“I’m a little suspicious of any offer that seems too good to be true,” Clark said.
“Just hear me out,” Mr. Smith said. “At the moment you are saving people’s lives one at a time. While that’s personally satisfying, there are limits on just how many people you can help. Even you can only be in one place at a time.”
Clark stared at the table. It was one of the greatest failings of what he was doing now. He’d had saved hundreds of lives already, if not thousands, and all he could think about were the thousands he wasn’t out there saving.
“What you need is a way to maximize your impact. You’ve said your goal is to help. I assume that means you want to reduce human suffering?”
Clark nodded slowly.
“Then what you need is money,” Mr. Smith said. “A lot of it.”
“So what do you want him to do,” Lois asked. “Star in Nike commercials?”
“Insurance companies own fifteen billion dollars worth of communication satellites many of which have nothing wrong with them other than needing minor repairs…repairs that aren’t available at any price. What happens when Superman offers to repair those satellites for $5 million apiece?”
“People will think he’s sold out,” Lois said.
“Say he repairs three satellites for fifteen million dollars….do you have any idea what he can do with that?”
“Buy a mansion in Beverly Hills?” Lois asked.
“He could buy approximately 1, 875, 000 bushels of corn. How many starving Africans or Burmese or Chinese could he feed with that?”
Lois was silent.
Mr. Smith spoke again. “Of course even if you got that food to them, there’s no guarantee that their bodies could process it. Starving people need a lot of special care…children especially. There is a product currently on the market called Plumpy’nut. It’s a peanut paste specifically designed to have the right combination of vitamins and minerals to return a starving child to health.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Lois admitted. “It’s used by Doctors without Borders.”
“With two packets a day you can turn a child dying of starvation into a healthy child able to keep down regular foods in two weeks. In the past you had to have medical supervision to restore the malnourished to health. Plumpy’Nut is so easy to use that you can give it to the parents to take home. That means you suddenly have doctors who are able to focus on the injured and diseased instead of caring for millions of malnourished children.”
“That sounds good,” Clark said cautiously, “but…”
“Five million children die a year of malnutrition. For fifteen million dollars you could provide enough Plumpy’nut to restore 2,142,857 children to health. For thirty million you could get nearly all of them.”
Clark stared at Mr. Smith for a long moment.
“What then?” Lois asked. “You bring them back, but there’s no food available.”
“You spend more money,” Mr. Smith said. “Provide cheap meals to children who go to school and you’ve killed two birds with one stone. Give the children an education and a chance to be healthy.”
“Don’t food subsidies cause part of the problem?” Lois asked. “American corn sent over, wiping out the local market so that local farmers don’t plant and can’t afford to live?”
“Not if you buy food locally first,” Mr. Smith said. He glanced around. “I’m supposed to tout the value of American produce, but if you really want to help the poor, you invest in their local economy.”
Clark wondered who was pushing Mr. Smith to talk about the virtues of American farm goods and just why Mr. Smith had mentioned it. Was it a ploy to buy their trust?
Mr. Smith spoke again, “Dean Kamen recently unveiled a water purification system called the Slingshot. A single unit purifies one thousand liters of water a day. You can use any water source…the ocean, puddles, chemical waste, poison, urine and what is distilled is pure clean water. No filters, no charcoal, nothing else is needed.”
“They had water distillation even in my time,” Clark said.
“The Slingshot only uses two percent of the power of conventional water distillers…and it’s run by an engine that can produce up to a kilowatt of additional power. It can use almost anything that burns as fuel, including cow dung.”
“I’m not sure why you’re telling us this,” Lois said.
“According to the inventor, it has the potential of eliminating of the source of fifty percent of all human disease. He has a tendency to exaggerate a bit, but three and a half million people really do die from waterborne illnesses every year. Most of them are children.”
“So what does it cost?” Clark asked. Mr. Smith had the sound of a salesman
“He’s hoping to get the price down to one to two thousand dollars a unit. With fifteen million dollars you could buy provide clean drinking water for more than a quarter million people.”
