in few centuries, doesn't mean it won't kick in any moment now!"

Mxyztplk mimed, confusingly, "Doubt worn like a St Patrick's day bonnet".

"Go, my friend!", Father Christmas smiled, not quite compellingly. "If the worst comes to the worst, you can be sure we'll see each other again in the world beyond".

All the elf could do: smile grimly, tip his tiny hat -and vanish.

Cc.

He made slow progress. Flickery, bomb-shelter lights, added to the dimness admitted through tiny portholes, created an impression that it was snowing -but now in blue and apocalyptic bucket loads. Through narrow, arched walkways and emergency adjuncts, it was giddy work to try and reach the main control room through the intermittent dark. Behind, throughout the lofty atmosphere, the terrific sound of Clark Kent rending whole metal walls was a deadly distraction.

And it wasn't like the films. There would be no clever, involved way of defeating his arch-enemy. At best, Father Christmas envisioned setting the PA system to transmit high frequency static to disorientate his acute hearing, though in practice it obviously wouldn't be that simple.

It felt like a long walk, even if there was no particular fear of death. He periodically checked his bloodied and hurting face to see if his healing factor had activated yet. In the meantime, he walked apace, fancying himself one step ahead of Clark Kent -but also lost in how he'd be remembered should he die. In the minds of children, he would continue to live on as a joyful folk character, and perhaps that would be enough. About to leave Colu, he'd walked the streets and countryside feeling beloved like an Earthly Apollo astronaut -merely absorbing the love, conversing with small children, disarming the world for wholesome family units as if it was an inherently innocent place after all. And all had been well, even if he'd been missing Mary so bitterly, so profoundly.

Just last year, the case of Will Buckley, a fifty-one year old from England. In 1995, when his wife was seriously ill, and he'd been driving the fourteen miles home from a thankless job, Chinese takeaway on the backseat of their tiny runabout. It was the first time she'd felt hungry for days. To his horror, plus the horror of a row of three dozen other cars, the A-road was completely shut down by a lone cyclist laboriously peddling in front of them. Overtaking him had been prohibitive due to oncoming lorries and cars. The drivers cursed and seethed, under their breath, like the mysteriously voiceless masses they were. As a five minute stretch of road became a half hour stretch of road.

And for Buckley, it had been a particular matter of horror; having lived in the area all his life, used the self-same rat-runs for years, he knew the numerous back lanes that the cyclist could have used, which were exactly parallel and more or less the same length from A to B. The only reason huge swarms of rush hour cars didn't use these lanes is because they weren't conducive to picking up forty miles an hour, and then phasing out until you were alongside your house again. Which was obviously the reason A-roads were built as motorcar highways and not leafy, laissez-faire cyclepaths. Road rage followed.

Buckley knew; if he was a novelty administrative worker like the cyclist so obviously was, with enough excess energy from working behind a desk to travel fourteen miles by pushbike, he would at least have the good grace to avoid main roads. And if there was some equivalent form of arrogance in his own life, wouldn't it be a blessed thing for someone to tell him about it? Really, 'Do unto others as you would have done unto you' was faultless, divine wisdom, always. It was such a simple step to disassemble the conspiracy of arrogance that had been secretly sewn in to every man, woman and child. He thought of his grievously ill wife, for once joyously hungry. He thought about the now cold Chinese takeaway on his backseat. He looked at the Live Action Banana-man lycra of the cyclist as the nearest car strained to overtake.

When his turn came, Buckley made a smooth job of the maneuver, but then stopped dead three metres ahead of the character cyclist.

He calmly got out, waited for the man to dither by -and hauled him from the saddle. On the ground, on the side of the road, he pummeled the cyclist until his face barely retained traces of eye sockets, cheekbones, a human nose. The mouth, of course, forever hung open like someone melodramatically orating a speech, but what good was that, when you could wait a thousand years and still not hear an apology for what he'd caused to happen? From the long line of cars behind, a solitary driver cheered. The rest, Buckley could sense gasping and shriveling their noses mousily.

Awaiting sentencing, his wife's health had deteriorated massively, though Buckley made a concerted, very artistic effort to focus on what the judge said. Court judges, who are second only to politicians and Army types in terms of doling out uselessly homogenous rhetoric.

'No matter what the circumstances, it is incumbent of civilised society that we prevent such bitter anger from erupting with the strongest deterrents possible, which is why I have no option but to pass the maximum custodial sentence. You will go to prison for six years. Do you have anything to say, Mr Buckley?'

Buckley felt embarrassed and ashamed that he had to speak to the judge at this point, still more so that he'd had time to rehearse it in his head. In an ideal world, he'd simply walk over to the stenographer's desk, cut his throat over the blotter, and the resultant spray of blood would mist out his words like an ink-jet printer.

'Your honour. I don't know about civilised society needing deterrents. Wouldn't it be better for people to have an in-built sense of morality? And then we could not only do away with crime, but also go into degrees, and see off all the little things that society accepts but are undeniably wrong. When was the last time society was emphatically told something is legal but utterly immoral?

'Me? I look forward to arriving in hell -or maybe just having a really vivid nightmare, if you don't believe it's a literal place- and being perpetually eaten alive by a field of pigs. In simple revenge for all the bacon sandwiches I've eaten. And I wouldn't even call that morality. You can live, and be evil, if you want. God doesn't care. It's all about not wanting to be exploitative and arrogant. Because those things make you weak. And that c- on the bike? Was very arrogant".

But down fell Nutmeg's gavel.

On visiting days, his increasingly hollow-cheeked wife forgave him instantly, and if anything their love grew stronger. But from then on he was haunted by that strange, tiny look of confusion which fluttered in her eyes.

She died during the first year of his sentence. 'Don't do anything silly', more than one guard had warned him. Well, he wasn't sure whether it would be silly or not, but his continued existence was ensured by a new fear. He imagined that the terrible look of confusion had been transmitted from his wife to their young daughter Katherine, now in the care of his parents.

He became obsessed with disproving that confusion, whatever it was. Proving to her that the world was more than a relay for unfairness and horror. He became a model prisoner, and when the prison administrators asked him to enroll in a Criminal Outreach program, he did so with good will. Travelling around various government lounges giving talks to penalized drivers on the dangers of road-rage. Going into schools to coolly inform all the little devils that criminality can creep up on you suddenly, and that prison is a place best avoided. His creed was to talk compellingly, but give up barely thirty or forty percent of the whole, sorrowful story. Of the human race.

