Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic A Town Called Smallville - Henry's Story 1/1 (updated)

Follows A Town Called Smallville: Panic in the Sky

Henry Deacon smiled when his office door opened and his secretary allowed Lois Lane to enter. Lois was nothing if not tenacious and he had promised her an interview concerning what he was doing at EPRAD (Extra Planetary Research and Development) if Superman succeeded in saving the Earth from not one, but two, extinction level event sized asteroids on collision courses with the planet.

The Daily Planet reporter's writing partner was nowhere in evidence and Henry assumed that Clark Kent would show up as soon as Superman finished handling whatever emergency had come up.

Lois thanked him for agreeing to the interview and settled into one of the chairs opposite his desk. She put a tape recorder on the desk, turned it on, and then opened her notepad.

"So, first, have you found out who was listening in on places they had no business to?" Lois asked.

"It is an on-going investigation which I can't comment on," Henry said. "But, as soon as we have something to release to the public, I'll make sure you and Clark are at the top of the list. In the meantime, I can tell you that there is strong evidence that the person or persons responsible for Doctor Baines death were also responsible for other sabotage to EPRAD and possibly other space programs. I can also tell you that since EPRAD is internationally funded, more than one of the contributing nations has insisted that the attacks be classified as terrorism."

"None of the major terrorist organizations have made a credible claim of responsibility," Lois reminded him.

"Most terrorist organizations are hate groups with a budget and delusions of grandeur," Henry said. "A few of them eventually evolve past that into entities with real political agendas and real clout that doesn't depend on hate-mongering and violence. But, there are a few that don't want their names known, whose real agenda is harder to divine because it's not political but economic. It's based on greed more than hate."

"Organized crime?" Lois asked.

"If organized crime had the protection of a soulless mega corporation," Henry said, "with aspirations to match."

"Sounds like one of those 'the world governments are controlled by a super-secret bunch of what-evers' conspiracy theories," Lois commented.

Henry chuckled. "It's remotely possible that the 'super-secret bunch of what-evers' might be better for the human race as a whole than mega corporations controlled by greedy megalomaniacal sociopaths."

"Do you have somebody specific in mind?"

"I have a list," Henry admitted. "And no, I'm not giving you a copy."

"I was going to suggest you and Clark compare notes," Lois said with a tiny laugh. "He has a list, too."

Henry watched as Lois flipped to a different page in her notebook and looked over what had to be her prep notes. She started reading: "Henry Wilbur Deacon, born 1942 in Newport News, Virginia to Susan and Henry Oscar Deacon. He was an airplane mechanic and she was a 'computer' for one of Langley aerospace labs. Your family moved to Eureka, Oregon when you were eight. You have a double doctorate in physics and aeronautical engineering from MIT and practically designed the current generation of space shuttles. You've done stints as an instructor at MIT, Caltech, UCLA, what have I left out?"

"You've done your homework," Henry commented. "I've done consulting for the DOD, NASA, and for Global Dynamics and other companies…"

"And now you're head of EPRAD."

"That's only until we have EPRAD back in working order," Henry told her. "I'm good at fixing things. I've never been good with just sitting behind a desk and telling people what to do."

"And after EPRAD?" Lois asked.

"I'd really like to figure out how Superman flies and apply it to Earth systems. Most of the problems of world hunger don't stem from lack of food production. They stem from distribution system issues and in most of the world that's due to a lack of cheap, reliable transportation and local greed and mismanagement," Henry said, letting his enthusiasm, and his disgust at political corruption, show.

"And the ability to see through things without instrumentality. Can you imagine the advances in diagnostics if a doctor could see what was going on under the skin without expensive machines, without radiation?" He couldn't help but get excited. So many of humanity's problems could be solved by just figuring out how Superman's abilities worked and finding ways to replicate those abilities in humans or adapt them to technology. Unfortunately, he also knew that the most likely first applications of any advances in the area of 'Superman studies' would be in weapons development. Henry doubted that Clark Kent would be happy with that state of affairs.

