Have been nagged to repost a little more quickly and get on to the new stuff. So here's part 4.
Just a reminder:
Radio Broadcasts are designated by #####. Information used for the broadcasts will be cited and credited at the end of the story.
There are new characters introduced here as well as more locations-- Just hang in there as we continue this bumpy journey. Remember to watch for quick date and places changes. Hope you're enjoying this. And again thanks to so many people who supported me and provided me with help.
From Part 3
When Lois had written the last name on the board, the students gasped. Lois turned to face them. “Any problem,” she asked, remembering not too fondly, the reaction she had received last semester when she put the topics for discussion on the board. But what could possibly be controversial about this project?
“I’m waiting,” Lois asked the group.
“It’s the Barton house,” Emily Cox explained.
“What about it?” Lois inquired.
“Well,” said John Greene. “Old Lady Barton is the only one left living there now.”
“And?” she urged him.
“In 1938, Miss Libby Barton murdered everyone in that house.”
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Now for Part 4
Cassville, New Jersey
Sunday,
October 30, 1938
8:16 p.m. EST
Unlike Libby Barton, another twelve-year old, living some one thousand miles away from Smallville, Kansas’ heartland, was not distracted away from his family’s radio that October night in 1938. “Mother,” he called out. “You’ve got to listen to this. There’s real trouble at Grovers Mill. A meteorite landed!”
Jason’s mother came into the living room of the modest house on Spring Street and sat down next to her son. “Where’s Grovers Mill?” she asked him.
“I don’t know,” Jason replied. “But it’s twenty miles from Trenton and we’re twenty-two miles away.”
“Maybe they mean Francis Mill, that’s just two miles up Cassville Road.”
##### ANNOUNCER TWO: For those of you have joined us late, we have a special bulletin: It has been reported that at 8:10 P. M., eastern standard time, a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty miles from Trenton. We take you now to Grovers Mill, New Jersey. #####
Jason and his mother could hear loud background noises and sirens.
##### PHILLIPS: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, at the Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Professor Pierson and myself made the eleven miles from Princeton in ten minutes. Well, I . . . I hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern "Arabian Nights." Well, I just got here. I haven't had a chance to look around yet. I guess that's it. Yes, I guess that's the . . . thing, directly in front of me, half buried in a vast pit. Must have struck with terrific force. The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must have struck on its way down. What I can see of the . . . object itself doesn't look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I've seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. #####
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Smallville, Kansas
Wednesday,
May 18, 1966
3:30 p.m. CST
Jonathan Kent hurried into the kitchen of his home where Martha was warming a bottle of milk for their new-found son.
“There are government people in town asking all kinds of questions,” he told her.
“You’ve got to destroy that...that...cylinder thing...that whatever it is,” she insisted.
“The men in town say it’s a Russian experiment gone sour,” he told her. “The capsule should be safe until tonight. I dragged it behind some bushes. After dark, I’ll go back and burn it.”
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Late that May 18th night, in the darkness that surrounded Shuster’s field, Libby Barton held the unusual circular thing in her hands. It was a globe of some sort. Then she examined the space ship and her hand ran slowly over the letters etched in it. Then from where she stood, by the hidden space ship, Libby suddenly heard some twigs crack as Jonathan Kent made his way back to where he concealed the vessel that had brought happiness back into his wife’s eyes.
Libby put the globe into her pocket, rearranged the branches to disguise the ship once again, and ran across Shuster’s field and back toward her home.
Jonathan moved the branches and looked at the ship. He set down the gasoline cans he had brought with him to obliterate the evidence. He paused as he stared at the space craft. This cylinder had changed their lives. How could he...?
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Cassville, New Jersey
Sunday,
October 30, 1938
8:19 p.m. EST
##### PHILLIPS: ...the object itself doesn't look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I've seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. It has a diameter of . . . what would you say, Professor Pierson?
PIERSON: What's that?
PHILLIPS: What would you say . . . what is the diameter?
PIERSON: About thirty yards.
PHILLIPS: About thirty yards . . . The metal on the sheath is . . . well, I've never seen anything like it. The color is sort of yellowish-white. Curious spectators now are pressing close to the object in spite of the efforts of the police to keep them back. They're getting in front of my line of vision. Would you mind standing to one side, please?
