Metropolis, post-Hong Kong, was a very busy place for Lois and Clark. Both were relaxed and pleased that they had learned so much about each other on the trip. Lois still was overwhelmed at the ring on her finger, and the meaning of it seemed to occupy her every thought. She was officially engaged to the man who caused her to reject the third richest man in the world at the altar. Instead of the farm boy, the hick from nowhere, or just her best friend, he also was the one and only man who had always set her heart to fluttering. She felt like she was the luckiest girl in town, getting every wish met without having to give up on anything. She dearly loved Clark Kent. He made her feel secure, loved, and very happy. He also was the fellow who could sweep her off her feet, literally, and take off in a moment’s notice into the wild blue yonder. Superman was every girl’s fantasy. And he was in love with her!
Their arrival back at the apartment was not the simple homecoming that they had anticipated. When they alighted on the balcony, Clark heard a beeping noise in his apartment, so he told Lois to stay behind and safe while he checked out the unknown noise he heard. He walked into his apartment and found that it was the answering machine beeping to reveal that it had a full load of messages. They had only been gone for two days, but had managed to collect around thirty messages. What had they missed while they were in Hong Kong? Clark went back outside and collected Lois and their suitcases, and then went into the apartment. Along with the full answering machine that was giving off an irritating noise, there was a pile of small notes that had been stuffed through the mail slot in the front door. They looked at each other with confusion on their faces and decided to read the notes first. Most of them seemed to be from Perry, wondering where Clark was and why he was not answering his phone. There were also two from Bobby Bigmouth telling Lois that she owed him a meal for what he managed to find. No hints, but definitely interesting.
Lois grabbed a pen and notebook and went over to the phone. She listened to the answering machine, wrote the date and time down, along with the messages. When the answering machine finally wound down to the last message, they had more messages from Perry, getting more and more frantic as the weekend went past. There were also a few messages from Bill Henderson; the one that interested Lois the most was telling them that Bill had shut down the drug lab Lois found, and she was free to freelance the article about it to the AP. Bobby Bigmouth had left messages saying that if she did not call him back by Sunday evening, she still owed him a meal for the “good stuff” he had for her. She definitely was interested in what Bobby had
found.
Clark picked up the phone and dialed the number Perry had given. Alice and Perry were in the process of moving back to Metropolis from Florida, and neither Lois nor Clark knew exactly where to find them. At the same time there was a knock at the front door, so Lois went up the stairs to answer the door while Clark was attempting to call Perry. As she answered the door, Perry was on the other side with his pocket jingling as a phone call came into his cell phone. He stepped into the apartment, answering his phone at the same time. Clark looked up from his position on the sofa and realized just how comical the whole scene looked. As Perry said, “hello,” Clark broke into a huge smile. He held the phone away from his ear in the direction of Perry and said that neither one needed to use the phone to talk. Perry caught the meaning of his remark and put the cell phone back in his pocket with a grin. All three of them settled back down on the sofa to have a discussion. Lois and Clark were very curious about what had gotten their unshakable editor in such a condition. Neither had seen him push the panic button before. He not only had left many messages on the answering machine, notes at the front door, but he was on their doorstep before nine a.m.
“Where have you two been? I have almost been ready to send out the bloodhounds to look for you both. We are having some problems with the purchase of the Planet, and as an owner, Clark, you need to know what is going on. I have been so frantic trying to get this in order so that we could sign the final papers soon and not have to worry about the Daily Planet any longer.” Perry still had hardly taken a breath in his
monologue and was as agitated as the moment he walked into the apartment.
Lois and Clark looked at each other. “What’s going on, Chief?,” asked Clark. He wanted to help, but was clueless about what had gotten Perry so riled up. “Lois and I were in Hong Kong getting her an engagement ring. We did not think twice about Metropolis, so you will have to catch us up to speed so that we know what is wrong.”
Perry looked over at Lois. A slow but steady grin spread across his face. Just a few short months ago he had been so worried about her mental health, and now she looked so happy. He was pleased for her that she finally had done something smart, something that her heart told her to do. There were times when Lois forgot to treat herself like she was important. Perry knew that Clark would take care of her and love her, and he was pleased as he could be about the news. “Congratulations, you two. I could not be happier for anyone in the whole world than I am about this news.” Momentarily he was distracted, and relaxed for the first time since he had walked into the apartment. Then, as if he came back to himself, he realized that he still had a lot to tell Clark. He took a deep cleansing breath and started back on the path of setting the problem straight.
“Clark, as you know, we bought the Daily Planet’s right to publish back from the estate of Lex Luthor. We got it for a very good price for his fifty-one percent interest, and we have assumed the mortgage payments on the Sunrise Building that houses the Planet. The other forty-nine percent owners have petitioned the court to have the building sold, and the money from the insurance on the bombing of the building distributed among all of us owners. They say that it is not in the best interest of the city of Metropolis to continue with another paper. ANOTHER PAPER! What is wrong with these people? The Daily Planet is not another paper!” Perry’s face was a deep shade of red as he finished the rant. Someone had really gotten his dander up. He seriously looked like he was about to have a stroke.
“What can we do to help,” asked Lois. “How do you think we will be able to get this stopped?”
“Why would anyone think that it was a good idea to disband the Daily Planet?” asked Perry. “That makes no sense. It is not just a local paper for Metropolis, it is the voice of the world.” Perry was preaching to the convinced, but he knew that if anyone could help him find a reason to keep the paper going, it would be Lois and Clark.
This conversation continued for hours. At one point it moved from the living room into the kitchen, and Clark started to make lunch for the three of them. As they ate, the conversation continued, but Perry seemed to lose his agitation. He was still very upset, but he was not as frantic as when he first arrived.
