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Learning Curves
By Chris Carr <carrcmh@yahoo.co.uk>
Rated PG
Submitted March 2000

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FEEDBACK: Any and all welcome, so long as it's polite!  Public via
the fanfic list, or private.


INTRODUCTION: I owe thanks to a number of people: Nan for
giving me General Newcomb's name; LabRat for telling me the name
of Clark's landlord; all the folks who said nice things over on the MBs;
Wendy and Jenni for reading through a very early and very incomplete
draft and making suggestions; Wendy and Irene for reading through
later drafts and spotting typos and saying more nice things; Wendy
(again!) and Jenni for helping me get out of a deep plot hole (after all
this time I'm not sure who should take credit for the whispering
scenario, but I know that I can't do so all alone); and last, but not least,
Bryce Zabel who I don't know and I'm sure I'll never meet for writing
two of the best episodes of Lois and Clark.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Lois and Clark, or Perry White, Jonathan
and Martha, Jimmy Olsen, General Newcomb, Dr Klein or even Ralph
and Eduardo.  I'm making no money from this, and I mean no harm by
borrowing the characters.  No infringement of copyright intended.

Historical note: in my corner of the world, the episode Neverending
Battle aired before Strange Visitor.

Learning Curves
by Christine Carr

The elevator came to a halt, the bell pinged, and the doors opened.
Lois Lane stepped into the newsroom.  She inhaled the atmosphere
with the proprietorial air of one who knew that she didn't just belong
here, she ruled.  After Perry White, the editor, Lois was probably the
most important asset the Daily Planet had.  She was, as she was well
aware, the best reporter on the paper, if not in the city.  It was a
position she had worked hard to achieve, and she continued to work
hard to maintain it.

En route to Perry's office, Lois caught sight of a flash of red and blue
on one of the Planet's television monitors.  She paused, curious as to
what the big guy was doing now.  She smiled faintly as she realised
that he was helping out with the aftermath of an earthquake
somewhere in Asia; was there anything that Superman couldn't tackle?
she wondered.  His debut had been astonishing enough, but since then,
the kind of emergencies he dealt with had been growing ever more
ambitious and impressive.  As the camera panned to show the full and
horrific extent of the devastation it became obvious that this one was
going to keep him busy for a while.

She shook her head ruefully, thinking that no woman could resist the
lure of that body; he truly was the stuff of dreams.  However, when she
put her dreams aside for a moment and considered her situation in the
cold light of day, she knew that Superman probably barely even knew
that she existed.  If he had paid any real notice to her when he'd flown
her back to the Planet after the Prometheus incident, she reasoned, he
would never have been tempted to give the interview that should by
rights have been hers to Clark Kent.  Lois smiled grimly to herself as
she thought back to the afternoon's interrogation session.  No matter
what the polygraph machine had said, she knew that she didn't have a
romantic attachment to Superman, at least not in any meaningful sense.
When she thought about it, the government agents' belief that she
might be able to tell them something interesting about Superman was
almost laughable.

Pushing thoughts of Superman from her mind, in favour of more
immediate concerns, she went on her way.

"What's up, Perry?" demanded Lois as she strode, uninvited, into his
office.

Perry looked up from his desk and said, "Hi, Lois.  Come on in.  Oh,
you already *are* in."  Lois didn't bother to acknowledge his jibe and
Perry chose not to pursue the matter, electing instead to get down to
business.  "The warrant those guys had this morning?"

"Yeah?"

"It's phoney."

"Phoney?!" cried Lois.  "What do you mean, phoney?"

"I mean, no-one down in Washington knows anything about it.  The
lawyers have been calling all over, but have come up empty.  No-one
recognises the descriptions of the agents, either."

"What?"

"They called the Justice Department, FBI, State Department, CIA...
They even called the ATF.  Nada."

Lois felt her temper fray.  "You mean, I let myself be strapped to that
torture machine for *nothing*?"

"That's about the size of it, yes."

"That makes me mad!  Really mad!  Oooo, someone is going to pay for
this!  I'm going to find them and expose them and hang them out to
dry, the lying, scheming, double-dealing, duplicitous...  Words fail me,
Perry.  They really do!"

"Well," said Perry, "I'm pleased to hear that you're on the case, but
you'd better be quick about it.  The only thing we know for sure about
them is that they are after Superman.  They want to track him down, so
you'd better make sure that you track them down first!"

The only problem with that was neither Lois nor Perry knew where to
start.

Fortunately that state of affairs changed with a phone call to the Planet
first thing the following morning.

*****

Although his speed would have been envied by the passengers of the
transoceanic planes he overtook, Clark flew across the Pacific at what,
for him, was a leisurely pace.  Twelve hours spent digging survivors
out of the rubble of collapsed buildings in Asia had taken its toll on
him.  The sun on his back was renewing him physically, but the
emotional healing would take longer.  The memories of the previous
night would, he suspected, haunt him for a long time to come.  He had
witnessed so much suffering, so much pain.  Images of the victims'
grief and worry for loved ones were intermixed with fragmented
memories of joy as families were reunited, children with parents,
husbands with wives.

Superman had helped the emergency teams locate casualties, both
living and dead.  He'd helped retrieve the former but had left the
grizzly task of reclaiming the latter to others.  As the memories
crowded in on him, he felt torn.  Perhaps he should have stayed, even
though the emergency workers had said that they could handle things
on their own now, and he, as Clark Kent, had commitments elsewhere.
At the same time, he couldn't help but feel that he had run away from
his responsibilities, fearing that he couldn't have borne to witness the
suffering for much longer.

At thirty five thousand feet above the sea Clark found himself sighing.
Being Superman was much harder than he had ever imagined it would
be.  He'd thought that putting on the suit would solve a multitude of
problems; wearing it, he had thought, would enable him to help people
without putting his identity on the line.  While it was true that the suit
had solved that particular problem, a new range of difficulties had
arisen to taunt him instead.

He had completely failed to foresee the reaction Superman would
engender.  He had underestimated the furore that would be elicited by
the appearance of a flying man, just as he had underestimated the good
he could do as Superman and the demands, both physical and mental,
that would be placed upon him.

Nothing in his previous life had prepared him for this.

He sighed again, thinking of the mistakes that he had almost made in
Asia.  He had wanted to tear at the rubble, ripping the debris away
from the wounded.  It had been the merest good fortune that he had,
thinking that it would be polite to do so, consulted with the emergency
crews before he started work; he had heeded their advice that the
debris had to be moved with the utmost care and patience lest it topple
and crush those trapped beneath.  He knew that, if he hadn't given in
to his impulse to be courteous, the casualty statistics could have been
far worse.

The trouble was, of course, that, while, as Superman, he still had a
tremendous amount to learn, there was no training course to teach him
how to be a superhero.  He needed to learn how to be the best
Superman he could be, just as he needed to learn how to balance the
two sides of himself.  He didn't want to lose Clark, the essence of who
he was, to the two dimensional cut-out in the red and blue suit, yet the
more time he spent as Superman, the more he realised there was for
him to do.  He found himself pulled constantly in two directions,
between being the hero and being Clark.

Clark glanced at his body.  At that moment, more than anything else,
he wanted to be able to shed the disguise he had adopted.  He wanted
- needed - to be Clark, to put the last night into some sort of
perspective, and to regain his equilibrium.  He needed to cling on to the
moments of normality he could grab in his everyday life.

Normality, he thought with a harsh laugh.  What kind of normal did he
mean?   As much as he might wish otherwise, being Clark was as much
of a disguise as being Superman.  Only at the farm or, now that he had
his own place, in his apartment could he truly be himself.  Only then
could he shed the glasses and just be.

Just be what? he wondered.  Himself, he supposed, whatever that
might be.

He pushed aside the all too familiar questions of where he had come
from and why he was the way he was before they could crowd in on
him as they were occasionally wont to do.  He didn't feel up to dealing
with them at the moment although, given the raid at the Planet the
previous day, he knew that they had been given a new urgency, and he
was going to have to face them soon.

Right now, though, he needed to think about the practicalities of
getting back to his life.  As he thought about the way he'd left things in
Metropolis, he realised three things.  First he couldn't go home to
shower and change; Perry had expressly told him to avoid his
apartment.  Second, he was already late for work.  Third, and most
worrying of all, strange government agents were after Superman.

Clark took a deep breath, not because he had any physiological need
for it, but because of the calming effect it had.  The first problem was
the easiest to solve; a quick side trip to Smallville would take care of
his need to clean up.  As for the second, well, he'd have to find yet
another excuse to explain away his prolonged absence.

The third problem, though, was much more difficult to deal with.  The
agents' reaction was exactly the kind of thing that his father had always
warned him about.  Jonathan Kent had always stressed the need to
keep Clark's gifts a secret lest he be locked away and, as he colourfully
expressed it, "dissected like a frog".

The Kent family had done a good job of keeping the secret of Clark's
powers until Clark had created Superman.  It was the flashy superhero
and not the man beneath the suit who had lured the agents to
Metropolis, where it looked as though they had every intention of
conducting a witch hunt.

Why were they so against Superman? he thought painfully.  What had
he ever done to warrant their paranoia?  Their xenophobia was
unfathomable to Clark whose generous heart always sought to see the
best in everyone irrespective of colour, creed or political affiliations.

If only, he thought, everyone could understand Superman as well as
Lois did!

The thought of Lois caused his mouth to curl up at the edges.  For
some reason he didn't understand, the merest thought of her had the
power to ease his disquiet.  She'd recognised, before even he had done,
that Superman couldn't be everywhere, couldn't do everything.  "It's
the idea of Superman...  Whatever he can do, that's enough,"  she had
said.

Her wise words warmed him again, just as it had done when she had
first spoken them, not knowing to whom she was talking.  He
wondered what she would think if she knew that she was at least as
responsible as he was for creating Superman.  Yes, it had been his idea
to create the hero in the first instance, but, without Lois's unknowing
support, Superman would have fled the skies of Metropolis, afraid to
carry on in the face of Luthor's threats.

Superman had stayed because she wanted it, and she had helped him to
want it, too.

How ironic, he thought, that they were barely friends, yet he valued her
advice over that offered by almost anyone else.  She was prickly and
competitive, strong-willed and arrogant, yet she was balm on his soul.

*****

It was a wonder that the cab driver had managed to get a permit, Lois
decided, as he grated the gears and lurched to a start as the traffic light
turned green.  Then she tuned out her immediate surroundings,
preferring instead to concentrate on the morning's events.  That a man
called George Thompson had crawled out from underneath some
anonymous stone in Washington and had seen fit to phone the Planet at
eight thirty suggested someone was attempting damage limitation on
an impressive scale.  That he had invited her to visit him, saying that he
wanted to talk, had inevitably further aroused her curiosity.  However,
she had been in the business long enough to know that this Thompson
wasn't going to give her information for no reason; he undoubtedly had
his own motives for wanting to see her.  She could only wonder what
they might be.

For a moment she regretted the fact that Clark wasn't with her.  After
all, he'd been affected as much by the raid as she had been, and she
knew that he had been right to suggest that it was *their* story, not
merely hers.  However, Perry hadn't been able to track him down since
he'd left the Planet the previous day, and that left the field clear for
Lois to pursue the investigation on her own.

It wasn't as though she was stealing this story, she reassured herself.  If
Kent couldn't use a pager or get into work at a reasonable hour, then
he only had himself to blame for missing out on the juicy stuff.

Clark disturbed her in a number of ways.  He got to her, pulling her
towards him as much by his unassuming personality as by his good
looks.  She wondered why that was.  He wasn't particularly
charismatic.  Rather he was laid back and softly spoken, easy going and
polite.  He was the sort of person who faded into the background
rather than demanding that others sat up and took notice.  Yet, to her
chagrin, she found that she was beginning to miss his steadfast
presence when he wasn't around.

There was something about him that inspired confidence.  When,
during that Prometheus business, she had found herself spilling her
inner-most secrets - and whatever had possessed her to do that, and to
a man she had only just met? - he had seemed genuinely sympathetic
and afterwards he hadn't spread his knowledge across the newsroom.
In a business where gossip was considered to be a way of life, Clark
Kent had turned out to be surprisingly good at keeping things to
himself.

He was a study in contradictions, Lois thought.  In a city where
aggressive rudeness was a survival tactic, he was courteous.  In a
business where meeting people was essential, he was shy.  A
wordsmith, he was sometimes tongue-tied in speech.  And, most
curious of all, although he refused to be intimidated by her, he had
never made any attempts to be intimidating, himself.

He was, Lois decided, a nice man.  She wasn't sure if that was a
compliment or not.  She would have thought he was too soft to survive
in the newspaper business, were it not for two things.  The first was
that he could undoubtedly deliver the goods.  The second was that, if
he was provoked enough, he would retaliate.

She thought about his little stunt with the Godzilla doll.  Maybe it
hadn't been a kind thing for him to do, but she found herself respecting
him a lot more for having played the prank on her.  Her behaviour had
been appallingly unprofessional and, under the circumstances, he would
have been well within his rights to have done much worse.  She was
grateful both for his restraint and for the understated way he had
handled the incident's aftermath in the newsroom.  He hadn't gloated
over his triumph, choosing instead to accept her apology when
everyone else was out of earshot.  She was grateful, too, that he didn't
bear her any grudge.  As far as he was concerned, the story-poaching
episode had ended with her visit to the sewage treatment facility and,
thanks in large part to him, while she hadn't quite been able to put her
guilty feelings from her mind, they were becoming easier to live with.

What bothered her more was that Clark had beaten her to the story of
Superman's return.  For Lois, nothing could be more galling than
losing a great story to a competitor, especially if that competitor
worked for the same newspaper.  She was not, by nature, a team
player; she could cope by being scooped by a rival paper, but to be
scooped by a colleague!  She worked hard to be the best, and to be
beaten to the Superman story by a rookie out of nowhere was, for
Lois, a blow of the cruellest kind.

