The limousine moved smoothly over the road, its interior dark, lit only by the light of an occasional streetlamp and the reflected light of a small laptop computer. Lois sat uncomfortably, wedged between two large agents who reminded her more of bouncers than Feds. Only their dark suits and general demeanor assured her that they were who they said they were.
She stared across the divide at Agent White and Dr. Ledderman. Dr. Ledderman was staring intently at the laptop on his lap, clicking impatiently from one piece of information to the next.
“I thought you were off the case,” Lois said, finally breaking a silence of several minutes duration. “Agent Randal said…”
“Agent Randal has been known to overstep his boundaries,” Agent White said. “I’ve been out of town taking care of matters.”
“Oh? Any place in particular?”
“I’ve been in Hawaii…” Agent White began.
At that Dr. Ledderman looked up sharply. “You went to see that charlatan before you came to me? He’s a laughingstock…”
“Your reputation isn’t much better than his,” Agent White said, “Although out experts say that your mathematics are better.”
“The things he’s worried about aren’t even remotely the problem,” Ledderman said.
“He refused to sign the nondisclosure documents, and he was more interested in being combative than in actually looking at the problem.” Agent White said. “We had to ask him despite all that; at this point we aren’t ready to turn away anyone who could help.”
“I’ve been doing some research on my own,” Lois began.
“We know,” Agent White said. “There’s a reason you’re here instead of locked up in a Las Vegas jail cell awaiting transport.”
Dr. Ledderman looked up sharply and said, “How is she involved in all of this?”
“I have a full presentation ready when we board the plane,” Agent White said. “For the moment I hope you’ll just continue to look over my people’s work and see if there are any flaws you can see.”
Lois sighed and wondered where Clark had gotten to. Part of her had hoped for a glorious rescue. Given Clark’s power the agents wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Of course, assaulting federal agents in the middle of a casino with hundreds of cameras probably wasn’t the best start to a career as Superman, especially if you were trying to get the trust of a paranoid public.
She couldn’t help but stare out the window and wonder what had happened to him.
*************
“All right, shut it down.” Jacob stepped out into the warehouse. He still felt stunned in the wake of the phone call he’d just had.
His crew was still working diligently, even though it was almost three in the morning. He dreaded what he was about to tell them.
They’d already filled four of the six forty foot shipping containers in the loading dock with food, water, blankets, tents and medical supplies. Now they were busily loading the remaining supplies onto pallets so that the two men with forklifts could load them.
Trucks had been arriving all night with the donations from local churches. People didn’t think of California as having much of a church going population, but they were willing to dig deep when it counted.
“We still have two more to fill.” Sweating heavily, Bob looked like a truck driver. Very few people would guess that he was a local preacher. “If we don’t get them out in time, they’ll ship off without us.”
The ship was leaving in four hours. They’d been lucky to get the transport charges as cheap as they’d gotten them.
“The junta is turning away relief shipments.”
He could see the expressions of disbelief rippling through the crowd of men in front of him.
“How can they do that?” One man Jacob didn’t know well leaned heavily against a crate of water. “Those people are going to need help sooner, rather than later.”
“We could send it anyway,” Bob said. “It’ll be several days before the ship gets close, maybe they’ll have changed their minds by then.”
“They’ve seized two shipments already, and they aren’t letting foreigners into the country. The ship captain doesn’t want to take the risk. He’s voided our contract. He’s sailing without us, no matter what we do.”
The volunteers groaned almost in unison. They’d already put in a massive amount of work on this. They had been working until the early hours of the morning and the thought that it was all going to be for nothing…
It was then that Jacob saw movement in the darkness between shipping crates. This wasn’t the safest area; their charity had wanted to spend as much of the money as they could on aid instead of overhead and infrastructure.
“Maybe I can help.”
Stepping out of the darkness was a man in a Superman costume.
Jacob shifted uneasily, as did several of the men in front of him. They’d had a problem with crazies in the past.
“Unless you are ready to fly these containers to Myanmar, I don’t think there’s much you can do,” Jacob said. “There isn’t much point in loading these others, except to keep them out of the rain.”
