It felt like an eternity since Clark had seen Lois. He stared at her for a long moment, wondering how he’d forgotten how good she looked. It was almost as though she’d become even more beautiful since the last time he’d seen her.
There had to be something wrong with his hearing because suddenly all he could hear was the sound of her heart beating, the sound of her indrawn breath. It was an effort to look away from her long enough to make sure no one was waiting outside the door.
She was staring at him strangely, her face slightly flushed and her breathing uneven.
“Are you all right?” he asked, “They haven’t hurt you?”
“They’ve been good,” Lois said. She smiled up at him and her breathing began to slow. “I think some of them are coming around to being the good guys.”
Her smile brightened the room and Clark felt something tight in his chest begin to relax. He’d hated having to choose between her and the rest of the world.
Lois glanced down at herself and suddenly flushed even more. She pulled away from him and grabbed the comforter off the bed, wrapping it around herself. At his expression she looked down at the floor and said, “I’m a little cold.”
She’d been wearing a short robe, but Clark couldn’t see why she’d have a reason to be embarrassed. She could have worn a robe covering her head to toe and he’d have still been intoxicated by her scent, by the sound of her breathing and the…
His face suddenly felt hot and he was suddenly glad the lights in the room were dim.
Lois sat back on the bed and for a long moment they did nothing but stare at each other.
“I’m glad I found you,” Clark said at last. “I don’t know what I’d have done in this world without you.”
“I’ve just been a tour guide,” Lois said. She looked down at her lap. “You’d have found someone else fairly easily.”
“You gave me the courage to stand up and do what I should have done a long time ago,” Clark said. “No everyone can say that.”
“I should be thanking you,” Lois said. She was silent for a long moment before finally speaking. “Since my parents died, I’ve been pretty numb. It was easier than actually feeling things.”
“I felt that way for a long time after seeing my parents died,” Clark said. “It helped me get through some of the bad years in foster homes.”
“Bad years?”
“Nobody wants a kid who sets fires and breaks things,” Clark said. “Even the nice ones. And once you get the reputation as a bad kid, it follows you. You learn to blend into the background and not make waves.”
“Setting fires?” Lois asked, glancing up at him. Realization set in. “I guess you didn’t learn how to control your heat vision right away.”
“Or the rest of it,” Clark said. “I broke a foster brother’s arm when I was thirteen. The look on my foster mother’s face….that was the day I decided I wasn’t going to hurt anyone ever again.”
The smell of seared flesh came to his nostrils and he looked away from Lois. He’d violated that promise in China already, and even though it had been to save lives, it still sickened him.
“I got so angry after I found out,” Lois said. “Bitter and angry and hating God. I begged Him to give them back to me, swore I’d do everything different, be a better person.”
“You managed to get Lucy back,” Clark said. “If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.”
Lois nodded soberly. “There are people who’d give anything they had for just one more day with the people they love.”
Clark glanced at Lois covertly and wondered if there was going to come a time when he felt that way about her. It was already getting harder and harder to leave her.
He’d always felt like an outsider, like the stranger staring in at a world he would never truly been a part of. It had taken traveling to another universe to find someone who understood him the way Lois had.
The desire to return home had been a burning need since this entire debacle had begun, but strangely he was beginning to feel content about the idea of staying.
***********
Opening the door quietly, the agent froze for a moment as he realized that security had been breeched. Despite the alerts by the others that there had been a momentary lapse in the security cordon, he’d hoped not to have to deal with the situation on his watch.
His hand hovered near his weapon, but he’d been briefed thoroughly about the target’s capabilities. He hesitated and then let his hand fall away from his weapon.
They’d been waiting for this opportunity for several days after several mistakes earlier in the week. He closed the door gently and then began walking away. He murmured into his lapel, setting a pre-planned series of events in motion.
He’d followed many orders that he hadn’t agreed with, but this one made perfect sense. Letting the target get a few hours sleep before waking him was prudent and sensible. Sleep deprived individuals were irritable and had short fuses. They made mistakes, certainly, but this wasn’t a bank robber who would accidentally step into the line of fire.
If this man, or robot or alien or whatever he was became irritable, people could easily get killed, and according to the brass, it would take something more powerful than a two thousand pound bomb to take him out.
Everyone assumed that a nuclear weapon would take him out, but even that wasn’t completely certain.
No, this was better. It was his job to protect national security, but being able to do that without getting his face burned off with some sort of alien heat ray was a definite plus. He was a patriot, not an idiot.
