The boy would be ready, Jonathan Kent decided, when he was able to
feel pain.
Jonathan had already awakened his wife Martha three or four times this
night with his tossing and turning, but she had not been awake enough
any of those times either to stay awake or to notice why she had
awakened. This time, when Jonathan screamed a shrill, horrible
scream, she was awake enough.
"My land, Jonathan! What is it?"
He screamed again, catching the sound short in his throat as he woke
himself up.
"Jonathan! Oh dear, please wake up, Jonathan."
He grabbed at his pillow, tensed his muscles, slowly let them go.
"Jonathan? Are you all right, Jonathan? Won't you please wake up?"
"I'm awake, I'm awake. I don't think I ever want to go to sleep
again."
"What a horrid thing to say. I've never known you to have bad dreams
before."
"I've never had a dream this bad before."
"Do you want to tell me about it?" She no more wanted to hear about
it than she wanted to stay awake any longer, but she was ready to
comfort her husband back into sleep.
"Don't even want to tell me about it. Go back to sleep,
Martha."
"Good night, Jonathan."
"Good night, dear."
But Jonathan had to tell himself about it. It was more than a dream,
of course. It was the future - the real future - and not
distant at all. He repeated it in his mind over and over until he
tortured himself with the experience, tortured himself into coming up
with a solution.
It had begun this past afternoon, Thanksgiving Day, with the turkey.
Jonathan had stopped raising livestock for slaughter a few years ago,
soon after he and Martha had adopted little Clark. Martha bought this
turkey from young Maynard Stone whose father, James Stone the bank
president, had thought it was a better idea for his son to go into the
backyard turkey-breeding business than to simply give his son an
allowance. Maynard, nearly grown now, was a good boy, taking care of
his father with turkey money through the banker's long illness.
Martha brought the kicking and gobbling turkey home and nine-year-old
Clark helped his mother by snapping the bird's neck and plucking its
feathers in the twinkling of an eye. Sarah Lang and her young
daughter Lana came to the Kent farm for Thanksgiving dinner because
Professor Martin Lang was off in Yucatan or the Sinai Desert or
Thailand or somewhere on one of his archaeological digs. Martin
called the farm at dinnertime from wherever he was to say hi and happy
Thanksgiving, and Sarah told him it was the best-tasting dinner she
had ever had. For all Jonathan knew it may have been. He was not
enjoying himself.
All through the meal Martha went on about what a good boy Clark was
and what a help he had been. Of course, she left out certain facts in
her approbation. Clark had, for example, dressed and stuffed the bird
in four seconds, including time out to ask Martha whether she wanted
thyme in the stuffing. Also, when the bird was not done in time,
Clark had finished roasting it with heat vision. And through it all,
Jonathan had trouble noticing how good everything tasted because
something was bothering him about the bird, about his wife, about the
smiling faces of his neighbors and his compliment-collecting son.
That part of the dream was real, from the past afternoon and evening.
The rest of the dream took place in the future, but it was also real:
Sometime during the next few years a pair of bored, broke adventurers
in diving suits tried to rob the Smallville branch of the Heartland
Bank and Trust Company. The event in progress was broadcast over a
police-band radio in Jonathan Kent's general store, the store Jonathan
was planning to buy when he sold the farm later this year. Lana Lang
was in the store at the time, and Jonathan covered for young Clark by
asking him to go to the basement and bring up a package from storage.
Clark brought back no package. Clark was Superboy, and this was the
day he would tell the world he had arrived.
Clark stripped to the costume he wore under his street clothes, the
costume Jonathan and Martha had made for him from the unraveled
material of the blankets in which, as an infant, Clark had come to
Earth. He dove through the tunnel he had built from the basement of
the store to a wooded area. He found the robbers jumping into a lake
from a pier outside of town. Police in their cars were unable to
follow them into the water.