Good behaviour carried some little sway and Buckley was released in 2014. In all honesty, there was no other way to look at it than exemplary behaviour, and long did it reign into his life on the outside. Katherine loved him deeply, as did the on-lookers at the church hall charities, his workmates at the builder's merchants, the people at his running club. But for himself? He had no idea what spiritual or emotional value he had; it was the tip of a dog whelk's spiraling shell, while the other end houses an all-but unconscious, satanic monster. Society: greedy, futureless. Completely blind as it pushes its way through the filth and mire of a pressure-filled ocean bed. William Buckley was a good man, but he dwelled on the problem of a futureless Britain as a serial killer dwells on murder. One could imagine how the point of the dog whelk's shell could direct the way into the afterlife, but it was hardly a very graceful metaphor.

Then at Christmas 2014, his life was flagged up by Cerebro in a burst of thick, psychic energy. Father Christmas' tranced eyes sparked and narrowed as he took in the sight of Katherine Buckley's mental algorithms, depicted by abstract spikes and loops in the aura of the holochamber. Her initial thoughts were to buy for her father a season ticket for his beloved football team, Nottingham Forest. Beyond that, she planned to buy him a leather travel case.

These, of course, were adequate presents, very fulfilling. But probing deeper into their lives, Father Christmas found the perfect present, which would make William Buckley's heart -sing!

During a house move by his parents, the removal men had lost the family photo album. All pictures of his wife had gone. And yet, in the pages of one of her Hilary Mantel novels, currently in a box in the garage awaiting a trip to the charity shop -there it was!- one final photo of himself and his wife, taken by a kindly old man in snowbound Wollaton Hall. They smiled, joyously, transcendently.

All Father Christmas had to do was put forth his will and direct into Katherine's mind the idea that she should check through the pages of the novels before she took them to the charity shop. The picture discovered, it would look simply splendid in a SAA frame and wrapped in silver paper.

And yet. Was it such a perfect gift? Something made him to pause. Reverently, he took to probing the mind of William Buckley himself. He examined the soulful grasping which went on inside the former prisoner's consciousness. He was a man who believed intensely in the afterlife as the only means of explaining the spiteful injustice of modern life. By showing him the tranquil photograph, that belief could only be moderated, insidiously, for the worst. He would lust for Heaven in a way that made his day-to-day life intolerable. On the other hand, if the sight of his dead wife's smile started to put doubts into his mind about how a paradisal universe could vanquish something so perfect -this really was how serial killers were made.

So Father Christmas hesitated. He'd allowed the last image of Hanna Buckley to vanish from their lives. Beguilingly, it was the first time in many years that he felt such guilt about his involvement in the affairs of mortals, and he wondered why. Especially now. Even families separated by World War II or 9/11 hospital beds had failed to stir such feelings, with the Will Buckley predicament seeming like something entirely new, a taste of things to come.

Casting his mind back, he forced himself to remember the present which the ill-fated cyclist had received the year he'd almost been pummeled to death. His wife had been so determined to spend their disposable income on the most lavish thing she could think of, she'd been immune to the tacit suggestions made by Cerebro. In the end: an Apple Mac 7100B and a leather filofax, as if upperclass clichés didn't exist.

Father Christmas looked up painfully as a large section of the link ceiling was torn away. Clark Kent hovered malevolently, and exactly like a creature cathartically emerged from Hell; in the midst of a steel-rending rampage, there'd been an explosion, coating his brittle muscles completely in black. His eyes burned red. Face turned directly to an angry stareout, Father Christmas wondered if Mr Kent was even seeing him, in any proper sense, or simply perceiving ways he could tear the old man limb from limb. Certainly their eyes connected, on such a soulful level, only to reveal murderous disregard.

Kent, at least, was aware of the red energy which pulsed in his eyes, the way it filled the old man with sheer horror, "You must have seen it before. Snowman melting from the inside. Global warming. Let's all make a song-and-dance about rising sea-levels and moving inland, but that I have to travel forty miles to get a manual job because I'm working class? Fine. Fine. It's fine".

A warbling 'Ra!' was emitted as Father Christmas shouldered forwards, and only marginally quicker than his enemy. The clash brought a sensation of heavily packed flesh-on-bone, pleasingly secure under normal circumstances, wickedly vulnerable today. Once again the red lasers of the Kryptonian's eyes burned wildly across his skin. Once again the medium-well-directed punches made agonising progress across his jaw and shoulders. Somewhere, in some partially numb region of his lower body, his hernia twinged like fury, tho as an everyday feeling, almost wholesome, almost friendly. As surely as death was inexorable, each blow creased the outline of his body into subtly unnatural shapes.

An underdog palm was directed into the small of Kent's jaw, almost karate-like and with a surprisingly effective amount of power. To bluster and repel him millimetres, giving clearance to swing around and crash against a huge, rounded wall. It was unhelpful, the odd structure of the bulkhead, and they folded and squirmed in a struggle for battle stance. Red laser fire came in a spit. Father Christmas aimed his fists as if at a patch of light through a closing door.

He would never understand, the surging, supernatural strength that allowed him to swing his pine and shoulders around, catching his enemy an evil upper cut. Granted, a sledgehammer caught his own face more or less simultaneously, tho it was largely numb, something to be fought through -as progress was made. He lanced with his forearm, across the Kryptonian's neck, an unwise and wholly ad-hoc maneuver, which still served to grind the man down. Metronomic rhythm, made irregular by some Satanic musician, became a mainstay, almost a pleasant and Philip-Glassy way to die. If that was true, the old man wondered if the hypnotic tempo of their violence, the butting, the heaving, was a sign of the fight being weirdly protracted -or simply his death-bound mind getting artistic.

Still he fancied his blows were reasonably powerful. He fought, felt unashamed. The elves and pixies watching from behind bookcases, all year long waiting to tell Father Christmas which little boys have been good or bad. A spark here, an all-annihilating, bone-crunching roundhouse there.

Snow mixed darkly with blood, even moreso as a funny little distraction against burning skin. Autopilot ebbed. His fists, in the space of two or three minutes, felt like they belonged to a child or else were oversized, Brother Lee Love monsters. He thumped and punched, without even trying to get a more effective grip. He sought something more elusive than simply his opponent's death, or disfigurement, or unconsciousness. This is autopilot, clicked off.

Father Christmas realised that, at some point in the recent past, he'd miraculously gained the upper hand, emphatically. Clark Kent lay at his shins, as battered and broken as any man in history, Floyd Patterson times ten.

