Lois sat staring at the computer monitor for an endless moment. It seemed insane somehow that just a few days before the world had seemed to be rational and sane and now she was dealing with things like parallel universes.
Part of her still didn’t want to believe it. She’d seen no direct evidence. Maybe her source had been lying; maybe the tests had been faked.
Maybe Passenger pigeons had been alive all this time and were only now making a comeback. More likely, she’d mistaken the breed for another, similar kind of pigeon.
Yet the evidence was mounting, and the feeling deep in her gut was that the impossible was happening. She’d already accepted that Lucy wasn’t her sister; that realization had brought her to unaccustomed tears.
The world had been simpler when it had been simply about guns and politics.
She glanced at the paper she’d been given, and then blinked. She stared at the masthead and then flipped to the front of the paper.
Her first impulse was to assume that this was some sort of joke. Even if another universe existed which had cities named things like Metropolis and Gorham, it didn’t necessarily follow that the newspaper had to be named the Daily Planet.
Yet that was the name spread across the top of the paper, and on top of each following page. She flipped through looking for the masthead, which was the list of members of the editorial board.
The masthead described .the Daily Planet as having been founded in 1775. She scanned for familiar names; most of them were unknown to her, although Perry White was apparently managing editor.
The date on the paper was four days ago, in 1993. Quickly skimming headlines, Lois discovered that the other world apparently also had a David Khoresh, and that the FBI was in a standoff at the Branch Davidian compound.
A minor grenade attack on a United States embassy in Belgrade, fighting in Angola, bombings in Algeria and Madrid.
Authorities were investigating ground zero at the World Trade Center…this was a story which made Lois blink until she realized that it was about the earlier bombings, from a time when Ground Zero had meant something quite different.
Apparently Clark’s world was already sowing the seeds that would lead to the world Lois was currently living in.
The television listing had only twenty channels, and MTV was listed as only having music videos. One of the channels was LNN. There were no other major news only channels that Lois could see.
She recognized perhaps three quarters of the television shows as being from her own childhood; others were completely unfamiliar.
Even the comic strips were different. She recognized Peanuts and Mary Worth, but she’d never seen a strip called “Out of the tar pits” or “Captain Carrot.”
Flipping randomly through the paper; she saw sports teams she didn’t recognize, articles on things done by politicians with names she didn’t recognize.
One article caught her eye; it was a piece in the Metro section by Clark Kent about the closing of a landmark theater. It was well done, tugged the heartstrings and next to the top of the story was a grainy picture of the man she knew.
Clark Kent was some sort of columnist then, not just a reporter.
He had other stories in other parts of the paper; all of them were competent and well written. It rounded him out a little and made her respect him more.
More than just a daredevil willing to climb tall buildings and leap off speeding airplanes, he was a fellow reporter. He was a member of the same once exclusive community that Lois was.
Lois sighed. She was going to have to find out more about the passenger pigeons. Heading for the single remaining pay phone, she began to slip quarters into it, and then began to punch in the sequences of numbers that would give her access to her voice mail messages.
“This is Pilar,” the first message said. “I need to see you as soon as possible.”
The tone of her voice set Lois on edge, and checking the time, she saw that the message was only sent thirty minutes earlier.
She’d heard that tone before, and it was never good. Her stomach clenched as she began gathering her things together.
*************
It was raining again, even more heavily than it had been for the last several hundred miles. Clark grimaced. At the heights he was forced to fly, he couldn’t move nearly as fast as he wanted to go. It was taking seemingly forever to get back to Washington.
The sound of a crying baby alerted him that something was wrong. A quick glance below showed him that someone had attempted to cross the flooded road despite numerous warnings about crossing running water.
He grimaced; this was only going to slow him down even more, and he was feeling a sudden urgency to get back to Lois.
The car gave a sudden lurch and began to slide sideways along the pathway of the moving water. The woman inside gave a sudden scream.
It was a work of only a moment to flash down and land in the water behind the car. He gave it a push and the car was suddenly sliding even further in the direction of the running water. The woman inside screamed again, and Clark winced. Even with the overwhelming sounds of rushing water her voice was piercing.
As soon as he saw a suitable place for the car to emerge onto dry ground, he gave it a sudden shove.
The woman screamed again, but this time her wheels had traction, although her engine was stalled, and she was safe by the side of the road.
Clark allowed himself to duck down behind the car and back into the water.
At this rate he was never going to keep a clean suit of clothes. Allowing himself to float downstream, he waited until vision was blocked by a stand of tress and then he was in the air again.
He hovered for a moment to make sure that the woman was going to be all right. It was only then that he noticed the teenage boy sitting on his roof in the rain with his cell phone held up before him.
The boy was staring at him, and had his cell phone held before him like some sort of shield.
Clark froze for a moment, and then shrugged. Who was going to believe a kid who said he’d seen a man who could fly?
A moment later he was gone, not bothering to look back at the teenager’s expression of glee.
************
Lois stepped into the lobby with a feeling of trepidation. She’d been with the company back before the remodeling, back when people were still working out of closets and incredibly cramped spaces.
Now the whole place was futuristic, with almost a millennium design. Ergonomic furniture, a wide open design, work spaces in modular clusters, everything was completed by an amazing view of the Capitol, which at this time of night was lit and looked amazing.
During the day the office was a cacophony of ringing phones, murmuring voices and turned up televisions. At this time of the night, the staff was less than a fifth of what it was during the day, which left the place seeming ominously quiet.
