It was hard not to crush the dead pigeon in his hand. This was the general vicinity where passenger pigeons had been seen in the past, and more had been coming through the portal.
Similar worlds might have produced Passenger Pigeons, but it was just as likely that they had come from the same world.
“We have to go back,” Clark said.
“What?” Lois asked. She was squinting at the pigeon in what must have seemed to her to be mostly darkness. The lightning strikes had illuminated the skies before, but the unnatural clouds around them were already dissipating.
“This is where the pigeons came from before,” Clark said, “Or at least it seems to be pretty close.”
“That means the door to Metropolis might be opening in a couple of hours,” Lois said. “You might be able to get home.”
“I might be able to get everybody home,” Clark said.
“You won’t have time,” Lois said. “These things last less than an hour.”
“We can at least see,” Clark said impatiently. This was the closest he’d been to home since the night he’d tried to rescue the plane.
She nodded finally, and a moment later they were off.
He felt tense; carrying a passenger he could only move at a snail’s pace compared to what he could do on his own. The fact that Lois was slender and small and fit into the crook of his arm made things easier. He could fly faster with her than with someone like Lana or Cyrus, who insisted on keeping their distance.
With Cyrus he hadn’t exactly wanted to get any closer than he had to; it had obviously been days since the man had had a bath. Consequently he’d had to fly even more slowly.
But thirty minutes was an agonizing slow period of time compared to what he could do on his own. At faster speeds it almost seemed as though whatever it was that protected him seemed to constrict, so that as his highest speeds he was losing his pants if they were at all bulky. He rarely had to fly that fast, but this time he found he was wanting to.
Grimacing, Lois turned her face into the crook of his arms. When he realized that the bird in his hand was losing its feathers he forced himself to slow down.
They were already moving at close to the limits of his ability to protect her. Moving much faster would expose her body to g-forces and would give her face the possibility of wind burn.
The line between a few too many g-forces and being ripped apart was far too thin in a fragile human body.
There were more clouds ahead however, forming before his eyes. From the speed they were gathering, he could see how it might look like they were appearing instantaneously in the atmosphere.
He stared down into the storm with his special vision and he couldn’t see anything. The portal, if it was there was invisible.
Squinting harder, he strained to see anything at all. There were spectrums of light that he could see that he had no words for; colors with names that didn’t even exist. Mostly he ignored these as being too trivial or too terrifying to bother with.
The world seen through some spectrums was a horrifying place.
Mostly he tried to stay near what he assumed was the human norm, although he really had no way of being sure if what he saw was even close to what normal people saw.
The few times he’d tried to get Lana to help him, to see whether they saw the same colors she’d quickly changed the subject.
Utterly useless for the most part, the visual abilities were a boon now. By turning his head and squinting he could just make out the edges of the rift, which was expanding rapidly.
The edges fluctuated, and it was only a matter of minutes before the edges began shrinking.
Narrowing his eyes, Clark tried to guess if he would be able to make it through in time. He’d make it through along with Lois, but there was no way he would be able to carry a plane through. The portal had barely grown large enough to drive a Winnebago through before its edges started fluctuating.
Clark tried to see if he could see what was on the other side, but he couldn’t. When the rift collapsed, and the clouds began to dissipate, Lois said, “What did you see?”
“A chance,” Clark said.
*************
They stopped regularly after that, following the clouds which seemed to gather out of nowhere only to dissipate a few minutes later. Each time Clark stopped and stared intently at the cloud.
For the first time Lois felt a little left out. He was seeing things she was blind too, and the longer they were at it, the more he seemed to withdraw into himself. It was almost as though he was preparing himself mentally to go home.
When she finally saw the lights appearing on the horizon Lois sighed in relief. Although she enjoyed the flying she was getting a little impatient to be back. There was so much to do and so little time.
The gathering storm was already there, and before Lois could say anything she found that they were dropping. She found herself beside a coastal road. A moment later Clark was into the air and out of sight into the storm.
Outside the warmth of his arms Lois shivered as she was suddenly exposed to the chill of the night air. The rain soaked her almost immediately and she scowled up at the sky. What was he doing? Was he going to go home and leave Lucy and everyone else on the plane here?
It wasn’t the sort of thing Superman would do, but as he said, he’d never been Superman. He was a person, and people sometimes did stupid, selfish things.
She didn’t want to believe it. She’d come to admire him a little, in a way that she hadn’t admired anyone since her father had died. So far as she could see, he lived up to the ideals her father had espoused.
Her disappointment would be profound if he abandoned her and her sister and all the others trapped here.
What happened if the rift closed while he was passing through? Lois doubted if even he would survive that. The thought that half of him might be already falling to earth horrified her.
The rain didn’t last much longer than any of the others had, and moments later Lois found herself standing shivering in the humid air.
She felt an odd sense of warmth from behind her and she turned. Clark was staring at her, and she could feel steam rising from her pants. It was a little like standing next to a roaring fire, and it was all Lois could do not to moan. She was cold.
“What happened?” She asked when she finally got control of herself.
“I found Metropolis,” he said. “It was right there on the other side!”
“Are you sure it was your Metropolis?” Lois asked.
“I had time to do a quick sweep,” he said. “Everything is exactly as I left it.”
“Part of you must have hoped that the rift was going to close behind you.”
Clark shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that. I’m not going to leave your sister and the others behind, even if it means I get stuck here.”
Lois took a step toward him. “Then why did you go?”
