Miracle Monday (23 page)

"I haven't got the slightest idea of what you're talking about."

"Oh come off it, Lex."

"Lex? What's a Lex? Is that somebody's name? I'm Michael Hemmingway with two m's. I assume you're—um, what did it say there?—Clark Kent."

"You're no Michael Hemmingway any more than I'm Superboy."

"I think he calls himself Superman these days."

"Whatever it is. That nose is pretty good, though. Did you have surgery on that or—"

"Get your hand off my nose. What're you, weird?"

"Listen, I won't tell anyone. Honest, Lex. But why on Earth don't you cut this master criminal stuff out?"

"Master criminal stuff?"

"Yeah, that's what the papers call you now, the bad papers at least. The
Times
and the
Planet
still refer to you as just an escaped felon. I mean you've just stolen property so far, right? Never endangered anyone's life seriously, at least since you turned eighteen, and that's what counts, right?"
 

"Look—um, Kent—I don't think I'm going to be able to use your data here. You're too hostile."

"Hostile? You know as well as I do that I'm as hostile as your average terrier puppy."

"Maybe hostile isn't the word. I guess it's schizoid. That's it. And if you insist on staying here I'm going to have to let the psychological counseling office know about you—um, Kent."

Clark stood quietly for a moment, wrinkled his eyebrows and said, "Sorry, my mistake." Then he shuffled out of the room.

When Luthor went back to Michael Hemmingway's locked dormitory room that afternoon he found an envelope lying on the unmade bed. There was a typed note inside:

Dear Lex,

I'm really sorry if I got you upset today and ruined your game, and I know you always have good reasons for doing the things you do, but I've got an idea. It seems to me that anybody who could invent a new identity for himself the way you have done can probably wipe out his whole past and start over anywhere with a clean slate. You could be a scientist or a doctor or a psycholinguist if you feel like it or anything else. Well, it seems to me that the only thing keeping you from actually doing this is Superman. No
matter where you went or how you changed yourself, Superman could probably find you sometime. And it seems to me that if somebody could somehow guarantee that if you
decided never to commit a crime again, to go straight, if someone could then make it so Superman never came after you again, that would be just like a pardon. What I'm getting at is that I can do that. Honest. I can make it so Superman will forget about your past altogether if you want to start all over and use your intellect and your talents to benefit humanity instead of to destroy Superman. You'd be famous and acclaimed, I'm sure, no matter what career you chose. By now, after six or seven years in jails and reform schools, I'm sure you'll agree that it would be a better life. You know me well enough to know that I wouldn't lie to you. I know you well enough to know that even though it would not be a good idea to trust you blindly, you'll stick with any agreement you make outright. That's why I want you to meet me in the lobby of this building at eight o'clock tonight and I'll tell you my secret. I know you think I'm just a wimpy kid from the sticks somewhere, but I can make you believe me. If you're not down in the lobby by five after eight, I'll just assume you're not coming.
 

Your old friend,

Clark Kent

Luthor hated being confronted with decisions he never anticipated having to make. He sat down on the bed and decided. Clearly, he thought, Kent had something to tell him. And clearly, he thought, if he is the same kid he was six or seven years ago, it is something Kent considers pretty big. A lot of things can change, however, in six or seven years. Certainly Luthor had changed. Certainly, with the loss of his parents and the move from Smallville to Metropolis, Kent had changed as well. It was even possible that the kid had gone nuts. Then again, he was sane enough to have seen through the Michael Hemmingway disguise. Kent looked normal enough this afternoon, for an incurable wimp. But if he really was a wimp, how could he really believe he had a way to get Superman off Luthor's back unless he really did?

This was too much to sort out without more information. The thing to do, therefore, was to miss the appointment with Kent, but kidnap him on his way home. That way, Luthor would be able to get to the bottom of these questions and still not immediately endanger his disguise.

