Last Son of Krypton Read Online Free PDF

to be covered in the daily hour-long broadcast. It also meant that Kent had to be in the newsroom before anyone else, going over newswires and trying to figure out in mid-morning what the news would be by the end of the day.  
    "Hey, Clarkie, what's news?" Steve Lombard, the sports broadcaster and former first-string quarterback for the Metropolis Astros, lumbered into a newsroom full of clicking wire service receivers and clacking typewriters. "Get it? What's news? Ain't anybody got a sense of humor around here?"
    "Good morning, Steve." Clark smiled as he tried to figure out whether he should eliminate a story about a twelve-year-old girl swimming across Long Island Sound in favor of a nineteen-year-old engineering student who had equipped a Volkswagen to run on twelve storage batteries instead of gasoline.
    "Ah, good old conscientious, punctual, enterprising, dull Clarkie. Can't you say anything besides 'good morning'?"
    "Nice day, isn't it?" The engineering student had a distracting tic when he talked. Clark decided that for television the little girl was more newsworthy.
    "Same old faces around here," Lombard muttered. "Same old routine. Boyoboy, when they told me I was gonna be on the tube every day, I figured the chicks'd be climbing the walls like King Kong to get next to me."
    "They're not?"
    "Well, I 'spose they are. But there's something missing, know what I mean, Clarkie?"
    "What do you mean, Steve? Love? Affection? The sort of thing that makes lasting relationships, right?"
    "No, I got all that. Maybe I should grow a mustache."
    "What've you got lined up for your spot today, Steve? Isn't this the day you do an on-the-air interview with Pelé?"
    "Yeah, hey, hey!" Steve cuffed Clark on the shoulder, and Clark fell back clumsily, more out of concern for Steve's hand than anything else. "Guy can sure kick that soccer sucker, hey, Clark? Get it?"
    "Got it."
    "He'll be here about four-thirty. Great guy. Had a Bloody Mary with the dude last night at the Ground Floor."
    "He broke training?"
    "Nah, the season ended last month. You gotta keep up with the news, man. This waitress—y'know, Maureen, the one with all those low-cut drinks—she kept coming on to him, y'know, just to be nice 'cause he's a friend of mine."
    "Couldn't be she liked him, could it?"
    "Sure she liked him."
    "How do you know?"
    "She told me when I dropped her off at work this morning. Why's the place so dead today?"
    "Had to send a lot of crews on the road."
    "Slow news day in town, eh? 'Smatter, old Musclehead ain't helped any old ladies across the street with super-breath lately?"
    "I guess there hasn't been anything spectacular for him to do the past few days. Maybe he's worried about Luthor's escape last week."
    "Luthor, huh? He's been in the headlines since he broke out again and nobody's seen hide nor hair of him. Pretty hard to see a hair of him. Get it?"
    "As long as the FBI issues statements that they expect an arrest within twenty-four hours, we've got something to say about him."
    "Ah, that bald fruit's not human. Third time he's broken out this year, ain't it?"
    "Fourth, if you count last New Year's Eve."
    "Everyone knows the FBI's not in Luthor's league. We're just waiting for another showdown between Baldy and the Super-guy, right?"
    "I suppose, but Superman doesn't issue a press release every day, so we go with what we've got."
    The people of Metropolis were secure enough in their big-city provincialism to look up when they heard the high-pitched wind-tunnel sound in the sky no more often than they looked at the tops of the buildings around them. But there were still the tourists on the crowded streets who responded when some lunkhead yelled, "Look! Up in the sky!" Someone would always answer, "It's a bird!" and then a few people would yell, "It's a plane!" and in a boom of voices that was more often than not louder than the whistling wind in the sky, "It's Superman! " Then again, few were the natives who had been out of town for some