“I don’t suppose you have any money,” Susan said. “This world’s money…I heard about your problems with currency.”
Clark looked embarrassed. “I was hoping you could do it pro-bono. The fame would probably do your business a lot of good.”
“Assuming that the government doesn’t sweep the whole thing under the rug in the name of national security,” Susan said, glancing at her husband.
“I wouldn’t let that happen.”
“If the judge issues a gag order, you wouldn’t have any choice.” Susan said. “If you didn’t want to risk your entire case.”
“Honey…” Her husband stared at her with a pleading expression. He’d always been a Superman fan and Susan groaned. If she didn’t accept the case she’d be hearing from her husband.
“You need to go away,” she said, making a shooing motion toward the house. Someone needed to stay with Molly anyway. “If I do accept the case, everything we talk about will be privileged, protected under lawyer client confidentiality. Anything you overhear us saying won’t be.”
Her husband brightened at the suggestion that she might take the case, even as he looked disappointed that he wasn’t going to get to stay.”
As soon as he stepped into the house, Susan continued with the conversation. She said, “There’s an opportunity cost here. You aren’t talking about some two hour quickie divorce…you’re talking about taking on the United States government in what amounts to a class action suit. This would involve hundreds of hours of work, time I could be spending on other clients.”
“If you can get me legitimized somehow, there are things I can do,” he said. “When I was in college I found a couple of sunken treasure ships back home.”
“What did you do with them?” Susan asked.
“I left them where they were,” he said.
At her expression he said, “Finding them would have exposed me to scrutiny. I’ve spent a lifetime staying out of the spotlight.” He gestured down at his suit. “All this is new to me.”
“Weren’t you somewhat famous as a reporter?” Susan said. She vaguely remembered hearing Agent White say that the passengers had recognized Clark Kent’s name.
“People knew my name,” he said. “But they didn’t know my face.”
“Are you even sure that those ships haven’t been found on this side yet?” The image of treasure chests filled with gold bullion and jewelry WAS tempting, but Susan was proud of her practical nature.
He shook his head. “I haven’t checked. It’s not even certain that they sank in this universe in the first place. But if I found two, I can find others. It’ll just take a little time.”
“And what about in the meantime?” she asked. “Do you have any other way of making money?”
“I can recover ghost pots in Alaska, I guess,” he said. “I paid for college working on a crab boat, and there were times where you’d lose the crab traps. There was a program to recover the traps in my world where they’d pay you fifteen dollars for each one you recovered.”
“Don’t those things weigh like eight hundred pounds apiece?” Susan had watched enough episodes of Deadliest Catch with her husband to know a little of what he was talking about.
He shrugged. “I can probably collect several hundred of them, if I can get someone to pay for them without identification. Those ghost traps keep killing crabs, which damages the crab industry. It’d be a public service.”
Susan stared at him for a moment, then glanced back toward the house, where she could see her husband staring at them through the window. She sighed.
“Do you have a dollar…a real, United States dollar?”
He was silent for a moment, then reached into his boot, pulling out several crumpled bills. He handed her one.
“This may end up taking a long time,” she warned. “I may have to shift some or all of my other clients to other members of my firm. It could end up being costly.”
“How much is gold going for these days?” he asked.
Susan smiled slightly. “What do you want to accomplish?”
“There’s a good chance that we may never be able to get home,” he said. “If it means endangering this world, I’m not willing to try to reopen a rift home. If we can’t go home, I want those people to receive status as American citizens, and to have a chance to make some sort of life here without being prisoners.”
“Was everyone on the plane American?” Susan asked.
“Um…I’m not sure,” he said. “Then they should get asylum here if their country of origin don’t want them.”
“And for yourself?”
“I can’t do what I do alone,” he said. “I want to help the people of Myanmar, but unless charities are willing to work with me, I won’t have anything to take to those people. If I were to try to stop crime, the police could refuse to hold anyone I captured.”
“There are some serious legal issues related to stopping crime,” Susan said. “Ones we’ll need to go over. Even though you aren’t a citizen, you could make citizen’s arrests in every state except North Carolina. There you can only detain someone, but you can’t transport them.”
“And in other countries?”
