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Land to the North - Chapter 12

2011-12-03T13:41:00.001-08:00

As had happened so often in this new land, I came awake slowly, not sure of where I was or what was happening around me. My head ached and when I opened my eyes, I found that I was lying in the grass outside. I could hear people talking around me. I sat up, a hand shading my eyes. In front of me was a rank of black clad warriors and behind them was the beginnings of a stadium.

I climbed to me feet, wavered as a curtain of black descended and then stood erect. I saw Eric lying on the grass, a hand to his head. His face was pale, as if he was about to be sick. He groaned and sat up.

“What’s going on?” he moaned.

I touched a hip but the .45 was gone.

There was a burst of cheering as Eric got up. He stood there for a moment and then asked again, the anger creeping into his voice, “What in the hell is going on?”

A sword, thrown by someone to our right stuck in the ground near me feet. A second one joined the first. Neither of us moved, but the crowd went wild.

In Spanish, the high priest, the man who had stood on the ramp and killed the children and who had ordered the attack on us, said, “This is trial by ordeal. Two of our best warriors will be pitted against you. If you win the battle, you will live for another day. If you lose, you will die and your bones will rot in the forest. There is no appeal.”

I reached out and pulled the sword from the ground. I hefted it, swung it right and left and then asked, “Where is my personal weapon?”

“Your thunderstick has been taken as a gift for the emperor. It is now his. You will use the weapon given to you.”

“And if we don’t fight?” asked Eric.

“Then you will die.” He said simply, “And they will die most horribly. They die as infidels and will be deprived of their afterlife.”

I turned and saw that both Christine and Huana were bound to poles. Ropes were drawn tightly around their bodies, holding them upright. Around their feet were stacks of kindling and piles of wood.

“When the battle begins,” said the high priest, “the fire begins. Win quickly and you may save your woman. Lose and they die in the fire. Fight slowly and they die slowly. It is all up to you to finish.”

I glanced at Eric. He didn’t look too good. His hair hung in his face and he was sweating heavily. I didn’t think it was the tropical heat that was bothering him. He was sick with some kind of fever. That was an additional handicap.

To the high priest, I said, “If I dispatch my adversary, am I allowed to help my friend?”

“You my do as you choose, remembering that the women are in mortal peril.”

“Then let’s begin,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

The high priest raised his hands and clapped them once, twice, three times. To the sound of blaring trumpets, a caravan entered through the gate. First, there were naked women scattering flower pedals, their hair adorned with brightly colored feathers. They were followed by naked men, carrying a wheelless carriage on long poles set up on their shoulders. Inside each was a human figure and as the procession approached, I saw mummified bodies inside. I learned later that these were the mortal remains of past rulers, brought out for ceremonies. When the rulers were set down where they could watch the activities, four old women, dressed in pure white danced out and began waving palm leaves as if trying to cool the dead. I suppose it was to keep the flies away.

With the rulers ready and in position to watch, the living emperor descended the marble steps and entered the royal box. He sat on a carved, wooden throne and held a hand high. When he dropped it, four men charged out. Two of them held flaming torches which they tossed into the kindling and wood piled around Christine and Huana. As the flames started to build, the two other men, stripped to the waist attacked Eric and me. I held my sword high, point up, watching the dancing feet of my enemy. He was a big man, well muscled. There was almost no hair on his body. That on his head gleamed in the sun. It was long, black, and tied back in a ponytail. He grinned at me with white, nearly perfect teeth.

He attached immediately, moving in and chopping at my head. He swung his sword with strength, trying to kill me quickly. I parried the blow and then swung my sword. He leaped left and countered. Our blades hit with a ringing of metal against medal. He twisted his hand, trying to flip my weapon from me, but I was prepared for that. I snapped my hand around and drew first blood as I slashed his side. The wound, though superficial, draw a shout from the crowd.

Then, behind me, I became aware of the crackling of the fires. I knew that the wood was beginning to burn and the flames would be spreading quickly. There was no sound from either Christine or from Huana.

My adversary attacked again, swinging his sword like he was clearing vines from a jungle trail. He kicked out with a foot and danced closer. I retreated, parrying. Sweat popped out on him, making his body glisten, but he didn’t seem to be tiring at all. He was as strong as when we began.

I stumbled then and a roar rose from the crowd. My man leaped at me, swinging his sword like he had gotten a fat one on the outside of the plate. I ducked under it and rolled. He chopped down, his sword cleaving the soft earth. I jabbed and caught him on the leg. Blood flowed freely and the crowd roared its pleasure.