Part of him was able to maintain objectivity. The target was something to be tracked and monitored closely until it was proven dangerous or hostile. It was in the unique position of being both a distinct military threat and a potential military asset and being able to make its own decisions.
A nuclear warhead with the ability to make its own decisions was a nightmare for any strategist.
Yet there was something about the suit that called to another part of him, a part that he’d suppressed long ago. He’d grown up reading the comics, and Superman had been one of his early models for what it meant to be a hero. Superman had helped people and had done what was right even when it wasn’t easy. He’d had a code.
Helping people and having a code of honor had brought him into the marines and later into national security. It had shaped his life; the thought of giving his life for his country wasn’t something he looked forward to, but it was something he was willing to do.
It had been disappointing to learn that some of his superiors let pragmatism supplant that idealism. Others, especially the civilian leadership appeared never to have had any honor at all.
Yet it didn’t change the value of the ideal. No country ever lived completely up to its ideals, because human beings were flawed. They made mistakes and sometimes allowed emotion to override judgment. Sometimes people were corrupt.
The man on the chair wasn’t a human being. He was something else, and by all reports he was working to represent that dream. As dangerous as this man was, he had a chance to make more of a difference than anyone.
He’d set the highest standard for himself when he donned that costume, and the agent hoped that he didn’t stumble and prove to be as corrupt as most men with power became.
A fictional Superman had made him aspire to be a better person when he was a child. How much more influential would the real thing be?
Heroes inspired people to be better. With the right inspiration, and enough people, it was possible to truly change the world.
If there was even a spark of something within this man that really was Superman, then he wanted to be around to see it.
He hummed a familiar tune as he walked down the hallway. Things were already in motion.
*************
He woke with a start and then felt embarrassed. He’d fallen asleep on the chair while talking to Lois. A glance at the bed showed that she’d wrapped a comforter around herself and had fallen asleep as well, although now her eyes were open and she was looking at him.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“I feel fine,” he said. He glanced at the clock and started; he’d slept longer than he’d intended to. Almost five hours; the heavy drapes had kept the sunlight from waking him, and he’d been very tired. On a normal night he only slept three.
He stood easily and stretched. A normal human would have had pain from having slept in an odd position throughout the night; he had none.
The footsteps coming purposefully down the hall startled him. He considered leaving, but he had vague recollections of people looking in on them throughout the night, and of murmuring voices downstairs.
They knew he was here and there wasn’t any reason to hide.
The doorway opened and a man in a business suit looked in on them. “Breakfast is almost ready,” he said, looking unsurprised to see Clark standing in the middle of the room.
Now that he mentioned it, Clark could smell the scent of coffee and bacon. His mouth watered. He’d eaten very little over the past few days and though he didn’t seem to need to eat, he enjoyed it.
“There’s time for a shower,” the man continued, “And there are clean clothes waiting for you in the main bathroom.”
Clark nodded, surprised at the simple courtesy. He glanced at Lois.
“I have my own bathroom,” she said. She looked slightly embarrassed. “I’ll get ready.”
**********
There was a nondescript man waiting for them at the breakfast table. He was dressed in a business suit that would make him blend in with thousands of other functionaries throughout Washington D.C.
As Lois and Clark stepped into the room, the four agents who had been lounging around the room stood suddenly. They glanced at the man, who nodded at them. They quietly filed out of the room.
“My name is Joseph Smith,” the man said. “I’m the new head of the EAD.”
“EAD?” Lois asked.
“The Extraterrestrial Affairs Department,” the man said. “As of this moment I am the only member of the Department, which came into existence approximately three hours ago.”
“So the government is creating a department just to deal with Clark?” Lois asked. “That seems a little wasteful.”
“Properly speaking it should be the Department of Extradiminsional and Extraterrestrial Affairs,” the man said, “But that made us sound a little too much like we were in drug enforcement.”
“So you are going to deal with the passengers as well as Clark,” Lois said. “When do you plan on releasing them?”
“It’s not that easy,” Mr. Smith said. “While we’re willing to expedite the naturalization process for them, being as they are displaced people and inadvertent refugees, there are questions to be answered.”
“What sort of questions?” Clark asked as he slowly sank into a chair. Lois followed suit.
Mr. Smith began scooping spoonfuls of eggs onto their plates.
“These people don’t have valid social security numbers. They don’t have drivers’ licenses. They don’t have any possessions other than what they brought in their luggage.”