To the old man's astonishment, he was lamenting -the measured howl of a man four times his age.

"We could have saved the world!"

Through his own flappy-cartilage face, Father Christmas made a sound, a bit like a tut, "You tried to assassinate someone, just out of revenge! No good can come from evil intentions! Why couldn't you have just -gone out, made speeches, tried to educate the humans about their greed?"

A big proportion of Kent's fluttery, remaining strength was channeled into disdain, "Why should a working man have to worry about being charismatic, getting to be a great leader, when all he wants is to do physical work in recompense for a physical life? Why, when he'd only end up being shut down by greed and laziness, anyway, the way the Soviets were, the way the Kryptonians were?"

Down they'd fallen into the snow, in a mighty jolt. Through battle-dimmed perceptions, it was like the black-blue sky falling, too. Sucking down a sharp breath, unintentionally sounding like Henry Higgins about to burst into song. "I know it seems like things exist in isolation, but they really don't. One has to believe that. Little specks of common sense. Little specks of nobility. There's a slim chance they'll prevail. But little specks of violence or totalitarianism? Never in the long run".

"God almighty", breathed Clark, seemingly about to fall unconscious. "It's like reading an editorial in The Guardian. If I had a spare six quid a day, or however much it costs nowadays".

"When you come -gubld -dbl-"

Father Christmas' words became strange and garbled. Mr Kent lolled his head sharply, obviously fearing a stroke. "Are you OK?"

"You -I'm afraid you've damaged my false teeth".

Mr Kent shrugged, mildly regretful. He also gestured at his own face to indicate some further damage to Father Christmas' features, "There's also that".

To his surprise, the old man found that a large section of his beard had been cleanly burnt away at angles by the lances of heat-vision. The overall effect was bizarre like-

"You look like an upside down Kid Reid".

Said Father Christmas glumly, "I suppose it's any time this century I was due to have a shave, anyway".

"Complain when the only thing that can see off your stubble is industrial diamond cutter".

But -determination, success. Talk of the future, no matter how loose, was impelling something in Father Christmas' mind. He rubbed his mouth, twitched his Malcolm McDowell nose.

"We must be smart, Mr Kent. We'll appear on the television together, you and I. You're right; I've neglected any real involvement in human destiny for far too long. Together, we will try -to save the world".

Except, numbly, Clark moved a blackened forearm to examine his Accurist.

"It's too late".

"Really? How so?"

"I have an accomplice. Feels as strongly as me. We agreed that if anything went wrong with me bringing down Black Knight on Lyson HQ, he'd murder the man the old fashioned way. Barring hell, nothing's gonna stop him".

Father Christmas narrowed his eyes.

Cc.

Sormarton Top Chapel, abandoned like so many countryside churches, hadn't yet been consumed by 'I'm doing something anyone can do' Channel Four-style yuppie redevelopment. Though there were signs. In amongst the ancient spreads of ivy and spilled-out hedges; crème-stone pallet drops, fluorescent architect reflectors, discarded mid-price coffee cups. It seemed bad form to tell young Clark, but Martha Kent's paternal grandfather was buried in the front lot, one of the rounded Victorian micro-graves sticking up like the tail fin of a submerged plane.

Together they simply stared, bolt upright, Michael Landon and Victor French gone horribly post-modern. The outer edge of the graveyard looked down onto Lex Lyson's country estate, the very heart. Any moment now would see him emerge to step beside his cliche-richo Range Rover.

But not before Jimmy Olsen, perched on nothing more than a low bank of dirt, snipered a high-impact bullet into the side of his soulless-granny-smile head. The shot, Father Christmas saw, would not be particularly easy. Which was to say, the Metcalfe 377 Sniper Rifle being slightly less than state-of-the-art, he'd have to make the tiniest effort. The young man, with his heavily flared nostrils and lips tightened even at the best of times, was dangerously self-aware. He tidied away his forensic trail in perfect cleanliness, but also took the time to periodically maul his heavy black stubble in a way that provoked nervous-underdog sympathy as sure as sunlight.

"What if you can't talk him out of it?", wondered Father Christmas.

Clark Kent shrugged. "If I can't talk him out of it, then I can't talk him out of it. You're asking if I'm going to kill my best friend over Lex Lyson? Not -ing likely. But maybe you're really asking if I'll change my mind, and kill that yuppie f- myself? No. You have my word. We'll follow your little plan".

The threat of Jimmy Olsen neutralized, the plan was that Mr Kent would descend into the country house courtyard and carefully deploy his heat-vision within a four metre radius -and no more than that, never quite connecting with Lyson, though to the outside world (looking on through a smartphone video app uploading directly to Ytubue), it would seem like he was on an inexorable, killing rampage. Father Christmas would arrive, as if to defend Lyson. He and Clark would have a staged fight. Defeated, the Kryptonian would fly away, leaving the old man to explain what had just happened. Two soldiers fighting for the same cause, but he a liberal, the other an extremist (and this was close enough to the truth to avoid any moral shame). In this way, civilisation would have its first reminder of the twenty-first century that working class, communist pride still existed, and had designs on saving the world from arrogance.

From the start, Mr Kent had repeated that he had no desire to play the hero, because he really didn't believe that heroes could prevail. Admittedly, Father Christmas wondered whether, for all his years of practice, he even had the energy himself...

Hanging back in the grey matte of the trees, "I think it might pay to fly your friend away and explain to him exactly what we're doing".

Clark frowned, though there were also elements of pride. "Jimmy is smarter and more passionate than you and me put together. He's got a very low threshold for the 'I'd like to teach the world to sing' b- we're about to try. I might be able to stop him shooting, but that's about all. He'll never kow-tow to the conceited s- of modern man they way you and I are".

Father Christmas nodded to where Jimmy was neatly bedded down on the cornflakey leaves, in the final stages of readying his oversized gun, "Then make haste, my friend, and try".

The old man walked away, didn't look back. At the final stretch of graves, however, he paused to look down at a bizarre nineteen seventies resting place, adorned with lead grates, a faux-bedrock headstone and a bed of synthetic green crystals. He picked one up, stared at it thoughtfully, then popped it into the pocket of his huge red coat.

Cc.

"Jimmy? It's over".

Barely looking up from his squinting acquaintance with the sniper-scope, "Hi, Clark. What happened to bringing down the satellite?"

"I tried to fly up there. Couldn't reach it. I fell down to the North Pole, barely alive. And I started to hallucinate".

"Hallucinate? You OK, man?"

