LEXCORP

a novel by
ELLIOT S! MAGGIN

cover logo by
KEN PENDERS
 CAVEAT CORNER BOOKS

The Text of Lexcorp is

Copyright © 2024 by Elliot S! Maggin.
All rights reserved.

The character Lex Luthor, the city of Metropolis and

associated previously existing characters are
Copyright © 2024 by DC Comics.
All rights reserved.

Superman (who does not appear in this narrative),

Lex Luthor, and many associated pre-existing
characters,places and conditions
were created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Lexcorp was created by Elliot S! Maggin.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and

incidents are used fictitiously and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead,businesses,events or
locales is entirely coincidental.
The only exception to this is Earth, a planet on whose
surface most of this story happens,
which is a real place.

First printing ISBN:9798335382083

 For my kids
And their kids.
 Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and
manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there
is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle,so watchful, so interlocked, so
complete, so pervasive,that they had better not speak above their breath when they
speak in condemnation of it.

Dr. Thomas Woodrow Wilson

Intellectual,narcissist,racist
28th President of the United States
A NOTE

HERE'S WHAT I DID TODAY.

I was still asleep with my friend when B.J. came in to tell me the consul from
Zimbabwe was here to see me.I asked if he had an appointment. B.J.said she didn't
know.
"How exciting," I said. "Have him wait." I told her that after an hour she should tell
him that I'll meet him in a conference room at the Tower. I told her to find a window in
my schedule of maybe twenty minutes and to tell him to be there half-an-hour before
that.
I showered in the microwave cylinder and left my companion a note inviting her to
lunch downtown.
Instead of the hovercraft, I took a taxi to the Lexcorp Tower for a change. The city
gets more navigable by theday now that half the north-south avenues have become
pedestrian walkways. Fewer people commute into Metropolis than have since the
middle of the last century.Many people who have offices in town work primarily from
home,even more than did during the last pandemic.Few people take vacations anymore.
You can practice law or teach a class as easily from a bistro in Paris as anywhere
else.Metropolitans mostly kept freelancers'hours these days.
Increasingly, buckling road surfaces are no longer repaired, not because of the
expense but for the reason that a great many non-native saplings poking up through the
ground show promise. Bike paths and jogging trails weave among the skyscrapers. Owls
and raccoons have brought the rat populaton under control. Hawks and falcons flourish
on

LEXCORP 1
 the archways and rooftops. Most of the major cities of the West were in this
increasingly pleasant state. Others would follow.
I spent most of the morning at my Tower working out an algorithm for the
sanitation department. They needed to incorporate a safety plan into their trash
collection system to shield active bio-organisms under, say, five pounds from
teleportation. It wouldn't do to have a ten-year-old hiding from his friends in a pile of
leaves show up at a reclamation plant in New Jersey. It hasn't happened yet, but who
knew?
I managed to put off the intrusive consul until four in the afternoon. It turned out
that he wanted me to intercede with the Maasai chieftain in Tanzaniato return an entire
well-to-do community of tribespeople to Zimbabwe. They had fled to the north decades
earlier to avoid a government purge that brought about the deaths of sixty-thousand
people,along with Zimbabwe's expulsion from the British Commonwealth. This band of
Maasai had since built a thriving economy around an engineering concern with whom I
had done a good deal of business over the years.They even created a proprietary
software protocol based on the isiXhosa language.
"The president of Zimbabwe wishes to convey that all is forgiven,"the consul said.
"They're being forgiven for what?" I wanted to know.
“Their dissident activity and their failure to pay taxes on the income they have
accumulated over the past forty years."
"You realize that most of the kids who run this engineering operation are under
forty.”
“Still,their Zimbabwean citizenship remains-"
Probably my laugh put him off.
It was an amusing proposal. I told him that once he took up restoring his country's
Commonwealth membership with the British crown he should let me know. I also
suggested he call ahead for an appointment because it was more difficult to get an
audience with the King of England than with me.

2 MAGGIN
 I had no reason to suppose that was true. I'm an unreliable narrator, like Holden
Caulfield and Huckleberry Finn and anyone who ever wrote an autobiography.
I left the room then. On the way to the elevator I told a guy in the hall-no clue who
he was, but he worked for me -to offer the Zimbabwean consul a cup of coffee and send
him on his way. It was the best coffee I've ever had.My friend Gorongo,the chief of the
band of Maasaiin Tanzania,sends me a couple of pounds of the stuff once a month.
More quickly than I or anyone else expected, the city of Metropolis, like most of
the great cities of the Earth, was turning into a decent place to live and work and raise
families. I made that happen. I'll tell you how.

Lex Luthor
Lexcorp Tower
Twenty-First Century sometime

LEXCORP 3
MAGGIN
 I
BULLION

THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE MY CENTURY. If only that damn Alien hadn't shown
up. If only he didn't pretend to be one of us. If only he didn't take it upon himself to see to our
safety and well-being as if he were an indulgent master and we were his pets. These were
supposed to be the days of Lex Luthor.
If I can multiply nine-digit numbers in my head, he can calculate pi to the millionth digit
in half-a-second and use it to correct the wobbling orbit of Uranus with his left shoulder. If I
compute the ionization rate in the fuel rods of a nuke plant, he'll watch the molecular decay in
real time and stockpile the uranium to replace the control rods before they go inert. I design
an industrial unit to mine molybdenum on the Moon and he sets up an airless automated
smelting operation there in a dozen locations and plants a flag on each one. And he'll do it all
with the emotional maturity of a grape.
We've got a guy flying around all up in his skin-tights,stopping bank robbers and
catching falling babies and turning back hostile flying saucers on a daily basis. This was not a
world equipped to deal with me. And for that matter, it was not a world I was much interested
in dealing with either. I was twenty-four when I decided to kill myself over it all.
I determined to go about my demise in the most public way possible."Suicide-by-cop" is
the technical term for the method I eventually settled on. I thought of all sorts of alternatives.
I thought to smuggle myself in the wheel well of a jet liner and hang myself from an axle of
the landing gear just before they retract; but I realized the world would spend too much time
trying to identify me and not enough

LEXCORP 5
 speculating on why I did it. Then I considered using my meteorological destabilizer
to rev up a full-blown tornado over Metropolis - a town well outside the zones of any
naturally occurring tornado - to pluck me out of a busy intersection and carry me above
the troposphere to vanish without a trace. I found that the tornado would act too quickly
and few people would realize what was happening before I was gone. Somewhere along
these musings I figured out a way to rig up a system where I would break in on every
broadcast operation in the world to air my departure as it happened. A simple
decapitation; it would be neat, quick and painless for me and a hell of a mess. I would
strap myself into position in front of a camera, give a little talk about the unfairness of it
all, then the world would see the blade sweep across the frame and through my
restrained neck and that would be that. I even added a cute touch since inevitably, I
thought,someone could figure out my location in the course of my statement and come
swooping in to "save" me.I would pull off the plan on a programmed schedule and put it
on a timer to take over the airwaves automatically. By the time any grandstanding savior
showed up I would already have been dead for ten minutes and he'd have to clean
up.Too many moving parts in that plan, I decided. I had to time too many things
precisely. Inevitably something would go wrong, So I didn't attempt that delicious little
version of self-imposed extinction either.
What I did settle on was simpler: robbing Fort Knox.
I didn't allow myself any illusions about the actual possibility of robbing the United
States' primary gold bullion supply, but I concluded that it was not particularly
complicated to trip a few alarms at an opportune time and get the federales to run out
with guns blazing. That would do the trick. It wasn't particularly orderly, but it was just a
suícide mission,after all.
First thing I did was read up on how the government kept the facility secure. Fort
Knox is an army base in

6 MACGIN
 Kentucky about forty miles from Louisville. It had all the security and defense systems
you would expect for such a base. I downloaded as much black-box information as I could
from the Dark Web-it was called ARPANET at the time. I did this with a public computer at
the library downtown,of course, so nobody could trace me. In addition,the armory with all the
gold was a 13-thousand square foot building with two stories above ground, most of which is
wall thickness, and at least two stories below ground -probably more. The interior area of the
vault is 4,000 square feet and most of that is below the surface,with walls two feet thick made
of concrete, granite and steel. 16-thousand cubic feet of granite and 670 tons of steel
collaborated to make those walls. The rest of the building was in a compound of its own, with
a multi-layer electrified fence around a roughly square shaped six-acre parcel peppered with
land mines in a random pattern. I found the mine placements on the Dark Web too, but I
wouldn't trust the accuracy of that.
Four reinforced turrets sat on the corners of the roof and there were two marksmen with
two M16 automatic rifles in each one. Several exterior wall panels on all sides had
custom .65-caliber automatic gun barrels that opened fire when any of several dozen lasers on
the property detected unauthorized movement. More automatic weapons would rise from trap
doors around the grounds, triggered not only by motion but by as little disruption of the
ground as a man walking. There was not just the perimeter electric fence but three additional
razor wire fences, also electrified, at three concentric locations inside the compound.
Cameras were everywhere; that's what I liked most about this caper.Cameras are fun. People
think cameras manufacture incontrovertible evidence, but they're as easy to mislead as an
eyewitness. Around the clock,a large complement of United States Mint Police in staggered
eight-hour shifts occupy tiny offices along the outermost wall of the building like drones
protecting the goods against honey badgers.

LEXCORP 7
 Surrounding that compound are six hundred regular army troops. They, in turn, are
surrounded by four million Kentuckians armed to the teeth.
That much I learned at the public library. Then I got on a plane to Louisville.
I've been on the tour of Fort McHenry in Baltimore where they have a live webcam
online around the clock.When the Secretary of Defense canceled a speaking engagement
once, I looked in on the view in Baltimore and saw companies of troops in combat gear
scrambling over the lawn and I knew something was up. I peeked in on a shielded site I share
with the Pentagon - and no, the Defense Department hasn't found my link-and learned that
the national defensive posture had moved to DEFCON-3. I bought as much stock as I could
afford in Boeing and Rocketdyne and made a few bucks a week later when the feds gave both
companies an unexpected contract to make a gadget that could soup up the B-1 bomber to
reach Mach 4.I never did find out what that shift to DEFCON-3 was about,but it was
profitable anyway.
On a tour of the Naval base in San Diego one day I got on the flight deck of the aircraf
carrier Walter Schirra and picked up three new ideas. First idea: the ship used an
electromagnetic catapult to assist planes at takeoff. I added it to the design of the Black
Widow, my one-man wormhole ship. Second idea: I scraped a little material off the surface of
one of the cables that caught landing planes, analyzed it chemically and came up with a great
anti-rust coating. And the third: the onboard nuclear reactor secretly had a solar power
enhancement apparatus that let it generate six percent more power than it would without it.
Using that gadget I eventually rigged up a design for my nine orbiting Lexcorp nuclear
reactors that,because of the absence of atmospheric and cloud cover, boosted output between
seventeen and twenty percent.

8 MAGGIN
 I'd been to the base in Baltimore and on the carrier in San Diego and I'm sure lots of
other top-secret facilities have tourist relations. Still, they didn't offer public tours at Fort
Knox. I guess nuclear secrets aren't as important as gold to these guys, and I can't really
blame them. I concluded that the likeliest way in for me was to get a job there.
They don't hire just anyone for the Mint Police. I went way over the top with the identity
I created for myself.Crawford Pierce was a former Montana state trooper who graduated
magna cum laude with honors in chemistry from Purdue. He had a law degree from Yale and
a fellowship at Georgetown in prosecuting international counterfeiting.He had a Purple Heart
for service as a paratrooper in Desert Storm. All on paper. And he had a thick headful of
wavy red hair with a hint of gray along the edges, that fell just a quarter inch over his ears.
I missed my red hair. In real life I have to wear a hat whenever I go out on a sunny day
or my scalp freckles up something fierce.
The job interviews went well. The good folks at Fort Knox conscientiously verified all
my references. I anticipated every phone call they made and they all redirected to my cell
phone. My phone was a clunky thing in those days, the size of a brick; I kept meaning to
redesign it but that would've gotten in the way of my suicide attempt.The only written
communication from Fort KKnox that I had to intercept was a verification of my employment
in Montana. I designed an official-looking state employment form to sendto Kentucky from a
Montana ZIP code, with a beautiful clip-art logo on it of an eagle flying over a mesa.Montana
ought to adopt that logo for real. Crawford Pierce's first day of work at the US Mint was a
Wednesday. His last - the date I scheduled for Lex Luthor's demise-was the following
Monday.
You need a dozen keys,four combinations and as many people to open the bullion vault,
and the process takes most

LEXCORP 9
 of a day. Every step involves a countersigning ritual thatruns like a religious conversion
ceremony. Every entry gets filmed and reviewed by the office of the Secretary of the Treasury
no matter who slips in. Except me.
My intake interview must have gone better than I realized. They assigned me one of the
vault keys before close of business Wednesday. The odd-shaped thing weighed almost as
much as my cell phone, with spikes and concave depressions all over it. There is
noconventional way you could pick any lock that this weird key fit into. They gave me an
office and a lock box to hold the key in. Next order of business was to locate the other eleven
keys. They scanned everyone entering the building, including the commanding general. All I
dropped in the tray before I entered the metal detector was a Swiss Army knife I keep in a
pocket.Embedded in the two heels of my cowboy boots I had a lock picking device that I
designed to look like a pocket watch. In a hidden inside pocket of my jacket was a sonar
detector that isolated clicks on combination locks. I'm partial to ScottEVest jackets wit lots of
hidden pockets. The sonar gizmo was all plastic, so the metal detector had nothing to say
about it. One of my new fellow employees carried the fake pocket watch with the big knife
around the metal detector in a tray. The guy who carried the tray didn't notice that the watch
was correct exactly twice a day. My boots set off the alarm, of course. Crawford Pierce wore
those boots everywhere,as I explained to anyone who would listen.To sidestep the alarm, I
took the boots off and showed the guards the copper and steel threading in the side welI and
the quarter stitching of the boots, and I entered the Fort Knox gold bullion armory in stocking
feet. The uniformed attendant handed me back my boots with the gadgets still hidden in the
heels.
I spent most of my first day at work making friends.Everyone with a key had a lock box
in the room where he worked. In one office there were two. I found them all by

10 MAGGIN
 mid-afternoon. Several cameras- some hidden and some obvious-were embedded in
my office wall. Also there was one in the pot of a plastic philodendron on a table. I shut
my door, temporarily jammed the cameras and used a plastic toothpick to break into the
lock box that had may vault key in it. I determined that it would be an easy matter to get
into the others. For the last two hours of my workday Wednesday I got roped into a
poker game with seven other MMint Policemen and my immediate supervisor. During
the game I volunteered to work on Sunday and to take an additional shift Friday. I left
on that Wednesday evening with two hundred forty dollars in poker winnings in my
pocket. I couldn't help myself.
My pocket watch lock-picker was essentially a resistance simulator. It had a
specialized memory chip that recorded the three-dimensional proportions of a key and
applied ambient air pressure at the face of a lock to simulate the key's shape. The
eccentric shapes of the Fort Knox keys didn't matter, but I had to modify the
programming of my lock pick that night to enable it to archive the pattern of more than
one key at a time. No problem.
The girl at the reception desk of my motel in Vine Grove, Kentucky had a top row
of teeth that were slightly bucked. She smelled of Shalimar. I was in my twenties;it
didn't take much. Her name was Barbara Tolley and, at the time, she thought my name
was Crawford Somethingorother. I was disappointed when she wasn't on duty that
second night, so after I updated my programming I called her.
"How did you get my number?" she wanted to know.
“You gave it to me," I lied,"last night when I asked you for it,Remember?”
"I guess so. How's your day going?”
I wanted to tell her I found all the keys and one of the combinations for the United
States bullion reserves and I'm about to attempt the theft of the century before they shoot

LEXCORP 11
 me, "Not bad," was what I said. "It'll get better if you let me feed you.”
"Are you sure I told you my number?”
“You did. You were putting somebody's registration into a file drawer and you just kind
of said it. Really offhand.I thought you meant to tell me but..."
"No no,that's fine.I'd love to."
“Love to what?”
"Feed me. Go to dinner with you. Or coffee with a sandwich on the side.What you
said.Whatever you meant."
“Right. I was thinking of that Chinese place up the street from the motel.Do you like
Chinese?"
"There isn't a good Chinese restaurant for a thousand miles of Vine Grove. But there's a
Mexican place with good burritos near me. Are you sure my manager didn't give it to you?”
“A burrito?”
"No,my phone number."
“Oh.No.You did.”
"It's just he gave it to some creepy guy once and he said he wouldn't do that again."
"No. This creepy guy got it the old-fashioned way.Hermanos Cocina?"I said.
"Yeah Hermanos. And you're a lot less creepy. You know the place?”
"Like the back of my hand." Actually I got the name of the place from the database on
my transponder connection,same place I got Barbara's phone number.
"The creepy guy had no hair and a crazy ego but it still wouldn't have been okay if my
manager gave you my number.”
"No hair.Was he old?”
"Early thirties maybe. Some guys lose their hair before others,I guess."
“I guess.Should I meet you there or do you want me to come get you?"

12 MAGGIN
 “It's just two blocks from where I live. I'll be there."
I was sitting in my rented Sebring convertible in front of her building before she made it
out the front door. That was Wednesday. Dinner was pretty good. Sex with Barbara was better
than average, but I was more impressed with her mind. Absence of that is a deal-breaker.
Apparently she was about to finish an MBA program in Lexington-in one year -while
working full time at the motel. In the course of that year Barbara made the motel her
economic laboratory,taking over the dive bar next door and incorporating it into her boss'
business. She diverted sixty thousand dollars to buy out the mortgage on the motel's biggest
competitor four blocks away and the manager of that place had not yet realized it. She wrote
up -for her own use-a business plan to purchase the last drive-in theater in Louisville and turn
it into a movie complex and shopping mall without laying down a nickel of her own money. I
wondered whether she would miss me when I was gone.
Friday morning I hitched a ride to work with Barbara-just because I thought she'd think I
looked good in my uniform with the black shirt, the black tie and the .38 pistol.Midwestern
women have a thing for heavily armed men.When she dropped me off I walked onto the
compound,following the minefield map my supervisor gave me.Apparently they reposition
the mines periodically. If I had followed the map I found online, I wouldn't have made it to
the first checkpoint. Because I took a double shift that day,I finished all the preparations for
my theft of the vault and reserved my overtime Sunday for whatever remaining business I
had to work out. As it happens, I didn't need Sunday for much of anything besides going over
the mechanics of the plan and avoiding any more contemplation of my impending last day on
Earth.
There actually were three sets of vault keys and three Mint Policemen with a copy of
each, one set for each shift.I could be sure only of the locations of my key and the eleven

LEXCORP 13
 in the possession of the eleven other key holders with whom I shared a shift. Once I
pried open the latch on my lock box -always preferable to using a key-it took about
nine-and-a-half seconds for my pocket watch device to record the dimensions of the key
inside. During my second shift Friday I had no need for keys anyway, just my pocketful of
plastic toothpicks. I used them to get into the empty offices and the lock boxes in each one. I
needed about thirty seconds of camera downtime for each office I broke into. I rigged up a
little appliance for the lens of the hallway cameras that caused each to rerun a thirty-second
chunk of innocuous inactivity on a loop. Meanwhile I fiddled with each lock box.
My overtime shift Friday ran from six in the evening to three o'clock Saturday morning.
I was done with everything I had to do well before midnight. To stay awake for the remainder
of my shift I sat at my desk reading a book about superstrings by Pierre Deligne. Saturday I
slept. Sunday I wrote a letter (under my real name) to correct a stupid mathematics error
Professor Deligne made which, if he had gotten it right the first time, would have eliminated
the cosmological constant and made the micro-geography of the Universe a lot simpler and
more interesting. Monday I robbed the U.S. Mint.

MONDAY WAS CHILLY SO I HAD AN EXCUSE to wear my pocket-rich jacket over

my uniform shirt. I was already a fixture here. I had friends, none of whom would play poker
with me anymore. The surveillance cameras were my friends as well.
The first entry to the vault involved a combination lock and three keyed locks. I had
found the combination for the first lock with the sonar device I brought in that first day and
left in my desk drawer. The tricky part was determining the codes of the three inner
combination locks as I used my air

14 MACGIN
 pressure lock-pick to open the keyed locks that governed each one, It had been easy
enough to get the combination code for the first one; that was out in the open. The others
were not accessible unless you first opened the outer vault doors that blocked them.
They didn't all have the same volume of numbers for each combination. You needed four
numbers on the first,six on the second, five on the third, and although I had to re-run the
calculation three times, I found there were nine numbers in the combination for the fourth big
lock. My sonar gadget figured out the code order for each combination based on the relative
intensity of the clicks that the device detected. The heaviest click indicated the first number in
the progression and the softest was the last.
When, after four minutes and twenty seconds that seemed an eternity, I climbed into the
inner gold chamber, I was startled at how dark the place was. I shouldn't have been surprised
at this, but I was. There was not much opportunity to carry things like flashlights in and out
of my workplace unquestioned, but I did have a handy piece of artificial anatomy. When I
was fourteen I got my left upper second incisor knocked out of my mouth by a soccer ball. A
dentist replaced it with a temporary tooth made of plaster. I never went back for the
permanent implant. I made my own. It's a forty-watt flashlight with a pressure switch on the
back inner side of the tooth. So a built-in flashlight is one of my super-powers. I have no
problem keeping it turned on with my tongue, but in order to see with it I haveto keep my
upper lip in a kind of rictus so the light shines out. And if I leave it on for more than about
half a minute at a time, it starts to heat up my gum. It's difficult, but that's goodfor my
character.
I flipped my incisor flashlight on and looked around at roughly half-a-trillion dollars in
gold. The sight of it left me oddly unmoved.

LEXCORP 15
 The main advantage of suicide-by-cop is that you can't back out. You leave the
actual execution, as it were, of the final act to others. You don't have to look at the vial
of poison before you swallow it or at the rope while you're pulling it around your neck.
You don't have to contemplate anything at all like looking down the barrel of the rifle
and the curl of your thumb over the trigger. Once you put yourself in a position where
other people feel compelled to stop you by force, the decision is out of your hands. The
only way to fail in the attempt is somehow to avoid having anyone object to what you
are doing.
Each bar of gold in the stack closest to me weighed 27pounds.The floating market
price of gold that day was a hair over a thousand dollars an ounce, more or less. So each
27-pound bar was good for just short of half a million dollars.I opened some drawers in
a wall of cabinets and found neat stacks of loose gold coins. Krugerrands. Maple
Leafs.Britannias. There were even a few ancient Spanish doubloons. I hefted up two of
the bars from a pile and slid them into the wide inside pockets of my jacket. They were
bulky, but not difficult to carry. I took handfuls of the coins indiscriminately and stuffed
them in whatever pocket space remained.
I stepped out the first vault door and locked it behind me four times. Then I stepped
out the second, the third, the fourth. I left everything as I had found it-except for a little
more than a million dollars' worth of gold. Nobody stopped me.
For the first time I wondered,why would they stop me anyway? It was just one
five-hundred-thousandth of the wealth in there. I don't know how often Fort Knox does
a comprehensive audit. My haul would amount to an accounting error.
I found the minefield map on my desk and stepped outside,smiling and nodding at
the three guys manning the metal detector for anyone coming in. Gingerly, I strode

16 MACGIN
 across the lawn littered with explosives. I thought I recognized one of the riflemen in
one of the turrets and I waved at him. I wasn't sure whether he waved back. I smiled at the
guys at the checkpoints. My story was that the other officers had sent me out to grab burgers
for everyone.
My car - which I rented from Enterprise at the Louisville Regional Airport under the
name Neils Bohr-was in a parking lot on the compound, but I had no more use for that. When
I got around a building on the army base,out of sight of the armory, I tried to call Barbara
from a pay phone, but for all the gold that weighed me down I had no change. I had made no
plan for surviving this caper. Against my judgment I used my slab of a cell phone.
"I wonder if you would give me a ride?" I asked her.
"Yeah,I'm free,”she said.“Where?”
"I'm thinking the Illinois state line." I'm not sure what I was thinking. Crossing a state
border with stolen federal property doesn't make the crime any greater or less. All I could
consider was that my suicide attempt had failed.
"Mind if I drop some stuff in the trunk?" I asked her.
"No prob,"she said and pulled over onto a wooded road.
I took off my jacket with pocketsful of gold and shut it in the trunk.
Half an hour into our trip I asked her to stop at a men's clothing store where I changed
into new clothes, picked up a large satchel as well, paid for it all and walked out to the
parking lot where she waited.
She drove me to a small hotel outside Mt Vernon,Illinois and I got my jacket out of her
trunk. I stuffed all the gold except for one Canadian Maple Leaf into my new satchel. Then I
thanked Barbara and through the window I pressed the coin into her palm.
"That should cover the gas," I said.“You should go to a big department store, someplace
anonymous,pick up a few hundred dollars' worth of stuff you look good in and pay for

LEXCORP 17
 it with this. Say you left your wallet at home and look harried. No one will think
twice."
"Way ahead of you, Craw," and, smiling sweetly, she drove off.

IF YOU LIVE IN A WORLD WITH A SUPER-POWERED ALIEN whose every

capability seems to outstrip your own by light-years-and you can't bear the thought of
it-the weight of the cosmos lifts quietly off your shoulders when you realize there are
lots of things you can do that your adversary can't.Or won't. In the next few weeks, with
my newfound million dollars and change, I took a twelve-month lease on a penthouse on
the Upper East Side of Metropolis and started to figure out what to do next.
My suicide attempt wasn't only not a failure. It was my début.

18 MACCIN
 II
CRIME BOSS

FAILING TO COMMIT SUICIDE, I FOUND SOMETHING I was good at. I was a

gifted criminal.
Wait. Let me rephrase that. I was good at a lot of things.I was-am,in fact-the best
anywhere at a lot of things but it was virtually impossible to make sure people knew what I
was capable of when my planet had an immigrant Boy Scout from space conducting a
long-running public relations campaign. Mostly, this Alien kept things from
happening.Tsunamis. Plane crashes. Marauding fleets of interstellar invaders. That sort of
thing including, when we were younger,me. What I was best at was using my intellect and
initiative to make sure things did happen.

It was just my shitty-ass luck to be born when I was. I could blame myself for making a
choice like that, but even if it had been my choice I couldn't have known there wasan
interstellar cradle headed for this rock, much less known it'd be carrying that damn Alien to
screw everything up for me and all the rest of us.
I should blame myself in fact, but I won't. I'll blame him.He can take it.

LEXCORP 19
 I had been in a juvenile penal facility a few times before I started setting aside time
to audit college classes. My first such sojourn was a result of the Desmond incident in
high school. A judge slapped me in a cage for a while and my parents left town without a
forwarding address. I was playing around with biochemistry and came up with an
injectable formula that I thought would make an ordinary human super-strong.
Obviously it was physiologically possible because the Alien demonstrated it every day. I
was going to inject myself with the stuff but this jock kid Desmond in my AP bio class
volunteered to try it instead. So I jabbed him in the arm under the bleachers during
half-time of a football game against Lynbrook when we were behind thirteen to
six.Desmond was a tight end, mostly a bench warmer, but in the third quarter he was
responsible for our team taking the lead to the tune of forty-five to thirteen. It seemed to
make the kid a little aggressive, though. When the coach pulled him to put in his own
girlfriend's skinny nephew for the last few minutes of the third quarter Desmond
plopped on the end of the bench,sending the rest of the kids on the team flying like they
were launched off a see-saw. This made Desmond a little more enthusiastic and by the
time the game ended,four of the Lynbrook team and one of their concerned fathers
required hospitalization for one thing or other. Desmond got suspended for two weeks,
but when he rolled over on me I ended up graduating from Juvie. That was the last time
I used a guinea pig who wasn't on my payroll.

Before I decided I wasn't serving myself well to be so obvious about the shit I was
pulling, I made a habit of taking my vacations upstate in a cell that was getting homier
every time I woke up there. The comfortable gray prison pajamas that my fellow
inmates kept cleaned and pressed for me got to be my favorite articles of clothing.
Money was never an issue after my little Fort Knox adventure. Whenever I checked any
of my accounts there seemed to be more in them than the last time. I dabbled in crimes
of one sort or other for

20 MAGCIN
 a few years before and after that. I used my weather manipulation technology to make
Metropolis safer for bank robbers and jail breakers. I even synthesized the Alien's
approximate DNA from a bead of his sweat to see which of his powers I could replicate. At
one point I created a bizarre imperfect duplicate of the Alien out of ambient matter and the
thing grew a life of its own, complete with values and sycophants and an idiosyncratic
sociology. The creature turned out to be not so much menace as comic relief.

THE TIME I SPENT IN STIR EARLY IN MY CAREER prompted me to take time to

think. When I started making other people think,though,I decided to re-evaluate my lifestyle.
The shrink staff of the Pocantico Correctional Facility upstate decided to give me a
battery of psychological tests. I didn't mind, other than for the fact that it was a waste of my
incredibly valuable time. What they were clearly contemplating didn't bode well for my
continued intellectual independence, though. So I decided not to go back to prison.
I could have left. Left the planet, that is. I hadthe technology in development-stuff that I
thought I would probably never release in my lifetime-to make a pretty good life for myself
on a suitable world orbiting a nearby star.But why should I? This is my world-certainly more
mine than that damned Alien's. So I stayed.
The good folks at the Bureau of Prisons decided that my problem- rather, their problem
with me-was that I was possibly a narcissistic sociopath and they wanted to use conventional
diagnostic means to confirm it. Obviously,they could use such a diagnosis against me. It
would be a good excuse if someone wanted to drug or lobotomize me or take me apart and
see how I worked. That would be unacceptable,so I undermined it.
David Turley was one of those guys who had a stash of Peter Paul and Mary albums at
home, took a pilates class

LEXCORP 21
 twice a week and loved granola more than life itself. He was the chief psych
counselor at Pocantico, where they stashed me whenever they didn't know what to do
with me.He was thrilled to meet me.

ACCORDING TO THE DIAGNOSTIC AND STATISTICAL MANUAL OF

MENTAL DISORDERS, in order to certify that someone is a sociopath-a danger to
society-that person had to have any three of these seven characteristics:
1) disregard of social norms or laws,
2) a habit of using false identities or nicknames in order to deceive others,
3) a disinclination to make long-term plans,
4) aggressive or aggravated behavior,
5) no care for his own personal safety,
6) a tendency to ignore responsibilities and
7) absence of guilt or remorse.
As far as they could document, I qualified objectively for all but items two, three
and six. Not that I don't actually answer to those three as well. But what do
psychologists know-really? I had to disprove two more to get my count down below the
cut.
I convinced the prison shrink that I was terrified of falling from a great height (item
five) and that I was remorseful over almost nuking western Europe (item seven).On that
Europe thing I was, a little.
"This fear of falling. It's all about the Alien,”I told Turley.
"Do you think he's going to drop you?"
“Every time,"
“Every what time?”
"Every time he snatches me up and flies me somewhere.”
"You know he has a personal rule against killing,right?”

22 MAGGIN
 "And you believe that bullshit?”
"Well the common wisdom is-"
"He could just drop me," I said. I knew he couldn't get himself to do that but I said it
anyway."No one would think anything of it." In fact, I knew that it would make life less
interesting for him.
“Uh-huh,"from the shrink.
"I could keep him from grabbing me,”I said.
“Could you?How?”
“I can think of a dozen ways off the top of my head."
“Tell me a few then."
“Okay. I could have a herd of holograms follow me around so he wouldn't know which
one of them was me-at least long enough for me to get out of there. I could teleport
somewhere. Teleportation is crazy expensive,though,unless every time you do it you make a
side trip to a Congolese diamond mine I know and fill up your pockets. I could
decorporealize enough to drop out of sight for a wvhile.Decorporealization is cheap, but if I
don't land in a cavern or an air pocket I could suffocate and caverns are scarce in a granite
slab like Metropolis. I could build myself a pair of jet boots but he'd outrun them and besides
that'd defeat the-”
“Yes I get the idea.”
Turley scribbled something on his pad - probably noting that I was delusional, which
was fine with me. That wouldn't make me a candidate for vivisection.
"Tell me about your remorse over..." he flipped back a couple of pages in the note pad "...
over this espionage charge.Over the nuclear blackmail in the European Union."
"There was no blackmail involved," I tried to sound as snappish as I could. “Just theft.
I'm not a spy but I'm a pretty good thief."
"Theft of heavy plutonium, yes. From the North Atlantic Council in Belgium."
"Belgium,yeah. The place hardly qualifies as a country.And what business have they got
keeping fissile shit like

LEXCORP 23
 Plutonium-241 in the middle of a city of a milion people anyway?”
“I didn't do it,” Turley said.
“What? Put nukes in Brussels? No,NATO did that."
"You're raising your voice," and he wrote some more in the notebook.
“But while you're documenting that please notethat I know you're not the supreme
commander of NATO-but that you buy into the patriarchy that landed us on a rock where a
few guys determine whether to blow the whole thing up on a moment's notice." I couldn't
help myself.
“Umm.”
“Go ahead,”I said.“Write it down.”
He hesitated. Then I spelled out "patriarchy" for him.He scribbled something-probably
nothing about patriarchy -and I guess the session was about over.
I made a deal with the Governor who, in turn, clued in the President and the CEOs of
major industrial concerns. The agreement was that I woud release the technology I developed
selectively,as I decided society was prepared to deal with it. In return, the authorities would
wipe my criminal record clean and I would engage in no overt sociopathies that they
wouldn't.
By choice, reluctantly, I decided to turn myself into a citizen.

PROBABLY THE PROJECT I'M WORKING ON NOW is the culmination of a long

career of making things happen. In fact,it turns out that I'm saving the world. It's not as easy
as it sounds.
We've had this threat to human existence, see, and it seemed all that needed to be done
about it was to change people's approach to the use of resources. You'd think you could do
this through simple education about the threat, but there was this group of influential
Chickenshits to whose

24 MAGGIN
 advantage it was to make sure that enough people didn't believe the threat existed. The
production, sale and consumption of carbon and petrochemicals is the most profitable
business there's ever been. Everything runs on oil,gas and coal, and when you're making
pissloads of money you're not going to be interested in changing immensely rewarding habits
even if your own immediate demise is breathing down your neck.
Which it is.
The worst people in the world are the greedy deceptive folks trying to convince the
ignorant that a threat doesn't exist. Pretty much the best people in the world keep repeating
the mantra that climate change was an “existential threat"-foolishly lording their superior
education over the less pretentious by invoking a four-syllable word which they use
incorrectly. It's not an existential threat, it's a threat to existence which is somnething
altogether different, and that's plenty bad. I'm an existentialist and I'm not a threat. Seems
nobody reads Sartre or Nietzsche before they decide they know anything. Nietzsche is
pietzsche. And these snotnoses are the best people in the world,heaven help us.
Humans.Ughh!
I was aware of the danger to our continued existence (the more precise expression of the
idea) before it became general knowledge-and long before it became widely accepted
information. I decided that, as demonstrably the most intelligent and capable individual of my
species, it was my responsibility to deliver the ignorant and the knowledgeable alike from
certain disaster. As for the greedy and deceptive,they can go to Hell. In fact, that's where I'm
sending them.

WHEN I WAS A CALLOW TWENTYSOMETHING and I first set up operations in the

penthouse of the Fillmore Hotel on Parkland Avenue I didn't realize I would need more room

LEXCORP 25
 before my lease was up. Fortunately, by that time I had all the money I needed. The
extra room was for all the people who came to work for me. At first I took over most of
the floor below me. Pretty soon I would need someone who could take day-to-day
concerns off my hands.
In September, my first month in the penthouse, I had this idea for a home video
game that I uploaded every month to a communications satellite in geosynchronous orbit
22,300 miles above the Equator. I called the game Timegate.The conceitof the thing was
that there was this secret agency of planetary overseers in a space station in
geosynchronous orbit up there, and the game-player was this agency's Earth-based
contact person for the President, or the Secretary-General of the United Nations, or the
chief judge of the World Court in the Hague, whoever that month's storyline called for.
The player deployed resources all over the world to solve some theft or mystery or
undermine some imminent disaster. The game would change every month and get
beamed down to all the gamers who had modems. There weren't many people at the
time who had modems-the early days of public access to the Internet and all-so my
customer base was a select collection of people: mostly the children,niecesor nephews of
the very wealthy. Timegate got into the homes and workplaces of the CEOs of big
corporations,hedge fund managers, market makers, incipient Internet
billionaires-through the same devices they used to keep their business records, their
trade secrets, their future plans and access to their money. So when the kids were getting
their monthly fix of game information from the actual transponders that I controlled on
real geosynchronous communications satellites, my software was gathering information
on the fastest growing financial operations in the world. The programmers,designers and
scenarists I brought in were all freelancers taking up space in my penthouse. As for the
download software- the mechanisms that filled a database with business secrets-I
programmed that myself

26 MACCIN
 using a sweet little interactive language called ColdFusion.I got that chunk of larceny up
and running by mid-October.Subscriptions to the game itself generated enough money to pay
for the apartment, equipment and freelance employees,even a few bucks for me. Cool, huh?
I'd figure out something to do with my growing database later.
It didn't take long. I came across an email from a financial officer at a company that
owned a big newS magazine whose profits were chronically declining. He floated an inquiry
to the CFO of a large communications company - film studios, television production, more
magazines, licensable fictional characters - about the publishing company buying out the
communications firm.Seemed like a good idea to me, and each of the officers of the
communications company stood to make a hatful of money on the transaction. I bought up as
much stock in the communications company as I could without being noticed.I even created a
few false identities to snatch up some more stock without drawing attention to me. I sat on all
this stock until the merger was in full swing and the publishing company was scooping up
communications stock at inflated prices. I made a boatload that way. Then there was another
merger that I wheedled my way into. Then another. I got bored with this quickly.
Clearly,serial insider trading was not the most productive wayfor the most intelligent person
on Earth to spend his time. I needed to do something that brought bigger returns,something
risky enough that if I got caught doing it,that would just make life more interesting.
I used a software scheme to simulate a nuclear attack on a small country in southern
Asia. The United States, Russia,Britain, France, China, Israel, India and a pileup of other
countries that no one knew had a nuclear capacity, all mobilized-sent bomber and fighter
pilots into the sky and redirected their air-and sea-based arsenals at each other. At the crucial
moment, I had my program make a small error in geography so the panicky world leaders
would realize it war

LEXCORP 27
 all a head fake. They stood down within a few days and the public never knew that
anything almost happened.
Before all this got started I had already bought up shares of defense contractors
around the world. Their value would spike in the coming few weeks as all these scared
shitless heads of state secretly beefed up their own defensive capabilities-and a few
weeks afterward I would sell all of it at a huge profit. I also made a note of what
countries with secret nuclear programs had mobilized their forces and I put seed money
into weapons systems starting up in those places. With controlling interest in the new
companies coming into their own I would soon be the weapons master of the Third
World. I was in control of the defense capacities of a couple dozen countries, many of
whom were at each other's throats. That's a good place to be if you want either to incite
wars or defuse crises as they showed up.

BY NOW I WAS MAKING TOO MUCH MONEY under too many guises to keep
track of. I needed a nuts-and-bolts person I could almost trust. I called Barbara in
Kentucky and asked her to come out and heIp me run the place.
“Crawford?”Barbara asked over the phone.
"The name's Lex, actually. I've got a proposition for you.”
"Sure,"she said,always game.“I thought you seemed a little shady. I think that's
what I liked about you,"
"That's all? My shadiness?"
"I liked your vocabulary too.It made you sound smart."
"I hope I didn't just sound smart."
“You never know. And your hair. I liked your hair."
“All right,that's something we can talk about."
"Great hair. So,Lex. What's your real last name?
“Luthor," I said.
There was a pause and then she said,"Get! Out!"
I guess I was famous.

28 MAGGIN
 Barbara showed up in December and started coordinating things, kicking systems into
place, cracking the whip with the employees.
Her favorite trick was saying I ordered something -designated bathrooms, a limit on the
number of objects on desktops, a dress code- and then telling me about it a few days later. In
Metropolis she took on the name B.J. as a long-term alias. Most of the people who worked
for me never knew her by any other name. She convinced me I needed to incorporate.
"What do you want to call the place?" she wanted to know.
"Lexcorp," I said off the top of my head.

THAT FIRST YEAR I WAS IN THE CITY I READ about a crew of treasure hunters off
the west coast of Florida who made a haul of gold nuggets and a handful of gems from a
sunken 17th-century pirate ship they located. They had rubies, opals,a lot of tourmalines. It
would probably cost them as much in taxes as it took to get it all assessed. There was one
bright green piece in the mix that they tried to pass off as an emerald, but no jeweler would
touch it. It turned out to be a rock rather than a crystal, and close to impossible to cut. On a
hunch, I sent Barbara down to Tampa to buy the rock.
“Send me a photo of it when you see it," I told her."Negotiate. Ifyou can't get it for less
than a thousand give me a call."
She sent my phone a couple of snapshots of it. It looked to be partially melted on one
side. I wondered if this band of pirates had a blowtorch or something. HIardly likely. Even
that wouldn't account for this kind of smoothing of the surface of it. When I looked more
closely at a jpeg she sent I made a quick call to tell her she could go as high as five thousand
for it. She said she'd already bought it for two hundred fifty dollars and she'd be home
tomorrow.

LEXCORP 29
 "In that case,"I told her,"swap out your plane ticket for business class." When she got
home I told her she was Chief Operations Officer of Lexcorp. I'm a great boss.
As I suspected, it was a meteorite. And it glowed, just a little. It seemed to have
incredible life-supporting properties.It was the size of a ping pong ball but it weighed slightly
more than four pounds, and it carried a geological signature indicating that its environment of
origin was a place with much greater gravity than Earth. When I analyzed it I found that it
was not an amalgam or a compound like most meteors,but an entirely new element. It
belonged at position 99 on the Periodic Chart. Ostensibly, that position was already claimed
by another radioactive element, an isotope of an artificial one. That is, this previously
discovered element was synthesized in a lab and had a half-life of about twenty days. My
rock was relatively stable. Without a doubt there was radiation coming off it, but its isotopic
ratio made it stabler than the stuff physicists first synthesized. I estimated its half-life
somewhere in excess of twenty-five hundred years. I walked around with a chip of it in a
shirt pocket and I swear it cured me of a cold.
I suspected some of its properties, so I tested my blood after I carried it around for a
week, and again when I left it in the lab for a few days. When I carried the rock the vitamin
C,D and K contents of my bloodstream were far higher than they had been before. My fasting
glucose level was lower.My electrolyte levels were way up but still in balance. I worried that
if I carried it around for any appreciable time I might be able to turn on a light bulb by
putting it in my mouth like Jackie Coogan. I stashed most of it in an old pewter jewelry box I
picked up at a yard sale and I meant to examine it some more.
Other than carrying around a sliver of it, I forgot about my green rock for a while. I had
this idea for a new kind of jet engine with no moving parts and just air for fuel and propulsion.
The basics of it were simple: a tube that bulges

30 MAGGIN
 at either end-one shallow bulge and one wide bulge. You force the air into the wide end
and it gets constricted as its path narrows, so when it finds its way out the narrower bulge it's
moving faster and propels the tube and whatever it's attached to. It was simply the shape of
the gadget that drew a stream of fuel through it. You can try to build one if you like, but it's
patented to within an inch of its life and that's how badly Lexcorp will sue your ass if you get
the thing to work.I calculated the proportions of the device in a diagram and fed it into a
three-dimensional printer to make a small prototype. This lovely idea was the simple part.
Figuring out how to attach it to a payload and force air through without ruining the dynamics
of the thing was a technical problem that I didn't think was worth my time. So I told B.J. to
find me a mechanical engineer. I'm not sue if she ever did,but I installed it as an auxiliary
liftoff mechanism on my interstellar cruiser.
Oh yeah, I've got an interstellar cruiser. I call it the Black Widow and I keep it in the
sculpture garden out in back of the Metropolis Museum of Modern Art.

