A Man's Got to Know His Limitations
Chapter Five: An Accurate Mind Overtaxed
By LastScorpion
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed."
It's an interesting theory.
Most of the world didn't realize, really realize, that Superman was gone until five lunatics with an incomprehensible agenda blew up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Our own alien savior had been dead for three weeks, and we humans were back to mass destruction of innocent civilian targets.
What I couldn't stand were the commentators who said it was all Superman's fault. The theory went something like this: After the World Trade Center catastrophe back in '01, all sorts of intrusive, inconvenient safeguards were put into place to make sure nothing like that could ever happen again. When Superman started routinely and painlessly rescuing us from that sort of madness, the safeguards gradually went away. Then, as soon as he was gone, terrorists took their chance to wreak havoc, and there wasn't anything else set up to stop them. The pundits never said what they thought Superman should have been doing instead of saving us. Hardly any of them blamed the FAA or the airlines for letting their paranoia lapse. It made me mad.
There was no doubt that the death of Superman had irrevocably changed the world. Metropolis had nine square blocks of radioactive no-man's-land right downtown, surrounding his grave. Chicago's skyline had a gap that history would never repair. Thousands of people had their lives altered in unpredictable ways. Clark Kent quit the Planet. Lex Luthor, according to strictly off-the-record LexCorp employees, lost his mind. Perry and Jimmy, I'm sure, thought I'd lost mine as well.
Someone, a woman, had called Personnel a couple of days after Christmas and reported Clark sick. She didn't leave a name. If I'd been on my game, I would've investigated that better. How the hell did Clark Kent know a woman? His mom was dead. I tried calling his apartment, and there was no answer. I even found his parents' phone number in an old directory, but it had been disconnected. I called the Smallville Town Library and asked if Clark Kent was in town, staying with a woman. I could tell by her tone of voice that the librarian was shocked at the very idea. She informed me that Clark Kent had moved to Metropolis years ago. Of course, the bastard didn't have a cell phone, or even a pager. Nobody heard from Clark himself until the end of January. I was writing a feature about The Families Left Behind, comparing Chicago's recent tragedy with Metropolis's. There was going to be a sidebar about air safety. The phone rang, and it was Clark.
"Hi, Lois." He sounded like shit.
"Clark! My God! Are you okay? Nobody's heard from you in a month! When are you coming back in?"
"Um. I'm not. I'm sorry. I just got off the phone with Personnel."
"What do you mean, you're not? What the hell happened to you, Kent?"
"Um, I'm. I just. Well, broken ribs, and concussion, but that's nothing too unusual for a guy from Smallville...."
"Yeah, yeah, Rockwellian childhood spent falling out of trees. I get it. Why aren't you coming back?"
"I'm just. I'm -- maybe I'm not really cut out for a reporter. I've had a lot of time to think, and I was always letting you down, and Perry, and.... There's the farm, still, and I can do that, and not have anybody have to rely...."
I interrupted him again. "Clark! Not cut out for a reporter? Are you nuts? You've been a reporter for fifteen years! We're great together! What...."
He cut me off that time. "You're great alone. You know you are. All I was ever really good for was keeping you out of trouble, and you're a big girl, now. You don't need a baby-sitter."
"You're not...." I was starting to tear up. Damn the man! "It'll never be the same here without you."
I could hear that calming smile in his words. "It'll be fine. You'll be great. And if you miss me so much, you can come visit me in Smallville whenever you want. Kent Organic Farm. Ask anyone in town for directions."
"I'll do that."
"Good. Take care of yourself, Lois." He hung up before I thought to ask for his phone number. Damn! What the hell had happened to my brain?
Thus ended the longest and most civil relationship I've ever had with a man.
Speaking of short, uncivil relationships, Lex Luthor seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. No one could get any sort of an interview with anyone on the record, of course, but I was still acquainted with several of his employees, and people do talk. LexCorp was changing shape. There was a definite intelligence behind it, but the Business Section reporters were so baffled they were asking ME what was up. If we all hadn't known better, it would have looked like Lex was trying to make his company into one of those socially responsible enterprises beloved of the Global Sustainability crowd. A couple of divisions which had been so secret that nothing was known but their names were summarily shut down and their assets disposed of at scrap metal prices. Some of his key people got lured away unexpectedly into academia, too, always going to universities with impeccable ethics committees.
