Demons

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 other 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.

What Clark Kent was supposed to tell the technician, as the final commercial ended and Josh Coyle played with his tapes, was, "Cue the tramway film for seventeen seconds."  This meant that the final segment would consist of Clark talking for seventeen seconds, followed by Lloyd Kramer's film.

What Clark actually said was, "Cue the Luthor film for seventeen seconds."  Then, as the technician sitting next to the preoccupied Josh Coyle slipped the wrong tape into the videotape player and the live image of Kent at his anchor desk in Studio B returned to a million people's television screens in the Metropolitan area, Kent read from his prepared text: "A few hardy and perhaps a few foolhardy souls did, for reasons known only to them, venture among the elements today.  Our man Lloyd Kramer watched some of them this afternoon on the Outerborough Bridge from his vantage point on the Fifty-Ninth Street Tramway.  This is what he saw."

Clark Kent, running through his mind the same scene that was now reenacting itself on a million television screens, and Josh Coyle, splicing and cross-editing videotaped scenes only hours old with the skill of a ping-pong champion, noticed the error simultaneously, less than a minute before the end of the show, when Coyle's job was complete.  Angry with the technician whose fault he thought the error was, Coyle flipped a switch from his booth, signaling the anchorman was now back on the air.  Before the director turned to vent his anger on the young technician, Clark apologized on the air.

"We usually call these things technical difficulties," Clark told his audience.  "That's simply an easy way of saying, 'Sorry, my mistake.'  I gave our technician the wrong cue, and he rolled the wrong film.  We'll get Lloyd and the snow, I trust, on the eleven o'clock report."

"See?" the technician in the booth told Coyle.  "See?  He did say 'the Luthor film.'  See?"

"For all of us here at WGBS News, this is Clark Kent wishing you a good evening," and Josh Coyle's videotape collage of the day's newsfilm rolled underneath the credits to signal the end of the program.

As it turned out, this particular mistake was not a bad thing for Superman.  It helped, to some extent to reinforce the reality of Clark Kent as a fallible human being.  But the fact remained that it was Superman, not Clark Kent, who made the error.

C. W. Saturn occasionally lost a battle, but he did not make mistakes.

Fifty miles to the north, at his home in the village of Tarrytown, Warden Haskell of the Pocantico Correctional Facility had been late in turning on the WGBS Six O'Clock Evening News.  The story in which he was interested, Jimmy Olsen's account of Luthor's transfer from Cell Block Ten to the new super-security cell, was the lead story that night and Haskell had missed it.

Mrs. Haskell was a newspaper reader rather than a television watcher.  She came into the living room with the morning's Daily Planet, the afternoon Post and the message that dinner would soon be ready.  During the remainder of Clark Kent's broadcast, Mrs. Haskell sat on the couch next to her husband reading stories about her husband's day, about Lex Luthor's past career, and the locusts that swarmed over the streets of Brussels.  Mr. Haskell did the crossword puzzle until he was stumped by 24-across, which was a thirteen-letter word meaning deliberately, for dolphins."  That was when Haskell looked up at the screen and was alarmed to see the mistakenly rebroadcast film of Luthor lighting his pipe.

Haskell bolted from the couch and his wife asked, "What's wrong, Eddie?"

Without answering her he grabbed the kitchen telephone to call the prison's director of maintenance.  The man was not at home, and none of the custodians on duty that night was near a phone at the prison.  Haskell would try the maintenance director's number every half hour that night until someone answered.  Despite his errors in judgment and his doomed retirement pension, Edmund Haskell was a very bright man.  He knew what was wrong with the film.

Coyle always had trouble criticizing Clark Kent.  The newsman was so self-effacing, so will to acquiesce to a put-down that Clark was still only about midway through an elaborate apology when the frustrated director threw his hands into the air and walked off.  Clark appeared to be talking to himself, with Coyle's back toward him, when Lois Lane walked into the studio.

"Come on, Clark," the woman said.  "You wouldn't want to stand in the way of young love, would you?"

"What?"  Clark was riffling through the pages of the script for the news show whose ending he had just botched.  He looked up and said, "Oh.  Lois."

"Busy for dinner?"

"Me?  Busy?"  Clark was genuinely surprised.  "You're asking me out to dinner?"

"Gloria Steinem and Helen Gurley Brown both said it's alright.  I figured I'd better do it."

"Of course I'm not busy."

