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appeared to be hang gliders, propelled by tiny jet engines and rotors. One of the gliders left formation and hovered over the Metro National Bank and almost instantly a low-pitched rumble shook the ground.
    "Luthor!" Clark spat.
    "What?" Lois said. "What are those things?"
    "High-pitched sound coming from devices in the gliders. Probably at exactly the pitch that will shatter tempered steel. As in bank vaults."
    "What? Clark, how do you know all that?"
    "My nose for news."
    "Is there a cliché you haven't hit yet today?"
    "Look, Lois. You stay and watch what happens. Take notes. I've got to get a film crew on the roof for the show, anyway, so I'll let Perry know you're covering the story for the paper."
    "Oh, no, Clark Kent. You've stepped on enough of my bylines, and the old man would hop at the chance to get your name over a front-page story. I'll call my editor myself, thanks." Lois elbowed her way into the restaurant and its public telephone.
    By the time Clark had had the chance to smile at his own cleverness he slid into the lobby of a building that was emptying quickly. Once he found a corner safely away from onlookers he moved faster than any eye could follow. The glasses, the blue jacket and pants, the tie, shirt, and shoes peeled away in a twinkling. A curl of blue-black hair dropped over his forehead.
    And for no more than another instant there stood the most powerful man on Earth.
    LOVE
    Superman loved Lois Lane.
Lois Lane loved Clark Kent and ached in vain to believe he was Superman.
Clark Kent loved Superman.
No one understood this.

Chapter 6 T HE P ENTHOUSE
    Y esterday Luthor was dressed in skin-tight pajamas and crossed ammunition belts. The outfit was the only affectation he had for a purpose, and therefore the only one he recognized as an affectation. The penthouse hideaway four hundred feet over the city, the medieval tapestries hanging over the faces of the computers and wall consoles, the Egyptian sarcophagus whose mummy was replaced by a mattress covered with Snoopy sheets and pillowcases, paintings on the wall by Leyendecker, Peake, Frazetta, and Adams, those weren't affectations. Those were matters of taste. Luthor was flying in the terrace window with his jet boots for the seventeenth time, and he was running out of videotape.  
    Six videotape recording units operated by six wanted criminals stood at different angles facing the pathway from the terrace window to the far wall. "We're going to get it right this time," Luthor said, "then we work on the disappearing shot and we're into the projection booth for splicing and recomposition into a holographic image. It's going to be a long night."
    Nobody groaned. This was the highest paid staff in organized crime.
    Lex Luthor firmly believed in the theory that there was some Universal law yet unexpressed by the temporal humans who lived on Earth, which explained the clashes of great opposing forces. When the United States teetered at the brink of collapse, a socio-political genius named Lincoln appeared to steer the potentially disastrous forces in the direction of positive reform. When Caesar began to amass dangerous power, Brutus found the moral strength to stop him. When armies of procreating hominids of various states of development began to overrun the habitable areas of the Eastern Hemisphere and compete with each other for food, there arose homo sapiens with their wheels, their tools and their weapons to subjugate the land and take the future for their own. When a super-powered alien brought his hyperactive sense of propriety across the heavens in order to cram it down the gullets of perfectly capable, sentient Terrans, there came Luthor, a creative marvel who alone among the human community was capable of keeping that self-important, cape-waving pork-face in his place. Luthor saw himself, as he saw Lincoln, Brutus and the inventor of the wheel, to be an integral part of the eddies and currents of the Universe. He was a product of natural law.