Miracle Monday (8 page)

What Clark Kent was supposed to tell the technician, as the final commercial ended and Josh Coyle played with his tapes, was, "Cue the tramway film for seventeen seconds." This meant that the final segment would consist of Clark talking for seventeen seconds, followed by Lloyd Kramer's film.

What Clark actually said was, "Cue the Luthor film for seventeen seconds." Then, as the technician sitting next to the preoccupied Josh Coyle slipped the wrong tape into the videotape player and the live image of Kent at his anchor desk in Studio B returned to a million people's television screens in the Metropolitan area, Kent read from his prepared text: "A few hardy and perhaps a few foolhardy souls did, for reasons known only to them, venture among the elements today. Our man Lloyd Kramer watched some of them this afternoon on the Outerborough Bridge from his vantage point on the Fifty-Ninth Street Tramway. This is what he saw."

Clark Kent, running through his mind the same scene that was now reenacting itself on a million television screens, and Josh Coyle, splicing and cross-editing videotaped scenes only hours old with the skill of a ping-pong champion, noticed the error simultaneously, less than a minute before the end of the show, when Coyle's job
was complete. Angry with the technician whose fault he thought the error was, Coyle flipped a switch from his booth, signaling the anchorman was now back on the air. Before the director turned to vent his anger on the young technician, Clark apologized on the air.
 

"We usually call these things technical difficulties," Clark told his audience. "That's simply an easy way of saying, 'Sorry, my mistake.' I gave our technician the wrong cue, and he rolled the wrong film. We'll get Lloyd and the snow, I trust, on the eleven o'clock report."

"See?" the technician in the booth told Coyle. "See? He did say 'the Luthor film.' See?"

"For all of us here at WGBS News, this is Clark Kent wishing you a good evening," and Josh Coyle's videotape collage of the day's newsfilm rolled underneath the credits to signal the end of the program.

As it turned out, this particular mistake was not a bad thing for Superman. It helped, to some extent to reinforce the reality of Clark Kent as a fallible human being. But the fact remained that it was Superman, not Clark Kent, who made the error.

C. W. Saturn occasionally lost a battle, but he did not make mistakes.

Fifty miles to the north, at his home in the village of Tarrytown, Warden Haskell of the Pocantico Correctional Facility had been late in turning on the WGBS Six O'Clock Evening News. The story in which he was interested, Jimmy Olsen's account of Luthor's transfer from Cell Block Ten to the new super-security cell, was the lead story that night and Haskell had missed it.

Mrs. Haskell was a newspaper reader rather than a television watcher. She came into the living room with the morning's
Daily Planet
, the afternoon
Post
and the message that dinner would soon be ready. During the remainder of Clark Kent's broadcast, Mrs. Haskell sat on the couch next to her husband reading stories about her husband's day, about Lex Luthor's past career, and the locusts that swarmed over the streets of Brussels. Mr. Haskell did the crossword puzzle until he was stumped by 24-across, which was a thirteen-letter word meaning deliberately, for dolphins." That was when Haskell looked up at the screen and was alarmed to see the mistakenly rebroadcast
film of Luthor lighting his pipe.
 

Haskell bolted from the couch and his wife asked, "What's wrong, Eddie?"

Without answering her he grabbed the kitchen telephone to call the prison's director of maintenance. The man was not at home, and none of the custodians on duty that night was near a phone at the prison. Haskell would try the maintenance director's number every half hour that night until someone answered. Despite his errors in judgment and his doomed retirement pension, Edmund Haskell was a very bright man. He knew what was wrong with the film.

Coyle always had trouble criticizing Clark Kent. The newsman was so self-effacing, so will to acquiesce to a put-down that Clark was still only about midway through an elaborate apology when the frustrated director threw his hands into the air and walked off. Clark appeared to be talking to himself, with Coyle's back toward him, when Lois Lane walked into the studio.

"Come on, Clark," the woman said. "You wouldn't want to stand in the way of young love, would you?"

"What?" Clark was riffling through the pages of the script for the news show whose ending he had just botched. He looked up and said, "Oh. Lois."

"Busy for dinner?"