“What if I had tried to take the others back through and it was a world even worse off than this one?” Clark said. “Like a world with those giant scorpions maybe, or a world with no shrimp.”
At her look he shrugged and smiled sheepishly. “I didn’t actually check for shrimp.”
“So what now?”
“Now we find a place to hole up,” Clark said. “I’ll fly to France myself; I can go a lot faster without you. Then we move on in the morning.”
Glancing down at the mass of feathers in Clark’s hand, Lois was glad to see that it was still recognizable.
“What are you going to do with that?” Lois asked.
“I’m not sure,” Clark said. “Maybe find a bag or some kind of container. I’m getting tired of holding it.”
“It’s a corpse from an extinct species,” Lois said. “Let’s do something with it.”
************
Being a Nobel laureate didn’t make writing grant proposals any easier. Malcolm Carrick stared at the blank screen in front of him and wondered if he should have gone into an easier field of study, like physics. There were still new and exciting discoveries being made there.
Working for the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology as well as his work as a professor had seemed exiting at first. Tracing bird populations, finding the occasionally species which had once been thought to be extinct but was instead only exceedingly rare…helping to preserve the earth’s ecology and biodiversity, those were the exciting parts of the work.
Inspiring the next generation with the same fire that had gotten him into the field in the first place…that was also exciting.
The paperwork and bureaucracy behind the grant application process was not exciting. Trying to convince a group of non-scientists that research proving that one bird species was different than another when one only had a slightly different bill or color of head crest was exhausting.
Sometimes he dreamed of making the one great discovery, the one that would put his name in the textbooks giving him fame and fortune. Unfortunately, most of those discoveries were being made in the flashier sciences. He was forced to deal in small steps…good science, but hard to get approval from the appropriations committee.
The knock at the door was a welcome relief.
He grimaced as he rose to his feet. Old bones weren’t as limber as they had been. He shuffled across the floor wondering if he should have someone tidy his office, which was the usual academician’s muddle of books and papers and obscure notes which made the place look a little like a tornado had hit it.
Opening the door, he was surprised to see two people standing on the other side. A little old to be his usual lot of undergraduates, they weren’t part of his graduate program. He knew all of those students by name.
They were a handsome couple, and the chemistry between them was obvious. Malcolm wondered how long they had been together.
“May I help you?”
“Professor Carrick,” the woman said. “My name is Lois Lane.”
Recognition sparked. “The reporter?”
She nodded. “May I come in?”
“I haven’t done anything newsworthy lately, young lady.”
“I took one of your classes as an elective,” she said, “that last year you taught at Columbia.”
“I doubt that bird watching has done you much good in Iraq,” he said. “But I’m flattered that you remembered me.”
She glanced at her companion, who had his hands behind his back.
“What can I do for you?” Malcolm said.
“I came across a specimen, and was wondering if you could identify it for me?”
“Something you killed?” he asked disapprovingly.
“It was dead by the time we got to it,” she said.
Her partner pulled his hands from behind his back and held a small corpse out.
Reaching for a set of latex gloves, Malcolm grimaced. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to pick up dead animals with your bare hands? Birds sometimes carry parasites or bacteria that can be harmful to humans.”
“I’m not worried,” the man said, smiling at Lois as though to an obscure joke.
“Set it down here,” he said, pulling a tray out of a cabinet. As the man did so he said, “Wash your hands in the sink over there. The last thing we need is some sort of infestation.”
He pulled a lamp on a portable stand over the tray and then switched the light on.
“What happened here? This cut looks extremely fine and the inner surface is cauterized. Was this done with a laser?” he asked.
She shook her head.
He frowned as he smoothed some of the feathers down and looked at the other end of the bird. A moment longer he stiffened and said, “Where did you find this?”
Lois said, “Is your computer connected to the Internet?”
He nodded. Although he was reluctant to leave the remarkable specimen on the tray behind, he stepped across the aisle and set up the connection.
She typed in an address and a moment later a You Tube clip appeared on the screen.
The two people standing on either side of him waited as he stared at the screen. When the clip was over he stared into space for a long moment then gently lowered himself into his seat.
“Has anyone else seen this?”
Lois glanced at the screen and said, “About three hundred thousand people.”
“Anyone important?”
“It hasn’t made the mainstream news, if that’s what you are asking.”
Malcolm tried to grasp what he was seeing.
He had half of a passenger pigeon, and apparently somewhere out there was a flock which had to contain millions of members.
This year’s grant application was actually going to be fun to write.
***************
“So do you know of any physicists we can talk to?” Clark asked.
The old man said, “I have a number of colleagues. They tend to specialize in different things.”
“What about other universes? I know some people have done some theoretical work…” Lois said.
The old man glanced back at the bird on the table, his expression startled. “If you are saying what I think you’re saying, this could be a potential disaster.”
Clark blinked. “What do you mean?”
“Passenger pigeons were never part of the native ecology of northern Europe. They’ll have to establish a niche in the ecology, which means that other bird species are going to have to find a way to compete. If they are carrying any sort of parasites or disease that the local fauna have no defense against…this is something we may be dealing with for a long time.”
“We need to talk to someone,” Lois said.
“I have a colleague, Thomas Ledderman. He’s done some groundbreaking work in string theory. He’s lost some credibility recently, but he’s considered one of the leading minds in the field.”
“Why has he lost credibility?”
“He’s suing the government over participation in a project in France. He’s convinced that it’s going to destroy the world.”
