Chapter Eleven
"It's really going now," said Emma excitedly, looking out through the hole at the tree. The roar and crackle that they could all hear confirmed her words. "It's almost up to the top of the tree."
"Gracie, I'm so *proud* of you!" Karen said. "Oh, I wish I could see it!" she added a little wistfully.
"I'm so proud of me too," said Gracie, her image in the mirror sporting a smile which lighted up her whole face.
"Ya want to come back here and look?" asked Emma. "I could help you fly over the seat..."
"I wish I could, but my feet and ankles are buried in rocks. And there's not enough room for me to bend down to move them."
"I could do it for you," Emma said. Karen suspected that she might even be feeling a little jealous, having been scooped by her little sister in the heat-vision department. Though the offer had merit.
"Well, I *would* appreciate it. My feet have gone to sleep, and my ankles are starting to hurt a lot..."
"Just a minute..." said Emma. There was a blur, and she was hovering head-downward beside Karen's knees, the soup pot in one hand.
"Cool!" said Gracie.
"Uh -- wait!! This is really important," Karen cautioned. "Whatever we do, we mustn't disturb the pile of rocks on your mom's lap. If we do, the whole pile could shift, and bring in an avalanche that could bury her even more!"
Emma glanced sideways at her mother's still form. "I'm really scared for her, Karen."
Karen reached around her and felt Lois's pulse. She was shocked at how weak it was growing. "I know, honey. Me too. Let's just get this done, and I can take a closer look at her."
Emma's gloved hand seemed to blur; there was a staccato clanging in the pot, and in under a second it was full.
"Do you want to go back there, and I can hand it back to you?" asked Karen.
"Nah. Now that you showed me how, I can just *fly* it back." And she was gone. Karen heard the pot's contents being dumped into a corner behind the rear seat. "Gracie, you need to stay down, out of the way, so I don't hit you."
"But I wanna watch!"
"It'll only take a minute. Then you can watch, okay?" True to her word, Emma had both of Karen's lower legs freed in short order.
Karen carefully moved her ankles, wriggled her toes and flexed her knees. What had been numbness was quickly turning into the most painful bout of pins-and-needles she had ever experienced, as the circulation to her lower legs and feet was restored. Thankfully, nothing seemed to be broken. There were a couple of scrapes where she was bleeding slightly, but nothing seemed to need immediate attention.
As Emma dumped the last pot load of dirt and rocks, the interior of the car again became quiet. Then there was a faint sound, barely audible above the muted crackle and hiss from the burning tree outside. As they all listened, it resolved itself into the repeated ringing of a phone.
"That's Mama's cell phone!" said Emma, from her seat behind her mother.
Karen looked hastily around, but saw no sign of Lois's purse. "Where is it? Can you see it?"
There was an extended silence. After a moment, Karen turned in her seat, to see Emma staring in fascination at the back of her mother's seat. She must be looking *through* the seat, at her mother's...
'Stupid, *stupid*!' thought Karen as she realized the direction of Emma's gaze. How could she, a trained nurse, have made such a blunder? "Emma! Emma, *look* at me!"
Emma's eyes slowly dragged themselves away from the back of the seat. They were wide in her pale face as she looked over at Karen. "Karen, I saw..."
"I *know* what you saw, Emma. But don't say it, okay?"
"But..."
"It's something that not everyone needs to know."
Emma's eyes started to slide toward her little sister, then jerked back to lock with Karen's. "All right."
The ringing of the phone stopped.
"We need to find that. But just be careful what you look for, okay?"
Emma gulped, and then nodded. After a moment of gazing toward her mother's seat, she said, "It's down on the floor by the door. But the door's all bashed in..."
"I know. I thought it would be. Well, the phone's where we can't possibly get at it, not without bringing the whole rockslide in through that window. We'll just have to trust in our beacon."
Gracie, curiosity in her voice, asked, "Whatcha talkin' about?"
"Nothing," said Karen quickly, hoping to head off the emotional disaster which she foresaw, should Gracie's gaze seek out what Emma's had seen. "Gracie, can you see the sky?"
"Yeah, but it's all dark. 'Cept where the fire's shining on the clouds."
"I want you to sit over on this side of the car, behind me, and watch the sky. If your daddy comes, we need to know right away, so we can call to him. Can you do that?"
"Awright." Gracie settled into her new assignment.
"Emma? I need you to hand me the leather jacket. I'm going to need to check your mom, and I don't want to kneel right on these sharp rocks on the seat." Emma handed up the jacket, which Karen doubled up and spread out over the rubble on the seat as best she could.
