Miracle Monday (6 page)

Sometime during the coming eighteen hours, that great steam cloud would freeze and crystalize in the February air. Countless tiny six-sided crystals of former tidal wave would ride the air and gravity to the ground, and Metropolis would wake up the next morning swathed in a blanket of snow sixteen inches thick.

Like matter and energy, forces of nature cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed and diverted. A blizzard, the Man of Steel had reasoned as he spun his circles, was something with which the city was equipped to deal. A killer wave was not.

The streets were paved with slush. The bus he had to drive this morning was twelve years old if it was a day. The guy getting on was smiling and saying good morning as though he were someone running for office; instantly the driver disliked him. Most people in this town actually liked this man with the silly grin and the inoffensive good looks who broadcast the news over WGBS every evening. As Clark Kent gained his footing on the slippery floor of the crowded bus the driver lurched the vehicle, hoping to trip up and embarrass the reporter whose face unnerved him the way a peaceful afternoon bothers the leader of a marching band. Instead of tripping Kent, the driver found that his bus was stuck.

Clark folded himself over a seat and waited patiently for the bus driver to conclude that he had another reason to be angry today. There was another bus, of course, plowing through the snow a few blocks behind. Nobody on this bus would mind transferring to that one and the city looked rather attractive in white anyway.

Clark Kent would be a few minutes late for work today, but he didn't think he'd mind that either.

Chapter 5
T
HE
A
NNOUNCEMENT
 

Basically, the idea was to escape from the Galaxy Building and get well on the way out of town before the associate producer arrived and told everyone to do something else. The escape was Jimmy Olsen's idea, and Ev and Jerry didn't much care whether it worked or not. They played along because the alternative to following Olsen upstate was probably to sit on the Fifty-ninth Street Tramway and shoot film of cars sliding into one another's fenders on the bridge below. Going along with Olsen would, at worst, make for an interesting day and, at best, it would give Ev and Jerry a story to tell their grandchildren someday.

Reporters, secretaries, technicians, staffers of one sort or another were beginning to blow out of the snow into the WGBS-TV newsroom adjoining StudioB. When Jimmy had arrived at work—as was his custom, snow or no snow—fifteen minutes early at eight forty-five, he turned on the United and Associated Press tickers in time to get a list of the major anticipated stories of the day. Clark Kent, the associate producer, was responsible for assigning reporters to their stories. The moment Jimmy saw the name Lex Luthor type itself out on the rolling yellow paper, he started wanting Clark to arrive at work late.

Years ago James Bartholomew Olsen Senior had told Jimmy that once a man knew what he wanted, he was halfway to having it. By that reckoning, Jimmy reasoned, Clark ought to be late for work half the times Jimmy wanted him to be late for work. Whenever a story about Luthor tapped itself out over the wire, Clark invariably assigned it to himself. Clark was almost never late. Jimmy looked out at the snow and figured that he had a lot of potent wanting saved up.

Because of the snow, Jimmy thought it was fair to wait for Clark for an extra fifteen minutes. When Clark was still somewhere out there at ten past nine he decided that no one would haggle over five minutes. He signed out the four-wheel drive newsvan and hustled Ev and Jerry into the freight elevator.

"Excuse me, sir," the freight elevator operator said, "but you ain't carrying any freight."

"Pardon?" Jimmy said as he pressed the button for the basement and blocked the elevator operator from keeping the door open.

"Freight. You've got to carry freight. Packages or heavy equipment or something."

"Oh that's all right. See my press pass?" Jimmy smiled as he pulled out a laminated card from his ski jacket. He wore the pass on a rawhide shoelace around his neck. "I'm with WGBS News, you see, and Ev and Jerry here are my cameraman and sound technician. They carry heavy equipment all the time."

"But they ain't carrying it now. This is a freight elevator."

"Right. Yes. You're new here, aren't you?"

"I've been working here for twelve years."

"Right. Well, you must've seen a lot of strange things. A lot of strange things happen here, you know."

"Not on the freight elevator."

"Not until today, huh?"

"Eh?"

"Well, thanks for the ride," Jimmy said as he pulled Ev and Jerry by the elbows off the elevator into the basement garage. "Hope your next twelve years are just as interesting."

