The revelation about Clark was stunning, but Lois had to put it on the backburner. She had to keep him talking while she worked out some sort of plan.
“I don’t understand why you would come all the way back here if you were mainly interested in changing the future.”
“I miscalculated a little.” Tempus admitted. “After taking the key, watching the most entertaining bit of torture I ever saw and slipping Clark’s wallet into the dead man’s pocket, I decided to head home and see if things were a little more to my liking. The great thing about time travel is that it makes you almost like a god. You can change entire worlds and force them to your will.”
Tempus tossed a pair of handcuffs to her. “Lock yourself to that,” he said, gesturing toward a set of stairs through a hallway at the back of the room.
Lois wondered if she was more disturbed by the velvet linings on the inside of the cuffs, or by the look in Tempus’s eye.
She allowed herself to be lead into the hallway, where she locked the cuff around her left hand. She looked for the flimsiest looking of the support posts and reluctantly locked it around the thinnest part of the post.
“”I hadn’t realized that he hadn’t already dealt with Nightfall,” Tempus said as he headed into a small storage room.
Lois could hear the sounds of banging as he rifled through what sounded like boxes of tools and equipment.
She began tugging at the support post, pushing with her feet. It budged, but only slightly.
“I was heading home, when Metropolis suddenly ended up underwater.” Tempus’s voice was muffled. “The ship I was in wasn’t exactly a submarine, and even with everything being slightly out of phase, I started to sink. I hit reverse, but everything was already shorting out. The ship shook itself apart, and I ended up with a concussion in a hospital in Hell’s kitchen.”
“It wasn’t Nightfall.” Lois said. Whatever he was doing, she needed to slow him down.
“What?” Tempus asked, popping his head around the door. “Not Nightfall? What was it then?”
“Shiva.” Lois said.
“The Hindu god of destruction?”
“This year there was a collision in the asteroid belt. A planetoid was split into two parts and it’s orbit changed. One part is due to make nine more revolutions before it hit’s the earth. The other is due to hit in twelve more revolutions. The second one was twice the size of Nightfall.”
Tempus whistled. “They never wrote anything about a second rock in the histories.”
“The government planned to contact Superman quietly and have him change the meteor’s orbit a little on one of it’s earlier revolutions. No panicking the population.”
Closing his eyes, Tempus sighed. “And the fact that you’re here suggests that they built my machine.”
“All twelve billion dollars of it,” Lois said. “They hoped I’d come back and fix things.”
Tempus grimaced. “I’d planned trying to stop myself. I suppose I wasn’t successful this time around. Oh well,”
He slipped back into the storage room. Lois heard the sound of a drill.
She frantically searched through her pockets. At this time in her life, Lois hadn’t known how to pick locks, so she wouldn’t have been in the habit of carrying lock picks.
She did find a toothpick in her right pocket. Lois pulled it out and frantically attempted to pick the lock of her cuff.
The end of the toothpick frayed, and Lois reversed it, using the undamaged end.
“So why invent this kind of time travel?” Lois asked. “Why not build a real time machine, like your first one?”
“I never learned how to build those,” Tempus’s voice was sharp. “In the precious Utopia you and Kent created, there aren’t many people who know much about technology.”
“So why?”
“I grew up in the twenty second century. I went forward a few hundred years and found just more and more peace and prosperity. They did invent some interesting teaching methods…loading information directly into the brain. In the twenty ninth they developed some really interesting time travel technology. I downloaded as much historical information as I could, including a classified project from 1999.”
“The time travel I used,” Lois said.
“It wasn’t classified because no one could built something like that without so many resources that no one worried about it.”
“So why?” Lois asked again. “Why this kind of time travel?”
“Did you ever wonder what a civilization that had time travel would use it for?” Tempus asked.
“Um…not really.”
“Every major historical figure gets a team of observers, historians and scientists attached to them. If I managed to invent time travel, then…”
“You’d be famous and they’d send people to watch you.”
“I was going to steal their time travel equipment, and then I’d be free again. Instead, I’m still stuck on this ball of rock.”
“Because you wiped out the future. There’s nobody left to send anyone back.”
“Well, forewarned is forearmed I always say,” Tempus said. “Obviously I need the man of steel if I’m going to have anywhere to go back to. It occurs to me that the best way to make that happen would be to get rid of the bone he and Lex were fighting over. My guess is that you’ve already enlisted Clark Kent’s help. He’ll know about Lex Luthor, and he’ll be fine.”
Lex returned, pulling a barrel like machine made from the cylinder of a washing machine. It was obviously home built, as it had wired and pieces from telephones and radios attached.
“You’d be surprised how much you can learn from twenty ninth century sleep teaching techniques.”
He bent down and plugged it in.
Lois screamed as loudly as she could. “Clarrrrrk!!!! Hellp!”, even as the lock on her wrist finally came down.
Tempus didn’t bother to respond. He just finished plugging the machine in.
