Until I stumbled across this file, I had completely forgotten that a million years ago, I planned to pitch a Smallville novel to DC! I never got far enough along to do so, but I did write the first chapter. Please realize that this was in, like, 2003. I hadn’t published my first novel yet. It was not great writing. But hey, here is the beginning of Chapter One of…
Smallville: The Monday Man!
It was the first day of the work week, bright and early in the morning, and already the pain started just below Jonathan Kent’s left shoulder blade, spreading like hot syrup until it flared along a quarter of his back and threatened his whole left side. He ignored it as best he could, wincing, but not permitting himself even to breathe in sharply. Clark would hear any such evidence of pain, and Jonathan just couldn’t let himself look weak in front of his son.
“You OK, Dad?”
Despite himself — and despite the pain — Jonathan grinned. Sometimes Clark’s superior senses made Jonathan forget that his son also possessed good old-fashioned Kansas horse sense. Sure, his ears would have picked up the slightest gasp of pain…but the expression on Jonathan’s face just now had been just as obvious.
He dropped the heavy bag of feed he’d been taking down from the truck bed when the pain had hit him. Clark was off to one side, balancing a stack of the fifty-pound bags on one palm, his brow furrowed as he gazed at his father.
“I’m fine, Clark. Really. Stop worrying about me.”
“I can do this, Dad.” Clark gestured with his free hand (the bags of feed, Jonathan noted, didn’t even wobble). “I can have the truck unloaded and all of this in the barn before you even get back to the house.”
Jonathan grimaced. Yes, Clark could do all of that, and that was precisely the problem. He didn’t want to have to rely on Clark for everything on the farm. He’d been running the farm before the miracle that brought Clark to Smallville, and he knew — deep down — that someday Clark would move on, and Jonathan would still be running the farm, whether or not he’d bruised a rib while hitching a stump to the big tractor last week.
“That’s not it,” his wife, Martha, had scolded. “There’s nothing wrong with letting Clark take care of things while you heal. You just don’t want to admit you’re hurt. You don’t want to admit you’re not some twenty-five-year-old any more, who can take a beating and still work from sunup to sundown.”
“I can handle this,” Jonathan said now to Clark, meaning both the work and the pain.
“I’m worried about you, Dad. The doctor said—”
“I’ve been looking after myself longer than the doctor’s been doing it. I know what I can do.”
Clark frowned and narrowed his eyes. “I still see swelling around the third—”
“Clark!” Jonathan resisted the urge to cover himself with his hands, not that it would help. “Haven’t we had a talk about respecting people’s privacy?”
“But, Dad—”
“Stop it right now.”
Clark blinked and turned away slightly, eyes downcast.
Jonathan sighed under the bright sun and the concerned gaze of the child that had literally come to him from the heavens. “Clark, I don’t expect you to understand this just now, but maybe someday… Sometimes you just have to do a thing to prove that you can do it.”
Unexpectedly, Clark’s face broke into a grin. He started to juggle the big bags of feed. “Like this?”
The sight was so strange and yet so Clark, that Jonathan couldn’t help himself — the tension bled away, and he threw back his head and laughed. It pulled on his injured rib even more, but it felt good just to relax and share a normal — well, almost normal — moment with his son for a change. He had a truck full of feed, a clear day to move it in, and the help of his son. Things didn’t seem so bad.
Just then, he noticed something. Overhead, something was cutting an arc over the flawless blue sky, like a jet contrail, only a boiling gray/black rather than white. It sketched across the field of Jonathan’s vision in less time than it took him to realize what was happening.
Whatever it was, it was moving fast. And if his eye was any decent judge of trajectory and speed, it would crash in his north field.
“What in the…” he started, and looked over at Clark to get his reaction.
The bags that Clark had been juggling were stacked neatly by the barn door, and Clark was nowhere to be seen.