POLICEMAN: One side, there, one side. #####
“Where’s Father,” Jason asked. “He knows all about this stuff.”
“I know,” his mother responded walking over to the window to look out. “Maybe he has to stay at Lakehurst longer because of this. Maybe the personnel at the Naval Air Station have been put on alert.”
##### PHILLIPS: While the policemen are pushing the crowd back, here's Mr. Wilmuth, owner of the farm here. He may have some interesting facts to add . . . Mr. Wilmuth, would you please tell the radio audience as much as you remember of this rather unusual visitor that dropped in your backyard? Step closer, please. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr. Wilmuth.
WILMUTH: Well, I was listenin' to the radio.
PHILLIPS: Closer and louder please.
WILMUTH: Yes, sir -- while I was listening to the radio and kinda drowsin', that Professor fellow was talkin' about Mars, so I was half dozin' and half . .
PHILLIPS: Yes, yes, Mr. Wilmuth. Then what happened?
WILMUTH: As I was sayin', I was listenin' to the radio kinda halfways . . .
PHILLIPS: Yes, Mr. Wilmuth, and then you saw something?
WILMUTH: Not first off. I heard something.
PHILLIPS: And what did you hear?
WILMUTH: A hissing sound. Like this: sssssss . . . kinda like a fourt' of July rocket.
PHILLIPS: Then what?
WILMUTH: Turned my head out the window and would have swore I was to sleep and dreamin.'
PHILLIPS: Yes?
WILMUTH: I seen a kinda greenish streak and then zingo! Somethin' smacked the ground. Knocked me clear out of my chair! #####
“Wow!” Jason exclaimed. “Come listen, mother.”
“I can hear just fine over here,” his mother told him and turned her head back to look out the window.
Jason was riveted to the radio, hanging on every word. His mother, Mary, stared out the window hoping David would get home quickly. She thought back on another day eighteen months before when she and David were equally fascinated by a radio broadcast.
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Arlington, Virginia
Thursday,
May 6, 1937
7:25 p.m. EST
##### NEW JERSEY ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen. This is Herbert Morrison broadcasting live from Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The great air ship, Hindenburg is about to come in for a landing.... It's practically standing still now. They've dropped ropes out of the nose of the ship, and it's been taken a hold of down on the field by a number of men.
It's starting to rain again; the rain had slacked up a little bit. The back motors of the ship are just holding it, just enough to keep it from -- It burst into flames! ... It's on fire and it's crashing! It's crashing terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It's burning, bursting into flames and is falling on the mooring mast, and all the folks agree that this is terrible.
This is the worst of the worst catastrophes in the world! ...There's smoke, and there's flames now, and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast...Oh, the humanity, and all the passengers screaming around here! #####
Mary looked over at her husband as he started to get up and put on his coat. “I’ll be needed at the War Department,” David told her as he put on his jacket.
“I know,” she said to her husband, as she helped straighten his tie. “Being the wife of the Naval Commander in charge of finding boogie men, hasn’t been easy.”
She walked over to David and adjusted his tie. “Do you think it’s saboteurs?”
“As Thomas Jefferson said, ‘The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
David kissed her gently and strode out the door. Mary sighed and walked into her son’s bedroom. The ten-year old lay sleeping. He had had a cold for the last two days and Mary had put him to bed early. She leaned down and felt his forehead. The fever appeared to have subsided and Jason was sleeping gently. She walked into her bedroom. She opened the closet door and took out two large suitcases and began packing.
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Smallville, Kansas
Thursday,
January 13, 1994
5:30 p.m.
##### KSML ANNOUNCER: This is KSML, Radio Smallville with the news. At present, the Galileo spacecraft is about 150 million miles from Jupiter and its camera’s will be able to see part of the planet's night side, where comet impacts are predicted to take place. Galileo will be capable of taking pictures, says a spokesperson from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. These pictures and infrared spectral scans must be tape-recorded for slow playback, which is expected in a month or two. #####
Clark came up behind Lois and encircled her waist with his arms and kissed the nape of her neck.