At five past eight Clark Kent sighed a sigh mixed with equal portions of regret and relief, stepped out the door of Michael Hemmingway's dormitory building and walked south along MacDougall Street toward his own dorm. A block behind, Michael Hemmingway, in black turtleneck and black slacks and carrying a handkerchief doused in chloroform, followed Clark Kent. A few blocks downtown, Clark turned left into a short, dark alley that cut through to Jones Street. With Clark out of sight, Luthor/Hemmingway started running quietly on crepe soles toward the alley.

Three steps into his trot, Luthor felt the Hemmingway toupee he had glued to his head being ripped off, and then Luthor himself was lifted into the sky by his armpits. Luthor remembered struggling for a few moments. He remembered Superman's hand pressing the chloroformed handkerchief against his face. He remembered his last conscious thought before he woke up at Pocantico—that now he might never know Clark Kent's mysterious secret. And, again, he remembered rage.

Luthor, now masquerading as Skvrsky instead of Hemmingway with two m's, heard someone across the laboratory say something that sounded surprised. He looked up at the television screen across the room and did not look back down at his microscope again that day.

For the past minute or so, the panel of newspeople and experts discussing the varied reasons for this news special had seemed distracted. There was some noise somewhere off the set, maybe somewhere in the hallway outside the news studio. Then there was a voice from off-camera that everyone, including the television viewers, could hear. It was harsh, inhuman.

"The calamities have one cause, and that cause is me," the voice barked, and then Kristin Wells bounded before the camera and the startled panel.

"Excuse me, miss," Lana Lang said, standing up and taking Kristin's arm, "but maybe you don't realize this is a live news broad—"

Kristin whipped her elbow up into Lana's chin and, with her free hand, pointed two fingers at the Galaxy Broadcasting System's star anchorwoman and blasted her backward through the cardboard set that formed the backdrop with what appeared to be a burst of light from her fingertips.

Everyone on the set except for Clark Kent scattered. The camera remained on, fixed in position without a cameraman. Clark yelled, "Lana!" and went to see if the woman was all right.

"You can see from where you are that she is unharmed, Clark Kent," the inhuman voice said from the throat of Kristin Wells, "and that is why you go to her so slowly, at human speed. The charade will no longer be necessary."

Clark paid no attention to what Kristin was saying, although maybe he should have done so. He knelt cradling the head of the unconscious Lana Lang in one hand and placed it down again as the woman began to wake up. He stood up to say something suitably indignant but still in character when Kristin threw a dark, hollow laugh at his face.

"Kristin," Clark said, "this is hardly appropriate behavior for a—"

"I am Saturn," the voice from Kristin Wells said. "I was born when the elements of Earth and Krypton were still cooling in the heart of a dying star. I will live on when your memory and time itself have no meaning. I have occupied your time, alien, these past weeks, and I will complicate your life until your precious Earth is a husk smoldering with the stench of rotted dreams and your Universe is tumbling faster than life into the pit."

No one had any idea what she was talking about, but she was clearly addressing Clark Kent, who insisted on remaining in character as he walked toward Kristin, who stood resolutely in the eye of the camera. Lana was looking up, Kristin was gesturing insanely toward Clark with both her hands. Clark was speaking in tones and words of reason. Between twenty-five and twenty-six million people across the country were watching.

Kristin Wells's hands shot out a burst of cold Hell-born energy at Clark Kent and minds froze as, in an instant, Clark Kent was gone, what was left of his clothes draped indecorously over the unmistakable frame of Superman.

Kristin laughed once more, and then she too was gone. A puff of black smoke and a dying squeal replaced her.

"That son of a rabid terrier!" Luthor wailed from behind the still intact disguise of David Skvrsky. "That was his secret, damn him! He was that wimp all along."

Nobody noticed what Skvrsky was saying and in a moment he would pull himself together enough to stop saying it. Life would go on, for the moment.

It was over. He was horribly embarrassed. He was mortified. A big part of him, the mortal part, was killed. He wove through the sky in a random pattern above Metropolis. Maybe he had broken a window or a wall on his way out. If he had, he would fix it sometime.