Clark, Lois realised, was good, and had the potential to become better
than merely good.  It had been a long time since she had felt her
position at the paper was under threat, but now she was remembering
just how much she disliked the feeling.

Well, she scowled, thinking of the story that he'd produced, she'd show
Clark Kent.  She'd make sure he knew why she was the best, and, this
time, she'd make sure that she played fair.  No stealing stories, no
underhand techniques.  No, this time, she'd beat him fair and square, by
being the best investigative reporter that she knew how to be.  Maybe
she'd lost a battle, but she was going to win the war.

The cabby pulled sharply into the kerb, throwing Lois off-balance in
her seat and earning himself a muttered curse from his passenger.  She
climbed out onto the pavement and threw a few bills at him through the
car's window along with a barbed remark about getting some driving
tuition before he picked up another fare.  She glanced at her watch.
Two things crossed her mind; first, the stitching on the leather strap
was unravelling and she needed either to get it mended or to replace
the strap altogether, and, second, that if she didn't hurry she was going
to be late for the appointment.  Then she ran up the building's front
steps.

Moments later she found herself being pointed in the direction of
Thompson's office.

He didn't step forward to greet her, but he did stand up as she entered
the room.  He was, she judged with the benefit of long experience,
being as courteous as manners demanded, but no more than that.  If he
had been genuinely happy about their business together, he would have
approached her, introduced himself, and shaken her hand.

Well, she thought, if that was the way he wanted to do things, then she
was more than happy to oblige.  Dispensing with the amenities, she
said.  "Mr Thompson?  Lois Lane."  Without asking for permission,
she set a little tape recorder up on the corner of his desk and
continued.  "Who exactly do you work for?"

Most interviewees responded to her bulldozer behaviour by quaking in
the face of such determination and giving up their information easily.
Not so Thompson who turned out to be as urbane in his speech as he
was in his appearance.  When he spoke, his voice told of a privileged
upbringing and an expensive education.  He was smooth.  Too smooth,
indeed, for Lois's taste.  "I'm a sort of government ombudsman.  I go
where the problems are.  Right now, my job is to get to the bottom of
this incident at the Planet."  While that told her, in vague terms, what
he did, it didn't answer her question.

"Well, that's my job, too.  What can you tell me?"

"Not much.  The first step in our investigation process is to collect all
eye-witness accounts."

His use of the word "our" was not lost on Lois, and she wondered
once more who, precisely, he was working for, where the rest of his
people might be, and why he was unwilling to part with the
information.  However, she let his slip pass, suspecting that she would
meet with resistance if she pursued the matter.  In fact, she was
beginning to wonder if her coming here hadn't been a complete waste
of her time.  Still, there was no point in giving up until she was
absolutely sure.

"Your investigation?" she asked.  "What about my investigation?"

Thompson replied, "That's the other reason I'm here.  Understand, we
do not take it lightly when someone tries to pass himself off as an agent
of the US government.  Can you give us a physical description of any
of the people involved?"

Lois stared at him, her eyes beginning to smoulder in a manner that
should have set alarm bells ringing in Thompson's head, and would
have done if he had known her better.  "Let me get something straight.
You're here to interview *me*?"

"Yes.  And to advise you to stay out of harm's way.  The person who
did this is very dangerous."

All Lois's suspicious about the interview gelled into certainty; she
could recognise a spin job when she encountered one.  If Thompson
knew that the person who had carried out the raid was "very
dangerous" then, she deduced, he also knew who it was.  In that case,
what point could there be in asking for a description, other than to try
to cover up for him?   Moreover, it was most unlikely that he would
tell her anything helpful.  With only limited success, she struggled to
hide her irritation.  Biting off her words as she spoke, she said, "Mr
Thompson, let me explain something to you.  I do not need your
protection.  I came here because I thought you could help me find the
man responsible for the raid.  Do you have any clues?  Any ideas at
all?"

She wasn't surprised when Thompson failed to answer her questions,
choosing instead to divert the flow of the conversation.  He said, "Let
me ask you a question, Ms Lane: to the best of your knowledge, does
Superman have any enemies?"

With an exaggerated sigh, she reached for the tape recorder, and,
clicking the stop button as she stood up, she said, "I can see that I'm
wasting my time here, Mr Thompson.  Good day."  She spun on her
heel, and exited the room without a backward glance.

Muttering murderous things about slimy mouthpieces, Lois strode out
of the building and crossed the street, taking only cursory glances to
make sure that it was clear of traffic.  At the far side, she made a bee-
line for a payphone, and put in a call to the Daily Planet.  She made a
mental note to see whether Perry could be persuaded to spring for a
mobile; this was, after all, the nineties and a reporter of her calibre
should have access to information at all times, and not have to worry
about carrying around a good supply of quarters.

She was part way through giving Jimmy Olsen instructions to pull
everything he could find on George Thompson for her when she saw
the man himself coming out of the building.  Intrigued as to where he
was going in such a hurry, she slammed down the phone on Jimmy, put
her fingers between her lips, and whistled shrilly for a taxi.

With a screech of brakes, a cab pulled up alongside her.  She leapt in,
saying, "Follow that car!" as soon as her first foot was inside the door.

The driver, who had undoubtedly watched too many detective shows,
put the car into gear and pulled away from the kerb before she had sat
down.  She found herself losing her balance and falling against
cushions for the second time in half an hour.  Quickly righting herself,
she leaned forward, keeping her eyes focused on her quarry.

Not five minutes later, the taxi came to a halt outside a warehouse on
Bessolo Boulevard.  Lois thrust some money in the direction of the
driver and, not bothering to wait for change, she jumped out.  Keeping
to the shadows, she tailed Thompson to a door and watched him as he
glanced around furtively then swept a card through a magnetic strip
reader.

Without thinking about what she was doing, she darted after
Thompson and wrapped her hand around the door, keeping it from
shutting behind him.  A few moments later she cautiously crept inside.

After passing through a second door, she ducked down behind some
filing cabinets and stayed out of view as she watched Thompson walk
to the far end of the warehouse and, without knocking, go into another
room.  She caught a glimpse of an office and of its occupant; he was
no longer wearing a suit - instead he was wearing something that
looked suspiciously like military fatigues - but Lois had no difficulty in
recognising him as the leader of the goons from the Planet.  She'd been
right: Thompson did know him!

Once Thompson had closed the door behind him, Lois found her view
impeded by frosted glass.  She no longer had a clear view of the two
men, but equally the glass had the effect of making it most unlikely that
they would catch sight of her dodging closer to them.  Coming to rest
about fifteen feet away from the office, Lois hunkered down again,
eager to see what would happen next.

Although the two men were reduced to mere silhouettes and were
regrettably at enough of a distance to render their individual words
indistinguishable, it was obvious from their tones that they were having
some sort of dispute.  She watched, mesmerised, as the leader back-
handed Thompson then hit him a few times.  Thompson did his best to
retaliate, but Lois could tell that he was outclassed.  It wasn't just
because yesterday's leader was a younger and heavier man, solid with
muscle.  The way his silhouette moved told her that he was a trained
fighter who had no compunction about hurting his opponent.
Thompson, by contrast, appeared to lack both his skill and his killer
instinct.

The fight came to a abrupt end with both men still standing.
Thompson leaned over, and Lois suspected that he was supporting his
hands on his knees as he caught his breath.

More words were exchanged then, and some sort of uneasy truce must
have been reached because the door opened again, and they came into
the main body of the warehouse together.  They walked in silence
towards the door, the tension between them radiating away from their
bodies and setting the very air on edge.

Lois, who had clamped her hands across her mouth and cowered in the
darkest shadows she could find as soon as the door to the inner room
opened, felt her heart beat at double speed as she listened to the men's
footsteps echo through the cavernous room, then fade as the far door
closed behind him.

Now alone in the warehouse, Lois had the luxury of time to look
around.   Shafts of light reflected off dust motes hanging in the air and
bounced off the concrete floor.  Metal shelves, filled with objects
covered with dustsheets, and randomly placed filing cabinets littered
the cavernous space.

Lois eased herself out of her hiding space.  Her footsteps sounded
unnaturally loud to her ears as she walked over to the first row of filing
cabinets.  She pulled open a few drawers, and her eyes widened as she
took in their contents.  Blurred photos and eye-witness accounts of
UFOs were recorded on something called Bureau 39's stationery, and
were catalogued and sorted, both alphabetically by location and
chronologically by date.

She thought incredulously, UFOs?  The government got out of the
UFO business back in 1969.  Didn't they?  Perhaps not, she realised.

She pulled out a file at random, flicked through it, and stashed it in her
satchel for later examination.  Then she turned her attention to the
metal shelves.  Pulling up a few sheets, she took in the sight of various
bits of scrap metal.  They looked like so much junk to her, but
evidently one person's junk was another's extra-terrestrial space
debris.

She continued her search, shaking her head as she worked her way
through the collection, stunned by the amount of effort that had gone
into amassing this stuff.  However, she had seen more convincing alien
spacecraft in the cinema and she found herself despairing of this waste
of her tax dollars.  Nothing she saw here impressed her, until, that was,
at the end of one of the shelves, she espied a small object.  Intrigued by
its tiny size, she pulled back the sheet covering it.

The little craft looked as though it had been sorely neglected.  A light
soil filled in the indentations along the ship's side and the gaps between
the raised relief of Superman's S-shield.

Lois gasped and recoiled in shock, letting the sheet fall untidily across
its back.  Here she was, in a warehouse full of UFOs, and she was
confronted by a tiny craft, quite unlike anything she had ever seen
before, sporting the famous symbol of Metropolis's superhero!

This, she realised, was major!   This was the story that would bury
Clark Kent once and for all and that, perhaps, might even be the key to
that elusive Pulitzer.

Her hands shaking with excitement, she gingerly peeled back the
corner of the sheet, peering underneath it before she threw it to one
side.  She took her time, approaching the ship with caution, almost as
though she were afraid that it was going to leap into life and attack her.
When nothing happened, she explored further and more boldly, looking
in and around the tiny craft, searching in vain for a tag that might tell
her where it had come from.

There was no tag, but her eyes finally lit upon a cloth bag resting next
to the ship, and she quickly opened it.  At first glance its contents
didn't seem to be particularly interesting.  The single object inside
looked like a rather simple globe.  She tipped it out into her left hand,
almost dropping it when it was warmer than she'd anticipated.  Then,
taking a firmer hold on it, she examined it more carefully.  She
shrugged to herself.  Perhaps it had some function she couldn't figure
out.  In any event, it was portable, which the ship was not, and she
wanted evidence to take away with her.  She quickly dropped it back
into its bag, then, in its turn, she dropped the bag into her satchel.

Lois scrabbled around inside the satchel for a moment and retrieved a
compact camera from its depths; she took some photographs.  Then
she returned to the filing cabinets, hoping to find some documentation
to go with the little ship.  However, she had no idea what it was she
should be looking for, and she knew that she couldn't linger here; she
was on borrowed time, as it was.  Still, she had a couple of souvenirs
now, and those, combined with her tale of how Thompson had led her
to the goon from yesterday, would almost certainly be enough to
convince Perry to organise a more official search of the building.

Lois made her way over to the exit, only to discover that it was locked
from the outside.  She rattled the door handle a few times before she
accepted that trying to leave that way was an exercise in futility.  Then
she looked around her, high and low, looking for some other means of
escape.  Finally, just as desperation was about to set in, she spotted a
window low enough for her to climb through.

She scoured the warehouse for an object that would be solid and heavy
enough to break the glass, but still light enough for her to throw with
the momentum necessary to do so. Eventually she settled on a lump of
rusty metal labelled "Oblong, Illinois, January 27, 1973" which looked
as though it had fallen off an old Chevy.  She weighed it experimentally
in her hands to get the feel of it.  Then she drew back her arm and,
with a force that would have made a major league pitcher envious, she
launched it at the window.

The glass shattered and tinkled to the ground.  The artefact from
Oblong thudded onto the tarmac below, and burglar alarms began to
wail.

Her heart pushed up to her throat by the noise, Lois pulled off her
jacket and bunched it around her fist so she could punch out the few
jagged shards of glass that still clung to the frame.  Then, as gingerly as
she could, she clambered through the opening.  She teetered on the
window ledge for a moment before she dropped to the ground outside,
swearing faintly as she realised that high heels were not the ideal
footwear for these kinds of gymnastics.  Then, recovering her balance
and stepping clear of the broken glass, she ripped her shoes off her feet
and, clutching them in one hand, she ran, putting as much distance as
she could between herself and the building before the police
arrived.

*****

It took time for the Planet's lawyers to navigate their way through all
the red tape necessary to obtain the warrants required for a search of
the building.  Lois put some of the time to good use by putting the
finishing polish on another story, though her mind kept wandering back
to the treasure-trove she'd been forced to abandon.  Once she'd sent
her piece to Perry, she commenced pacing around the newsroom, the
conference room and the editor's office, complaining in earnest about
the slowness of the lawyers.

Finally, after five hours, the paperwork was completed, the men with
briefcases taking great pains to reassure Lois that, in their terms, this
had been a rush job, and that she should be pleased by their efforts, not
critical.

   She wasn't impressed by their arguments, and, as far as she was
concerned, her opinion was vindicated when she discovered, upon her
eventual return to the warehouse, this time accompanied by some
faceless officials, that it had been emptied.  To add insult to injury,
someone had even found time to sweep it through.

By then, evening rush-hour was underway, and it took her forty
minutes to make her way through the gridlock downtown and get back
to the Planet.

Back in Perry's office once more, Lois sat down in his guest chair.  She
told him what had happened, throwing in a few colourful metaphors
about the lawyers' tardiness for good measure.

