For a moment they both froze, staring at each other. It was like looking into a mirror, but oddly off balance. It was as though the face he’d looked at all his life was reversed, left to right, right to left.
The other man didn’t stop blowing, however, and a moment later Clark felt the slight thud as the plane hit the ground.
A moment later the man was in the air and now Clark could see that his outfit was slightly different than the one Clark was wearing. It was a darker, richer blue and it was made all in one piece.
The man rose until he was level with both rifts and then he began to spin faster and faster. He began moving so quickly that he looked like a blur even to Clark’s eyes, although Clark could squint and make him out if he wanted.
The flames from both side of the rift began to rise, drawn upward by wind he was generating.
Clark stared upward at him, his jaw dropping. For the first time he understood how some of the people who had been staring at him felt.
The other man would be able to maintain that spin much more easily than he would be able to continue blowing. Clark wasn’t sure that what he was watching was even possible given the rules of physics as he understood them.
Of course, nothing Clark himself did was explainable by physics either.
He stared upward, his one worry that if too much of the flame was drawn upward that the hydrogen sulfide would be doused and then distributed over an even wider area.
Almost as though reading his mind, the man visibly slowed, and the flames stopped flickering and brightened once more.
He heard the sound of the aircraft emergency door opening, and the sound of the emergency slide being inflated and deployed. Glancing to make sure that the people in the News van were safe, he gently dropped toward the plane.
Men and women were deploying from the plane quickly and efficiently. Most wore business suits or expensive outfits. Almost everyone was in their forties or older.
As Clark landed gently on the parking lot, he felt his knees buckle a little as he saw the figure standing in the doorway to the aircraft.
Almost involuntarily he moved forward in time to catch her as she reached the end of the slide.
“Lois?” he asked.
The woman in his arms was visibly older than his Lois. She was in her forties and she’d grown if anything even more beautiful.
She glanced down at his outfit and murmured, “What happened to your suit?”
“Clark?”
The voice in his headset was that of his own Lois.
“Lois, I...um...” he said. He stepped quickly back from the older Lois.
“There are two of you,” the voice in his earpiece said. “Two of me, too.”
He glanced up sharply. “How do you know?”
“We’ve been watching everything,” she said. “The whole country has.”
It was then that he noticed the reporter and her camera crew rushing across the parking lot. He smiled weakly into the camera.
***********
The Lois Lane on the screen was larger than life. She was older, but there was a certain elegance about her that Lois hadn’t realized she was missing until this very moment.
She was the first person Lois had ever hated on sight.
This Lois didn’t speak like a reporter. Instead she spoke like a politician, her words falling into a smooth, almost hypnotic cadence.
“My fellow passengers and I are refugees from a dying world,” she was saying. “A collection of the greatest minds our world had to offer.”
“It’s too good to be true,” one of the men beside her murmured, glancing at Lois.
For once Lois was inclined to agree with him. How much that was influenced by the sight of the older woman in Clark’s arms she wasn’t sure.
The cameraman was undoubtedly shooting from one knee, filming up so as to get the first onscreen interview with passengers from another world and to get a view of the action above.
Lois was gratified to see that her Clark had joined in; she didn’t want this Lois Lane to think her Superman was somehow superior to hers.
It was surprising how possessive she felt toward him. Usually she just felt this about awards and stories and family and…
She felt this way about things and people that were important to her.
***********
It was harder than it looked, and as the last of the rift faded, Clark stopped spinning. The world seemed to spin around him and he felt dizzy, but the man floating across from him seemed unaffected.
Unlike this version of Lois, this Clark didn’t look any older than Clark himself did. Yet there was something about the way he carried himself, a certain confidence that was a little intimidating.
“Um,” he said. “Hello?”
The other Clark Kent was staring at the place where the rift had once been, and there was a wistful look on his face. He was silent for a long moment and then he said, “Is this happening everywhere?”
“It’s heading west,” Clark acknowledged.
“Then we have to stop it.” The other man’s face hardened. “Nobody else is going to die today.”
Lois’s voice came through his earpiece. “What’s he saying?”
The cameras below were pointed up at the two of them now, their first meeting being witnessed by the entire world.
“He wants to help,” Clark said into the mouthpiece. Looking up he said, “I’m in contact with…”
“I’m familiar with the setup,” the other man said. He gestured toward the earpiece around his own ear. This one seemed more sophisticated that Clark’s and it didn’t seem to have any sort of main unit. “Give me the frequency and we can get to work.”
Stung, Clark complied.
***********
Flying over the endless expanse of whiteness, Clark was startled to see a rift even larger than the ones over Denver. It was fifty feet in the air, and even as night was falling it created a waterfall with hundreds of thousands of gallons of water spilling onto the whiteness of the salt below.
Clark began to slow, but he heard the other Clark say, “Leave it. We don’t have time.”
Speeding up to follow him, Clark said, “But it’s going to leave a big mess.”
“We worry about people first,” the other Clark said. “The government can keep an eye on it, and if the lake gets too large, we can always come back.”