She knelt on the jacket, the rocks painfully gouging her knees, and reached toward Lois's wrist. She felt a trembling hand on her arm. She turned toward Emma, to see her lip quivering in her white face. "It's stopped. Karen, it's stopped."
"*What*?" Karen grabbed wildly for Lois's wrist, and felt frantically for a pulse. She couldn't find it; Emma was right, the heart had stopped. Immediately she was full on her knees, heedless of the pain. She leaned forward, bracing herself against the partially-exposed steering wheel, and began to administer CPR.
The rock pile began to shift.
"Emma!" she yelled. "Stop the rocks!"
"How?! I don't..."
"I don't *know*! Put your hands against the window and try to *fly* them back!"
The shifting stopped. Immediately, Karen continued with the CPR as best she could. She continued this for eight or ten minutes, until she realized that she was virtually exhausted from the position which she was in. She sat up and looked at Emma, who was hovering above the rear seat, perspiration sheening her small face, and pressing her splayed fingers against the rubble above the lip of the window.
"Emma... Emma, honey...stop."
"No!" said Emma through clenched teeth. "I *won't* let it bury her..."
"Honey, there's nothing more we can do. There's nothing more *I* can do. Unless you can help me over the seat; maybe I can try this from behind..." Karen suddenly found herself virtually weightless. Emma had one hand against the rubble at the window, and another on Karen's wrist. Stunned, she found herself floating over the high seatback, her foot grazing something soft. She looked down, to see Gracie turned to face the far door, hands pressed tightly over her ears. '*I can't do this*,' she thought as she gazed at the pitiful scene around her.
As she settled into the seat, and Emma released her grasp, she felt gravity return. She reached up in turn to grasp Emma's shoulder. "Honey, try easing back. Maybe the slide has stabilized."
"No." There was determination in Emma's voice.
"You have super-speed, right? You can be right back on the job if the rocks move again."
Emma didn't move for a moment; then she gradually removed her hands from the pile. It remained still. Then Emma was collapsed against her, shaking.
Karen carefully disentangled herself from the girl and leaned forward, ready to reach forward over the seat so she could apply pressure to Lois's chest from her position behind her.
And the world fell apart. With a shrieking of rock against metal, the rockslide over and around them began to move again. She was barely aware of Emma zipping back to her position at the driver's window as Gracie screamed and dived toward her, throwing her arms around Karen's neck. After about ten seconds the rumbling ceased, and silence returned. She looked up, to see Emma carefully removing her hands from the window. Nothing further happened.
Emma dropped back into the seat beside them, and Karen could feel her quiet sobs against her side. After a few moments, she looked around. The dust was settling, and the map light -- was it getting dimmer? -- showed much the same scene as before.
But the light from the burning tree, which she had noticed before against the rear seatback, was missing. The muted roar and crackle of the fire were gone. Their air hole -- their lifeline -- was plugged as though it had never been. She silently gathered both sobbing children into her arms, and sat quietly. Hopelessly.
* * *
Chapter Twelve
Superman touched down on the graveled rooftop of the Daily Planet building, allowing Walter to step away before spinning into his alter ego. They hurried to the door to the stairwell, then swiftly descended floor after floor toward the newsroom.
"What do you hope to find?" asked Walter.
"I don't know; I'm just hoping Lois left a note or something before they left."
As they stepped out of the stairway door, the elevator *ding*ed and the door slid open to reveal Jimmy Olsen. "CK, Walter! What're you guys doing here? I thought you'd be long gone by now, on your way up to fun times in the mountains."
"Well, Jimbo, it seems that half of our party is missing. Have you seen Lois?"
"Or Karen?" added Walter hopefully.
Jimmy at once picked up the concern in their voices. "No, I thought they left with you. I heard Lois say that they were stopping by to pick up the kids, and then they'd be on their way outa town! Have you tried phoning them?"
"We tried from the cabin, but we were out of range."
Clark walked over and scanned his and Lois's desks to see if a note had been left, as Walter grabbed the handset of a phone on the nearest desk and quickly dialed a well-known number. He waited impatiently. Clark surreptitiosly listened for the ringing of Lois's distant cell phone, but heard nothing. Finally Walter hung up the telephone. He shook his head. "I guess they must be out of range, or else Lois's battery is dead."
"You got the old 'Subscriber is not reachable' message, huh?"
"No," said Walter, "it just rang and rang. No answer."
