Overachieving

In the morning, while swimming through the twilight land between awake and asleep, one can sense what sort of a day it is going to be.  From this interface between the two states of consciousness, one can gather, with a little effort, enough psychic energy to get a sense of the next several hours of one's life.  It is really possible.  Anyone can do it simply by being careful to catch one's self before one is quite shed of sleep.  Superman did it all the time when he woke up in Clark Kent's apartment after his daily thirty or forty minutes of sleep.

This April morning, however, as Superman was lying in twilight, Clark Kent's telephone rang next to his head.  Telephones and other such machines inflicted the life of Clark Kent just as they inflicted the lives of most people Superman knew.

Several blocks away, linked by an electronic arc to Clark Kent's machine, Morgan Edge had a similar machine of his own.  Into his own machine and out of Clark's machine, Edge said, "Kent, did I wake you?  Too bad."

"Fine, thank you," Superman said in a groggy version of Clark Kent's voice, "and yourself?"

"It's Edge, Kent, and I called to tell you this could be the most important day of your career."

I get one of those every week and a half or so, one of Superman's cerebral hemispheres said to the other.  "Oh, sorry, Mr.  Edge," Clark Kent fawned, "Did I wake you?"

"Think now, Kent.  Do you remember dialing?"

"Oh, you called me.  I'm sorry."

"Don't let it happen again.  I want you to grab a pad and write this down, Kent.  Do it before you fall back to sleep and forget about it.  Got that?"

"Just a second.  I'll see if I can find a pencil."

"No no, scratch that.  Just get up and - "

Superman dropped the receiver of the telephone loudly between the night table and the mattress frame in such a way as to make it dangle on its cord and continue to make noises in Edge's ear while Superman walked to the far end of the room and called, "Just a second, Mr.  Edge.  .  .  .  be right there .  .  .  no problem .  .  .  I've got the pad," and then Superman gently tossed a small chair into the night table.

Several blocks away Morgan Edge bit through his first cigarette holder of the morning and slam-dunked his third cigarette of the morning into his office wastebasket.

With telescopic and X ray vision Superman watched Edge throw out the cigarette.  Satisfied that he had sufficiently gotten back at Edge for disturbing his rare chance at sleep and simultaneously extended the executive's life by about fifteen seconds, Superman put on his glasses.

"Sorry, Mr.  Edge," Clark Kent said, "but I guess I'm not quite awake yet.  I knocked over a chair."

"Sounded like you knocked over the Seventh Fleet.  Listen, Kent, forget the stupid note pad.  I want you to get dressed right away.  Drink some coffee.  Better - swallow a few spoonfuls of instant coffee out of the jar.  It'll work faster.  The copter is on the way to the roof of your building.  There are four major stories in town this morning and you're going to cover them yourself.  You'll anchor the news tonight from your remote location using the copter's equipment.  Coyle and Lana will take up what slack you leave behind at the studio, if any."

"Hold it, Mr.  Edge.  Excuse me.  Four major stories?  What are the stories?"

"They all broke in the past hour.  The pilot, what's his name, has your working orders.  You just follow him wherever he takes you and be lucid for the camera."

"I'd appreciate it if you told me what the stories were, sir."

"Oh, I don't know.  Where is that sheet of - yes, hello, right here.  Let's see," Edge said as he sat at his desk and read from the list he held.  Superman could not see through Edge's chair to the desk.  There was probably just enough lead derivative in the petrochemical stuffing of the chair to block the X rays.  "Let's see now, a collapsed brownstone on the Upper West Side."

"Yes?" Clark found the building across town through his apartment window.  There was no one in immediate mortal danger.  "What else?"

"A fairly destructive minor earthquake along Fourteenth Street.  A subway derailment under Christopher Circle on the D-line."

There were no major injuries at either place.  There were some due in a few minutes, though, if Superman did not do something soon.