IT TOOK B.J.A WEEK TO ASK ME WHAT EXACTLY the Chief Operations Officer
of Lexcorp does. I told her she writes job descriptions for everyone who makes over, say,
seventy-thousand a year. Starting with herself.
"Let me see the description of your job when you're done and I'll sign off on it. Then
you can approve the job descriptions for everyone else yourself."
A few days later she showed me a three-page document that I signed,
"Just one thing to add," I said.
"What's that?”
"You name yourself the agent for receipt of process.That is, if anybody shows up with a
summons or anything,

LEXCORP 31
 you're the one who deals with it. I never want to see the inside of a courtroom again.”
"Shouldn't we have a lawyer to do that?" she wanted to know.
"Probably," I said. "Or else you can put yourself through law school.
She did, and she billed her tuition to the company while she worked for me full time. I
found out she'd done that when she invited me to her graduation from Metropolis University
School of Law. She wouldn't have bothered with the ceremony, she said, but they roped her
into giving the valedictory address.
B J.'s first legal job for Lexcorp was to deal with a cease-and-desist order from the state
of New Jersey.More on that later.

32 MAGGIN
 III
ATLANTIS

BEFORE THE FOLLOWING YEAR ENDED I was making improvements to the world
right, left and center-on fronts we didn't even know we had yet. That's what happened when I
started reading up on ceramic engineering.
There was an ugly-ass artificial island collecting in the Atlantic. Mostly it was plastic -
emptied detergent containers,juice cartons,disposable dinnerware,throwaway drinking straws,
that sort of thing. It was about the size of Delaware and growing. I went out to it on a mining
expedition.
Operators of fishing vessels and small transports have learned to navigate around the
accumulation. Larger ships plow right through it without any ill effect beyond accumulating a
bit of flotsam. I hired a nineteenth century whaling ship about the size of Old Ironsides
because I thought it might be fun. It was, a little. We cast off from Pier 118 before the sun
came up.
With a crew of sixteen, including a foraging team that I trained to wade into the mess,
we made it out into the body of the sludge pile within six hours after our departure.“See that
collection of stuff over there?" I said into a headset."The pile with the two milk cartons in the
middle and the

LEXCORP 33
 rectangular thing that looks like a big picture frame on the side?”
"Yes sir,"the voice in my ear said.
“Get it. I want as broad and representative a sample of this garbage as possible,emptied
into these bins."
Two foragers on the crew wearing headsets similar to mine got in a pair of big
water-tight eggs hanging against a pair of boomns on the sides of the ship. These crew guys
attached their eggs to a large three-pronged mechanical claw that hung off the hull. One of
the crewmen manipulated the joysticks between his legs to hover above the segment of the
putrid artificial island that I indicated.
“Yeah, right there,”I said.
While the first guy let his load drain for a minute and deposited it in a receptacle on the
deck, I directed the other globe guy to another selection of trash.
It went quickly. By midafternoon we had a bin filled with two or three tons of schmootz,
a slippery wet deck,and a weighted-down ship. We got back to Metropolis harbor a little after
dusk.

A HELICOPTER TRANSPORTED MY BIG BINFUL of sea-driven waste to an

abandoned steel mill on the East Side that I bought a few years ago. I supposed I would
eventually come up with some use for the place. There, I fired up a blast furnace and steamed
a big vat of water until it was mostly bubbled off. I had a few roughnecks dump my load of
material from the artificial island in the vat and smelted it until it liquified. It blended into a
greenish brown colloidal suspension, and we steamed off the remaining water. I let it sit a few
days until it cooled into a coherent slab of mostly plastic.
One of my electric trucks rolled up and a couple of my guys hauled the slab into the
container attachment. I met the truck at a corner in midtown where I was putting the

34 MAGGIN
 finishing touches on a real estate deal. I got the chunk transported to my makeshift
heavy materials lab in the penthouse on Seventy-Seventh Street, and I went to work.

CONSTRUCTION STARTED ON THE LEXCORP TOWER at Jefferson Avenue and

Fifty-Fourth Street while I was working out this ceramics project. By the time I figured out
the chemistry of the plastic conglomeration there was enough of the tower in place that we
could start moving in.
The building was already topped out when I had a brainstorm in the middle of the night.
"Hello it's Luthor," I told the phone by my bed in the penthouse of the Fillmore Hotel.
“Do you know what time it is?" the groggy voice of my building contractor on the other
end said. "This betterbe someone who owes me money."
“I said it's Luthor."
"Okay," the groggy guy said. "You're up to date I think.”
"I'll have a revision for you by noon today on the exterior design of the tower. Reassign
any of the construction crew working above the fifty-fifth floor."
"Noon.Heartwrarming,"he said.
"I'll meet you on the ground floor of the construction site.Be there."
"I'll have a hard hat waiting for you," he said and hung up.
Another voice came from behind me as I grabbed for my slippers.
"Do you know what time it is?" she said. I think her name was Miriam.
"I do,” as I got up and grabbed my robe off the hook on the door and walked out.
"Somebody'll call if you leave anything behind.”

LEXCORP 35
 I ran over to my drawing board downstairs to redesign the top twelve floors of the
tower. I reset it to take out a slice of the northeast quadrant of those top floors so the
building spells out the letter "L." I wanted it to be visiblefrom space.A year later I
hitched a ride on a surplus F-14 fighter to fly above the city and see how it looked. The
shape of the building faded off, even with binoculars, at about sixty-thousand feet. But it
looks great on Google Earth.
Go see.

THE GULF STREAM IS A WARM, PEPPY RIVER running to the northeast

through an indifferent Atlantic Ocean. Water-in-water. It reaches from the Gulf of
Mexico, up the coast to North Carolina, then across the Atlantic to northern Europe.It
brings warm water from the south to the Irish Sea, the English Channel, the North Sea
before it meanders east and then south. Its gift is a temperate sea breeze down the faces
of Portugal and West Africa. It's the strongest, most reliable current on the Earth and it's
made life more bearable along the shores of western Europe ever since the glaciers last
receded and Homo Sapiens migrated north to build cities and grow nations on a stretch
of land that once was a colossal ice cube. It wasn't so long ago.
The stream runs winter and summer, day and night,in calm seas or through
cyclones and waterspouts, without fail.That's more than you can say about any power
company or even the post office. That's why I put it to work.
The idea was to build a big Flywheel, like the London Eye only bigger, a little more
than two miles in diameter.The current would drive and turn a turbine to supply
enormous reserves of hydro energy to the rest of the world.This Flywheel would sit in a
big underwater trench to shield the lower part of it from the flow of the current above,
and make sure it rotates continually in one direction. A turbine would pick up this
kinetic energy and hard-cabled the power

36 MAGGIN
 to distribution stations along the east coast and Gulf coast of North America and then
around the world in a brand spanking new fiber-optic electrical grid to fuel dishwashers and
EV charging stations and electric can openers and whatever else anyone wants to plug into it
at almost no cost until the end of time. Or at least until the oceans dry up,whichever comes
first.
I needed a material to build the Flywheel and all its fixings. It had to be absolutely
impervious to wear and decay from salt water and debris, and disinclined to combine
chemically with anything that occurs in nature. I had all that plastic junk from the garbage
island in the Atlantic in a supply that will only get bigger. That is, until I figure out some
degradable substitute for petrochemicals.
I'll get to that too when I have some spare time.

HERE'S AN ASIDE FOR YOU:

Flash forward to the latter years of twenty-second century. A teacher ushers a herd of
schoolkids through the Metropolis Museum of Unnatural History showing them how their
great-great grandparents lived. In a display behind a barrier, the Hologram family empties
groceries out of their internal combustion station wagon, piles a dozen or more plastic bagsful
of processed food and storage materials onto the kitchen table and sorts through them. Little
Billy Hologram grabs a small plastic bottle of store-bought distilled water from a
thirty-six-pack of them,gulps it down and drops the empty container in a plastic bag that lines
a plastic trash can tucked away behind a plastic kitchen cabinet door.
One of the schoolkids watching this asks the teacher,“What's that big bowl kinda thing
above the cabinet with the trash?”
"That's a sink,"the teacher says."It dispenses water from a common supply somewhere
miles away."

LEXCORP 37
 "So why is the kid drinking the water they bought at the store?" another student wants to
know.
“Good question," the teacher answers."Why don't you punch that into the docent
hanging on that wall over there?"The electronic docent doesn't know either.
Eventually the store-bought single-use plastic water bottle and the bag it's in, with a
bunch of other disparate stuff,make their way into a blue plastic garbage barrel and onto a
truck to get dumped into the ocean.It bobs among the currents until it all embeds along the
edges of a growing island of garbage floating in the North Atlantic.
As the class leaves the museum, a few of them notice the inscription carved in stone
above the exit. It says,“WHAT COULD THEY HAVE BEEN THINKING?”

IN MY WAREHOUSE AND SMELTING PLANT on the East Side three crews worked
around the clock to separate out the plastic from whatever else was in the mess that we pulled
off the island of garbage. In Earth's ecosystem, plastic is pretty much indestructible. I had big
plans for that plastic.
“Don't bother Mr. Luthor with things like that," I heard B.J. say into her phone as I blew
by her on my way out of the elevator on the 65th floor. I didn't think anything of it.Until I
did.
I rounded the corner toward my private sanctum, then stuck my head back around the
wall. "What aren't you bothering me with?”
"Bugs,"she said."I'll just call an exterminator."
“Okay,”I said and disappeared down the hall.
Maybe ten minutes later,waiting for a 3-D printer in my workshop to finish up a
replacement windshield washer tank for one of the electric trucks, I called B.J, back.
“Hi,”she said.
"What kind of bugs?" I said.

38 MAGGIN
 "Bees,"she said."A whole hive of them in a wall of the East Side warehouse. One of the
guys got stung."
“Once?”
“I don't know. Maybe twice.”
“Honeybees?”
"I don't know.”
"There are six guys and a colony of probably twenty-thousand bees in there and one guy
got stung once? Maybe twice?”
“Yeah.SoI-”
“You called an exterminator?”
“I did.”
“Call him back. Tell him never mind.”
“Okay.”
"And find an apiary supply place and get them to ship us maybe half a dozen ten-frame
bee colony boxes. And a beekeeper suit.”
“Okay.”
“Make it two bee suits. You'll want one too."
“No.I won't.”
“Order it anyway.”
“Okay.But I don't want-”
"And tell the guys in the warehouse not to try to pick at the bee stingers. If they get
stung just scrape the stinger with the flat side of a key or a credit card and it'll come out.And
use rum on it.”
“On the stinger?”
"On the wound, if there is a wound. First externally,then internally if they want. And tell
them not to be such wimps.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Anything else?”
"Yeah. Tell them I'll be at the warehouse in maybe twenty minutes. I'm headed to the
street. Get someone to bring a car around right away."

LEXCORP 39
 “Got it.”
On the way down the elevator I logged onto Amazon on my phone and found a few
promising books on beekeeping.I ordered two of them, had them delivered that day and I read
them that night. Then I ordered a few more on Alibris.com to read whenever I got around to
it.
At the warehouse I looked over the hive in the side of the wall facing the river. It was
embedded impressively among the construction beams and the insulation. We would have to
remove a large section of the wall and abandon mnost of the honey structures to get as many
of the bees out as we could. They would lose a lot of honey,but it was only April.They would
have plenty of time to replenish their supply before the first frost in Metropolis. I looked over
the sting on the assaulted workman's left wrist, laughed, and removed the stinger with the
American Express card I have under the name of Niels Bohr. I told him to stop kvetching and
go back to work. And I sent another guy to a convenience store up the block to get a bottle of
Captain Morgan.
These little buggers would fit into my plans very nicely.

40 MAGGIN
 IV
GRENDEL

SOMETIMES I FEEL LIKE GRENDEL. I don't feel a lot like Grendel, only a little.
You remember Grendel,the monster that wreaked havoc in the court of some
self-important potentate during the Dark Ages. Pretty much every age in those days was
dark, diseased, despairing. Even in a place like that, Grendel showing up was the worst
thing that could happen to you.
I'm a monster too. Ask anyone.
Where Grendel mostly shows up these days is in the Beowulf epic. Beowulf
himself was this ignoramus of a Norse nobleman who became the legendary hero of the
Brits.He was strong as a herd of bulls, he glistened in the sunlight and he glowed
brighter in the night. Grendel was this angry brute who terrorized the countryside,
especially the reinforced fortresses where the decadent aristocracy spent most of their
time maintaining a steady drunk.
What the elites of these kingdoms-in-the-dark used to do mostly was hang out in
big banquet rooms, make noise and drink mead. Mead was honey wine that they made
themselves from the civilization of honeybees whose product they stole from their hives.
The humans fermented the honey with yeast and water. Sometimes these drunks were
pretty good at fermenting honey and sometimes they

LEXCORP 41
 weren't. One batch of mead was never the same taste or potency as any other batch.
No onehad come up with quality control at the time, but if it got you off it was
acceptable.
This was western Denmark,whose warriors would soon occupy the little island of
Britain1 and whose issue one day would rule most of the world. For a while. These land
barons and ferocious exploiters of the under-valued would get out-of-control toxic as
early in the day as they could manage,get rowdy and destructive, get sick and eventually
pass out.Then they'd get up and do it some more. In those days there wasn't much else to
do with your life.
Grendel was more interesting than the dullards who found him menacing. And I
number Beowulf also among the dullards. But the bees who made all the honey were
even more interesting than Grendel. So that left the humans who fancied themselves
lords of this land, to be only the third most significant inhabitants of it. What ultimately
gave these jokers hegemony over the land at long last was the adversity they faced.
Adversity was what Grendel generously provided.
So in descending order of significance,it was first bees,then monsters, and finally
the humans who eventually founded the empire.

BEES.EVERY COLONY OF THESE CREATURES was a complex industrial

plant, a nation unto itself complete with job specialization,productivity standards,
architectural policies,and a sociopolitical structure at the head of which was a
benevolent but obsessive chieftainess of state, their absolute ruler.
I keep at least a dozen beehives at the Lexcorp Tower at any given time. They're
scattered over the floor of the penthouse balcony outside my Cave. Sometimes I swipe
some of their honey, mostly because I likce honey.I like food that bites back. But the
reason they're there is to pollinate

42 MAGGIN
 my vegetation. Lots of plants. Lots of pollinators. It's all part one of the three-part plan.
Details to come.
The way a bee colony works is that everyone in it,hundreds of drones, thousands of
workers, function solely to benefit the queen. She's an autocrat. Any of her subjects would
enthusiastically sacrifice her life to protect her. As it is with humans, absolute rule is a tough
business. The queen lives in the hive, planting eggs in the hexagonal cells of the combs. She
assigns jobs. She enforces building codes.A company of worker bees attends her. They
surround her at all times,walking forward,sideways,backward, eyes on her and insulating her
from harm as she goes about her job of leaving an egg-a little fleck like half a grain of rice-in
the comb chambers which other workers have built out of sugar and spit. I provide the sugar.
The workers also manufacture,among other things, something called royal jelly.
Royal Jelly is the compound that worker bees smear over the eggs and feed the larvae of
potential queens as they grow. It's a combination of vitamins, amino acids and secret sauce
and I've swallowed a quarter teaspoon of it every morning since I adopted my first colonies. I
can't be sure yet,but I believeI have actually reversed my aging since then.Royal Jelly is
much rarer than either honey or beeswax.I harvest it myself, and someday there'll be enough
of it so every man, woman and child on Earth can have a little bit every day. And the longer
people live the more jelly I'll be able to bring to market. Some monster I am,huh?
In the spring, a virgin queen goes off to explore her surroundings,looking for the places
where drones hang out.Drones are frisky male creatures who spend lots of time lounging
around the treetops with other drones from all over the neighborhood like prowlers in a dive
bar. When a young queen comes across a crowd of drones she hollers, she flaps her wings
provocatively, she unleashes a cloud of hormones the guys can't ignore, and she launches into
an attitude of

LEXCORP 43
 hard-to-get. All the drones within pheromone-shot follow her flight, hopingto get
lucky. She leads an air show with the horde of admirers in her trail, each intent on
making a good impression, on being deemed worthy of depositing his seed in her regal
center, on achieving genetic survival.
Invariably, she finds a few drones worthy indeed,and the moment any of these
suitors gets lucky with her, he is spent. Used up. Dashed in a conflagration of mortal
ecstasy.Emasculated by lust. He falls to te ground, dying,dismembered and forgotten.
Thus are his life and purpose fulfilled. The next lucky drone gets to remove his
predecessor's organ, snapped off inside the queen,and plant his own, and the ecstatic
dance of doom repeats. Those of this throng who don't impress her highness eventually
return home to live out their brief days sleeping and being fed by their sisters and doing
not much of anything but occasionally returning to their hangout hoping another deadly
temptress buzzes by. In the fall the workers in the hive get tired of feeding the drones
and throw most of them out so there's more winter honey for the productive members of
the family.
Workers and drones live for a few weeks, maybe a month. The queen can rule for
years. If they need to install a successor queen, workers build up a few cells of their hive
that already have eggs in them with higher, wider walls to fit a new queen's larger frame.
They feed royal jelly to the larvae and watch them grow. Whichever potential queen
emerges first summarily stings and kills all her potential rivals before they hatch.
All in all, not so different from human rituals of succession.
The purpose of a hive, like the purpose of any nation, is to thrive. The more
breeding room I give each of these little independent states, the more offspring the
queen will produce,and the more nutrients the workers can store in their combs. Some of
my colonies are six levels high and doing

44 MAGGIN
 great. In the daytime there might be half a million of the little buggers out scavenging
nectar. When I look out at my balcony, though, what I sec are not colonies of bees.I see a
jungle growing six hundred feet above the city floor. I've got rambling bushes of rosemary
and lavender and succulents.I bioengincered a stand of areca palm trees to survive in a
climate with harsh winters unlike their natural south Asian habitat. Sprays of Transvaal
daisies glow yellow and deep orange seven months of the year. Snake plants climb ten and
twelve feet high. I have Chinese evergreens, vines everywhere climbing the trunks and the
walls.I synthesized something I market through one of my subsidiaries called Tropical
Garden Fertilizer. With enough attention,that stuff will grow palm trees on an ice floe. My
balcony is a concentrated oxygen production facility, a mini-Amazon Basin.
My jungle expels fresh breathable air over midtown streets like nobody's business. You
could hyperventilate just walking the avenue below. When I started keeping these bees and
growing my forest the whole midtown area lit up with street plants, lush traffic dividers
flowered through belches of gas. In the business district at the foot of the Tower,people's eyes
stopped watering. Their faces cleared up. The heart of the sprawling town became one of the
healthiest places on Earth and no one could account for it.It's all part of the plan.

MONSTERS. GRENDEL WAS A MONSTER, same as me. He was the scourge of

blooming empires. And like me, he was the King Bee.
At first, the chronically intoxicated noblemen didn't know enough to care. Grendel
smashed through walls,shattered tables, spilled the occasional flagon of mead. The

LEXCORP 45
 laborers could repair all those things. After a while, though,Grendel started ripping
heads off.
The story goes that raucous singing from the mead hall at all hours was what stirred
up Grendel's hostility,but who knew what riled him? It's not as though he sat down to an
interview for posterity's sake. I never started shaking things up either until I realized that
the Alien was an actual enemy -a rival rather than just an annoyance. Maybe something
like that is what occurred to Grendel.
Some say Grendel was a great bear because Beowulf meant "bear wolf." But it
doesn't. Later for that. There's no real description of Grende1 in the source material.
There's been some thought that he was a giant, one of the nine-foot-tall Nephilim who
show up in the Old Testament.
It's easy to be a monster. I should know. All you must do is provide a hard time, so
that a monster is what folks will decide you are. With my youthful antics I inadvertently
inspired the Alien to put on a costume and go around crusading. Grendel's aggressive
objections made it necessary for these mead hall drunks occasionally to put down their
flagons and build the infrastructure of empire.Your life's purpose is defined by the
enemies you keep. That was what made me a brother to Grendel.

BEOWULF AND THE FOUNDERS.WORD GOT AROUND among the fiefdoms

of the north that there was a monster on the loose,menacing the mead-guzzling oligarchs.
So naturally heroes started showing up, because that's what aspiring young heroes do.
Most of these sword-waving galoots who came to challenge Grendel made fine monster
meal.
The story of Grendel and Beowulf took the form of an epic poem because
wandering storytellers found words in verse easier to remember than dry prose. The
Beowulf epic is the first recorded piece of literature in English. It was in

46 MAGGIN
 Old English so if someone read it to you as it was first composed. you wouldn't
understand a word. Here:
Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon, hū þā æðelingas ellen
fremedon.
That's how it starts. Rhymes pretty good, huh? Sounds just like it's spelled. What that
says in real life is,"Hey listen up! I want to tell you what I heard about this Saxonking of the
Danish spear slayers and how incredibly intrepid he was.” It really starts that way. "Hey there!
Hi there! Ho there!”would be another accurate translation.
Now that's literature.
According to scholars and others who claim to know such things, the Old English word
"beowulf" means “bear wolf," or just "bear." That's close enough to being accurate.I have
another theory, though. Bear in Old English is bera.The meaning of beo is actually bee,
which is much more interesting. Go look it up and you can be a scholar who claims to know
things too. Beowulf was not actually a hero who killed a bear like Daniel Boone. He was a
bee wolf,a thief of honey wine. He didn't tear apart the mead halls to save lives from a
monster.He came for the mead. As for the monster, I think he was just a guy who was really
pissed off on behalf of the bees. And his advantage over the mead hall gang was not that he
was so big, but that he was mostly sober.
The focus of these paleo-aristocrats' lives, beyond retaining their primacy, was the mead
and how it made them feel. It was a better life support elixir than the fetid water to which
these people had access. They were obsessed with their drink, and consequently with their
colonies of bees.They'd take the honey they stole from the bees,mix as much of it as they
could gather with boiled water and yeast, let it all sit for a month and watch it bubble,
cooking itself in big jugs. When it was a translucent yellow-brown liquid that bubbled up
only once or twice a minute it was as fermented as it was going to get. Then they separated it
out into clean

LEXCORP 47
 containers- or as clean as they bothered to get them-and let them sit for a few
months until it was sweet-tasting and clear enough to see through. They cooked up and
drank enormous quantities of this stuff and in most cases they probably didn't let it
clarify enough. They were too thirsty to wait, and they hated being sober. Most likely,
the mead gave them the impression that Grendel was more fearsome than he was.
Certainly it made them more vulnerable to the big guy's attacks.
The hardship Grendel brought to these people of the Dark was the tool they used to
wake up civilization again.Like a crowbar. They had no other tools to save
themselves.They used this tool to build roads. They built wagons. And one of these
nobles, in a fit of abstinence, thought to urge others to standardize vehicle parts and
scatter some spare wheels and axles along the more extensive routes. Service stations.
Ever since, the standard pitch of wagon wheels,traffic lanes and the trucks of railroad
cars has been based on the width of two horses walking abreast. They developed a
common language, the evidence and product of which is this very poem and other
surviving stories. They built bigger,stronger castles and ships. Eventually they
conquered northern Europe from Germania to Iceland and a healthy chunk of North
America too.
If only they had figured out what was most significant about those bees.

I LOVED THE LEXCORP TOWER FROM THE DAY we broke ground for it.
No,before that. I loved it from the moment I put the first pencil line on a sheet of pink
drafting paper to draw up its specifications.
From that day until less than a year later it rose like a ghost over Jefferson Avenue
between Fifty-Third and Fifty-Fourth. The Presbyterian church that was on the site
before,was now on my bottom three floors. The congregation made

48 MAGGIN
 it a condition of the sale of the property that I replace the neo-Gothic cathedral with a
modern facility of stone and steel. They thought that was their idea. I negotiated hard against
it anyway. As a result, I owned the church as well as the rest of the building and the
congregation had no title to it. I built them a pipe organ of my own design, thirty feet tall.I
auditioned the church organist personally and put him on my payroll. My main requirement
in choosing an organist was that besides Protestant liturgy,he could alsoplay reggae and
salsa-which he did weekdays at my direction. I would throw open the sliders in the penthouse
and listen as I worked. My top twelve floors, fromn the fifty-fifth story up,were in the shape
of a letter“L.”On the roof segment at the fifty-fifth floor I had a greensward planted,with wild
grasses growing. It wasn't the most efficient use of space, but my Lexcorpus breed of
honeybees,accustomed to hanging their structures off Himalayan cliffsides, hung half a dozen
colonies over the edges of the roof cutout. I loved everything about that building. Mostly I
loved it because it was mine.
As soon as I started moving my employees and my labs into the Lexcorp Tower I started
getting invitations to the periodic meetings of a semi-secret society that called themselves the
Masters of the Universe. This gang was crucial to the third and most difficult tier of my
three-part plan,the migration. That part of the plan was to get the pains in the ass out of the
way.

LEXCORP 49
 V
UP IN THE SKY

"WHO THE PISS STRAIGHTENED UP MY CAVE?” I meant for my voice to be

intimidating whenever I flung open the door to the corner suite. Everyone except B.J.
was terrified. I loved it when I could petrify my underlings. It's one of my
superpowers.Life would be easier if B.J. were subject to that petrification too.
Walls shuddered at my voice-or would have if I hadn't been the guy who wrote the
specifications for the building.Furniture leapt. Supplicants froze. In the reception well
outside the double door to the Inner Sanctum I blew brimstone like a bull demon.
Besides B.J, there were two receptionists, a messenger with a contract for me to
review,two job applicants and a management consultant in immediate earshot, all of
whom should have known better than to be startled by a sudden outbreak of chaos in the
southwest corner of the sixty-fourth floor of the Lexcorp Tower, but it seemed there was
no getting used to this. I wouldn't read a word of the contract. I'd probably never set eyes
on the two new hires again-whether B.J. brought on either of them or not-and the
consultant would be out on his ass before lunch. My authority was in full bloom.

50 MAGGIN
 B.J. enjoyed the heavy breathing for a few seconds. It must have seemed like days to
everyone else before she stepped up to ask me what the issue was.
“My schematic was in the trash can," I fulminated.“The trash can!" I bellowed.
Bellowed and fulminated simultaneously. At times like thisI wished I could stand outside
myself and hear me like everyone else.
"And you found it," she said, barely loud enough to hear.
"Of course I found it," I said.“It was color-coded.”
"So what's the harm,Lex?”
"Someone has been picking up after me.”I liked watching the hangers-on in reception
withdraw further whenever I said something new. “Don't these housekeeping drones know
their jobs?”
No one is empowered to pick up after me. B.J. had devised a training regimen before
employees were allowed to step into the Cave-into the triplex penthouse that was my
workshop. They were supposed to dust, vacuum if they must,and clean the four bathrooms.
They feed the animals and water the plants according to instructions attached to collars,cages
or pots, and they oversee the trash that was airlifted off the balcony once a week. B.J.
supervises the systems so I can think about whatever I'm working on at the moment. I was
getting bored with what I was doing, so I was going to have to delegate the rest of it to her
next.
"It's a good damn thing trash day is Thursday,"I told B.J. "That was a green draft." I
used paper that was colored according to the increasing sophistication of an idea:
pink,orange,yellow,green,pale blue and finally white for final drafts.
"What was it, Lex? A gadget of some sort?”
"Not a gadget," I said."Come on in here,”
B.J. and I evacuated to the Cave and I slid shut the door behind us, probably slamming it.
All six people in the wide corridor were relieved.

LEXCORP 51
 "It's a Nancy Aldente article for the Rolling Stone that's almost done," I told her.
“I'll use a picture of you for it," and I handed her several sheets of green paper from a
workbench.
In the Cave we may as well have been in another building. The office space outside,
like the other sixty-three occupied stories of the tower, was crisp as a fresh saltine.Walls
were French gray. Corridors were clear of dust and temporary furniture or paraphernalia
of any kind.There were no sockets in the walls; electrical outlets were wireless and solid
state.Employees had to clear pictures and murals in or out of offices with the Lexcorp
Artistic Norms Authority and specialized staff installed them so that when anyone
removed them it would be with no trace that they were ever there. All the phones were
cellular and hooked into a proprietary communications system that lived on transponders
in a complex of geosynchronous satellites.Phones never rang or vibrated; they sent a
signal to an aural implant that only the recipient could hear. If as much as a pin dropped
in an office,a lab or a conference room, it triggered an activity monitor that hung on the
wall next to every room's entrance, and the roster of movements would lock down and
archive between two and three every morning.
Just thinking about all the innovations I crowbarred into Lexcorp's plant took more
than the sixty seconds that I allow myself to dedicate to company operations in the
course of a week.
No such protocols obtained in Luthor's Cave. The rule of order here was far subtler.
The first room off the reception corridor on the sixty-fourth floor was my workshop.The
floor was hardwood slats and the walls were rough-sawn pine lined with cabinets,
shelves, drawers and equipment.The focal piece of furniture in the room was a big
wooden bench with a butcher's scale and an open laptop computer whose screen-saver
displayed images of astral bodies colliding and shattering in space. Three vises hung off
one

52 MAGGIN
 side of the workbench and a wallful of heavy tools faced the entry. Six chairs on
casters-three with backs and armrests,two high stools and a recliner with a reading lamp
atached to an arm-sat around the bench. Shop lights dangled from the ceiling and lamps
poked out from spaces on the walls between pieces of furniture. Shelves held about two
reams each of the six colors of paper I worked on,in both letter and tabloid size. Nearby, a
shelf held boxes of Post-It notes in the same collection of colors. A big Xerox
copier/printer/fax/email machine occupied one corner of the room and a sand-bath style
three-dimensional printer sat next to it. On the opposite wall was a 110-inch monitor.
“You're in rare form,” B.J.said.
"Not so rare. I live in that form." To the room at large I said,"MacDuff,turn on the
reading lights." And the lamps on the arm of the recliner as well as one extending on a
retractable arm from the wall behind it came on.
"Yes Mr. Luthor," MacDuff said from the nearest speaker. And there was light.
"Sit down," I told B.J. “Read it.”
B.J. sat in the recliner, adjusted the two lamps and scanned the Nancy Aldente article.
There was no Nancy Aldente.She was one of the dozens of identities I created for myself
over the years as surrogates on my behalf. Sometimes I hired actors or vagrants to play at
being one of my fake faces.Sometimes I disguised myself and appeared in one identity or
other when a public appearance was necessary.

"NANCY'S” ARTICLE WAS AN ADVOCACY PIECE ABOUT THE GROWING

POPULATION of extraterrestrials showing up in the world's urban centers and
why,according to her, that was a good thing for women, immigrants and other
disenfranchised groups. She noted that these off-worlders didn't vote (I have no idea how
many of them vote or not).

LEXCORP 53
 They pay ther taxes (not a clue whether they do or not but I made up some statistics).
They're law-abiding (not taking into account bizarre cultural practices like the telepathic
force field that the family of Mimosans on 116th Street keep around their townhouse, or
Arcturans' obnoxious compulsion to throw any ringing telephone into the nearest body of
water).
"Nancy" expressed the belief, according to this article,that off-worlders' visibility among
us, diminished conservative white Americans' skepticism about their changing demographics.
She contended that because there was a small but growing population of these people
here,Americans who might otherwise look for ways to suppress the influence of Hispanics or
Asians would tend to be more tolerant of other Earthers.
The fictional Nancy'spoint was bullshit, of course,but the idea of the article was to wake
people up to some assumed danger fromn the off-worlder population, and still be afraid of the
growing influence of immigrants and foreign belief systems.I needed the electorate at large to
stay at odds with itself for a little while longer. B.J understood my intention immediately,and
she had some good suggestions.
"I think you make too good a case for alien harmlessness, Lex," she said. "And if your
real target audience is political conservatives, why not go with some publication they're more
likely to read?"
"Like what? NNancy's already had half a dozen pieces in Rolling Stone."
"So she should be ambitious and try to expand her clientèle. I'dgo for USA Today, the
business insert in the Friday Daily Planetor even the Wall Street Journal. Here,want me to
take a pass at it?"
B.J. was a gem. I left her in my reading chair and went out on the balcony to check up
on my bees.

54 MAGGI
 BY THE TIME THE LEXCORP TOWER WAS A LITTLE OVER THREE years
old it was, as far as the folks in town were concerned, a piece of furniture on the
cityscape. The gang-I liked to call my employees a gang-moved all but my living room
and bedroom furniture in the three floors I occupied in the Fillmore Hotel twenty-four
blocks uptown,to the nearly complete construction site. It was heavenly.
The Presbyterian church on the site for 150 years didn't have much of a
congregation left when I bought the land,but they made a new church structure part of
the deal. No problem. I never understood why, well into the twentieth century, American
religious sects would model latter-day houses of worship after thousand-year-old
cathedrals. The new church had a steel frame and a granite interior, same as the rest of
the building. The sanctuary was bigger than the old one had been, and you could hear
the bells and the new pipe organ a mile away. It was the only noise I could abide when I
was upstairs working.
My Cave-the sanctum-occupied most of the top three floors. In short order, there
were dozens more Presbyterian families in midtown, and the membership of the church
tripled within the new building's first two years. No one knew that it wasn't the
innovative architecture that drew them. It was the rich air supply tumbling down from
the tropical forest on my rooftop that made people feel serene and healthy when they
walked into the place. They had no idea that when they prayed for mercy, for
forgiveness,for the health of their children and parents, that they were really petitioning
me.

IT USED TO BE MORE FUN TO BE INVISIBLE, to operate below the surface of

the world, but the Alien kept finding me and putting me back in these porous cages. So I
gave that up.Being honest about being a crook got to be too much trouble.But I still have
lots of invisible men running around.

LEXCORP 55
 You'll remember invisible men from when you were a kid. If you were playing
ball-stickball, softball,kickball,whatever-and you couldn't scrounge up enough kids to
run bases when your team was up, then you'd have invisible men occupy the bases. If
you made it, say, to third base and the bases were loaded and it was your turn at bat
you'd leave the other guys on first and second, but you'd put an invisible man on third.
When the guy on second made it to third then the invisible man came home. Sometimes
players would insist that the invisible man was out before he could score,but my
invisible men were always faster than anyone else.
So to keep track of my life choices I've sent invisible men alI over the local
Universe. The people on a planet in a tight orbit around Proxima Centauri got excited
about a simple irrigation system that I designed and radioed to them,and they wanted
meto go out there to get an award. I didn't go,but the invisible man I sent got a pet space
beastie from them. My alter ego decided to stay and they renamed the planet after
him."Lexor," they called it. My invisible man is emperor there now and he's bored silly.
When I decided in my teens to bag school and strike out on my own as a tinkerer
and entrepreneur I sent out another invisible man who went to Princeton. He's a
professor there now, teaching young incipient felons to do the things I've actually been
doing ever since.
The invisible man who made out best, though, is the one I sent out when I was very
young and the Alien landed. This invisible man's existence is based on the premise that
the Alien never showed up, overshot Earth altogether and was raised by Martians or
Tralfamadorians or something. By comparison,I've actually done pretty well,but this was
an imaginary story. In that scenario I won the Nobel Prize in chemistry before I turned
twenty-five and another one in physics at thirty or so. Then I used the prizes as seed
money - didn't need to rob the US gold reserves - to stat a multinational corporation and
made a gazillion bucks.Along

56 MACGIN
 the way I cured cancer, heart disease, old age and mass produced a de-ionizer that
suppressed fusion in the air to make thermonuclear explosions fizzle out all over the
Earth.This guy cured the arms race. I could've done that too,and maybe someday I will. The
United Nations awarded this invisible Lex citizenship in all its member countries and every
high school that's been built in the last generation is named Lex Luthor Senior High, or some
variation on that.This invisible Lex is the most revered figure in the history of the world-all
because the space guy who took it upon himself to outshine me every chance he got, turned
up AWOL instead.
It really wasn't fair. He had super-powers.
But the invisible man who pops into my head the most is the guy in the gray prison
fatigues. He spent his life in and out of cages, mostly getting slapped in there by the Alien
and breaking out to pull off whatever hijinks he fancied in the moment. He was the guy who
kept a collection of crazy mechanical devices- from that mole-nosed transport that travels
underground, to a fully functional solar-powered starship that could detect wormholes for a
light-year around - sprinkled around the countryside, many hidden in plain sight. Actually I
do that now, but not as redundantly. This guy had a giant flying robot with jets in its feet and
rocket launchers in its forearms, and it was hidden in the guise of a fifteen-foot statue of the
Alien in front of the courthouse in a little town at the southern tip of Illinois. Of all my
invisible men, I think the chronic jailbird in the gray fatigues was the happiest. A little
clueless and obsessed, but definitely a happy guy.
What I was working on the day somebody violated my Cave by trying to tidy up, was a
system that could cast detailed holograms remotely. This device could project a perfect
high-definition image -reproduce a person, say -down to the hair follicles and sweat glands.
Three-

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 dimensional television. I got the idea in east Africa where I went on a talent hunt.
I thought 3DTV was innocuous in the sense that holography wasn't an easy thing to
weaponize. Then again,Edison thought movie film was a useless curiosity when he invented
it. Then it turned out to be the tool that the United States uses to export American culture
around the world.Generally I sit on my inventions to keep themn for my own use until I think
the world is ready for them -or until I contrive a way to make a decent profit from them. My
wormhole starship is a prime example of that; potentially it can solve the population boom
and someday it will. In theory, this technology is capable of relocating downtown Chicago to
a moon of Saturn. But it could launch the whole city into that nebula in the Large Magellanic
Cloud if the wrong pilot is in charge. We'll save that one for a time when the schools wise up
and make sure kids learn differential calculus before they get a driver's license.
At any rate,I thought the entertainment business wasn't immediately life threatening.
Lexcorp could make a major fortune with my hologram gizmo if we partnered with a big
company that had a track record of producing movies and television shows.
I was in regular touch with some of the right people to turn on to the idea, By now, I was
a long-term member of that secret society of industrialists and venture capitalists who called
themnselves the Masters of the Universe. As I've mentioned, I had another name for this
gang...

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 VI
THE CHICKENSHITS CAUCUS

THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE WAS A CLUB of the worst,most dangerous

people in the world. They wore tailored clothes and masked their faces with an imitation of
confidence.Most people who find themselves with a lot to lose get destructively cautious.
They guard their lives and their possessions with reflexive abandon. Some call it greed.I
recognize it for what it really is: fear. That was my beef with these people. They were
arrogant and terrified at the same time. Cautious. Scared. Frozen in place.
Chickenshits.
I never set ouIt to get rich and don't much care whether or not I stay that way. Really.
Wealth is a tool,like a hammer or a patent. It was just that when I get an idea in my head-and
I have a galaxy's worth of those-I generally figure out how to make it real.
"Abra Kadabra!" as they say in Aramaic.
It didn't occur to me at first that all of this would make me inordinate amounts of money,
though I took no offense when wealth started to accumulate around me like barnacles.
“Lex,how much money do you have, really?" a girl I met once asked me.
"All of it," I told her. That was true.

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 Still, I don't know exactly how I got rich.For sure I didn't have the first clue how all
the Chickenshits in our secret society grew their fortunes. Chauffeurs and security
guards and boards of directors breathed down their necks safeguarding their empires like
apetal pattern of worker bees relentlessly guarding their queen's ovary. But as soon as
treasure got a grip on these people, every one of them petrified. Or putrefied. They woke
up nights from falling-through-the-sky dreams, lying in a lake of flop-sweat,convinced it
would all fall apart for them like Lady Luck wandering all over the room to blow on
some other guy's dice.
The Masters of the Universe convened every even-numbered month, always
somewhere different,usually in a place few people knew existed. They started dropping
me discreet invitations when I moved my company into the new Lexcorp Tower and the
Journal ran a piece about my filling up all the office and lab space within two months. A
rotating cast of members stepped into the role of Chicken host each meeting, and the
host set the location of each meeting.My favorite location so far was the granite cavern a
mile or two from the old haunted castle of a house where the chairman of Wayne
Enterprises lived. Sonoma Mandell the cable news boss once got us together at an
unused broadcast facility on a pontoon platform just outside the three-mile limit off the
coast of Asbury Park. The group had also met in an abandoned film studio next door to a
trailer park, inside a hangar disguised as an office building near the Eastside Heliport,at
all sorts of disparate spots. The last time I hosted,I called the meeting to order in a
bunker I keep underneath Grand Central Terminal.
The master of these particular ceremonies was Abel Cookhouse, the founder and
chair of General Paper,the information technology conglomerate. We met in an elaborate
conference room perched near the top of a dense forest along the Housatonic River.
Ninety-odd billionaires

60 MAGGIN
 parked at the dead end of a lane in the woods and walked or rolled or were carried
the quarter-mile along the river bank to a mechanical platform powered by a water
wheel.Walking among the parked Fleetwoods, Navigators and gull-wing Teslas at the
foot of the lane, most with a driver at the wheel dozing or listening to something,I could
only suppose what bumps and dislocations these plutocrats had to endure to get from the
public road to this spot. My electric Range Rover had no such problems. The
water-powered platform I found at the base of the cluster of big trees lifted as many as
eight people at a time a hundred-fifty feet to the oak and mahogany meeting room. The
view was amazing.
When I got there, half-an-hour late because I didn't want to ride the elevator with
company, night was just starting to show up. I got to the conference room at the forest
roof in time to see an orange and red sunset settle on the green, and the haze of house
lights over Quaker Hill, a hamlet maybe fifteen or twenty miles to the west.
"Nice of you to join us, Lex," Cookhouse interrupted my communing with the
forest.
“It is nice," I said."And I come bearing gifts."
“Gifts? Did you bring enough for the whole class,Lexie?" Mary Louise Hancock,
the chair emerita of Amoskeag Industries asked,pushing her wheelchair back from the
conference table.
“Maybe. In a sense. I need to find a-"
"I'm sorry Dr. Luthor but we were in a prior discussion," Cookhouse interrupted.
He knew I hated being interrupted. I suppose he hated it too.
“It's mister. Mr. Luthor or Lex is fine." I also hated to remind people I had no
advanced degree but I couldn't bring myself not to correct anyone who needed
correcting.
I looked around the room, saw that there were no empty seats at the table, pulled a
chair from against a wall and rolled it a few feet to shove between Zach Sklar and Roxy
Richards, the film and television moguls who were having

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 an animated conversation until I jostled myself and my chair into the middle of it. I had
to talk to these guys sometime tonight.
"'Scuse me," I smiled at both of them.
"No worries,” Richards said.
“Sure.Hi,” Sklar said.
"We were considering long-term solutions," Abel Cookhouse tried to pick up the rhythm
of the meeting from before I came in.
"I was saying I can handle our software needs. Zach here volunteered for public
relations. Colonel Allaire will have contingency plans for invasive plots. Sir Herald has
pre-repatriation operations and we were about to see whether Bruce could handle resupplying
and expansion as necessary.Prince Ahmad covers startup materials and Mary Louise will
oversee manufacture. Which brings us to you,Mister Luthor.Word on the 'nets is you've been
sitting on some new remote mineral identification technology.”
"I've been sitting on a lot of technology, and it's not so new.Are we mining something?"
"Very likely," Cookhouse said."We're putting together a contingency plan to vacate the
planet surface."
"A mass underground shelter? Seriously?" I wanted to know. I tried not to show surprise
but I was failing miserably.
"No, not at all. No big mass," Abel Cookhouse said."Just us. Those of us in this room.
And our key people of course,”
"You're kidding me," I said, looking at the room full of impassive faces.
They weren't kidding me.
"... which leaves most of us with a certain amount of overage in the assumed budget of
the unspecified joint project for the coming year."
Mole people. They all thought they couldbe mole people. Thought they could live
underground for who-

62 MA.CCD
 knows-how-long. Then after the biosphere cleared they-or more likely their
descendents-would come up for air and take over their economic interests where they had left
off.I could sell them on something better than that.
They'll buy in, I told myself. They'll think it's their idea. This is going to be fun.