Behind me I heard the first cry of fright. The flames had to be getting close to the women but I couldn’t afford to look. As my enemy fell back, I got to me feet and advanced on him. He hobbled, favoring his wounded leg, but I was afraid that he was making it seem worse than it really was.

To the left, I could hear Eric fighting with his man. Their blades rang with blows, each of them grunting with the effort.

Now I attacked, swinging, thrusting and circling. I danced around my man so that I could look beyond him, at the fires. Pillars of white smoke obscured the women. They were dark shapes, hidden behind the flames, and inside the smoke. One of them was whimpering but I didn’t know which.

By checking them, I lost the advantage. The man came at me, roaring his fury, trying to disorient me. I ducked under a blow, fell, and rolled. He thought that he had me then. He leaped at me and swung. Instead of rolling away as I had in the past, I rolled toward him. Caught by surprise, he hesitated. That gave me the opening I needed. I jammed my sword into his side. There was a shriek of surprise and pain, a fountain of blood and then the odor of death. The man fell, wrenching the sword from my hand.

I scrambled to my hands and knees as the man dropped. I grabbed my sword, tugging it free. Eric was holding his own and had blooded his enemy once or twice. I spun and raced toward the fires. At first the flames were to high and hot for me. I ran around the end and saw an opening. I leaped over a pile of wood, stumbled but didn’t fall. Huana was sagging against her bonds, as if she had passed out. I slashed at the rope holding her. I cut several of them but had to be careful. Her hands were tied behind her and the pole. I needed to get closer.

The smoke poured up as the fire roared. It stung my eyes and filled my lungs. I blinked rapidly, the tears streaming down my face. I sawed at the ropes around Huana’s wrists.

Christine saw me then and screamed at me, “Hurry! Please hurry!”

The ropes parted and Huana fell to her knees. I helped her to her feet and pushed her away from the post and the fire. As she tripped and began to crawl out of the smoke, I turned to Christine. I could feel the heat of the flames beginning to bake me. My eyebrows began to curl and sizzle in the heat. I could barely see with the stinging smoke burning my eyes. I coughed. It felt as if my lungs had caught fire.

Christine was beginning to babble, her voice rising in panic. I cut the ropes that held her legs to the pole. She jerked, vainly trying to pull herself free. Her bonds cut into her body, drawing blood on her arms and shoulders.

I used my sword and cut through the majority of the rope. I coughed again as the smoke filled my lungs, making me dizzy. I slipped to my knees and lost sight of the pole.

Christine was shouting now. Screaming, almost incoherently, as the heat grew and the smoke thickened.

I reached up and touched the pole. I slid my hand down it until I came to hers, bound behind her. I couldn’t see now. By touch, I could the ropes and felt the wetness of blood. I knew that I had injured her but she didn’t cry out. Without a word, she leaped from the pole, staggered through the smoke and flame and then ran for safety.

Now it was time for me to get out. On my hands and knees, I crawled over the rough surface of the logs, cutting myself badly in the process. I kept going until I could taste the clean, fresh air. Shakily, I got to my feet. I dropped the sword and scrubbed at my eyes, trying to find Eric. I hoped he had been able to dispatch his man because I was in no condition to fight anyone else. At least not right then.

As I stood there, fighting for air, trying to see, I heard a chant from the crowd. A rhythmic chant that rocked the stadium and shook the ground. I looked toward them and saw they were on their feet, shouting and clapping and stomping. On the grass, in front of the dead rulers, were the bodies of the two men sent to fight us. Eric was standing over one, looking down at the dead man, as if he didn’t believe that he had won.

I stooped to pick up my sword and tossed the weapon at the feet of the high priest. He glanced at the bloody blade and then at the dirty bodies of the women standing behind me, coughing because of the smoke. Sweat was dripping from them and there were smears of dirt and ash on them. He turned up his nose, as if he found their very presence distasteful.

“You have won,” he said.

“Damn right,” I said. “We are now free.”

He grinned evilly. “You are not free. Tomorrow you fight again. Tomorrow will be the same as today. And each day you will fight until you are killed and your bodies thrown into the flames to be destroyed along with those of the women.”

“Or until there are no more warriors to face us,” I said with a confidence that I didn’t feel.

“We are many thousand and you are but two. Without your thunder weapons, you will surely fall.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” I said.

“Tomorrow will show us how strong and brave you are. Tomorrow will be the true test.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. We had just defeated two of the strongest men I had ever faced. We had done it with the weapons they provided and unless they took away those weapons, I believed that we could hold out indefinitely. I hoped after a couple of days, they would give up.

