Miracle Monday (3 page)

"Lyndon? No, don't call him. I'm afraid he might still remember breaking a needle on Clark's arm when he was a baby. We'd have a devil of a time explaining if it turned out to be some space bug giving him the shakes. Just keep him warm until I get there and we'll figure out what to do."

Jonathan was a strong man, Martha knew. Underneath his glasses, his mild manners, his sheepish grin was the boy who had spirited her off in his buggy to a justice of the peace when he couldn't convince her father he could support a wife; the man who had taken a hundred twenty acres of the rockiest thicket in Kansas and twisted it into a wheatfield and a home; the husband in whose face she found love and prayer and hope when she had despaired over being unable to give birth. Middle-aged and childless, Martha Clark Kent grew to want no more from life than to grow old in the company of this unshakably good man. Then, as happened to Abraham's aged wife Sarah, the Heavens gave her a son.

Someday soon she would learn the origin of her son, the toddler she and Jonathan had found in an object she thought was a falling star one afternoon when they were on their way to look over a used tractor. She would learn of his flight from a dying planet, cast off into space by his parents. She would even learn the name of the planet—Krypton—and the names of the parents- Jor-El and Lara. But for most of the time she knew her adopted son, Martha Kent would know no more about him than that the boy had had, when she first saw him, the most angelic face she had ever seen. She wondered if all angels rode falling stars when they came to Earth.

Before Jonathan closed the gate of the picket fence, Martha had already flown out the door and into his arms with a "Jonathan! Jonathan!"

"Now what's all this about the boy being sick?" he asked as he fairly carried her back through the door.

"He won't talk to me. He may be delirious. He made his way home all right, he's just shivering and his face is so hot you could scramble an egg on his forehead. I'm scared for him, Jonathan."

"Now now dear, he's got a tougher skin than we do. Why don't you fix us a cup of tea and I'll see what the boy looks like?"

"All right." He was the kind of man—and they were scarce indeed—who quietly watched life most of the time, but when those he was watching seemed unable to handle things, he stepped in and shone with confidence.

Jonathan was in Clark's room for three or four minutes, not long enough even for the water in the kettle to think about boiling, before he came out. He wasn't smiling, but the confidence was still there.

"Growing pains, I warrant," he told her.

"Growing pains? With a fever and the shivers?

"That's what I'd call it. Nothing a good man-to-man talk won't cure."

"Jonathan, the boy's ill. I never had growing pains like that."

"I did."

"Do tell?"

"First time I came calling on you. I was so worried I'd made a bad impression I had to stay home from school for two days."

Martha thought a moment. Then her eyes widened and she said, "Sakes alive, Jonathan. It's not little Lana. Not at their age, is it?"

"Oh no, Martha. Nothing like that. That'll come too, soon enough, but not yet. There's a lot of hurting a boy goes through if he wants to be a man. And when a boy wants to be a special kind of man like Clark'll be—well, that's a lot of hurting. I left the store open and there were three robberies in town last year. You run off now and tend to that and don't worry. I'll tell you all about it later."

"Oh men!" And she left, no longer the least bit worried.

Clark was not sure whether he was awake or not, whether he was talking or not. He felt as though he was talking. He was using up the kind of energy you use up when you are talking, and he did not have a lot of energy to spare just now. He did not feel as if he was saying anything, though. Just talking.

What was there to explain? Clark wondered. He was sick. People get sick, right? So he was sick. He did not like it, did not do it on purpose, didn't think he was going to die from it or anything. He was just sick, is all. So what was Pa talking about when he said he wanted to know what happened? He had been feeling all right. Then he was sick. After a while he would feel all right again. End of story.

Clark felt as though he was going to throw up. Then he wondered what it felt like when you felt as though you were going to throw up. But Clark didn't throw up, so he must not have felt as though he was going to throw up, but it must have felt a lot like that. What did Pa want now?

Then Clark was thinking about that poor dead dog.

