Miracle Monday (22 page)

Skvrsky paused for several moments to allow his audience to murmur learnedly and sit in awe of him a little bit. He noticed that two women in the second row of seats, both certainly case-hardened scientists, were gazing at him quite intently. This pleased him, though he assiduously avoided showing it.

"On the sixteenth and final page of my data," he went on, "I have included a graph detailing the spectrographic analysis of Superman's hair. Those of you familiar with such things will note that it resembles hair much less than it resembles tiny strands of titanium. Titanium, however, is closer in resiliency to normal terrestrial hair than it is to Superman's hair. No matter."

"I propose that we do two things immediately. First, the Center will request Superman to submit a lock of his hair for testing. Second, we will use the federal money that you all saw me so skillfully wangle a few minutes ago to produce, in the laboratory, a super-strong organic strand that is physically and spectrographically identical to Superman's hair. Those of you who consider this second task impossible may be assured that you have a lot to learn from me. I trust that for this project I will have your complete cooperation and access to all resources of the Center for the Study of Short-Lived Phenomena. Any objections? Good."

"I will require a small office and a large laboratory equipped for conventional chemical and biological work. Later today I will choose two special assistants from among you. If you would be so kind, Mr. Golob, as to show me a suitable laboratory space now, I will order any additional equipment I need to be delivered tomorrow morning."

Richard Golob, the distinguished director of the Center for the Study of Short-Lived Phenomena quietly led Skvrsky to another room.

When they were gone somebody said, "Whew."

Almost nothing of what Skvrsky said was true. The only true information in the sixteen-page report was the accounts of Superman's appearances during the previous weeks and the spectroanalysis of Kryptonian hair.

There was no Itching Sickness.

There was, in fact, no Dr. David Skvrsky.

Skvrsky was one of Lex Luthor's elaborate creations, and the man who had breezed out of the room with Golob was Luthor himself in disguise. The reporters, George Laderbush and John Hughes, were also born of Luthor's brow. There would be no more need for fictional reporters to issue falsely documented accounts of the disease's outbreak. Once the news of Skvrsky's involvement got out, hysterical cases of Itching Sickness would actually begin to appear around the world wherever Superman went.

It was a charming little conundrum, Luthor decided.

The networks all preempted their regular programming that evening in early May for hour-long news specials. They often preempted their programming for reports on major events in the news: when kings and presidents took office or died; when war or peace was declared somewhere; when aliens from other worlds appear unannounced in major population centers; that sort of thing. This time, however, there was not any particular event of the past week worthy of a special report. There were so many little unexpected events this week that were of almost major proportions that the networks decided to run specials on all of them together. The last time something like that happened was in 1964. One week back then, among other things, the Chinese exploded their first nuclear bomb and the Soviets deposed their premier to replace him with two younger men. That week, like this week, the Galaxy Broadcasting System titled their special report, "A World Turned Inside Out." This time, though no one knew it, the title would be more appropriate than it was in 1964.

Without any introduction other than the title of the report, the images on the millions of televisions across the country switched to a quick series of excerpts from news reports of the past week. John Keepe in Charleston reported on the pollution of most of South Carolina's city reservoir systems with tadpoles. There was Blake Thiebass in Duluth reporting on the inexplicable lowering of the melting point of steel in the mills there. From Tacoma, Kelly Tarsneaux gave an account of the disappearance of snow on mountaintops overlooking blizzard-bound towns. Donna Toothe in Belgrade talked about the outbreak of the previously unknown strain of eczema wherever Superman had appeared thirty-six hours earlier. Paul Grinn in Cairo gave an account of the migraine headaches that were afflicting virtually every head of state in the Middle East this week. In Paris, Marcel de Stonne reported on the swarm of locusts raging over the western European countryside. In the Metropolis studio, Clark Kent recounted the various major crimes and near disasters, natural and otherwise, that Superman was known to have defused around the world this week.

When these brief snippets of the week's regular newscasts ended, national anchorwoman Lana Lang appeared on the air and said, essentially, that there was a lot of weird stuff going on in the world these days. Most of the people watching had already surmised this, but Lana realized that restating the obvious in a clear manner seemed to be a large part of a newscaster's job.

A good many of the millions who were watching the report, possibly a majority of them, had some idea that their understanding of the past few dizzying weeks would be enhanced by this clear restating of the news. People hoped that the astute collection of Galaxy Communications employees who confronted them in such a fluent array tonight would be able to discern some pattern in the madness. During the first half hour of the report, those who hoped for such a synthesis saw no evidence that the journalists briefly in charge of their senses had any such thing to offer.

Uptown from Galaxy Communications, at the Center for the Study of Short-Lived Phenomena, was a group of people accustomed to discerning patterns in apparent madness. All but one of them expected no less of these reporters. Only the man who called himself Dr. David Skvrsky gave less than total attention to the television screen. Skvrsky was studying a notebook full of acetate-covered spectrographic photographs of Superman's hair. The others in the room were eagerly awaiting the appearance on the television screen of their colleague Tami Muriello, who was the chief public affairs officer of the center.

Skvrsky had decided that it was technologically possible to duplicate to the smallest atomic detail the hair of Superman's head. It would take about a hundred thousand dollars to do it, Skvrsky decided, but it would be a simple matter for the Center for the Study of Short-Lived Phenomena, using Skvrsky's prestige, to get a five-hundred-thousand-dollar federal grant to do it. Skvrsky would spare the Center the moral dilemma that the grant suggested by keeping the entire four hundred thousand dollars that he would not spend. Luthor, meanwhile, would layout the hundred thousand dollars needed to manufacture a lock of indestructible fake hair. If Luthor were a law-abiding citizen, he would somehow justify a 400 percent interest charge on his loan. Since he was a criminal, however, he, like the center, had no moral dilemma to overcome. He was simply stealing the money, and that was fine with Luthor.