“There can’t be that many satellites up there that need fixing,” Lois said. “He’d run out of them sooner or later, and then all he’d have left was the loss of his credibility.”
Well, that and the thought of millions of children who would have died except for him, Clark thought, staring at the two of them. Lois was trying to defend him, but Clark wasn’t sure he needed defending.
“There’s a critical point in the life of a child. Malnourish them before the age of three and they suffer from brain damage, stunted growth and permanent ill health. Feed them by the age of three and you’ve bought them a lifetime of health and productivity. Do it for a few years, and you’ve changed the lives of an entire generation of people.”
“This wasn’t what I was expecting to hear from you,” Lois admitted. “I thought you’d talk about Clark working for the government.”
“You were thinking we’d want to use Clark as a weapon?” Mr. Smith asked. He smirked. “We don’t actually need him. As long as nobody else uses him as a weapon we’re reasonably content.”
Lois looked as though she wanted to argue.
“Now if he should happen to be flying through Afghanistan one day and happen to see Osama Bin Ladin, we wouldn’t turn the help away,” Mr. Smith said, smiling slightly. “We’d be happy to donate another twenty five million to the Foundation.”
“I’m not sure if I’d…”
“I know,” Mr. Smith said. “If I thought you would, we’d be having an entirely different conversation.”
“You seem a little different than the others,” Clark said. “I thought you were going to try to sell me on promoting American interests.”
“I am,” Mr. Smith said. At Clark’s look he said, “These things I’m suggesting are very much in the best interest of America.”
“So feeding the hungry, preventing water borne diseases…”
“Where do you think most of the new diseases come from?” Mr. Smith said. “They tend to come from places where people are hungry and already sick, where their bodies have compromised immune systems that are perfect incubators for a new disease to learn its way around until it’s virulent enough to spread to everyone else.”
“So this is about self interest?” Lois asked.
“Very much so,” Mr. Smith said. “Those African immune systems are the world’s first line of defense against the next super-plague.”
“It still doesn’t change the fact that there’s a limited supply of satellites that need a space repairman,” Lois said. “So in three or four years he’s right back where he started, except that people will see him as someone who has sold out to the special interests.”
“Do you really care?” Mr. Smith asked, looking at Clark. “Being a hero isn’t about being liked or being popular. It’s about doing what needs to be done, even if no one ever knows what you did.”
“I’m sure that’s the government’s mantra,” Lois said acidly. “I don’t suppose you were a spy before you moved into this job.”
“I was an economist for a little while,” Mr. Smith said. “It didn’t pay enough.”
“Thus the capitalist spiel.” Lois said. “Hasn’t big business done enough damage to the environment?”
“Actually,” Mr. Smith said. “I have some thoughts about that too. What Clark needs is a source of income that keeps producing even when he isn’t around. That way if something happens to him…say he finds a way home in six or ten years, he’ll leave a lasting legacy.”
“All of this just serves to tangle Clark up with business and government,” Lois said. “If he wants to help people, he has to be seen as being above money and politics. He has to be as acceptable to people in Kabul as he is in New York or London.”
Clark nodded. The things Mr. Smith was suggesting would only serve to enmesh him in contracts and rules and would create the suspicion that he was in the pocket of one organization or another.
“Couldn’t I just set up a Superman Foundation and accept charitable donations to do the same thing?” Clark asked. “Maybe license the use of my name and image…”
“DC comics already owns that, unless you want to change to a different suit,” Mr. Smith said. “They’ll be collecting on all the posters and action figures and underroos for years to come. It’s the only reason they aren’t suing you for copyright violations.”
“Still, there is charity…”
“How many disasters have there been this year alone? People are getting tired of giving. There’s a limit, and people are reaching it.” Mr. Smith shook his head slightly.
“Then what do you suggest?” Clark asked, frustrated.
“Solar power satellites.” Mr. Smith said. He grinned at the expression on both of their faces.