LexCorp's charitable wing pumped tons of cash into the rehabilitation of the Extra-Terror's Path of Destruction (name courtesy of that jerk Merle Johnson again), but Lex didn't show up at the ribbon-cuttings or press conferences. It wasn't like him to skip the kudos.
Some people, including his own staff, seemed to think he'd become unhinged by the sudden death of his greatest enemy, Superman. If that were so, though, wouldn't the LexCorp transition have been more disorganized? They were still a profitable company, and the stock didn't even fall much. Others, mainly Perry, thought that Lex was cleaning house so he could run for office in a couple of years. That made more sense to me, but shouldn't he have been taking bows right, left, and center for the re-building funds they were donating? Did he have something going on that was so much more important? If so, what? It was a puzzle.
Unfortunately, it was a puzzle that I really wasn't up to figuring out. Perry had been worried that I might get the Planet into legal trouble without Clark as a steadying influence, but he shouldn't have bothered. The crying jags that had started when I touched Superman's broken, lifeless body for the last time had just gotten worse. Most days I managed to keep my composure during working hours, but nights spent weeping tend to take some of the fire out of an investigative reporter. Perry called me into his office at the end of February. He told me that he wasn't firing me or suspending me, that my work was still in the average-to-good range, but that I'd slipped a lot, and he wanted me to take a vacation. I had strict orders not to come back until I'd used up my entire six weeks accrued time, and if I still couldn't pull myself together he was going to refer me to his ex-wife's shrink.
I was totally professional in the office. I didn't start crying until I was almost home. Then I cried at home until lunchtime two days later. Then I packed up a bunch of stuff in the back of my Honda and started driving west.
I had a nice time on the road. If there had only been more than one radio station, or if my CD player had been working, I could even say I had a great time on the road. I had an idea that I wanted to see San Francisco, and I stopped at Yellowstone National Park along the way. The geysers weren't affected by the death of Superman. The mountains were ignored by human terrorists. The pristine snowy forest didn't care that the biggest billionaire in the country was going nuts. The path I was taking hadn't been touched by the Extra-Terror. Nobody called me on the cell. I could forget about things.
I hadn't been to California since college. Berkeley hadn't changed. I lucked into a room with a view at the Radisson and settled in for an unending round of bookstores and coffee shops. To my surprise, I found that there were some guys in Bay Area bars and restaurants who would flirt with me -- it had been a long time since I'd felt attractive. I always took care of myself, and simple pride made sure that I always looked my best, but no one had looked at me just as a pretty woman since Lex, and that was only until he actually knew me. Still, it was good for the ego, and after I'd been there a week and was starting to get a little bored, I suddenly realized that I hadn't had a crying fit in four days.
I called Perry to see how things were going in Metropolis. He sounded genuinely glad to hear from me, and that was nice, too. I told him I felt fine, and he said that was great, but I couldn't come back to work for four weeks. I swore at him a little, and he laughed, and we both hung up feeling better, I think.
The space plane was hit by orbiting junk the same morning that I decided to drive to Yosemite.
Northern California was blessed with a multitude of radio stations. Some of them were "All News." I was flipping around the radio dial when I blipped past one of those, reporting on the story about the space plane. I backpedaled and tuned in, making sure to keep my eyes on the road. Apparently, Kent's constant nagging over the years had sunk in.
The radio newsmen didn't have all the details, but the story seemed to be this: The VentureStar Space Plane, on its way up to the International Space Station, plowed into the remains of some unidentified satellite just over the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. It had happened about half an hour before I tuned in. The crew had managed to scramble into their suits before the air was gone, but the space plane was damaged over so much of its exterior surface that the commentators were saying there was almost no chance of landing it safely. NASA was just about to order them to try re-entry anyway when all radio contact was lost.
