Supergirl (8 page)

Nigel came hurrying out of the building. "Ride didn't show up yet, Miss Lee?" Screwing up his face into a grimace that was supposed to pass for a friendly smile, he ran on without waiting for an answer.

Silence descended over the deserted campus. Linda Lee took a long, deep breath. She felt as if someone had been holding her head under water . . . holding her down . . . and her lungs were about to burst . . . And now, suddenly, she could breathe again. She was alone. So good, good, good-bye, goody Linda Lee, and hello, Supergirl, the real me! But wait, don't be impatient, not quite time yet . . . Taking out her map of Midvale, Linda Lee soberly scanned it, making careful mental notes. When she was satisfied with the results of her study, she stood up, primly smoothed her blouse, and walked around to the back of the building.

Moments later, dozens of Midvale citizens all over the city, released from their offices and shops (their usual
TGIF
good mood even better than usual because of the long weekend)—these citizens stopped by their cars, and before getting on buses, and as they were about to go into grocery stores—stopped all their activities for a moment, their eyes irresistibly drawn upward, not by a flock of red-winged blackbirds netting across the sky, but by the startling, splendid sight of Supergirl, arms clipped tight to her side, rising . . . rising . . . rising straight up into that blue sky, as pure as a child's crayon drawing . . .
Lookit that, lookit that!
they cried.
Did you see what I—
But as suddenly as the vision had come, it was gone, and they weren't sure if they'd seen it or dreamed it.

And now, soaring high, circling like a hawk above the little town, Supergirl searched for the Omegahedron. Her X-ray Vision pierced every home, every factory, every office. Where? Where? Where is it? How much longer can Argo live without the Power?

In another part of Midvale, Selena, too, had been studying. Busy, always busy, perfecting her art. A book open in front of her, a pair of glasses perched on the end of her splendid nose, she pored over an ancient love potion. Begin with a spider fresh from the web . . . Easy. She stretched out her hand, plucked a spider from overhead. Put the darling thing into a nutshell and boil. No sooner said than done. Spider boiled in hot oil coming up. Oops. Supposed to have a bit of web in that oil. She added the sticky web, brushed off her fingers fastidiously, and stirred, chanting, "Who drinks the drink, when he wakes shall love the first who strikes his eyes . . ."

And I shall be the first who strikes his eyes. Ethan's eyes. Oh, what a clever, devilish, fiendishly devious mind she had! A clear stroke of genius to call ETHAN'S MOTHER EARTH WEED & INSECT SERVICE (CALL US 24 HOURS A DAY) for emergency service. It was definitely an emergency. The love potion was at the peak of its potency.

The bell rang. Selena smiled. What a prompt boy. She did like a man who came when he was called.
Who drinks the drink
. . . Lov-er-ly. She sashayed into the hall and opened the door. Surprise! Ethan, the gorgeous gardener, muscular in his T-shirt, adorable in his aviator sunglasses, nonchalant with his chewing gum. Lov, lov, lov-er-ly. "Yeeeesss?" Selena said, giving him one of her favorite best smiles.

Ethan slouched gracefully."Mother Earth here"

Selena nearly wept. Oh, no! Just when she thought she had a live one.

"—Weed and Insect Control," he finished, "and I'm looking for a—Ms. Selena?"

" 'Tis
moi
," Selena said sophisticatedly. The bracelets crowding her arm clashed as she motioned Ethan in.

Inside, Ethan looked all around. Something, maybe, a little, uh, weird about this place. No windows. Funny furniture. "Unusual decor," he said, his voice a little weak. "So . . .what's the emergency? I'm here to serve. On call twenty-four hours a day," he added.

"Splendid," Selena purred. "But let's not hurry"

"I charge by the hour."

" 'Tis
beaucoup
fine with me"

Bianca appeared, arms extended, balancing herself on a huge circus ball. Seeing Ethan, her eyes grew large and glittery. Seeing Bianca, his eyes grew small and dazed. Hoo, boy! Not his usual kind of house call. Some house. Some household. Some housemothers. Good-looking women. Actually,
GREAT
-looking women. He combed his hair. He liked the way the two of them were eyeing him . . . not that he wasn't used to it. Still, all the times it happened, he never minded being given the old eye by a beautiful woman.

"How ya doing?" he said to Bianca.

"Having a ball." She rolled around Ethan, giving him the old eye.