"And there's a tramway car hanging by a fraying cable over the Outerborough Bridge."

"Oh, my Lord," Clark Kent said before he blew himself out the window.

"Hello?  Hello?"

The cameraman in the helicopter that was approaching the roof of 344 Clinton Street considered himself very lucky.  He had just finished loading and checking out the videotape cartridge in his videotape recorder when Superman slowed his flight enough for the cameraman to see him.  The hero did not want to upset the air around the helicopter as he flew by, so the cameraman was able to whip the recorder into position and film the Man of Steel whizzing off toward the Fifty-ninth Street Tramway.

"Turn the chopper around," the cameraman ordered the pilot.

"That's Mr.  Kent's building right in front of us.  I know where I'm going," the pilot said.

"I know.  I know.  Clark's not even on the roof yet, and that was Superman who just flew by us."

"You seeing things?"

"No.  I swear, I just saw him flying off toward the river.  Didn't you see him?"

"I was too busy flying this rig.  You sure it was him?"

The helicopter was beginning to dip in the direction of the apartment building's roof.  The main rotors shifted on their bearings and the bird that that bore the decal WGBS FLYING NEWSROOM rose back toward the sky.  Its smaller rear rotor revved faster and it spun around to the direction of the river.  In less than a minute the WGBS news cameraman could see the figure of a flying man approach a pillar of smoke hanging over the bridge.  The man in the helicopter turned on his videotape recorder and pointed it in the right direction and hoped Clark Kent would not have to wait on the roof too long early in this unseasonably cold morning in April.

Superman had sized up the situation seconds earlier from Clark Kent's apartment.  There were seven people in the enclosed, heated tramway car.  One of the two cables that held it as it made its trip over the river into the inner borough of the city had snapped.  The car hung from the second cable, thirty meters above the bridge, and that cable was supposed to be strong enough to support the car in an emergency.  It was not.  The electric wires that carried the heat to the car from a generator in the outer borough were also fraying as a result of the first cable's snapping.  The heating system was still working, but the fraying wire had ignited the paint on the outside of the steel cable car.  If the paint fire reached the transformer on the roof of the car, it would explode.  Meanwhile, the smoke from the fire outside the car was blocking the air filtration system into the car and of the seven people inside, only two were conscious.  Superman knew exactly what he had to do.

From several hundred meters away Superman blew the pillar of poisonous smoke off the surface of the cable car and cleared the air filtration system.  He shot a searing beam of heat from his eyes to the smoldering wire that had set off the hot smoky fire on the exterior of the car.  The dangling wire fell, swirling and leaving a trail of light like a Fourth-of-July sparkler.  The fire was gone, but at least for the instant, the heated air was still there.  The air was still hot enough to push the transformer to critical heat.

With a burst of speed, Superman closed the remaining distance between himself and the tramway car.  He ripped the transformer from its perch, stuffed it under his arm like a football, and shot upward into the sky.  As he let go of the transformer and it continued to rise on its momentum, enough of the cable's frayed strands of wire snapped so that what was left of the single cable could no longer hold the dangling car.  Superman arced downward as the hissing piece of machinery rose above him and, the remaining strands of cable having wrenched apart, the car with seven people aboard fell free.

Inside the car the air had cleared a bit and when the smoke dissipated and the two conscious passengers saw Superman - or a red-and-blue flash of light that must have been Superman - streak past the window, one of them had the presence of mind to shove out the emergency exit window and let the poisonous air inside clear.  Seconds afterward, as the cable car wrenched downward, one of the five who had been overcome by the fumes opened her eyes.  Neither the two women nor the one man who was awake when the cable snapped knew that they were in free fall.  What they did know, as Superman held the cable in one hand and the car itself by five finger holes he had made in its steel roof and lowered it gently to the sidewalk at the corner of Fifty-Ninth Street and Polis Avenue, was that somewhere half a kilometer overhead, there was a burst that sounded like an extended rifle shot.  As the sound of the explosion echoed off the walls of the nearest buildings, the muffled sound was joined by the splash of scores of tiny chunks of the shattered transformer hitting the river.  While his hands and his flight softened the descent of the seven passengers, Superman's breath diverted the fall of the three charred chunks of transformer from appointments with the rush-hour jam on the bridge.

