Biological Families

by a-delacroix

*!* COMPLETE *!* Clark, Lana, and Whitney travel to 1936 Nazi Germany to save their friends. Special Guest Stars: Dr. and Mrs. Indiana Jones and Var El of Krypton. Note: This is a sequel to 'The Portal'.

22. Chapter 22

7/15/07

Biological Families – Chapter 22

Part 1

Var looked up at the tall, youthful Kryptonian standing in front of him. From his own perspective, it had been almost sixty-five 'Earth' years since they had last parted - sixty-five long hard years with most of them spent trapped here in this crippled body. Yet he understood how from Clark's perspective they had been together back in 1936 Washington mere minutes before and he knew what a shock his appearance must be.

"Clark," he rasped out after waiting the necessary three seconds for the respirator to be in the proper portion of its cycle to force air passed his vocal cords. "I am . . . sorry you had . . . to find . . . me like this."

For a moment it looked like Clark was going to just stand there, frozen in shock. But after only a few seconds he saw Clark visibly pull himself together.

"Var, what happened?"

Var shrugged. Or at least he tried to. After all of the decades he had been trapped in this chair and its many predecessors, he still at times forgot that almost all of his body below the neck and even some of it above the neck was no longer under his voluntary control.

"Long story . . . follow me . . . I have . . . prepared a recording . . . which will explain . . . it better . . . and quicker . . . than I can."

Var turned his chair and headed back to the main computer terminal where he had been working when Clark's long anticipated, yet unexpected call had come through. Oh, he had been keeping tabs on Clark's life in Smallville and knew from his approximate age during their encounter in Nazi Germany that it was bound to happen sometime in the next few months; yet receiving the call on this particular day had been a bit of a surprise. The explosion in the Physics building at Metropolis University, which had certainly destroyed the time machine, had only been six days earlier. He had assumed it would take months to get it back in service before the events leading to Clark's appearance at the hangar in Peenemunde could occur. But here he was now. So either the timeloop Clark was experiencing was a lot more convoluted then he had expected or else Elizabeth Campbell, or Chloe Sullivan as Clark knew her, had a backup device already in place. And knowing Lizzy, who always seemed to think twenty steps ahead like the Grand Master chess player she was, he suspected the latter.

Var was still thinking about Lizzy as his chair rolled to a stop before the voice control interface on his personal, highly modified computer. During his conversations with Clark back in 1936 when they had had extra time to kill during the flight from Germany to Washington, he had learned a little about Clark's girlfriend's extraordinary life and her centuries' long project to develop the time machine. When he had once again found himself stranded on Earth, he had set about tracking her down. The fact that she would only adopt the 'Chloe Sullivan' name shortly before arriving in Smallville hadn't significantly increased the difficulty of finding her. No, with his unique scientific background and enhanced Kryptonian mental abilities, it hadn't been difficult to find hints in various scientific publications, patent applications, and lists of small technology start-up companies. These hints had all pointed to a handful of venture capital companies. And when the paper trail of five out of eight of the venture capital companies eventually led to a single woman, he had been certain he had found Clark's future girlfriend. Then it had been a simple matter of dangling a couple 'never before seen' scientific advancements in front of her people to make contact. Eventually he had come to realize he, too, was part of the giant timeloop generated by the creation of the device. For if Clark hadn't used the device to go back in time to rescue him, Var never would have ended up helping to create the very device which would end up sending Clark back in time.

Enough thinking about Lizzy and how their lives had become entangled over the past quarter century, thought Var. It was now time to focus on Clark.

"Computer . . . start program . . . Clark One," enunciated Var carefully.

On the wall behind the desk was mounted a very large framed mirror at least a dozen feet wide by five feet tall. At least at first glance it looked like a giant mirror, but at Var's words Clark, out of the corner of his eye, noticed something about it had changed. When he turned to look at it more closely, he immediately realized it was more than a simple mirror. The image it was showing looked like a mirror image, but there were subtle differences. However what had caught his attention was how the apparent reflection of Var in his wheel chair had abruptly morphed into the healthy, vibrant man Clark remembered from his time onboard Var's ship. But before Clark could turn to question Var, his miraculous doppelganger in the fake mirror began to speak.

"Clark, I am a program designed to provide you with some background on both my personal history and how I ended up sitting here, as well as some more historical type data that will be useful in the future. Feel free to jump in with any questions you might have and I will endeavor to answer them."

Clark slowly nodded and it was as though the image on the screen could read his facial expressions, as its monologue immediately continued.

"The first thing I need to do, Clark, is to clarify some of the things I told you right before we parted company back in 1936, based on additional information I now have available as well as some things I was afraid to say because of the timeloop. The timeloop you have been experiencing is about to close, correct?"

"Yes, I will depart for 1936 on Saturday, two days from now."

"Two days?" echoed the Var on the screen. "Good, that should give us plenty of time to cover the things we need to discuss as well as prepare you for the upcoming events."

"Now, as I said back in 1936, the damage to my ship, which left me stranded in Germany, wasn't a direct result of my translation from Krypton to Earth." The image of Var paused for a moment almost as though it was a real person rather than a program. "The actual situation was that my ship had been under attack by three Kryptonian Defense Cruisers when I attempted the jump. I had taken one hit and the next missile would have destroyed my ship if I had remained on Krypton for two seconds longer."

"I remember that part, of course I should, since you just told me about it twenty minutes ago, at least from my perspective," Clark answered with a small smile. "You said it was because of some trends you had uncovered indicating a bleak future for Krypton. However you didn't explain in what terms the future was bleak. Was it political or economic?"

"Actually, neither. What I had been working on was a projection of the environmental trends of the planet. Krypton had suffered an incredibly long, devastating war in the distant past. It lasted for a thousand years and by the end, weapons were used that make hydrogen bombs look like hand grenades.

"When the war was finally over, things did not return to normal as everyone expected. Rather the environment became more and more inhospitable due to massive radiation storms that continually circled the planet. Over time all but the hardiest forms of plant and animal life died out. Three hundred years ago the Kryptonian race was forced to start erecting protective domes over their cities or else move entirely underground.

"By my time, Kryptonians had been living under the domes for so long it had begun to feel natural. Everyone, including the ruling council, believed the status quo could be maintained indefinitely. However the data I had been collecting showed that the situation was not stable, but was getting worse at an exponential rate. My projections showed that all life outside the domes would be extinct within 40-50 years of my original departure from Krypton. And even the domes wouldn't protect us. The steadily rising radiation levels would become lethal within sixty years.

"And even if we could somehow incorporate improved radiation shielding into the domes, it would only gain a small increment of time. The real cause of the problems was a planet-buster bomb that one of the sides in the war had attempted to set off when it became apparent they were losing. It was an experimental device and they didn't manage to get it deep enough to implode the planet, but it did create a small black hole. Well, small compared to the black hole sometimes formed at the core of an exploding supernova star. Even on a planetary scale it started small, massing no more than two million tons, about the equivalent of say Devil's Tower out in Wyoming. Have you ever been there, Clark?"

Clark remembered the vacation he had taken to Wyoming with his parents the summer he had turned nine. The weather had been good that year and his Dad had gotten the crops in early and decided things could take care of themselves with a little help from the neighbors for ten days in early June. They had just had time to visit Mount Rushmore, Devil's Tower, and Yellowstone. Devil's Tower had seemed such an oddity. Hundreds of feet tall, this butte of stone stood there all alone with nothing similar visible anywhere around. It had been a cool summer day and at least ten separate parties were visible climbing its steep flanks. At the time it had looked so scary, but now with his new found flying abilities he could reach its flat summit in less than a second. It was definitely one of the wonders of the world he wanted to revisit once Chloe was restored.

But then Clark forced his thoughts back to what the image of Var on the screen had been saying. Someone on Krypton had set off a device which had created a black hole with the mass of Devil's Tower somewhere inside the planet.

"Yeah, I have been to Devil's Tower and it is huge. I know black holes are all about gravity and sucking matter in. Wouldn't such a thing quickly destroy a planet?"

"This black hole was really tiny. Oh, two million tons sounds like a lot, but a black hole that size is actually smaller than a single atom. And atoms, even in things like solid rock, are pretty far apart when looked at on an atomic scale. Of course, as you said gravity is one of the key things about black holes and in this case the first thing to consider is the interaction of the black hole with the gravity center of Krypton. They would feel a mutual attraction and would start moving towards each other. Now since the planet massed millions of times more than the black hole, the black hole did most of the moving. The black hole fell towards the center of the planet, but like all celestial bodies, Krypton was at the same time moving in orbit about its sun. So the black hole didn't actually reach the exact center of the planet, but instead ended up in a highly elliptical orbit that at one extreme came within twenty miles of the surface of the planet and at the other extreme dipped three hundred miles into the inner core. It completed one 'orbit' every sixty-three minutes.

"Now, as I said, on an atomic scale even solid rock is mostly empty space. The black hole cruised along in its orbit occasionally passing close enough to suck in the stray atom, which in the early days amounted to maybe a ton of material per orbit – again not a lot on a planetary scale. However as each atom crosses the event horizon it releases a small burst of radiation. And even in the early days the radiation released by a ton of material per hour was having an effect on the planet's surface and was the secret driving force behind the never-ending radiation storms."

"And nobody knew this was going on?" asked Clark.

The image of Var shook his head. "No. Even at the time of my first trip to Earth I didn't know about the underlying cause. All I had been doing was collecting data on the effects. I thought the ongoing, worsening radiation problems were related to the weapons released on the surface of the planet during the long ago war, but it wasn't clear what was continuing to reinforce them. I should have suspected with the earthquake data I had been collecting, but I guess I was simply too close to the problem. What is that Earth saying – 'I couldn't see the forest because of the trees'."

"Earthquake data?"

"Krypton had been experiencing steadily worsening earthquakes during the past few centuries. By the time of my first trip, we were seeing a couple quakes per year that would measure around 12 on the Earth's Richter scale. And my predictions showed increasing frequency and severity in the future. Within 50-60 years they were going to be so severe there was a high probability of the planet breaking up.

"In hindsight it is obvious everything Krypton was experiencing was related to the black hole. As it continued to grow over the centuries it was starting to effect things on a seismic scale. Now rather than sucking in a few million atoms per second it was boring tunnels several meters wide through the planet with each orbit."

While the image of Var had continued to talk, the screen had changed from the fake mirror into a graphical display of what the black hole had been doing to the interior of Krypton. As Clark stared at the bright colors used to show the black hole's passage, part of his mind was running the numbers for years until Krypton's destruction in his head. Var had left Krypton for the first time in the Earth year of 1934. If the planet was to become completely uninhabitable in 50-60 years, that would have put the end in the period from 1984 to 1994. If the small spaceship he had arrived in had had a similar instantaneous drive to the one in Var's ship, it would have left Krypton in 1988 – right in the middle of Var's estimate for end of the planet. Was he the sole survivor of the destruction of Krypton, well other than Var who had been trapped here apparently years earlier?

"Var, if the situation was becoming that desperate, why wasn't anyone doing anything to start evacuating the planet?"

"Somebody was. Me. Unfortunately, I was having trouble getting anyone to listen."

"But why?" asked Clark. "It certainly sounds like there were plenty of signs for anyone to see."

"Well, that was part of the problem. There were plenty of signs, but they were all only gradually getting worse and the mind, human or Kryptonian, likes to think that things are stable. So without a root cause to explain things – and I didn't know about the black hole until later – it was simpler to arrest me for spreading subversive lies then to accept what I was saying."

Clark shook his head. "I guess I can understand why they would want to silence you, but why try to shoot down your ship?"

The large wall display reverted back to its mirror function with Var once again standing there looking out at Clark.

"The Kryptonian race was extremely xenophobic. Down through the millennia the planet had been invaded and conquered on several occasions by alien intruders. Everyone was afraid of drawing the attention of outsiders if we started traveling beyond our solar system." Var shook his head. "If they only knew the powers they would possess once they were away from the effects of our red sun, but they didn't. Anyway, I think a lot of people, including members of the ruling council, would rather have died then risk going out into the galaxy. So when I announced the development of my ship and my intention to look for a new home, well that's what triggered my arrest. They were attempting to confiscate my ship when I made my escape. I truly believe they brought in the cruisers with the intent to merely scare me into surrendering and things just escalated out of control."

Clark nodded in response to Var's explanation of the events leading up to his original arrival on Earth, but his mind kept circling back to Krypton's eminent destruction via the black hole and how the dates seemed to line up with his own arrival on Earth.

"Var, is Krypton gone? I mean, has the black hole really destroyed the planet?"

The image on the screen looked at Clark for a moment and then turned to look at the true Var trapped in the wheelchair. Clark followed the image's gaze and found himself looking down at his old friend – the man who had mere hours before helped him to evacuate first the great battleship Hitler and then the Peenemunde complex in the minutes before they destroyed it.

"Clark . . . I have been . . . trapped here . . . for almost . . . fifty-five years . . . so I do not . . . know for certain . . . but my gut . . . says yes."

Clark suddenly found it necessary to lean against the corner of the desk. He had suspected for some time that that was the case, but this was the closest he had come to confirmation. And it was the closest he might ever come until he somehow traveled there himself. He remembered how Chloe had told him on the first night of his return from ancient Rome that she was building a 'souped up' version of the portal device with sufficient range to reach the distant star. But if they were to use it, what would they find? Just a pile of rubble slowing being eaten by the black hole? If the planet had been destroyed, where could the device even open a portal?

