Authors: Elliot S. Maggin
"As I was saying earlier," the warden went on, "any claim that the prisoner might make to the effect that he is being held out of touch with his attorney, his friends, his colleagues in either criminal or legitimate pursuits—anyone at all— will not be borne out. As you can see, there is a functioning private telephone on the wall between the television and the camera through which the prisoner is monitored, although the numbers of all outgoing and incoming calls will be recorded automatically, and you will notice that there is a switch under the camera with which the prisoner can turn off our audio monitor for up to fifteen minutes of any twenty-four-hour period. Thus, the room simultaneously provides redundant security and maintains a convict's rights to limited privacy."
Luthor had been bragging during these past days that he would escape this week. The man was not generally given to boasts of either the hollow or the dense variety. Haskell was the ninth warden at this prison in eight years. Four had been fired; two had had nervous breakdowns; one had had a heart seizure after seven months here, following a history of anemia; and one had actually turned out to be one of Luthor's many fictional alter egos. This last case was such an embarrassment that the governor lost his own job over it. Haskell had entered public service twenty-nine years earlier in order to have job security. He was eight months from retirement and did not intend to screw up as had his predecessors. No one would blame Haskell if Luthor escaped from him every once in a while. The man had not stayed in jail long enough to go to trial more than once since he was a teenager. But if Luthor managed to get out after announcing his plans to the press, Haskell would have the same job security as the forgotten pitcher who was dumb enough not to walk Babe Ruth after the hitter pointed out the place in the bleachers
where the next pitched ball ultimately landed.
"Well, I wouldn't dream of taking any time away from our star inmate," Haskell concluded. "I wouldn't want to be accused of emotional brutality." No one laughed but Haskell. "There will not be any time for questions, gentlemen."
"Wonder why," the reporter from Newark said, loud enough for Jimmy to hear him.
Almost immediately, there was a shuffling and the muffled sound of men's voices from the hall. Before anyone could get out of the room, three prison guards, each with a .38 calibre pistol in one hand and a set of complicated work orders on a clipboard in the other, rushed in and ordered everyone into the hallway. The warden went with them to stand on one side of the door as a horde of prison guards—none of them was shorter than six-feetthree—burst through the translucent, wire-reinforced glass door at the far end of the hall. Ev and Jerry recorded the scene for Galaxy News. As far as any eye or any camera could detect, no one was saying a word, but as the swarm oozed into the narrow space, reporters could gradually make out the sound of a man's mouth moving faster than any biologically sound mouth ought to be able to move.
"Hey cauliflower-head," were the first words that the reporters were able to distinguish from the clapping of cleated boots, "don't you ever have trouble getting fitted for earwax?...
"Watch those size fourteen hooves of yours, Elmer. I don't want instant fallen arches. Look, when you get a new pair of shoes can I have those? I need a spare rudder for my yacht.....
"Will you look at old granite-face here, about to crack his first smile since kindergarten? Last time he did that they had to call in an orthodontic stone mason and a cement truck to repair him...."
It was unmistakably the voice and attitude of Lex Luthor, dwarfed and invisible among shoulder-to-shoulder prison guards. The lump of guards passed, knee-to-knee, holster-to-clipboard, through the hallway toward the reporters and the warden, then turned right into the super-security cell like water over a dam. The only way to determine where among the swarm Luthor walked was to try to figure out at what point
the stream of invectives sounded the loudest before it faded into the reinforced room.
"That was my groin you hit, ape-arms. Wanna find that clipboard in your spleen some morning?..."
Luthor could say anything he chose to the guards. Once, when Luthor was working a rock pile, a rookie guard shoved him onto a heap of stones that cut his face. Luthor never said a word to anyone else about the guard or the incident. All he did was suggest to the young man that he apologize. Luthor told the guard that he did not even have to act as though he was sorry, only that he should say the words. When the guard declined the suggestion, Luthor simply heaved a sad breath, wiped a grimy hand over his face and went back to work. One morning not long afterward, while accidently dozing for a moment during the night shift, the young guard woke up with the initials
LL
carved in his forehead. Luthor was accounted for during the time it happened. He certainly would have arranged for an alibi had he done it himself, but he had nothing to do with it. It was simply the work of one of the inmates, angry over his hero's indignity, serving notice on the prison administration—as the inmates did in one manner or another from time to time—that Lex Luthor was not to be touched.
