No Arguing With Logic
On the bottom of the complex, on the outer edge of the southern spoke, in a section marked "training" on the map, Baron John maintained a comfortable living area with a great many communications devices, both extant and concealed. Anyone who had made it past the entry security measures at Special Operations was welcome to come see the boss any time. In practice, it was a desperate situation or a direct command that brought anyone to his door.
Right now, it was both of them that had Cyrus tentatively approaching the low voices coming from within.
"Come in, William," said a deep voice with an odd timbre before he reached the door.
Bill poked his head around the door. Wynter was already there, along with the man (well, Martian) who had spoken. "Thanks, J'onn. I wasn't sure if I should knock."
The large green humanoid with deep crimson eyes smiled. "You know yourself that your talent is better than that, and getting stronger and more controlled every day. You should not be surprised, however, that Kal-El is a case difficult enough to test your limits. He may well be the most powerful person on Earth already, and he is still growing."
"No kidding." Cyrus glanced at John for permission, picked up the emotion without any physical indication at all, and flopped into a chair. "He's -- well, I knew he wasn't human the first time I touched him, and that was when he was going out of his way to try to pretend. But now -- J'onn, what did that damn spaceship DO to him? He's being eaten alive inside."
Wynter looked up from the screen he was racing through. "Some kind of implanted post-hypnotic command, augmented by a forced attempt at brain reorganization. It didn't hit any of us that hard to experience it because the input was specifically geared to Kryptonian bio-molecular structure and transmission capability. What his damnfool progenitors didn't count on was the cellular alterations he'd be subjected to in a different planetary and solar environment. The AI's attack on his psychological and physiological configurations, and I'd give a lot to know if it were telepathy or plain energy or nanotech or all three, is literally at war with the neurological patterns laid down through experience and chemical substructure."
Only Wynter, thought Bill, would say damnfool progenitors. "If I understood five words of what you just said, I might even be able to agree with you."
Wynter sighed. "He's been breathing Earth air, eating Earth food, living under Earth's sun, for a dozen years. He's not pure Kryptonian. The computer feed directly into his brain was geared for a pure Kryptonian. If he weren't so tough, it would have killed him."
"Not to mention the nurturing element," the Martian added quietly. "He's been raised to think of himself as human. An extraordinary human, to be sure, but of this planet, part of it. To find oneself suddenly become 'other' is to make one doubt all that has come before, but at the same time, it does not change the fact of all that has come before." J'onn shrugged. "I was full grown, well trained, and the veteran of a planet-wide war before I was stranded here. And still I find myself wondering, sometimes, if I have lost not only my family, but my racial heritage, by learning to fit in as a human." To prove a point, J'onn seemed to melt and change shape, until he was indistinguishable from a normal human. From Baron John, in fact.
The Baron snorted without humor. "Very good, Manhunter. You are welcome to my job for a week. What about the voice in his head?"
"You are familiar with phantom pain."
"Actually, I'm not, since I regenerate so easily. But yes, we know the concept."
"A very strong impression was forced upon his mind, against his will. You know something of the extent of it. It burned pathways into his brain that a child raised on Earth will never be able to make full use of and have a difficult time handling at all. His action in destroying the spaceship was -- heroic, but futile. The damage had already been done."
"I don't agree that it was futile. Who knows what else it might have done?"
"We never will, will we?" J'onn / John shifted into a more neutral appearance, with a glance at Bill, and a slight, amused, calculating look.
"Don't you dare!" the empath warned. "Sir."
"Ah, you see, your talent is indeed strong enough to read past a Manhunter telepath's block. Quite impressive." Bill glared at him, knowing full well that J'onn knew that Bill had read the intention purely off the Martian's deliberately expressive face. Being teased by an alien was even less fun than being teased by Wynter.
"Kal-El still hears the voice impressed upon him because of the new pathways," J'onn went on seriously. "Clark, technically, does not, because Clark, whose only experiences are of Earth, is of no interest to the Kryptonian mechanism. That the child who was raised here, and the child who would have been the hope of Krypton to reestablish their culture on another planet, share the same physical brain, does not mean they are the same person."
"Multiple personality disorder? He shifts back and forth with this phantom pain?"
"William, until you've finished your training, refrain from making pop-psychology guesses," John said mildly. "You notice that Wynter knows better." To the Martian: "You indicated that you had neutralized the so-called voice."
