Despite everything Dominic tried, it seemed clear that Lionel intended for Lex to manage LuthorCorp in the case of any sudden disability. Dominic tried his hardest to insinuate that Lex was responsible for Lionel's injuries, but all the police and medical reports were against him, and he finally had to resort to innuendo and pouting.
Lex was used to the innuendo, and Dominic didn't pout nearly as well as Clark did. The meeting ground to its inevitable conclusion; papers were signed; Dominic grudgingly turned over Lionel's day-planner (Lex wasn't about to trust Mr. Senatori to mind it for him) and Lex was free to step out into the blazing, sticky city summer and look for his car.
As he settled into the comfortable leather, he decided that he'd performed enough unpleasant duties for one morning. He'd postpone visiting Dad in the hospital until tomorrow, and putting the fear of Lex into Dad's LuthorCorp minions until after lunch, which he would have with someone nice.
Lex had installed hands-free cell phones in all his cars. He made a quick reservation for two at his favorite downtown lunch spot. Then he called Metropolis University's main information number, and spent a few minutes being pleasant to assorted office workers before getting the number for Dawn's lab.
"Lab Seven."
"Dawn, it's Lex. Would you like to come out for an early lunch today?"
"Aren't you busy being a big-time tycoon?" she asked archly.
"I've done more double-talking this morning than most people do all day. I want a break, and I thought maybe you could come keep me company."
"I should be at a convenient stopping-point in about twenty-five minutes. I gotta warn you that I don't have time for any three-hour business lunch."
Lex laughed. "I'll come pick you up."
"Oooh! I can show you my doohickey! It's not finished, though."
"Great!" Lex chuckled. "See you soon."
------
Feeling torn was getting to be a way of life, Clark thought. He supposed he'd better get used to it.
"I wish I didn't have to ask you to do this," he said again.
"Clark!" Buffy exclaimed. She sounded like she was getting a little exasperated with him. "I already told you! This will be a vacation for me! If your dad's willing to let me have the chance to mess up his stuff...."
"It's really hard to break dirt, actually."
Buffy grinned at him for that one. "Well, good!" she declared. "'Cause I gotta tell you, my yard at home is pretty much a distressed area."
"I'm not worried about that. Mainly, I wanna make sure there's someone to help Dad with the two-man jobs. And, you know, don't let him, um...."
"Blow me off, over-do, and hurt himself. I get it."
"I'll do what I can at night, or...."
"Speaking as the more experienced evil-fighter, you prolly want to patrol Metropolis at night, and do your home-on-the-farm thing around, like 10 am to noonish. Take a nap after lunch. Once the pres's here, anyhow -- how much sleep do you need?"
It amused Clark to see the tiny blonde woman getting all 'as the more-experienced evil-fighter' on him, but he wasn't quite dumb enough to let her see that. "Less and less as I get older," he answered. "I haven't really checked out all my limits -- they seem to keep shifting. You know, it's really neat to have somebody to talk to about this stuff."
"Well, yeah. You sort of do need a Watcher, I guess. Otherwise you're just all on your own -- trial and error."
"Dawn told me a little about Mr. Giles. He sounds like a good guy. I wasn't all on my own, though. My folks and then Pete always helped, and there was a lot of stuff kind of written in the caves."
"As keen as cryptic underground prophecies can be, I still think it works out better with an actual person to tell you stuff."
"I guess it's a good thing I grew up in Smallville. Local mutants to practice on." Local mutants that are all my fault, Clark thought.
"Not your fault, doofus!" Buffy said, whapping him on the arm just hard enough to feel. Clark wondered if Slayers could read alien minds. Weirder things had happened. "You were three! Cara's age! You wouldn't blame her for something like that! Now, show me how this farm-stuff works."
"Okay. Right." Clark effortlessly lifted the huge milk can up into the back of the truck. Buffy watched how he arranged it neatly against the others, then copied him. She seemed to handle it easily. "It's a little old-fashioned," Clark said. "The big dairy operations use tanker trucks, but the organic creamery outside Grandville does business with small farmers all over the county, and we're kind of idiosyncratic."
