Miracle Monday Read Free

mode impulse of my—Are you following this, Pa?"
    "Umm—barely, so far," Jonathan Kent answered the nine-year-old child. "You're likely to lose me any second, though."
    "Well, anyway, it's like with these slides I'm projecting what I can see, like mirrors off the back of my eyeballs. Pretty good, huh?"
    "Pretty good. Don't suppose the grasshopper appreciates it much, though."
    "He didn't appreciate the virus either."
    "Tell me something, Clark. Couldn't you have done about the same sort of trick with a chunk of rock or an old tree twig?"
    "What do you mean?"
    "I mean instead of putting a dead thing on your slide."
    "Huh?" The boy crinkled his eyebrows for a moment and glanced through his foster father's eyes. "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know stuff like that bothered you. I just wanted to see what killed the grasshopper, is all."
    "Whuzzat? You didn't kill him?"
    "No. And there were grasshoppers all over the cornfield. Well, not like it was an infestation or anything, but there didn't seem to be any reason for this one to be dead. It was young, no parts missing, didn't have any digestion problems I could see. So I took it in here and found the virus. They're all up and down his nerves. He probably just twitched to death. Terrible."
    "Well now, that's the best news I've heard all day."
    "It is?"
    "Sure enough."
    "Well this virus could get into other grasshoppers. It might be all over. Could even get at other animals maybe. That's not great news."
    "Son," Jonathan Kent said smiling, "when you live around farming and nature as long as I have, you learn to understand that everything lives in a balance. Grasshoppers live with corn crops, viruses live with grasshoppers, even men live with their livestock. All you've got to remember, being a thinking kind of creature, is not to tamper with the balance as much as you might be tempted to. Understand, boy?"
    Clark looked through his father's eyes again. They were different from the way they were when Jonathan walked in. They were somehow more relaxed, moister in the tear ducts. "Yeah, Pa, I think I understand that."
    "I was just thinking about that tonight when I woke up. Wanted to come in here and tell you."
    "Right, Pa."
    "Well, good night, Clark. Don't strain those active modes of yours."
    "Right. G'night, Pa."
    Clark wondered why his father had been so upset when he walked in, wondered why the little bit he said was so important to him. Clark tucked his questions into a pocket of his mind, confident that he would figure out their answers soon enough. For the rest of the night Jonathan Kent slept like a grizzly in January.

Chapter 2 G RADUATION  
    The boy grew up in a universe of macrocosm and microcosm. To visit the other side of the world was, to him, what swinging on a vine across a creek was for other boys. He could see the unending dramas of underground ant colony wars and stratospheric weather front competitions as easily as he saw the mail truck barreling past the farm into town twice a day. He could alter his visual perceptions to detect waves on the entire electromagnetic spectrum, seeing alpha particles or cosmic rays as easily as he saw the visible light- but in colors that ordinary humans were incapable of imagining.
    He could feel the level of the day's sunspot activity when he woke up in the morning in much the same way that those around him could tell if it was raining before they opened the shades. He could hold a conversation in one room while he listened to another one a mile away and to a radio broadcast as it flew through the air around him in microwaves.
    The world was his playground and campus, superhuman senses his teachers, the anonymity of the Kent home his womb and protection. He was alone in all this sense and knowledge, monumentally alone; but less alone, he realized, than were those other Earthmen, glued to their work and trapped inside bodies that could do no more than touch the outsides of other bodies. The boy was alone, but he was never