The passengers who were conscious hauled the others out onto the sidewalk, and two sat with their heads between their knees as policemen gave the four unconscious ones mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.  Two ambulances were making their ways, with police motorcycle escorts, through the morning rush to the scene.  Superman flew off to the northwest, followed by the WGBS Flying Newsroom that had hovered like a honeybee through the scene.

The WGBS helicopter landed on the roof of 344 Clinton Street where the pilot and cameraman found Clark Kent standing in the shelter of the roof stairway door, lost in a massive overcoat.  He was hopping on one foot, then the other, and breathing condensed vapor the way a dragon breathes fire.  The rotors of the copter continued to beat as the cameraman rushed out of the cab to find Clark and realized that it had not been this cold in weeks.

"Sorry we're late, Clark."

"What?" Clark yelled over the sound of the rotors.

"Sorry we're late."

"I can't hear you."

"Did you have a long wait?"

"Yes," Clark said, "I got out here late."

"Superman came by.  We had to follow him.  We got it all on tape for you."

"What?"

"Superman's on tape;"

"Whose cape?"

"What?"

"Is it heated in the copter?"

"What?"

"Then let's get out of the cold."

The flying newsroom beat in the direction of Fourteenth Street where the earthquake had been.  Clark knew that the extent of the damage included several broken plate glass windows, some roof ornaments shaken free to the ground and some broken dishes.  Thirty or forty people had been shaken awake by the quake, but that was the extent of personal injury.  There would be no aftershock and the damage would not be lost to the camera before this afternoon.

"Not that way, Jake," Clark told the pilot.  "Christopher Circle and the subway derailment first."

"That's not what Mr.  Edge said, Mr.  Kent."

"It'll be my responsibility.  Christopher Circle is a more immediate story."

"How do you know?"

"My nose for news," Clark Kent said and meant it.

At Christopher Circle there was a crowd surrounding a police line that kept them back from the subway entrance.  The crowd got bigger as the WGBS helicopter lowered Clark Kent to the street from the height of a small building.  The cameraman was supposed to set up his equipment while Clark milled through the crowd looking for someone to interview on camera.  As Clark and his notebook waded toward the subway entrance, the crowd ignored him and followed the helicopter as it landed on the roof of the museum in the center of Christopher Circle so that the cameraman could get his equipment to the street.  Clark had assiduously cultivated the capacity to be ignored, even while pursuing the most intriguing of enterprises.  There was simply nothing interesting about the way he climbed to the ground from a hovering helicopter.

Slipping out the far end of the crowd, the journalist sprinted at an agonizingly slow thirty-five miles per hour into the lobby of the Paramount Building which looked down on Christopher Circle.  In the lobby a crowd of people sardined their way into an elevator and as the door closed on them, an X-ray beam caused the latch to trip, opening a door whose elevator was two floors below in the sub-basement.  Clark Kent dove upward through the shaft, and before the door was fully closed again below him, Superman burst out the trap door on the roof, fifty stories high.

"Look!  Up in the sky!" somebody called from the ground.

If not for the beating rotors of the helicopter, Clark Kent's cameraman might have heard the call in time to record the hero's downward plunge into the subway entrance.  He missed that, but he would catch the exit.

