You can find the
Another Dimension, Another Time, Another Lois[/i] TOC here.
You can find the
The Prologue here
Part 1[i]Meanwhile, in another dimension at another time with another Lois…
“What do you mean baby Clark is dead?” Lois screamed at H. G. Wells.
The man had turned the color of ash. “He’s not breathing,” Wells responded in monotone, clearly in shock.
“That can’t be!” Lois argued with him, taking the no-longer-glowing green rocks off the baby. “Clark? Clark?” she called out to the universe. “He can’t be dead.” She picked up the unmoving infant and held him to her chest. “He just needs to be away from the Kryptonite and get some sunlight,” she explained to the author. “He can’t be dead,” she repeated. “He can’t be.”
Tempus – whom it took longer than expected to knock out – was starting to rouse himself from unconsciousness. He blinked his eyes a few times then he focused on Lois and the baby.
“You
killed him, you sick deviant of a man! Who kills a baby?!” Lois hollered at Tempus, tears running down her face. She kicked the man in the stomach and then the crotch.
“It worked?” Tempus replied in a grinning daze, between gasps for air. His face froze and he murmured, “I feel funny.” Suddenly, Tempus seemed more a collection of atoms and less a solid mass. A breeze passed through Rocky Cove and Tempus disappeared.
Lois turned to Wells. “Where did he go?”
Wells gulped. “I believe he erased himself from history. Superman or one of his descendents must have saved the life of Tempus’s mother, father, grandparents, or great-grandparents at some point. With Mr. Kent gone, Superman is no longer around to save them; therefore, Tempus was not conceived.”
She set the baby down on the ground in a patch of sunlight. “Come on, Clark. Survive.” She started to give the baby CPR. “You don’t need to have superpowers, Clark. I just want my best friend back. Please.” She didn’t know what she was doing. She knew CPR for adults, but this wasn’t an adult. This was a baby, a roughly three-month old infant, from another planet. She had no idea if she was doing any good, but she couldn’t give up. She couldn’t. This was Clark.
Wells set a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Ms. Lane.”
“Live! God damn it, Clark. Live!” She begged the still infant as she rubbed his chest. “Live. You aren’t allowed to die, Clark.” Sobs wracked through her. “I love you.”
Some time passed as she wept over the body of baby Clark. Wells set his hand on her shoulder again. “We need to go, Ms. Lane. I should get you back home.”
Lois pierced him with a cold, sharp glare. “We aren’t leaving Clark,” she told him, her voice hoarse.
“All right, Ms. Lane. What should we do with him?” the writer asked softly.
“We should put him back in his ship. The Kents need to find him,” she announced, getting to her feet and picking up the infant.
H. G. Wells seemed perplexed. “What would be the point…?”
She ground her teeth together and spoke through pressed lips. “Better them than Bureau 39.”
He nodded and they walked back to Shuster’s field in silence. They found the ship and Lois set the body inside. She rested her hand on the globe. This was the same sphere Clark had found at the warehouse – the globe that Jack had stolen from him and then sold to some collector. Clark had never told her what he had learned from it. He… never could now.
She picked up the sphere. The green continents of Earth melted into red continents. “Krypton,” Lois whispered and tucked the globe next to baby Clark. Maybe it had healing powers. Maybe it would save Clark from this fate. Then she picked up the lid of the ship and fastened it shut.
“Shall we return to the time-machine, my dear? Or do you want to say a…” H.G. Wells’s voice petered out.
“How are the Kents going to know he’s here? Clark said his folks had found him at dusk. They had seen the meteor crash and went to investigate and found him, but if the ship has already landed…?” Lois looked around. “It’s almost dusk now. We need to do something to draw their attention to baby Clark.”
H. G. Wells appeared unable to think. It would have to be up to Lois. Clark
needed her.
“Would you be able to fly the time-machine…?”
Before she had finished speaking, Wells started shaking his head. “It doesn’t ‘fly’,” he explained.
“We’ll have to start a fire, then,” she said and looked around for the necessary things to make a fire. “The smoke should get the Kents’ attention and make them stop.”
Soon, she had a small fire started.
“Blow!” Lois ordered to Wells.
He did as he was told.
