Doug stared at the man dressed as Superman, considered, and resigned himself to ridicule. He walked around the room, staying out of the psychics' way, and offered his hand. “Superman?”

The man turned and smiled, looking at him a bit quizzically. He shook hands with a firm but not crushing grip; nothing supernormal there. “Hello. I'm pleased to meet you, Mr…?”

“Call me Doug. I'm a physicist—” To his surprise, the hero's eyes lit up.

“Ah! Good! I—I'm sorry, you were saying?”

Doug took a moment to get back in stride. “Um, well, I was wondering if you had time to answer a few questions, maybe demonstrate something since I'm new to the whole…” Doug felt his voice fade out as he realized that the man in front of him was now several feet up in the air.

The hovering man spread his arms. “Convinced?”

“Uh…” The fellow reached down, hooked one finger around his belt and hoisted him into the air; another hand reached out to grip his neck to steady him. Doug stared, waved his arms around where wires should have been, and became a believer.

“Convinced, Superman. My apologies.”

Doug found himself lowered quite gently to the ground. “Mine as well; it's just that we may not have long to talk, and I've had to explain my existence too many times in the past twenty-four hours. It gets time-consuming. I'd be happy to answer your questions, if you would answer some for me.”

Doug had to just stare at his hero for a moment, then whirled to face Murray Goldberg. “How in the hell?!?”

“I've been trying to tell you,” the mystic answered with a shrug, seeming to understand his discomfiture.

Doug turned back to Superman—to Superman!—standing right in front of him. “Sorry. Uh…”

“Perhaps your first question?”

“Right. Um…how do you fly?”

“I don't know, actually. Dr. Hamilton has speculated that it is a form of telekinesis.”

“But there's…” no such thing, Doug managed not to say. “We've seen little or no sign of such abilities on this world. Um, next: where is—was—Krypton located?”

Superman recited Right Ascension, Declination, and distance in light-years, and Doug took them down carefully. He felt bad about the sad note that crept into Superman's voice as he did so.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Closest alien race?”

“Right here.” Doug looked up to find Superman trying to keep a straight face. “Eighty-seven light-years away.” Doug took down more coordinates. “I don't know if that civilization will exist in this universe, however.”

“Noted. God, there are so many questions to ask; I'll have to just ask the most important ones. Superman, for the sake of science, could I have a bit of your hair, or a bit of fingernail, or…?”

Superman reached up, rubbed a blue-black lock of his hair, finding individual hairs by feel, then plucked one. He inspected it, then held it between them, not quite offering it. “One condition.”

“What?”

“No cloning.”

Doug almost laughed. “Done. Superman, our science is not as advanced as yours, there is no way we could clone a human from a piece of hair, let alone a Kryptonian.”

“Very well, then. Be careful—”

Doug grasped it firmly, thinking that Superman was cautioning him not to lose the hair. A moment later, he found he had matching cuts bleeding on his thumb and forefinger. Still, he didn't let go until he had obtained a small clear plastic box (an empty candy container, actually) and set the hair carefully inside. A few tentative shakes convinced him that it wasn't going to slice its way out without pressure being exerted on both sides.

“Thank you, Superman.”

“You're welcome. Now, if you wouldn't mind answering questions for me?”

“Oh, of course, if I can!”

“All right, first one: why doesn't my heat vision work here?”

Doug blinked. “It doesn't?”

“No.” Superman explained at length, and Doug thought it over.

“Well, Dr. Harper had his intro physics wrong, because waves converge just fine in our universe; that's how lenses work. Okay…You're impossible six ways before breakfast, Superman, and most of those translated to our universe without incident, but heat vision didn't. Maybe there's simply no way for your heat vision to work in our universe. I mean, it's not actual beams of infrared radiation shooting out of your eyes, is it? It's something else?”

“Well, let me try to demonstrate…here.” Superman picked up a candle that was sitting in a candlestick on one of the bookshelves. He furrowed his brow, staring at the wick. Doug watched in fascination. Superman's eyes narrowed, and abruptly a pair of red beams shot out of his eyes and converged on the wick; it burst into flame instantly.

“WOW!” Doug yelled, then caught himself.

“It worked!” Superman exclaimed, pleased. He blinked a couple of times. “There's still a bit of a twinge, but not much.”

“It must be proximity to the opening. The other time it worked, you were in Boston, right?”

“Right. Doctor, you seemed more surprised by the heat vision than by the flying. Why?”

“Well, movies and science fiction to the contrary, in this universe, beams don't actually glow when they propagate. And those beams weren't moving at the speed of light; if I could see them traveling, they couldn't be going more than 100 meters per second, probably much less, in fact. That means that the laws of physics in your universe are leaking into ours, and ours might be leaking into yours the same way.”

“But I flew to the Moon and back just now and that worked, well, oddly, but it worked.”

“Which means that whatever you use for propulsion is actually possible in our universe. Wow. Superman, I may be spending the rest of my life trying to figure out how you fly,” Doug happily told him. “Maybe the cells in your hair will give us a clue.”

Abruptly, the microphone in Superman's hand came to life. “Superman, come in.”