The truck of a subway car is the heavy bed on which the passenger-carrying container of the car sits.  The truck is made up of the car's eight steel wheels, the axles of each wheel, and a rectangular carriage into which the main body of the car is bolted.  On the D-train heading downtown through Christopher Circle this morning, the second-to-last of eleven cars derailed when its truck split up the middle for the length of the car.  The car jumped up somewhere in the tunnel between Christopher Circle and Sixty-Sixth Street, disconnecting itself from the nine cars that it had been following.  The eleventh car, the one behind it, bashed into its rear wall and molded its front end into the impossibly creased shape of the derailed car.  The two cars were now locked together like two pieces of some three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Thirty-one people in the derailed car and forty-two in the one behind had suffered varying degrees of terror for periods ranging from four seconds to several minutes.  Miraculously, no one was hurt more than Edna Lerner, whose ankle was sprained, swelling to roughly twice its normal diameter, when the crash flung her against a retaining pole for passengers who had to stand.  The only two persons in the two cars who were still terrified were Luis Izasa and Naomi Greensleeve who communicated with each other between the two cars by two-way radio.  They were still terrified because they were the conductors and the only people among the seventy-three trapped here under Metropolis who knew the extent of their predicament.

Each subway car had two sets of walls, one inner wall and one outer wall.  The inner wall, as were the aluminum windowpanes and doors, was completely insulated from the outside wall.  The outside walls of both trains were charged with enough electricity to kill a person instantly.  When the first car derailed, it skidded along the track until the hull of the car rested on a chunk of broken truck and the electrified third rail.  The outer wall of the car behind was fused into the derailed car's outer wall and was thus electrified as well.  Luis Izasa made a show of laryngitis for the passengers when he noticed this, and yelled through a small opening to the rear car for his colleague, Naomi Greensleeve, to communicate with him by radio so that the passengers could not hear.

Neither, it turned out, was able to contact anyone outside the subway cars by radio, and both concluded that it was impossible for anyone to leave either car without climbing or sliding over electrically charged metal.  It was to their credit that they managed to convince their passengers to wait patiently until help arrived.  They could not imagine what sort of help short of a drill through the roof and a powerful crane could be provided by the Transit Authority.  Both conductors simply waited in private terror until (1) the passengers realized the nature of their problem; or (2) a miracle came to pass.  This was Metropolis, after all.

"Please sit down and hold tightly to the nearest stationary object, ladies and gentlemen," the miracle called from in front of the derailed car.

Standing on the tracks was a large human form, glowing with electricity as white as fresh-blown snow.  Everyone aboard knew who it was.  As he hopped up over the roof of the derailed train, passengers saw Superman for a moment without the blinding glow.  Then passengers in both cars heard the sound of metal prying free from metal.  Seventy-three people wrapped white knuckles around chairs, armrests and standing bars while, gently, bit by bit, Superman worked the two subway cars apart without damaging the insulation that kept the interiors from burning the occupants of the cars to ash.

The hero pulled the cars free of each other, and the one whose truck was still intact rolled backward a few paces as they wrenched apart.  Superman dropped from the ceiling of the tunnel to the track and pulled the misshapen front end off the rear car as though it were the top of a milk bottle.  "Conductor?" he called, folding up the double wall of steel like a sheet of scrap paper.

"Yes?" Naomi Greensleeve said to her miracle.

As he folded and crushed the sheet of metal, it occasionally brushed against the electrified rail and Superman glowed for those instants with white-hot energy.  Clark Kent would have liked to get that on camera if Clark Kent were here, but he wasn't.

"Miss - um, Greensleeve," he said, looking at her lapel tag, "this car is no longer electrified, so as soon as I clear the track in front of you it will be relatively safe for you to lead your passengers along the tunnel to the Christopher Circle station.  It's less than a block down the tunnel, but be careful to tell them how to avoid the third rail."

"Uhh." Naomi Greensleeve nodded and turned around to face passengers who were nearly as awestruck as she.  After a moment, she swallowed slowly and said, "He called me by name.  Right?  He said 'Miss Greensleeve.'  You heard him, didn't you?"

"Maybe you should have your first name legally changed to 'Miss,' eh?" one jealous commuter suggested.

"Hold on tight now," Superman called into the electrified car in front.

