by Tom De Haven
“Hello, Mom.”
“What are you doing just sitting there, Clark?”
“I’m not sure, Mom.”
“Don’t you think it’s pretty selfish?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Clark Kent!”
“I’m sorry, Mom. But I don’t know what to do.”
“Herman says hello, Herman says hello.”
Clark turns and looks at the parrot, then he turns back and looks at the Kelvinator.
The clock on the electric range reads nine-twenty-three.
“Son, do you plan on sitting here all night?”
“Probably not. Just till everything goes away outside.”
“Clark …”
“I don’t know what to do!”
“Give yourself a little credit, son. Your vanity will do you in if you don’t.”
“My vanity?” Clark laughs. “Me, vain?”
“Herman says hello, Herman says hello.”
“Mom?”
“Herman says hello …”
“Mom, come on, quit it,” he says, pulling on his tattered sleeve, poking a finger through a burn hole in an elasticized cuff, slack now and droopy. “Mom?”
“Clark, are you scared?”
He considers the question for a moment.
“Yes, ma’am, I suppose I am.”
“That’s good.”
“That’s good?”
“I wouldn’t want to think your father and I raised a fool.”
“No, ma’am.”
“Now get off that silly chair and go do something. Doesn’t matter what. Just do something, Clark.”
When he leaves the kitchen the glow-in-the-dark clock on the electric range reads nine-twenty-three.
Passing through the living room without glancing at either of the dead women, Clark goes and stands in the bay window. A hook-and-ladder screeches to a stop, firemen dropping from it, unwinding canvas hoses and dragging them toward hydrants. Several cars, skeletons now, still burn. Another just whumped into flames. As far as Clark can see, all of the house fronts, brick and brownstone, are scorched black, and every other window looks blown out.
About twenty, twenty-five feet away from where he stands (but raising one foot now to the window seat, bracing it there, jiggling it nervously), the robot continues its monotonous spin. Pencil-thin streaky light shoots from its head and the ends of its fingers. Clark lifts his other foot onto the windowsill and crouches, arms winged back like a competitive swimmer.
The instant he springs, the air is raked with submachine-gun fire. Volleys of bullets strike him and recoil, further shredding his tights, his trunks, and his cape, and snipping off the final stitch fastening the wedge-shaped emblem to his chest.
The big S goes skimming away just as Clark plows fists-first into the robot, digging knuckles into its plated chest, lifting it off the street, and carrying it with him over the roofs of the police cars (everyone ducks) and down toward First Avenue.
But that’s not where Clark wants to go—he can see a crowd gathered there—so he bears down with his weight, and both he and the robot (Clark on top) crash into the street. Tumbling half a dozen times, Clark collides with a lamp post, his lower vertebrae taking most of the impact. The lamp post snaps near its base and slams across the pavement.
Angling as it goes, the robot skates on its back down the street, then strikes the curb and sideslips across the pavement, toppling over a low metal railing and down a flight of steps to the basement entrance of a brownstone. It clatters and clatters and finally bashes against a door.
Clark picks himself up and shakes his head.
Despite all the sirens and the roars of hose water and flames, the staticky grumble of squad-car radios, it seems all of a sudden very quiet and still.
Then: “You in the leotard!” Edges crackling, the voice comes amplified through a bullhorn. “Down on the ground with both your hands in back of your neck—now!”
From the bottom of the areaway comes a low scritching sound followed by a soft whir and then silence.
From behind Clark come the racking of shotguns.
He slightly turns his head, looks over a shoulder.
A dozen policemen, at least a dozen, are pointing their weapons at him across the bonnets and boots of radio cars.
“This is your last warning, circus boy! Get down on the ground!”
With a vague hand gesture, much the same one a good host would use during a party if a guest offered to get up and fix his own drink, Clark continues on across the pavement.
The cops don’t shoot him.
But a bluish-white light flashes.
Clark closes the short distance to the top of the areaway and then peers down the steps.
Popping a molten pimpled bulb from his camera’s flash attachment, Willi Berg smiles up at him.
