Chapter Two
The pair of reporters picked their way through the trash in the hallway and cautiously approached the apartment door. Lois noticed Clark’s deliberate and cautious approach, but she also noted that he positioned himself between her and any possible threat. He’d been the first one to step over the sleeping wino in the building’s doorway, and he’d handed Lois across the man with both prudence and alacrity. He’d also slapped his shoes on the bare concrete floor to frighten the rats away from her.
The guy was turning out to be a real boy scout. Not that she minded, especially given where they were at the moment. Of course, she couldn’t let him see how much she appreciated his care and concern. It wouldn’t be professional.
Platt’s door was unlatched when Lois knocked. As it swung aside, she called for Dr. Platt and slowly made her way into the apartment.
The apartment itself should have been condemned, she thought, not just the building, even before she met its sole occupant. The middle-aged man jumped up from a table with a crowbar in his hand and ran from them as if afraid of their very presence.
“Don’t!” he called out. “Don’t – don’t come any closer! You don’t – I’ll – I’ll call the – the police!”
Clark stopped in the doorway behind her as if guarding their path of retreat. Lois stepped forward and lifted empty hands to the frightened man. “Dr. Platt? We’re not here to hurt you. We’re from the Daily Planet.”
“You – you’re – reporters?”
Behind her, she heard the door close. Clark stepped up beside her and softly said, “Yes. You said something about the Messenger being sabotaged?”
Platt seemed to relax slightly. “Yes – yes, I did. Do you have the proof?”
Lois frowned at him. “What proof, Dr. Platt?”
“My report! I submitted my report and then – after that they – don’t you have my report?”
“No, we don’t. Can you tell us – “
“Oh!” Platt burst out. “It was – yes – it was the – the drugs they gave me! That’s why they said I was crazy! Wouldn’t you be? They drugged me after I submitted my report to Dr. Baines.”
“Do you still think the Messenger was sabotaged?”
“Of course! Why else would it just blow up on the launching pad?”
“But how could that happen?” asked Lois. “With all the security on the project, how could any sabotage have taken place? Unless – the orders came from higher up?”
Platt’s eyes widened alarmingly and he nodded. “Yes! You see, under extreme low temperature conditions, the particle isolators were in danger of shutting down. That would cause an explosive reaction with the rocket fuel. So, in order to prevent this, we installed heating devices. But when I broke into one of the off-limit labs, I discovered that the heating devices had been replaced by coolant systems!”
Clark’s head lifted like a pointer scenting a bird. “To freeze the ion particles?”
Despite herself, Lois was impressed. She hadn’t followed any of Platt’s techno-babble, but Clark obviously had. “Of course!” exclaimed Platt. “And then the fumes – and then the Messenger would blow up! I mean, it’s all in my report.”
“What report?” asked Clark.
Platt lunged past Lois toward a cluttered table. “The report I gave to Dr. Baines!”
Clark anticipated her next question. “Do you have a copy of that report, Dr. Platt?”
The ragged twitchy man pointed both index fingers at Kent. “Ha! What kind of scientist would I be if I didn’t keep copies of my published documents?”
Kent wasn’t following her lead, he was asking questions she would have asked if he’d waited half a second. But she held herself back from correcting him. Doing that would probably spook Platt even worse than he already was. She could always slap Kent down later.
Lois watched with increasing trepidation as he grabbed scraps of paper from a bookshelf, from behind a stuffed fish on the wall, from inside a tennis shoe, and she tried to slow down his frantic efforts. “Maybe we could send someone by later to pick up a copy of the report.”
Then she noticed the one clean item on the table – a framed photo of a smiling Platt beside a young girl in a cheerleader’s uniform and a woman around his age standing on the other side of the girl. She lifted a snapshot of the same trio which was wedged into the front of the frame, but this photo showed the same girl seated in a wheelchair.
“My wife,” muttered Dr. Platt. Lois noticed that he suddenly sounded calmer and more in control. “We planned to live together on the Prometheus.”
“Where’s your family now?”
“Gone. They left when I – well – it’s all for the best.”
Lois couldn’t help but feel his pain. She fought the sudden impulse to hug the man and tell him that she’d make everything right for him. Instead, she asked, “Dr. Platt, who would want to sabotage Space Station Prometheus?”
