Following Lois’s directions, Clark followed the course of the Ohio River. Although he couldn’t imagine what she needed to pick up in Illinois, he was willing to give her the time. As a guide to this new and strange version of America, she had yet to steer him wrong.
Truthfully, he was just enjoying flying with her. For the first time he was able to share his greatest joy with someone who seemed to enjoy it as much as he did. She seemed to have no fear and no reservations.
He kept being distracted by her perfume, by the feeling of her cradled against him. It was almost like being hugged, which was something he badly needed in the aftermath of the fire.
Lana would have looked at him in recrimination, either for risking his reputation or hers by taking the risk of helping them, or for failing in what he had set out to do.
The Superman in the comics made it look so easy. He was brave and strong and seemed to have an endless well of courage. He was an icon, an ideal for people to look up to.
There wasn’t any way Clark was ever going to be able to match that.
“Can you see Interstate 24?” Lois asked suddenly, “Or maybe see the glow from the riverboat casino…Harrah’s.”
“I don’t need any more money,” Clark said. “I feel bad enough about the lottery thing.”
There were other casinos that would have been closer anyway.
“You don’t have any ID,” Lois said, glancing at him.
“Then why are we here?” Clark asked.
“You’ll see,” she said. “Turn left up here.”
By this point he had slowed to the speed of a speeding car. He turned, and shortly afterwards he could see a small town in the distance.
It was actually a little smaller than Smallville, but it reminded him of it.
“Drop us off near the circle in the middle,” she said.
They landed silently in an alley. Clark stopped as they stepped out of the alley and around the corner.
To one side stood a red brick courthouse, much like courthouses all across the country. In front of it stood something that made him blink.
A fifteen foot tall bronze statue of Superman stood in front of the courthouse. Even from here he could see the motto at the statue’s base. “Truth – Justice – The American way.”
“It’s sort of appropriate for a courthouse, don’t you think?” Lois murmured.
“What is this?” Clark couldn’t take his eyes off the statue.
“The City of Metropolis,” Lois said. “Population 7200.”
On the opposite side of the courthouse were two maple trees. They were huge, each at least twelve feet in diameter. Lois walked over to the trees and said, “Why don’t you wait here?”
There was a payphone nearby. It was in a traditional telephone booth, one that looked like it was from in the forties.
Lois stepped inside, and Clark wondered if she really thought he couldn’t hear everything she had to say.
When she picked up the phone there was a prerecorded message from Superman. A moment later she had dropped several coins in the slot and he could hear the dial tone.
The voice on the other end of the line said, “Hello?”
“This is Lois,” Lois said. “I’m in town.”
The voice on the other end of the line sounded more alert now. “You want to come by in the morning, talk a little?”
“I was wondering if you could come out tonight,” Lois said. “I’m sorry it’s so late, but I need it.”
The voice on the other end of the line grumbled for a bit, and then said, “I’ll meet you out front in ten minutes.”
Lois exited the phone booth and headed for Clark. “It’ll be ten minutes,” she said.
“What’s going on?”
“Did you know that the citizens of this town paid for that statue with their own money?” Lois said, ignoring him. “They gathered more than a hundred thousand dollars together by buying thirty five dollar memorial bricks. You can see the names on the paving around the statue.”
“We have a lot to do,” Clark said. “I can look at a giant statue of…Superman later.”
“Those people would have died without you,” Lois said. The abrupt change in subject caught him off guard. “And the people who went in after them would have been at risk.”
“I didn’t do enough,” Clark said.
“You did more than anyone else could.” Lois shook her head. “There’s a chance that the refinery might be saved now. If it had been allowed to burn there was a chance they’d have closed the plant. You may have saved hundreds of jobs.”
Jobs were important in small towns. Clark remembered vividly the hard times in Smallville when he had been growing up, the times when sometimes it seemed as though the town was going to dry up and blow away. Several years of bad crops and bank foreclosures had led to a ripple effect as stores couldn’t sell to farmers who had no money. Places had closed up shop one after another.
“But those people I did get out…”
“They could have died in the fire. Now they have a chance to live. You couldn’t have done anything more than you did.”
“I could have flown them directly to a hospital, or at least to an ambulance.”
Lois looked at him for a long moment then nodded. “So we’ll have to do something about that.”
“What can we possibly…” At her expression he took a step back. “No…”
“What are the odds that you are going to be able to find all the passengers and gather them together without help?”
The odds were pretty slim. He’d almost have to have the people ready to leave and something to transport them all in if he was going to get them home. That wouldn’t work if they were scattered around different facilities.
Even if he was bulletproof, none of the passengers were, and they would provide a perfect group of hostages. Although Clark would hope that Federal Agents wouldn’t do something like that, he had to admit that it was possible they might, especially if they didn’t see any other way of stopping him.
Desperate people did desperate things.
“If you can’t get them together on your own that means that we have to put pressure on the government to release them. The only way we can do that is to make the public believe that they really are from another universe.”
“And the public isn’t likely to believe that,” Clark said.
It had been difficult enough to convince Lois, and she’d had a first hand seat at most of the events in question. How much more difficult would it be to convince a public watching events through a television screen, especially a public jaded by special effects extravaganzas.