I was on Highway 99 between Turlock and Atwater. It was early on a Sunday morning, and there was hardly any traffic. I pulled over and looked up. Maybe it was a ghoulish impulse, but it was comforting to think that my nose for news was finally poking up out of the sentimental quagmire I'd been wallowing in for a month. Perry would probably accept an eyewitness account of the VentureStar crash, even if I wasn't supposed to be working again 'til next month. I remembered the Columbia, which was destroyed when I was in college, and I expected to see a fiery streak across the sky.
What I saw was quite different.
The radio guys weren't looking out their windows. They kept blithering on about expert opinion this and historical record that. They didn't know that the space plane was coming straight down at a relatively sedate jet-airplane-standard speed, in complete violation of everything I ever thought I knew about physics, just off Highway 99 in Central California. I jumped back into the Honda and sped off to intercept.
Judging by the road signs I seemed to be following, the VentureStar had put down at Atwater Municipal Airport, formerly Castle Air Force Base. There hadn't been a big fireball or any sort of explosion; there was no plume of smoke. I found my way onto the tarmac (not to incriminate myself or anything, but I always made it a point to travel with bolt-cutters), and there it was. The VentureStar Aerospace Plane was sitting in the middle of a huge cold-war-era concrete runway. It was upright. The landing gear had not deployed. I could see half-a-dozen large craters, each a yard or so across, on the forward surfaces. As I watched, the passenger compartment hatch opened, and the astronauts started coming out. Even with their spacesuits on, they looked shell-shocked. I moved in quickly to get my exclusive interviews.
Astronauts are tough. The seven of them were bruised and shaken, but not seriously hurt. I used my cell to call NASA and 911 for them, and they graciously agreed to talk to me until Emergency Services showed up. Their story was unbelievable. The space plane had crashed into a trail of tiny debris at 17,500 miles per hour, three hundred miles above the Pacific. The damage had been extensive, but they were going to have to try to land it anyway. That much the radio had gotten right. What happened next was a Lois Lane exclusive. The space plane suddenly decelerated at twenty to twenty-five G until its velocity tangential to the earth was about zero. Then it headed straight down to the planet at roughly six hundred miles per hour -- not fast enough to overheat the damaged craft, but fast enough to get it down to the ground before their limited air ran out. They set down with barely a bump on the huge underused runway of the former Castle Air Force Base. Physically speaking, it was all quite impossible. Mission Specialist Karen Johnson said, "It was like the hand of God just rescued us or something."
That was my story, and I had to get it called in before anybody showed. I heard sirens in the distance, so I bid the astronauts a fond farewell and hightailed it off the runway to lurk among the old base buildings. I ran (thank God I was on vacation and not wearing heels) past a bunch of old barracks and ended up at the Castle Air Museum. I called Perry and told him the whole story. He was happy with me. I felt better than I had since December.
The museum was just opening. I decided to pay my $10 and look inconspicuous for a while. Maybe more information would turn up. Besides, I like old planes.
I wandered out among the vintage aircraft. There were nice paths and benches scattered around among the planes. I was surprised to see someone out there already; I was sure I'd been the first paying customer of the day, but there was a dark-haired man lolling on a bench in the chilly sunlight. He looked familiar, and my heart lurched.
"Clark Kent!" I shouted.
The man gave a guilty start and stared at me like a deer in the headlights. He didn't get up, though, and I went over and sat down next to him.
"Lois," Clark faltered, "what are you doing here?"
"Never you mind what I'm doing here. What the hell are you doing here?"
Clark took a heavy breath. He looked terrible. His plaid flannel shirt was open, and his (kind of impressive) chest was all bruised. "Contemplating the SR-71 Blackbird," he said.
I was irate. "What?!"
He took another deep breath and coughed a little. Then he went on. "It was the fastest plane in the world, but it was top secret. For years, the record books had the wrong information about the fastest flight, and the pilot who really had gone the fastest couldn't say anything about it. By the time anyone could tell the truth, it wasn't the fastest anymore."