AN EXPENSIVE SECRET DEVELOPMENT PROJECT LIKE THIS was the excuse

for the bunch of us to get together. Last year it was an internal combustion steam engine. The
consensus was that we'd keep that one undercover for the moment.The year before that it was
an extraplanetary habitation unit to multiply the size of the sheltered colony they set up on
Mars back in the Nineties. A couple of years ago we did a crash program to perfect two-sided
adhesive material that you could rinse off in water and use again. That last one was my
favorite, and most of the surplus Cookhouse was talking about now was from marketing that
tape.
The Mars colony was actually doing pretty well too.Once the first few settlers found an
underground stream of free-flowing water they became self-sustaining and they were able to
increase the population to a little over four hundred. They produced goods and services like
any colony:software, information processing, a reality show, and eventually they found some
local resources and shipped out a ton or two of bauxite and copper twice a year. A teenager
who had been born in the colony - a kid named Ares Harriman-looked up online how to smelt
aluminum and he set up a slapdash processing plant outside the habitable zone.That's when
the locals showed up from underground-yeah,Martians; who knew?-and objected to all the
smoke and seepage. Without a flap, the kid negotiated a treaty with the natives (technically,
he's a native too) and he's been trading downloaded Chuck Berry and Whitney Houston tunes
in exchange for life support technology. I'm going to put Ares

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 through college one of these days. Then I'll probably hire him to do something, if only to
keep him from going into competition with me.
“Hey Cookhouse," I raised my hand and interrupted,"I've got an idea.”
He looked around the room hoping for another hand to acknowledge,then
said,“Mr.Luthor?”
"How about we put together a starship?Fill it up with the most physically fit, intelligent
people of child-bearing age we can find. To perpetuate humnanity in some other star system.
About time, don't you think?”
Common wisdom held that Earth was deathly ill. This was not true. The planet was fine.
It was the human hangers-on who were ill-terminal unless somebody did something about it
soon. The planet was compensating for it-a little too enthusiastically for my taste, but you
don't second-guess geology.
Every one of the head-in-a-hole flightess birds at this meeting is part of the problem and
the solution some of them had been toying with was to go to some unsuspecting backwoods
underground location and mutilate that one beyond repair too. Every sector of the economy
that these guys run is at fault. And the hell with them.
Energy. That one's easy. First they decide the internal combustion engine is the be-all
end-all of transportation.Why is that? Because there are so many moving parts and support
structures in the thing that you can make more money by repairing them than by selling them.
Every sale is a long-term profit center. Then they invent a ream of requirements for fuel in
their Rube Goldberg contraption. If they didn't dredge up more profit in over-processed
petroleum you could run the damn thing on spit. Then they leverage the power and money
they get from the fuel biz to force planes, buses and even power plants themselves to run on
the same crap, Seriously-the two-ton truck I designed when I was a teenager runs on kerosene.
White kerosene of

64 MAGGIN
 course; I'm not a barbarian. Forty miles and three bucks to the gallon; cheaper to run
than electric. I built a prototype a few years ago and put it into service making tomato and
almond crops more productive. It transports commercial beehives to pollinate garlic and
alfalfa farms all through Pennsylvania and the Midwest too. I won't deal with farms that are
fumigated. My drivers are trained to respect the fields they pollinate. If they don't see
blankets of fireflies the evening after a rain then my bees won't help them out. Lots of Amish
acreage has gotten mysteriously productive in the past few years. One truck gets ten times the
fuel mileage as diesel and has pulled down at least a million-and-a-half for Lexcorp for years.
It started as a thought experiment and now most of my land-based company vehicles run on
the same kerosene engine, including the mole machine I keep camouflaged in plain sight in
the sculpture garden at MMOMA. Yeah, I've really got a mole machine. I dust it off,go
underground and surface in some urban center when the local authorities start thinking they're
really in charge.Cookhouse and most of the rest of the Chickenshits seemed very excited
about the low-gas-use engine we'd all invested in. I hadn't told any of them about my
kerosene trucks.I was trying to decide whether to tip my hand or wait for them to over-spend
and then put them out of business. I probably shouldn't compete with one of my own
investments,but it would be an awful lot of fun.
I caught the eye of Sterling Babylon the auto manufacturer five seats down the meeting
table. He nodded and smiled back at me. One of Babylon's grandfathers founded his company.
The other grandfather, who hooked up with the last despotic king of the Netherlands to
exploit rubber plant jungles in Java and Sumatra, started manufacturing tires. So this guy
down the table, thinking he's such a man of the people, has taken to doing his own television
ads where he talks about the hunting trips his grandpas used to take with Teddy Roosevelt. As
soon as I

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 bag the CEOs of all the major auto companies and their lackeys,I'll go public with a
line of kerosene cars and blow a new asshole in Big Transport.
Agriculture. Earth folk grow their produce and tend their livestock the same damn
way they did ten thousand years ago-only now they squeeze it all into a smaller
space.The six-story vertical farm I set up in Lexcorp Tower has been selling produce to
every bodega on the East Side from 40m to 110t Street at about half the wholesale cost
of conventional distributors. It helps that the Tower is local.Trucks from far away have
to budget for traffic tickets they get in the course of unloading their goods in Metropolis,
and those costs get passed on to end-users. With Lexcorp's urban farm that's not a
problem. My delivery people ride bicycles.As far as meat goes, lots of companies have
been working on growing biological materials in the lab. So far it tastes like a cross
between cardboard and shit with the texture of aluminum foil. We synthesized a filet
mignon using royal jelly as a catalyst and nutrition booster. B.J. entered it into a cooking
contest on the Food Channel. We won, of course-and no one had any idea that the entrée
never walked around a pen or blew out a milligram of methane. She gave me an idea for
gooseless paté to try next.
Garbage used to be a by-product of industrial process.Now it's a profit center. It's
been that way since that sonofabitch John D. Rockefeller figured out the formula:First,
you steal an idea. Next, you set up a manufacturing operation that employs scads of
humans. Third, you overproduce your stuff, turn your labor force and their families into
consumers until they and a bunch of affinity industries become dependent on the product
they help produce. Then you start paying off public officials because that's so much
cheaper than taxes. Bust up any unions or guilds your skazillions of employees have
hooked up with.Then you automate everything and fire all the actual Earth humans who
built your business for you.

66 MAGCN
 Communications. You'd think the expansion of media access would be unifying and
productive. Newspapers and magazines,telephone,radio,television, Internet. All of these and
more are designed to be the people's tools and that's what they were-for a minute or two each.
But once the folks in this room got their hands on any given medium it became a means to
spread self-serving nonsense disguised as information. Three seats to my left sat the reigning
empress of disinformation, the lovely Sonoma Mandell, Chief Executive Officer of the
Mandell Network. She singlehandedly named a succession of presidents,kings,popes and
saints around the world who seemed ever at odds with each other, but pushed the agenda of
the Chickenshits Caucus inexorably one millimeter at a time. More on Sonoma later.
Manufacturing. Religion. Education. Tech. Medicine.Construction. Entertainment.
Finance. Natural resources.Government. Munitions. They've all bought in. And tey're all in
this room.
Overload the troposphere with carbon and mnethane particles and more heat gets
trapped near the surface. More heat melts land-anchored glaciers and raises sea levels. More
condensation of sea water in the air lowers the levels back but kicks off monster storms like
we haven't seen in four-hundred-thousand years. Condensation changes the level of salt in the
oceans so the underwater environment shifts.
Living things respond to environmental changes in one of three ways: adapt, migrate or
die. Stationary life like coral or redwoods or earthworms can't adapt or migrate so they die,
and they take with them the habitats they provide for other life. Whales and elephants will
probably figure out new itineraries pretty well. Eventually there'll be more coral, or
something like it, but only after the meteorological systems stabilize and everything comes
back in balance. The planet is hunky-dory. It functions the way it's supposed to.The way it
always has. The Earth's current solution appears to be to

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 get rid of the humnans. The way it did with millions of extinct species once they became
a liability. I would argue-with the Earth-but all you really need to do is get rid of a select
group of humans. Yeah, I did say that you can't second-guess geology, but everything bends a
little.
QED.
Quod erat demonstratum.
Quite easily done.
The people sitting in this treehouse were ostensibly the most powerful people on the
planet. And they were among the vilest.
The billionaires in this room-effectively trillionaires,some of us, if you figure in how
much we actually control-are the owners of the means of production on the skin of this world.
Most of them don't know a damn thing about the way the things that we control work.
Consequently,most of my colleagues and competitors here contribute mightily to their own
encroaching demise by being scared off their meds.Insteadof trying to solve the problem,
many of these guys deny in public that it exists. And in private, here in this aerie,they plot to
abandon the issue. To move into some humongous cave and leave the problem for everyone
else to solve.
Chickenshits.

PROBABLY THE MOST DANGEROUS OF THEM was Sonoma Mandell the twisted
cable news czarina, sitting down the table from me trying not to make eye contact with
anyone.There was no reason to suppose anyone could convince her to do something else for a
living. People had tried. When Sonoma was three, her father Noah Mandell bought a
transponder for fifteen cents-the cost of a postage stamp at the time -and turned it into a
television station, then a network, then a string of sports franchises, then a national news
organization. By the time Mandell the Elder had the

68 MAGGIN
 good sense to cash out and leave his budding empire in Sonoma's hands, Mandell
Networks LLC was foundering.Top-heavy.A victim of its own success. Sonoma took it over
and fixed it.
It all started with Echo I, a ten-story reflective mylar balloon that the United States
launched into orbit in 1960.A satelloon. Engineers at NASA could bounce a broadcast sound
off Echo I- a ping, say. Radio operators at various points on Earth could detect the weak
signal repeating back a moment later. The receivers picked it up about a quarter of a second
after it left Earth, the time it takes for a radio wave to travel 22,300 miles to the satellite and
back. It was simple enough, but a breakthrough nonetheless.
When mass communication was young, within five years after the début of the Echo
satelloon, the United States government had no clue what to do with a little device named
Intelsat that it flung into Earth orbit. The idea was to get the international communications
business out of government hands and into private ones. Intelsat was a so-called
"communications satellite," the first of a string of them that were eventuallyowned and
operated by a private corporation chartered in the little duchy of Luxembourg. As long as the
charter documents were in Luxembourgish-a language that not even most people in
Luxembourg understood-no one would notice the company's obligation to launch at least one
American spy satellite every nine months. Today there are about 180 communications
satellites, perched at two-degree intervals over the Equator, not counting the
who-knows-how-many United States spy satellites that fly along their orbits under their own
power like Buck Rogers' spaceships.
A transponder is a little broadcast channel on a communications satellite. Each satellite
will host about a dozen of these. What the transponder does is pick up and amplify a signal to
the satellite and beam it back to an Earth station, which then broadcasts it in that station's
immediate area. In the early Nineteen Seventies the United States

LEXCORP 69
 government had a handful of satellites in geosynchronous orbit, each with a bunch of
transponder stations aboard,and the government had no idea what to do with them. So the
Federal Communications Commission put them up for auction.
The Ninth Circuit invalidated the transponder sale.Evidently,as a federal court pointed
out, the airwaves don't belong to the government and it thus couldn't se1l access to them.So
the government announced that it would conduct a random drawing, assigning broadcast use
of these transponders to whoever claimed them by lottery. Sonoma's dad applied for a dozen
of them and,by the luck of the draw,acquired one. Noah always said that he paid fifteen cents
for his space age broadcast gadget. In fairness, he had sent out several entries to qualify for
the one he got. So it really cost him about three bucks, but fifteen cents made a better story.
That was how Mandell the Elder got his toe in the communications biz.
When Sonoma took over her dad's business the little empire had nine television stations
and twenty-seven radio stations. The first station was in Cleveland Ohio,a town where there
was a big basketball game in 1976,two years after the old man snagged that first transponder.
The elder Mandell insisted it was cheaper to bounce a basketball game in Cleveland off
a satellite 22,300 miles in space and back down to television screens in Columbus, than to
transmit it overland the hundred fifty miles between the two cities. Proving this was Noah
Mandell's major contribution to contemporary technology. He spent the rest of his life riding
on that accomplishment.
Noah was an eccentric visionary, but he was no businessman. He didn't know anything
about marketing and didn't know that when there's something you don't know,you can always
hire someone who does know. He got into lawsuits over broadcast rights and trademark
infringement that went on for years in some cases. You got the impression

70 MAGGIN
 from the way Noah lived, that he set up his business so it would run itself and he spent
the rest of his time doing whatever amused him. In that sense he was a man after mny own
heart. I'm smarter,is all.
Noah went off to teach English at a little college in New Hampshire-which was where
he spent most of the rest of his life. When Noah retired, most of the Mandell Network's board
of directors didn't even know he had a daughter,much less that she was now running the place.
The board had little to say about the matter. Noah, his wife Erika Birmingham Mandell and
their two daughters Sonoma and Willowbrook ended up with a little over sixty percent of the
stock in the network. What Erika and Willowbrook most liked to do was go shopping. What
Sonoma liked to do was give orders. The Mandells were glad to let Sonoma be in charge; she
made them all much richer. She kept all the sports broadcast contracts that her father
established up to date. That was her bread and butter,but she decided what she really wanted
was to run the news.
Growing up, Sonoma noticed that broadcast journalists acted as though there were two
sides to every story. If a Democrat said one thing, newsfolks went and found a Republican to
disagree. If an oil company wanted to build a pipeline across a large expanse of land, some
reporter would find an environmentalist to object to the pipeline on television. If a public
official declaimed about a dictator who invaded a neighboring country to annex it,there
would soon be a historian or an activist or a religious zealot to claim that the dictator's
country had a rightful claim to the seized land.Or not. And so forth. As long as the reporter
found two sides to a story, the job was done, and rationality was not a consideration.
There actually are stories with just one side, Sonoma realized. The world is in fact round,
not flat. The dinosaurs that once walked the Earth are in fact extinct. The rearrangement by
humans of resources and other aspects of

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 the world was in fact turning the countryside to shit.But increasingly, in the name
of fairness, news organizations were going out of their way to find crackpots to spout
claptrap opposing views. Nonsense was a salable commodity in the right hands. There
are stories that have just one side which are called facts, but there aren't any stories with
just two sides to them. Two is a ridiculous number.In fact,every idea whose truth is not
settled has a minimum of thirty-one sides. Trust me on this; I can prove it
mathematically.
Sonoma understood most of this. She decided that her news network would find a
third point of view for everything. Even for facts, in many cases. And to save on-air time,
that third point of view was what she and her employees would advocate. This was a
good start.
Soon, Sonoma was the most powerful person in broadcast news. Instead of people
with degrees in journalism and backgrounds in local reporting, she hired entertainers and
young blonde women to broadcast and editorialize on the news. Rather than trying to
present simplistic opposing positions on complex issues, she had her people find a view
that was unrepresented among conventionally rational people. If others claimed Mandell
News was reactionary,the network would claim to be conservative. When people said
the news was unbalanced, they claimed to be representative of the people. While the
conventional wisdom at other networks was that Sonoma's people took advantage of
mistrust of longstanding institutions, Sonoma's people would question whether such
institutions were worthy of trust at all.“People will believe what I tell them to
believe,"Sonoma said. Mandell News was gloriously successful.Bullshit has legs.
Sonoma was just the worst of the information terrorists who were melting human
civilization. The fossil fuelers,the weaponers, the drug merchants, all of them worked in
concert to sell the notion that all that might seem amiss with

72 MAGGIN
 the world would inevitably work its way out and we'd all have a warm place to piss and
enough birthday cake to keep us all soft and rounded. Fortunately for me and my intentions,
all the liars, rascals and scoundrels gathered in a room every other month to compare notes
and reassure each other that they were doing what was best for each other.

HERE'S MY THREE-PART PLAN to save humanity from itself:

1 -Build a simple turbine-the Atlantic Flywheel,two miles in diameter-and plant it in a
trench directly in the path of the Gulf Stream to generate enough hydro power to power every
municipality that currently depends on fossil fuels;
2 Populate the planet,beginning with the rain forests and eventually every wooded
stretch of land and every front lawn, with hives of carefully bioengineered super-pollinators
to turn cities and towns,pathways and roadways, living spaces on the edge of extinction, into
a vast renewable syIvan paradise rich in oxygen and dense vegetation;and
3 Banish every terrified, carboniferous, money-grubbing, idustrialist intent on keeping
profits high and populations subdued, into a star voyage bound for some unspecified
unspoiled extraterrestrial destination where they/'ll be free to screw up this fresh-brewed
countryside to their hearts'content.
Thus will the Earth be free to rebalance itself.That's the plan.
Cool,huh?

THE GUY FROM WAYNE ENTERPRISES BEEPED. He was annoying as hell to start
with and now his pants were mouthing off. He pulled out his phone, got up, excused

LEXCORP 73
 himself. Nobody noticed. Cookhouse was still taking suggestions and assigning
committees. I saw the Wayne guy summon the elevator, look out over the balcony of the
structure and I looked in my jacket pocket for a set of sketches of the hologram system I'd
brought for my two table mates. When I looked back up the guy was gone but I hadn't seen
him get on the elevator. The elevator platform was clattering downward now-so I shrugged it
off. That's the trouble with having a suspicious nature. You get tangled in the minutiae.
The reason this cave scheme was not credible was not because it wouldn't work. It
would work just fine. It would let the worst people in the world survive and build a new
world in a few generations, after the planet exterminated everyone they left behind. The thing
was, it wouldn't solve the problem either for these chronic polluters or for the people who
died in their backwash. It was all these terrified colleagues of mine, they were the problem,
and they'd just bring it with them wherever they went. I would see that they were safely away
from Earth and Earth was safely away from them.

WITHIN A FEW DAYS I CIRCULATED A DRAFT report illustrating the future of

humanity on Earth. It drew a dire picture of a planet quickly becoming an environment
hostile to human life. I exaggerated a little, but it was roughly accurate,all things being equal.
Space mariners whose ancestry is of Earth, if we survive as a people to have such issue,
are far more likely to come across dead civilizations among the stars than thriving ones.For
every bulging-headed, enlightened alien world of our speculative fiction that our descendants
encounter, there will be a hundred lifeless worlds peppered with the ruins of lost cities,or the
overgrowth of life forms who once dined on intelligent life to extinction, or saurian predators
who were

74 MAGQI
 never wiped out by an asteroid and routinely crush little bite-sized furry beasties under
their enormous clawed feet.
Good luck, Chickenshits.
If there is no conscious intervention by humans acting in concert to stop our own
disaster short, then the human race's tenure on this planet has less than a generation left.That
was the case my white paper presented. Yeah, maybe I exaggerated in my report to myfellow
plutocrats. Maybe we could go two generations. But no more than that. The report included
several scenarios where corporate executives and oligarchs are singled out for special
treatment by ravening mobs. There was a purposely specific story about a woman who owned
a major broadcast news organization being dragged by a truck with a chain on her ankle until
her head separated from her shoulders. Not long ago an eastern European dictator and his
wife got themselves toppled and were similarly dragged through the streets of Bucharest, so
my speculation was credible enough.
"Will you let us in on this geological breakthrough you've happened upon, Mr. Luthor?"
Abel Cookhouse the software king wanted to know.
"Sure," I said, and started figuring out which of these people had actually bought into
this cockamamie cave-dwelling plan, and who I could peel away to help me-and the rest of
us-to adapt.
About twenty past midnight the meeting let out.Everyone with an assignment agreed to
return with a report in two months. I leaned back in my seat and put my arms over Roxie
Richards and Zach Sklar's shoulders before they could get up."Hey would either of you guys
be interested in a joint venture in 3-D television?”

LEXCORP 75
 VII
AHBS

THERE'S A SUBCULTURE OF NEPALESE HONEY THIEVES in a valley in the

shadow of Mount Annapurna. They're the Gurung people and they harvest wild honey from
Apis Dorsata Laboriosa, a species of giant golden Himalayan bees. Ordinary Laboriosa
worker bees are as big as my thumb knuckle, and their queens are twice as long as that.They
generally build their hives on the faces of cliffs a mile-and-a-half in the sky.
The honey is gold with a hint of red and sells for a hundred dollars or more for a pint jar.
It makes you high.I swallowed about half a teaspoonful of the stuff when I visited the Gurung
not long ago. It was sweet enough but very tart. At least I think it was. That taste was the last
thing I remember before the hallucinations started.
I was in an open-air living room, which is common in Nepal. It had three walls and in
my perception those walls,people's skin, the skin of the Earth, all started breaking into their
component particles. Paint danced off the walls of its own accord in strips and flakes.
Someone extended a hand to me that seemed rather to be a hand-shaped collection of
free-floating cells of skin and joints. I grabbed for it and thought my hand would pass through
it like water, but my hand was in the same condition and my own cells clapped

76 MAGGIN
 against the corresponding cells of this Gurung man's hand,surface for surface. I thought
we were shaking hands but his disconnected floating ceIls held fast to mine and he swung me
around so he held me back to back. I weighed nothing.I rode him up a hill and down a valley.
I couldn't see him anymore because we faced opposite directions. All I saw was a path
through the woods, sparkling with green lights, as the trees and the path receded slowly into
the distance.The only way I knew he was still there, was that he kept repeating some
nonsense sounds: “Gopya thau," he said,“Boldina."He repeated this over and over again, all
along the way until it imprinted on my brain like a pop song. The words are there still, carved
into my consciousness. If they stay long enough for me to run into someone who speaks
Nepali, I'll askif it means anything.
I materialized in a narrow clearing against a rocky bluff with half a dozen Gurung guys.
One of them,maybe the one who had carried me there, moved up the side of the bluff to an
overhang about a hundred feet up. It seemed to me in my questionable state that he floated,
like the Alien would,tapping the vertical surface with disembodied hands and disconnected
feet along the way. The place he was going was where a swarm of bright golden bees buzzed
around under an overhang.
These bees seemed each to be the size of his head and he had no protection from stingers
as big as paring knives.He shoved his hand among the swarm and brought it out with a wad
of goo that he dribbled into a basket that hung between his legs. He stuck his bare hand in
slowly, over and over,as the enormous golden swarm enveloped him. He vanished into the
crowd, became part of them,among them. When finally he emerged he had transformed into a
giant bee and drifted down the cliffside on translucent wings that he must just have grown. A
mailbag of honey dangled between his legs likea pollen pouch.

LEXCORP 77
 I knew, even when it was taking place, that this had to be at least partially a
hallucination. I didn't care. It made me think that maybe a lot of things I'd seen the Alien
do over the years were from some shadowy corner of my imagination too.That thought
made me happy.
This type of befogged trip was the only way these Nepali Gurung guys would let
me accompany them to see their bees, tripping like a naked hippie at Woodstock. All the
way back I thought I heard Richie Havens strumming and warbling and howling along
the Himalayas. It was wonderful.
I managed to bring home three Laboriosa queen cells in a shoebox with a handful
of worker bees. I put together some oversize top bar hive boxes to accommodate them
and installed them at my penthouse jungle on the balcony of the Lexcorp
Tower.Eventually one surviving queen managed to hatch offspring and build herself a
colony.I was in business.

IIT ISN'T ONLY GOLDEN GIANT Himalayan honeybees that aren't native to
North America. All American honeybees are immigrants. They first came across the
Atlantic with the colonial tobacco trade.
Merchants and adventurers who came to the New World looking for gold came up
short in that quest. What they did find was a big noxious leaf that they could set on fire
and enjoy inhaling the fumes. Those fumes turned out to be addictive. When I was a
kid,all the world smelled of burning tobacco. People walked the streets spewing smoke
and lit these pellets in a successive chain of fog as they worked at their jobs. Talk show
hosts and newscasters on the tube would puff on the smoldering weed while they were
broadcasting. Doctors would come into hospital rooms to look after their patients with
lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths. It was an absurd practice and for centuries
poison

78 MAGGIN
 profiteers made great mounds of money from it. Tobacco was gold.
The honeybee migration started when English and Spanish traders took big barrels
stuffed tight with tobacco leaves back across the Atlantic to Europe. When they tried to bring
the empty barrels back to fill them up again, even strapped to the decks of ships, they
bounced and rattled and in rough seas they splintered. So the Europeans filled their tobacco
barrels with dirt to keep them heavy and stable enough to survive the trip to North
America.Inevitably,the European soil brought earthworms, another plentiful species that did
not yet exist west of the Atlantic. In a lot of cases bees buzzed around in the barrels.
Europeans also brought an ambush of viruses that had not been seen in the Americas before.
In the four hundred years since then,earthworms haven't spread much beyond the midwestern
states, but some of the bees survived the Atlanic crossing and reproduced in great swarms
along the way. When the Europeans opened their barrels in North America and dumped out
the dirt, honeybees took to the air with wild enthusiasm and built comb all along the
countryside. They spread to the north, the south, the west with the alacrity of smallpox.
Inside a generation, the pox depleted the numbers of tribal people across the continent
like a great boot stomping down cities and villages from tens of millions to an outnumbered
handful. Further west, whenever bees showed up, it was an omen that the white men were
close behind. It was too bad the natives never figured out how to guzzle honey mead the way
the Brits and the Danes had. That wouldn't have forestalled the disaster, but it might have
softened their anticipation of the pain that was to come.

I PUT A COLONY OF KILLER BEES ON MY BALCONY in the Lexcorp Tower to

see what would happen. This was a hive

LEXCORP 79
 of honeybees whose DNA had been enriched with descendants of Apis Mellifera
Scutellata, bees from the coastal lowlands of Kenya that a sloppy Brazilian entomologist
let loose some years ago. Scutellata has been terrorizing the landscape ever since the
Brazilian getaway.Their venom is no more potent than that of other species.The problem
is that they gang up in hordes and occasionally kill perceived threats with their volume
alone. I haven't been stung by a bee since I was a teenager, but I learned quickly not to
walk in front of the Kenyans' hive entrances without a protective suit. The polite
accepted term for them is Africanized Honeybees.That sounds a tad racist to me.They
earned the over-the-top nickname of Killer Bees the same way I earned titles like
Renegade Scientist and Criminal Mastermind. I call them Killer Bees out of respect.
To get the strain of bees I needed, I had to synthesize a breed that maximized their
capacity to pollinate and to reproduce at the greatest rate. What was attractive about
these Killers was their habit of quickly establishing new colonies and, once the colony
grew to a critical mass,going on to establish more colonies the first chance they got.
There were lots of problems with them besides their aggressiveness. Mainly, no matter
how many new colonies they spread over town in the spring and summer, they couldn't
handle a Metropolis winter.
They're pirates, impressing more mild-mannered bees into servitude like the British
Navy in the War of 1812.They bully their way into established colonies, depose the
reigning sovereign and force the workers already there to hire a new queen, one of theirs.
What I noticed,however,was that the time it takes for a Killer queen to gestate and hatch
each egg -about three weeks-is about a day less than it takes the European queens. So
invariably the usurper queen, an African Queen first out of the gate, is genetically
disposed to be a natural Killer and produce offspring who are as well.While the Killers
spread their colonies at a greater rate,they

80 MAGGIN
 don't pollinate healthy vegetation as fast as the others do.There's no physiological
reason they can't; they're just too busy being disagreeable. Not such killers really, except
in name.
During my study of Killer Bees they spread from my balcony jungle to take over
colonies all through Midtown.They chased a jogger through the park one morning and
left him wounds that looked like third-degree burns. They infiltrated the mane and tail of
a police horse and conditioned her to shy away from conflict. They swarmed over an
eave at the film school of the Downtown University campus and turned the out-takes of
several student films into amusing bug-on-human combat scenes. That sort of thing. The
Metropolis installation of Killer Bees that I started -including the hive on the penthouse
of the Lexcorp Tower and two other colonies on the balcony that they took over-died off
with October's first snowfall. That's the perennial problem with bullies and killers.
They're wimps.
The giant bees from Nepal with the psychedelic honey showed more promise.

SOME DORK REPORTER FROM THE DAILY PLANET called,claiming to be a

guy I would vaguely remember from high school.He wanted to interview me about my
relationship with the Metropolis Museum of Modern Art of all things.I guess he got my
name off the plaque listing donors in the museum lobby. I told B.J. that if he calls again
she should blow him off.
He did call back about a week late,she told me. In fact,she said he made a pain in
the ass of himself after a while.Finally one afternoon he dropped by the Lexcorp Tower
without an appointment. I had a free second a few days later and checked out the video
footage of his attempt to get past the lobby guards.

LEXCORP 81
 "I've got my press pass right here," he told the enormous bruiser who sits at the
front desk.
"Not immediately relevant, sir, if you ain't on the appointment roster."
"Well I'm sure Mr. Luthor will see me once you tell him who I-”
"I don't tell Mr. Luthor nothing," my guy said.“Once in a while I see him tread
through the lobby in acrowd of guys who're mostly bigger than me. But we're not on
howdy-ing terms.”
"Well I spoke to Ms. Tolley a few days ago. She said that I might-”
"You spoke to Ms. Tolley? Herself?”
“I did.”
"Ms. Tolley only speaks to Mr. Luthor and Mr. Luthor only speaks to God."
“I've met him too.”
“Mr.Luthor?”
"No,I've met,umm-”
The journalist looked to his left,then his right,as a few more of my bruisers
collected at the corners of the elevator corridors,eyeing him.
He actually did look a little familiar. He turned around and stared upward for a
moment. He lowered his glasses as if he was studying the ceiling. I zoomed in on his
face,but as I did that his features blurred for some reason.
He put the glasses back on, thanked the desk bruiser and said he might call again
sometime. I don't know whether he did.
I issued an order to the maintenance crew to check out the resolution of the lobby
video cams but they found nothing. I'll have to examine them myself sometime.

MY BREAKTHROUGH WITH THE BEES came when I force-mated a two-inch

long Nepali queen with a horde of

82 MAGGIN
 Monticola drones. Apis Mellifera Monticola are a species of bees native to Uganda and
the highlands of Kenya. They're closely related to the Killers, but more open to
negotiation.Like their Kenyan cousins,they gestate in twenty days,a day faster than our more
familiar Italians. I raised a hybrid queen from these guys - I've named them Apis Mellifera
Lexcorpus-and coronated her into an established colony of Ligustica,the Italian honeybees
that have buzzed around the Americas since the days of the colonial tobacco traders. My
hybrid immigrants reproduced like gangbusters. They pollinated my balcony as well as most
of Metropolis within a week. Before anyone knew it, papaya were breaking the surface all
over Central Preserve although Metropolis wasn't remotely tropical. They fought it out with
banana trees for space along the median of Parkland Avenue and the sidewalk trees on
Jefferson Avenue. The city Beautification Department took credit for all the steamy
vegetation,but it was Lexcorpus that really made it happen. That's how I would solve the
pollution problem. That is, the global pollution problem.
Quickly, the big bees' nests spilled off the balcony of my Cave and Lexcorpus raised
four satellite colonies on the roof of the building cutout, twelve stories below. They hung
their homes off the edge of my L-shaped slice of lawn 550feet above the city floor, to
resemble the cliffside outposts in the Himalayas.
The air wouldn't suddenly burp off its carbon. The seas wouldn't immediately gulp down
its remaining islands of plastic waste and disgorge them as hybrid coral reefs. The Arctic
glaciers wouldn't abruptly rebuild themselves and immobilize Norwegian and Russian
merchant ships trying to taking advantage of the newly cleared Northwest Passage.It wouldn't
happen all at once. But it would happen.
The Chickenshits had no idea that my bee-driven cleansing program was in progress.
The engineering phase of construction of the Ark was underway and the human

LEXCORP 83
 migration competition was moving along nicely. I had a structural engineer working out
the specifications of the Atlantic Flywheel and soon it would need only to be planted in the
Caribbean. We were golden.

84 MAGGIN
 VIII
BENJY AND HIS DAD

A TEENAGE KID NAMED BENJY MCFAUL SHOWED UP at his high school

science fair with a new species of bees he found up in the Adirondacks. He got an "A”
and a trophy and freaked out his biology class when a few of them started buzzing
around the classroom. It would have been fun to be there. That reporter-I think he was
the guy who said he went to high school with me-wrote a feature piece in the Sunday
Planet about Benjy. Two photos attached to the article and the description of the worker
bees' size clearly indicated that they were the species I created by crossing the giant
Nepalese bees with Italian and African strains. What was encouraging about this was
that Apis Mellifera Lexcorpus were robust enough to migrate out of Metropolis on their
own. The bad news was that the kid's dad was making noises about naming the new
species Apis Benjaminus, after his son. We couldn't have that.
“Mr.McFaul?" I said."I'm calling as a representative of Lexcorp. On behalf of our
company I'd like to congratulate your son Benjamin on isolating our new variety of
honeybees,"
""Our'new variety you say? And you are...?”
“Alexander," I said in my most officious tone.“Joseph Alexander. I'm a public
affairs officer here at Lexcorp."

LEXCORP 85
 "Mr. Alexander," he said. "How do you do? Did you want to speak with Benjie?
He's at school just now-"
"No actually, but that would be nice eventually. I'm calling to discuss the
classification of this strain."
“This honeybee strain? Apis Benjaminus?"
"Apis Mellifera Lexcorpus, actually. It was developed here at Lexcorp although we
haven't formally released them into the wild yet.”
"Apis Lexcorpus? Seriously? You're trying to tell me-"
“Yes. We developed this honeybee species in our biology labs and planned to
announce it in scientific journals."
"I'm afraid not, Mr.... um, Alexander was it?" McFaul said,“The genus and species
Apis Benjaminus has already been published in newspapers all over the northeast. I
expect you've missed your window of opportunity." McFaul was slipping into something
of an officious funk himself.
"I'm sure, but the Ithaca Journal and the Lake Placid News are hardly publications
of record for scientific innovations."
"And the Planet, right? A1l it has to be is published,"McFaul said. "I havea friend
who's a tenured professor of entomology at Cornell and he tells me-”
"Your friend is mistaken," I told him. “It needs to be in a respectable peer-reviewed
journal. And I don't believe Cornell has an entomology department."
"Biology then, He's an entomologist with the biology department. Look my Benjie
came across this big bee when we were on a canoe trip on Lake Cayuga and he did his
research.We did our research."
“You might want to check again, then. Congratulations on Benjamin's successin the
science fair. I'm sure it will look good on his college applications. We'll certainly be in
touch.”
After I hung up I had my artificial intelligence drone spit out a press release
announcing Apis Mellifera Lexcorpus and

86 MAGGIN
 I dashed copies off by email to three relevant journals:Science of the Total Environment,
Energy and Environmental Science, and Nature. Then I made some phone calls - as myself
this time - to ensure that those publications crowbarred my announcement intothe issues in
production. Retroactively if possible.
Stop the presses!
The McFauls wouldn't be a problem. In fact, I wwould put them on the payroll.

SO MUCH FOR THAT DAY'S ENTOMOLOGY session. I had a ceramic engineering

problem to solve. I was making something new out of the plastic alloy I melted together.I
tried rearranging the order in which I added one material or other.I swapped out substances
with small molecules for those with big complex ones -or vice versa. I'd crack off a corner
from the big slab I collected from Atlantis-that is,the garbage polymer island that was still
collecting in the North Atlantic. I'd melt it in a paraffin heater and stir in the latest binding
elixir I whipped up with my chemistry set.I'd pour it into a mold-a hubcap, a replaced sink,
the door of a defunct refrigerator, whatever durable junk I had lying around the heavy
materials lab. That room where I watched all this magic faIl flat would never qualify under
the Lexcorp Artistic Norms Authority, but there are advantages to being me. Next day, when
whatever molds I had poured set in place, I hefted a.38 caliber Glock and plugged the things.
The idea was for bullets to bounce off the new hybrid material, but nothing was working.
Sometimes my mold cracked up the middle, sometimes it shattered in a million pieces, other
times the bullet just left a hole and embedded in the wall behind it. Then I'd go to work
brewing up another bunch of chemical mixtures to try out. With the failure of the fifth or
sixth round of witch's brew I was sweaty and

LEXCORP 87
 frustrated and plopped backward on a beanbag chair on the floor behind me.
By now,most of my operations-including a makeshift lab on the penthouse floor-were in
the tower. The place was unacceptably dusty and untidy, but that would improve.Meanwhile,I
appropriated most of the space on the top three floors to my own use. It was shaping up.
I fell hard into the beanbag, landing softly, almost fell asleep in the middle of the day.
But instead, I had a waking dream about how beanbags work. The structure of the thing gave
way,folded around me, curved inward and upward the way space curves around a massive
object to make gravity.The beanbag emulated the texture of space itself. And I realized that
the material from which I wanted to construct my big Flywheel didn't need to have bullets
and clumsy whales bounce off. It needed to be a thing that gives way for solid objects but
always springs back. I didn't need to harden my fused plastic; I needed to make it malleable.
It needed to suck in anything that hit it and spit it out again like a fit of reverse peristalsis.
Besides a binding agent, I needed my chemical additive to have shape memory and infinite
flexibility. I needed a hardening solution that I could add to the molten glurp already in a
mold, that would suffuse itself through it in a colloidal suspension without stirring. Become
part of it. Fix it in place. Now that I knew what I was really looking for...
Back to work on the chemistry.
By the end of the following day, my indestructible bouncing construction material was
synthesized. I poured a ladleful of molten plastic in an aluminum pie plate, added a quarter
cup of chemical goop and let it set overnight. I also made a few more figures with big metal
cookie cutters that I found in a cabinet of the lunchroom off the floor's main corridor, I
poured out some cookie-shaped figures with hardening solution on a copper sheet and let
them set too. In the morning I shot a.38 round at the disc in the pie plate.

88 MAGGIN
 The bullet hit the surface of the disc, which stopped it,sucked it in a little, then
pressed back into shape. The bullet fell on the table below. The projectile was creased a
little unevenly off its point, but intact. My disc was unmarked.
I stuffed the Glock and the figures from the cookie cutters in the pockets of my lab
coat and ran down the corridor to an elevator.
I got out on the sixty-fourth floor, turned a corner and stuck my head through the
slider into B.J.'s office.“Senior staff.Conference room. Five minutes," I said.
In the conference room across the hall I pulled three cookie cutter objects-a bear, a
Spinosaurus and a thing that looked like a cross between a camel and an elephant-out of
the pocket of my lab coat and laid them out across the head of the table. Eleven of my
department chiefs, most of whose names I knew, came in and found seats around the
table.
"You guys might want to take cover," I said, pulling the pistol out of my pocket.
I tossed the Spinosaurus in the air and fired at it. Two of my executives ducked
under the table. B.J. and three others jumped in their seats but didn't move otherwise.
Two of them,one woman and one man, let out an undignified high-pitched noise. Three
people fell out of their chairs. The bullet made a dent in the target but it stopped short.
As the shape of the target re-formed, the bullet fell off it and rolled back toward me and
the Spinosaurus hit the far wall.
“Can anyone tell me what just happened?”
No one volunteered.
“Let's try it again.”
I took the unidentifiable cookie cutter shape and tossed it underhand up over the
table and took a shot at the top of its rise. Most of my execs made it under the table this
time,but I'm a pretty good shot. The bullet threw the thing back at a whiteboard across
the room and embedded it between the board and the frame that held it. After a moment,
the bullet dropped to the ground.

LEXCORP 89
 "Whoever's in charge of that sort of thing you'll want to replace this whiteboard," I said.
"Anyone see what happened that time? Maybe one more time?"
"Not necessary,Lex,”B.J.suggested.“You might have to just tell us."
"I call it the Lexcorp Objectively Indestructible Substance,"I saidI to the room at large.
"Of course you do,”"B.J.said.
"It's a highly durable construction material wwhose base is made of random plastic
objects I fished out of Atlantis.Incredibly cheap."
"Atlantis?" That was from the guy whose job it was to find a new whiteboard. I could
remember his name if I thought about it.
"Atlantis. The waste dump collecting in the North Atlantic. I melted it with a solution I
synthesized yesterday down on the seventh floor. You'll want to get the heavy materials room
wall repaired too. Eventually we're going to want to line the walls of all the labs with this
stuff,but that can wait."
The execs around the table picked up my bullet-resistant demonstration pieces and
passed them around. Some of them felt for the areas where the bullets hit them and tried
unsuccessfully to find the points of impact. I pulled the third figure, the bear cookie, out of
my pocket and passed that around too.
"We've got this stuff in unlimited supply," I said."It's replenishing faster than I can
harvest it. We're going to use this material to build a giant Flywheel, a little over two miles in
diameter. It's plastic and not subject to rusting or any other form of deterioration. We
assemble it underwater directly in the path of the Gulf Stream and connect it to a turbine that
generates enough hydro power that will meet the energy needs of the Earth as long as the
oceans have current. The plan is to overlap all the electric grids worldwide. I've done the hard
part. All the rest is engineering."

90 MAGGIN
 “Ocean life?”B.J.said.
“What about it?”
"Won't it be an obstruction? Slice through whole pods of whales? Defeat the
purpose of saving the world?"
“It's not like it's a propeller. It's a two-mile-high rotor moving through water. It
moves a lot slower than a whale. If they can't get out of the way they're too damn big."
That seemed to satisfy her. I looked around the room.Most of the faces wore
expressions of wonder,some of apprehension. Either was acceptable. They had all
long-since outgrown any kind of skepticism, or else I'd have taken them off the payroll.
“I require a detailed design and logistics plan a month from today and for
construction to begin in sixty days.Questions?" I didn't give them enough time to figure
out any inquiries or raise their hands. "See you around," I said and left the room...
...and came back five or six seconds later.“Also,come to think of it," I said,"we
ough to test this stuff in the field.I want you to make me half a dozen outfits out of
this.Coveralls. Like suits of armor." I looked around the room again.“Okay that'll be all.
For real this time.I think."
B.J. clapped her hands together once and said,“Okay group.I'll allocate tasks by
department before the end of the day.Get to work clearing your calendars."
My peasants.

WORLDS END ALL THE TIME, I suppose it's cause for some alarm, but it's no
novelty. These days the human community is trying to adapt its way out of a plastic bag.
A plastic garbage bag, to be exact and that's not at all figurative.Evolutionary progress
comes from diversity and Earth humans have almost none of that. We had an extinction
event about ninety or a hundred-thousand years ago-the encroachment of glaciers from
the north over Europe and

LEXCORP 91
 Asia, probably simultaneously with an asteroid impact in Smithtown Bay
separating Connecticut and Long Island. It created the Long Island Sound and kicked up
enough dust to cancel summer for at least four years running.The trees were the life
form that dealt with this best. Trees crept along all the ocean coasts prospecting for
sunlight by growing to prodigious heights. This created a perfect storm that wiped out
most of the humans on the planet, including at least six entire human species. Probably
more whose bones we haven't come across yet.
Homo Sapiens aren't the first natural phenomenon to bring disaster to life on Earth,
just the most efficient. Rapid plant growth was the most damaging factor that last time
around. Trees and ferns adapted to stretch hundreds of feet in the sky along coastal areas
and the banks of large rivers all over the world. Their root systems grew to
accommodate their mass and encroached on oceans and water tables.They sucked up
oxygen from the water, and their roots drove minerals into those streams from displaced
earth. The lost soil provided nutrients for sudden algal blooms that sent millions of
square miles of biomass to the surfaces along the shores. The algae, in tur,depleted
coastal air of oxygen. It was a slow-motion extinction, much more drawn out than we
are experiencing now. Humans native to Pacific islands -Homo Floresiensis and Homo
Denisova and probably others - starved or suffocated. Food shortages and competition
among tribes for decreasingly fertile land wiped out the others-Neanderthal,Homo
Erectus (who thrived for two million years, the longest of any of us), Homo Habilis and
at least a couaple others, all gone. The only survivors were a group too small at the time
to be a separate species with a name of its own. They were probably just a small family
in east Africa: Adam and Eve and their precarious brood. Us.
We're all descended from those few paleolithic survivors. One of the things that
threatens us now is our negligible genetic diversity. There's less inherent

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 differentiation in the entire human community than there is in a single band of
chimpanzees. Genetically,an American industrialist has more in common with a pygmy
from the Congo basin, than a monkey has with his uncle.
For the past two hundred years humans have reproduced at an alarming rate-not
because we don't know any better,but because we're drowning in our own gene
pool.Overpopulation is a biological imperative. We can't help ourselves. One large
country even made it a law for a long time that couples could have no more than one
child. They denied education, medicine, public accommodations,official recognition of
any kind, from any family's second (or third, or fourth) child. The policy was so
oppressive that the national government went from a system of simple central control
and substituted an outright brutal dictatorship to enforce it. As the economy became
more sophisticated and likewise the people, Medieval-minded autocrats held on to
political and social power far beyond their natural lifespans. Now these people's
occasional protests flash into violent uprisings. That won't last long. I've seen it happen
in bee colonies. Inevitably,the economy will crumble and the government will follow.
Something to look forward to.
To enrich this shallow human gene pool, to survive as a species, we need to mutate
- to adapt and create new variations on the face of our deoxyribonucleic code. We sound
the alarm over population growth, but growth continues inexorably.Certainly we will
enrich that gene pool in the course of things, but only if we survive.
We contend with other species-using the advantage that comes of our numbers - for
territory and food. We invent peculiar tools - clocks, elevators, languages- to maximize
our access to resources. We devise machinery and chemistries that pump out increasing
supplies of carbon to weigh down our air. We eat away at the land's fertility.We drive
scores of competing species to extinction every day.As we require more territory to
produce food and raise

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 livestock, our living space necessarily expands to diminish the area of that arable land.
We overreach into biological support systems. We wipe out rain forests and deplete our own
oxygen supply. The natural world objects to these shenanigans, so planetary upheavals and
severe weather patterns push back at us, as the Earth struggles to rehabilitate its existing
systems.
The planet we are currently despoiling has a particular talent for creating new life forms.
To our apparent amazement, Earth displays scant inclination to protect humanity or any other
of the millions of species that have vanished since the onset of the current rapid extinction
event.The instinct for preservation of the species is strong in my creative soul, and I have a
passion for unraveling puzzles.I have decided that my purpose is to provide the solution.
We all have at least one super-power.My best one is my imagination. I've got a couple
others, and they're not bad either.My super-powers are going to save the world.