Looking jailed, Lois Lane stands just inside the basement behind a decorative wrought-iron security gate.
A couple in bathrobes and pajamas flanks her, peeking cautiously out. The man is armed with a pewter candlestick, the woman with a coal shovel.
Willi takes another flash picture of a badly dented, partly crumpled steel cylinder, maybe eighteen inches long, that lists in a corner, half buried in a clump of dead leaves.
The cylinder sporadically emits crackling blue sparkles.
Willi calls up, “Check out the mechanical monster.”
“What happened to it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Oh. Um, Superman, I want to introduce you to my good friend Lois Lane. Lois, this is Superman I was telling you about. And that’s Mr. and Mrs. Pierce. Dave and Sally were kind enough to let us in during the fireworks.”
Clark goes down a few steps, nodding hello to all but never taking his eyes off Lois Lane. She’s going to recognize him. Of course she will. He’ll never pull this off.
But then she says, “Superman, huh? What’s your real name?” and Clark feels the giddy joyful pleasure of a practical joke successfully perpetrated. Remembering to lower his voice, he says, “Let’s talk about that some other time, shall we, Miss Lane?”
Clark feels cocky enough to swagger but then, catching his own reflection in a lit-from-behind basement window, he is mortified: his hair sticks out and his face is streaked with grime, his clothes are in complete tatters, and where his emblem used to be, minuscule knots and twists of black thread shabbily outline its tricornered shape.
His boots are gone and he has white socks on.
No wonder Lois Lane doesn’t recognize him! Who would?
Like a futuristic whoopie canister, the cylinder suddenly springs open and reassembles. A shaft of ruby-red light cuts a neat furrow, a dandy’s central part, through Willi’s thick hair, singeing it down to his scalp. It also passes between two bars of the iron gate and strikes the blade of the coal shovel, which then smacks Mrs. Pierce in the face, knocking her flat on her back.
Simultaneously the reconstituted robot’s articulated fingers close around Willi’s trachea and squeeze.
Clark drives his left fist through the robot, back to front. It comes out tangled with circuitry and spaghetti wires. He yanks it back inside, flexes open his fingers, and just—grabs. Anything he can find. And when he withdraws his hand, he pulls out still more insulated wire, more circuits, a spool of celluloid film, a tangle of paper tape punched with slots, and a small black socketed cube.
Willi is rubbing his throat, coughing and gasping.
Clark has had enough of this.
Plucking the gutted robot off the ground, he bends, crushes, twists, countertwists, and otherwise compacts it till it is roughly the size of a grapefruit. A small ellipsoidal plate mark dislodges itself and hits the bottom step with a bright ting!
Willi picks it up, and with Clark leaning over his shoulder they inspect it together. Stamped into the metal plate is a nine-numeral serial number, plus this information:
LEXBOT Sidekick S-40
LUTHOR Corp.
Assembled in the
United States of America
XXV
Soda in turmoil. La Guardia gets testy.
Boastfulness and diffidence. “Deep Elem Blues!”
●
1
Dialing from her office at the club, Soda Wauters asked the operator to put her through to City Hall, New York City, only to be told to lie down and sleep it off, lady. And the operator strongly suggested that in the future Soda try speaking civilly over the telephone. What? She’d been civil. What? She’d said what? Called the operator what? She’d never—
But maybe Soda had, it was hard to remember. She was drunker than she’d been in a long while.
She considered calling one of the big dailies in New York but was afraid she would only get that same hateful operator again. Ditto for calling a cab. So she left the club around seven-thirty and waited on South Orange Avenue for a Public Service bus.
While she did, she got violently sick over the gutter.
Eventually she found herself in Newark’s Pennsylvania Railroad Station, following red arrows to the Hudson-Manhattan Tubes. Despite those she wandered around for half an hour, or maybe it just felt that long, till a transit cop nearly arrested her for public intoxication.
