Chapter 17: Six Impossible Things
“And this next image is a composite sketch based on the witnesses’ descriptions, the photos, and the videos.”
The President examined the drawing on the screen: an artist’s rendition of a somber-looking little girl, her hair pulled back by a headband. He knew the expression was due to the artist and not the child. Police sketch artists did not usually draw happy people.
He glanced around at the civilian and military officials assembled in the Situation Room. They were taking in the portrait, their expressions guarded.
The analyst, a young man with wire-rim glasses, continued his briefing. “We also have a watercolor from one of the British papers; they commissioned it for their front page.”
This one was more flattering: the child was smiling. The President felt a pang of fatherly affection, and pushed it down. He couldn’t afford to be sentimental about this.
There was precious little data so far. There wasn’t a single photo or video that had gotten close enough to capture her face in detail. Her age was estimated to be between eleven and twelve based on height and overall physique as measured from the photos. Blue eyes, blonde hair, just like her comic book counterpart.
“So far she’s demonstrated independent flight and enough strength to support the weight of a fully loaded jumbo jet. She also departed the scene at hypersonic speed, though curiously the sonic boom was much less than we’d expect. She seems able to partly or fully dampen the side effects of her super-speed. The report from the mine cave-in in China was quite terse, and for obvious reasons we don’t want to ask the Chinese for more, so pretty much all we know comes from London.”
“Can we track her?”
“Only sporadically. She’s just too small and her radar reflectivity is low. We can’t get a reliable signal.” The analyst shrugged. “Our systems were not designed to track flying kids.”
The President frowned. That wasn’t good. “Have we been able to identify her?”
“No ID so far, Sir. The sketches aren’t good enough for the recognition algorithms; there are way too many hits. We need a good close-up photograph or some other key. MI5 tried to get fingerprints from the aircraft but they were too smeared.”
“Can we tell whether she has other powers besides flight, strength, and speed? Like…” He tried to remember.
“Invulnerability, vision, hearing, freezing breath?” The President nodded. “We’re convinced she’s invulnerable. Hearing and vision are likely.”
“Why’s that?”
“From the limited data we’ve collected it appears she’s mostly traveling at several miles per second in the lower thermosphere…” The analyst paused at the President’s glazed look. “Um, right where the atmosphere starts to thin out into space, about sixty miles up. She can fly at high speed with very little air resistance.
“But she’s also gone through denser air and generated plasma. Like a spacecraft during reentry, or a meteor, but hotter because she’s moving faster. We estimated it at ten thousand degrees, as hot as the surface of the Sun. Also, we’ve tracked her accelerating at nearly a thousand g’s. Even a machine couldn’t withstand conditions like that, much less a human. She must be invulnerable.”
“Good God,” someone murmured.
“Hearing we think is likely because she was able to come to London so quickly. Either she spends all her time watching TV, or she overheard it. Vision we think is likely because we don’t see how else she could navigate at the speeds she travels.”
The President had trouble finding words. “I see. Any ideas on how she does all this?”
“None, Sir. What she does is impossible according to current human knowledge. We think she’s tapping into laws of nature we haven’t discovered yet.”
The President mulled that over, frowning. “And her intentions, behavior? Any profiling?”
The analyst shook his head. “Again, very little data, Sir. What we have suggests she’s behaving as a child of that age would. There appears to be a genuine desire to help. She tried to reassure the passengers with a gesture as she started the rescue. She could have set the aircraft down once it was stopped, but she didn’t want to cause damage, and she cooperated with the emergency workers.
“Those are all positive signs and our behavioral experts are cautiously optimistic. Still, we can’t be sure yet. If she’s truly an alien as in the comics, it’s possible her psychology has non-human aspects.”
The President sighed. “I can’t believe I’m asking this, but
can we learn anything useful from the comics?”
The analyst spread his hands. “Probably not, Mr. President. While Superman’s biography and personality have been fairly consistent across the years, Supergirl is another matter: her back story and personality are all over the map.”
The President spoke forcefully. “We can’t keep flying blind like this. We need to talk to her in person, interview her, understand her. Get more data! That’s our top priority.” There was a murmur of agreement from around the room.