“That can be remedied,” Lois said.
“They’ll have to completely start over from scratch. None of them have a place to live. They don’t have jobs or family who can help. They don’t even have any friends.”
“I’m going to help my sister,” Lois said. “She can live with me until she gets acclimated.”
“There are three or four other people on the plane who have analogues who have died. They’re the lucky ones…they have family who might be willing to help them.”
Clark took a bite of his bacon and was surprised how good it tasted. It felt good to be clean again and doing something as normal as eating breakfast instead of sifting through rubble in hopes that he would find someone else in time.
“But only maybe a third of the passengers have alternate versions of themselves. The rest of them have no one. They are utterly alone. Even if they do have alternate selves, they run the risk of being rejected by their alternate families.”
Clark tried to imagine how it would have felt to find his parents alive again, only to have them reject him in favor of someone who looked like him and had been raised throughout his life by them.
“Some families will see these people as intruders. Some might accept them, but none of them have alternate families who are wealthy enough to help much.”
“So basically the government is going to have to help them get a new start,” Lois said.
The man nodded. “Worse, there are certain extremist elements of society who have been making threats. We suspect it’ll only be a matter of time before those threats extend to the passengers, especially after the news media gets to them. We may have to set them up with new identities through witness protection.”
Clark scowled. When he’d tried to save the plane he hadn’t intended to disrupt so many lives. He’d only intended to save them.
“They need new driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and social security numbers. There is a mass of paperwork involved in setting up a new life, and it’s complicated.”
“So the plan is to release them,” Lois said.
He nodded. “We’ll want to keep in contact with them in any case. We have geneticists who want to track them to see if they have vulnerabilities to diseases that don’t exist on their world. They may need specialized health care. They may need psychiatric care to help deal with what they’ve been through.”
“I don’t understand why they’d create a whole new department for this,” Lois said, interrupting. “Couldn’t FEMA or Homeland Security or another agency handle a planeload of passengers?”
“How long do you think it will be before this happens again?” Mr. Smith said. “If we’re surrounded by worlds that are similar to our own, then it’s only a matter of time before more of them develop the same technology.”
Clark felt a sudden sense of alarm. The idea of a whole cluster of worlds developing the same technology at nearly the same time alarmed him. It meant that his own world was in just as much danger as this one, but with fewer defenses because they were fifteen years behind and without someone like him to defend them.
“My agency is also going to oversee grants for the development of extradiminsional technology,” Mr. Smith said. “I’ve got a dozen grant applications on my desk and the department isn’t even three hours old yet.”
“Are you crazy?” Lois asked. “You know how dangerous this is, and-“
“We need to know how to shut rifts down if they happen,” Agent White said, interrupting Lois. “And we need to know whether it can be controlled without creating worldwide devastation. The potential gain is incredible.”
“So you can look at extinct animals?” Lois asked.
“So we can see if the other worlds nearby have cured AIDS or diabetes or cancer,” Agent Smith said. “So we can find lifeless worlds where we can dump toxic wastes and use as sources for minerals that are getting rare here. So we can learn what’s out there.”
“What if you don’t like what you find?” Clark asked suddenly.
“Then we need to know that too,” Mr. Smith said. “Because it’s only a matter of time before those worlds come here.”
Lois began to spoon eggs onto her plate. “So your agency is going to be dealing with Clark too?”
Agent Smith nodded. He took a sip of coffee and said, “I have some ideas about that. I think we could have a partnership that’s beneficial to both parties.”
“We meaning me and the United States government,” Clark said. He hesitated, then said, “I don’t think I’d like to work for the military.”
Mr. Smith gestured dismissively. “As long as you don’t work for any one else’s military we don’t have a problem with that.”
Clark glanced at Lois. This wasn’t what he’d expected to hear from the government, and he wondered just how much authority Mr. Smith was going to have to back this all up.
Mr. Smith continued. “The problem, as I see it is that you aren’t seeing the full potential of your abilities.”
“What do you mean?”
“You say you are here to help, and so far you’ve been living up to that. Yet there are other ways to help people.”
“I have my hands full as it is,” Clark said. He was suddenly reminded that there were tens of thousands of people in China who still needed help. “I really shouldn’t be here at all…”
He rose suddenly.
“How would you like to be able to feed two million people in Africa, steer hurricanes away from populated area and cut the source of human disease in half?”
Clark sank back into his chair.
“I’m listening.”
