Miracle Monday (11 page)

He knew the man was going to be hurt. It was Superman's unwanted responsibility to decide how hurt.

As the Kryptonian plunged fists-first at the man on the catwalk, the fire was at his heels, moving toward the man like a spark along a fuse.

With a burst of speed through the air Superman reached the catwalk before the fire did, spreading his cape with both arms above his head as an awning against the licks of flame that were now crowding the hold.

Flame was below now as well. The only place in the hold sheltered from the fire was in the shadow of the spread cape.

During the few millionths of a second between the time Superman let go of the cape to let it snap back into shape and the time he snatched up the fallen ensign, Superman studied the habits of the flames and gases immediately around him. There would be a tube of air six meters long and roughly the diameter of a man forming for an instant or two directly below the catwalk.

Superman held the man by his shoulders, stomped on the catwalk and, as the grid of aluminum clattered toward the bottom of the hold, he shot the man feet first through the cylindrical pocket of air.

The ensign flew at the intensifying wall of fire that raked upward between himself and the outer hull wall.

The hero launched himself, swirling his arms like a rotor, in front of the unconscious man, beating a path for him through the inferno.

What Superman would do next was to crash through the hull and ease the pressure inside enough to put off the coming explosion by about a quarter of a second. During that quarter second the man would fly out behind him and land in the water. As the officer hit the water with third-degree burns on his body and second-degree burns on his lungs, he would go into shock, but not as badly as he ordinarily might, since his body was already massively assaulted. The hero would shoot upward toward the main deck and drill his body through the hull for its entire perimeter immediately below the deck and crash through walls and supports to the main support beam under the deck.

On the main deck, seven of the eight remaining crew aboard the Monrovia II were jolted by the force of Superman's crash into the hold. At that instant an automatic alert sounded, and the crewmen knew nothing except that they ought to head for air and grab something bolted down. When the few on board saw Superman's exit moments later, they thought that he was the source of the huge explosion that followed on his heels. Actually, the explosion was the first of the LNG tanks going up like a Fourth-of-July ash can. The last member of the crew made it to open air just in time to see the horizon begin to drop.

The top half of the shattered hulk that used to be the Monrovia II was serenely rising into the air and those not holding on to something were thrown onto the deck. The air rattled with more explosions from below and the men prone on the deck of the Monrovia II, who now realized roughly what was going on, were afraid to breathe that air. High over Metropolis Harbor the surface of the former Monrovia II seemed to hover for a moment. Then it began to fall.

Underneath the dismembered deck, Superman had let go and bolted downward, plucking the unconscious ensign from the water and, in the same motion, darting back upward like a falcon toward the deck that was beginning to pick up speed in the direction of gravity.

On his way back to the sky Superman puffed and inhaled into and out of the ensign's injured lungs. He cleaned the lungs of fumes and cooled them down before he looped over the port side of the falling deck and gently deposited his charge. The lungs would work by themselves until the man could be brought to a respirator.

A quick calculation of the speed with which the deck was already falling and the distance to the surface of the river below told Superman that he had just enough time to call to a terrified crewman who lay on his stomach nearby, "This man has lung injuries. Get him medical attention as soon as possible."

Then Superman was gone again, below the falling deck and grabbing the main support beam. The descent of the deck slowed.

Superman set the jagged bottom of this slab of metal and masts on a pair of adjacent empty parking lots on Eleventh Avenue. He would repair the damage to the hurricane fence separating the lots later.

At dawn, when Superman would finally get around to removing the broken chunk of ship and replacing the fence, the owner of one of the parking lots would already be there, livid over the mess. When Superman managed to leave the lot spotless and ready for the day's business, the lot owner would stalk off to the police department to demand that Superman be forced to pay for parking a tanker in his lot overnight. The parking lot owner would be the high point of the duty sergeant's day.

Now, Superman left the crew to their own devices on the remainder of the ship. There was a shipload of deadly liquefied natural gas unwinding from its shattered tanks into the city.

Superman swept along the waterfront, snatching up three policemen, nine would-be muggers, and four prospective mugging victims from the vicinity of the pier where the bottom half of the Monrovia II had exploded.

Two at a time, by the waist, the legs, or the shirt collars, depending the degree of legitimacy of the reasons each had for being on the waterfront, Superman carried these sixteen people three blocks away and plopped them, disoriented, onto the sidewalk. If that was not far enough away, Superman knew, then no one else in the city would be safe either.

Again, soaring back toward the pier, Superman grabbed up a corner of his red cape in each hand, and as he reached the spreading cloud of LNG fumes, he picked up speed and altitude, catching the wind in cups of his cape and pulling up a wake of deadly fumes behind him.

Upward he raced into the air, his cape spread in his arms, then plummeting down again like a missile, to rise again with the cape spread and a load of poison gas following him. He cleared the air until, after thirty trips to the stratosphere and back, the air over Metropolis Harbor was cleaner than it had been an hour earlier.

Superman had saved the city.

Clark Kent had blown his dinner date.

He watched the invisible fumes swirl upward from the stratosphere, already free of the planet's gravity. Then he took off into the direction of the night.

During the time he was saving the crew of the tanker his mind was occupied with only that. Now, as he moved eastward over the Atlantic he began to clear his head again with the joy of flight and power. He swooped low over the nuclear power plant floating off the coast of New England. He checked the level of radiation escaping from its cooling system. As night dropped over Newfoundland he picked up a foundering fishing boat out of rough seas and deposited the boat, the fisherman aboard and his two sons, back in port six miles away.