“What?” Clark asked. “Aren’t satellites solar powered already?”
“I’m talking about solar power stations in geosynchronous orbit above the earth. They provide power twenty four hours a day, and the same mass of solar cells can produce ten times as much power as they could on earth.”
Clark sighed. Things had been going so well. He’d been taking what Mr. Smith had said seriously, but now…
“That’s science fiction,” Lois said.
“The Japanese already plan to have a small plant in space by 2025,” Mr. Smith said. “The technology is here already.”
“So why hasn’t it been done yet?”
“Because launching the materials into space would cost twenty times as much as the satellite itself. It’d cost up to 320 billion to launch a 4 gigawatt station, which isn’t economical when the same amount of power could be produced by ten coal plants costing seven billion.”
“So you’re saying the station itself would cost sixteen billion? How is that at all economical?” Lois asked. “Twice as much for the station?”
“Because a 500 megawatt coal plant burns 1.43 million tons of coal a year. Eight of those plants would burn over eleven million tons of coal, at a cost of $100 a ton. That’s not counting the employees needed to run the plant, or any of a dozen other costs associated with disposing of waste and the environmental cost.”
“It’d still take seventeen years to pay for itself.”
“Four gigawatts would produce 35 billion kilowatt hours a year, which could be sold at five cents a kilowatt hour to produce profits of $1.75 billion a year…without having to buy a billion dollars worth of coal every year for the next thirty years.”
“Nobody is going to fork over sixteen or seventeen billion dollars for an unproven solar technology,” Lois said.
“T.Boone Pickens is building a four gigawatt, ten billion dollar wind farm already,” Mr. Smith said. “And that will only produce power 30% of the time. People are hungry for this kind of technology. Give them the chance and they’ll come through.”
“And what does Clark get out of this?”
“Ten percent of the profit from now on.”
“That’s going to make him look really impartial,” Lois said. “Superman…billionaire industrialist.”
“He doesn’t have to take a dime for himself. Instead, every year the Superman Foundation receives $175 million dollars to disperse as he sees fit. I’ve already told you what fifteen million dollars can do…multiply that by a factor of more than ten to see the possibilities.”
“There are already charities out there that give a lot more money than that,” Lois said. “The United way gave away more than three billion dollars last year. Why would this be any different?”
“Normal charities have administrative costs. They spend an average of fifteen percent on overhead, and there are costs they can’t get away from, like the cost of transporting goods.”
“Clark can help them with that,” Lois said. “In fact he’s already started.”
“He could do it just as easily from his own Foundation…or actually he could do both, enabling charities to buy more food to compensate for lowered transport costs, and using local charities to point him in the direction of places where existing charities aren’t keeping up.”
Clark spoke finally. “Are we talking about shooting a four million kilowatt beam of power to earth? That sounds an awful lot like a weapon to me. I won’t have anything to do with planting weapons in space. Even if it’s not a weapon, what happens when a piece of space debris hits the station and the beam moves across a populated area?”
“The receiver would cover an area of several miles,” Mr. Smith said, “so that the beam could be dispersed enough to be safe for people to walk through.”
“How is that any different than solar cells then?” Lois asked.
“You can’t do much with solar cell land,” Mr. Smith said. “But the area under a solar power satellite rectenna can be used to grow crops. It’d be fenced off for safety of course.”
“I can’t believe it’d be as easy as you are making it sound,” Lois said. “Or there would be a lot more people talking about it.”
“It’d take slightly more than the current annual solar cell production capacity of the entire world,” Mr. Smith admitted, “And there have been supply shortages. The silicon producers would have to build new facilities, which they would do if they had a guarantee the demand would hold up.”
“What makes you think enough could be even produced for this?”
“They’ve doubled photovoltaic production every two years since 2002. With this much money pumped into the system new factories would open, and thousands of jobs would be created. People would be able to make an honest living and achieve the American dream, and in the end the prices for ground based solar power would drop due to economies of scale. You’d have a cleaner environment, money for charity…everyone would win.”