His expression turned grim. “And now the ugly part. Is there any way to neutralize or control her?”
There was a heavy silence.
The analyst sounded rather more somber. “None that we know of, Sir. There doesn’t appear to be any substance known to our scientists that could be Kryptonite. If she’s like her comic counterpart her power comes from the sun, but we can’t deprive her of it without subduing her first. And we don’t know how long her power would last without exposure to sunlight; it could be a long time. In the comics, Superman doesn’t run out of power in the middle of the night. He’s supposedly invulnerable even to a nuclear weapon, so…”
The President shook his head. “Not an option except as the very last resort.”
The analyst nodded. “Of course. Besides, if she’s powered by the sun a thermonuclear weapon could be just like an energy drink for her.
“Without Kryptonite we’re stumped. If ten thousand degree plasma and a thousand g’s don’t faze her, nothing else short of a nuke is going to.”
He hesitated. “Of course, we don’t know that she’s just like the comic character. We could experiment, try throwing weapons at her to see if anything works, but the most likely outcome is that she’d be unharmed and angry. We’d burn our bridges.” He coughed. “Not to mention the P.R. debacle if the public found out.”
The President sat back in his chair. “So you’re saying we don’t have a clue how to stop her if we had to?”
The analyst shook his head. “None, Sir. Again, whatever drives her superpowers is far beyond our science.”
The President was silent for a minute and looked very unhappy. The United States of America was not accustomed to relying on the kindness of strangers. “Assuming she’s not hostile, who or what is she? Why pretend to be Supergirl?”
The analyst shrugged. “At first we were certain her appearance was a ruse, but that theory doesn’t hold up. The only motivation would be to influence us not to attack her, but there are far better reasons not to attack her. So if it’s not a deception… she might
be Supergirl.”
“How could she
possibly be the fictional character?”
“We don’t know, Sir, but given all the impossible things she’s
doing,
being Supergirl is just one more. It may even be the simplest explanation for her having Supergirl’s exact abilities. Occam’s Razor.”
“‘Six impossible things before breakfast,’” quoted the President. He rubbed his eyes; he needed more coffee. “All right. Until and unless there’s a known way to neutralize her, or she becomes hostile, let’s keep watching.”
• • •
The news from London had been too late for the newspapers’ home delivery editions, and most parents were too harried to watch TV or browse the web while getting their children ready for school. Most of those who did have time didn’t share the news with their children, not wanting to distract them. So the day started out as a fairly normal one at school. It didn’t remain that way for long.
When the bell rang for Social Studies, Mr. Ordemann began, “Class, we’re going to skip the topic I had planned for today and concentrate on a current event, one that I think you’ll all find much more interesting than usual.” The students all looked around, and a little buzz went around the classroom.
Mr. Ordemann was grinning as he went to the room’s TV monitor and turned it on. It was set to CNN, where an anchor was reading the news.
“…is still in shock at the events in London this morning. To recap for those of you just joining us: this morning, British time, an airliner carrying hundreds of people was in serious trouble, unable to lower its landing gear. The plane was on its way to attempt an emergency crash landing at London’s Heathrow airport, when passengers looked out the window and saw this.”
The video switched to something obviously taken from a phone or the like. Kara saw an image of herself, viewed from the window of the plane as she flew alongside. Fortunately, between the typically scratched airplane window and the distance, you couldn’t really make out her face.
The broadcast switched to other videos, including one showing her passing overhead with the plane above her. Another video showed her floating and holding the airliner up as the emergency crews lowered the landing gear. There was a still of her that wasn’t too clear, but was clear enough to show the shield on her chest.
Mr. Ordemann muted the audio on the TV but left it playing. Suddenly, the whole class began talking at once.
Mr. Ordemann raised his hands and motioned. “Quiet, everyone, please!” The class reluctantly settled down. “I do want to hear what you have to say, but one at a time. I don’t have a lesson plan for this — it just happened this morning. So today, we’re going to analyze this together.
