Miracle Monday (9 page)

"It's gone. Forget it. What about Clark?"

"Clark? He's impossible. He can't be for real."

"I told you when I met him, Lois," Lena Thorul, recovered, dropping to her most conspiratorial tone, "and I'll say it again now. Clark Kent's got a lot more going for him then he lets on. I can tell these things. You could do worse."

"I bet I can do better."

"Be careful about that. You've been believing what you read about yourself in
People
magazine. How's it going with the test pilot anyway?"
 

"Superman?"

"Who else?"

"The same." Lois paused, wondering if Lena could read her mind across the city or through the telephone line. "I don't want to talk about him. I'd rather talk about Kris. She should be there any minute. Listen, would you try to talk some sense into her?"

"I've been trying to do that with you. Why would it work any better on her?"

"You're younger than me and you're older than her."

"This from someone who makes a living with words."

"Grammar is the editor's job. Listen, Lena, she hangs out at discos."

"So?"

"So? Have you ever been to one of those places?"

"As a matter of fact I have. My husband took me to Regine's once and the music actually cleared my head. They're aren't a lot of things that do that. Some nineteen-year-old guy tried to pick me up, though, and we haven't been back. What's wrong with Kristin?"

"She's a smart girl. She types as well as anyone I know—certainly better than I do—and if you ever get into a discussion of American history with her you'll be amazed at
the things she knows. She can tell you more about the Second World War than my father, and he was a colonel. But she's a total air-head about men. She does this space cadet routine."
 

"How do you mean?"

"Well, Steve Lombard came into the restaurant by himself as soon as Clark left. He must have heard me tell Jimmy where we were going, because the last time Steve went anywhere alone I fell off my moa."

"Your mower?"

"Moa. It's an extinct bird. Jimmy actually seemed to like Kris—and you know how Jimmy feels about my introducing him to someone. Ever since my little sister packed him in, he's acted like I was his mother anytime I wanted him to meet anyone I thought he'd like. There was this woman pediatrician I knew once who—"

"Kristin. You were talking about Kristin."

"Right. Steve came in and acted like it was a surprise we were there. I think he saw Clark leave, although he said he didn't. He sat down next to me and all of a sudden Kris was mesmerized."

"Was he wearing an open shirt?"

"An open shirt. Yeah, he was. Why do you ask?"

"Just something that popped into my head."

"Yeah, and he was doing his usual come-on number with me, and Kris said out of nowhere, she says, 'I don't believe how much hair you've got on you're chest.'"

"Really? She said that? In front of Jimmy?"

"Well, she and Grizzly went off to someplace on First Avenue and Jimmy and I passed on it. I think he was really hurt."

"I would think so."

"And Steve Lombard? That lumbering, swaggering—"

"Hold it, Lois. That's the doorbell."

Lena Thorul was one of those rare people to whom the psychic gift was precisely that—a gift. It was something she did not cultivate, fake or particularly want. Lena was writing, on Lois's suggestion, an anonymous autobiography she would call
A Burden of Prophecy
. Two days after Clark Kent left Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Kristin Wells sitting in a restaurant, this perfectly rational young woman who happened to be highly psychic left Lois waiting on the telephone and walked across her living room to answer the doorbell. On the other side of the door she found something unholy, an apparition whose form she could not bear to see. She wailed and fell on the rug.
 

Kristin was as startled as Lena. She bent over Lena for a moment to see that the woman had fainted. She wrung her hands in her confusion, then noticed her telephone out of its cradle.

Kristin picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Lena? I heard a scream."

"It's not Lena. Is that Lois? This is Kris."

"What happened?"

"She fainted. She opened the door and I said hi and didn't even get as far as telling her who I was and she was felled in a faint."

"Was felled in a faint?"

"I mean she fainted. The chick fainted, man. Checked out on the rug. What's her scam?"

"I don't know. She's a psychic and sometimes funny things come over her."