He lifted the rear end up from the damaged truck as his body flashed and crackled with light.  He had a deadly white halo over his whole form as he hopped between the truck and the elevated passenger container, lifted the body of the subway car over his head, and balanced it on his back, flying forward, until he deposited it, passengers and all, on the Christopher Circle platform almost a block away.  He doubled back and leaned the steel pieces of the broken truck against the tunnel wall, and he was gone before Naomi Greensleeve began to help the passengers past the two halves of the truck toward the platform.

Clark Kent and his cameraman were on the platform waiting for her and her charges.  "He said my name, I heard him.  Tell the man he said my name," was all the heroine subway conductor could say to Clark's microphone.

"All right," Clark told the cameraman, after what Clark decided was the requisite number of expressions of relief/gratitude/indignation/wonder from the people who had been in and around the two subway cars during the crisis, "back up to the copter."

From the bubble front of the airborne helicopter, Clark got a better view of the collapsed building on the Upper West Side than he had gotten from his apartment window.  As he had seen earlier, there were no casualties as a result of the collapse.  There was, in fact, only one person caught inside the building when it fell; and in an evident fluke, the woman's second-floor studio was the only room in the building completely untouched by the disaster.  As far as Clark could tell, while neighbors and fire trucks with their ladders swarmed over the sidewalk trying to make some sense out of the pile of rubble, the young girl sat comfortably on a couch reading a paperback edition of Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow.  She could not leave her studio apartment, since the fire escape was gone, the hallway floor was piled up in crumbs under the floors from above, and the doorway was caked with ancient building materials.  No one among the crowd gathered out front knew that there was anyone in the building, and nearly everyone there was horrified at the possibility that there might be.  The young woman's window faced an alley and it was inaccessible to anyone who did not fly.

Clark was quite startled, now that traces of lead in building walls no longer blurred his view, to see that the woman sitting among the ruins reading pseudohistory was Kristin Wells.

The WGBS Flying Newsroom alit on the building across the street.  This time the cameraman decided to set up on the roof facing the shattered brownstone while Clark went down to ground level with his wireless microphone.  Between eight and nine seconds after Clark and his microphone disappeared from his cameraman and pilot behind the rooftop door, Superman crashed through Kristin Wells's window.

She looked up from her book with a vacant stare.  Unnaturally vacant.  She looked at the glass around Superman's feet, closed and opened her eyes once and said, "Oh, that's all right.  I've got a carpet sweeper."  She stood and walked toward the door of her broom closet.

"Miss Wells?" Superman took her arm.  "Are you all right?  None of the falling debris hit you, did it?"

"Debris?"

He looked at her blank eyes and through them.  If only he could decode the mess of circuits and connectives in the human brain, he thought.  That would save a lot of questions.

But as he looked into her eyes they changed their expression.  They widened.  The tear ducts were sucked dry in an instant.  They went from blue green to a chalky gray.  Suddenly they were different eyes.

"You like my handiwork, Superman?" a voice hollower than Kristin's asked him.

"Your handiwork?"

"The earthquake, I thought, was a masterpiece of surgical destruction, though I admit the tramway was a touch sloppy.  But the subway car was very inventive and I think this building's new configuration is the best of all of them.  Do you not agree?"

"Who are you?" Superman still stared at the eyes.

"Who is Kristin Wells?  Is that what you want to know?"

"No.  Who are you?"

"Someone you are going to get to know better."

"I have no use for riddles." But as Superman said that, the eyes resumed their ocean color, more clearly awake than when he had come in.

"Superman?"

"Yes?"

"Have you been here long?"

"No, not long.  Who are you?  Are you all right?"

"Don't we know each other?"

"Do we?"

"I'm Kristin Wells, a metaphor in the mind of God, as are we all."

Superman took Kristin to a nearby hospital, from which she was released within an hour.  She had arranged perfect health for the occasion.