At least the locked containers would provide extra security. Local drug addicts had been known to try to steal what they could.
“Where are they headed for?”
“Not anywhere now,” Jacob said. “We were hoping to get supplies out to the Irrawaddy Delta, to monestaries.”
Some of the men were moving away from the crazy man; no matter how reasonable he sounded you could never trust how some of these people were going to react.
He walked to the end of the container and checked to see that it was locked.
Then he bent and put one hand to the bottom of the metal container and another higher up. There was a sound of groaning metal and a moment later the entire container began to rise into the air.
The container weighed approximately twenty six tons fully loaded.
The men in front of him began to scatter and a moment later Jacob discovered that he was in the front of the crowd.
Jacobs’s mouth was dry and he could hear the thunder of his pulse in his ears. His heart was beating rapidly, and the men behind him were dead silent.
As the man reached the end of the loading dock, he turned to look at them.
“Will you need these back?”
Jacob shook his head faintly. “It costs more to ship them than it does to buy a new one. We get abandoned ones donated to us all the time.”
“I think these would make good temporary shelters,” the man in the Superman suit said. “I’ll be back for the rest of these as soon as I can.”
A moment later he and the entire container were rising into the air as though being lifted by a crane. Jacob found himself rushing to the end of the dock along with the others to stare up in the sky.
The container vanished from sight in a shockingly short amount of time.
The men around him were shocked and silent. Several had faces that were white and pale.
One man spoke up. “What are we going to tell the bosses?”
“We found alternate transportation.” Bob spoke finally. “Sometimes God works in mysterious ways.”
The group was silent again, staring at the sky.
“If he’s really coming back,” Jacob said, “Then we probably need to get back to work.”
The men stared at him for a moment and then began to grin. As Jacob began to join in he could hear the excited murmur of conversation between the others.
Unless they were all hallucinating, the world was about to change dramatically, and they were part of it.
***************
Stepping into the private jet, Lois was surprised. In her experience government employees didn’t travel in luxury any more than was necessary, and this was obviously a luxury plane.
Dr. Ledderman was looking around approvingly. Apparently the plane appealed to his sense of aesthetics. He moved quickly and found a seat near the back of the cabin.
The plane was large enough that the cockpit was separated from the passenger section, but the cabin wasn’t much larger than her living room at home, and it was narrower.
It definitely wasn’t government issue.
At Lois’s look, Agent White said, “A sponsor in the committee on armed services was kind enough to provide transportation.”
As the last agent through the door turned to shut and seal the door, Lois slowly found her seat. If Agent White had connections to a senator, he had a great deal more authority than she had suspected.
Of course, members of the appropriations committee knew about secret programs as they were the ones who funded them.
“Do they believe it?” Lois asked Agent White as he sat down beside her.
“Given the evidence they don’t have much choice,” he said.
“You have evidence that all this is real?” Lois asked quickly.
“Other than you arriving in a Las Vegas Casino less than three hours after being seen in Georgia?” Agent White asked mildly.
“Other than that, yes,” Lois said.
The front of the cabin had a relatively large flat screen television which Lois suspected was probably used both for presentations and in-house movies during flights.
Agent White reached under his chair and pulled out a remote. “As soon as we get in the air, I’m going to give a presentation. Feel free to tell me if I’ve got something wrong.”
************
By all rights, Clark shouldn’t have been able to lift the shipping container, no matter how strong he was. The metal of the structure hadn’t been designed to take the entire twenty six ton weight of the structure spread across the minuscule area of two human hands. The metal should have crimpled like tissue paper in his hands.
Clark’s best guess was that the same thing that allowed him to protect Lois from the wind and cold of moving at supersonic speeds also allowed him to better distribute the weight of a relatively massive structure. Spread thin, it didn’t protect the object he was holding against anything but its own weight.
Although they weren’t nearly as fragile as human beings, shipping containers had very poor aerodynamics. They were flat and slammed into the wind instead of funneling air around it.
Because of this, he was very limited in the speed he could fly with one.
