The gazebo was the perfect solution, given Clark’s sensibilities. There were no walls, so no one could claim that they were doing anything scandalous, yet it was separated from the hotel far enough that no one could hear.
It was dimly lit with electric lights, but in the darkness that would be more than enough for anyone to see.
Lois suspected that many couples used the gazebo to whisper sweet nothings, but she couldn’t afford to do that now. Time was running out.
Setting her purse down carefully, Lois frowned.
Clark, seated beside her said, “Are you having second thoughts?”
Lois smiled nervously. “I’m not. I’m just afraid that you might, once I tell you what I have to tell you.”
“Are you going to tell me that what you’ve told me isn’t true?” he said, frowning.
“I wish it was that simple.” Lois hesitated a long moment. “The things I’ve told you- about the job, being assigned here to get away from Metropolis...my family…it’s all true.”
“Then what…?”
“It’s just not the whole truth. There are things you don’t know about me that may change how you feel about me.”
“I can’t imagine anything that would do that.” He took her hand gently. “Whatever it is, I wager I will feel the same.”
Lois took a deep breath.
“In your lifetime, you’ve seen a lot of changes, haven’t you?”
He frowned and shook his head.
“When you were younger, would you have ever imagined something like an airplane or an automobile or even electric lights?”
He shook his head, a puzzled look on his face.
“You can imagine, then, that technology will continue to improve in the future,” Lois said. “Things will get smaller, better, more reliable. There will be things that you never even imagined, and the world will change in ways no science fiction writer could ever dream.”
“I’m not sure how any of this relates to us,” Clark said.
“It’s got everything to do with us,” Lois said. “About what will happen to both of us over the next couple of days and the rest of our lives.”
She reached into her purse carefully, searching for her IPhone.
“When I said I was thinking about the future, I wasn’t just talking about your future or mine,” Lois said finally. “I was thinking about the future I came from.”
He stared at her without speaking.
She pulled the IPhone from her purse and slipped it out of its case. “I know that sounds like the rantings of a madwoman, but I have proof.”
After learning she was in the past, she was grateful that she’d turned the phone off. These things never had the kind of battery power she really wanted, and she wasn’t sure whether these old time outlets were even compatible.
He leaned forward as the screen lit up with the familiar apple logo. He flinched as the screen was replaced with her usual array of icons. In the background was a picture of the daily planet building, the globe on the top famous worldwide.
“In the world I come from, this is a telephone. It won’t work as that here because…it’s hard to explain really, but it will do much more.”
She clicked on her photos.
“This is my editor, Perry, and Jimmy, our intern.”
She began flipping through pictures, her thumb flicking past in ways that had to have been dizzying for Clark. “This is my father…my mother…my sister.”
An idea flickered through her mind and she exited her picture application.
“Smile,” she said, holding up her phone.
There was a small flash, and a moment later she turned the camera toward him again to show him his picture.
In his time, developing pictures took a long time.
She switched the camera to movie mode, and then turned it, holding out as she leaned toward him.
“This is Clark Kent, a man I’ve met in 1912. Say hi!”
He looked stunned. “Hello?”
A moment later she replayed it for him.
“You can play movies on devices not much larger than this,” Lois said. “It uses too much memory for my taste.”
She showed him her calculator, and flashlight aps, and then she flipped through her ITunes, looking for the oldest music in her collection. She didn’t dare let him hear the death metal songs Lucy had downloaded, or she’d never see him again.
Ah. Sergei Rachmaninoff…his Rhapsody. It was slow, beautiful music, unlikely to frighten him away.
As the sounds of an entire concert flooded the area, she carefully turned the sound down. There was no point in making anyone curious.
“Is there anyone anywhere in the world who has anything like this?”
He shook his head mutely.
“It’s from the future,’ Lois said. “The same place I am.”
**************
“So you’ve come back in time, like the hero in one of Mr. Well’s stories,” Clark said.
It had been almost twenty years since H.G. Well’s time machine novel had been published. Lois shouldn’t have been surprised that Clark had at least heard of it.
“Not exactly,” Lois said.
“So people have invented time travel….have you had to come all this way just to escape the people who are after you?”
He was taking this much better than Lois would have hoped. Most people would have run screaming into the darkness. Lois was guiltily afraid that she might have been one of them.
“It was an accident,” Lois said. “Apparently there are these…tunnels in time. They are invisible, and only appear very rarely under certain conditions and in certain places.”
“And you fell into one of these tunnels.”
He really was very quick witted. Lois would have spent at least thirty minutes trying to rationalize away what she’d seen, but he seemed to accept it right away. He was already leaping forward to what it meant.
“I was doing a story on ghosts,” Lois said, “A puff piece to get me out of Metropolis. I spoke to a scientist who theorized that at least some ghost sightings are people moving through these tunnels.”