As she finished, she saw Perry shaking his head sympathetically at her.

"Well," said Lois, trying to console herself, "at least I've still got the
photos and the file.  The story isn't a total loss."

Perry stood up, walked around his desk, and sat on its edge, changing
from boss to father figure as he did so, "I'm sorry, Lois."

He didn't say anything more, but she knew what he meant: he wasn't
going to publish the story.  "But, Perry!" Lois wailed.  "It's a great
piece!"

"Sure, Lois, I know that.  But I can't print it."

"Why not?" she asked petulantly.

"Now, Lois," Perry chided gently, knowing that she wasn't as naive as
the question would have suggested to an outsider.  Rather, she was
bitterly disappointed. They needed more evidence than she had
provided to back up the story, and that evidence had been whipped
away from them.  "You know better than to ask questions like that.
We need solid proof, if we're going to run with this story."

Lois suddenly remembered the strange globe and opened her mouth to
reply, but Perry forestalled her by raising his hand.

"Now," he said, "I know what you're going to say.  We've got your
photographs.  We've got a file.  But you know as well as I do that
photographs can be faked, and the file doesn't have anything to do
with Superman's ship.  If it was his ship."

"What do you mean, 'if'?" Lois demanded.  "It's got his shield on it!
Look!"  Lois jabbed fiercely at one of the photographs with a long
finger.

"Well, you have to admit, it looks very small.  In fact, it looks more
like a toy than anything else."

Lois nodded.  Perry had a point.  "Maybe it was a supply ship, or
something like that," she suggested.

"Look, Lois," said Perry, returning to his earlier point.  "If you can find
out what happened to the stuff in the warehouse, or if you can get an
on the record confirmation from Superman that he *is* an alien, then
maybe I could do something with this.  But, otherwise, well, I'm sorry,
but I can't take the risk.  I mean, aliens?  UFOs?  We'd be a laughing
stock!  Whatever you've got, well, honey, it's just not enough."

   Lois scrunched her lips up together, determinedly channelling her
disappointment into anger as she left the office.

*****

Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen were sitting at the table in the empty
conference room, chatting.  Lois picked up a mug of coffee and went
in to join them, as much to find out what they were doing as from any
more friendly motive.  She hated not knowing what other people were
up to.

Clark looked up as she entered the room and smiled at her in welcome.
"Hi, Lois," he said.

If anything, his good-humoured greeting soured her mood further.
Why did he always have to be so pleasant?  So pleased to see her?
Being unpleasant to him was like hitting a puppy, she thought.  He
kept coming back for more attention, seemingly unable to learn a
simple lesson of distrust.

Jimmy eyed her scowl, made some excuse, and dodged out of the
room.

Clark, however, was either very stupid, or he was made of sterner stuff
than their more junior colleague.  Lois couldn't decide which it was as
he held his ground and asked, "What's up?"

"What's up?" parroted Lois.  "Why would you think anything is up?"

He shrugged faintly, his eyebrows raised as his lips twitched.  "You
don't usually scowl for no reason, Lois," he answered.  "And you seem
a little... tense?"  She was vaguely aware that he'd made his last
sentence into a question to rob it of its sting.  However, in her present
mood, everything stung, and she reacted angrily.

"Oh.  I'm tense, am I?  Well, you'd be tense, too, if you took Perry a
story - not just any story, but a *great* story - and he said that that he
couldn't print it!"

"Which story was that?" asked Clark.

"Only the Superman-is-an-alien-and-we-have-proof story!"

He stared up at her blankly as he said, "W...What?  Superman is...?"

"An alien.  Yes."

He seemed to have trouble speaking as he said, "And y... you have...
proof?  W... What *kind* of proof?"

Lois felt her anger begin to dissipate in the face of his reaction.  Clark
was more than ordinarily shocked.  They'd had the same information
about Superman from which to work, and, she was certain, the same
possibilities had been pointed out to them both during the polygraph
tests, yet, unlike Clark, she'd taken the knowledge of Superman's
extra-terrestrial origins more or less in her stride.  Therefore, she
concluded, at least part of his shock had to be attributable to some
other cause; the only other cause she could think of was herself.  Not
only did her discovery clearly demonstrate that she was still the best, it
also undoubtedly had forcibly rammed that fact home to him.
Suddenly it didn't matter quite so much that the story hadn't actually
made it into print.

"Oh... photographs," Lois replied with studied nonchalance.  She
passed a selection of prints across to him, and watched with ill-
concealed satisfaction as his jaw hung open and he scrutinised them,
one by one.

"Where did you find this?" he asked at last.

Lois sat down at last, and her satisfaction waned to depression.  "In a
warehouse down on Bessolo Boulevard.  I took the photos and
brought them to Perry to persuade him to go down there and retrieve
the rest of the stuff, but, by the time we got back there, the whole place
had been cleared out."  She sighed.  "Unless I can trace that stuff, or
unless I can get Superman to admit that he's an alien, this story isn't
going anywhere."

Putting both hands palm down on the table, she levered herself upright
again.  Sitting here was doing no good, and she didn't like Clark seeing
her like this, feeling defeated.  As she reached the door and said, "If
you see him around, tell him I'm looking for him, okay?"  As she
headed back into the newsroom, she wondered what had prompted her
to say that.  So far as she was aware, no-one knew how to contact
Superman; asking Clark to pass the message on wouldn't bring her any
closer to the man in blue.

She gathered together her belongings and summoned the elevator.

*****

Clark stared, unseeing, as the door closed behind Lois's back.  The
stunned numbness he'd felt upon hearing Lois's revelation began to
wear off, to be replaced by a gamut of questions and emotions chasing
one another through his mind faster than he could follow.  But,
overriding everything else was the thought, I am not human.

He wasn't sure what that meant, exactly.

He took a deep shuddering breath and let it out slowly, trying
desperately to calm himself.

Suddenly the conference room seemed unbearably small, its walls
hemming him in.  He had to get out and go somewhere to think things
through, somewhere where he would not be disturbed.

Having decided on a plan of action, even if it extended only so far as
getting away from the Planet building, Clark felt fractionally better.  He
grabbed his jacket, slung it over his shoulders, and headed for the
stairwell, his fingers toying impatiently with the knot on his tie as he
went.

He was in luck.  The stairwell was empty.  Before the door clicked
shut behind him he'd spun into his Superman suit.  Then his feet were
off the floor and he was diving upwards, slicing through the air.  An
open window beckoned and, faster than a human eye could follow, he
flew skywards.

It was drizzling, almost more of a heavy mist than real rain, but Clark,
with his thoughts turned inwards, didn't feel the wet that soaked into
his clothes and hair.  He didn't pay any heed to the rapidly cooling
temperatures as he climbed ever higher, nor did he notice when he left
the clouds behind him.  Only when he reached the outer limits of the
Earth's atmosphere did he come back to himself and draw to a halt.

He hung suspended for a moment, surprised at where he'd ended up.
He hadn't deliberately set out to come here, but, now that he'd arrived,
he realised that it was as good a place as any to think.  In fact, it was
better than most as he was out of earshot of any distractions.  For once
he was selfish enough to want to take advantage of the luxury of total
silence.

He floated, staring first at the planet beneath him, the only home he'd
ever known, and then at the stars above from where, he now knew, he
had come.

He hadn't needed Bureau 39's interrogation to drum into him the
possibility that he wasn't human.  He'd known for a long time that he
might not be; the circumstances of his arrival in Smallville and the
strange array of powers he'd developed as he grew up invited such
speculation.  Yet, he had always preferred the "Russian experiment"
scenario painted by his parents.  Despite his uniqueness, being an extra-
terrestrial just wasn't the first thing to pop into his mind as an
explanation for why he was the way he was.

Now, though...

He cast his mind back to the photographs that Lois had shown him.
The glyphs on the spaceship bore no resemblance to any of the many
human languages that Clark knew.  Add to that the circumstances
under which Lois had found it, and only one conclusion seemed
possible.

The possibility that he was an alien wasn't new.  The certainty,
however, was, and it was deeply and unexpectedly shocking.

Clark turned to lie on his stomach, staring down at the clouds and the
patches of planet that were visible through their breaks.  Earth was the
only home that he had ever wanted.  Given that, how did he feel about
his new-found self knowledge?

Conflicted, he decided.  On the one hand, he had the first ever concrete
knowledge about his past; just as he'd said to Lois only a couple of
days ago, it was the not knowing that tore at the hearts and souls of
adopted children.  He'd always, on one level, needed to know who -
what - he was.

Yet, on another level, he was honest enough to realise that needing and
wanting were not the same.  The circumstances of his arrival on Earth
were so unusual that he had never been able to come up with a
plausible scenario as to where he had come from from which he could
draw any real comfort.  No matter how hard he tried, he could find no
explanation that didn't involve, at best, callousness, and at worst, out
and out cruelty as far as he was concerned.  He had been an infant
when, at a time he should have been dependent on his parents' care and
protection, he had been sealed alone in his tiny little craft and sent
away.  No matter how hard he tried, Clark could think of no
circumstances under which such actions might be justified.

Yes, he had needed to know where he had come from, but he'd always
feared the answers.

More than that, though, he realised that he'd *wanted* to be human.
To be human and different was bad enough, but to not be human to
begin with merely served to accentuate the alienation that he felt.  He
grimaced at the unintentional pun.

That, he supposed, explained why he had never asked his parents about
the ship, and why he had never tried to find it.  He hadn't been ready
for the truths that he might learn.

Was he ready now? he wondered.  He wasn't sure, but ready or not the
truths were finding him.  The agents had evidently known that he was
an alien; their questions had been designed only to discover how much
he, Clark Kent, knew.

Lois had found out that he wasn't native to Earth, and, knowing Lois
as he did, he was certain that she would be digging for more
information.  To protect himself, he realised, he had to learn what both
she and the agents already knew; not knowing made him feel peculiarly
vulnerable.

Clark, nodding to himself, resolved to start taking control of his history
for himself.

He pointed himself towards Metropolis, and the obvious place to start
his quest.

*****

The silence in the apartment told her that Lucy had gone out for the
evening.  Lois closed the door behind her and felt another wave of
disappointment wash over her.  She kicked off her shoes and padded
barefoot through to the bedroom.  She sat down on the edge of the
bed, too tired to change into something more suitable for wearing
around the apartment, and found herself thinking back over the events
of the day.

It should have been a great day, but, all told, it had been almost
unbearably frustrating.  True, she had found the warehouse, but she
had just as quickly lost everything once more.  She'd found out
something newsworthy about Superman, but she couldn't publish it.  In
fact, the only good thing had been managing to take Clark down a peg
or two, but even that hadn't left her with any long lasting satisfaction.

She sighed.  She seemed to be doing a lot of that today.

*So*, she thought, *Superman is an alien*.  She wondered what that
meant, exactly.  There was something appealing abut the idea of an
advanced - and his people must have been technologically advanced
for him to have got here in the first place - and benevolent being
coming to Earth.  What lessons might he teach humanity?  What
technological wonders did he have access to?  How much could he
teach humans about the best way to live their lives?  Could this almost-
godlike being impart moral guidance to Earth's populace?

She swung her feet up off the floor and sprawled out across the bed,
propping her head up in her left hand.  Then she reached into her
satchel with her right and pulled out the globe.  She rolled onto her
back and cradled it in her hands, drawing reassurance from its presence
that the day hadn't been some sort of horrible nightmare.  She passed it
between her hands, then gently threw it in the air and caught it again.
She rolled it over the bedspread, and stared at it.  What was it? she
wondered.  What was it for?

She shrugged.  No matter how hard she tried to figure it out, she
failed.  Frustrated, she put the globe back in its bag.  She leaned over,
pulled open the top drawer of her dresser, and carefully settled her
souvenir into a back corner where it was likely to pass unobserved by
any casual observer.

A gentle tapping on her open living room window alerted Lois to an
unexpected presence.  She jumped up, feeling guilty, as though she had
been caught doing something wrong - which, admittedly, she almost
had been.  She automatically ran her hands down her body to smooth
her skirt, and walked into the next room with a curiously bashful smile
on her face.

"Come on in, Superman."

He crossed over the threshold and came to a halt just inside.  He stood
with his arms crossed over his chest and his mouth set in a stern line.
Lois smiled as she took in what Metropolis had already come to know
as the classic superhero pose.  Then she saw the determined look in his
eyes, and her smile faltered.

"I heard you've been looking for me," he said.

Her mouth tightened.  Just when she'd thought the day couldn't get
any more difficult, it had.  For Superman to know that she wanted to
talk to him, he must have spoken to Clark, and for Clark to have met
the hero, he must have stumbled across another exclusive.  That
thought made her react more brusquely than she might have done
under other circumstances.  She stiffened her spine, resolutely fighting
the attraction and awe that had made her tongue-tied the first time she
had met Superman, and said, "So, have you come to give me an
interview?"

The question seemed to take him off-guard.  "What about?" he asked.

"About your origins, of course.  About your home planet.  About why
you didn't think it was worth mentioning before that you're not
human."

Superman stared at her, apparently at a loss to know how to reply.

"Well?" she prompted.

Instead of answering her, he asked her a question of his own.  "Please,
I'd like to know... what else did you find?"

"What makes you think I found anything else?"

"There must be more.  I'd like to know what it is."

The audacity of the man!  How dared he come waltzing into her
apartment, demanding to know what she knew about him!  But then
she realised that he hadn't actually demanded to know anything; he'd
asked politely.

"Why, Superman?  Are you afraid of what I might learn?"

He glanced away from her.  "I'm curious," he said, and Lois took note
that he hadn't answered the question.

Lois gave his response careful thought.  Finally she said, "Okay.  Let's
trade.  I'll tell you what I know, if you fill in the gaps for me."