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IX

LIFE,LIKE LAWYERS

THE ENGINEER THAT B.J. HIRED TO FIGURE out the nuts and bolts of the
Atlantic Flywheel was quite talented according to his résumé. I think his name was Phil
Periwinkle but B.J.kept telling me there was another "P" sound in his name.I don't know
where it went. Didn't matter, I called him Winky,when I didn't ca1l him Hey You. He
mostly worked out of the penthouse on Parkland Avenue. His third day on the job he
spent his lunch period idly testing my prototype jet engine. He rigged up a table fan and
a cone gizmo that drove a gulp of high-speed air into the device to get it started.It almost
worked, I hear.
I had really met Winky only a couple of times before I dragged him by the arm to
go with me to the bagel shop around the block. That's where I made him an accessory to
manslaughter.

NOBODY UNDERSTANDS DEOXYRIBONUCLEIC ACID like I do.I once

synthesized DNA with stuff out of my mom's kitchen and a little sulphuric acid I swiped
from the chem lab at the high school. I created artificial life before I turned seventeen.It
was an experiment that went south and made for a nasty memory, but I'm glad I did it
just the same. It's a good thing

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 I remembered the rough outlines of the formula when I first met the Alloy Guy or I
would have killed him for a second time.
The first time I killed him was in the bagel shop. But I fixed it.
Construction of the Lexcorp Tower was done,but I was still living and mostly
working out of the penthouse that Sunday morning. Six kids from my assembly crew
and I had been at it through the night, welding together the hull of a trackless cargo train
whose patent I had just filed. It wasn't altogether trackless. It was the lead car of a train
that laid down track in front of it as it chugged along its path. The idea was that it would
go wherever its engineer pointed it,slapping ten-foot lengths of track as it went over any
kind of surface,with a pair of multi-function rotary arms. It ran on solar or hydro and it
could haul outlandish amounts of freight. I can't think of any practical use for it on this
overbuilt planet, but it will be outstanding for construction of habitats on the Moon and
Mars.
Somewhere after dawn it occurred to me that I should probably be hungry and so
should the kids in my crew.I'd been strapped for a couple of hours on a boom nine feet
off the ground, in a director's chair with a polarized facemask and a welding torch. I
assigned myself the task of going to the bagel shop to pick up breakfast for the gang of
us. I don't usually go out in public without a guard, but it was early morning and my legs
really needed stretching.Besides,1could always draft an escort. I always take
precautions,especially when I go off in town. I grabbed a fisherman's cap riddled with
titanium hooks and a vest with twenty pockets,most of them hidden, and on my way out
I saw Whatsisname in the room next door with his head down on a lab table.
"Winky!" I yelled as I went by the door.“Come on with me,”
“Whuh?”

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 “Let's go out on the town. Hurry up - I'm at the elevator.”
He came running out as the elevator doors opened, I held it long enough to ask
him,“Dreaming?”
"Working on a mechanical problem,”he said.
“What time do you think it is?”
"I don't know. One or two AM?”
“Close enough,”I said.“Hungry?”
I took a long breath of fresh air on Parkland Avenue. It must have surprised Winky
to find out it was full daylight.Or maybe he didn't notice.
They know me at the bagel shop. There was only one other customer there at this
hour but the guy at the counter knew to take my order ahead of him.
“Two dozen bagels," I said,"and half a dozen bialys. A couple vats of cream cheese,
one plain and the other with chives. And half a pound of lox."
“Yes sir.”
"And salad stuff. Sliced onion, lettuce, tomato and a jar of capers. Don't forget the
capers."
“Bialys?” The voice that wasn't Winkie's behind me said.“What are bialys?”
“Some whitefish salad too. A small one," and I turned to see a guy with a UNC
Tarheels sweatshirt and a moustache like Mario Procaccino. "Flat round rolls and a little
onion and poppy seeds smeared where a hole should be. You ever hear of a town called
Bialystok,Poland?"
“Poland? Yeah.”
"So this bakerfrom Bialystok migrated here sometime around nineteen twenty and
he made these rolls back home.He started selling them here and named them after his
home town. Big hit. Now if you go to Bialystok the only place you can get a bialy is at a
place called the Metro Deli." I reached for a bag the counter guy was handing me. "Here
have a bite," I said and saw the counter guy's eyes go wide.

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 I spun back to the moustache guy as I slapped my right hand on my vest just under
my rib cage and a crack of electrical energy flew at him and shocked a pistol out of his
hand.
I don't know what a certain loser class of wannabe crime kingpins have against me
but every few months, it seems,one of them tries to take me out. It's like this Kung Fu
grand master I met in Hong Kong a few years back. Master Chan was the guy who could
come out on top in any context for most of his life. He was ninety-two for heaven's
sakes,and kids were still trying to take a shortcut to anace rep by invading his space. Just
two weeks before I met him,some twentysomething Tae Kwon Do punk who was a few
seats away from Master Chan at some banquet, reached across the table as if to grab a
dish. Instead, this kid twisted left to fling two extended fingers of his right hand hard at
Master Chan's eyes. He wanted to earn the dubious honor of his friends by blinding the
old Master.
Instead,Chan caught the two fingers with the stiff of his vertical right hand over his
nose and forehead. With his left,Chan twvisted and snapped off the offender's hand like
a chicken leg. He placed the disconnected appendage on the table beside him and
continued his meal.
I met CChan two weeks after this happened, but I would have liked to see it.
Instead,I had a quiet conversation with Master Chan about a martial maneuver called
Dim Mak. It was an expensive conversation. More about that later.
I thought of the unfortunate young one-handed martial artist when I hit the gadget
in my inner jacket pocket and it shocked the gun out of the hand of the guy behind me.
It's a clever device. It is effective only against dense objects like guns,so I was right to
activate it as soon as I saw the counter man's eyes grow alarmed. The gadget detects any
heavy concentration of matter within twelve or fifteen feet and microwaves a strong
electrical shock at it. Things like engine blocks or tire irons or Oscar statues or guns. If
someone

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 holds a slab of iron ore or a pistol anywhere near me he's going to get a shock to his
hand faster than I can turn around.
Unfortunately for this guy, though, where Master Chan's assailant lost only a hand,
the pest with the handgun got himself killed. Clumsiness, most likely. He dropped the
gun,stumbled back hard into a big Coke machine against the wall and cracked his skull
open on the corner of the thing.
He was still a problem.
Maybe a quart of blood accumulated in a puddle around this guy's head on the floor
while I rushed at the shop door to lock it and pull down the shade. By the time I got the
phone out of my pocket the blood stopped flowing. He was gone.
“Cleanup job at the bagel shop," I told my phone. And to the counter man who
huddled in a corner wondering what to do I said,"Have you had breakfast yet?”
He shook his head.
"Not you," I said to the phone."Line a minivan in plastic and bring it around back
with a body bag. Lots of cleaning materials. And a car for me and Periwinkle. Get the
package to the sterile room on the fifteenth floor. And why aren't you here yet?" As two
burly guys from my custodial crew came into the shop through the kitchen door.
I slipped the counter guy a hundred-dollar bill and told him to treat himself to
whatever he wanted.I suggested decaf and told Winky to stand out front for an hour or
so and give out bags of bagels to whatever potential customers came by until my guys
let him know they were done. If any police stroll up the street, I told him, give them an
extra bag to take home and smile until they go on their way.
I don't think any police showed up and I'm not sure Winky ever figured out what
had happened. But he did his job just fine.

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 THE UNIVERSE IS CRAWLING with life. DNA, the fundamental chemical
component of biology pretty much everywhere-is inevitable. Once it forms in a place,even
just one molecule of the stuff, there's no stopping it. It is possible for a contained system of
matter in the Universe to exist without DNA,but once a DNA molecule forms, there will
never be no DNA in that place again.
Lawyers are like that. When I was a teenager, for about a minute and a half, I thought it
might be a good idea to go to law school. Then I read in Time magazine that there would be a
glut of lawyers in the coming generation, that there might not be enough jobs for the lawyers
we had. By the time I was old enough to have completed law school-and thank whatever gods
may be that I didn't-lawyers had invented dozens of new functions and legal actions to keep
their proliferating race awash in profit for practically ever. It's conceivable for there to be a
society without lawyers. But once lawyers appear somewhere it's damn near impossible to get
rid of them.
DNA takes hold with the same attitude. Like lawyers,DNA reproduces autonomically.
Anywhere particles of anything at all float in space or bob in liquid or get kicked around on a
surface, once these particles tumble into a pattern that suggests that of a DNA molecule, it
suddenly hangs together and makes more DNA molecules. That's all it knows how to do, so it
reproduces constantly, unceasingly,until the end of time, and it mutates whenever necessity or
convenience dictates. Without a doubt, life is a more prevalent condition across the Universe
than we once thought possible. WWhen life takes hold anywhere, it forces its DNA to adapt
into whatever shapes and sizes might be appropriate for the environment it occupies, and it
never gives out, Never gives in. Just changes its mind-often. I can demonstrate this without
even going offworld. My proof is the octopus,

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 At the beginning of the 19 century, Earth scientists grouped octopus into the
cephalopod class of sea life,along with squid and nautilus. They decided this, as far as I
can tell, on the basis of what it looks like. Internally, octopus anatomy isn't similar in the
least to that of a squid - or anything else. Stay with me here; this is a little nerdy.Once
we mapped the octopus genome, we found that the only things they had in common with
cephalopods were multiple limbs and a prominent head. Their brains are outsized and of
a structure completely different from those of any other animal. In fact, there are
independent brain structures in all eight of the creature's tentacles, each one only
vaguely connected with the stem in the head or with the other seven brains. Even though
their genetic structure is built on a configuration of DNA molecules - same as ours, and
whales', and eucalyptus trees' and Barsoomians' and Tau Cetians'-their genes and
component chromosomes built out of that DNA are unrelated to those of any other
species we know. Unlike any other plant or animal life form on Earth,the base element
of their blood and other fluids is not carbon,but copper. We're more closely related to a
staphylococcus bacterium than we are to an octopus. They're no more a cephalopod than
your grandmother is a truck,even if she looks like one. Octopus are alien to this planet.
Same as we are. Maybe we'll come back to that too.
The biochemists who mapped the octopus genome,about ten yearsinto the
twenty-first century, thought it was a joke when they said that octopus were
extraterrestrial.Then they went about publishinglearned journal articles-rationales, really
- about the unlinking of chromosomes during evolution, gene-jumping to create unique
characteristics, novel proteins that change their functions like flipping a switch, all sorts
of horseshit. And when they ran out of wackadoodle contrivances - that is, ran out of
imagination-they dismissed out of hand the simplest, most obvious explanation. They
made a joke out of their own

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 discovery and kept making up complicated nonsense to explain it away. The octopus is
manifestly an extraterrestrial life form whosc ancestors somehow got stranded on Earth.If
you climinate the impossible, what's left, no matter how unlikely, is the truth. Luthor's Law. (I
know some crackpot claimed to have said that first, but I stole it fair and square.)
One big steaming load of evidence that DNA is universal is the fact that for all their
alienness, octopus are made of it. Just like us.

I SLOUCHED IN THE BACK SEAT of the car that picked me up in the alley behind
the bagel shop and punched in a number on my cell.
A woman's voice answered,"Fillmore Hill Hospital,how can I direct you?"
"I dialed Dr. Hardishaw's personal cell number,"I said."Why have I got an operator?"
"I'm sory, Dr. Hardishaw is in surgery. He probably forwarded his phones."
"Probably? You think? What does that mean?”
"I can redirect you to his medical assistant."
"No don't-" but she was gone. I hate that.
The next voice said,“Cardiopulmonary department,Dr.Hardishaw's line."
"Tell Hardishaw his brother-in-law called. How long will this surgery take?" I don't
know whether he had a brother-in-law but he'd know who I was.
The medical assistant wasn't any help. I knew who would be.
A few years earlier I had built a rooftop helipad for Fillmore Hill Hospital and endowed
a new pediatric wing.They offered to rename the place after me but I told Dr.Itami,the
medical director, that I didn't think it would do much for their business. I'm not much of a
philanthropist.The real reason I spent the money was to make sure I had a

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 doctor whenever I needed one. I'm a pretty healthy guy, but there are other reasons
I need a doctor on call. I told Itami I needed Hardishaw ASAP and he said no problem.
When I got to the fifteenth floor of the Fillmore Hotel,my would-be assaulter lay on
a gurneyunder an operating room lamp, dead as a boot. The incident in the bagel shop
was twelve minutes ago. One of my guys had just put an I-V on a stand next to the body
and was about to shove the needle in his arm as I walked in.
“Hey!”I said. “Back off!" He backed off.“Last thing I need is for his blood to start
flowing again."
Hardishaw from the hospital came running up the hall from the elevator as I put on
a pair of latex gloves. He was panting like a racehorse.
"You need to get more cardio, doc," I told him.
“I was in the middle of repairing a blown aorta. What's the emergency?”
“Itami took over for you?”
“The only one I would've trusted," he said.“But you didn't give me much choice."
“Scrub up in the corner. I've got another patient for you.”

I WAS SIXTEEN WHEN I CREATED LIFE in my lab. It was destroyed in an

accident and I've never tried to do it again.It was not that complicated. What I did was
synthesize a DNA molecule that cooperated enough to begin to reproduce.
For about a year I lived in the same small town where the Alien sometimes showed
up. It was a quaint little place.Its main export was its youth. A year there was all I could
handle. For a short time the Alien and I were friends. Ten minutes,maybe. He helped me
outfit a lab in a big old tool shed on my parents' property. My Cave, I called it.

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 I distilled my homemade DNA with an eyedropper in a two hundred milliliter glass flask
before my mess of chemicals was big enough to see. At first it was just a speck in a bath of
warm water. I sat watching it for a long time.Occasionally a tiny bubble would show up and
let me know something was going on in there. But mostly it looked like it wasn't doing much
of anything. Eventually I clamped it to a stand and went to bed.
The next morning it filled the body of the flask and it was starting to squeeze up into the
neck of the thing. It was a purplish gray wad of shapeless plasma. I found a big vat in my
mom's kitchen, cleaned it out with bleach and water and I decanted my undefined life form
into the vat.
It kept growing. It was shapeless, but it was coherent-a lot like an octopus, in fact. It had
no bloodstream,no respiration, no nervous system - not yet. It grew exponentially anyway. It
reached out blindly in random directions from its vat with pseudopods. It was trying to figure
out what it was, same as the rest of us. I suspectit had the same sort of consciousness a fetus
has. That is, none.But it already existed independent of any birthing apparatus.Independent of
me. Its volume got to be about twice that of the big kitchen pot it sat in. I watched it grow,
prodded it,talked to it well into the afternoon. That must have been when the fire broke out.
I was excited beyond my capacity, I think, flailing around like a crazy kid, imitating my
creation's random motions. I touched it, shined a light on it, tried to figure out if it was
responding. I have no idea what caused the fire,but the wooden workbench behind me was
involved in flames before I noticed.
I went for the fire extinguisher in a corner of the room.It was an old-fashioned
ammonium phosphate cylinder, the type they used to keep in little shelves inset in the
hallway walls of public buildings. I probably swiped it from the bigh school.You had to turn
these things upside down so a cup of

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 ammonia inside tumbled over to make the chemicals expand and blow out the hose
in an extended belch. Once the chemicals combine you need to let it empty out before
you can let go of it. I grabbed for it just as a big gust of wind came through a shattering
window and knocked me and the extinguisher against the wall. The thing started
spraying its chemical mess all over the place. All over the fire, all over the lab, all over
my new creation that I hadn't even gotten around to naming yet.
It was the Alien. He was blowing out the fire. Saving me if you ask him, the clumsy
dolt. He was a kid then,younger than I was, he seemed. No sense of decorum or
propriety.Self-indulgent. Thoughtless about consequences.A textbook case ofarrested
development, just like he is now.There were all sorts of chemicals and airborne shit in
the ruined lab. That was when my hair started falling out. All of it,eventually. I haven't
even been able to grow eyebrows since then. And as an afterthought, he killed my
artificial life. Probably a few molecules of its remains fell on the ground. Probably it'll
start to grow again someday. I'm not holding my breath.
The Alien hung around, waiting for me to thank him I guess. I don't remember what
I told him, but he didn't hang around for long.

HE'S NOT AS BIG A DEAL as you think he is.

He's not even as big a deal as he thinks he is.
Listen...

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 X
BoGSoP

LIFE IS EVERYWHERE. Not just on planets, but everywhere.There's this Big

Giant Space Puddle an astronomer found about twelve-and-a-half billion light-years
beyond Vega, in roughly the same dlirection. It's the brightest object we know of in the
Universe. It's a coherent cloud of water vapor 140-trillion times the volume of all the
oceans of the Earth, at whose center is a black hole. The black hole pounds together
oxygen and hydrogen atoms at an alarming rate, tossing them out into the cloud on
waves of Hawking radiation and building deeps upon deeps of pure water. This monster
has the astronomical designation of APM 08279+5255 and there's no traditional Greek
or Latin name assigned to it yet.I call it the Big Giant Space Puddle. Vorvorodis in Greek.
Or BoGSoP for short.
If we can detect BoGSoP twelve-and-a-half billion light-years out, and the Big
Bang was just thirteen-point-eight billion years ago, that puts it near the edge of what we
perceive as the far end of the visible Universe. But that isn't the far end of the Universe
any more. The Universe has continued to expand-to build more space like honeybees
build comb -and BoGSoP could be thirty billion or a hundred billion or a trillion
light-years away by now. Still growing.

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 What if, somewhere in the course of the twelve-and-a-half billion years since the
last detectable trace of its light reached us, a collection of water vapor molecules
arranged themselves in the configuration of a single molecule of DNA? It's likely. It's
happened at least twice,maybe more,right here on this little Earth-not even counting the
time I did it-and the rock we're on is only a little over three billion years old. It's not just
likely to have happened in the BoGSoP; it's incredibly unlikely that it hasn't. Say when
BoGSoP was maybe a billion years old it got close to doing it too. Some configuration
of water molecules drifted into place just by chance, but there was something out of
place.What if a DMP-12 monomer was where a beta-sheet should have been and there
was a random carboniferous dust particle blocking the electrostatic potential of the
phosphate backbone of the thing and all the particles continued to dissipate among each
other without a binding force?
S'matter,you don't speak English?
But then what if a couple of hundred thousand years later in a remote corner of the
Puddle it came almost that close again? This time where the second hydrogen proton of
a certain atom should have spun west it spun at a little angle northeast instead and hit a
thing that might have doubled for an oxygen neutron-which wasn't such a big deal-but at
the same micro-moment there's no negative silicon electron but a positron instead-it
could happen!-and it fails to compose a coherent helix to hold it all together and the
moment passes. So close.
It's a delicate, precise process. That's why it takes so long.
After, let's say, three-and-a-quarter billion years,everything drifts into place. Every
particle occupies the space it should, relative to every other particle. And at once
everything rotates at the correct angle and it's all perfect for the tiniest fragment of an
instant. And in that fragment of time, it makes sense to itself and it all clicks into
place.Only

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 a single molecule's worth, but it binds. And from that mini-micro-moment when it locked in,
it inevitably...inevitably it started to reproduce.
When a mess of stuff becomes deoxyribonucleic acid,it becomes a mess of endlessly
reproductive stuff.
When a reproductive thing reproduces,it evolves and grows a form.
Form moves to reflex.
Reflex moves to intention.
Intention moves to awareness.
Awareness moves to self-consciousness.
Self-consciousness moves to intelligence.
Intelligence evolves to super-consciousness.
Super-consciousness charts its own course.
Even I don't know what happens after that. But whatever it is, it has certainly happened many
times across this immense disorderly Universe.
It is all demonstrably possible, given infinite resources over infinite time. Across an expanse
of twelve-and-a-half billion years, everything that's possible is inevitable.Something like the
synthesis of a super-human is the least of it.
If we, scurrying over the surface of a speck of rock,found BoGSoP in a pinpoint of sky,how
many more comparable objects must there be out there in a trillion quadrillion other pinpoints?
How many living macro-organisms are there in the uncountable parsecs that the Universe has
harvested through expanding space?
They're aware. All the BoGSoPs and whatever other undiscovered things are out there, are
aware of one another.Certainly they're aware of us if they care to be. There are things out there -
things we can see - that are more profoundly alive than we are.
Everything that's possible is inevitable. I don't think anyone said that before. I'm going to take
credit for that one too.

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 HOW, THEN, DOES LIFE COMMUNICATE itself across the Universe? Don't
strain your brain. The answer is that it travels as spores, mostly. Spores are the little
packets of life -as potent as a fusion reaction; less specialized than sperm cells-that
proliferate on the undersides of mushrooms, fern fronds, some bacteria and other simple
organisms that reproduce asexually. A spore is a single or a paired cell that,when it
separates from its primary, can go great distances carrying the genetic formula of that
species. In many documented cases, spores have traveled to the outer edge of Earth's
atmosphere. We inhale and exhale them as we speak and sleep, and we are among their
many means of locomotion.
Let's say there's a puffball that carries spores growing among the weeds at the edge
of a launchpad at Kennedy Space Center. The countless spores on the puffball get swept
up in the backwash of a rocket launch. Most of them are incinerated, but maybe a couple
of them - or ten, or a hundred-get enough lift to stream up to the edge of space.Given
any significant momentum at all, there's nothing to stop a spore from continuing to
travel beyond the orbit of this truculent Earth and set out on a journey among the
stars,even amid the galaxies. There's no significant time constraint. The chemical
composition of the spore can conceivably remain intact in an absolute vacuum.
Most of space is emptier of intrusive matter than most humans can imagine. If all
the universe sized down to the volume of two standard bathtubs, then all the matter the
Universe contained would amount to one molecule. Toss that spore into that tub and the
chance of its intersecting that molecule in your lifetime is nil-but if it continued to float
around and you could wait long enough, eventually that spore and that molecule would
find one another. There are enough entire galaxies abroad so that you could name one
after every human who's ever lived. The thirteen-point-

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 eight-billion-year age of the Universe is enough time for anything to happen.
Our puffball doesn't necessarily need a rocket's red glare to yank it up to space. A
volcanic eruption or a groundquake... a sneeze from the correct angle could be enough. Earth
is peppered with meteorites and particles of other worlds. There is no reason to suppose all
space isn't awash in rogue spores. A great spore tide hauls between here and Andromeda and
to galaxies yet unnamed. Most of the dark matter, whose nature perplexes Earthstuck
astrophysicists, could well be prodigious vessels of life codes traveling off to who-is-to-say.
These interstellar spores aren't necessarily from Earth. In fact,it isn't likely that many are.
They could be from anywhere a spore has ever set sail and spilled the riddles of its life
patterns to reproduce,to evolve in as much complexity asit can spew and resume the cycle.
Whatever you're doing now, do this. Get up from your chair or your bed or your library
carrel or your pup tent and flashlight or wherever. Get up and look at the sky, day or night or
somewhere in between. If you can see stars, look for Vega, then look the littlest bit to its right.
That's where BoGSop roosts, an unfathomable distance away. Look across the heavens,lousy
with life.Bow deeply at your waist - if you are of a species that has a waist. And conjure up
some wonder.

110
MAGGIN
 XI
ALLOY GUY

"THIS MAN IS DEAD,” DR. HARDISHAW SAID as he came up beside me in the

sterile room of the Fillmore Hotel on Parkland Avenue.
"Very good. Is that why they let you graduate med school with a degree?" I wanted
to know.“Hand me the number ten blade please."
He did.
“Cracked his skull open on a soda machine half an hour ago," I said. "Made an
awful mess. Expired in under a minute."
"So what are you doing in his carotid artery then?”
“Getting a blood sample."
"In that case, you want to hold your pinky and ring finger further apart on that
scalpel handle."
"That's why you're here," and I slapped the blade in his gloved palm and stepped
back.
"Planning on an autopsy?" as the doc took a glass slide from me and pressed it
against the stagnant artery to yield a drop of blood.
"Not necessary. I was at the scene.He was startled by an electrical shock to his
lower right arm and jumped back to injure himself fatally."
"The source of the electrical shock was where?”

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 "Do you want that for the police report?"
“Umm...”
"It appeared spontaneously," I said. "Out of the sky.Shazam!”
The blood in his veins and arteries did not flow at all. It was inert and soon rigor mortis
would begin. I directed Hardishaw to take fresh blood samples from a dozen points in the
body and I labeled the slides.
“Did he have relations?”
“Like sex or...”
"Family.Did he have family?”
"I wouldn't know."
“Do you know anything about-”
"We're speaking the language of blood,”I told the good doctor.“Blood is a
communications medium,yes?”
"How do you mean?”
"I mean it carries chemical markers to the various organs and lets them know how much
of what secretions to produce and where, to function at whatever level and maintain a proper
chemical balance.Yes?”
"That's a good way of putting it,actually." It was like I was telling the learned Hardishaw
something new. Maybe I was.
"I just need to know at what level certain chemicals were in the different regions of the
body at the time of death,and what the blood was saying to the different organs."
"Okay,”"he hesitated, stood and thought for a moment.
"Hey move it, huh? I don't want him to clot."
"We don't know that language, y'know.That's why we do chemistry tests and exploratory
surgery."
"Well won't it be nice when you don't have to dig around in people's innards and shit
anymore?”
"You're trying to decode Bloodspeak?Is that it?”
"It's a language, right? Like Nepali or Xhosa or English.”
“Yes but-”

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 "Or JavaScript. Just draw the blood. Inner thigh next.Either one. You can write the
academic paper when I nail this down. Get all the footnotes right and you'll get a Nobel
in medicine or linguistics or something. Is there a Nobel for linguistics? Maybe I'll
endow one.”

MY FIRST INSPIRATION WHEN IT CAME TO REBUILDING this guy was

what to make his chassis out of. By the time we were ready to breathe some life back in
him his outer skin looked like a disgusting brown, bloody lump. Once I analyzed the
body fluids I had to decode this guy's DNA,then Hardishaw and I modeled his
musculature and made him some new bones and tendons. I would make the bones and
outer skin from my Lexcorp Objectively Indestructible Substance. We poured his organs
into molds we fashioned in wet sand. We let it all dry and harden and we put him back
together from the inside out. When people saw him later on and saw how bullets
bounced off him like rubber balls they decided that he was a metal man. They were
wrong,though.He was made of the plastic refuse from their detergent packaging and
polystyrene egg cartons.
On the second day after we reassembled him, I had a few of my roughnecks move
him downtown to the heavy materials lab in the Lexcorp Tower. I figured he would be
up and running in no time. Turned out he was up shortly, but then he was down again
after about half an hour. No matter how we tweaked the systems that transmitted
movement impulses we couldn't keep him on his feet for more than forty-five minutes at
best. We tried plugging him in. We tried microwaving him supplemental energy from an
electric generator, then from an electric car that I winched up the outside of the building
to the seventh floor lab. None of it made a difference. The only thing that boosted him
was a chunk of radium that Hardishaw plugged into an artificial nerve ending connected
to his ersatz heart. He got up and

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 sort of walked,leaning against whatever wall was nearby as he went. That was good
for two hours and thirty-three minutes-a record so far-and he collapsed on the hallway
floor. But Hardishaw convinced me we were onto something.
We tried more isotopes of radium, whatever we could get our hands on, then three
isotopes of uranium. We tried more elements. Plutonium. Curium. A bunch of the
trans-uraniums. Thomas Edison used to say that an inventor's most useful tool is a pile
of junk. I had to send employees all over town looking for radioactive samples. My pile
of junk cost me thirty-two thousand bucks, mostly in black market materials. I don't
think Edison ever knew what thirty-two thousand dollars looked like.
It seemed the slowest decaying isotopes of whatever we tried worked for the
longest period of time. After more than a week of this it occurred to me to plug the lump
of element-99 into him-the chunk of green meteorite that I carried around in my pocket.
That really turned him on. I should have thought of it sooner.
He still moved in a herky-jerky manner at first, like a robot from a fifties sci-fi
movie. But once he was stable for two or three hours his gait smoothed out. He moved
almost like a human being. He was a human being,kind of.
At some point I could swear he said "Hi" to me. His voice sounded like a bathroom
drain. I have no idea whether he figured out who I was, and I'd rather he didn't for the
moment. So I started asking him questions.
What's your name?
What's your mother's name?
What planet do you live on?
Who's the president?
Mostly he didn't respond or know the answers to these questions. At some point he
said he thought Herbert Hoover was president. I have no idea where that came from, but
it was closer than most of his answers. At some point

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 Hardishaw asked me when he could write this all up for an anatomy journal.
The Alloy Guy said,"Not 'til Dad says.”
Evidently I was Dad. I thought this was a good answer and I told Hardishaw so.
"Follow me,"I said.
Both of them, the doc and the Alloy Guy, came with me to the elevator, then up to
the sixty-fifth floor.

AT THE END OF A STERILE-LOOKING RECEPTION area was the door to my

Cave. My private space was anything but sterile.Inside,the Alloy Guy leaned against an
empty strip of wwall and Hardishaw sat in a swivel chair by my workbench.
"What is this place?" the doc wanted to know.
"My inner sanctum," I said. “Make yourself comfortable.
After his last comfortable moment Dr. Hardishaw said,“There are bees in here.”
"Only a few. They live out on the balcony mostly."
“I'm allergic to bees."
“Only if they sting you.Just sit still.”
"I can't sit still around bees."
"Well there's plenty of epinephrine and antihistamines in that fridge over there.
Here," I handed him an empty writing pad.“Take notes.”
“For what?”
“For your journal article."
“Really?”
"Eventually, Now sit still. The bunk room is through that door and up the spiral
stairs. There are restrooms all over the place. This might take a few days."
"Yowie that bee is huge!" he said.
“The Alloy guy said,“Yowie."
"Is that a queen?”

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 "No she's just a regular worker bee," I said.“Apis Mellifera Lexcorpus. You'd be
really impressed if you met her mama."
“I think I want to check out your bunkroom."
"Yeah,"I said.“Meanwhile I'll see if I can persuade any flying things in here to take
their act elsewhere. Want me to send for anything from the hospital? Underwear?
Pajamas?"
"A few pairs of Latex gloves would be helpful."
"I've got plenty of those. Second drawer of the cabinet by the staircase. And here." I
tossed him an EpiPen from the little refrigerator as he left the room. He fumbled it and it
clattered but the cap stayed on the point. It would still be fine,probably.
Hardishaw closed the door behind him and the Alloy Guy said,"Apis Mellifera
Lexcorpus."
“Impressive," I told him.
"Thanks Dad,"he said.
He would be fine too.

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 XII
3-D TV

ABOUT TWO MONTHS BEFORE that treetop meeting in Connecticut I needed to

take a sample of the more docile highland honeybees in Kenya, so I took a trip. But in
Nairobi I heard about a clique of a dozen or more Maasai kids going through a graduate
level engineering program while they were still in their teens. They cobbled together a
hybrid online curriculum from engineering classes at Oxford, the Sorbonne and MIT.
I'm always looking for new talent to corrupt.Problem was the only way to get from
Nairobi to the settlement where this crop of prodigies studied was on foot.Fortunately,I
had feet.
I had made life-like, three-dimensional holograms before. The process involved six
cameras working simultaneously, each without letting the other five into frame,and a
tank of editing. With all that, it was incomplete.It had blind spots. If you looked at an
image from above, for example, it had enough gaps to make it unrecognizable. It worked
well enough for a few specific purposes, but it was inelegant. Now I solved that problem.
I developed a single camera that saw around corners.
To trek into the bush you need to hire a guide who knows the countryside well
-usually a native with some education but who grew up outside the city. Your guide

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 would get together a crew of bearers - tough wiry guys whose job it was to carry
your baggage, weapons, cooking and foraging equipment-and off you'd go. You were on
foot for a week or more looking at zebras, wildebeests,big cats and, if you were lucky,
an elephant herd or two. The cats generally didn't bother with humans. We are
notoriously bitter-tasting, according to Osita my guide. Osita never told me how he
knew this and that was disquieting. As for hippopotamus, though,you needed to give that
critter a wide berth.Despite their vegetarian diet they are sensory deprived -dim eyesight
and poor hearing - so they behave like a person with encroaching dementia. At the
slightest movement or unexpected sound, they become enraged and stomp on anything
that could possibly be a threat.Osita's crew and I traveled on foot from one common
water hole to the next,taking advantage of the inhabitants' disinclination to be aggressive
toward one another while they used this common resource.
On our fourth day out Osita said,“We're in luck.The herd is on the move."
"The herd? What herd?" I wanted to know.
“Oryx,”he said.“That way.”
I looked off in the direction he pointed and all I saw was savannah. Brown grass
and horizon. I grunted. I was sweating like a water bottle in the Sun and wasn't much in
the mood for conversation. Besides, oryx in the wild had been extinct for years. There
were a few in zoosand labs,but certainly not on the Serengeti. I supposed he was pulling
my aching leg-maybe both of them. Osita had an opaque sense of humor,
Then,not half-an-hour after he brought it up, our bearers started to collect in a
bunch and they shoved me along with them behind an outcropping of big roots and a
cluster of acacia trees. I was about to ask what we were doing but then over the horizon
came a dust cloud that contained a hundred or more scimitar oryx, rumbling in our
direction. The

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 horizon was a good fifteen miles distant and it took them more than an hour to
reach us. But there was no mistaking them,each with a pair of steepled horns on their
heads like exclamation marks.
"Extinct!" I hollered, struggling to be heard over the hoofbeats as they went
by."They're extinct!"
“Not here," Osita said and laughed from deep in his chest.
"What's next? A stampede of triceratops?"
“Don't be surprised.”
“How did you know they were there?”
“Saw them,"he said.“An hour ago when I told you they were comning,"and he
continued to laugh unaccountably for most of the rest of the day.
“You saw them where?”
“There,”Osita said and hooked his hand forward and down in the direction of the
horizon.“I see the watering hole is over there," he pointed in another direction at what
appeared to be nothing. I was skeptical but I believed him despite myself. That was day
four.
By the sixth day I was less sore and I was seeing things too. A family of a dozen or
more giraffes lounged in a patch of palms and lemon grass to the west. There were water
buffalo to the southeast. Rhinos, meerkats and baboons collected around a water hole to
the southwest, the direction we were walking. To the east was a herd of elephants and I
could swear some of them were staring at me. It was difficult, ultimately immaterial, for
me to distinguish between what I was actually looking at and what I simply knew was
there.
We were on foot for eleven days and I had a meeting eighteen miles south of
Mugumu at the edge of the Serengeti in Tanzania. That was where I left Osita and his
crew and I picked up my reservation at the Ingonyama Lodge. The lodge is unseemly
civilized,aside a big pool where they serve the best coffee I have ever tasted. I stayed in
a stand-

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 alone cabin a few yards from the main building that held reception and a restaurant. First
thing in the morning, when I would have expected to hear from housekeeping, there was a
knock on the door and I said, "Come on in,Gorongo."
There was no way I should have known Gorongo was at the door. He was four hours
early for our appointment, but there he was. Gorongo was nominally the mayor of Mugumu,
but more significantly he was a chieftain of the local Maasai band. He showed up in a white
shirt and tie and wrapped in a blue and red checked robe that suggested a suit jacket except fo
the fact that it left his legs uncovered from mid-thighs down to his sandals. We went to sit by
the pool where I bought him breakfast and I had my fourth cup of coffee of the morning.
This meeting was the reason I had trekked to Tanzania.Ostensibly I was here to speak
with him about setting up an internship program with the technical institute in town and
eventually hiring a handful of young Maasai engineering students for my future projects. This
“technical institute,"I learned, was a few straw huts with a dozen late model personal
computers and the fastest wi-fi connection south of Cairo.But all I could think about was my
newfound ability to see around corners and through apparent barriers.
"See around corners?" Gorongo wanted to know.“How do you mean?”
"The way I knew it was you at the door. This morning.My cabin door."
"I knew it was you inside as well," Gorongo said.
"You were supposed to know. Reception sent you,right? But I had no way to know it
was you when you showed up so early,"
"The lobby was empty. No one told me what cabin you were in or what you looked like.
Yet I knew you would be a hairless man in a lounging robe. I know you wore sitting at a desk
with a laptop computer before you came to greet me,and then I recognized you. Is that odd,
do you think?"

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 “Isn't it?”
"Look at the vista here," he said and gestured out in the distance. There was only
open space-grassy empty land for miles,occasional stands of vegetation, streams of
clouds and air of all the colors of the rainbow."The capacity you speak of is necessary
here in the bush. What do you see there?”He pointed at nothing in the distance.
"Some trees anda patch of bluish grass, a mountain in -”and then I said,"A family
of sleeping lions in the root system of two fallen trees." They were there,but many miles
away."Fourcubs and two adults. The mature female is just waking up. She means to go
out hunting."
"She does,"he said."And how do you know what she means to do?”
“She...”I was about to say she said so. But who would she have told?
"This Metropolis where you live," Gorongo said “there are a great many people
there,yes?”
“Yes.Millions.”
“I never thought to have need of a number so large.These people are all in one
place?"
“Yes.Like a beehive.Only more of them."
"When I go to the city," Gorongo said,"to Dar es Salaam or Nairobi, I am
surrounded by crowds of men and women and sometimes I lose my sight. When I return
home my sons and my wives must keep watch over me for some days until I can see
again."
I was fascinated. Excited. I had to understand this. At first I thought it was some
supernatural capacity, something in the soil or the air of Africa that manifested when
there were few people around to dilute the magic. But it wasn't magic. It was much more
interesting than that. It was science.

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 CONVENTIONAL HOLOGRAMS ARE IMAGES of projected light.They're imperfect.
Depending on from what angle you look at them, they're distorted. The edges of the shapes
vanish,bleed into each other like color ink on cheap pulp. My full-form video does something else
altogether. It's based not on light projection but on the images you can see around corners and over
the horizon in the bush. Pictures appear not in the air or on any medium, but rather they imprint
directly into a little overworked squiggle in the human brain called the hippocampus. People who
normally wear thick-lensed glasses and even most blind people will be able to “see"my 3-D
television as clealy as a 25-year-old test pilot can see a UFO.
The hippocampus is buried deep in the amygdala,cushioned at the back underside of the
neocortex. It's what made it possible for ancient homo sapiens to hunt and gather,to develop
language, to collaborate on complex plans,eventually to dominate their environment. Meanwhile
Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon and Homo Erectus, with larger brains but less complex language
systems, all went the way of the mastodon. The hippocamnpus governs spatial perception, the
flight-or-fight response and long-term memory. The hippocampus is what made inventions
possible, as well as history. In the structure of ourbrains are the headwaters of civilization. That's
what I pitched to Roxie and Zach at that Chickenshits meeting in the treehouse in Connecticut.

YOU CAN'T PATENT A TOOTHPICK, ALTHOUGH IT'S POSSIBLE somebody has tried.
If something has ever been described in public, if its existence is generally accepted,if people
know about what it is, it isn't subject to patent protection. But if the thing has been around forever
and pretty much no one's noticed it hidingin plain sight,you can get away with putting a patent onit.
The bees noticed though.

122 MAGGIN
 One of the hives on the balcony had a laying worker.That's a commoner who
aspires to be a queen. Normally the queen is the only bee in the colony who lays eggs.
She lays maybe one or two thousand of them a day,graceful little white flecks she places
standing on end in the exact center of each empty hexagonal cell that she comes upon.
My guess is that this hive recently lost its queen-an accident,old age,maybe I
inadvertently dropped her off a frame I was inspecting and she fell into a drain,
whatever-and there weren't any new queen cells close to hatching. Bees get a little nuts
in a hive with no queen. You can hear it in their voices. And that's when a laying worker
bee sometimes appears.
The eggs that these hopeless aspirants to the throne leave behind are not fertile.
Worker bees never mate and don't have that capacity. The worker's thorax isn't long
enough to reach the bottom of a cell, so these unfertile eggs drop and lie flat on the floor
of the structure. It's fairly easy to find a queen. She's about twice as long as her worker
bees and usually she's surrounded by her circle of retainers-the palace guard. It's
unreasonably difficult for a beekeeper to find a laying worker. She looks the same as the
thousands of other workers. You'd have to happen to be looking at her in the act of
laying an egg to pick her out.
I stuck half a dozen coin-sized digital recorders along the inside wall of the hive
while the colony were all buzzing extra loudly, indicating there was probably no queen
in the box. Either the new queen had not yet hatched or she was out on the town getting
inseminated. When I opened the hive the next morning the bees had quieted down.
There was a normal level of buzzig and activity. The young queen was somewhere
among her colony, going about her business planting eggs in empty cells and seeing to
the well-being of her realm. As gently as I could, I collected the disk cameras I had stuck
to the walls two days earlier.

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 My little cameras operated with infra-red detectors.They saw in the dark. And what they
showed me was that the queen re-entered the hive about two hours before sunset the previous
day. She was plump with a lifetime's supply of sperm,and animated. The reception she got
was suitable for a conquering hero. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of her subjects collected
around her as she paraded along the surface of the frame nearest the hive entry. She dropped
eight or a dozen eggs precisely in a spiral pattern on the main body of that first frame. She
came upon a cell that already contained an egg that had been dropped slapdash to land
against a wall of the cell. She paused a moment, looked up.She scooted off the frame she was
on, headed around the edge of the hive as if on a hunt. The monochrome digital display that
recorded these events lost track of her. I had to fumble among the other coin-sized cameras to
see where she went.
The time stamps on all the recorders were synchronized so I could find the proper
moment when she disappeared from her egg-laying routine. I didn't pick her up again until I
looked at the fourth recorder. She popped into the sixth frame in from where she had left,
only seconds after she left the first frame. She didn't even have to search. On the new frame
was what she was hunting - the usurper worker bee who was laying infertile eggs in random
patterns. She took a leap and tackled the pretender to her throne like Elway in his prime. I
thought she was going to sting and kill the worker as peremptorily as she might dispatch a
potential replacement queen before she emerges from a new cell.But no,she did not kill the
worker. She punished her. She rolled over her would-be rival, slammed her against a frame
wall,kicked at her and shoved around her weight. The queen was quite large now, heavier
than she had been a day or two ago when she first emerged. She was just returned from her
maiden flight. Her mating dance. She carried the seed of maybe two dozen drones from
neighbor colonies. The

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 arrogant worker could not have been having a good day.It was not long before the
new queen sufficienty made her point. But I had a niggling suspicion watching all this.
I played back the moments before the queen left off laying her eggs and she went to
teach the laying worker her place. I checked the time stamp. Then I looked at the scene
six frames over and checked the time stamp there. She appeared on the new frame just
three seconds after she left the first. There had been no time to check the frames along
the way for the usurper worker. The queen already knew where she was.
How?
I could disassemble her, this young queen. I could crack open her skull and look at
her nerve ganglia with an electron microscope to see whether there was anything
approximating an amygdala in her rudimentary brain stem.I could do that, but I didn't
want to, and it would gain me nothing. I already knew what I would find. The queen
could see around corners, just as I had done in the East African bush. Just as any
conscious organism can do in the state of nature.
This thing we call "intuition" is a natural function after all. And it's mine. Mine to
describe, to publish, to reproduce.You can't patent a toothpick. But you could if no one
had ever noticed before that you could prong chunks of food out from between your
teeth with a little sharp stick.
In all of non-industrialized Africa, cohorts of humans walk unmolested along the
same paths as the elephant, the rhino and the lion. They use the same tool our ancestors
used to safeguard their homes and build their first cities. The ancestors simply did it
without thinking about how.I figured out how they did. That's all I'm going to explain
here in writing. I've got patents to protect.