In Reykjavik he averted a barroom brawl. In Scotland he lifted a swimmer out of Loch Ness because the swimmer had not seen the loch's most famous inhabitant until the monster paddled by underneath. In Munich he delivered the local police a company of six would-be bank robbers whom he had found in a tunnel under a vault. In Belgrade, unseen as far as he knew, he caught a chunk of an ancient and obsolete communications satellite most of which had disintegrated on its way to Earth. The surviving chunk would otherwise have hit an oil refinery and caused an awful mess.

That night, Superman was seen or heard, or his presence was otherwise felt, in seven countries of Europe, twelve of Africa and eight of the Middle East. It was morning in India when he swept out of the sky to snatch two children at play out of the path of a madly careening bull who would have trampled the children outside the main marketplace in New Delhi. Then it hit him.

As he held the two muddy children, the tape of Jimmy's Luthor film ran through his mind again, and in his mind's eye he saw the match that lit Luthor's pipe drop and spiral gently to the ground. And he saw the tower of liquefied natural gas fumes spiraling similarly upward toward the roof of the Earth's atmosphere.

Superman indecorously plopped the two disoriented children on the roof of an awning that shielded a merchant's delicate art prints from the Indian sun, and he swept off through the sky, taking the New Delhi marketplace's wind with him. Madly, angrily, he stroked over half the world, backward through the morning into the dying night to the west. It was not yet four in the morning at the Pocantico Correctional Facility sixty miles north of Metropolis. From a world away Superman flew there, realizing that there was an air current in Luthor's super-security cell where none should be. Underground, against a wall, a match that fell from a man's hand had been caught in a spiral of air either entering or leaving the room where there should have been no opening. Why hadn't he seen it earlier?

Somewhere hundreds of miles from the super-security cell underneath the Pocantico Correctional Facility Lex Luthor, whole and healthy, lay gathering his strength. He had known he would have to do this, but he had not realized how achy his muscles and joints would be.

He had escaped. He had walked through his "demonpass," his pathway through the Netherworld, and emerged here where he could easily stow away on a transport back to the city. Luthor had indeed been on a strict diet to make his body completely organic, since only organic substances could pass through this process. He could do nothing, however, about the mineral deposits that collect in the joints and muscles of the human body. These deposits, mostly infinitesimal bits of aluminum from cookware that gets into food, are permanent fixtures in the body unless drastic measures are taken to remove them. Luthor had just taken such a drastic measure.

Luthor, in throwing his body through a hold in space that would accept only organic matter, had ripped this residual inorganic matter out of his body and left it behind. He felt as though he had pulled every muscle in his body in all directions at once. He had.

For a moment after he collapsed, Luthor thought he felt a chilling breeze blow past his body. He was too busy with his pain. He ignored it.

The human was clever indeed, but absurdly foolhardy to pass this way, thought the demon.

Certainly the mortal who entered and moved a short distance through Hell's borderland had protected himself, with copious meditation, from possession; but he was still a fool. Any corporeal being who comes here creates a path for the denizens of this place to enter the human's own world. Maybe there were still humans who did not know that. More likely, the avarice endemic to the race moved them to do, for personal profit, things that were immeasurably dangerous to the survival of the race as a whole.

The demon thought to possess the body of the one who had led it here, but this strangely hairless mortal, even in his pain, continued to protect himself. The demon saw that although he was somewhat twisted and bent, this Luthor possessed remarkable moral strength.

No matter. If this Luthor had not led the demon here, then some other fool who thought himself a sorcerer would have done it soon enough. And if Luthor would not allow himself to be the vehicle of the demon's triumph, then there would be another more vulnerable.

The demon rode a cold wind to the center of life's energy in the world. C.W.Saturn, the bringer of Chaos, had returned to Earth.

Superman arrived too late. There was no use alerting the prison authorities either to his presence or to Luthor's escape. That bad news would travel quickly enough.

Superman looked over the super-security room into which he had slipped, unknown to the army of guards around it. He knelt down beside the wall where Luthor had stood and dropped his match this past afternoon. There was no trace of an air current left. There seemed to be no trace of Luthor left, other than the prison fatigues lying crumpled on the floor. Clearly, Luthor had used some form of teleportation to get out of here.

Hello, Superman thought. What was this? On the floor where the match had fallen, on the immaculately sterile floor of the new super-security cell, there were minute traces of some mineral. Aluminum, Superman saw by the molecular structure. He poked a finger at a few microscopic flakes of the metal and could feel that they were warm, but cooling off toward room temperature. They could have been as warm as body heat a few minutes ago.

Curious, Superman thought. These would be difficult circumstances out of which to drag some sense. Superman would figure it all out, though. He had to figure it out, and he always did what he had to do.

From
the
Journal
of
Kristin
Wells
 

For
the
first
time
in
the
seven
months
I
have
been
here,
I
feel
as
though
I
am
accomplishing
something.
I
can
tell
because
I
have
not
particularly
felt
like
sleeping
for
the
past
two
days.
I
have
simply
had
no
desire
to
sleep
when
I
can
read
or
work
instead.
It
is
quite
pleasant,
actually.
My
typing
speed
is
nearly
ninety
words
per
minute
now,
and
this
acquired
ability
has
both
brought
me
into
Superman's
circle
of
friends,
and
provided
me
with
an
income
on
which
I
am
able
to
support
myself.