Suddenly finding the floor at his feet fascinating, Superman said, "I'm
sorry, Lois.  I can't do that."

Lois folded her arms.  "Then we have a problem.  I don't give up
information for nothing, Superman."

He sighed.  "I was afraid you'd say that.  Still, coming here was worth
a shot."  He looked at her at last and said, again very politely, "I'm
sorry to have wasted your time."

He turned to leave, but Lois called him back just as he began to float
out of the window, "Wait, Superman!"

He turned back to face her, his expression unreadable.

"Why can't you fill in the gaps for me?"

He stared at her, and again she had the feeling that he didn't know what
to say.  She realised that the question had, for some reason, unnerved
him, and she decided to press her advantage.

"How many other people... like you... are there on Earth?  Are you
breaking some tribal taboo if you talk to me?   What?"

"No," he said.  "Nothing like that."

"Then what?"

Her question was again met with silence.  Superman seemed to be
weighing matters carefully in his own mind.

She pressed him for more answers.  "What was that ship I found?  It's
so tiny...  What did it have in it?  What was it for?"

Finally he said, "If I answer your questions, I think you will know far
too much about me."

"You *are* scared of what I might find out, aren't you?" she asked
again, amazed as the truth of it sank in.

"Yes," he admitted this time, smiling faintly.  "You are, without doubt,
a brilliant journalist.  If I give you any more clues about me, then I
think you could find out things I'd rather you didn't.  And just by saying
that, I'm sure that I've already said too much."  Then, in a flash of
colour, he was gone, leaving Lois feeling more frustrated than ever.
Superman had slipped through her hands without leaving her with
anything she could use.

The story was a bust.

*****

As was frequently the case when he was troubled, Clark found himself
drawn back to his childhood home.  There he knew he would find
comfort and support, love and acceptance.  In a world that sometimes
seemed unforgiving of his differences, Clark valued his parents and the
farm more than anything else.

Clark hovered over the farmhouse, checking that there were no visitors
around.  It would be hard to explain away Clark's appearance in the
middle of the countryside with no transport; if anyone other than his
parents were there, he decided, he would go back to Metropolis.

A quick glance told him that the truck was missing.  Further
examination found his father sitting in his favourite armchair, his feet
up.  The television played softly in the background as he read a farming
magazine.  Of his mother there was no sign.

Clark lowered himself onto the stoop then pushed the unlocked front
door open.  He called out as he did so.  "Hey, Dad!  It's me!"

As Clark walked into the living room, Jonathan Kent scrambled to his
feet.  He smiled warmly, opened his arms to invite Clark into a hug,
and said, "Hello, son.  Good to see you."

"You too, Dad," said Clark.

Jonathan heard the flatness in his son's voice and noticed the way that
Clark prolonged the embrace longer than was strictly necessary as he
drew comfort from the contact.  "Something's wrong, isn't it," he
asked, worried.

"I... Yeah."  Clark stepped back, spun, and came to rest once more,
this time clad in jeans and a shirt.  He eyes were wide with tension and
confusion as he looked at Jonathan.

"Your mom's not here," Jonathan said.  "Art class."  The two men
shared an indulgent yet wry glance.  "Will I do on my own?"

Clark nodded.  "Dad..."  He sat down at one end of the sofa, adopting
a deliberately relaxed pose as he rested one arm across the sofa's arm
and the other along its back.  He loosely crossed his ankles.
"Something happened."

Jonathan, himself seated once more, shot a shrewd look in Clark's
direction.  He pointed the remote at the television and turned it off.  He
could see that this was no time for distractions.  "And you want to talk
about it."  It was a statement, not a question.

"Yeah," said Clark, relieved by his father's matter of fact manner.  He
hadn't really expected anything else, but it was a relief, nonetheless.
He raised uncertain eyes towards Jonathan as he said, "Dad... I'm not
human."  It felt strange to finally say the words out loud.

"What do you mean?"

"We always knew it was a possibility, right?  Well, now I know."

"Go on."

Clark hesitated for a moment.  He shifted in his seat, planting both feet
on the floor, and letting his hands dangle between his knees.  He
looked down as he tried to marshal his thoughts together.  Finally he
said, "It all started yesterday."  He proceeded to explain about the raid,
pausing just long enough to reassure his father that his secret was still
safe.  He explained how he'd been asked whether Superman was an
alien, and how he'd answered truthfully that he didn't know.

"Son," said Jonathan, interrupting the recitation, "just because some
men asked questions doesn't mean-"

"No, wait, Dad," said Clark, cutting into his father's sympathy.  "Let
me finish."  He then told of Lois's visit to the warehouse and, finally,
about the photographs.

Silence fell as Clark completed his tale.  Jonathan looked at Clark
thoughtfully, trying to take everything in.  Clark stared back, his eyes
wide open, almost beseeching, vulnerable.  Finally, unable to stand the
quiet any longer, he said, "Dad...  I need to know... about how you
found me.  I want to know... everything."

Jonathan nodded.  He began to speak.  "May 17, 1966.  We were
driving past Shuster's field when..."

Not much of the story was new to Clark.  However, there were
unexpected details in the familiar history, such as how, fearing
discovery, Jonathan had resolved to destroy the ship but had, at the last
minute, chosen to bury it instead.  He'd thought that it would be safe,
if he hid it well, but now, twenty eight years later, he'd discovered that
it had, nonetheless, been unearthed.

When he was done the painful silence fell once again.  Falling back on
the old-family cure-all, Jonathan left Clark to his thoughts and
disappeared to put the kettle on.  He returned several minutes later
with a mug of herbal tea in each hand.

Clark took one from him, wrapping his palm around its body, heedless
of the heat that could not hurt him.  He waited until Jonathan had
settled himself back into his chair then he said tentatively, "Does it...
Does it make a difference?"

Jonathan frowned, unsure precisely what it was that Clark was asking.
"How do you mean?"

"My not being... human.  Does it matter?"

Jonathan looked at Clark thoughtfully.  "To me, do you mean?"

Avoiding his gaze, Clark nodded.

"Of course not," Jonathan said.  "You're my son.  Nothing can change
that."

Clark sighed silently, doing his best to hide his relief, but he knew that
Jonathan could see the tension in his shoulders ease. He hoped his
father wouldn't feel insulted that he had even felt the need to ask the
question; it was unlikely he would because, as Clark was aware, his
father knew he had always been plagued with self-doubt and fear.  To
some extent,  Jonathan was to blame for that; his own paranoia that
Clark would be taken away if it were known how he had come to them
had inevitably transmitted itself to the boy.

"You're not happy about this, are you?" Jonathan said.

"I... don't know.  I honestly don't know what to think, Dad."

Jonathan licked his lips.  Thinking aloud, he said, "Maybe it's a good
thing."

Surprised by Jonathan's observation, Clark said, "Good?"

"Well, you've always wondered why you were so different, Clark."

Clark smiled wryly as he recalled pain-filled conversations he'd had
with his parents as a teenager.  Every time he'd discovered a new
power, he'd ask, "What's *wrong* with me?!" to which his parents
would inevitably answer, "There's nothing wrong with you, Clark."
Their unconditional love for him had undoubtedly done much to ease
his passage into adulthood; if they'd ever had any misgivings, they'd
done a remarkably good job of hiding them from him.

Remembering those past conversations Clark said, "You mean, what's
wrong with me, right, Dad?"  He spoke the words softly, with the
faintest hint of painful humour colouring them.  His eyes met
Jonathan's and he could see that Jonathan, too, was remembering the
past.

Jonathan smiled kindly.  "Like we always said, there's nothing wrong
with you.  I guess this just goes to explain something your mother and
I always knew.  You're special, Clark.  We always knew that.  Now we
know why."

Clark watched Jonathan intently, soaking up his words, reassurance
and wisdom hungrily.  Seeing that, Jonathan repeated, "There's
nothing wrong with you, Clark.  All those things you can do...  It's not
because you're a mutant or an experiment.  They're obviously a part of
you.  They're perfectly normal - for you."

"You think other people from... wherever it is I come from...  You
think they'd be like me, too?"

"That'd be my guess, yes.  I know all you've ever said you wanted is to
be normal."

Clark nodded.

"Well, I'd guess that normal for you is being super."

"I guess I never thought about it like that before," admitted Clark,
comforted beyond words by the notion.

This time the silence that fell between them was easier.  They drank
their tea, enjoying both its curative properties and the tranquillity of the
farmhouse.  When they were both done, Clark reluctantly said, "I guess
I'd better be getting back to Metropolis now.  Tell Mom I'm sorry I
missed her."

"I will."

Jonathan escorted Clark onto the porch.  He watched as Clark spun
back into the Superman outfit.

Clark allowed himself to levitate six inches off the ground, then he
paused, looked at his father and said, "I'm going to have to find out
more, Dad."

Jonathan looked at him expectantly, waiting for him to explain what he
meant by that.

"There are people out there who know more about me than I do,
myself."  He shook his head.  "I've got to learn what they know."

Jonathan nodded.  "It's only natural that you would want to know
where you come from."

"Yeah.  But it's not just that, Dad.  I don't feel *safe* not knowing."

Jonathan nodded again.  That made sense, too.  "So, what are you
going to do?" he asked.

Clark shrugged infinitesimally.  "I'm sure yet.  But I'll work something
out."

"I know you will."

"Bye," Clark said, and shot into the sky, leaving his haven behind him.

However, before the farm had disappeared completely from view, he
heard his father's voice drift up behind him, saying, "Good luck, son."

*****

Lois filled in the time as she waited for the first coffee of the working
day to filter by skimming through the morning edition of the Daily
Planet.  She was satisfied to see that her article on the police
department's budget cuts had made page one, and she read with
interest the editorial based around the issue that Perry had included.
Then she flipped through a few pages, looking to find something else
of interest.

She frowned as something struck her as odd: there were no Superman
stories in the morning edition.  That begged the question, if Clark
hadn't spotted Superman mid feat, so to speak, how had he met up
with him the night before?  She had taken him at his word when he had
said he had been in the right place at the right time to get his first
exclusive.  Now she wasn't so sure; what if he had some inside track
on Superman?  What would that do to her position on the paper?

*Nah,* she thought. *You just had a lousy day yesterday, and you're
being paranoid.  How could Clark possibly have a link to Superman?*
Thinking that was almost as absurd as thinking he had a hot line to
Santa Claus.

As the coffee machine spluttered to signal that the last of the water had
bubbled into the filter, her eyes were drawn towards Clark Kent's by-
line.  It was, she realised, the adoption piece he'd been working on a
couple of days before.  Her attention caught, she folded the paper back
on itself, then in half, so that it wasn't so unwieldy, and she began to
read.

It was powerful stuff, she realised, just as she had feared that it would
be.  Clark had pulled no emotional punches, but he'd managed to keep
the article from being overly sensational.  She found herself nodding in
places as she read about an ongoing campaign to increase the
transparency of the adoption process and the negative effects that
secrecy could have upon adoptees.  He hadn't ignored the stance taken
by opponents of reform, and he had put forward their case clearly;
however, it was clear that Clark's sympathies lay with the adoptees
who wanted to trace their roots.

The machine's silence dragged her attention back towards her errand,
and she quickly poured herself a mug of the fresh coffee, added
whitener and sweetener, and stirred it briskly.  Then she picked up the
paper and proceeded to walk back to her desk, reading as she went.
She had just put the mug and paper on her desk, and was about to sit
down, when a nearby phone rang.  Lois scuttled over and picked it up.

"Clark Kent's desk," Lois said into the handset.

"Oh, hello," a woman's voice at the other end of the connection said.
"Is Clark around?"

"No," answered Lois.  "I think he had to step out for a minute.  Do
you want me to take a message?"

"Yes.  If that wouldn't be too much trouble."

Lois raised her eyebrows at the politeness.  "No.  No trouble at all,"
she said.

"This is his Mom.  If you could just ask him to phone home I'd-"

Lois cut into the message.  "Hold on a moment, Mrs Kent.  He's just
come in."  Then cupping her hand over the mouthpiece, and waving
the handset in mid-air, she yelled, "Clark!  It's your mother!"

Clark grinned his thanks at her as she handed the phone to him, and she
angrily clamped down on her automatic desire to smile in response.
Why did her body always have to behave so treacherously in the face
of that grin?

As Lois turned away, she heard Clark say, "Hi, Mom...  Oh, so Dad
told you...  No, I'm fine.  Really.  It came as a bit of a shock at first,
but I'm okay now."

Lois frowned.  Something was wrong?  Wrong enough to prompt his
mother to phone from Kansas to check up on him?  Clark hadn't
mentioned anything to her.  Of course, there was no reason why on
Earth he should have done, but...  She concentrated, trying to hear
more.

"Yeah.  Well, you have to admit, it does explain an awful lot...  Yeah.
I'd like to know that, too... Maybe I'll have another go tonight... Love
you too, Mom.  I'll call you later, okay?  Bye."

He put the phone down, and stared at it thoughtfully for a few
moments.  Then he stood up and made as though to go to the coffee
pot.

Lois picked up her mug once more and waylaid him.  "So," she asked.
"What was that all about?"

"Hm?  Oh.  Nothing.  Just... family stuff."

"You sure?  I mean, if there's anything I can do..."  The surprised look
on his face mirrored the surprise that she felt internally.  Whatever had
prompted her to be nice to him?  Even more surprisingly, she found
that she actually wanted to help, if she could.  God, when had he
started to get under her skin?  She didn't have time for this!

"Thank you, Lois.  I appreciate that."

A rare moment of accord passed between them, and they exchanged
smiles.  He had, Lois had to admit, a wide repertoire of the most
beautiful smiles.  They ranged from small and shy to, when he grinned
or was amused, broad and blazing.  When that happened, his perfect
teeth gleamed against his sallow skin, and the amusement always
reached his eyes, causing the skin around them to crinkle into laughter
lines.