Living things have a kind of glow around them, like a halo. Living happy things glow in one color; living sad things in another color. Living intelligent things in still another color, living innocent things in yet another. There was no name for any of the hundreds of colors and shades in which living things glowed. They were not colors that could have been seen by the eyes of whoever it was that had made up the names of the colors. The boy did not feel he had to make up names for them; he had no one with whom to talk about them except himself, and he would know what he meant without the names. But dead things, especially dead things that have lately been alive, look awful. They're all gray and empty. Their glow fades slowly—as slowly as a mimosa leaf closes when it reluctantly decides that the sun is going down. Then after the glow is weak and gray for a while it disappears, leaving behind a disgusting lump that is not much besides a disorderly mess of chemicals. There is nothing else like it. No metaphor, no analogy. Just nothing, where there had been something that once glowed.

Pa was sitting there, smiling sometimes, asking a question sometimes, listening all the time. Then once, just before he left, Pa put his hand on Clark's head—softly, the way Pa did things—and left it there awhile. Before Pa left the room, Clark stopped shivering.

Clark slept peacefully for two hours, longer than he had slept in one stretch since he was a baby. When he woke up, it was nearly six o'clock and his dinner was warming on the stove.

"Hello, Clark," Jonathan Kent said. "How are you feeling?"

"All right."

"Would you like your turkey soup?" Martha Kent asked, as she felt his forehead and pushed that dangling curl of hair out of his face.

"Sure, Ma."

The three ate for a few minutes before Jonathan said, "I told Ma about the talk we had this afternoon, son. Do you remember much of it?"

"Some."

Clark ate a few spoonfuls of soup and then he said, "The thing of it was, I was on the bus."

"I know."

"I was riding on the bus that k-k-k..."

"That's all right, Clark," Martha said, as she handed him a big dish of roast beef and string beans.

"... that k-killed the dog."

"It's over now, it's all right."

"It's not all right! It's really not. How could it be all right? None of the other kids could've helped it, the driver couldn't've helped it, even the dog couldn't. Only I could've helped it. And I could've, too!"

"If you'd seen it coming," Jonathan said. "But you didn't."

"But I could've."

"But you didn't. We already went through this hours ago."

"We did?"

"Yes."

Clark worked on the string beans for a while. Then he put down his fork and asked to be excused. "I'd like to go for a walk somewhere."

Martha looked at Jonathan and said, "Certainly, dear. I'll keep your dinner warm if you like."

Clark walked toward the door until his father asked him to wait a moment.

"Why don't you put on that outfit we made out of your baby blankets?"

As dusk gathered that day, on the hill overlooking Smallville there was a sight no one had ever seen before. There beside the Totten Pond Road stood a black-haired boy in a costume of primary colors. A red cape billowed in the breeze at his back. Red boots, blue tights and a blue shirt stretched over powerful muscles. An irregular pentagon containing a stylized letter "S" blazed over the boy's chest and cape.

A few cars slowed as he stood there, then sped past him. One man driving a buggy stopped for a second, about to call out to the boy, but went on instead. The boy looked not at all like any of the other boys his age who lived in Smallville.

On that hill, silently and solemnly, Superboy promised himself and who or whatever else might hear his thoughts that his life would be devoted to the preservation of life; that he would use his powers whenever possible to save and improve the conditions of life and of living things everywhere; that under no circumstances would he ever be responsible for the loss of a single conscious life; that failing in any of these affirmations he would renounce his powers forever. There could be no nobler mission for a superman.

That evening Clark came home, finished his dinner and went to his room early. Jonathan and Martha sat together by the fire and read until well after midnight. At some point just before they went to bed, Jonathan looked up from his book and said, as much to his son as to his wife, "Well, Martha, looks to me as though the boy's ready."

Chapter 3
T
HE
W
ATCHERS
 

Did you ever get the feeling you were being watched? Most likely you were.