She put some wet leaves on the fire to make it smoke. Before long the fire started to spread.
“Great, Lane,” she admonished herself. “Burn down Smallville Forest.”
They heard someone coming, and Lois grabbed Wells’s arm, dragging him behind a group of trees.
“Hurry, Martha. We need to get this fire out before it spreads further. Take your shovel and dump dirt before the fire,” said the same young Jonathan she and Clark had met earlier that day.
Lois was thankful she and Wells were upwind of the smoke and fire, thankful that they wouldn’t be seen. Not thankful for the extra dose of smoke in her lungs. She got as close to the ground as possible and covered her nose and mouth with her jacket, trying not to cough. She didn’t want Jonathan and Martha to see them.
In what felt like a matter of minutes later, Jonathan – with a line of black soot across his cheek – came into Lois’s view. “Who do you think would…?”
“Jonathan!” Martha interrupted. “What’s that?”
“Gosh, Martha, it looks like something out of the Saturday matinee at the picture show,” said Jonathan, gazing into the sky. “If it crashed… yeah, it could have started the fire… maybe. Do you think it’s a Russian space probe or something?”
“Or something from another world?” Martha suggested. “These markings don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before on Earth.”
“Well, I know an ‘S’ when I see one and that’s definitely an… Martha! Don’t!”
Lois winced at the description of Superman’s ‘S’ crest. She listened as Martha opened the lid of baby Clark’s space casket.
“Oh, Jonathan. It’s a baby!” Martha gasped with joy.
Lois’s heart leapt.
Clark’s alive? she thought.
The Kryptonite didn’t kill him?“Martha,” Jonathan said coolly. “Don’t touch him, honey. I don’t think he’s…”
Tears crept down Lois’s face. Baby Clark was still dead.
“Oh, Jonathan,” she could hear Martha sob. “To die so young. What a waste of life. If only…”
“I know, Martha. Come on. Let’s take him home and give the fellow a proper burial,” Jonathan suggested softly.
“Yes. Let’s,” responded Martha, even more quietly.
Lois waited until the Kents had departed with baby Clark before she spoke to H. G. Wells again. “You’ve got to stop this. We’ve got to go back in time to before Clark died and stop this from happening.”
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Lane,” said Wells as they started back to Rocky Cove and the time-machine.
“You
should be. You’re the one who brought Tempus into the past in the first place,” she snapped at him. “We’ve got to fix this.”
Wells nodded. “Though I don’t know how.”
“By going into the past one hour, maybe two – to before Tempus killed Clark – and saving the baby Clark,” Lois growled with more than a little annoyance.
“But as you have seen Tempus wiped himself out of the future by this act, Ms. Lane.” H. G. Wells stopped and gazed at her with sadness. “If Tempus no longer exists in the future for me to bring into the past as soon as we leave 1966 – this current time stream – it will be like Clark never existed at all. You will not remember him and neither will I.”
Lois’s jaw hung open. “Are you saying that rescuing Clark is impossible?”
Wells pinched his lips together. “I don’t like to use that word, Ms. Lane. Let’s just say, it will be more difficult, much more difficult.”
“If Tempus doesn’t exist in the future to come into the past to kill baby Clark, how come Clark’s not alive?” she asked. It felt like a migraine headache decided to move into her head to stay.
“It’s hard to explain, Ms. Lane.” Wells sighed and collected his thoughts for a moment. “Because Tempus changed the timeline by traveling to this point and erasing himself from the future, he has shattered time.”
Lois’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What does that mean? Shattered time?”
“Time is like this line…” Wells picked up a stick and drew a line in the dirt. “Because Tempus changed history so drastically, at the point where Tempus, me, you, and Mr. Kent arrived in 1966 – or probably more precisely at the point in time where baby Clark died – our timeline split or shattered into two separate dimensions.”
