Miracle Monday (28 page)

Superman stood motionless in space and time, shortly before four in the afternoon of the third Monday in May, one hundred fifty meters above midtown Metropolis, facing the agent of Hell on Earth. It was an instant suspended between the eternities of the past and the future where the pillar of obscene energy was the only thing that moved, in answer to the command of the last son of Krypton, who had made himself its master. The pillar spun and swirled into the solid form, four meters long from horns to hooves, of the dark fallen angel of fable. C.W.Saturn took the form he had devised an age ago to strike terror into the hearts of humans. It was the leathery-winged, goat-like devil, spurs at its joints, beard reaching from its pointed chin, nostrils distending in hypnotic rhythm. The creature was visibly—to the eyes of Superman, who needed no light—quaking under the Kryptonian's command and hating him nonetheless. No one who had made himself this creature's master would have needed light to see now.

"I was supposed to kill her, wasn't I?"

The demon only glared and sucked its nostrils.

"That was the plan, wasn't it? That was how you proposed to defeat me, by getting me to think I was freeing her from you by killing her, wasn't it?"

Saturn stared some more.

"You thought you'd use my pity for an innocent victim to make me abandon the principle I hold the most sacred, didn't you? Answer me."

"Yes. That was it. I could not find an adequate weakness with which to tempt you, so I tried to distort a virtue."

"Shrink yourself down to three feet. I don't care what you choose to look like, but I won't have you hovering over me."

The creature became smaller in an instant, but still it glared and hated.

"I know the rules," Superman said. "I'm in charge now. Am I right? Tell me."

"Yes, you are."

"And the girl. Tell me what happens to her."

"When time again resumes, when our conversation is ended, she will soon die."

"Why?" howled the indignant hero. "She was innocent. Completely innocent. I don't even think she belonged in this city full of fallible humans. She was too good even to be here. Why is she to die? Answer that."

"Her mortal form has been overextended by my possession of it. Her shell will collapse, her power to live used up."

"Fiend!" Superman swatted the back of his hand with all his power across the leathery face of C.W.Saturn. The hero was surprised that the part of the demon's face that Superman's fingers had touched was now striped with fiery red welts. Saturn could not bear the touch of his vanquisher.

"No," Superman said, sorry now for his burst of temper. "That won't do. I won't waste my power on anger. You're going to undo your damage and we will figure out the best way to do that. First, tell me why, of all the people on Earth, you chose Kristin Wells."

"She was an alien element in the city. She was the most susceptible to my influence because she did not really belong here."

Superman was startled to hear this, not because it was of itself surprising, but because Superman had just said it out loud and it had been no more than an idle thought he had tossed out in a rage. What Superman did not realize—it did not matter whether he realized this or not—was that in this extended instant he could do or say no wrong. There was a right and a wrong in the Universe, and Superman was no more capable of erring here and now than C.W.Saturn was capable of defying him. He did not need Saturn to tell him what he instinctively knew about Kristin Wells. There was something else he wanted.

"Kristin Wells's life," he barked at the demon. "Tell me how I can save it. I will not have her indebted to you for that."

"You will find in the private notebook of Dr. David Skvrsky the formula for a life-preserving elixir which can save her."

"The notebook. Tell me where it is."

"It is in a drawer in Dr. Skvrsky's temporary office at the Center for the Study of Short-Lived Phenomena."

"How will I recognize the formula? Tell me which page it's on."

"The pages are numbered. It is written on page number thirty-one."

"Swear you're telling the truth."

"I must tell the truth," and C.W.Saturn swore in the name of his master.

Superman was disgusted by this, and spat on Saturn's hooves, which burned at the touch.

"You took Clark Kent away from me," Superman accused Saturn. "I want you to give him back. Tell me if there's any reason I shouldn't make you do that."

"It would upset the balance of nature that you hold so dear," Saturn mocked his captor, "if I were to recreate a person the memory of whom has been destroyed through natural means such as this one."

