The Death and Life of Superman Read Online Free PDF Page B

Superman turned away from downtown, trying to put LexCorp Tower and its young owner out of his mind.
    Straight ahead of Superman lay a ten-square-block area known officially as Hob’s Bay. Named for Elias Hob, an early Metropolis landowner, it had been a prosperous, middle-class neighborhood at the turn of the century. With the beginning of the Great Depression, it began a slide into poverty and decay from which it never recovered. Now only City Hall and the Chamber of Commerce referred to the neighborhood as Hob’s Bay. To the rest of Metropolis, it was Suicide Slum.
    Suicide Slum was a hellhole. Its most famous sons and daughters were those who had escaped to a better life. Despite numerous attempts over the years at urban renewal and Superman’s best efforts, it remained a venue for X-rated theaters and adult bookstores, for run-down tenements, and for crime-infested streets. Life was cheap in Suicide Slum. On the other hand, so was the rent.
    On the edge of Suicide Slum stood a blocky five-story brick building whose single distinguishing characteristic was an oversized satellite dish. The sole tenant of the building’s top floor was an eccentric former college professor by the name of Emil Hamilton.
    Professor Hamilton was an inventive genius whose unorthodox work habits had resulted in his being fired from a score of commercial research laboratories. Like his boyhood idol Nikola Tesla, Hamilton was able to design circuitry in his head, visualizing it so vividly that he sometimes neglected to commit his preliminary notes to paper. While still a young man, Emil had conceptualized a magnetic field generator that he theorized could provide protection from nuclear attack. He spent much of the next twenty years laboring on his own to develop a working prototype. During that time, he repeatedly tried to interest the Defense Department in his proposed generator but was able to obtain only an occasional small federal grant to continue his work. For the most part, government bureaucrats considered Emil a crank and dismissed his work as impractical. The one man who had seen possibilities in his work was Lex Luthor.
    Luthor began funding the professor’s work through a dummy corporation with an eye toward eventually discrediting him and claiming full ownership of his device. Under extreme stress from the pressure put on him by Luthor’s people, Emil had suffered a nervous breakdown. He became obsessed with proving the effectiveness of his invention, and irrationally set out to test its power against that of Superman. In doing so, Hamilton pushed his prototype device beyond its limits, requiring Superman to use his own invulnerable body to protect the professor from the explosion of the overloaded generator.
    Hamilton was remanded to a mental health facility for treatment and counseling. He later served a few months of a sentence in a minimum security prison before being paroled on Superman’s recommendation. Upon his release, he managed to secure enough funding to set up a small, independent lab in the old building, where he began to eke out a modest living as a technical consultant. In that capacity, the professor had aided Superman on numerous occasions and had eventually come to serve as the Man of Steel’s unofficial science advisor.
    The big double windows on the fifth floor swung open, apparently of their own volition, at Superman’s approach. That’s new, he thought, landing silently inside the lab. As the windows began to ratchet closed, he heard the whir of tiny servomotors mounted onto their hinges. Looking more carefully, Superman saw where the new wiring connections passed through the wall into a conduit leading to the roof, and from there to a new array of equipment mounted just under the eaves. A glance at the circuitry within confirmed what he already expected. “Ah-ha! Infrared motion detectors!”
    “What about them?” The voice came from beneath a nearby computer console and was immediately followed by