But that was not to be. The high priest turned and prayed loudly, the crowd following him. When he finished, he spun and said, “Tomorrow you will each fight two warriors and if you win, the next day it will be three each. Laugh now, infidel.”

Land to the North - Chapter 11

2011-12-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

I had expected someone to pull a fast one on us. I had thought they were leading us off to either another dungeon or to an arena for execution. Since no one had tried to take my pistol from me, I couldn’t see any reason for causing trouble now.

With Eric and the woman, I followed the officer as he began to climb the steps that lead up into the white building. There were massive pillars holding up the roof, wide doorways that seemed to contain no doors and huge, open windows without glass in them. The front of the building was covered with carvings and designs including swirls, serpents, and sun bursts.

As we reached the top step, two dozen men poured from the building. They were all dressed in black and carried black shields. They had on black boots and held obsidian spears. They formed two ranks, on either side of the door but didn’t try to keep us from entering.

When the officer led us through the great door and we stood in a marble and stone area that had to be a hundred feet in diameter. A staircase wound around the wall, leading to a second and third level. The walls were decorated with woven rugs showing a wide variety of scenes. The one that struck me was a picture of a large battle. Men such as those I had seen lining the plaza fighting with white bearded men who were dressed like Spanish conquistadors.

A man dressed in the finest white robes I had ever seen appeared on the steps. The robe was trimmed with red and yellow and his arms were wrapped in gold. He came down a few steps and stared at us.

The officer lifted his sword in salute and said something I didn’t understand as he bowed. He backed up and disappeared behind us.

The man on the stairs came down and stopped in front of us. He spoke in the strange language and when neither Eric nor I responded, he switched to Spanish. It had a strange accent, but I could understand what he was saying. He rambled for a few moments, talking about Manco Capac and the ruler of the universe that blazed in the sky above us.

When he wound down, I stared at him and asked him, in Spanish, “Why have we been brought here and treated as enemies?”

He seemed taken aback by the question. He blinked rapidly and then said, “It came to me in a vision. White men would come into our realm, as they have come before. Some would be evil men, interested in killing and enslaving. Others would be friendly but we wouldn’t know which was which.”

“That’s all fine,” I said, “but doesn’t answer my question. Why have we been brought here?”

“You are my guests,” said the man. “Regrettably, I had to test you before I allowed you to enter my home.”

I thought about the dead men scattered in the plaza and the prison and wondered about a ruler who allowed his subjects to die in the tests of stranger’s motivations.

He bowed and said, “I am Pachacuti, Ruler of all that you see. Ruler of the world.”

“I am Stone,” I said. “And my friend is Jansen. We are explorers and scientists.”

“Ah, men of learning. Good. We will have much to talk about,” said Pachacuti. “But surely you are tired after your journey.” He clapped his hands once and a tall, slender woman with blond hair appeared. She wore a very short, white skirt, sandals and nothing more.

I looked at Pachacuti and then her. She was on her knees, her head pressed to the marble floor. In Spanish, I asked him about her.

“You may keep her as my gift,” said Pachacuti. “Come. I will show you to your quarters where you may bathe and eat and then rest.”

My head was beginning to spin with the sudden turn of events. One moment we were fighting for our lives in the plaza and the very next we were being offered the finest quarters, food and companionship available.

Pachacuti spun and climbed the steps. We followed. I paused at the top and saw the black garbed guards enter the palace. They halted then and waited. I was sure that Pachacuti was always within easy reach of his guards. He seemed to be taking the big risk by keeping them almost out of our sight, but maybe he was just attempting to gain our trust.

Pachacuti lead us across the floor, to a large, dark wood door. He pushed it open and waved at the giant room. The floor was marble and on the opposite side was a massive balcony that looked out on the plaza. There was little furniture in the room. A couple of chairs, a single table covered with golden trinkets including a decanter and four large goblets, and dozens of pillows spread across the floor. At the far end, in the darkest corner, near a heavy curtain that could be drawn by ropes to the side, were two beds.

“Please, make yourselves comfortable. If you desire anything, please inform Christine. If she fails to supply it, her head is forfeit.”

“Well,” said Eric, spinning slowly so that he could take in the whole of the scene around us. He stopped, facing Christine and said, “You are not of these people.”

She didn’t respond. Her eyes were downcast, staring at the floor.

Without looking up at me, she said, “I am Christine. I am here to serve.”

“Yes,” I said. “But you are not from here. You were born elsewhere.”

“I was born in Neuve Macchu Picuhu.”

“Never heard of it,” I said.