"So, why were you the one chosen to get EPRAD back in working order?" Lois asked, bringing him back down to Earth.

"Like I said, I'm good at fixing things and they needed someone to fix things here," Henry said. "I guess I take after my Dad that way." In fact, he didn't really want to admit his appointment to Director of EPRAD had purely political: he knew he'd lost out to Antoinette Barnes for the position five years before due to the fact that she was a good-looking female and the selection committee had wanted to show how 'open-minded' they were by appointing a woman. Granted, her credentials had been good but he knew of nearly a dozen men and women whose credentials had been better – including his own. But none of them had Barnes' photogenic blonde Barbie sex-appeal. This time around, they chose the one black person on their short list of qualified contenders. Maybe if they'd chosen one of the others the first time around, Luthor would have had a harder time suborning them. Or maybe not – Luthor had a gift for sniffing out his victims and their weak spots.

"Tell me about your parents," Lois asked, interrupting his unsavory train of thought. "I didn’t find much about them."

"Well, you know my dad was an airplane mechanic and my mom was a mathematician," Henry began. He saw Lois' expression shift as she realized what 'computer' meant. He smiled inwardly – how soon people forgot that the programmable machines everyone took for granted used to be called 'electronic computers' because a 'computer' was actually a person with an adding machine.

"They met in college, got married right after graduation, and then the war broke out," Henry continued. "The government needed mechanics and mathematicians more than they needed teachers. Dad ended up being shipped wherever he was needed to train people. Mom ended up working with an aeronautical design team in Newport News."

"What was it like there?"

He tried to decipher any hidden meaning to her question – what was like being a black child in a segregated town or what was the town like in general?

"There were a lot of black people working in the airplane industry there," Henry said. "I don't think it even occurred to me then that the fact that all of our neighbors were black wasn't necessarily a matter of choice. We had a nice little house and the neighborhood had a decent school. Mom was involved in civic committees. Dad was gone a lot but he always came back. A lot of dads didn't… When he came home on leave we'd go on trips, go camping." Henry had loved the road trips with his mom and dad. They'd drive up to Boston or New York and check out the bookstores. Dad would always be in uniform on those trips. It wasn't until much later that Henry realized that it was the uniform that the white shopkeepers respected.

"When the war was over, Mom still had her job and the army kept Dad on, so for me, things didn't really change until he was stationed at Camp Eureka and they offered Mom a job at the labs they were building there. So we moved to the wilds of Oregon."

"It must have been quite the culture shock," Lois commented.

"You have no idea," Henry said. 'Culture shock' was putting it mildly – not so much for him, but for his parents. Henry hadn't wanted to leave 'his' neighborhood. All his friends were there, he didn't know any place else. But his parents were insistent. In fact, it was the only time he could remember that his dad had ever raised his voice to him. 'Henry Wilbur Deacon, get in the car NOW!' his dad had shouted. His mom had stood there, eyes wide with fear. Later Henry would recognize the same look on the faces of other parents – something was in the wind that threatened their children. He was never certain, and never asked, if his mother's fear was of her husband or of something that was happening outside their little neighborhood. Neither of his parents actually relaxed until they landed at the Air Force base in Portland, Oregon and a government car picked them up to drive them to Eureka.

As an adult Henry had come to realize that his mother's fear was probably related to Joe McCarthy's hate rhetoric and not to any threat of domestic violence – Henry's father had simply not been a violent or manipulative person. A black female civic leader would no doubt have been an attractive target for McCarthy and his hate-mongering sycophants.

Eureka had promised to be a safe haven against McCarthy's sort of insanity.

"We were the fifth family to move to Eureka," he said aloud. "The town had been platted for a two thousand family homes but only a couple of streets were paved, only about a dozen houses were finished at the time. The labs were at Camp Eureka while they worked on the offices and labs for Global Dynamics. There was a gas station/auto repair shop, a general store, a diner, a library, a jail house, and a one-room school house. I was the youngest of ten students. The teacher was a grad student from UCLA. I'm sure the poor woman had no idea what she had gotten into. No one did, really."