"No. I hallucinated Father Christmas. He had a machine that could read the crystal, telling me who I am and where I come from. The hallucination was trying to make me feel ashamed. Violence, even with the best intention, being a bad idea; all that s-. I only just stopped seeing it now".

"That's intense", Jimmy sympathized, but didn't tear his eye away from the barrel. Heavily bearded, still anything but a hipster, he commanded -calm. Eerie, abrupt -calm. Projecting his voice, "You know you'll feel better when you see this s-head's brains being eaten by his dog".

"I don't want you to do it".

"Why would you say that?", Jimmy drew a little way up onto his elbow. "You're scaring me. Wanting Lex Lyson to carry on living is as weird as suddenly having Grand Designs as your favourite TV show. It's the weirdest thing. What's wrong with you? You land on your head?"

Clark aimed for normality with a tiny smile. "You know my favourite show will always be Arrested Development" -and weakly made the Gob Bluth chicken sound.

With no smile in return.

"We've discussed this. What's wrong with you? Think about everything he is, man".

Yes. Clark moved around in the winter-sodden leaves, beneath the two-tone sky of ethereal haze, deep-comfort grey. It was hard to think of Britain's Technology and Industry Tsar and not instantly dwell on the way he was so conceited, socially dangerous. Lex Lyson, with his deluded-philanthropy, paying for a private coach service to ferry his overpaid executives to and from work, as if they couldn't afford taxis a hundred times over. Lex Lyson, who pretentiously displayed a decommissioned stealth fighter in his company car park, because fighter plane technology has... (?)... to do with a domestic appliance company.

And worst of all, Sir Lex Lyson, perpetually making reports to parliament about the way Britain had an urgent shortage of engineers and product designers. Yes. Britain did indeed have a shortage for such people, and it surely had nothing to do with the guilty, psychological need to have his eccentric inventor lifestyle vindicated, nepotically, in as many other people as possible.

Clark looked jealously at the sniper rifle. A starving man looking at sausages. A man in a blizzard.

"Listen, Jimmy. You've got no idea how badly I want that kill that Voltaire-jawed c-. I want to punch him and punch him until he's there on the floor, two-dimensional like your man from Roger Rabbit".

Except Jimmy didn't smile at this. He looked fully through the sniper bead, decoding something beautiful, or at least, something beautifully decisive.

All helped by the relatively warm atmos, there being no way you could mistake the coldness of mid-winter, even walking around without getting stung or shivering. Clark clumped heavily across the waxy-hardened earth to stand directly in front of the gun scope. Clothes burnt and shredded, he knew he must look to Jimmy like Ed Norton having fought Tyler Durden, and Kevan Jones, let's start a parliamentary campaign about mental illness as if it -is- an illness and not just bourgeois modern life itself.

"I'm not messing around, Clark. I don't know what's wrong with you, but I need you to get out of the way. I try to shoot through you, it could ricochet off you and go in my head. How would that make you feel? Your best friend dead in lieu of the most arrogant man in Britain".

Tried the Kryptonian, "That's a black-and-white viewpoint. There are other ways of looking at it".

"No way. There's no other way of looking at it. People believing they can have a world where everyone gets to do their hobby for a living? And working class guys like you and me get shafted. He needs to die!"

Unearthly drum-beats, a suggestion of being submerged in a liquid far heavier than water, sounded heavily in Clark's ears. He frowned through the tension, knowing all at once that he was detecting the terrible brinkmanship of his own heartbeat. Staring at his best friend's handsome-if-anger-worn face, at the delicate winter sky, it could all change in hours and hours. He gulped while stepping aside. Thick canopy clouds and fluttering leaves; frozen in a way that was magical.

He meditated in readiness. When he tried to speak, it was an interesting question, whether the muscles in his jaw were moving at a sane, intelligible speed. To Jimmy, "Then go ahead. Shoot him".

His friend didn't need to be told twice. The expression of mild determination shifting not a bit; he pulled the trigger. For Clark, the world heaved and twisted in a stomach-churning mix of quantum stillness and sudden high velocity. The statistic bouncing around in his head; suicide the biggest killer of under thirty-five males, yet with no one ever making a political statement as they went -you might almost accuse capitalism of systematically exhausting people.

Unless you were fortunate enough to have been born four-hundred-thousand light years away, under a red sun.

He ran. Faster than a speeding bullet.

Cc.

"Mr Lyson".

Unaccustomed to being greeted in the privacy of his own country estate, Sir Lex Lyson could only smile weirdly. He didn't have the basic human emotions to feel angry or indignant at discovering a trespasser on his land. In all likelihood, his nightmarishly twee mind was preoccupied mainly by the recent idea of a revolutionary new kind of soap dispenser, a pie-in-the-sky daydream that would come to nothing, the difficult second single of a Toploader-esque top 40 vanishing act, and God knew how many fillers the full record would contain.

But people, they love Toploader. Give them a fifty album recording deal.

"Can I help you?"

Father Christmas spoke quickly, the primordial-legendary equivalent of Lieutenant Colombo commencing his sniffing-job, notwithstanding that eye contact was difficult when dealing with a man who had such a subtly desperate expression. How had the Queen reacted when she'd been forced to knight him? Embarrassed or just weirded-out?

"Well, I realise I'm intruding. I just thought I'd come over here to wish you Seasons Greetings. And, of course, those mighty stone dragons you have at your front gate -very impressive. Are they Mabinogion? Tudor?"

"I really couldn't tell you", said the eccentric in his typically dry voice. "Are we neighbours?"

"No!", pulsed the old man. "Just two people, passing each other. That's the joy of Christmas, perhaps of life in general. Do you remember when you were a child, your father gifted you that little chrome-plated flute decorated with cowboys? You loved it. How often you think about it. Yet it was incredibly simple; no moving parts at all".

The inventor narrowed his eyes. Weakly clasping his keys, his hand drifted free from the Range Rover door, "We must have gone to school together, is that it?"

"No", Father Christmas smiled faintly. "I went to school a very long way from here. Do you still have it? The flute?"

Smile like tin-foil, dented by the breeze, "I confess I don't. Perhaps in an attic somewhere".

"Well, the chrome probably disintegrated", said the old man empathetically. "Made in Britain!"

"Who are you?"

"Your friend. Beyond that, I am a simple man. I come to ask you a question; do you believe in God?"

The rich man, with his strange lack of personality, answered surprisingly quickly. "Not many people believe in God nowadays".