“Not coal miners,” Clark said. “Or people in the space industry.”
“The rocket makers would only lose money if the project were going to go ahead with or without you. The coal miners…even four gigawatts won’t make much of a dent in the huge increases in coal.”
“Then why bother?” Lois asked.
“Because if it can be done one year, it can be done again and again. Imagine if they were able to create two or even three plants in a year. If Clark was here twenty years he could have as many as sixty of those stations up and running…creating enough electricity to power sixty million households and providing ten billion dollars a year to the Superman Foundation.”
“You said something about stopping hurricanes,” Clark said faintly.
“Solar power plants can be used to heat masses of air, steering hurricanes away from populated areas. Eventually we could create a world where tragedies like Katrina or what happened in Myanmar just don’t happen anymore.”
“This all seems…so pie in the sky,” Clark said. “How big are we talking about these stations being?”
“Four thousand to eighty thousand tons…thus the transportation problem. They’d be kilometers wide too. It wouldn’t be an easy job,” Mr. Smith said. “I won’t lie to you. It would be huge and difficult. The problem is that anything worth doing usually is.”
“So you want me to basically sell out…”
“Partner with,” Mr. Smith corrected.
“Private business,” Clark continued. “What does the government get out of this?”
“Clean energy, cheap telecommunications, thousands of jobs in the solar sector with the taxes associated with that. The United States’ dependence on foreign oil would be lessened to some extent.”
“And you don’t think the government would interfere with me?”
“No more than it would interfere with any other citizen,” Mr. Smith said. “People are afraid of you now because you’re a loose cannon. You could decide to join Al Quaida tomorrow and there wouldn’t be anything you could do about it.”
“But owning stakes in a company or even a Foundation…”
“It creates a sense of stability. You’d have assets that could be seized, legal penalties that could be assessed…you’d be part of the system. People would feel that the Foundation would be important to you, so you could in some way be held accountable.”
“So basically people in Congress would feel safer if Superman was a businessman, because that’s something they can understand,” Lois said.
“They’d feel better if he had ties to the world,” Mr. Smith said. “Because those ties make it seem more likely that he’s going to try to be a law abiding citizen.”
“They make him easier to control,” Lois said.
Mr. Smith nodded. “At some point you are going to have to make a decision about why you are doing all this. If it’s for the glory, then fine. But if you really want to help people you’re going to need help. Partnering with business is going to be the fastest and easiest way to do that.”
“It’s a lot to take in,” Clark said, glancing at Lois. “And I’m not exactly ready to start signing contracts.”
“You’ve got time to think about it,” Mr. Smith said. “But don’t just dismiss it. These things I’ve been talking about really can happen. I can show you feasibility studies done on the solar satellite idea, and I could have signed contracts on satellite repair by the end of the week.”
He pulled a business card from his jacket pocket and gave it to Lois. “I’d hate for it to get lost in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere.”
Clark scowled. Apparently everyone had been briefed on his problems keeping a wallet.
“As an apology and a gesture of goodwill, we’ve had three replacement costumes made for you,” Mr. Smith said, turning to Clark “Your friend at the Superman Museum was helpful as to the measurements, and he says he’d like the original back. He thinks you’ve quadrupled the value of the suit by having it be worn by the real Superman.”
Lois stared at him for a long moment. “That wasn’t why I…”
Mr. Smith shrugged. “Also, the Astronomers at SETI want to talk to you. They’d like to pinpoint the part of the galaxy that Krypton is in.”
“Why?” Clark asked. In the movie, Lex Luthor had used that information to find kryptonite. He wondered if the government was looking to see if any existed on this world as well.
“Given that are worlds are so analogous, they wonder if maybe the reason a version of you doesn’t exist here is that Krypton never exploded.”
Clark stared at the other man suddenly speechless.
“You may be our best chance of actually contacting an extraterrestrial civilization.” Mr. Smith said. He smiled suddenly. “At the rate things are going I may start having to hire a lot of people.”
