Miracle Monday (2 page)

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 Xrays 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.

Chapter 2
G
RADUATION
 

The boy grew up in a universe of macrocosm and microcosm. To visit the other side of the world was, to him, what swinging on a vine across a creek was for other boys. He could see the unending dramas of underground ant colony wars and stratospheric weather front competitions as easily as he saw the mail truck barreling past the farm into town twice a day. He could alter his visual perceptions to detect waves on the entire electromagnetic spectrum, seeing alpha particles or cosmic rays as easily as he saw the visible light- but in colors that ordinary humans were incapable of imagining.

He could feel the level of the day's sunspot activity when he woke up in the morning in much the same way that those around him could tell if it was raining before they opened the shades. He could hold a conversation in one room while he listened to another one a mile away and to a radio broadcast as it flew through the air around him in microwaves.

The world was his playground and campus, superhuman senses his teachers, the anonymity of the Kent home his womb and protection. He was alone in all this sense and knowledge, monumentally alone; but less alone, he realized, than were those other Earthmen, glued to their work and trapped inside bodies that could do no more than touch the outsides of other bodies. The boy was alone, but he was never bored.

Jonathan Kent had sold the farm for less than it was worth; bought the general store in Smallville from old Whizzer Barnes for more than it was worth; and moved into a little clapboard house he couldn't afford next to Sarah and Martin Lang. Young Maynard Stone, the former backyard turkey entrepreneur, was now John M. K. Stone, the chief loan officer at the Smallville branch of Heartland Bank and Trust. Young Stone floated a loan to Jonathan for ten years, betting on Clark's eventual ability to pay it off. That was the way people did business in Smallville, especially with a man whose smile was as infectious as Jonathan Kent's.

Clark was thirteen when he sat on the school bus and stared through the window at the installation ceremony for a new queen bee in a hive four miles away. Lana sat next to him and talked incessantly about how incredibly old Clark Gable was starting to look and how she couldn't understand why her mother said he was such a hunk every time she saw a picture of him in a magazine and was Clark listening to her?

"Yeah, Lana. Clark Gable's a hunk. Mostly I like his name."

"Oh, Clark, you're always daydreaming. I don't know why I talk to you at all."

"No, I was listening, Lana. Honest," he said, as the new queen's nuptial flight carried her above all the drones but one. Clark turned to look at the girl, taking an instant to notice her incredible red hair for the seven hundredth and twelfth time, and said, "You said that he's nearly sixty and his wife at home is pregnant and he's filming a movie somewhere out of the country with Marilyn Monroe and every woman your mother's age is drooling for him all the time and you don't see how his poor wife can handle even looking at a man like that because he's so old and presumably overrated and outside the country with Marilyn Monroe and I suppose I agree completely."

Clark smiled the way his father smiled (if people knew he was adopted they had very likely forgotten by now) and Lana let out a deep breath and said, "Oh Clark," and the bus driver slammed on his brake.

They were on the Totten Pond Road, on a little hill that was the highest point for fifty miles, and the window on the right side of the bus looked out over Smallville. If Clark pointed the fingers of his right hand upward, with his thumb on the gold-leafed town hall bell tower and his ring finger at the point of the light blue steeple of the old Methodist Church, then the span of his hand held the entire town.

Clark looked up when the bus stopped short. So did Lana and the thirty-one other kids on their way to school this morning. The driver threw the handle to open the double-door and hopped out. The fifteen kids on the left side of the bus gaped out their windows and said things like "Wow," and "Aww," and "Oh the poor thing," and the eighteen kids on the right side got out of their seats to see what was going on.

"This old fella look familiar to any of you kids?" the driver wanted to know. The driver was kneeling next to his left front wheel, gently stroking the fur of an ancient black Labrador retriever, dying or dead, who had just been hit by that wheel.

Clark gulped, looked at the dog thoroughly from his vantage point on the bus. The animal was not breathing, its heart had stopped; its brain was still radiating electromagnetic energy but it would not be doing that for long. It probably died of shock the moment the bus hit it. There was nothing Clark or anyone else could do for it.

"That's Tim," Pete Ross said, "the dog that lives in the chicken coop on the Johnson farm."

"Is that Tim?" somebody said.

"Aww," somebody said.

"There was so much dust on the road," the bus driver said, "that I didn't see him until I was almost on top of him. He just stood there, didn't even try to get out of the way."

"Mr. Johnson said he had arthritis," somebody said.

The driver wrapped the old dog in his coat and put him under his seat, saying that he would take the animal to the Johnson farm as soon as the students were all at school. The rest of the ride was uncommonly quiet. Halfway through the morning, all the students who were on the bus, except for Clark, seemed to have forgotten the incident. Clark left school that day at lunchtime.

Jonathan Kent was planning on liking his new career. He was supposed to have gotten rid of the farm years ago on doctor's orders, but the advent of a son had delayed that. It's just plain common sense that a little kid can't keep a big secret in a small town, and little Clark's secret was as big as they come. Doc Hill told Jonathan then that if he kept up the hard work he wouldn't live to see another president sworn in. Well, he'd lived to see two or three, he couldn't remember exactly how many it'd been. All he'd needed was a boy to share the work and to call him Pa.

Clark was older now, though, and he could keep his own secrets; and running a general store right in town just a few blocks from home was lots better for body and soul than pitching hay—as long as Martha kept the books straight. Jonathan was rearranging his display of detergent boxes from alphabetical order to size places for the second time this week when the pay phone near the door rang.

"Kent's General Store, Jonathan Kent here."

"Jonathan, is that you?"

"It was when I answered the phone. Don't see any reason it'd change now. Something wrong, Martha?"

"It's Clark."

"What about Clark?"

"He came home early from school. He's running a fever."

Jonathan was about to say something to the effect that boys get sick sometimes, but then realized that Clark had never been sick before. "You suppose your thermometer could be wrong?" he asked his wife.

"The temperature is the least of it. He walked in red-eyed and he hasn't stopped crying since he got here. He's in his room under the covers and shivering and he won't tell me what's wrong. Jonathan, I think it could be some sort of unknown ailment we can't do anything about. That's the only sickness I can imagine him getting. I don't know whether or not to call Doc Hill."