He really did look terrible, and he was rambling. I gentled down some and tried again. "Clark. What are you doing here?"
He blinked at me for a moment before he answered. He didn't have his glasses on, and his eyes looked bluer than they usually did. "Sitting in the sun for a while before I try to get home again. Can I borrow your cell phone? I'll pay you back for the call."
"Knock yourself out, Smallville. Unlimited weekend minutes."
He thanked me and tried to dial, but his hands were shaking, and he couldn't. I ended up dialing the number he told me. A man answered before the first ring was finished.
"Lex Luthor. Clark, is that you?"
"Hi, Lex," I purred. Knowledge was humming in my blood like wine, and it made me indulgent. I handed the phone to Clark without bothering to give Lex a hard time.
"Hi, Lex. I'm fine; the astronauts are fine. Nobody saw me. Well, except, yeah, Lois is here. No. What's done is done, Lex. See you later." Clark gave me back my phone, but Lex had already hung up.
"So," I gloated. "You're Superman."
"Superman's dead, Lois. Nobody's Superman anymore."
"Why the hell didn't you ever tell me? You jerk!" I whapped him on the shoulder, and he winced.
"Ow," he complained. "Leave me alone, Lois."
"As if," I scoffed. "So this whole Death of Superman thing -- was it all a big scam? And why the hell didn't you do anything about the Sears Tower last month?"
He looked at me with big wounded eyes and then leaned his head in his hands. "I tried. I tried to get to Chicago. I crashed before I even got off the property. Lex says I didn't wake up for two days." He lifted his head and looked at me again, and there were tears in his eyes. "I tried, Lois."
My heart went out to him, which is not a thing that happens much. I knew then that it had been no scam. "It's okay, Clark." I rubbed the shoulder I'd just hit, as gently as I could. "I'm sure you tried your best."
He looked so grateful that I was almost ashamed of myself. "What's up with you and Lex Luthor, anyway?"
"He was my best friend, you know, back in Smallville."
"I've seen the Smallville Ledger stories about how you saved his life, but that was years ago. What's up with you two now?"
"He had his goons dig up my, um, body after that thing, um...."
He didn't want to say it any more than I wanted to hear it, so I interrupted him. "I was there, remember, Smallville? But Luthor wasn't."
"Yeah. Well, when he got a good look at me, in his, uh, lab, he realized who I was. And that I wasn't really dead." Clark smiled bashfully. "I guess, overall, I was more his friend than his enemy. Anyway, he helped me -- took care of me, until I was better." He looked up at me with hopeful eyes. "I think he's changed."
I snorted at him. "People always think men have changed. I myself have sometimes thought Lex Luthor had changed."
Clark's smile at that was just blinding. "You two would have had beautiful kids."
That left me speechless for a minute. "Shit, Clark," I sputtered, "where the hell do you come up with these things?" The bastard had the nerve to laugh at me, which made him cough, and it served him right. I thumped him on the back a little, and then I asked, "How are you getting back to Kansas?"
He sighed. "Well, I guess I'm going to try to fly back. Maybe I'll wait until dark. The more sun I get before I try to take off the better."
"No offense, but you look like shit. There's no way you'll be able to make it."
"You've always had such faith in me, Lois," Clark said sarcastically. He snorted and shook his head. "I'll be fine."
"Hey," I ventured. "I'm out here because Perry made me take all my vacation time. I've got my car. I could -- you up for a road trip, Smallville? I could give you a lift; you could tell me all the stuff you've been keeping from me for the last fifteen years."
He thought for a minute, then smiled. "I did say you were welcome to visit any time. You'll enjoy springtime in Smallville, I think. Thanks."
Damn, I felt cheerful. I sprang to my feet. "Let's go, then, Clark. The open road awaits."
"Great," Clark said. He struggled for a moment, then gave me that dorky, mild-mannered, helpless look. "Help me up?"
Author's Note: There's a chapter 4.5 that didn't really work out too well, but it's sort of funny. If anybody really wants to see it, say so in the "Reviews," and we'll work something out. Maybe I can post it as an epilogue.