There were species on this Earth for whom heartbreak was a common cause of death. Swans and pigeons died soon after the deaths of their mates. Dogs sometimes pined to death when their masters died or moved away without them. Last year, twenty healthy sperm whales, distraught over the use of their spawning area as a dumping ground for nuclear waste material, beached themselves and gently died on a shore near Peugeot Sound. Now, Superman felt that he too was slowly beginning to die.

The news reached the entire United States and parts of Mexico and Canada before it fully hit Superman himself. Now, the last of Clark Kent's clothing ripping off in the breeze and flapping to the Earth below, Superman turned north and sliced the sky alone. Totally alone.

By the time Superman crossed the Canadian border, the telephone cables and the microwave satellite relays linking the North American continent with Europe and Asia were overloaded with calls to and from diplomats, business leaders, journalists, friends. News offices in America and then in Western Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union, Africa, China, India—ultimately all round the world—sat in undirected silence for a moment before somebody in each office ordered everyone else to go about telling the story.

When monitors at Strategic Air Command in Omaha picked up evidence of an erratic, highflying object crossing the Distant Early Warning defense line in Canada and heading over the Artic Sea, there was momentary mobilization. It could have been an enemy aircraft blundering into unauthorized space, but that was not what it was. The news had reached this underground fortress, and when somebody muttered, "It's him," everyone else knew approximately where he was going.

"He's moving awful slow," a young technician said, "He never moves that slow. You sure it's him?"

"Leave him be," an officer said.

One hundred thirty miles south of the North pole—from the North Pole every direction is south—there was a hollow, artificially built mountain. The mightiest hands on Earth had gathered and fused together a huge mass of granite blocks which now sat collecting snow and permafrost, hidden from anyone who might be imprudent enough to linger over this forsaken corner of the earth. From the sky, one could see only a golden arrow the length of two Olympic pools, which pointed north, presumably for the benefit of airline pilots. Only Superman could lift the sixty-ton object, slide it into a camouflaged lock set into the mountain face, and open the door bigger than most medieval cathedrals.

This fortress of Solitude, this repository for collectibles—the junk and the treasure of the great man's life—was the final privacy he had.

By the time Superman laid his hands on the base of the golden key, the fact of his formerly secret identity had passed, in most of the world, from news, to common knowledge, to a source of idle speculation. When Superman lifted the key a hundred meters into the air, faltered a moment and then, despairing, dropped it back to the steel-hard frost that covered the earth below, the human population of the world was astir with excitement mixed with confusion. The President of the United States got the idea into his head to issue a postage stamp bearing the face of Clark Kent, when the key cracked and shattered against the cold.

By law, no living person may be pictured on a United States postage stamp.

Superman sat on top of the mountain that he had built, in a temporary high-backed chair that he dug out of the ice. He leaned back his head, closed his eyes and listened. He listened for everything. He turned on his full super-hearing, not simply the directed senses that he had trained himself to use in homing in on distant conversations or on the noise of a distant underground rumble before the Earth moved somewhere. He turned on the whole thing, and in a moment, he realized that he had never done this before.

From his perch at the top of the world Superman heard the clatter of trains making their ways among the towns of central Europe, the hissing of a cobra in the basket of a Pakistan fakir, the tuning sounds of the Boston Pops Orchestra and the orchestra of a high school in La Paz as respectively they rehearsed "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and the second Brandenburg Concerto. A geyser bubbled below the surface of Colorado. A company of humpback whales howled an ecstatic, intricate symphony whose orchestration stretched for half the width of the Indian Ocean. Quintillions of snails dragged quintillions of jellied tails over the surface of quintillions of leaves.

The slap-slapping of a runner's feet against the outskirts of Kampala made a perfect syncopated rhythm with the singing of a thrush in Singapore. When the thrush stopped for a moment, the runner would stop for a gulp of water from his wineskin. When the runner stepped up his pace, the thrush soared into a new rhythm, as though the man in Africa and the bird in Asia were following signals from the same conductor.