TOC Part 17 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
JOURNAL ENTRY #18
MAY TO OCTOBER, 1996
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We heard about it first through the bugs in Clark's apartment. The software tripped when it noticed that Clark seemed to be in trouble. A shot from a camera hidden across the street showed him to be facing off with a man who had trapped himself inside a Kryptonite force field. That was new technology, even to us. The man threatened to shoot himself. We wondered why Clark didn't use his heat vision. Then again, there was no telling if it would have penetrated the force field.
Clark managed to disarm the man, but only by flying through the barrier. He almost didn't make it. We watched as the man and a woman we vaguely recognized from the Planet newsroom flew away, leaving Clark unconscious but breathing shallowly.
We watched closely as he recovered. Then, later that night, he got some kind of telepathic message from the woman, and went off to meet her. When he came back, he explained the situation to Lois. We listened avidly. I'm sure you already know the story. Zara. Ching. Visitors from "New Krypton." On Earth to claim Clark (or, as they called him, Kal-El) so he could help them avert (or was it start?) a civil war. Oh yeah, and, as part of the whole deal, Zara needed Clark to accept their crib-side betrothal.
Zara, to prove her claims, asked Clark for his ship. He told her that he knew where to get it, then flew out to the construction site. He'd flown out to check on it several times before, but had never landed anywhere close enough to attract notice. We were a bit surprised at first, but given the mess with the wedding (and I don't think any of us wants to dwell on that) and the fact that it had been so easily stolen from its previous hiding place, it made sense that he hadn't had time to find a secure place to put it.
He retrieved the ship, having remembered our instructions perfectly, and brought it back to Zara that night. You probably know what happened after that. There was a message hidden in the ship, activated by the presence of both Clark and Zara. The message helped convince him of Zara's story, and it wasn't long after that when he left the planet.
He gave a good speech before he left, imploring everyone to be heroes in his absence. It helped quite a bit, but we still had a little more work to do than usual in keeping the streets safe. At least it helped us deal with the shock of his departure. We'd known it was coming, but the moment still had plenty of impact.
Even more of a shock was finding out that the guy he'd gone chasing off into space to find had instead come to Earth. Lord Nor, as he called himself, quickly took over Smallville, Kansas. We hoped no one would realize the significance of the fact that he'd chosen Clark's home town or the fact that it was the same town which had seen the end of Jason Trask and his quest for Superman. We were very surprised when Hamilton actually came up with something to help prevent that very thing.
It seemed he'd been working with The Prankster's immobilization flash, Dr. Neal Faraday's visual learning device (an object in the shape of a pen designed to implant knowledge into the brain by means of a beam of light shined into the eyes), and something called a Vibro Whammy (it used an electric signal to make people vulnerable to suggestion) created by Herkimer Johnson, brother of the infamous Bad Brain Johnson. Superman had destroyed the prototypes of two of the three, but we'd collected the original notes, which were thankfully detailed in both cases. Of course, that only helped so much. There were, according to Hamilton, only eight people in the world capable of even understanding Faraday's more advanced theories, and, unfortunately, Hamilton himself wasn't one of them. Still, studying the Prankster's similar (but much simpler) device had helped him get at least a basic understanding of Faraday's.
Working with bits and pieces of all three, he'd constructed a device of his own, one capable of using a flash of light to implant a simple suggestion into someone's mind. Hamilton came up with a single positive statement to serve our purposes. "Superman is Kal-El of Krypton and has no other identity." People who knew better would reject this, but most of the general public already believed it (including, thanks to the New Krypton situation, the name Kal-El). Reinforcing the idea would help avert most casual suspicions.
Some of the Shadows were a little uncomfortable with the idea, since it was a little too close to brainwashing for comfort. I wasn't sure what to make of it, myself. Back then, I wasn't used to thinking about things like that. Aymee and Alan worried that we were being overprotective, supporting the right cause but going too far with it. Phillip and Bobby, each in his own way understanding the importance of information (getting it to the right people, using it properly, keeping it out of the wrong hands, etc), were both for it. The rest of us were kind of in the middle, not sure enough to commit to either side.
In the end, we did it. Bobby ran a series of ads for his restaurants (one of which had become a national chain) and added Hamilton's flash of light to the background. The ads ran on just about every major station across the country at some point. After that, very few people were willing to seriously entertain the idea that Superman had another identity. The few who did (like Penny Barnes, who showed up using the name Barnebeedian about a year later) often found themselves scoffed at.
Back to the invasion... There wasn't much we could do about it. We were good at some things, but facing down Kryptonians wasn't one of them. We did, however, notice one human trying — Our old friend, Col. Ambrose Cash. Having nothing better to work with, he first tried conventional weaponry. Nor's force field easily withstood Cash's battery, and his thugs had no trouble dealing with the soldiers and their tanks.
Cash showed up in Metropolis a little later, and overheard Superman asking Doctor Klein about the Kryptonite in the STAR Labs vault. That night, the vault was opened. We found out through Cat that Cash had people working on a Kryptonite gas grenade. A couple days later, it was announced that Kal-El and Lord Nor would be fighting a duel in the streets of Metropolis. The general location was given as a warning, to keep the area clear. It didn't take us long to figure out that Cash would take this as his best opportunity to deal with the threat.
Since the duel grounds were considered very dangerous territory, I was sent up to keep an eye on things without the kids. I watched, invisible, as Clark fought Nor. I heard Lois warn them both about the gas, though of course Nor didn't understand. I saw Clark win the duel, and Nor's thugs come in to change the outcome. Suddenly, the street shook with an explosion. All five Kryptonians were hurled back and surrounded in a fog of green gas.
I adjusted my goggles to infrared and navigated my way through the cloud. The tiny radioactive particles made it hard to see even with the goggles, but I had at least a couple feet's worth of visibility. I found Clark at the bottom of the pile of bodies. He was unconscious but alive. I put an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth and turned a special flashlight (more like a miniature sun lamp) on his face. I prayed it would be enough. I'd seen enough of the man that all my old grudges had been left behind. He needed to live. For Lois. For us. For the world.
Around me, I could see the gas starting to dissipate. Clark, still unconscious, was breathing much easier. I turned the flashlight off and hid it in an invisible pocket. I looked up to see several people cautiously approaching, although they weren't nearly close enough for me to recognize them through infrared lenses. I kept the oxygen mask on as long as I dared. When they got within a few feet, I slowly backed off. The cloud was pretty much gone, anyway. I moved back to a corner of the alley and adjusted my lenses back to normal. I watched Lois's expression as she discovered that Clark was still breathing. It went far beyond relief into territory they don't have words for. If I'd ever had reason to question the risk I'd taken in standing in that alley, that one look would have been enough to settle the issue. Smiling to myself, I snuck back down to sewers. I'd saved Clark. I'd saved
Superman. Life was good.
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