Superboy plopped out of the sky into the lake and spotted the pair
merrily plowing through deep murk, breathing their canned air. The
boy knifed through the water and gripped steely hands around a pair of
aluminum air tanks. He punctured both tanks in five places. The air
rushed out, and a minute later - fifty-nine seconds after police
and onlookers saw the not-yet-familiar red-and-blue streak pop
straight up into the sky in a spout and a swirl - people saw the
corpses of the pair of drowned bank robbers surface in a dead man's
float until the police could fish their blue bodies from the lake.
Superboy's work was not done. Up, up and away through the sky he
flew.
In a nearby national forest preserve a timber wolf was menacing a
forest ranger. The ranger held an empty rifle in one hand and reached
for the door of the truck with the other. The ranger had scared the
wolf into growling at arm's distance while he had edged twelve feet to
the truck. His fingertips reached the truck door. Then, deliberately
and with no quick moves, he would position himself. In one motion he
would leap into the cab and slam the door closed. The window on this
side was shut, the wolf couldn't get in. He would slam on his pedal
and leave the beast behind. He would make it now. He knew it.
A red-and-blue gust of wind swept down from the sky and left the
animal, its jaw shattered like a dropped piece of pottery, dead on the
forest floor. Superboy stopped to introduce himself and shake hands
with the bewildered ranger, then soared off.
On the other side of the preserve there was a drought, the only one in
the country that year. Farmers were losing their wheat crops,
hundreds of thousands of acres. Superboy plowed a system of trenches
and canals through the area, linking it with the Ohio and Mississippi
Rivers, irrigating the countryside for all time, or until the rivers
choked themselves with slit and waste, whichever came first. Fallow
land would bloom again. The boy stopped to make a statement to the
press.
In Minneapolis there was a little blind girl undergoing a brain
operation. The tumor that had sat against her optic nerve and made
her blind since the age of eight months had begun to grow, and it had
to come out. The supervising neurosurgeon had delivered the child six
years earlier in a stalled elevator, the only delivery he had made
since he was an intern. Now he had to save her life. He was as
nervous as he had ever been. It was he who had made the decision not
to remove the tumor when it made the girl blind. There was about one
chance in a hundred that her brain would survive this operation. The
doctor guided a tiny scalpel past her optic nerve in order to separate
the tumor from the bone tissue it touched, and then he remembered that
this little girl whose skull lay open under his hand was someone he
loved. His fingers were going to shake. He knew it. The scalpel
vanished from his hand.
Suddenly, beside the neurosurgeon, there stood a handsome black-haired
boy, maybe thirteen years old, dressed in a bizarre red-and-blue
costume with an odd pentagonal red-and-yellow emblem on his chest. In
the moment the doctor and his surgery team looked on without knowing
what to do, Superboy cleanly vaporized the deadly growth and with a
puff of air he cooled the space where it had been. Six days from now,
for the first time since her infancy, the girl would be able to see.
Superboy told the doctors and the hospital's publicity department who
he was and what he had done, and he called the neurosurgeon a bumbling
incompetent in front of his colleagues.
Superboy crashed through virgin forests to help build roads or dig
mines. For the good of society he dropped tyrants, heinous criminals
and chronic speeders into volcanoes. He was a weekend guest at the
White House where he suggested that the president make him de facto
Commander in Chief of all American military forces, since, according
to Superboy, he would be in charge of everything soon enough anyway.
The president considered the expediency of this.
Jonathan Kent knew about kryptonite. No one had yet given a name to
the glowing green stone that the boy once closed up in a lead tube and
buried under a corner of the Kents' old barn. No one knew it was a
fragment of the exploded planet Krypton, the lost world of the boy's
birth. All anyone knew was that one day, when Clark was about four or
five, there was a splash of meteors in the sky over the farm. The
boy decided to dart into the sky and see if he could catch one of the
fiery rocks before they all fizzled into nothingness with air
friction. Thirty miles over the farm the child caught hundreds of
them in the little red cape of his playsuit. The biggest one was the
size of a baseball. Mostly they were cosmic gravel. But as he tied
the ends of his cape into a hobo knot, he felt dizzy and lost the
power of flight; it was all he could do, as he fell to Earth, to catch
currents of air and point himself in the direction of home. Martha
heard a thud in the back of the house and found her son at the bottom
of a ten-foot hole, threw the cape and the meteorites away and dragged
the child into the house where, almost immediately, he woke up crying.