Chapter Five: An Accurate Mind Overtaxed
By LastScorpion
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtaxed."
It's an interesting theory.
Most of the world didn't realize, really realize, that Superman was gone until five lunatics with an incomprehensible agenda blew up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Our own alien savior had been dead for three weeks, and we humans were back to mass destruction of innocent civilian targets.
What I couldn't stand were the commentators who said it was all Superman's fault. The theory went something like this: After the World Trade Center catastrophe back in '01, all sorts of intrusive, inconvenient safeguards were put into place to make sure nothing like that could ever happen again. When Superman started routinely and painlessly rescuing us from that sort of madness, the safeguards gradually went away. Then, as soon as he was gone, terrorists took their chance to wreak havoc, and there wasn't anything else set up to stop them. The pundits never said what they thought Superman should have been doing instead of saving us. Hardly any of them blamed the FAA or the airlines for letting their paranoia lapse. It made me mad.
There was no doubt that the death of Superman had irrevocably changed the world. Metropolis had nine square blocks of radioactive no-man's-land right downtown, surrounding his grave. Chicago's skyline had a gap that history would never repair. Thousands of people had their lives altered in unpredictable ways. Clark Kent quit the Planet. Lex Luthor, according to strictly off-the-record LexCorp employees, lost his mind. Perry and Jimmy, I'm sure, thought I'd lost mine as well.
Someone, a woman, had called Personnel a couple of days after Christmas and reported Clark sick. She didn't leave a name. If I'd been on my game, I would've investigated that better. How the hell did Clark Kent know a woman? His mom was dead. I tried calling his apartment, and there was no answer. I even found his parents' phone number in an old directory, but it had been disconnected. I called the Smallville Town Library and asked if Clark Kent was in town, staying with a woman. I could tell by her tone of voice that the librarian was shocked at the very idea. She informed me that Clark Kent had moved to Metropolis years ago. Of course, the bastard didn't have a cell phone, or even a pager. Nobody heard from Clark himself until the end of January. I was writing a feature about The Families Left Behind, comparing Chicago's recent tragedy with Metropolis's. There was going to be a sidebar about air safety. The phone rang, and it was Clark.
"Hi, Lois." He sounded like shit.
"Clark! My God! Are you okay? Nobody's heard from you in a month! When are you coming back in?"
"Um. I'm not. I'm sorry. I just got off the phone with Personnel."
"What do you mean, you're not? What the hell happened to you, Kent?"
"Um, I'm. I just. Well, broken ribs, and concussion, but that's nothing too unusual for a guy from Smallville...."
"Yeah, yeah, Rockwellian childhood spent falling out of trees. I get it. Why aren't you coming back?"
"I'm just. I'm -- maybe I'm not really cut out for a reporter. I've had a lot of time to think, and I was always letting you down, and Perry, and.... There's the farm, still, and I can do that, and not have anybody have to rely...."
I interrupted him again. "Clark! Not cut out for a reporter? Are you nuts? You've been a reporter for fifteen years! We're great together! What...."
He cut me off that time. "You're great alone. You know you are. All I was ever really good for was keeping you out of trouble, and you're a big girl, now. You don't need a baby-sitter."
"You're not...." I was starting to tear up. Damn the man! "It'll never be the same here without you."
I could hear that calming smile in his words. "It'll be fine. You'll be great. And if you miss me so much, you can come visit me in Smallville whenever you want. Kent Organic Farm. Ask anyone in town for directions."
"I'll do that."
"Good. Take care of yourself, Lois." He hung up before I thought to ask for his phone number. Damn! What the hell had happened to my brain?
Thus ended the longest and most civil relationship I've ever had with a man.
Speaking of short, uncivil relationships, Lex Luthor seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth. No one could get any sort of an interview with anyone on the record, of course, but I was still acquainted with several of his employees, and people do talk. LexCorp was changing shape. There was a definite intelligence behind it, but the Business Section reporters were so baffled they were asking ME what was up. If we all hadn't known better, it would have looked like Lex was trying to make his company into one of those socially responsible enterprises beloved of the Global Sustainability crowd. A couple of divisions which had been so secret that nothing was known but their names were summarily shut down and their assets disposed of at scrap metal prices. Some of his key people got lured away unexpectedly into academia, too, always going to universities with impeccable ethics committees.