"Oh, I'm sure you'd first and foremost describe yourself as a man of science. I wouldn't dispute that. But on a sliding scale, which do you believe in more -purely as an exercise in imagination, say- God or magic?"

"Magic, I suppose", Lyson scrunched his Mr Punch face.

"Lex, I am about to tell you of the most important development of your life. There is a powerful magician coming here. He hates you and would see you dead, for reasons that are entirely explicable. Your position that England is a country where people must necessarily work behind desks to earn a sane, utilitarian wage. Fortunately, myself, I'm completely bi-partisan, and would take measures to protect you-"

It was around '... necessarily work behind desks', that Sir Lyson slipped free his phone and fingered in '999'. Father Christmas could sense the connection being made somewhere not too far along the nearby M4. He waited in patient silence while on a deeper level, post-middle-age haughtiness took full control.

"My name is Lex Lyson, I'm outside of my home, just off the junction at Sormarton. There's a gentleman here, I'm afraid he's threatening me".

"Mr Lyson!", the old man was genial, soft-expressioned -but utterly commanding. Something in the way he didn't shy away from the police being called, too, made Lyson lower his phone and listen to what had to be said.

"You may call the police, of course. But you've got nothing to fear, I promise. I have a certain understanding of these things. As long as you are consciously aware of your own morality, and carry the courage of your convictions, you will be safe, all the days of your life. All any mortal can aspire to, really, is full consciousness. And what more sacred thing is there, than the overlap between your own consciousness and the consciousness of the most average man from the beginning of time? Oh, he'd like very much to work behind a desk, and spend his life designing things -but the world is not created from behind a desk. Nor is it designed into existence by university graduates. It's physically made. Perhaps you understand?"

Sir Lex Lyson did not understand.

Father Christmas sighed. "In the meantime, please except this festive gift. It is the one magical substance on Earth which will repel the evil magician who is about to attack you. Call it Kryptonite".

From his voluminous coat pocket, he passed the funny synthetic stone to the rich man, then smiled proudly. He regarded him with twinkling eyes, then, only once the man was looking down at the smooth green crystal -vanished.

Cc.

Except, Lex Lyson couldn't ponder for long. Like a sack of potatoes, he was on the ground, the said magician on top of him and completely uncontrollable. He saw red eyes. That he was evil seemed a blunt and implicate truth, both subjective and objective, the wrath sewn in to every inch of his leathery skin.

Death wouldn't come right away, apparently. His assassin stood tall and savored the meek and crawling billionaire. This was no kidnap, and so no insistence that he could pay the ransom would suffice. Unexpectedly, the young man smiled, all immoral and anti-heroic light delicate in his eyes, extremely conflicted with the rest of his unnaturally aged skin. Once, Lyson thought, he'd been young and intelligent. If only he could have caught the boy at the right stage, he could have enrolled him in one of his Youth Enterprise Scholarships. Except -the burning red eyes seemed to be very aware of this tragedy and many more besides.

Perhaps there were layers of truth to modern life, where a conscious man might think, 'What have I done to the world?' Periodically, 'This economy is artificially maintained in favour of the rich and lazy', then later, 'I've never really done a days work in my life, my mind the zoetrope of pretentious dancing horse', 'My life exists purely as an aid to a narrow band of people just like me', 'The government, every modern conception of society -a lie'. Each of these flashes of guilt, a man would need to craftily file away and forget, as a non-vegetarian must dismiss what happens in slaughterhouses to stay sane. The guilt was meaningless because it was just the way the world worked.

The problem, however: it occurred to Lyson that he'd never had a single one of these guilty- subconscious flashes, let alone the half dozen which must necessarily make up someone's pragmatic internal life. There was no experience in building up a psychic threshold against the raw, brutally working class character which shone in the boy's eyes. Wave after wave hit the billionaire, as he recoiled, moved shaking hand over shaking mouth.

His soul was searched. He had no time to search it himself, however; it was war. His would-be assassin advanced slightly. He remembered the talisman which had been given to him by the first man, the one that looked mysteriously like Father Christmas. Fingering it in his thick-jointed, hobby-engineer hands, "Kryptonite! I have Kryptonite! Stay away from me!"

Squad cars, probably dispatched from both nearby Tayte and the motorway response centre, audibly converged. Hardly even a comforting sound, given that the man didn't recoil as Lyson had expected. No Christopher Lee discerning a crucifix and flapping a velvet cape. Eyes like the lost chapter of a Jeff Nicholson novel glared hatefully -forever.

"Kryptonite? It's a good thing you've got that. Because how badly I want to smash your arch-stupid face".

"Who are you?"

"You don't care who I am. I could be the last working class man in Britain, at odds with your yuppie house of cards. I could be an alien from space. And that green crystal could be a hippy ornament or a sacred artifact from God himself. We've all got our stupid little beliefs".

"I don't understand", said the rich man.

His young arch-enemy shrugged. "What do you want from me? I'm already recoiling".

And recoil he did, step by step, until he'd fully reversed into the handcuff-brandishing arms of a high-viz policeman, freshly emerged from a steeply-handbraked rapid response car.

Was it over? The assassin's eyes fell onto the Range Rover, seemingly worried by some tiny, specific detail -something the size of a penny, a chewing gum wad, a bullet hole.

He shouted cathartically; from his eyes came an unearthly lance of red fire. Predictably, the policemen were profoundly shocked, but they kept their grip, their stance. There isn't a being alive who doesn't know that British Policemen are second only to NHS workers as the most noble professionals in the world. Something we all agree on -chillingly, even the monster with his flaming red eyes. One could almost describe as tender the way his heat-vision melted the people carrier to slag -slowly, slowly as to alarm his captors as little as possible.

Still half a dozen men dived on his unprotesting body and wrestled it towards the back of the wagon. Lyson felt his heart begin to beat again with something approaching a normal rhythm. Until that strange, energetic head ducked outside the car one more time.

"Do what you like! Ponce around Bedford Falls. Breed another ten thousand spods. It doesn't matter to me. But keep that Kryptonite handy, because I'll always be there, over your dirty yuppie shoulder! Britain is getting saved, you chinny f-!"

Cc.

Epilogue One.

The military guards at RAF Cuttersby, Britain's most fortified military base, were surprisingly decent. Clark felt this owed mainly to the fact that he was the single detainee who wasn't an Islamic terrorist, and also just because they could relate to his disciplined exercise regimen. Maybe they were just good people, too. They laughed and smiled grimly at his deadpanned jokes. Come Saturday, they'd relay to him all the Premiership action, and even take his Stan Collimore-style betting predictions on board; Man City would flail, Chelsea would inexorably continue to recover towards the number two spot, Liverpool under Klopp would thrive. And Harry Kane at Spurs? The man was a surgeon; Rooney's record would be matched season by season.