Superman was watched all the time by somebody, somewhere. As he was born, he was watched and cherished by his natural parents, Jor-El and Lara. As he traveled from his dying world to the planet Earth, he was watched and protected along the way by the immortal Guardians of the planetoid Oa and by their Galactic task force, the Green Lantern Corps. As he grew up, he was watched over by his foster parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. Later, as well as along the way, he was watched as well by those who waited for him to touch their existences. Among these were Kristin Wells, a graduate student in history at Columbia University in the year 2857, and the creature known as C.W.Saturn, the agent of the Underworld.

On occasion, Superman had come to grips with people, creatures, beings of one sort or another, whose motivation for pursuing evil purposes was, simply, to serve the forces of evil. This was a point of view Superman could not understand. He was convinced that all one needs to do to persuade someone to do what is right is to educate that person to the fact that it is in his interest to do what is right. There was a right and a wrong in the Universe and that distinction was not very difficult to make. If you litter the park, it will not be as clean next time you want to use it. If you hold up a driver when you are hitchhiking, there will be fewer people likely to give you a ride when you really need to get somewhere. If you pepper the atmosphere with radioactive waste, your children and grandchildren's share of your legacy will be diminished. No one, Superman was convinced, would want to serve the cause of evil once he or she understood the meanings of right and wrong. Superman had not yet met C.W.Saturn, who was watching him.

C.W.Saturn stood in a place that did not exist in space or time, but which existed nonetheless. It was the seat of heinous authority; the centerpoint of Creation's evil; the throne room of Samael, C.W.Saturn's master.

Saturn stood in a depression in the ground and looked out over an endless crawl space. The floor was no more than two meters from the ceiling at any point, and stalactites and stalagmites made sure that the space was appreciably smaller than that in most spots. The hole in which Saturn stood was more than a meter deep, and the headroom it gave Saturn was a sign of Saturn's rank. The smoothly surfaced depression followed Saturn wherever he walked in this place, its walls staying a constant distance from Saturn's sides, so that Saturn hardly ever had to stoop to avoid a stalactite.

Saturn was neither man nor woman, not animal, vegetable, mineral, or energy. As this creature stood there, across no time, the forms of six hundred sixty-six humans walked over one at a time, naked, stopping before Saturn and banging their heads on the obstructions that they could not see. They could see nothing but Saturn, although they were not blinded. That which existed in this place was simply not visible to humans, and this cluttered, limited universe looked to them like vast emptiness.

This curious court stood facing Saturn, trembling for a moment of no time; then each suffered an unspeakable indignity at Saturn's hands—dismemberment, force-feeding of foul substances, being crushed by jagged objects, that sort of thing, only worse. There were six hundred sixty-six tortures, each different from the others, each agonizingly complete. This particular mass indignity was Saturn's distinctive mark, the equivalent of a sovereign's signet on an edict or a spy's countersign to a colleague with whom he is to rendezvous.

These six hundred sixty-six pawns were acquainted with Saturn, whose exploits on Earth were legion. Although Saturn had a good many minor failures, failure never came the same way twice; and after all, he had done quite well on occasion.

Saturn got the best of a young Egyptian pharaoh, for example. He promised that if the boy destroyed all records and memory of his monotheist predecessor Ikhnaton, then the boy-king would have gold and treasure beyond his greatest dreams; and that treasure would be with him longer than that of any other pharaoh. True, the tomb of King Tutankhamen remained free of looters until the year 1911; but the boy had died at nineteen, and Saturn saw to it that the treasure remained with Tut's body, not his soul.

In 1846 Saturn was beaten by a United States senator from Massachusetts, who was actually a native of New Hampshire. Because of the Senator's brilliant oratory, a jury comprised of vermin summoned from the bowels of the Netherworld was convinced to free the soul of a hapless farmer Saturn had trapped. In return, Senator Daniel Webster won freedom for all of New Hampshire until the end of time.

In 1920 Saturn won when he posed as an angel who offered eternal salvation to a young Austrian house painter in return for the Austrian's agreement to take his greater reward then and there, foregoing the remainder of his allotted years. Adolf Hitler foolishly refused, and as a result of the encounter, he was encouraged to go on to establish the Third Reich.