“Where do you think you are?” Lois asked, sitting down finally on the cheap couch across from the woman who looked like her sister.
“They didn’t tell us,” Lucy said. “All I know is that they started splitting us up a few hours ago. I saw people being loaded into at least a dozen different trucks.”
Lois grimaced. The moment the government had decided that Superman was real, they’d split the passengers into at least a dozen different locations. If they were careful about just who knew where those locations were, and only talked among themselves when he was being recorded on the other side of the world, it would be hard for even Clark to find the passengers.
Unless of course they were to yell, “Help, Superman.” Lois suspected, however that the government wasn’t allowing most of the passengers any access to television or movies that hadn’t been approved. Agent Randal’s sloppiness with Lucy was just a minor act of cruelty.
“What’s going on?”
“What year was I born?” Lois asked.
“Why are you…?” At Lois’s expression, Lucy said, “You were born in 1967, of course.”
Lois shook her head. “I was born in 1982.”
Snickering, Lucy said, “You’re very well developed for an eleven year old.”
“It’s not 1993,” Lois said.
“Maybe you’ve lost a little time from being in the jungle, but it was 1993 last week and it’ll be 1993 tomorrow.”
Lois sighed and grabbed the remote from the cheap coffee table. She flipped channels impatiently until she found what she needed.
“See?” she said.
Lucy glanced at the channel and shrugged. “See what?”
The list of channels and programs scrolled by.
“Look at the header,” Lois said. “Look at the date.”
Lucy stared at the screen for a moment then blinked. “That’s a weird error,” she said. “Someone should call and report about it.”
“It’s not an error. That’s today’s date.”
“So you’re saying I’ve traveled in time…the whole planeload of us did?”
Lois nodded slowly.
“Was it something Star Labs did?” Lucy asked. “Can we get back?”
“I don’t know,” Lois said. “We’re looking into it.”
Lucy reached out to touch Lois’s face and said, “Then why are you so young?”
“I should be an old hag in my early forties you mean,” Lois said dryly.
Lucy pulled her hand away. “Well, yeah. You should be old enough to be my mother unless…did you time travel too?”
Lois switched the television off and glanced back at the closed door. She’d have done this better with a night’s sleep she was sure. As it was her head felt fuzzy and this was a conversation she wasn’t looking forward to.
“How much do you know about parallel worlds?”
“You mean like in Star Trek, where Spock had the beard.”
Lois nodded slowly. She’d forgotten how quick Lucy could be at times.
“So what you are trying to say is that I haven’t just been transported in time, but that I’ve been moved to a different dimension.”
“Different universe,” Lois said absently. “Different dimension means something else.”
“So did the Nazis win in this universe, or what?” Lucy was staring at Lois with an odd fascination.
“What are you talking about?”
“You just said this was an evil dimension. I was just wondering when everybody turned evil.”
“I didn’t say that,” Lois snapped. “This isn’t the evil dimension.”
“The government arrested everybody and didn’t give us a lawyer or a phone call or anything. That seems pretty evil to me.”
“I’m sure it would,” Lois said. “It’s just that some bad things have happened since 1993 and things have changed.”
Lucy stared at her and said, “So are you like part of the government conspiracy?”
Shaking her head, Lois said, “No, of course not! Why would you ask me that?”
“My sister gave her life to uncover conspiracies, and so I guess evil Lois helps cover them up. That’s how this works, right?”
“I’m not the evil Lois!” Lois protested. It was so easy to fall back into old patterns with this woman. They’d always argued when they were children, with Lucy taunting her with leaps of logic that wouldn’t satisfy anyone.
Wait.
“What?” Lois asked.
Lucy was watching her calmly.
“You knew I wasn’t your sister?”
Lucy nodded slowly. “I’ve suspected from the beginning.”
“How?”
“You had a lot of the details wrong. I thought at first that you were trying to tell me something because people were listening in. But you were really confused about some things, things that my sister wouldn’t ever forget.”
“So you knew all this time and didn’t say anything?”
“I didn’t know, really, but I suspected.” Lucy looked down at her hands. “I didn’t want to believe it. We spend so much time looking for you…her…and we never really knew what had happened to her.”
“I’m sorry,” Lois said. She’d thrown herself into plenty of danger in the Middle East, but she hadn’t had anyone worrying about her back home. If she’d died, she’d have been a minor news story and a forgotten footnote in a week.”
“I thought a lot of things,” Lucy said, still not looking at her. “I thought maybe they’d brainwashed you, so you really didn’t remember, or that you’d had a bump on
I thought you were somebody made to look like Lois,” Lucy said. She looked down at her hands. “To try to get me to talk. But you knew all these things that only Lois would know, and so I hoped…”
She’d hoped they were keeping Lois alive somewhere to provide the details they needed for those conversations.