The scientists and doctors were a different matter. There seemed little point in trying to avoid their finding out that he was the most powerful and impervious man on Earth. They tried to make him submit to subatomic cellular tests, high-powered cat-scans, radioactive fusion experiments, beyond.

To the ringleader, Dr Star, he said simply, 'No'. Which just took their confusion fathoms deeper. Their psychologists had identified early on that Clark felt no remorse whatsoever for the attack on Sir Lyson. Until the end of time, Marxist ideology would remain an immaculate solution to the squalid problem of democracy-blessed arrogance; he had nothing to apologise for. But if this was the case, asked Star, why did he allow himself to be incarcerated like this?

Explaining, his beliefs made him hella incompatible with the modern world. For him to walk freely in the world, he'd necessarily have to start killing people. Politicians who endlessly apologised to university students for raising the tuition fee during the last parliament, as if non-medical students aren't the most unnecessary social units in the world. Politicians who kow-towed tax credits over a higher minimum wage to sustain undisciplined lifestyle choices. Anyone remotely connected with local government administration, as if every word that came out of their mouths couldn't be equally substituted for, 'blah, blah, gravy-train, gravy-train'. The consensus of the average British housewife or housewife-dominated man, which would rather see anything happen in their town or city other than affordable houses being built or sustainable, manual jobs being created.

Yes to The Range.

Walls adorned with plasticote rather than paint, a steel toilet that might have just fitted Action Man, frosted lights where you longed to see a filament, even if it burned your eyes. It was an environment that naturally leant itself to developing days-long internal theories, but what developed in Clark's mind, he didn't like one bit. He thought for a long time of the slavery of the American Delta back in the eighteen-fifties. That it was emphatically wrong was one thing. That the otherwise homely and humane society, slaves included, had developed calm, highly rational justifications for it -to the degree that it seemed the most natural arrangement in the world- that was something else. A century later, through Martin Luther King, arguably as far as the LA riots and Ferguson, the problem had hardly eased. People felt murderous rage, but why did they never feel embarrassed that such a fundamental injustice could have developed in the first place?

Clark realised he was in eighteen-fifties America. Krypton had been eighteen-fifties America. Earth was eighteen-fifties America, from now until the end of time. He was a cliché, in a straw hat, dungarees, wielding a banjo and talking in charming patois. That ninety-nine-point-housewife-student percent of the British population believed that sustainable manual jobs should be paid less than contrived deskbound work -it was analogous with any celebrated injustice in history.

But no one would ever celebrate.

He resolved not to try.

Perhaps, Dr Star speculated, it wasn't Clark who was incompatible with the modern world, but the modern world who was incompatible with Clark?

Go forth, Comrade Star. As if he would.

Trying something new, "Have you seen the new Star Wars film yet?"

All he wanted to talk about, curiously, was normal things, everyday concerns from the lives of people who worked nine-to-five, things irrelevant. But it just wasn't happening. Anyone who brought up his revolutionary beliefs would grow to be in awe of him, and from then on, never the twain would meet.

Days turned into weeks. Some of the guards brought him a fold-out DVD player with boxsets of Family Guy, and The Sopranos, and -for some bizarre reason- Mr Selfridge. He'd always loved Family Guy and The Sopranos, but didn't watch them for fear that his self-imposed prison would start to seem normal by association. Mr Selfridge, he watched with mild interest, deciding the whole thing was raised just by Jeremy Piven and Katherine Kelly being above-average actors.

The remainder of his time, he spent staring through the Oz-style transparent walls of the inner compound. Granted, it seemed so much like an ironic joke on his X-ray vision, and so delicately executed with the complex architecture of the cubicle walls. The Muslim prisoners prayed lovingly to their mind-bending God, and he envied them. One man perpetually re-read the same John Grisham novel, and Clark wondered if he'd suffered some kind of head injury.

Most interesting of all, the main military checkpoint was fully observable, with top-ranking officials coming and going all day long. Clark saw both working generals and starched, medal-strewn government advisors. He saw that former Five-Star who'd subsequently become a local MP, and he longed to f- around with his head.

The day it all changed was different, however -immediately, from the outset.

She emerged through the yellow-tipped blast doors looking beautifully adrenalised, single vape cigarette fluttering between nervous fingers and shoulder-strap mauled like a year nine schoolgirl. Continuously, it seemed she was pushing her luck far beyond its limits, though sheer pluckiness impelled her to continue. The only civilian in a hundreds-strong vice of burly soldiers, she exuded ill-discipline -or at least, she would to anyone sane.

Clark watched in fascination: each guard she approached seemed to go insane. They allowed her to pose them like action figures. One man, she made pull his jacket around his ears and cornholio his arms into a cactus shape. Another man had his face decorated with her lipstick: whiskers and a cat nose. A third man had all his colleagues' baseball caps stacked on his head simultaneously, until he resembled something like a totem pole with each section showing Turtle from Entourage.

The Muslims all looked on and guffawed. The girl stared up at their transparent cells and warned them to keep shcthum with a furious finger to her lips, fearing the spell might be broken if they laughed too loudly. Her escort, a man with his captain's cap fitted upside down, led her onwards up the heavily-treaded mezzo steps. As she nervously sucked on her vape, Clark took the opportunity to duck into the cell recesses to check his mirror. His fringe -damnibly, as ever- had assumed its default cow-lick; with diluted rubbing alcohol, he gelled it back into Johnny Handsome. He wondered how he knew the girl was coming to see him. Perhaps she wasn't, but it would be foolishness not to prepare.

The guard unlocked the triple-stage door and she meekly filed in. They were left alone. Clark, of course, reeled. She was not only beautiful, but just his type -full lips that were perpetually as responsive as her questing eyes, jet-black hair worn in a vaguely unconventional style, blink-rate that flowed out like a fine old Genesis riff.

In the style of Roger Moore before Grace Jones, maybe, "I take it you drugged those guards and you're here to rescue me?"

The girl leaned in slightly, "No! I was hoping you could tell me what I'm doing here?"

"I'll help if I can". Clark shrugged his mouth. Heart-in-mouth attraction made him pragmatic and to-the-point. "What's your story? What did you do to the guards?"

