The Death and Life of Superman Read Online Free PDF

vain try to overshadow the Man of Steel. Superman survived countless attempts to discredit and kill him, but was never able to prove that Luthor was behind the attacks.
    Then Luthor had gotten his hands on a chunk of kryptonite.
    Kryptonite was the common ore of kryptonium, an unusually stable transuranic element which had been created in the thermonuclear destruction of Superman’s ancestral world of Krypton. The two-pound chunk of glowing ore was the only such specimen on the planet. Ironically, it had come to Earth on the tail section of the same drive vehicle that had brought Krypton’s last son to our world. The rock had passed through several hands before it came into Luthor’s possession and he discovered that its radiations were deadly to Superman.
    Ecstatic over his find, Luthor had a fragment of the kryptonite cut, polished, and set in a signet ring which he wore for many months. He taunted Superman with the ring and used it to keep the last son of Krypton at bay. But the kryptonite was not as harmless to terrestrial lifeforms as Luthor’s physicists had thought. The ring’s radiation slowly poisoned him. His doctor was forced to amputate Luthor’s right hand, although even that drastic measure proved in vain. He managed to avoid a slow, wasting death from kryptonite poisoning, however, when his plane crashed in the Andes. Superman himself recovered Luthor’s remains, but he could never determine whether the crash had been an accident or if his old enemy had planned it.
    I never thought of Luthor as being the kind to take his own life, but you just never know. He was a complicated man, thought Superman. He stared long and hard at the LexCorp Tower but was unable to discern much. The old man had retrofitted the building with a fine mesh of lead that frustrated Superman’s X-ray vision and installed elaborate sound baffles to keep him from hearing sounds spoken inside. Still, it was a different world without Lex Luthor around. Without the first Lex Luthor, anyway.
    LexCorp had momentarily floundered in the wake of Luthor’s death, the value of its stock plummeting on the open market as members of its board of directors vied for power. The corporation was looking like a prime candidate for downsizing and restructuring when Luthor’s son arrived to take control.
    Accompanied by Sydney Happersen, the elder Luthor’s chief aide, Lex Luthor II had taken the city by storm. As his father’s only heir, he had access to both a personal fortune and a controlling interest in LexCorp, and he used both to put the recession-strapped Metropolis back to work. Young Lex proved every bit as wily as his father in handling the board of directors, and within days he had himself approved as LexCorp’s chief executive officer. It was now generally acknowledged that he had turned the company around. Just twenty-one years old, Lex Luthor II was a genuine wunderkind. Until he had been recognized as both heir and son in Luthor’s will, it was claimed, his existence had been kept hidden for his own protection. The boy had apparently been fathered by Luthor with his personal physician, Dr. Gretchen Kelley, and brought up by LexCorp employees in Australia.
    A son, raised in secret. Superman shook his head at the thought. Even now it sounds like something out of a soap opera. But, Lord knows, Luthor had plenty of enemies from whom he might need to protect a son. It was just the sort of Byzantine scheme he and Happersen would concoct. Superman had personally flown overseas, using both his powers and the contacts he’d made over the years as Clark Kent, to investigate young Luthor’s background. All the stories checked out.
    When young Lex became aware that there’d been bad blood between Superman and his father, he had gone out of his way to apologize to the Man of Steel. He seemed utterly sincere, but . . . I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s still something about the man that bothers me. He’s almost too good.