A standalone flashback chapter from a Superman novel I will likely never finish. Superman is from DC Comics; Reverdy L. McMillen is from the 1956 short story “The Cave of Night” by James E. Gunn; Kathy Fiscus’ story is, sadly, quite real.
On a Friday afternoon in 1949, a three-year-old girl named Kathy Fiscus fell into an abandoned well. The well shaft was more than a hundred feet deep but only 14 inches in diameter, so no one in the Fiscus family could have fit into it, let alone get the child back out; all the Fiscus family could do was to call the police.
When the police came, they tried to lower a rope to pull Kathy to safety, but they had no way to tie it without risking a loop getting caught around her neck, and she was trapped head downward with her legs pinned against her chest, unable to grab hold. They were able to move her a few feet up, but then the rope went slack, and they realized that she must have slipped out, and fallen even further down. With the rescue beyond their capabilities as well, the police radioed for help. They asked for anyone in San Marino – no, anyone in the whole of Los Angeles – who could help, to come, and help save this little girl.
To a first degree of approximation, everyone answered that call.
Firemen arrived first, lowering an air hose down and pumping oxygen, so that she wouldn’t suffocate. Busy Los Angeles streets were shut down as the police escorted bulldozers, trucks, drills, and three giant cranes to the lot. Within an hour, a power-drill crew began to sink a narrow but sturdy shaft parallel to one side of the well, and to the other side, excavators and power shovels began to dig a wider pit; there was no time to do a geological survey to find out which method was more likely to succeed, so both were begun, both manned by dozens of oil engineers, sandhogs, and cesspool diggers, all volunteers. When night fell, nearby Hollywood studios sent dozens of floodlights, and twelve thousand people kept vigil with the Fiscuses overnight as work continued.
And, in an unprecedented move, KTLA General Manager Klaus Landsberg pre-empted all programming and all commercials, and sent reporters Bill Welch and Stan Chambers to report continually from the scene for the next twenty-seven hours; the entire city of Los Angeles could see it, and TV and radio news programs all across the country aired special bulletins and reports from KTLA’s footage. That was how eleven-year-old Clark Kent first found out that she was in danger.
There had been rumors before of a boy in a blue and red costume, jumping over buildings or lifting trees, somewhere out in the Midwest. But it was never rock-hard evidence, never a genuinely public appearance. This was at Jonathan Kent’s insistence. He knew that young Clark was getting stronger, was getting faster, and he knew that by all accounts the boy was growing up with a good head on his shoulders and a strong sense of right and wrong. But he also knew that growing up was hard enough as it was, that fame turned many good people bad, and that becoming publicly known was not a choice that could be undone, and consequently had told Clark to wait to show himself until he was more mature, until he had a better understanding of the world. When Clark heard the news Saturday evening, he asked his father for permission to go to San Marino to help. His father, thinking carefully, told him no.
Clark went anyway.
It took him twelve hours to run the fourteen hundred miles from Smallville to Los Angeles, running twice the speed of a highway car through forests and up mountains, practically invisible when the clouds covered the moon, the hardest continual exertion thus far in his life. As he ran, he followed the story, using his nascent power of electromagnetic sight to decode the television signals and radio waves, when he was close enough to a town for those signals to be visible and when the sun had set low enough to not drown them out. And in bits and pieces, he learned what everyone else did.
He, like everyone else, became an expert in soil quality and mineshaft carpentry. He knew the tireless “Whitey” Blickensderfer and the small, wiry A.O. Kelley, and Herb Herpel and Don Metz, all taking shifts and risking death at the bottom of the 24 inch rescue shaft, digging down to ninety-four feet underground with tiny hand shovels, since no bigger shovels would have fit. He knew them as if they were from his own hometown. Clark laughed, despite himself, when he heard Clyde Harp swearing at the bottom of the shaft after a tool had been nearly dropped on his head, only for Mark Nottingham to yell at him to quit swearing because he was still on TV. Clark didn’t laugh because it was a Jack Benny sketch he found funny. He laughed because, when you’re under that kind of stress, you can’t think about the life-or-death situation all the time, and you have to laugh now and then to keep going. It was as if Clark was there.
