This is shorter than I planned for posting, but I spent a lot of my writing time finding reference photos for characters, and then this scene came to a really good ending point for a break in reading so I'm posting it as is. If I get more written today, I'll just make another post.
In case you missed it:
Part One Part Two Operation ArgusPart 3
Regardless of her anger, Lois still had to put together an article by deadline. She had plenty of old notes to pull together for a brief article on Krypton based on earlier information, though she knew there was more recorded on her tapes at home. She also sent a research assistant to work on finding more information about the discovery by astronomers years before, but they hadn’t found anything by the time she left with her son and fiancé for dinner.
Once the dishes were cleared away, Lois stood in the entry to the living room watching Jason and Richard play a video game with animated racing carts. Jason laughed as he rammed into his daddy’s cart repeatedly, delighted with the “boinks” emanating from the speaker and the exaggerated reactions from Richard. The latter looked up from his seat on the floor and caught Lois’s eyes, flashing a charming smile.
“Got you, Daddy!” Jason pointed at the screen where he’d managed to run Richard’s cart off the road while he was distracted.
“No fair, you must have cheated!”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Uh-huh!” And Richard tackled Jason, tickling him while the boy squealed and shouted for Mommy to rescue him.
Lois chuckled and walked over to scoop Jason up from the floor. Richard fell onto his back with a grin on his face. “And what are you going to do someday when I’m not here to rescue you from the tickle-monster?” she asked.
“Won’t happen, you’ll always be here.” Jason threw his arms around her neck and hugged her tight.
Lois forced down the sick feeling inside of her, and the memories of the plane the day before. “Hmm, well, right now Mommy’s here to tell you it’s time for bed.”
“Aww, Mom…” It came in stereo from both the boy and the man, but she just shook her head and started up the stairs with Jason perched on her hip. Richard followed soon after and whisked the boy into the bathroom for the nightly routine of a quick wash and tooth brushing, then both parents stayed to read Jason a story. Once he drifted off, they quietly closed the door.
Richard wrapped his arms around Lois’s waist from behind her. “What do you say we pick a movie and spend the rest of the evening in bed, huh?”
Lois leaned her head back against his shoulder, a wry smile on her face. “Nice as that sounds, I still have work to do tonight.”
He pulled back and came around her side to see her face. “I thought you already filed your story before we left.”
“Yes, but I have to go down and work through some old tapes. I know I have more information down there about Krypton, something’s tickling my memory but I can’t remember what it is.” She shrugged. “And something just doesn’t feel right. I’m missing something.”
“Lois,” Richard sighed, “only you could be there the day Superman reappears and think there’s something wrong. Not everything is a big conspiracy.”
Lois glared and opened her mouth with a retort, then closed it again when she remembered they stood right outside her son’s bedroom. She spun and marched down the stairs, half-frustrated and half-satisfied that Richard followed her to her office. Once there, she spun back around to him. “I
don’t think everything’s a big conspiracy, but I’m
not sorry that it is my job to uncover them when they are there. And stop putting words in my mouth. I’m just as happy as anyone else is that Superman’s back.”
“Right, you’re so happy about it that you came back from the press conference looking like you’d just absorbed his ability to shoot fire from your eyes,” he retorted. “I know that look, Lois, it’s the one you always have before you dive into some big story that absorbs you for weeks and half the time means I end up picking you up from the police precinct.” He raised both hands quickly to stop her response. “I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.”
“You’re darned right that’s uncalled for, White.” It was an old argument, and neither was in the mood to retrace those steps again tonight. But neither did Lois want to let it go.
So it was Richard who backed down. “Just, promise me you won’t spend all night down here again? I’d really hoped to spend some time together tonight.”
She grudgingly nodded. “Really, Richard, I just want to go through some background information. It might take a little time to find the right tape, but that’s all. No writing.”
“Thank you.” Richard gently kissed her, then left her alone in the office.
Lois sighed and turned to the closet to pull out her box of Superman interview tapes. She had several dozen of them - she knew for a fact that no other reporter in the world had as much information on him as she did, and probably less than half of what she had was ever revealed in print. It wasn’t unusual that the two of them would veer off topic and forget the tape recorder was still running - or at least Lois would. She suspected he had never forgotten it, but was showing an immeasurable sense of trust by not asking her to turn off the machine outside of the official question and answer sessions.
The memories were hard to avoid as she sorted through the tapes. Some of them were marked with notes about the subject matter, and she was lucky to find one with a quickly scrawled “Krippton” inside the case. She smiled at the old misspelling - at least she’d remembered it started with a K! Removing the old tape machine from the same box, she popped in the tape and then connected a set of headphones. Lois settled into the desk chair, looking past the computer monitor to the dock outside the window. She had to hit the fast-forward button a couple times to get to the conversation she wanted, but found it soon enough.
“ - what it was like on Krypton?”
“Of course.” A faint rustling. “Krypton was the home to a highly advanced society. There was no disease, and no war. My own father was a scientist, and was held in the highest regard for his position. But they had one failing - they were overconfident in their control of the universe around them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I told you once that Krypton was destroyed. Rao, the solar system’s sun, had a series of massive fluctuations that was affecting the gravitational balance of the planet. My father discovered that this imbalance was tearing the planet apart. But when he brought this to the ruling council, other scientists disputed his conclusion that their only option was to evacuate. They insisted they could find a solution and save the planet. My father was forbidden from telling anyone else his theory, or trying to escape himself.”
“Doesn’t sound all that enlightened to me, if they were hiding something like the destruction of the whole planet!”