Selena gave Bianca the old eye, too, the old evil eye.
Get—out—Bianca. He's—mine
. Bianca kept rolling around.
Fix you later. Tend to business now
. She turned to Ethan. "Like a beer before we get down to business?" she sang out.

"Well, if you lovely ladies join me—''

So polite! So much more pizazz than that fusty Nigel! Selena glowed. Singing, humming, content as a little spider in its web who's just spotted a tasty morsel, Selena took two beers from the refrigerator (none for you, Bianca,
now
do you get the message?) and spiked one with a few drops of the love potion.

"Shalom." She handed Ethan his beer.

"Cheers." Like the real men on TV, he took a couple of hearty swigs, almost emptying the can.

"What I was thinking of in the line of work for you . . ." Selena began, then paused, searching for the right words. "Hmm . . . I'd like to cheer this place up." She was cheered already by the mere sight of Ethan. "Maybe some hanging plants and some ferns in the corners," she said, feeling quite the little housewife.

"Grgggg," Ethan said. Powerful beer. His tongue felt thick. House plants? In this gloom? Em-emerer-emer-gency. Got it. His brain also felt a trifle thick. Ms. Selena was gorgeous. That hair . . . those eyes . . . If she wanted house plants, Ethan would give her house plants. How many house plants would a house planter plant, he wondered fuzzily, if a house planter could plant plants? He took another swig of beer to clear his head. The gloom was getting gloomier. He wanted to tell the beautiful lady with the long red nails to turn on the lights. He wanted to ask the beautiful lady with the frizzy hair in her eyes why she kept rolling round and round and round . . . and round . . . and . . . "How many house plants . . . ?" he mumbled. He swayed, trying to get the thought straight. Something about plants . . . dark here . . . beer . . . ? That was his last thought before he went down like a felled tree.

Bianca threw herself across Ethan's prostrate form. "What'd you do to him? Like, maybe you killed him?"

The doorbell rang. "Answer that, and I don't want to see anybody," Selena said, hauling Bianca to her feet. She bent over Ethan and stroked his cheek. "Sleep well," she crooned. "Soon you'll wake and be all, all, all mine."

But even as she said it, her lovely mood was spoiled because she remembered the scholarly footnotes to the love potion. "1.
In Kasmania, where potion was well known in the middle ages, reportedly wore off in one day. Klemper
. 2.
Studies indicate effective potion lasts no more than six hours. Kooper.
3.
Many reports from Kresmieg, all unverified, that potion loses effect at sunrise. Karmichael
."

Rats. Ethan would be all, all, all hers—but not for very long. Bumm-er! She should have picked a better recipe. Oh, well, live and learn. For now, she would just have to make hay while the moon shone. Grabbing Ethan under the arms, she dragged him toward her bedroom.

"Selena!" an unwelcome voice cried from the hall. "Selena! It's me, Nigel. Tell your little buddy to let me in. I'm not going away until I talk to you."

Nigel, at this delicate moment! Selena dropped Ethan with a thunk.

"Well, what is it?" she said, issuing forth regally.

"I'm here to talk seriously to you. I have a proposal to make . . . an offer you can't resist."

Wanna bet? Selena thought. She gave Nigel, in his chrome-plated jumpsuit, one long look and said, "Talk then, but make it brisk, I've got more interesting things to do than listen to you."

Nigel cleared his throat importantly. "It's about that whatchamacallit we found at our picnic.

"Not we, Nigel. I."

"I've been giving this matter a lot of thought, Selena, and I'm convinced the whatchamacallit won't do its best for you until"—Nigel lowered his voice and raised his eyebrows— "you internalize your power." That ought to impress Selena. As he well knew, the surest way to her wicked little heart was to help her along with her power plans. Fine with him. She could be President of the World, as long as he was her Vice-president. "Some Mosaic Invocations are indicated here," he went on masterfully.

"Some what?" Bianca said. "Talk English, Professor.'' She looked at Selena, who shrugged her ignorance.

"Soooo," Nigel said with a significant glance from Bianca to Selena. "Sooo, you don't know. No good acting like amateurs, when you do something on a big scale, call on the experts. This is big-league stuff. You need me, Selena."

"Where have I heard that before? Nigel," Selena said in measured tones, "nobody knows a hustle better than I do. Good-bye, it's been a real displeasure seeing you." She slammed the door in his face.

"Some people," Bianca said. "Like, you know."