Clark wanted to argue, but by this time they were already over an area of burning trees. He could see fire fighters struggling to get their equipment set up.
The other Clark blew, extinguishing the fire and leaving a small sheen of permafrost. They were gone before the fire fighters could even turn around.
“And the environment?” he asked.
“It’s a salt flat. Nothing lives there.”
The other man didn’t even look at him. He simply scanned the horizon before flashing off again.
Clark followed. He was beginning to get a little irritated. Somehow the other man had taken charge, and this wasn’t even his world!
It wasn’t Clark’s either, really, but the other man had no way of knowing that.
Catching up to the other Clark, he was surprised to see the man simply floating in mid air, motionless.
Glancing down, he felt his own jaw drop slightly.
Ordinarily, I-10 was one of the busiest freeways leading in to Los Angeles. Today, however, residents had apparently gotten the message because traffic was very light. However, traffic was backing up.
The rift was wide, and the herd of buffalo moving through the rift was growing even wider. They were scattering as they moved out onto the unfamiliar feel of the pavement and some of them were charging at cars for short periods before retreating back to the safety of the ever growing herd.
“Does this world have buffalo?” the other Clark asked suddenly.
“I think so,” Clark said. “I really don’t know.”
He’d been busy with other things.
The other Clark was looking at him suddenly, with narrowed eyes. Clark shrugged sheepishly.
**********
Although the news media was hampered like anyone else by the lack of cell phone reception, word did get around. The west coast rifts tended to be huge and there weren’t the sort of micro-rifts that had made east coast travel so difficult.
The two Supermen were on every channel, and it seemed like they were everywhere. Whether it was herding buffalo into an abandoned culvert, putting even more of the fires that seemed to be springing up here and there, or entering rifts where bystanders told of carloads of people vanishing, they seemed to be on every street corner, and on every street.
Lois’s throat was raw by now, from murmuring what information they actually were able to gather from the overstressed communications system. More often the two of them seemed to do it on their own.
Members of local agencies in Denver were already collecting the newest planeload of passengers.
Suddenly though, it was over, at least as far as mainland America was concerned.
*************
As the other Clark shook the hand of the Chinese Premiere, Clark wondered how easy it had all seemed. The other man never said more than he had to, but there was something about the way he spoke that made people listen. He spoke with such assurance that it was almost impossible not to do what he said, and yet somehow he managed to do so without sounding threatening or arrogant.
With the organization of the People’s Liberation Army, China would be as safe as it possibly could be given the circumstances.
Japan had already been contacted by the American government and was prepared as well.
The news from back home was encouraging. The rifts had stopped growing and they had continued to disperse, growing farther and farther apart even as there were fewer of them.
As they rose into the sky heading east, Clark wondered if he was even needed at all. The other man fit seamlessly into the role of Superman as though he’d been born to it. Next to the other man Clark felt hopelessly incompetent and clumsy.
It was a little depressing how easy the other man made it all look. Clark had learned more in the first few minutes of clearing ships out of the path of danger than he’d learned since putting on the suit.
The other Clark was polished, somehow, as though he’d done all of this a thousand times before. Yet he didn’t look any older than Clark himself did.
The thought that this man had chosen to be a hero instead of being a coward and hiding bothered Clark. Was this who he might have become if he’d had a modicum of courage?
The fact that the other man barely spoke to him at all made Clark wonder if he’d already been judged and found somehow wanting. This man was in the unique position of being able to know exactly how Clark felt, and yet somehow the other Clark could barely look at him.
As they arrived over the skies of Hawaii, they saw that the boats were all being beached and people were heading for their homes as instructed. The sun was setting again; this was going to be their sixth sunset of the day. They’d outraced the sun over and over.
Clark was startled to see the other Clark pull to a stop over Pearl Harbor. The other man had been a whirlwind, and this was the first time he’d simply stopped moving.
As Clark floated around to face the other man, he realized that the other man had his eyes closed.
“It’s good to hear it again,” the other man said. It was the first time he’d spoken to Clark in hours, and Clark was a little startled.
“What?”
“Life.” The other man didn’t open his eyes. “I’d almost forgotten how good it sounds.”
To Clark’s ears, Honolulu and the other cities sounded quieter than usual. The sounds of daily life were muted as people vacated the streets and sat in their homes. The usual sounds of people screaming at each other, arguing, going about the business of daily life were missing.
“It’s a little quiet,” Clark said.
“It’s been a while since I heard it at all,” the other man said. “Every city has its own sound.”
“I know,” Clark said.
Opening his eyes, the other Clark looked at him. “I guess you would.”
They stared at each other wordlessly for several seconds.
“It’s a little weird,” Clark said. “Like having a brother who remembers the secret crush you had on your teacher Ms. Jamison in the third grade.”
“You had her too?” The other Clark smiled slightly, although it didn’t reach his eyes. He was silent for a long moment then said, “I don’t know what to say to you.”
“I’m doing the best I can,” Clark said defensively. “I’m new at this.”
