by Dan Swanson
“So you want to hear about the dragon?” Karre Orr sighed, then continued softly. “Okay. It happened several days after the pink veils started to drop from the sky. Zoll Orr had just announced that he had discovered a shield that could protect us, and people all over the world were frantically rushing to get started building them. The populace of Xenonopolis thought they were safe, and many of them were on the streets watching as that fateful veil swept in. And then, instantly, disaster struck, and after that, all that was left was the cleanup.”
***
Captain Karre Orr of the Xenonian Science Patrol blazed through the sky, leaving behind her the flashing, slowly fading trail that had led the newscasters to call her Skyfire. Her barracks was in the part of Xenonopolis that had been saved by Zoll Orr’s shield, and when she received emergency orders to respond to the destruction in that city, she had prayed that he also had been saved by his own invention. But she quickly realized there was nothing she could do for her grandparents — they were now monatomic dust, separated into the original elements that were contained in the human body. Wherever the veil had swept, there was nothing left but dust. The only place her help would be valuable was at the edge of the dustbowl — where buildings had only partially been disintegrated before the veil had lifted.
For several hours, her rescue work had left her no time for grief. Her telepathic powers enabled her to locate living victims in the rubble of collapsed structures, and with her great physical strength and unending stamina, she was able to reach many still-living citizens hours before the heavy construction equipment still being mobilized by the government would even reach the scene.
She was heartened when she was joined by her father Kell Orr, known on this world as Superman, and her brother Larre Orr, alias Fource. Her telepathy and Superman’s super-vision powers helped locate survivors, and their great physical strength, along with Fource’s gravity-controlling powers, allowed them to safely and efficiently locate and rescue the survivors.
There was only a relatively small region of partial devastation where they needed to work. Where the veil had completely passed, there was nothing but dust. A hundred meters from the edge of the dust bowl, it was as if nothing had happened. But in between, the structures that had been partially dissolved by the veil before it lifted had collapsed, sometimes pulling down other nearby structures, forming a ribbon of destruction around the bowl.
The super-heroes were soon joined by a growing army of workers in individual heavy construction exoskeletons who streamed into the disaster site, and they broke into teams working in different directions around the rim. Karre took time to direct about half of the construction workers into the dustbowl — there was a lot of city more than three feet down, and anyone who happened to be in an underground location, such as a transport tunnel or a sheltered walkway or the like, would likely need to be rescued from being buried in the monatomic elemental dust. She hoped the sealed exoskeletons were up to the task.
After several hours, as nearly as they could tell, everyone who needed rescue had finally been rescued. The exhausted heroes could leave the rest of the work to the construction professionals. As they were discussing the remaining work with several job site foremen, there was a flare of light from somewhere high above the horizon.
The flare was bright enough to dazzle everyone who had been unfortunate enough to be looking upward, and even reflections from dull or dark surfaces were too bright to look at. Within seconds, Fource’s electromagnetic powers detected a shower of atomic radiation raining down from the sky, and the sky was lighted by the most magnificent auroras that anyone on Xenon had ever witnessed.
The radiation grew in intensity, peaked, and grew less powerful, until less than a minute later, incoming radiation was back to normal levels — but the ground was now radioactive. Nobody would die instantly of this level of radiation exposure, but a half-hour’s exposure would be enough to kill many people.
Fortunately, the crust of Xenon contained an unusually high concentration of lead, and most of the building materials used in the city would block radiation. So the interior of any intact buildings would shield the populace until the city could be evacuated. Superman used his super-voice to warn everyone within hearing range that they needed to go inside and stay there until rescue teams came for them, and then the three heroes headed for space, looking for the source of the massive atomic explosion.
What the people of Xenon had just experienced, however, was not a massive atomic explosion high above the planet. Actually, it was the second half of a massive atomic explosion, an explosion that had begun light-years away from Xenon and years in the past. Though the radiation from that explosion was troubling, Xenonian technology was able to manage it. It was what materialized along with the explosion that would cause real problems.
Kell Orr examined the sky above with his super-vision. “There’s something big up there that shouldn’t be there,” he told his fellow heroes. He focused more intently. “It’s a snagriff, and it’s heading for Ulaine!”
Snagriffs were very large, dragon-like beasts seemingly native to several of the planets in the Krypton/Ra system, and Kell knew that they could snort fire through their nostrils — but this one seemed to have just spewed an incredibly powerful atomic explosion from its mouth. Kell rocketed skyward at his highest speed. He had to stop the beast before it reached Ulaine, a small asteroid of exceptionally high metallic content that had been moved into orbit around Xenon. The snagriff’s “nuclear belch” could easily kill the thousands who lived there and destroy the factories where they worked.