Selena pushed past her, intent on getting to Ethan before he woke up. She didn't fancy his seeing Bianca first. She rushed into the living room, where she'd left him lying senseless on the floor. He was gone.

In the few moments while Selena was fending off Nigel at the front door, Ethan had awakened from his drugged sleep. Disoriented, his mind foggy, he stumbled through the house from room to room, finally finding a way out of the Ghost Train into the deserted carnival grounds. Outside, despite the fresh air, he still couldn't focus his mind. He felt ill, couldn't remember where he was or why he'd come to this place. Slipping and sliding, clutching his poor head, he staggered down an embankment.

Selena was in a rage. Damn that Nigel. If not for him, she'd still have Ethan. And now, whoever Ethan saw first, he'd love with all his heart. It could be a dog. It could be a chicken. It could be a
cockroach
, and he'd still love it, love it so much he wouldn't give her, the ravishing Selena, a second glance. "Where is he?" she screamed. "Ethan! I want you
BACK!
" She ran to her bedroom for the Coffer of Shadow and the whatchamacallit. Let it do her one good turn, at least!

Speeding away from the Ghost Train in his car, Nigel, too, was upset. His disappointment at Selena's curt dismissal cut deep into his soul. Who said men weren't as sensitive and feeling as women? While Selena rampaged through the Ghost Train, mourning the loss of Ethan in her own special way, Nigel was also suffering in
his
own special way. He ran three red lights and four stop signs, grazed a blind flower vendor, but, unfortunately, missed running down a cub scout troop. Still brooding sensitively, he reproached a crippled pedestrian caught mid-street by a red light. "Get your stupid, defective self the bloody hell out of the street, you retarded donkey's ears."

So. Selena suffering. Nigel depressed. And Ethan? Staggering down the highway as cars roared past, he narrowly missed being hit at least ten times. Ethan was in a daze.

And Supergirl—where was she, and how was she? To be truthful, for Supergirl, she was discouraged. One might even say, monstrously discouraged. She had not located the Omegahedron. She flew lower and lower; when last seen, she was flying into one end of a large conduit. Moments later, Linda Lee crawled out the other end, smoothed down her hair, brushed off her hands, and headed briskly down the road.

There was something about Jimmy Olsen, cub reporter, that brought out both the tender and the tiger in Lucy. Something about the way his shirt was nearly always spotted with food, how sometimes there was even a nip of hamburger or a dollop of ketchup in his hair, and how he would gaze at her with those baby browns, those little shy, squinchy brown eyes that looked out at the world with the greedy innocence of a child convinced it is the center of heaven and earth.

Oh, yes, Lucy had found herself thinking when she saw that brown, innocently greedy gaze turned on her, oh, yes, Jimmy Olsen, you
ARE
the center of the world, the center of
MY
world. But, actually, what Lucy usually said was more along the line of, "You wanna get tacos or fried chicken? You wanna go to Popeye's or the El Hambra Hut?"

And after thinking it over for four or five minutes, Jimmy would come to a snap decision. "Popeye's. I want some of that good Southern-fried chicken."

Popeye's it was. Anything Jimmy wanted . . . Popeye's was jammed with kids listening to rock music and eating fried chicken. Lucy hoped Linda Lee would show up at Popeye's, too, but she wasn't counting on it. As she told Jimmy, she couldn't quite figure Linda Lee out. Sweet girl, easy to live with, and Lucy felt sorry for her on two counts—no parents, and Lucy's being her only real friend. But . . . "She's kind of a babe in the woods," Lucy confided to Jimmy. "I have to watch out for her. You better be nice to her," she added (tigerishly).

Jimmy fiddled with the camera hanging around his neck. That Lucy . . . he just couldn't help being crazy about her. That mop of curly hair . . . that determined expression on her sweet little face . . . the way she clenched her fists . . . "Golly, Lucy, sure, I'll be nice to her."

Lucy patted Jimmy's arm reassuringly. "I knew you would be," she said (tenderly now). "I just can't help worrying about Linda Lee."

"That's because—" Jimmy looked down, then up at the ceiling, then out the window (anywhere, in fact but at Lucy) "—because you're so—you know—so—"

"So—so
what?
"

"So . . . so . . ."

Bouncing on her toes, Lucy sent mental telegrams to Jimmy to help him finish his sentence. Jimmy, how about
YOU'RE SO WONDERFUL