Hot Springs

"Busy?" the voice on the telephone wanted to know.

"You mean now?"  Lois answered with another question.

"Well, thirty or thirty-five seconds from now, actually."

"Umm, no," she said, scooping up the loose scraps of paper she had scattered on the bed, "of course not."

"Feel like a picnic for dinner?"

"Sure.  Do you want me to bring wine or an ant colony or something?"

"No ants.  I promise"

"No ants?  What kind of picnic is that?"

"You'll see.  I'll be there in two second."

Two seconds?  He meant it when he said two seconds.  She grabbed the papers that held the first scratchings of a silly, sappy little poem about the man on the phone, threw them into her cardboard file drawer, and went to open the living room window.

What a remarkable city this was, he decided, as he threw himself upward from the window of the apartment at 344 Clinton Street.  He knew it was remarkable.  He had seen a lot of cities.  Metropolis, he knew, threw off a brighter glow than any other gathering of life he had seen anywhere in the Universe.  He was glad he lived here.  This world was teeming with life and this city, whether the world knew it or not, for all its concrete and radiating heat and clogging of air and waterways, was the focal point of life on planet Earth. 

In no other place that he knew of, had any form of life gathered such an orgy of creativity in so small a place.  There were nearly eight million humans here at any given time, and sometimes there were as many as fourteen million of them here at once, along with countless octillions of pets, micro-organisms and entities of super-consciousness that came with them.  The humans worked and grinded, conceived and grunted, through a period eight hours or more every day; then they unwound the excess creative force from their beings at the dinner tables, taverns, churches, and meeting halls in and around the city.  They spewed the unused energy of their day out over the town and into the collective consciousness of the planet even as a skyscraper throws the heat it cannot hold out its edges and its asphalt roof to ride the stratosphere and ward off the imminent ice age.

If Metropolis were to die tomorrow, if the bodies of its myriad souls dropped in their places and its structures were lost into ineptness, going the way of some latter-day Pompeii, then the undirected life energy that the city left behind could drive whatever was left on Earth for millenia though the shock, until the force itself could create a new metropolis.  This city was the closest thing in the Universe to a perpetual motion machine. 

Between 344 Clinton Street on the Upper East Side and Lois Lane's apartment in Chelsea were the unusually crowded hotel district, Central Preserve, the strip of Sixth Avenue that held the corporate seats of every major energy, recording and film distributor, and every broadcasting network in the country, Governor's Plaza, the theater district, Foundation Center, three major colleges and twelve minor ones, the garment district, midtown, and the homes of thousands of all conditions of people.

He swam through it all, drinking the power into his own, osmosing the energy through his cells, looking, touching, listening.  He loved the stink of this town.  Even this man relaxed sometimes, as he would do tonight, but the organism that was this city never let up.  He did not have any idea how long he would live, and he had little idea of why he was here.  He might live forever, since he saw no evidence that a man like he was would ever die.  Or he might, like Achilles, die tonight after a short but glorious life.  There was indeed glory in the legend he lived, but that glory was only for others to perceive.  His own glory, here and now, in this city that was his home and captor, was the joy of being who he was.

He was Superman. 

Precisely two seconds after he hung up the telephone in Clark Kent's apartment, not a microsecond more or less, Superman rapped on Lois Lane's living room window just as she was about to open it.

"You're half a second early," she said.

He knew he wasn't, but he apologized anyway.

He told her to grab a swimsuit and then he scooped her up and whisked her into the night.  He flew slowly through the clear winter sky over the city, letting Lois watch the world spin below them.  Soon they lost the lights of the city into the east and flew over the clouds as the waxing moon made streaks of color dance through the mist of Metropolis.

"Wrap up now," he said and unsnapped the red cape from under his shirt.  "I'll let you know when we catch the sun on the horizon."

"Where're we going, Hawaii?"

"Not that far," he said as he enclosed her loosely in the indestructible cloth, "too many ants."  Gently he accelerated as the G-force wrapped her close to him and the deadly air friction washed over the cape like soapsuds.

When the sun poked over the western sky, they were flying over Missouri.  Superman dipped through thin clouds, turning so that he was flying feetfirst, and slowed down as gently as he had accelerated.

"You awake in there, Lois?"

"Mmm, yes."

"Want to see where I grew up?"