Eureka's founders had insisted that the town be 'color-blind', despite Oregon's endemic, pervasive, racism. There would be no segregated housing, no marked water fountains or bathrooms, no discrimination based on color or religion. As part of this, newcomers chose their homes by looking at photos and selecting from the finished units on a map. The map had no tenant names on it. The Deacons' new home was two doors down from the director of Global Dynamics and his family. The town 'sheriff', a not exactly retired military police officer named Dobson, and his family lived across the street. The medical clinic was under construction and the new town doctor was living with the GD director until the clinic was finished with its upstairs apartment.

Henry recalled meeting his new teacher, Miss Lisa Underwood. She was young, had curly brown hair and brown eyes and was a little over-weight. She had a friendly smile and she hadn't hesitated at all to shake his parents' hands. He watched his mother as her eyes flicked over the classroom.

"Only one washroom?" Mom asked.

Miss Underwood shrugged. "I've been promised another one once we get enough students to warrant another teacher and another classroom." Then Miss Underwood asked him where he was in school and what textbooks he'd been using. She mulled over his answers for a moment then said: "The rest of the students are in high school, so I'm going to team you up with Harold for math and physics, Gina for English, and David for biology. The other kids aren't as good in English so I hope you and Gina will help them out. So, do you want to learn Italian or German?"

Henry's dad took over running the gas station. Mom hadn't been pleased with the perceived demotion until she found out that the wife of the GD director was running the library, the sheriff's wife was running the general store, and a big part of being the town 'mechanic' was building machines and prototypes for the people in the labs and being the first line of security in misdirecting lost travelers and sizing up new residents.

Everyone in Eureka had multiple jobs, even the kids. Henry delivered newspapers to the neighbors and helped his dad. Max also worked at the gas station and helped Henry with his German while Henry helped him with his English. Harold worked at the general store. David helped out the army cooks assigned to the diner. Sergeant Tetelbaum got a degree in food science and eventually brought his family to Eureka from New York. They took over running the diner and named it 'Café Diem'.

When the population of the growing little town reached 500, Eureka held its first mayoral election and overwhelmingly elected Susan Deacon to the job – of course, it hadn't hurt that Eureka's only voting requirement had been 'legal resident able to understand the ballot'. All of Henry's classmates had voted for his mother in hopes of her making her oatmeal chocolate chip cookies the official Eureka food.

Aloud, Henry said, "Eureka was progressive when that was considered by a lot of people to be 'un-American.' It was Einstein and Truman's grand social experiment, a safe haven for scientists, no matter their race or religion. My mother was the first elected mayor. She held the post for 20 years. It was a good place to grow up. A good place to be from." He didn't add that Eureka was a dangerous place to live – the researchers weren't always as careful as they probably should have been and most were more than a little cavalier about possible downsides to their brilliant ideas. Even forty-plus years ago some of their experimental devices had the capacity to destroy the world. Luckily only a handful of people on the planet knew exactly how dangerous one little town in Oregon actually was. Or how much promise was hiding there if they could only get the bugs out.

Lois reached over and turned off the tape recorder. "How did you meet Clark's parents?"

Henry chuckled. "I was a summer exchange student when I was twelve and I stayed in Smallville with the Clarks – that was Martha's family – the summer before she left for college. For me, Smallville was the culture shock. Eureka was built from scratch, very modern, very new. Aside from stories from Camp Eureka and the town founding, it had no history. The local native people didn't count at the time.

"Smallville had been there since well before the Civil War. It even had a Carnegie Library. But the town almost died during the Depression. The only thing that had kept it from becoming a ghost town was a couple stubborn families and Camp Small. The Kents were one of the old families and the Clarks were another. They kept the idea of the town alive. So Smallville had 'history'. The James brothers had drinks at the Clarks' saloon while on their way to Texas in 1866. Smallville had a cemetery with graves going back more than a hundred years. In Eureka they were still debating on whether or not they'd even have a cemetery."