"By the way," she said, shifting the subject slightly, "I read your piece
in today's paper."

He looked at her, raising his eyebrows.

"You know," she reminded him.  "The article on adopted kids?"

He nodded, indicating that he was listening.

"It was good," she said grudgingly.  Then, more honestly, she said,
"Actually, it was better than good.  It was great.  You really seemed to
identify with them."

"Thank you.  That means a lot to me, coming from you."

"You and your parents are close?" Lois asked idly, thinking back to the
easy familiarity with which he had spoken to his mother and the fact
that he had obviously recently spoken to his father.

"Yeah, why?"

Lois shrugged faintly.  "Your mom sounds nice."

Clark nodded at the apparent non sequitur.  "She is," he agreed.  "They
both are really great.  They're more than just family.  They're also my
friends."

"You're lucky," said Lois, feeling a strange pang of envy as she
wondered what it must be like to have a closely knit family wherein
you could rely on each other for comfort and support; the concept was
foreign to her.  "I can't remember the last time I spoke to my father.
And Mother...  Well, let's just say that talking to her is more of a duty
than a pleasure."

Clark's sincerity was obvious as he said, "I'm sorry."

She shrugged his sympathy away and said, "It doesn't matter.  I've got
my sister, and I guess that's enough family for me."  Lois drained the
last of her coffee from her mug and realised that she had drunk the
whole of its contents in the course of her conversation with Clark.

Why, she wondered, as she made her way to her desk, did he make her
relax in his presence?  What was it about him that made her talk of
things better left unsaid?  Why did he seem to care about her when she
was so determined not to care about herself?

She pushed the thoughts aside as she sat down.  Then she wrote a brief
outline for her next article and began to make some calls.

*****

The soft tapping on her window made Lois jump.  She fumbled the ice-
cream tub and spoon in her hands, but managed not to drop them.
Instead she quickly put them aside, wiped her mouth to remove any
tell-tale signs of her self-indulgent snacking, and stood up.  "Come in,
Superman," she said.  "It's open."

He drifted to the ground and stood watching her.  He seemed to be
waiting for her to say something, but that was ridiculous, Lois thought.
After all, he had come to see her, not the other way round.
Presumably he'd had a reason for coming.  Nonetheless, she found
herself filling in the silence.  "I didn't expect to see you again," she
said.  "Not after the way we left things last night."

"I'm sorry about that, Lois," he said, "and I was wondering..."

"Yes?"

"Could we start that conversation again?"

She stared at him, puzzled, but she said nothing.  Instead she waited
for him to continue.

"You were right," said Superman.  "I *am* frightened of what you
might find out about me, but I want - I *need* - to know what you've
learned."  He fell silent, apparently unsure as to how to proceed.

There was something almost endearing about seeing the hero standing
tongue-tied in her living room.  Lois took pity on him, smiling
sympathetically.  "Curiosity overrides fear, huh?"

"Yeah," he said, his lips twitching in a way that struck her as being
vaguely familiar.  However, she couldn't think where she might have
seen that expression before.  "That's just about it."

"So, you want to trade information?" she asked.

Suddenly he seemed wary.  "That depends," he said, "on what you
intend to do with any information I might give you."

Lois raised her eyebrows.  She was a journalist.  What did he *think*
she wanted the information for?  However, she didn't voice the
question.  Instead she said, "You don't trust me to treat the story
honestly.  Is that it?"

Superman smiled faintly.  "Oh, I have no doubt that you would be
*honest*, Lois.  It's just that I'm not sure I want to find my personal
life plastered across the front page of the Daily Planet.  Forgive me, but
everything I know about you tells me that you'd put your work before
almost everything else, and I don't have much faith in your...
compassion."

Lois's eyes narrowed.  Was she really that hard?  She decided that, yes,
she probably was.  That was, after all, precisely the kind of front that
she had been trying to cultivate all these years, but, now that even
Superman had been taken in by it, she found herself wondering if she
hadn't gone too far.  "And... what if I said that this conversation will
be totally off the record?"

"That would help."

"All right, then."  She held out her hand, daring him to seal a pact.  "I
promise that, whatever I learn from you here, tonight, I won't publish
it without your permission.  It stays between us."

Superman seemed to hesitate for a moment, then he took her hand in
his own.  His skin felt warm and smooth against hers, and Lois felt a
shiver run up her spine in response to his touch.

"And I promise," he said, "to tell you what I know."

Lois nodded her approval.  "Shall we sit down?" she asked, gesturing
towards the love seats.  She was mildly disappointed when Superman
chose to sit opposite, rather than next to, her.

"Okay," she said.  "You first."

"All I know is..." he hesitated again.  "All I know is what you found."

"What?!"

"All I ever knew is what my parents - my adoptive parents - told me.
I was a baby.  They found me in a spaceship.  You asked me what the
spaceship was for: well, it was to carry me - as a child - to Earth.
They had no idea where I came from, and neither did I, until I heard
about your story.  I guess, we always knew it was a possibility that I
wasn't human, especially after my powers started to develop.  But we
didn't *know*.  For all we knew, I could have been some weird
Russian experiment."

She felt a momentary flash of anger at the lack of information she was
receiving.  She thought that he had been going to tell her about the
secrets of his origins.  Instead she was getting nothing.  However, she
realised, that was also information of a kind.  It meant *he* didn't
know anything, and, in turn, that suggested...  She flung the thought
from her head; she didn't have time to think about it now.

If what he was telling her was a cover story, she thought, it was good
one.  It gave him the perfect excuse to tell her nothing.  But the awful
thing was that she believed him.  It certainly explained his curiosity in a
way that little else could.  For some reason Clark's words from their
conversation several days ago echoed in her mind.  "It's that not
knowing that kills ya."

Watching Superman's face, she could see that was exactly what it was
doing to him, eating him from within.  It was bad enough, she thought,
for human kids to wonder where they'd come from.  How much worse
must it be for this man, who apparently hadn't even realised that he
wasn't human until he'd heard about her discovery? . . .


"I'm sorry," she said inadequately.

He shrugged.  "It's not your fault."

"No.  But I do feel bad because..."  She stood up and disappeared into
the next room.  When she returned, she was holding her souvenir from
the warehouse in her hands.  She held it out to him and said, "I think
this might belong to you."

"What is it?" he asked eagerly.

"I've no idea.  It looks like a globe of some sort, but it was next to
your spaceship, so I guess the two things were together."

He took the object from her outstretched hands and examined it
minutely.  As she'd said, it looked like a globe, showing the land
masses of Earth silhouetted in a dark green against a paler background.
"It feels warm," he said.

"I know," said Lois.  "Any idea what it is?"

Superman shook his head.  "None whatsoever."

Then, to their joint astonishment, the object began to glow and the
colours and patterns on its surface began to shift.  The land reddened
and the shapes changed.  Superman's face took on a look of wonder
and he whispered, "Krypton!"

"Pardon?" asked Lois, uncertain as to what was happening.

Superman looked up from the marvellous artefact he held and said,
"Krypton.  I'm from a planet called Krypton!"

"But how...?" asked Lois.  "I mean, how do you know?"

"I don't know how I know.  But I do.  The globe told me somehow."
He looked at her, and his eyes were filled his wonder.

"Wow," she said breathlessly. "That's amazing."

"Yes," he said softly.  "It is."  He looked down at the globe again,
silently begging it to say something else, but it was quiescent once
more.

After a few moments he looked at her again and said in a hushed voice,
"Thank you, Lois.  Having this means a lot to me."

Puzzled by his reaction she asked, "You're not mad at me for taking
this?  For not telling you about it sooner?"

He answered her with a question.  "Should I be?"

*Yes*, thought Lois, *you should.  I would be, if I were in your shoes.
But then, I suppose, your generous nature is just one more reason why
you're Superman.*  Out loud, however, she simply said, "I guess it's
up to you, but I'm glad that you're not."

Suddenly his head cocked and he said, "I'm sorry, but I must go.  Bank
alarm."

"Oh," she said, startled at this display of his abilities.  Then she
watched as he vanished in a blur of red and blue.

The curtains rippled in his wake.  Lois stood watching them for a few
moments as they settled down.  Then she retrieved her ice-cream tub
and made herself comfortable on one of the love seats, curling her feet
up under her.

The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to do something
for Superman.  When she had first met him, he had seemed like a god.
He had been confident, strong, and powerful in a way that transcended
the physical.  He had been admirable.

He was still all those things, she thought, but as she spent time with
him, she found her perception of him altering.  Her image of him as an
advanced alien who could teach humanity was receding as she was
coming to see that the reality was quite different from her dreams.  The
only lessons Superman could teach the people of Earth were those that
could be learned by any human being.  Superman's decency didn't stem
from other worldly knowledge, but from the fact that he managed to
live up to humanity's ideals better than most humans.  Of course, his
powers aided him in his fight for good, but Lois could see that they
were simply tools he used, nothing more.

The more she thought about it, the more certain she became that
Superman was not the omniscient creature that others admired or
feared.  As he allowed her to catch glimpses of the person inside the
costume he became more three-dimensional somehow, and, she
realised, she was beginning to find Superman the man more admirable
than Superman the god could ever have been; she felt her instinctive
worship and awe begin to shade into a more reasoned respect,
accompanied by the first stirrings of friendship.

*****

Flying was, for Clark, the best part about being himself.  There was a
joyous exhilaration to be had from climbing free of Earth's bonds,
letting the air brush against his face, seeing the world spread beneath
him.  Flying offered him comfort when he was troubled because it
allowed him to put distance between himself and the world with which
he sometimes felt so at odds; when he was happy it enabled him to
express his joy in a physical manner that he would have been hard
pressed to explain.  He would soar and dive, performing aerial
acrobatics with enthusiasm.  He would revel in the opportunity to just
be.

After handing the bank robbers over to the police, Clark found that he
was too excited to go home immediately.  He knew that he was too
keyed up to sleep, and he wanted to work off some of his excess
energy.

His visit to Lois's had been more successful than he could have dared
hope. He'd gone there with no small amount of trepidation, uncertain
as to the kind of reception he might expect.  However, to his surprise,
Lois, who guarded her information and sources jealously, and who
wanted a tangible return on every story she put effort into, had
promised to keep their conversation off the record.  Her promise had
given him an unexpected insight into his colleague's personality,
hinting at a gentler, more reasonable, person lurking beneath her
professional mask.

The sky over Metropolis was awash with stars even through the light
pollution, and the heavens beckoned, calling him.  It was a familiar
siren song, and one that he seldom tried to resist, lonely though it was
to float alone in the empty heavens.  Perhaps one day, he thought, he
would have someone to share the experience with, and he found
himself hoping that someone would be Lois.

Perhaps it was a ridiculous dream.  She'd barely noticed Clark, only
paying attention to his creation.  However, just for the moment, the
reality of the situation was lost to him as he was caught on a wave of
euphoria.

Was it so stupid of him to think that they had shared something special
together, back in her apartment?  It wasn't just the sharing of
confidences, but also the fact that she had witnessed a pivotal and
deeply personal moment in his life and, to all appearances, she had
been as moved by the experience as he had been.

Clark had been attracted to Lois from the first moment that he had
seen her.  To begin with, he had rationalised her attractiveness as being
physical or hormonal.  Certainly, he had been attracted to her before he
had a chance to get to know her, and he still didn't know her very well.
But he had met beautiful women before, and none of them had ever
touched him in the way that Lois did.

He was fascinated by her, and even her most caustic words failed to
dissuade him from his desire to be with her.  Now, to discover that she
could, given the right set of circumstances, transcend her work
obsession just stoked the flames of that fascination.  Yet more
intoxicating was the thought that she had done it for him.

That reflection carried him on to another aspect of the evening.  He
had a name to conjure with.  Krypton.  The name of the planet from
which he had come.

He turned his head towards the sky and stared at the stars.  Which one,
he wondered, was his?  Was it even visible to the naked eye?  He
focused outward, picking up pinpoints of light that were beyond human
vision, and realised just how remote the chances of his being able to
identify the correct one were.  Maybe, he thought, it wasn't even on
this side of the planet.

There were hundreds - no, thousands - of questions to ask, but, for
now, he was content to savour the tiny scrap of knowledge he'd
acquired.  He was from Krypton.  So that made him what?  A
Kryptonian?  He nodded to himself.  It sounded right to him.

Clark came to a halt and allowed himself to drift on the breeze.  Aloud,
knowing that no-one could hear him, he said, trying on the words for
size, "My name is Clark Kent, and I come from the planet Krypton."
Then, louder, with more confidence, he said it again.  And again.
Then, finally, he shouted the words, sharing his secret with the night.

His new-found identity settled over him, and, despite all the misgivings
he'd expressed to his father just twenty-four hours before, he found
himself embracing the fact of it with gratitude.  He knew who - what -
he was at last.

And it was all thanks to Lois.

All thoughts came back to Lois who, somehow, had become the focus
of his being.  Clark smiled at the thought, and willingly embraced that
self-knowledge, too.

*****

Lois looked up from the motley assortment of papers on her desk,
tilted her head back and closed her eyes, absent-mindedly rolling a
pencil against the balls of her fingertips.  The file she had been studying
was officially "dead", and she'd had to spend half an hour going
through boxes and getting covered in dust in the Daily Planet's
basement before she'd found it.

She wondered how could she have had the audacity to write her
adoption story three years ago when she'd had no empathy for the pain
of the adoptees looking for their roots.  Then she remembered; she'd
written it because she had been made to.  She remembered she hadn't
enjoyed the experience, and that she had put as little effort into the
venture as she thought she could get away with.  She had collected all
the research she'd needed, but, at the time, she hadn't cared enough
about her article to think about the implications of what she learned
and afterwards she'd let her new knowledge slip from her mind as
though she was a student after finals.