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 XIII

PLANNING THE PLAN

THE CHICKENSHITS YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE WITH YOU.

In ancient times emperors and pharaohs, in fear of losing their lives or positions,
claimed to be deities. That worked so well for them that their children and successors adopted
the same conceit. As people became more sophisticated-less susceptible to the notion of gods
walking around in palaces eating, cheating on their spouses, taking people's property by
decree-the scam evolved. When their subjects showed signs of getting wise to them, rulers
held power by selling an idea they called the divine right of kings.People were still fooled,
but the rulers remained terrified enough to keep standing armies, police forces and palace
guards close at hand.
Gradually people decided they liked the idea of choosing their own leaders and
occasionally throwing them out of authority when they got too arrogant- sometimes violently,
sometimes not. Barely a hundred fifty years ago,temporal power started to take another form.
When much of the world went industrial, power became private again.Gradually, the capacity
to make things happen-the thing I do best - moved from men who held thrones and public
offices,to people who ran trade concerns and corporations.They had long-since stopped
claiming any exclusive

126 MAGGIN
 connection with gods. In order to seem to be of benefit to the common folk, some
of them called themselves “job creators"for a while,but that quickly fell flat.
The error that most of today's Chickenshits make is that they measure their success
by the volume of means of exchange-that is,money-they can accumulate. The actual
measure of success is what each of us can make happen.Money is one means to this, and
not a very efficient one. It helps,though.
In my analysis of the ills of my world, the bees would solve one problem.
Meanwhile, I had two others besides (1)creeping, debilitating pollution to solve before I
was done,which the Lexcorpus strain of bees would eventually do away with. And the
Atlantic Flywheel, currently under construction, would (2) establish a clean,sustained
energy source to replace carbon and reduce all the rogue methane running around loose.
Then (3) neutralizing the people most likely to undermine and take profits from the
ongoing problem was the stickiest of this collection of difficulties.
The ancient epic tale of Beowulf serves as a model for any emerging society as it
grows. Of the three estates that the Beowulf story represents - pollinators,active drags on
civilization and elite movers and shakers-I was ostensibly a member of the last group. I
was a card-carrying member of the monster movers-and-shakers club, the Chickenshits
Caucus.But my role will soon be a bigger one than that.
These are certainly the days of Lex Luthor. This Earth is my possession and
responsibility. The longer these jokers try to exercise control over some aspect of a
world that they're incapable of understanding, the more fucked up they're going to make
it. Eliminating them was the final crucial phase of the three-part plan.

DEAR SWEET MARY LOUISE HANCOCK, THE WHEELCHAIR-BOUND

doyenne of Amoskeag Industries, took on the job of

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 finding civilians to populate the big Space Ark that I was assembling at an otherwise
worthless twelve-acre spread I bought in the Pine Barrens of South Jersey.Mary Louise
approached the job with characteristic enthusiasm. She publicized the contest to find several
hundred of the fittest,most intelligent, most fertile humans on the planet to perpetuate the human
community among the stars.She went on talk shows and news outlets all over North America and
Europe.She recruited the heads of government in the biggest totalitarian states of Asia and eastern
Europe to rope academic and industrial leaders there to survey their nations'talent. In Africa and
South America she solicited applicants among Olympic-level athletes, medical students and
Rhodes Scholars. She traveled, talked constantly into who-knows-how-many microphones in
maybe a hundred countries. She was having the time of her life.
By the time the segments of the Ark were about halfway through construction she had a full
roster of recruits.A little more than eight thousand qualified people around the world were eager to
fly into space to seekhumanity's fortune,and she was eager to winnow that list down to one or two
thousand. It was my job to make sure all the dear lady's efforts failed.

THE SPACE ARK WAS GOING TO STOMP on a bunch of international treaties. The big
one was the Limited Nuclear Test Ban of 1963. There was no way to launch the Ark past Earth's
escape velocity except by boosting it with a fairly large nuclear explosion. My MIT-and Cal
Tech-educated engineering staff called the booster modules "enhanced propulsion devices." The
Maasai kids and I called them bombs. Iibhombu zenyukliya,as we say in Xhosa.
Now, where to locate the materials I needed to make these bombs?

128 MAGGIN
 Abkhasia is either the westernmost region of the nation of Georgia, or it is an
independent country, depending on whom you ask. There are even those who claim it's a part
of Russia, which it was for a couple of centuries but isn't any more.National borders in that
part of the world are getting softer all the time, and no one knows who owns what.Abkhasia
is a little spot of mountainous land on the eastern shore of the Black Sea where legend holds
that people routinely live into their mid-hundreds. I don't know whether people there really
live twice as long as people in the rest of the world. Abkhasians don't issue birth certificates
so there's no reliable documentation of someone's claim to have fought in the Crimean War.
What I do know is that until recently,Abkhasia was home to the least well-guarded major
supply of uranium-235 on Earth. That's what I went there to get.
I took Winky with me because he looks much olderthan he is and wih a little work he
could pass for a centenarian. I rented a ten-year-old Jeep Wrangler. At the border with
Georgia-which shouldn't be a national border according to the Georgians - there were only
two Abkhasian border guards. They sat playing cards in the two-lane road behind a barrier
gate. A booth on the north side of the road seemed to be unoccupied.
As we drove up, the guards hustled their chairs and their low card table to the side of the
road. One stood in front of the car with a Kalashnikov rifle in one arm and the other came up
to me at the driver's side window.
“Zure pasaporteak mesedez," the guard said.
Something about passports, obviously enough. I had no idea which of half a dozen
possible languages he was speaking. I recorded his question into an app on my phone and the
phone had no idea either. I smiled and handed him a Ukrainian passport under the name of
George Yuri Rainich with my picture in it. That's a real guy; look him up if you like.

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 "Eta berea?" the Abkhasian guy said, pointing at Winky.
"My grandfather is very old," I said into my phone in English. "He has never had a
passport. We heard that Abkhasian doctors were the best gerontologists in the world."
The language app translated my answer into Ukrainian and the guard responded with a
blank stare. Then Georgian. Then Russian. I tried Armenian to no avail.My guess after I
thought more about it was that either the phone or the guard was having trouble
translating "gerontologists,"but that didn't occur to me until later. The other guard came
over,said something to the first guard in some language or other and both of them
nodded at me. The guard with the rifle said,“Ongi etorri Abkhasia Errepublika
handira."Again, no idea what they said or what language they were speaking.
They raised the gate nonetheless, and now all I had to do was find an address in a
town called Tkvarcheli, wherever that was.I hoped there was something on the way
there like a gas station that took western credit cards.

THE ARK IN NEW JERSEY WOULD BE TWO ACRES BIG and held around
eight hundred family dwellings and half an acre of vertical farming and manufacturing
facilities. I thought about rigging up a livestock operation, but I couldn't figure a way
around the methane production and the stink. The emigrants were just going to have to
deal with meat that I could synthesize with chemical simulation and 3-D printing.We
had won awards from the Food Channel, after all.They'd learn to live with it.
I erected eight pre-fab corrugated steel sheds,all but one the size of an airline
hangar, around the periphery of my secluded property. There were no major roads within
forty miles of the place. There were no towns big enough to have names for at least eight
miles around. In the middle of it I

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 clear-cut fouar acres and covered it with macadam to use as an assembly and
launching site for the Ark. The location was quite isolated, despite its being barely an
hour's helicopter flight from Metropolis. All the better to keep the operation secret.
Construction guys were easy to keep quiet about the location. I hired guys without
families and had them set up living quarters in one of the hangars. The engineers and
designers were a bigger problem. I kept the four Americans -three women and one
man-working at their desks and drawing boards in the Tower so they never really knew
where the Ark was. The Maasai kids commuted back and forth in the big company
'copter and I urged them to speak Xhosa among themselves when they were on site. The
kids were the ones assembling the launch thrusters-the bombs.No one knew the entire
scope of the project except for me.I was convinced there wouald be no security issues
before the Ark was ready to fly, but I overlooked one very large leak.There was this big
eye in the sky that anyone could look through, and that caught everything at the most
inopportune of times. Google fucking Earth.
"You've got an unannounced visitor," came B.J.'s voice from my cell phone at ten
o'clock that morning.
“Who?”
"Norm Something from the New Jersey Department of Building Safety.”
“What the hell is that?”
"No clue, but he's asking questions around the construction crew at the Pines."
It was an hour after the opening bell at the Metropolis Museum of Modern Art
when I got the call. I was adding an item to the sculpture garden.
"What do you want me to do?” B.J. wanted to know.
"First make sure the construction crew don't let this guy anywhere near Building
Four."
“Got it.”
"Where's the Huey?” I wanted to know.

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 "It's down at the Pines with the African engineering gang."
"Damn," I said. "Hire me a 'copter at the commuter port. ASAP. I'll get to the
helipad on my own.”
"With or without a pilot?”
"With," I said. "Tell them I'll want to fly it myself, but I may need the 'copter to
make a quick exit without me.”
I was at the museum overseeing-mostly watching, it turns out-the installation of an
eleven-foot tall red and tan twisted cylinder on a plate-shaped stand. I brought over a
steel label to mount next to it. The label idenified it as a sculpture titled “Stubbed-Out
Cigarette" by the Scots artist Wainwright McAfee. Wainwright's cigarette got a rave
review in the Arts section of the Times. The critic at the Planet was a little more
skeptical. The television and radio commentators who covered it treated it as a joke,
which it actually was. There was, of course,no Wainwright McAfee,but I had been using
the name for years to scatter various works of art in strategic places around Europe and
the Americas. Some of them were actual works of art. This one,though,was a
camouflaged override mechanism that I could use to break into communications media
worldwide,if I ever had a need to do that. You can't be too careful.
"One rent-a-copter with spare pilot coming up,”B.J.said.
"Good. Make sure you get the pilot's name and email a non-disclosure agreement
for him to the business office at the Pines," I said as I trotted out the gate of the sculpture
garden and hailed a cab.

THE MAASAI KIDS WERE HAVING A GREAT TIME designing the fine points
of my nuclear fueling system, but there was no way around the need for a
multiplecritical mass of a radioactive' isotope to ignite it. My trip to Abkhasia to pick it
up-over unpaved mountain roads and wooded paths-

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 was a nightmare. At some point I thought about leaving Winky behind as a hostage,
but he was too valuable as a mechanical engineer to leave in some Gulag prison camp.
Tkvarcheli, Abkhasia used to be a real town. Now it was an outpost of fewer than
eighty people living among the ruins of a place that used to have a hotel, a blacksmith
and carpenter shop, a library, two gas stations, a bank and six Orthodox churches. Three
of the churches were still active,and every Sunday a dozen or so serious Orthodox
adherents in town come up with a consensus about which one to attend that week. Not
long after the early nineteen-nineties when the Soviet Union broke up, a civil war broke
out between Georgia and Abkhasia. It ended inconclusively with an open-ended
ceasefire and most of the towns within about fifty miles on either side of the border
became piles of rubble.
A few years earlier, as the Soviet empire crumnbled,It occurred to President
Mikhail Gorbachev that he ought to stash the country's raw supply of nuclear materials
somewhere safe. Gorbachev's best pal from law school was Eduard Shevardnadze, who
was in line to become president of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic when it
declared independence and became the Republic of Georgia.Gorbachev came up with a
list of relatively secure locations,but none seemed safer than a bunker under a hotel in
this sleepy little village in northwestern Georgia. That's where he put
who-knew-how-much enhanced plutonium and uranium.
Soon after the Soviet Union broke into its component parts,Gorbachev was indeed
deposed and became a private citizen of the new/old Russian Federation. It took his
buddy Shevardnadze four years to become president of Georgia.But by the time he did,
the Abkhasian separatist movement plunged Georgia's northwestern corner into an
untidy civil war. The Georgians easily overcame the resistance at first,but by the
mid-Nineties Georgia was fighting an ongoing

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 war of attrition against a guerilla group calling itself the Confederated Mountain Peoples
of the Caucasus. It was a mess,and Shevardnadze, Gorbachev and the new president of
Russia had no access to these forgotten nuclear raw materials.
What I needed for the Ark's propulsion was still there.Winky and I found several tons of
weapons-grade uranium-235 in forty lead-lined crates in the basement of the wreck of the
Tkvarcheli Hotel. We could hardly carry them out of the basement and even the Jeep wouldn't
be able to haul it all. So Sunday morning we went to church and hired the remaining
population of the town to move it.
A few adults in the village understood enough Armenian to get our directions through
my phone app translator. We organized a convoy of twenty able-bodied Abkhasians tocarry as
many crates as we could find and pile them up on a clearing next to a wide dirt path nearby. I
called B.J. and gave her directions to load the Huey into the belly of the Gulfstream and take
it to an airport twenty miles away on the Black Sea coast. There were no roads from the
airport to where we were, but the big helicopter landed a day later on the clearing in the New
Jersey Pines with all of our sealed crates.
Our newfound friends the Abkhasians got all the radioactive material aboard the Huey
and we left the nukes in the 'copter's storage space on the flight back. Winky and I got aboard
my Gulfstream and we were in the sky over the Black Sea and headed home by dusk.
Before we left, we went to the bank and managed to give each of our twenty Abkhasian
porters twenty bucks. They were thrilled. I handed the Orthodox pastor the keys to the Jeep
and gave him the address of the car rental agency in Tblisi, Georgia and a Visa debit card to
cover the trip and whatever incidentals he needed for returning the car.To my eternal surprise,
the Visa card showed up in the mail in Metropolis a little more than a month later. Rather
than

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 making the trip to Georgia, the pastor's church ended up buying the Jeep from the
rental agency for aboutten thousand dollars-on my credit. That was fine with me;my
contribution to the Abkhasian Orthodox church. I tried to take a charitable deduction on
the Jeep that year,but Uncle Sugar wouldn't go for it.

NORMUENSTER PHILPOT WAS SOMETHING of a twit. His favorite trick at

the office was to appear to be working while he found the addresses on Google Earth of
kids he knew from high school. He would try to figure out from the look of their homes
whether they were doing better or worse than he was. In his office in Trenton a few days
earlier he was making believe he was working when he stumbled over an aerial view of
my installation in the Pines. I don't suppose he would normally concern himself with
what a bunch of airline hangars were doing in the middle of the backwoods,but he must
have been really bored that day. He had no assignments and no one else to annoy for a
few days,so he put in a request for a field trip. This morning, after a couple of hours
weaving among one- and two-lane, occasionally paved roads,he parked his nine-year-old
Kia hatchback near something that looked like a garage and rapped his fist on the steel
door. One of the guys from the construction crew opened up.
"Hi,”he said."Norm Philpot from the state of New Jersey Department of Building
Safety," and he held out a laminated card on a chain around his neck.
"Hi back,"my guy said."Ben Harrigan from Fort Lee,also the state of New Jersey.
How're you doing?" and he held out his right hand.
Philpot moved the laminate from his right to his left hand, dropped it, and lost his
right hand in Harrigan's ponderous mnitt. "Are you in charge here, Mr.Harrington?"

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 "It's Harrigan," he said, grinning. He was really Stan Sagan from Hightstown, but my guys
were under orders to use aliases with strangers."And call me Ben. So what's the Department of
Building Safety and how did you come across us?"he asked,peering at the ID tag. He pulled
Philpot into the structure and slammed the door behind him.

WE HAD ALL THE PARTS OF THE FLYWHEEL constructed by now.The segments that
we built in the old steel mill on the East Side were complete and it was time to load them aboard a
hired ship and take them to assemble where the Caribbean Sea met the Atlantic Ocean. Each
segment of the Lexcorp Objectively Indestructible Substance in the Flywheel was about two
hundred feet long and slightly bowed. There were three hundred thirty-two lengths of the
Substance, each numbered, to fit together and make a roughly circular structure two miles in
diameter. I had made an insignificant dent in the volume of the island of junk we called Atlantis,to
manufacture that much stuff. I hired a ship to take the load of them,along with the parts of the
stand they fit precisely into at the base of the trench north of Puerto Rico, down to where we
would assemble it underwater.

For reasons I have not been able to determine there hadn't been nearly as much snooping
about ongoing construction from the bureaucrats in Metropolis, as there was in the Jersey Pines.
That was why it was particularly galling when I had to put off my trip to the trench that day and go
to New Jersey instead.By the time I touched my rent-a-copter down on the macadam in the woods
my construction crew were effectively distracting Philpot with nonsense about the safety of the
machinery in the workshop.I told my helicopter pilot-who, for my crushing half a tab of Ambien
in his coffee, had been sleeping since we crossed under the suspension bridge across the Narrows
south of the city-to wait there while I got together some paperwork for

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 him. I parked my rented craft by the engineering building at the far end of the
macadam. The Maasai kids, bless them,would be in there, oblivious to anything but
what they were working on. I pulled a key out of my pocket and opened up the larger
building next door.
"Hey guys!" I called across the big room. It echoed.
Seven burly construction guys hovered around a skinny guy in a tie-I assumed this
was Philpot-next to one of four twenty-foot cast iron breaks along a far wall. There were
sheets of galvanized steel scattered around workbenches all over the room. I supposed
these and the guys themselves effectively served as a fort to keep Philpot from leaving
the building before I arrived. He had to have been here for two hours at this point.
"Yeah Boss,”one of them called back.
“Did you get that NDA in the email?” I called.
Philpot said, “I'm a state official. I can't sign a non-disclosure agreement.”
"You don't have to," I said. “It's for somebody else."
“Good,”Philpot called back. And then to one of my crew,“Is that Lex Luthor?"
"Nah,”my guy told him. "In South Jersey? In the woods?How could that be Lex
Luthor?”
"Hold on to the NDA,” I called. "I'll be back." And I was outside,heading across the
macadam to the engineering building. The smaller shed with a "4” on the door sat
unopened. I would make sure it was lockedup tight before I left.
I looked at the helicopter as I trotted by and didn't see the pilot. I supposed he was
asleep again. If he was wandering he couldn't go far.
"Hi kids,” I stomped into the engineering building.
Each of the Maasai kids worked on his or her own. They hunched over drawing
boards or desks, with laptops scattered around the room.

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 "Inkosi Luthor," Lolo, a seventeen-year-old boy who was the self-appointed leader of
the group, said, "It is an unexpected pleasure to see you."
"I'm thrilled to hear that," I said. "Now pick upany plans and specifications, especially
any diagrams and prototypes, and get your asses into the woods for a couple hours.All of
you."
"We trust your health is sufficient," Lolo stood and took my hand to shake it.
"My health is peachy." This greeting ritual had been threatening my production schedule
since I hired these kids.I wondered if they all did this with each other when they got up in the
morning. “Get your work out of here. There's an inspector or something from the state of
New Jersey prowling around the place. Get moving, kids."

NOT TWO MINUTES AFTER THE LAST OF MY PRODIGIES made it out a back
door, I heard a timid knock from the front.I was in no hurry to answer it, but before I walked
across the big room the knock grew to a pounding. I rolled my sleeves up to my elbows and
stood by the door for a moment, waiting for my uninvited caller to start to knock again. I
waited for him to attempt a fourth knock,hoping he would lose his footing,but Philpot
managed to stand relatively steady as I yanked open the heavy door.
"How do you do," I said."And you would be...”
"It is you,"he said,"I thought so."
"Of course it is," I said."So who are you?"
"Norm Philpot.New Jersey Department of Building Safety,"as he tried to step into the
building.
I stepped in front of him."Got some ID?”
"I do,"he said, feeling for the laminated card that had been hanging around his neck. I
have no idea where he lost it.Maybe one of my construction guys wanted a souvenir.“I

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 guess it must be in the car. But I'm Norm Philpot from the New Jersey
Department of Building Safety."
"I believed you the first time.”
"Yes. Of course. You seem to be engaging in an extensive construction
operation here, Mr. Luthor.We'll be sending out an inspector to verify whether
you're operating to state standards.”
“State standards?”
"Yes sir. Do you have a construction permit for this site?”
"It's pending. But these are pre-fabricated temporary structures that I can
remove on short notice. We're building a piece of machinery that will also be
removed. That shouldn't require a permit."
"There's always a permit required. I see you have two flying vehicles here. Do
you have the landing permits-”
"They're removeable too. That one is an Iroquois personnel carrier-my
Huey-that seats eight comfortably.Ten if you push it. The other is a rental chopper
built by Sikorsky Aircraft, probably with a sleepingpilot inside.”
“May I come in sir?”
"Not without ID.”
“Perhaps I could speak with the pilot?”
"Why? Do you want to go for a ride?”
"No that won't be necessary,"but I think he considered it a moment.
"Mr. Luthor I'll be filing a report on the presence of this installation and you
will be informed of what permitting and fees will be required. Meanwhile,you will
receive a bill for two hundred fifty-two dollars for my trip out here."
"Did you use that much gas to get here from Trenton?”
"No I... may I have the address of your main operation?"
"It's in the phone book," I said. "Do they still have phone books?" and I shut
the door with him still outside it.

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 I doubted he could rouse my pilot even if he wanted to.After about ten minutes I
heard his Kia start up,presumably to wend its way back to Trenton. Then I called the
governor's office.
The receptionist said the governor didn't accept outside calls without an
appointment and I said, "Tell him it's his brother-in-law." That was a mistake.
"If you leave a forwarding number-" and I hung up the phone.
I remembered that the governor of New Jersey had just resigned over an investment
scandal and the new governor was a woman with a reputation for being a bluenose
straitlaced puritanical sort. She wouldn't last long,but it was always a pain in the ass to
break in someone new.
I printed out and left the NDA with the rent-a-copter pilot.He was indeed asleep on
the deck behind his seat. I left a handwritten note instructing him to sign both copies, to
leave one behind with the constrction crew,to forget he was ever here and I wished him a
pleasant trip home.
"Head north,"I wrote."You'll figure it out."

IN THE BACKWASH OF MY BANGING-MY-HEAD-against-the-wall

negotiation with Philpot the phone in my pocket rang again. It was B.J. telling me that
the Alloy Guy was missing and that I should turn on the television. There was no
television here. I didn't want my guys distracted by anything.
"Just tell me what's going on,"I said.
"They're saying a 'metal man' is on a tear on the Interborough Bridge and that su-
They're saying that the Alien is on the way to stop him."
"What do they mean by a tear? What do you see?”
“I see he's not in his bunk."
“No,I mean what do you see on the tube?”

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 "On the bridge? They don't havecamcras there yet but supposedly he wrecked a
couple of cars trying to cross the street, then he jumped on the back of a pickup truck
and hopped off somewhere halfway across the river."
“Off the bridge?”
“Off the truck.”
“Great.”
"What do you want me to do?”
"Let's let this be the Alien's problem for the moment,okay?”
“Are you sure?”
"Yeah, I'm an hour away. What am I going to do? I'd send Hardishaw out to calm
him down but he can't even handle a bee sting."
I had no idea what a bee sting could actually do to Hardishaw but he still carried
around that EpiPen every time he came up to the Tower.
"So when are you going to be back?" she wanted to know.
"I'll be late for dinner, Mom," I said.“Oh one more thing. We'll be getting a
summons or something like it from the State of New Jersey. Take care of it. Don't tell
them anything you didn't make up out of nowhere."
“On it,” she said and I hung up.
Before I could think about a way to check on what Philpot might have meddled in
with the construction crew,the phone rang again.
"The Alien can't handle the Alloy Guy," B.J.said.
“What do you mean can't handle him?”
"He won't go near him. Our guy is popping suspension cables and something is
keeping the Alien away from him like a force field or something. They're saying the
bridge could go down and they're trying to evacuate traffic."
"Wait. Go back, A force field is keeping the Alien away from the Alloy Guy?"

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 "They didn't say force field. But that's what it sounds like."
"Do they have cameras there yet?”
“No.The police are keeping the press away too."
"Shit," I said. Thought a moment. Then, "There's a control console in the bottom drawer
of the dresser in his bunk room in the southwest corner of my Cave."
B.J. was already on the 65th floor and she found the console after a moment. It was a
small rectangular metal and plastic jobbie I had adapted from an old Nintendo Wii game
controller. I told her to look on the underside of the gadget and find three color-coded on/off
switches I embedded in the plastic.
"Flip the blue switch off,"I said.
After a few moments she said,"It's stuck."
“It's not stuck.”
"Right. It's not stuck any more. It's off.”
About a mile and a half across town on the Outerborough Bridge, the Alloy Guy stopped
short in the middle of whatever he was doing. I didn't know it until later,but he had snapped
four steel cable suspenders on one side of the bridge and scraped a two-hundred-foot gash on
the bridge surface. The bridge was listing a few degrees to the south and you could see
through the gash to the river below in three places.
All right," I told B.J, "go out to my workshop and put the console in the steel vice at the
far end of the workbench."
I told her to crush the thing until pieces started fallng out from its interior. I didn't care
what pieces fell out or broke. I just needed to be satisfied that the Alloy Guy couldn't be
tracked back to Lexcorp. The only thing that might have been a giveaway was the tracking
device I had planted in his chest behind the chunk of element-99 that powered him. His outer
layer of "skin" was made of the Lexcorp Objectively Indestructible Substance for which I
hadn't yet filed a patent. People were still supposing he was

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 made of metal, and for some reason the Alien still kept his distance. I trusted that
he wasn't subject to close investigation.
I had no idea where the Alien took the inert Alloy Guy or how he got him there and
didn't really care yet.

THIS WAS A DISASTER. IF THE STATE of New Jersey forced me to suspend

construction in the compound in the Pines there'd be no Space Ark. The worst of the
Chickenshits would stay on Earth running their businesses. The minute the bees started
to proliferate the Chickenshits would send fumigators afte them like Genghis Khan's
horde. They'd file injunctions up the wazoo to keep the Atlantic Flywheel offline and
keep their filth-spitting power plants up and running. My plan would collapse on itself.
Meanwhile the Alien and everyone else would eventually track the Alloy Guy to me.
They'd put me back in stir and humanity would continue its course to self-destruction.
To avoid going to more trouble than I could stomach, there was only one rational action
I could take at this point.
What did I need with this shit? To hell with humanity.

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 XIV
FOLDED OVER

I HAD TO GET OFF THE PLANET, I decided. For good this time.Let it burn to a
cinder without me.Leave it all behind. It was time to leave permanently. I almost did too,
but I could not succeed at that. I found I had to stay and the reason was Eve.Eve
Callaway is her name. I haven't mentioned her before,but she was responsible for my not
leaving everything behind. I couldn't go while Eve was here.
This trip started the way all of my long trips start. With a backpack dense with
sandwiches and water and a short walk from the Lexcorp Tower to the Metropolis
Museum of Modern Art. Most of the large bulky slabs of art in the sculpture garden
inside the iron fence behind the museum belong to me. To be more accurate, most of
them belong to various artists and art collectors who are aliases. It was the aliases that
belonged to me.
One of my sculptures was “Black Widow" by the great fictional multimedia
sculptress Sarah Elizabeth Brandeis.The Widow was my star cruiser, a black oblong
globe about twelve feet long and eight feet at its tallest point. It was punctuated with
eight tightly rolled tracks that connected to its underside and served as a stand here in
the garden. The stand was, in practice, an eight-pronged solar absorption cell,

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 I got there around five in the afternoon that day. The garden generally isn't very full
that late on a weekday, but a class of fifth-graders swarmed around a teacher and a
couple of parent chaperones. I probably should have complimented the teacher for
working late to make sure her students had a rich educational experience, but instead I
nosed around some of the sculptures that I hadn't planted there and made sure Hamid the
night watchman knew I was up to something.After about fifteen minutes Hamid started
shepherding the fifth-graders back into the museum building and the garden was mine.
When I built it, I textured the globe of the Black Widow to look like tinted glass,
but it wasn't. When I flicked on the interior lights from a panel at the base of one of the
Widow's eight "legs," the interior lights shone through a series of plastic and alloy
windows in a strip along the upper part of the globe. As that happened, the sealed hatch
of the globe-invisible to the eye when it was closed-opened up and the pilot's seat inside
rose and angled forward. I scrambled in and hit a series of knobs to kill the lights and
clap the hatch shut again. I had test piloted the new spring-lift system maybe half a
dozen times but had never actually flown any distance with it. Thesun was still bright in
the southwest,so there would be no problem soaking up enough energy on the initial arc
to get a good lift. I flipped on the solar sponges to start sucking up and storing propellant
from the sun. I gave that about ten minutes while I checked some redundant systems.
That would be plenty of time.My initial trajectory was between the leaves of the oak and
the elm on the apron of Fifty-Fourth Street.
I checked the environs of the sculpture garden for curious eyes once more, clamped
myself in and hit the spring lock key. Hamid would be pissed that he missed this. The
liftoff devices flung me into the sky like the flexing blades of a sprinter's prosthetic legs.
They retracted and-as I realized only later-one of the lifts snatched up a couple of

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 oak leaves. I'd make sure they trimmed that tree before the next time I did this. The
Widow sprung upward and caught itself, switched to solar-powered propulsion a
moment before the parabola of my lift would have arced downward.The eight "legs" of
the spider unfurled into eight flexible solar cells and I was off.
I was mad at the world -even more than usal.And yeah, it helps to be
constitutionally afraid of pretty much nothing.

IMMEDIATELY ABOVE THE IONOSPHERE I SURVEYED my battery of

detection devices, casting around the local Solar System for a spaceworm-a deformity in
the continuum.They aren't rare. I found one after about a day's survey. It took me
another few days to reach it, deep in the southern arc of the orbit of Jupiter. It was far
fromn the discs of the orbits of the planets and asteroids but well within the area of
dominant influence of the Sun, so there was plenty of energy for my sails to soak up
before I made a run for it. The structure of the wormhole seemed stable enough-that
is,there was trace matter,dust,gravel, even flecks of water here and there to indicate it
had been here for a while so it would likely still be there if I chose to mnake a return trip.
I couldn't be sure of any such thing. I had never made a trip like this before and didn't
know anyone with whom I could compare notes.Everything was speculation based on
what guys like Einstein and Rosen and Witten had theorized, and on my own fantasies
of rationality.
We are four-dimensional holograms projected on an eleven-dimensional surface, so
anything we think we know is only metaphor anyway.
When a Roman general came home after a campaign of conquest and the city came
out to cheer as he rode his chariot through town, there was always room for a slave to
stand behind him. It was the slave's job to lean into the general's

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 ear over the crowd's roar. “You're nothing but a man," the slave said. "Only a man,”
over and over and over. Whenever I do something remarkable, when I pull off an
impossible theft,breathe life into the dead, unravel the tangles of space and time, I need
someone to whisper into my ear...
"You're an illusion smeared on the skin of reality."
... over and over and over again. Maybe I'll build that into the next version of my
star cruiser.
Keeps a guy humble.
I navigated to the mouth of the wormhole and looked it over. It wasn't hard to see. I
didn't have to squint or look side-eyed as though it was a stereogram or something. It
looked like nothing so much as a total solar eclipse. It just hung out there where my
instruments said it would be, andI thought I would see a kind of tunnel that proceeded
some vast distance in one direction or other until it faded from sight. It wasn't anything
like that. It was a recession in spacetime,a hole with a thin corona around it. It had no
front or back or sides. It looked the same from all directions. But it wasn't like a black
hole, sucking and chomping anything that approached. It threw off no gravitation or
attractive force at all that I could determine.It just hung there,pulling on nothing,
apparently weighing nothing, the size of a small asteroid. I suppose it could have been
any size at all. Anad it glowed with something that had no source, and that I couldn't
possibly characterize as light. It looked like a corona,the wavy signature of folded
gravitation.
It wasn't a gateway. It didn't have an entrance or an exit.It apparently had no optical
qualities, didn't distort the space around it, but I was disoriented to look at it, to
contemplate connecting with it.
And in I went.

IT WAS FOREVER.
The first thing I felt was the jolt. Then came the fade.

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 It was all dimensions in here, but I could get my mind to inhabit only three at a time-and
maybe a shadow of a fourth. But it didn't matter which dimension I found and which I lost.
They were all tickly flickers. I couldn't distinguish time from smell. Or up from through. Or
yesterday from a cupcake.
At first I thought the seven dimensions beyond time should take on the names of the
seven colors of the visible spectrum. Then I remembered that some physics geek had
assigned color names to quarks. There were no colors at the quantum level, but the idea was
already taken.
Cupcake it is, I decided. I named the fifth dimension “cupcake.”
I'd tack names on the other six later, I decided, like Adam naming the animals.
Then,thinking of Adam, that's when I saw Eve. Not his Eve,My Eve.

THE HUMAN CONDITION IS AS FOLLOWS:

We are four-dimensional creatures. We are naturally able to navigate three of those
dimensions: depth,width and height. We are tacked to a determined path on a fourth,whích
we call time. Our course in time has a determinate beginning and end. This does not make us
merely three-dimensional.
Here's proof. If a person were to fall from an airplane due to gravity and was thus unable
to navigate one of those otherwise navigable dimensions-the dimension of height-that would
not make us two-dimensional.Similarly,because we are unable to navigate our course through
time, that does not mean we are not also bound to it. To the contrary, we are both bound to it
and not in control of it. We just hurtle along.
Presumably, when we complete our course along the dimension of height from this
hypothetical airplane to the ground, our control over the dimension resumes. That is,

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 unless our course along the dimension of time ends simultaneously, which I
suppose is likely.
As a human, I can experience those four dimensions.I can imagine five, sometimes
six. I can postulate all eleven mathematically, but the human mind is structurally
incapable of experiencing more than four. What I learned in the wormhole was that we
can experience any of the eleven dimensions-length, width,depth,time,cupcake,all the
others-but we can perceive no more than four at a time,and we can control our course
along no more than three. Trying to keep aware of all of them hurt my head. The
pounding head is an organic response, an intellectual defense mechanism.
Your head will hurt too if you try to conceive of a multidimensional experience.
Just try it; you'll see. The migraine is embedded like the fight-or-flight impulse. We can
overcome such a response from our ancient reptilian brain like this only by reserving
such concepts for our intellectual capacities and we don't try to let it into our perception.
It's all just math, even when you're living it.That was the only way Ed Witten could have
formulated super-strings and M-Theory without having his brain explode all over the
dining room table. But when I entered the wormhole I experienced all of it. The
migraine reverberated for a week-and-a-half after I eventually made my way home.
Four at a time, out of eleven-any four. That's all our perceptions have room for. And
which four? The wormhole kept changing the mix.

OKAY,I GET IT. I'm being unclear and obtuse. If you object,consider what it was
like living through the obtuseness.

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 IT WAS ALL I COULD DO TO HOLD ON to my senses. And it seemed that these
waves of pain showed up only when the dimensions of time and something like position
manifested simultaneously. That is, all but two of the dimensions I could name flitted away
and the dimension of time linked to my position in space.
Does that make sense? I'm sure it doesn't. I'm working on it. We don't have the
vocabulary for it yet. Bear with me.
I'll tell what I saw and felt as well as I can. I learned that the perception of dimensions is
tied up with our physical senses. This was news to me. Parts of my eyesight and balance
vanished as new dimensions poured in and others faded off. I sensed time as something I
could navigate like walking along a street. Height fell away but time stayed and there was
something else that let me move along my timeline. Right there in my cruiser-my flattened
seIf,inside my flattened two-dimensional vehicle in the wormhole. It was little chunks of the
past and the future. I don't think it was the dimension of time because I couldn't move along
it.This was something else. I could see forward and back. This was a new sensation. I saw
myself flying into the wormhole and talking to the guy in the bagel shop. For a glance I saw
my father bitching about what the hell I was doing in my lab out back. Then I saw the most
familiar face I had never seen before in my life. There was Eve,right in my line of sight.
I knew she was Eve, and I said her name out loud.It must have been out loud,because I
remembered it later when I didn't remember anything else about her. But in that moment I
knew everything about her. Then I forgot most of it. I had heard her name in my own voice. I
forgot everything I had known when the dimensional protocols changed again.The ship had
height again but no width. For a moment I could see that I was about to pop out in a chunk of
the sky where I couldn't recognize the configurations of constellations or any of the stars.
There was a big blue giant star fairly nearby, and rocks that could have been worlds

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 tumbling around it.I was pretty sure it was Rigel. Nice planets, dozens of them. A
couple of them had oxygen and water. Then I was seeing it in my immediate future, and
suddenly I was there. In my perception, for a moment, I was back on Earth. But Eve was
gone. Most of my memory of her was gone. I couldn't remember my future with
Eve.Whoever that was. Whenever that was. And I realized that,because I was linked in
time with her, I had to get home.
It was so weird.
I turned the craft around- there was no dimension of depth, but I turned it around
anyway-probably on impulse from muscle memory, which was promising-and the craft
passed back out of the wormhole. I closed my eyes, didn't pay attention to anything until
I popped out what I supposed to be the same corner of the thing that I had entered. I took
a relieved breath of recycled air, but before I finished inhaling,I realized I still didn't
know where I was. I recognized some of the constellations, sure, but they were subtly
different.I checked my charts. Vega was where Polaris was supposed to be. Scorpius
seemed to be there, kind of, but there was a nova where the tip of the scorpion's tail
should have been.There were other differences too. I checked my charts again,did a few
calculations...
...and it was obvious I was somewhere else.Somewhen else. I was in the future. I
quickly took a reading on the position of the Sun and found I was off the aft end of the
orbit of Jupiter where I was supposed to be. The wormhole still gaped in front of me,but
this was the distant future when half a dozen of the stars I was familiar with had blown
out and the shapes of the constellations were shifted.
I looked around the cramped cabin of my cruiser. It was undamaged and it looked
like it was supposed to look. It had height, width, depth. The only dimension still
screwed up was time. I unlatched a drawer and yanked out an astronomical chart. I used
the relative positions of the stars Castor and Pollux in the Gemini constellation to figure
out

LEXCORP 151
 what the likely year was. Centuries before our own time,when Greek astronomers
named those two stars, Castor was the brighter star. By the twenty-first century, Pollux
had wandered closer to our Sun and appeared a bit brighter than Castor. But now Pollux
was across the entire constellation from Castor and it was the brightest star in the sky.
I did a few computations based on that, came up with a timeframe,looked at the
number a second and third time and ran my computations again. There was no way
around it.The year was 24,762. Sometime in October.
I didn't even check in on the Earth. It could've been a burned-out husk like Venus
for all I knew. Or cared. I had just allowed the ship to pop out of the wormhole the way I
came in and didn't think of time as simply a dimension among other dimensions. Like an
idiot I had supposed I would come back at the same point in time. I needed to calculate
my return path in the wormhole and I thought for a moment to use the stopwatch on my
cell phone. Then I realized that the cell phone would be suabject to the same time
dilation I was. It would run slow, but in reverse-same as I would.
When I was in the wormhole a few minutes ago I lost most of my sense of place,
but I suddenly had a few more senses-they felt like instincts,mostly-having to do with
reliving my past,knowing the future, understanding things I couldn't possibly have
understood before. All my life,all the life that I have so far been able to perceive, I had
been a four-dimensional hologram projected on the face of an eleven-dimensional
Universe. I was still a four-dimensional hologram, but in the wormhole it had been four
different dimensions in any given moment.
I'ye got to come up with another word for “moment"that isn't tied to the idea of
time. The language has to grow a whole subsection of nouns and verbs if it is ever going
to accommodate interdimensional relations. Time was not

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 necessarily passing. It wasn't standing still either.Sometimes it wasn't even there.
It was four different dimensions in any given instance.
That doesn't quite cover it either. Take my word for it.
I'm going to have to write down the properties of the seven dimensions that are
missing from conventional human perception. You really can't describe the sensation of
experiencing these dimensions if you're someone who hasn't experienced them. I settled
for naming them. I named the dimensions after baked goods. It makes as much sense as
anything else. Here we go: Length, Width, Depth and Time.Then comes
Cupcake,Pumpernickel, Challah,Bananabread,Chocolate Chip,Pita,Bagel.
No,let's make that last one Bialy instead. That's eleven,right?
I knew what I needed in order to get back home.I needed a combination of two
dimensions-let's call them time and pumpernickel-and I needed to cast around inside the
wormhole unatil I found myself experiencing that pair of dimensions simultaneously. All
eleven came and went,in random combinations.
The dimension I named pumpernickel had to do with mathematics, I think-at least
that was what I perceived it to be. It slipped into my consciousness somewhere in a
fragment of the wormhole. I assigned a value that I think was a multiple of the square
root of a negative eight-digit number.It seemed just a second,but it may as well have
been a century.Or more. When it intersected with the dimension of time, I knew where
my home year was. I had to wait for an intersection of height and length to grab the stick
of my craft and point at an exit from the wormhole and at a moment that felt lke home.
When I emerged I was in my own space again. It was almost perfect.
Then with my inertia-damping gadget running full bore I made it on impulse power
from the neighborhood of Jupiter's orbit to Earth in less than two days.There was the

LEXCORP 153
 passage of days here. That was encouraging. It would take some time for this
pounding in my head to dissipate.
I still missed the target. I calculated the position in its orbit where I found
Earth and determined that I got home three days before I left. I had packed a bunch
of sandwiches,but they were gone now. I was inordinately hungry.

MAGGIN

154
 XV
EVE

MY STARCRAFT-THE SEVERAL-DAYS YOUNGER VERSION of it that was

there before I left-would still be sitting in the sculpture garden at the Metro Museum of
Modern Art. So I had to stash my better-traveled version of the Black Widow
somewhere out of sight. I couldn't put it on the roof of my own tower because I would
have to take the elevator down to the ground and there was too much chance of running
into myself. I touched down on the apron of the helipad on the roof of the hospital
around the corner from my penthouse,where my young East African1 engineers were
still crashing.That was the hospital across the street from the bagel shop.I knew I hadn't
been walking these streets for those three days,so I needed to lie low.
Down the elevator from the hospital roof was sevenateen floors. There were a few
stops on the way. I kept my head down and I didn't think anyone noticed who I was.
That worked until someone I vaguely recognized got in the elevator at the fourth floor.
“Eve?”I said and shouldn't have, but I had to.
“Yes?”
She was small and thin with blonde hair drawn back in a bun and a bare ring finger.
She wore nurse's scrubs. Her

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 cheekbones were high. The cleft in her chin was an angel's thumbprint. A shiksa
goddess.
“Do you like bagels?"I asked her.
She knew who I was as soon as she looked at me.I suppose that made me
dangerous. "I do like bagels,Dr.Luthor,"she said,"but I have a class to teach.”
"Mr. Luthor actually," I said, “and it's Lex. You're a teacher?”
“A trainer. A nurse educator."
"That's-"but the door slid open on the first floorand she was down a hall leading
away from reception. I hadn't been this tongue-tied in memory.
On the way out of the hospital I saw a guy wearing a driving cap and gave him a
crumpled fifty-dollar bill I found in my pocket for it. All the better to shield my absent
hairline from adoring crowds and potential assassins. At the bagel place across the
street-my kitchen away from home-I picked up a dozen assorted bagels, half a dozen
bialys,cream cheese, sliced tomatoes and some lox. I couldn't resist asking the counter
guy,still a little bit terrified from our last encounter, to slice and spread the works on
abialy.
"Hold the tomatoes," I said,"and don't forget the capers this time." I inhaled the
sandwich as I crossed the street back to the hospital.