Wells drew an off-shoot of his line in the dirt, so it looked more like a ‘Y’. “In this line…” He pointed to a spot on the original line past where the two lines intersected. “Baby Clark still grows up to become Superman. Time wasn’t changed by our visit into the past, at least, not to any large degree.” He sighed and moved the point of his stick to the new shorter, off-shoot line. “This is us. Tempus created this new dimension by killing Clark as a baby and erasing himself from the future. As soon as we get into the time-machine and return you to 1995, you will no longer remember Clark or me or this visit to 1966, because it didn’t happen. Because Tempus shattered the timeline we – even I – can only move forward in time from this point in time. By shattering time – Tempus has closed, or broken, the door for us to go further back into the past.”
“So you can only go back in time to the point when baby Clark died?” Lois tried to understand.
“Precisely.”
“So, how are we going to save Clark, precisely?” she asked.
Wells took a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “I don’t know.”
“But it’s not impossible?” Lois threw his word back into his face.
“No, not impossible,” he said slowly, unsurely. “If I can figure out a way to change this new dimension’s future, so that Tempus does exist, that will repair the door into the past for us to go back and rescue Clark as a baby.” Wells extended the off-shoot line so that it went past the intersection point and ran parallel to the original line.
Lois stared at the two lines in the dirt. “And how exactly do you plan on doing that without being able to remember that Clark existed in the first place?” she inquired tersely.
“It shall be difficult,” he replied.
She crossed her arms. “So, what you’re really saying is that saving Clark is not impossible, just more like improbable?”
He gave a barely noticeable nod in defeat.
“I’m sorry, I don’t accept that answer. I refuse to forget my best friend and leave him to die in the past – to cease to exist.” They arrived at Well’s time machine. Lois sat down and opened her briefcase. She pulled out a notebook and pen and started writing. She described who Clark Kent and Superman were and what had occurred that day briefly. She wrote her contact information at the Daily Planet down at the bottom of the page. Then she tore it out of the notebook and handed it to Wells. “What do you know about Tempus? His parents’ names? Where he came from? Anything?”
Wells shook his head softly.
“I refuse to believe that
you of all people would bring someone from the future into the past without knowing
something about them, doing some kind of background check.” Lois flipped to a clean page, before handing him the notebook and pen. “I want you to write down everything you know about Tempus, every little thing. You will then give that to me. I’ll research this man and his ancestors, any of them I can find, and I’ll use all the resources at my deposal at the Daily Planet to locate them. In the meantime, you will use your time machine and go into the future. You’ll invent something or find someone who can invent something to either fix our broken door or who will help us figure out which of Tempus’s ancestors was supposed to be rescued by Superman and now won’t. Or maybe you will figure out a way to jump to another dimension – our parallel dimension – and their future, where you can figure out this information. Together we will save Clark.”
Wells handed his sheet of information back to Lois.
She scribbled at the top.
Clark Kent is real. Research Tempus to rescue Clark from dying in the past. H. G. Wells will help you. Lois slipped this note into the side of her briefcase.
As long as she held on to this hope of saving Clark from this fate, she wouldn’t allow herself to dwell on the fact that he was dead. Until she gave up hope completely, Clark would still be alive. She was still mad at him for never telling her his big secret and for letting some time-traveling future Neanderthal do the job for him.
Duh! There was no way in hell she was going to let Clark die before she had a chance to tell him off some more.
Lois stepped onto the time machine and sat down. She slapped the bar in front of her as H. G. Wells stood there in daze. “Okay, take me home, Wells. Let’s get started. We need to rescue Clark. He’s counting on us.”
***
Lois lifted her head off her desk and rubbed her eyes. Had she fallen asleep? At work? Her cheek felt damp.
Great, I’ve drooled.It must have been that investigation she had been working on into the wee small hours of the morning had drained her of energy. Mayson Drake’s death. She stretched, yawned, and blinked her eyes.
That had been one strange dream. She shook her head. It had seemed so clear, so vivid, so real. She had been in love with a man, a handsome man with dark hair and glasses, and muscular physique.
Him, she could remember, his name, not so much. She remembered how he had taken her into his arms and floated them over the fence.
Lois thought about that one detail again. That didn’t make any sense. People don’t float. She shook her head. Anyway, her dream man had disappeared, literally. And there had been a baby. Their baby? The baby had dark hair, so it could have been. But the baby died too.
Her chest ached at the thought of her baby dying. She wished she could remember the baby’s name. She had never wanted children before, never considered it a possibility. But this baby… she pined for this baby in a way she had never longed for anything in her life before.
