Chapter 6: Tomorrow Never Comes
Oh, tomorrow never never comes.
No, tomorrow never comes.
--“Tomorrow Never Comes”
****
The next day, I was working at my desk when a very grumpy Lois Lane came into the newsroom. I raised an eyebrow, taking in her sour expression. “Having problems?”
“I managed to follow the EPRAD truck with the Messenger wreckage, but I wasn’t able to get into the hangar. Dr. Baines threw me out.”
I smirked to myself. Only Lois Lane could make a person’s stopping someone from being in an off-limits area sound like a crime to humanity.
The approach of footsteps caught my attention, and I turned to see Jimmy walking toward us. Seeing he had our attention, he told us, “We got a call from Dr. Platt this morning. He’s done gathering the pieces of his report, he says, and he hopes it’s, uh, readable.”
“Thanks, Jimmy,” Lois said, still looking unhappy about the result of her morning escapades. “Do you think you could pick it up and also get a copy of it to S.T.A.R. Labs? Maybe one of our contacts there could analyze it.”
“Can do,” he affirmed. He left, and Lois returned to her work station. But as I moved my eyes back to what I was working on, a man and a woman stopped close to my desk. I recognized them as people who worked at the Planet, but there was some part of me that really disliked the way they were staring at Lois.
The man leaned toward his companion and whispered, “Looks like Mad Dog Lane wants to rip off a couple of heads this morning and eat them for breakfast.”
The woman stifled a giggle. “Don’t let her hear you say that . . . . It might be your head she rips off.”
The man’s sneer faded. “You’ve got that right. She’s the last person you want angry at you.”
Without any real thought—certainly without any conscious planning—I found myself standing beside them. They didn’t notice me at first.
“The name ‘Mad Dog’ is definitely fitting,” the woman noted. “She really is a b—”
She cut off her words abruptly as she realized I was right by them.
I didn’t know what to say—didn’t know what I was doing, really—and I stood there for a few awkward seconds staring at them before I mumbled, “Um, excuse me. Ms. Lane is . . . ” The first words that popped into my head were “my friend,” but that would be exaggerating our relationship. My eyes flicked toward her desk hesitantly. “ . . . my colleague,” I finished lamely. I was hoping my expression would make up for the inadequacy of my words—I wanted them to know that I didn’t appreciate their attitude toward Lois.
They exchanged a surprised glance. It was obvious they knew I had heard them talking. But they didn’t appear to know what to do next any more than I did. At last, however, the shock that someone would dare stand up for Lois Lane—albeit in a clumsy fashion—finally wore off, and they muttered something vaguely resembling an apology before they skulked off.
As I returned to my desk, I saw them both give me a backwards glance, but I paid them no heed.
My head was reeling from what had just happened—I was probably just as confused as they were.
Anger was my constant enemy. One slip on my part could lead to drastic consequences. I couldn’t afford to act impulsively.
But what I had felt was definitely the stirrings of a strange righteous anger—and from that anger had grown the even stranger compulsion to defend a woman I barely knew.
Shaking my head, I tried to force myself to calm down, but my breathing was still ragged. When my phone began to ring, I picked it up with trembling fingers and stared pensively across the newsroom at Lois’s detractors.
“Clark Kent, Daily Planet,” I said into the receiver, still distracted by my contemplation of the anger that had taken hold of me.
“Mr. Kent? This is Lex Luthor.”
My attention was suddenly captured. “Mr. L-Luthor,” I said fumblingly. “How can I help you?”
“I didn’t get the opportunity to thank you last night for saving my life, Mr. Kent.”
I shifted in my chair, feeling uncomfortable. “There is no need to thank me, Mr. Luthor.”
“No, there is,” he insisted smoothly. “Most people wouldn’t have done what you did.”
“I couldn’t just leave you there to die . . . . ”
“And I’m grateful for that—and for the fact that you didn’t print what happened. It would have been very unfortunate to have such a scene in the paper before the White Orchid Ball. I really wanted the space station to take priority there.”
“Yes, sir,” I acknowledged. I couldn’t really blame him.
“Mr. Kent, in honor of your good deed, I would like to give you a personal interview. It would be the first one I’ve ever given, you understand.”
The significance of what he was saying was not lost on me. To get a private interview with Lex Luthor could be the thing that made my temporary status at the Planet permanent. I would go from a no-name reporter to someone who was actually seen as having some pull in this city.
I raised my eyes to look at Lois, who was busy at work. She may have told me it was her goal to get the first one-on-one interview with Lex Luthor, but she didn’t have sole ownership of the idea. Reporters got scooped all the time—it was nothing new.