Platt shook his head. “I don’t know. See, the microgravity laboratory in the Prometheus could be the key for curing hundreds of diseases here on Earth. In a zero-gravity environment, we can actually separate the proteins that form viruses. And so many children with crippling diseases – “ He stopped and waved his hands aimlessly. “My daughter – “ Lois could hear the heartbreak in his voice, see it in his eyes. “We could cure them,” he finished.
Again Lois beat down the urge to offer him comfort. Instead, she glanced over her shoulder to Clark and said, “I think you and I should pay Dr. Baines a visit.”
Clark nodded to her, then said, “We’ll be back in touch soon, Dr. Platt. In the meantime, can you organize your notes for us? Keep in mind that we’re not rocket scientists.”
His soft corn-fed grin seemed to loosen Platt up even more. “Yes,” the man responded, “I’ll do that. I’ll – I can have an outline for you by tonight if you want. If you need something more formal, maybe – maybe the full report the day after tomorrow?”
Lois nodded. “We’ll come back tonight for the outline if that’s okay, Doctor.” She glanced at Clark for affirmation, and he nodded.
Then he grinned again. “And this time we’ll bring a pizza. Do you like pepperoni?”
Platt chuckled. “Who doesn’t? Can you make it deep dish? That’s my favorite, and I can’t get anyone to deliver here.”
*****
I snapped my seat belt closed as Lois started the Jeep and lurched away from the curb. “I’m not surprised no pizza places deliver here,” I said. “This is a pretty nasty part of town.”
Lois dodged an older woman pushing a shopping cart full of aluminum cans. “I’m surprised the utilities are still on,” she answered.
“Maybe he’s tapping into someone else’s power and water. He is a scientist, you know.”
“Yeah. Hey, you’ve got some science background too, don’t you? You followed that bit about the ion particles, and I barely recognized that he was speaking English.”
“Just from a layman’s point of view. I understood the basics of what he was talking about, but I couldn’t have followed his math unless he’d walked me through it very slowly.”
“I’m still impressed, Clark.” She favored me with a sideways smile. It felt warm even from across the cab. “Maybe this partnership won’t be a total burden after all.”
I chuckled. “Thanks, Lois. That may be the nicest thing you’ve said to me so far.”
“I hope you focus on the scientific aspect of the story when we talk to Dr. Baines instead of the personal aspects. She’s – well, she’s fairly attractive. If you like icy blondes.”
That was an interesting and revealing tidbit from her. “You’ve met the good doctor?”
Lois shook her head. “I’ve seen her on TV a few times, once at a news conference a few weeks ago, that’s all. She smiles pretty for the cameras. She’s a photogenic face for the space program.”
“Isn’t she qualified to do her job?”
“That depends on what job you’re talking about.”
I nodded but didn’t speak for a long moment. As Lois stopped for a traffic light, I decided to ask, “What do you think about Dr. Platt? Is he on the level, is he crazy, or is he somewhere in between?”
She frowned and didn’t answer at first, then she said, “I think there’s something to his story. Did you see his face when I picked up the picture of his family?”
“Yes. I heard his voice, too. He sounded like a man with a broken heart.”
She snapped a pointed glance at me, then quickly faced forward again. “How would you know that, Kent? You’re not old enough to have had your heart broken that badly.”
I almost said, Yes I am, but then I reconsidered at the last moment. I wasn’t ready to tell her about Rachel.
But I had to tell her something, and it had to be true. “He reminds me of my Aunt Sadie when she talks about Uncle Ben. I was about seven when Ben died in a car wreck, and Sadie still has his picture on her mantle and beside her bed. Ben was my dad’s brother, and we took Sadie into our home for several months after the funeral. To this day she can’t talk about Ben without getting misty-eyed.”
“I guess – “ Lois’ voice cut out for a moment, then she cleared her throat. “I guess you know about it. At least, you know second-hand.”
“Yep.”
Neither of us spoke again until she parked the Jeep in the EPRAD visitor’s lot.
I didn’t want her to know how I knew how she felt. She was carrying enough pain as it was.
