As bullets bounced off the figure floating above them, spectators dived for cover. The Burmese were faster about it than the MSNBC crew, but Nelson Bradley and his crew were trained professionals. They dove for cover and kept the film rolling.
The Burmese soldiers scattered so as not to present an easy target and to surround the figure as it landed with the cargo container.
Gently it set the container down on the ground and stood. It ignored the bullets being sent at it until a Burmese soldier crouched with a submachine gun and sprayed it.
Its hands disappeared and in their place was only a blur. This time there were no ricocheting bullets, and after a moment the soldier’s gun stuttered and died.
The other soldiers kept firing for a few moments, but the gunshots began to stutter and then die off. For a long moment the figure stood motionless, smoke rising from its right hand.
Then it stepped forward, moving directly toward the Burmese sergeant who just moments before had been refusing to give the MSNBC crew an interview. To the man’s credit, he rose stiffly and stood at attention as the garish figure stood less than three feet away from him.
For the first time it spoke. It spoke in Burmese for a moment and stared at the sergeant, who nodded.
It dropped the mass of metal in its hand to the ground and then took off, flying directly upward almost faster than the eye could see.
For more than a minute no one dared to move, and then the sergeant barked out an order. The soldiers began to converge on the container.
Nelson turned to his native guide and said, “What did he say?”
The guide was still staring into the air. For a moment it looked as though he wasn’t going to answer, but finally he said, “He said ‘Put any name on it you want. Just get it to the people who need it.’”
The camera zoomed in on the steaming mass of metal on the ground; bullets crushed and fused together, then zoomed on the soldiers unloading the desperately needed supplies.
**************
“We keep these secrets because we have to,” Agent White said. “At this moment we have no idea when these phenomena will reappear, or whether they will ever reappear.”
“I’d guess that was up to you,” Ledderman said. “If you can stop the project, we might be able to…”
“We’ve traced the first two incidents to trial runs for the project,” Agent White said. “The first trial was aborted after a period of several seconds, and the second lasted almost a minute. In neither case was the system fully operational. However, the system was not running during the last incident.”
“First two incidents?” Lois asked. “I didn’t know there were any after 1013 came through.”
“There was another that occurred three days before. This one created anomalies that didn’t reach all the way across the Atlantic.”
A touch of the remote control showed a screen split between three different maps. The first showed relatively few highlighted storms. The second was the familiar screen Lois had seen before and the third was the most recent incursion.
There were fewer storms and they seemed smaller, but in some places between other storms were storms which hadn’t been there before.
“It’s an aftershock,” Dr. Ledderman said, leaning forward. “I’ll have to look at the data, but I suspect that the places where the storms are forming don’t completely close, at least not right away. We’ve managed to punch our way through to the other side and maybe there’s a delay before there’s a backwash of energy, reopening the rift.”
At their expressions, Dr. Ledderman shrugged. “This is as new to me as anyone. Until we get hard data it’ll be impossible to even hypothesize about what is happening with any degree of certainty.”
“The rifts were smaller,” Lois said suddenly. “The second time.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The second set of storms didn’t last nearly as long as the first,” Lois said, avoiding their eyes. “They sort of appeared and then vanished again in a few minutes.”
“How would you know that?” Agent White asked intently.
“I’ve seen it happen several times,” Lois admitted.
*************
As Hadi reached for the flower, a strange hand caught his.
He looked up to see a strange man in a curious costume. In the distance he could hear his mother shouting. He’d gotten away from her again and now a strange man was lifting him up and away from the flower he had wanted to give her.
Touching the man’s suit, Hadi found himself fascinated by the red cape. The man was all blues and reds and fun colors, like the balloons he’d had recently on his third birthday party.
Hadi smiled up at the man, and the man smiled back at him.
The screams of his mother made Hadi look up. It frightened him a little to see her running. His mother never ran, and she rarely screamed.
He clung to the man as his mother raced up the hill.
In slightly accented Persian, the man said, “I believe this belongs to you.”
His mother reached for him, and Hadi hugged her. She hugged him tightly, so tightly it frightened him a little.
“It’s not safe for him to be here,” the man said, looking around.
“I know,” his mother said. “He keeps getting away.”
His father and uncles were also running up the hill, and it was only now that Hadi remembered that he was never ever supposed to go up the hill or into the valley on the other side.
His mother seemed unusually tense around the colorful man, and as soon as she could she pulled away from him and began to stumble backward. She was muttering something about crazy foreigners when the sound of the first explosion came.