Eric moved to the table and was looking at the treasure spread across it. “If I didn’t know better, I would say the old boy is trying to bribe us with beads and bobbles just as the English tried to buy the Indians.”

I glanced at him and turned my attention back to Christine. “But you are not one of these people.”

“No,” she agreed. “I am not one of the chosen.”

I was fascinated by Christine. She was so out of place here. She looked like she belonged to a Viking village, not among the shorter, squatter people here. I had seen no one, other than her, who was fair and blond.

I realized that I was ignoring the other woman. She was crouched on the floor near the door, her eyes on our feet. I said to her, “Who are you?”

“I am Huana,” she responded. “I am chosen for the capacocha. You have won me for your time here.”

“What’s the capacocha?”

“A sacrifice. I was due for the capachocha this morning, as were you, but your escape has won all of us a reprieve.”

Eric, holding a goblet in one hand and a large pear-like fruit in the other came toward us. He said, “I don’t like the sound of that. A reprieve.”

To Christine and Huana, I said, “You may feed yourselves. Please go to the table.”

As the two women stood and moved away, Eric said, “Which one do you fancy?”

I stared at him for a moment and then walked across the floor until I had reached the balcony. I walked out into the hot sunshine, or what would pass for sunshine on the surface. I leaned my hands on the sun warm railing and looked down, into the now vacant plaza. All this, everything about it was vaguely familiar. It stirred memories of my schooling but I couldn’t put my finger on it. The clues were all there, I was sure, if I could just take the time to figure it out. The natural assumption was that we had somehow found a lost tribe of Aztecs, but that wasn’t quite right either.

Eric joined me on the balcony. “Was it something that I said?”

“No, not at all.”

“Then, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have the small, dark one.”

“Eric, these people are people, not pets. You can’t just have one like you would a dog.”

“Why not?” he asked, unreasonably.

“We just fought a war so that people wouldn’t own people and you come up with that.”

“Our war was fought to end all wars,” he said. “We didn’t fight the Civil War.”

“The principle is the same,” I said.

“All right,” he said, but I didn’t think that he agreed with me. “So, what’s our next move?”

I turned and looked at him. “You’re the leader of this expedition. What do you think?”

“I think that I know everything that I wanted to know. I have learned that my father was right. I think it’s time that we get the hell out of here.”

“I do too, but I don’t think they’re going to let us just walk out.”

Eric grinned. “Then we wait for dark and slip into the jungle.”

“And we’re going to need someone to help us through the jungle. We don’t have any idea of which way to go to reach tghe river.”

I leaned forward and looked down. Directly under us was a garden of some kind. There were several men tending the plants, cutting the leaves and trimming them. Flowers in wild colors bloomed everywhere.

“Before that,” he said, “I think we ought to eat and sleep. There’s not much we can do now.”

When he spoke of sleep, I realized just how tired I was. The little sleep I had gotten on the beach had not been all that restful. And neither of us had eaten in a long time. I turned and entered the palace again. The women were sitting on the floor, a large, golden platter of food between them.

I walked to the table and picked up one of the pear-like things. I bit into it. Juice dribbled down my chin. I found the flavor sweet. I ate it and then poured a goblet of the liquid that had been supplied. It was some kind of dry wine with an unusual aftertaste. I wondered if we had been poisoned, and then wondered why they would have gone to that much trouble. They could have killed us easily a dozen times before showing us to the rooms and they hadn’t done it.

I plucked another of the green pears from the table, poured another goblet of the wine and glanced at Christine. Although I felt tired, there were a dozen, a hundred questions that I wanted to ask her. I moved toward the beds and told her to follow.

When I laid down, she crawled onto the bed to lie right beside me.

“No,” I told her. “You sit there. Over there. I want to talk to you.”

She looked hurt, unhappy, but didn’t say anything. She did as I told her. When we were comfortable, I asked her to tell me about herself.

She had been born far from here, to a mother and father who were like everyone else in their village. Tall, thin, blond. She had thought nothing of it. Then, one day, the shorter, darker people entered the village and took away a number of the children. Both boys and girls. None of the parents protested. They were marched through the jungle until they arrived here. They were given rooms inside the pyramid and began instruction in the languages, history of these people and were told what their ultimate duties would be.

I listened to her, fascinated by the story. I liked the sound of her voice. But I was suddenly so tired that I couldn’t keep my eyes open. There was a disturbance at the far end of the room. A clatter of a goblet to the hard marble floor and then a cry of despair. A feminine cry.