Now, though, she wanted that information.  She wanted to understand
what was driving Superman to tell her things that he would have
preferred to have kept private.  She wanted to understand his need to
know.

Lois sighed softly.  She remembered the look on Superman's face
when the globe had "spoken" to him.  She had seen how much that
touch of home had meant to him, even though it had done no more
than give him a label for where he came from.  It was as though the
mere act of touching the artefact had given him something precious.
Perhaps it had, she realised.  He'd somehow lost track of the ship that
had brought him to Earth; perhaps this was the first time, to his
memory, that he had had any kind of contact with his heritage.

She sat bolt upright, startled by the realisation that that was
undoubtedly the case.  He'd said that he hadn't even known that he
wasn't human until he'd heard about her photographs.

According to what she had just read, there was a theory that suggested
the separation of a child from its natural mother, after nine months (or,
Lois supposed, whatever the Kryptonian equivalent was) in the womb,
could leave psychological scars, no matter how loving the adoptive
parents.  Even in the happiest household, the adopted child could suffer
from a persistent sense of a failure to belong.  Adoptees worried about
their medical history, wondering what unknown diseases might linger
in their genes and about what unknown, and unsuspected, diseases they
might pass on to their offspring.  The culmination of all these things
was a need to *know*, to *understand* their heritage.  And that was
just human children.  How much worse must it be for Superman?

She found herself thinking about something else, something she'd
realised last night but which had slipped from her mind in the wake of
the other discoveries that had followed immediately afterwards.

He'd told her that he'd been adopted as a baby, but Superman had only
appeared a couple of weeks ago.  For Superman to have grown to
adulthood unnoticed meant that he must have been either living as a
hermit, hidden in some barren outpost of civilisation, or he had to have
been hiding *himself* away, camouflaging himself and living as a
human.  That, in turn, meant that Superman must have another identity,
and that meant...

Her thoughts were dizzying.  Superman was - or, at least, had been -
someone else.  It was an incredible thought.  She could have walked
past him on the street and never have known.

Unconscious of what she was doing, or the maddening effect it had on
all her colleagues who were unlucky enough to be within earshot, Lois
began to beat out a syncopated rhythm on her desk with her pencil.

She'd decided that there was no future in doing a story on her
discovery of the UFO stockpile when the Superman angle hadn't
panned out.  However, perhaps she'd been premature to do so.  The
warehouse undoubtedly contained not just his secret, but also other
newsworthy items.  Indeed, its very existence was newsworthy.  Why
hadn't she seen that before?

Because, a little voice chided her, you've been blinded by Superman.
There is more to the news than stories about the boy in blue.

She wanted to help Superman.

She wanted a great story.

Maybe, she realised belatedly, there was a way that she could satisfy
both her desires.  All she needed to do was trace the missing material
from the warehouse...

She wondered how she might go about doing just that.  As she thought
about her options she stopped tapping on the desktop, and instead
began tapping the pencil's blunt end against her teeth.  Finally, having
decided upon a possible course of action, she went to see Perry.

She knocked lightly on the frame of the open door and poked her head
into his office.  She asked, "Have you got a minute?"

Perry looked up from the mock-up of the front page he was annotating
and said, "No, but when did that ever stop you before?  Come on in
and tell me what's on your mind."

Lois came to a halt a couple of paces short of Perry's desk and, tying
her fingers into intricate knots as she fidgeted, she broached the subject
that was uppermost in her mind.  "It's about the UFO warehouse
thing..."

"Yes?"

"You said, before you'd run it, I'd have to get an on the record
statement from Superman-"

"I remember," said Perry, cutting her off.  "You got a quote from the
big guy?"

"Not exactly, no.  Actually, I was thinking about working this from the
opposite angle."

"Oh?"

"I want to trace the stuff that was removed from the warehouse."

"And how do you intend to do that?"

"Well," said Lois, "I was thinking...  The lawyers drew Thompson out
of the woodwork when they were phoning all around Washington,
trying to find someone who'd admit to knowing anything about the
raid, so..."

"So?"

"If you give me a list of who they talked to, I could take it from there.
Someone had to have a link to this Bureau 39.  I just need to find out
who it was."

Perry nodded thoughtfully, then, after a moment's reflection, he said,
"Okay.  I'll give you twenty-four hours to turn something up.  But
after that I'll have to put you on another story.  Okay?"

"Okay, Perry.  Fair enough."

*****

By a quarter to one Lois's shoulders and back were stiff from hunching
to cradle the phone against her ear, and her notepad was covered with
a myriad of tiny doodles, about half of which were variations on
Superman's S.  She rolled her eyes as, for what felt like the hundredth
time, the muzak cut out to be replaced by the artificial cadences of a
recorded message.  Lois didn't bother listening to the words; she'd
spent most of her morning on hold with various organisations, and all
their messages sounded the same.  "Thank you for calling [insert name
of department as appropriate].  All our operators are busy.  Someone
will be with you shortly.  Please hold the line."  Then the muzak would
cut in again, offending Lois's musical sense by the way it always did so
in the middle of a bar.

"Yeah," she muttered.  "I'll just bet they're busy.  Busy having lunch!"
Lois glanced at her watch and decided to give up this latest call as a
bad job.

Deciding that a break from the telephone might be a good idea, Lois
stood up, stretching the kinks from her spine as she did so.  Then she
grabbed her jacket and purse, and headed for the exit.

Lois dead-heated with a man coming from the opposite direction as she
reached the entrance to Wegner's Deli, a block away from the Planet.
They danced around one another, each trying to politely allow the
other to go first.  The momentary stalemate was broken when Lois
belatedly recognised her companion and said, "Oh, it's you," and
barged in front of him as if it were her right.

Clark didn't take offence at her sudden lapse in manners; rather, he
seemed to find them vaguely amusing.  Good-naturedly, he waited as
her order was made up, bagged, paid for, and handed over.

Lois, struck by some strange impulse, found herself waiting for him,
and they fell in step with one another as they headed back to the office.
Choosing to avoid the sensitive question of what her competition was
working on, Lois found herself engaging Clark in small talk, and the
next thing she knew, she was engaged in a teasing banter about their
respective sandwich choices.  Hers, he described as a health-freak's
delight: brown bread, crisp salad, chicken and low-fat mayonnaise.  In
turn, she described his as cholesterol on a bun.  "Who," she asked,
"ever heard of having egg mayonnaise and ham *together* before, let
alone with a slice of Emmental cheese?"

The sound of a bank alarm cut through their companionable chatter
just as they reached the Daily Planet's entrance.  Lois, suddenly all
business again, said, "Well?  What are you waiting for?" and, without
bothering to check that Clark was following her, set off at a run in the
direction from which the sound was coming.

Lois arrived at the scene of the crime just in time to see two armed
robbers suddenly divested of their guns and swag by a fast moving
blur, and then, as the blur gained substance, she saw Superman grab
the robbers by their collars.

The scattering of passers-by broke into spontaneous applause.  Lois
smiled and joined in.  Superman acknowledged the praise with a slight
incline of his head and busied himself with making sure the robbers
were secured for the police to find.

Lois waved frantically at the hero, calling out, "Superman!  Over here!
It's me!  Lois!"

To her great delight, Superman drifted over in her direction.  Then he
lowered himself to the ground to stand in front of her.

"What can I do for you, Lois?" he said.  The businesslike words were
softened by a faint smile playing around his mouth.

"Superman..." Lois said quietly, making sure that nobody without
superhearing would be able to hear what she was saying,  "I hope you
don't mind, but I've been trying to find out more about that
warehouse.  I know you don't want me to write anything about you,
and I'll respect that wish, but this has the makings of a great story.
But even if the story doesn't pan out, I'd like to help you, if I can, and
you can trust me.  I know that you don't know me very well, but-"

Superman's smile widened in the face of her babbling.  He said, "I
would be delighted to have your help, Lois."

"You would?"  She sounded shyly astonished.

"Yes, I would."

"And you trust me?"

His eyes twinkled.  "Yes.  I'm beginning to think I do."

"Great!  Then, there's a question that I've got to ask you."

"Yes?"

"Where, and when, did you arrive on Earth, Superman?"  As Lois
watched she could see Superman withdraw into himself, and she knew
that she was not going to get an answer.  However, she was not one to
give in without a fight, so she justified her request by saying, "All the
records in the warehouse were classified by place and date.  If I don't
have that information, I won't know where to start looking."

Superman looked torn.

Lois tried again, "You said you trusted me.  Trust has to start
somewhere."

"It's not simply a matter of trust.  It's also a matter of privacy.  If it
were just for myself then maybe... but there are my parents, too.  It's
not just my secret."

Lois bit on her lip, not liking his answer.

"I'm sorry," he said.  "If you find the records, and if it becomes
absolutely necessary for me to do so, then I will tell you the rest of it,
but only then."

She sighed, giving in.  It was, she supposed, fair.  She already knew
that she wasn't going to get a story out of this, so what did it matter
anyway?  "How do I get in touch with you, if I find anything out?"

Superman smiled faintly, accepting the change of subject as it was
meant, a tacit agreement to go along with his wishes, at least for now.
"Don't worry, Lois.  I'll find you.  I'll drop by in the next couple of
days."  Then he was gone, leaving her standing alone on the street.

Moments later, when Clark jogged around the corner, she greeted him
with a jovial slap on his chest and said, "You've missed all the
excitement."  Her smile was self-satisfied as she said, "Superman's
already left.  Where did you get to, anyway?"

"Hm?  Oh!  I was... calling the police."  Then, as if to corroborate his
story, they heard the wail of approaching sirens.

"Well," said Lois, "there's not much left for them to do, other than
collect the garbage."  She waved a hand towards the two robbers who
were sitting in twin trashcans, suspended from a lamppost.  Her smile
broadened at the spectacle; Superman had style.

*****

Lois made another mark on her notepad, recording that the tape of
Greensleeves had restarted for the ninth time since she'd been put on
hold.  She yawned, stretched, and realised that she had got precisely
nowhere with the investigation.

"Lois?"

Perry's concerned tone alerted her to the fact that something was
wrong.  She put down the handset, giving up on the call, and swivelled
her desk chair around to face him.  "What's up, Perry?" she asked.

"It's your man Thompson.  He's turned up again."

Something about the way he said it told Lois more than the words
alone could have done.  "Where?" she asked, bracing herself for the
inevitable.

"Washed up on a beach south of the city, down near that old airforce
base.  The coroner's got him.  Sounds like he's been dead for a couple
of days."

"A couple of..."  Lois's stomach twisted as the implication sank in.
"You mean... he died not long after...  Oh, my God," she whispered.

"There's more," Perry said.  "There was no water in his lungs.  He
didn't drown.  My sources say he'd been beaten up pretty bad.
Probably he died of his injuries and was dumped."

Lois closed her eyes against a feeling of nausea and felt her fists bunch
as she tried to block out the memory of the fight she'd witnessed.  She
had no proof, but she didn't need proof to know that she'd almost
certainly witnessed the prelude to a murder.  She took a deep breath,
then said, "I guess I'd better talk to the police."  She didn't relish the
task, knowing how Henderson would react to the news of her breaking
and entering when he heard about it.

"Now, listen, Lois," said Perry, pulling her back to the present. "I won't
stop you from carrying on with the investigation; your twenty-four
hours have been extended, okay?  But, you be careful, you hear?"

She nodded mutely, for once not arguing with Perry.  No matter how
great the story, she didn't want to follow in Thompson's watery
footsteps.  No story was worth that.  On the other hand, his murder
made the investigation all the more important: she couldn't let things
rest.  She smiled wryly to herself as she realised that Superman was not
the only person in whom curiosity overcame fear.

Perry watched her in silence for a few moments, as if to reassure
himself that she was going to be all right.  Then he turned away,
heading back to his office.

Lois found another number to call and, with renewed enthusiasm,
began to dial.

*****

Clark, sitting with his elbows on the dining table and his chin cupped in
his hands, looked the very picture of dejection.  He stared unseeingly at
his abandoned cup of oolong tea; he'd made it thinking it would help to
soothe his churning thoughts but, now that he'd let it grow cold, the
thought of drinking it was vaguely repugnant.

Thompson's murder hadn't put Lois off her quest.  Quite the reverse,
in fact, and he couldn't help but admire her for her bravery and
tenacity.  However, what were, professionally speaking, admirable
traits were troubling to him on a personal level.  If this had been just
another story she was working on, he probably wouldn't have been
concerned, but, knowing that this was personal, he found himself
troubled by her reaction.

Was it irresponsible for him to want her to continue with her quest,
knowing that he would be at least partly to blame for whatever
happened to her as a consequence?  The answer to that was easy.  Yes,
it would be.  But at the same time, he was selfish enough to want her
to continue her investigations.  He wanted information, and he knew
that she was the key to finding it.  He couldn't, either in good
conscience or without arising suspicion, look for information relating
to a story upon which she was working; if she gave up, the chance of
him finding out more about his roots would be lost.

If only he could decide what to do for the best!

The phone rang, interrupting his introspection.  His reluctance to
answer it was reflected in the time he took over picking up the
receiver.  As Superman he could have picked it up a nanosecond after
the ringing started.  As Clark he usually let it ring once or twice.  This
time he let it ring six times before he lifted the handset and gave his
name.

"Hi, Clark!"  Martha's upbeat greeting made him smile, despite his
more general gloom.

"Hi, son," said Jonathan, letting Clark know that he was on the other
handset.

"Mom.  Dad.  How're things?"

"Oh, we're fine, honey.  But what about you?"

Suddenly sounding very depressed, Clark replied, "To be honest, I've
been better."

"Clark?"  Martha's voice automatically shaded into a warm concern.
"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," Clark said immediately, wanting to reassure them.
"At least..."

"You can tell us.  You can tell us anything."  Jonathan's voice was
encouraging.