Then Clark remembered Var's ship. If they traveled to Krypton via a ship, at least they would be safe, even if the planet itself was gone.

"Var, I have to know for certain what happened – if the planet is gone or if there is any trace of survivors. If you have been here for the past fifty-five years, perhaps they evacuated after you left. What about your ship, could I use it to travel back to Krypton?"

This time it was the image on the display that answered. "My original ship was confiscated and destroyed upon my return to Krypton. Based on events on Krypton after my return and general knowledge of your time machine, I attempted an alternate design for my second attempt to reach Earth which would be more useful in transporting large quantities of people than the self-contained ship design of my first attempt. But as you can see from my present condition, this new design was less than completely successful."

As the 'program' Var began to describe the chain of events after his return to Krypton which had led to his present predicament, the 'real' Var couldn't stop his mind from rerunning those same events in parallel.

Part 2

Var took one last look at the planet Earth from the vantage point of his ship which hung motionless twenty miles above Washington D.C. Off to the east glistened the waters of the Atlantic. In the west the Appalachian Mountains were just visible against the distinctly curved horizon which this 'near space' location made obvious.

For a moment his mind turned to Clark and his nearly unbelievable story. Time travel, a girlfriend who had lived almost forever, and nanobot enhanced bodies – any or all of them would have been impossible to believe except for the equally unbelievable abilities he himself possessed on this world.

And thoughts of his superhuman gifts raised the question he had been putting off – what would he, no, should he say when he got home? Of course he would have to tell his wife, Salva, but what about others – in particular the Supreme Council? He didn't have anything beyond his word to prove his story. Oh, he had some tele-recordings demonstrating his speed and strength, but any emotive-cinema production team could easily produce special effects that would look more 'real'.

Plus, did he really want word getting out that resettling to Earth would grant every Kryptonian near godlike abilities? He remembered how the Nazis' had sabotaged his ship, which brought to mind that not all Kryptonians were 'pure as the driven snow', as the Earthmen would say. No, Krypton had its share of bad elements. And if those bad elements somehow arrived on Earth first, they would be quite capable of destroying the planet.

Therefore Var decided it was probably best to not divulge his secret until he had more time to consider the potential upside and downside of any decision.

And even the decision to return to Krypton at this time had its own upside and downside arguments. Meeting Clark and his friends the previous evening had reminded him that he had utterly failed in his original purpose for coming to Earth. He had come with the goal of finding a new home for the people of Krypton. Earth definitely had sufficient space to absorb the millions of inhabitants of Krypton, but he had made no contacts with any of the major Earth nations let alone reached any binding agreements.

No, if he was going to be honest with himself he was going home with his tail between his legs, an utter failure. But it had been over two years since he had seen Salva or any of his children. Well, more like a year and a half, as he needed to force himself to start thinking in Kryptonian units rather than their human counterpart.

Deciding that he needed to see his family more than he needed to stay on Earth, he pressed the button which activated the teleportation drive. Just as his final view of Earth faded from the large semi-spherical dome which formed the upper surface of the control room, he came to the conclusion that the next time he journeyed to a new planet, he was most definitely going to bring someone along who had been trained in diplomacy and had some natural gifts for simply dealing with people – both of which were clearly areas that weren't his forte.

Abruptly the view through the dome changed from the deep blue of Earth's upper atmosphere to the deep green of Krypton's. And just as abruptly he felt all of the impossible abilities his body had on Earth slip away. His incredible strength was gone. He felt half blind and deaf as much of the electromagnetic spectrum which had been accessible was ripped away. His right knee even began to ache again from the Kresche injury he had suffered during his student days. For a moment he was almost glad he had been sitting in the command chair when the transition occurred rather than standing.

"Ship, status on the drive systems, please. And where are we?" asked Var of the ship's brain.

+-+ Both the anti-gravity drive and the teleportation drive are within acceptable parameters. Our current location is fourteen miles north of the estate. +-+

"Ship, get us down to three hundred feet in an emergency descent and then make best possible speed for home. Monitor the airwaves for any indication we have been noticed, as well as watch for other airborne traffic."

+-+ Understood. Implementing course corrections now. +-+

Var's stomach abruptly felt like it had fallen through the floor as the mighty ship dove for the ground. Within twenty seconds they had dropped forty thousand feet and the ship began decelerating hard to keep them from hitting the rapidly approaching ground.

Var just had a quick glimpse of what he was certain was the El estate before the ship was down among the canyons racing for home. As the ship twisted and turned, he couldn't help but vividly remember his last ride like this. If the teleportation drive had taken just a few seconds longer to warm up, he would have been long dead by now. He hoped it wouldn't come to that again, but just in case this time he had a pre-recorded surrender message ready to go with a moment's notice.

+-+ I am picking up a sudden increase in the coded message traffic, however I don't see any Defense Force ships within scanning range. We will arrive at the estate in twenty seconds. +-+

"Ship, send the house brain the security codes and then direct it to open the main hanger door. Also have it open a communication link to Salva."

+-+ Acknowledge. . . . The house brain has accepted the security codes. The hangar door is opening. We will be there in twelve seconds. +-+

Twelve seconds suddenly seemed like an eternity as Var sat watching the canyon walls race by.

Finally, just as the hangar entrance came into view, one of the monitors attached to the command chair sprang to life and Salva's shocked face filled the screen.

"Var is that really you?" she whispered after five seconds of silence. "They said you were dead."

Var nodded as he felt his eyes tear up. He hadn't realized how much he had actually missed his wife until this moment when he finally saw her again.

"Yes, it is really me. How are the children?"

"Everyone is fine now, but we had some rough months after you died, or I guess 'disappeared' is now a more accurate word. Rao, are you really back? What happened? Where have you been?"

While most of his attention was focused on his wife, a small part was keeping track of the ship's progress. It had just entered the cavernous hanger. He felt the slightest jolt pass through the structure of the ship as its three large landing struts deployed. Then as it settled to the ground, it rotated one hundred eighty degrees until it was facing back towards the massive door which was already in the process of sliding closed.

"Salva, I have just arrived at the estate and I am planning on coming straight home from here. I will explain where I have been when I arrive. Oh, you better call Yas-Blee and tell him I am back, although he probably already knows. Please suggest that he comes out to the house. I am ready to surrender myself if that's required."

"Surrender yourself? But . . . you just got back," exclaimed Salva, as Var watched how she was trying to hold back her tears.

"Well, I was under arrest the last time I was here and they tried pretty hard to destroy my ship. And unless there have been major changes in leadership while I was gone, I don't see how anything is different. Even if all is miraculously forgiven, they are still going to want to do a debriefing."

Salva slowly shook her head. "No, nothing major has changed along those fronts." She paused for a moment and then squeezed her eyes tightly shut. When she opened them she had an expression that said it had been an experiment to verify if Var was really there or just a figment of her imagination.

"Var, I better make that call and then I need to round up the children." She paused for a moment and then her hand reached towards the screen as though it could pass straight through so she could touch him and convince herself that he had truly returned.

Var found his own hand reaching towards the screen. "I will see you in thirty minutes. Salva, I love you."

"I love . . . you, too," she finally managed to get out.

- + - + - + - + - +

Var had been under house arrest for six months when Yas-Blee was unexpectedly announced by the house brain. Var hadn't seen him face-to-face since that first day on his return from Earth. And he wasn't sure he wanted to see him now for whatever the reason for this visit, it couldn't be good news.

No, they hadn't parted on good terms the last time they met. Var had thought at the time Blee had wanted him to be executed on the spot. He had always believed Blee was one of the moderates associated with the Supreme Council, not one of the more extreme xenophobes. Fortunately, cooler heads had prevailed after Var had explained Earth's complete lack of space capabilities and rather than being executed he had merely been hit with house arrest enforced by a small squadron of Blee's elite guards.

Now, Blee was back and there was no point in postponing the inevitable. Var told the house brain to direct Blee to his study and then put down his light brush and stepped back to study his current work. Since he was restricted from all of his normal technological pursuits, he had been using his time to document his most interesting memories of his time on Earth. Today he had been working on an image from the pivotal encounter out over the Baltic. In the center was the great German battleship hanging vertical in the air where Clark had just hoisted from the depths with water still cascading down its gray hull. In the background was the brilliant red Nazi anti-gravity vessel they had created by copying the basic design of his ship. In this scale the gaping wounds from its conflict with the battleship and the emasculation of its primary weaponry by Clark were clearly visible. Unfortunately, what wasn't clearly visible was Clark. No, Clark was a mere speck at the prow of the battleship and Var hadn't found any angle which more clearly showed Clark and yet captured the rest of the scene. Perhaps it was time to admit this 2-D still format was never going to capture both the epic scale and the individual heroics at the same time. To truly achieve what he wanted, an emotive cinema approach was what he needed. He wished he could bring in a team to record his vision, but he was going to have to learn to do it himself – allowing others to become involved would be to risk the secret of Kryptonians' abilities on Earth.

As he removed his work smock, Var remembered his conversations with Salva during those first days after his return. He had tried to explain the incredible abilities he had acquired while on Earth, but she had been difficult to convince. But then who in their right mind would believe that simply traveling to that planet would bestow unimaginable speed and strength, the ability to fly, the x-ray and heat vision, and all of the other things. It wasn't until he played for her the tele-footage he had recorded on Earth and then dumped to a data crystal that she started to believe a little of what he had been saying.

And if his own wife needed visual proof before being able to accept what he had been saying, what about everyone else? But perhaps it was for the best, if it was too easy to believe, there might be an exodus to Earth of all the wrong types of people. For Clark's comments about the Nazi mentality had opened his eyes to some of what went on in the world – be it Earth or Krypton – beyond his normal narrow focus on his scientific projects and his immediate family. Now that he had forced himself to look, he recognized a lot more bad traits in people, both big and small, than he had ever noticed before.

But as long as neither he nor Salva said anything and no one stumbled across the carefully hidden data crystals, the secret should be safe. As he had expected, his ship had been immediately confiscated, so he had carefully deleted from the ship's systems any references to special abilities possessed by either himself or Clark, which brought his thoughts back to his current art project. Was it even wise to create an image such as this? But on this scale, with Clark nearly invisible, who was to say what the picture represented? Since no one who would see it had ever been to Earth, how would they know the battleship didn't actually fly in the vertical orientation shown? Since Krypton had had anti-gravity ships for millennia, most people would probably think it was natural that humans would be at the same level for intercontinental travel.

As he headed towards his study to meet Blee, Var tried to get his mind away from the whole 'incredible abilities on Earth' topic since it seemed extremely unlikely that was why Blee was here. Unfortunately, the next thing that popped into his head was what Blee had done to his ship. Oh, he had known in his heart it would be confiscated, but he hadn't expected it would be cut up and sent to salvage with only a cursory inspection for useful data.

'Calm yourself,' Var chastised himself. The ship was in the past now and he would have to find alternate solutions for eventually evacuating the planet. And truthfully, it was a useful tool for a mission of discovery, but it would have been too limited for evacuating more than a handful of people. No, after Clark's brief, non-technical description of the combination teleportation/time travel device he had been using, it seemed like just what he was going to need to transport hundreds of millions of people. Vehicles like his ship would take a lot of time shuttling back and forth between Krypton and Earth or whatever planet they settled on. But with a large version of the portal machine in every major city, the people could simply walk through to their new adopted world.

Var had already been doing some surreptitious calculations and had hit the first roadblock. The power required to hold open a passageway between worlds for hours or days on end far exceeded what was required for the short, nearly instantaneous jump of his ship. Rao, even the few seconds Clark's device held open its doorway would seem to far exceed the power output of his ship. Yet he knew Clark's machine couldn't possibly have access to that kind of power. So Clark or rather his girlfriend had come up with some solution that required a lot less power than his calculations had indicated. Not for the first time he found himself wishing he had asked Clark more questions about the underlying principles of his device.

His musings about Clark's device had absorbed so much of his attention, his body seemed to find its way to his study on auto-pilot or at least it seemed that way when he suddenly found himself stepping through the doorway and watching Blee slowly climb back to feet.

"Welcome to my home, Yas Blee," began Var with the traditional greeting as he took in the other man's formal, almost gaudy attire. Normally, Blee appeared to prefer a simple monochromatic black jumpsuit with just his family's crest for adornment, but today he was in his official green and emerald uniform with what appeared to be every crescent, insignia, and glyph he had ever earned.

Abruptly Var felt a stab of fear. Perhaps Blee was here to formally announce the charges which had keep him under house arrest for the passed six months. But then as he fought to still his racing heart, Var tried to convince himself that maybe it was for the best. At least if they formally charged him it would get him out of this dull limbo he had become trapped in.

So, Blee's first words came as a surprise if not an actual shock.

"Var El, I am here to officially notify you that your commission in the Defense Force has been reactivated, effective immediately."

Var had been expecting this visit was going to be the first step down the path to trial and potentially prison or even execution. Therefore this was the last thing he had been expecting.

The only thing he could imagine which would get him drafted back into service would be a perceived threat to the continued existence of the Kryptonian race. Particularly since by long tradition, ever since Hatu El had defeated the alien Vrang all those thousands of years ago, during times of martial law the hereditary head of the El family was the head of planetary defense and second only to the Warlord, whose area of responsibility extended throughout the whole solar system.

Knowing his own arguments with the Supreme Council would never cause them to take action in a way that would suddenly thrust him into a position of power, his mind became all business as he wondered what was going on.

"Has martial law been declared?" he asked to clarify his status.