Jimmy looked puzzled. "But that's not how cell systems work nowadays. If the system can't locate the phone, it tells you so..."
Clark was staring hard at the photographer. "You mean that the phone is somewhere nearby, but no one's answering?"
"Well, not necessarily nearby, but yeah; it's in the network."
Clark was thinking furiously. "Jimmy, is there any way to triangulate a phone's location?"
"Ya mean like they used to do in war movies, where directional antennas in two different locations each turn to point toward a transmitter somewhere? Then they each draw a straight line on a map, and pinpoint the transmitter by where the lines cross?"
"Yeah, I guess that's what I mean."
"You can't do that with Cell phone station antennas, 'cause they don't rotate." Disappointment showed on Clark's and Walter's faces. "You'd need to use a different system, called 'echo-location.'"
"Does it exist, for cell phones?"
"Well, they don't advertise the fact; but yeah, a couple of years ago, the government authorized that feature. Nowadays the feds, or whoever, can locate a phone really quick, by electronic echo-location -- provided that the phone is within range of three or more transmitting stations."
"What if it's not?" Walter asked.
"You mean, like only one station, for example?" Walter nodded. Jimmy beckoned them to follow him to his desk. "You can still get some location information, just not the exact position." He switched on his computer.
"See," he went on as his monitor warmed up, "two or more ground stations try to be in constant contact with a cell-phone unit so that, if the signal received by one station gets too weak..."
"...it can hand off the call to the other station. I've heard about that."
"Yeah, but there's more to the story. A station can send out a locator signal to a phone. That signal travels outward in all directions at the speed of light, until it reaches the phone. The phone immediately sends out a response signal -- like an echo -- which travels back and gets picked up by the station. Since the signals travel at the speed of light, just multiply that by the time it takes for the round trip, and..."
"...and you have the distance from the station to the phone," finished Clark.
"Well, almost; you have to divide it by two to get the one-way distance. Now," he went on, grabbing a piece of paper and beginning to draw, "it knows the distance to the phone, but not the direction." He drew a dot on the page, which he labeled 'S1,' and then drew a large circle around it. "It only knows that the phone must be somewhere on this circle.
"Then," he went on, "the second station does the same thing." He drew another dot, labeled 'S2,' and drew a different-sized circle around that dot. The two circles crossed one another in two places. "The system now knows that the phone has to be either here, or here." He indicated the two intersections. "If we have three stations, the system can narrow it down to just one of the intersections."
"Jimmy," Clark said, his gaze intent on his young friend, "you're the world's foremost hacker..."
"'Researcher,' CK, 'researcher.' Ya gotta remember that, so you don't get me into trouble!" Jimmy grinned.
Clark returned the look with a slight smile. "Okay, 'researcher' then. Is there any way...that is, could you..."
"Consider it done, my man!" He dropped into his chair, and his fingers were quickly flying over the keys. Shortly, a window popped up on the screen showing a map, with a large dot in the lower-right corner, a complicated number displayed beside it. Near the top and left sides of the map, an arc of red was displayed, as though it were part of a circle having the dot as its center.
"That's interesting. They're only within range of one station. This mostly covers the mountains north and west of Metropolis."
"Why doesn't it go all the way around the station?" asked Walter.
"Ever notice the tower for a cell-phone ground station? It's got three banks of antennas on it, each pointing in a different direction around the compass. The system can tell, by the relative strengths of the signal received by each antenna bank, roughly which direction the signal's coming from."
"That's still a pretty big area to cover," said Clark, pointing to the space between the circle arc and the ground station. "It looks like that circle has a radius of at least thirty miles!"
"Thirty-two point six miles, to be exact. But, CK, they're not *within* the circle. They're *on* it."
"You mean they're somewhere along this red line?"
"Yep, have to be!" Jimmy affirmed. He hit a key. "The map's printing out now. I sure hope you can track 'em down."
"We'll get Superman to help us!" Clark said as he grabbed the map off the printer. He and Walter ran for the stairs, leaving an open-mouthed James Olsen staring after them. Once the stairway door had closed, Clark grabbed Walter around the waist and headed up the stairs at super-speed.
They reached the roof, and Clark set Walter down in order to spin back into the Suit. As he reached for Walter again, he froze.
"What's wrong?"
Superman slowly turned to Walter, a look as of intense pain on his face. "It's gone. It just...it just faded out."
"What did?" Walter' confusion was evident.
"There's this...this *connection* between Lois and me. We've always had it; and I can feel it, no matter where she is. It's gone."
* * *