"Yeah, Dad.  I know that.  It's just...  I'm not sure what to do for the
best.  Or, rather, I do know, but..."

"Clark?"  Martha's confusion was obvious.  Clark couldn't blame her
for that.

"It's Lois," he said.

"Lois, eh?"  Now her confusion was intermixed with a large dose of
hopeful curiosity.  Maybe Martha had yet to meet Lois Lane, but,
Clark knew that, despite all his best efforts, Martha had heard
something in the way that he spoke about his colleague to cause her
heart to beat just that bit faster with the hope that her son had met
someone at last.

"You know she's been helping Superman look into his origins?"  Even
as Clark said the words, he knew what his parents would be thinking;
how odd that he felt the need to talk about Superman as though he
were a separate person.  But, Lois *did* think she was helping another
person; she wasn't helping Clark, and talking about Superman helped
him to clarify the distinction.

"Yes," they agreed together.

"Well...  I don't think that I can let her continue."

There was a small pause at the other end of the line as his parents
considered his words.  Clark painted a mental picture of his mother,
frowning her confusion, exchanging a glance with his father who would
be shrugging his incomprehension back at her.

It was Jonathan who spoke for both of them when he said, "But you
always knew there was a risk she might find out about you.  You said
that you were prepared to take the chance-"

Clark interrupted.  "I did.  I *am*.  I'm not worried about *that*.  I'm
worried about Lois."

"Why?"

Clark ran a hand through his hair.  "I'm not explaining very well, am
I?" he asked rhetorically.  Then he said, "One of the men involved with
this mysterious Bureau was murdered."

"Murdered!  Oh, Clark!"

"Yeah.  His body washed up down the coast a little way.  And Lois
was one of the last people to see him alive.  So you can see why I'm
worried about her.  I don't want her putting herself in unnecessary
danger on my account.  I couldn't bear to be responsible if..."

"If anything happened to her," Martha finished the thought off for him.
"No, I can see that."

"But at the same time I can't help feeling... *disappointed*."

Jonathan's voice chimed in.  "Well, that's understandable, I suppose.
To be so close to finding out about yourself and then to be faced with
having to give up the search..."

"It doesn't seem quite fair, does it?" Martha chimed in sympathetically.

"No, Mom.  It doesn't."

"Oh, honey.  You sound so sad."

Clark shook himself mentally.  "I'll get over it," he said, doing his best
to reassure both his parents and himself.  "Look," he said, finally
deciding to take action, "I've got to go."

"Okay, Clark.  Love you."

"Love you, too.  I'll talk to you guys later, okay?"

"Bye, honey."

"Bye, son."

"Bye," echoed Clark and hung up.

Somewhere, during the conversation, his indecision as to what to do
for the best had turned into certainty.  It wasn't that anyone had
pointed him towards any particular course of action, yet somehow his
course of action seemed suddenly clear to him.  He needed to talk to
Lois.

When it came down to it, there really was no choice to be made.  Lois
had to come first.  Lois would always come first.

Clark spun into the Superman suit and left the apartment via the
balcony.

*****

Somehow Superman's arrival at her apartment didn't surprise or fluster
Lois as it had done on the two previous occasions that he'd visited.
She greeted him in a relaxed manner despite the poor news she could
offer him about her progress, a genuine smile of welcome on her face.

Her smile slipped as she took in his expression.  The skin was taut
across his cheekbones and his mouth was chiselled in a determined line.
"What's wrong?" she asked.

Superman didn't waste any time in getting to the point.  "I want you to
stop your investigation."

"What?!"  Lois was indignant.  "Now, just a minute-"

He cut off her protest.  "I heard about Thompson's death.  I don't want
you to endanger yourself unnecessarily on my behalf."

Lois blinked at his words.  "You want me to give up the investigation...
because you're worried about *me*?"  Her surprise was absolute.
"When you said... I... I thought that you'd decided to hold out on me
after all.  That you'd changed your mind about letting me help you."

"I wouldn't do that, Lois."

Lois ran a hand through her hair as she considered how best to reply.
Finally she said, "I couldn't give up this investigation now, even if I
wanted to - which, by the way, I don't.  The investigation isn't just
about you, you know.  It never was, not entirely, but Thompson's
death made it front page news.  I can't ignore that."

"Lois..."  Superman's eyes were beseeching.

"Superman..." she said in an impatient mockery of his tone.  Then,
relenting slightly, she said, "Look, I'll keep my promise.  Whatever I
find out, I'll keep you out of it, okay?  I like it that you're concerned
about me.  And, maybe you even feel a little responsible for me."  She
paused as she caught sight of a flicker of emotion crossing his face,
telling her that that was, indeed, the case.  "But you have no reason to.
This is my choice.  My life.   And I don't need your permission to live
it.  Do you understand?"

He nodded faintly, slightly taken back by the vehemence of her words.
"I only wanted to protect-"

It was the wrong thing to say.  "And I don't need your protection!"
spat Lois.  Then she paled as she thought of Thompson.  Thompson
had known the person responsible for the raid on the Planet and had
warned her about him, yet he hadn't been able to save himself.  "I... I'm
sorry," said Lois.  "I'm grateful for your concern, Superman, really I
am, but..."  She shook her head.  "It's my job."

"And it's the only way you know how to do it?" he asked.

"Yes!" she said, relieved and astonished that he actually seemed to
understand.  Even so, she thought that a little more explanation was in
order.  "Investigative journalism is still pretty much a man's world,
Superman.  I've had to work hard to get to where I am today.  And half
the battle has been to convince the less enlightened of my colleagues
that I'm up to the job, that this little woman isn't afraid to go where the
trouble is.  That this little woman *doesn't need protecting*."  A proud
defiance mingled with a hint of bitterness as she recalled her past
struggles.

Superman seemed to consider her words carefully and, to her relief, he
didn't discount them or try to argue with her.  Instead he said, "Well,
since I can't persuade you to drop this, then at least promise me that
you'll be careful?"

Lois nodded.  "I will."  However, given her past history, she wondered
if it was a promise she'd be able to keep.

"Thank you, Lois," Superman said.

Lois thought for a moment then asked, "Would it make you feel
happier if I asked a... friend to help?  Then I wouldn't be on my own."
What was she saying? she wondered.  Asking for help with a story
meant electing to share a by-line, something she had always resisted
and resented doing.  Sharing glory wasn't in her nature.  Yet,
Superman had met her more than half-way, and she wanted to do
something in return.  For Superman's peace of mind, she found herself
thinking the unthinkable.

She watched as Superman's expression shifted towards thoughtfulness.
"Wouldn't that place two of you in danger?"

Lois shook her head.  "He's more cautious than I am.  I'm sure he'll do
his best to keep me out of trouble."

"And can he be trusted?"

Lois looked at him and thought for a moment.  The question was a
difficult one to answer.  On a business level, she was pretty certain that
the person she had in mind had integrity.  On a personal level, she
wasn't so sure.  However, she couldn't see how that latter
consideration would affect her guest, so she said, "I think so.  Yes."

Still sounding hesitant, Superman nonetheless gave his approval,
saying, "Very well."

"Good," said Lois, mentally crossing her fingers and hoping that his
trust was not going to be misplaced.  Watching the hero, Lois was
struck by how... human... he appeared to be, and she found herself
remembering something Clark had said, soon after Superman had made
his debut.

Superman must have seen something shift in her expression because he
said, "What?  Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I was just thinking."

"About what?"

"About you.  About something Clark said."

"Oh?" he prompted.

"He said that, apart from the flying and stuff, that you could be any
regular guy.  I thought he was being pretty dumb at the time, but now
I'm not so sure."

"Oh?" he said again.

Lois looked away, unaccountably embarrassed by the direction in
which her thoughts were taking her.  She tried to put her reasoning
into words, a task rendered all the more difficult by the fact that she
still wasn't sure that she understood it herself.  "You turn up out of
nowhere, doing good deeds and being, well, wonderful is the best word
I can think of.  I, along with everyone else in the city, am awed by your
activities, and we automatically begin to think of you as some kind of
angel or saint or minor deity."

"I have never claimed to be a god!" Superman protested.

"I know that.  You just claimed to be a friend.  But you have to see
this from the point of view of the rest of us.  What were we
*supposed* to make of you?  Nobody had ever seen anything like you
before: you fly, you're extremely strong, you're... Superman.  Even if
you didn't actually say that's what you were, you still *seemed*
godlike."  She felt her face flush under his intense scrutiny, but she
ploughed on.  "But in the last few days, I've seen another side to you.
Deities shouldn't have any frailties.  We don't expect them to have
insecurities or needs of their own.  And you, Superman, seem to have
both.  So, underneath that suit and cape, I can only suppose that there
is the heart and soul of a man.  Not a god."

Lois found the courage to look at him then, wondering how he would
be taking her assessment of his character.  Would he be offended?
Hurt?  Amused?

To her relief he was none of those things.  Instead he was regarding
her with an unfathomable expression on his face.  "And... does that
disappoint you?" he asked.

She thought about his question for a moment, then she said, "It did a
little, to begin with.  But now I've had time to think about it, I'd say
that it's probably a good thing."

"Why?"

Lois shrugged infinitesimally, then she said, "It makes me feel more...
equal to you.  And it's easier to be friends with someone who is your
equal."

"Friends," he said, thoughtfully.  "I like sound of that.  And, right at
this moment, I'd have to say that you are just about the best friend I
could wish for."

Lois looked shyly at him as she said, "Well, thank you, Superman.
That means a lot to me."

*****

Clark landed gently on the balcony of his apartment, a half-smile
playing around his mouth.  His earlier mood had been lifted by the
discussion in Lois's apartment, and he felt much better than he had just
an hour before.  It was strange how talking to Lois could put him in
better spirits.

The first reason for his new-found good mood was, of course, that his
situation no longer seemed so helpless.  From a reluctance to find out
about his beginnings, his desire to unearth the truth had fanned into an
all consuming need.  Was this, he wondered, what addiction felt like?
The constant hunger?  The drive to get what he wanted, with scant
regard to the cost either to himself or to others?

He wondered, had he given in too easily?  Should he have tried harder
to make Lois drop the investigation?  Was it his own self-interest that
had stopped him from doing so, or was it because he knew that she
was right; this wasn't just about him.

The conversation had added a new perspective to his musings; he'd
been considering everything from his own point of view.  Lois,
however, had helped him see a fact that should have been obvious, but
which he had previously missed.  The choices weren't his alone to
make because this was about the job she had to do.

But it wasn't just that Lois was helping him that warmed him.  There
was also the reaction of Lois herself to Superman.  "So, underneath
that suit and cape, I can only suppose that there is the heart and soul of
a man," Lois had said.  It was such a little thing, but it meant the world
to Clark who was always conscious of the differences that set him
apart from the people with whom he lived and worked.  Keeping the
secret, while necessary, made matters more complicated.  Ever since
his powers had started to develop, he had wondered how other people
would react if only they knew the truth about him.

Until he had created Superman only his parents had seen what he was
capable of; it had never upset them.  But he was very aware that they
were biased in their opinions.  After all, that was the way of parents.
That was, of course, not to suggest that he did not value their
unconditional love and support; he doubted that he could have coped
without them, and for that he would be forever grateful.

People's reactions to Superman had been mostly positive, and for that
he was thankful.  Of course both Luthor and the government agents
had shown that there were those who resented his arrival, but generally
speaking his presence had been welcomed.  Yet the welcome he had
received hadn't been one of open-armed acceptance.  Lois's comment,
"You turn up out of nowhere, doing good deeds and being, well,
*wonderful* is the best word I can think of.  I, along with everyone
else in the city, am awed by your activities, and we automatically begin
to think of you as some kind of angel or saint or minor deity," had
simply put something he had known into words.  Acceptance of that
sort was, in its own way, almost as disquieting as the hatred he had
always feared.

Of all the people he had met thus far, Lois was the first to see beneath
the cape, and he was warmed by her empathy and understanding.  That
she was beginning to see him as a person, not just as a set of
marvellous abilities packaged in a gaudy outfit, made him feel good in
a way that he found hard to define.

He thought about it, trying to make sense of the feelings.  The best
explanation that he could come up with was that her reaction made him
feel as though he belonged.  He felt comfortable with her, not ill-at-
ease as he did with the gawpers and the sycophants he was meeting
with depressing regularity.  He had no desire to be admired, but being
liked was something else again.  Lois had offered him friendship; no
one else had accorded that honour to Superman.

Friendship, he thought.  He accepted her friendship gratefully as
Superman.  He thought, if only she would offer the same to Clark Kent
then he would be supremely happy.  However, everything he'd learned
about Lois, variously from what she had said, the titbits offered by the
Planet's grapevine, and what he had observed of her behaviour at
work, indicated it would be far harder for Clark to earn her trust than it
had been for Superman.

At work, she appeared driven in a way that she did not in the comfort
of her own apartment.  She had confided in him about Claude, and he
was sure that she was embarrassed by the admission; he suspected that
went a long way to explain her defensiveness.  To be betrayed by
anyone was bad enough, but by a colleague must have been doubly
painful because it had attacked her on both personal and professional
levels, leaving her vulnerable on both counts.  How long, he wondered,
had it taken her to put the ghosts behind her, to be able to face going
into the newsroom with equanimity, and not be haunted by the
remnants of a relationship gone awry?

What, he wondered, would Lois have been like if Claude had not
existed?  It was an interesting question.  He suspected that she would
still be ambitious and driven by a need to be the best, but he also
suspected that she would be more relaxed.  Less prickly.  More like the
woman whose apartment he'd just left.  The woman that he, as Clark
Kent, had not yet been allowed to meet.