I KNEW ONLY HER FIRST NAME and her face from the image I saw in the
wormhole. I felt as though I knew her well before I ever met her. I don't know what was
the dimension that shoveled her into my mind, but she was the reason I had turned
around and come home. She was destiny.
I peeked through a slice of every unlocked door along the hallway where Eve had
disappeared.
"I got us these," I told her when she yanked open the door to her training room.
She appeared unhappy.

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 “I brought enough for the whole class," I said.“What are we teaching?”
"Medical record keeping,”she said.Icy.
I glanced at the monitor of the laptop on a wheeled stand at the front of the room.
"Converting to Epic?" I asked her.Epic was the current fashionable brand of software for
medical records.“About time, don't you think?”
“Mister,uh-”
"First names," I said. "Have a bagel. Are poppy seeds okay? You're not taking a
drug test anytime soon, are you?”
There were eight other people here, apparently flabbergasted, sitting at tables in
scrubs or lab coats. Each had his or her own laptop. They were doctors or nurses, I
supposed,learning the new system.
"I understand MMr. Luthor is a major donor to the hospital," Eve told her students.
"A silent one. Until very lately.”
An older man in a lab coat nodded, confirming this. The exchange gave me a
moment to set up my gift on an empty table. I piled up the bagels and so forth on the
emptied bag they came in.
"No such thing as adult edlucation without snacks,"I said. A clock on the wall said
it was almost ten thirty,good time for a break. "Come get something to munch on. Is
there a knife around here? Wait I've got one," and pulled my Swiss Army knife out of a
pocket.
I neglected to warn them that the tomatoes tasted like cardboard. No matter. The
salmon was excellent. No one was annoyed except Eve.
I pulled a Lexcorp business card out of my billfold and scribbled on the back.
"That's my cell,” I said,handing Eve the card."Very private. Call.Please.”
"What is this? The super villain version of a meet cute?”And she was clever.How
nice.

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 FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS I HAD NOTHING to do but avoid running into myself.
The several-days-younger version of me would certainly have understood, but I had no
memory of having run into myself before I left. There was also the likelihood that
slightly-younger-Lex and I had clothing in common,as well as a billfold, a pocket watch and
my phone.I didn't think anyone had done a valid experiment to determine what happens when
matter overlapping the timeline encounters itself. Certainly I hadn't, and this was no time to
find out.
To avoid myself I took a Lyft out to the suburbs and spent the next few days in a
multiplex watching movies in the dark and eating snack bar food. Popcorn and partially
cooked hot dogs, mostly. When the theater closed at the end of each day I picked up some
odds and ends from the projection room and from a storage bin behind the snack bar.To pass
the time I rigged up a device to simulate three-dimensional projection with conventional flat
film.
After three days, when it was safe for me to leave, I put my gizmo in an empty cola
syrup box outside the theater manager's office, with some handwritten installation
instructions.Call it room and board.
Outside the theater I looked at my watch and then up in the sky. It was late afternoon,
the time of day I took off in a snit a few days ago. I had only a vague idea what I had been
angry about when I left. I was fine now. High above the clouds was the barely perceptible
white beam of my spacecraft cruising above the clouds of a gray Metropolis sky. I punched
up the Lyft app on my phone. Time to go home.
The driver dropped me off at the hospital where I had left my cruiser on the roof while I
hid out in the suburbs.I lifted it off and dropped down several blocks away into the sculpture
garden of the museum. It was a short walk from here to Lexcorp. It was past MMOMA's
closing time by

158 MAGGIN
 now, and everyone was gone except for Hamid the night guard.
Hamid scurried over with a clipboard from the rear door of the building before I
unlocked the gate to leave.He had the front page of the previous day's paper with a stock
photo of me under a headline. Apparently I was under suspicion for sending an advance
copy of a Supreme Court decision to a few news outlets. I hadn't done anything of the
sort, but maybe one of my enterprising employees had, for all I knew.I autographed the
picture for Hamid's ten-year-old,who would probably bring it to show-and-tell the next
day. Then I pulled my driver's cap down halfway over my face and strolled eastward
along Fifty-Third Street and up Jefferson Avenue to my tower.

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 XVI
CHICKENSHITS IN PARIS

THE FIRST THING I DID WHEN I GOT OFF the elevator on the sixty-fourth
floor at Lexcorp after my trip back from the wormhole was ask B.J. how long I had been
gone.
"I don't know," she said. "Maybe an hour-and-a-half.I thought you went out for a
late lunch or something.Have you been getting any sleep, Lex? You look like hell.”
"Yeah,I said,"just I forgot to eat. Think you could have someone call out for a pizza?
Anchovies and 'shrooms?"
“Sure.”
"And when's the next Masters of the Universe meeting?”
"A week from Friday. In Europe. I marked the Gulfstream unavailable."
"Nah, make it available to lease for the moment.I'm going to hitch a ride I think.”
"The Carters are going to this one. From MacArthur Airport,"
"Last time I went anywhere with them it was a zoo.People singing and dancing in
the aisle all the way to Singapore, tripping over my power cord. Couldn't get any work
done. Call Zach Sklar, would you? We'll have a sit-down on the way.”
“Will do,boss.”

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 "No rush,"I said, and disappeared into the Cavre to grab a shower and spend some
quality time with my bees.

OUR ECONOMY IS WELL PAST THE POINT where it requires a workforce the
size of the general population to support it.The idea of requiring people to hold down
nonsense jobsto make them contributing members of the community is unnecessary,
counterproductive and a tragic waste of creative resources. It's perfectly workable for
large numbers of us simply to live and raise families or gardens or ideas instead of
working at jobs we dislike for bosses we resent.Too many people who insist that
immigrants or minorities or anyone they'd rather not hang out with shouldn't be allowed
to benefit from the largesse of a highly developed civilization, areeither missing the
bigger picture or looking for someone on whom to take out their irrational resentments.
I know plenty about irrational resentments.

I DID GRAB A RIDE TO THE PARIS Chickenshits meeting with Zach Sklar. Zach
is the chief of a thing called the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company,which
owns a chunk of virtually every motion picture produced in Hollywood. They're the
oldest film production company in the land,supposedly founded by Thomas Edison
around the time he invented movies. Neither Zach nor American Mutoscope ever took a
production credit on any of these films, but Zach's share was generally the biggest. Zach
seemed, by nature, less cowardly than the other Chickenshits. I have no idea how Zach
came to be the czar of this cash machine, or what was his connection with his
predecessors, or the connection among any of the company's past bosses with one
another. I supposed that matters of

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 succession in Hollywoodland were comparable to that of bee colonies.
Roxie Richards was also on Zach's Learjet. She was a tall, broad black woman in her
fifties whose pedigree was less obscure than Zach's. She was sole owner of a growing string
of television series. She first came to prominence as a syndicated talk show host. Her hair
was straightened,shoulder-length with a subtle red tint. Her lips were thin but puffy,her
cheekbones were high, her skin quite dark. Roxie had those inoffensive but not extraordinary
looks that,in a woman,people sometimes characterized as handsome. I envied her ability to
walk anonymously in city crowds,despite the fact that she was one of the most recognizable
people I knew.
Zach and I sat opposite each other across the aisle of the passenger compartment as the
jet crossed from the eastern tip of Long Island and over theAtlantic. We talked about the real
story behind Art Buchwald's lawsuit, years ago,over the film Coming to America. It was a
pretty good story,until Roxie walked up the aisle, eased into the seat in front of me,swiveled
in my direction and said,"So Lex, show us this groundbreaking new medium you mentioned
two meetings ago,would you?”
She stepped on what Zach was saying in the middle of a phrase but he didn't seem to
mind. Inerrupting people to drag a conversation into the direction she wanted to take
it-without seeming rude-was Roxie's first monetizable talent.If she had interrupted me I
might have feigned offense, if only to see how she handled it.
“Sure,”I said.“Take a look at this."
I pulled my projector out of a wide briefcase I carried aboard,and I Alien Taped it to the
ceiling of the passenger compartment. Great stuff, Alien Tape. I thought at firstthat it was a
piece of extraterrestrial tech, but it turns out to have been licensed from the Chickenshitss by
a family of Gamma Cetians who have been living in a little apartment in Stoke-

162 MAGGIN
 on-Trent, England for three generations. It was marketed as a Chickenshits product.
I clicked a button on a remote in my pocket and lo,there was a three-dimensional
projection of me, sitting in a Barcalounger turning the pages of Moby Dick and reading
chapter 63 aloud. My image was projected into the air in the aisle of the plane, floating
about a foot above the floor.
"Impressive," Zach said. "That's as stable a holographic projection as I'veever seen.
And from a single projector."
"There are a few more things for you to see.”
But Roxie, on her feet now and looking at the image from different angles, noticed
before I could tell them.“Wait wait wait," she said. "I blinked and the image didn't go
away." And then,"Now I've got my eyes closed and I still see it.”
“What else do you see?” I wanted to know.
"Nothing,” Roxie said."My whole line of sight is blacked out, but I still see you
sitting there."
“Geez,spooky,"Zach said when he closed his eyes too.
"Try putting your hands over your ears," I said.
They both did. I did it too. We continued to hear me reading chapter 63,but the
sound of the jet was muffled.The image and the sound bypass the optic and aural
functions and they imprint directly to the brain. It was disorienting at first,but you get
used to it.
“It's like having superpowers," I said, but I doubt either of them heard me.
They were both interested, of course. How to partner up and market 3-D TV was
the subject of conversation all the way to Le Bourget Airport in Paris.
Sonoma Mandell rarely missed a gathering of the Chickenshits Caucus, and she
was set to chair this next meeting. She was a mildly attractive early-middle-aged woman
these days. Her clothing was always elegant but understated. She smiled and looked
people in the eye when she greeted them. She kept her name and personal opinions

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 out of the public to whatever extent she could. I liked Sonoma, mostly because she was
unspeakably rich. Sonoma was the one I was going to take down first and most of the
Chickenshits would tumble into perdition behind her.
I don't think Sonoma had any particular business interest in Paris. She chose the location
simply because she liked the place. Doesn't everyone? About a third of the way up the Eiffel
Tower is a secret mezzanine level. It's shielded from sight and unavailable except by pressing
a coded combination in a certain elevator. As dusk gathered over Paris,along with my new
business partners Zach and Roxie,I got aboard the elevator and punched in the code: first the
button for the top floor, then the stop button, next was the second floor button and then I
pulled out the stop button ("Arrêf actually). Try it next time you're in town.
The elevator climbed a third of the way up the Tower and the door opened on a square
room furnished only with a big round meeting table and several dozen mesh-backed chairs.
Also, there was a 360-degree view of the City of Lights through one-way glass as the Sun set
and Paris gradually lit up. The meeting hadn't yet begun, but most of the Chickenshits
gathered around the edges of the room gaping in one direction or other. I looked out over the
Champ de Mars toward Montparnasse and thought certainly Sonoma was softening up this
group for something.
"First order of business," Sonoma said when finally she called the meeting together, "I'm
looking for a couple of volunteers to go into competition with me.”
Just as I thought. Whoever raised a hand, this was going to cost them.
The way she explained it, Sonoma though it was going to be necessary to get a public
debate going about our becoming cave people. I wasn't clear yet when or whether we had
agreed to give up our lavish lives to set up housekeeping in the Stone Age. Sonoma said her
neWS networks would take the point of view that those who

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 planned to shelter radically from environmental disaster were alarmist and trying to
foment popular uprising against the job creators (that is, the ruling class, us). The Mandell
News Network would insist that assertions about impending environmental disaster and the
mass desertion of the elite from the surface world were an elaborate hoax. Sonoma wanted
someone to take the opposing point of view -publicly and loudly-so everyone would decide
that those reporting the truth of the matter were nonsensical.Consequently, legislatures would
pass laws to protect us while we got this cave-dwelling project off the ground.Essentially, it
was a cheap way of recruiting public law enforcement to support and protect the Desertion
Project, as we were calling it now.
I thought Sonoma's supposed plan was incredibly contrived. She was just scheming to
get one of her fellow Chickenshits to spend scads of money building a new business when
there wasn't sufficient time to make it profitable. This new communications network would
bad-mouth our project every chance it got. Those in the room were assuming that these days
were the final days, and that money was now a zero-sum game. Maybe she was right.
“I think that's an outstanding opportunity, Sonoma," I lied.“But I have another idea."
That got the attention of most of them.
“Before we go identifying habitable caverns and protecting them from the great
unwashed mass,”I said,“we should all consider an alternative that takes many of our fellow
humans off this surly world altogether.I've got the technology in process to do it."
That got the attention of all the rest of them.
"The technology to do what?”
“Interstellar travel," I said.“Remember the meeting when a bunch of you crowbarred the
idea of our all retreating underground? And I said I was working on a technology to get a
large group of people safely offworld?”

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 "You want us to believe that you've come up with warp drive, Lex?” That was Abel
Cookhouse, the inveterate skeptic.
"Quantum drive more accurately, but I suppose you could call it what you like.
Want to go for a ride?”
“Do we have a destination in mind?”
“Several,” I said, truthfully. “I've been able to doa little exploring the past year or
two. There's a pretty decent mercantile infrastructure out there, most of you might be
interested to know. It seems capitalism is a widespread practice among a bunch of alien
races."
That brought murmurs around the room, and Sonoma didn't quite know how to
respond.
"Shouldn't be a surprise," I said, "considering the number of established families of
outworlders who've gradually made their presence public since whatsisname spilled the
legumes."
"Whatsisname? Who's he mean?" I heard from somewhere to my left. I looked to
see who that was but what I saw was Mary Louise elbowing the chairman of the Federal
Reserve to shush him. It was touching that she was concerned about my sensibilities.
"Of course, if it's the sense of the group that you'd rather spend
who-knows-how-long in a hole in the ground and come out looking to rebuild the mess
you left behind we can do that. An extinction is a terrible thing to survive," I said and sat
down.

MOST OF MY COLLEAGUES in the Chickenshits Caucus didn't much mind the

prospect of human extinction. Primarily because they're idiots. They just didn't want to
be around when it happened. What with all the rapine and pillage-the struggle and
despair - the denial, anger, bargaining,depression and acceptance. Acceptance has got to
be the worst of them.

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 A starship capable of quantum drive. I had already designed the thing - ten years earlier,
as an intellectual exercise when I first built my Black Widow. It was all just a question of size.
The living area is a big cone-shaped space,about an acre at is base, contained in a spherical
exterior.The engines and steering mechanism gather in the part of the sphere outside the
living space. Everything is on a complex of rollers and bearings so the flat of the cone always
points in the direction of the artificial gravity.
Humans need gravity, or something like it, otherwise the brain floats inside the cranial
cavity and atrophies faster than muscles do when they get no exercise. My ship accelerates
continuously at 32 feet per second squared.(I know how many meters 32 feet is and I don't
care. Anyone who needs base-ten to calculate is plain lazy.) That way,as long as the tip of the
cone points in the direction the ship is traveling it duplicates Earth gravitation on the floor.
When it decelerates, the cone rotates to the opposite orientation and maintains a comparable
centrifugal force on the floor,slowing at the same rate as it sped up.
The Ark would have the same quantum capacity that my Black Widow had, for a craft
that large to keep a steady multi-light rat would still use inordinate amounts of energy and it
wouldn't do to have the thing run out of propulsion somewhere between star systems.
Conventional acceleration and deceleration for most of the trip would take it far enough.I still
had a dry, hairy-feeling tongue from my trip to the wormhole and back. It would be more
comfortable for people to accelerate linearly with normalized gravitation most of the time,
than it would be to travel at quantum speed.
If I use conventional acceleration to press the velocity to 99 percent of lightspeed, I can
keep the gravitation in the craft at one-G. The ship would accelerate continually for a little
less than a year. Then the conical living space rotates to the opposite position within the
sphere and it begins to slow at the same speed it accelerated. Slowing down, it

LEXCOBP 167
 creates the same artificial gravitation in the opposite direction, within a negligible
passage of time in the perception of the people aboard. Without even shifting to quantum
drive, the ship can travel a linear lightyear every two years, with little discomfort for
theabsence of gravity.Don't take my word for it; do the math.
I couldn't figure out how to soup up my quantum capacity to propeI a ship of this
mass to reach escape velocity from liftoff like my one-man Black Widow. In
space,though, mass is less of a factor. When and whether to cross into quantum drive for
short bursts is at the discretion of the pilot-as long as this crowd of Chickenshits keeps
getting further from Earth. Now that I've perfected an effectively indestructible material
using recycled plastic, I've got an unlimited supply of raw material to build the hull and
the batteries of the thing. As for who the pilot will be, I've got that figured for sure.
That's why they call me an evil genius.
And they do. Just check me out on Wikipedia.
By the end of the meeting, the idea of holing up in caves while the environment
went to hell was dead.Now we were going to recruit space travelers.

168 MAGGIN
 XVII
SHE CALLED

SHE CALLED. EVE DID. While I was on may way back from Paris, dammit. She
got forwarded to the Lexcorp switchboard and B.J. called my satellite line on Zach
Sklar's plane to tell me I had a message that I might think was important.
“Who's Eve?”B.J.wanted to know.
“Eve?Why? Did she call?”
"Really. That bad,huh? Who's Eve?”
“Eve. A girl I met. What'd she say?”
"I don't know. The call got forwarded to the switchboard.”
"I turned off my phone for my meeting. What'd she say?”
"I didn't talk to her. She talked to one of the phone people."
“Which one?”
“Denecia.”
"Who's Denecia?”
“Somebody on the switchboard."
“Put me through to her.”
“Really?”
“Put me through to her."
“To who?”

LEXCORP 169
 "To Denecia. And it's 'whom'.”
“Denecia Whom coming right up.Give me a second.”
It took longer than a second.
"Lexcorp,”Denecia said.“How may I direct you?”
"Denecia,"I said,"this is Luthor.You took the message from Eve.”
“I did,sir.Yes.”
"What did she say? Exactly."
"Can I have some verification that you're Mr.Luthor?"
"You've been my employee for fourteen months.You're black, about five-foot-five,
shoulder length hair that used to be in locs but you straightened it last January. A mistake
in my opinion. What was the message?”
"Mr. Luthor never remembers the names of his employees. Who is th-”
"I only pretend not to know people who might start thinking they're more important
than they are. But that wouldn't apply to you, would it? Denecia?"
I think she started sobbing. I wasn't going to apologize.That should be further
verification.
"No sir,"she said.
"The message.Specifically.”
"She said she thought it would be nice if you called her back,sir,”
"Nice? She thought it would be nice? That was the word she used?”
"Yes,Yes,she said nice."
“What else?”
"I... I...” I couldn't believe I hired this woman."I don't know. She left her phone
number. It's seven one-”
"Just patch me through to her," I said."And write down the number,”
"Yes sir.”
It seemed to me she was taking too much time. I meant to tell her she should let the
locs grow back out but instead I said,"You hit the 'PATCH' icon in the lower right of the

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 screen, enter her number and on the three icons 'ADD''MERGE' and 'CANCEL,' hit
'MERGE'.”
But before I finished the sentence Eve said,"Hello, this is Eve Callaway."
I must have hesitated.
“Hello?”she said again.
“Hi,”I finally said."It's Lex.”
“Oh. Yes. Mr. Luthor. I was wondering-”
“Lex,”I said.
“Excuse me?”
“It's Lex.Right?”
"Yeah. Of course. L-uhh. I was thinking, since you gave me your card. I thought
maybe you might be interested in helping us out with a small problem."
“Us?”
"The training department. You seemed to be familiar with Epic software. We're
trying to work out a multiple entry process to use with Smart Tools."
“Smart Tools?”
"Yes, Smart Tools are a kind of macro system built into-”
“Yes. I know what they are. So you walked around for over a week until you
thought of this excuse to call me?”
"You sound far away. Are you far away?”
"Somewhere over the Atlantic,"I said.“Between ninety and ninety-four miles west
of the Azores. Is that far away?"
"It is. So what we're trying to-”
"You called me for tech support?”
"Kind of. We're trying to figure out how-”
“Eve,I just wanted you to call. I was hoping you'd call.I'm glad you called,"
"Well it seemed to me you could help with-”
"You don't need an excuse to ca11. Your excuse is I gave you my number. My
extremely private satellite phone number. I didn't have your number, so I gave you mine.

LEXCORP 171
 That's your excuse to call. Did I tell you I'm glad you called?”
“I think so.”
“Good.Is this your cell phone?
“Yes.”
“So now we've got each other's numbers," I said.“Try again. Call me. For no
reason." And I ended the call.
I counted seconds.
At seventeen,the phone beeped.
“Eve.Will you have dinner with me?”
“Uhh.”
"Is tomorrow good for you?"
“Uhh.”
“Good.”Now she was the nervous one.“You'll have the afternoon off. I'll pick you
up at the hospital, Eve. Let's say one PM?”
"Are you an early supper guy? Like my grandfather?"
"Depends on the time zone. See you tomorrow?" I said.
"Sure.See you tomorrow,"she said.
I put the phone in my briefcase under the seat and looked out at the ocean
below,pleased with myself. The voice came from the seat behind me."Who's Eve?” Zach
Sklar said, leaning over the seat back like a giraffe.

THE LEXCORP JET LIVED in a hangar at Teterboro Airport.B.J, would make

sure it was ready to go the next day and she would reserve two suites near each other
with an ocean view at the Parador de El Hierro in Tenerife on the Canary Islands.I
would call Dr. Itami and ask him to modify Nurse Callaway's schedule so she had the
next three days off. And I would make sure Denecia set calls from Eve to stay on my
satellite phone if they redirected to the company switchboard.
I worried for a minute that the Canary Islands might be a little too much for a first
date, then I remembered who I

172 MAGGIN
 was. I leaned back and closed my eyes. When I woke,we were touching down at the
West Islip airfield.

LEXCORP 173
XVIII

FIRST DATE

“I WAS JUST WONDERING whether your rap sheet includes kidnapping,"Eve said.
"I don't have a rap sheet, but it may have included that at one time.Why?”
"Well, I thought we were going to dinner. But this is New Jersey. No rap sheet? I don't
much follow the crime news.Did you get a pardon?”
“A pardon?”
"For kidnapping. And threatening to hijack the province of Ontario. And attempted ...
what was it you were attempting?”
"No pardons," I said. "A gentlemen's agreement involving the President, the Prime
Minister and a few state and provincial governors. That's better than a pardon.”
“As long as everyone is a gentleman.”
I thought about the last President and his table manners and wondered whether I should
renegotiate.“You're safe,”I said,thinking she was safe.
I drove west on Route 80,looking forward to surprising Eve with a lavish trip to a
Spanish isla and she was casually inquiring about my arrest record.
"We're going to the airport," I said. "We're almost there.”
"You missed the exit. Route 95 is a few miles back."
"We're not going to that airport.”

174 MAGGIN
 "You're not taking me to Pittsburgh, are you? I hate Pittsburgh.”
"What have you got against Pittsburgh?”
"My ex-lives in Pittsburgh.”
"My ex-lives in Metropolis and I haven't moved out of town yet.”
"You practically own the city. Sheprobably pays you rent.”
"She might,for all I know."
"Where are we going?”
“Teterboro.”
"Teterboro? There's an airport there?”
“Yeah,a pretty nice one. I keep my plane there."
"You've got a plane. Of course you've got a plane,I guess.Like a Cessna kind of
thing?"
"Hardly. It's a Gulfstream G650 jet. When's the last time you went for a ride on one
of those?"
“Wait,let me think. Uhh, never?”
"You're in for a treat."
“Another one?”
"Lots of treats," I said.
"So when I told Iris my roommate I was going out on a date with Lex Luthor she
said make sure he knows you've got a roommate.”
"Named Iris.”
“Right. And parents and a grandfather and an eleven-year-old daughter who'd miss
me if I turned up,say,under a pile of leaves outside of Pittsburgh six mnonths after I
left.”
“Noted.”
"You don't share information much,do you,Lex?”
"Not as a rule. I should work on that, I s'pose?”
"So where are we going?" She was still joking around at this point. I think.
"We're going to a place in the Canary Islands called Tenerife,"I said.
"The Canary Islands."She didn't seem pleased.

LEXCORP 175
 "You don't have an ex-there too,I hope?”
"No,” I said. I was pretty sure I didn't.
"They speak Spanish there,do they?”
“Mostly.”
"I speak Spanish,"she said.
"That's good.I don't.”
She furrowed her brow and stopped talking for a minute.
“What?”I said.
"You live in Metropolis and you don't speak Spanish?Half my patients speak Spanish.”
“Not me.”
“You must hire people to speak other languages when you have to. Just English for
you?"
"English, yeah. Also German, Russian, pretty good Cantonese,Farsi and a little bit of
Xhosa.”
“Did you trip over your mouth?"
“Pardon?”
“You clicked your tongue ..." and she clicked her tongue on the roof of her mouth like I
had when I said Xhosa.
"Xhosa," I said again. "That's how the word is pronounced,“X-H-O-S-A. The 'XH' is
pronounced..."and I clicked my tongue.
"It sounds unnatural."
“Really?”
"Yes. And you nod your head forward when you click,as if it's a big effort to incorporate
a click into a word."
“It is.”
“Like it's not a normal word."
"It isn't, except in Xhosa. It's a click word. Xhosa is a lot like Swahili, I'm told, but I
don't speak Swahili."
"No Swahili? And they said you were smart."
“They?”
"My grandfather, my daughter,my mom.”
"And your roommate Iris."

176 MAGGIN
 “Not her. She said you were dangerous and that I should tell you I have a roommate
and I should mention her name because that would make her seem real.”
"Is she real?”
“Oh yeah. She's real. She plays woodwinds with the Philharmonic and she likes
scrapbooking."
"She told you to tell me that too? To make her seem real?”
“All real."Then she was quiet for a moment.
“What?”I said.
"You're serious about the Canary Islands?”
“Yup.”
"I'm just wondering if it's really all right for me to go."
"Got your passport? Doesn't matter that you don't if you're with me.”
"I do. I keep it in my jacket pocket.”
"Prudent. Smart. And funny when you want to be.That's good."
"Not so funny. I'm really wondering if it's a good idea to go to the Canary Islands.
They don't have packs of wild dogs there or anything?"
"Not since about the seventeenth century.”
"What about terrorists?”
“A few separatists but they won't bother with you."
“And super-villains?”
“One or two.”
"At least one we know of," she said.
We turned a corner and a runway was in sight.
Among a row of planes by a hangar was one with the Gulfstream logo.
“Is that your plane?”
"No that's a G450. Not bad in its day I guess," I said."Mine is the long narrow
jobbie sitting at the bottom of that other runway.”
She looked. "Pretty," she said. "And big. You didn't,like,steal it or anything,did
you?"

LEXCORP 177
 "Not the plane, no. It's all mine."
I stopped,opened my car door, but she just looked out the windshield at the plane. I sat
with one leg out the door for the moment.
Eventually she said,“Okay."
“Okay?”I said.
“Yeah," she said. “Okay, let's go for a ride.

MY PLANE IS NINETY-NINE FEET LONG and forty of those feet are the length of
the passenger compartment. It's got eleven passenger seats but it was just the two of us in
it,along with Federico my flight steward who is positively gifted at being invisible. He
brought crab cake appetizers and a nice bottle of Chenin Blanc and he vanished for the
remainder of the flight. The storage compartment below is much too bigto reserve for
baggage, so I use it as a garage for my electric Land Rover Defender.On the level above us
was a piano bar.
"Do you play piano?”I asked her.
"NJot since I was about fifteen. Why do you ask?”
"I thought maybe because your roommate is a musician.”
"We lived together junior year at Tufts. She majored in musicology and I majored in
biochem and never the twain shall meet. We're still friends anyway."
So I didn't bring up the piano bar.Maybe next time.

I HAD NOT BEEN TO THE ISLAND of Tenerife in the Canaries since I used it as a
base of operations after a prison break years ago. I was still auditing classes in universities in
the northeast- not long before my aborted adventure at Fort Knox. It's a charming place, but I
spent virtually all my time there hiding out from Interpol and an extradition squad,mostly in a
series of disguises and fake jobs, planning a safe return to Metropolis.

178 MAGGIN
 Life in those days felt like a long series of disappointments and missed opportunities. I
kept taking quick peeks at the mountains and the beaches,thinking what an outstanding place
this would be to hang out and relax-if I managed to live long enough to find out what
relaxing was like. Now here I was,touching down at the general aviation airport in my own
jet with the very loveliest of companions,on our way to a pair of newly opened bungalows at
the Parador de El Hierro overlooking the eastern Atlantic shore - protected well enough from
the accumulating island of plastic slop to the northwest.
Federico leaned his head into the front end of the passenger cabin. "Mr. Luthor, Ms.
Callaway, Juniper is on the tarmac waiting to drive you to your hotel,"he said.And indeed she
was, in the Land Rover with a couple of my guys loading bags into the back end. The idea
was that they and the plane's crew would function as a discreet bodyguard deployment while
we were here.
“Hotel?”Eve wanted to know.
"A nice one,"I said in the car.
“How long do you think we'll be here?”
"Dr Itami gave you three days off. I'11 let him know if you need more.”
"I thought we were going out to dinner. I didn't even bring a change of underwear."
"I brought plenty of stuff," I said and got on the phone to call the restaurant at the hotel
where we were registered under the names Pierre and Marie Curie. I ordered a tray of
charcuterie and cheese to leave on the outdoor table between our bungalows.“It'll all be in
your room when we get there."

I DIDN'T BOOK A SUITE for the two of us. We had two stand-alone cabins across a
short walkway from each other.I got the impression she was okay with this. In fact, she
seemed to think it was a matter of course. She was still a little

LEXCORP 179
 standoffish. I might at least have hoped she'd say something indicating she
appreciated my etiquette,but no.
That was to be expected, I suppose.
I wanted to charm Eve and I couldn't help trying too hard. I didn't have a real
memory of her from the temporary memories I grew in the wormhole, but
something like the experience of her got embedded deep in my gut there. It was out
of my control. I had a visceral memory of a life together through our futures, but I
couldn't impose it on her. This put me at a disadvantage. There aren't many things I
dislike more than a disadvantage. I'm not very good at being charming,but I tried. It
was all I could do.
I sat at the table by the walkway between our cottages,watching a helicopter
drop toward the ground to the north.It looked like it was landing ten miles up the
coast at the airport where my Gulfstreamnow sat in a hangar. I absently munched
on smoked gouda and salami for about ten minutes before Eve came out of her
bungalow all showered and crisp and smiley.She wore a frilly yellow ankle-length
skirt and a pair of boots with two-inch soles and bigger heels.B.J.had gone to
Bergdorf's the day before and picked up all of the clothes Eve had here. She looked
great.
"Do you like wine?" I asked her when I got up for a moment and we sat down
together. I'm so gallant sometimes I can't stand it.
"I do,"she said.
“What's your favorite?”
"I don't know. Something white and French maybe."
"Sweet? Dry? Fruity?Bubbly?”
“I-uhh...”
“Okay,”I said."We'll do a taste test." I pulled the satellite phone out of my
pocket and called room service.
"Why don't you just use the phone in your room?"
"That would involve getting up." The front desk would send bottles of Pinot
Grigio and Gewürztraminer for Eve and

180 MAGGIN
 a nice Zinfandel for me. The Zin was my opening. The best date wine is the one
that's got the best story.
I poured the two white wines in two glasses for her.Then I poured the Zin for
myself. "Zinfandel is the only native American wine grape," I said.
"Really?” She took a sip from both glasses and let each one slosh around for a
moment.
"Yes. For a long time no one knewv where Zinfandel came from. In the 1840's a
German nobleman bought a bunch of worthless land in California.It's wine country these
days. Then he took a tour around vineyards in Europe collecting cuttings from mature
grape vines. He put each one in a big jar and labeled them and sailed back to the United
States.But on the way back there was a leak in the hold with the cutting jars-”
"Okay, I like this one," Eve said,indicating one of her glasses.
"Which one is that?”
“Geffen-something.The long name."
“Gewürztraminer. You picked the one with the unpronounceable name and the
umlaut over the vowel."
“How do you say it?”
“Gewürztraminer,”I said.
“Geh-vootz-tra,what?”she said.
"Würz,” I said. "Like you'd say O-E in-”
“Get under the table!" she barked.
"What?” and I heard a whoosh from behind.The sound was the last thing I
remembered.

THE FUCKING ALIEN, I thought before I opened my eyeS.I always heard a

whoosh before the fucking Alien showed up.Then I peeled my eyes open and saw that I
was wrong.
I was tied to a chair in a small room with just one other person here. The windows
were small and high and painted over. The air was damp. This was a basement. There
was a

LEXCORP 181
 water heater in a corner and a workbench against a wall.It was a private house. They
don't build houses with basements in the Canary Islands any more. The water tables are too
high and the worst winds tend to be moderate so a basement is unnecessary for shelter. I
wondered whether I had been transported somewhere.
“Hey!”I said.
“You're awake.”
"Who are you? What is this place?”
"I'm the guy in charge. That'sall you need to know."
This guy looked less like the boss and more like the muscle. I didn't feel injured or
groggy, just headachy. I couldn't have been out for very long. The arrow that embedded in our
table emitted a gas from its tail to make me unconscious. If I was still on the island,this
building had to be from at least a hundred years ago when they first tried building basements
here.
“Where's my friend? The lady."
He didn't answer. He stood at the workbench,his back toward me.
“I said-”
"I don't know where the girl is. I just work here."
I was bound with plastic zip-ties. Those are easier to undo than rope, but it felt like there
werethree or four of them on each wrist and ankle. They were attached to the legs and back of
the chair. The stairs were behind me, out of my line of sight. The guy stomped upstairs,
probably to tell his fellow thugs I was awake. These were little-leaguers; I'd figure a way out
soon enough.
I heard some sort of thumping from above, then quiet.I didn't even hear muffled voices.
After a few moments someone scurried down the stairs. I twisted to look in that direction. It
was Eve, for heaven's sakes, with a carving knife.
"Eve! Please don't tell me you're with-”

182 MACGIN
 "Don't be ridiculous, Lex. Let's get out of here."She severed the bonds on my left
wrist in one swipe and I took the knife from her with my freed hand. I struggled
left-handed to cut the ties on one leg but she took the knife back and freed my legs and
right hand like she was slicing air. I've always been annoyed that I'm right-handed. It
seems so jejune.
"Do you know who these people are?” I wanted to know.
“I was going to ask you."
"Anybody. Nobody. Grab the plastic ties." There were a handful of them lying
around on the workbench.
Upstairs, the guy who had been tending me in the basement was on the floor by the
stairwell door. He made an indecipherable noise, on the edge of waking up. I pinched
him lightly in that crucial spot the way Master Chan taught me to do in Hong Kong that
time. It was the only time I used the Dim Mak technique on someone, but this guy really
pissed me off. I elbowed him in the head and bound his limbs hog-style with some of the
ties Eve had taken. Now he had a month or so to find some hotshot doctor would figure
out which of his organs was deteriorating and making him unable to assimilate food. Or
maybe not.
There were two more men in another room,both apparently still unconscious and
tied up on a couch and a chair with electric wire that Eve had yanked off lamps or
kitchen appliances or something. That'd be reasonably effective.
"How did you do this?" I asked,a little astonished.
“Square knots mostly."
"No I mean overpowering these big guys."
"Oh. Nurse's training," she said."And the boxing club I joined when I was in grad1
school.”
I slapped against my pockets looking for my phone.Eve handed it to me."It was on
the kitchen counter with this ring of keys. And this billfold. Yours?"

LEXCORP 183
 "Yes." I thumbed through the billfold to make sure all the cards wvere there.“You're
amazing," I told her.
"I thought you might notice eventually." She inspected her knots of electricaI wire and
said,"What do we do now?"
"We get you somewhere safe and see what happened to my security people."
“And what would you do next if I wasn't here?"
"I'd find out who tried to kidnap me and devise a retaliatory measure.”
"Then that's what we do," she said. "Both of us.”
I was already looking forward to our second date.Maybe I'd even get to finish my
Zinfandel story.

GIVE ME A MOMENT. JUST A MOMENT to tell you what I thought about-dreamed

about-when I was out cold and getting dragged off to who-knows-where. All I could think
about were Eve's eyes. They're round and gray-green.These days she thinks I spend too much
time studying them,but mostly it's research. I'm trying to figure out what combination of
melanin and retinal refraction would produce a color like that, It's true that I like the way they
look,but that's not my primary interes in them, as I keep explaining to her.
When we got back from the Canary Islands, back from our first date, I set up a
mechanism in my sixty-fourth-floor Cave at Lexcorp to measure the color balance. This is a
spoiler, by the way; now you've got foreknowledge that we surviyed the trip to the
Canaries-but only to the extent that Eve became the subject of an ongoing science
experiment.People's eyes aren't just blue or brown. People have all sorts of colors and
gradations in their eyes, but I decided that Eve's color was the most interesting one. I rigged
up a mechanism to shine a light into a bath of melanin in a bowl.
I got one of those multicolor smart bulbs that's responsive to robot commands from Siri
or Alexa - or

184 MAGGIN
 Macduff, the voice-operated system I programmed for my Cave, which is far
superior to the commercial gadgets in every way. In fact, I would probably have gone
after Amazon and Apple for patent infringement if I were in the habit of patenting
everything I come up with. So I shined the light in a range of colors into the melanin
soup trying to reproduce the gray-green of Eve's eyes and I haven't yet been able to find
quite the right shade. I decided that there had to be a mechanism or chemical component
in her eyes that was peculiar to Eve, something other than conventional melanin.
One of these days I'll have to do some exploratory work on her retinas to figure out
what is generating that color.She doesn't seem interested in having me do that, though.
Maybe when I know her better.

IT DIDN'T TAKE A GENIUS-certainly not one of my level-to figure out who

snatched me. It was the Russians. In collaboration with the Georgians. I knew that as
soon as I realized it wasn't the Alien. They were the only ones who knew about the
enriched uranium I swiped.
Real wealth is all about how much you can borrow and put to work. The president
of Russia was,according to some accounts, the wealthiest person on Earth. He controls
the eleventh largest economy in the world. I live, however, in a multi-trillion-dollar
economy, the biggest one there ever was. I can get my hands on pretty much all of it and
I don't have to steal a damn thing.
Watch what happens next.

LEXCORP 185
 XIX
THE PENN STATE LION

MY SECURITY DETAIL IN THE CANARY ISLANDS was diminished only

marginally. My pilot Enrique, and Federico the steward had been at discreet locations on the
grounds of the hotel when the three Georgian agents showed up to kidnap me. They got the
same treatment the kidnappers served up to Eve and me minutes later, the knockout gas in a
sac attached to an arrow that theyshot into our cocktail table. Juniper my driver,
though,sitting nearby in the Land Rover, was shot dead when she tried to ram them as they
loaded me into their van. When I found that out I was glad I'd been so pissed.
Eve had recovered consciousnessas quickly as I did-but by then I was in that basement
strapped to a chair.Enrique and Federico,who had greater doses administered by soaked
handkerchiefs when my abductors grabbed them from behind,were still unconscious when
Eve and I returned in my captors' car from the site of my interrogation. Eve found the old
house where they held me by tracking my phone. Probably I should've objected to that, but I
didn't want to get in an argument with Eve. It seemed her wary roommate Iris had convinced
her to load a tracking application into my phone first chance she got. Maybe I'd yell at Iris if I
ever met her. From now on I'll have to take

186 MAGGIN
 my electronics with me even when I relieve myself, no matter how much I want to
trust the people around me.
I learned that from Eve. Such a clever girl.
We left the kidnappers' car at the hotel and took the Land Rover back to the
location where I had been held. It was a ramshackle place in need of a paint job,with a
busted window at the peak of its second story. We made a note of the location and its
address. I pulled a driving cap down over my face when we saw one of my former
captors hobbling around a dirt driveway.
"Did you1 do that to him? That limp?" I asked Eve.
“Probably,"she said.
"Good work,”I said and pulled away to head north along the coast on Autopista del
Sur.
"Aren't you going to do something to him?"
“You sound eager.”
“Don't I? Oddly eager,"she said.
"He's a toady,”I said.“We're going to the island capital in Santa Cruz and find out
who owns this property. We'll improvise from there. How's your Spanish?"
“Pretty much street Spanish," she said. “I don't know how I'd do trying to speak
with government officials.”
"We're about to find out."
"Does this sort of thing happen to you often?”
"What sort of thing?”
"Getting ambushed, drugged, abducted, having your dinner date bail you out of
trouble?”
"Altogether too often. Except for that last part.”
The deed to the old house was in the name of a chargéd'affaires at the Russian
embassy in Madrid. The kidnappers' car we swiped to get back to the hotel was
registered to the embassy itself. It wouldn't be difficult to track that down. And I had a
good idea of who had to have given him the order to interrogate me. To convince Eve
that it was time to go home with two days remaining on our hotel reservations, I had to
promise her I'd let her in on the

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 retaliation plan against the Russians, once I figured out what I was going to do.
"What we're going to do," she corrected me.
“Okay,”I said.
We reached Metropolis in late morning the following day and I drove her to her
apartment building on West Eighty-Fifth Street. She invited me up.
"I didn't plan on that," I told her.
“Plan on what?”
"A nightcap. A daycap. A stopoff in your apartment.Whatever.”
"You can't plan everything,"she said.
“I always have so far," I said.
"Life is full of surprises."
It's impossible to find a parking space on the Upper West Side in the middle of the
day. I double-parked and waved down an unobtrusive black Chevy Bolt that had been
following us two or three cars back since we left the airport in Teterboro. The Bolt
stopped behind me and one of my three security guys got out.
I gave him the key fob for the Rover I was driving. I told him to circle the block a
few times and I went up tothe third floor with Eve. The visit lasted longer than I had
planned.