"Hey, where's the innkeeper? Where's former Warden Half-skull? You out there, Warden, scraping the governor's shoe polish off your tongue again? Hey, I don't like to kiss and tell, but I think one of your hired thugs just tickled me."
Eventually the entire company of prison guards flowed into the super-security cell and the wind began to die down for a few moments. Seven guards came back out of the room and solemnly assembled in the corridor—one on either side of the cell door facing three who lined up opposite them looking into the open room, and two at the translucent wired-glass door at the end of the hallway.
"All right, gentlemen," Haskell said to the company of reporters who were amazed by the security precautions, "I think we're ready."
The newsmen, with their notepads, flash cameras and video equipment, all filed into the room. Spiffily uniformed men, pistols and clipboards in hands, lined all four walls, and in the far left corner, dressed in fatigues and a cherubic grin, stood Lex Luthor, lighting a pipeful of tobacco.
"I do wish you'd thought to put some ashtrays in here, Half-skull." Luthor dropped his match which fell straight for half the distance to the floor and then spiraled the remainder of the way from the height of Luthor's knees. Imprisoned, handcuffed, dressed in dull gray, surrounded by eighteen men, all of whom were appreciably more massive than he, the bald, stocky man looked for all the world as though he were in charge.
Luthor greeted the reporters, taking care to pay special attention ("Your acne clear up yet, puss-face?") to Jimmy Olsen. He made his three-point statement, embellishing it suitably; Haskell once again assured the reporters that the room was quite escape-proof; during the drive back to Metropolis Jimmy began writing the story of Luthor's escape, which would certainly come in handy sometime during the coming week.
In two weeks Warden Haskell would be transferred to the East Kansas Juvenile Reformatory where his salary, and consequently his retirement pension, would be reduced by about 20 percent.
Nearly everyone had a personal demon. Few people called them demons, but that was what they were.
Perry White, the editor of the
Daily Planet
, and Franklin Roosevelt, the thirty-second President of the United States, collected stamps.
Lex Luthor had a younger sister named Lena who was a toddler when Lex left home and who did not know she was related to the infamous criminal, but whose life and career Luthor followed.
Sherlock Holmes played the violin, as did Albert Einstein, who realized during his final years that he was in danger of dying before he formulated his Unified Field Theory and so banished his demon, in order to spend all his intellect chasing the tail of time and space.
Lois Lane wrote poetry and hid the pages in a corrugated cardboard file box whose inside she once lined with lead foiling.
Jimmy Olsen, unknown to any of his friends other than Clark Kent, took the name Marshall McShane to host a Sunday afternoon country music show on a college radio station called "Music You Can't Hear on the Radio."
Morgan Edge, the president of Galaxy Communications, ran six miles a day.
Kristin Wells, Lois Lane's two-day-a-week girl Friday, had a passion for expensive discos and for obscure volumes on recent history.
Steve Lombard, the former quarterback and current WGBS sports reporter, spent weekend afternoons, when millions of American men are watching football games, eating popcorn in front of old movies on television.
Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school.
Martha Kent collected antique bottles.
Lord Greystroke learned languages, human and otherwise.
Edward R. Murrow smoked cigarettes.
Superman had Clark Kent.
In fact, Superman loved Clark Kent as much as he loved anyone or anything else. He loved his alter ego as he loved the memory of the two good people who had taken him as their son; as he loved this adopted world that had accepted him as its hero; as he loved Lois Lane. Clark Kent was a person as real and individual as any man ever created by the mind of man. Superman even gave Clark a demon: Clark videotaped television commercials that particularly amused him, and showed them to friends who were polite enough to sit through them. Superman spent appreciably more time creating the reality of Clark Kent than he spent doing anything else. Clark Kent spent more time walking the Earth than Superman spent flying above it. Superman valued his creation as he valued a human life.