"I rechanneled the patterns that had caused the most damage, yes. It would have been more difficult had he not already been so badly poisoned. His resistance is still formidable."
"As proven by the fact that he's still alive," John agreed dryly.
Wynter glanced up from his screens again. "J'onn, can you link me to Clark?"
"Not without him knowing that you're there. Too much personality conflict."
"Blast. I would really like to get a direct feel for which part of his brain is doing what." Wynter frowned. "Bill, can you give me an idea of what you're getting?"
Bill laughed shortly. "Wynter, I can barely read you either. Try Randal."
"Randal's not a healer. Damn, damn, damn. I can't get a single decent scan past that energy aura of his. And Dylana and Nicole are both gone. John," Wynter rubbed his eyes, "I can't promise you that the hope of both Krypton and Earth isn't stone cold crazy. We might be able to stop him if he tries to suicide -- but it might not be worth the effort."
John contemplated that, the Baron impassive under the anxious eyes of a powerful amateur empath healer and a child whose IQ couldn't be measured, and the brooding red orbs of an ancient telepath from an extinct race of another planet. Finally he lifted his own eyes, unreadable even to the formidable powers of those around him. "We'll do whatever we can."
The common room had a huge flat-screen TV that gave Clark a headache to watch, since he kept focusing on the pixels instead of the whole picture. There was a lesson in there somewhere, he was grumpily sure, but since he had never had much interest in TV anyway, he took to reading while listening to the other conversations around him and letting the TV chatter play in the background, as a form of practice in splitting his concentration. Everyone here seemed to be better at it than he was, including the people who did a certain amount of cleaning up around the complex for the scientists who were particularly bad about it.
(They were "special," too, Clark figured out pretty quickly, in the socially-accepted sense of the word. He was still mortified at himself for almost snapping at Angela when she asked if there were anything she could do to help him. He had caught himself in time -- recognizing the simple bright eyes of a permanent child in the older woman's smiling face, and then gently thanked her, and asked her to show him where the laundry room was, although he already knew -- but the damage to his own conscience was already done.)
He wandered in after dinner (Nicole had been right about the garlic) and another bout of tests (he would rather have a mechanical shark in his bunk than face philosophy 101 again) and selected a book from the light comedy section, not knowing that Tim Dorsey had been labeled "light comedy" as a particularly nasty joke on the unwary (Dorsey, like Hiaasen, was considered hilarious only by people who thought hurricanes were fairly amusing, too).
The tube (stupid slang for a device that hadn't used vacuum tubes in decades, Kal-El commented acerbically) was on CNN, self-important talking heads competing with screen crawls that Clark read mostly by glancing strobe-fast at it every ten seconds. No one seemed bothered by his particular method of mixed reading styles, so he didn't bother to change it. The picture itself rarely contained anything of interest, much less information.
Until he caught, in one of those quick glimpses, an image that he knew far too well.
"Lex!" Clark shot to his feet, drawing the attention of everyone in the room.
The talking heads' tedious words and awful pictures faded in and out on him. Plane lost ... wreckage discovered ... no sign of survivors....
"No!" He turned to run, and found his way blocked by half the people in the room. How had they moved so fast? "Sorry, excuse me. I have to go."
"That's not a very good idea, Kal-El," one man said softly. Clark didn't recognize him, but for the very short man to have the nerve to stand in front of him, opposing him, knowing who Kal-El was and what he could do, he must have been a Special. "Everything that can be done is being done. You'd only cause yourself more problems."
"Lex is my friend," Clark said, beginning to get angry. "I have to go help."
"Trust me on this one, okay? Please? At least talk to Wynter before you run off. There's a lot you'll need to know before you go charging in."
Clark glared, but there was no arguing with the logic of that. "Okay, I will. Just for a minute. Where's Wynter?"
The short man took out his hand phone. "Wynter? Clark just found out about the Luthor crash. Yeah, I know. On his way." His clicked it shut. "Level 5, spoke 6, the observation control room. As if I couldn't have guessed." Clark was gone before he finished speaking. The short man sighed. "Well, that went better than I expected."
One of the women in the barricade-the-door team shook her head admiringly. "Mustafa, you got cojones where your brains should be."
"Well, not too far away from them, anyway," the Arabian midget joked, and the rest of the room cracked up at the release in tension. They had all been warned that Clark was potentially unstable. Facing down an upset Kryptonian was not in the job description of anyone from Earth, unless they worked for Baron John.