It irritated him a little that he’d been here first and the other man had just taken charge the way he had. This world could have been completely different from the world he’d known, and yet he’d started giving orders almost as soon as he’d come through the rift.
He didn’t have any room to judge Clark.
The other Clark ignored him, seemingly lost in his own thoughts. “I’m starting to think I’m a bad omen. I skipped out on two dying worlds and here I am in a third. I should be better at this.”
It was a thought that had passed through Clark’s mind several times, especially since he’d put the costume on for the first time.
“I’d like to thank you.”
“For what?” Clark asked.
“This isn’t my world,” the other Clark said, “but after everything that’s happened…I have to keep busy. If I think too long about what I’ve lost…”
“There’s a lot to do here,” Clark said. “Earthquakes in China, tornadoes, floods.”
“Business as usual, then,” the other man said. He sighed. “I’ve spent the last fifteen years dealing with exactly that sort of thing, and what have I accomplished really? Saved two hundred lives out of eight billion?”
Clark frowned. Fifteen years? At the age of eleven he hadn’t had the power to save his parents from a burning car. He certainly hadn’t had the power to deal with earthquakes and other natural disasters.
“How old are you?” he blurted.
“Forty one,” the other Clark said.
Clark stared. As far as he could see his other self hadn’t aged a day in fifteen years.
*********
Aging wasn’t something Clark had ever thought about. The thought that he would remain young long after Lois was something that left him feeling a little numb.
Worse, once the other man started talking it was like the floodgates had opened. Clark wasn’t sure why he was suddenly so anxious to talk, although as a teenager he’d often dreamed about having a brother. The thought of having someone who could understand exactly what he’d been going through had been a dream he’d had for a long time.
What this Clark was saying however wasn’t something Clark wanted to hear.
“Weather patterns all over the world were getting worse and worse,” the other Clark said. “We’d started environmental controls, but China and India kept spewing increasing amounts of pollution into the air, and the average temperature worldwide kept rising.”
“You forget how fragile civilization is, how interconnected. There came a point where there were too many storms for me to handle. Hurricanes and tornadoes, tsunamis…they started appearing in unusual parts of the year, and soon they were appearing all year long.”
“Things didn’t go well, I gather,” Clark said. He’d noticed that the weather on this world seemed more volatile than the weather in his own. He’d assumed it was a side effect of the rifts, but…
“The infrastructures started to collapse, first in the third world and then it started to spread. The economy collapsed and people started to riot. There were wars and new diseases. People went hungry…and people started dying.”
“I did what I could, but it was never enough. There were always more people slipping away. If it hadn’t been for Lois, I don’t know what I’d have done. Imagine seeing thousands of people dying every day and knowing there wasn’t anything you could do.”
The other Clark’s jaw twitched and he was silent for a long moment.
“I thought we could turn it all around. I still think we could have, but the world kept getting hotter and hotter and the snow kept melting. That was the beginning of the end.”
“The peat bogs in Siberia were releasing billions of tons of methane into the atmosphere, methane that was twenty times as effective as carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Scientists had predictions and models for just how fast things would turn bad, but they didn’t take into account what was happening. It was worse than their most pessimistic predictions.”
“There were four hundred billion tons of methane hydrate in the permafrost…and all it took was a release of one half of one percent of that to double the speed of global warming. The hotter it got, the more methane was released. Eventually the methane pockets in the ocean started to thaw as the water got warmer. There were fourteen thousand billion tons in the oceans.”
The other Clark grimaced.
“The first firestorm burned the city of Irkutsk to the ground.” The other Clark paused and took a deep breath. “I’d thought I’d dealt with every possible disaster, but this killed half the population and left a quarter with horrible burns. A quarter of a million people…”
The smell of burning flesh from one amputated leg haunted Clark. He couldn’t imagine what an entire city must have been like.
“Tensions between Russia and India were already high because of…well, it doesn’t matter now. They went to war, and while I was dealing with that, firestorms began appearing in other parts of the world…Jakarta, North Korea, Brussels. Millions of people were being killed and there wasn’t any way to predict where it was going to happen next. People started to panic and governments fell.”
“When people get desperate, they do stupid things. They started going to war over natural resources. A year ago, a billion people were dead. Six months ago, half the world’s population was gone. Plague and Famines, War and Death…the world didn’t end with a whimper.”
************
The two Clarks had obviously forgotten that their microphones were still on; Lois sat at the table staring at the other men and women around her. Generals and analysts, bureaucrats and professional soldiers, all of them looked stunned.
The crowd had thinned considerably since the rifts had left the mainland.
Before anyone could say anything, Lois flipped the switch, shutting off the connection. The new Clark sounded as though he was ashamed and she didn’t want him to know that they’d been listening in. Some things should be private.
It was a sobering realization for a reporter. She hadn’t felt this way a week ago.
“We’ve got time that they didn’t have,” Lois said. She cleared her throat. “And we have the value of hindsight. Nothing is set in stone.”
“What if they need to call back?” the analyst beside her protested.
“The new Superman has our number. They’ll call if they need us.”
