Sometimes Clark forgot that he was in the future. This was a darker world than his own, but the cars still looked mostly the same, the buildings hadn’t changed much, and there weren’t any flying cars that he could see.
It wasn’t until he was faced with clear evidence that he was confronted with the fact that he’d moved not only in space, but in time.
Staring at the rows of computers around him, Clark felt a little lost. He’d had a computer back at the Planet, of course, but he’d mostly used it for word processing and the occasional game of solitaire. They certainly hadn’t been connected into any sort of world wide network of computers, although he’d at least heard of the concept back home.
They certainly hadn’t had these tiny looking flat screens or sleek looking ergonomic keyboards.
He felt a little anxious; after hiding the car in a nearby lot, Lois had taken the subway to go to a branch bank, presumably to make a withdrawal.
She was taking a lot of chances that Clark wished she wouldn’t make.
“Would you like some coffee?” The waitress was perky and looked as though she was still in high school. Given the hour, though, she was probably older.
Clark shook his head and wondered again why Lois had parked him in this place. He felt exposed and conspicuous.
“If you’d like to spend some time on the internet, it’ll cost five dollars for thirty minutes.”
Staring mutely at the girl for a moment, Clark dug in his pocket for a five dollar bill. There was a seat on the back row that was behind a small partition on which sat a planter. It wouldn’t give him much cover, but it would protect him from someone passing by on the street recognizing him.
The girl led him to his seat, and then smiled down at him.
”If you change your mind about that coffee, let me know.”
The girl grinned at him and bumped him with her hip.
Clark smiled up at her blandly. He’d fenced off enough advances from women over the years to know better than to be too enthusiastic in responding to her. At best she was just being friendly. At worst she was interested and rejecting her would lead to a bruised ego or worse.
A moment later she was gone and he was faced with a computer screen filled with a bewildering array of headlines and pictures. It took him a moment to realize that by clicking on a story he could read the headline.
At the top of the page, a cursor blinked on a blank line, with a button next to it saying “Search web.”
Hesitantly, he typed in the word “Superman.”
***********
Stepping into the Internet café, Lois looked anxiously around for Clark. Getting to her bank in a big hat had taken longer than she’d planned. It helped that her bank had branches all over the country.
It wouldn’t take the Feds long to notice her withdrawal, but she’d timed the withdrawal to coincide with the bus schedule. By the time someone noticed, and black and white units were called, she’d be long gone.
She’d taken two more buses and a taxi just in case. She wasn’t going to be able to maintain this level of paranoia for very long. It amazed her sometimes that people could live their lives that way.
Blinded, Lois stood a moment to let her eyes adjust to the darker interior of the café. The windows to the outside were tinted, leaving the interior cool and dim. The welcoming smell of coffee reminded her that she hadn’t had her fix.
When she saw Clark in the seat behind the planter finally, she smiled. She gave her order and extra money for the connection and headed in Clark’s direction.
The girl behind the counter scowled as Lois sat down beside Clark.
“How’s it going?” Lois asked, glancing at the screen.
It showed the iconic comic book cover of her counterpart sobbing, holding Superman dead.
“It says we’re married,” he said, looking a little stunned.
Lois rolled her eyes. “Superman is married to Lois Lane. You are just a guy from somewhere else who happens to share the name. Let’s stay focused.”
Of course he was interested. If she’d gone to another world and discovered that people had been telling stories about someone with her name for the past sixty years or more, she’d have been interested too.
Lois took the seat next to Clark and said, “I paid for the next several hours for both of us.”
“What are we doing here exactly?” Clark asked.
“We’re looking for patterns,” Lois said. “You tell me that there are no passenger pigeons in your world, and yet suddenly there are some here.”
“Just like there was suddenly a planeload of passengers from…” Clark said, as the waitress approached. He hesitated, and then said, “Somewhere else.”
Lois smiled and graciously accepted her coffee and her change. As the waitress moved away, she said, “What do you think the odds are that those are the only two things to come through?”