Yas Blee looked back at him with a cold, furious stare that clearly stated his own opposition to this turn of events which had put a man he thought was a risk to the race in a sudden position of authority.

"Yes, it was declared two hours ago. And yes, your commission is to take over planetary defense, not just the sub-commander rank you held during your tour of service fifteen years ago."

Var could see how much it was costing the other man to remain civil when a man he clearly hated was about to step in as his second-in-command, a job he was most certainly not prepared for.

"What is going on?" asked Var trying to keep things focused on the facts.

"Three hours ago the deep space scanning array spotted an approaching intruder. At first I was certain it was visitors from your supposedly 'none space-flight capable' friends. But with a few minutes of additional observation and data collection, an old familiar energy signature became apparent. Although I still personally don't believe you are off the hook. He hasn't been here in almost seven hundred thirty years and now he shows up a mere six months after you last used your machine. A mere coincident? As a long time military man, I have a hard time believing in coincidences. No, based on my personal experience, nothing happens without an underlying reason."

Blee paused and made a gesture pointing towards the nearest pickup of the house brain. After Var gave a small nod of assent, Blee spoke up. "House Brain, please open a connection to the brain at Planetary Defense Command in Kandor. Have it route a copy of tele-sequence A57-J548-A003 to the nearest tele-display."

+-+ Acknowledged +-+

After a pause of ten seconds the left wall of the study, which had been displaying an image of the Fire Falls as seen from the top of the observation tower at the El family estate, slowly faded to black. After a few seconds a scattering of small points of light registered in Var's vision as more than just noise on an open channel and he realized the tele-sequence had already begun. Suddenly, a red circle enclosed one of the points of light slightly to the left and below the center of the image. Quickly, the image recentered on the colored circle and then the circle began to expand as the image zoomed in. When the circle filled half the screen, the image abruptly jumped again and Var knew the large gravity lens tele-scope based on Wegthor had been brought into play. And with the added power of the moon-based tele-scope, the faint point of light resolved itself into the image of a ship - the dreaded ship Kryptonian parents referenced when they needed to frighten their children into being good. While on Earth, Var had heard about 'The Boogie Man' and this ship was the closest Kryptonian equivalent.

The hated ship had been built in the configuration of a giant bleached white skull. It was impossible from the image to get a true sense of scale, but Var knew from the historical records it was the size of a medium asteroid – roughly twenty-five miles in diameter. The skull shape alone made it scary, but from its lower surface daggled a giant mass of gray and black shaded tentacles. Given the scale of the skull, each tentacle had to be almost a mile in diameter and over twenty miles long. The Kryptonians had never determined the true purpose of the tentacles, whether they were part of the ship's propulsion system or served some other purpose, but the mere sight of them were enough to send shivers down Var's spine.

From the moment Blee had made the seven hundred thirty year reference, Var had known to whom he had been referring, but it still hadn't had the same impact as seeing the dreaded ship. For like every boy and girl who had passed through Purl Nous and the tele-learning system, he couldn't help but remember the significance of that date. It marked the last visit by the Kryptonians' most famous and dangerous adversary – Brainiac.

The image of the massive ship filled the screen for at least thirty seconds before the recording ended and the display went blank. It seemed like another thirty seconds passed before Var finally found his voice.

"How long?"

Blee turned from where he, too, had been staring at the blank screen.

"If he maintains his current course and speed, he will be here in three days."

+ - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - +

The next three days seemed to race by in a blur for Var. Blee had insisted that Var relocate to Kandor where the headquarters of the planetary defense organization was located. However Var had refused and insisted instead that the planetary defense needed to be orchestrated from the El Estate outside of Kryptonopolis. In his new found capacity, Var had won out and while Blee returned to Kandor to coordinate the initial defenses in the outer reaches of the solar system, Var had returned to the estate for the first time since his return from Earth. And quickly he was followed by a work-force of hundreds and the old estate was rapidly filled with more activity than it had seen in centuries.

Now, as he happened to be passing through the Hall of Elders, Van El's old powered exoskeletal warsuit caught his eye. As he stared at its bristling array of weapons and hardened armor plating, he couldn't help but think back to his time on Earth and how Clark had single-handedly lifted the great German battleship from the depths of the sea. If only the whole Krypton race had those abilities here on Krypton, he thought, the upcoming conflict might have a different resolution than the one he feared.

However he was kept from further pointless wishful thinking by the loud voice which accompanied the youthful face now visible on the nearest tele-screen.

"Tanth El, the leading elements of our space forces are about to engage the enemy," exclaimed the excited voice in a rush.

Var sighed. Was he really getting that old? He felt no excitement or thrill for battle. He only had a strong feeling in his gut that something very bad was going to happen.

"Thank you, Jes, I will be right down. Please sound the warning alarm telling everyone it is time to relocate to the lowest bunker levels."

"Yes, Tanth El," said the youth before signing off.

Var shook his head as he headed to the nearest grav-shaft. At least the kid wasn't referring to him as Ampar El. If he had, then Var knew he would be feeling truly ancient.

When Var stepped out of the grav shaft at the estate's lowest level, he heard a subdued groan emanating from the large, long disused storage room he had converted into his command post. Quickly, he walked over to the control panel where Jes Ul was monitoring the radio communication link between the estate and Planetary Defense headquarters in Kandor.

"What?" whispered Var in a soft tone in an attempt to keep the others in the room from being distracted from their tasks.

"Tanth, the first twenty of Warlord Blee's ships just engaged the enemy. Unfortunately, they had no apparent success. Brainiac's ship is still proceeding forward with no change in speed or direction. The same can't be said for the defenders. Fourteen of our ships were destroyed outright and communications has been lost with the remaining six. Hopefully, they have just lost their comm systems, but I think we need to assume the worse."

Var nodded – partly in thanks for the update and partly in concurrence with the younger man's assessment; it seemed very unlikely the missing ships would be seen again.

Right up to the start of the battle Blee had been putting a good face on things and had tried to convince everyone that improvements in the state of the art in gravity and maser based weapons in the seven hundred years since their last encounter would level the odds. But Var had never had much confidence in what Blee had been claiming, and secretly he believed Blee would agree. No matter how much their weapons had improved, it was still like a small swarm of crystal gnats going up against a flame dragon. The Defense Forces largest space-borne cruisers barely stretched fifteen hundred feet from stem to stern, which would hardly be noticeable against Brainiac's twenty-five mile wide behemoth. Rao, thought Var as he swore once more upon the name of the chief god of a long gone era – Brainiac's ship was so large, it could easily have an armored hull a hundred feet thick.

At least there was one consolation, thought Var. Unlike the human battleship he had encountered, the Kryptonian ships were only crewed by four people, aided by a large group of robots, rather than the thousand people needed to keep the Nazi ships operational. Still, the first brief encounter had cost them over eighty of their youngest and finest.

Var's thoughts were interrupted by a sharp shout from Jes.

"Yes?"

"Tanth, the alien ship has just opened communications with Warlord Blee."

Ummm, thought Var, things are finally starting to get interesting. Then speaking out loud, he responded. "See if you can get the communication link routed down here."

The younger man nodded and as he bent to his comm. panel, Var couldn't help but think of his own son, Jor. Jes Ul couldn't be more than a couple years older than his youngest son and for a moment he wished it was his son who was here with him. But his son was back at their home in Kryptonopolis. Well, actually, he, his mother, and all the other residents should be in the deepest subterranean shelters below the city. During his last 'visit', Brainiac had wrought a lot of destruction on the surface of the planet. Therefore, as one of his first acts as planetary coordinator, Var had ordered all non-essential personnel to relocate underground eight hours before Brainiac's anticipated arrival.

In less than ten seconds the nearest tele-screen mounted just to the left of Jes' workstation sprang to life. As the image resolved, Jes explained, "Tanth, the message is running on a fifteen second delay, but I thought you would probably want to see it from the beginning."

Var nodded almost absent-mindedly as his full attention was absorbed by the tele-screen and its unexpected image.

Var had chosen not to explain to Blee his true motives for basing his operations at the El family estate. Blee already didn't trust him and was probably just as glad Var had chosen to stay out of his way by not going to Kandor. But the true reason Var had retreated to the estate was to access the ancient family archives. The El family was the oldest continuous line on the planet and they had secret records dating back hundreds, if not thousands of years further than any other public or private source.

Public records documented three previous encounters with Brainiac, but Var was fairly certain he had seen references to at least two earlier encounters during previous research he had done on entirely unrelated topics. So once things had been set in motion with his newly acquired military staff, Var had spent much of his time in his private quarters working with the house brain to sift through the oldest records.

Based on the three previous encounters, most Kryptonians believed Brainiac was of Kryptonian origin – a machine constructed to look like its designers or perhaps some sort of machine/Kryptonian hybrid. It was assumed he was relic of the long lost First Age of Science which had ended over eight thousand years earlier with the atomic accident that destroyed the original capitol city of Erkol. But the oldest and most secret of the El family records dated back to the time of Erok-El, the individual who had first unified the Kryptonian race and started them on the path from a race of migratory herdsmen into the great city-building culture they would eventually become. And those oldest records, which predated the development of true science by hundreds of years, had included fables and stories describing a stranger from the stars who could only be Brainiac. Therefore regardless of what everyone else believed, Var knew Brainiac couldn't be of Kryptonian origin, regardless of how 'normal' his appearance seemed.

However at the start of the message from the oncoming ship, even Var wasn't sure what was going on. The image on the screen didn't look at all Kryptonian. While the creature visible in the image had the expected two arms, two legs, and a head, its face was a shade of green approaching the emerald color of firestones. The top of its bald head was studded with at least fifteen vivid red sensor diodes which looked fully implanted into the green skin stretched over its skull rather than merely pasted in place.

Had some other individual or race wrested control of Brainiac's ship from their ancient nemesis? Var wondered.

However when the creature began to speak, its words came out in clear, unaccented Kryptonese; although whether that was its native tongue or merely the result of an excellent translating program, Var didn't know.

"I am Vril Dox," began the stranger in a booming baritone voice that sounded perfectly capable of being heard from the alien's current location at the edge of the solar system without any need for amplification or retransmission. "I am the Emissary of the Computer Tyrants of Colu."

The creature paused for a moment and Var wondered if he was supposed to recognize the 'Colu' reference. A quick search of his vast enhanced memory didn't dredge up any associations.

"You will cede one of your cities to me," continued Dox. "You have two hours until I arrive at the planet to announce your choice or else I will choose for myself."

And as abruptly as that, communications with the giant alien spaceship was broken. No discussions and no details, just a pronouncement.

After about thirty seconds, when it was obvious the alien wasn't going to add anything further and Var hadn't heard anything from Blee in Kandor, Var turned back to Jes.

"Get Warlord Blee on the line please."

Jes nodded and within ten seconds Blee's image was visible on the same tele-screen which had just displayed the alien.

"Warlord Blee, have you heard of this Vril Dox or the Colu he refers to?"

The image of Blee shook his head. "No, I was going to ask you the same thing."

"What do you make of his demand for control of one city?" Var continued. "I would have thought he would want to conquer the whole planet if he intended to stay here."

"We are not going to give him control of the planet or even a single city. We are not going through another Vrang-style occupation on my watch," answered Blee in an anger tone that was emphasized by a pulsating vein in his left temple.

"How are we going to stop him? You saw how easily he got passed your picket line of cruisers. We can probably throw more ships at him once he gets closer in, but to what purpose? Nothing we have is going to stop him or most likely even slow him down."

Blee took a slow deep breath before responding. "You're right about defeating him in space. Nothing we have is going to put a dent in that ship. But down on the ground is another matter entirely. If he wants control of a city, he isn't going to want to destroy it with heavy weapons, so his primary advantage will be nullified. Therefore we need to make our stand here."

After a moment Var nodded. If they were going to be able to do anything, the first step would have to be to get this Dox separated from his ship. And if they were going to confront him on the ground, what would be the optimum location?

"Where do you suggest?" asked Var.

"I think here in Kandor," answered Blee quickly, as though he had been mulling the decision from the moment Dox had made his announcement. "Between the headquarters of the planetary defense system and the nearby spaceport, we have more men, equipment, and ordnance here then anywhere else on the planet. And with less than two hours, we don't have time to significantly reposition anything."

"I concur," said Var without hesitation, as Blee's logic seemed inescapable. "If I leave now and if there is a maglev car waiting for me in Kryptonopolis, I should be able to reach Kandor in forty-five minutes to help coordinate the final defenses."

Blee stared back at Var and for a moment Var thought he saw a new hint of respect in the other man's eyes, as though Blee hadn't expected this response from Var. Then the man shook his head.

"No, Var, if something goes wrong, we shouldn't both be in Kandor. If it comes to a fight and we lose here, at least you might spot some weakness that will let you save the rest of the planet."

Var nodded. "If there is anything I can do, just ask."

Blee returned the nod with a gesture that indicated he was about to break the connection. But before he did, Var interjected a final question. "How do you think this Dox creature got control of Brainiac's ship? Surely there can't be two ships like that in existence."

"That is the question of the day. If he found some weakness, we needed to figure out how to exploit it, too."

"Of course, if it was me who had gained control of that ship, plugging that particular weakness is the first thing I would have done."

Blee shrugged. "Even if the weakness is still there, it is unlikely we could find it and use it in less than two hours."

Blee straighten almost to attention before formally concluding. "I need to see about preparations. Good fortune to you, Tanth El."

+ - + - + - + - +

For Var the next two hours felt almost two days long and he almost found himself wishing he had gone to Kandor. He was sure the two hours raced by a lot faster for Blee who was busy organizing the city's defenses.