"Oh, she's an empath. You told me. I know what to do about that. I'll take care of it.," Kristin said and hung up.

Kristin rifled the food stores of the apartment for any source of vitamin C, which
Lena needed, Kristin knew, in great quantity. The girl open several small cans of frozen fruit juice concentrate and forced the contents in spoonfuls down Lena's throat. In a few minutes the older woman was back to normal.
 

Across town, Lois Lane wondered how Kristin or anyone else for that matter could know what to do for an empath who had suddenly fainted.

Lois was incorrect about one thing for certain in her conversation with Lena. Steve Lombard had not seen Clark Kent leaving the restaurant two days ago. It was Clark who had run, with one hand on his stomach and the other on his mouth, into the vestibule between the restaurant and the sidewalk, but when the sidewalk door opened it looked as though it was pushed only by a stiff wind.

Up, up into the darkness gathering over Metropolis soared Superman.

To a stranger, every highly developed technology must look like arcane ritual. The impression on the first extraterrestrial who studied an operation of brain surgery, for example, must have been reminiscent of the impression physicians had when they began to take note of the herbal therapy practiced by Ozark healers, or the reaction of anthropologists to social customs of the natives of Samoa. What is an alien to think of a rite carried out in a sterile room by veiled men and women wearing nova-white robes, a ritual that involves the removal and subsequent resecuring of a hairless human's scalp with bizarre specialized tools?

Such arcane rituals accompanied every new discovery that civilization added to its repertoire. The discovery of tools was accompanied by the rituals of woodcraft and stone masonry. The bronze age brought the smelting of ores. The locomotive was accompanied by coal-tending and first-class compartments. The telephone evolved with dial tones, busy signals, conference calls, and adolescence. Internal combustion brought drive-ins, traffic jams and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. Now Luthor brought to civilization's environs a new discovery, and the collection of rituals he formulated to go with it showed signs of being no less distinctive than any that went with previous discoveries.

Luthor called his discovery
gas-wave physics
, and until he saw the coverage of his press conference on the Six O'Clock WGBS Evening News, he had planned to put off his ritual for a few days. What Luthor saw on the television screen alarmed him. He would certainly had been more alarmed if he had noticed the three guards and one electrician who came to the super-security cell on the warden's orders that night at two o'clock to check the heating system. Luthor was doing something like meditating at the time as part of his ritual. Of course the three guards and the electrician thought he was asleep. The guards were glad to avoid the customary verbal abuse, although the electrician, who did not know any better, would have liked to meet Luthor. As a matter of fact, the electrician was very careful not to find the air current that the warden insisted was in the room, so that the workman would have an excuse to come back tomorrow and see what Luthor was really like. Tomorrow, of course, Luthor would no longer be there.
 

All sorts of conflicting emotions flew around in Luthor's formidable brain when he watched Clark Kent on the evening news. Kent was the good boy that Lex Luthor never was, the conventionally successful and respected man that Luthor never grew up to become. These days, on the few occasions Luthor had to talk to the newsman, Kent called him Mr.Luthor and acted as though they had never met other than in connection with Kent's job and Luthor's infamy. Luthor supposed he acted the same way toward Kent, except for the one time he had idly threatened Kent's life, the time Kent nearly had him convinced to change his ways. But years ago they were both in Smallville, and in Smallville things were different.

At the age of twelve no one but a potential saint is flawless, and in America saints don't generally live past the age of nine. That was what Jules and Arlene Luthor had in mind when they brought a child into the world—a saint. When their nine-year-old son Lex clearly showed himself to be something other than that, they decided to have another child and move to the heartland where their son, for what he was worth, and their infant daughter could have a proper upbringing.

In the city, Lex learned how to pick locks, slash tires and extort classmates' lunch money in return for "protection." In the country he learned how to steal fresh watermelons, break into ice cream parlors for midnight snacks, and from Clark Kent he learned how to scare cows into losing their milk.