“I guess she really isn’t coming back,” Lucy said. Her expression crumpled and a moment later she flung herself forward to embrace Lois tightly.
Lois returned the hug, awkwardly at first, but then with more enthusiasm. This woman even smelled like her sister, and she was the closest thing Lois had left to family.
“At least you still have some hope that your Lois might be alive,” Lois said.
“You don’t?” Lucy pulled back.
Lois shook her head.
“Mom, dad?”
Lois looked away, staring at the carpet.
“I’m so sorry,” Lucy said. She reached out and grabbed Lois’s hand and squeezed it.
“It gets easier,” Lois said, knowing as she said it that it was only partially a lie.
**********
As the garishly dressed figure landed gracefully, it set the ship down gently. This required that it hold the ship with one hand for a moment, which to Nikolai seemed impossible. The ship and its occupants weighed more than three metric tons.
The figure then knocked on the door to the shuttle, even as around the square hundreds of rifles were lifted onto shoulders and men were taking aim with tanks along the three accessible sides of the square.
Nikolai gestured urgently. If someone shot at the man in the bright suit with a tank, he’d risk killing the cosmonauts inside. With the press watching, that would be a political nightmare, especially as there was an American on the crew.
The crowd behind the barricades roared as the first man opened the door and blinked out into the light. When the man in the bright costume stepped aside, and ambulance crew surged forward. These people had been without gravity for weeks and it would take time for them to reacclimate.
Seeing the media, the figure levitated into the air and slowly moved forward despite shouted commands from the commander on the west side to stop.
“I am here to help,” he said in flawless Russian.
A moment later, even as the troops closest to him began to surge forward he rocketed directly into the sky.
Nikolai wondered what the troops had planned to do. Tackle a man who demonstrably was able to lift a three ton spacecraft in one hand?
Despite the barricades the members of the press surged forward, and the flashes of light as the downed reentry module was photographed over against the backdrop of St. Basil’s cathedral.
***********
“So what are we to each other then?” Lucy asked finally, wiping tears from her eyes.
“Genetically we’re sisters,” Lois said. “Maybe it’s like discovering that your sister had a twin separated at birth or something.”
Lucy shook her head. “We’re closer than that. Twins are completely different people but you seem a lot like the sister I remember.”
“You don’t,” Lois said. At Lucy’s shocked expression, Lois said, “The sister I remember was a brat, not a relatively mature woman.”
Grinning, Lucy said, “I’m still a brat. I’m just not used to being locked up.”
“I hope I get to know you a little better,” Lois said, “Before you go home.”
“We’re going home?” Lucy’s expression was shocked.
“I have a friend who is working on a way.” At Lucy’s expression Lois quickly said, “It’s not a sure thing, and it might not be workable at all, but there is a chance, as long as he can get the government to agree to let you all go.”
Lucy visibly deflated. “So we probably won’t get to go then. Are you sure we aren’t in the evil mirror universe?”
“I’m fairly certain,” Lois said. “Beards aren’t really all that popular in my circle anyway.”
“So who is this Superman they kept asking us about?” Lucy said. “I saw him on television.”
“What did they tell you?” Lois asked.
“They made fun of the whole idea. They asked us a lot of questions about famous people like Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent. I guess you have them in this world too?”
Lois said, “Apparently not everybody has a counterpart.”
“But if Superman is real, why did they act like we were crazy when we said we were from Metropolis?”
“You talked to some of the others?”
Lucy nodded. “They put us together in small groups after questioning. I think they were listening in to see if we would let something slip while we were together.”
The door opened and the two women looked up, startled.
An agent stepped into the room; Lois recalled that he had been one of the men with Agent Randal when they’d ransacked her apartment.
“Turn on the television,” he said.
Two other agents trailed in behind him. Agent Randal didn’t show. Reaching for the remote, Lois switched on the television.
CNN had footage of a spacecraft being carried into the middle of Red Square.
**********
“This is obviously a hoax being perpetrated by the Americans!” The Turkish ambassador’s face was flushed. “As a cover for testing of a new weapon.”
The French ambassador didn’t look any happier. “Our sovereign airspace was violated without prior notice. If we had known you had this superweapon, we would have…”
“His presence is just proof of the larger problem,” Joel said. “You’ve seen the evidence. The Large Hadron Project must be shut down until these results can be investigated.”
“You think we do not know the difference between fiction and reality?” The French ambassador shook his head. “You helped finance this project and now you want it shut down.”