To keep himself and his people occupied, he set them to collecting and organizing all the data they could gather about the ship as it swept further in-system. And the first, most unusual thing they encountered was the ship's trajectory. After Blee's response to the alien's original message, the ship made a single minor course correction and then there had been no further changes. When it got further into the system, it should have begun braking to slow to orbital speeds. Var had expected it would move into geosynchronous orbit over Kandor, but that didn't seem to be the case. No, the closer it approached, the longer it maintained the same course and speed. Eventually, Var requested a plot of its course if it didn't slow and it showed the giant twenty-five mile in diameter ship passing within eighty miles of Krypton's surface. And the perihelion of its approach would be right over Kandor.

Now, with the clock ticking down to less than one minute to its closest approach and no sign of its slowing to achieve orbit, Var had every available sensor trained on the ship. Therefore his instruments recorded the exact instant the ship began projecting a giant pale orange beam towards the ground from a projector mounted on the ship's lower surface just forward of the mass of writhing tentacles. Quickly the beam intensified until it looked almost opaque.

As soon as he saw the activation of this new weapon or whatever, Var changed the primary feeds he was monitoring from views of the ship to views of the ground below. Fortunately one of the defense force's spacecraft was returning to the planet from one of the orbital construction yards and Var could use its sensory array to get a clear shot of Kandor as seen from roughly a thirty mile altitude and one hundred twenty miles downrange. And what he saw made his blood run cold. Whatever that orange beam was, it had expanded to engulf the entire city of Kandor, its tall protective dome, and maybe fifty miles of surrounding wilderness.

For just an instant before the beam turned completely opaque, Var saw something that caused him to think his eyes were deceiving him. It had looked like the central spire which dominated the skyline of Kandor was visibly shrinking, but that was crazy.

The brilliant orange beam continued to hide whatever was going on within its field for perhaps another ten seconds. At the speed at which the giant ship was streaking passed Krypton, Var knew it couldn't hold the beam in place for much longer. And as he expected, the beam abruptly died.

What he didn't expect was that when the beam disappeared, Kandor would be gone. Not lying in ruins as might be expected if the orange beam he had witnessed was some extremely powerful maser or particle beam, but rather the city was completely gone. And from what was visible from the descending craft, even the ground the city sat on was gone as far down as he could see. And with the hole in the ground stretching at least fifty miles across, the depth he could see had to extend down at least ten miles or more into the crust.

At least it did for about five seconds before the enormous pressures involved at those depths tried to find a new equilibrium after trillions of tons of weight had been suddenly removed. Then on a planet which between earthquakes and ion radiation storms had seen more than its share of damage, something truly catastrophic occurred. The giant hole in the ground where the city of Kandor had once stood became the open maw of a supervolcano more than fifty miles across. Within seconds a fountain of molten lava had climbed twenty miles into the sky. And with the explosive blast of magma had come a superheated thermal shockwave which twelve seconds later destroyed the spacecraft Var had been using as a sensor platform.

As the screen went blank, Var stood there blindly staring at it in shock. What had just happened? What had the alien spacecraft done to the capitol city? Had it been destroyed as a simple demonstration of the aliens' power to force the rest of the planet to surrender? But if so, why was the ship not moving into orbit?

Before Var could follow through on any of these thoughts, he was interrupted by a growing clamor of alarm bells, tones, and whistles.

"What is going on?" Var said loudly more to hear his own voice then because he expected any coherent response. But unexpectedly, he did get a response from Mils Ree, the lead civilian scientist on his team. A geologist wouldn't have been his first choice for the current situation involving a space-borne opponent, but he had been forced to use what resources he had. Now it was turning out to be an unexpected break.

"Tanth," began the man formally. "I am picking up severe seismic activity spreading in a radial pattern with an epicenter at Kandor. It is way off the scale from anything I have ever seen and it is knocking every sensor I have off-line as it passes. I project the first magnitude fourteen shockwave will reach here in just over seven minutes. It will be followed by similar magnitude shocks every twenty to thirty seconds for, well I don't really know how long. I have never seen anything like this."

Var remembered back to the pitch he had made to the Supreme Council before his trip to Earth. He hadn't predicted the first magnitude fourteen shockwave until more than thirty years from now. And Ree was indicating that was what they were about to see. And that was here, seven hundred miles from the epicenter in Kandor. What were things like around Kandor? Could anyone survive on that side of the continent? Rao, would anyone ultimately survive on this side of the continent? That massive volcano he had briefly seen wasn't going to stop anytime soon. How many cubic miles of material was going to be ejected into the atmosphere?

Suddenly, Var shook his head and tried to clear his thoughts. If they survived, there would be time to think about those things later. With Kandor gone and Bree dead or lost, he was the acting commander of Krypton. What did he need to do in the remaining minutes before the approaching quake most probably would knock out all of his communications with the outside world?

"Jes, get the commander of the installation on Wegthor on the line, NOW."

As he waited for the connection to be made, Ree spoke up again.

"Tanth, by my best estimate, a thermal shockwave will be following behind the spreading front of quakes. It should be traveling at just below sonic velocities and reach here in seventy four minutes. The air temperature will climb to approximately six hundred degrees and remain there, well, until the supervolcano dies down, but probably on the order of weeks rather than hours. The crystal domes of the cities should be okay at those temperatures assuming the earthquakes don't finish them first. We are deep enough here, we should be okay, too."

Great, thought Var, it just keeps getting better.

"Tanth, I have Commander Mar Zod from the moonbase on the line."

Var glanced at the screen which was showing a slender, some what smarmy looking man with a pointed goatee. He looked early middle age and was wearing the standard issue dark blue uniform of space command.

"Commander Zod. I am Var El, temporary head of Kryptonian Defenses. I am sure you are aware of the situation down here. I expect to lose all communications in just over four minutes. I anticipate the same loss of communications throughout the continent of Lurvan. I am not sure if the situation will be as bad on the other side of the planet in Urrika, but I think we better assume the worse. Therefore I need you to assume overall command until further notice."

"Very good, Tanth. I understand the situation. The volcano where Kandor used to stand is clearly visible from here and it's still broad daylight over Kandor."

"What is the status of the alien ship?" asked Var.

"It has not altered course and has just passed the orbit of this moon. If the destruction of Kandor is intended to threaten us into submission, it seems like an odd flight plan."

"Keep an eye on it, Commander, but your first priority has to be the survival of the Kryptonian race. Render what aid you can to the people down here, but don't risk your own survival to do it. If Krypton becomes uninhabitable, you must find the necessary resources to re-establish our race on some other planet."

Var saw the other man blanch. "Surely, Tanth, it can't be that bad down there?"

Var had seen the images of the supervolcano, and had heard the comments from his geologist. Even more importantly, he had spent years before his trip to Earth studying potential doomsday scenarios. And this sudden attack, even if the aliens didn't see it as an attack from their point of view, fell among the range of some of his worst case scenarios.

"Commander, the volcano and all of its associated aftereffects have only just begun. The peak may not occur for weeks or even months. Don't commit your limited resources to helping people down here too soon."

The commander of the moonbase was just beginning to nod that he understood the situation when Ree shouted. "Here it comes. Everyone brace yourselves!"

Var was just diving across the floor to reach one the large support pillars scattered around the room, when the first shockwave arrived. Seemingly in an instant the floor jumped straight up almost three feet and slammed into Var's chest. Then just as quickly it dropped away and Var experienced what felt like a long moment of freefall before being slammed down into the floor again.

The incredibly loud roar of the quake blocked all other sounds, which Var thought was probably for the best. Out of the corner of his eye he could other less fortunate members of his team who hadn't reached a solid handhold being thrown about like rag dolls.

Just as he thought he was going to survive the experience unscathed, the level of shaking increased by a noticeable amount. After only a few more seconds his grip on the support column failed and he joined the others in bouncing around the madly gyrating room. As the powergrid finally came apart under the violent shaking and the room was plunged into darkness, Var's final thoughts were of Salva and their children. Were they fairing any better in Kryptonopolis than he was doing out here at the ancestral El estate?

+ - + - + - + - +

Var was barely out of the old antique warsuit when Slava flew into his arms. As it was, he scorched one of his hands on the still blistering hot armor.

"Oh, Var," Salva exclaimed as she continued to hug him so tight he thought for a moment that she had suddenly developed the strength only a Kryptonian on Earth possessed. "I thought for sure you were dead. It has been so long."

Var hugged her back and knew she wasn't far from the truth. It had taken him and the other survivors out at the estate three weeks to dig their way up from the lowest level where they had taken shelter. There certainly had been a number times where sudden cave-ins during the still ongoing quakes had nearly convinced him he wouldn't escape from there alive. But thoughts of Salva and the children had kept him from giving up.

Once the survivors had reached the main levels of the estate they had found them surprisingly intact. However the atmospheric conditions had kept them trapped there for an additional three months. And the whole time they had been unable to contact the outside world. All of the landlines of communication had been severed by the quakes. And none of the surviving radio gear had been sufficiently powerful to penetrate the heavily ionized seven hundred degree atmosphere.

Finally, after three months the air temperature had fallen a hundred fifty degrees which brought it just within the operational limits of the old warsuit. It had been a long, hard thirty mile hike through an environment which had seemed almost alien. The air was heavily filled with smoke and haze - limiting visibility to no more than ten feet. And everywhere, strange crystalline structures were sprouting that looked like nothing he had seen before.

After a long eighteen hours in the suit and countless false turns, he had finally made it to one of Kryptonopolis' airlocks. With his strength almost gone from his ordeal, he had stumbled through the lock and was just managing to extract himself from the suit when Salva and the others had arrived.

"Are Zim, Kayla, and Jor okay?" was the first thing Var asked when Salva finally loosened her grip.

"Jor is fine. We just recently started making reliable contact with Xan. Therefore I found out about a week ago that Zim and Byma are okay, too. But there hasn't been any communications with Argo City, so I don't know about Kayla."

As she spoke, Var spared a glance at the city spread out before him. Clearly several of the medium sized towers had collapsed somewhere along the way, but the famous Red Tower still stood, although he couldn't guess at its remaining structural integrity. On the whole, the city looked in better shape than he had feared.

"How are things here in the city?" Var asked.

"Not great, but all things considered, they could be worse," answered Salva, as she wove her arm in Var's and started leading him away from the airlock. "We lost seventy five thousand out of four hundred sixty thousand residents during the initial quakes – primarily due to a total collapse of the south east shelter. We have gotten most of the food production back online, but we are extremely limited for power, so no electricity in homes and we mostly get around by walking."

Seventy five thousand dead sounded like an unimaginable number, but it was far less than what Var had been expecting based on his experiences out at the estate. Out there, only forty three out of three hundred twenty six had survived.

"What about the alien ship? Has it made any further demands?" asked Var.

Salva glanced at him before responding and from long experience Var quickly recognized the hint of anger that flashed through her eyes.

"Not that I know, but then that jerk, Zod, just sits up there on Wegthor and does nothing. He doesn't send down any of the emergency medical supplies we need or the equipment we could desperately use to get our power generation systems back on-line. Hell, he barely answers our queries for information. A lot of people down are starting to curse his name."

"I am afraid the response, or lack thereof, that you are getting from Zod is probably my fault," responded Var trying to clear up the situation. "After Kandor was destroyed, overall command fell to me. I only had a couple of minutes to talk to Zod before the first quake reached the estate. I told Zod his number one priority was to ensure the survival of the race, even if it meant sacrificing the people down on the planet. I didn't want him to squander his limited resources on what might be a futile attempt to save the people down here. I had no idea at the time whether things would even stabilize down here. If anyone is to blame for Zod's behavior, it is me."

Salva looked at Var for a moment then simultaneously shook her head while tightening the arm that was wrapped around his waist. "Thanks that makes things a lot clearer. Unfortunately, I am not sure the others are going to have the same response. If Zod had just been upfront about why he wasn't sending help from the beginning, I think people would have understood and agreed. But he didn't explain and a lot of people think he is up to some kind of power-play to gain control of everything."

The further they walked from the entrance portal to the city and into the residential district where their home was located, the worse the devastation seemed to get. Trying to force a smile, Var answered. "If he is, it looks like all he is getting is a huge pile of work to rebuild his 'empire'."

Then sobering, Var continued, "Where is the radio system? The first thing I better do is get a comprehensive status of the current situation and then try to get things, including Zod, headed in the most productive direction."

Salva nodded and immediately changed the direction they were heading more towards the center of the city. "The Red Tower had to be abandoned for the present, significant cracks were discovered in its foundation and we haven't had the time or resources to get it properly shored up. In case it collapses during one of the aftershocks, everything within a one mile radius has had to be temporarily abandoned too. The remaining members of the city council are meeting in the Hall of Natural Sciences and the radios have been set up there also."

It was a fifteen minute walk to reach the Hall of Natural Sciences. Var and Salva spent the time sharing the highlights of their lives since the day the alien ship destroyed Kandor and as a side effect, most of Krypton, too.

When they reached the Hall, the first thing Var noticed was the giant flame dragon which had hung from the ceiling of the entrance hall for centuries. Now its shattered body was spread out on the floor having crushed dozens of smaller display cases which had occupied the center of the room. Its torn and disfigured head was turned towards him and as he stared at its artificial golden glass eyes, Var couldn't help but wondered if this damaged, stuffed husk of a once mighty dragon might be the last remnant of those magnificent beasts. Even flame dragons couldn't survive if the atmosphere had been seven hundred degrees for months everywhere and not just the local region around Kryptonopolis. Had any Kryptonian life survived outside the domes?