LexCorp's charitable wing pumped tons of cash into the rehabilitation of the Extra-Terror's Path of Destruction (name courtesy of that jerk Merle Johnson again), but Lex didn't show up at the ribbon-cuttings or press conferences. It wasn't like him to skip the kudos.
Some people, including his own staff, seemed to think he'd become unhinged by the sudden death of his greatest enemy, Superman. If that were so, though, wouldn't the LexCorp transition have been more disorganized? They were still a profitable company, and the stock didn't even fall much. Others, mainly Perry, thought that Lex was cleaning house so he could run for office in a couple of years. That made more sense to me, but shouldn't he have been taking bows right, left, and center for the re-building funds they were donating? Did he have something going on that was so much more important? If so, what? It was a puzzle.
Unfortunately, it was a puzzle that I really wasn't up to figuring out. Perry had been worried that I might get the Planet into legal trouble without Clark as a steadying influence, but he shouldn't have bothered. The crying jags that had started when I touched Superman's broken, lifeless body for the last time had just gotten worse. Most days I managed to keep my composure during working hours, but nights spent weeping tend to take some of the fire out of an investigative reporter. Perry called me into his office at the end of February. He told me that he wasn't firing me or suspending me, that my work was still in the average-to-good range, but that I'd slipped a lot, and he wanted me to take a vacation. I had strict orders not to come back until I'd used up my entire six weeks accrued time, and if I still couldn't pull myself together he was going to refer me to his ex-wife's shrink.
I was totally professional in the office. I didn't start crying until I was almost home. Then I cried at home until lunchtime two days later. Then I packed up a bunch of stuff in the back of my Honda and started driving west.
I had a nice time on the road. If there had only been more than one radio station, or if my CD player had been working, I could even say I had a great time on the road. I had an idea that I wanted to see San Francisco, and I stopped at Yellowstone National Park along the way. The geysers weren't affected by the death of Superman. The mountains were ignored by human terrorists. The pristine snowy forest didn't care that the biggest billionaire in the country was going nuts. The path I was taking hadn't been touched by the Extra-Terror. Nobody called me on the cell. I could forget about things.
I hadn't been to California since college. Berkeley hadn't changed. I lucked into a room with a view at the Radisson and settled in for an unending round of bookstores and coffee shops. To my surprise, I found that there were some guys in Bay Area bars and restaurants who would flirt with me -- it had been a long time since I'd felt attractive. I always took care of myself, and simple pride made sure that I always looked my best, but no one had looked at me just as a pretty woman since Lex, and that was only until he actually knew me. Still, it was good for the ego, and after I'd been there a week and was starting to get a little bored, I suddenly realized that I hadn't had a crying fit in four days.
I called Perry to see how things were going in Metropolis. He sounded genuinely glad to hear from me, and that was nice, too. I told him I felt fine, and he said that was great, but I couldn't come back to work for four weeks. I swore at him a little, and he laughed, and we both hung up feeling better, I think.
The space plane was hit by orbiting junk the same morning that I decided to drive to Yosemite.
Northern California was blessed with a multitude of radio stations. Some of them were "All News." I was flipping around the radio dial when I blipped past one of those, reporting on the story about the space plane. I backpedaled and tuned in, making sure to keep my eyes on the road. Apparently, Kent's constant nagging over the years had sunk in.
The radio newsmen didn't have all the details, but the story seemed to be this: The VentureStar Space Plane, on its way up to the International Space Station, plowed into the remains of some unidentified satellite just over the western edge of the Pacific Ocean. It had happened about half an hour before I tuned in. The crew had managed to scramble into their suits before the air was gone, but the space plane was damaged over so much of its exterior surface that the commentators were saying there was almost no chance of landing it safely. NASA was just about to order them to try re-entry anyway when all radio contact was lost.