But I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did this to her. And so, I said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Luthor, but Lois Lane has been seeking that interview with you for a while. She is the one who deserves it—you should give it to her.”
There was a pause. “Are you certain, Mr. Kent?”
I hesitated and then stated firmly, “Yes, I am.”
“Very well, then. If there is ever a favor I can do for you personally . . . ”
I suspected Lex Luthor hated feeling indebted to any man, but there was little I could do about it except to assure him, “There’s no need to repay me, Mr. Luthor. I am just glad to see you are recovering so well.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kent. I hope you have a good day.”
“You, too, Mr. Luthor.”
After I hung up, I felt eyes on me, and I turned slightly to see Mr. White looking at me with interest. Flushing, I inquired meekly, “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough,” he replied, still studying me. “That was Lex Luthor on the phone?”
I nodded. “Yes, Mr. White.”
“Does he, uh—feel he owes you something?”
“Yes, Mr. White.”
“You didn’t do anything bad, did you?”
“No, Mr. White.”
“And he offered you a private interview—which you turned down and gave to Lois?”
“Yes, Mr. White.”
He stared at me for a few seconds. “Uh . . . I see.” He crossed his arms. “Now, Kent, there are two things I want to tell you. The first is this—the newspaper business is a cutthroat world. You use your favors as you can to help yourself out. Now, you gave the interview to Lois, so it’s still with the Daily Planet, but I can tell you right now—if Lois had been in your position, she wouldn’t have even thought twice before jumping on it. Morals aren’t so cut and dried in journalism. Sometimes, you gotta watch out for number one and not feel bad about it.”
Glum, I watched as the Chief Editor started to walk away, but then something struck me, and I called out to him, “You said there were two things. What’s the other one?”
He turned toward me, and his serious expression was broken by a smile. “The other thing? Well, I’m proud of you for what you did, son.” He prepared to go once more and then faced me again. “Oh, by the way, Kent—that piece you wrote yesterday was a good one. You can now consider yourself a permanent member of the Daily Planet team.”
And with that simple aside, one of my dreams had come true.
Stunned, I sat there for a few moments, trying to convince myself I’d really heard him right. But my reverie was broken when Lois Lane walked up to my desk.
“What was that all about?” she asked, trying to sound offhanded. But the very fact that she was coming over to me spoke volumes for her curiosity.
“Just a story I wrote about a woman and a theater,” I responded, trying to mimic her feigned lack of concern. But I couldn’t help but crack a smile. “Your rookie partner is now the newest permanent hire.”
“Temporary partner,” she corrected. “I work alone.”
“Right,” I returned.
With a mumbled congrats, she returned to work, and I did the same. But it was all I could do to keep a goofy grin off my face. Knowing I was permanently hired by the Planet was enough to lift me up to Cloud 9.
A few minutes later, Cat came up to my desk. She had evidently learned that touching me was not the way to get on my good side, but she was focusing her every pore on looking “sultry.”
“Hello, Clark,” she purred as she sat on the corner of my desk. She pulled one of her bare legs across the other one, and I was sure that if her dress had been an inch shorter, then she would have been flashing her underwear at me. As it was, I was once again extremely discomfited by her forward manner.
“Hi, Cat,” I murmured, trying to look everywhere but at her.
“Why don’t you and I do dinner tonight? I know this wonderful restaurant owned by this sweet little old couple—they make wonderful cheeseburgers . . . . And their chocolate shakes are simply to die for.”
Lois passed by my desk with an annoyed expression, and I grimaced. Cat may have been trying to cater to my rural tastes, but I wasn’t having any of it. “Look, Cat, I really have a lot of work to do. Maybe some other time.”
“It’ll be a date,” she said with a sleek smile, trailing a finger across the edge of my desk before blowing me a kiss. As she left, I just shook my head, still surprised by her audacity.
I saw Lois disappear into the conference room, and I grabbed a notepad and pen and hurried after her.
Lois looked up briefly from her seat when I entered. “Playing a game of Cat and Mouse?”
I ignored her statement and gestured at her notes. “You having any luck?”
She shrugged. “I’ve called probably fifty former employees of EPRAD who knew Platt . . . . But no one is saying anything.”
“Where do we go from here?”
“Well, we’ll need to piece together the report and then try to prove Dr. Baines did get a copy of it but ignored it . . . . I just hope you didn’t plan a date with Cat.”
“I don’t have a date with Cat,” I said firmly.
“All right. Let’s take a little time to regroup and then meet again when Jimmy returns. There’s a long night ahead of us.”
I smirked. “I can handle it if you can.”