“They were trying to avoid a panic. While they had the capacity for space travel, it was a costly and risky proposition. Even if they’d agreed with him and begun preparations right away, they wouldn’t have been able to evacuate even half the population. There would have been mass hysteria.”
“And letting everyone die was better?”
“I’m not saying I agree with their decision, Lois. I’m just explaining it.”
“Hmph. Well, if your father was forbidden from doing anything, how did you get here?”
“He promised that neither he, nor his wife, my mother, would leave Krypton. But he never said anything about me, his son. So he and my mother worked in secret to build a small spaceship that I could escape in. My father had done extensive research in his youth on other habitable planets, so he knew he could safely send me to Earth.”
“Oh? How much did he know about Earth? Have we been visited by Kryptonians before you?”
“No, everything was learned through probe relays and data gathering. To send a living creature through space limits the speed to less than faster than light. And the distance between Krypton and Earth was over a thousand light years. Do you know Einstein’s theory of relativity?”
A light snort. “I’ve heard of it, but don’t ask me to tell you what it is.”
“Well, there are some problems with it, but the basic principle holds true - the faster something travels, the more time for that something slows down. So a person traveling close to the speed of light experiences time very differently from the rest of the universe.”
“Not really seeing where you’re going with this.”
“Since Earth and Krypton are so far away, while a person can travel between the two within a single lifetime by going close to the speed of light, for everyone on Earth and Krypton over a thousand years would pass. So sending someone on a visit from Krypton wouldn’t have been very practical.”Lois stopped the tape and sat up very slowly from her slouch in the desk chair. She briefly rewound the tape.
“-experiences time very differently from the rest of the universe.”
“Not really seeing where you’re going with this.”
“Since Earth and Krypton are so far away, while a person can travel between the two within a single lifetime by going close to the speed of light, for everyone on Earth and Krypton over a thousand years would pass. So sending someone on a visit from Krypton wouldn’t have been very practical. Luckily, there are ways for nonliving
matter to travel faster than the speed of light, allowing for long-distance research. So my father not only knew that Earth could sustain life, but that humans were quite similar to Kryptonians and it was possible for his son - for me - to assimilate.”She stopped the tape again and reached for a notepad and pen on the desk. She remembered Superman sketching the concept for her briefly - science wasn’t her strongest point, though she did manage to learn a lot from him over the course of their friendship. Though it had always been Clark who really understood the scientific principles and could eventually explain them in a way that made sense to her.
If what she suspected was right, she could really use Clark to back her up right now.
Trying to remember the sketch, she drew two circles on the pad and labelled them “Earth” and Krypton”. She drew a dotted line between them, and labelled it “Travel - 2-3 years.” That had been to represent Superman’s journey. Then she drew a solid arc between the two, and labelled it “Non-Travel - 1000 years.” She sat back and looked at it, not liking the conclusions she was finding.
Their discussion about Einstein’s theory of relativity never made it into an article. Lois had no idea if he’d ever discussed the practical applications of space travel with anyone else, though she strongly suspected he hadn’t. Surely any scientist he HAD spoken to would have been eager to publish something with confirmation of Einstein’s theory, citing an actual space traveler’s experience. And she’d never heard of anything like that. In fact, Superman really didn’t seem inclined to share that sort of knowledge with anyone in the scientific community. She’d asked him about that once, and he’d merely responded that it can be dangerous to skip the intermediate stages of scientific development and discovery.
So she was probably the only one who really knew what traveling to Krypton would mean. And, according to this, it should have taken at least 2000 years on earth for Superman to travel out to Krypton and back, not a mere less-than-6 years.
Maybe he found another way there. But he’d never seemed very interested in experimenting or furthering the knowledge he had from his people.
Even as she argued with herself, she knew this was what she’d been trying to find. This was why she’d known something was off about what he said at the press conference. Superman had lied about traveling to Krypton.
With further thought, Lois also began to wonder about the sudden decision to share technology with the U.S. Army when he’d always refused to do so in the past. What changed his mind?
Itching with energy, Lois went in search of a light jacket and then walked out of the back of the house, standing on the dock along the river. Richard’s seaplane bobbed lightly on the water, nearly glowing in the moonlight. Lois looked up at the house to see if any lights were on - she could see a dim blue glow from the master bedroom, meaning Richard had the television on. Good, he won’t hear me. She felt a twinge of guilt, then pushed it aside as she looked up to the sky.
“Superman, I need to talk to you.” She waited for a few minutes, then added in a wry tone, “It’s about your so-called trip to Krypton.”
She knew it could take him a while. If he was in the middle of a rescue, he’d wait until everyone was safe before coming. But Superman would recognize her tone, and would come soon. He always did before. It had thrilled Lois to know that he responded so readily to her. Early on, she tempered the impulse to call on him constantly, afraid he would tire of her questions. But as their friendship developed, she grew more comfortable with just calling out to him in the evenings for a quick conversation. He didn’t always stay long - sometimes all she’d get was a quick flyby with a wave, acknowledging the call but signaling that he couldn’t talk that evening. But he always,
always, came.
Lois settled into a deck chair, watching the clear sky. As she waited, the water splashing along the dock lulled her into a light doze. It wasn’t until the seaplane thumped the dock that she jolted awake, and glanced down at her watch. It was well after midnight - she’d been outside for hours.
Superman hadn’t come.
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Quick A/N: The idea for Lois having a stash of interview tapes is almost a direct lift from an unfinished Superman fic,
Sunspots, by Hadrien Asbury. It always made a lot of sense for Movie!Lois, so it was absorbed into my head canon.
Please remember to
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