When Perry finally got ready to leave, he told Clark he wanted him to plan to go to the lawyer’s office the next day for their appointment and they would see what they could do to stop the destruction of the one thing that made Perry want to take his next breath. This cause was so ingrained into his psyche that he could not think or talk about anything else. If he had not caught the grin between Lois and Clark at the doorway as he was leaving, he would have forgotten completely that they were in love and now engaged. He stopped moving toward the front door and told them both congratulations again. Then he kissed Lois on the cheek and shook Clark’s hand as he took his leave.
*******************
Monday morning dawned, uneventful except that the weekend excursion of Lois and Clark had left the world with the beginnings of the promised Utopia. As the children’s proverb from olden days said, love came before marriage, marriage before the baby carriage, and their half-Kryptonian children came before the end of the reign of crime as a way of life in the city of Metropolis, and then on to the rest of the world.
Clark had arranged to meet with the Daily Planet lawyers along with Perry, and Lois was curious to get the scoop from Bobby Bigmouth. So, as they went their separate ways on that fateful morning, history as retold by Tempus was marching forward, unstopped by all Tempus’ schemes. A final passionate kiss of the two held a promise of what was to come as they both marched toward destiny.
Clark went to the offices of Smith, Smith, West, Finegold, and Arrow to read what had been filed in the courts the last week by the other owners of the remainder of the Daily Planet. He went as Clark Kent, with all his Smalltown wisdom about big business. That insecurity was clouded over by the fact that he’d known when he arrived a year before that the Daily Planet was his destiny, just as he knew when he met a certain brunette reporter that she would be more than just a partner to him at the paper. He was certain that they could work out the problems and ensure that the Daily Planet had a long, productive, and world-shaking life. He had attended its premature burial a few months before, and he was not ready to go to another funeral for the paper. The pompous Charles Smith, the partner whom they were to meet, took them through the complaint filed, their counter-complaint as signed by Perry White, and what Mr. Smith thought should be done. Clark tried hard to follow the conversation, but he knew he was missing the point. It looked to him, in his simplicity, that their fifty-one percent trumped the forty-nine percent, so what was all the fuss about? What was he missing in this conversation?
A few hours later, and with not too many more answers, the group of Perry, Clark, and Mr. Smith broke up to await the rulings of the court. Mr. Smith had Clark sign a complicated and long-winded piece of paper that essentially said that Clark agreed with his co-owner that the Daily Planet should live and not be sold off and the proceeds distributed among the owners. Clark left the building understanding the frustration that Perry was feeling as evidenced by the prior evening. It seemed that for the last hour he had spun his tires in the muddy soil and had only managed to get them deeper in the rut. He wished that Superman could just pick up the whole problem and dump it back to the earth, solved. As Clark made his way back to the apartment, for the first time in a while he wondered how Lois had done at her meeting with Bobby Bigmouth. She was so hopeful that maybe she would once again have a scoop, that she must have forgotten that they had no paper to publish her scoop. Clark had done his part to rectify that small glitch, but he was curious as to what had gotten Bobby all worked up about getting a meal as soon as he could tell her about what he knew.
Lois had not had the same kind of day as Clark. She was riding on the top of the world! She had just gotten Bobby a week’s worth of food that he probably would be finished with before suppertime. Bobby had very carefully, and with great detail, laid out the plans of a new group by the name of Intergang. It had taken over in Metropolis when there was a vacancy caused by the death of Lex. Bobby said he was not sure who the new boss was, but he would keep his ears open, and as soon as he knew who was the top dog, he would call Lois. She was walking on air that she finally had something to do beside digging into Lex’s past misdeeds. That depressed Lois more than she could describe. This at least gave her a whole other group of people to investigate. Lois was elated that she was there at the beginning of this new group, and that she would be the one to put a row of nails in the lid of its coffin.
*******************
The next week went by quickly. Lois was preoccupied with her investigation of Intergang. She had gone to Bill Henderson and shared what Bobby had told her and asked whether he knew anything about the new crime organization. Bill was puzzled where she had learned about it, but he was forthright with her that he had only heard rumors about Intergang. He was grateful that she wanted to look into the group. The Police Department was limited in how much investigation they could do because of politics that limited the funds until after a crime had been committed. The new crime organization was still in its infancy and was hard to pin down right now with proper police techniques. But a nosy reporter with fewer restrictions could do a lot. Bill knew that Lois was the best person to crack this for him, and she could be trusted to share everything with the police. Nothing like having an unpaid assistant, thought Henderson.
*******************
Superman was called into action in the Alaskan tundra. A huge sink hole had opened up at a very small airport in the interior of Alaska, and since it was the only way to travel so far off the beaten path, Superman was called in to help expedite the new runway for the residents. Until it was completed, the town’s residents would be unable to travel in or out as they were landlocked in the small town in the middle of nowhere. Clark tried to explain the problem to Lois, got her to promise to PLEASE try to stay out of trouble since he could not rescue her. He thoroughly kissed her goodbye and flew north. He knew that it would be a day or two until he was finished with rebuilding the new runway, so he would need to stay up in Alaska until it was finished.
The work on the runway went better than he thought it would when he first was called to help with the problem. Instead of trying to fill in the sink hole and repave over the mess, Clark decided that Superman would improve the airport so that something like this would not happen again. He plowed a wide path through the pine trees and carried the trees, whole, over to the site where the last runway had been. He deposited nearly 200 fully grown pine trees in a pile and smoothed out the surface of the ground where the trees used to be planted. He then helped the road crews lay the asphalt and smooth it out into a firm, wide, long runway. It was much better than the original one. As soon as it was done, Clark took a short flight over the beautiful Alaskan countryside. He saw many things that caught his attention, but he was anxious to return to where his heart was located, back in Metropolis, so he just looked as he passed quickly overhead.