It was a fog. Blurry, yet, so intense. She had never felt for any real man what she had felt for… what’s-his-name in her dream. Not even Lex. She pushed Lex out of her mind, she didn’t want to think about him.
Lois remembered that they had yelled at each other – her and the man with the glasses. No, not yelled, argued. She had still loved him, but she had been mad. He had done something to make her mad – lied to her, most likely. That was what most men she met did, with the exception of Lex. Lex had always been honest with her, which was why Lois Lane hardly ever dated anymore. Which was why Mayson’s death had affected her so strongly. She would miss her one female friend, her best friend. She sighed.
If only she could meet a man who could sweep her off her feet like her dream man. Literally. Oh, to have a man like that in her life. She would turn to pudding in his arms. She scoffed at her foolishness. Men like that just didn’t exist, at least not in this universe. Dan Scardino was interested in her, but she wasn’t sure about him. He seemed more Mayson’s type. Lois just didn’t feel for him what she had felt for the man in her dream.
“Lois!” Jimmy ran up to her desk. “There you are. Eight minutes to spare. Perry’s birthday. Remember?”
She winced. She
had forgotten. Again.
Jimmy pulled out a wrapped birthday gift from behind his back and handed it to her. “Love me?”
Lois rolled her eyes. “What did I get him?” she asked and then answered her own question, “Checked suspenders?”
“Yeah! How did you know?”
She wondered how she knew too.
Didn’t you get him checked suspenders last year? a man’s seductive, somewhat hesitant, voice asked inside her head.
“Didn’t I get him checked suspenders last year?” she asked her partner.
“Gift horse, mouth,” Jimmy mumbled, scratching a nasty rash on his arm and then raising his voice. “Well, he liked them, didn’t he?” He turned and indicated their boss, standing across the bullpen and yelling at someone. It looked like Cat Grant. Oooh. That would make her day. Perry White was wearing said checked suspenders.
Lois felt like rolling her eyes again.
Terrific.“Do you have a card?” Jimmy asked.
“Card? Card?” Lois started patting down her pockets. She had a card, didn’t she? That seemed familiar. She stuck her hand into the side pocket of her briefcase and pulled out said card.
“Who has always got your back, Lois?” Jimmy winked at her as he scratched his arm again.
“You’re the best, Jimbo! Thanks.” She smiled appreciatively and then took a closer look at the red mark on his arm. “Wow, that must be some itch.”
He shrugged and tugged down his sleeve. “Oh, this. I get it every year around this time since I was a kid.” Jimmy was still a kid, a junior underling, but he was
her junior peon,
her personal photographer. No other staff writer had their own personal assistant or photographer, and she had both in one man. Perry loved her and, better yet, he knew Lois’s worth. Her boss knew who consistently brought in his front-page headlines.
“It looks painful. Isn’t there some kind of cream you can put on it?” she asked him.
“I’ve tried everything. My doc says not to worry about it though. It’ll go away.” Jimmy nodded and returned to his desk.
Lois noticed another piece of notebook paper that had fallen out of her briefcase pocket when she had retrieved the card.
She picked it up and looked at it. Scribbled across the top of the paper she had written: “
Clark Kent is real. Research Tempus to rescue Clark from dying in the past. H. G. Wells will help you.”
Lois didn’t remember writing the note. She had no idea who Clark Kent was nor who, or what, Tempus was. H. G. Wells? The author? The
very dead author? Please!
What kind of crap was this, Lane? Notes for a novel?Did she come up with this crazy story idea while out drinking the night before? No, she had been working on that Resurrection drug story with Scardino. She had turned it in this morning before passing out on her desk. Anyway, she knew better than to drink so much that she couldn’t remember. It hadn’t done any good for her mother, so how could it do her life any good?
The rest of the note was in someone else’s handwriting and was a list of some sort. She could hardly read the handwriting at all. “Hmmm. That’s strange.” She shrugged and tossed the paper haphazardly onto her desk. She grabbed the gift and yelled, “Happy Birthday, Chief!” as she crossed the newsroom towards her boss.
*** End of Part 1 *** Part 2 Comments