“Mmmmm,” Lois murmured. “You’re going to have to stop, if you want anything to eat,” she explained, stirring the sauce on the stove. “Your mom gave me this recipe, and I don’t want to spoil it.”
“You don’t have to do this,” Clark told her. He moved his hand to turn off the burner on the stove. “I’m not really hungry...for food,” he said, turning her around and pulling her into his arms. He kissed her lightly, then more passionately; and continuing to search out her mouth, he walked her slowly out of the kitchen toward the living room couch.
“You’re getting really good at this,” Lois informed him as she came up for air.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Clark told her. Maneuvering her carefully, he levitated them slowly until they were above the couch horizontally and then gradually, effortlessly, he lowered them gently unto the couch itself.
Lois ran her fingers through his hair as she kissed Clark intently. His body, lying on top of her, provided her with a feeling of warmth and safety she had never known before. His hand began unbuttoning her blouse. Lois knew that their resolve to wait was threatened. She hesitated for just an instant. Lois was uncertain, doubtful-- maybe terrified was the word she was really searching for--because she wanted this so much...she wanted this relationship to work. She wanted him to, she really did, but...
Clark pulled back, his head cocked in that familiar way. “Lois,” he said, reluctantly.
“I know. Go.”
Lois watched Clark spin into his suit. She smiled. She would never tired of seeing him do that spin thing.
Clark smiled back at her and hurrying out her door, he flew off.
Lois followed out onto the porch. She took a deep breath. It was probably a good thing that he had been needed. They had to talk, she decided. All of her past relationships had been so terrible and Lois didn’t want this one to end that way. Deep down she knew that their love was special and their passion would never grow cold. A gust of wind blew through the porch. She shivered in the cold January evening as she watched him streak across the sky.
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Smallville, Kansas
Thursday,
January 13, 1994
5:40 p.m.
Martha Kent looked down at the script she was preparing as the prompt book. She was enlarging the pages and leaving space in the left-hand margin for her notes.
She took a look at the pages she had just run off.
Aunt Martha: Mortimer didn’t seem quite himself today.
Aunt Abby: Well, that’s only natural--I think I know why.
Aunt Martha: Why?
Aunt Abby: He’s just become engaged to be married. I suppose that always makes a man nervous.
The Director of the Smallville Players stopped reading. A strange sensation had hit her--a strange premonition. <No,> she thought. Lois and Clark are fine.
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Roswell, New Mexico
Tuesday,
July 8, 1947
3:40 p.m. MDT
Lou Ann Baker walked over to one of the tables in the Copper Kettle Café. “Would you like me to warm that for you?” she asked.
“I’m sure it was a flying saucer,” Mac said to his friend across the table and then looked up at Lou Ann. “Yeah honey,” he said. “Warm her right up.”
“Are you crazy?” Sheriff Wilcox asked him. “I know we been hearing lots about space ships and such recently. But here in New Mexico, nah!”
Lou Ann slowly walked back to the counter. She closed her eyes and remembered a day back in 1938, a day she would never forget. It was a hoax then--the alien threat. There had been no little green Martians. Monsters didn’t come from outer space, they came from right in your own home. The 1938 attack from Mars had been hoax--plain and simple. And just like then, it was a hoax now.
Lou Ann hoped that what had happened that October day was behind her. She had paid the penalty required by society--she had been put away for almost nine years. Four months ago, when she turned twenty-one, she had been released and had moved away from Smallville, Kansas. She had come to as remote a place as she could think of--Roswell, New Mexico. No one knew her here and she had started a new life. Libby Barton had become Lou Ann Baker.
But now aliens in Roswell, New Mexico. Would monsters always be part of her life?
The door to the café opened and two men dressed in military uniforms entered. They sat down on the counter. “Coffee,” said one.
The other officer scanned the café. “Which one is W.W. Brazell,” he asked Lou Ann.
“That would be me,” Mac responded as he walked toward the officer.
“I’m Major Marcel,” the Army officer informed him, “and you’re taking me out to your ranch.”
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Cassville, New Jersey
Sunday,
October 30, 1938
8:21 p.m. EST
Jason walked over to the window and tugged at his mother’s arm. “Come listen,” he told her. They’re talking to someone from Grovers Mill.”
