“You have no way of knowing whether Krypton even exists here,” Lois said, “And even if it did, signals would take years to come back and forth.”
She glanced at Clark, who looked stunned. “Chances are that if the planet exploded or was hit by a supernova or whatever on your world, it happened here too. The only difference would be whether a spacecraft made it out or not.”
“How do you know it didn’t?” Clark asked.
At this, both Lois and Mr. Smith turned to stare at Clark.
“What?”
“I’ve been in hiding all this time on my own world,” Clark said. “What makes you think there isn’t a version of me here?”
“Well…the whole Superman thing started here,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s fiction.”
“Maybe my counterpart landed earlier than I did,” Clark said. “Maybe he inspired the comic book guys to come up with the Superman idea.”
“He’d have to be more than a hundred years old by then,” Mr. Smith said. “But then…who knows how old you’ll eventually get to be?”
Lois touched his arm. “Clark…do you really think that any version of you could have seen what’s been going on in the world and not get involved?”
Clark suddenly seemed to deflate.
“I suspect that if you’d been around in World War II, things would have gone very differently,” Mr. White said. “Even if you had to make it all look like a coincidence.”
“I couldn’t have stood by once I found out about the Holocaust,” Clark said. “Or once I saw how many people were being killed.”
“That’s why you shouldn’t stand by now,” Mr. Smith said. “You should be proactive. Change the world.”
“You keep pressuring Clark to get in bed with business,” Lois said. “To do all these things with charity money. But I don’t see how the little bits of money he’d be able to raise would make all that much difference when we’ve already thrown trillions of dollars at the problem.”
“You talk about me spending eight billion dollars a year,” Clark said, his expression still distant. “But that would be a drop in the bucket compared to what the United States government could spend…or Japan or France or Britain for that matter.”
“You’re expecting too much of democracies,” Mr. Smith said. “Which tend to be notoriously short sighted.”
Lois shook her head. “That’s just an excuse. The governments could do something if they really wanted to.”
“How do you explain giving billions of dollars to some third world country when people in your own congressional district are homeless? How could you explain giving health care away to Africa when millions of Americans don’t have health care?”
“Maybe they should.” Lois said.
“And by the time the money for that goes through, there won’t be anything left for the kind of projects we’re talking about.”
“You said these things are in the self interest of the United States.”
“How many senators bother to look at what’s actually good for the nation? Most of them only worry about their own state and the rest of the country can go hang.”
“That’s cynical,” Clark said.
“Where do you think pork comes from? You get projects producing corn ethanol that take a gallon of petroleum to make a gallon of ethanol when you could use the same amount of petroleum to make five gallons of sugar ethanol.”
“The corn farmers like it,” Clark said.
“And they vote. South American sugar growers can’t vote, and so instead of an ethanol product that makes sense, we get something that’s popular. That’s what pork is all about…stealing money from the other forty nine states to give to your voters.”
“Ok,” Lois said. “But there are aid programs out there.”
“Aid programs with strings attached,” Mr. Smith said. “No government gives away money for free. There is always a price. If we give massive amounts of aid to an African nation, then we’re going to insist that American farmers grow the food. We’re going to insist on having a say in that country’s internal affairs.”
“And when we flood the market with American corn, the bottom drops out of the African corn market.”
“Which means African corn farmers can’t make a living growing corn…and so they don’t. That in turn means that they don’t have enough food and need more aid next year.”
“Then all Clark would be doing with this money is doing the same thing,” Lois said. “Tarnishing his reputation for nothing.”
Mr. Smith shook his head. “He’d have the chance to take the long view. Even charities tend to prefer short term solutions. You give a child a vaccine and he doesn’t get sick. You get instant gratification. Teaching new agriculture techniques and providing farm implements…the rewards of that sort of thing are too far away for most people.”
“The things you were talking about before were instant solutions,” Lois pointed out.
“Because they are the easiest things to sell. Long term change can take a lifetime of dedicated, thankless work, and it’s a tough sell sometimes.” Mr. White said. He shook his head and looked tired for a moment. “I’d be happy to talk all of this over with you in the future, but I’m going to be spending the day in hearings.”
“Hearings?”
“With the Appropriations committee. I don’t actually have any funding as of yet, and they have to decide just how much all of this is going to cost.”
He reached into his pocket and handed an envelope to Lois.
Glancing suspiciously at him, she used her butter knife to open the envelope. She glanced inside and grimaced. “A subpoena?”
“At the moment you are the world’s greatest Superman expert,” Mr. Smith said. “THE committee wants to hear from you.”
“Um, I’d have thought I was the world’s greatest Superman expert,” Clark said.
Mr. Smith looked embarrassed. “As far as the committee is concerned, letting you testify would be like letting a man with a submachine gun into the senate chambers. There’s no known way to disarm you, and they’d really prefer that you be out of hearing range when the hearings are going on.”
