Free Enemies & Allies by Kevin J. Anderson Page A

out the letters one by one, opening them, reading the problems, and setting them aside. He was quickly overwhelmed.
    I’m sure my husband is cheating on me. Should I confront him? Should I forgive him?
    My boyfriend keeps hitting me, even though I know he doesn’t mean it. My friends tell me to leave him, but I love him. What should I do?
    We’ve been going steady for three whole months—will he ever propose?
    My husband doesn’t like my cooking….
    Letter after letter left him mystified about basic human nature. He could bend girders with his bare hands, outrace a speeding locomotive, fly from one side of the country to the other faster than the most advanced fighter jet. He could grab Lois Lane out of the air as her car plunged off the Twelfth Street bridge. He could whisk victims of a school bus crash to the hospital faster than any ambulance. He could carry a sinking passenger ship to the docks in Metropolis Bay. He could hunt down jewel thieves, stop kidnappers.
    But this? He had no idea.
    My boyfriend won’t look at me anymore. He didn’t even notice my new $20 hairdo.
    We’ve been trying to have children for five years, but nothing’s worked. Should we adopt? My husband says there must be something wrong with those babies, otherwise why would the mother give them away?
    For the rest of the day, Clark felt he was reading the same basic letters over and over. These people posed difficult questions and had deep emotional problems that couldn’t be solved by simply twisting steel or outracing a bullet.
    He thought about going to visit Lorna in the hospital, to ask her advice on giving advice. How did she deal with this every day? Clark tried to imagine the conversation in the sterile hospital room, with him awkwardly attempting to discuss love with an older spinster who, despite being single, still knew a lot about the human heart.
    In fact, everyone seemed to know more about emotions than he did.
    Clark had a deep-seated desire to help people, and he had never questioned his own motives or feelings on the matter. To him, it was the obvious thing to do whenever he saw someone in need. Until today, he had always felt he could overcome any challenge, but now he thought perhaps he was wrong. Helping people overcome emotional pain and suffering was obviously a lot more difficult than exhibiting feats of strength.
    Still, in a different way, by answering these letters and writing the “Lorna for the Lovelorn” column he would also be doing something important for people in need.
    But he couldn’t do it alone.

METROPOLIS
     
    T HE LUTHORCORP ANGLE. LOIS HAD AN INSTINCT FOR these things.
    She’d arranged to meet her source for coffee at a Canal Street diner. Blanche Rosen was a forty-eight-year-old widow whose husband had been killed in the Korean War. Though she had worked on various factory assembly lines for twenty years, and the last five at LuthorCorp with an exemplary job performance record, Blanche suddenly found herself jobless. Lex Luthor had systematically removed all of his female and older male employees and put “a man in a man’s job.”
    It had happened previously in American industry, particularly after World War II. With the overseas war wrapped up and all the men returning home, many women had found themselves booted out of the factories and sent back to become barefoot and pregnant homemakers.
    But with no such flood of returning soldiers now, LuthorCorp’s deliberate action really stuck in Lois’s craw. Worse, Blanche Rosen’s surreptitious message strongly implied that something more sinister was going on. Lois was doing some digging, but so far she couldn’t find anyone else willing to talk. In fact, she could find few of the fired LuthorCorp employees at all.
    Very fishy indeed. She couldn’t wait to hear what Blanche had to say.
    Lois waited in a bright red Naugahyde booth. Exactly on time, an older, severe-looking woman arrived and took the seat across from her. She wore a nice