"Smallville functionally being a farm town had to be a bit of a shock," Lois commented.

"It was," Henry agreed. "Eureka was very Northwest, lots and lots of trees and hills, fairly moderate climate year around. Smallville was surrounded by farmland, not many trees, hot as hell in the summer and miserably cold in the winter. I'd never seen a cow or sheep or pig or chicken up close and alive before. Horses were what cowboys rode in movies. The only working dog I knew was Lassie from TV and since the Brauns' dog down the street was dumb as a stick I couldn't believe a dog could really be that smart. And then in Smallville I met Zeek and Skeeter and Laddy and I realized that the Brauns' Liselle might not have been all that stupid but her people weren't putting in any effort to teach her anything except that barking got her attention. I actually told my Dad I wanted to become a veterinarian. He reminded me that I was allergic to cats so that put a quick end to that idea.

"Jonathan and Martha were dating the time and they let me hang out with them. Jonathan taught me how to ride a horse, how to milk a cow, collect chicken eggs. He let me help him work on the farm equipment. He and Martha made sure I kept up with my school work – Eureka had a twelve-month school year so I still had homework. One weekend near the end of my stay we drove up to Wichita to check out the Wichita State campus. Then we went to a drug store for lunch and…" His voice trailed off. It wasn't a pleasant memory.

"And…?" Lois prompted.

"Despite their geographic and historical differences, Eureka and Smallville were and are very similar. They're both integrated, progressive communities. Skin color, race, religion, those weren't allowed to be an issue. That meant I had actually lived a very sheltered life. So when I was denied service at the lunch counter due to my skin color, I'd never experienced that before. And Jonathan and Martha had never seen such a thing, never imagined it could happen in their state. They were both absolutely furious. I think Jonathan would have cheerfully punched the counter guy but Martha stopped him."

"What happened then?"

Henry chuckled. "Martha was, and is, nothing if not practical. She walked us over to a grocery store and bought all the fixings for a picnic. Then we went to the nearest park and sat down and had the picnic."

Martha fumed at the open insult to Henry. Jonathan wondered aloud about what a couple of Smallville teenagers could do about it. Discrimination was not the law in Kansas unlike in other parts of the country. But it wasn't illegal either. However, he figured it was also immoral as hell and said so.

"Well, we can see if there's an NAACP chapter here and find out what stores discriminate on the basis of race and let all our friends know to boycott those places," Martha said."Hit 'em where it hurts - their pocketbooks."

"I don't think being boycotted by high-schoolers from Smallville is going to bother them much," Jonathan pointed out.

"It will, if it's college kids getting an entire campus to boycott them."

"Martha and Jonathan got deeply involved in the fight for desegregation and voting rights while in college," Henry added. "They ended up in jail more than once. Luckily for them, almost everybody in Smallville agreed with them and so, there at least, having a record involving civil disobedience on behalf of a good cause was practically a badge of honor. A little surprising, considering who really pays the bills." He paused then went on, "but then, maybe not for Smallville. Ezra Small's wife was Native American. Small, at least according to Smallville legend, had wanted the place to become a trade city, a place where everyone could safely come to do business regardless of race or religion. But history got in the way of his dream."

"But the dream is still part of Smallville, because it's part of Clark and his parents and everybody else there," Lois said thoughtfully. "When Clark and I were there, you said that Superman's people had contacted you first."

"Yes, I did and they did."

"Care to expand on that?"

"This is completely off the record," Henry warned.

Lois nodded agreement and put away her notepad.

"I kept in touch with Jonathan and Martha," Henry said. "Martha was, and is, a lot like me in that we're both interested in everything. I try to keep up on advances in biology. She dabbled in physics. We'd share interesting bits of research, things like that. I attended their wedding. I knew they wanted a family, at least a couple kids. It didn’t happen. And even if Smallville didn't consider their 'criminal' records an issue, the state of Kansas… well, the Kents weren't considered good candidates for adoption for a number of reasons."