“The laws are different in every country. You have to be careful. People can sue you for almost anything and the one inevitable fact is that they will. If you arrest someone, they are going to try to claim that you hurt their arm or caused whiplash or infringed on their rights in some way and they’ll try to get as much money out of you as they can.”
“I suppose that’s a good reason to wear a disguise,” he said. “If nobody knows who you are they can’t serve you up a subpoena.”
“Everybody already knows who you are,” Susan said dryly. “And I doubt that a pair of glasses is going to be enough to disguise you, especially if we somehow got the government to set up an identity for you.”
He sighed and stared at the picnic table for a moment.
“You need to be careful even in rescuing people. You aren’t in as much risk in other countries, but in this country if you rescue someone they may still Lou you. There are Good Samaritan laws that may provide some degree of protection, but it’s not complete. In Minnesota and Vermont there is a duty to assist, which usually only applies to people at the scene of the crime. Do you have super hearing?”
He nodded.
“Then in those jurisdictions you might be liable for NOT assisting.”
“Are you certified in performing CPR?”
He nodded.
“In this world?”
He shook his head.
“Then you’ll need to get that renewed.”
“So you are saying that I might as well not even try?”
“I’m saying that if you want to do this, you’re pretty much going to have to keep a lawyer on retainer at all times.”
“What if everyone knows I don’t have any money?” he asked.
“That would help,” she admitted. “But everyone will also know that you have almost unlimited money making potential.”
At his look she said, “Sports stars make tens of millions of dollars in endorsement deals a year. If you are really who you say you are, you will very rapidly become the most famous man on the planet.”
He glanced down at his hands uncomfortably. “I don’t exactly feel comfortable shilling for one company over another.”
“You may not have a choice,” she said. “There are a limited number of treasure ships out there, but human greed is unlimited.”
“All this should be simpler,” he said.
“If this were the comics it would be,” she said. “But this is the way that it is.”
“You make it sound like I shouldn’t even try,” he said. He was silent for a long moment. “I can’t do that. I can’t see people hurting and not do everything I can to help. Not anymore.”
Susan nodded approvingly. “You wouldn’t be who you are if you did anything different. You just have to get the best legal protection you can get and hope for the best.”
He sighed and nodded soberly. “So what’s the game plan?”
“I’d like to get Lois out first,” Susan said. “She’s already my client, and the rules applying to her are going to be different from those applying to the rest of you.”
Clark nodded. “So what do we do?”
Susan began to lay out a strategy. It was a rough draft, but with time she’d polish and improve it. Luckily she’d already had time to think about it, because she’d been working on strategy to get Lucy out.
With any luck the government wasn’t going to know what hit them.
***********
Mary-Lou knew they were in trouble the moment the rain hit. It poured down in sheets so thick that the windshield was covered in water and no one could see anything.
The clouds had been gathering all afternoon, turning a dark, ugly color, but she’d thought they’d have more time.
She glanced into the back seat where Suzy was tightly strapped in. She was staring out the window wide eyed.
“Everything’s going to be ok honey,” she said. “Daddy’s going to pull over until the rain dies down a little.”
She glanced over at her husband who was desperately trying to see through the windshield, a hopeless task despite the best efforts of the windshield wipers. He sighed, a disgusted sound and pulled carefully over to the side.
“I hope nobody plows into the back of us,” he muttered. He switched the engine off, carefully setting his emergency blinkers.
Without the sounds of the engine, the sounds of the pounding rain sounded even more like thunder. The wind howled, and the car rocked in the wind.
In the back Suzy began to cry and Mary-Lou looked at her husband for a moment.
“We’re here,” she said. She reached back to grab her daughter’s hand. “We’re going to be all right.”
The sound of the wind began to grow louder. It turned from a howl into an overwhelming roar.
The rain let up just in time for them to see the tornado.
As the car jolted and Mary-Lou’s head snapped back painfully she realized that they weren’t going to be all right. They weren’t going to be all right at all.
As her daughter began to scream, so did Mary-Lou.
The power of the wind lifted their car and flung them into the air.
**********
It still amazed Clark that this world had a channel devoted to nothing but the weather. In his world the weather was something that got talked about in a short segment on the news, unless there was some sort of emergency.
Hearing about the tornadoes in Kansas had been something of a shock.
