Justice League of America - Batman: The Stone King by Alan Grant (best english novels to read .txt) 📗

limits of Earth's atmosphere, almost a hundred miles from the planet's surface, its top spread out in a blue-sparking canopy that grew at amazing speed to cover half the planet.

Then, suddenly, it was gone.

"Did you see that, Houston?" Even dampened by the operations room speakers, there was no mistaking the urgency in the astronaut's voice. "I repeat, Houston–do you copy? The whole column just vanished, like somebody switched off a light!"

"We copy, Lincoln," a voice from NASA crackled. "Over."

Batman removed his eyeshade, more troubled than impressed by what he'd seen. He hit the button that controlled the shutters, and as they slid silently back into place, he and J'onn returned to their workstations.

"You don't think . . ." J'onn began. He hesitated, as if unwilling to put the thought into words, before finishing slowly. "You don't think the Stone King has started early?"

Batman ran his eyes over the columns of data that constantly flowed across his screen. "According to this, the light was a visual phenomenon only. None of the other instruments picked it up."

He closed his eyes, deep in thought. When he spoke again, it was with a slight shake of his head. "No, I don't think he's started early. I think he's testing whatever powers he has, awakening the ancient energy centers. He's making sure that he'll be ready . . . when the time comes."

J'onn defocused his vision, allowing himself to drift into the calm center of his being.

"We're fast running out of time," he said softly, "and I still don't understand what this is all about." He garnered his ragged thoughts, men went on. "The spirit of a Stone Age shaman has possessed a university student. Now he's going to destroy the world. But why?"

"Presumably because he doesn't like what we've become," Batman countered. "Peter Glaston was a highly intelligent young man. There's no saying what the Stone King might have extracted from his memories."

This was a scenario League members often adopted when faced with a problem that baffled them. Talk about it, toss it back and forth, all the time looking for some tiny fact that had until then escaped their notice.

"Pollution, environmental destruction, global warming," Batman went on. "They didn't have these problems five millennia ago."

"He has access to seemingly unlimited power," J'onn said musingly. "The energies of the planet itself."

"And he can discharge those energies in highly destructive ways."

Batman gestured to the huge electronic map, his unconscious mind releasing what he'd learned in his reading at the university the day before.

"Almost all of the sites shown there were sacred to one or another human culture or religion. According to Jenny Ayles, Peter Glaston believes they stand on points of power, part of a grid or network that once covered every continent. It's probable from the increased activity hat the Stone King is trying to kick-start the grid again, and use it to annihilate modern society."

Under his craggy brows, the Martian's blue eyes stared fixedly. He remembered the red dust wastes of his homeworld, the rock-strewn deserts that covered all that had once been green and fertile. He remembered a world once thronging with people, now dead and barren, a planetwide graveyard.

J'onn J'onzz had come to love Earth. It twisted him up inside to think his adopted home was slated to suffer a similar fate.

"But in the final analysis," J'onn said at last, "the Stone King is a foe like any other we've faced. Somehow, he can be beaten. What we have to do is discover his mind-set. If we can think like him, we can anticipate his actions . . . and beat him."

"We can't think like him," Batman said flatly. "Our brains are wired differently. I've learned the hard way, from battling the likes of the Joker these many years."

"Many scholars consider that prehistoric peoples were barbarians," J'onn persisted. "If that is the case, surely we can outthink him."

"That paradigm is changing quickly," Batman told him. "Rock art of thirty thousand years ago is highly sophisticated. There were flint factories in Czechoslovakia twenty thousand years ago. The city of Jericho was inhabited in 8000 b.c. Who knows how much people learned before Neolithic times?"

He paused for a moment, allowing his conscious mind to retrieve more of what he'd read in the university library. "Their knowledge of stellar events predated ours by thousands of years. We still haven't duplicated the building techniques that let them move two-hundred-ton blocks of stone, the way they did at Ba'albek in Lebanon. Some accounts claim they had mastered sonic energy and knew how to use the earth forces for teleportation–"

"Which might explain the pyramid's disappearance," J'onn pointed out.

"According to one theory," Batman went on, warming to the subject, "the mind of ancient man was very different from our own. It was bicameral–two-chambered. Commands issued by the dominant right hemisphere of the brain were heard as audio hallucinations by the left brain."

"Voices in the head?" J'onn looked doubtful. "Isn't that one of the defining symptoms of schizophrenia?"

"It is. It's also what happens to me when you establish your telepathic link. There's something very powerful about hearing an internal voice. It instills obedience much more strongly than any external order ever could."

Which was precisely why Batman disliked the telepathic link procedure so much.

"So if the Stone King is controlled by an internal voice," J'onn asked, "he'd be impervious to anything we might say to him?"

"Yes," Batman agreed.

"Unless, of course," J'onn added hurriedly, "my telepathic powers can affect him."

"To do that, we have to find him." Batman continued to think aloud. "How can we save the others when we don't know where they are–or if they're even still alive? Where do you hide something the size of a pyramid?"

"Where indeed?" J'onn nearly leaped out of his chair as a sudden thought overwhelmed him. "Think back to the archaeology room. I was there, but you couldn't see me."

Batman understood instantly. "Of course, the pyramid's invisible!"

"Sometimes the obvious solution is the easiest to overlook," the Martian said ruefully. His voice took