The next morning Jonathan took the boy out to the barn, where he had
laid out the rocks. Some of them looked quite remarkable: one was
orange striated with blue; another was melted and bubbled with
friction on one side and solid as granite on the other, as though
someone had thrown a knuckleball at Earth's atmosphere; the shape of
one looked to Clark like the bill of a duck.
One, the size and shape of a big marble, was undistinguished except
for the fact that it glowed slightly in a dull green color. It was
the radiation of that stone that made the boy fall down again in the
barn.
That was years ago, and no one had talked much since then about what
the stone might be. Maybe the boy had forgotten about it.
Now - Jonathan dreamed - Superboy was already being
worshipped as a messiah by people who should know better. Superboy
should know better. Soon he would take the power of the life and
death of the planet into his hands. He was a boy - no more than
a boy, with a boy's emotions, a boy's caprices, a boy's lack of
restraint - with the power of the gods of fable.
The man certainly did not want to kill his son. Father's do not kill
their sons. He did not even want to punish him. He only wanted to
talk to him - to make him listen, the way a boy ought to listen
to his father. But when Jonathan drove out to the old barn that night
and took three shovelfuls of dirt out of the corner where the
lead-encased meteorite was buried, the shovel hit something solid the
fourth time it sliced the earth, and Jonathan shuddered.
What was he nervous about? Clark hadn't buried the meteorite that
shallowly; the shovel had hit a rock, that was all. Jonathan pulled
the shovel out and chopped into the ground a few inches away: it hit
something again. Another rock, probably.
Then, what should have been a rock under the shovel pushed the blade
up out of the ground, shook off some dirt, and the rock became a sooty
hand at the end of a blue sleeve. The arm shoved itself out of the
dirt and pushed at the shovel, throwing Jonathan to the ground. And
following the arm out of the earth was the body to which it was
attached - the figure of Jonathan's adopted son Clark, in his
red-and-blue flying suit - the boy the world knew and feared as
Superboy.
The boy glared at the man, raised the shovel over his head like a
broadsword.
Jonathan screamed, "I wasn't going to - "
That was all he had a chance to say before the shovel came at
Jonathan's face: he screamed, Martha shook him awake.
Jonathan was too pumped with adrenaline to do any more sleeping that
night. He knew what he had to do in the morning; then he remembered
that he did not have to wait until morning. Clark did not sleep more
than an hour or so each night, and Jonathan suspected Clark only did
that to be polite.
Jonathan groped for his glasses, draped his robe over him, shivered
until he found his slippers. He padded down the hall to Clark's room
and was about to knock on the door when the boy said, "Come on
in, Pa."
Jonathan found the boy sitting at his desk with a plastic microscope
from a Gilbert Science Set, and for an instant the man was scared
again. He told himself that, at least for the moment, his experience
was only a dream. "What're you up to, Clark?"
"Look in here." Clark slid the microscope along the desk
toward another chair.
The boy's desk was an L-shaped affair in the corner of the room. It
was a combination of an old office-style desk on the wall facing the
window, and a long butcher-block platform that used to be the kitchen
counter against the adjoining wall. "What am I looking at?"
Jonathan asked as he peered through the lenses.
"A cross section of a grasshopper's nerve ganglia."
"Umm."
Clark thought the old man was somehow nervous. He looked into his
father's eyes and thought they were uncommonly dry. That was probably
only because it was so late, Clark decided. "It's magnified
forty times," Clark told his father.
"How do you know it's the . . . nerve ganglia?"
"I dissected him myself with my fingernails and my microscopic
vision. Now watch."
Jonathan watched Clark as the boy held up two empty microscopic
slides, one next to each of his eyes, to act as reflectors. He faced
the shaft of the microscope and told his father to look at the
grasshopper now.
"Bigger," Jonathan said, "lots bigger. Is that the
same thing I was looking at a moment ago?"
"Yeah. Watch it now."
