Authors: Elliot S. Maggin
Just then, from the vicinity of the barn entrance which Lex's back was now facing, came an awful crash of metal and rock and clanging and a human voice howling in pain. All the cows woke up and mooed for all they were worth. Through the gauzed-over window at the rear of the barn Lex saw a hallway light in the big Herman farmhouse flash on. He spun to face the barn door.
"I wasn't doing anything, I swear!" Lex edged closer to the figure near the door, scared witless.
"Lex?" the boy's voice said.
"No, it's not Lex. Lex who? It's just—who is that? Is that you?"
"Yeah. Sorry, Lex," Clark Kent said, scratching his feet on the ground like an embarrassed bull.
"You turd, Kent. What's with you?"
"I just saw you walking around. I got up early, see? And I figured you had something neat to do. You're always doing all this neat stuff. I had to walk Chief Parker's dog because the chief had to go to a convention, see? So when I brought the dog back and saw you in war paint, I followed you here because I thought maybe you were going to do some neat stuff. What kind of neat stuff you think you're going to do?"
"A rain dance, you dunce."
"Can I watch? You know about—"
"Oh!" Seeing the porch light come on and the door start to open, Lex shoved Clark aside and ran out of the barn.
"Hey," Clark called after him with as vacant a voice as he could find, "you dropped a balloon."
Mr. Herman appeared at the barn door, however, as quickly as Lex had disappeared through it, and he wanted an explanation for Clark's presence.
"I was just walking around," Clark said, "and I really like barns. Dad doesn't have a barn anymore and I just came around because I like barns. Isn't that all right?"
It was not all right, as it happened, since none of the cows yielded up very much milk that morning. Meanwhile, Lex waited through his classes for most of that Friday for someone to drag him into the office of the principal or the police chief or the mayor or the senator—that would be nice—or someone in authority, so that Lex could be chewed out for his aborted plan. Lex did not see Clark until fifth period and Miss Roberts's social studies class. The room was cluttered with film equipment.
Clark was downcast. Lex sniffed a hello and got a less articulate response from Clark. Then Miss Roberts said, simply, "We are going to need another person for the group who is to meet with the senator this afternoon. Jacqui, will you be free after school today?"
"Boy, I sure will!" the girl in the fourth row said. "When? Where? How?"
Immediately, Lex caught on. Was Clark Kent a total moron, he wondered, or some self-sacrificing nincompoop? It did not matter. He had not even mentioned that Lex was in the barn that night. He took the entire blame for scaring the cows milkless. He had probably even pocketed the wired balloon that Lex had left behind, so that suspicion would not fall on the young inveterate tinkerer. Clark's inadequate explanation for his presence in the barn—in light of his stature as a model bland and wholesome-looking young midwesterner—had brought no more punishment than his exclusion from the great man's acquaintance. What a guy—the jerk!
On the way out of that class was where and when Lex said to Clark, "I might've forgot to tell you this before, Kent, but don't trust me."
"Wasn't planning on it," Clark said.
"Am I supposed to trust you?" Lex Luthor asked the creature who claimed to be the arch-devil of cross-cultural fable.
"Certainly not," the apparition answered. "Simply adhere to your half of any bargain we strike, if we can come to an agreement on terms."
"Ah, yes. The bargain. I hope it doesn't involve my having to believe that you are who you say you are."
"That is not necessary either. I am aware that you are a cautious enough man to feel comfortable simply adhering to the rules we set. First tell me—assuming I am who I say I am—what would you like from me?"
"That's simple. I want you to teach me enough about the physical laws of your realm—the Netherworld or whatever they're calling it these days—to construct a cheap, practical source of energy from the interface of the two worlds."
"You want to run turbines and generators by harnessing the clash between Earth and Hell, the same way a dam harnesses the clash between rivers or a windmill harnesses the clash between land and sky—"
"Or the way a nuclear reactor directs the energy from the conflict between Order and Chaos."
"That is simple enough. In return, I would like you to procure for me a lock of Superman's hair. Do we have a bargain?"
