The hairstyle was a weird coincidence. Lois hadn’t thought women began wearing their hair in pageboy cuts until the fifties and sixties, but she wasn’t exactly an expert on the history of women’s hair. She had no doubt that there were women ahead of their time; someone had to set the new trends.
She squinted, trying to see if she could make anything out about the woman. Finding out who the woman was would go a long way to helping find out what had really happened the night of the fire.
No body had ever been found, and there had been a search. Either charred bones were even now resting in some out of the way cubby, or Kent had fled with his mystery woman.
The image of two sets of bones trapped together flashed through her mind, and she scowled.
More likely they’d eloped. What she’d read of the manager made him sound like a real tyrant, the sort of person who would be hard to get away from. Lois had seen too many cases of people faking their own deaths to be surprised by anything.
The problem with the mysterious woman was that no one seemed to know anything about her. If she had a name or even a time she’d arrived it would get her something to build an investigation on.
All she had was a picture at a distance in profile; while that was more than she’d started with, it wasn’t much.
Lois made a color copy of the picture and she also scanned it and sent it to Jimmy. Maybe he’d be able to find something that she couldn’t.
Leaving the library, she sighed. She resigned herself to another night of eating alone. At least at home she was able to eat a diet frozen dinner in privacy. Her only choice here was to eat alone at a restaurant.
Usually she was able to distract herself with work, but she was at a dead end, at least until she spoke to the professor tomorrow morning.
She folded the copy of the picture and put it in her purse.
*******************
The professor was younger than she would have thought, looking not much older than Lois. Given his body of work he had to have started working at a young age.
She also hadn’t expected hostility.
“If I’d known you were a reporter I never would have agreed to this meeting,” he said. He didn’t look at her, instead shifting through a stack of papers that looked like it was about to fall off his desk.
His office was as cluttered as Lois had seen, with barely enough room for a desk and two chairs. The desk was covered with stacks of papers and a laptop, and stacks of books covered every other available surface.
At least there weren’t any alien abduction posters. None of the book titles she could see had anything to do with ghosts.
“I’m not sure what you’ve got against the press,” Lois began. “But…”
For the first time, the professor looked up at her. “It doesn’t matter what I tell you, you’ll twist it around. Either you’ll be too stupid to understand what I’m saying, or you’ll deliberately misquote me.”
“I can’t promise that I’ll understand,” Lois said. “But I work for the Daily Planet, and we pride ourselves on being fair and balanced.”
He scowled. “Fine. What do you want to know?”
“I understand you did some research at the Grand Hotel a couple of years ago,” Lois began. “And that you were doing some research about the relationship between gravity and time?”
“That’s the sort of reporting I’m talking about,” Dr. Erskin said irritably. “One reporter thought I was saying that time travel was just around the corner and so he went for the exciting headline.”
“I’ll try to keep my headlines as boring as possible,” Lois said dryly.
For a moment Lois thought he was going to throw her out of his office, but finally his lip twitched and he relaxed.
“As long as you don’t write an article the other scientists can use to make fun of me, I’ll be fine.”
Lois quickly slipped into the one available seat.
“I didn’t really understand what you were trying to say about gravity and time,” Lois admitted.
“Mass warps space. Gravity is the curve in space caused by mass,” Dr. Erskin said. “Imagine a bowling ball on a rubber sheet pulled tight. The ball would sink into the sheet, distorting it. Anything you placed on the sheet would fall toward the ball.”
Lois sat attentively, but didn’t say anything.
Dr. Erskin looked at her as though he was expecting a question, then he shrugged. “It affects time as well; time passes more slowly on Earth than it does in space; satellites have to compensate for the difference. NASA has to misadjust the clocks on the space shuttle before missions.”
“That’s pretty basic,” Lois said, although it really didn’t seem that way to her. “I thought I read something about portals in time?”
Dr. Erskin sighed. “That’s where the other reporter got excited. He thought I was talking about being able to build portals here on earth.”
“You aren’t?”
