Lois ran down the stairs at Richard’s shout, skidding to a halt at the wide-eyed look of near panic on his face as he leaned over Jason lying on the sofa.
“He’s burning up,” Richard told her as she hurried to her son’s side. She could hear the tension in his voice. She felt Jason’s forehead, then put her hand down his shirt to feel his chest. The boy’s temperature was well above normal. He started shivering at her touch, his breath catching in his throat.
“Lois, Jason and Clark both need to be in the hospital,” Richard told her. “I don’t see any choice here.” She could see the earnest concern in his eyes.
“Lois, maybe Richard’s right. Maybe you should get Jason to the hospital,” Perry said. Lois looked over to see him coming down the stairs. “They might be able to help Jason.”
“And what about Clark?” Alice asked. She’d been standing quietly in the kitchen doorway, watching.
Lois held her breath, waiting for Perry’s answer.
Does he know? “Like I told Richard upstairs. I seriously doubt there’s a damn thing they can do for him.”
“Perry, that doesn’t make any sense at all,” Alice told him. “Of course they can help.”
Richard straightened up and Lois saw a flicker of comprehension cross his face. “No Aunt Alice, I think Uncle Perry and Lois may be right. All they’d be able to do it monitor him and hope he recovers on his own. Isn’t that right?”
Lois found herself nodding.
“It makes sense now,” Richard said softly. Lois assumed he was really talking to himself. “The partner you never talked about. The anger, then running off with him, everything.” He looked down at her, still kneeling beside Jason. “You weren’t on any INS story.” It was a statement. “But I’m sure it would make interesting telling sometime.”
“Richard…” Lois began.
“No, please,” he said, cutting her off. “Let’s get Jason to the ER. A fever that high can’t be good for him.”
Esperanza began to wail and Jason woke up enough to cover his ears, scrunching up his eyes as if in pain. Lois reached over to check the baby and then pulled her hand back. The baby’s temperature was at least as high as Jason’s. Her breath caught in horror as she looked back at Richard and Perry. “What ever it is, she has it too.”
* * *
Richard drove Lois’s car to the hospital. Jason was buckled into his booster seat with a blanket wrapped around him. Esperanza was in her car seat next to him. Lois was seated next to Richard in the front passenger seat where she could at least keep an eye on Jason. The boy had started shivering when they got him into the car. The baby simply wailed in inchoate misery.
“They’re going to want to know where they’ve been, what they may have been exposed to,” Richard told her. His mind was still reeling from what he’d figured out and what Perry and Lois had confirmed with brief nods.
Clark Kent, the nerdy reporter from Kansas, was Superman.“Clark and I were in upper Alaska, then we were in Metropolis,” Lois told him.
“You told me you were out of cell phone range,” he reminded her, trying to keep the hurt out of his voice.
She lied to me again.“Richard, in the Metropolis we were in, the Wanamaker building was still standing and Lex Luthor had been dead for ten years.”
“You’re joking, right?” He glanced at her and saw the grim seriousness in her face.
She’s not joking.“I wish I was,” Lois told him. “Something happened when we were coming back to Metropolis. A storm, something… We wound up someplace where Lois Lane, their Lois Lane, was pregnant with her fourth child, Clark Kent was editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet, and Richard White was married to Penny Landris and was considered one of the hottest reporters in Metropolis. It was an interesting visit. Our counterparts weren’t very impressed with us.”
“That I find hard to believe,” Richard commented. The traffic wasn't very heavy and they were making good time. Jason had finally stopped shivering and was watching Richard and Lois with worried eyes.
“Mommy, I don’t feel so good,” he complained.
“Do you feel like you’re going to throw up?” Lois asked him. He shook his head and grimaced in pain.
“My throat hurts and I’m real cold and Baby Esperanza is really noisy and my head hurts,” he said.
“We’re almost at the hospital, kiddo,” Richard assured him. “They’ll figure out what’s wrong and get you all fixed up.”
“Are they gonna help Mister Clark, too?” Jason asked. There was a plaintive note in his young voice.
“Uncle Perry and Aunt Alice are helping Clark,” Lois told Jason. “So I’m sure he’ll be okay.” Richard noted that she didn’t sound very convincing.
* * *
The light hurt his eyes through his eyelids and everything seemed horribly, impossibly loud. Even the gears of the bedside clock sounded like grating heavy machinery. His skin hurt, the sheets rubbing like sandpaper. He tried to keep from moving, but even breathing brought his skin against the cotton weave of the bedding.
One part of his mind was dispassionately observing his symptoms. Fever, joint pain, sore throat, abdominal pain, headache, sensitivity to touch. The wound on his back hurt like hell, a sharp, digging pain. Of course the operative word in the entire list was ‘pain.’
This is what being sick is like. I don’t like it. It hurts almost as bad as Luthor’s beating only that didn’t last as long. Kryptonite hurts this bad, but there wasn't any kryptonite at the fire. Didn’t I hear that Jason and the baby had it too…?The damp cloth felt cool on his forehead. And the weight and warmth of the blankets was comforting, despite the sandpaper feel of the sheets. He tried to protest when he felt a hand against the back of his neck, lifting his head. A voice cajoled him to swallow bitter tasting pills followed by sips of lemon-lime soda mixed with water. He preferred ginger ale – it tasted less artificial – but they didn’t know that.
After a while the pain lessened slightly and the clock stopped making quite so much noise. Finally he was able to fall asleep.
* * *
“Perry, please explain what’s going on here,” Alice White demanded, fists on her hips as she watched her husband of nearly forty years. “Why are you still insisting he can’t go to the hospital?”
