Pheromone, More Likely: 3/?
by Nan Smith
Previously:
A pair of arms snaked themselves around his neck from behind, and turning his head in surprise, he recognized Hamilton Grimm, the quiet, middle-aged columnist who wrote the "Mystery Diner" feature for the Planet's Sunday edition. "Umm, Hamm, I'm working."
The food critic's arms tightened. "Aw, Clark, you're such a killjoy. Nobody's working. Why don't we just take the day off?"
Feeling distinctly harassed, Clark disengaged the other man's arms. "Because it's a workday, Hamm. If you'll excuse me ..." His exit toward the elevators was shamefully craven, he admitted later, but he'd dealt with too many shocks in the last twenty-four hours. His courage was running low.
"Aww, Clark," Hamilton said. "Why don't we just play hooky?"
Clark ducked into the elevator, feeling hunted.
**********
And now, Part 3:
A visit to the magazine stand in the lobby of the planet yielded a substantial number of women's magazines. Clark recalled his promise to Lois that he would return, and decided to get a cup of cappuccino before he did -- and to sit with his back against the wall. He'd had enough of admirers sneaking up on him for one day. Why on Earth were so many of them zeroing in on him, anyway? It wasn't as if he was the only guy in the office, after all.
Upon his return to the newsroom, he saw Luthor talking to Lois, and the man glanced at him with a cryptic smile on his lips. Clark controlled the urge to bristle. Any time the billionaire showed an interest in Lois the reaction was instinctive, but until he had the proof, there wasn't a lot he could do to convince Lois that the man wasn't the charming, philanthropist that he showed to the world, but a cold, calculating criminal whose hands were stained with the blood of who knew how many innocent people.
As a matter of fact, his very presence here was suspicious, as was his lack of reaction to the obviously strange behavior of the inhabitants of the newsroom. Clark kept his face blank as Luthor turned and strode up the ramp toward the elevators, but his mind was racing. What had Luthor wanted here, anyway? Why had he walked in when he had and why was he leaving now, while apparently unconcerned with the weirdness going on around him? Something was definitely up, as Lois, in her more rational moments, would say.
He continued on down into the pit and set the pile of magazines on the corner of his desk. After a moment's hesitation, he walked through the Conference Room to the window and looked out, scanning the street.
A long, black limousine waited in the loading zone, and as he watched, Luthor exited the main doors of the Planet and strode toward the car. A uniformed chauffeur opened the rear door for him, and he got in.
There was someone waiting for him in the rear seat, and Clark lifted his glasses, scanning the interior of the limousine, looking for anything that might tell him what Luthor's purpose here might have been.
The other occupant of the rear seat was the woman who had sprayed the newsroom with her unusual perfume. Quickly, he shoved his glasses into place and turned to make a quick return to the elevator.
"Get your hands off of me!" Lois's voice rose in a combination of fury and outrage. Clark paused in mid-step.
"But I love you!" a male voice protested. "I want to spend my life with you. I'd swim the Pacific Ocean for just one kiss ..."
Lois's voice exclaimed in anger, and there was the sound of a healthy slap. Clark lowered his glasses, looking through the wall at the scene.
Lois was confronting Pete, the Sports editor. The man, undaunted, had backed her against the wall and was leaning in for a kiss. Lois didn't look in the least frightened, however. As Clark stared in an instant's frozen shock, Lois rabbit-punched her amorous co-worker just under the ribs and ducked beneath his arm, making for the stairs. Pete, clutching his side, followed.
On the street below, Luthor's car pulled away from the curb. Clark cast a frustrated glance back over his shoulder, and then went to help Lois and Pete. The Sports editor might be enamored with Lois, but he was courting sudden death, if Clark knew his partner. As he stepped out into the Pit once more, Wally crossed the room toward Lois, who had stopped, facing Pete, her back against Clark's desk.
"Hey," Wally said. He elbowed Pete aside. "The lady isn't interested." He moved over to Lois and dropped to one knee. "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known, Lois. Will you marry me?"
Pete shoved him sideways. "Lois and I were talking. Beat it!"
Wally sprawled awkwardly on the floor, recovered and scrambled to his feet. Pete had returned his attention to Lois. "Don't pay any attention to that loser. There's only one real man here who can appreciate you the way you should ..." Wally tackled him from the rear and the two men went down in a tangle of arms and legs, knocking Clark's chair sideways into a trashcan. The can crashed into Jimmy's desk, upsetting a pencil holder, and fell over, strewing its contents across the floor of the newsroom.
Clark, in full Superman regalia, moved across the room at super speed and bent down, picking up both men by the backs of their collars. Well aware by now of the futility of trying to reason with persons affected by the foul-smelling perfume, he zipped from the room, dropping one man on the fourth floor and one in the lobby. Hopefully, it would give the two of them time to cool off before they encountered each other again.
A chorus of screams from out on the sidewalk alerted him and he glanced in the direction of the sounds. People were staring upward and pointing. Clark whisked outside and followed the direction of the pointing fingers.