“Because they want me to be able to speak freely,” Lois said. It was a little insulting to Clark, but it was better than some of the treatment they’d had in the past.
Clark sighed, then started. His face settled into a grim expression. “I’ve got to go. There has been a major aftershock in China.”
“The new costumes are in the living room,” Mr. Smith said.
They barely felt a wind as he vanished from sight.
“He can hear all the way to China?” Mr. Smith asked, his expression startled.
“CNN is playing down the street,” Lois said.
She sighed and picked up a piece of bacon. “So what are they expecting me to wear to the hearings?”
If they’d left a single unwrinkled item in her closets at home she’d be surprised.
**************
Making copies of his keys had been nerve wracking. He’d kept expecting someone to come around the corner to arrest him, and he’d wondered if the keysmith had been looking at him strangely.
This was worse; the security passes would be checked soon; if they discovered them missing, it wouldn’t be long before the investigation began pointing in his direction.
Slipping them into his pocket, he stepped outside and hoped that the next shift was going to be sloppy. Otherwise he was risking more than his career.
They had his family.
Getting involved with them in the first place had been a mistake, but he’d been young and stupid. The world had seemed like a different place, more black and white without all the shades of gray he’d seen since moving here.
His only consolation was that this was all going to be over soon.
************
The aftershock wasn’t as bad as the news had predicted. The people were prepared this time, and had generally stayed safe. Those trapped under rubble hadn’t fared as well, and Clark wondered if he could have saved them if he’d simply skipped breakfast.
It was raining again, and this was becoming as much of a problem as the earthquakes.
“We must release the pressure, or the dam will burst.”
The Chinese engineer was gesturing and showing him a series of planned sluiceways to release the pressure. Looking at the waters built up behind the dam, Clark could see that they weren’t going to make it in time.
How much of the rain was an aftershock from the rifts that had brought him here?
He’d been wondering more and more just what sort of impact all of this was going to have on the world. Were the recent tornadoes and storms simply aftereffects of the phenomena that had brought him here, or were they signs that global warming was finally causing nature to strike back?
Was Mr. Smith right? If it really was global warming causing the problems, then he should be doing everything he could to help change it.
Mr. Smith hadn’t wanted to say it, but Clark knew that some of the strongest contributions he could make would be to allow scientists to study him. Over time they’d learn the secrets that allowed him to fly. Then they’d be able to launch their own satellites.
If they could figure out his energy source, the world would never need any other source of power.
Yet his abilities also had the potential of creating terrible weapons. His father had warned him against revealing himself throughout his childhood. The fear had been that he would be locked up in a government laboratory somewhere and would never get out.
He’d had nightmares of being dissected by people who didn’t see him as human.
What was right? Was selling out ultimately the thing that was going to do the most good for people? Or would he be better off maintaining his impartiality?
Confused, he allowed himself to focus on the man in front of him. If the water behind this dam wasn’t removed, a city of forty eight thousand people was going to be washed away.
“I’ll built canals here, here, here and here,” he said, pointing to the map. The engineer nodded emphatically.
The places he was going would create channels that would send water into uninhabited areas. It would take days for the Chinese army to get where he was going, but that was why he was here.
At least this was clear and simple.
************
The hearings were anything but clear and simple. All seventeen members of the United States Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security were in attendance; apparently the prospect of talking about Superman and the other recent problems was enough to catch the members’ interest.
Lois was already getting a headache. They were going over the same subjects over and over again, and she was beginning to feel irritated.
She blinked as she realized she was being questioned.
“My sister is one of the detainees,” Lois said, leaning forward into the microphone. “I’m willing to give her a place to live. Most of them aren’t so lucky.”
“The woman you are talking about isn’t actually your sister, is she?”
This had already been discussed on at least two occasions since Lois had entered the session. Although it had taken her time to believe the truth, at least she’d understood it almost right away. Lois suspected that some of these people still thought the Internet brought messages through tubes.
“She’s an analogue of my sister, genetically identical and in some ways closer than a twin.” Lois said. Irritably, she said, “I thought that had already been established.”
Susan leaned close to her. Covering the microphone with her hand, she said, “Don’t antagonize them. Do you really want to be charged with contempt of congress?”
“So why are you taking her in?”
“She’s the closest thing to a sister that I’m ever going to have,” Lois said. “I’m sure there are a few relatives out there who will feel the same way, but not all of them will have the resources to help.”
Another congressman leaned forward. This one seemed a little brighter than the other one. “We’ve shut off the power to that cyclotron thing…why do we need to bother with an agency to deal with one man, no matter how powerful? These people can be dealt with through Immigration and through FEMA, and he can be dealt with by the pentagon and Homeland defense…or maybe other agencies.”