She rolled her eyes. “If we’re lucky, tomorrow we’ll be able to prove Platt’s theory. It may not be easy, but hopefully he’ll be back with EPRAD soon. That man is a born scientist, even if he is a bit . . . unorthodox.” She made a gesture toward the door, obviously dismissing me.
I left the room and returned to my desk, where I stared at my phone in contemplation. Since I had a little bit of time, I wanted to look into the incident in the alley. Was Lex Luthor trying to cover his tracks? On the phone earlier, I’d felt almost like he had wanted to offer me a bribe for my silence, though he hadn’t said anything that would explicitly indicate that. But it couldn’t hurt to check into things. Maybe there was some kind of story here.
****
Unfortunately, my pursuit of what happened in the alley to Lex Luthor only led to a bunch of dead ends. I gave up on it and was about to stand up to go talk to Lois when Perry White slapped something down on my desk. “Not sure if you saw this or not, son, but I figured you’d want to.” He smiled at me and then continued on his way.
I looked down at my desk. In front of me was a copy of the Daily Planet that had been opened to my article on the theater. It wasn’t the front page, but I was proud of it nonetheless. With a smile, I read the article and then put it in my desk. I would have to show it to my parents sometime.
A few minutes later, Lois and I began working on piecing together the report Jimmy brought us. It was infinitely more frustrating than a jigsaw puzzle, as Dr. Platt’s report was ridiculously long and detailed. It seemed to me as if he could have just said, “The coolant systems have been replaced by heating devices, which will cause the Messenger to explode,” and then he could have been done with it. But Platt was a scientist, and simplicity wasn’t the name of his preferred game. Much to Lois’s and my misfortune.
As the hours ticked by, the newsroom became deserted except for Lois and me. We were surrounded with scraps of paper, and our task seemed more futile by the minute. The task was so daunting—there were no dates, no page numbers . . . . It seemed as if nothing matched. I would think I had a series of pages correctly lined up only to realize they didn’t go together at all. Finally, Lois left to pick up some Chinese food. I was still working on piecing together the report when she returned.
Lois dropped the sack of food on the table and then took out two cartons. Opening the cartons so I could look at them, she said, “All right. You have a choice—cashew chicken or moo goo gai pan.”
I raised an eyebrow at the mediocre-looking Chinese food. “Boy, you sure know how to bring back a large selection. How can I ever choose?”
“Shut up, farmboy, or I’ll eat it all.”
Grinning, I took the moo goo gai pan, grabbed a fork, and placed a napkin in my lap. We both ate quickly, and it somehow turned into a contest as to who could eat the fastest.
“Ha!” I exclaimed at last, throwing my plastic fork into the carton along with my napkin. “I won.”
She glared at me and continued shoveling food into her mouth. After she finished off the last smidgen of rice in her carton, she pointed out, “You still have a mushroom left. So, actually, I won.”
I looked down at the tiny sliver of mushroom she was referring to. “That does not count!”
“Does, too.”
“It’s almost microscopic,” I declared incredulously.
“Tough. The contest was for eating everything.”
I narrowed my eyes. “We never set any rules for this eating contest.”
“It was understood,” she declared.
“You just can’t stand losing,” I muttered.
“Lois Lane doesn’t lose,” she informed me matter-of-factly.
I snorted but didn’t comment further. Instead, I reached for a fortune cookie, but she swatted my hand and took the one I was grabbing. “You have to take the one farthest from you,” she explained when I looked at her.
Rolling my eyes, I asked her, “What other rules do you have about food?”
“Well, for one thing, you have to eat the whole fortune cookie before you read your fortune—or else it won’t come true.”
“Fine.” I took the remaining cookie and watched her actions.
She broke her fortune cookie in two, pulled out the tiny piece of paper, and then slipped the fortune into one hand so she couldn’t see it until after eating her cookie. I mimicked her movements and began eating my own fortune cookie, feeling amused. I couldn’t really make fun of her for it. My parents and I had a lot of Kent family traditions, some of which seemed as nonsensical as Lois’s rules for eating fortune cookies. There was just something comforting about tradition that couldn’t really be explained.
When Lois and I were finally done eating our fortune cookies, she held out her piece of paper and read, “‘He who throws dirt is losing ground.’” Her expression soured. “That is not a fortune—that’s a saying. They either need to rename these things or put actual fortunes in them, like ‘You will become rich and famous’ or ‘You will lose something dear to you this year.’” She crumpled the paper and threw it in her carton. “Not something like this.”
Smiling, I took a drink of coffee before picking up my fortune, and I barely kept from choking as I read it to myself. It said, “The one you love is closer than you think.”
I was still blinking at it when Lois asked, “What does yours say?”