But rattling the bulky envelope in his not-unkind face, Soda told him she was on a mission, she had to catch the tubes because the man that she loved—the man she’d met and briefly but unconditionally loved, a policeman of all things, had entrusted her with special documents intended for hizzonner the mayor of New York City—these.
“Sure, lady, sure,” he said. “Why don’t I help you walk over to Nedick’s and we’ll get you a cup of coffee?”
“I’m sure he’s dead!” she wailed.
“Who?” The cop looked sorry he had ever paid her any attention.
“The man I loved. He stopped coming around and now I’m sure he’s dead. And I have to get these papers and pictures to the mayor of New York City. Don’t you get it? That’s why he left them with me!”
When the transit cop took Soda firmly by an elbow she almost struggled. But something told her to be still and shut up, the right thing to do because at last he led her to the correct platform.
She paid her twenty-two cents, boarded a train, and promptly dozed off. She rode all the way into Manhattan and to the end of the line … then all the way back under the Hudson River, through Jersey City, across the Hackensack Meadows, to Kearny, where she woke up, and then to Newark again.
She changed trains and willed herself to stay awake.
Although Soda had never been to City Hall before (it never crossed her mind that the mayor might not be there on a Sunday evening—he lived there, didn’t he?), she knew it was downtown, not far from the Woolworth Building, so she meant to get off at the first stop in lower Manhattan: Cortlandt Street.
But somehow she missed it and got off at the second stop: Church Street. Good enough. She’d find the place. She had to. She was determined to deliver the envelope, and to deliver it tonight.
After Soda had taken it from her safe this afternoon she pored over just enough of its contents to get the gist.
There was a “ghost gang” operating in New York City, and her Richard (his last name was Sandglass, she discovered: “respectfully submitted, Richard Sandglass”) had rooted it out, gotten the goods on all of those dirty crooks like a G-man in a Warner Bros, picture. Why hadn’t he said he was a cop? Because she’d practically told him don’t be one? Or was she flattering herself?
Alexander Luthor, a name that kept appearing on page after page, meant nothing to Soda because she never read the papers. Why read a newspaper when you had a phonograph? Newspapers could only make you feel bad-sad, but songs could make you feel good-sad. No contest.
Now, after Soda has dragged herself up the stairs from Hudson Terminal and is standing on the pavement in front of two bridged skyscrapers on Court Street, she is struck with a pang of terror: it’s dark, it’s cold, the streets are empty. And turning dizzily in a circle, she can’t locate the Woolworth Building. She is lost in a canyon of tall buildings, her stomach is churning, her temples are throbbing, her cheeks are wet and chapped.
Soda’s instincts tell her to walk south; in fact, she heads due west, believing it’s south, and shortly finds herself on Greenwich Street. Stepping off the curb, her left ankle buckles and she goes down, whacking both kneecaps. The envelope sails from her grip, skims into the street. She gets up again—hosiery torn, knees bleeding, embedded with grit—and limps after it. Why is she doing this? Why did Richard come into her club? Why did she ever send him a drink? Why did he smile the way that he did?
She can’t do this.
She’s lost.
She’s fat and lonely and her heart is broken and she can’t do this, she’s lost.
Clutching the envelope horizontally, she folds it around her face like a mask and stands there.
Just stands there.
2
“Are you ever going to take these things off? I’m not a criminal, I’m a reporter!”
“There’s a difference?” says the cop who just leaned into the front of the radio car to grab a long-barrel flashlight, a notebook, and a fountain pen from the dashboard.
“Please. Can’t you take them off?”
Lois holds up her wrists fettered by handcuffs that are not just heavy but painfully tight, grooving her flesh. She cocks her head, looking miserable. “Come on, be a good guy.”
He slams the door and hikes away up the middle of Thirty-ninth Street, sidestepping debris and splashing through hose-water puddles.
Lois pounds her handcuffs against the steel grating that separates the front and back of the police car, then clashes them harder against the side window.