Superman thought for a moment. "You can substitute Clark Kent for Kristin Wells. You can, can't you? Tell me."

"Yes, I can. I can remove the memory of Kristin Wells from everyone with whom she came in contact here, and balance that by replacing it with the person of Clark Kent so that you may resume your elaborate charade."

"Tell me if that would in any way disrupt the natural balance."

"That would not upset your Universe as it is."

"Then do it. Take away the memory of Kristin Wells from the human consciousness and replace her with Clark Kent. Give me back Clark Kent."

"It is done," Saturn said.

"And what do I owe you and your master for performing these services for me and for this world?"

"Nothing," the creature said with disappointment.

"Then I want nothing more to do with you. Get out of this world, out of the realm of humanity for all time. Do you understand that? Go see how your cursed master deals with you now."

Photons of sunlight streamed once again to Earth, the city resumed its motion from the moment it had left off. Life continued. The rolling waves of the Universe continued. Shortly before four in the afternoon on the third Monday in the month of May in the city of Metropolis, after an immeasurably long, short, or middling pause, the Universe resumed its course through time into the future.

The unholy shriek, the sound of the force of C.W.Saturn leaving the body of Kristin Wells, continued, then died on the air.

Shortly before four in the afternoon on the third Monday in the month of May, the people of the city of Metropolis learned the meaning of joy. They had no explanation for this feeling, and there were gaps in their knowledge of what had gone on in their lives so far that day. It was as though they were all waking up, or at least opening their eyes, for the first time in an awfully long time. The first thing many of them saw was the red-and-blue figure of Superman drawing a line across their sky, and he became the symbol of their joy. It felt like a miracle, though none could say why.

In the apartment building where Kristin Wells lived, the superintendent, Cezar O'Higgins, was inspecting an empty studio apartment. It was clean, free of vermin except for one roach who poked his head out a crack under the bathroom basin, and it was completely empty. The refrigerator door as well as the freezer compartment hung open, the machine turned off and dry. It looked to Cezar as though it had not been used for nearly a year, which was what his boss told him was evidently the case.

No one understood how the apartment could go empty for so many months without anyone calling the fact to the attention of Cezar or the owner of the building. The owner had been quite confused, as a matter of fact, when he called Cezar about it a few minutes ago.

No matter, Cezar thought, he could worry about finding a new tenant tomorrow. Or the next day. Right now he felt like calling his friends and having a party. He did not stop to wonder why he felt this way.

"Kent!" Morgan Edge yelled with the characteristic disdain for dignity befitting his position. "Kent, where are you?"

Edge had commandeered an elevator down from his office in the ivory tower of the thirty-third floor of the Galaxy Building, to the WGBS News offices on the twentieth floor. As far as Edge could tell, he had been speaking with Clark Kent on the interoffice picture-phone and the anchorman had shut him off.

Morgan Edge blew open the door of the office like the Big Bad Wolf and found Dan Reed sitting at Clark Kent's desk. Reed looked more surprised to be there than Edge was to see him. Edge looked at the sign on the door which said "Mr. Kent," and at the plaque on the desk which said CLARK KENT. The certificates and testimonials that customarily paper the walls of a television newsman's office—a Peabody Award, an Emmy or two, "Best wishes" from Hugh Carey and Eric Sevareid and so forth—were all in place and inscribed to Kent.

"What're you doing here?" Edge asked Dan Reed. He supposed the question was appropriate.

Reed looked around. "I don't know, Mr. Edge," he said. "Working, I guess."

"What's that noise?" Edge wanted to know, and both men went to the window and looked down at the street. Clark was the only newsman at WGBS who had insisted on having a window in his office.

It was the first really hot day of the year in Metropolis, an assurance from the heavens that there would indeed be a summer this year. Outside, people had left cars unattended in the streets. People were cheering at something, running through the plaza waving jackets and sweaters as if they were banners at the ends of sticks and umbrellas. People were reaching into deserted cars to honk horns, and then running on to other cars to do it some more. Mounted police were rearing ecstatic horses up on their hind legs.