"Understatement!" Buffy commented.
Clark flashed her a grin. "So you can load up the truck and deliver the milk while Dad's disassembling and sterilizing the milking machine."
"Which is the skilled job," Buffy put in, hoisting another umpteen-gallon can. "I'm no good at all with machinery invented after about 1520, but I can drive. Finally. Stick, even!"
Clark put up the last can and showed her how to secure the back. "Great!" he said. "Why don't you drive, and I'll give you directions, and then tomorrow you'll know just how to get there!"
"Sounds like a plan!"
--------
Lex found that picking his way through the dimly-lit subterranean corridors leading to Lab Seven was unexpectedly enjoyable. Who knew that cheap linoleum and grubby institutional cinderblock walls could evoke a sense of nostalgia in him? From the inside, this low-level laboratory building strongly resembled the ones he'd known as an undergrad. Briefly, he considered lunching with Dawn wherever it was that she usually ate, but he discarded the notion almost immediately. It was almost sure to be somewhere greasy and cheap, and he wasn't nineteen anymore.
The door to Dawn's lab, like most of the others along this hallway, was wide open. Lex politely stopped at the threshold and said, "Knock knock."
Dawn stopped frowning at her apparatus and looked round. Her shiny brown hair gleamed warmly in the cheap fluorescent light as she swung her gaze up to meet his eyes. "Who's there?" she teased.
Lex chuckled, partly at the lame joke, but mainly because it felt so good to see a friendly face after spending the morning with the LuthorCorp lawyers. "Your lunch date. Ready to go?"
"Just about. I wanna run this once and record the..." Dawn squeaked and fell off her lab stool when the apparatus made a loud popping noise and showered the workbench with sparks. The lights wavered and went out all up and down the corridor, and the dim yellow emergency-lights came on.
Lex hurried to Dawn's side and helped her to her feet. "Was it supposed to do that?" he asked dryly.
"No!" she sputtered. "There's no flipping way that could have happened! It was set to -- well, okay, if there had been a dimensional rift right here, at the same moment I put the power to it, but I'm sure we would have noticed Olaf the Troll suddenly popping into the lab!
"Maybe somebody else was pulling almost enough electricity to pop the breaker already, and you just pushed it over the edge," Lex suggested.
"I guess," Dawn said dubiously, as she set all the switches to OFF and then, brow wrinkled in thought, disconnected the power cable. Lex ushered her out the door to go get their lunch, but she stopped a few paces down the corridor and turned back to close and lock the door.
Most of the other lab doors they passed had been left open when their researchers had abandoned their work after the power failure.
Lex decided he'd have to get considerably more information on this little project of Dawn's over lunch.
--------
"This is a terrific lunch, Mrs. Kent," Buffy said.
"Call me Martha, Buffy," Clark's Mom told her.
It's like there's light in her when she smiles, Clark thought, passing round the biscuits. It's more there than it was in Sunnydale, and it was almost gone when I picked her up in LuthorCorp Tower, but it's coming back for sure. No wonder Dawn was so happy yesterday that I made her laugh.
"Earth to Clark?" There was that laugh again.
"Huh?" Clark asked brilliantly.
"The milk, please?" Buffy repeated politely. Now Mom and Dad were laughing, too, and Cara was practically crowing.
Clark felt his face go red. Oh, well. Someday he'd probably learn how to listen and think and maybe even do a few things all at the same time. It couldn't be that much harder than flying.
"The baked goods are cooling," Mom said. "If you want to learn the delivery route, Buffy, you'd better go along with Clark this afternoon."
"I'm looking forward to it." Yeah, cute sure ran in Dawn's family.
"I'm comin' too!" Cara declared. She had jam on her face again.
"Now, sweetie, you need to take a nap after lunch," Mom said reasonably.
Clark would've been willing to bet cash money that Cara's next words would be something like "No I don't; I'm big now!"
The little girl surprised him and his folks by saying instead, "Uh huh I know. I'm done. May I please be excused?"