DAVY ATHENS, THE KID WHO DRESSED up in a lion costume in the Nineteen
Nineties and danced around the field to fire up the enthusiasm of the home crowd at
Pennsylvania State University football games, made it clear that becoming a nuclear
power was within the capacity of ordinary citizens.It was certainly within the capacity of
your friendly neighborhood criminal billionaire.
Once you've got a critical mass of the right uranium ions,along with a sufficient
degree of engineering expertise,you can conceivably put together your very own arsenal
of hydrogen bombs. In my case, it didn't even cost a billion

188 MAGGIN
 dollars. Most of the necessary information is available on the Internet. The rest is
on the Dark Web. The most expensive part of the process is filtering uranium ore to pull
out the rare deposits of uranium-235. Enriched isotopes, they're called.You do it with a
centrifuge and the process is a lot like panning for gold although it comes out not in
nuggets but in molecules. To get enough of the stuff to use-the critical mass-takes pretty
much until the end of time. Instead, I stole a few tons of it from the Russians. That's how
I saved time and a billion dollars,give-or-take.
You use the uranium to set off an atomic explosion,which then steps it all up to
produce radioactive plutonium through the fission that the atomic explosion sets off.
That's how the hydrogen fusion explosion takes place-with an atomic trigger.
I had met David Athens a couple of years earlier when some of the most
irresponsible news outlets on the planet started floating the idea of my running for
President of the United States. I don't know how any of them figured out what they
thought my politics were-or even that I had any -but for almost a minute I considered
running. I even sent out an invisible man to run for President instead of doing it myself.
Of course my invisible man got elected- mostly by making friends with the
secretaries of state in the swing states. In office, my mini-me shoved other government
chiefs at summit meetings out of the way to get a better picture taken, nearly scuttled the
NATO alliance,and occasionally said "shit" and dropped confidential information during
news conferences and summit meetings.This President Luthor wasn't the most
successful of my invisible men. Still, in the real world, somebody else got elected that
year and did nearly as much damage as I would have.
David Athens had a political consulting business, a very successful one called The
Plato Group. Mostly he worked

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 with American politicians, but there were rumors he had also done business getting
several foreign heads of state elected.Those rumors were mostly true. He kept voter
databases for every congressional district in the country, along with voters' political
contributions, social media activity and dozens of other pearls of information. When the
rumors of my political prospects started bouncing around, he got in touch with me. This
time I called him.
"Nah, I'm not running for anything,"I told him, as I had told him when we first
spoke, "but I'd like to talk to you about your academic career.”
“My what?”
"What you did in college. The trick you pulled off to get an A in physics junior
year."
"Oh that. Hah!” He didn't laugh, but he actually said Hah. "That was a trick. I
should never have taken advanced physics. I was a poly-sci major and I was flunking
physics so I pulled a rabbit out of a hat.”
"And instead of writing a conventional term paper you designed a nuclear bomb."
"I did a lot of creative stuff like that in college,"he said."All the technical data is
out there. Hah!" Then he said,"You're not planning on going to war with Russia or
anything,right?”
"As it happens, I'm already at war with Russia,but no.I want to use fusion bombs as
propulsion devices."
He thought a moment and said, “Wait. You're the guy putting together the big Space
Ark that's supposedly going to preserve the human race,”
I didn't say anything.He took that as confirmation.
"Now this evacuation thing seems like less of a joke to me," he said.“Maybe I
should apply to go."
I told him not to waste his time with the Ark, that he'd do better on Earth. That was
true.
The problem, I explained to him, was that I couldn't test my explosive devices
before I used them to launch the Ark

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 from my property in the Jersey Pines. Everyone else-that is, every country with
nuclear capacity-had set off test explosions before building a backlog of nuclear
devices.They did this to make sure the things worked. I also needed to make sure mine
worked. But I didn't want seismic activity to alert the world that I had them. Besides that,
I would rather not blow up New Jersey if I could avoid it. I needed to compare my
explosives with those of another engineer.
At the time David wrote his paper,his physics professor circulated it among a dozen
prominent nuclear physicists and engineers to check the design's viability. Three
responded to say they would rather not comment, and what the hell was this prof doing
encouraging this kind of shit anyway. Two physicists didn't respond at all. And seven got
back in touch with the professor to say that the Athens design would absolutely work.
One of those seven started an email with the phrase,"You are become Death, the
destroyer of worlds ...”I'm a big fan of David Athens.
He sold me a copy of the term paper for ten thousand dollars. For another twenty he
agreed to keep mum about the fact that I was interested in it at all. He came to town and
hand delivered the old term paper himself. A bargain at twice the price.
I sat in my Cave for a couple of days with David's term paper, a pencil and a yellow
legal pad. I compared his design and process with my own, point for point. Without a
doubt my propulsion bombs were going to work. By the end of the next week, Lexcorp
would be a nuclear power.

I WAS AT THE CONSTRUCTION COMPOUND in New Jersey when my cell

rang. I had to pull my arm up through the sleeve of my radiation suit to reach into my
pants pocket and answer the phone.
“Do you have any plans for dinner tonight?" Eve wanted to know.

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 "Hi,”I said. I hadn't spoken to her since our interrupted first date.
“Yeah hi.It's Eve.”
“I know who it is.How are you?"
"Wondering why I haven't heard from you all week.I never heard of a one-night
stand that involved a private jet and a tropical island before."
“Is it really a week? Sorry,"I said."I never say anything like 'sorry.'See what you do
to me?”
"Dinner? Tonight?" she said. "I feel like cooking."
She cooked too, for heaven's sake. I made my way out of Building Four and
eventually out of mnost of my radiation outfit.My Maasai kids and I were hoisting
150-pound blocks of U235, each into a container I designed to isolate the uranium until
the explosions of one block ofit had propelled the craft several hundred million miles
and depleted its charged ions.
"I'd love to,but...”
“I'm making chicken Kiev.”
“I really can't tonight.”
"Seriously?" she said.“Little rolled-up boulders of deep-fried chicken with chives
and butter and Havarti melted inside them and double-coated with Italian breadcrumbs
and crushed almonds?”
The best chicken Kiev I ever had wasn't even in Ukraine. It was at a restaurant in
Kathmandu called Rum Doodle. The place had cutout footprints of famous sherpas
hanging from the ceiling and it looked like Marion Ravenwood was going to jump out
firom behind a table any minute and challenge you to a whisky shot contest. It sounded
like Eve made her Kiev the same way."I'm out of town in the middle of a project here."
"I'm putting the almonds in the Cuisinart.”
"I might be a little radioactive,"
“So seven-ish?”
"I'll bring the wine."

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 The Maasai kids could manage the rest of this without me today. That's why I have
Lexcorp, after all.

THE PLATO GROUP, DAVID ATHENS' POLITICAL consulting business,

operated out of an office building in Philadelphia and David lived nearby in Elkins Park.
I had B.J. set up a meeting for David, Eve and me in a classroom in Spring House, a
little building on the Abington campus at Penn State on a Sunday afternoon in late June.
"Tell Athens he'll get double his normal consulting fee and wve'll feed him," I told
B.J.
"Will do. So who's Eve?” B.J. still wanted to know.
"Don't you want to know why I'm meeting with the head of the Plato Group?”
"I figure you're probably running for something.That's much less interesting than
who this mysterious Eve is."
“Eve is a girl I know. You'll meet her sometime.Maybe.And I'm not running for
anything."
"That's what people running for something always say."

IT WASN'T CLEAR TO ME WHETHER MY PURPOSE in preparations for the

meeting with Athens was for security or to impress Eve. Either one worked for me.
There was a well-equipped cafeteria in the building next to Spring House and I sent a
kitchen staff ahead of us to make veal parmesan for lunch. A security squad was there to
meet us when I landed the 'copter on a lawn on campus in sight of the building. Four
cars full of my staff goons drove up and surrounded Eve and me as we stepped out of
the helicopter. Eve wore a backpack that one of the goons eyed suspiciously but I waved
him off.
"That's the building we're going to," I told Eve as I extended a hand to help her step
down. "Want to drive over?”
"What a nice campus," she said."Why don't we walk?”

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 So we did. With a company of armed people on foot and in cars crawling behind us.
"I told you I would read you in on the retaliation plan against the fools who interrupted
our first date," I said on our short walk.
"Yes,"she said."“You found out who it was?”
"I found out who gave the order to have me abducted and questioned.”
“Anyone I know?”
"Maybe someone you know of."
"Okay, so you're not going to tell me.”
"Oh I'll tell you. I just want to get a good look at the expression on your face when I do."
“I didn't know you were into torture."
"I'm a sadist from way back,”I said.“Just check out my press."
The little building was mostly made up of two sizable classrooms. We took the room
without an outside door. Most of the student desks were shoved out of the way. I let the
hallway door hang open so I wouldn't have to make sure who it was when the crew showed
up with lunch. There was a small table with three office chairs around it.David Athens was
already here,sitting in one of those chairs. He looked up from the laptop computer he puttered
with.
"Hey Dave,"I said.
"Mr. Luthor," he said as he stood to offer a hand.
"It's Lex,” I said, shaking his hand. "This is my friend Eve Callaway. Hope you don't
mind my including her.”
"I don't think I mind," Athens said."Depends on what this meeting is about."
"Nice to meet you," Eve said."He hasn't told me what it's about either,”
"Eve," I said, "Dave Athens is a political consultant with clients all over the country and
several more around the world. He's kind of a big deal."
“And what do you do,Eve?" Athens asked her.

194 MACGIN
 “I'm just a nurse,”
"That's kind of a big deal.What's your specialty?"
“Oncology and mostly technical training these days."
"Hah. I'd heard you weren't fond of super-heroes,Luthor.”
“Oh you have no idea,” I told him.
I'm not much for small talk. We sat down and I said,"So Dave, the reason I asked
you here is because I'd like you to answer some questions about the president of Russia."
“Okay,”Athens said.
I looked at Eve's face in that moment. It was worth the wait.
“Geez Lex,” Eve said.“You must be more important than you let on."
"So,”I said.“Are we hungry yet?”

RUSSIA WAS A DEMOCRACY for a few months following the revolution of

1917. Women were able to vote there before they could in the United States, but that
right was good for only one legitimate election. They tried democracy again about
seventy years later and it lasted longer that time.Early in the century, as his first
four-year term was ending, the current president of Russia had an aide call David
Athens'Plato Group to get a re-election campaign underway.That involved an extended
trip for Dave to the Russian's secret estate on the Black Sea-not far from the spot where
I pulled off the Uranium heist that got the Russian so pissed at me.
Not long after Dave consulted with him, the Russian president decided it was safer
and easier to fake election returns than to win them. He effectively suspended the new
Russian constitution altogether. He ignored term limits,filled public agencies with loyal
cronies, extorted a sizable personal fortune from state-owned businesses,left whole
industries in the hands of his owned-and-operated plutocrats,interfered with elections in
foreign countries and even

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 invaded one or two of them. Meanwhile, after that first consulting job Dave was out of a
gig.
"He doesn't really live in Moscow, does he?" I asked him.
"I don't think so," Dave said. "Mostly he hangs at the estate. It's like a castle, really. A
palace. A fortress on the shore of the Black Sea."
“Is it right on the beach?”
"He owns the beach,but he's got a couple acres of dense forest and a steep bluff between
it and the building. So you can't surf to get there.Hah.”
It occurred to me that we could take wind-surfers from a small boat to the shore by the
president's palace, but I realized that we would end up too tired out to pull off anything
successful once we got there. Another time perhaps. Meanwhile Eve yanked off her backpack
and leaned it against the leg of her chair.
"Here, let me try," Eve pulled a sketch pad and a bunch of colored pencils out of the
pack and found a clean sheet.“Mind if I go online,Lex?”
“Go ahead." I pulled out my cell phone, intending to activate its wifi connection. She
already had a laptop out and on the table.
"I've got it," and she pulled up a screenful of Google images of the Russian president's
supposedly secret summer retreat. "Is this the place?" she spun the screen around to show
David.
"That's the place," Dave said. "This wing on the southeast corner is new.”
"Let's look at that”she said,punching up a few keys to bring up a schematic of the
ground floor."According to this,tat seems to be a kitchen with an outdoor dining space next to
a staircase to the second floor."
"The main entrance is on the west facing the beach.How long were you there?”I asked
Athens.
"Six days,"he said.

196 MACGIN
 "Just the one trip? And how long were you actually with him? Where does he spend
most of his time?”
"In the workout room there on the northwest wing.I talked to him three or four
hours a day."
"Just him? Alone?”
"No, never alone. He always had at least one armed guard with him. Sometimes
two or three other men joined the conversation. Guys I didn't recognize and he never
introduced them. Government officials I guess."
"Any women?”Eve wanted to know.
"Just the girlfriend," Dave said. “She's a-”
“That gymnast,yeah,” Eve said."From the Olympics in Australia. Was she in on the
conversation too?”
"No. Never. She just came in a few times with her own armed guy to work out on
the parallel bars," Dave said.
"How'd she do?” from Eve.
“On the equipment?" Dave said. "She was doing all right, but I had to shift my
chair around to avoid being distracted.”
“Okay"I said."Show me how much of this place you actually saw.”
The three of us talked for a little over an hour. By the end of it Eve had a detailed,
color-coded diagram of the northwest corner of the building- the gym, an adjoining
dressing room and an indoor pool cabana connecting to a long narrow swimming pool
with six lanes marked by tiles in the floor. I was a little jealous of the palace, but I wasn't
impressed with its security. The president's palace guard were mostly live-in guys and
there was very little in the way of electronics.
I concluded that he didn't much trust technology.Probably he didn't understand it.
“You came well prepared," I told Eve as we walked out to a car by the door of the
building.“How did you know what we were meeting about?"

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 "I didn't," she said.“My first two thoughts were that we were going to infiltrate an
insurgent force in Ukraine or that you wanted to spring a few dissidents in a work camp
somewhere."
"Were you prepared for that too?"
She smiled as she slid into the back seat and pulled a map of Siberia out of her pack. It
was marked with the locations of all the known forced labor camps in the region."Once a Girl
Scout..."she said.
She edged her hand along the seat toward mine until we locked pinky fingers.
"Hey Lex,"she said."Thanks for including me."
"I promised. I'm a promise keeper.”
“So what are we going to do? Yank him out and deliver him to The Hague for his trial?”
"What if I told you we were going to assassinate him?"
She thought a moment."That works too,"she said.
The president of Russia was obsessed with his wealth.The ability to put money to work
is based on how much purchasing power you're able to borrow, and borrowed money never
gets taxed. The Russian got all his money by stealing it outright from other wealthy Russians.
But because of the economic insecurity of his country-for which he is solely responsible-he
can't borrow much of anything. So he sits on an enormous pile of cash, and that's all he has
access to. As an American with unlimited credit, I have free access to a multi-trillion-dollar
economy, the largest there ever was. That Russian popinjay can only dream of having the
kind of resources I've got.
I would enjoy this caper. It was pretty much Eve and my second date, but it was starting
to feel altogether too much like a Nicholas Sparks story. With the addition of the talk of
assassination, of course.

198MACGIN
 XX
THE AMAZON

ALL THREE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO SEGMENTS of my Atlantic Flywheel were

manufactured and most of them were in place. I designed a pressurized two-man submersible
craft with flexible external clamps, and I built eight of them.I even rode one down to the floor
of the trench to make sure the water pressure wasn't going to kill anyone. I had to use
earplugs to keep my brain from fogging up with the depth.A construction crew was down
there now,manipulating and locking together the segments in the order I numbered them.
The sphere of the Ark sat on the two-acre macadam space in the Pines waiting for its
eager residents, as the Maasai kids installed the last of its propulsion bomb receptacles. A
handful of the Chickenshits were already agitating for themselves to replace many of the
potential travelers that Mary Louise had painstakingly identified. A few inspectors from the
State of New Jersey were showing up in the Pines occasionally but I found them eagerly
amenable to small amounts of income enhancement. I knew I'd picked New Jersey for a
reason. I still needed to find my space pilot, but that wouldn't be much of a problem.
And the bees.
My fat Apis Mellifera Lexcorpus honeybees were my pride and joy. There were three
six-level hives of them on

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 the Tower balcony outside my Cave and there were four distinct feral colonies of
them-maybe six; they overlapped a little-hanging off the grassy corners of the fifty-seventh
floor. They made terrific honey. Unfortunately, unike their wild forebears in Nepal,
Lexcorpus honey was not hallucinogenic. Not that it mattered very much, but at first I
couldn't figure out why.
For all the years I raised honeybees and manufactured healthy air on the balconies of my
operations centers at both the Fillmore penthouse uptown and the Lexcorp Tower,I didn't
come across a single employee who was interested in helping out with my hives. No matter;
I'd rather handle that on my own. But I still had a spare bee suit hanging in a closet. It was
time to bring in some people to propagate these incredibly productive little beasties around
the world, and I knew exactly where to find them.

“MR.MCFAUL,THIS IS LEX LUTHOR." I called using my own identity this time. It

was time to come out of the closet.
"The man himself," McFaul said.“Calling to try and extort us out of house and home this
time?"
"Water under the bridge, sir. I hope there are no hard feeling6.”
"Not at all. Call any time you're in the mood to deprive my son of his shot at
immortality."
"Where is Benjie applying for college?”
"Amherst, Brandeis, Cornell and Harvard. Who wants to know?”
"He shoots high," I said."Any safety schools?”
"Harvard. Is there a reason you're calling,Luthor?”
"Ask him to call Lexcorp when he's home from school,”I said. "I've got a project for him
that will impress the hell out of the admissions office at any university that strikes his fancy.
Oxford. The Sorbonne. The sy's the limit.Harvard'll

200 MAGGIN
 want to put him on the faculty. It'll probably involve a gap year after high
school,though.”
“And how am I supposed to pay for Oxford tuition and trans-Atlantic flights for
Christmas and summer vacations?”
"You haven't heard of the Lexcorp Obligatory Reserve Instruction fund, have you?" I
made up the name on the spot.
“I haven't but-”
“Have Benjie call me. Write down a switchboard number.”
Benjamin McFaul was a seventeen-year-old kid quite a bit taller than his father. He had
his father's sass, though.I liked him after a while. I was even starting to warm up to the old
man. Both McFauls drove out to Metropolis the following weekend and the first thing I
showed them was the feral overflow Lexcorpus colonies hanging off the side of the
fifty-seventh floor.Then I gave them bee suits and took them to see the jungle on the balcony
outside my Cave. I had a third protective suit now,lined with the Lexcorp Objectively
Indestructible Substance. I gave Benjie that one. Told him it was a signing bonus.
“What's my son signing?" McFaul the Elder wanted to know.
Then I told them the kid's prospective assignment. He was to take a supply of Lexcorpus
queen cells and quantities of worker bees and plant several of them at suitable locations in
every rain forest and high altitude tropical region he could travel to in the next year.
"You'll start in South America," I told him. “The Amazon basin."
"Is it okay, Dad?” Benjie wanted to know.“Is it?”
"Travel, hotels, meals, all paid for?" Dad wanted to know.
"Of course," I told him."And a thousand bucks a week.It's a business expense. We'll get
you a tent and a sleeping bag too,"

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 Mr. McFaul thought about that for a minute. Then he said,“Can I go too?”

THE CHICKENSHITS WERE GETTING restless. The first one to bring it up at

the meeting in a one-time fallout shelter near Corporate Center in Delaware was Sonoma
Mandell. She piped up after my progress report on the Ark.
“Whose bright idea was it to send a bunch of ordinary people off on this mission to
save the human race?”Sonoma wanted to know.
"I'm not sure what you mean when you say ordinary,”I said."Mary Louise has
gathered a very impressive roster.We've got Rhodes Scholars, Olympians, I think even a
Nobel Prize winner or two,right Mary Louise?”
Mary Louise started to say,“Yes, Lexie, we're calling them the Worthies. They're a
group of some of the mnost extraordin-”
The previous Chickenshits meeting was in a little-known bunker under the Santa
Monica pier. By design I wasn't there because I knew that conversation would get salty
and I didn't want to interfere. The gang had a chance to look at the statistics and
projections forclimate change and they all realized that things would get worse than
anyone had said in public, and faster than anyone realized1.Meanwhile,the only way out
of this was to eliminate the means that were keeping most of them slathered in privilege.
I didn't even have to exaggerate to scare the crap out of them. It was obvious that it
would be far less dangerous to set out across the expanse of space than it would be to
sweat it out on Earth.
Mary Louise had skipped the Santa Monica meeting as well. It was three thousand
miles from home and without wheelchair access. So they had a massive blowout of a
session, and two months to let it simmer. You can always trust Chickenshits to behave
like chickenshits.

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 "Worthies?” Sonoma snapped at Mary Louise. "Not a leader in the bunch of them. Are
you putting together a new civilization or a pickleball league?"
“Sonoma, I have no idea what you mean by that." I did know, and it wasn't leadership
she was really talking about.She was talking about mortal fear.
“Community builders is what she means," Abel Cookhouse and his corpulent voice
stomped in."If the planet where we've planted our businesses and our families is dying-and
we all know it is, despite what we put in the press releases -then the next world better include
people who can give orders. Movers. Shakers. Guys with the balls to take chances and
leverage resources out over the edge."
“You mean people like-”
“People like us," Sonoma broke in. I hated being interrupted,but I couldn't have written
the script any better than this.“Talented,successful industrialists.People like the people in this
room.”
The Ark was nearly ready to cast off, and no one in this bunch was going to get aboard
without thinking it was their own idea.

THE MCFAUL BOYS,BENJIE AND DAD,were somewhere in the wilds of Brazil

setting free the bees. Two of the Maasai kids went with them to keep them safe. I sent them
off with forty screened boxes of worker bees, plenty of water and an unhatched queen cell
with each incipient colony. If half of the prospective mamma bees succeeded in forming a
new community we would be fine. A week later I made a trip to look over progress on the
Flywheel in the trench north of Puerto Rico.
The wheel itself was complete and connected to the frame at its hub. I went for the first
test of the mechanics of the structure-that is,to see whether the Atlantic current was strong
enough to make it rotate steadily on its axis. The

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 foreman of the crew kept apologizing about any snags in its movement but I was
concerned mostly that it moved in the right direction, and that the circumference all
remained below the surface of the water so storms wouldn't affect it.I accepted my
foreman's lavish apologies, usually with a stern expression, but it rotated the right way,
and smoothly enough. I gave them the go-ahead to connect an optical fiber conducting
mechanism-an electrical cable-to the hub of the turbine and get it online. I think I
intimidated the workers within earshot a little when I spoke Xhosa on a phone call from
the deck of a tugboat to one of the MIaasai kids in Brazil. All the clicking could have
made him think I was speaking to an extraterrestrial somewhere. That'd make a good
story for him to carry back to the mainland. Then I was off to Peru where I would
rendezvous with the McFauls and their escorts.
If you consider all the surface area up and down the Andes mountain range, the
Inca empire was one of the largest the world had ever hosted. And they did it without
wheels or steel. An Inca arrow to the heart was more likely to get through a European
suit of armor than a bullet was to pierce the tight weave of an Inca waistcoat. I have no
idea how these people ever managed to get conquered. I flew into Lima and caught a
helicopter that B.J. leased from a local pilot to meet my team of Lexcorpus propagators
in Cuzco.
"You look beat. How're your lungs?" I asked Mr.McFaul at the little restaurant
where I bought everyone lunch. I never did get the elder McFaul's name straight. It was
either George or Sam-I always get those two mixed up.
"Adapting," he said.“But Benjie and the boys got in a pickup game of basketball
with some of the local kids yesterday afternoon and they all seemed to be fine."
"Young lungs," I said."We're a little over two miles above sea level here. You'll
want to take it easy. There

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 should be a tank of oxygen for you in your hotel room. How many honeybee
colonies have you got left?”
"Four,"Benjie said."And all four queens have hatched,still in the screened
containers."
“Doing well,are they?”
"Yeah,” Benjie said. "And they're all starting to build comb inside their boxes."
"That's all right. Hope they don't get too attached to it.How did the ones you left in
Brazil do?"
“Okay I guess.”
“Great. I think they're going to like it better atthe higher altitude. The pilot of that
'copter I came in seems competent enough. Put two of the remaining colonies at the
opposite ends of town here and fly down to Machu Picchu to leave the other two.”
“Okay,”Benjie was eager, his dad less so. Benjie had been raising honeybees in
their back yard since middle school and he was good at manipulating hives. “We might
get two colonies out of one of the boxes. I think they've already started a new queen
cell.”
"Happy little critters," I said.“So separate out the new queen cell and some of the
workers and plant that one here in Cuzco, at least four miles from the primary hive."
"I can do that," Benjie said. “And I think I solved your hallucinogen probem.”
“My-”
"Dad said the original Nepalese bees made honey that got you high,right?”
"They did." I had forgotten I mentioned that to his father.
"It's rhododendrons,” Benjie said. And his father smiled sheepishly,"I got a little
honey on my gloves emptying out one of the colony containers in a little town in Labrea,
in Brazil. I washed the glove off in the hotel and Dad took a nap with my hand towel
over his face. When he woke up he was,um-”

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 "High as a kite,"the elder McFaul said.
"We stayed there an extra day and tried to figure out what happened. We traced it back
to a flower shop next door to the hotel where they'd just gotten in a shipment of
rhododendrons from wherever."
"Impressive," I said. That was going to be useful information for me. I was definitely
putting this kid on the payroll the day he finished college. "That honey goes for about a
hundred bucks a pound in Kathmandu,” I said. “Ten times the cost of saffron."
"What's saffron?” Benjie asked.
"Something that's a lot better for you than acid honey,"his father said."Countries fought
wars over it a thousand years ago." Dad took a long skeptical breath. The two Maasai kids
were taking turns at an old Atari coin-op Dig-Dug game in a corner of the restaurant,
obviously having as great a time as Benjie.
"Rhododendrons, eh? Good to know," I said.“I'll take the Jeep back to Lima. We've got a
bunch more queen cells at the Lexcorp Tower. It'd be a shame to let them go to waste. You
guys can meet me in Metropolis in-what?-a week or so?"
"Five days," Benjie said. Another long breath from McFaul the Elder.
“That'll be fine," I said.
Cuzco to Lima by road took about the same as the time it was to get from Metropolis to
Miami. I gave it three days,leisurely motoring along the Pacific coast, with meals and oxygen
breaks.

"WANT TO SEE A BLACK WIDOW SPIDER?”I asked B.J.when I got back to the
Tower and started to unpack.
"Hell no!" she said.
The specimen had skittered out of my airline bag when I opened it on top of the
workbench. They're fast. But I

206 MACGIN
 dumped out a jar of washers and caught it in that. If I had put the widow on the lip
of any of my conventional hives she would just have gotten stung once or twice and
tossed out.Instead, I dropped her on the entry shelf of a Lexcorpus hive and the residents
welcomed her wwith open arms. They invited her in and made a rare feast of her.

LEXCORP 207
 XXI

BLACK SEA PALACE

"LET ME SEE THAT DIAGRAM YOU DID of the Russian fortress," I said to Eve over
a glass of Gewürztraminer in her apartment on West Eighty-Fifth Street."Please," I said after
a moment.
Her daughter Raya was home today,a pretty fifth-grader with buck teeth and freckles.
Eve and I had not yet reached the stage where I could stay over with Raya in residence.That
was fine, if frustrating. Adversity is good for my character,I've been told.
Eve went into a cabinet in thekitchen and came back carrying a black art folder in one
hand and an aerial drawing of the big Russian house in the other.
"No not that one," I said. “Didn't you do one like head-on looking at it from the point of
view of the Black Sea?”
"Water is inanimate. It doesn'thave a point of view."
"Okay,I should be more precise."
"Hey Mr. Lex," Raya came running out of her room carrying an open laptop."What's
your last name?”"
"I was never told."
"Raya," Eve said, "I thought you were watching something."
"What're you watching, Raya?" I askedher.
"The Secret Life of Pets, but I found this." She held out the laptop at an angle so that I
couldn't see what was on it.I took it from her to keep her from dropping it.

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 “You probably shouldn't waste your time looking at junk like that," I said.
"What's your last name, Mr.Lex? Is this you?
I looked at the screen of the laptop I had in my hand. It was on the Lex Luthor
Wikipedia page. “Oh you definitely don't want to look at this," I said.
“Is it you?”
"Yeah, in a manner of speaking," I said.
“It says you're the arch enemy," Raya said.“And you're a billionaire.”
“Probably an understatement," I said.
“The billionaire part or the arch enemy part?"
“Both.”
Eve convinced Raya to retreat to her room and pulled a smaller sheet of paper out
of her folder. It was a photo from the 'Net. Eve printed it out on typing paper.
"That's the one," I said. It showed the house deep in the background but the focus
of the sketch was the steep sandy bluff with a narrow strip of beach at the bottom of it.
You could barely see the top of the four-story house poking up above the thick stand of
trees at the top of the bluff.“Is there a date on this? Are there more photos?"
“It's got to be within the last year or two," she said."I got it from Google Earth.”
“I tried to find the place on Google, but I keep finding it all blurred out. That's why
I was glad you made those sketches.”
"Well he did a good job of obscuring the building itself," she said. "Overhead shots
make the place look like mashed potatoes but when you get a perspective at an angle
like this-”
"Hey Raya," I called toward the bedroom.
“Yeah?” The little girl immediately poked her face around the door jamb.
Clearly,she had been standing there trying to hear as much adult conversation as she
could. Who could blame her?

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 “Can I borrow your laptop?" I asked her.
"Sure,"she scooted back into the room and came out with the device. She sat on the
couch, supposing she might stay. Eve vetoed this notion.
"Yeah,go back and stand by the edge of the door,kid,”I said.
Her mom shot me a dirty look. I liked that look.I should give Eve an excuse to brandish
that chunk of ordnance more often.
"Okay, so tell me," I said. I opened Google Earth on Raya's computer and found the
fuzzy image of the big house.I pulled back on it, and southward until the image of the bluff
and the edge of the sea became clearer."Let's say you've got the resources you need to build
your dream castle anywhere you want, and you put it behind a fifty-foot wall of sand and silt
at the edge of a major inland sea.Why?”
"He already had property there?"
"Probably not. He could've afforded it even if it was over a copper mine."
"He wanted to invade a nearby country?"
“Not yet,”
"Nice sea breeze?”
"I'll give you that. But there's more."
“Yeah?What?”
"He wanted to make sure he had an escape route.”
“Escape what?”
"Anything, He's a paranoid dictator. He cut his teeth spying on CIA spooks. Did you
ever notice the way he walks?”
“How does he walk?”
"He swings his left arm whenever he takes a step,"I said,getting up to demonstrate, "but
he keeps his right arm stiff at his side."
“Which means?”
"He walks like he's got a gun in his belt, like an outlaw in the Old West. He probably
still carries a sidearm and

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 never wants his hand to get far from it. He's scared of his own shadow. Terrified.
With visions of Khadafy and Ceausescu kicking around in his head."
“Ceausescu from...?”
"Romania. The people stormed the palace,put him on trial and executed him then
and there. Then they dragged him through the streets behind a truck. And the crowds
cheered.”
"This guy is still scared, with all those people around protecting him?”
"He's even scared of the people who are protecting him." On Google I found
something at the bottom of the bluff."The more you have to lose,the more you're afraid
of losing it.”
She thought a moment as I zoomed in on the base of the bluff.“So what are you
afraid of,Lex?”
"Not a damn thing. I'm the exception that proves the rule," I said. "Look at this."
There was a dark rectangle at the bottom of the bluff, the shape of a wide doorway.
“What's that?”
"I'm betting it's the basement door," I said."His exit strategy. I'm sure of it. And it's
our way in."

THE RHODODENDRONS WERE DOING fabulously well. I had planted a couple

dozen of them in wide pots around one of the Lexcorpus hives on the balcony outside
my Cave. There were still lots of other flowering plants out there. They were growing
positively jungle-like these days and that was how I-as well, I suspect, as my colonies -
liked it. The big Lexcorpus bees had effectively taken up residence there in the
rhododendron forest and rarely ventured beyond it. They hardly ever foraged anywhere
else. The rhododendrons fed the Lexcorpus bees, and the bees pollinated the
rhododendrons. Both that colony and the plants that nourished it grew quickly. I had to
add a seventh and then an

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 eighth oversized ten-frame box to the hive in the rhododendron patch.
By now the McFaul boys and their Maasai chaperones were on the Olympic
Peninsula in Washington State scattering new colonies of Apis Mellifera Lexcorpus
through the Cascades and the Hoh Rainforest like Johnny Appleseed.Apparently Benjie
was also picking up a pretty good Xhosa vocabulary. There are five different click
sounds in the language and Benjie mastered all of them. I could do only one, so my
accent made me sound to Tanzanians like a British colonialist.
About a month-and-a-half into the bees' enthusiastic rhododendron production I put
on my bee suit, took a single frame out of the Lexcorpus hive on the balcony, shook the
workers off and spun out a minimal amount of sweet stuff in my centrifuge. I scooped a
bit of it into a coffee cup, shut the sliding door, sat down with my feet up on the
workbench and I touched the tip of my little finger to the sticky-sweet confection. I
wiped my pinky on my lips and my tongue and sat back in the chair for a moment.
In a while, as the lightheadedness began to pass, I felt around for my phone. After a
few tries I figured out it was in the pocket where I usually kept it,
"Hey Eve,” I said."Do you want to come over and get high?”

MOST OF THE CHICKENSHITS DECIDED they would substitute themselves for

Mary Louise's "Worthies" to leave the planet in my Ark. And they insisted on also
reserving places for their families and their key people- the folks who actually run their
businesses while they play golf and buy racehorses.A bunch of them damn near started a
riot in the meeting space in Delaware and prompted Mary Louise to leave the room
sobbing. At some point a mining magnate proposed that we offer the Worthies the
chance to take our place in the

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 network of caves that had figured in the original plan. That's what we would end up
doing, although there would be no takers. I just walked around the periphery of the
meeting,basking in the chaos.
"Are you not going?"I asked the guy from Wayne Enterprises who sat quietly amid the
commotion.
"I don't think so," he said."Still have work here. What about you?”
"Me neither,” I said.“I've got my own transportation anyway.”
“Right.” This guy was always showing up in the entertainment news and the celebrity
rags pawing at the flesh of some babe-of-the-week. You wouldn't think he was this taciturn in
real life. "So where've you been, Luthor?”
“Been?”
"Yeah,”he said.“Thanagar? Tralfamadore? Yonkers?”Always with a straight face.
"Well there's this little wormhole in space a few light-minutes offthe southern rim of the
orbit of Jupiter," I told him."It's like a traffic hub in Oklahoma City. It'll take you anywhere."
He looked at me from deep inside his eyes. It almost seemed he realized I wasn't joking.
"This is a pretty good meeting for a change,you think?”
I almost said, “Yeah,it's just the real Chickenshits who want to cut and run," but that was
my private designation.I just found a seat at the table, steepled my hands and
listened,calculating a bit to make sure the accommodations in the Ark would be sufficient.

NOw I NEEDED THE ALLOY GUY, and I found him with the tracking mechanism I
had planted behind the pebble of Element-99 in his chest. He was still inert, which was no
surprise. The surprise was his location. He was apparently on a tiny ice-encrusted island 130
miles south of the North

LEXCORP 213
 Pole. From the North Pole every direction is south. There wasn't much land up
there, mostly enormous masses of permafrost. All that ice is the historic source of
Russia's chronic paranoia.
Russia is the country with the greatest land area on Earth,but for most of the year it
is landlocked. Its longest coast, the one to its north, is iced over eight or nine months a
year. To the west is the peninsula of Europe. To the east are the North Pacific and the
Bering Strait, which is effectively walkable year-round-or it was, until the planet started
warming in earnest. To the south they've got the dead-end of the Caspian Sea, the Aral
Sea which has dried up enough to be pretty much a bathtub these days,and the Black Sea
whose prevailing currents have traditionally driven trade ships back to the east and north,
or to the rocks below. The largest country in the world has been, for most of its history,
an island unto itself and chronically terrified.
They had to wait for the Twentieth Century and air travel to let up on their abject
fear. No matter; it's their state of nature.
For centuries seafaring nations have been looking for a Northwest Passage-a clear
year-round water route over the Pole from Europe to North America and Asia. Now our
planetary crisis was bringing that seaway into being. It would alsobring disastrous
flooding to North America and northern Asia. The ice was melting,but Russia and the
Baltic states would soon have their passage. My Alloy Guy was entombed in a cake of
ice sitting on a small island that was a rarity in the Arctic Sea, an uncharted piece of rock
jutting up from an undersea mountain range between the North Pole and Siberia. I'd
have to make an excuse so as not to risk Eve's safety for the Arctic trip, to retrieve the
Alloy Guy.I could have her meet me to help with the errand I needed to run before I
came home,
I'ye found that the best way to formulate a plan is simply to think it through.
Someone in my employ was

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 playing a double game, I knew. There was no othcr way a foreign national could
havc known when I was out of the country and I was using my plane, unless he was in
touch with someone on my Gulfstream staff. I had used the jet on the caper in Georgia
that got me several tons of enriched radioactive material. I hadn't taken the plane out of
the country again until that spur-of-the-moment trip to the Canary Islands. The Russian
president didn't have the stones to try to kidnap me inside the borders of the United
States.
Let's see who has the stones for what's next.
Between my trip to East Africa over a year ago and my first date with Eve, the
plane and its crew were registered with a leasing service, which is how most private jets
partially pay for themselves. So if a movie star who's been rehearsing his hosting gig on
Saturday Night Live all week,along with his posse, all have to make their way from
Newark to a Friday night premier party on the west side of Los Angeles, and then have
to get back east the next morning to shoot a promo and host the show, they can call the
leasing company,pile into my Gulfstream, and spring for about 70-thousand dollars,
most of which turns into pocket money for me. That accounts for lots of bialys and
anchovy pizzas.
I asked B.J. to pull up a list of all the contract flights the Lexcorp Gulfstream had
taken since I flew it home from Nairobi with my lowland Kenyan honeybees in tow. As
it turned out, there had been quite a few.
Sure enough,two months after the African trip, on the way back from Riyadh, the
jet registered an unscheduled four-hour "emergency" layover at a private airfield in the
Black Sea beach resort of Sochi. That's the Russian town that hosted the 2014 Winter
Olympics. The jet had just dropped off a clan of Saudi diplomats going home after a
United Nations General Assembly meeting,and it took no passengers to this unscheduled
stop. Without a doubt, the jet didn't touch down at Sochi at all, but a few miles up the
coast

LEXCORP 215
 at the private air strip behind the Russian president's Black Sea fortress.
"Hi B.J, do me a favor?" I said into my phone.
“Probably,”B.J.said.“I met your girlfriend,by the way.About time."
I was at the old steel mill on the East Side checking out the final design specs for the
turbine we would attach to the hub of the Atlantic Flywheel.“Get the phone logs for all the
Gulfstream staff who were aboard during the trip to the Canary Islands. From two weeks
before to a week after. I'll text you the dates and the flight identifiers."
"Seems like a nice girl," she said."The private phone logs?”
“Yeah.All of them.”
"A little perky for you, I thought.But nice enough."
“Perky?Who?”
"Eve,"she said.“Eve Callaway.215 West Eighty-Fifth Street. Apartment 3-A. That Eve.
The perky one."
“Don't you think I've gotten a little perkier since I met her?" I asked B.J, against my
better judgment.
“Perky.You? Lex actual Luthor? I'm trying to come up with a clever answer for that. I'll
let you know."
"I'm glad you approve."
"I didn't say I approve. She was stoned silly when she left.”
“You called her a cab,yes?”
“Better than that. I drove her home. We had a nice talk."
"My second-worst nightmare," I said.“Keep an eye out for those text messages."

ENRIQUE THE PILOT WAS THE MOLE in my operation, and when they kidnapped
me they could negligently have killed him in the process. He had two calls with a Moscow
phone code on his cell-one outgoing and one incoming-the day before the trip to the Canary
Islands. I had no idea what

216 MAGGIN
 leverage the Russian president had on him and I didn't care.I wouldn't blame Enrique.
Not until it became amusing.
I had a device that would get me to the Arctic, a one-man craft-two if you struggled. I
stashed it in the sculpture garden. It was a speedboat with runners suitable for a snowy
surface. It had a storage space, like a large trunk, behind the driving compartment. The art
gallery label on it was "Downhill Racer,”which it decidedly was not. The sculptor of record
was the late Wainwright McAfee who,despite the elaborate funeral I threw for him in
Scotland twelve years earlier,never really existed. My main problem with using the Racer to
retrieve the Alloy Guy, was getting it out of the museum and over to the river harbor. I
managed to do that with a rental F-250 pickup and the help of a few of the roughnecks from
my converted steel mill. Hamid covered for me at the museum. All that help cost me was a
couple of boxes of contraband Havana Montecristos for the guys. I could live with the fact
that the steel mnill would smell like tobacco smoke for the next month.
B.J. asked for volunteers from the switchboard crew-including my emotional friend
Denecia-to help pack a couple of weeks' worth of sandwiches and coffee for me.I was
especially fond of the grilled cheese with egg salad sandwiches and I told B.J. so.
"Those were Dee's idea," she told me the first time I called her from out in Hudson Bay.
“Dee?”
“Denecia,the phone operator."
“Promnote that girl to switchboard manager next time there's an opening, would you?" I
reasoned that her new exalted position would give me ample reason to forget Denecia's name.
I also stashed a satchel of honey jars and Lexcorpus honey gummies in the big sack of
sandwiches.

My trip was uneventful until I got to the northern r

eaches of Hudson Bay where the water started to get c
hoppy. As I navigated westward toward Siberia I had to

LEXCORP 217
 make several stops on freezing islands along the way to disgorge some of the egg salad.
That was good for my waistline. For the entire trip I did not see a single human being. I relied
on my satellite phone for occasional conversations with B.J.-substantive enough, mostly
about the final progress of the Ark and the Flywheel-and with Eve-involving as little real
substance as I could manage.There were more polar bears along the way than I
expected,swimming in the frigid water or drifting by onice floes.I usually wished them luck
as I passed by and continued north and west. I sent Eve a few photos along the way, and the
next time I was in her apartment there was a polar bear family in a frame on her wall, fishing
off the edge of a chunk of ice near a frozen cliff. I had taken that photo and it was stunning.I
wished I had thought to notice the beauty of the Arctic when I was actually there.
My maps did not indicate the existence of the island I was looking for, but there it was
nonetheless- a rocky outcropping of about three acres very near the International Dateline.
Through the fog, on the northern shore of the island, I saw what seemed to be an old airline
marker that probably hadn't been overflown since the nineteen-sixties.I beached-or more
accurately,iced-the Downhill Racer on the northern face of the island and let the craft ski its
way via global positioning to where my tracker indicated that the Alloy Guy was. He was
where my device indicated,leaning against an iced-over boulder and wrapped in a cocoon of
some fibrous material.
I used a small ice axe to disconnect the cocoon from the frozen boulder, maneuvered the
rear of my vehicle as close as I could get, and managed to tip the cocoon over into my craft's
hatchback storage space. I melted as much ice off the thing as I could with a heat gun and
softened the cocoon enough that I could fold the Alloy Guy's knees-I hoped they were his
knees - to secure the hatch. That little operation took me most of a day. Then the inert Alloy
Guy

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 and I made our way on my vehicle's runners to the mouth of the Anabar River on
the northern shore of Asian Russia.
I navigated south, up the sluggish river as far as it was practical, to a little diamond
mining village called Kheta Zera. There, I drove the Downhill Racer with the Alloy
Guy's cocoon over the snow piled up by a dirt road -escorted by a growing collection of
well-wrapped natives-to the only inn in town. I “spoke” with everyone I met there
through a translation app on my phone, either in Russian or a language called Sami-the
latter of which I had never tested before. That worked well enough until I tried to pay for
a room for two nights with an American Express card.The innkeeper looked at the card
as though it was an artifact from Neptune.
He said he had seen me through a window as I drove up to the little inn and he
admired my transportation. I offered to trade my Downhill Racer for two
nights'accommodations. The innkeeper grabbed an elaborate hand-carved walking stick
from behind his reception desk and went out in front with me, favoring his left side. My
vehicle was parked on a mound of snow. I grabbed my sack of belongings off the seat,
shouldered the Alloy Guy's cocoon from the trunk space onto the snow and I told the
innkeeper that the Racer was his. I can always build another one.
The man thought the vehicle was worth far more than the hotel fare, which indeed
it was. He insisted on paying me something for it. Before I could explain that local
currency was as worthless to me as an American Express card was to him,he took a
small fistful of uncut diamonds out of a pocket and poured them into my gloved hand.
On Neptune it occasionally rains little shards of diamonds like hailstones.I doubt he
knew that.
Behind his reception desk the innkeeper leaned on the desk to help himself to the
back of it. I asked him why he had the cane. Was it something permanent? He had
twisted his hip when he slipped on a streak of ice a few days earlier,

LEXCORP 219
 he said. It'd be fine soon. I rooted around in my sack.First I pulled out a little jar
ofLexcorpus honey and looked at it.Might be too much for a working guy, I thought. I tossed
it back in and pulled out a jar of Ibuprofen. They were the 800milligram horse pills you can
only get with a prescription or unless you know someone. So now the innkeeper knew me.I
told him not to take more than one every four hours and I'd be back to check on him in a little
while.
I went up to my room on the second floor and fell asleep until eleven the next morning.
Next time I saw him he was bouncing around like a teenager. I guess he'd never swallowed a
pain pill before. So I told him I'd invented Ibuprofen.I could've,right?
Before I left town I got the local mortician to sell me,for a couple of diamonds, a simple
pine coffin to carry the Alloy Guy. This would be much easier to explain than the cocoon in
which he was still wrapped.
I called Eve to ask her whether she really meant it when she told me to promise her she
could be in on my strike-back at the person who ordered my kidnapping.
"Yes I meant it. You sound like you're calling from the bottom of a barrel, Lex. Where
are you?"
“A little town in Siberia."
"What are you doing in Siberia?”
"I'll explain later, I just want you to know this could be dangerous for you.For us.”
"Okay. Noted. Tell me where to meet you.”
"Tell me what you're afraid of."
“Nothing.”
"Large animals with teeth? Losing your parents'approval? Speaking in public?"
"Nothing. I've thought about this. Nothing.Same as you.”
"Okay,then meet me in Turkey. Call B.J. and she'll set it up, Travel light."