Salva led him around the left side of the flame dragon down an obviously well-trodden path through the debris. Once beyond the entrance hall, it suddenly felt to Var like they had moved back into a more traditional office environment. People were busily scurrying everywhere. And everyone seemed to be carrying sheaves of papers, but then if the power system was mostly down, it would mean most of the brains which handled much of the minutiae of modern life would be off-line, too.

Salva led Var into a large room behind the third door on the right side of the main corridor. Inside, a large conference table had been set up on the right side of the room while the left wall was filled with radio gear. A group of men and women were seated around the table and from the few Var knew by sight, he knew this must be the city's ruling council.

A loud argument had been going on between two of the more elderly members of the council when Salva and Var entered the room. But as soon as someone at the table recognized him, a hush quickly spread until silence reigned and all eyes in the room were turned in Var's direction.

"Good afternoon, ladies and gentleman," began Var feeling it was probably best to act like he was definitely in charge, whether that turned out to be the case or not. Certainly, by historical precedent, his position should be dissolved as soon as the alien invader crisis was passed. He didn't yet know the status of the alien, but certainly the planetary crisis did continue to exist.

"Sorry, I have been trapped incommunicado out at my estate until now. However with the loss of Yas Blee in the destruction of Kandor, I believe I currently in charge."

After pausing for a quick breathe and to give the others in the room a moment to object if they so chose, Var continued. "Now, the first thing I need is to be brought up to speed on the current situation."

As he moved to a vacant spot at the head of the table, Var glanced over to the radio array lining the opposite wall. Pointing to the man nearest the equipment, Var asked. "Are you the radio operator? Good. Can you get Commander Zod on the line? Please do so."

It only took about thirty seconds until the single large tele-viewing screen in the room sprang to life with the image of Zod, who looked exactly the same as Var last remembered him from the brief conversation they had exchanged in the opening minutes of the crisis, now almost four months in the past.

"Tanth El, this is an unexpected surprise. After all this time I was afraid we had lost you just like we lost Warlord Blee."

Var couldn't stop a small smile from crossing his lips. He hadn't missed the hint of disappointment he saw in Zod's eyes. Perhaps Salva's assessment that Zod was in the process of making a play to take over wasn't far from the mark. Well, after being stuck out at the estate with lots of time on his hands, Var had come up with a few ideas and plans of his own. But first he needed to better understand the true situation.

"Oh, you know those of us from the house of El, we are a hard lot to kill. Now, I need a status report of the current situation. First, what is the status of the alien who started this whole mess?"

Zod seemed surprised at the swiftness Var was getting down to business, but after only a moment, he responded. "The alien is gone. He never slowed after his single pass by the planet. Within a matter of hours he was out of the planetary system. Within three days he was out of detection range, well unless we were going to keep the big grav'scope focused on him, but there didn't seem to be any point."

"So he makes a single pass, destroys one major city and then proceeds on his way. What was the point?" Var asked, thinking out loud and not really expecting a response.

"I don't think he actually destroyed Kandor, Tanth," came Zod's respond.

"What?" asked Var and his wasn't the only voice suddenly filling the council chamber.

After a few seconds of pandemonium, Var motioned the room to silence.

"Please explain, Commander," requested Var.

"I have had my people studying all the available telemetry of the event. Numerous sensors were focused on both his ship and the city when he made his closest approach and the orange beam was played over the city. Anyway, we have data from more than one source which indicate the beam playing over the city was some kind of shrinking ray. Based on the rate of shrinkage observed in the initial 0.75 seconds before the beam turned fully opaque, we project the city and the surround countryside were shrunk by a factor of somewhere between sixty thousand and one hundred twenty thousand. This would reduce the seventy five mile diameter of land missing to a diameter of four to five feet. Since there wouldn't be much point of shrinking the city to that size only to leave it to be destroyed in the ensuing volcanic activity, I surmise it was relocated to the alien ship after it had been reduced to a more convenient size for transport."

Var stared at Zod's image on the tele-screen for a minute. Shrinking an entire city to tabletop size sounded absolutely crazy at first. But the more he thought about it, the more sense it seemed to make. He had been trying for three months to figure out why the alien would attack and destroy one city and then simply leave without making any demands. But if his whole purpose was to make off with a city for some unknown reason, then things suddenly started to make a crazy sort of sense. And the devastation of the planet, which had been a simple byproduct of the theft of the capitol city, had prevented any attempt at a rescue mission until it was far too late.

"Well, Commander, I will admit at first that sounded completely crazy, but the more I think about it, the more it does seem to fit the facts of the situation. But I think we are going to have to put any pursuit of the alien and any attempts to retrieve our Kandorian citizens on the backburner until we get things taken care of here on Krypton.

"Now, Commander, what can you tell me about the status of the volcano where Kandor once stood?"

"The volcano seems to be in the process of capping itself off. Based on the trends we are seeing, it should be fully contained within the next ten to twelve days."

"That is good news, Commander," answered Var and he could feel the same sentiment circling the room based on the nods of heads.

"I am afraid there is plenty of bad news to go with it, sir. Actually, this may turn out to be more significant in the long run than the volcano."

Var wondered what new catastrophe he was about hear about. A dozen things ran through his mind, but he quickly tried to quash his imagination. Doubtlessly none of them would be correct based on his limited information at the moment.

Just then a flicker in the image on the tele-screen caught his attention. Once the new image stabilized, Mar Zod began a voice over.

"What you're looking at is a composite image of the south east portion of the Lurvan continent and the surrounding Morstil Ocean. The image was shot in the far ultraviolet portion of the spectrum to penetrate the cloud cover. The spot highlighted with the red 'X' is the volcano where the Kandor used to stand. The white area you see stretching for several hundred miles from the volcano is a crystalline structure which has completely covered the landscape. Based on lidar measurements, it averages over four miles thick."

Var suddenly remember all of the white crystals he had seen growing all along the path he had taken from the estate. None of the individual crystals he had seen had been more than twenty feet long, but they had to be related.

"What is it?" asked Var.

The image of Zod had returned to the screen, but he merely shrugged his shoulders. "I have no idea really. There is too much of it for it all to have been simply spewed up by the volcano. I am simply theorizing now, but I think the source is material brought up from deep within the planet. And whatever it is, it is reacting positively to being on the surface of the planet. It could be exposure to sunlight. Or it could be exposure to moisture. It has spread five times as fast out over the ocean as it has over land. Already the island of Xord has been completely obliterated and even Uvot is almost completely encircled. At the geometric rate it is progressing, my scientists estimate less than fifteen years until the entire planet is covered under one massive crystal structure from one to eight miles thick."

Var thought back to his meeting with the Supreme Council before his trip to Earth. He had predicted the end of the Krypton within thirty years due to either radiation or quakes. Now, they had this whole new catastrophe with almost the exact same time frame. At least this time people wouldn't be able to ignore what was right in front of their eyes. Perhaps he would finally be able to get support for his plan to evacuate the planet.

Part 3

Var forced his memories of those long ago days on Krypton to the back of his mind and made himself focus once more on the present. The youthful image of himself showing on the screen was just finishing covering the same period in Kryptonian history.

"So, was Krypton really overrun by the giant crystals?" asked Clark.

"I would guess so," answered his image on the screen. "I left Krypton for the last time about ten years after Kandor was stolen. By then the crystals had covered about twenty five percent of the planet. At the geometric rate they were progressing, they should have inundated the whole planet within fifteen years like Zod had originally predicted."

"Did the crystals force the population to retreat in front of them?"

The image of Var on the screen shook his head sadly. "No, that had been my original expectation and I thought it would force people to back my evacuation plans. However, Kryptonians are nothing if not stubborn. It took seven years for the crystals to reach the first major domed city which had survived the volcanic destruction and by then our scientists had made a surprising amount of progress in understanding the crystals. They had even achieved a limited amount of control, enabling them to force the crystals to grow around and over the city's dome without destroying it.

"As a result of this success, people started to believe they could survive this incursion of crystal," concluded the image of Var.

"So how did you end up back here on Earth?" asked Clark.

The screen Var's response didn't initially seem to be a direct response to Clark's question. "I, too, had been doing research on the crystals. 99.999 percent of the crystals were clear or white. The remaining 0.001 percent consisted of a variety of different crystals. It is probably simplest to refer to these trace elements by their primary colors. The next most plentiful type of crystal after clear white was green."

Clark couldn't help but think about the green stones scattered around Smallville – the stones which had nearly killed him on numerous occasions. There definitely was a crystalline structure to the green bits where they typically protruded from the surrounding black rock.

"Are the green meteor rocks, which arrived in Smallville at the same time I did as a small child, truly tiny fragments of Krypton?"

"Yes. And not only are the green variety present in Smallville, they are merely the most plentiful and obvious. I have had to work second and third hand and be careful not to upset the timeloop, but I have managed to collect a fairly extensive sample of meteor rocks and I have found most of the major types to be present – red, black, blue, pink, silver, and gold."

Clark looked surprised. "There are more than one kind of meteor rocks? I have never seen any of the others."

The image of Var on the screen nodded. "The others are extremely rare compared to the green. Red is the next most plentiful and there is at least a thousand times more green than red. And some of the others are more than a thousand times rarer than the red."

Clark looked lost in thought for a moment. "Close proximity to the green meteor rocks seems to strip away most of my special abilities. Well, more than that, it makes me as weak as an eighty year old man with Parkinson's. Do the other varieties have the same effect?"

Var's image shrugged. "I don't know for certain, but I would guess they will have different effects. At least based on my limited personal experience, I know the gold variety doesn't just temporarily strip your powers, but permanently removes them. Or at least that is what seems to have happened to me. As to the other colors, I have no idea. My powers were stripped away at the moment I returned to Earth. So, none of the various kinds of meteor rocks have any more effect on me now than they do on normal humans."

The youthful Var on the screen paused for a moment before continuing. "You know, Clark, we need to find a better name for them than meteor rocks."

"Ever since you first told me about Krypton on your ship, I have sort of been calling them Kryptonite in my head," answered Clark.

"Kryptonite," repeated Var. "I guess that is as good of name as any."

"Var," continued Clark to get their conversation back on track. "You said contact with gold Kryptonite permanently stripped away your special abilities and that it happened at the moment you returned to Earth. How could you have run into it then? The meteor rocks which arrived with me wouldn't have been here until years and years later."

"Well, that brings us back to your earlier question – how did I end up here," began Var, as he launched into the next portion of his story. "In the months that followed my return to Kryptonopolis from the family estate, we slowly managed to bring our civilization back from the brink of destruction caused by the theft of Kandor. Oh, many things changed like the underground mag-lev system needing to be permanently abandoned, but we got all of the power grids back on-line, the damage to the cities was repaired, and people got on with their lives.

"After six months, it was apparent civilization was going to survive and Brainiac or whoever it was that controlled his ship wasn't going to return, so I stepped down from my post as temporary Warlord of Krypton and returned to my research. With the steadily accelerating pace at which the crystals were engulfing the world, it was more obvious to me than ever that I needed to find a way to quickly evacuate Krypton's millions of citizens when they, too, finally saw the threat I had long recognized.

"Even before the events involving Kandor, I had already come to realize I needed a different method of transportation than the ship I had used for my first trip to Earth. When the end did finally come for Krypton, there probably wouldn't be time to build the massive fleet of ships required to transport tens of millions of people. No, what I needed was something more along the lines of the device you had used for time travel. A device which could open a stable portal in city centers where people could stream quickly through.

"However, I ran into what seemed like an insurmountable problem. My calculations showed the power required to hold the wormhole open was way beyond anything we could generate. Now since you never mentioned the need for incredible amounts of power, and my numbers indicated needing to harness almost ten percent of the output of the sun, I knew you, or rather Chloe had discovered a way around my power dilemma."

"Kryptonite," exclaimed Clark. "I think Kryptonite is the secret Chloe discovered."

"Yeah, Clark, Kryptonite is the secret. And just so you can appreciate the true convoluted nature of this timeloop, I am the one who gave Chloe the necessary hint about using Kryptonite. So your initial trip back to Rome and then your trip back to Germany were both really part of the same loop. I wouldn't know about the possibility of wormhole travel until I meet you, and Chloe wouldn't know about the importance of Kryptonite in the process until I, in turn, secretly passed the word to her.

"Anyway even knowing an answer had to exist, it still took me almost ten years to work out that the crystals were a big part of the solution. In fact, it wasn't until some of the other scientists started to identify some of the crystal's unique properties and then managed to redirect its growth to encompass cities without destroying them that I turned my own research in their direction. After months of work, I was able to get the desired interaction between the Kryptonite and the wormhole. With green Kryptonite, I was able to open a stable wormhole from one side of Krypton to the other while using an acceptable amount of power, no more than the power required to light up twenty square blocks in the city center. However I still had significant power limitations when trying to achieve interstellar distances."

Clark thought back to the conversation he had had with Chloe on the evening of his return from ancient Rome. She had explained how she was building a fusion powerplant under the old Creekside Foundry. If what Var was saying was true, would the fusion power source really be sufficient to reach all the way to Krypton? Although if what Var was saying about the planet's future was true, there might no longer be anywhere to open the far end of the portal.

But then a small smile graced Clark's lips. If the planet was truly gone, they could just use the time-travel feature to open a portal at a time shortly before his own childhood departure from the planet. For in truth, what he was most interested in seeing on Krypton was not the planet, but his own parents.