And as he passed by towns under the cover of darkness, he could hear snatches of conversation, the sibilant syllables carrying the name ‘Fiscus’ to his ears better than most words. He heard people talking with genuine compassion about a girl they’d never met, half a country away, and praying for her safe return. He saw neighbors visiting each other, to both share the same tiny television and hope. He heard (or imagined he heard) more subtle effects, with people just a bit kinder, just a bit more sympathetic, just a bit more willing to sacrifice for their fellow man than the day before. Clark saw, for the first time, the kind of positive effect that news reporting could have on an entire country.
But when he finally arrived before dawn Sunday morning, he realized that it had all been for nothing. An average-sized adult could never have fit into the hole, but jockeys, schoolboys no older than Clark himself, a midget, a contortionist from a visiting circus, all had gone to Raymond Hill, the engineer in charge, and bravely volunteered to be lowered by rope face-down into the narrow shaft to try to grab the girl. All had been rejected. The well shaft was corroded, and lowering anyone into it was liable to both badly cut him but (even worse) breach the pipe and cause dirt to pour in and suffocate her. Clark knew all this, and much more besides, from Stan Chambers’ tireless reporting. He was planning to prove, when he got there, that he could not be cut by corroded metal and that he could see and seal pipe breaches as he went. He knew it would have worked. But when he first arrived at the edge of the field, he used his unique vision to look further than anyone else could. And he saw that Kathy Fiscus was already dead.
Water had seeped in to where she was pinned, and drowned her, probably just a few hours after she had fallen in, before the story even made it outside Los Angeles. That same water was, at that very moment, seeping into the parallel shaft, forcing the men out of it and out of the lateral tunnel they were digging until they could pump the shaft dry. And then Clark faced a decision. Should he tell the rescuers, or not?
If there had been something he could have done to save the girl, Clark would have done it. Of that he had no doubt. But now, there was nothing he could do to change the outcome, only to make the process faster.
Listening, he could hear the men talking to each other, away from the microphones placed at the top and bottom of the shaft, impatiently waiting for their shifts. Blickensderfer was the first to go back down once the lateral tunnel had been pumped out. “He deserves a knighthood”, Clark heard one of the others say, “but he doesn’t even have a job”. In fact, half of the men there didn’t. It was 1949, the Depression was back in all but name, and many of the trades were suffering. And yet these men were there. None of them wanted pay for this exhausting, back-breaking, filthy labor. They were there out of love.
Clark imagined, for a moment, stepping into those Hollywood floodlights and dramatically demonstrating his powers. He imagined jumping down to the bottom of the shaft and finishing in ten minutes the hole that these men had spent thirty hours digging. And he imagined the country’s fixation turning in an instant from the tragedy that befell this little girl to the sensation that was him himself. All that sympathy, all that compassion, all that care, all gone. Replaced by his smiling face. Down to his bones, it felt wrong.
He could have saved the men there another twelve hours of work, single-handedly. And none of them were doing this for fame, all of them just wanted to get the job done. If he’d gone to the digging crew, and shown what he was capable of, and asked to help, he had no doubt every single one would have said yes.
But he didn’t do it.
Clark waited there, out of sight of the crowd, through the morning, through the afternoon, and late into the evening on Sunday, ignoring his own desire for sleep and food. After dealing with the collapse of the lateral shaft, and the flooding preventing the use of electric tools, and after finally cutting open the pipe itself, the workers asked that the microphones be turned off. An hour later, Doctor Paul Hanson – who had brought Kathy into the world three years earlier – announced what Clark had known for a full day. An hour after that, and after the crowds had dispersed, Bill Yancey came up carrying a small black shroud, and Clark decided then to leave as well.
It took him almost another full day to get home to his worried parents; fatigue was taking its toll on him. His mother was proud of him for trying, for doing what he thought he could to help. But before his father could say a word, and tell Clark that he had been wrong to say not to go, that his son was obviously ready, that it must have been hard, Clark stopped him, and told his father, with nothing but sincerity, that he didn’t know.
Clark knew in every fiber in his being that there was a right, and there was a wrong. There was good and there was evil. To help rescue a little girl was good. To save time, and pain, and backbreaking labor of those who were already working heroically was good. But to turn a tragedy into an opportunity for personal glory, that was bad. Going to help had been the right thing, Clark thought. But so was not helping once he got there. How could that be?
He knew that he should always try to do the right thing. He knew someday he would have the power to do whatever he tried.