"Looks like they're happy about something," Edge said absently.

"Yes, sir," Reed said. "Me too."

"Happy? About anything in particular?"

"No, sir. I mean, no, I don't think so, sir. Just happy. Kind of mellow."

"Hmm. Aren't you guys supposed to put today's news on the air in two hours?" Edge asked, also because it seemed appropriate.

"Yes, Mr. Edge."

"Right." They both looked out the window again. "Come on, Reed, I'll buy you a martini. You can wing the news tonight. It'll be good practice. Doesn't look like anyone's doing much of anything newsworthy today anyhow."

Throngs cheered through the streets as Superman passed overhead, and the feeling spread to the streets where people could not see him. The feeling spread into buildings, through subway catacombs, across rivers, over oceans, through the air. There was a collective consciousness about the people of this world, a mass mind personified by Clark Kent and other newsmen like him who told the entire planet Earth, almost all at once, as if communicating with one pair of eyes and ears, what had happened on this world today. This day, though, the souls who had subjugated the surfaces of the small planet needed no artificial aids like newspapers, radios, televisions, even word of mouth, to know it was a good day.

The next time Clark Kent would identify himself over the airwaves to a million Metropolitans, it would be Tuesday. For the next twenty-four hours or so, acting en masse and without any cue other than the conviction that such a thing was peculiarly appropriate, the human population of the entire city would take the day off.

A great miracle had happened here.

Across the top of the city Superman sped, warding off the feeling until his job was done. He landed uptown on the roof of the university building that housed the Center for the Study of Short-Lived Phenomena. The office for which he was looking was locked and unoccupied. He hovered at the outside window, hearing cheers from the street below. He scanned the shelves and cabinets in the room until he found the notebook in the drawer of a roll top desk. He flipped through the pages long-distance by minuscule intensifying the radiation from his eyes. Page thirty-one was facedown and he read it mirror-fashion through the back of the page.

Immediately, Superman whizzed off to a laboratory at the medical school where he left an I.O.U. for the chemicals he lifted. He swiped the garlic and a paper bag from a grocery store on Columbus Avenue on the ledge of whose cash register, at eye-blinding speed, he left three quarters from Clark Kent's pocket which was in the pouch of his cape. He filled the paper bag with hawthorne berries that he found growing in Evenside Park. In the next three seconds he streaked the three and a half miles from Evenside Heights downtown to the Galaxy Building, tincturing and heat-bonding the substances as it had said to do in Skvrsky's notebook, and then cooling the serum with the air for the last four blocks. On the roof of the Galaxy Building, fallen and gasping at the air, was the girl nobody remembered.

"Kristin," he said after a while. "Kristin, can you talk now?"

He had no idea what the serum was that he had just made, no idea that it was the medicine with which Luthor had cured himself of heart disease years ago. He did watch what it did to Kristin Wells and he was impressed. The liquid seeped right through the walls of Kristin's esophagus before it reached her stomach, and lodged in the muscles of the upper chest, including the heart and the lungs. Rather than an added burden, it acted as a stimulant at first, then prompting the gradual growth of new and stronger tissue. From the looks of it, Superman thought, kids should start to take the stuff as soon as they were off mother's milk. Tomorrow morning he would submit a sample to the Food and Drug Administration. The agency would test it for several suspected impurities, and six years later they would rule it unacceptable because it evidently caused mumps in rhesus monkeys.

"Kristin?"

"Yes?"

"Are you alright?"

"Wonderful," she said as she opened her eyes and feeling reached her. "Superman?"

"Yes."

"Superman? Really?"

"Really. Kris, are you alright?"

"I think so."

"Then tell me something."

"Anything."

"Who are you?"

"Kristin Wells," she said. "Brandeis Class of '53, Columbia history Class of '55."

"Care to fill in a century?"

She looked up and squinted her eyes. She sat up and couldn't believe it. "Superman," she said, "it really is you. Columbia history masters Class of 2855, doctorate, maybe 2859."

"That explains it."