Clark managed, barely, not to rip the door off the observation control room. Wynter and eleven other people on headsets had some hundred screens -- smaller and much higher resolution than the common room's flat screen, Clark was distantly relieved to note -- tuned to various news channels, and some to images that obviously were not for public dissemination. At least forty were following whatever information they had managed to find on the LexCorp plane loss. Clark scanned them angrily, wishing for high-speed playback of his own. "What's going on?" he demanded, anger warring with grief and fear.
"Looks like sabotage, to me," Wynter said mildly, not turning around. "Lex had a competent pilot, and the initial NTSB reports are not consistent with any usual sort of mechanical failure, though of course there will be more to come on that one. Wonder if they'll ever find Bryce's body? Lake did mention that she was dancing with Lionel. Over you, as a matter of fact, and what she discovered in your blood sample." Clark went pale to the point of green at that. Wynter appeared to ignore him. "Was she actually in league with that wart on the butt of humanity, or did she think she was playing on a level field against him? Foolish, either way. Even if she did bail out, she'll never be able to show her face or even her credentials and capabilities again without being traced. Talk about throwing it all away."
"I have to go help find Lex," Clark said faintly.
"Indeed? How? We have much better swimmers and divers on the team than you, and experts with search and rescue, and Dylana and Little Sky are there to help unobtrusively with the weather. Though using Dylana's name in the same sentence with subtlety is kind of a bad joke. What, exactly, were you planning to do? Go up to the Coast Guard and say, hi, I can carry your boats out to the crash site? For that matter, could you? You're not nearly as good at flying as Lake or Sky or Dylana. Maybe you will be, someday, but one more time, Kal-El: what, exactly, were you planning to do?"
Clark just wanted to throw something. Or hit something. Anything to keep from feeling so powerless. So helpless. Because Wynter's maddeningly reasonable voice was right -- there was absolutely nothing he could actually think of to do. "I just know I have to help. Somehow." His voice broke. "Please, Wynter. I *have* to. Tell me how. I know you can."
Wynter swung on him, and the anger in his brown eyes and unwashed face took Clark aback. "You want to help? Good. Then sit in that chair over there and help keep watch on those ten screens. Keep notes in that halfway-functional head of yours of anything and everything, and I do mean anything and everything, that's even the smallest bit out of place, or inexplicable. If Lionel and Helen didn't conspire to kill Alexander Luthor, then I want to know who did. And if you aren't interested in who else might be after you, I most certainly am. And if you don't care about yourself, then consider that it may well affect us too. And you might try THINKING, for the first time in your life. If you want to help, then you have been given your orders. Now sit down and shut up and watch and take notes." He spun back to the screens that he was monitoring, flashing from one to another at a speed to rival Kal-El's.
More astonished than he'd ever been in his life, Clark obeyed.
After a minute, Wynter said gently, in a more conversational voice, "By the way, giant lightning bolts don't count as inexplicable. That's just Dylana bleeding off the cloud potentials and damping the storm. As I said, she's not the most subtle person in the world."
"Um." It was, Kal-El thought, a peace offering of a sort, but not important right now. Clark was finding it hard enough to keep up with the ten screens he'd been assigned. How had Wynter and the others been managing for the hours since the crash? Some of the input had to have been coming from their own people on the scene. Clark swore he saw a Coast Guard officer wink at them through a supposedly hidden camera.
"Wynter?" he said quietly, not wanting to interrupt the youngster's concentration. "That guy who called you when he stopped me from running off -- is he a Special?" Did someone a meter tall actually have a chance of standing up to me? Kal-El did not say aloud.
"Mustafa?" Wynter spared him one second and a raised eyebrow. "He's a communications engineer. Mostly he fixes these lousy excuses for phones."
Sixteen enervating hours later, the Coast Guard announced that Lex Luthor had been found alive. Eleven news networks, including the BBC, ran special features on Lex, calling him a hero and praising his indomitable will to survive. Appropriate condolences were expressed for the loss of his new bride. Lex begged off interviews. Wynter, who had stayed on with the crew through a shift change, called for a pizza and fell asleep in his chair. Clark stumbled back to his apartment, where he sat down and gave himself over to exhausted tears.
Lex was Clark's friend. Kal-El had not been able to do anything to help him. Mere mortal humans had. So much for ruling the planet.