Clark found himself angry at Claude, a man he'd never met, and
jealous, too, just as he felt jealous of the unknown friend with whom
Lois had told Superman she would work.  He found himself trying to
work out who the friend might be; he'd not noticed her being very
friendly with anyone, except, perhaps, Perry and Jimmy.

He didn't see how she could ask Perry for help; his responsibilities
would preclude his assistance.  Jimmy, then...  Clark wasn't sure that
he was entirely comfortable with the idea.  He liked the young
researcher, but he wasn't yet convinced of his ability to keep any
secrets he might learn.

Still, he trusted Lois, and he would have to place his trust in her
judgement, too.

*****

After he'd gone, Lois sat on the love-seat for a long time, just thinking.

It disturbed her to think of his isolation.  Superman's comment, "Right
at this moment, I'd have to say that you are just about the best friend I
could wish for," had jolted her, partly because it showed just how
alone he was, and partly because she realised that the reverse was
possibly true as well.  She had colleagues, she had interviews, and she
had a sister.  But she could count her friends on the fingers of one
hand.  Who were her friends? she wondered.  She had drifted away
from the crowd she'd hung around with at college.  There was
Superman, and, possibly, Clark Kent.  Where had that errant thought
come from?  She'd been trying to hold Clark at bay, and now she was
thinking of him as a friend?

Clark was still largely an unknown quantity.  However, he had earned
her respect, and he was undoubtedly both bright and discreet, two
attributes she needed in her current endeavour.  Besides, Lois thought
that she could appeal to Clark's sympathetic nature to get him to do
what she wanted.

She just hoped, for Superman's sake and for her own, that she had
read Clark correctly, that he wouldn't run off with the story, leaving
her high and dry and Superman exposed.  She hoped that he wasn't
another Claude.

Still, what was it she had said to Superman?  "Trust has to start
somewhere."

When it came right down to it, what had Clark done to make her so
suspicious of his motives?  If anything, it was he who had been given
reason to question her integrity, not the other way round.  She'd stolen
his story, and she had gone out of her way to be unpleasant to him.

She wanted his help, but what if he didn't want to give it?

*****

"Clark," said Lois.  "I want a word."  She sounded imperious, even to
her own ears.

Clark looked up at her, his face a question.

"I... I mean..." she said, trying again, and suddenly feeling flustered,
"can I have a word with you, please?" *Dammit Lane*, she chastised
herself. *Why are you so nervous?  You haven't had any qualms about
ordering him around before, so why worry about it now?

Because,* a little voice at the back of her head said, *this isn't simply
work.  This is also personal.  And that puts a different slant on your
relationship with this man. *

Lois could see his surprise at the sudden change in her demeanour as
he said, "Sure, Lois."

"Not here," she said.  "Come with me."

Lois tugged on his sleeve, towing him in the direction of the
conference room.  Once the door was firmly closed behind them, she
turned to face him and began.

"I want you to partner me on that UFO warehouse story I'm working
on."

"The Thompson murder?!"  Clark's look of surprised delight almost
made her rethink her decision to enlist his aid.  He was just too keen
and, no matter how useful he might be, she still didn't want him getting
close to her.  "Well, sure, Lois.  I'd love to, but... why?"

"Why, what?" she asked.

"Why do you want me to work with you?  I mean, you haven't been
very keen on the idea of us working together before."

"Because I need some help, okay?"

"Okay," said Clark, apparently deciding to accept her explanation at face
value.

Lois looked at him for a moment, knowing that she was about to pass
the point of no return.  Did she really want to do this?  She nodded to
herself, taking courage in both hand.  Committed, she began to speak.
"Now, first, you've got to promise me that you'll never breath a word
of what I'm about to tell you."

Clark looked at her.  "Okay," he said again.

"I want a favour, Clark."  She stood facing him defiantly, her arms
crossed tightly across her chest.

He looked confused.  "Wha'...?  What's the big deal about your
wanting a favour?  That's what I can't tell anyone?"

"No!" she said savagely.  "It's the favour that's a secret."

"Oh," he said.

"So?  Will you or won't you?"

"Will I, or won't I, what?"

"Do me a favour!"

Clark, to her utter dismay, seemed to be finding her discomfiture
amusing.  Here she was, trying to lower her barriers enough to ask him
this teensy weensy favourette, and he was *laughing* at her!  "Now,
why," he said, "would I want to do you a favour?"  His lips weren't
smiling, but his eyes were dancing with barely restrained humour.

She resisted a sudden urge to hit him, choosing instead to flounce
towards the door.  Her hair fanned out at a forty-five degree angle as
she tossed her head, and her chin jutted forwards.  "Fine!" she said,
through clenched teeth.  "Don't help!  I don't need-"

"Lois?!"  Somehow Clark was standing in front of her, blocking her
exit.  "I didn't say 'no'!"

Lois stared at him, nonplussed.  He hadn't said no, but he had been
going to.  Hadn't he?  Perhaps not, she thought.  She bit back her
anger, and tried to be reasonable.  "Look, Clark, I know that we've not
gotten off to a very good start, and I know I haven't been all that nice
to you, and, really, I can't think of any reason why you might want to
help me, other than that you seem to be a decent sort of guy, and, in
any case, you probably don't have anything better to do with your free
time, and, if you don't want to help me, then maybe it'll make a
difference if I tell you that this isn't really a favour to me but a favour
for a friend and-"  She stopped abruptly.  "What?!" she demanded in
response to his wide-eyed and close scrutiny.

"Oh, nothing," he answered, "except that I've never seen anyone speak
without stopping for breath before."

"Oh," she said, her voice small.  "I was babbling, wasn't I?"

Clark nodded, but didn't make any comment.  "Who's your friend,
Lois?  And what's the favour?"

"Well," she said.  "It's like this..."

*****

The quiet of the Daily Planet at night was eerie after the bustle of the
day.

In a pool of light cast from their desk lamps, two reporters remained at
work in the newsroom hours after the last of their colleagues had gone
home for the day.  Lois and Clark sat surrounded by stacks of books
and paper, occasionally reaching over to their computers to key in
commands, as they trawled through databases and directories, trying to
identify any publicly owned buildings that lay unclaimed by the more
accountable government departments.  Given the mysterious Bureau
39's obvious liking for subterfuge, they had decided that, whatever
buildings they couldn't identify by department would warrant further
investigation.  They'd known from the outset that it was, at best, a
long shot.

Lois leaned back in her chair and sighed, discouraged.  As the evening
eased into night with no obvious leads coming to light she was
beginning to think that there was little future in continuing.

Clark looked up at her sigh.  He stood, stretched, and said, "I don't
know about you, but I could do with a break.  You hungry?"

Now that he mentioned it, she realised that she was ravenous.  Lunch
was a dim and distant memory.  She nodded.

"I'll go get us something," Clark volunteered. Lois nodded again,
silently and gratefully accepting his offer.

He jogged up the ramp and vanished into the elevator, leaving Lois to
return to the search.  However, now that her concentration had been
disturbed, her attention refused to stay fixed on the task in hand,
instead drifting towards the enigma that was Clark Kent.

She'd had little trouble in persuading him to partner her on this story or
in agreeing to help her keep the Superman side of things under wraps.
In anyone else, she'd have suspected that his willingness to assist her
was due to opportunism; what rookie could resist the opportunity to
share a by-line with a seasoned pro, such as herself?  The trouble was,
though, that she didn't think it was ambition that was driving Clark to
help her, yet she found his motivations hard to figure out.

Perhaps part of his reason for helping was because he, too, wanted to
help Superman.  After all, she'd already figured out that they'd had
some sort of contact beyond the purely professional.  However, Lois
realised, Superman evidently didn't think of Clark as being a friend.
The conversations she'd had with the hero had shown her just how
short of friends he was.

So, if it wasn't friendship with Superman that was driving him to work
with her for hours after he might reasonably have decided to head for
home, he must had another reason for spending his evening in the
office; the only other reason she could come up with was that he
wanted to spend time with her because... because... he liked her?  It
seemed probable.  Once or twice she'd caught the admiring way he
glanced at her when he thought she wasn't looking.

And how did she feel about that? she wondered.  The answer came
slowly, as though her mind was reluctant to give up its secrets, even to
herself.  She was flattered; no woman could fail to be flattered by the
attention of such a good-looking man.  At the same time, though, she
found his interest in her terrifying.

Lois's previous experiences with men no doubt coloured her judgement
where Clark was concerned, but she found it hard to believe that he
didn't want something more from her than she had so far offered.
Indeed, what had she offered?  Not a great deal, she decided.  Their
working relationship was strained, deliberately so on her part.  So,
what was keeping him here?  Physical attraction?  The hope of a brief
and enjoyable interlude with a colleague?

She frowned.  That must be what he was after.  It was, after all, what
Claude had wanted, no matter how much he'd professed to love her.
Well, if that was what Clark was after, he was going to be sorely
disappointed.  No matter how attractive he was, she wasn't in the
market for a casual affair.  If she were ever to find the courage to
embark on another relationship, it would be with someone who wanted
the same thing she did, a loving lifetime partnership.  She could settle
for nothing less.

Maybe she was reading too much into a few glances.  It wasn't as
though he'd tried to push her into anything against her wishes.  Maybe
he was being genuinely helpful, or maybe he had some reason for
helping that she hadn't thought of.

Her ruminations were interrupted by Clark's return, and her stomach
grumbled in delighted response to the sight of the bamboo containers
and the delicious aromas she remembered from their first late-night
meal together.

She rapidly pushed papers aside, clearing space on her desk for him to
put the food down.  Then all her fears receded into the darkest recesses
of her mind as they began to eat.

By the end of the meal, Lois had managed to relax a little, and she
found herself smiling at him without a trace of mockery or
condescension in her expression.  "Thanks for getting this, Clark."

"You're welcome," he said.

"Sometime you're going to have to show me where you get such great
Chinese food!"

His smile widened slightly.   Teasing her, he said, "Come on, Lois!
Can't a guy have some secrets?"

She could feel her smile slip.  "That depends on what they are," she
said seriously, thinking about the men in her life, and how their lies had
drummed into her the merits of mistrusting everyone.  She wondered
whether Clark had any idea what it had cost her to ask for his help.

But, sitting here, with Clark...  She shook herself.  What *was* it
about this man?  He made few demands upon her, and he was easy to
be with.  Yet there was something more, something unspoken between
them.  She didn't know what it was, but it pulled her towards him,
making her open up to him in ways she couldn't begin to understand.
And she didn't like the sensation one little bit.  She floundered for a
few moments for a way to shift the conversation onto less sensitive
ground, and she found herself asking, "Look, I know it's none of my
business, Clark, but I was wondering... are *you* adopted?  Is that
why you wrote that article?"

He seemed taken aback by the question, coming as it did out of the
blue.  "Well, yeah," he admitted.

"I thought so," she said, sounding pleased that she'd been right.

"Why?  What gave me away?"

"It was how you looked when I asked you why adopted kids should
care about their real parents.  It was really bothering you.  I could tell."

"Oh."

"So, which one of the categories were you in?  Unrealistic expectations
or tear-jerker reconciliations?"

"Well... neither, actually."

Lois frowned.  "Why not?  Haven't you looked for your birth-parents?
After reading the article I would have thought you'd be right out there,
looking for answers, no matter how well you get on with your folks."

Clark seemed to take a long time to formulate his reply, and Lois was
beginning to wonder whether she had overstepped the mark with her
questions by the time he finally responded.  After all, their
conversations had barely touched on such personal territory before.
"It's just that I haven't managed to track them down," he said.

Lois frowned.  "Why not?"

"These things take time.  Plus I haven't been looking very long.  I
mean, I was travelling for so many years, and I couldn't really do both
at the same time.  Now that I'm settled in Metropolis though..."

"Well, I'm sure you'll find them sooner or later," Lois said
encouragingly.  "Just think about it: we're trying to trace the origins of
an extra-terrestrial.  In comparison, finding out about yours should be a
piece of cake!"

Clark didn't answer.  Instead he stood up and began gathering together
the empty bamboo containers and chopsticks.  Then, once her desk
was clear, he retreated to his own, and they began their search anew.

*****

It was fortunate, Clark decided, that he could do most things faster
than other people.  Judicious use of his superpowers when Lois wasn't
looking helped to disguise the fact that his mind wasn't fully focused
on their current task.  Instead, his thoughts kept drifting off on
tangents that had nothing to do with finding government buildings and
everything to do with appreciating the woman who sat only a few feet
distant, her head bowed, and her brow furrowed in concentration.

There was a lot for him to consider, such as the fact that she had asked
for his help, something that filled him with a joyful optimism, but
which, at the same time, was a little confusing.

Lois had told Superman that she would ask a friend for help, and she
had elected to ask Clark.  But Clark wasn't sure whether that meant
she now thought of him as a friend or whether she had chosen to
stretch the truth for his alter ego's benefit.

Even if she *didn't* see him as a friend, he still had reason to be happy
because it was clear that, on some level at least, she had found
something in him to trust and that, earlier impressions aside, he wasn't
completely beneath her notice.

Was he imagining it, or was Lois beginning to warm to him, at least a
little?  He hoped her change in attitude wasn't just in his mind, or due
to expediency, because the more time he spent in her company the
more time he wanted to spend.

Clark lifted his eyes away from the volumes on his desk and looked at
Lois.  What she was doing here was nothing short of admirable.  Yes,
he knew that she was working on a story, but he also knew that wasn't
what was driving her to put in long hours, staying late into the night.
No, she was doing it out of a desire to help Superman.  She was, he
decided, pretty wonderful.

As he got to know Lois better he was coming to appreciate her more:
her generous spirit, her desire to help, her strength, her determination.

For an instant he thought about telling her who he really was, but he
immediately quashed the impulse.  He'd never told another person
about himself, and he couldn't start now.  Could he?

No, he decided firmly.  It was quite impossible; the secret had to be
ke