Falling to the ground, his mother began to cry. A moment later his father and uncle had caught up to them.
It was the second explosion that caught the adults’ attention, followed by a third and a fourth.
The man in the red cape was walking through the forbidden fields staring at the ground in front of him. From time to time something exploded; sometimes so close to the man than it made the adults gasp.
At one point the man stood for a moment and then stomped slightly on the ground. The explosion was loud, but it didn’t seem to affect the man at all, although it set the hem of his cape on fire. The man didn’t seem to notice and the fire quickly went out, leaving only charred edges.
It was over in less than three minutes. The man in the costume walked toward them.
“Those are all I can see,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it is safe at least out to the second ridge.”
Then without saying goodbye the man shot into the air.
************
“So your companion knows more about the rifts than he’s letting on.” Agent White’s gaze sharpened. “Do you think the passengers might be holding out?”
Lois shook her head quickly. “He’s been consistent in insisting that coming through to here was an accident.”
“We’re not completely willing to rule out the idea that the rifts might have been generated from his side,” Agent White said with a glance at Dr. Ledderman.
“Haven’t you done enough damage to these people with conspiracy theories?” Lois snapped.
“I’m just saying…if a world can have a Superman, who’s to say it doesn’t have a Lex Luthor, or any of a hundred other mad scientists who seem able to sidestep the laws of physics. By current understanding, after all, your friend should be impossible.”
“The correlation with the testing-" Dr. Ledderman began.
“Isn’t perfect,” Agent White said. “For all we know, they have an identical collider on the other side and the effects only happen when both are running at the same time.”
Dr. Ledderman was silent for a moment. “So the weaker effects could be the other collider running in the other world without ours?”
“It’s 1993 over there,” Lois said. “Would they even have something like that?”
“They are more advanced in some things than they should be,” Agent White said. “Which we consider to be possible evidence of mad scientist types. According to the passengers, both Star labs and Luthercorp are organizations known to work on what their world considers to be the fringes of science.”
“Well, had any of the passengers ever heard of a Hadron collider?”
“No,” Agent White admitted.
“Clark is a reporter,” Lois said. “If anyone would know, he would.”
“We’d like to bring him in,” Agent White said. At her expression he raised his hand. “Not to lock him up. Anyone capable of carrying a passenger jet and surviving being hit by a two thousand pound missile isn’t likely to be containable.”
“I think he might be willing to deal,” Lois said, “As long as you weren’t asking him to do anything morally repugnant. He just wants to get his people home.”
“There’s not guarantee the rifts even go back to the same place,” Dr. Ledderman said. “They may be random or shifting. He may never be able to get home.”
Lois took a deep breath and said, “He’s been through a rift already. It leads back to his home, as near as he can tell.”
Dr. Ledderman looked excited. “Was the rift in the same location as it had been when he originally came through?”
“I think so,” Lois said. Clark had never described exactly where he’d come through, but he’d certainly seemed to know where to look. “I think the passenger pigeons were coming through from the same place too.”
“That’s important,” Dr. Ledderman said. “It gives us a clue as to how the rifts operate.”
Agent White looked ill for a moment. He pulled a cell phone from his suit jacket and flipped it open.
“We need to get the contingency plans ready,” he said. “It looks like it may happen again. Yes, Denver, what do you think I’m talking about?”
He flipped the phone closed with a snap and then looked up at them.
“What?”
“What happened in Denver?” Lois asked slowly.
Agent White took a deep breath and reached for the remote. “There’s a reason we keep things from the public. If certain things were known it would cause a panic, rioting…the death toll would be even worse.”
The screen lit up again, this time to a scene of horror.
*************
Slamming on the brakes, Private Jacobson stared at the brightly costumed figure standing in the middle of the road. He ignored the cursing of his team, and a moment later several of them were spilling out of the car, weapons at the ready.
This was a poor spot for an ambush; bombs had leveled the buildings for a thousand yards in all directions leaving only rubble and very little in the way of cover.
The man standing in the middle of the road ignored their shouted demands to surrender, and instead he kicked a box standing next to the road.
The explosion was hot enough to be felt even from a hundred feet away. They ducked and ran for cover, only to stop and stare. As the fires died away, the man in the Superman costume still stood in the same position, although the lower part of his cape had burned away.
He looked at the cape, sighed and then shot directly into the air.