I was on Highway 99 between Turlock and Atwater. It was early on a Sunday morning, and there was hardly any traffic. I pulled over and looked up. Maybe it was a ghoulish impulse, but it was comforting to think that my nose for news was finally poking up out of the sentimental quagmire I'd been wallowing in for a month. Perry would probably accept an eyewitness account of the VentureStar crash, even if I wasn't supposed to be working again 'til next month. I remembered the Columbia, which was destroyed when I was in college, and I expected to see a fiery streak across the sky.
What I saw was quite different.
The radio guys weren't looking out their windows. They kept blithering on about expert opinion this and historical record that. They didn't know that the space plane was coming straight down at a relatively sedate jet-airplane-standard speed, in complete violation of everything I ever thought I knew about physics, just off Highway 99 in Central California. I jumped back into the Honda and sped off to intercept.
Judging by the road signs I seemed to be following, the VentureStar had put down at Atwater Municipal Airport, formerly Castle Air Force Base. There hadn't been a big fireball or any sort of explosion; there was no plume of smoke. I found my way onto the tarmac (not to incriminate myself or anything, but I always made it a point to travel with bolt-cutters), and there it was. The VentureStar Aerospace Plane was sitting in the middle of a huge cold-war-era concrete runway. It was upright. The landing gear had not deployed. I could see half-a-dozen large craters, each a yard or so across, on the forward surfaces. As I watched, the passenger compartment hatch opened, and the astronauts started coming out. Even with their spacesuits on, they looked shell-shocked. I moved in quickly to get my exclusive interviews.
Astronauts are tough. The seven of them were bruised and shaken, but not seriously hurt. I used my cell to call NASA and 911 for them, and they graciously agreed to talk to me until Emergency Services showed up. Their story was unbelievable. The space plane had crashed into a trail of tiny debris at 17,500 miles per hour, three hundred miles above the Pacific. The damage had been extensive, but they were going to have to try to land it anyway. That much the radio had gotten right. What happened next was a Lois Lane exclusive. The space plane suddenly decelerated at twenty to twenty-five G until its velocity tangential to the earth was about zero. Then it headed straight down to the planet at roughly six hundred miles per hour -- not fast enough to overheat the damaged craft, but fast enough to get it down to the ground before their limited air ran out. They set down with barely a bump on the huge underused runway of the former Castle Air Force Base. Physically speaking, it was all quite impossible. Mission Specialist Karen Johnson said, "It was like the hand of God just rescued us or something."
That was my story, and I had to get it called in before anybody showed. I heard sirens in the distance, so I bid the astronauts a fond farewell and hightailed it off the runway to lurk among the old base buildings. I ran (thank God I was on vacation and not wearing heels) past a bunch of old barracks and ended up at the Castle Air Museum. I called Perry and told him the whole story. He was happy with me. I felt better than I had since December.
The museum was just opening. I decided to pay my $10 and look inconspicuous for a while. Maybe more information would turn up. Besides, I like old planes.
I wandered out among the vintage aircraft. There were nice paths and benches scattered around among the planes. I was surprised to see someone out there already; I was sure I'd been the first paying customer of the day, but there was a dark-haired man lolling on a bench in the chilly sunlight. He looked familiar, and my heart lurched.
"Clark Kent!" I shouted.
The man gave a guilty start and stared at me like a deer in the headlights. He didn't get up, though, and I went over and sat down next to him.
"Lois," Clark faltered, "what are you doing here?"
"Never you mind what I'm doing here. What the hell are you doing here?"
Clark took a heavy breath. He looked terrible. His plaid flannel shirt was open, and his (kind of impressive) chest was all bruised. "Contemplating the SR-71 Blackbird," he said.
I was irate. "What?!"
He took another deep breath and coughed a little. Then he went on. "It was the fastest plane in the world, but it was top secret. For years, the record books had the wrong information about the fastest flight, and the pilot who really had gone the fastest couldn't say anything about it. By the time anyone could tell the truth, it wasn't the fastest anymore."
