"Finally!" Chloe exclaimed when Clark drifted into school a few minutes late. She shouldered her bag, keys already in her hand. "Let's go!"

"Huh?" Clark asked.

Chloe circled him restlessly. "We need to go to Metropolis today. Now, in fact!"

"Why?"

"I'll explain in the car!" Chloe exploded.

Clark noticed her eyes looked suspiciously bright. Something was wrong. "What's wrong?" he asked.

"Aargh!" She actually let out a little scream of frustration, but she also stood still and started to explain. Clark felt vindicated.

"My dad caught me sneaking back in this morning! I'm grounded! Can't go anywhere but school! That's why we need to hurry!"

"To Metropolis?"

"Yes! I've been researching links between Lionel Luthor and Morgan Edge. All the computer records will tell me is that they were both born in Suicide Slum, two years apart. Everything else has been -- it looks like it's all been tampered with! I can't even find out where Edge went to school! Or if he ever did! And Mr. Luthor's records are uniformly too perfect to be true!"

"That fits right in with what Lex said about your dad's Performance Evaluations, at the plant."

"Yes!"

"But why do we need to go to Metropolis?"

"Oh! I so don't have time for this! We need to get there and find what we need and return before Dad thinks I should be back from school!"

"Won't you get in even more trouble for cutting school?"

"This is important, Clark! This is Lana's life! And it's news! And it's our only chance of protecting ourselves from Lionel Luthor! It doesn't matter if I get in trouble!"

"I still don't understand why we have to go to Metropolis."

Chloe dodged around Clark's bulk and headed for the front door. Clark stopped her very, very gently. "Chloe, please." He used his best puppy-expression on her. "Just explain it to me?"

"Fine." Chloe heaved a big sigh and dragged Clark into the Torch office. She carefully closed the door behind them.

"In 1970 Metropolis became one of the first cities in the U.S. to completely digitize all its public records. Ever since then, everything's been kept on computer, available by printout at City Hall, or these days over the web."

Clark nodded. "Everybody knows that."

"What everybody doesn't know," Chloe continued, rolling her eyes at him, "is that the Metropolis City Registrar from 1969 through 1994, Carl Kearns, didn't believe in ever throwing anything away. The city allotted money to destroy the old paper records once they'd been transferred over, but Kearns never spent it. Eventually it got folded back into the City General Fund. The old files are all still there, in the sub-basement of the Hall of Records."

"How do you know all this arcane Metropolis history?"

"I'm an arcane Metropolis girl!" she sniped, but then she smiled and took the sting out. "Seriously, Clark, I spent the last two summers working at the Daily Planet, while you were down on the farm picking corn. You know me. I found out all I could. The place is huge, cavernous really, and in no particular order, but it's pretty much our only hope. If Lionel Luthor and Morgan Edge were crime-buddies before 1970, and if they only got around to record-cleanup after the big computerization, and if they never bothered with the old leftover paperwork, we might find something. I know it's a long-shot...."

"No! I think it's a good plan! Really!" Clark knew the look that got him. That was the Clark-You're-Dumb-Maybe-This-Isn't-a-Good-Plan look. He charged ahead anyhow. "But if we leave now, and miss the whole day, you'll get in more trouble with your dad...."

"It's a three-hour drive to Metropolis!" Chloe interrupted. "Even if we go right away, and come back as fast as we can, we'll still have barely any time to search!"

Clark continued unperturbed. "Remember last night? I'm fast. Here's what we'll do...."

Chloe cut him off again. "How fast?" she demanded.

"Very fast," Clark assured her. At her dubious look, he elaborated. "Five minutes to Metropolis, maybe less. And I can carry you easily." Wow. He'd surprised Chloe into wide-eyed silence. Cool. He hurried to take advantage of it. "So here's what I think the plan should be. You go to Home Room. I go to Home Room. We're both late, but I'm always late so it doesn't matter, and your eyes are all red. If you just look real upset and stuff, they probably won't bother you much. You turn in your assignments, and go to First Period, and then in about forty minutes you look even more upset and go to the restroom. I'll meet you outside the door...."

"What are you doing while I'm looking upset and teary?" Chloe asked indignantly.

"Moping," Clark replied promptly. "Moping in Home Room for five minutes with my head down, then saying I have a stomach ache and asking Mrs. Merck if I can call my mom and go lie down. She'll let me because I'm useless when I'm moping, and I ran away last summer, and my test scores are always good. After a while I'll just disappear from the office couch, and they'll think Mom came and got me. The story that we're pretending to be hiding can be that you and I had a big fight -- maybe even a bad breakup. That fits in with you being caught sneaking in this morning, too. It's our lie-behind-the-lie."

"This is awfully intricate," Chloe said dubiously.

"Not really. I'll meet you at the Girls' Room door, and run you to Metropolis. We'll find the information."

Just then, Chloe's cell phone rang.

"Darn!" Chloe ejaculated, after a short conversation. "I have to go pick Lana up from the hospital at lunch."