“Alice, aside from the fact that I know he’d refuse to go,” Perry said. “There’s little or nothing they can do for him. From what I know about him, he’ll either recover completely on his own in a day or so, or he’ll be dead. And if he dies, I seriously doubt that Jason or the baby will survive either, ‘cause if it’s nasty enough to kill him, it’ll be more than enough to kill them.”
--Another Universe (Earth II)—“How was your day?” Lois Lane-Kent asked her husband as he came through the garage door with three of their four children in tow. The kids stayed in the family room as their father continued on into the kitchen.
“Not bad for being gone four days, unexpectedly,” Clark replied. “Margot and Eduardo kept things together without too much trouble. And the city was pretty quiet too. That’s always nice.” He gave her a kiss, then reached over to the baby carrier on the counter and tickled Baby Martha’s foot. “So, how was your day?”
Lois managed a chuckle. “Not bad for almost no sleep the past four days.”
“You know I would take the three AM feeding if I could,” Clark responded. “But since I can’t…” He peered into his wife’s face. “There’s something else.”
She nodded. “I’ve had this strange feeling all day that’s something’s about to happen, like waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“You too?”
Lois’s forehead creased in concern.
“I’ve had this odd feeling all day, too. Like the weather’s going to change or something,” Clark told her. “It doesn’t make sense, but I was looking behind me all day, even on patrol, to see if someone was there. It’s creepy.”
“Do you think…? Nah,” Lois began.
“Do I think what?” Clark asked. “I know that look. Something’s just clicked.”
“You and the other Clark, you telepathically communicated, right?”
“Yes,” he answered. He watched her process the information. He still found it fascinating to watch her as she put things together. It was rarely logical in any ‘normal’ way, but she was usually right on in her intuitive leaps.
“And I was linked to them through you, right?”
“Right.”
“What if the link wasn’t completely broken when they left?”
“And you’re uneasy because I’m picking up something wrong?”
Her expression cleared. “It makes sense, doesn’t it? Kryptonians are telepathic, even if he didn’t know it till he got here, and I’m linked to you…”
“But from another universe? Lois, I can’t even contact New Krypton.”
“But maybe, since there’s a physical connection…” she said, thinking aloud. “You have some of his blood in you. Maybe that made the link stronger between you.”
“But, honey, even if you’re right, there’s nothing we can do if they’re in trouble,” Clark reminded her. “We are talking about Superman here, right? He should be able to take care of himself, right?”
She just looked at him, hazel eyes shining, lips in a half-smile, as if she couldn’t decide to be amused or annoyed.
“Okay, I take that back. He’s Superman, and he
thinks he should be able to take care of himself,” Clark amended. “But unless you have a plane-hopping device hidden around the house somewhere, there’s nothing we can do but be supportive.”
Her eyes got wider as she looked at him. Puppy-dog eyes.
“Lois, I know that look,” he protested. “You’re trying to come up with some way to contact Wells, aren’t you?”
“Well, he and Tempus and those Peace Keepers are the only ones with time travel that works and Wells and Tempus are the ones with plane-hopping machines, and I’m certainly not going to try to get hold of Tempus…”
He couldn’t keep from grinning at her. “What have you got in mind?”
“Oh, something simple. Like an ad in the Planet. H. G. Wells, please contact Clark Kent. Superman needs to talk to you… something like that.”
Clark chuckled. “Okay, you place the ad and I’ll start dinner.”
“Pasta with creamy garlic sauce?” She gave him a saucy grin.
“Woman, you are incorrigible! You know what pasta does to me.”
“And you love me anyway.”
--Earth I—“Miss Lane, you say neither of these children has been out of the country?” the very young pediatrician said. Lois was thirty-three, but the young man with the braided hair and stethoscope looked to be a teenager. Jason and Esperanza had been rushed from the emergency room up to the pediatrics floor. Jason was now in the pediatrics ICU while Esperanza was in the neonate ICU.
“No, they’ve not been out of the country,” Lois told him trying to stray calm in the face of her child being deathly ill. She ignored the annoyed look Richard gave her at her lie to the doctor.
But Esperanza hasn’t been out of the country. She’s from another planet.“Have they been in close contact with someone who’s just returned from overseas?”
“One of my co-workers returned from traveling in South America a little more than a week ago,” Lois told him.
“Where in South America?”
“The mountains in Peru.”
The doctor noted that down. He read through his notes again and sighed. “Look, I’ve got a call into a specialist and a call in to the CDC. We’re hoping to have a better handle on this once the cultures come back. In the mean time, we’ve started broad spectrum antibiotics to try and knock it down and we’re taking measures to reduce the fevers. But I do have to admit, your son’s history of allergies made it a little difficult to find a suitable antibiotic.”
“But you did find one?” Richard asked.
“Yes, we did find one, and hopefully, once we identify the cause of the illness, we’ll have a suitable treatment then as well,” the doctor told them.
“When can I see my son?” Lois asked.
“In a few minutes,” the doctor promised her.
Richard cleared his throat nervously. “Doctor, the baby was in close proximity to Superman just this afternoon. In there any chance that he…?”
“Richard!” Lois said in horror.
How could he?“It was my understanding that Superman was immune all Earth diseases,” the doctor said, giving Lois an apologetic glance. “I seriously doubt he could be a carrier of any sort.”
“I’m just thinking, we don’t know what other horrors Luthor cooked up while he was making that island of his. And Superman did get hurt there…” Richard went on.
“I’ll make a note in her chart that Superman was around her,” the doctor promised.
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