She peeked from under the flap of cape on her head, but she had to let her eyes readjust before she saw the familiar checkerboard of the Great Plains covered in white.  Rushing at the pair from the western horizon was a little town dominated by a pale blue church steeple to the right and a gold-domed village hall on the left.  As they got closer Lois saw the famous water tower with the sign that said:

"There's where Lana Lang lived, and next door was Clark Kent.  Look - old Chief Parker walking his dog.  There's the movie theater, the only one for miles.  It's got three screens now.  The bank that was robbed the day I went public.  The statue of me as a boy in the square over there obstructs the view of that nice old gazebo.  Somewhere out there, where the Stone Poultry Farm stretches for miles now, is where my cradle from Krypton crashed."

"You never told anybody exactly where that happened, did you?"

"Never did."

"A secret?"

"No, not really.  I guess I didn't want them to make it into some half-baked shrine."

"What've you got against hero worship, hero?"

"Oh, people shouldn't pick living people for their heroes.  Somebody who's dead can't disappoint you anymore."

"What's that?"

It was a long narrow slab of concrete in the snow with some charred planks and slats around it, the ruins of a small building.

"Oh that.  A workshop I once built for a friend.  Burned down.  I don't know why the town doesn't use that lot for a park or something."

He didn't want to talk about it, so he arced down from the sky toward a group of four young boys snowshoeing through the woods and called out, "Jonny!  Jonathan Ross!"

The blond boy who knew him was the only one of the four who could gather the spit to say, "Superman!"

"You fellows are pretty far from home and it'll be dark in less than half an hour.  You'd best start heading in."

"Okay, Superman," and they all waved at the man and woman soaring back up toward the clouds.

"You say hi to your dad for me, now."

They were gone into the sky again, Lois sheltered in red and pressed against his shoulders by the speed.  When Lois Lane next saw daylight, the Rocky Mountains, swathed in an eight-foot base of snow, flowed majestically beneath them.  Lois thought Superman had changed his mind about where they were going. 

"Aha," she said.  "The bathing suit was just a clever ploy.  You were planning on forcing yourself mercilessly upon me in the wilderness all along, you cad you."

"It is a wilderness, my dear Miss Lane," he said, "but I am capable of getting quite a lot more merciless than this."

"Can't tell by me," she said, shedding the cape when they landed on a rock outcropping near a bubbling spring.  "What is this place?"

A narrow stream of water flowed from a crack between two rocks on the mountainside into a mostly frozen river that was no more than six or eight long strides across.  Where the stream hit the river, there was a constant hiss of steam.  Around the intersection of the two flows of water were a few square meters of snowless scrub grass, with a heated pool half the width of the otherwise frozen river on one side, and on the other side unearthly configurations of ice that were made directly from steam.  It was a valley boxed in on all sides by six peaks, a misty oasis in this crisp frigid desert. 

"Welcome to my newest discovery."  Superman bowed at the waist, his cape draped over one arm.  "Our own private hot spring." 

"It's stunning.  Where are we?"

"Near the northeast corner of Utah.  I think this place is really undiscovered.  It would be pretty tricky to get even a helicopter through the air currents into this valley.  May I dust off your seat?"  He grinned as he clapped the cape over a flat rock and then reached into the pocket in the cape's lining for Lois's studiedly scanty swimsuit. 

"What else've you got in there?"

"A handful of marbles, a rabbit's foot, two frogs and a road map to Metropolis."

While she changed into the swimsuit he turned his back, ostensibly in order to dig in the nearby snow for a small floating table and the picnic dinner that he had buried there a few hours earlier.  The snow melted at the touch of hands that were still warm from friction.  Dinner was his own concoction, made out of mushrooms, walnuts and fresh vegetables, with a mixture of fruit juices that Martha Kent had once taught him how to make.  He defrosted and cooked the platter with the wink of an eye.  He sat down in the steam-heated pool, surrounded by winter, with a tableful of picnic goodies floating on little pontoons in front of him.  She sat in the warm water opposite him and rinsed off her hands in the pool.

"So, Miss Lane."

"Yes, Mr. Clean?"

"Do you come here often?"

They ate dinner, talked for a while, imagined animal shapes in the mountains through the steam, swam, sat in the natural sauna, and when night fell, they cooled off by rolling around together in the snow.  When she wrapped herself again in the red cape he accelerated even more gently than he had before, until somewhere over eastern Colorado they reached the velocity he wanted.  He rose higher in the sky and began to weave back and forth as he flew, delicately rocking her to sleep, helped by the thinness of the air.  She would have been a touch disappointed to know that he kissed her lightly on the forehead when he left her in her bed and soared off to save worlds until morning.

Lois Lane woke up before dawn dry and warm, still in her swimsuit and under her blankets.  For now, she thought, this was enough for her.  She turned over and fell back to sleep.