"Would a fusion power source be sufficient to power the portal device for a trip from here to Krypton?" asked Clark eagerly.

The image of Var on the screen froze, not quite like a person deep in thought, but more like someone had hit the 'Pause' button on a DVD player. After nothing happened for at least fifteen seconds, it was the real Var in the wheel chair who responded.

"Chloe has . . . a working fusion . . . power source?" asked Var. Var was a little surprised by this information although he knew he shouldn't be. Lizzy, as he had long known Chloe and still tended to think of her, did always play things close to the chest. And truthfully, in the quarter of a century they had known each other they had only met face-to-face five times. So she didn't have any reason to trust him with all of the details of what she was doing. Of course that sort of went both ways. He had never divulged his true background or his knowledge of the Portal device being her ultimate goal. No, they had almost been playing a game where they occasionally dangled a small technological advance in front of the other.

He hadn't had any idea she was working on fusion power, but she had her fingers in so many pots, it wasn't surprising she was working to advance the state of the art in power sources, too. He had made discreet inquiries over the years since he had known her and his best guess was roughly thirty-five percent of all R&D work on the entire planet, both military and civilian, was either being funded or at least guided by her. It staggered even his powerful mind how one person could be actively controlling things on so many fronts. But then from what Clark had said about the computer power of her nanobot system, it seemed vaguely understandable, particularly since she had been planning this for almost two thousand years.

Clark response almost seemed like an interruption to Var's musings.

"Well, the first fusion generator has been powered up for about two weeks. It will be a couple of months before the other two primary units and three backup units will all be tested and ready. Plus the big, long range Portal device should be finished around the same time," answered Clark. It had been difficult to tell with Var's strange speaking cadence and the minimal changes of his facial expression, but Var had seemed to have been surprised by this information. And something at the back of Clark's head said it seemed like more than just that he was surprised that Chloe had achieved it. No, it seemed like he was surprised she had been able to achieve it at all. "Var, did you have fusion power back on Krypton?"

After a few seconds pause, Var responded. "No, Clark, . . . Krypton had a rich . . . supply of Uranium, . . . so fission power sources . . . and drive units . . . for spaceships . . were cheap and easily . . . available. . . . Plus anti-gravity . . . greatly reduced . . . the need for . . . powerful energy . . . sources."

"So will Chloe's machine be able to reach Krypton?" asked Clark.

"Possibly," was Var's succinct answer.

"You said your device only had sufficient range to reach intercontinental targets not interstellar ones. So how did you reach Earth?"

"Computer," began Var, "Reinitialize program at . . . Clark One Beta."

After a three second pause the image on the screen suddenly became unfrozen. "Sorry about that, Clark," the image of Var said, once again more fluidly than the wheel-chair bound Var could. "Could you repeat your question?"

"I was wondering how you got here, if your Kryptonite powered device only had intercontinental range."

"Green Kryptonite only gave intercontinental ranges with a reasonable amount of power. However after further experimentation, I discovered the extremely rare gold Kryptonite was much more powerful. With even less power than the green needed to reach the other side of the planet, the gold could reach up to four hundred lightyears."

"So you just opened a wormhole to Earth and stepped through? And the gold Kryptonite in the wormhole then stripped away your powers?" asked Clark. With his curiosity about Var's present physical condition getting the better of him, he added. "How did you end up in the wheelchair? A later accident?"

The image of Var on the screen shook his head. Clark knew it was just a computer simulation, but couldn't miss the sudden sadness in its expression.

"No, Clark, it all happened at the same time."

"How could stepping throw the wormhole land you in the chair?" repeated Clark.

"I didn't step through the wormhole, unfortunately. I flew through it," began Var. "I needed a way to send a retrieval signal and I couldn't come up with anything as compact as your phone device. So I built a special ship which could pass through the wormhole to act as a portable signaling device. Oh, it was nothing like the original ship you saw, relative to that it was tiny. It could carry two people sitting in tandem, but was hardly bigger than a fully enclosed motorcycle would be.

"I probably didn't need to design it to fly since I knew I could just fly myself once I was back on Earth, but I thought I might need some bargaining chips to put on the table when I started negotiations with the leaders of the United States. And this time I didn't want to reveal my special abilities, if I could avoid it."

Var had just laid a lot of information on the table, but the thing that stuck in Clark's head was the comment about his new ship's ability to carry two people – perhaps it was the sadness in Var's voice.

"Var, was someone else with you when you journeyed back to Earth?"

For a moment it looked like the image of Var on the screen wasn't going to respond. Clark glanced over at the real Var and saw tears glistening in his eyes. Then the one on the wall began to speak softly.

"I should have made a test run before bringing her," he seemed to mumble quietly before looking up in Clark's direction. "Salva, my wife, was with me. She was the only one to whom I had told everything. I had been afraid if word got out about our abilities here, the wrong sort of people would get involved. So I only told her.

"My original purpose, when I first came to Earth back in 1936, had been to secure a new home of the people of Krypton. However the problems with my ship had sidetracked me during that initial trip. But after dealing with the Nazis and seeing the way they had tried to sabotage my ship, I realized I was okay as a scientist, but terribly lacking as a negotiator. However Salva had been running the El family businesses for years and they had been prospering more than they had in centuries; she would be far more adept than me at the task of dealing with governments and politicians.

"Salva agreed to join me on the trip since our children were now all grown and leading lives of their own. I had thought the risk of bringing her along was minimal, I mean we were supposed to be impervious to danger here.

"Tragically, that wasn't the case. The wormhole opened only a hundred feet above the ground and it should have been a simple matter of touching down safely. But the interaction of the gold Kryptonite in the wormhole with the Earth's yellow sun caused a physical reaction in our bodies beyond anything I had ever imagined. You mentioned how green Kryptonite makes you feel like you are eighty with Parkinson's. Well, try amplifying that by a factor of a thousand. As we exited the wormhole, my limbs were gyrating around madly and I quickly lost control of the ship. We hadn't been moving fast, but diving straight down from a mere hundred feet was enough to shatter the ship."

Clark had seen enough footage down through the years of light plane crashes to imagine the wreckage of Var's tiny ship and also what it would have done to his body. He already suspected what he was going to hear about Salva's fate, but had to ask to know for certain and to clear the air. "And Salva?"

The image of Var paused for a few seconds and Clark was afraid it was crashing like it had earlier. But then it seemed to take a deep breath. "I was unconscious for months and when I finally awoke in the hospital of a secret military base, I was in the condition you see before you. I was badly hurt and didn't have any special gifts, but they had been able to tell from the wreckage that I wasn't from around here. You have probably even heard about my crash – Roswell, July 1947?"

Clark numbly nodded his head. "Who hasn't heard the stories about Roswell? Hell, I even borrowed some of the highlights for one of the stories I had to spin out for Hank. The crash of an alien spaceship. The cover up about weather balloons. The bodies being kept at a secret base. Oh . . ." Clark's voice petered out as he realized what he had just said.

"Yeah, I was little more than a body and they had possession of Salva's body for years. It wasn't until well after I managed to escape that I finally was able to retrieve her body and give her the proper burial she deserved."

Clark looked from the image on the screen in front of him to the broken man sitting in the wheelchair beside him. He found it impossible to imagine what the past fifty plus years had been like for Var. The pain. The loneliness. His wife dead, the remainder of his family unreachable, hundreds of lightyears away. Clark wondered if he could have survived what Var had gone through.

But then he remembered some of the seemingly impossible things he had witnessed since that first passage through the portal device on his way to ancient Rome. In particular his mind was drawn to the memory of events and discussions when they had first returned to the present and Chloe had led them into the room where Lex and Lana's resurrected parents had waited. Chloe had used the time travel device to retrieve their parents within moments of their respective deaths. And since the events on the Nazi battleship where Whitney had ended up dead, he had continually hoped Chloe would be able to retrieve Whitney in the same way. So why not try for the same thing with Var's wife?

Clark was about to mention this possibility to Var, when the other part of Whitney's situation sank in. They would not only need to retrieve Whitney from the past, but also Chloe was going to have to do her nanobot magic if Whitney was to come out of his predicament healthy and alive. A simple exchange of blood was all Chloe or Lana needed to introduce 'bots into someone's body. That had seemed impossible with a Kryptonian like himself or Var, but suddenly he wondered if things had now changed for Var. With all the tubes he could see penetrating Var's arms and throat, could Chloe's 'bots also enter his body and repair its damage? Clark knew Kryptonians were descended from the humans of seventeen thousand years ago, but he had no idea what genetic changes had been imposed to make it possible for them to survive and thrive on Krypton. He decided it would be prudent to talk to Chloe before mentioning it to Var, but at least he felt a glimmer of hope he might one day see Var restored to the healthy body he remembered from 1936.

However saving Salva might not require Chloe's 'bots, but merely her time machine. And since Var was fully aware of the capabilities of Chloe's device, putting a positive spin on the conversation felt like the right thing to do.

"Var, I think we may be able to save Salva using the time travel aspects of the Portal."

Var's eyes were still filled with tears from his revelation of the circumstances of his wife's death. After a few seconds he responded, but his voice was suddenly thicker and raspier than could be attributed to the effects of the respirator. "Clark, I have . . . dreamed . . . of the same . . . thing many times. . . during the last . . . fifty years. . . . But I saw . . . her remains. . . when I . . . buried her. . . . It was . . . definitely her."

"I have no idea how to accomplish it at the moment, Var. But I think we need to discuss it with Chloe once we have restored her. I mean she managed to save my friend Lana's parents from certain death a millisecond before a street full of people thought they saw them killed by a major meteor strike. And she also managed to save my friend Lex's mother after everyone thought she had died. From my experience, Chloe is capable of functioning on an entirely different mental plane than anyone else. If there is anyway of saving your wife, I am sure Chloe can find it."

Var blinked at the tears filling his eyes, which was one of the few aspects of his body still under his conscious control. He had thought a lot in the early years about how to use time travel to save his wife. But as the decades passed, it had faded to little more than a dream. But now Clark's words or perhaps his youthful enthusiasm sparked a little more hope in Var. If Lizzy had been able to achieve the things Clark had said with the time machine, perhaps it might be possible. And with what he knew of her capabilities, if Clark asked her to throw most of her attention at the task, she might come up with some solution he had never explored.

"Thank you, Clark. . . Perhaps you are . . . right and . . . your friend, Chloe. . . can find a . . .solution I . . . have not foreseen."

Var paused and Clark wasn't sure if he was finished speaking or merely pausing to catch his breath. When Var started speaking again, he suddenly moved the conversation in a direction Clark hadn't been expecting.

"But she can . . . not do us . . . any good until . . . you rescue her. . . So it is . . . time to talk about . . . preparing you."

"Preparing me?" echoed Clark not knowing what Var was talking about.

"When I traveled . . . from Krypton . . . this time . . . I came prepared . . . just in case . . . I ran into you . . . again. . . The device . . . was heavily damaged . . . during the crash . . . and I have . . . had to jury-rig . . . some of the . . . components, but . . . it is ready."

"What device, Var? What are you talking about?"

"The device which . . . performs the Purl . . . Nous procedure. . . . The procedure that . . . activates all of . . . your Kryptonian mental . . . abilities."

Purl Nous -- for a moment Clark drew a blank at the term. Then bits and pieces of their very first conversation came back. Purl Nous was a procedure performed on Kryptonian youths during their sixteenth year. It somehow activated a huge array of dormant neural pathways already present in their brains. And with these additional active circuits, their memory and thought processes were significantly enhanced.

Clark was about to ask Var to fill in at least a few of the gaping holes in his knowledge on this topic when they were interrupted by a middle-aged woman in the typical modern day nurse's uniform of green cotton scrubs.

"Doctor Swann," she began. "You know you are passed due for your next meal and how risky such behavior is to your health."

"Yes, Mildred," responded Var. Then as he turned his chair to follow the woman out, he commented. "Clark, we can . . . continue this . . . conversation after . . . we eat."

Clark felt like he had a thousand questions; each one burning to get out. But he had no idea how much this 'Mildred' knew and didn't feel it was his place to risk exposing their numerous secrets. So he was trapped into just quietly following along as they left Var's work area behind and headed back in the direction from which the nurse had come. However while he couldn't say anything out loud, he couldn't stop his mind from racing ahead. And where it kept racing to was the description from his mother of what had happened to Lex, as the powerful beam of light had played across his face in what looked to be an extremely painful manner before eventually hoisting his body effortlessly into the air. He couldn't help but wonder if that was the normal reaction to receiving the treatment back on Krypton. And he wondered at what his own reaction would be, as surely no one had ever undergone the procedure while graced with his incredible strength, speed, and other abilities. He shuddered to think what might happen if it involuntarily triggered his heat vision. Would he destroy the device before it completed its task? Might he destroy the whole facility?

Part Four

The highly customized Boeing 727 jet taxied straight through the open doorway of the hangar. Before the three tail engines had completely spooled down, the built-in rear exit ramp was already descending towards the concrete floor.

As Clark walked down the ramp, he suddenly remembered the famous story of D.B. Cooper, who back in the 1970s had committed the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history. Cooper had used the rear exit of a similar 727, the only Boeing jet to have one as standard equipment, to parachute from the jet in mid-flight. Cooper had never been heard from again and neither his body nor parachute had ever been found.