Scanning the container, he didn’t see anything that would be excessively damaged by a vacuum, although radiation was always a concern.
His best bet would be to fly into space, where he could move as quickly as he wanted to as long as he could avoid orbits with high flying debris. With no wind resistance he could accelerate to almost full speed.
Unfortunately that required that he climb higher at what felt like a horribly slow rate.
He almost didn’t hear the planes until it was too late.
Two of the sleek looking fighters were coming alongside him and he could hear the comments of the pilots inside.
“We have the bogie in sight. It’s….”
The voice stopped suddenly and Clark turned his head to look at the pilot. He wasn’t concealing himself now, but it would have been useful to have a radio or some sort of way to communicate.
Undoubtedly the comic book writers would have given his counterpart something silly like super-ventriloquism.
“You’d better look at the feed for yourself.”
“What is it?”
“I’d like to stay out of the nuthouse, respectfully sir. Just check the feed.”
There was silence on the pilot’s radio for almost a minute before the voice reappeared. “This is some kind of joke. It’s not funny.”
“You’re seeing what I’m seeing,” the pilot insisted.
A second plane came up on the other side of him. “I’m seeing it too, I think.”
Clark smiled and waved a little.
The voice on the radio cursed for a moment. “If it’s really who it looks like, he can hear you. If it’s some kind of trick, then they may have a radio. Either way, deliver the message.”
The pilot flicked a switch and said, “Unidentified aircraft, you are in United States airspace. Land at the following coordinates or you will be fired upon.”
Clark looked at the pilot, grinned and shook his head. The extended conversation had given him exactly what he had needed. Every second had led them higher and higher, and the planes were having to drop back even as Clark was able to put on more speed. Less air meant less resistance.
This time the planes didn’t fire on him, and for the first time Clark began to realize that while the suit might look a little ridiculous, there was one thing Lois hadn’t mentioned about it.
It could be a lot of fun.
His grin held as he moved out into the crystal cold clarity of space.
***********
“This was found on the ocean floor by divers looking for bodies swept off the deck of the boat when it capsized.” Agent White said.
The tattered contents of a wallet first burned and now water logged were scattered across the television screen.
“They dredged these pieces up over an area of several hundred yards,” Agent White said. “It was as though the wallet had exploded on contact with the water, or that it had been exposed to water moving at very high speeds.”
Leaning forward to stare at the screen, especially as the view changed to a close up of a familiar driver’s license, Dr. Ledderman said, “Why is anyone interested in a fake Clark Kent driver’s license?”
“Interestingly, we have footage of Ms. Lane hugging this very person in Washington DC. less than an hour after the boat’s miraculous recovery.”
Lois flushed as the video in question was played. It looked a lot more intimate from this angle than she’d remembered it being. It had been a spontaneous display of emotion, but in black and white it looked like something much cozier.
“Oh, that’s funny,” Dr. Ledderman said. “You, Lois Lane got involved with someone going around calling himself Clark Kent.”
Lois grimaced. She’d heard enough jokes about her name without having to listen to a new one.
Of course, he wasn’t just calling himself Clark Kent.
Thankfully the doctor didn’t focus long on the irony of her choice of people to hug.
“What’s all of that have to do with the boat?” Dr. Ledderman asked. “The boat was recovered because of a geothermal vent or a methane explosion, or at least that’s what the news said.”
“The geography is all wrong. There isn’t a pocket of compressed gas within fifty miles of that site.” Agent White stared at Dr. Ledderman for a moment, as though waiting for him to make the obvious conclusion.
The conclusion that to anyone who believed in a rational world wasn’t obvious at all.
For all his theories about alternate universes, Dr. Ledderman didn’t seem to be ready to make that kind of leap.
“So what in the blazes happened then?”
What followed was an instructional series of radar data, followed by the data from the sonar.
“I didn’t realize we had anything that could move that fast,” Ledderman said.
“We don’t.” Agent White said. “We’ve been tracking readings like this since the night of the first disturbance.”
“You think something came through the storm?” Ledderman asked.
“We know it did.” Agent White said, “And we have the proof.”