"I -I'm a reporter for the Weltsbury and Gloucehampton Enquirer. The email account I use for anonymous tips had a message from the governor of this place. Supposedly from the governor of this place. It said you'd requested an interview with me alone, to make public all the info on your terrorist cell. But when I got here...

"I stood in front of the first guard booth by the entrance barrier, said, 'I'm from the Weltsbury and Gloucehampton Enquirer'. But the guard just said, 'Welcome General, we've been expecting you'. I said, 'I'm not a general, I'm a reporter-', but they just opened the barrier to let me through anyway. All through the lobby, I tried to argue, but it was like they could only understand certain things or direct orders. So I tried to give them totally bizarre orders until they just had to refuse. But none of them have yet. There's a soldier around here somewhere with no shirt and drawn on his chest in marker-pen, a family of Clangers staring off into space. Don't you know what's going on?"

Clark was only marginally embarrassed, "I've got a friend who has this kind of -mass mind-control thing. I'm sure he's only trying to help".

"Who is he?"

And the delicate response to the delicate question, "He's just an old guy who likes to help people".

"But -is it true? Do you really want to get interviewed by me?"

Clark Kent wondered. "What kind of reporter are you?"

"Crime. Scandal. People on the giving or the receiving end of mischief".

"What's it called, that kind of news story where it's mostly just about people's lives?"

The girl-reporter mulled this over, very unprofessionally. "Human interest? I specialise in that, though when it gets too political, I have to hand the story over to the current affairs staff, which is annoying because, surely 'Human Interest' means politics as much as anything?"

Clark said reasonably, "I always thought politics was like moving to a country where the national sport is Tennis, and all anybody talks about is Tennis, and people put huge bets on it, and gradually you start to get involved -only years later, you realise it's still only bloody Tennis, and you're suddenly in the thrall of some personality-void like Andy Murray or his overbearing mum".

Because she was into him, perhaps, the girl laughed at this. "When you put it like that, I might become a terrorist myself".

He deliberately de-tuned his X-ray vision from discerning the texture of her underwear, not because he was particularly chaste, but because he knew her hawkish-sharp reporter senses would detect his reaction. That she was firm and athletic, though: undeniable.

"I'm not really a terrorist. Not truly and honestly. I'm an alien from space".

Confusion. "But aliens from space, surely they'd get put in a medical centre and get dissected to see what kind of guts they've got, not put in a prison?"

"I'm not the kind of alien that you can dissect", revealed Clark. "Do you have a nail file? Try to clip one of my nails".

The girl, however -a feminist-skimming trailblazer- hardly missed a beat, "You assume that, just because I'm a girl, I carry a nail file?"

From the prisoner, "We're all clichés in our own way. I'm an 18 year old man. I passed my driving test when I was sixteen, not because I'm a good driver, but because I was too full of myself to be nervous, and was desperate to go drag-racing on Weston beach with my friend Jimmy. And I can recite to you the scores from all last week's premiership games, and I'm a Chelsea fan, even though I've never been within fifty miles of Stamford Bridge, and Jose Mourinho, 'The start of everything is a collective strategy that nobody is more important than anyone else'. I just thought you might keep a nail file handy because your hands are so beautiful".

A protracted period came where she denied him eye-contact, and merely smiled at his faux-romantic intimacy. With her lips continuing to ripple, she reached into her handbag and produced a nail-clipper. She moved to try and cut one of his index nails, though at the last minute flicked out the two-inch knife attachment and plunged it into the back of his hand.

Or at least, tried to.

"Are you crazy?", Clark was alarmed.

The girl stared at her ninety-degree-bent knife. "You really are an alien".

Clark formed his hands into the nineties-rap gesture and imitated Eminem, "If I wasn't, then why would I say I am?"

"But where do you come from?"

He shrugged. "I could tell you, but I could equally just say, 'Birmingham' or 'Norwich'. Alien planets are just the same as Earth, actually. I mean, my planet had a red sun, which translates to me having crazy powers under your yellow thing, but don't ask me how it works. Where do you come from?"

With surprising sharpness, "Long Sansingforth".

Clark thought, "I've heard the name. That's in the Midlands, isn't it?"

"No", she breathed, "Devon".

"Do you like being a reporter?"

"I love it. But -why are you here on Earth?"

He shrugged, "Just wasting time. I'm Clark, by the way".

As he held out his hand, she said curtly, "Lois. How'd you do".

"Listen, Lois. Are you the type of girl who, if she ever met someone who could fly, would be too consumed by jealousy to accept a ride?"

With a ballpoint, she rubbed the heavily-dimpled space between her bottom lip and chin. "Not if the person who could fly offered me exclusive rights to their story".

And so it began. The alien's eyes, they glittered. "You've got all exclusive rights. I'll also give you a producer credit on my idea for a BBC Four Nordic crime drama. Shall we get out of here?"

"But won't you get in trouble for leaving?"

"You're the one", he pointed out, "that drew all over their faces with marker pen".

Cc.

Epilogue Two.

Jimmy's new job as a supermarket car park attendant brought nervous tension as springy as anything. Just on his first day, his fellow flatbed-jock Phil had said, 'You OK, man?', and mimed snowballing coke to suggest he understood. Except, Jimmy used a minimum of drugs, barely even beer. Through the jumpy, fast-moving days, it was all-too-easy to pin down what the fury was. Everyone in the storeroom and the warehouse knew that they were too good to work at such a weird, impersonal little shop. Only Jimmy, however, had such clear-cut reasons that he was willing to be driven insane.

To show that he didn't care what people thought of him, he'd taken to wearing one of the lightweight croupier caps which had been given to him by a delicatessen girl who'd fallen in love with him. Technically it was still uniform, and his supervisor was too scared of him to administer a telling-off

In awe of him, too? Jimmy didn't want to be subject of anyone's awe, but the fact remained that he frequently came back from lunch twenty minutes early to sweep away the leaves at the edge of the car park, unsolicited. Phil thought he knew his game: he'd heard that every four months, the company made a store-wide personnel assessment, where good workers were automatically promoted. There was every chance, his colleague thought, he'd be in an upper management position in as little as two years.

'That's great, man', glowered Jimmy.

The area of car park where he went to war most fiercely on the leaves faced North. He found himself flicking his eyes to the horizon. A few weeks ago, he'd seen a feature on Breakfast News where Vicki Vale was being shown around a plastics factory in Rochdale. Jimmy noted the fast-moving production lines, plus a bonus-related production read-out like the one he and Clark had doted on at Lyson. Quick as a flash, he'd made a mental note of the company name, which led to a protracted daydream about sending them a job application. Of course, he'd have to make up a better excuse than, 'I like tangible, hard work' to explain to them why he was moving the two hundred miles. Other than that, it was a pretty solid plan.