The late night flight from New York to New Mexico had been Clark's first ever flight in a normal airplane. But after traveling from Germany to America in Var's incredible ship and given his own unique flying abilities, it had been rather anti-climatic. Hell, he could duplicate Cooper's famous escape and he didn't even need the parachute. And knowing he could have covered the two thousand mile cross-country distance in mere seconds by dipping deep into the 'speed zone', the three and a half hour flight had seemed like such a waste of time. But Var could no longer fly at his side, and given the level of support Var now required merely to survive, simply carrying him had been out of the question, too.

He had tried to catch some sleep during the flight after having gone almost non-stop for days back in 1936 Nazi Germany and knowing today was going to bring fresh trials, but sleep had been hard to come by. It was now less than thirty-six hours until the events in his parents' storm cellar would play out all over again. This time he had to find some way to save Lex and Chloe before the time loop started all over again. And that was what had left him tossing and turning on the narrow cot in the small sleeping chamber he had been using on the jet. How was he going to save Chloe and Lex? He still didn't have the faintest idea. From seeing Chloe's video message in the device he had gone back to 1936 to find, he knew he would find the way. But it sure would have been nice if Chloe had given him a more specific clue than just 'Talk to Doctor Swann'. Now he could only hope this 'Purl Nous' procedure would somehow trigger the answer.

Clark reached the bottom of the ramp and looked out through the hangar doors. The sun was just rising over the horizon. At this early hour and with just the right atmospheric conditions present, the sun's leading edge had a startlingly red hue. For just a moment, Clark wondered if this was what the sun on Krypton had looked like. But then he realized the sky was shading from pink to the traditional light blue rather then the pale green he had seen in the paintings and other images on Var's ship.

One of Var's attendants guided his chair down the exit ramp behind Clark. Then he turned without pausing towards the van approaching the halted jet from the left. Quickly, Clark followed. As he got further from the heated air surrounding the jet's engines, Clark could start to sense the crispness of the desert air. However from what Var had told him during their journey out, the cool night air wouldn't last long and by noon the temperatures would be brushing one hundred degrees.

Once Var's chair was secured aboard the van, and the private nurse and the two other attendants/bodyguards had taken their seats, the van pulled smoothly out of the hangar. Immediately, Clark could see the mountains to the north where the desert stopped and the relatively lush, quasi-Alpine terrain began. From the maps he had seen on the jet, he knew it would be an easy fifty mile jog through those hills to reach the historic town of Los Alamos.

Clark had been surprised when Var had told him the facility where the device was housed was in New Mexico. He would have thought New Mexico would have had too many bad memories and possibilities of danger for Var to return. But Var had simply stated that the former military base he had acquired had been a steal when the cold war was winding down. And as far as dangers, well, he and the government had long since reached an understanding. Clark had wondered about the terms of this arrangement and he also had wondered how a quadriplegic trapped in a wheelchair had escaped from a secret military base, but Var had pointedly not gone into any details.

From the airstrip they drove for over twenty minutes until they had passed through the first set of foothills. The road was wide and obviously designed to handle a lot of traffic, but this morning they didn't see another vehicle. As they rounded a final curve, Clark could see the road ahead disappeared into a large opening cut into the side of a hill. A quick glance with his x-ray vision revealed giant blast doors like those always seen in footage of the NORAD command facility buried under Cheyenne Mountain up in Colorado. Whatever the original purpose of this facility, it was clearly intended to ride out a nuclear exchange.

Turning his gaze deeper into the hill, Clark could see this highest level was primarily fitted-out as a parking structure for three or four hundred cars. Obviously someone was trying to hide them from 'eye in the sky' satellites, but to Clark the major road dead-ending in the side of a mountain would have been just as much of a give-away as a parking lot full of cars in the middle of nowhere.

Refocusing his eyes for 'normal' vision, Clark leaned forward in his seat to read the words inscribed above the entrance to the underground facility. "Daghlian Test Site" was what he read. The name 'Daghlian' felt vaguely familiar, but he couldn't quite place it.

Looking back over his shoulder to Var, Clark asked. "The name 'Daghlian' feels like it is on the tip of my tongue, but I can't seem to force it out. Who or what is it?"

"Clark," began Var in a voice which would be barely audible to a normal human over the sound of the van's engine and the roar of its tires on a concrete roadway leading into mountain. "Things being on . . . the tip of . . . your tongue . . . won't be a . . . problem soon . . . Anyway, Harry Daghlian, Jr. was . . . the first scientist . . . on the Manhattan . . Project to die . . . from radiation poisoning . . . after an accident in the lab."

While Var paused briefly to catch his breath, Clark thought he could recall more of the story. But then he wasn't certain if he was remembering it from something he had read in school or if it was just a scene from one of the numerous movies about the development of the A-bomb. If, as Var seemed to be implying, he would have near perfect recall after the procedure, it might turn out to be useful - and for more important things then old movie trivia.

"Was this a nuclear test facility before you acquired it?" asked Clark.

"Yes . . . they set off . . . numerous deep . . . underground . . . weapons here in . . . the fifties and . . . early sixties."

By now they were passing through the underground parking structure. It had space for hundreds of cars, but at the moment it only had five private vehicles and half a dozen vans and pickups with 'K-Star Research & Development, Inc.' logos on their doors. Their own matching van pulled passed all of the parked vehicles before stopping in front of a large freight elevator. Immediately the two male attendants were up and working to release the locks holding Var's wheelchair in place and then wheeling him out.

Clark jumped down from the front passenger seat and followed the others to the large elevator. The van's driver walked up to the control panel beside the elevator and then raising his keychain, he unlocked what looked like a relatively new cover plate and pressed a normal-looking 'down' button. At once the giant door slid up into the ceiling, revealing an elevator the van could have easily driven into.

Inside, the elevator had a series of buttons with the numbers on the labels getting large the lower Clark looked rather than getting larger towards the top as with most elevators. The driver pressed the lowest button, a '12'. This control panel didn't require any security keys like the panel in the parking garage, but then Clark realized the other panel was designed to keep people out, while this one assumed if you were already inside then you must belong. He didn't remember seeing any security guards on the drive in. So either they were well hidden or they simply weren't there. Perhaps Var was trying to keep an extremely low profile about this site's existence or its purpose and minimized things to just a few surveillance cameras.

As though reading Clark's mind, Var said, "I primarily use . . . this facility for . . . storage. The constant . . . temperature and . . . low humidity is . . . ideal for paper . . . records. . . It has turned . . . into a profitable . . . venture."

The elevator growled along for almost ninety seconds. It didn't feel very fast, but they were definitely going deeper than just the twelfth story of an inverted building. Using his x-ray vision, Clark estimated the first level was down about seventy-five feet. The further levels were separated by about thirty feet on average, sometimes more and sometimes less. The first level they passed had been the largest with rooms and corridors stretching for hundreds of feet in all directions. The other levels varied in size from no more than a few rooms to spaces with twenty-five to thirty rooms.

When the elevator halted and its large door lifted up into the ceiling, Clark stared down a long passageway roughly twenty feet wide by fifteen high. As he stepped out of the elevator, he found himself in a large alcove with similar looking elevators occupying the two side walls. But what held his gaze was the passage directly in front of them. It was lit by a long, long row of naked bulbs. Even zooming with his powerful vision, he couldn't see the end. The passage had to extend straight ahead for miles.

Before he could ask, Var stated. "The passage extends . . . just over two . . . miles to the valley . . . beyond the mountain . . . That is where . . . the old atomic . . . tests were . . . conducted . . . Fortunately . . . we do not . . . have to travel . . . nearly that far."

One of the attendants began to push Var's chair down the long passage. They walked about three hundred feet before stopping at a door recessed into the right wall. The main passage had felt old to Clark. From the stains on the floor and the bits and pieces of concrete crumbling from the walls, it was easy to believe it had been there for fifty or sixty years, if not longer. But when he looked at the doorway in the wall, it looked a lot newer. Perhaps it was simply the different color of the concrete and the way it had been feathered into the existing wall, but he had a strong sense it wasn't much more than five to ten years old.

Next to the door was a small control panel with several buttons, lights, and a microphone on a cord that looked a lot like the one on the CB radio in his father's oldest pickup. The man who had been pushing Var's wheelchair stepped up to the panel, flipped one of the switches, and then pulled the microphone from its catch and held it down in front of Var's face.

After the man push the 'talk' button on the microphone's side and gave a small nod of his head, Var spoke more slowly than was normal even for him. "Victor . . . Swann."

After a wait of no more than three seconds, one of the red lights on the control panel went off and a green one took its place. Then with a hiss and a metallic grinding sound that was eerily similar to the sound bank vaults always made when opening in old James Bond movies, the heavy door began to swing outward. Clark was a little surprised to see it was over a foot thick.

When the door stopped moving, they all proceeded through into a shorter fifty foot corridor which was blocked at its far end by another door. They passed through three more of the equally spaced massive steel doors, although only the first one had utilized the voice recognition lock, before finally reaching their destination.

The room, carved from the native granite found here in the mountain's roots, was roughly square with sides of about thirty feet in length. Its sole features were an electronic apparatus hanging from the center of the ceiling and directly below it what looked like a funerary bier carved from a solid block of titanium.

"Please wait . . . outside," ordered Var to others who had made the trek down here with them.

The two male attendants immediately turned towards the room's solitary exit, but the nurse instead stepped closer to Var. She spent almost two minutes checking Var and his support equipment over. Before heading to the door, she told Var, in a tone that said she would brook no opposition, that he had ten minutes before she would be back.

As soon as the door was closed, Var began to speak. "Clark, the Purl Nous . . . procedure has never . . . been attempted on . . . someone with . . . your gifts . . . Typically, youths are . . . restrained during the . . . process . . . However . . . I don't know . . . what will . . . restrain you . . . I thought about . . . using green Kryptonite."

At the mention of green Kryptonite Clark vehemently shook his head 'no'.

"I thought . . . that would be . . . your feeling . . . Therefore the best . . . I could do . . . is this block . . . of titanium . . . buried . . . deep in this . . . mountain . . . It has handholds . . . deep inside . . . and maybe it . . . will help."

Var paused for a few seconds, as though to gather his strength to continue.

"The process forces . . . tons of data . . . directly into your . . . mind . . . I have replaced . . . some of the . . . more esoteric . . . knowledge about . . . Krypton . . . which will have . . . little value for . . . you here . . . with knowledge of . . . all the major . . . Earth languages.

"Now, go lay atop . . . the pedestal . . . please," requested Var.

Clark moved over to the center of the room with some trepidation. His strength might make him physically invulnerable, but nothing Var had said had done anything to calm his nerves. No, the fact Var felt it was necessary to locate the device under hundreds of feet of solid rock certainly indicated he expected a violent reaction from Clark. But Clark knew he didn't have any real choice but to go through with it. Hopefully, it would provide some solution to the situation with Chloe and Lex.

After stretching out on his back on top of the block of titanium, Clark found the two deep recesses for his arms. As he was about to lower his arms in, Var spoke again.

"You will find . . . hand grips at . . . the bottoms of the . . . recesses . . . Also in the right . . . recess you will . . . find a button . . . near your index . . . finger . . . Pressing the button . . . will initiate the . . . process . . . Please wait until . . . you see the . . . green light . . . above your head . . . which will indicate . . . the rest of . . . us have . . . retreated . . . to the upper . . . level.

"Are you ready . . . Clark?" asked Var without further preamble.

Clark sat back up and looked across at Var. "Ah, I think so," he began. "Well, I have one unrelated question. It has been on my mind for the past few hours, but this is the first time we have been alone."

"What is . . . your question?"

"Well, back in 1936 you had to have been around forty years, ah, earth years old. That's over sixty years ago, which should make you around one hundred. Yet other than your physical impairments, you don't look more than a few years older. How is that possible?"

"'The average Kryptonian . . . life expectancy is . . . about two hundred . . . twenty Earth . . . years . . . I may have . . . lost my special . . . gifts . . . but not my . . . hereditary gifts . . . So . . . I have spent . . . over fifty years . . . in this chair . . . and might have . . . another hundred . . . years to look . . . forward to."

Although Var's voice normally came out as little more than a monotone, on this occasion Clark could pick up the undertones of various emotions ranging from anger to self-pity. Clark found himself tempted to tell Var about his hopes that Chloe could help him, but once again he bit his tongue. After Var's comments about Kryptonian lifespans, he wasn't sure if Kryptonian DNA was similar enough for Chloe's 'bots to perform their magic.

Finally, deciding not to be too specific, Clark responded. "A hundred years is a long time. With the rate at which technology is advancing, perhaps a solution to get you out of the chair will be found sometime soon."

"I hope you . . . are right . . . Clark . . . I have really . . . come to hate . . . being trapped . . . here . . . Now any other . . . questions before . . . we proceed?"

Clark took one last look at Var and then shook his head. "No, let's do it." He was surprised how calm his voice sounded as his stomach was churning more than he could remember at any time since the computer virus or whatever had attacked Chloe and left her body helplessly spasming in his arms.

"Good luck . . . Clark," said Var quietly before turning the wheelchair towards the room's exit.

Just as Var's wheelchair reached the door, Clark remembered the contents of the pocket of his blazer. It was hard to believe it was only the day before that he had been involved in the Olympic parade of athletes during the opening ceremonies in Berlin. But the official American Olympic blazer and slacks he was still wearing was proof.

"Wait, Var," called Clark as he jumped back down from the pedestal and jogged over. When he reached his wheelchair-bound friend, he pulled the sheath of photos from his pocket. "Could you hold these for me, in case things down here get . . . ah, wonky?"

"Certainly, Clark," answered Var.