"Terrific, Clark.  I'm trying to get Jimmy to meet Kristin, that new girl who's typing the final copy of my book.  You just make believe you're my date, all right?"

"I'll try to put on a good act."

Lois Lane was Clark Kent's idea of a remarkable woman.  She was almost anyone's idea of a remarkable woman.  Not yet through her twenties, she was successful in her field, famous, envied, intelligent, and one suspected that if she was not wealthy, it was only because she did not care to be.  She was regularly named to the annual list of the year's "Ten Worst-Dressed Women," a promotional device used by a California dress salesman who sought notoriety by picking fights with people whose names were more famous than his.  Last year a writer for People magazine placed her on a list--along with names as diverse as Jacqueline Onassis, Kate Jackson and Lillian Hellman--of the "World's Ten Most Eligible Women."  She asked Clark to spend time with her, she supposed, because he was safe.

"Hey, Clarkie, cutting out so soon?"  The voice from behind was that of Steve Lombard, the sportscaster.  "Whatcha up to, Lois-babes?"

"No good, Grizzly.  Come on, Clark.  I don't want to miss Jimmy."  Actually, the rush was over the fact that Lois wanted to miss Lombard.

"Hey, stick around for the free feed.  I'll buy ya a margarita, Lois."  Lombard had hooked Clark and Lois by their elbows and Clark noticed that the former quarterback was maneuvering them toward the swinging door of the hallway.

"See that elbow, big stuff?" Lois asked as Lombard glanced out the window of the door, deftly positioning the pair in front of it.

"Yeah."

"It's as close as you're going to get."

And then Benny Boghosian, as was his custom, wheeled his snack cart unceremoniously from the hallway through the door, which hit Clark, who softly and carefully defied gravity to lift himself slightly off the ground and into the left side of Lois where Lombard had aimed him.  Lois fell smoothly into the arms of the former quarterback.

Of course, there was nothing else Clark could have done about Steve's prank, nothing else he could do about the scores of similar pranks pulled in front of women on whom Steve was determined to make some sort of an impression.  But Clark could never get even overtly.  Steve was as much a tool of Superman's constant fashioning of the fictional Clark Kent persona as Clark was a function, very often, of Steve's apish nonsense.  That was what was so infuriating about Steve.

There was a bloody mary for the sportscaster on Benny Boghosian's lunch cart, compliments of Galaxy Communication's president, Morgan Edge.  Clark noticed it with his heat vision.  It would be unbearably bitter this afternoon.  Clark apologized to Benny and to Lois, who took his hand as they left.  She took Clark's hand to make it clear to Steve that she was not impressed with him.  She held Clark's hand once in a while, for one reason or another, and she often had to tell herself not to notice whatever it was that she felt in her hand when she did.  She had no conscious idea what it was she felt, but she resolved not to think about it for fear that she might decide she liked it.

"Maybe it's his money or something," the sportscaster said downing the drink in one swig, " 'cause it sure ain't the way he dresses."  Then he noticed his throat.

"You know you Kristin is," Lois said to Clark in the hallway.  "I told you about her.  She's the one typing up my book on that bank robbery down in the Village.  The one where the kid saw the Al Pacino movie and went out and held ten people hostage for eight hours and got talked out of it by the disc jockey on WNEW."

"Right.  Are you done with that already?"

"Except for the final proofreading.  I'm not much on style, Clark, but any editor can be sure Perry White taught me to make my deadlines.  Anyway, Kris is a really nice girl.  A little spacey, maybe, but she's pretty new in town and she's been hanging around those awful singles' bars and I promised to treat her to dinner today.  Then it occurred to me that she and Jimmy would be perfect, so I told her that you and I had a date tonight and that I'd forgotten about it, but she could certainly come along, and wouldn't it be nice if we got another man to make it a foursome.  Pretty clever, huh?"

"Clever as a fox, Lois."

"I found her through one of those temporary office help agencies, but I only need her for two days a week and they almost never call her, so I told her about Lena.  You remember my friend Lena Thorul, don't you, Clark?"

"That's not the one with mental telepathy, is it?"

"Telepathy.  Not mental telepathy.  Mental telepathy is redundant.  Yeah, that's the one.  Lena's writing a book, too, a psychic phenomena, and she can't type at all.  So that fills in another two days a week for Kris.  She's even covering her rent!  Now you're briefed on her."

"Why do I want to be briefed on her?  Now I won't have anything to talk about."