**************
Clark vaulted the fence that separated the north field from the central hub of the Kent farm. He looked up — the object he’d seen before was closer now. Squinting, he focused all his concentration on it, but the object’s speed and the sheath of smoke and flame around it made it almost impossible to tell what it was beyond a basic cylindrical shape.
He turned his attention back to the path he was running. It wouldn’t do to trip over something or run into a fence post. He couldn’t be hurt, but it would slow him down.
Clark did some quick calculations in his head. Judging by how fast it was moving, the object would land soon, not far from here.
Please, please, please, he thought. Don’t let it be another meteor shower.
His first thought upon seeing the trail of smoke and fire had been that the object might be another massive kryptonite meteor, some lost interstellar flotsam from his home planet. The last time the stuff had come to Earth, he had come with it. As had the horrific plague of glowing green meteorites that could kill him with their mere presence, and had also so changed the innocent, unsuspecting town of Smallville.
And killed one of his best friends’ parents, too. He couldn’t forget that, no matter how much he tried.
He came to a stop about thirty yards from where he judged the object would impact. Maybe some thing blazing down from the upper stratosphere could hurt him and maybe it couldn’t, but didn’t it make sense to play it safe…especially if it turned out to be kryptonite after all?
When it hit, the object shattered the very air, sending powerful sonic vibrations out in all directions. Clark’s teeth rattled. The impact kicked up geysers of dirt and stone that rained down on him. He reflexively held up a hand to shield his face, even though the largest stones only shattered into pebbles against his skin.
After a moment, the soil and rocks stopped falling around him. Smoke purled up before him, boiling from a new pockmark on the field. Fortunately, it was late fall — the field had been reaped already, so there were no stalks of corn to catch fire.
Clark edged close to the lip of the crater. Waves of heat radiated out at him, but he didn’t feel the tell-tale prickling in his muscles and burning at the pit of his stomach that meant kryptonite poisoning had begun. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the green glowing mineral he’d grown to hate.
His vision, which could see through walls and more, now focused on the smoke-swaddled scene before him. He couldn’t believe what he saw! He had to be sure it wasn’t some trick of his heightened senses, so he took a deep breath, then blew away the smoke.
The crater was no more than ten or twelve feet deep and twice as long. Jammed into it was a roughly cylindrical craft, pointed at the tip where it bit into the earth, with flaring wings and flaps that jutted out of the pit.
“A spaceship…” Clark whispered, disbelieving. Since learning of his alien origins, he’d made something of a hobby of studying Earth’s various space programs. Unless it was classified beyond the sort of secrecy even his prying eyes could get to, this thing resembled no Earth craft he had ever seen before.
He stood at the lip of the crater and gazed down on it. It was larger than the ship that had brought him to Earth as a baby, but not by much. He squinted again, this time trying to look through the hull.
No good. Somehow, the composition of the ship’s skin was impervious to even his sight.
He looked around quickly, then dropped into the crater to stand near the ship. He touched it, testing its weight with one hand. He would need to move it. Soon. No telling who had seen the trail of smoke overhead. Someone might come to investigate, and if they saw one spaceship, they might suspect another. And that could lead them to the ship hidden on the farm, and to the secret Clark and his family had fought so hard to preserve.
The enormity of the coincidence struck him. What were the odds? Two spaceships landing a dozen years apart, one almost on top of the other. The odds had to be astronomical.
Unless, he realized with a chill, it wasn’t a coincidence. Could this have somehow been done on purpose?
All the more reason to move the ship. But before he moved it, he’d better see what was inside, right?
On one side, he saw a seam, where a hatch was supposed to open. There was no mechanism for activating it, though. After a moment, he gripped the seam as tightly as he could, feeling the metal yield slightly under his fingers. It was stronger than anything he’d ever felt before, and there was a brief instant where he thought he’d finally encountered something stronger than he was. But then the metal finally gave; his fingers crushed it, creating their own purchase, and he ripped the hatch off with a triumphant cry.
And inside the ship…
He couldn’t believe it.
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