220 MAGGIN
 I called B.J. to tell her that Eve would be taking the Gulfstream to Istanbul and that
she should have a company expense account and instructions to use it. I said to give her
a clean credit card with no traceable connection to me or to Lexcorp. I also told her to
make sure Enrique does the flying and that he should find his own place to stay
somewhere in town and wait for me. I called Dr. Itami at Eve's hospital and wangled a
two-week leave of absence for her.
I hired a sled dog team and a driver to get me and my coffin to the nearest airport
thirty miles to the south. It was a helluva ride.

"WE'RE NOT GOING TO KILL HIM,” I told Eve in the Istanbul hotel suite where
she'd made our nest. "We were never going to kill him for heaven's sake. I was trying to
make it interesting, is all. We're just going to..."I hesitated.
"Lift him? Detain him? Take him out of circulation?"
"All of the above," I said. “We're going to depose the sucker.”
"About time somebody did.”
By the time I arrived, Eve had been in Istanbul for two days and she was trying to
go native. The best she could pull off was appearing to be a blonde American in a
Byzantine linen robe. A stola, she called it.
“You look like a Roman generalissima ready to sack the Ottoman Empire," I told
her. I had no idea what such a creature might look like.
"Want to go shopping?"she said.
"You should definitely go shopping,”I said.“I'll come with you long enough to find
a set of socket wrenches. I've got tinkering to do."
I found a pretty good wrench set, C-clamps, and a few other tools at an outdoor
market. All the tools were metric,which was annoying, but I made do. I propped up the
Alloy Guy's coffin beside the door of the suite. That freaked out

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 the cleaning staff considerably. I got to work reviving him as soon as I got back to
the hotel.
I ripped through the cocoon lengthwise with my Swiss Army knife. I laid the Alloy
Guy out lengthwise on a long desk in the suite, opened the hatch on his chest and got to
work. Alloy Guy looked good for havingstood motionless by the ice of a melting glacier
for a year or two. He had a lot better color than, say, a mummified pharaoh. His eyes
were a little rheumy, but his artificial "flesh" was intact and undamaged. That was the
Lexcorp Objectively Indestructible Substance.Same thing the hull of the Ark was made
of. It would be fine in interstellar space.
It took me all afternoon and most of the evening to turn bolts and tighten wires and
coax him awake. I slipped into a concentration funk and didn't look up for hours. When
he finally blinked once and said, "Hello," I flipped his chest plate shut and guided him
up to a sitting position. I reached for a tissue to wipe the sweat off my forehead and I
heard the sound of hands clapping lightly in the corner of the room.I had no idea how
long ago Eve had come back in the suite.
"Eve,"I said,"this is the Alloy Guy. Alloy,this is Eve."She extended a hand toward
him but I pushed it away."Not yet. Give him a few minutes to decompress."
“Okay.You too?”
“Me too?”
"Need to decompress too?"
"Oh yeah,Probably.Hi,"
"Hí,”she said.
She sat cross-legged on the bed surrounded by maybe half-a-dozen articles of
clothing she had picked up in street markets around the neighborhood. She also had a
large clothing box, a bag full of Turkish flat bread and a bunch of spreads in wax
containers. Hummus, labneh, a stewy sort of mishmash of tomatoes and eggs, some
other stuff I poked through.
"You didn't maybe get some kind of smoked fish?”

222 MAGGIN
 “Nope.”
"I wish we at least had some peanut butter or something.”
She reached into her shoulder bag by the side of the bed and dug out a small jar of
Jif.
“Obviously we're madle for each other," I said,reaching into the jar and spreading
peanut butter over a disk of bread like two-finger poi.
“Obviously,”she said, looking for a spoon. She looked up at me with my peanut
buttery fingers in my mouth and she decided I had no use for utensils.

WHETHER TO TAKE THE ALLOY GUY with us to the Russian president's

fortress at the far end of the Black Sea was a question in my mind. Alloy was recenatly
revived and I had not checked him out extensively, but he could probably provide some
protection from any unexpected adversity.Eve understood that his ability to
communicate coherently was limited, but the two of them got along fine. She found a
big wraparound for him, like a serapé, at a merchant's stand. It camouflaged his bulk and
jerky movements and she took him out shopping with her in the afternoon. They came
back with enough hummus and fresh fruit and salmon to last us a week, along with a
case of motor oil. That wwas the Alloy Guy's dessert.
She said he had taken to calling her Mom, although I didn't hear him do it.
B.J. gave me the local address where Enrique the pilot was staying. He had been
cooling his heels for the past week in a bed-and-breakfast on the edge of Istanbul. She
warned me that he sounded nervous. He should. Rather than call him, I took a cab to the
place where he was staying. It was a large ancient stone cottage on the outskirts of town
with clean towels and sheets and what looked like a new swimming pool in the shape of
a keyhole. Given a choice, I

LEXCORP 223
 would have had him rough it a little more,but he was pitifully apologetic.
"I want to first tell you that I'm very sorry for my lapse,Mr. Luthor," was the first
thing he said to me.
“Lapse?”
"Yes," he said.“The incident with the foreign inquiry."
“Inquiry,”I said.“You mean when you got me abducted and got one of your
teammates killed?"
"Juniper. Yes Juniper. Unfortunate." He wrapped himself in the same uniform
jacket he wore when he flew the jet. Some kind of pilots' countersign,no doubt.
"Well you can make it up to me," I said. I had provided the girl's parents with an
open-ended stipend. I'm a great boss, especially when you die. "And when we get back
stateside you can apologize to Juniper's parents. They live in El Paso."
"We're going back home?”he said,apparently relieved.“You're not going to-”
"No,I'm not going to... whatever. You think I want to have to spring for your kid's
education and yourwife's mahjong habit without getting any more out of you?"
“Right.”
"So what were you thinking,Enrique?"
“Thinking?”
"When you took the gig with the Russians.”
“Uhh.”
"Am I not paying you enough?”
“You're paying me-umm.”
“Spit it out.”
"Well my son and some of his friends went on the roof of my house and scraped the
facing off some of the shingles and I found out the whole roof had to be replaced. That
was the day I got the first call from the Russian chargé d'affaires at the consulate. I
needed eighteen thousand dollars for the repair so-”

224 MAGGIN
 "And that was what they offered you to help them track my movements.”
“About two thousand more actually.”
“You were underpaid,asshole."
"I guess. It sounded harmless. A diplomatic thing.”
“Which you knew to keep secret. Has it occurred to you that it's easier for them to
keep tabs on you than on me?"
“Sir?”
“They probably trashed your roof before the kids did.Why do you think they knew
when you'd be the easiest target?”
“Right.”
“Employees can apply for a loan from Lexcorp whenever you have unexpected
personal expenses."
“A loan?Really?”
“Yeah,nine percent. Four-and-a-half for everyone but you. It's still a good deal.
How are your helicopter skills?”
“Excellent, sir. I requalify every eight months.”
"Adequate. Tomorrow you'll pilot a Huey about eight hundred miles over
uninhabited terrain, staying under the radar floor the entire way."
“Eight hundred miles? That's what, about a thousand kilometers?”
"Twelve hundred and ninety, actually. I just did that in my head. Do we need a
remedial math class too?”
"No sir.I can-”
“Meet me at helicopter hangar three at Atatürk Airport at 0700 tomorrow. The trip
will involve some danger." I turned to leave.
"Mr. Luthor sir? The roof ended up costing me a little more than-”
“Don't press your luck," and I left.
Seven o'clock the next morning Eve, the Alloy Guy and I boarded the rented Huey.
I told Enrique to report a plotted course for Ankara to the tower. Instead, we were
heading

LEXCORP 225
 undetectably across the Black Sea to the Russian president's palace.
"You're familiar with this destination, yes?" I asked Enrique.
He hesitated a moment, looked down, said, “Yes sir,I am.”
"Here," I said and handed him a small jar of honey."Weapon of choice.”
“Whose choice?”
"Mine. Use it wisely. I had some gummies made up.Take a few of these too." I explained
that it was a quick-acting hallucinogen and that if we all made it home he could keep the
leftovers for a date night with his wife after they sent the kid off to summer camp.
Eve and I strapped ourselves in for a rough ride. The Alloy Guy was stable enough
without constraints.We lifted off and the three of us went over my plan, such as it was.

FIVE HOURS LATER ENRIQUE DROPPED the three of us off on the shore on the
south side of the palace property. He lifted again into the sky above the bluff to fly directly
over the palace itself.He would probably have to evade some gunfire from the palace roof
before he identified himself. Then he would land at the bottom of the runway on the north
side of the building. I was hoping the Russians would rough him up a little and he'd maybe
get a little wound or two. No such Luck. It turned out that they already/knew who he was.
The three of us walked a quarter mile up the beach until we reached the door to the
tunnel into the palace. I had rarely used my compressed air lock pick since it had worked to
get me into the gold vault at Fort Knox. I pressed the mouth of my device against the
conventional looking keyhole above the steel door lever. Air hissed. I felt a click and I pulled
up on the lever. Nothing. I tried it again and was still

226 MAGGIN
 unsuccessful. Apparently lock security here was better than it was at the United
States Bullion Depository.
I motioned the Alloy Guy over to the door.
to.”“Gently,”I said.“Don't break anything you don't have

He pulled up slowly on the door lever. There was a light squealing sound as the
interior of the mechanism bent,then snapped. We were in.
The interior of the tunnel was unlit. I pulled back the side of my mouth and pressed
my tongue against that fake incisor to shine a light on the tunnel floor as we walked.That
was fine for a hundred yards or so.
The voice we heard said, “He делaй eщe waг. Рукиynupaются в стену.”
Neither of my companions had any idea that the Russian said,“Do not take another
step. Hands flat against the wall,"I translated. It didn't matter. I reached for the tunnel
wall and as soon as three men with Kalashnikov rifles stepped within nine feet of me, I
clapped on the density detection device in my pocket-the same gadget that prompted the
death of the human that the Alloy Guy used to be - and it sent an electrical shock up the
arms of all three of them. They dropped the rifles, which I scooped up quickly.
“Alloy,”" I said. "disable any radio communication devices these guys are
carrying."
The Alloy Guy didn't have any special electronics detection equipment. But before
the Russians could sit up he smashed three chest-mounted cameras, two cell phones and
a knockoff Apple Watch. Crushed them to dust. I slung one of the Kalashnikovs over my
shoulder, held one at the ready and gave the third to Eve.
it?”"I've always wanted one of these,"she said.“Can I keep
"Sure, if you can hold on to it.”
“Do you believe how light this thing is? It weighs less than a laptop."

LEXCORP 227
 "We're lucky they were dense enough to activate my electric shock gizmo." I tossed
a length of nylon cord from my belt at the Alloy Guy and told him to immobilize the
three Russian sentries before they recovered enough to run off. He hog-tied them like
he'd been in a rodeo.
I pulled a little jar of Lexcorpus rhododendron honey out of a backpack and
smeared a fingerful of it over their upper gums. They'd have a fine time.

228 MACGIN
 XXII
WE'RE LEAVING THE PLANET...

HE KNEW WHO I WAS THE MOMENT HE SAW ME, and he wasn't happy
about it. By now,this president had suspended the hard-won constitution that Russia
adopted after the overthrow of its extended flirtation with communism. He extorted
ownership of production and marketing of the country's munitions and most other
industries. Self-government is a pushover.
He sent troops over the border of a neighboring country and was planning a war for
territory there for no coherent justification. He conscripted, sent into combat, and
effectively disabled or liquidated three generations of his countrymen, from their teens
into their sixties. He planted friends and followers in management of the country's
industrial production, creating a new class of plutocrats who held dictatorial power over
the population. He trashed most of the country's industries other than ordnance and
crude oil extraction. He was one of the most destructive and incompetent heads of state
anywhere in the past century.
I was thrilled that he had decided to pick a fight with me.

LEXCORP 229
 WE DOUBLE-TIMED IT DOWN the long hall below the palace.There were no
more sentries, but the door at the far end was panic-barred and locked tight. On a hunch
I tried my air compression gizmo on the lock there ad this time it worked.The exterior
door was protected against my unconventional lock-busting gadget but the interior was
not. Inattention to detail, I thought. I was accumulating little mini-details of my
adversary's character and management style.It was a reflex.The next lock would be
unfastened and the door beyond that might have no lock at all, I decided.
The interior door opened to a two-story stair with wooden risers like a set of
basement steps. There was a light at the top of them. I wouldn't need the awkward
bicuspid flashlight anymore. We scampered lightly up the slats and at the top a doorway
hung open.
"Keep the rifles slung," I whispered to Eve."No unnecessary noise."
But as soon as we were out of the dark and on1 a narrow lawn,somebody barked
something unintelligible in Russian and a shot blew past my face.
I unloaded two or three rounds from the Kalashnikov in the direction the noise
came from but I hit only vegetation.Then two bullets from behind me flew by. I heard
the Russian shooter go down and moan and found him behind a shrub. I turned and saw
Eve and her Kalashnikov getting up from one knee.
"Radios," I said to the Alloy Guy. He found a body camera and a cell phone and
crushed them to slag.
I hadn't supposed Eve even knew how to use that rifle.
"Trapshooting with dad," Eve whispered.“Pretty much every weekend through my
teens.”
"Open this would you?" I told her, tossing another jar of honey.
I held the Russian down with a knee on his chest.One round- or maybe
both-bloodied his lower leg. Lucky shot.Eve handed me the open jar.

230 MAGGIN
 I yanked back on the guy's hair and put the honey jar up to his
mouth.“O6езболивающие,” I said in Russian. Pain meds, I'd told him. I picked up more
Russian in the past week than I picked up Xhosa over a month in Kenya and Tanzania.
He swallowed hard and stopped whimpering. He'd live.Maybe he'd lose the lower
half of his left leg, who knew?His eyes rolled upward, and he was merrily hallucinating
before I let go of his hair. To minimize his visibility I dragged him under the shrubbery.
Maybe nobody had heard the gunshots.Maybe they had.
The three of us slipped in the nearest outside door. We were in a small atrium,
about twelve by twenty feet with a windowed ceiling. I smelled chlorine to the left. An
indoor pool. The whole installation wasn't so much a fortress as it was some guy's house.
Some very rich,pretentious guy with a taste for gold-leafed walls and ivory crown
molding and a few armed guards here and there. Not that I should talk. We were in the
southeast corner of the building. Dave Athens and Enrique had both said that the
president spent most of his time in the gym at the building's southwest. That would be
along the long side of the pool and through whatever was between the pool and the gym
equipment. Cabana's,showers, maybe a locker room and who knew what else.There was
a long hall along the north length of the pool.I motioned for my companions to start
down it, but I heard laughing behind us.
“Wait,”I whispered.
Men were laughing, in a room somewhere near where we had come in. I
backtracked,heard that the laughing came from behind a thick door. I cracked the door
open enough to let some sound out, but no light in. It was a screening room and I could
hear only the laughter. Two men were probably all who were there, and maybe a
projectionist.My guess was that only the master of this place had the privilege of
ordering up a movie. I padded around to the exterior of the

LEXCORP 231
 room,estimated it was no more than forty-by-forty feet with a vaulted ceiling. It
couldn't have more than two narrow rows of seats inside. I let the crack of the door
almost close and motioned Eve and Alloy to come close,weapons ready.When I heard
another laugh from inside to muffle any sound,I let the door click shut and let it go.
"Movie room," I whispered."He's in there sitting with a friend and maybe one other
up in the booth. Take precautions.”
"Uh-huh,”Eve said. She unslung her rifle onto her left arm.
“Close your eyes. Count to thirty to get used to the dark.Once we're in we'll have
maybe four seconds.”
“Okay." Eyes shut, she peeled off her shoes with her feet and crouched in the
direction of the door."For the next five minutes, forget I'm your girlfriend.”
I put my hand on the doorknob, hesitated, and let my hand drop to my side."Are
you my girlfriend?" I asked her.
"Idiot," she said. She thought my question was rhetorical.
She yanked the door open and the threeof us were inside. Elizabeth Perkins was on
the screen, bouncing on a trampoline. They were watching Big, dubbed in Russian.
Within a second-and-a-half Eve and I were on top of the two men in the back row.
The one I had jumped wore some kind of uniform. I assumed he was armed but I got
him in a full-nelson. Eve's guy was smaller, balding, older, but his right arm flailed - not
in defense but as though he was reaching for something.
"Alloy! Disarm!" I hollered and an objectively indestructible arm shot out from
behind me to yank a handgun from the waist of the guy I still held immobile.“Not this
guy.Protect Eve!”
Eve's guy managed to reach under his jacket and grab for something at his waist.
He came up empty-handed but she flipped him over the back of his chair into Alloy.My

232 MAGGIN
 former human held him with his arms out and his hands empty.
"How'd you do that?" I asked her but there was no time for her to answer.
Apparently she had spent five lunch hours a week for the past five years in a Tai Chi
class in the park.I knew I liked that girl.
I looked at the guy that Alloy held helpless. It was indeed the president of Russia,
and a PSM pistol clattered on the floor at his feet. I grabbed and twisted one of his ears
to force him to one knee as I grabbed his gun off the floor and stuffed it in my pocket.
In Russian he said to the man he had been sitting with-now on the ground with
most of Eve's weight on his neck-“Дайте десять секунд, и здесь будет
полдюэиHычacoвbx."” Give it ten seconds and there'll be half a dozen sentries in here.
“Он преследовал тебя здесь, сукин сын?”Did he follow you here you son of a bitch?
a-”From the guy choking under Eve's shin,“He called me

"Sumbich. Yeah, I heard." Suddenly I recognized who the guy in the uniform jacket
was. He had a Russian tag, a credential, on a lanyard around his neck. “What the fuck
are you doing here,Enrique?”
"I told him I wanted to defect.”
"You wanted-”
"I hadda tell him something.”
"Just don't let on I know Russian, You guys,we've got maybe-" There was a thud
against a wall. “Correction.Time's up."
I thought it was a guard coming in. I wheeled around and almost let go of the ear in
my left hand,but I drew a little blood instead. It was Alloy Guy throwing a little man I
could only assume was the projectionist against the back wall.
The projectionist was out cold on his ass before I said,"We're outta here," And to
Enrique I said, “Eve's gonna pound on you a little. Go with it,” I knew the Russian

LEXCORP 233
 understood a little bit of English so I tried to speak as colloquially as I could to
keep him out of the loop.
Eve kneed Enrique in the kidney and yanked him to his feet.
"Okay,move it!" I said and started to throw the door open but slammed it again
when I saw at least three men with firearms out running toward me. "Umm... Alloy?”
He responded with one of the longer sentences I've heard him say."What is your
directive?"
At the root of Alloy's perception and response were the remains of an actual human
brain. Speaking to him was a lot like speaking to Alexa or Siri or a rudimentary
household robot - not so much an early iteration of artificial intelligenceas an even more
fundamental version of natural intelligence. I had to stay simple. "Stop the sentries
outside the door,”I said.
Immediately, he ripped the door off its seating and tossed it down the hall to throw
down six armed Russians in a single swipe. I think there were only six of them. Maybe
one or two more landed under the door.
I still can't remember why I had considered leaving the Alloy Guy inert in an
Istanbul hotel room instead of bringing him with us.
The president of this big shambling country was still in my custody, a little
disoriented, a lot pissed off, ear twisted in my left hand. I pulled a honey gummy out of
a shirt pocket and shoved it in the corner of the president's mouth."Here.Analgesic," I
told him. I thought maybe he'd understand that and spit it out, and maybe he understood
but he didn't spit it out. The juice hit his neurons like a jackhammer. He would have a
pleasant trip to New Jersey.
The five of us -Eve, Alloy, Enrique, the guy with the achey ear, and I-huddled
behind a structural post at the top of the steps to the tunnel. "Can you get back around to
the helicopter?" I asked Enrique.

234 MAGGIN
 “Piece o' cake,"he said,flicking the card on the lanyard."I'll pick you up down there
where I dropped you off."
Instead of going around the big house Enrique walked back in. He would stride
leisurely through the length of the building, nodding and smiling at anyone he
encountered.He'd speak pidgin Russian to anyone who spoke to him,assured them that
everything was fine. Any of the sentries we had left behind were either stationary or
drugged.He would even dribble some honey over the sandwiches and cereal of some
people-he had no idea who they were-eating lunch in a kitchen on the way. “Вкусный,"
he told them. Delicious. I'm sure it was.
The man had huevos. He was a pilot. I suppose it comes with the territory. I looked
forward to busting his balls when he asked me for a loan.

WE MADE OUR WAY BACK through the tunnel and to the beach below the bluff.
I pulled a length of cord from my belt loops and made a kind of leash and collar for the
president,who was now far more docile than he had been. The guards Alloy had tied up
in the tunnel were still there, still in a hallucinogen-induced haze. They'd be fine. Eve
and I kept their weapons as souvenirs. Maybe we'd go Kalashnikov skeet-shooting
sometime.
Enrique in the Huey dropped out of the sky to the beach about ten minutes after we
made it there. I strapped my new passenger into a rear seat with his wrists and ankles in
zip-ties and I didn't hear from him again for hours. He never had much of a reputation as
a conversationalist anyway.
A little more than halfway along our return trip across the Black Sea my guest
mumbled something-maybe half an unintelligible sentence-in Russian. I looked at
him,saw his eyes seem to clarify a bit. "Eve, would you hand me a fresh jar of that
honey, Honey?" I don't care what B.J.says,this lady's perk was rubbing off on me.

LEXCORP 235
 With another dose of the psychedelic sweetener the president was down for the
duration.
In Istanbul when we returned the helicopter to the rental agency they found a bullet
hole in its underside and charged me twenty-five hundred lira to repair it-a little short of
a hundred bucks. Probably they'd just slap on some Bondo and paint. A bargain on both
sides.
There was no mention for a while from the Russian side of the world that their
president was out of commission. This wasn't surprising. No one there really knew
where he'd gone or under what circumstances he might be back. Four days after the
Lexcorp Gulfstream returned to New Jersey there was a news item about him.
Apparently, according to the various embassies around the world, he had a “slight
cold"and would be isolated for his safety and recovery for at least a week.That was fine
with me. By then...

EVE AND I GOT A GOOD SEVERAL HOURS' sleep and something to eat on the
trip across the Atlantic. Evidently someone had leased the Gulfstream for a few days
while we were away and there was lots of leftover French food in the galley. A board of
dry chateaubriand, pâtisseries, and three-day-old Bordeaux. It was an improvement over
my dwindling sackful of two-week-old sandwiches. I scrounged up a supply of motor oil
for the Alloy Guy and he seemed happy enough.
"Status reports on our two construction projects?" I said to B.J. over the phone
before we landed.
"Which one first?" she wanted to know.
“The Flywheel."
"Completely operational,"B.J.said."They're running a redu ndant systems check on
the transmission lines, both cable and microwaye. There are no apparent hangups other
than negotiations in progress."
"Negotiations for what? Access issues?”

236 MAGGIN
 “The North American Electric Reliability Corporation is all in. Except for Texas,"
she said. This was the umbrella company that ran the United States and Canada's power
supply. Three major grids and three minor ones all interlocked. There was another one
for the sparse human-populated areas of Alaska, but I had bought that outright under
several aliases last year.
"What's the Texans' problem?” I asked her but I already knew.
"Rates and transfer fees,"she said.
There wwas no issue with either of those. The prices we quoted everyone were
already eighty percent below market.These guys just wanted to keep control-which was
why Texas had an inadequate independent power grid of their own in the first place. I
was tempted to tell her to send someone to see the governor and make him an offer he
can't refuse. But I didn't say it. I had a gadget in the sculpture garden at MMOMA that
could send a satellitesignal to the monitors of every oil well in Texas, Oklahoma and
Louisiana and fool them all into thinking they had suddenly run dry.
That'll be fun.
"How about Central America? Columbia? Brazil?”
“Ready to swwitch over whenever you give the word,"she said, Heartwarming.
“I'll get on the Texas thing myself after the launch," I said."Any issues with the
Ark?”
“Ready to go, by all accounts. But Mary Louise has called you every day since you
left town. She's a little frantic. Want me to tell her you'll be-”
"Just text me her number," I said.
“Done.”
I hadn't spoken to Mary Louise Hancock since the Paris Chickenshits meeting
where most of the attendees caused an uproar over who'd get to go offworld. The
Gulfstream was landing and I got off the phone.

LEXCORP 237
 On the ground, I wrapped a hoodie over the Russian,and Alloy stuffed him in the
back seat of a kerosene-fired limo on the tarmac at Teterboro Airport. I told the driver to
get his own ride home. Eve got in the passenger seat and Alloy got in back with the
Russian. I drove onto the Turnpike south ramp and I told the dashboardto dial Mary
Louise's number.
"Lexie, it's a disaster!" was what she said before she said hello."They supplanted all
the Worthies.”
"Our Chick-our Masters of the Universe group have taken the place of everyone
you found belonged on the Ark?”
"All of them. Yes. Sonoma Mandell called a special meeting while you were away.
You were away,yes?”
"I was. I took a quick trip to the wilderness."
"Well I hope you had a wonderful time,Lexie. But all our best-laid plans fell to
pieces while you weren't around to stop it.”
"Calm down, Mary Louise. It's not so disastrous.Can you forward a list of those
who have elbowed their way onto the travel roster?"
I gave her my call sign on the Dark Web.
"That's not the one I have..."she said.
"Would you send it from a secure email address?”
“A what?”
"Umm. Never mind. Don't include any cover notes.Nothing but names in a list for
heaven's sakes.”
“All right Lexie."
Ten minutes later a three-page single-spaced Word document showed up on my
phone, listing the names and family members of most of what turned out to be the CEOs
of the most profound despoilers of air and water supplieson the planet. Egregious
Chickenshits all. There were quite a few. I'd look this over later. First I had to install the
leader of the seventh- or eleventh- or maybe thirtieth-most powerful country on the
planet into his new living quarters.

238 MAGGIN
 "Lexie?”Eve said quizzically.“Really?”“What?”
"Who else calls you Lexie?”
"Nobody.Just Mary Louise.”
“And me.”
"Damn,"I said. "My third-worst nightmare. Just don't do it where anyone else can
hear."
"Lexie,"the Alloy Guy said.

ENRICO FERMI, THE LATE OVER-RATED PHYSICIST who built the first
nuclear reactor, suggested once over lunch with a few of his over-rated buddies,
something that he insisted was a paradox. He thought about the mathematical certainty
of the existence of many alien races whose intelligence was comparable to that of
humans, and asked the question,"Where is everybody?” He figured that since the
Universe must be engorged with life-which it is-then why is there no indication that
anyone from elsewhere has ever been here? As the world is now aware, with the advent
of the ongoing public relations campaign that the Alien launched sometime
ago,extraterrestrial types are scattered all over the place and always have been.
Still,the Fermi Paradox persists in suggesting that there should be a vast network of
interplanetary civilizations feeding off one another's commerce and technology. What
Fermi didn't take into account was that civilization and scientific progress have never
been common elements of the human condition. For most of human history,the vast
extent of it in fact, we were neither civilized nor social. It was the Garden of Eden. The
first sign of our current civilization appeared about ten thousand years ago at the dawn
of the Age of Awareness.Then, occasional incidences of agriculture and cave art started
showing up, folks started writing things down, recording ideas and impressions,wearing
clothes. That was the beginning of what we call

LEXCORP 239
 humanity,but not nearly the beginning of humans. We've got separate wall paintings
and etchings in the same cave,scrawled four thousand years apart, probably by the same
family.
Homo Erectus, the most successful and longest-lived of our ancestors, showed up a
little more than two million years ago. They were bipeds, about two feet tall and smart
as a whip. A million years before that were Homo Habilis and,before that,
Australopithecus and a bunch more scattered along the way.
Let's say, conservatively, that humans have walked the Earth for about three million
years. What we call human society stretches for a two-hundredth, maybe a
three-hundredth of that time. Maybe somewhere along the way somebody built a wheel
and never told anyone else about it.Maybe someone came up with War and Peace or The
Odyssey in his head and never got around to writing it down.Dystopia is the standard.
Maybe the next civilization is a society of dogs or reptiles or rodents.
An organized society, muchless a civilization, is not a normal product of human
nature. Probably it isn't a normal element of intelligent species anywhere. I have taken it
upon myself to make sure our version of civilization lasts at least a little longer than it
would otherwise havelasted without my bees, without my underwwater Flywheel, and
with a persistent handful of assholes profiting from the inexorable deterioration.
Fermi was a presumptuous little shit.

THE DRIVE FROM TETERBORO AIRPORT TO THE ARK WAS RELATIVELY

uneventful, except when the Russian in the back seat managed to recover from his high
long enough to slide his belt out its loops and pull it up in two hands. He was about to
flip it over my head and yank back hard when the AHloy Guy shot a hand up and
grabbed the belt,snapped it

MAGGIN

240
 with two fingers like Thanos winking out the population.With his other hand Alloy
pushed back on the Russian's chest and held him immobile. I was doing eighty-five on the
Jersey Turnpike south of Freehold at the time. No one worries about speeding down there
unless you leave a mess on the road, which I suppose we could have done.
“Ешь дерьмо, сукин сын!” the Russian said.
"There's a ladly here," I said. I don't think he'd caught on yet that I was reasonably fluent
in Russian. Then,“Eve,would you get a honey gummy out of the banged-up Mentos container
in that bag? No, the green one.Make sure they're not just mints." Then I added, “Please."
Perky or not,having her around was working wonders for my personality.
She twisted back in her seat with the brain candy for the Russian.
"Teeth alert," I said.“Let Alloy put it in his mouth. This guy's a bear when he's sober.”
From three miles away as we approached my compound in the Pines,we could see the
dome of the Ark above the levels of the trees. The construction guys were about done with
the eight hundred apartment habitats in the interior. The young Maasai engineers were
rotating the globe when we arrived to make sure the interior surface remained stable and
nothing came loose. In conventional navigation, when the craft reached ninety-nine percent
the speed of light and began to decelerate, the shift in simulated gravitation from the aft to the
fore of the sphere would be virtually undetectable. If there was any hangup and it had to shift
beyond lightspeed the passengers and the pilot would be on their own. There was no way to
test that without an inordinate expense of plutonium. They'd learn to live wvith it.
"Come on gang,"I told my companions as we unfolded ourselves from the limo in the
shadow of the ark. "Let's look over the interior and find our new passenger a nice place to
live,”

LEXCORP 241
 XXIII
...AND YOU CAN'T COME

"ARE YOU GOING TO BREAK UP WITH ME, LEXIE?" she asked later on as
we crossed the big bridge into the Heights.
"Why do you think I would do that?" I was a little surprised at the question,
although at first I thought she was just making conversation.
“I don't know.”
“Don't you? Why would you bring that up? Aren't we in the middle of saving the
world? Are you breaking up with me now?”
"No. Not at all. Why would I do that?" she said.
“Why would I?”I said.
“Because ever since I asked you if you would, every sentence you've said back to
me is a question. So,would you?”
“What?”
“Break up with me.”
“Why would you th-I mean no. No, I don't expect to break up with you. Ever. I
have no contingency plans in that area. No Plan-B. None. Is that declarative enough for
you?"
“I guess,”
“You guess?”
"Yes. It's declarative enough.I guess.”
"Can I ask a question now?" I said.

242 MAGGIN
 “Ask.”
“Why are you asking me a question like that?"
“I was just making sure,"
“Are you sure now?”
She thought about it. "No,” she said.“Are you?”
"I'm sure I have no plans to break up with you,Eve.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
"You're good at plans," she said. “I've seen it. But you can pivot like a wide
receiver. You make up new plans on the spot. In a moment. You've doneit over and
over.”
“I have?”I said.
"Like when you snatched the Russian out of his private theater. Like when you
tracked down the guys who kidnapped you. Like when you robbed Fort Knox,"
"Shh! How do you know about Fort Knox?”
“From B.J. When she drove me home."
"She told me you were still high that day."
“I remember things.”
"Okay,I get it. Quick on my feet. A regular Y.A.Tittle."
“Who?”
"Quarterback. Fast hands. Hall-of-Famer. Bald guy.I thought you were the football
fan."
"Yeah,but I'm not a historian.”
“Are you trying to make me feel old?”
"Good, Lex. That's good. Go with it.”
“Go with what?”
“Argue with me,”
“What are you-”
“Starting a fight. We never fight."
"I fight with everyone. It's my brand. I go out of my way to get in a fight. What are
you talking about?”
"Yeah. That's good. Raise your voice. Echo down the river,”
"What are you doing,Eve?”

LEXCORP 243
 “Creating conflict.”

LEXCORP 243
 "What are you talking about? You think I don't have enough conflict in my life?”
"Not nearly enough of it. It's like food for you. You'd blow up like a balloon if you
didn't get your fix of mano a mano every day."
“Y'think?”
“You know how people say you should never go to bed with any argument
unresolved?”
“Junk psychology.”
"Well I think we should pick a fight with each other at the end of every day. To
keep our relationship strong.”
“Interesting.”
“And to keep you healthy."
“You know that's horseshit,right?”
"Very good, Lex. You know your head looks like an ass cheek,right?”
Fun girl,huh?

244 MAGGIN
 XXIV
LEGACY

THE ATLANTIC FLYWHEEL CAME online the day after the Ark lifted off. I
suppose the launch of the Ark was impressive,but I wasn't there. Couldn't be held
responsible. The construction guys erected a twenty-two-foot wall of Lexcorp
Objectively Indestructible Substance around the perimeter of my twelve acres to shield
the world from the blast,and there are damnpers in the engine mechanism too. I made
sure that when the first bomb detonated, every sentient creature except for the
passengers would be at least five miles away,preferably facing the opposite direction.
The Pine Barrens is the only place in the east where you can make sure of that.Still, the
buildings in the compound and the trees for a half-mile radius burnt to a crisp. The first
blast would sock away enough energy to keep the craft accelerating at a rate of one-G
until it got somewhere between the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. That would give my
prospective colonists plenty of time to become acquainted with one another. Heaven
help them when someone aboard got the idea to set up a government. I expected
Sonoma and the Russian would have it out in due course,

Meanwhile, the great empires of the Earth were headless,

LEXCORP 245
 I told Mary Louise Hancock that the plan all along was for the most gutless
Chickenshits in our group to demand places aboard the Ark. I explained why, told her
about the Flywheel and the bees and the rest of it and she was kind of amazed. I thought
she'd be pissed but Mary Louise thought it was an outstanding plan. She insisted on
coming down to New Jersey and overseeing the check-in process. So for five days she
sat at a wide desk at the end of the dirt road that dead-ended at my construction
compound with a three-dimensional schematic of the interior of the Ark and a pile of
yellow legal pads, assigning people residences in the habitats inside.
Six companies owned the largest broadcast and publishing companies in the world.
The presidents or chairs or chief officers of all of them, their immediate families,and
various hangers-on all showed up to get a residence assignment on the Ark a few days
after Eve and I got back from Istanbul.
The governors of three large American states and their broods, and the heads of
state of one Asian and two Latin American countries dribbled in over the weekend.
The guy responsible for the distribution of large weapons systems to the network of
arms dealers doing business in the Middle East and Africa turned up. He arrived Sunday
afternoon in a Hummer filled with kids and a Lhasa apso.
It took four days for the three women and two men who pulled the strings on oil
and fossil fuel allocations around the world to file past Mary Louise. One of them
showed up with nothing more than a tote bag. This was around the same time that two
archbishops and a lama, all in sweatshirts and jeans,drove up together in a station
wagon.
The electric vehicle magnate, with his mom and his kids, showed up in a Ford
F-350.

246MAGGIN
 Mary Louise smiled sweetly. I told everyone to leave the keys in their cars. Those
vehicles would be useful to me or they'd be vaporized in the backwash. I didn't care
which.
It went like that. One-by-one,two-by-two,whatever.I wondered whether Noah had a
receptionist with whatever they used in those days for legal pads at the ramp of his
ark.By the Wednesday after the Thursday when we started,seven hundred eighty of the
family habitats were occupied and the most terrified and dangerous people on the planet
were all eager to take off on potentially the most perilous trip since the first hominids
got planted on Earth millions of years ago.
"It seems there's room," I said to Mary Louise.“Have you thought about going?”
"Heavens no,"she said."My first great-grandchild is on the way," and I offered her a
ride home.
In Building Four my band of Maasai engineers played some raucous African game
similar to ring-a-levio and the Alloy Guy,already inside and at the heIm,was hooked up
to my mainframe downloading instructions. The construction crew were long gone.
"Time to move out," I told the Maasai kids.“Pick a car.Any car.”
The kids seemed partial to minivans and pickup trucks.Each of them would drive
off in one of his or her own. B.J.would finesse their car registrations back in town. Mary
Louise came with me in my converted Rover. We all headed north.
“Okay,space pilot," I said to the Alloy Guy through the car's wireless.“You're on.
As soon as you're airborne you'll want to release our friend in apartment 101. I made
sure he has a large supply of hallucinogenic honey."
"Yes dad.”
“Any questions?”
"No. Navigation protocols integrated." It was one of his longer attempts at a
sentence.

LEXCORP 247
 "Excellent. Give m1c at least an hour."
Ninety minutes later I was on the Jersey Turnpike and thought I might hear a
rumble from the liftoff, but I didn't.I turned on the news, though, and there was a great
deal of blather about an enormous explosion in the wilderness area near the Delaware
state line. The forest would absorb any fallout issues.Pretty much.

I DROPPED OFF MARY LOUISE AT NEWARK AIRPORT and made my way to

the Upper East Side. It took me three trips around the block before a parking space
opened up on Seventy-Ninth Street outside the hospital. I sat with my driving cap pulled
over my forehead for two-and-a-half bours, making phone calls and waiting for Eve's
shift to end.She tapped her fingernails on the passenger-side window and I let her in.
"Everybody's talking about the big blast and the alien flying saucer in the Pine
Barrens."
“Are they?”
“Was that you?”
“It was us."
“Everything go all right?”
“Who knows?”
"Is the world changed?”
“Definitely,”
“What will we notice first?”
"A big blast in South Jersey. After that it'll be gradual.Years at least,”
"So will next summer be cooler than last summer?”
"Nope. But almost everyone who profits from keeping this train wreck of a
planetary crisis going is halfway to the asteroid belt by now. It'll get warmer every year
for a few years.Then...”
"How many is a few?”
“Want me to do the math?”

248 MAGGIN
 “Roughly.”
“If we had a kid nine months from now, things'd start to level off around the time
he hit junior high school."
“Wow,”she said. "Are we having a kid in nine months?”
“Hypothetically speaking," and I changed the subject."I bought a lot of stock in the
major petrochemical companies.Enough for an unreasonable amount of influence over
their short-term policies. Production will grind to a halt as the markets dry up and I'll
make a lot of money while oil prices rise. I'll try to sell off the stock before it becomes
worthless,but probably not most of it. We'll make up for it with mass production of the
Lexcorp Objectively Indestructible Substance.”
“You realize you're going to have to find another name for that stuff,right?”
"How about you come up with something?”
“I'll work on it," she said.
"I was thinking maybe 'Lexor'.”
"We can keep working on it.”
“Steelium?”
“I'll take it under advisement.”
“What's the Band-Aid?”I asked her.
“Band-Aid?”
"On the back of your hand.”
“Oh,I forgot about that. Bee sting. In the park after my Tai Chi class. She was a big
one. I think it was one of yours."
“One of my bees? They're spreading on their own."
“Yeah," she said. "It got me a little high."
"Uh-oh,"I said."You know what's good for that?”
“What?”
"A bialy with cream cheese," and I drove around the block again.

LEXCORP 249
 MAYBE IT WILL ALL WORK out for them. Maybe the Alloy Guy will pilot the
Ark to a habitable world far from Earth where the people aboard or their descendants
can begin again to set up a blooming civilization. Maybe they'll overcome the malice
and cupidity that earned them their places in this new world and they'll manage to work
together. Maybe they'll take what we've learned in the course of eight or a dozen-odd
mnillennia of so-called civilization and use it as a jumping-off point for their own
sustainable future.
Maybe not. I don't really care.
I had all these contingency plans to activate in case the Alien stuck his nose in my
business. I always do. To be fair,those plans rarely work, but this time-other than his
failing,for some reason to stop the Alloy Guy on the bridge on the east side-he didn't
even try to intervene in what I was doing. Could it be that he thought it was all a great
idea too and tacitly threw in with my plan? Maybe he thought it was a worthy pursuit,
and something he wouldn't be able to do himself. He'd never actively banish hundreds of
the world's most dangerous people from the planet for generations. But would you
suppose he'd let someone else take the blame for it? Even me?
Who else but me?

ACROSS JEFFERSON AVENUE from the Lexcorp Tower was the Metroport
Building, the corporate headquarters of Shabwah Street Petroleum USA. Metroport was
sixty stories high until I built my Tower. Years earlier, soon after the topping party for
Lexcorp-where the city's dignitaries and pop stars showed up to celebrate the skeleton of
my construction reaching roof level-Shabwah erected a 150-foot antenna for proprietary
communications on the roof of the Metroport Building. I'm sure it was there mostly to
make sure their building stayed taller than mine. Not long

250 MAGGIN
 afterward, Sheikh ibn Alathiah and his extended family-that is, most of Shabwah
Street Petroleum's board of directors-left Earth with several hundred of their closest
friends, Shabwah and the rest of the oil business worldwide tanked big-time.
I bought the Metroport Building for Shabwah Street's outstanding debt plus one
dollar and I tore it down.When I sold it for scrap steel I came out ahead by about twenty
dollars and change. Then I took a shovel-I did it myself-and planted a genetically
modified giant sequoia sapling in the middle of the emptied lot and set up an endowment
to pay for a round-the-clock squad of armed gardeners and an endless supply of
industrial strength Lexcorp Tropical Garden Fertilizer. The gardeners' job is to make
sure the sequoia eventually grows to cast shade on the penthouse of the Lexcorp Tower
across the street. So far, there isn't a sequoia taller than about three hundred fifty feet,
but that will change. Coconuts and guava trees already grow all along the median of
Parkland Avenue. It might take a century or two, but my little sapling will cast a big
shadow.By that time, I expect Jefferson Avenue will be a pedestrian walkway the length
of Midtown.
I love capitalism. It's self-pollinating.

LEXCORP 251
 SELECTED WORKS BY ELLIOT S! MAGGIN:

BOOKS
Last Son of Krypton
Superman: Miracle Monday
Generation X
with Scott Lobdell
Kingdom Come
based on a story by Mark Waid and Alex Ross
Not My Closet
For the Luvva Jack
a novella

ANTHOLOGIES
Superman: From the Forties Through the Seventies
Green Lantern/Green Arrow Collection
Superman: A Celebration of 80 Years
The Joker: The Clown Prince of Crime
An Enemy's Gift

COMICS AND GRAPHIC NOVELS

Green Arrow:“What Can One Man Do?”
"Must There Be a Superman?”
“Superman 2001”
with Cary Bates
Atari Force
Wonder Woman:“Paradise in Peril”
The Living Legends of Superman
The Joker:"Luthor You're Driving Me Sane”
"The Sword of Superman"
Total Recall: The Official Adaptation
Superman/Superwoman:"The Last Secret Identity"
Superman:"The Last Earth-Prime Story"
Batman:"The Blue the Grey and the Bat"

...and a bunch of things that won't fit.

Printed in Japan
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