"You never have anything to talk about anyway, and it has to look to Jimmy as though you and Kris are old friends, so it won't look as though we're setting them up."

"Aren't we setting them up?"

"Of course we're setting them up."

"So why can't we tell them?"

"It's like a bear in the woods.  Don't you know anything, Clark?"

"A bear in the woods..."

By now they had walked down the hall to the elevator, taken it down from the twentieth floor where the WGBS News offices were, to the sixth floor, which contained the editorial department of the Daily Planet where Lois worked.  Halfway down the hall, between the elevator and the cubbyhole that was Lois's office, she stopped, made Clark stand still, and faced him.

"When you run into a hungry bear in the woods," she explained, "you have to lie down and play dead.  That way the bear doesn't know what's been at you and he'll leave you alone.  If you run away the bear's likely to kill you."  She walked on.

"Oh."

"Right!  Well it's the same with Kristin and Jimmy.  If we lay them out like dead meat neither of  them will be interested."

"I see."  The fact that he didn't see at all pleased him immensely.  Generally, his curse was to understand too much.

Kristin Wells turned out to be what Jimmy Olsen would probably call a knockout.  Jimmy was not in Lois's office, though.  Kristen was there alone, doing the crossword puzzle in the morning edition of the Daily Planet.

"Porpoisefully," Clark said as he walked in behind Kristin and she jumped.

"Oh.  What did you say?"

"Twenty-four across, the one you're having trouble with.  It's porpoisefully.  Like dolphins.  Thirteen letters."

"Hey man, you're right.  Outrageous."

"Kris Wells,"--Lois was formal in very breezy manner--"this is Clark Kent."

"Sure, Clark.  I watch you on the news every day."

"We're old friends," Clark told his new friend solemnly.

"I bet Jimmy is upstairs getting free food.  I'll run up and get him.  You two become older friends.  I'll be right back."

Clark sat down on the windowsill and awkwardly clapped his hands once.  Kristin watched him, watching herself being careful not to let on how thrilled she was at meeting Superman.

"So," he said and paused.  "You like doing crossword puzzles, do you?"

"We were having a perfectly good time," Lois was telling the phone two days later, "and then he got sick to his stomach over the lobsters and left."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

"No 'excuse me' or anything?"

"Oh, lots of 'excuse mes' Lots of 'pardons' and 'terribly sorrys' and all that stuff.  Clark's got all the manners his milkmaid mother ever taught him and then some.  Just no stomach."

"Well, I don't know, Lois," Lena Thorul said from the other end of the line.  "The thought of picking out your dinner from a tubful of crawling things never much appealed to me."

"You're one thing.  Clark Kent is--Do you have any idea how tall he is?"

"Tall?"

"At least six-two."

"Really?  He never looked that tall to me."

"That's not taking the slouch into account.  I saw him next to Steve Lombard--y'know, Grizzly the football player?  Oh, that's another thing.  Remind me to tell you about him before I forget."

"Grizzly the football player.  Got it."

"Right.  Where was I?"

"Six-foot two."

"Right.  At least six-two, maybe more.  I'll admit everybody looks tall to me, but he's taller than Steve.  Really.  Do you believe a big strong guy like that whom everyone in town watches on the news every day and trusts to tell them stuff they don't know--this guy never even knew that they throw live lobsters in boiling water?"

"Come on.  Are sure this is recently?"

"Really.  It was two days ago.  Yeah, the night Luthor escaped."

"Ohh--"

"Oh, I'm sorry, Lena.  I forgot about that."  Lois had momentarily lost the fact that Lena was what she called an empath.  Lena had emotions that were psychically heightened, and one of the things she became unaccountably emotional about was Lex Luthor.  Lois knew why this was, although Lena did not.  Lois apologized: "I just remember headlines the way other people remember days of the week.  I didn't mean to mention that."

"It's gone.  Forget it.  What about Clark?"

"Clark?  He's impossible.  He can't be for real."

"I told you when I met him, Lois," Lena Thorul, recovered, dropping to her most conspiratorial tone, "and I'll say it again now.  Clark Kent's got a lot more going for him then he lets on.  I can tell these things.  You could do worse."

"I bet I can do better."

"Be careful about that.  You've been believing what you read about yourself in People magazine.  How's it going with the test pilot anyway?"

"Superman?"

"Who else?"