*****
Lois forced herself into “reporter mode” before they met Antoinette Baines, and it turned out to be the right choice. Baines stonewalled them about Platt, about the report he claimed to have sent her about the cold ion particle thingy, about the destroyed shuttle, and anything else – until Clark smiled at her and asked so very nicely. Baines’ “I’ll see what I can do” made Lois grind her teeth at the woman and her weakness for Kent’s down-home charm.
“She seemed nice,” offered Clark as they walked toward the Jeep.
“Of course she did! A pretty young blonde with a nice smile and sharp clothes and you all but trip over your tongue!”
“Come on now, you can’t condemn her for being attractive.”
“Not her, you! You can’t tell me you weren’t pulling back your shoulders and holding your stomach in like any typical male would!”
“Trust me, Lois, I’m not your typical male.”
“Really? Could you tell she was lying? Could you tell she was hiding information from us? Could you tell that she’d rather stick her hand in a blender than give us the access we need?”
“Hey, take it easy, okay? We’re on the same side here.”
They were on the same side, she reminded herself. She resumed stomping toward the Jeep and considered why she was so upset.
After a moment, she reluctantly admitted that she wasn’t angry at Clark so much as she was still pricked by his description of Platt as broken-hearted. She’d seen it right away, but she hadn’t expected Clark to pick up on it so quickly. It bothered her that a green rookie had noticed something so subtle as easily as she had.
His comment broke in on her thoughts. “I knew she was lying.”
She stopped for a moment, then reached for her keys and unlocked the driver’s door. “How could you tell?”
He shrugged. “When I was in Virginia a couple of years ago, I went through the FBI’s interrogation course. They teach you to look for the subject to try to distract you either by changing the subject or calling attention to something they’re doing, to watch the amount of eye contact they make with you, if it’s not enough or too much, to pay attention to their body language and the way they smile or don’t smile, that kind of thing. Nearly everything Dr. Baines did tells me she was hiding something important from us.”
She hit the ‘unlock’ button on the armrest and slid behind the wheel as he opened the passenger door. “You saw all that?”
“Uh-huh. You did too, even if you weren’t consciously aware of it. You’ve got very good instincts for digging out the truth.”
She didn’t know whether he was trying to pacify her or was paying her a sincere compliment, so she let it pass. “We’ve got to get Platt’s outline and take it back to the office. If he’s really on to something, we should be able to tell from that.”
“Sounds like a plan to me. Let’s go, partner.”
Lois hid it, but she felt a surge of warm pleasure when he called her ‘partner.’ Maybe this really would work out after all.
*****
Lois sat back in her chair and pulled her hair back with her hands. “Clark, can you come over here for a minute?” She waited until he stood beside her desk, then said, “I really can’t follow this thing. I don’t know if this outline is useful or not. It’s just too technical for me. What do you think?”
He frowned at the paper on her desk and swiveled it toward him. “I think we have something, but I don’t know what. I can grasp just enough to believe that I want to know more about this report.”
“Okay.” She let out a deep sigh. “Let’s see if we can do better with Platt’s full report, assuming that he can put it together for us, and assuming we can understand it.”
Before Clark could respond, Jimmy jogged past and said, “Lois, call for you on line three.”
“Got it.”
Clark nodded and stood, then called to Jimmy. Lois tuned out the rest of their conversation as she picked up the phone, trusting Clark to fill her in if she needed to know what they were talking about.
“This is Lois Lane.”
“Lois! This is Mitchell.”
“Hi, Mitchell. To what do I owe this pleasure?”
“No need to be sarcastic. Well, maybe there is. I’m going to have to cancel.”
For a moment she didn’t know what he was talking about. Then it hit her – the White Orchid Ball was tonight. “Cancel? You mean the Ball? Tonight? You’re cancelling on me now?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, really! But I think I’m coming down with something.”
No. He wasn’t backing out on her now! She wasn’t Cat Grant, she had to have an escort! “Can’t you take something for – for whatever it is you’ve got?”
“You know I can’t handle antihistamines, Lois. They put me to sleep for hours and hours. I’m really sorry, but if it’s just sniffles now, by tomorrow it could be pneumonia or the flu or bronchitis or a sinus infection or – “
“Okay! I got it. You’re sick and can’t go.”
“I’m really sorry. I hope you’re not too mad.”