I almost said, “The same thing yours does,” but I knew that would draw her curiosity, so instead I thought for a second and told her, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.”
She snorted. “I swear—these things are getting worse every year.”
I grinned. “I bet they could all say the same thing and you would still want to get one every time you ordered Chinese food.”
“They’re a staple for American Chinese,” she returned. “Of course I would want one.”
I just stared at her in wonder. She could really irritate me beyond belief—yet somehow, she was getting under my skin.
She stared back at me, and something passed between us. But she suddenly realized the intensity of our gazes and told me abruptly, “Don’t fall for me, Kent. I just don’t have time for it.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Ms. Lane,” I murmured.
As she picked up her carton and went to throw it away, I quickly shredded my fortune and then did the same.
****
After working a little longer and with more success than we’d had with empty stomachs, we gathered the pieces of Platt’s report in a box and went to his residence for help in deciphering the scientific jargon. We entered the building without problem, but we stopped abruptly when faced with the open door to Platt’s room.
There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I stared at that door. Coming from the room was a dim flashing and a sparking noise that just added to my sense of foreboding. Though I had the box of papers in my hands, I tried to get in front of Lois. “Lois, maybe you should let me look first.”
But she dismissed my attempt to shield her and told me, “Don’t be ridiculous, farmboy. I’ve seen a lot more in life than you have out in the cornfields.” She pushed the door open wider and went into the room with confidence. After moving the light switch back and forth and discovering it wasn’t working, she approached the chair in the middle of the room. A small halo of hair could be seen just above it. Then, I saw something else.
“Lois, hold on . . . . Look—the water.”
There was a pan of water visible beneath Platt’s chair, and his feet were submerged. Moving closer, we could see the electricity running from live electrical cables from the wall. And then we saw Platt, sitting back in the chair, his hair standing up and his face pale and still and utterly lifeless.
My breath caught in my throat, and Lois turned with a gasp and hid her face in my jacket. Closing my eyes, I held my breath and tensed. My instinct was to lurch back, to pull away from this human contact, but something else within me—something I had thought long extinguished—rose up, and I realized with profound shock that I wanted to embrace her. I started to bring my arms up to hold her, but then my brain caught up with my actions, and I lowered my arms and just concentrated on breathing regularly. I needed to be careful. I shouldn’t be touching her.
Finally, Lois moved away from me with a mumbled apology.
“We had better call the police,” I told her, the taste of bile in my mouth.
As Platt had been living in a condemned building, there was no phone in the room, so we went outside and found a payphone. After calling 911, we returned to the room and stood there in solemnity for a few minutes without saying anything.
Finally, I spoke. “It’s my fault he’s dead.”
“What?” Lois exclaimed, gazing at me incredulously.
My head was filled with thoughts of the man—and an image of that smiling girl in the photograph on his desk. Speaking in a low voice, I told Lois, “I should have forced him to leave . . . . I knew he wasn’t safe here, but I just let him stay.”
She was adamant. “It’s not your fault. Dr. Platt made his choice. He was willing to sacrifice himself for his daughter. Is there a more noble cause than that?”
“He shouldn’t have had to die at all,” I insisted, turning away from her and clenching my fists at my sides. “He should still be alive.”
“We’ll find whoever did this and make them pay,” she promised. “We’ll get to the bottom of this.”
I pressed my lips into a thin line and just stared at the chair in which Platt had lost his life. Whatever we did would already be too late—a man’s life had been lost.
****
Eventually, the police arrived. They hadn’t been gathering evidence for long before they proclaimed death by suicide.
“Suicide?” I echoed, getting angry. “Dr. Platt was not suicidal. He was a brilliant man who loved his daughter and was willing to do all he could to help her, not hurt her.”
“Look—” one of the policemen started to say.
“He would not kill himself,” I growled, my rage growing. “He was helping us work on a very important case. He gave his life for it.”
“He’s attempted suicide before, Kent,” Inspector Henderson—the detective covering the case—pointed out in a calm voice. “There are no signs of struggle or forced entry.”
“I told you, he did not kill himself,” I growled. “His death has been set up to look like a—” My anger was growing to dangerous levels, and that realization hit me suddenly. My expression suddenly turned from extreme fury to something resembling a deer in the headlights. What was I doing? “I’m sorry. I just—I’m sorry.” I bit my lip and glanced at my watch. It was 5:30 am. Turning to Lois, I mumbled weakly, “I’ll see you at the Planet at 9,” and then I left, ignoring her as she called out after me.
I doubted I would be able to get much sleep, but I knew that she needed it. All I was able to think about was how I was partially responsible for Platt’s death. I should have gotten him out of there.