"Actually, that works great. You show me what to look for in Metropolis, and then I'll run you back. Go to class, or hang out here, or whatever, but make sure lots of people see you head over to Smallville Med to get her at noontime. You'll have tons of witness that you were at school today."

"You're smarter than you look! No offense."

Clark laughed. "It totally comes and goes. Some things are really easy, and some things are really, really hard."

"'Cause you're an alien. Jeez," Chloe whispered. She looked like it might finally be really hitting her. What with getting caught out by Gabe last night, and worrying about Lana, and this morning's Luthor-Metropolis panic, his big revelation might not have had time to soak in for Chloe yet.

He didn't want to watch it happen.

"Go on," he said, giving her a tiny, gentle shove. "Go to class. Look upset. I'll meet you outside the bathroom in this building in forty minutes!"

Being picked up by a big, good-looking guy was new and weird enough -- Chloe felt like the heroine of one of Lana's stupid romance novels. Then Clark took off, and it was like nothing on Earth. Literally, she realized with a tiny shiver. Nothing on Earth.

Five minutes isn't long to travel a hundred and fifty miles, but it's plenty of time to think when the wind keeps your eyes tight shut, and you have nothing to do with your hands but hold on. It hadn't sunk in before. Clark Kent, Chloe's sidekick and sometimes-crush since eighth grade, had been born on another planet. He wasn't even as close to her, biologically, as a cat or a dog. He didn't know what he was doing here, but he said Dr. Swann thought all the rest of his people were dead. That was another spooky thought.

Lex and Clark together -- that was kind of spooky, too. She supposed she should have seen it before, but Clark was always such a goddam mystery ('cause he's NOT FROM THIS PLANET) and Lex always had that smooth, smooth shell, at least before the medically-incorrect Electro-Convulsive Therapy. God, Lionel Luthor did that to his own son, to cover up some crime. She couldn't let Lana just marry the guy, not when she knew how incredibly evil he was. They had to find a weapon to use against him. They just had to.

All the whooshing suddenly stopped. "We're here," Clark said, setting her on her feet.

Chloe recognized the place -- they were in an underground parking area behind the Metropolis City Hall. No one was around.

She knew her way from here. "Come on, I'll show you the way and introduce you to the check-in guy. Do you have money for the copy machines?"

"Um." Clark looked embarrassed.

Chloe gave him twenty bucks and grabbed his arm. "C'mon," she repeated, "let's get this show on the road. I want to make sure you know what you're doing before you take me back to pick up Lana."

Clark in Metropolis moved like a smaller, shyer guy. Chloe supposed he was remembering the stuff he'd done over the summer. She was sure she hadn't heard about all of it, but she'd heard enough. If it had been her, she'd be cringing too.

There was no problem getting into the archives. They were even more of a mess than she remembered. Since the city had no official interest in them anymore, and maintained them in an unheated, un-air-conditioned, otherwise useless basement room, people (mainly historians, reporters, and novelists) could rummage through them unsupervised. Some of them were apparently slobs.

"Okay. This is the place. We're looking for anything about Lionel Luthor, Morgan Edge...."

"Lachlan Luthor, explosions and/or fires in Suicide Slum, arson in general...."

"Whoa, Clark. Don't cast too wide a net, here. We've got to be quick and move on; there isn't time to look for absolutely everything."

"How 'bout I do Lachlan Luthor first?"

"Huh?" Chloe asked, but there was already a whirlwind going on. Papers were flying, but not randomly. Clark was literally going too fast to see, but the effects of his actions were visible in the fluttering, and the noise was like a windstorm, punctuated by the slams of file drawers. Less than five minutes later, he was back at her side, with a stack of papers. The room looked a lot neater, too.

"Here," he said, handing them to her. "It's everything with that name on it."

"Wow." Chloe stared at him, feeling a little stunned. C'mon, Chloe, it's the same old Clark. He's always been an alien; you just didn't know it before.

He was still looking at her, expectant and a little worried now.

Suddenly Chloe laughed. "Actually, this is very cool, Clark. You know what? With the way you spun that yarn last night, and the light-speed-human-search-engine thing you can do? You would make a hell of a reporter."

Clark blinked at her. "I always thought that the lunch menus were more my speed, and I'm not exactly a human search engine," he mumbled.

She grinned at him. "Work with me, Kent. I'll have you winning Pulitzers in no time." He stopped looking worried and grinned back. Everything was going to be okay. Still the same old Clark. "Come with me; I'll show you the copy room. We're not allowed to take anything out of the building...."

"We might want to hide what we find in here, then," Clark interrupted. "Is there anyplace?"

"That radiator doesn't work. Can you...." She was talking to empty air, and then Clark was back in a flash.

"Plenty of room. There's no water in it anymore; I can bend it a little if I have to, and put stuff down behind."

"Great! We don't want anybody Lionel might set after us to find anything we find."

In the copy room, Chloe showed Clark how to work the machines, and they copied all he'd found. "I'll search out whatever seems reasonable, and bring the copies to you this evening," Clark proposed.

"Since I'm still grounded, I guess that's how it'll have to be. If I think of something better, I'll call you." They stashed Lachlan's records, and Clark ran Chloe back to school.