Earth Alpha: The Journal

[jonclark]

If you have found this book then I must be dead. Truly dead this time. And my successors, if any, long past caring about old family secrets. Or at least I hope that is the case for this journal tells the true story of my life with real names. And the truth may not be accepted as easily as the myth that has grown up around it, a myth that was largely created to obscure these truths



My name- well that’s the first myth. I’ve had many in my time. But I suppose I’ll go with the one known to almost everyone- Superman. It’s the one I created for myself and the one I tried most to be. But this story while it will deal with the “Super” is really about the “Man”, the flawed person who existed before and behind the legend.



I expect that other parts of my life have come to light by now and that some of you are thinking of the name I used most often when not in costume . That you are preparing to hear about a rocket ship and a kindly farm couple. Well the farm couple is something we will get to eventually but a lot of the rest is not going to be what you expect. A few of you may recognize the “newer” details since they have been told before as well in other places. I’ve sown kernels of the truth in various places throughout my life to obscure the full story - in part to protect others, but if I’m being fully truthful largely to protect myself.



But here in these pages I’m laying out the truth, warts and all.



The story begins in ruins, not those of a dying world, but rather a dying marriage …

[jonclark]

August, 1885 Bethlehem, New York

“Mathilda, you are being unreasonable”, Abner complained.

“Unreasonable? I’m asking you to consider an idea and I’m the one being unreasonable” came the loud reply.

The man stared at his wife much as he did at his more dense freshmen students. He drew in his breath much as he did when facing the problem of how to make them see some basic idea that somehow eluded their grasp. Unfortunately Mathilda Dehner was far less interested in trying to understand than his students.

“I’m tired, Abner. I’m tired of your explanations about how everything I know is wrong. I’m tired of seeing all my friends in town and having them turn away from me. Tired of all the overheard comments both in town and even from your friends”, she screamed, “Yes, Abner, even your oh so enlightened fellow natural philosophers and their wives pity us. The wives of these great scientists gossip amongst themselves about us. Even a few of them whisper about curses and divine punishments.”

“Mattie, we’ve been over this. God is not punishing us. It’s a simple biological problem. And every problem has a solution. It’s just our misfortune that the solution for this type of thing hasn’t been found yet”, Abner calmly replied hoping to calm her as well.

“A… simple… biological… problem… You call 5 stillbirths a simple problem”, she cried each word louder than the last before bursting into tears and fleeing up the steps where she slammed the bedroom door.

Professor Abner Dehner considered following her but decided she was in no mood to see the facts. And he wasn’t up to dealing with her hysterics tonight. He had tomorrow’s lecture to prepare and another hour or so of trying to make her see the foolishness of her fears would only leave him less able to write clearly.

He sat down at his desk to write but found his thoughts kept drifting from arguments on species differentiation back to his argument with his wife. These clashes had been coming more frequently the past year. And Mattie had been falling back on her father’s religious ramblings, convinced that some hidden sin was behind their inability to have children.

Abner couldn’t accept that. This wasn’t the Dark Ages when illnesses were blamed on demons; this was an age of reason. There had to be a scientific cause. Some trick of evolution that made it impossible for her to carry their children to term. He knew in his heart that it was just a biological problem, another hurdle that was waiting on someone to overcome it.

And all at once it struck him. For all his claims of being a scientist, he was really little more than a translator. He understood what others discovered and distilled it into terms his students could understand. In his classes he duplicated some of the experiments to show what had already been learned. But Abner Dehner had never gone beyond that. He had never thought to explore new territory himself.

But now…

[jonclark]

Journal entry, March 16, 1891

Mattie would be furious if she knew just how much I have spent , but I’m beginning to see results.

Despite numerous dead-ends, the notes I obtained from my agents in Britain have lead me to a breakthrough. I have isolated a chemical compound found in a sample of the so called BoomFood that made a splash in British journals several years back. This compund was not present in the second sample of the grain from the final batch produced just prior to the company’s collapse. It was the inferiority of the later crops of Boom Food that led to the company going bankrupt.

I suspect the compound may have been native to the area where the original crop was grown. My friend, John Watson, told me that area also has connection to certain cases that the government investigated like the Iping Riot or the murders of Edward Hyde. There are also local records indicating that a Doctor Victor Frankenstein visited the area during his studies in England roughly a century ago. I recall from my youth the rumors surrounding the doctor’s death and that of his family. I’m now considering those rumors from a different perspective.

Watson’s colleague was able to obtain samples of unique concoctions connected to the more recent cases. One was a serum found on the dead body of an albino killed near Iping shortly after the riot. The other was a different serum found amongst the possessions of Dr Henry Jeckyll whose death was attributed to Hyde, although no body was ever found.

I found traces of the same compound in both serums. This compound seems to bond well to organic chemicals, but becomes inert if added to a compound using the same chemicals from non-organic sources. It interacts with iron in a drop of blood, but not with iron shavings from a fireplace poker. I can dissolve it easily in milk or wine but not in boiling water. In point of fact it is only by mixing it in with some bread mold that I have been able to reproduce it. A happy accident as I would otherwise quickly exhaust the few ounces Watson’s sample yielded.