What was the right thing?
Seven years later, Clark had announced the existence of Superboy – now Superman – to the world, and the Space Race was in full swing. US Air Force lieutenant Reverdy McMilllen was the first man to enter space, and as disaster struck, it looked like he would be the first man to die there. Reaching an orbital height of 1,075 miles above the atmosphere, at a speed of more than fifteen thousand miles per hour, the automatic motor controls had failed, and flamed for twice as long as they were intended to. Rev was able counteract some of the excess speed, to not crash uncontrollably back on Earth, by redirecting to a polar orbit, perpendicular to the equator. But he did it at the cost of his little remaining fuel. There was no way down. He was out of gas.
At eight o’clock, after the Sun has set and the sky is darkening, look up! There’s a man up there where no man has ever been. He is lost in the cave of night…
This news swept not just the United States but the entire planet. A ham radio operator in Davenport, Iowa was the first to hear the transmission, and then a military base in Fairbanks, and then a night-shift worker in Boston, and then dozens of others, then hundreds, all across the world. Orbiting every ninety minutes, crossing from the North Pole to the South, he was in range of every point on Earth for brief moments, and from these independent snippets of transmission the story was pieced together. There had been a small explosion in the secondary oxygen tank, damaging not just the motors but many of the other systems. His receiver was broken, but the transmitter was still functioning. And he’d continue to transmit for as long as he could, with whatever data he could.
Within a day, everyone who could find a newspaper, everyone within earshot of a television or a radio, was an expert in space travel. Everyone knew nitric acid and hydrazine as well as they knew oil and water. Everyone debated statistics, memorized diagrams, knew every minute detail of the ongoing effort to build a second craft to rescue Rev. They knew that, with the secondary oxygen tank blown, then even rationing food and water well beyond the one-week orbital mission originally planned, the carbon dioxide recyclers were not designed for this kind of extended work, and that when he ran out of oxygen, twenty-nine days after the initial disaster, the rocket he was in would become an orbital tomb.
People contributed billions. Congress authorized an emergency bill. Hundreds of skilled engineers from every discipline showed up at the gate to the Air Force Proving Ground, volunteering help. The discarded first and second stages were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, and a new nose section was being built as quickly as possible; estimates were that it would be done with at most two days to spare. After three days of intricate calculations and measurements to determine Rev’s exact orbit, the entirety of Kansas City turned off its lights at midnight precisely, and one minute later turned them back on. Even if he lacked a receiver, it was still possible to send a message up to him. And that message was “Hang in there. We’re coming.”
Clark Kent, just graduated from Smallville High and just starting his career in journalism, heard about this crisis along with everyone else. Now capable of breaking the sound barrier and of unaided flight, he pulled into his own funds and bought scuba-diving gear. One tank of oxygen for him, and five more, to be delivered along with food, water, and an undamaged ham radio, into space. He left the atmosphere and accelerated in vacuum for almost an hour before he caught up with the rocket, shocking the Air Force lieutenant four days into his exile from Earth by knocking on the airlock door. Rev, overjoyed, announced this over the radio to a captive audience. Superman couldn’t safely deorbit the rocket himself – he couldn’t exert enough delta-v to prevent the uncontrolled hypersonic tumble that the thrusters were designed to prevent, and at any rate the rocket was designed to be pushed by chemical ignition and not hand-sized stress points, and would have buckled under a tenth the required force – but with the new supplies, the lieutenant had plenty of time. The rescue would work. This news made headlines the world over the next day.
The day after that, Rev’s story was off the front page.
The rescue effort continued apace, of course. The Air Force had enough funds and material, now, to make the new nose section, and after forty-five days (longer than projected to allow for more stringent safety measures), they launched the second rocket. Reverdy was returned to Earth, safe and sound. And people were glad of it. Had Clark asked the common man on the street about the whole fiasco, the common man would have (and did) tell him that it was a good thing that the rescue worked. Good not to lose face in front of the Russians, if nothing else. But the outpouring of compassion, the willingness to put a distant stranger above his own comfort, the reminder of the common humanity of his fellows regardless of personal differences, the thrill of following every new development with every waking moment? By the time Lt. McMillen was brought back to Earth, the common man didn’t feel any of that.
Why should he? This wasn’t a job for him. This was a job for Superman.