The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (free children's ebooks online .TXT) 📗

Barry to one side. That chunk of the sphere had rolled through the haze of dust and almost smashed into Barry. It struck the Man of Steel a glancing blow—and Superman actually staggered back.

“Are you OK?” Barry asked, rushing to the Man of Steel’s side.

“We gotta wait for the dust to settle,” Mick said, landing nearby. He grinned in self-satisfaction at his successful landfall. “Can’t see anything yet. Hey, what’s wrong with the cape guy?”

“I’m not sure . . .” Barry helped Superman steady himself. The Kryptonian hero had a wan and sickly look about him. “Are you OK, Superman? Clark?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “But something’s wrong. There’s . . . The sun . . . Or, suns, actually.” He glanced around. “They’re all distant. And dying.”

Barry wondered where this sudden concern was coming from . . . and then remembered: Most of a Kryptonian’s superpowers came from the light of a yellow sun. Flight and super-strength were a function of low gravity, but all the others—the super-senses, the invulnerability, the heat vision—came from yellow solar radiation.

Here at the End of All Time, stars were in short supply, and those that remained were old and dying.

And red.

There were basically two kinds of stars: small ones, like the sun around which Earth orbited, and massive ones. As small ones aged, they became white dwarfs and then eventually cooled into black dwarfs, which emitted no light. The big stars went supernova and became black holes.

But no matter what the size, every star turned red late in its life cycle. Here at the End of All Time, late was a way of life.

“I’ve been draining my reserves since we got here.” Superman spoke with an infuriating and almost incomprehensible calm, as though he hadn’t just learned that the source of his power no longer existed. “Pretty soon, my cells will have no more yellow solar radiation to draw on. And I’ll basically be a human being.”

“You’re taking this pretty well,” Mick commented.

“It’s not like getting upset about it will change things,” Superman said. “I’ll figure out a way around it. I always do. The dust seems to have settled. Let’s move on.”

36

Ray’s new atom suit was pared down from its original design, but he still had small retrojets in his boots. They had been put there to help him counter crosscurrents when shrunk down and drifting through the air, but right now they acted as nice little boosters to convey his group to Egg, the asteroid bearing Cisco. He held Oliver and Sara by their hands and used the booster rockets to jolt them across the void. Since everyone was essentially weightless, it took almost no effort on his part to drag them along. Still, Sara felt like some kid’s kite.

“Not the most dignified travel arrangements I’ve ever had,” Oliver deadpanned.

“Time travel has done wonders for your sense of humor,” Sara commented.

Oliver chuckled. “There’s no point being grim and gritty when you’re stuck at the end of the Multiverse with a quiver of trick arrows strapped to your back.”

“True.”

Their landing on Egg was undignified, to say the least. Ray had limited experience with this sort of low-gravity flight, while Sara and Oliver had precisely no experience touching down under these sorts of circumstances. The three of them collided on impact with the ground, became entangled, and rolled along for several yards before managing to stop and extricate themselves from one another.

Sara bounced up first, buoyant and light in almost no gravity. She brushed dirt from her pristine White Canary outfit. “No matter what happens next, we all agree that we will never, ever talk about what just happened.”

“Agreed,” Oliver said, rising.

Ray hopped to his feet. “Can I include this anecdote in my memoirs, as long as I agree not to have them published until fifty years after we’re all dead?”

“You’re writing your memoirs?” Sara asked.

Ray’s head bobbed with verve. “Of course I am! The book is tentatively titled Big Time: How Being Small Taught Me to Feel Huge.”

Oliver glanced at Sara and did a terrible job suppressing an amused smile. She resisted the urge to return the smile—if she did, she knew she’d start laughing and not be able to stop.

“Fine, put it in your autobiography, Ray.” She turned on one heel and led them toward the metallic rectangle Superman had described to them.

“It’s not an autobiography,” Ray argued as they took bounding moon steps toward the structure. “An autobiography is a factual history of your life, from your point of view. A memoir is a time-delimited reminiscence of a specific—”

“We get the point.” Oliver, Sara noted, was deliberately hanging back, eyes up, scanning the dead skies. Expecting an attack.

Other than the Time Trapper, though, what was left to attack them? Everything else in the Multiverse was already dead. They were the only living beings in all of Creation.

She shivered at the thought.

The “building” didn’t really meet the standards of being a building. It was more like a plinth for which the sculptor had forgotten to create the statue. It was a story and a half high, made of rusting, dull metal. It looked like a pyramid with the top chopped off and covered over.

“OK,” said Oliver, catching up to them. “Now, how do we get inside?”

37

The dust had mostly meandered to the ground, with only a smattering of it still turning in the near vacuum, twinkling dully in the faint light of the End of All Time and trapped in mid-fall by the weak gravity of the rock. Barry kept a careful eye on Superman as the three of them made their way to the sphere. The Man of Steel seemed no worse for wear, his bearing still upright and powerful. In anyone else, this would have come across as denial. But somehow, in Superman, it seemed both right and rational. As though the super part of his nom de superheroing came not just from his powers, but from something deeper, something innate.

“How are you feeling?” Barry asked.

“Not bad,” Superman said. “I’m not a mere mortal yet,