"You sure that's all you want, honey? Everybody else is still eatin' dinner," Dad smiled at her.
"I finished my milk, and if I take my nap now right away, I might wake up in time to go with Buffy 'n' Clark." She put her chin up and tried to look tall.
Dad chuckled, and Mom smiled. "All righty, then," Dad told her. "Remember to wash your hands and face before you go lie down."
"I will," Cara promised. She took her plate and cup to the sink, and then headed on upstairs.
Clark noticed Buffy looking quietly proud. "Did you tell her to do that?" he asked.
"I just told her that people would be more willing to treat her like a grown-up if she did the things she knew she has to without complaining. Nobody likes a whiner, and it never does any good anyway."
"That's very wise," Mom said softly. She was looking at Buffy sort of the way she looked at Lex sometimes, like she wished she was their Mom, too.
"Well, you know. Wisdom's what happens when you forget to duck. Besides, I might need Cara along delivering stuff. She says she never gets lost."
"Yup. Must be a Kryptonian thing." Clark knew he always sounded a little smug when he referred, no matter how indirectly, to Kara's abilities. Saving her and Mom had been the first time he'd come up with a plan, a good, quick plan that had really worked. Before that, he'd never thought that was a skill he even might have, but it turned out that, as Superman anyhow, he could do that a lot.
"If only it were a Slayer thing," Buffy said wryly.
----------
Mulder awoke with a start. His eyes felt gritty, and he might be hung-over. It only took a moment for him to remember everything. "Where are we?" he rasped.
"Tourist Information Center, Steuben County, Indiana," his companion rumbled. Ex-Captain Stonetree, or rather Joe, was stretching and twisting in his seat, making the whole car move, despite its impressive suspension. The engine was stopped; they were parked in front of a nicely-landscaped, modern-looking building with a lot of dark-tinted windows.
It was a hot day, bright and humid. The 1962 Caddy didn't have a working air-conditioner. Stonetree opened his door and got out, grunting. "Gotta stretch my legs a little," he told Mulder, bending over awkwardly to get his head back in through the window. "You go on back to sleep if you want."
Mulder didn't feel like sleeping any more. He got out, too, first double-checking that the doors were locked, that Joe had taken the keys, and that the windows were mostly closed, then followed Joe into the building. It was cool inside. Joe headed straight for the Men's Room, and Mulder tagged along. There was nobody else inside. Mulder ignored the sounds coming from Joe's stall, and ran cold water on his arms, splashing his face. Yeah, hung-over. Eventually he just put his head under the tap.
Finally Stonetree finished. "Aah," he said, approaching the sink. As he washed up, he looked at Mulder in concern. "You okay, Fox?" he asked.
Mulder straightened up and shook the water off. Oog. Shaking like that had been a mistake. "What about the end of the world?"
"Don't worry. We're on it." Mulder wished he shared the old man's confidence. "There's an EconoLodge outside Fort Wayne. We'll get four-five hours' sleep, then continue on to find the caves."
"What?" Mulder protested. "We don't have time for that!"
"Sure we do. More haste less speed. I'm about too tired to steer, and you can't drive. Look at you."
Mulder had to admit the old guy had a point, but he didn't have to admit it out loud. "We're up against a pretty serious deadline here, Joe."
"Yeah, I know. Don't worry. We'll get there; we'll get help. If we crash the car in Indiana, Naman and Segeeth will have no warning."
Mulder knew he was clinging to straws. He'd never heard of this Kawatche legend before, and Stonetree seemed to be taking this all too calmly. He had an ace up his sleeve, though. It was a slimmer chance than Nick Knight had been; Mulder had seen the vampire cop fight alien invaders with his own eyes. However, there were stories out of Kansas, some woman at the Metropolis Daily Planet claimed that city had a superhero, an alien protector who flew around in garish tights and a cape, helping the helpless. If he weren't just a circulation ploy, and if Mulder could get to him, he might be enough to turn the tide. It wasn't any worse a hope than anything else. He was still in there swinging.