“You listen,” Mary told her son. “I’m watching for your father.”
Mary looked up in the sky and wondered, fearfully. Her husband had been involved with seeking out those that wanted to hurt us. David had railed against invaders, saying that they wanted to destroy this nation. He had been thought a loose canon as he tried for the last eighteen months to prove that saboteurs were at the bottom of the Hindenburg disaster. She had tried to support him, but she was beginning to believe that David was imagining things--no alien power could be that corrupt. But now, maybe he was right; but the danger wasn’t coming from across the Atlantic, it was coming from up there, outer space. Mary was frightened but she couldn’t let her son know that she was scared.
##### PHILLIPS: Well, were you frightened, Mr. Wilmuth?
WILMUTH: Well, I -- I ain't quite sure. I reckon I -- I was kinda riled.
PHILLIPS: Thank you, Mr. Wilmuth. Thank you.
WILMUTH: Want me to tell you some more?
PHILLIPS: No . . . That's quite all right, that's plenty. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just heard Mr. Wilmuth, owner of the farm where this thing has fallen. I wish I could convey the atmosphere . . . the background of this . . . fantastic scene. Hundreds of cars are parked in a field in back of us. Police are trying to rope off the roadway leading to the farm. But it's no use. They're breaking right through. Cars' headlights throw an enormous spot on the pit where the object's half buried. Some of the more daring souls are now venturing near the edge. Their silhouettes stand out against the metal sheen. ######
A faint humming sound came from the radio.
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Smallville, Kansas
Thursday,
January 13, 1994
5:35 p.m.
The car’s brakes weren’t working! Vivian Cox pumped at them repeatedly, but the car kept speeding up, as it slid along the icy surface of Maple Street toward...toward the bridge.
Miss Libby Barton poised herself on top of the window seat as she peered out to see what was happening. Nothing that occurred on Maple Street got by Miss Libby. The Barton home was the last house on the street before one came to the bridge that crossed the Arkansas River, which traversed Smallville’s eastside. The bridge was slated for renovation in the summer of 1994, as the state survey last fall had declared that it was sorely in need of repair.
The occupant of 417 Maple Street was about to go phone for help, when she saw Superman land just in front of the car and stop the runaway from crashing into the guardrail and careening off the bridge.
Suddenly, Miss Libby heard a faint humming sound coming from the window seat beneath her. She stood up and once again retrieved the globe that had been resting there for almost twenty-eight years. <It had belonged to an alien,> she thought as she looked at the globe. Miss Libby smiled as she realized that she had been right to keep the secret. No one would have believed her. But knowing the Kents, she also knew that this particular alien would never be the monster people feared. Deep down she knew that the baby nestled in Martha’s arms she saw back in 1966 had a destiny far beyond any little green man threatening the world in 1938 or 1947.
Miss Libby looked out her window, as the globe began to vibrate.
Superman opened the car door to assure that the driver was okay.
Vivian Cox smiled up at him. “Thank you, Superman,” she said breathlessly.
“Are you all right?” the man of steel asked her.
“Yes, I’m fine. Just a little shaky,” she explained as Rachel Harris arrived on the scene.
Superman’s head jerked right as he heard something. Not a call for help this time, but an unusual humming sound that was vaguely familiar as if from a far distant memory.
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“Move over! Let me try,” Tom Mock insisted, gently pushing Emily Cox to one side.
Tom sat down at the computer and typed something on the keyboard. The screen changed and the menu from the Kansas State Genealogical Society appeared. “Got it!” he exclaimed.
Cindy Brady put her hands on Tom’s shoulders, as she stared at the monitor. “Great!” she said excitedly.
“Wow!” Keith Haley echoed. “Now we’re getting someplace.”
The four students from Miss Lane’s American Literature Class had been in the computer lab for several hours after school researching their assignment. Jimmy Olsen, who taught computers at Smallville High School and was at his desk at the back of the lab, heard their exclamations and joined them as they clustered around a computer.
“Sounds like you’re on to something,” Jimmy remarked.
“Yeah,” Tom told him. “Look at this, guys.”
The screen displayed the entire family history of Laslo and Lillian Barton.
tbc
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