Lex always showed signs of alarming honesty. If he neglected, for some reason, to tell a new acquaintance not to trust him, then Lex could certainly be trusted. He was careful, upon meeting each of his eighth grade teachers, to smile and say, "Don't trust me," before he said hello. Although Brooklyn's public school curriculum was woefully behind that of Smallville at the time—and has been ever since—Lex immediately led all his classes academically. And once he convinced each teacher that he was smarter than anyone else in the class, he proceeded to convince each teacher that the teacher had no business presuming to teach him anything about anything other than humility.

When Lex interrupted Donna Hughes, his mathematics teacher, while she was in the process of showing the class how to derive the formula to solve quadratic equations, Mrs.Hughes slyly invited Lex to finish the derivation. He did, faster than she could follow, and he did an encore to that performance by deriving a formula that generates prime numbers. Mrs.Hughes, along with nearly every other mathematical scholar since the time of Euclid, was under the impression that there was no formula in existence which consistently generated prime numbers. Lex erased his formula before the teacher closed her mouth and could summon the presence of mind to copy it down.

When Robert Knodt, the science teacher, got it into his head to convince his students that chemistry was relevant to their everyday lives, Luthor managed to dull the teacher's point. Mr.Knodt set up a simple experiment which he had designed to measure, during a period of a few days, the relative efficiencies of different kitchen-food wrappings at keeping out moisture. These commercial food wrappings ranged from ordinary wax paper to the rolled plastic wraps that were just then beginning to come on the market. Lex volunteered to bring in one of his mother's wax paper bags, whose inside he first coated with a nonporous, nearly undetectable clear paste that Lex made from one of Arlene Luthor's fiberglass kitchen curtains. Mr. Knodt was at a loss to explain how the wax paper turned out to be more resistant to moisture than any of the supposedly nonporous wrappings. The wax paper, in fact, seemed to be 100 percent resistant. Lex told Mr.Knodt and the class what he had done, but when the science teacher asked Lex if he was interested in patenting his new substance, Lex claimed to have forgotten how he had made it.

And when Carol Roberts, the social studies teacher, suggested that Rutherford B. Hayes did not actually win the presidential election of 1876, but that his party had bought southern electoral votes in an illegal political bargain, Lex disagreed. The boy launched into an involved polemic on constitutional law to prove that although there was a political deal, it was actually perfectly legal. The irrefutable logic of his tirade reached above the heads of the class not long before it also eluded Miss Roberts.

Except that on these occasions, and on several others, Lex noticed the faintest hint of a grin on Clark Kent's face. Clark knew something he was not letting on, and Lex decided for some reason that he liked Clark. For a while Clark seemed to be the boy's only friend.

Lex liked Clark less and respected him more when Clark took the blame for some silly prank Lex pulled one night at the Herman farm, but Lex finally told Clark not to trust him after that. Clark had not trusted him since.

No time to think about that now, Luthor decided as he sat watching the Six O'Clock WGBS Evening News in the Pocantico Correctional Facility's super-security cell. He had contrived to be transferred to this dungeon for a reason, and now that he was here there was work to do.

Since the last full moon, when he did not eat for three days, Luthor had been on a completely organic diet. This was one of his new rituals. It was not particularly healthy for him, Luthor knew, but it was no less healthy than his normal diet of hormone-infested meat and canned food-coloring and preservatives flavored with traces of vegetation. A diet of whole grains and fruit juices was necessary for what he had to do. In order to deal with the forces he had to harness for his escape, Luthor had to cleanse his body as much as possible of all traces of inorganic matter. That was the key.

It was no more difficult, in Prison, to get organic food than it was to get illegal drugs. The price was higher than it was outside, that was all, and that was no problem for Luthor. It would have been difficult to get any such substances into the super-security cell, but Luthor had not eaten anything since that afternoon, and he had been planning to fast for a few days just to be sure his body was cleared of inorganic chemicals before the escape. The plan was different now. He had to get out before someone—before Superman—noticed his little indiscretion on film.