The members of the crew stared at each other for a long moment before slowly filing back into the vehicle.
As Private Jacobson shifted gears, he saw that his hands were shaking.
He was suddenly glad that he wasn’t yet a sergeant. He wouldn’t want to figure out how to report this, or why.
Suddenly though he was very glad to be alive.
**********
The film shook unpleasantly, obviously taken by a hand held camera. Bodies were lying scattered on the ground, and as the camera moved it proved to be worse than anyone could expect. Room after room of the dead, their skins blue and cyanotic.
“How many?” Dr. Ledderman asked.
“Two hundred and twelve.” Agent White said. “There were seventeen survivors on the outskirts of the event who managed to get to their breathing equipment in time.”
Lois stared at the scene at the refinery, and something tugged at her mind. “Aren’t these scenes from the gas leak in Denver?”
“It was the most plausible explanation,” Agent White said. “But these people were asphyxiated by chemicals not in use in the plant.”
“What sort of chemicals?” Dr. Ledderman asked. “Methane?”
“There were traces of methane,” Agent White said, “But hydrogen sulfide was what killed these men.”
Lois glanced at the other two men, who were looking at each other. “What?”
The scene on the television was eerily still. Whoever had been holding the camera had set it down.
“It was lucky the whole place didn’t go up in a fireball,” Dr. Ledderman said.
“It killed everything within a thousand yard radius, and we’ve found small animals injured and dead at twice that distance.” Agent white said. “People in Denver five miles away were able to smell the scent of rotten eggs.”
“So how long would someone have to breathe this stuff before it killed them?” Lois asked.
“We’re estimating the concentration in some parts of the plant to have reached twelve hundred parts per million,” Agent White said. “Anything over a thousand parts per million, one whiff and you’re dead.”
“The people on the outside edges didn’t get out?” Lois asked.
“Low concentrations smell like rotten eggs,” Ledderman said. “But anything over two hundred fifty parts per million deaden the sense of smell, so those on the outskirts wouldn’t have known that anything was wrong until it was too late.”
“I thought people on plants like that carried gas detectors,” Lois said.
“Most of them carried badges to detect poison gases,” Agent White said. “Seventeen managed to get to gas masks. Twelve of those are already dead. The survivors are likely to have lasting problems.”
They were all silent for a long moment staring at the screen. The scene had changed to show the outskirts of the refinery.
“To get that concentration, the gas on the other side must have been under tremendous pressure related to atmospheric gasses here.” Dr. Ledderman said. “Otherwise it would have just diffused into the atmosphere and we wouldn’t be seeing this.”
On the screen a dead bird was shown lying on the ground next to a small marker showing its distance from the epicenter and its direction.
“Denver is downwind from that refinery,” Agent White said soberly. “Residents have complained about smells coming from it before.”
Dr. Ledderman reached into his pocket and pulled out a small notebook and pencil. He began to scribble furiously. “Either it’s a result of some sort of pressures from the rift, or the planet on the other side of the rift has a much higher atmospheric pressure than ours.”
The voice of the pilot came over the loudspeaker announcing their arrival in Washington DC airspace in fifteen minutes.
Dr. Ledderman was still murmuring to himself. ”If I knew the size and elevation of the rift, I’d be able to calculate-”
“So essentially you are saying that after all the presumably earthlike worlds we’ve been connected to, we finally hit one where a planet like Jupiter is on the other side?” Lois said, interrupting him.
This caught the older man’s attention and he looked up.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Dr. Ledderman said. “Between the first test and the second, the number of rifts increased geometrically. If they come into full operation, there will be even more rifts and each new one has the risk of bringing just this kind of thing across.”
“I think the rifts were bigger too.” Lois said.
They sat and stared at each other for a long moment. If the Denver Rift had been ten times larger, it would have created a poisonous, explosive cloud of gas that might have reached the edges of Denver.
The death toll would have been in the hundreds of thousands.
Agent White’s phone rang and he pulled it out.
“What?!?” he said sharply.
He kept the phone to his ear as he fumbled under his seat for a second remote. Switching the television screen, he began to switch channels.
A moment later he’d found it. MSNBC was running footage of a brightly colored figure being fired upon by Myanmar troops.
Agent White was gritting his teeth. “Your boy just caused six separate diplomatic incidents, including accusations by the Chinese and Russians that the United States is launching missiles toward Asia.”
He turned to her and said, “Since when did he think it was ok to start world war three?”