They couldn't take the regular passenger elevator down, Jimmy said, because they might run into Clark coming up. They couldn't leave through the lobby because that was the way Clark came in. They couldn't drive toward the East Side although that would have been the best route out of town because they might see Clark plodding through the snow, having missed his bus and unable to hail a cab, and the crew in the newsvan would have to offer him a ride and explain where they were going. Unfortunately, when Jerry, at the wheel of the oversized minibus, turned left onto Fifty-second Street, Clark Kent stepped off a bus that happened to be driven by a very patient and pleasant member of the overworked Transit Workers' Union.

"Uh-oh," Jimmy said and slouched in his seat.

"Jimmy?" Clark asked himself and then waved and yelled, "Jimmy! Where are you going?"

"Gotta watch Luthor escape. See you later," Jimmy yelled back and told Jerry to throw on the four-wheel drive and get out of there fast and to hell with the snow. Before Clark Kent had slogged across the street, through the lobby, up the elevator, and into the newsroom, Jimmy and the newsvan were on the Westway heading upstate.

Jimmy turned on the car radio and slid up and down the tuner until he found a weather report. Evidently it was snowing nowhere except in the immediate vicinity of the city. It was bitterly cold for hundreds of miles around, but outside Metropolis the air was crisp and clear. Maybe Superman really had caused this storm. Jimmy would have to remember to thank him for seeing to it that Clark was late the day Luthor showed up on the morning newswire.

The rolling yellow sheet from the Associated Press had said, simply, that Lex Luthor would hold a press conference at the criminal's residence, which happened to be on the grounds of the Pocantico Correctional Facility sixty miles north of Metropolis. Luthor's conference would be at two in the afternoon, and Warden Haskell would meet with the press an hour earlier. It would be at least noon before the newsvan broke free of the blizzard. The sound man drove and the cameraman navigated through the slow line of traffic filing up the Westway as Jimmy slouched among the equipment in the back of the van and wrote the story that had not yet happened:

Last year, the criminal scientist Lex Luthor escaped from Pocantico Prison eight times. The year before last he broke out eleven times, and one of those times he broke back in and then out again to retrieve something he had left behind. He has broken out only once so far this year, but it's only the beginning of February. He has broached walls, dug underground, flown overhead, set up disasters or mirages of disasters, and slipped away in the confusion. He has simply vanished, leaving no explanation for his disappearance. Today, however, he did something he hasn't done before. He called a press conference to announce plans for his next prison break.

Jimmy assumed that was the most likely reason Luthor might want to meet with reporters. It was not that the criminal had ever wanted to talk with a reporter before about that or anything else. It was not that Jimmy had any special information other than what he had learned from the AP report. It was not even that Jimmy had flashes of extrasensory perception. It was simply that, having been around news and newspeople constantly since the age of sixteen, by the time Jimmy was in his mid-twenties he was as aware of the patterns and probabilities of important events as he was acquainted with the phases of the moon or the floor plan of his apartment. Very little took him by surprise. His effusive and volatile personality was largely an unconscious attempt to provide himself with some internal excitement, since he was effectively jaded as far as the external world was concerned.

By the time Jimmy looked up from his scribblings, Jerry was wheeling the newsvan on a snowless highway through Scarsdale and it was half past noon and a forty-five-minute drive to Pocantico without traffic. Jimmy suggested that Jerry drive faster. Ev strongly suggested that the trio be prepared to split the cost of any speeding tickets because Clark was a stickler for obeying the law and the station would not cover it. They would be late for the warden's show, but they would catch the main event.

In a cubicle on the third floor of the four-tiered maximum security cell block at Pocantico sat a man who possessed probably the greatest intellect of any Earthman of his day. Luthor was talking to himself.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he said. "No, gentlemen... no, esteemed members of the press—the mass media? Umm."

Luthor got up from his cot, paced back and forth over the length of the cell, stared up at the gray back wall of the cell as if it had a window in it. "Simple," he told himself. "Direct, concise, simple. You're not running for office."