On the bottom of the complex, on the outer edge of the southern spoke, in a section marked "training" on the map, Baron John maintained a comfortable living area with a great many communications devices, both extant and concealed. Anyone who had made it past the entry security measures at Special Operations was welcome to come see the boss any time. In practice, it was a desperate situation or a direct command that brought anyone to his door.
Right now, it was both of them that had Cyrus tentatively approaching the low voices coming from within.
"Come in, William," said a deep voice with an odd timbre before he reached the door.
Bill poked his head around the door. Wynter was already there, along with the man (well, Martian) who had spoken. "Thanks, J'onn. I wasn't sure if I should knock."
The large green humanoid with deep crimson eyes smiled. "You know yourself that your talent is better than that, and getting stronger and more controlled every day. You should not be surprised, however, that Kal-El is a case difficult enough to test your limits. He may well be the most powerful person on Earth already, and he is still growing."
"No kidding." Cyrus glanced at John for permission, picked up the emotion without any physical indication at all, and flopped into a chair. "He's -- well, I knew he wasn't human the first time I touched him, and that was when he was going out of his way to try to pretend. But now -- J'onn, what did that damn spaceship DO to him? He's being eaten alive inside."
Wynter looked up from the screen he was racing through. "Some kind of implanted post-hypnotic command, augmented by a forced attempt at brain reorganization. It didn't hit any of us that hard to experience it because the input was specifically geared to Kryptonian bio-molecular structure and transmission capability. What his damnfool progenitors didn't count on was the cellular alterations he'd be subjected to in a different planetary and solar environment. The AI's attack on his psychological and physiological configurations, and I'd give a lot to know if it were telepathy or plain energy or nanotech or all three, is literally at war with the neurological patterns laid down through experience and chemical substructure."
Only Wynter, thought Bill, would say damnfool progenitors. "If I understood five words of what you just said, I might even be able to agree with you."
Wynter sighed. "He's been breathing Earth air, eating Earth food, living under Earth's sun, for a dozen years. He's not pure Kryptonian. The computer feed directly into his brain was geared for a pure Kryptonian. If he weren't so tough, it would have killed him."
"Not to mention the nurturing element," the Martian added quietly. "He's been raised to think of himself as human. An extraordinary human, to be sure, but of this planet, part of it. To find oneself suddenly become 'other' is to make one doubt all that has come before, but at the same time, it does not change the fact of all that has come before." J'onn shrugged. "I was full grown, well trained, and the veteran of a planet-wide war before I was stranded here. And still I find myself wondering, sometimes, if I have lost not only my family, but my racial heritage, by learning to fit in as a human." To prove a point, J'onn seemed to melt and change shape, until he was indistinguishable from a normal human. From Baron John, in fact.
The Baron snorted without humor. "Very good, Manhunter. You are welcome to my job for a week. What about the voice in his head?"
"You are familiar with phantom pain."
"Actually, I'm not, since I regenerate so easily. But yes, we know the concept."
"A very strong impression was forced upon his mind, against his will. You know something of the extent of it. It burned pathways into his brain that a child raised on Earth will never be able to make full use of and have a difficult time handling at all. His action in destroying the spaceship was -- heroic, but futile. The damage had already been done."
"I don't agree that it was futile. Who knows what else it might have done?"
"We never will, will we?" J'onn / John shifted into a more neutral appearance, with a glance at Bill, and a slight, amused, calculating look.
"Don't you dare!" the empath warned. "Sir."
"Ah, you see, your talent is indeed strong enough to read past a Manhunter telepath's block. Quite impressive." Bill glared at him, knowing full well that J'onn knew that Bill had read the intention purely off the Martian's deliberately expressive face. Being teased by an alien was even less fun than being teased by Wynter.
"Kal-El still hears the voice impressed upon him because of the new pathways," J'onn went on seriously. "Clark, technically, does not, because Clark, whose only experiences are of Earth, is of no interest to the Kryptonian mechanism. That the child who was raised here, and the child who would have been the hope of Krypton to reestablish their culture on another planet, share the same physical brain, does not mean they are the same person."
"Multiple personality disorder? He shifts back and forth with this phantom pain?"
"William, until you've finished your training, refrain from making pop-psychology guesses," John said mildly. "You notice that Wynter knows better." To the Martian: "You indicated that you had neutralized the so-called voice."