He sighed then went on: "I was doing some trouble-shooting for a team working on using microwave lasers for NASA communications. One evening I got an incoming signal that wasn't a test bounce-back. It was from 'out there'. I managed to decipher the signal – it wasn't that hard since they wanted the signal to be deciphered – and I sent a response."

He noted Lois's raised eyebrows and guessed the source. Responding to a signal of unknown provenance that looked to be of extraterrestrial origin? Not exactly smart to assume a 'hi neighbor' signal meant they were friendly. Of course, that hadn't occurred to him at the time.

"What can I say? I was very young, very naïve, and completely convinced of my infallibility," Henry explained. "I was also the only one in the lab at the time. Anyway, the same sidereal time the next night, I got another signal and it was stronger. Again, I responded. The third day, instead of a signal from 'out there' I was visited by a communications device, a small sphere that 'spoke' to me. It told me about Krypton and its imminent demise, and told me when and where the last survivor would arrive on Earth. It also told me that I was obviously the smartest person on the planet because I was the only one who had responded appropriately to its signal." He chuckled. "Nothing like extraterrestrial confirmation to boost an already over-sized ego."

"So you made sure you were then when the ship landed," Lois continued logically.

"That was what the communication was for – to make sure someone was there, someone smart enough to figure out what to do," Henry said. "But I would never have made it to the projected landing site in time. I was in Boston and the ship less than a day away. And getting a flight from Boston to Kansas City was not going to happen.

"I located and tracked the incoming object, confirmed the projected landing coordinates and called Martha and Jonathan so they could be there. Then I high-tailed it to Smallville. I think I broke every speed limit on the way. Lucky for me there weren't any state troopers on the lookout for a young black man in a hot red sports car heading for Kansas at high speed."

He chuckled slightly then went on: "Jonathan and Martha told everyone they had found the baby on their doorstep and I just happened to be visiting. Nobody in Smallville believed it, of course. But nobody was going to openly challenge the story either. Smallville was a research center and weird things did happen there plus, at the time, Martha was head of a project that might have produced a genetically modified human. It didn't, but it might have. And they all knew I was involved in 'space stuff' and I had been raised in Eureka so it was a reasonable assumption that I was involved with a Global Dynamics project that may or may not have caused a meteor shower in Lowell County, Kansas, or I had delivered a GD biological experiment to one of the country's foremost biologists. An experiment that just happened to look like a healthy human baby boy."

Lois was quiet for a long moment, no doubt considering how much more she could get Henry to reveal about the inner workings of the Truman Towns. There wasn't any more he could tell her. He had left Eureka for college thirty-six years before and had only gone back for family visits. He hadn't gone back at all after his parents died – first Dad of a heart attack and Mom a few weeks later of a broken heart. He had repeatedly declined invitations from Global Dynamics to head up one or more of their projects. He had turned down all their offers so far but he knew it was only a matter of time before they found something to lure him into their grasp. Only time would tell him what that something was.

"So the rest is history?" Lois asked, finally breaking the silence.

The office door opened and Clark Kent walked in.

"The rest is history," Henry agreed.

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"Lois and Clark – the New Adventures of Superman" was developed by Deborah Joy LeVine based on characters created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
'Eureka' (AKA 'A Town Called Eureka') was created by Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia.
Author's Notes: In order to make Henry an appropriate age to take action in 1966 (Kal El's arrival on Earth per Lois & Clark TNAoS) this version of Henry is 5 years older than Joe Morton, the actor who played him. So here, Henry is a venerable 52.

For Eureka fans: The interview takes place in 1994 which puts it about 12 years before Jack Carter arrives in Eureka.
Based on actor ages: Nathan Stark would be about 25, Allison about 24, Carter would be about 22 (but should be older as his daughter Zoe would be about 3 in 1994), Jo would be about 15, Fargo is about 13, and Kevin Blake isn't even a gleam is his daddy's eyes.