And on his way to Kansas.
-----------
"This is a nice lunch place," Dawn commented, eyebrows raised. There hadn't been anything on the menu under fifteen dollars. She was glad she'd worn the green cap-sleeve top this morning, instead of a tee-shirt with cartoon animals or witty sayings, and that her ratty gym shorts had suffered a catastrophic oatmeal encounter, forcing a change to the more-respectable khakis.
Lex did that infuriatingly elegant almost-shrug thing of his. His only concession to the weather was that his pale lavender business shirt had one button open at the throat, and he wasn't wearing a tie. "I'm incredibly curious about your research," he said with an ingratiating smile.
"I'm incredibly curious about what happened back there!" Dawn declared. "I was thinking about it again on the ride over." She did not add that she'd been using her speculations to avoid paying attention to their certain imminent deaths, based on the driving habits of the Metropolis populace. "Even if there had been a high load average on the lab electrical system, it shouldn't have gone like that. We could've blown a fuse, sure, but those sparks mean something else."
"So it's a dimensional rift detector?"
"It's an interdimensional transport device. Well, it will be, when it's finished." Dawn knocked the underside of the table for luck. "The number one thing is the steering, of course."
"Of course," Lex murmured.
"No, really! Dimensional travel itself isn't all that hard. Well, there are spells for it, and they work. Well, kind of. Mostly. Anyhow, I'm sure I can figure that part out. But even a hot witch who knows exactly what she's doing has trouble with the steering. Willow once said it's like trying to hit a puppy by throwing a live bee at it, and since I've been working on the problem I've decided she was being optimistic. She left out the blindfold, and the cross-wind, and the bee-booze, and the herds of rampaging bunnies." Dawn noticed the waiter staring at her, and stared back until he put down their orders and left.
"So you're working on the guidance system first."
"Exactly! There has to be a certain topology of the n-dimensional surfaces, and I've put together an algorithm and a detector. A few years ago it would have been impossible to even think of mapping anything that complex with a computer, but linking a few PC's even, is just about fast enough now. The detector's the thing, the first main big thing, because nobody before has even thought of trying it."
"That's what blew up on you today."
"Yes! See, witches don't traditionally think of a technological process, and tech guys typically don't know anything about this stuff. But I was practically brought up by Willow Rosenburg, and she's the shiznits in both. Plus I'm the -- well, I've always had a special feeling for dimensional stuff. Once they got into real actual math and science at school, instead of all that picture-book-counting-group-save-the-Earth stuff they used from K through ten, I could see how it all related, and I had Willow there to explain the tricky parts."
"I assume you'll be calling her wondering what happened."
"Yeah. Well. What it could have been would be -- here." Dawn pushed her plate out of the way and took her notebook out of her bag. Lex leaned over a little to look at what she was writing. "This is the distance equation. First approx, anyhow." Their meals grew cold as she defined her terms and explained the derivations. Lex really seemed to be following along -- nobody else but Willow had ever let her go on for five minutes of this stuff without glazing over and telling her to stop. Smart, as well as gorgeous and rich -- she sure hoped Buffy would get to keep him.
Lex put his hand on the paper. "Here. Look at this term. You said we would've noticed Alfy the Troll..."
"Olaf," Dawn corrected quietly.
Lex went on as if he hadn't heard her. "...suddenly appearing in the lab. But if the disturbance were large enough, it could have the same effect from much farther away."
"Ooh!" He was right of course. Dawn flipped over to the grid side of the paper and quickly started estimating a mass-distance curve. "So here, and here... Troll in the same room, elephant in the building (which I also think we would've noticed), building on campus -- did you notice any new buildings as we were driving out, Lex?"
"Appearing or disappearing?"
"Aircraft carrier somewhere in this country..."
"We'll have to check the newspapers in the morning," Lex smirked. She got the feeling he wasn't exactly taking this seriously.
"Small asteroid in orbit, Death Star in the Oort Cloud."
Lex just looked at her. She double-checked her figures.
"Darn."