"Me? Busy?" Clark was genuinely surprised. "You're asking me out to dinner?"

"Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown both said it's alright. I figured I'd better do it."

"Of course I'm not busy."

"Terrific, Clark. I'm trying to get Jimmy to meet Kristin, that new girl who's typing the final copy of my book. You just make believe you're my date, all right?"

"I'll try to put on a good act."

Lois Lane was Clark Kent's idea of a remarkable woman. She was almost anyone's idea of a remarkable woman. Not yet through her twenties, she was successful
in her field, famous, envied, intelligent, and one suspected that if she was not wealthy, it was only because she did not care to be. She was regularly named to the annual list of the year's "Ten Worst-Dressed Women," a promotional device used by a California dress salesman who sought notoriety by picking fights with people whose names were more famous than his. Last year a writer for
People
magazine placed her on a list—along with names as diverse as Jacqueline Onassis, Kate Jackson and Lillian Hellman—of the "World's Ten Most Eligible Women." She asked Clark to spend time with her, she supposed, because he was safe.
 

"Hey, Clarkie, cutting out so soon?" The voice from behind was that of Steve Lombard, the sportscaster. "Whatcha up to, Lois-babes?"

"No good, Grizzly. Come on, Clark. I don't want to miss Jimmy." Actually, the rush was over the fact that Lois wanted to miss Lombard.

"Hey, stick around for the free feed. I'll buy ya a margarita, Lois." Lombard had hooked Clark and Lois by their elbows and Clark noticed that the former quarterback was maneuvering them toward the swinging door of the hallway.

"See that elbow, big stuff?" Lois asked as Lombard glanced out the window of the door, deftly positioning the pair in front of it.

"Yeah."

"It's as close as you're going to get."

And then Benny Boghosian, as was his custom, wheeled his snack cart unceremoniously from the hallway through the door, which hit Clark, who softly and carefully defied gravity to lift himself slightly off the ground and into the left side of Lois where Lombard had aimed him. Lois fell smoothly into the arms of the former quarterback.

Of course, there was nothing else Clark could have done about Steve's prank, nothing else he could do about the scores of similar pranks pulled in front of women on whom Steve was determined to make some sort of an impression. But Clark could never get even overtly. Steve was as much a tool of Superman's constant fashioning of the fictional Clark Kent persona as Clark was a function, very often, of Steve's apish
nonsense. That was what was so infuriating about Steve.
 

There was a bloody mary for the sportscaster on Benny Boghosian's lunch cart, compliments of Galaxy Communication's president, Morgan Edge. Clark noticed it with his heat vision. It would be unbearably bitter this afternoon. Clark apologized to Benny and to Lois, who took his hand as they left. She took Clark's hand to make it clear to Steve that she was not impressed with him. She held Clark's hand once in a while, for one reason or another, and she often had to tell herself not to notice whatever it was that she felt in her hand when she did. She had no conscious idea what it was she felt, but she resolved not to think about it for fear that she might decide she liked it.

"Maybe it's his money or something," the sportscaster said downing the drink in one swig, " 'cause it sure ain't the way he dresses." Then he noticed his throat.

"You know who Kristin is," Lois said to Clark in the hallway. "I told you about her. She's the one typing up my book on that bank robbery down in the Village. The one where the kid saw the Al Pacino movie and went out and held ten people hostage for eight hours and got talked out of it by the disc jockey on WNEW."

"Right. Are you done with that already?"

"Except for the final proofreading. I'm not much on style, Clark, but any editor can be sure Perry White taught me to make my deadlines. Anyway, Kris is a really nice girl. A little spacey, maybe, but she's pretty new in town and she's been hanging around those awful singles' bars and I promised to treat her to dinner today. Then it occurred to me that she and Jimmy would be perfect, so I told her that you and I had a date tonight and that I'd forgotten about it, but she could certainly come along, and wouldn't it be nice if we got another man to make it a foursome. Pretty clever, huh?"

"Clever as a fox, Lois."

"I found her through one of those temporary office help agencies, but I only need her for two days a week and they almost never call her, so I told her about Lena. You remember my friend Lena Thorul, don't you, Clark?"