Right now, something was bothering Clark Kent and had been bothering him since he first saw Jimmy's film of Luthor's announcement, but Clark could not for all his reason figure out what it was. He sat in his tiny office running the film through an editing machine for the seventy-third time. He would have run it faster if not for the fact the film would have melted with friction. It was nearly five fifty-eight in the evening, two minutes before air time. He would have to memorize the entire film this time through, frame by frame, if he was going to allow himself the customary ninety seconds to type and edit the anchor script for his hour-long news show. He would spend most of those ninety seconds, of course, walking down the hall, at the speed of a normal, slightly clumsy Earth human, from his office to the news anchor desk in Studio B.
"Good evening, this is Clark Kent with the Six O'Clock WGBS Evening News," were the next words that he said, and slightly more than a million people heard him say that.
As it happened, slightly fewer than a million people saw the film of Luthor dropping the match that first fell and then spiraled to the ground. More than a hundred thousand of Clark's viewers, at that point in the show, were sniffing through the refrigerator, thumbing through the newspapers, sorting through the mail or whatever. Almost everyone whose television was turned on, however, heard Luthor declare his
intention to escape. A few clucked their disapproval. A few wondered if Luthor had, as he claimed, discovered some new miraculous source of energy. Most of them dismissed the claim, not realizing that Luthor was not a dishonest public servant but rather, an honest criminal. Clark suffered no such oversight.
Here were some of the other stories Clark mentioned on the news tonight:
Eleven hours after the snow had stopped failing, much of the city continued to be winter-bound.
The price of gold hit its first new high of the year this afternoon, and the price of imported oil did the same thing for the third time in the past six months.
The head of the state of Laos charged that the Prime Minister of Thailand was responsible for an outbreak in Laos of cholera, and the Laotian intended to put the Prime Minister on trial in absentia.
There was a plague of locusts in the sky over Brussels, Belgium.
And so forth.
Through these and all the other stories, Clark spoke his lines dutifully and professionally, as he watched a mental picture, frame by frame, of Luthor announcing his intention to escape. Clark had no illusion that Luthor might have slipped a clue as to his specific methods in the words he chose. The criminal was quite a bit cleverer than that. No, it was something else.
The show was supposed to end with a mildly amusing film narrated by Lloyd Kramer, which showed cars on the bridge below the Fifty-ninth Street Tramway sliding on the sleet and ice, bending up each other's fenders and breaking lights fore and aft. It was a fine report, actually, narrated in a flip, irreverent style. It had been a good story, in fact, during every major snowstorm of the past three years. Three years ago was the first time Clark had assigned the story, and by now it was getting dog-eared. Clark did his job with consistent efficiency and a startling lack of imagination.
Here is where Superman makes a mistake:
It is not a big mistake by the standard of the mistakes Superman is in a position to
make. It is indeed a mistake, however—not an intentional cover for the purposes of reinforcing his Clark Kent disguise, and because of who made it, this mistake becomes just a touch horrifying.
The show was supposed to end with Lloyd Kramer's amusing version of Clark Kent's standard soporific snow assignment. It didn't. During the final segment of the "Evening News," anchorman and associate producer Clark Kent momentarily takes over the function of the director, Josh Coyle, who spends the two or three minutes of the final segment feverishly editing together videotaped scenes from the day's newsfilm to show with the credits at the conclusion of the program. The reason Coyle has to do this during the final segment is that only at this point does Coyle know exactly how many seconds he can allot for the credits. Coyle began putting together the closing videotape as soon as he cued the final commercial which preceded the last segment of the show. Consequently, Clark Kent's sole function during the two or three minutes that he is effectively the director is to cue the final tag film. That is, it is Clark's job simply to tell the technician in the booth with Coyle which film to slip into a little slot, and precisely when to do it.