Chapter Text
7 FEBRUARY 1959 – METROPOLIS, DELAWARE
The Christmas break had been kind of wild. I’d spent several days up in the 30th century on a mission for the Legion of Super-Heroes. A weird disease running around on a planet in the Westenra system, causing a wave of uncontrolled giantism. It took a lot of the heavy hitters – me, Mon-El, Ultra Boy, Colossal Boy (since giants are right up his alley) – to keep the lid on things while Brainiac 5 ran himself ragged in the lab finding out the cause and developing a counteragent and a vaccine. Poor guy was pretty much awake for three days straight, and you don’t need a twelfth-level intelligence to know that that’s never good. He was so out of it that he didn’t even do his usual indignant splutter when I hugged him in thanks.
School was just starting back up again, and it was supposed to be a normal Monday morning as my class filed into the lab space for what was supposed to be Mr. Bates’ physics class. I was a bit grumpy – Jennifer had been needling me a bit about Dick Malverne and him supposedly being sweet on me. Really not something I need right now, thank you.
The man at the head of the class was definitely not Mr. Bates. This guy was taller, with slicked-back black hair and a thin moustache, the kind that Errol Flynn used to wear. As we settled in our seats, he introduced himself as Mr. Corben, and that he’d be substituting for Mr. Bates until the end of the school year, because Mr. Bates had to go back to Central City for a while because of a family matter.
I didn’t think much of it at the time – Midvale’s a school; we get substitute teachers now and again. But this guy proved to be something else – not for plain ordinary Kara Kent so much as for Supergirl!
o-o-o
John Corben – I found out his first name later – made a pretty fast impression on Midvale Prep. Certainly he was a big hit with some of my friends; I didn’t see it until Katy said how much he looked like Superman. I didn’t get it at first, but then, Superman is my dad, for pity’s sake. And people might think Clark Kent looks a bit like Superman, but he pretends to be such a yutz that that just seems dumb. Mr. Corben could probably have played Superman in a movie if he shaved his moustache off.
He seemed to fit right in with the staff, and I overheard Mr. Boltinoff, the headmaster, speaking well of him and suggesting that they might make him a job offer if Mr. Bates couldn’t come back. A lot of the girls thought he was dreamy and swooned over him; a lot of the guys thought he was sharp and they respected him for his offer to help coach the basketball team.
Everyone seemed to think he was great. So why did I keep thinking that something was off, like he was hiding something? I tried to push it down. Kara Kent was overreacting because Supergirl was suspicious. I hate that sometimes, even when I know it’s needed. It kind of needled me all through January.
I was concentrating on my classes, but I keep a keen eye out for things that needed my special attention, at least on the quiet. Dad accepts that I’m going into the “family business” – like, try to stop me – but he insists that he and Mom would say when I could go public as Supergirl. I get it, and it’s fun, but at the same time, like, total dragsville.
But it was a rescue that I didn’t make that started things getting weird.
A lot of the buildings at Midvale Prep are built around a green square and a big tree in the centre of it. It’s an ancient oak, maybe fifty feet round at the base of the trunk, branches going up to third-storey level in places. It’s called “Old Glory”, supposedly because it was planted in 1776 and the brand-new U.S. flag was unfurled on the spot where it stands. There’d been a big storm the night before; there were fallen leaves and some branches scattered all over campus. As my class was crossing the square to go back after morning recess, I heard the crack – Old Glory had taken some damage, too. One of its big branches gave way and started falling towards a group of kids.
I couldn’t give myself away by catching it. Visible powers like heat vision were a no-go, too. But I had another option. I drew in a deep breath and blew, as hard as I dared. I didn’t judge it quite right, the branch spun slightly as it fell – but I got an unexpected assist. Mr. Corben had scattered the group by running at them, shouting to get them to move. The branch clipped him as it hit the ground, and he fell. It looked bad and I was flailing myself in my head for botching it – but it looked like I was worried over nothing. He got up, dusted himself down. He looked okay; only his jacket and shirt were ripped.