"That's not the one with mental telepathy, is it?"

"Telepathy. Not mental telepathy. Mental telepathy is redundant. Yeah, that's the
one. Lena's writing a book, too, a psychic phenomena, and she can't type at all. So that fills in another two days a week for Kris. She's even covering her rent! Now you're briefed on her."
 

"Why do I want to be briefed on her? Now I won't have anything to talk about."

"You never have anything to talk about anyway, and it has to look to Jimmy as though you and Kris are old friends, so it won't look as though we're setting them up."

"Aren't we setting them up?"

"Of course we're setting them up."

"So why can't we tell them?"

"It's like a bear in the woods. Don't you know anything, Clark?"

"A bear in the woods..."

By now they had walked down the hall to the elevator, taken it down from the twentieth floor where the WGBS News offices were, to the sixth floor, which contained the editorial department of the
Daily Planet
where Lois worked. Halfway down the hall, between the elevator and the cubbyhole that was Lois's office, she stopped, made Clark stand still, and faced him.
 

"When you run into a hungry bear in the woods," she explained, "you have to lie down and play dead. That way the bear doesn't know what's been at you and he'll leave you alone. If you run away the bear's likely to kill you." She walked on.

"Oh."

"Right! Well it's the same with Kristin and Jimmy. If we lay them out like dead meat neither of them will be interested."

"I see." The fact that he didn't see at all pleased him immensely. Generally, his curse was to understand too much.

Kristin Wells turned out to be what Jimmy Olsen would probably call a knockout. Jimmy was not in Lois's office, though. Kristin was there alone, doing the crossword
puzzle in the morning edition of the
Daily Planet
.
 

"Porpoisefully," Clark said as he walked in behind Kristin and she jumped.

"Oh. What did you say?"

"Twenty-four across, the one you're having trouble with. It's
porpoisefully
. Like dolphins. Thirteen letters."
 

"Hey man, you're right. Outrageous."

"Kris Wells,"—Lois was formal in a very breezy manner—"this is Clark Kent."

"Sure, Clark. I watch you on the news every day."

"We're old friends," Clark told his new friend solemnly.

"I bet Jimmy is upstairs getting free food. I'll run up and get him. You two become older friends. I'll be right back."

Clark sat down on the windowsill and awkwardly clapped his hands once. Kristin watched him, watching herself being careful not to let on how thrilled she was at meeting Superman.

"So," he said and paused. "You like doing crossword puzzles, do you?"

"We were having a perfectly good time," Lois was telling the phone two days later, "and then he got sick to his stomach over the lobsters and left."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

"No 'excuse me' or anything?"

"Oh, lots of 'excuse mes' Lots of 'pardons' and 'terribly sorrys' and all that stuff. Clark's got all the manners his milkmaid mother ever taught him and then some. Just no stomach."

"Well, I don't know, Lois," Lena Thorul said from the other end of the line. "The
thought of picking out your dinner from a tubful of crawling things never much appealed to me."
 

"You're one thing. Clark Kent is—Do you have any idea how tall he is?"

"Tall?"

"At least six-two."

"Really? He never looked that tall to me."

"That's not taking the slouch into account. I saw him next to Steve Lombard—y'know, Grizzly the football player? Oh, that's another thing. Remind me to tell you about him before I forget."

"Grizzly the football player. Got it."

"Right. Where was I?"

"Six-foot two."

"Right. At least six-two, maybe more. I'll admit everybody looks tall to me, but he's taller than Steve. Really. Do you believe a big strong guy like that whom everyone in town watches on the news every day and trusts to tell them stuff they don't know—this guy never even knew that they throw live lobsters in boiling water?"

"Come on. Are you sure this is recently?"

"Really. It was two days ago. Yeah, the night Luthor escaped."

"Ohh—"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Lena. I forgot about that." Lois had momentarily lost the fact that Lena was what she called an empath. Lena had emotions that were psychically heightened, and one of the things she became unaccountably emotional about was Lex Luthor. Lois knew why this was, although Lena did not. Lois apologized: "I just remember headlines the way other people remember days of the week. I didn't mean to mention that."