He was silent for a long moment. “Was I the ghost you were investigating?”
Lois stared at him. “How could you possibly know that?”
He smiled sadly. “The medium I met four years ago told me that my life as I know it would end when I met the most beautiful woman in the world. She also said my time in this world would come to an end.”
“When did you meet the most beautiful woman in the world?”
“This morning, by the lake. I looked up and found that I couldn’t breathe.”
For a moment Lois felt jealous. She’d been with him almost all morning. When did he have time to- oh.
Her face flushed.
He thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world?
“You knew that early?”
“The moment I laid eyes on you,” he said. “My whole world stopped.”
It had taken her longer, but then, she was the cynic. Clark seemed more grounded than she’d ever been, more accepting.
Now, though…
“When?” he asked.
She didn’t have to ask what he meant. It was there in his eyes.
“Tomorrow night,” she admitted. “There’s going to be a fire. You’ll save a lot of people, then you’ll go in one last time, and that’s all anyone will have heard of you.”
“Perhaps I simply left?”
“There will be ghostly sightings over the next one hundred years…possibly longer,” Lois admitted.
“And you believe this scientist and his ghost theory?”
“There were people who seemed to see me when I was making my own journey,” Lois admitted. “I was mostly interested in your ghost and didn’t have time to look into any of the others.”
“So my offer to leave my life and be with you…”
“Is a lot…more…than you can ever imagine,” Lois said. “It’s not just about leaving acting and moving to Metropolis. It would require leaving everything you know behind.”
“I would imagine that remaining here would be just as difficult for you,” Clark said. “It would involve giving up a great many things.”
Lois nodded. “There’s no easy solution. The tunnel that takes you is the only tunnel that I have any way of knowing about. I could spend a lifetime looking for another and still never find one.”
Clark was silent for a long moment.
“I made a promise to you, and I will keep it.”
“I can’t ask you to do that,” Lois said. “You have no idea how much things have changed.”
“I could have lived in 1812 fairly easily,’ Clark said. “I would imagine that living in 2012 is within my grasp.”
Lois shook her head. “Change speeds up in the next hundred years. It’s speeding up so fast that even my parents are having trouble dealing with all the changes. How could you even imagine…”
“I’m not an ordinary man,” Clark said.
“I noticed,” Lois said.
“Many of the things I love about you are the things that set you apart from the people of this time. How could a time period that gave birth to someone like you be anything but a wonder?”
Lois stared at him for a moment, his innocent eyes looking at her, and she sighed.
If she was going to convince him for his own good to stay she didn’t have any other choice but to disillusion him.
So she told him about the twentieth century.
************
“It all starts in just two years?” he asked, stunned.
“One gunshot in the wrong place and the whole world goes up in flames,” Lois said.
“So if we stopped it…”
Lois shook her head. “It was just a pretext. If it wasn’t that it would be something else. The whole world is in a slow boil toward war.”
“And it leads to the next great war…the one with the horrors.”
Grimly, Lois nodded.
It broke her heart to tell him about the horrors of her world. The crime, the promiscuity, the famine and war and death.
She was a journalist and it was her job to chronicle exactly those things, because it was important that people know what was happening.
“I could make a difference,” he said. “There are things I could do that could stop all of it.”
“Nobody can stop it,” Lois said. “I fantasized about changing things, but really it’s bigger than anything one person can do.”
He looked stubborn. “I don’t believe that. Didn’t Archimedes say that he could move the world with a long enough lever?”
“Nobody has a lever that long,” Lois said. “If you go over there, all you’ll do is end up getting killed in the trenches like sixteen million other people.”
“I’m not talking about that,” Clark said. “There are things you don’t know about me…things just as fantastic…wait.”
“I’m willing to stay,” Lois said. “But I don’t think I could bear to see you go off to get killed.”
He reached out and took her hand. “I’m honored that you would be willing to give up your whole world for me. But even though I am torn…I could make so much of a difference here, but I’m not sure we have a choice.”
“Who says that time can’t be changed?” Lois asked.
“What happens if I don’t make that trip forward?” Clark asked. “If I am not in the hotel as a ghost, your editor would have never sent you here. You would not have fallen through time into my arms, and we would not be here now.”
Lois stared at him.
“Your history has no record of me in either of the wars, and I can assure you that I would not have allowed half of what happened to occur.”
He was certainly deluded about his ability to change the course of world history, but Lois for some reason found that to be cute instead of arrogant.
“If we choose not to go forward, will you vanish and I’ll have never known you?” Clark asked. ”I’m not sure I could bear that.”
The thought of never having known Clark created an ache in her heart.
“But if I don’t go forward, I can create the kind of world you can be happy in,” he said quietly. “Even if it means I never…”
He slowly rose to his feet. “I’ve got a great deal to think about. I’ll meet you in the morning.”