"I rechanneled the patterns that had caused the most damage, yes. It would have been more difficult had he not already been so badly poisoned. His resistance is still formidable."
"As proven by the fact that he's still alive," John agreed dryly.
Wynter glanced up from his screens again. "J'onn, can you link me to Clark?"
"Not without him knowing that you're there. Too much personality conflict."
"Blast. I would really like to get a direct feel for which part of his brain is doing what." Wynter frowned. "Bill, can you give me an idea of what you're getting?"
Bill laughed shortly. "Wynter, I can barely read you either. Try Randal."
"Randal's not a healer. Damn, damn, damn. I can't get a single decent scan past that energy aura of his. And Dylana and Nicole are both gone. John," Wynter rubbed his eyes, "I can't promise you that the hope of both Krypton and Earth isn't stone cold crazy. We might be able to stop him if he tries to suicide -- but it might not be worth the effort."
John contemplated that, the Baron impassive under the anxious eyes of a powerful amateur empath healer and a child whose IQ couldn't be measured, and the brooding red orbs of an ancient telepath from an extinct race of another planet. Finally he lifted his own eyes, unreadable even to the formidable powers of those around him. "We'll do whatever we can."
The common room had a huge flat-screen TV that gave Clark a headache to watch, since he kept focusing on the pixels instead of the whole picture. There was a lesson in there somewhere, he was grumpily sure, but since he had never had much interest in TV anyway, he took to reading while listening to the other conversations around him and letting the TV chatter play in the background, as a form of practice in splitting his concentration. Everyone here seemed to be better at it than he was, including the people who did a certain amount of cleaning up around the complex for the scientists who were particularly bad about it.
(They were "special," too, Clark figured out pretty quickly, in the socially-accepted sense of the word. He was still mortified at himself for almost snapping at Angela when she asked if there were anything she could do to help him. He had caught himself in time -- recognizing the simple bright eyes of a permanent child in the older woman's smiling face, and then gently thanked her, and asked her to show him where the laundry room was, although he already knew -- but the damage to his own conscience was already done.)
He wandered in after dinner (Nicole had been right about the garlic) and another bout of tests (he would rather have a mechanical shark in his bunk than face philosophy 101 again) and selected a book from the light comedy section, not knowing that Tim Dorsey had been labeled "light comedy" as a particularly nasty joke on the unwary (Dorsey, like Hiaasen, was considered hilarious only by people who thought hurricanes were fairly amusing, too).
The tube (stupid slang for a device that hadn't used vacuum tubes in decades, Kal-El commented acerbically) was on CNN, self-important talking heads competing with screen crawls that Clark read mostly by glancing strobe-fast at it every ten seconds. No one seemed bothered by his particular method of mixed reading styles, so he didn't bother to change it. The picture itself rarely contained anything of interest, much less information.
Until he caught, in one of those quick glimpses, an image that he knew far too well.
"Lex!" Clark shot to his feet, drawing the attention of everyone in the room.
The talking heads' tedious words and awful pictures faded in and out on him. Plane lost ... wreckage discovered ... no sign of survivors....
"No!" He turned to run, and found his way blocked by half the people in the room. How had they moved so fast? "Sorry, excuse me. I have to go."
"That's not a very good idea, Kal-El," one man said softly. Clark didn't recognize him, but for the very short man to have the nerve to stand in front of him, opposing him, knowing who Kal-El was and what he could do, he must have been a Special. "Everything that can be done is being done. You'd only cause yourself more problems."
"Lex is my friend," Clark said, beginning to get angry. "I have to go help."
"Trust me on this one, okay? Please? At least talk to Wynter before you run off. There's a lot you'll need to know before you go charging in."
Clark glared, but there was no arguing with the logic of that. "Okay, I will. Just for a minute. Where's Wynter?"
The short man took out his hand phone. "Wynter? Clark just found out about the Luthor crash. Yeah, I know. On his way." His clicked it shut. "Level 5, spoke 6, the observation control room. As if I couldn't have guessed." Clark was gone before he finished speaking. The short man sighed. "Well, that went better than I expected."
One of the women in the barricade-the-door team shook her head admiringly. "Mustafa, you got cojones where your brains should be."
"Well, not too far away from them, anyway," the Arabian midget joked, and the rest of the room cracked up at the release in tension. They had all been warned that Clark was potentially unstable. Facing down an upset Kryptonian was not in the job description of anyone from Earth, unless they worked for Baron John.