He sat on the cot again, sat back against the wall and picked up his yellow legal pad and his pen. "Three main points," he mumbled, and he listed them:

Luthor looked over his note pad and his three points, paced up and down the cell some more, waved a hand as he mumbled approximately what he had to say that afternoon, and looked up through the bars at the other inhabitants of Cell Block Ten. All the men in sight were quietly watching him, wearing various expressions of hero-worship and awe on their faces. Luthor smiled, tossed the pad on his cot and said in a clear, loud voice, "Any questions, class?"

Somebody hollered, "All right!" and two hundred or more men within earshot whooped and applauded for the greatest criminal mind of all time.

A kilometer away and thirty meters underground, Warden Haskell, the man who ran this prison complex when Luthor was away, was briefing the press.

"As you can see," Haskell said, "these walls are sixteen inches thick and this door weighs seven hundred pounds and takes three men to open it even when it is unlocked. We were very careful, by the way, in choosing the titanium alloy this is made of to see that there was no lead mixed in the material. Hence Superman will be able to monitor the prisoner if he so chooses. The lock, part of which you can see in the doorjamb here, consists of eight bolts which have to be opened both here at the midpoint of the door, and in my office by a special electronic control for which only the Attorney-General and I know the combination. Any claims the prisoner makes to the effect that he is being held incommunicado will be unfounded, as you can see from this press conference as well as the fact that we will provide him with—"

The reporters, fifteen men including four television technicians, were standing in the large super-security prison cell listening to the warden when they heard a crash out in the hallway. Then a man yelled "Stop!" and there was another crash and the warden walked out to see what was happening. There he found three strangers standing with their legs spread and hands on the wall while one of Haskell's prison guards held a gun and another one frisked them. Haskell wondered what was the matter until he recognized one of the three strangers.

"Curtis," he said to the guard with the gun, "what's the problem here?"

"Unauthorized personnel, sir."

"Unauthorized hell," Jimmy Olsen said as he pressed his hands against the wall. "Didn't anybody ever read the First Amendment to you guys?"

"This individual showed me a false press pass," the guard said, "and upon detection he became indignant and tried to force his way in."

"When're you guys gonna learn to talk English?" Jimmy wanted to know.

"Mind your manners, punk, or I'll break your face," the guard told him.

"That's enough, Curtis. You too, Murphy," the warden said. "Back to your posts. I'm sorry about this incident, Mr. Olsen. I'm Warden Edmund Haskell. I don't think we've met before."

"I was planning on being pleased to meet you, Warden," Jimmy extended a hand.

"The men are on edge today because of the heavy security around moving Luthor. I hope you understand. What's this problem about a press pass?"

"I don't know." Jimmy pulled his card out from under his shirt as the guards trudged off and Ev and Jerry went to check their two cases of camera equipment that had been thrown against a wall. "Here's my pass if you want to see it. It got me past three checkpoints just fine until I got down here to the dungeon."

"I see," Haskell snorted as he read the information that hung around Jimmy's neck.

"You see what?"

"I'll have to have a few security drills, Mr. Olsen. This card shouldn't have gotten you
this
far. It's your season pass to the indoor courts at the Metropolis Racquet Club."
 

"How do you like that?" Jimmy looked at it. "I wonder if my socks match."

Jimmy, Ev and Jerry followed the warden into the dungeonlike room and the other reporters tapped their feet, looked at their watches and gave each other impatient looks as Jimmy's crew set up their sound film equipment. Nobody said a word of complaint, though, as the warden waited for Jimmy Olsen before continuing his remarks. It was great to be a star.

The room was ostensibly built for occasional high security cases. The federal grant said that some examples of the room's uses would be for suspected assassins, spies
during wartime, an emergency bomb shelter, terrorists whose friends were likely to try to break them out of jail, that sort of thing. It would not do, Constitutionally, to build a special facility for a single prisoner, since that would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. During the construction of the facility, no one besides reporters mentioned the fact that the super-security cell was being built in the same prison where Lex Luthor had spent slightly more than half his time since he became too old for the East Kansas Juvenile Reformatory. But sure enough, the very day Luthor decided to call a press conference—something most convicted felons do not often do—Warden Haskell decided to announce that the new facility was complete and ready for its first occupant: Lex Luthor.