Have Yourself A Fanboy Little Christmas

by Carycomic

Synopsis: A certain ginger-haired Time Lord meets a husband-and-wife team of Voyagers for lunch.

Foreword: 1983 was a landmark year for me, as three of my top one hundred favorite movies came out that year. MY TUTOR (Apr. 22); RETURN OF THE JEDI (May 25); and SUPERMAN III (June 17). By fortuitous coincidence, the pilot episode for the classic Irwin Allen series LAND OF THE GIANTS was set on June 12, 1983! So it got me to thinking. What if...?

NICE, FRANCE.

DEC. 26, 1983

The three of them met at the Cafe St. Germaine. The raven-haired young woman wore a red vest and matching mini skirt over a black unitard. Her tall, thin, curly-haired husband wore a gray jacket with matching pants over a black shirt. While the slightly older gentleman seated across from them, at the sidewalk table, wore a dark brown overcoat with a matching fedora and a (sort of) rainbow-colored scarf.

The latter doffed his hat in greeting.

"Thorg! Berna! Hello. So nice to see you again."

"Hello, Doctor," said the younger man with a mischievous grin. "It's been a long... time."

"Thorg!" exclaimed his wife, slapping him across his right shoulder. "You promised me you wouldn't tell that awful old joke."

But, the Doctor merely grinned. "Now, now, my dear. 'Levity is the best medicine' or something to that effect."

Whereupon they all sat down. The waiter who approached them (apparently not noticing their out-of-style clothing) was given their orders in flawless French. When he returned to the interior of the cafe, they got down to business.

"I was contacted by the Celestial Intervention Agency. It seems they're concerned about a wormhole you two recently generated in the Triangulum Galaxy. And they wanted me to find out why."

Berna looked at her husband. "That was your doing; not mine. So, you do the honors."

Thorg sighed. "Very well. It was to keep a forested moon called Endor from being ecologically devastated by the explosion of a planet-sized space station called Death Star 2! Toward that end, I used my Omni-Space/Time Manipulator to open a wormhole between the moon... and a relatively nearby black hole called Endor's Gate. Thereby redirecting most of the explosive energy into the latter."

"Name of Rassilon!" gasped the Doctor. "Do you know what you've done?!"

"Yes," replied the younger man with a slightly defiant growl. "I saved a socially innocent race called the Ewoks- -plus a whole bunch of other indigenous life forms- -from premature, undeserved extinction. And don't tell me I did wrong, Doctor! I made sure that no local history was critically changed by my actions. So, technically, I did not violate my oath as a Voyager."

"True, there were no _local_ changes. But, you overlooked one not-so-small detail. Endor's Gate is a rotating black hole! That means, the explosive energy you re-directed was not just absorbed. It was interdimensionally transferred!"

SIX MONTHS EARLIER

The saucer-shaped, orange-painted, solar-powered SST/VTOL had taken off from LAX on its maiden flight. At the half-way point of their journey, however, something happened. Something totally unprecedented in the combined experience of the two men piloting the aircraft.

"Mayday! Mayday!" Capt. Steve Burton yelled into the cockpit's microphone. "This is Sub-orbital Flight 612, L.A. to London. Call sign 'Spindrift.' Can anybody read me? We have encountered turbulence caused by some kind of weird phenomenon. We cannot pull out of it. We need someone to get a radar fix on our position! Does anybody read me? Over!"

Unfortunately, no one did. The static jamming their transmission was too powerful. At least, for conventional radio receivers. In Metropolis, New Jersey, however, there was a certain set of ears more powerful than _any_ conventional radio receiver. Ears belonging to a mild-mannered reporter for a newspaper called The Daily Planet!

"This," he whispered to himself. "...looks like a job for Superman."

Whereupon he told his journalistic co-worker, Lois Lane, that he had to run to the men's room to answer a call of nature. Yet, the moment he passed a certain supply closet, just down the hall, he ducked in there to affect a change of clothes. When that had been accomplished, he exited the closet through a secret door that he had just as secretly carved into the back wall of the otherwise dead-end room. Thereby connecting it to the staircase leading up to the newspaper's rooftop helipad!

It was from there Superman took off on an intercept course for the Spindrift.

In less time than it takes to tell, he had reached the sub-orbital shuttle. Pausing just long enough, at the edge of Earth's breathable atmosphere, to inhale a super-lungful of air. For, contrary to certain stories generated in the tabloid press, he could _not_ breathe in total vacuum! He, then, positioned himself at Spindrift's stern. Using his super-strength to gently turn the experimental aircraft one hundred-eighty degrees counter-clockwise. When the craft's cockpit was once more facing Earth, Superman began to really exert his super-strength. Trying to push Spindrift back inside the sunlit portion of Earth's atmosphere.

Unfortunately, that proved easier said than done.

"The gravitational pull is stronger than I thought," he mused to himself. "It's like a whirlpool of water going down a bathtub drain!"

To make matters worse, his exertions were starting to decrease the normal amount of time he could hold his breath. That was when he remembered Newton's Third Law.

" 'For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.' Or, as Pa Kent once paraphrased it. 'Kill two birds with one stone'."

Whereupon he barrel-rolled so that his back was pressed up against Spindrift's stern while his face was turned towards the wormhole. He then exhaled his held super-breath

in the direction of the latter. The exhalation acting just like the ignition of a rocket engine in propelling both him and Spindrift back in the direction of Earth! Unfortunately, while Spindrift managed to get recaptured by Earth's gravity, so that her passengers and crew were able to complete her maiden flight to London, the same could not be said for their Kryptonian-born rescuer.

Exhausted from his exertions, he could not resist being pulled back towards the wormhole... and into it.

"According to the CIA," continued the Doctor. "...the terminus of that secondary wormhole opened above a planet orbiting the orange giant star Earth's astronomers will someday designate HD-13189. Or, as it's more simply referred to, by the inhabitants of neighboring worlds: Shoon!"

Berna was genuinely puzzled by the Doctor's reaction. "Why should that alarm them? Shoon is uninhabited, as any Voyager first-year trainee can tell you. Ergo; Superman's arrival there won't cause sociological damage of any kind. Allowing us to pick him up and bring him back here mere seconds after he left!"

"You're assuming he landed on present-day Shoon," replied the Doctor. "And we all know the old Earth saying about _erroneous_ assumptions!"

"Look! He's awake. He's moving!"

Kal-El groaned as he slowly regained his feet. His right hand massaging his aching forehead.

"Great Scott! I feel like I've been kicked by a Missouri mule... with kryptonite horseshoes."

This half-whispered comment was just loud enough to elicit a series of gasps from directly above him! So, Kal-El looked upward... and gasped in turn. For staring down at him, and surrounding him on all sides, were the beautiful faces of ten giant women! Every single one of whom were dressed in aerobic exercise leotards.

Flatteringly form-fitting ones, at that.

THE END?