He really did look terrible, and he was rambling. I gentled down some and tried again. "Clark. What are you doing here?"
He blinked at me for a moment before he answered. He didn't have his glasses on, and his eyes looked bluer than they usually did. "Sitting in the sun for a while before I try to get home again. Can I borrow your cell phone? I'll pay you back for the call."
"Knock yourself out, Smallville. Unlimited weekend minutes."
He thanked me and tried to dial, but his hands were shaking, and he couldn't. I ended up dialing the number he told me. A man answered before the first ring was finished.
"Lex Luthor. Clark, is that you?"
"Hi, Lex," I purred. Knowledge was humming in my blood like wine, and it made me indulgent. I handed the phone to Clark without bothering to give Lex a hard time.
"Hi, Lex. I'm fine; the astronauts are fine. Nobody saw me. Well, except, yeah, Lois is here. No. What's done is done, Lex. See you later." Clark gave me back my phone, but Lex had already hung up.
"So," I gloated. "You're Superman."
"Superman's dead, Lois. Nobody's Superman anymore."
"Why the hell didn't you ever tell me? You jerk!" I whapped him on the shoulder, and he winced.
"Ow," he complained. "Leave me alone, Lois."
"As if," I scoffed. "So this whole Death of Superman thing -- was it all a big scam? And why the hell didn't you do anything about the Sears Tower last month?"
He looked at me with big wounded eyes and then leaned his head in his hands. "I tried. I tried to get to Chicago. I crashed before I even got off the property. Lex says I didn't wake up for two days." He lifted his head and looked at me again, and there were tears in his eyes. "I tried, Lois."
My heart went out to him, which is not a thing that happens much. I knew then that it had been no scam. "It's okay, Clark." I rubbed the shoulder I'd just hit, as gently as I could. "I'm sure you tried your best."
He looked so grateful that I was almost ashamed of myself. "What's up with you and Lex Luthor, anyway?"
"He was my best friend, you know, back in Smallville."
"I've seen the Smallville Ledger stories about how you saved his life, but that was years ago. What's up with you two now?"
"He had his goons dig up my, um, body after that thing, um...."
He didn't want to say it any more than I wanted to hear it, so I interrupted him. "I was there, remember, Smallville? But Luthor wasn't."
"Yeah. Well, when he got a good look at me, in his, uh, lab, he realized who I was. And that I wasn't really dead." Clark smiled bashfully. "I guess, overall, I was more his friend than his enemy. Anyway, he helped me -- took care of me, until I was better." He looked up at me with hopeful eyes. "I think he's changed."
I snorted at him. "People always think men have changed. I myself have sometimes thought Lex Luthor had changed."
Clark's smile at that was just blinding. "You two would have had beautiful kids."
That left me speechless for a minute. "Shit, Clark," I sputtered, "where the hell do you come up with these things?" The bastard had the nerve to laugh at me, which made him cough, and it served him right. I thumped him on the back a little, and then I asked, "How are you getting back to Kansas?"
He sighed. "Well, I guess I'm going to try to fly back. Maybe I'll wait until dark. The more sun I get before I try to take off the better."
"No offense, but you look like shit. There's no way you'll be able to make it."
"You've always had such faith in me, Lois," Clark said sarcastically. He snorted and shook his head. "I'll be fine."
"Hey," I ventured. "I'm out here because Perry made me take all my vacation time. I've got my car. I could -- you up for a road trip, Smallville? I could give you a lift; you could tell me all the stuff you've been keeping from me for the last fifteen years."
He thought for a minute, then smiled. "I did say you were welcome to visit any time. You'll enjoy springtime in Smallville, I think. Thanks."
Damn, I felt cheerful. I sprang to my feet. "Let's go, then, Clark. The open road awaits."
"Great," Clark said. He struggled for a moment, then gave me that dorky, mild-mannered, helpless look. "Help me up?"
Author's Note: There's a chapter 4.5 that didn't really work out too well, but it's sort of funny. If anybody really wants to see it, say so in the "Reviews," and we'll work something out. Maybe I can post it as an epilogue.