***
The confused, angry snagriff let out a tremendous bellow that, if other snagriffs had heard it, would have translated roughly as, “Beware! I am Thunderwing Snortfire!” and which carried overtones of hunger, loneliness, frustration, and rage. In the vacuum of space, his roar was silent, which only increased his frustration and anger.
Less than a minute ago, Thunderwing had been on the surface of a planet, gorging himself on a mountain of steel and iron dust. Then his human enemy had flashed from the sky and at super-speed had entangled him in something red and stretchy. Before he could tear his way free, he was rocketed upward, and two seconds later, he was painfully jolted by the ultra-powerful explosion of six atomic bombs detonating in his stomach. The stretchy thing entangling him had vanished, and Thunderwing found himself in space, belching atomic fire, near a planet that was definitely not the same one he had been terrorizing just seconds ago. He had no way to know that the Anti-Monitor had plucked him from the time stream and made him a pawn in the Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Far in front of him, Thunderwing could see a large asteroid, glittering metallically in the red light of this planet’s giant star. It was covered with buildings and infested with humans, though he didn’t quite understand how he could see these details from so far away. If he could reach that asteroid, destroying the humans would slake his rage and frustration, and then he could gorge himself on the metal in the satellite.
He flapped his wings, not realizing that wings wouldn’t work in a vacuum, and leisurely flew toward the rock, eagerly anticipating the satisfaction in his near future.
Several years before the planet Krypton exploded, Jor-L, one of the giant planet’s leading scientists, was experimenting with life-extension techniques. He needed to test a serum, but wasn’t sure it was safe for humans. He chose a male snagriff, a very large, hardy beast that looked like a cross between a dragon and a stegosaurus, which could fly and snort fire from its nostrils.
After he had injected the snagriff with his experimental drug, Jor-L placed a collar of Kryptonian metal around the beast’s neck and inscribed on it a record of his research. The serum had unexpected side effects, and the beast began to mutate. The snagriff grew even larger, began to eat metal instead of its natural diet, and its hide and armor plates transformed into metal.
The mutated snagriff ate its cage and escaped captivity. Its newly enhanced abilities and new powers allowed it to avoid Jor-L’s efforts at recapture. When the snagriff started eating Krypton’s most valuable metal, boradium, Jor-L baited a trap for it. He lured the beast onto his giant space catapult and launched it to Koron, one of Krypton’s moons, which was largely composed of metal.
The mutations caused by Jor-L’s serum allowed the snagriff to survive in the vacuum of space, and by eating the metal that made up the moon, it was able to survive on Koron indefinitely. Jor-L had no idea how long the mutated beast might survive.
When Krypton exploded, Koron was hurled out of orbit and wandered through space for years. Eventually, it passed through the same space warp that had brought baby Kal-L’s rocket to Earth. In 1952, the rogue moon’s path passed near enough to Earth for the lonely snagriff to leap to the planet below, where it gained additional super-powers, as any Kryptonian would in the Terrestrial environment.
Not long after it landed on Earth, the snagriff was making a meal of an ocean liner, and Superman arrived to stop it. The Man of Steel had very little experience fighting Kryptonians, and he never truly believed that this space dragon had the same powers that he did, even though every effort he made to stop the beast failed.
Eventually, the snagriff swallowed six atomic bombs whole from a secret facility located so close to Metropolis that the explosion of these bombs would destroy the city. Superman saw this as a way to get rid of the snagriff. When a warning mechanism on the bombs showed that they were three seconds from exploding, he used his super-speed to wrap the snagriff in his elastic, invulnerable cape and carried the bundle toward space. Before he could get even a quarter mile high, the bombs went off, and his cape contained the explosion. When he reached space and released the cape, the snagriff was gone. Thinking that was the end of the troublesome creature, Superman was simply pleased that the snagriff had been apparently reduced to mere fragments of atomic dust, just as Krypton had been decades earlier. (*)
[(*) Editor’s note: See “The Beast from Krypton,” Superman #78 (September-October, 1952).]
Unfortunately, as we have seen, that was not the end of the space dragon. Superman apparently never wondered why an atomic explosion that he had expected to live through, and which didn’t damage his cape, had nevertheless disintegrated an invulnerable beast from Krypton. In hindsight, we now know that the snagriff wasn’t really disintegrated in the explosion, just snatched out of time and space by the Anti-Monitor.