Mr. Smith leaned forward. “We aren’t the only universe out there, and at least some of the others are near the same technological level of development as we are. It’s only a matter of time before they develop their own devices.”
“So it’s going to be a waiting game, and in the meantime taxpayer dollars are going to be hemorrhaging while we wait for something that might never happen.”
Mr. Smith had been right. Democracies were shortsighted.
Lois sighed. It looked like she was in for a long afternoon.
*************
“It’s going to take at least two weeks to warm everything back up again…and weeks after that if we want to repeat the experiment.” Pierre stood, staring up at the massive device above him. He’d been working on this project for years and it seemed like a terrible waste of time to stop now.
“We can’t continue if even part of what the Americans are claiming is true.” Lars shook his head. “And it’s going to be a while before we have enough information to know either way.”
Two thousand scientists working in a ring of tunnels twenty seven miles in diameter on a project costing ten billion American dollars and they were going to shut everything down.
“It’s junk science,” Pierre said. “This is all going to turn out to be a mistake…or some kind of political thing by the Americans.”
Of course, teams of American scientists were part of the project, but none of them were in the room. Pierre didn’t particularly like the American teams. They tended to be too loud and aggressive for his tastes, and he didn’t like their politics.
Plus, the blonde had snubbed him.
“What can we-”
The first sounds echoing from the distance sounded like firecrackers popping.
Pierre frowned. Nothing should be exploding, unless a seal had broken and super cooled parts had interacted with the warmer exterior.
Lars was a tall, dark haired Swede, and he stood staring off into the distance. A tall man, he often seemed to have trouble with the claustrophobic nature of the tunnels, sometimes bumping his head on the pipes overhead. At over six and a half feet and skinny, he could have been a basketball player in another life.
The popping sounds were coming closer.
Lars paled. “That’s gunfire.”
“What? No…why would anyone?”
Pierre gasped as Lars grabbed him with a surprisingly strong grip and pulled him down the hallway.
“We’ve got to hide,” Lars said.
Knowing it was probably useless at this depth; Pierre pulled out his cell phone and tried to dial out for help.
There was no signal, only dead air.
He began to run.
*************
“Do you realize how many jobs this scheme of Mr. White’s would cost? He’s talking about putting thousands of coal miners and truckers and power plant workers out of jobs!”
“The project would create thousands of jobs in the solar energy sector,” Mr. White said.
”Which is undoubtedly why my esteemed colleague sponsored this,” the senator said. “This is a project that would steal thousands of jobs from my state and give them to his state.”
“The coal industry isn’t going to be hurting for a long time,” Mr. White said. “My project would just slow the growth a little.”
“It would divert eighty billion dollars a year away from coal toward solar,” the speaker said. “That’s a lot of money taken from average working class Americans to benefit a few fat cat investors.”
Lois stared at the speaker, who was a heavyset man with small, squinty eyes. He reminded her a little of a pet pig a friend in college had owned. The pig had been bad tempered and stupid, a poor example of its breed.
“Some of us don’t think that’s such a bad thing, Robert,” another speaker said, “And we’re getting off the subject again. Mr. White’s suggestions are outside the purview of his office.”
“I still don’t understand why we have to have a separate office for this!” Another congressman said. “I don’t appreciate having the vote on this held while most of us were out of town.”
Lois should have known all of their names by now, but her head was swimming and she desperately needed a break.
Before the first senator could speak again, several doors opened at once, and six men in black suits stepped into the room.
One of them approached the leader of the senate and whispered into his ear.
“We’re adjourning this until next week,” the man said hastily. He leaned over and whispered to the two people beside him, who paled.
Lois was startled when she felt someone’s hand on her shoulder.
“Miss Lane? I need you to come with us.”
“What’s going on?” Lois asked.
The man glanced at Susan and said, “That’s classified.”
“My client…” Susan began.
“Is needed in the situation room,” the man said quietly. “You aren’t invited.”
To her side, Lois saw that Dr. Ledderman was getting the same treatment. She nodded shortly at Susan then stood up. As soon as they were out of earshot of the others, the man beside her leaned forward and said, “We’ve lost contact with CERN.”
CERN was the European agency that oversaw the large Hadron collider.
“We’ve attempted to contact Mr. Kent through the Chinese, but they say he’s out of contact, digging water sluices in the mountains.”
Dr. Ledderman had caught up with them by this point, and he paled. “The previous tests only lasted for less than a minute and a half. If they get that thing up and running…”
Lois stared at him for a moment. If they left the power on at the collider, then the effects would likely expand and grow far beyond anything they’d seen so far.
“Have they started the evacuation of Denver?” Lois asked.
At the look on the guard’s face, she picked up her pace until they were all almost running.
She’d spent too long just reporting on things other people did. It was time for her to step up. If this was the beginning of the end of the world, then she had to do everything she could to help.