"The same."  Lois paused, wondering if Lena could read her mind across the city or through the telephone line.  "I don't want to talk about him.  I'd rather talk about Kris.  She should be there any minute.  Listen, would you try to talk some sense into her?"

"I've been trying to do that with you.  Why would it work any better on her?"

"You're younger than me and you're older than her."

"This from someone who makes a living with words."

"Grammar is the editor's job.  Listen, Lena, she hangs out at discos."

"So?"

"So?  Have you ever been to one of those places?"

"As a matter of fact I have.  My husband took me to Regine's once and the music actually cleared my head.  They're aren't a lot of things that do that.  Some nineteen-year-old guy tried to pick me up, though, and we haven't been back.  What's wrong with Kristin?"

"She's a smart girl.  She types as well as anyone I know--certainly better than I do--and if you ever get into a discussion of American history with her you'll be amazed at the things she knows.  She can tell you more about the Second World War than my father, and he was a colonel.  But she's a total air-head about men.  She does this space cadet routine."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, Steve Lombard came into the restaurant by himself as soon as Clark left.  He must have heard me tell Jimmy where we were going, because the last time Steve went anywhere alone I fell off my moa."

"Your mower?"

"Moa.  It's an extinct bird.  Jimmy actually seemed to like Kris--and you know how Jimmy feels about my introducing him to someone.  Ever since my little sister packed him in, he's acted like I was his mother anytime I wanted him to meet anyone I thought he'd like.  There was this woman pediatrician I knew once who--"

"Kristin.  You were talking about Kristin."

"Right.  Steve came in and acted like it was a surprise we were there.  I think he saw Clark leave, although he said he didn't.  He sat down next to me and all of a sudden Kris was mesmerized."

"Was he wearing an open shirt?"

"An open shirt.  Yeah, he was.  Why do you ask?"

"Just something that popped into my head."

"Yeah, and he was doing his usual come-on number with me, and Kris said out of nowhere, she says, 'I don't believe how much hair you've got on you're chest.' "

"Really?  She said that?  In front of Jimmy?"

"Well, she and Grizzly went off to someplace on First Avenue and Jimmy and I passed on it.  I think he was really hurt."

"I would think so."

"And Steve Lombard?  That lumbering, swaggering--"

"Hold it, Lois.  That's the doorbell."

Lena Thorul was one of those rare people to whom the psychic gift was precisely that--a gift.  It was something she did not cultivate, fake or particularly want.  Lena was writing, on Lois's suggestion, an anonymous autobiography she would call A Burden of Prophecy.  Two days after Clark Kent left Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Kristin Wells sitting in a restaurant, this perfectly rational young woman who happened to be highly psychic left Lois waiting on the telephone and walked across her living room to answer the doorbell.  On the other side of the door she found something unholy, an apparition whose form she could not bear to see.  She wailed and fell on the rug.

Kristin was as startled as Lena.  She bent over Lena for a moment to see that the woman had fainted.  She wrung her hands in her confusion, then noticed her telephone out of its cradle.

Kristin picked up the receiver.  "Hello?"

"Lena?  I heard a scream."

"It's not Lena.  Is that Lois?  This is Kris."

"What happened?"

"She fainted.  She opened the door and I said hi and didn't even get as far as telling her who I was and she was felled in a faint."

"Was felled in a faint?"

"I mean she fainted.  The chick fainted, man.  Checked out on the rug.  What's her scam?"

"I don't know.  She's a psychic and sometimes funny things come over her."

"Oh, she's an empath.  You told me.  I know what to do about that.  I'll take care of it.," Kristin said and hung up.

Kristin rifled the food stores of the apartment for any source of vitamin C, which Lena needed, Kristin knew, in great quantity.  The girl open several small cans of frozen fruit juice concentrate and forced the contents in spoonfuls down Lena's throat.  In a few minutes the older woman was back to normal.

Across town, Lois Lane wondered how Kristin or anyone else for that matter could know what to do for an empath who had suddenly fainted.

Lois was incorrect about one thing for certain in her conversation with Lena.  Steve Lombard had not seen Clark Kent leaving the restaurant two days ago.  It was Clark who had run, with one hand on his stomach and the other on his mouth, into the vestibule between the restaurant and the sidewalk, but when the sidewalk door opened it looked as though it was pushed only by a stiff wind.

Up, up into the darkness gathering over Metropolis soared Superman.

Coming Soon: Chapter 7!