Clark managed, barely, not to rip the door off the observation control room. Wynter and eleven other people on headsets had some hundred screens -- smaller and much higher resolution than the common room's flat screen, Clark was distantly relieved to note -- tuned to various news channels, and some to images that obviously were not for public dissemination. At least forty were following whatever information they had managed to find on the LexCorp plane loss. Clark scanned them angrily, wishing for high-speed playback of his own. "What's going on?" he demanded, anger warring with grief and fear.
"Looks like sabotage, to me," Wynter said mildly, not turning around. "Lex had a competent pilot, and the initial NTSB reports are not consistent with any usual sort of mechanical failure, though of course there will be more to come on that one. Wonder if they'll ever find Bryce's body? Lake did mention that she was dancing with Lionel. Over you, as a matter of fact, and what she discovered in your blood sample." Clark went pale to the point of green at that. Wynter appeared to ignore him. "Was she actually in league with that wart on the butt of humanity, or did she think she was playing on a level field against him? Foolish, either way. Even if she did bail out, she'll never be able to show her face or even her credentials and capabilities again without being traced. Talk about throwing it all away."
"I have to go help find Lex," Clark said faintly.
"Indeed? How? We have much better swimmers and divers on the team than you, and experts with search and rescue, and Dylana and Little Sky are there to help unobtrusively with the weather. Though using Dylana's name in the same sentence with subtlety is kind of a bad joke. What, exactly, were you planning to do? Go up to the Coast Guard and say, hi, I can carry your boats out to the crash site? For that matter, could you? You're not nearly as good at flying as Lake or Sky or Dylana. Maybe you will be, someday, but one more time, Kal-El: what, exactly, were you planning to do?"
Clark just wanted to throw something. Or hit something. Anything to keep from feeling so powerless. So helpless. Because Wynter's maddeningly reasonable voice was right -- there was absolutely nothing he could actually think of to do. "I just know I have to help. Somehow." His voice broke. "Please, Wynter. I *have* to. Tell me how. I know you can."
Wynter swung on him, and the anger in his brown eyes and unwashed face took Clark aback. "You want to help? Good. Then sit in that chair over there and help keep watch on those ten screens. Keep notes in that halfway-functional head of yours of anything and everything, and I do mean anything and everything, that's even the smallest bit out of place, or inexplicable. If Lionel and Helen didn't conspire to kill Alexander Luthor, then I want to know who did. And if you aren't interested in who else might be after you, I most certainly am. And if you don't care about yourself, then consider that it may well affect us too. And you might try THINKING, for the first time in your life. If you want to help, then you have been given your orders. Now sit down and shut up and watch and take notes." He spun back to the screens that he was monitoring, flashing from one to another at a speed to rival Kal-El's.
More astonished than he'd ever been in his life, Clark obeyed.
After a minute, Wynter said gently, in a more conversational voice, "By the way, giant lightning bolts don't count as inexplicable. That's just Dylana bleeding off the cloud potentials and damping the storm. As I said, she's not the most subtle person in the world."
"Um." It was, Kal-El thought, a peace offering of a sort, but not important right now. Clark was finding it hard enough to keep up with the ten screens he'd been assigned. How had Wynter and the others been managing for the hours since the crash? Some of the input had to have been coming from their own people on the scene. Clark swore he saw a Coast Guard officer wink at them through a supposedly hidden camera.
"Wynter?" he said quietly, not wanting to interrupt the youngster's concentration. "That guy who called you when he stopped me from running off -- is he a Special?" Did someone a meter tall actually have a chance of standing up to me? Kal-El did not say aloud.
"Mustafa?" Wynter spared him one second and a raised eyebrow. "He's a communications engineer. Mostly he fixes these lousy excuses for phones."
Sixteen enervating hours later, the Coast Guard announced that Lex Luthor had been found alive. Eleven news networks, including the BBC, ran special features on Lex, calling him a hero and praising his indomitable will to survive. Appropriate condolences were expressed for the loss of his new bride. Lex begged off interviews. Wynter, who had stayed on with the crew through a shift change, called for a pizza and fell asleep in his chair. Clark stumbled back to his apartment, where he sat down and gave himself over to exhausted tears.
Lex was Clark's friend. Kal-El had not been able to do anything to help him. Mere mortal humans had. So much for ruling the planet.