A body was hurtling downward, having apparently leaped from the roof of the Planet. Clark shot upward to catch the falling woman and with a start, recognized Amanda Nelson, one of the young women in Research.
"What happened?" he demanded. "Ms. Nelson, are you all right?"
She began to sob, hysterically. Through the incoherent sounds she was making, as he descended with her to the sidewalk, Clark gathered that the man for whom she had conceived a violent passion was only interested in her coworker.
This wasn't funny, Clark thought. The whole thing, up until now, had seemed relatively harmless, albeit embarrassing and inconvenient, but it was evident that in certain cases there could be serious consequences. If he hadn't been there, Amanda would have been dead.
He set her gently on her feet, looking around for a police officer or someone in authority to take charge of her, only to have her throw her arms around his neck.
"Superman," she announced, "I love you!"
Given that he had just saved her from falling to her death, abandoning her at this point didn't seem like a good idea, especially since her reaction to a previous rejection had been so extreme. He hesitated for a moment, and then spotted a uniformed officer making his way through the crowd.
A few moments later, assured that Amanda would be safe in the immediate future, and with a promise to come to the police station to explain, Superman took off. Maybe, if Luthor was headed back to his office, he could still find out what was going on between him and the blond woman. It couldn't be a coincidence that this craziness had occurred to his friends and co-workers yesterday, and the fact that the woman who seemed to be responsible was apparently associated with Lex Luthor at just this time. It certainly looked as if Luthor had come by the Planet to check up on them. It wasn't exactly proof, he thought, but it sure seemed suspicious to him.
But the limousine bearing Luthor and the mystery woman seemed to have vanished. A quick fly-by and scan of Lex Tower revealed no sign of the two, and it was a frustrated Clark who walked back into the newsroom half an hour later after Superman made a quick detour to the local precinct. He had come to the conclusion that he had better be available, just in case. He didn't want anything to happen to any of the other victims of this stuff, whatever it was. Hopefully, it would wear off eventually, but until then, he was going to have to keep an eye on them.
Which was going to be easier said than done. When he walked into the newsroom, Lois looked up with a smile of greeting, and instants after he sat down at his desk, she settled herself firmly in his lap.
"What are you doing?" she asked, beginning to run her fingers through his hair. Clark gritted his teeth, trying to maintain at least a minimum of concentration, which was more difficult than it sounded. With Lois's warm body snuggled up to him in a way he had dreamed of for months, it was hard to keep his mind on business, but if he didn't, she would undoubtedly kill him, later.
"That blond woman said the perfume was hers," he told Lois, striving to look her directly in the eyes and not at the part of her body nestled so close to his face. "If she makes perfume, maybe she advertises in these. I'm hoping I'll see her picture." He exhibited the slightly out of focus photograph that Jimmy had given him a couple of hours earlier. "It's the best chance we've got."
"You're such a party pooper," she told him, pouting slightly. Her hand graduated to the knot of his tie and she began to play with it. "You wanted to play hooky yesterday."
"That," he said, firmly removing her hand from the tie, "was yesterday. You managed to convince me to mend my ways." He hesitated. Would it be taking advantage of Lois's clouded judgement to ask her about Luthor? He'd fled the newsroom so fast to escape Hamm's advances that he'd failed to eavesdrop on Luthor, which he'd fully intended to do the instant he'd seen the billionaire. "Um ... what did Lex want?"
"He came to remind me that I'm having dinner with him tomorrow night," Lois said, indifferently. "He means nothing, Clark. You're the only man for me."
If only that were true, he thought, unhappily. When she was in her right mind, she would never have said such a thing. "Did he want anything else?" he asked.
"No," Lois informed him. "You don't have to be jealous." Her hands had drifted to his shirt buttons again, and he gently removed them.
She looked disappointed. He continued to hold the hand he had removed from his shirt for just a second. "Lois, I'm sorry. I care about you too much to let you do something you'll hate me for, later."
Her eyes grew large for an instant, and she smiled breathtakingly. "Then, I'm just going to have to convince you, aren't I?"
"Lois ..." He drew a deep breath and forced his mind back to the subject of the blond woman. "Want to help me look for the perfume lady?"
The door to the copy room opened at that point and Cat Grant stuck her head out. Her hair was tangled and disheveled, her makeup smeared, and her earrings were missing. "Anybody out there have anything they want copied?" she inquired. Clark felt his face burning. After several seconds, the door closed again. The copy machine went into action once more.