Lois could see Pilar waiting for her at near her office and she felt her stomach tightening yet again. Pilar was one of seven producers of the bureau’s live production unit. At the moment, all that mattered was that she was Lois’s boss.
Straightening her back, Lois fought to keep her expression calm and composed. She’d faced gunfire in Iraq. One woman with a little power and authority over her wasn’t going to intimidate her.
Lois stepped into Pilar’s office and was surprised when Pilar closed the door behind her. That was a bad sign. Pilar usually kept the door open so that she was available at a moments notice. She only closed the door when she had something to say that she didn’t want others to hear.
“Take a seat,” she said.
Lois nodded and settled into one of three chairs in Pilar’s office. Pilar sat on the other side of a large desk, and she pulled out a remote control. She dimmed the lights with it, and then the flat screen monitor behind her switched on.
A moment later, familiar footage of an airplane landing appeared on her screen.
“Can you tell me what this is?” Pilar asked.
“My footage from the Flight 1013 landing,” Lois said. “You’ve been playing it for the last several days.”
“So why have we had eight different flight engineers and physicists calling to complain about the footage being computer generated?”
Lois blinked. “It’s not computer generated.”
“According to the experts, it takes an airplane that size at least a thousand feet to touch down and another two thousand feet to stop. That’s a minimum, and that kind of stop would likely result in blown out tires and a lot of damage to the aircraft…damage that didn’t show up in the video.”
“They were under the fifty foot mark by the time they reached the fence,” Lois said.
“The experts noted that, but it looks as though the plane made the stop in half the distance it should.” Pilar shook her head. “The laws of physics say that plane didn’t land the way you said it did. Whoever did the computer graphics should have done their homework better.”
“I filmed what I filmed,” Lois said, looking Pilar straight in the eye.
“How did you fake the footage?” Pilar’s voice was quiet, but steely.
“When would I have had time to fake the footage?” Lois said. “I started filming as the plane was landing. You think I keep stock footage of planes landing just on the off change I might see an accident?”
“You might if you were involved in the cover-up.”
Lois shook her head. “I don’t know what you…”
“I had a visit from an Agent Randal earlier tonight,” Pilar said. “He was asking a lot of questions about your family and political affiliations.”
Grimacing, Lois shook her head. “He’s a bully,” she said. “He likes to throw his weight around.”
Pilar nodded. “If it was just him, I wouldn’t be asking this. Are you involved in this case?”
Lois shook her head then hesitated. “I’m not, but someone in my family might be.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you.” At Pilar’s expression Lois said, “I signed a non-disclosure agreement.”
“Then I don’t have much of a choice,” Pilar said. “With everything that has been happening over the past few years, people have lost faith in the press. We’re lucky that none of the other networks picked up on this.”
Lois nodded slowly, not taking her eyes of Pilar. The twisting in her stomach grew even worse.
“If anyone else had pulled something like this, I’d be handing them their pink slip right now. You’ve been one of our best reporters and I’m going to credit this to burnout.” Pilar switched the television behind her off with the remote, and the lights in the room came back on.
Pilar pulled some paperwork out of her desk and began to fill in some lines. “As of this moment I’m placing you on unpaid administrative leave. I’ll try to keep it out of the gossip network. As far as the rest of the bullpen is concerned you are just taking a vacation.”
Lois wanted to open her mouth to protest, but somehow she felt frozen to her desk.
“We’re attaching the words “computer simulation” to the landing footage, and we’re going to hope that none of the other networks pick up on it.” Pilar hesitated. “If they do, there won’t be anything I can do for you.”
With her face feeling suddenly numb, Lois nodded. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“There will be a panel convened before you are allowed back to work,” Pilar said. “You can make your case there.”
Lois rose unsteadily to her feet.
“Before you leave, I need your press pass and satellite phone. If you want to get anything from your desk, I’ll escort you to it. You won’t be allowed back in the building until after the administrative review is complete….if then.”
Reaching into her purse, Lois felt a little lightheaded.
After everything she’d done for the network they were letting her go.
************
Flying past Lois’s apartment building, Clark could see no sign of her. A glance inside the parking garage showed no sign of her vehicle either.
If she’d been taken by the government, they probably wouldn’t have taken her vehicle.
Frowning, he considered his options. He could return to her apartment and wait for her, but he could already see that would require removing even more bugs.
He could look for her all over Washington D.C., but given the size of the place he’d probably never find her.
His only other option was to try to guess where she might have gone.
At this time of night there was very little shopping she could do, even in a twenty four hour city like Washington D.C. Her relatives were dead; he’d learned that much from listening to her speak to her sister and to Agent White.
He hadn’t seen any pictures of friends or colleagues except people from work.
Ah...work. Lois worked at a twenty four hour news network and where else would she be at this time of night?
He’d noticed the building on a previous pass over the city. It sat in the same location as the LNN building stood in his world.
Apparently there was no Lex Luthor here, although given this world’s portrayal of him in the movie; it was perhaps for the best. The Luthor he’d met would have hated being portrayed as an over-the-top caricature.
It wasn’t until he saw Lois standing on the front steps of the building with a stunned look on her face that he finally sighed with relief.
Dropping out of the sky quickly, he stepped out of a back alley and soon reached her.
“Lois,” he said.
He was surprised when she turned and hugged him tightly.