He’d lived through tornadoes in the past, and he’d even helped out once or twice. Never in his lifetime however had he had to do much; mostly the tornadoes hadn’t hit populated areas and people had been lucky.
Today, there were multiple tornadoes all over the country, and he wondered if it had anything to do with the rifts. Undoubtedly the energies released in their creation had to go somewhere and that could cause global weather changes.
He didn’t recall his own world having so many tornadoes or so much bad weather.
Kansas had enough tornadoes that he’d taken a little time to think about what he’d do if he ever had to stop one. Even a small tornado had the power of a nuclear weapon. A small tornado with two hundred mile per hour winds could generate a billion watts of energy. A monster tornado could generate forty trillion watts of power. A class five hurricane generated as much power as all the world’s power plants combined.
The one thing he was certain of was that he wasn’t going to be able to blow any but the smallest tornados off course.
But tornadoes were constructs of heat and cold, and those were things Clark had some power over. It wasn’t something he’d tried before, and he ran the risk of making the problem worse, but he had to do something more than just try to dig survivors out.
There was a learning curve to all this, and the one thing Clark feared was that while he was learning, people were going to be dying.
It was perhaps selfish to go to Kansas first, but there were analogues of people he knew here. He’d known many people in Wichita and even if Smallville didn’t exist here that didn’t mean that its people weren’t scattered throughout Kansas.
The storm clouds were on the horizon, and as Clark sliced through the air, he heard the sounds of screaming.
*********
They were flung free of the wind, and despite the wind the windshield wipers were still running. The rain had slowed enough for Mary-Lou to see the ground rising up toward them, and in her pain filled mind she felt a sense of regret.
There were so many things she hadn’t gotten to do. She wasn’t going to take back the things she’d said to her husband. Their arguments suddenly didn’t seem important at all. She was never going to be able to make things up to her mother.
She was never going to get to see Suzy grow up.
The tears in her eyes were almost blinding, and Mary-Lou closed her eyes tightly, waiting for the end. She tensed involuntarily, even though she knew that was the worst thing you could do in a collision.
She felt a jolt, and she stiffened, but it wasn’t a crash.
They didn’t crash at all. After several moments she opened her eyes. The ground was no longer rising up at them. Instead all she saw was blue sky.
It took her several moments to understand. They weren’t falling; they were flying. She wondered if perhaps they had died and she simply didn’t remember the crash. Perhaps they were heading to heaven together.
If they were heading for heaven, her neck wouldn’t hurt this much.
At least Suzy had stopped crying. Mary-Lou tried to turn to look at her daughter, but the effort caused a stabbing pain in her neck.
“Are you ok,” her husband asked.
“My neck hurts,” Mary-Lou said. “And I think I banged my knee.”
“Are you ok honey?”
Suzy was slow to respond. Mary-Lou twisted her entire body, ignoring the twinges of pain in her spine. She repeated her husband’s question. “Are you ok, honey?”
Her daughter was staring out the window. “I’m ok,” she said. She was silent for a long moment. “I thought you said Superman wasn’t real.”
“He’s not,” Mary-Lou said.
At this age Suzy sometimes had trouble distinguishing reality from fiction.
“Then who’s flying the car?”
************
It was always busy in the emergency room, but it was even worse at a time like this. People were coming in injured from flying glass and debris, and word was coming in that another tornado was heading for town.
Houses had already been destroyed and casualties were coming in.
Being a first responder in times like these was difficult. Luckily Thomas was an adrenaline junkie. He reveled in the chance to save lives and the thrill of speeding down the highway, racing against time. It made the job easier, enjoying that excitement. It helped make up a little for the times when there was nothing they could do.
In his time as a paramedic, Thomas had seen everything.
Everything but a man in a Superman outfit flying, carrying a car over his head in a pose that reminded Thomas a little of the cover of Action Comics number one.
The man set the car gently down and called out.
“These people need help. I think one of them has whiplash. She may have a concussion as well.”
He ripped the door open and moments later he was in the air again.
Thomas blinked as he saw what was on the horizon.
“Move, move, move!” he screamed, gesturing toward the other paramedics who were standing around staring.
Three tornadoes were visible and they were headed directly for town.
Against them stood a lone figure floating in the air.