In the morning, while swimming through the twilight land between awake and asleep, one can sense what sort of a day it is going to be. From this interface between the two states of consciousness, one can gather, with a little effort, enough psychic energy to get a sense of the next several hours of one's life. It is really possible. Anyone can do it simply by being careful to catch one's self before one is quite shed of sleep. Superman did it all the time when he woke up in Clark Kent's apartment after his daily thirty or forty minutes of sleep.
This April morning, however, as Superman was lying in twilight, Clark Kent's telephone rang next to his head. Telephones and other such machines inflicted the life of Clark Kent just as they inflicted the lives of most people Superman knew.
Several blocks away, linked by an electronic arc to Clark Kent's machine, Morgan Edge had a similar machine of his own. Into his own machine and out of Clark's machine, Edge said, "Kent, did I wake you? Too bad."
"Fine, thank you," Superman said in a groggy version of Clark Kent's voice, "and yourself?"
"It's Edge, Kent, and I called to tell you this could be the most important day of your career."
I get one of those every week and a half or so, one of Superman's cerebral hemispheres said to the other. "Oh, sorry, Mr. Edge," Clark Kent fawned, "Did I wake you?"
"Think now, Kent. Do you remember dialing?"
"Oh, you called me. I'm sorry."
"Don't let it happen again. I want you to grab a pad and write this down, Kent. Do it before you fall back to sleep and forget about it. Got that?"
"Just a second. I'll see if I can find a pencil."
"No no, scratch that. Just get up and—"
Superman dropped the receiver of the telephone loudly between the night table and the mattress frame in such a way as to make it dangle on its cord and continue to make noises in Edge's ear while Superman walked to the far end of the room and called, "Just a second, Mr. Edge.... be right there... no problem... I've got the pad," and then Superman gently tossed a small chair into the night table.
Several blocks away Morgan Edge bit through his first cigarette holder of the morning and slam-dunked his third cigarette of the morning into his office wastebasket.
With telescopic and X ray vision Superman watched Edge throw out the cigarette. Satisfied that he had sufficiently gotten back at Edge for disturbing his rare chance at sleep and simultaneously extended the executive's life by about fifteen seconds, Superman put on his glasses.
"Sorry, Mr. Edge," Clark Kent said, "but I guess I'm not quite awake yet. I knocked over a chair."
"Sounded like you knocked over the Seventh Fleet. Listen, Kent, forget the stupid note pad. I want you to get dressed right away. Drink some coffee. Better—swallow a few spoonfuls of instant coffee out of the jar. It'll work faster. The copter is on the way to the roof of your building. There are four major stories in town this morning and you're going to cover them yourself. You'll anchor the news tonight from your remote location using the copter's equipment. Coyle and Lana will take up what slack you leave behind at the studio, if any."
"Hold it, Mr. Edge. Excuse me. Four major stories? What are the stories?"
"They all broke in the past hour. The pilot, what's his name, has your working orders. You just follow him wherever he takes you and be lucid for the camera."
"I'd appreciate it if you told me what the stories were, sir."
"Oh, I don't know. Where is that sheet of—yes, hello, right here. Let's see," Edge said as he sat at his desk and read from the list he held. Superman could not see through Edge's chair to the desk. There was probably just enough lead derivative in the petrochemical stuffing of the chair to block the X rays. "Let's see now, a collapsed brownstone on the Upper West Side."
"Yes?" Clark found the building across town through his apartment window. There was no one in immediate mortal danger. "What else?"
"A fairly destructive minor earthquake along Fourteenth Street. A subway derailment under Christopher Circle on the D-line."
There were no major injuries at either place. There were some due in a few minutes, though, if Superman did not do something soon.
"And there's a tramway car hanging by a fraying cable over the Outerborough Bridge."
"Oh, my Lord," Clark Kent said before he blew himself out the window.
"Hello? Hello?"
The cameraman in the helicopter that was approaching the roof of 344 Clinton Street considered himself very lucky. He had just finished loading and checking out the videotape cartridge in his videotape recorder when Superman slowed his flight enough for the cameraman to see him. The hero did not want to upset the air around the helicopter as he flew by, so the cameraman was able to whip the recorder into position and film the Man of Steel whizzing off toward the Fifty-ninth Street Tramway.