Except. Also to the North, but only ten miles away, was Cepenhall, where a war was ranging between mousey community groups and a major warehouse company, about whether some vacant land should be used for a thousand-workforce distribution centre or... nothing, because it would destroy the archeological site of a Roman pig breeding farm. Despite the community groups being made up of old geeks who'd long-since passed from the need to have a job or contribute to the economy, somehow their counter-opinions still carried weight, and it looked like they'd succeed.

But what if they didn't? Jimmy had always loved it in Weltsbury. He imagined being able to both stay in his home county and have a meaningful bluecollar job. Within his powerful, bearded face, his dark eyes pulsed and passed into reverie. He daydreamed about truly going to war with the local planning authorities; blowing them out of the water, challenging them to give even a word of argument against his sane, working class beliefs. Except, of course, they would -and they would win, because c-s always do.

Clocking off, he fingered out a 80cl bottle of whisky from the liquor aisle. At the Baskets Only checkout, a little woman was shamelessly abusing the system by unloading a basket that contained more goods than most of the people who were doing a weeks worth of shopping in full-size trolleys. Jimmy breezed past her a threw a twenty pound note across the plastic ledge.

"Hey, Donna. I don't see you again, have a good Christmas".

Donna briefly paused from her barcode-swiping. "Jimmy, I was looking around for you. My shift ends in forty. You need some help drinking this?"

The woman with the hateful, overflowing basket became indignant, "Excuse me!"

Jimmy shook his head and palmed-out from the cash ledge. "Some other time, D. Me? I'm terrible company at Christmas".

"Excuse me! I was here first! I'm a paying customer, not here for the convenience of the staff!"

Smiling into the pretty girl's eyes just a while longer, Jimmy soon turned to face the gorgon.

"Ma'am? Actually? You're right. It's been a long day, I'm a little riled, and I'm being incredibly rude. What I want you to do is this-", he brandished his wallet, "take my employee discount card, buy yourself some expensive make-up".

Donna stifled a laugh while the Tardis-basket lady became furious as never before.

"See you in the new year, Jimmy!"

"Peace-out!"

Beyond the huge, shiney-glass supermarket, wind played savagely across the needlessly-bright bulbs of a bus shelter, a garage sign, the arrow markings of a speeding roundabout. Jimmy tugged at his thin leather collar just slightly, on the whole unconcerned whether he developed a cold or not. He thought of Clark. Wondered where he was and what he was doing. Christmas. The on-going flipstorm of the twenty-first century. A double-whammy for being without your best friend.

Arriving at his cramped little lodgings, he noted that his landlady Mrs Tunney had gone out for the evening, probably to some Christian sing-song, and even this added to the strange loneliness. Hungry or never-eat-again echoes ebbed away in his stomach, carrying him up the thin wooden stairs and across the landing to his door.

He stared. On the placemat was a small padded envelope, and what the f-? He never received mail from anyone, except a bank statement which rejoiced in telling him the Satanically small interest he earned on his savings. The brown-bubbled swell was incredibly small, maybe a key -maybe nothing.

But it was nice to have an outlet for his nervous energy, ripping the envelope wide on his kitchenette counter. A flush-mount USB drive fell out, the tied-on ribbon reading, 'J'ONN-EL WELMIAS - KRYPTIONIAN WORLD ANTHEM'.

Now. Where was Krypton? Was it somewhere in Africa? He was too excited even to type it into his search engine, instead cranking it straight in and media-playing the solitary data-file.

The first, quick drum-notes sounded, overlapping and building up like excitement incarnate. The orchestrations cut in. 'Anthem' was an understatement.

Jimmy sat bolt upright and went out of his mind. It was punchy. It was the bravest and most noble piece of music he'd ever heard, by a goddamn country mile. It was like being inside the very idea of nobility and excitement, evoking thoughts saving the world, bringing even the bitterest enemies together. Sometimes it went into a romantic reverie, conjuring ideas of some godlike and playful spirit twisting in the sky above newly-united continents. It was proud and profound in excess, but unfortunately it did nothing to dissipate his nervous tension.

He listened to it four times in a row, but by then was losing his s-. He paced backwards and forwards. At his wardrobe, he scrambled up his Hammer and Sickle T-shirt, then his Che Guevara, but then dismissed them both in favour of the simple Karl Marx black-and-white headshot. Tight and thin-woven as it was, it showed off his muscles, and this was far from a bad thing.

Fumbling his webcam, more numbly than he'd ever tried to unbuckle a girl's bra in the heat of passion, he set his Ytoube recorder to upload live and direct. The thing required him to enter a title. Hastily, Jimmy hit on, 'Christmas Motivational Speech'. And then he set to business, not a second too soon.

At first he could only pace backwards and forwards before the red-blinking camera lens, though there was no doubt what his first words would be. He tried not to be distracted by the low figure in the bottom corner: subscribers who'd seen he was making a live broadcast and were tuning in especially. Only 550, but climbing.

"DO IT!"

He made a pseudo-haka with his taut arms, then continued in an ear-grabbing shout that powerfully instructed, without ever being an order, more importantly without ever being cruel. He described his dispassion at tissuey human psychology.

"JUST DO IT!"

He paced. Everest-climbing passion informing his tension-conquered limbs. 'Belief' nothing. 'Success' nothing. It was all-important to try, though.

"Don't let your dreams be dreams! Yesterday, you said tomorrow, so... JUST -DO IT! MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE!"

Dating from the Big Bang, uncontrolled explosions had always been passé. The ugly chain reaction of Hiroshima, swatting a fly with the Eiffel Tower. No one had ever tried to moderate the fury into raw, psychological sanity.

Bending his arms into a horseshoe, unshaking and betraying no signs of coursing adrenaline or a racing heartrate, still he vibrated, just a little, "Some people dream of success. Well you're going to wake up and work HARD AT IT!

"NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE!

"You should get to the point where everyone else would quit, and you're not going to stop there! No. What are you waiting for?

"DO IT!"

With his all-powerful fist, he crushed a tiny, imaginary bourgeois, a plasma ball, a doubt.

"JUST -DO IT! YES YOU CAN! JUST DO IT!

"If you're tired of starting over, STOP. GIVING. UP".

And sure, there might never be an age of Supermen, but maybe one or two?