“OK,” he said.
Lois leaned over and said, “Let me give you a few pointers about how to conduct this sort of search. We’re looking for weird news…”
He was very still and Lois realized that she had put her hand on his shoulder. The waitress behind the bar was scowling even more broadly. Lois considered taking her hand away and then defiantly left it.
As though it was any of the girl’s business who she chose to touch.
************
Her hand burned through his shirt. It felt like a brand on his shoulder, and Clark couldn’t remember a time when he had been so focused on a single touch.
She smelled fresh and clean, like shampoo and bath soap. That he found himself aware at all of how she smelled was disconcerting. It meant that he was suddenly aware of her as a woman again.
Perhaps it was all those pictures of men and women together playing Clark Kent and Lois Lane. In every iteration of the story it seemed that Lois Lane was the love of Clark Kent’s life.
“Are you listening?” she asked suddenly.
In his time with Lana he’d learned the value of being able to repeat things when he was distracted, so he said, “You do this and this and this…”
She nodded. “Let’s get busy.”
When she pulled away, he felt oddly cold.
It had been strange seeing his life laid out before him on the computer screen. They had the details wrong of course. His parents had died when he was ten and he’d bounced around from foster home to foster home.
But they had his abilities right for the most part, even if they were sometimes exaggerated. They had the names of his parents, his home town, even his high school sweetheart.
It was telling that in no version of the tale did he end up with Lana Lang.
They named Perry White. They had Jimmy Olsen as some sort of flunky instead of as a computer magnate, and as far as Clark knew, Lex Luthor was just a wealthy businessman.
Of course, there had been rumors…
It didn’t make sense that they would have so many of the big things right, while getting the small details wrong. It was like someone was viewing his world through a distorted lens, and then spinning wild stories based on that view.
***********
Clark spoke up suddenly, startling Lois a little. “They found a coelacanth recently.”
Lois shook her head. “Those are just really rare. Besides, we’re just looking for things that show up close to the date of your arrival.”
He nodded, then clicked again.
“What about giant scorpions?” Clark asked. “Do you have those?”
“How big?” Lois asked.
Clark turned the monitor slightly toward Lois.
Her eyes widened and she leaned forward.
There was a picture of a smiling man and woman standing beside a segmented monstrosity hanging from its tail.
It was the sort of monster Lois had had nightmares about as a child, and the thought of the damage it might have done if it had washed up alive was enough to make her shudder.
What were they going to do if unpleasant things began to come through, things like Smallpox or diseases humanity in this world had no defenses against?
What if Lucy was already getting sick? There was no guarantee that Clark’s world even had all the same diseases as hers did, and sometimes all it took was a small change to make a disease much more deadly.
Lois glanced at Clark. He still seemed more than healthy. Maybe their worlds were similar enough that it wasn’t going to be a problem.
That didn’t mean the other places things were coming through from would be so forgiving.
Clark spoke again and Lois blinked.
“It washed up on the coast of Santa Barbara after a major storm on the night you arrived.”
If Clark was sick, it was already too late to do anything about it. They just had to assume the best and do everything they could to get people back into their own places before any further harm was done.
She turned to her own computer and her fingers began to fly over the keyboard. Not as quickly as his could, but he had special advantages.
“They’ve already had people from the University of California out to identify it. They are saying it’s a Eurypterid…a kind of sea scorpion that went extinct two hundred fifty million years ago.”
“That would certainly seem to fit the bill,” Clark said. “You say it washed up in a storm?”
Lois frowned. “There was a storm the night you arrived too, wasn’t there?”
“What about the passenger pigeons?”
It took her a little bit longer, but eventually she said, “There was a storm off the coast of France.”
“So we have three things probably related, and every time there was storm activity.” Clark hesitated. “Is there any way to check for storm activity all over the planet?”
Lois bit her lip for a moment then said, “I know someone I can call. Let’s keep checking the news for other things; the more information we have, the better we’ll be able to try to find some kind of cause.”