And the weird part here was that the body under that shirt was grey. No flesh, no cuts or wounds from the fall. From where I stood, it looked like metal. Iron, most likely. Mr. Corben saw the tear and pulled his jacket tighter around him as some of the other teachers and ground staff rushed in. The whole class was abuzz as we went back inside for Miss Fradon’s Spanish class, and I was still in a bit of a daze. What had I seen? Was it what it looked like?
o-o-o
The puzzle was grinding my gears until just tonight. I was done with homework and I was just sitting on the balcony looking out at the night sky when I heard it. The sound of a failing engine, somewhere out at sea on the approach to the harbour. I took a very quick x-ray vision look into the living room; Mom was deep into the workspace, up to her neck in papers and a complicated-looking pinboard. It was dark – close to the new moon – and all I needed were the dark clothes I was wearing and a hood over my blonde hair. Total stealth mode, man.
I got a bearing on the plane – a little one, Piper Cub or something – just as the engines died completely and it started to drop. Dad had taught me how to match speeds in flight, so I could take hold of the plane’s undercarriage and steer it – carefully, too much strength would snap the struts – into a stable landing line. There was a small private field on the edge of Burnley and I guided the plane into landing – a little bumpy, but okay – in a dark patch of the field so the pilot and his passenger couldn’t see me as I turned and flew away.
I hovered in the air a few moments, just long enough to see them get out as an emergency tender raced out towards them, made sure they were okay. Then I turned to fly home. It was already 10:30, I had school tomorrow and Mom insists I get proper sleep. Dad said once that, for us, sleep was kind of optional, but he still thought it was a good thing, something to keep us stable and normal.
When I got back – touching down on the roof of our building on Clifton Street and coming down the fire stairs – I was surprised to see Mom and Dad both there. Mom gave me that “totally busted” smile. “Hello, Kara dear,” she said.
Rats, I said to myself like Charlie Brown as they looked up. “Sorry, sorry, I had to go. I could…”
“Hear the plane,” said Dad. “I saw you. I was in the middle of something – not far from your school, as it happened – so I left you to it. That was a good call, and it looked like you handled it well. Well done!” That made me feel better; I was set for Dad’s disappointment. He doesn’t get angry that much, but his disappointment can hurt even more.
“Bill said there’d been more than one strike?” Mom asked. My ears kind of twitched a little. There’s only one “Bill” that I know Mom and Dad know that well; Bill Henderson, an inspector with the Metro police.
“This was the third hit in the last month or so,” Dad said. “Uranium isn’t strictly a commercial good. Finding it would be hard. Bill said that he’d put the word around after the second strike, but whoever did this just smashed his way through the wall and heisted two containers of uranium.”
“Wow,” I said. “To make a bomb?”
“Is that even possible by Joe Public?” A little dose of the patented Lois Lane ace-reporter scepticism.
“I didn’t think so. But I got a second opinion from Ted Knight.” Dad knows a lot about science for your typical journalist, I guess – but I’d met Ted Knight. He was Starman, one of Dad’s buddies from the Justice Society, and he’d supposedly worked on the H-bombs that landed on Japan. An honest-to-God expert.
“Oh. How is Ted?” Mom asked.
“Okay, but with the odd relapse, I think. Adele is very solicitous; she was reluctant to let me speak to him. Ted hummed and hahhed a bit – I think he’s still bound by some security clearances – but he confirmed that the uranium-238 which was stolen was common and more innocuous. It isn’t adequate for a bomb, you’d need the much rarer uranium-235, and more of it. But there are some esoteric machines that can use U-238 as a power source.”
Somebody stealing uranium near the school. A power source for unusual machines. The strange grey colouring I’d seen on Mr. Corben’s body after the tree branch fell by him. I didn’t know if two plus two was equalling five here, but…
“When were the other thefts?” I asked.
“The first, just before New Year. The second on the sixteenth,” Dad said. Mr. Corben hadn’t been at school on the fifteenth and sixteenth, when he’d called in sick. We missed a regular lesson on the sixteenth because of it.
I didn’t say anything then – it’d be super-embarrassing if I got it wrong – but there were things I needed to do.