Free Last Son of Krypton by Elliot S. Maggin Page A

pride, his masculinity, by all that's holy, in front of over a million people. Could Olivier, Gielgud, Brando, Nicholson pull off this act as effectively? Probably not, Clark thought.
    "Luthor turned up today, one week after his disappearance from the maximum security cell block at the Pocantico Correctional Facility, to steal secret documents belonging to the late Dr. Albert Einstein. Jimmy Olsen reports from Princeton, New Jersey."
    There was the scene in all its diabolical brilliance. Luthor stepped out the door and through the solid wall as if he'd had super powers all his life. There was the pompous crud flipping back and forth in the sky waving the leather folder and thumbing his nose at the bullets. There he was fading out. And there was Jimmy's verbose, overwritten narration. Jimmy tried hard.
    For a long time it was very difficult for Clark to notice when someone was trying hard. Most of what was important to American men in the twentieth century—surviving, prevailing, creating—came easily to Clark. All he ever needed was a good start. He had picked up the English language in a matter of weeks. He seemed to skip right over the single word stage and whole sentences poured from his infant lips. Grammatical rules did not much interest him at first, although his mind was frighteningly sharp. He often came out with statements like, "Me want finish reading Tale of Two Cities ," and then he did precisely that.  
    The Kents decided early that at least for awhile they were going to screen his influences very carefully. Martha Kent held, for example, that stories of cutthroats and street urchins of the type Dickens wrote were not the sort of things Clark should be exposed to. She put the Bible and lots of Horatio Alger on his reading list. If he were going to insist on reading, she thought, it might as well be decent material. Land sakes, he can wait for Tom Sawyer until he's assigned it in school.  
    By the time Clark Kent was old enough to start the first grade he had been exposed to the wisdom amassed over ten thousand years of human history on Earth. He was even able to extrapolate a bit on that wisdom. He could have discoursed with Descartes and Locke. In an apparent contradiction of his own condition, he held Hobbes and Nietzsche and their ideas of the natural superiority of certain members of society, in contempt. Martha Kent appreciated the influence of her reading list, but she suggested that he substitute simple rejection for the contempt.
    The boy was quite aware of the world around him, but he did not yet know who he was. The Kents were careful to ease the knowledge into his mind that he was somehow different. He also knew that this difference was not something to be ashamed of, but it was to be kept secret.
    When the time came, his hyperactive mind pondered all the questions his condition posed. There were certain fundamentals, however, that he did not question—axioms at the bottom of his thoughts on any subject that approached his mind: that there was a right and a wrong in the Universe, and that value judgment was not very difficult to make. They were the fundamentals that made Jonathan and Martha Kent who they were and they never seemed inconsistent with anything in Clark's experience.
    By the time Clark started school he learned how to wear normal clothes without flexing his muscles through them every time he waved his arm inside a sleeve or took a step in a pair of pants. Jonathan Kent retired as a farmer and started a small business—Kent's General Store on Main Street in Smallville, next door to Sam Cutler's hardware store.
    There had been rumors floating around the region about a super-powered tot almost since the day of young Clark's arrival on Earth. At parties, on hayrides, in local newspaper offices and the like, people would swear that they had seen a three-year-old boy punch a timber wolf and fly away. Or people would tell about others they knew who told some such story.
    With each rash of