Chapter 63

"How soon before you will know?" Superman turned to the doctor.

"How soon before you will know?" Lois asked at the exact same time.

Dr. Kline looked from Superman to Lois and back to Superman in surprise. "Know what?" The doctor asked happily.

Lois could see that Clark, in his impatience, was putting a little too much pressure on the desk. The wood was beginning to creak under his hands. "Superman," she touched the back of his right hand gently, "means how long will it be before you could be sure of this… this increased toughness on my part?"

"Oh, I don't know if we'll ever be sure. It would be one of those trial and error things we'd have to experiment with before we could assess the—"

"Trial and error!" Superman exclaimed under his breath and abruptly turned away from Dr. Kline, not hearing the rest of the sentence, for his eyes lit on a box of crystalline rocks on a table ten feet away that looked a little too familiar. "Dr. Kline, what are those?" His voice was even, but Lois could tell he had the slightest hint of an accusation in his tone.

Dr. Kline got up, put his hands in his pockets, and went over to the table. "Ah. Those. Well. Uh…"

"Let me put the question another way, since I know very well what they are. How did they come to be here?"

"Well…that would be…Mr. Queen…" A fine sheen of sweat appeared on Dr. Kline's brow.

"Oliver Queen?" Both Lois and Superman asked in unison. Then Superman added, "He had me followed?"

"No, of course not. That would be impossible anyway. You fly way too fast for that most of the time. He had you tracked." Dr. Kline relented. "His satellites, you know? They're quite remarkable. The absolute best in the world. Did you know that they didn't even go down on Dark Thursday?"

"I heard. So he sent someone to retrieve all the Kryptonian mineral specimens from Dax-Ur's property." Superman's anger was barely controlled. "Tell me they didn't scare his wife and child!"

"Oh, no. No, I'm sure of that! I'm sure they were very discreet. Mr. Queen was quite adamant that this was to be done with the highest degree of secrecy—"

"I'll bet. Especially keeping it a secret from me."

Lois walked over to Superman and placed a restraining hand on his arm, while giving him the same look he'd given her every time he'd uttered the word, 'careful,' to her that day. "So, Dr. Kline, what exactly did the two of you find out about these pretty rocks? They're really very colorful, aren't they?"

Dr. Kline coughed nervously. "Yes, yes, they are. But, more importantly, they're very unusual."

"Do you mean—? Are they like Kryptonite? Superman, maybe you shouldn't stand so close…" She started pushing him away from the table.

"It's okay, Miss Lane, I don't feel anything."

"Ah! I …wasn't aware Miss Lane knew about Kryptonite…Well, well, well…But no, Superman, you shouldn't feel any effects from them, not really, although they do share many similarities with the various forms of Kryptonite, like high nickel content, they aren't giving off any form of radiation that we can detect." He bent down and looked closely at the stones, "Nor do they seem to glow in your presence. Oh, I must write that down!" He grabbed a notebook and started scribbling. "We haven't quite evaluated them all just yet. There's been so much to do, and geology is really not our field of expertise." He walked back over to join them at the table and picked up a purplish stone. "Now this one is particularly fascinating. We're postulating its effects, should it be irradiated, just might be similar to the red—"

"Dr. Kline," Superman suddenly interrupted, took the doctor by the arm, and steered him back over to his desk, "getting back to Miss Lane and your theories, just how do you think her mitochondria got to be so different?"

For the briefest second, Lois looked hard at Superman, trying to figure out just what had elicited a sudden change in his demeanor. He had gone from a slow-burning anger to a little too animated all in one breath. Crap, she thought, what did I miss? Why can't I have just a smidgen of that total recall stuff? Dr. Kline said something about something red…red what?

But the conversation had continued with Dr. Kline spouting off his scientific theories as though they were cookie recipes, and Lois was missing them.

"…and if the artifacts that held those stones were located at different far off places on the globe, then it follows they were put there by Kryptonians, or 'a' Kryptonian, using those portals you told us about. It had to be done either thousands of years ago, since they were all hidden inside ancient artifacts for at least that long, or…" He paused.

"Or what?" Lois and Superman both prompted him at the same time.

Dr. Kline looked from one to the other of them curiously. "Do you practice that?"

"What?" both of them asked, confused.

"Saying the same thing at the same time?" he chuckled to himself.

Superman ignored the question. "Dr. Kline, given where they were found, the stones had to have been hidden that long ago. What other possibility is there?"

"Only one that I can see and that is that the portals themselves could have had the capability of time travel as well as space travel," Dr. Kline said proudly. "I favor that explanation myself. It makes more sense. If your father was capable of inventing a spacecraft that somehow traversed the distance between Krypton and here, and it must have been routed through some wormhole or something like that, then he was probably smart enough to figure out time travel. Of course, it goes against present-day, accepted scientific theories, but you yourself said you had been visited by people from the future, and there's the amazing fact that you can fly, even though there's no earthly reason you should be able to, so we're trying to keep our minds open to all—"

"Doctor—." Superman's mind was trying to sort out a lot of information and make sense of it all, so he was slow in forming his question. "You're saying… that my father could have come here before Krypton exploded, not only choosing the place but the time as well?"

"Yes. You said you thought he came here once as a young man."

"Yes. I believe he did."

"Wow." Lois said suddenly. "If he could travel into the future, he could have gone a little ahead in time just to make sure his only son made it to Earth and that he…" she stopped and finished lamely, "was okay." She looked awkwardly back and forth between the two men while they both just looked at her curiously.

"I suppose he could have," said Dr. Kline. "Of course, he may not have had that many options of what exact period in time he could choose. I imagine the fine tuning of getting to the exact moment you desired to visit through time and that distance of space would be an impossible task."

For the next half hour, Lois wheedled, Superman stood by and watched, and Dr. Kline spilled out just about every theory and thought that the two doctors had ever discussed involving the tests they had run. She'd even managed to copy a few files he had refused to show them right under the doctor's nose by making him think she wanted him to explain how the copy machine worked. After that, it was only a matter of slipping them to Superman to hide in his cape, a task she found harder to do given Superman's rigid sense of what constituted "stealing."

********

No sooner had they shut the door leading into the tunnels, Superman turned to Lois with arms folded.

"Sciency?"

"It worked, didn't it?"

"Yeah, but sciency?"

She tilted her head, smiled, and lifted her shoulders. "It sounded cuter than 'scientifically' and I was going for cute," she explained, and brushed by him, eager to get quickly past all those spiders. "Come on, we've got some reading to do."

"You mean the stuff you shoved at me? It's only a few papers."

"Yeah, but my jacket is just about stuffed. It was tight enough as it was."

"You didn't!"

"I did. I thought that was my job for today. To get information out of him. Well, I did," she said proudly, then changed her tone quickly at his open mouth. "Look, you can return it all later at super speed, if you like, but this stuff is about us, and I think it's our right to know what they've found out about us. Don't you?" She could see the thoughts warring inside of him. "Smallville, I know you wrote the book on doing the right thing at all times, but I wrote the one about bending the rules, and at some point in time, I'm hoping we meet somewhere in the middle."

"So am I," he said quietly, and kissed her full on the mouth.

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Author's note: Thanks, everyone, for the comments. I really needed them! (I'm having a bad day here!) I'm posting this chapter quickly because it was really a part of the one before until it just became too long and I had to separate it. Just warning y'all that's it's going to be a few days before I'll have any more ready. I've got a few chapters written but not the ones leading to them. Now to figure out how to get from here to there…