“Why the sudden interest in an obscure project only of interest to physicists?” The British ambassador was at least more polite than the others.
“You have something to hide,” the Chinese ambassador said. “We want to know what it is.”
Joel was losing them; it was hard enough trying to convince them that something as fantastic as other worlds were real without trying to convince them of the existence of a clearly fictional character. That the character was clearly impossible didn’t make it any easier.
The heat of the sun on his back from the large picture window behind him was making him want to sweat. In this crowd that would be a mistake.
It was already uncomfortable enough trying to cram ten other men into his office without moving his desk.
“Does it seem likely that we have anything that could move that quickly in space and then stop in mid-air?” he asked.
“We all know of American ingenuity,” the Israeli ambassador was usually more sympathetic to the American cause, but Joel could see that in this, none of the twenty men in the room believed a word he said.
“Look, I’m the Deputy Chief of Staff. I’m currently the highest ranked person in the building.”
“What?” For the first time he saw doubt and confusion in their eyes. They began to look concerned. This was the most powerful nation in the world, and when its leaders had to evacuate, something was definitely wrong.
“Congress, as you may have noticed, has suddenly decided to take an impromptu vacation. There’s a reason for that.”
“You are just trying to misdirect us!”
“He looks like the comic book character Superman, but we have no idea who he really is, or what abilities he really has. For all we know he took this form just to make us let our guard down. There is no indication that he doesn’t have all sorts of abilities we’ve never even thought of.”
The French ambassador was the first to recover. “Everyone knows…”
The sounds of gunfire made them all flinch.
Two secret service men opened the door and rushed toward him. “Sir, we have to get you out of here.”
They stopped suddenly and one of them pulled his gun. He could see the faces of the men in front of him suddenly going pale.
When he heard the sounds of knocking on the window behind him, he turned slowly. He was on the second floor and there were no balconies near his window.
Floating in the window was the figure they had been discussing for the last hour.
What followed was mass confusion as everyone raced for the door.
*********
Clark grimaced. All he’d wanted to do was set up a meeting with someone who had the power to free the passengers.
Instead, he was being shot at, over and over again.
Rising slowly toward the roof where two men had guns on tripods, he was surprised when a small anti-tank missile slammed into his chest and exploded.
He was close enough to the building that the façade caught fire. A quick burst of breath blew that out and he continued on toward the roof.
More and more agents were streaming onto the roof through an access panel; now there were thirty men and women standing in front of him, all in suits and all standing at ready. Their faces were impassive, although Clark could hear the sounds of their racing thoughts.
One man stepped forward.
Clark guessed that he was going to try to arrest Clark despite the obvious impossibility of it. Before he could say anything, Clark said, “I want a meeting with someone in charge.”
A moment later he was in the air and moving away from them, faster than their eyes could see.
If they were going to refuse to meet with him, then it was time to get serious.
**********
Tiredly, Susan Nygen rubbed her forehead. She hadn’t heard from Lois and she was beginning to be worried. Lois’s satellite phone didn’t seem to be working and she wasn’t at home.
She’d even tried calling Lois’s workplace. They’d given her the runaround until she’d described herself as Lois’s lawyer, and then she’d gotten an earful.
Apparently her boss very much wanted her back and didn’t want to be sued.
She was still a little confused about the circumstances of Lois’s departure, although from what she’d heard it sounded like government harassment had had something to do it. Pilar had complained incessantly about having her own house searched.
She felt a familiar tug on her shirt.
“Mommy, Superman is in our backyard.”
Susan blinked and said, “That’s nice dear. Just stay away from the door.”
“Daddy is talking to him.”
Susan frowned. She hadn’t been watching television much recently; children had turned her television life into an unrelenting round of Barney, Teletubbies and Disney films. For some reason children liked to watch the same movies over and over and over again.
As Molly left the room, Susan frowned. It wouldn’t hurt to see if someone really was in the back yard. At Molly’s age she couldn’t discriminate reality from fiction, but if she mentioned the back yard then something was out there.
She rose and moved quickly toward the back window.
Her husband Jared was sitting at the picnic table with a man in a very authentic looking Superman suit.
Stepping through the patio doors, Susan watched as both men looked up. The man in the Superman outfit stood up as he saw her emerge.
“Ma’am,” he said. “I’d like to hire your services.”
“Dressed like that?” she asked.
Her husband stared at her and said, “I guess you haven’t been watching the news.”
As though to answer her question, the man levitated six feet in the air.
Susan stared at him for a long moment before saying “Oh.” She suddenly felt an intense urge to sit down.
“How would you like to be famous?” the man asked.