“It’s common to take gravitational measurements because you can make an educated guess at how dense things are below the surface by the gravity. If there’s more mass, due to an iron deposit let’s say, gravity would be slightly higher. If there’s less mass, it’d be lower. Companies use this to make guesses about the presence of oil.”
“And that’s what you were doing at the Grand Hotel?”
“in a way,” Dr. Erskin Hesitated. “Did you hear about the discovery of a way to detect wormholes between the magnetosphere of the Earth and the Sun last month?”
Lois shook her head.
“There are places where the magnetic field of the Earth and the sun are connected, creating an uninterrupted path…uninterrupted by time or space.”
“What does that mean?”
“It takes light eight minutes to get from the sun to Earth, to travel 93 million miles. The best spacecraft we can currently build would take three months to go there. But at the points of connection, it’s possible to get there in the blink of an eye.”
“So faster than light travel?” Lois pulled a notebook from her purse and quickly jotted down a question.
“There’s no distance for the light to travel, or very little,” Dr Erskin said. “Light doesn’t have to travel faster than itself, it just doesn’t have to go as far.”
“So what does that all have to do with time?”
“These portals open and close randomly in the atmosphere, dumping tons of energetic particles. They cause geomagnetic storms and cause the aurora borealis to light up. The problem is that they are invisible and unstable.”
This wasn’t going to be easy to turn into the kind of story her readers would be interested in. “So this happens on earth?”
“Mostly they happen a few thousand miles in space. Most scientists would say they don’t happen on earth, but my theory is that it can happen under the right conditions.”
“Under the right gravity,” Lois said.
For the first time, Dr. Erskin smiled. “You’re a little brighter than the last reporter, at least.”
“So what would one of these portals look like?”
“It wouldn’t look like anything. It would be invisible…almost undetectable,” Dr. Erskin said. “Your only warning would be fluctuations in gravity.”
“So you could walk into your bedroom and end up walking out…where?”
“Maybe into outer space….maybe into this time yesterday. These portals travel through space as well as time, but considering that the earth spins at about 1000 miles an hour, moves around the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour and the sun travels around the galaxy at 486,000 miles an hour…”
“I’d think we’d hear about it if time travelers were just popping in randomly.”
“The conditions are rare. You’d have to be in the right time, in the right place…you’ve got a better chance of being hit by lightning, and even if you did make it back, most people know what happens to people claiming to be time travelers.”
Lois had read enough about how people were treated in the past in lunatic asylums to shudder.
**************
Lois walked slowly down the street staring in the store windows, her mind whirling.
According to Dr. Erskin, it might be possible to become trapped in one of those wormholes in time, skipping forward and backward without ever being actually part of reality again.
Once the Earth had moved past the last point of connection, there would be no way to escape. You’d be trapped forever.
There was no way to even know if a human could survive traveling through that kind of wormhole intact.
Unfortunately, time travel seemed doomed to remain in the realm of science fiction, at least for the immediate future.
Lois glanced at her telephone for the fourth time in the last hour. Service was still difficult. Apparently there was some sort of interference from solar storms or sunspots…she hadn’t paid that much attention.
She glanced upward. At least there were some unusual colors in the sky.
It only increased her sense of isolation. This trip was looking to be a dead end, and there was only so long she’d be able to stay before Perry was forced to call her back. Just because she felt drawn to the picture of a dead man wasn’t any reason to obsess over the story.
Sometimes you had to know when to cut a story loose.
It was a lesson Lois had been forced to learn time and time again. Sometimes stories didn’t pan out, and sometimes they had to be put on a back burner.
She typically worked on multiple stories at the same time; the stories she was leaving at home worried her.
Another look at her telephone still showed no bars.
Lois froze as she looked into the next store window.
It was a store that sold antique clothes, money and paraphernalia. They sold civil war sabers and confederate money.
What had caught her attention was a dress she saw against the back of the wall on a mannequin.
It was a pale pink chiffon dress with ecru lace and beaded trim. For some reason, it seemed familiar to her.
Lois frowned, then pawed through her purse looking for the folded up copy of the picture she’d scanned.
The woman standing next to Clark Kent had been wearing an identical dress.