Luthor, masquerading as a dashing, romantic international Angel of Mercy, sat scowling in a corner of the studied chaos of his uptown Metropolis laboratory, trying to ignore a boyhood friend who had just appeared on the television screen on the far side of
the room. Clark Kent was sitting in on a panel discussion with the anchorwoman and a
few other savants, including a few Galaxy newsmen from around the country and Muriello from the Center, trading theories on the spate of disasters around the world. Luthor was watching through an electron microscope as, at his prodding, thousands of macro-molecules fused together, crashing in and compressing one another, forming something that looked like strands of titanium but which was many times stronger. Luthor had to keep watching the strands form as his colleagues across the room listened to the words of Clark Kent from the television. Luthor ignored Kent as much as he possibly could. There was something about the man that spooked him.
 

It was years ago—the year Abraham Maslow, the pioneering humanistic psychologist, and Noam Chomsky, the linguist from MIT, both had visiting professorships at Metropolis University and were teaching a course together on psycholinguistics. In December a nineteen-year-old Lex Luthor vanished without a trace from the Pocantico Correctional Facility and in January a gawky, big-footed, potbellied and stunningly brilliant transfer student from Anchorage named Michael Hemmingway (with two m's, he was always careful to point out) showed up at Metropolis University and his late registration for the popular psycholinguitics course somehow slipped past the registrar into the file cabinet. In order not to arouse suspicion, Hemmingway also registered for four other courses that semester at Metropolis University. No suspicions arose at all, however, from the fact that the transfer student never showed up at any of his other classes. This was not unusual. Certainly no one had any idea that Hemmingway was Lex Luthor, the young hellion who already held the record as the person who had been placed on and taken off the FBI Ten Most Wanted list more times than anyone else on record.

The two great men, Maslow and Chomsky, conducted a very impressive class two days a week. On Tuesdays, Chomsky would lecture, blinding the students' minds with a phantasmagoria of observations and suppositions about the ancestries of various English words and why they had evolved the way they had. He traced the derivation of the word
phantasmagoria
and its relative
fantasy
one Tuesday, and then extrapolated its possible link, in the future, with
fanatic
or
fan
from an altogether different root. He supposed that someday there would be a marriage between these two family trees and a
fan
would eventually refer only to a fantasy fanatic.
 

Then on Thursdays, Maslow would pick two or three students from among the
class and ask them to have a ten-minute conversation among themselves in front of the
rest of the class. When ten minutes were up, Maslow pointed out each phrase, each word, each sound, each gesture of body language that had struck his fancy (from the same Indo-European root as
phantasmagoria
) and picked it apart the way a beginning biology student might dissect a frog or an earthworm. Maslow and Chomsky taught their students at Metropolis University to study language and human interaction the way a doctor studies a strain of bacillus or a good repairman studies the works of a sick washing machine.
 

Michael Hemmingway with two m's was fascinated.

Hemmingway went to ask Maslow for permission to do a special research project. Before the young man even told him what the project would be, Maslow asked the student why he held one hand in a back pocket as he walked into the professor's office. Then Maslow asked why he said the name "Hemmingway with two m's" with such emphasis. Then he asked why the student stepped in so decisively instead of shuffling the way most students did. And so forth. Michael Hemmingway tried to laugh off Abraham Maslow's questions and Maslow asked why he laughed so defensively. In fact, Michael Hemmingway did laugh defensively; he had a lot about which to be defensive.

The student gave up his mission for that day and went to propose the idea to Chomsky two days later. What he wanted to do was get a dozen volunteers from among the student body at Metropolis, students from diverse sections of the country, and make a study of their various accents. Hemmingway would record their pronunciations of certain key words, and interview each student about his or her background. Then, five months later at the end of the semester, he would interview each volunteer again, paying close attention to the two or three most unusual things that had happened to the student in the course of the five months—the births or deaths of relatives, the falling in or out of love, the peak experiences and the lows. He would again record each student's pronunciation of key words, noting any changes during the five-month period, and seeing if he could discover any reason for changes in pronunciation from the student's experiences during the same period. Chomsky made a few procedural suggestions, pointed out that Hemmingway should have some sort of a control group, and said it was basically a fine idea.

Luthor was amused that one of the first of the Metropolis University students to
answer Hemmingway's request for volunteers was a sophomore whom Luthor knew
from his days in Smallville named Clark Kent.
 

Kent pronounced words as though he were from Nowhere, U.S.A. He had a perfect midwestern accent and Luthor remembered thinking at the time that instead of trying to be a newspaper reporter, Kent should be broadcasting the news on television. Luthor alias Hemmingway was relishing the interview with his boyhood friend. He liked hearing—from Kent's mayonnaisey viewpoint—about the little hick burg that was the last place Luthor had lived with his parents. Luthor was mildly surprised to learn, for example, that Kent had been an adopted child, and for a moment Luthor felt a burst of resentment at his own parents for not loving their natural son Lex as much as the Kents evidently loved their adopted son Clark. Luthor even felt a touch of regret on hearing that Jonathan and Martha Kent had both passed on since he had last been in Smallville.

Luthor sat behind the studied solemnity of his Michael Hemmingway face, laughing at Clark Kent until the end of the interview when, getting up to leave, Kent said, "By the way, Lex, who do you think you're fooling?"

"Excuse me?"

"I asked who you thought you were fooling. Isn't this project for Maslow's class?"

"What of it?"

"Well, I just don't think you're fooling a guy like Maslow any more than you fool me, is all."