*********
By quitting time, Clark felt as if he'd been through the proverbial wringer. Between fending off Lois's increasingly aggressive advances, dodging Hamm, breaking up two more battles between Pete and Wally, who seemed to have fixated on Lois as the love of their lives, avoiding an attempt by Wally to engage in fisticuffs with him for the honor of the fair lady in question, and Perry's arrival, accompanied by a rendition of Heartbreak Hotel, performed a cappella on a desktop, he was ready to tear out his hair. The women's magazines from the stand in the Planet's lobby had yielded no results and he'd been forced to make three more trips to other magazine stands for other and more rarified women's publications. Some of the articles in these high fashion mags were as embarrassingly explicit as, if not worse than, some of the ones designed for men, and the peculiar looks he'd gotten from the proprietors of the stands had made him cringe. He just hoped he hadn't been recognized by anyone he knew.
He drove Lois home and saw to it that she was safely in her apartment before Superman took off for an evening patrol of the city. Rescuing a senior citizen from a mugging and breaking up a gang fight on the fringe of Suicide Slum was considerably easier than the day that he'd just spent, that was for sure. Luthor was in his penthouse apartment, he saw when he checked, eating a dinner that would have cost Clark Kent a month's salary and he wondered again what the billionaire was up to. Later tonight, when he was sure Lois and Jimmy and his other co-workers were safely asleep, he was going to employ a little of Lois's specialty. Covert break-ins weren't something he liked to engage in, but what had happened in the newsroom in the last two days was something he wasn't content to let lie. It seemed as if someone, possibly under the auspices of Lex Luthor, had sprayed them with some kind of mind-altering substance, and if he hadn't been Superman, the consequences could have been extremely serious. It didn't seem likely that it was a mere practical joke, either. Luthor didn't engage in purposeless practical jokes. The man had a reason for everything he did. If he could, he was going to find out what the purpose was behind this one.
A chorus of screams and the insistent blaring of a horn caught his attention, and he followed the sound in time to see Jimmy Olsen, dressed in an outfit that he would have described as "callow Miami Vice" frozen in the path of an enormous truck. He accelerated downward to snatch his young friend from the jaws of death and soared upward again, a shaken Jimmy gripped in one arm.
"Jimmy, are you all right?" he asked.
"I think so," Jimmy faltered. "What happened?"
"Come on," Clark said. "I'd better take you home."
By the time he dropped Jimmy off at his apartment, Clark was beginning to entertain hopes that whatever chemical it was that Jimmy and the others had been sprayed with was wearing off. The copy boy was rational and promised not to go anywhere for the rest of the night. Clark waited until he had gone inside and then left. He planned to wait until Luthor was in bed asleep to make his foray. In the meantime, he could take the time to peruse the remainder of the women's magazines waiting for him in his apartment in the faint hope that he would yet identify the woman who had done this to his friends.
**********
"Belle" was the magazine where he finally hit the jackpot.
He'd seen "Miranda's Scents" advertised in many of the previous publications, but none of them had shown the woman, herself. Clark experienced a jolt of recognition at the smiling photograph of "Miranda", holding one of her famous perfumes. So, now he had a name, and her presence in the newsroom yesterday and with Luthor, today, argued that her homeport was probably Metropolis. Locating her shouldn't be too difficult, now.
Someone hammered on his door and he glanced toward it, checking automatically with his x-ray vision. Lois stood there, wrapped in a heavy trench coat. His heart sank, but he grabbed for his glasses and got them in place before he hurried up the steps to answer the knock.
He opened the door. "Lois, it's very late," he said.
She pushed her way into the apartment. "Not too late, I hope," she said. "For us. For happiness." She tugged at the belt of her trench coat and peeled it off her arms. Clark stared in dismay at the harem costume she wore underneath.
"Oh, no ..." He gulped. "Lois, please don't."
She shut the door behind her and flung her arms around his neck. "I love you, Clark Kent. I want to spend the rest of my life with you."
It was tearing him apart, hearing these things from her, and knowing that it wasn't true. He tried once more, already knowing it was futile. "Lois, please go home."
Lois released him and skipped down the steps, whipping off one of her veils. "You're here. This is my home."
"Lois, you don't know how much I've thought about this -- dreamed about this ... Well," he amended, "something like this." He followed her down the steps, trying to get through to her with sheer desperation, if nothing else. "But, it's not real! What you're feeling isn't real! I don't know exactly how, but there was something in the perfume. It made everybody in the newsroom drunk on ... love."
She wasn't listening, he saw. Not that he'd really expected anything he said to work. Hopelessly, he tried one more time. "Lois, I cannot take advantage of you like this."
She moved to stand in front of him, looking into his eyes. "You're not taking advantage of me, Clark." She frowned, suddenly. "You know, it's remarkable. I never noticed it before."
"What?" Clark asked.
She ran a gentle finger across his cheekbone and he shivered reflexively. "You look a lot ..." She paused, looking closely at his face. " ... Like Superman."
"Lois ... "
She slid both arms around his neck. "Don't be jealous, Clark. It's you I want."
"Lois ..."
She giggled, her mood changing with mercurial quickness, and whirled away from him. Lifting one of the veils she wore, she began to dance. Clark sighed, moving dejectedly back toward the sofa. It was going to be a long evening.
**********
(tbc)