"Turn the chopper around," the cameraman ordered the pilot.
"That's Mr. Kent's building right in front of us. I know where I'm going," the pilot said.
"I know. I know. Clark's not even on the roof yet, and that was Superman who just flew by us."
"You seeing things?"
"No. I swear, I just saw him flying off toward the river. Didn't you see him?"
"I was too busy flying this rig. You sure it was him?"
The helicopter was beginning to dip in the direction of the apartment building's roof. The main rotors shifted on their bearings and the bird that bore the decal
WGBS FLYING NEWSROOM
rose back toward the sky. Its smaller rear rotor revved faster and it spun around to the direction of the river. In less than a minute the WGBS news cameraman could see the figure of a flying man approach a pillar of smoke hanging over the bridge. The man in the helicopter turned on his videotape recorder and pointed it in the right direction and hoped Clark Kent would not have to wait on the roof too long early in this unseasonably cold morning in April.
Superman had sized up the situation seconds earlier from Clark Kent's apartment. There were seven people in the enclosed, heated tramway car. One of the two cables that held it as it made its trip over the river into the inner borough of the city had snapped. The car hung from the second cable, thirty meters above the bridge, and that cable was supposed to be strong enough to support the car in an emergency. It was not. The electric wires that carried the heat to the car from a generator in the outer borough were also fraying as a result of the first cable's snapping. The heating system was still working, but the fraying wire had ignited the paint on the outside of the steel cable car. If the paint fire reached the transformer on the roof of the car, it would explode. Meanwhile, the smoke from the fire outside the car was blocking the air filtration system into the car and of the seven people inside, only two were conscious. Superman knew exactly what he had to do.
From several hundred meters away Superman blew the pillar of poisonous smoke off the surface of the cable car and cleared the air filtration system. He shot a searing beam of heat from his eyes to the smoldering wire that had set off the hot smoky fire on the exterior of the car. The dangling wire fell, swirling and leaving a trail of light like a Fourth-of-July sparkler. The fire was gone, but at least for the instant, the heated air was still there. The air was still hot enough to push the transformer to critical heat.
With a burst of speed, Superman closed the remaining distance between himself and the tramway car. He ripped the transformer from its perch, stuffed it under his arm like a football, and shot upward into the sky. As he let go of the transformer and it continued to rise on its momentum, enough of the cable's frayed strands of wire snapped so that what was left of the single cable could no longer hold the dangling car. Superman arced downward as the hissing piece of machinery rose above him and, the remaining strands of cable having wrenched apart, the car with seven people aboard fell free.
Inside the car the air had cleared a bit and when the smoke dissipated and the two conscious passengers saw Superman—or a red-and-blue flash of light that must have been Superman—streak past the window, one of them had the presence of mind to shove out the emergency exit window and let the poisonous air inside clear. Seconds afterward, as the cable car wrenched downward, one of the five who had been overcome by the fumes opened her eyes. Neither the two women nor the one man who was awake when the cable snapped knew that they were in free fall. What they did know, as Superman held the cable in one hand and the car itself by five finger holes he had made in its steel roof and lowered it gently to the sidewalk at the corner of Fifty-Ninth Street and Polis Avenue, was that somewhere half a kilometer overhead, there was a burst that sounded like an extended rifle shot. As the sound of the explosion echoed off the walls of the nearest buildings, the muffled sound was joined by the splash of scores of tiny chunks of the shattered transformer hitting the river. While his hands and his flight softened the descent of the seven passengers, Superman's breath diverted the fall of the three charred chunks of transformer from appointments with the rush-hour jam on the bridge.
The passengers who were conscious hauled the others out onto the sidewalk, and two sat with their heads between their knees as policemen gave the four unconscious ones mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Two ambulances were making their ways, with police motorcycle escorts, through the morning rush to the scene. Superman flew off to the northwest, followed by the WGBS Flying Newsroom that had hovered like a honeybee through the scene.