I have so little time right now, and it seems to be a permanent condition these days. So I either reply now or not at all.
I loved the fantastic, detailed realism of the airport scene. You had me grinning widely at this - I could imagine it so perfectly:
“…But they acted all weird when I ordered a cheeseburger and asked ‘em to hold the cheese.”
“Isn’t that just a hamburger?”
“No. They’re different.”
Well, when I ordered a cheeseburger once, it came with
both mustard and ketchup, while a normal hamburger just had ketchup. So I can imagine there are differences between a cheeseburger without cheese and an ordinary hamburger, but at the same time, I can totally see the exasperated expressions on the faces of the people serving the stuff.
The rest of this "airport section" may not be quite as delightfully absurd, at least not to me (I regard coffee as something you drink to wash down your delightful chocolate gateau, so if there is no sinful chocolate patisserie to be had, I don't notice how many people or various coffee outlets there are which try to sell me coffee.)
The conversation between the people in the control tower and the pilots was inexorably hypnotizing and sleep-inducing at the same time, plus a little scary. (What happens if one of those people happen to get one little figure just very slightly off?) And talking about sleep, this is of course so unbelievably typical:
At one busy gate, there was a man stretched out on his back, legs crossed at the ankle and head pillowed on his duffle bag, apparently sleeping. Hopefully, he had either an alarm clock of some kind or a traveling companion who would wake him when his flight was called.
How do people do it? How can they fall so fast asleep on a hard floor? And then, how do they manage to wake up at just the right moment to catch their flight?
You made me feel this so extremely strongly:
There was no way, even with her exceptional hearing and almost equally excellent multi-tasking abilities – really, it must be another super power - that she could hope to follow all the conversations. And there wasn’t anyone overtly suspicious-looking – or acting – that would allow her to single out a particular conversation to listen to.
The sheer volume of things to look at or listen to is so overwhelming. Sometimes I wonder how any of the more sophisticated criminals get caught. And sometimes I think that they just don't. Oh, and by the way:
Oh- and we flew from Denver, CO, to Indianapolis, IN, the week before the liquids scare... so I walked onto our connecting flight with a Starbucks coffee in one hand, my laptop slung over my shoulder, and a small duffle in the other hand. <sigh> ...The good old days.
Yes, sigh. The good old 1990s, and even, to some extent, the good old first five or six months of 2006. When you could bring your drinks on board the airplane without being regarded as a potential terrorist trying to blow up your fellow passengers and yourself.
To return to your airport scene of this chapter, though, the most absurdly funny line of them all was this one:
Come to think of it, it sure would make their lives – hers and Clark’s – easier if all the criminals looked – and dressed - like the bad guys on Saturday morning cartoons…
Isn't that so true???
Well, when Lois had been perched for a while wherever she had been perched, Clark, as Superman, turned up and told her about the plane that almost crashed - it had apparently been sabotaged, for unknown reasons.
Lois worried about
flying away from the airport with Clark, but he reassured her:
And… they can see us on radar, can’t they? If there’s two specks… Well, won’t they wonder?”
“Well, we could go up close together – you know, arm in arm or something. We might look like a couple of birds.”
It's a bird - no, it's two birds.... What a lovely image.
The whole window-cleaners episode was extremely well written, too. The drama was especially well captured here:
So LNN’s evening viewers, countless numbers of people all over the world, had watched in horror as the two men had fallen toward their certain deaths. And the countless numbers of viewers, joined hurriedly by still more viewers summoned to TV monitors by the shouts of their friends or families or coworkers, had seen the flash of red and blue as Superman had swept down almost too fast to see, catching the platform from below at almost the last possible moment and bringing it carefully and safely down to street level.
Afterwards, when Superman is being interviewed, Lois picks something up:
But by the time that LNN showed the police arriving and holding back the excited crowd, and Superman, standing beside the police chief, had given a brief and somewhat formal interview to several reporters, she’d gotten past the driving urge to *be* there and had started paying closer attention to Superman. Not to his words, but to a very subtle, underlying… *something*.
And this is so fascinating, and it doesn't get worse from the fact that we don't know what it actually is that Lois is picking up from Superman. Could it be something related to their telepathy, even though the telepathy only obviously works when they are happy and smiling (or better yet, laughing)? Or has Lois just gotten to know Clark so well that she can pick up very minute details in his facial expression or body language?
When Clark returns from his rescue of the window cleaners, she can't talk to him openly about it, because of all the other people in the newsroom. She tries to prod him in a purely Lois-Lane-the-reporter way, but at first she doesn't manage to get her intentions across, again because their telepathy just doesn't work when they are not happy and relaxed:
“So, did you see anything interesting? What do you think happened?”
“The cable broke.” He sent her a sort of what-are-you-doing kind of look.
She smiled gently at him and leaned back in her chair. “So… should we consider investigating it, Clark? Do you think there’s a story there? Negligence? Was it an accident? Poor maintenance? And what if it wasn’t? An accident, I mean?”
Clark’s confusion cleared, and he grinned, shaking his head wryly. She felt the slightest whisper of a thought; she couldn’t quite pick it up. It was just out of reach, like a word on the tip of her tongue. <Clark?>
But as soon as he is just honestly grinning, she can hear a whisper of a thought. It's so beautiful.
And when the newsroom is clearing and they can speak more openly, Clark tells her that the cables holding the window cleaners' platform had been cut into. Also, they talk about what she actually picked up from him, when he was being interviewed on TV:
“Did you… you know…” He tapped his temple very briefly with one index finger. “…Get that from…?”
“No. At least, I didn’t… hear, or… feel? …anything specific. It was more just a… sort of feeling as you spoke. Were you trying to send me something?” She still spoke in an undertone. He could hear her even if she whispered, anyway, and they might as well play it safe. There was no one close enough to overhear them at the moment, but still…
He shook his head. “No. Although I *was* thinking about you, because I wanted to tell you about it as soon as possible…”
Well, interesting. It does sound like
some sort of telepathy.
She sat back and looked at him. “Well. Looks like we have a couple of things to investigate, huh?” She hesitated. “Clark, do you think… is there any way, or any reason, that they’re related?”
“Who are related?” he asked, frowning.
“Not who. What. The airplane and this accident,” she clarified.
I was thinking the same thing. Two acts of obvious sabotage, meant to kill people, in Metropolis on the same day. Or could it be that these accidents were not actually meant to kill people, but that they were meant to draw Superman to these two particular accident sites for some reason?
And the chapter ends on sweet and lovely Lois and Clark feel-good sentiments that put a smile on my face.
To summarize, I loved the detailed realism of this chapter, and I like the intriguing mystery you have set up. Are the airplane accident and the window cleaners incident related? I think they are. But why?
Looking forward to more, Janet.
Ann
