I don't like the idea of her using Richard, either. I'm just not sure what else to think. We don't know the timescale, but we do know that:
1. Lois became pregnant before Superman left.
2. Richard and Clark/Superman did not meet before Superman's return. (It is therefore very likely, though not absolutely certain, that Lois knew him only in passing, if at all, before Superman left.)
3. There is a very short window of time during which Lois could have slept with Richard and been able to plausibly claim him as the father. A month, maybe. Two if you push it.
So...
Lois and Superman were in a relationship. He left. In the month after that time, Lois met Richard, started going out with him, slept with him, and discovered she was pregnant. Not necessarily in that order.
Rebound relationship. Makes sense. But I can only see it going one of two ways.
1. She slept with him immediately, during that first emotional mess after Superman left, and then got to know him later.
2. She got to know him first, they started dating, and then she slept with him. By which point she probably should have known that she was pregnant. (Although it is possible to go quite some time without realizing it. I know one person who didn't know until well into her second trimester.) I'm not saying using him was her only purpose. I'm just saying that if this is the case, protecting her child might well have been a factor.
I don't really like any of the options, but I don't see any others. To me, 2 seems more likely than 1, but... *shrug* Who can say for sure?
As for the proposal... Like I said, I haven't seen the movie in a while. I thought I remembered him proposing after dinner. I was fairly sure I remembered some pillow talk in which he promised he'd marry her properly when they got back to civilization. I could be wrong about either or both.
Larry Niven. Yes, same Larry. Yes, Ringworld has issues. Especially when it comes to sex. Even more issues in the later books (and there was more than just one). The thing about the later books is that they weren't originally planned. What happened was that readers (particularly the ones at MIT, where he reports that he was greeted by a mob of students chanting "Ringworld is unstable!" and similar slogans) started to write in about all sorts of logical problems with the first book. Some of them even wrote in with possible solutions. So he wrote the second book to try to fix those problems. IMO, he ended up highlighting them more than fixing them. Patching them, but with patches that were worse than the original problems. I'm not a big fan, really.
But... That's all irrelevant. I was giving the history of the issue. Which is that Larry Niven wrote a joke essay pointing out a bunch of problems that come up when someone with the strength to move planets around has sex with an ordinary mortal.
Some people laughed them off. Some ignored them. You're certainly welcome to do either. What I was saying was that some people, including the ones in charge of Superman II, took them seriously.
Paul