*************
Lois grimaced and stretched a little. The thing about searching the Internet was that it was amazingly informative, having a little bit of information about just about anything. Unfortunately, outside of porn and science fiction, things often dried up after that first rush of enthusiasm.
Clark had been staring fixedly at the screen for a long period.
“Did you find anything?” she asked.
He started, then shook his head. “You said you found that video on Youtube, so I’ve been looking to see if anything else like that has been put up. It took me a while to find the right spelling, and I keep getting off track…people put the funniest things up.”
“Don’t get stuck on that,” Lois said. “Or you’ll be trapped for hours staring at cats eating with forks, laughing babies and the dramatic prairie dog.”
“Dramatic prairie dog?”
“Type it in.”
A couple of clicks later, Clark chuckled.
“Why don’t you get us a couple of coffees,” Lois said. “Make sure the waitress doesn’t spit in mine.”
He smiled at her and stood up. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
As soon as he reached the counter, Lois slid over to his machine. The café had begun to slowly fill as the morning had worn on, and there was now a line at the coffee counter.
She checked his history, hoping that he’d found something she’d missed. Given that this was a new world to him, how would he know?
Giant supposedly extinct turtle found…the timing was wrong, but Lois jotted down the information onto her notebook. She’d left her personal organizer behind and was having to make do.
You tube…chocolate rain, talking baby, superman song…scenes from the superman cartoons, superman images…
A piece from YouTube saying “Real Superman.”
Lois frowned and clicked on the link. The picture was grainy, obviously having been taken from a cell phone.
A car sitting in the middle of a river of flowing water. There was enough light from street lights to show that it was a flooded street.
“This is how stupid my sister is,” the teenage voice was saying. “I always told her she’d end up on You Tube or America’s stupidest home videos!”
There was a flash of something, and the vehicle began moving.
“Whoa!”
The image suddenly jostled as the phone suddenly began to move across what Lois could now see was a second story deck built next to the roof of a house.
The car seemed to be moving on its own, even though it couldn’t have gotten any traction. A moment later it left the water.
Lois could just make out a shadowy figure pushing the car out of the water.
A moment later, there was a blurry shadow, and the figure slipped back into the water.
The camera’s view changed again as the camera holder rushed across the deck and then onto the roof.
He was just in time to see something hovering in mid air before zooming away.
The picture was blurry but clearly man shaped.
“You didn’t like your seat?” Clark’s voice make Lois jump a little.
“Wanted to make sure you weren’t missing anything,” Lois said, clearing her throat a little. “You shouldn’t watch this kind of stuff. Kids love to make up all kinds of hoaxes.”
He shrugged, then said, “I suppose you’d know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lois asked sharply.
The sting of Pilar’s rejection still hurt, as did the implication that she would ever consider falsifying information for a story.
“This is your world,” Clark said. “I’ve never even touched the Internet before today.”
Lois took the coffee from him and said, “It’s starting to get a little crowded here. Maybe we need to go.”
Clark nodded. “The waitress said the time we paid for is about up anyway.”
Lois closed Clark’s browser down after carefully erasing the history. It wouldn’t stop a determined Federal investigator, but with luck they’d never even know they’d been here.
She did the same with her own computer.
“I don’t think we’re supposed to shut the whole computer off,” Clark said.
“We’re working for the greater good,” Lois said. “Sometimes you have to stretch the rules a little.”
As Clark began to gather their things, Lois wondered why it felt so freeing in some ways to be a fugitive. All the common courtesies and little rules that she’d always felt constrained by now didn’t seem that important.
They had a planeload of people to save, and if this thing with the pigeons panned out, they might be working to save the world.
The video was obviously a hoax and nothing to worry about.
Still, Lois couldn’t help but stare thoughtfully of the back of the man she’d met only a couple of days before. The blurred figure on the video had looked a little like Clark Kent.