“No, Mitchell, I’m not mad,” she lied. “If you’ve got the sniffles, then you’ve got the sniffles. I understand. It could lead to complications.”
“Thanks, Lois. Should I call you and reschedule some time? After I get better?”
“No! I mean, don’t worry about it. I’ll call you.”
She hung up harder than she had to. Blast it! Why did Mitchell have to cancel? He was her fall-back escort, the guy who looked okay in a suit or a tux and kept the drunks and casual pick-up artists away just by being with her. And if she had to dodge groping hands and amorous VIPs at the most important social event of the year, she might not be able to get close enough to Lex Luthor to corner him and get him to agree to an interview. And she’d been angling for a one-on-one with him for months. Who could replace Mitchell at this late hour?
She glanced up and saw Clark paging through a phone directory and sighed. He wasn’t a total loss as a partner, at least not so far, so maybe he’d be okay as an escort. Did she want to risk letting him get that close to her in a social environment?
Then she reminded herself that it wouldn’t be a date. A date? With the hayseed from Kansas via Borneo and Madagascar and other points all over the globe? No. She’d make it clear that it was just business.
The decision made, she stood and marched to his desk. “I don’t suppose that you own a tuxedo?”
He looked at her with a totally innocent expression. “I could get one, I guess. Um – why?”
Okay, he had good hearing. He’d obviously heard her side of the conversation with Mitchell – not that her side had been all that quiet – and now he was putting two and two together. “Oh, well, the man that I was going to Lex Luthor’s ball with has the flu.”
He sat there like a bump on a log. A log in a small pond called Smallville. Like a big ugly frog on a bump on a log in a small pond called Smallville.
Then he drawled, “Yes?”
“Well, I was just wondering if you wanted to – “
She waited for him to respond, but he just lifted his eyebrows as if waiting for her to continue, like he didn’t know what she was talking about. But no. Nobody was that dense. He was deliberately making this hard on her. His smug half-smile bugged her and she spun away, then turned back. “Look, do you want to take his place or not?”
He gave a half-shrug. “Thanks, Lois, but I thought I’d go to bed early tonight.”
She couldn’t believe her ears! “Are you crazy? This is THE social event of the season! Everyone who is anyone is gonna be there and you want to go to bed early?”
He stood and put one hand in his pocket, then frowned in apparent comprehension. “So – is this – a date?”
She couldn’t let him get away with that one. “Date? Oh, you mean like in Kansas where you meet my parents and then you try to give me a hickey in the vacant lot behind the Dairy Freeze?” She let out a fake chuckle, then gave him a low-power Mad Dog Lane glare. “No, this is not a date! This is business! I am gonna land the first one-on-one Lex Luthor interview if it kills me!”
He pointed a finger in the air and shook it in her general direction. “Okay.”
His sudden surrender threw her off-guard for a moment, but Mad Dog Lane recovered quickly. “Good. I’ll see you at your place.” She turned to go, then spun back. “At nine.” He nodded. “Be ready.”
“Um, Lois?” he asked. “Would it be okay if I met you at the entrance? My hotel room isn’t really all that nice, and I wouldn’t want you to get your clothes dirty.”
She frowned for a moment, then nodded. “That works for me. But be on time! I don’t want to have to wait for you. And don’t get wet! The forecast is for thunderstorms this evening.”
“Of course,” he agreed. “I’ll be there on time. And I’ll be dry.”
“Good.” She turned and stalked away, trying for nonchalant but not quite making it that far. At least – she hoped – she didn’t appear relieved that he’d agreed to go with her.
Maybe this won’t be so bad after all. At least Kent didn’t seem like a hypochondriac like Mitchell. And he’d look good walking next to her, too, even if he didn’t know his way around the city yet. Eye candy was better than an empty arm.
She allowed herself to picture him in a tux. He’ll probably make a better escort than Mitchell, too, she mused. He’ll certainly be a better looking one.
The part of her heart which was loyal to Claude’s memory chided her for her consideration of Clark’s physical attributes. But only for a moment – then that part of her agreed with all the other parts of her that Clark was indeed a good-looking man.
Which meant that she had to look good too, if only to keep the balance in their partnership. And that was what was important to her.
Wasn’t it?