Of all the things she has to worry about (being handcuffed, being scooped, Ben’s condition, the way “Superman” stared at her and the way it made her feel), what primarily troubles Lois at the moment is this: she deliberately remained behind that locked security gate and let Willi Berg go back outside to inspect that robot-turned-cylinder.
She is appalled at herself, deeply ashamed.
Lois stayed behind the iron gate because she was scared.
Six or seven years ago, when she was still in high school, Lois went on a weekend camping trip with her father. (Her mother, as usual, didn’t accompany them; too many insects, too many sounds at night.) It was midsummer in the Adirondacks; they were hiking a rocky hillside, Lois in the lead. She felt strong, nimble, and full of health, and took a wholly conscious, unkind pleasure in the way that her father grunted and puffed and picked his way slowly along behind her.
As she found the last footholds to boost herself to the summit, she heard a clacking sound she ascribed to heat bugs. Planting the knee of one leg and swinging the other up and over the rim, she dragged herself onto the flat, sun-warmed surface of the granite rock only to discover, two feet away, a coiled rattlesnake. Its wedge-shaped head feinted and its tongue flicked. Lois froze in terror. Her mind shut down, went blank, so blank she never saw the snake slither away.
When her father arrived, she had already beaten her fists bloody against craggy rock. He had to grab her wrists to make her stop. Then it took Lois ten minutes to calm down enough to say what happened. He could understand her terror but not her anger. That just unleashed further anger. Didn’t he see? Couldn’t he get it? What was the matter with him? She was so scared that she’d, done nothing! “And just what do you think you were supposed to do?” he asked her. Go back! Run! Find a rock! No, no, no, he said. No. She’d done the right thing. Nothing was the right thing to do. Scared was good. Scared was smart. She could’ve fallen, she could’ve fallen on him! If she’d moved, the snake would have moved faster. Didn’t she get it? Scared was good. He put his arm around her shoulders, tried pulling her close but she flung herself away. “Scared is good,” he told her one last time, and let it drop.
Scared is not good! Lois thinks again now, sitting in the back of a squad car. Scared is just … scared.
And weak.
She stayed behind that iron safety gate because she was weak. Period.
And if there is one thing Lois Lane despises above everything else it is being, and being seen as, weak.
She turns to strike again at the side window with her handcuffs but sees a flying wedge of police-and fire-department officials flanking a short, rotund, furiously gesticulating man in a flapping overcoat and a black sombrero.
Lois palm-slaps the glass and the bracelets beat percussion.
Pausing in midgesture, midbellow (“And I want—”), Fiorello La Guardia glances irritably around.
Turning to one of the two police commissioners accompanying him, the mayor asks a quick question, nods at the reply. Then he says something else, and twenty seconds later Lois is sighing with relief as a key turns and her handcuffs snap open.
When the mayor says, “Good evening, Lois,” she feels an instant puerile gratitude that he called her by her first name. They’ve never spoken before, although she has attended half a dozen of his press conferences, even asked him a few questions, one of which (“Are you at all embarrassed to have sponsored Lex Luthor’s entrance into city politics?) he called “impudent.”
“Good evening, Mr. Mayor. And thank you.” She makes a big show of rubbing her chafed wrists. “At least some people know how to treat members of the press.”
“Don’t push it, Miss Lane,” he says, eyes snapping. “You were involved in a very damaging series of events here tonight, and for all we know you’re partly responsible. Are you?”
“Of course not!”
“What do you know about that infernal device? Are you smiling?”
“I’m sorry, Mayor. ‘Infernal device’?”
“That’s funny?”
“It was a robot.”
“So they tell me. What do you know about it?”
“It was in the luggage compartment of a car”—she ought to have said: a 1936 Nash-Lafayette 3-window coupe, now scrap metal, now shrapnel—“driven by the same person who shot Ben Jaeger.”
“And that’s all you know.”
“That’s it.”
Lois doesn’t deem it necessary to inform the mayor about the small obloid metal tag that Willi passed to her and that is concealed now inside the left cup of her white cotton Gamble’s brassiere. He can read about it like everybody else in tomorrow morning’s Daily Planet.