The blast of the machine was a white light, blinding. The pain made that of her first disincoporealization pale by comparison. The pain lasted only a moment, however, and then Lois found herself floating in blackness. She could dimly feel herself being slowly shredded, her mind pulling apart like warm taffy.
She felt a moment of hopelessness, then acceptance. At least she’d saved Clark. It took her a moment to realize that he was Superman as well. She’d saved the whole world- her father, Lucy, the Kents, Perry. All in all, it was a fair sacrifice.
It was only then that she felt the touch of the other mind. It was a very familiar mind, and it took a moment for Lois to realize it was her other self. Tempus had lied. Her younger self’s mind was pulling apart just as surely as she was. The device would kill the both of them.
Her other self made a wordless off, and Lois hesitated for a moment. She valued her individuality, but it appeared that the only way they were going to survive was by working together. The damage to each of them was too extensive for either to survive on their own.
Hesitantly she reached out, touching the other.
A moment later there was the shock of contact. Fusion. What had been two became one.
Their memories before Christmas were the same, but now Lois regained those memories of the time she’d been unconscious. Memories of her younger self being driven by impulses she didn’t understand, of her new found devotion to her grandmother. Memories of the bets she’d made, and of the secret accounts even Lois hadn’t found.
She felt the depression which had been at the back of her mind blow away like an odor on a breezy spring day. The optimism of her younger self, uncontaminated by years of disappointment made her feel as though she could accomplish anything.
The time she and Clark had spent together was there was well. They’d had a relationship that had been punctuated by mistrust on Lois’s part. But he’d slowly won her trust, and within time they’d become friends. Clark was now the best friend she’d ever had.
Her younger self had loved Clark, Lois now realized, but hadn’t had the words to say it. Unlike Lois, her younger self had never had sex, and her relationships with boys was even more circumscribed than even Lois’s had been.
She’d already avoided three relationships that had ended in utter failure and humiliation for Lois.
Her younger self, in contrast, was learning the hard earned professional skills Lois had honed through years of experience. She was learning the self confidence that came with being the best at what you do. She was learning what it meant to be in love with Clark Kent from a more mature perspective.
A moment later it was complete. They were both one being, and their hesitation was no more.
Lois opened her eyes. Tempus was still in the same position he’d been before. The transformation couldn’t have taken any time at all.
Despite the blinding light, Lois stood. The light wasn’t affecting her now.
Before Tempus could react, Lois lashed out with one food, kicking the device on it’s side. It remained on, and it’s light hit Tempus. His face froze in horror, and then began to sag.
Lois heard the sound of a sonic boom from behind her, and the front wall of the apartment disintegrated, sending splinters flying through the apartment, although none of them hit Lois.
She looked up at Clark, who looked stunned and slightly frazzled.
“Lois?” he asked hesitantly.
“We are here,” Lois said. She could feel the last remnants of her personalities beginning to merge.
“What happened?”
Lois glanced back at Tempus, who was convulsing. Clark moved forward to pull him out of the light, and Lois grabbed his arm. She shook his head and moved forward herself to unplug the device.
His convulsions ceased, but there was no light in his eyes. He lay staring at the ceiling.
Lois felt a moment of pity for him until she noticed the key in the middle of the floor.
Clark was beginning to look sick and nauseous.
The trace of kryptonite on the key must be affecting him already.
“We need to get out of here,” Lois said. “The neighbors will already be calling the cops. Do you think we can get out the back way?”
Clark glanced up, and then he had a look of panic. “I can’t…Lois…um.”
Lois grabbed him by the arm and pulled him toward the back door. She could hear sirens already in the distance. Some of the patrol cars must have been near enough to hear the explosion.
“You need to get out, Clark.” Lois said.
“What about you?”
“My car is in the driveway. If I run, I have a lot of explaining o do. I’ve still got a freelance job with the Star, and I’m going to claim to be working on a story.”
Clark nodded. Lois pushed him toward the back door, away from the kryptonite. As he was about to leave, Lois grabbed him and kissed him hard.
She then shoved him and said “We’re going to have a little talk about you keeping secrets from me later.”
He blanched, then set out across the open back yard.
Lois returned to the living room, and waited for the police.
****************
The grilling had been brutal, but the police had finally bought her explanation that somehow professor Templeton’s device had caused some sort of implosion and accidentally rendered him a vegetable.
Everything was different now. In the back of her mind, the adult Lois had been looking at Clark as something of a child. She’d been attracted to him, wanted him, but part of her had been having trouble accepting him as an adult.
Now, with three years of memories behind her, memories of seeing Clark as a respected contemporary, memories of having the relationship with him that she’d been cheated out of the first time, Lois couldn’t help but see him as an adult.
He’d already been graduated a year and had been traveling the world. She was ready to graduate soon.
The world was their oyster and nothing was ever going to be the same.
Lois wouldn’t have it any other way.