As Jonathan looked at the insect's nerve tissue, Clark continued to
stare at the microscope with some intensity, gradually bringing
together the outer edges of the slides. As he did this, the object at
which Jonathan was looking seemed to grow, to become more detailed.
Jonathan had to cover his left eye with his hand because the right eye
that was peering through the instrument began careening into the
grasshopper's body like a straw into a baler. As Clark diminished the
angle of his reflectors, Jonathan saw a close-up of the animal's nerve
tissue that looked like a red-and-orange landscape of another world.
Then closer. He saw a pair of narrow chains running parallel, and
between them was a red gully made up of some sort of pulsing, viscous
substance.
"See that, Pa? That's the nerve," the little boy's excited
alto said. "It's a single long cell running the entire length of
the animal's body. Now look at this."
Closer still. There was a tiny green triangular object stuck to the
edge of the nerve cell. It got bigger, bigger until Jonathan realized
that this was a separate complex object in itself.
"Know what that is?" Clark asked him.
"No idea. Looks alive, though."
"It is. It's a virus. It's a single molecule of ribonucleic
acid feeding on the grasshopper's nerve cell wall. It doesn't know
the grasshopper's dead yet. What you're looking at is magnified
nearly a hundred thousand times. Pretty good, huh?"
"Not a bad trick, son." Jonathan looked up from the
microscope and rubbed his eyes before he put his glasses back on.
"How d'you do it?"
"With my microscopic vision. I figured out how my eyes work.
I've got this weird optic nerve, see? It's got an active mode along
with the passive mode everybody else's optic nerve has, which is why I
can project heat and X rays with my eyes, besides just seeing
through them. Anyway, all I have to do to intensify the magnification
of that microscope is divert the active mode impulse of my - Are
you following this, Pa?"
"Umm - barely, so far," Jonathan Kent answered the
nine-year-old child. "You're likely to lose me any second,
though."
"Well, anyway, it's like with these slides I'm projecting what I
can see, like mirrors off the back of my eyeballs. Pretty good,
huh?"
"Pretty good. Don't suppose the grasshopper appreciates it much,
though."
"He didn't appreciate the virus either."
"Tell me something, Clark. Couldn't you have done about the same
sort of trick with a chunk of rock or an old tree twig?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean instead of putting a dead thing on your slide."
"Huh?" The boy crinkled his eyebrows for a moment and
glanced through his foster father's eyes. "Oh, I'm sorry. I
didn't know stuff like that bothered you. I just wanted to see what
killed the grasshopper, is all."
"Whuzzat? You didn't kill him?"
"No. And there were grasshoppers all over the cornfield. Well,
not like it was an infestation or anything, but there didn't seem to
be any reason for this one to be dead. It was young, no parts missing,
didn't have any digestion problems I could see. So I took it in here
and found the virus. They're all up and down his nerves. He probably
just twitched to death. Terrible."
"Well now, that's the best news I've heard all day."
"It is?"
"Sure enough."
"Well this virus could get into other grasshoppers. It might be
all over. Could even get at other animals maybe. That's not great
news."
"Son," Jonathan Kent said smiling, "when you live
around farming and nature as long as I have, you learn to understand
that everything lives in a balance. Grasshoppers live with corn
crops, viruses live with grasshoppers, even men live with their
livestock. All you've got to remember, being a thinking kind of
creature, is not to tamper with the balance as much as you might be
tempted to. Understand, boy?"
Clark looked through his father's eyes again. They were different
from the way they were when Jonathan walked in. They were somehow
more relaxed, moister in the tear ducts. "Yeah, Pa, I think I
understand that."
"I was just thinking about that tonight when I woke up. Wanted
to come in here and tell you."
"Right, Pa."
"Well, good night, Clark. Don't strain those active modes of
yours."
"Right. G'night, Pa."
Clark wondered why his father had been so upset when he walked in,
wondered why the little bit he said was so important to him. Clark
tucked his questions into a pocket of his mind, confident that he
would figure out their answers soon enough. For the rest of the night
Jonathan Kent slept like a grizzly in January.