“Let me summarize: I’m sure most of you have seen a superhero movie or read a comic book. It’s great fun, escapist fiction. But here we have a real, live, actual superhero. Not only that, she appears to be someone we already knew from the comics: Supergirl. I don’t know about you, but that blows my mind. I think it’s going to take a while for the world to understand this, but I want you to talk about what it means to you, what you think. OK, who wants to go first?” He looked over the sea of raised hands. “Trevor?”
“It’s gotta be a fake! I mean, come on…”
“I thought so too, but there are nearly a thousand eyewitnesses, with several thousand photographs and videos. Also, it wasn’t widely publicized but this wasn’t her first rescue: she helped out at a mine disaster in China a few days ago. It can’t be a fake; there’s just too much evidence. Next?” He looked around again. “Alyssa?”
“I mean, she looks like Supergirl, and she can fly and everything, but how can she be the same person? Supergirl is a comic book character.”
“Excellent question! You could say she’s just someone with the same abilities and appearance, but you all know the saying: if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. Personally, I think she raises more questions about metaphysics than about physics.”
The students stared blankly.
“Uh, right, sorry. New word: metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with the most basic things, such as being and identity, or what it means to know something. Not a sixth grade topic but you can look it up on Wikipedia if you like. Next? Nick?”
“Yeah, about that, how can she fly? Isn’t that, like, impossible? Against the laws of nature?”
Mr. Ordemann laughed. “Everyone thought so. I’m not your science teacher, but I bet you can tell me what he’d say.” He looked around at the blank expressions. “Come on,
somebody must know.”
Kara slowly raised her hand. This was a good opportunity to participate without talking about herself in the third person.
“Kara?”
“If experiments disagree with your theory, you need to change your theory,” she recited.
“Exactly right!” beamed Mr. Ordemann. “I’m sure Supergirl will keep physicists guessing for a long time to come.” He pointed. “Eric?”
“Shouldn’t we, umm, learn more about her before we talk about it more?”
“Good idea. There isn’t much, but let’s spend ten minutes catching up on what the talking heads have to say.” He moved to turn the volume back up.
Kara spent the rest of the period watching her classmates eagerly absorb all they could about Supergirl, in a way she’d never seen them try to learn before. It left her feeling uneasy.
• • •
She started to worry when she met Bailey on the way to lunch. Her friend kept looking at her with the strangest expression. She knew she was in trouble when she spotted Megan and Kevin at their table. Kevin had a half-awed, half-fearful expression on his face that was not at all reassuring. During the entire time she was getting her lunch, she felt like a condemned prisoner walking to the gallows.
It started the moment she sat down. “Kara…” began Kevin quietly. “We know.”
Kara’s heart was pounding, but what could she do? “Know what?”
Megan made a face, and Kevin rolled his eyes. “I mean, come on,” he whispered, ticking points off on his fingers. “You show up out of nowhere. Your name is Kara Kent. You didn’t know anything about Superman comics or movies. Your parents are both reporters. Your brother’s and sister’s names sound like Superman’s parents. For some reason your parents don’t seem to be coming to get you. Your grandparents have a farm in Kansas. You started wearing glasses. And your cat is named
Streaky!”
Kara couldn’t help herself. “Why is
that important? It’s just a name.”
“It’s the name of
Supergirl’s cat!”
“Oh. I didn’t know she had a cat.”
“She does,
apparently. I’ve been noticing this stuff all along, but I thought I was nuts till I heard the news this morning.”
Kara looked down. She hated to do this to her friends, but she knew she had no choice, at least not until she talked to Emily. “I see where you’re going with this, Kevin, but me, Supergirl?”
Her friends looked incredulous. “Oh come on, Kara,” whispered Bailey fiercely.
Kara couldn’t look her friends in the eye. She knew that they knew she was lying. She hated the way that made her feel.
“Do you think we’re going to rat you out or something?” hissed Megan. “We can keep your secret!”
Kara couldn’t reply; tears started to drip down her nose, landing on her sandwich. The inside of her glasses became flecked with tear droplets.
“Look—“ began Kevin, exasperated.
Kara couldn’t take any more. “
No!” She left her lunch behind and fled.
• • •