The chances were that some people would never believe he could do what he could do, even if he was forced to remain in this world for the rest of his life. At least on his world there were still people who didn’t believe in the moon landing.
“You’d have to appear in front of so many people that no one could denounce it as a hoax,” Lois said. “So that nobody could cover it up, no matter how they tried.”
“I’d never have a normal life,” he said.
He’d heard enough snippets in passing to know that this world hounded its celebrities incessantly, placing them on pedestals and knocking them down again with great glee. Talking heads spouting endless drivel about people whose only claim to fame was being famous.
“You don’t have a normal life now,” Lois said. “And if you go home, who’s to say anyone has to know?”
The odds that someone hadn’t mentioned the name Clark Kent in relation to Superman were slim, but still…
He’d been a coward for long enough.
“All right,” he said. “But not this.”
He glanced up at the statue towering over the square.
“Not what?”
“I should make my own costume…make it clear that I’m not…him.”
“You can be.” Lois said.
Clark shook his head. “He’s perfect. I’m just a person.”
Lois looked at him for a moment and said, “Clark Kent is a person. Superman is something else. He stands for something people want to believe in.”
“Still,” Clark said, “I think…”
“Can you sew?” Lois asked suddenly.
“Well, no…”
“Are you, by chance a fashion designer?”
“No.”
“How long do you think it would take to make a whole lot of costumes, hoping to find something hat both doesn’t look stupid and doesn’t accidentally look like something from hundreds of comic book titles?”
“I don’t know,” Clark said.
“Superman is one of the three most recognized icons on the planet. There isn’t a country in the world where that shield isn’t recognized.”
“Well, I guess I knew it was famous, but…”
“People grew up with Superman,” Lois said. “Everyone was a child once, and Superman calls to that part of us that sometimes we forget. People trust Superman.”
Lois looked as though she was about to continue, but she was interrupted by the arrival of a small green car. Clark didn’t recognize the model, but it didn’t sound like any gasoline motor he’d ever heard.
The man stepping out of the small car was anything but small. Standing several inches taller than Clark he was a heavyset man wearing glasses and a thick moustache.
“Lois Lane!” he said. His voice was deep. “I didn’t expect you in these parts.”
“Jim,” Lois said. “I need to pick it up.”
He stopped. “If you need the money, I’d be happy to make a bid on it.”
Lois shook her head. “I’m not selling it.”
“Then…” For the first time the man seemed to notice Clark.
“You must be one of the contestants,” he said.
“Contestants?”
“They’re having a contest for who would make the best new town Superman,” Lois said. Turning to Jim, she said, “He’s not one of the contestants.”
“You could have come during business hours,” the taller man said, grumbling as he reached into his pocket for the keys. “Is this going to be a permanent deal, or do you think I might get it back when you are done?”
“I…” Lois glanced at Clark. “I don’t know.”
Jim stepped over the threshold, and a moment later the lights began to come up inside the store.
Clark stepped through and stared. Inside was a store with more Superman merchandise than he’d even imagined possible. It reminded him a little of Star Wars, back in the day.
He wondered how much a Superman costume cost and how he was going to reimburse Lois. He couldn’t keep defrauding the government by cheating on lottery tickets.
The larger man locked the door behind them then led his way through a maze of aisles through a set of double doors.
The sign on the door said, “The Superman Museum.”
Stepping through the door he felt his jaw drop.
Every bit of wall space was covered in Superman memorabilia, from pictures to props to animation cells and comic books. There were collectibles, movie props, costumed mannequins, theater posters and thousands of toys and plastic figures.
There were so many items that Clark had to turn and squeeze his way through narrow aisles to follow Lois and Jim.
“This is part of Jim’s collection<’ Lois said. “There are twenty thousand items here and Jim had eighty thousand more at home.”
“He has a hundred thousand pieces of memorabilia?” Clark looked uneasily at the tall man. That level of obsession made him uneasy.
It was hard to imagine that there were this many items in the world.
“He’s got things on loan to the Smithsonian.” Lois said. “This is what I was trying o tell you. Everybody knows Superman. He’s a universal symbol, and everybody knows what he represents.”
She was quiet as Jim stopped in front of a case.
“We’ll really miss this piece,” Jim said as he opened the case with a key on his ring. “A lot of people have got a lot of enjoyment out of it.”
“What is this?” Clark asked.
“Three weeks after Christopher Reeve was paralyzed in 1995,” Lois said. “Christies of New York had an auction.”
Clark stared as the blue material began to slip off the mannequin.
“The filming company hadn’t sold the suits before, because they would reuse suits from picture to picture. As they got worn, they’d be used for flying shots and then they’d be used for long distance shots.”
Red and yellow and blue fabric slipped into Jim’s hands. Handling it carefully he turned.
“When it became apparent that Christopher Reeve wasn’t going to be able to make another movie, they began auctioning off some of the suits.”
Turning to Clark, Lois said, “My father was in the audience and he had the winning bid.”
As Clark stared, Lois turned and took the suit from Jim. She turned and handed it to Clark.
He stared down at the suit in his hands. Lois had just handed him a piece of history. This was what she wanted him to wear?
He hadn’t even been able to keep a single pair of clothes clean ad whole for more than half a day. How was he going to wear a literal museum piece?