After Clark dropped them in Var's lap, the older man wordlessly continued through the open doorway. As soon as he was clear, Clark pulled the heavy door closed and walked back over to the central pedestal.

Once Clark was seated back on top of the pedestal, his eyes turned back towards the passageway. Clark's vision seemed to automatically shift to x-ray mode has he watched Var's party pass through and close the other heavy security doors. As the group started their trek back to the elevator, Clark forced himself to look away and to revert his vision back to normal.

Laying down flat, Clark slid his arms down into the slots Var had provided. At the bottom were handholds almost three inches in diameter. He closed his hands firmly around them and felt the cold metal begin to warm at the contact with his flesh. He knew if he put his mind to it, he could easily rip the handholds free and he was sure Var knew that, too. So perhaps their real purpose was to give him something to focus on. Could he keep part of his mind focused on not tearing them out? He had no idea, but it seemed worth a try.

He took a deep breath and then let it out slowly. Then another. Rather than let his anxiety take control, he tried to think about happy times. After a few moments he settled on the first day he, Chloe, Lex, and Lana had spent in ancient Rome, the day they had first arrived at Chloe's estate. Or more specifically the time he and Chloe had spent bathing each other in the pool in the solarium room with its giant stained glass windows depicting a truly ancient Egypt.

It felt like his thoughts had only drifted languidly for a few seconds when the small green light in the ceiling next to the overhead device began to glow. Was it time to begin the procedure already? It seemed like his memory of events in the pool had barely reached their first passionate kiss.

Shaking his head slightly to clear thoughts of ancient Rome, Clark felt around with his right index finger until he found the button which would trigger the device. Trying not to give himself too much time to think, he firmly pressed the button.

It seemed to him like the brilliant white beam of light almost instantly extended down from the device and pounded against his forehead as though it was backed by a hundred pound sledge hammer. His head was thrown back from its slightly raised position with so much force he heard something crack. He barely had time to hope it was the titanium pedestal and not his head before the first image exploded in his mind.

But calling it an image was completely inadequate, it wasn't like an image seen on TV or projected on a movie screen. It wasn't even like seeing an image in true three dimensions. No, it was like seeing an image in four or maybe five or six dimensions all at once. Perhaps it was most like a hologram which stored a thousand, no a million images in the space of one. For that single image contained the complete history of the House El. From the vague, fragmentary data on Erok-El, the original unifier of Krypton, through the more detailed knowledge of Hatu-El, who had defeated the alien Vrang race, all the way to the gloriously detailed information of Var-El and his family.

As Clark's mind was still trying to cope with the wealth of data incorporated in that single image, the next image impacted his mind. This was another five or six dimensional array of data only this time is was all things related to the German language. For an instant it felt like Clark could grasp everything there was to know about the language from simple things like how to read a menu to complex things like how to speak like a native in every local dialect.

But just a moment before it had completely gelled, the next image overrode it and his mind was filled with a sea of equations related to the life-cycle of stars from the coalescence of a loose cloud of interstellar dust through the initial ignition point to its final death, be it brown dwarf, neutron star, or black hole.

Again while true understanding seemed just beyond his grasp, the next image filled with data exploded into his mind. And then the next and the next and the next. As Clark's mind tried to adjust, his subconscious started to force his body into 'speed mode' to give it more time to absorb the images. But Var must have anticipated this, as the images came faster and faster.

Soon Clark's body was deeper in the speed zone than he had ever been, deeper even than the time he had spun the mighty drive shaft of Var's ship. The images were now hitting his mind a million times a second and still they seemed to accelerate.

After nearly a minute, and due to his unique gifts being forced to receive thousands of times more images than any Kryptonian before him, Clark's mind reached the desired overload state. The trillions of extra neural pathways created during the gestation process began to activate.

And as his mind tried to adjust, every muscle in his body spasmed. Instantly, his arms shattered the titanium pedestal on which he was lying.

Then his heat vision kicked in with an intensity beyond anything he had ever experienced. The process had forced his gaze to be straight up and therefore the first thing that happened was all of the exposed equipment above him instantly vaporized. Then his gaze reached the granite ceiling, but the heatsinking capability of hundreds of feet of solid rock kept it from vaporizing. Instead it merely melted and began to flow down. While the area directly above Clark's eyes remained completely clear of molten rock due to the power of his heat vision, it dripped and then poured down on the rest of his body. In a fraction of a second his clothing burned away. It took only a couple of seconds more for the remains of the titanium pedestal to also begin to melt.

As his mind continued to adjust to all of its new interconnections and the storehouse of new knowledge, his body continued to thrash and spasm. Without the support of the pedestal, his body now twisted and turned and his powerful heat vision swept in a variety of random directions, but always melting everything in its path. Within twenty seconds of the activation of his heat vision, Clark's body was floating in the center of a roughly spherical mass of molten rock over fifty feet in diameter.

- + - + - +

Var sat in the special monitoring room he had installed on level 1 of the underground facility. Everything was voice activated so none of the employees who were here with him needed to be in the room. Some of them had been with him for many years, but none of them knew everything nor would understand what was going on with Clark down on level 12. No, if they had been monitoring the readouts in this room, they would most likely have guessed the Var was testing some new exotic weapon system. And they certainly wouldn't have believed a man could survive down there.

Based on his own long ago passage through Purl Nous and his experience with Kryptonian abilities on Earth during his initial sojourn back in Nazi Germany, he had tried to extrapolate what would happen during Clark's rite of passage. He had thought Clark's present location was sufficiently removed to safeguard the rest of the facility, but now he wasn't so sure. Perhaps he should have located him at the far end of the tunnel in the next valley over where all the old nuclear tests had been performed. But then there would have been the added unknown of Clark's interaction with all of the residual radioactive material.

Var had equipped the Purl Nous chamber with numerous cameras and sensors to monitor events during the procedure. Unfortunately, none of them had lasted very long. He saw the initial beam of light reach down and touch Clark's forehead. One of his displays showed the cumulative number of images projected into the boy's mind. He had recalibrated the Purl Nous device to automatically adjust for Clark's highly accelerated abilities, but never expected the results he was seeing. Generally, it took about twenty minutes to transmit the roughly ten thousand images required to activate the dormant neural pathways. However with Clark, the device had scrolled through ten thousand images in the first ten seconds at an ever accelerating pace and then the counter seemed to simply go mad. The display was a blur except for the leftmost digit. Ten thousand. Twenty thousand. Fifty thousand. A hundred thousand. Five hundred thousand. A million. Two million. The counter just kept climbing.

Var had never heard of anyone going passed twenty-five thousand images and couldn't image what was happening to Clark. Finally, after fifty-eight seconds, Var saw Clark's body spasm. A second later, giant chunks of the titanium pedestal were flying about the room as Clark's arms shot into view. They sprang outwards until they were ninety degrees from his body in a classic crucifix position. Then Clark's back arched and, even on the poor quality video feed, the beam of energy which shot up from his eyes completely overwhelmed the pale white beam coming from the Purl Nous device.

Var had only an instant to see the equipment mounted in the ceiling above Clark glow white and then vaporize before every data feed from the room died.

Now he was left with only the remote sensors scattered throughout the facility. The computer monitor in front of him was currently showing a real-time three dimensional thermal map of the facility. Temperatures in the level 12 main corridor at the entrance to the side passage leading to Clark's room were just over two hundred fifty degrees. They fell off fairly quickly so that at the elevator they were barely over one hundred. No, most of the heat from the event seemed to be going up rather than out. The section of level 11 nearest to Clark's location was reading five hundred twenty six degrees. Similarly, level 10 was reading one hundred eight three degrees and even level nine was reading an elevated ninety-four.

Based on temperature readings, motion sensors, and gravity readings, the worse of the events seemed to be passed. Var really wanted to be down there for Clark and with one more glance at the temperatures just outside the entrance to the elevator on level 12, he decided he should be okay for at least a short time if he stayed inside the elevator; in case a hasty retreat was required.

Var issued the voice commands needed to shut off the computer display and open the door. Then he directed his chair towards the open doorway. He had barely cleared the door when his long time nurse, Mildred Prescot, was at his side.

"Virgil," she began, using his first name as she only ever did when they were alone. "You are pushing yourself too hard today. Let me check you out and get you something to eat."

Var had long since adjusted to the motherly way Mildred treated him. He knew he had a serious problem with pushing himself much harder than his damaged body would allow. That's why he put up with Mildred; she was one of the few nurses he had had down through the decades who really seemed to understand his true limits and would insist he rest before he reached them. And somehow she also always seemed to know what method would work to get him to listen. Sometimes it was by cajoling and sometimes it was playing the drill sergeant and sometimes something completely different. But on this one occasion, Var was not prepared to listen to her. He needed to get down to Level 12 for Clark.

"Later . . . Mildred . . . I must get . . . down to level . . . twelve . . . Now."

Var hadn't stopped his forward motion and Mildred from long practice had easily matched his pace walking along his right side. Now she reached out and threw the manual override on his chair, bringing it to a halt.

"Virgil, I can see it in your face. You need to rest."

"Mildred . . . I must . . . get down to . . . level twelve . . . Clark needs me."

"I will send one of the others down," answered Mildred calmly.

"You don't . . . understand . . . It must be me . . . I promise it . . . won't take . . . more than ten . . . minutes . . . Then I will . . . do whatever . . . you say."

Mildred had been with Virgil Swann for over sixteen years and she had never heard such a pleading tone in his voice. And never before had he so strenuously objected to her decisions regarding what was necessary for his health.

It wasn't in her nature to capitulate, that's why he had hired her, but she could see how important this was to him. "Okay, you can go, but on one condition. I stay at your side the whole time and when I decide you have pushed too far, it is straight back to your suite."

Var knew he was boxed in. It was either take her along or stay right here. He had no way of overriding the manual shutoff switch she had used to immobilize his chair.

"Okay . . . we do it . . . your way . . . Just don't be . . . surprised if you . . . see things . . . that shock you."

Mildred gave a small laugh as she switched his chair back on. "Virgil, I have been with you a long time. I have already seen a lot of things that have surprised me."

Other than Var issuing an occasional voice command to his chair, the two of them made their way to the elevator in silence. It wasn't until the elevator was passing level 11 that Var spoke up.

"Ah . . . Mildred . . . it may be . . . a little warm . . . when the door . . . opens."

She shot him a glance, but it was already too late to do anything. The elevator had stopped and the door was starting to open from the bottom. And immediately waves of heat began rolling through the opening.

"Virgil, we have to get out of here!" Mildred said in a shrill voice as she moved towards the elevator's control panel.

"No . . . wait . . . I must have . . . a look down . . . the passageway."

Mildred paused and then leaned down so her head was on a level with the seated Swann. As soon as the door had risen sufficiently to give him his view, she intended to hit the door close button.

As the door rose, more and more of the corridor's floor came into view. And except for the heat, everything looked the same as when they had departed this level a bare fifteen minutes earlier. The long string of light bulbs was still glowing. The gray concrete floors and walls were unchanged.

Mildred had just decided Virgil had seen everything there was to see and that she needed to get him out of the heat, when it happened. With a loud metallic screech which echoed up and down the long corridor, the massive ten ton door to the side corridor ripped free and flew across the width of the passage. The whole level shook when it hit the far wall. Then it rang like a giant bell as it banged down to the floor.

A faint cloud of pulverized concrete dust seemed to fill the corridor. Then as she stared at it, the dust began to glow as though lit from below. Her eyes tracked down just in time to see a large incandescent orange mass come oozing out of the large hole in the corridor's wall where the door had just stood. The mass was thick, viscous and she had seen its like many times before, but always in movies.

"Holy shit. Virgil, is that lava? It looks like lava. What the fuck is lava doing down here? We need to get out of here now," she babbled. But for the moment she seemed frozen in place and unable to move toward the elevator's controls.

Then the truly impossible happened. The boy, Clark, who had shown up unannounced yesterday in New York and who Virgil had immediately treated like a long lost son, came walking out of the side corridor. He was completely naked, but that barely sunk in to her overworked mind. No, his nudity was insignificant next to the way he was calmly wading through the knee-deep lava.

It only took him ten strides to outpace the slow moving lava and then he seemed to pick up the pace. And as he approached them his nudity still hardly registered on her dazzled mind as her eyes remained focused on the slowly cooling lava still dripping off of his legs.

Var watched as Clark closed the distance until he finally paused a mere ten feet away. Var's ability to judge people's true height seemed to have failed him when he took up residence in this chair, but somehow Clark looked like he was several inches tall than when he saw him a mere fifteen minutes earlier. But then he remembered his own sons' Purl Nous experiences and how they both had stood taller and straighter as the true understanding of the experience sank in.

However he wondered if it was even more than that for Clark, as he remembered how Clark had experienced something at least a thousand times more intense than what anyone on Krypton had ever gone through. And then when Clark spoke his voice was suddenly half an octave lower then before and rumbled with a strength and power Var had never experienced from Clark.

"I KNOW HOW TO SAVE HER."

End of Chapter 22

Author's Note:

I have always wondered how the planet Krypton of the movies ended up a planet of crystal, since it didn't seem like people could evolve there. And the movies never gave a satisfactory explanation of what destroyed Krypton. So, since I don't foresee this saga returning to Krypton any time soon, I decided to use this chapter to fill in these old holes in the story.

After a slow three year trek, is everyone ready to finally reach the conclusion of this particular story? Hopefully, I can come up with something in the next chapter worthy of the long wait.

Have a great day and thanks for reading and reviewing,

Duane