I thought about sitting up to discover what had happened, but found that I didn’t have the energy to do it. The curiosity burned and I pondered the question with half my mind, but it seemed to be too much of an effort. Besides, Christine seemed to be unconcerned about the noise because she continued to talk. And then I could no longer hear her voice either. I slipped down, into the blackness of sleep, unaware fo everything that was happening around me.

Land to the North - Chapter Ten

2011-07-19T09:29:00.000-07:00

Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy. I realized that as soon as I said it. For one thing, we were isolated in darkness and I was sure that the guards would have torches with them. When they opened the cell door, they light would momentarily blind us, unless we had prepared for it. Now, that would be simple. When we heard someone coming, we could set a bundle of straw on fire to let our eyes adjust to the light.

I sat on the cold, damp stone and thought about everything that had brought me to this point. The only choice I had made was when Eric had arrived at my room in Kansas City. From that point I had drifted along, taking everything in stride. I had thought nothing through to the end and that was the reason I was now sitting in the cold dark cell. I hadn’t even been inclined to fight our captors until I saw the sacrifice of the children. Just drift along and let things flow in their natural direction.

“Once we’re out,” said Eric, “What’ll we do?”

“What was the purpose of this expedition?” I asked.

“Find a passage through the Earth’s crust and explore the Inner Earth. Prove that my father wasn’t deluded and learn what happened to him.”

“Have we succeeded in that?”

I heard a rustling as if he had moved to the straw bedding. “In a way,” he said, “but we have no proof. The pictures we were going to taken as proof are impossible because the camera is at the bottom of the river.”

“Eric,” I said, “we know where the place is. We know it exists. Hell, until we got here, you have to admit that there was a certain amount of doubt about it. But now that we know, we can come back with a proper expedition.”

“Yes,” he said.

“We know what we need now. Long boats and twenty men. Photographers and journalists. Weapons. We know exactly what we have to do.”

“Financing,” he said.

“Did you look around? There is gold all over the place. One of those ceremonial spears would be worth enough money to finance half a dozen expeditions.”

I had another thought and added, “Even the hint that there is gold for the taking ought to interest some. We can finance it that way.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. “So our first task is to escape from here.”

“And our second is to find a way out of the Inner Earth. With our boat gone, we’ll need to locate one of the land entrances.”

“Or steal another boat,” he said. “Now, what’s your idea about escaping.”

I told him that one of us would have to be awake at all times, listening for the guards. When we heard them, we would have to light a couple of clumps of twisted straw so that our eyes would be ready.

“When the door opens, we shoot everyone we see standing in the way,” I said.

“I don’t know about that,” he said. “Just gun down all of them?”

“Eric, my friend, just what the hell do you think they’re going to do to us? We’re going to be killed just as soon as the party is arranged.”

“How do you do that?”

“Because a number of these primitive civilizations do that. Enemies captured in battle, or on the frontier, are sacrificed to the various gods. Hell, the Aztecs needed so many people for their sacrifices that they made war on the people surrounding them just to supply the victims.”

“You’re not suggesting that we’ve found the Aztecs are you?” His voice was high and tight with disbelief.

“No, not the Aztecs,” I said. I had a feeling about this, but it didn’t lead to the Aztecs.

“So the first thing,” said Eric, “is to prepare for the return of the guards.”

“Right.” I grabbed a clump of straw and twisted it together. I set that aside and prepared another. I had Eric give me a couple of matches and put them in my pocket. Then, using my fingers, I checked my weapon, slowly stripping the rounds from it and then reloading the magazine with seven bullets. That done, I cocked it, chambering a round, released the magazine and added one more round. Now there were eight. Carefully, I lowered the hammer. My .45 would now fire once I pulled back the hammer.

I sat down on my straw bed and waited. I stared upward, into the dark, hoping that morning would come soon. I had a real problem with that. We had come into the prison at high noon, although it would have been about five or six, if the sun ever moved. As we descended and the light of day faded to be replaced by the artificial light of flickering touches, I had the impression of the sun setting. All of it was in my mind. Now, in total darkness, I thought of it as night, although, if we escaped, it would be the middle of the day.

I put those thoughts out of my mind. Instead, I concentrated on the expedition, amazed at the amateurishness of it. We had climbed into our truck, driven north, piled into the boat and ended up here. No great sacrifices, no real hardships. We just blundered our way through it all. I hadn’t even kept an accurate journal of the trip, although, if I had, I probably would have lost it by now.

“Dave.”

I turned my head toward the sound of Eric’s voice.

“Dave,” he repeated. “I’m getting sleepy. You want to take the first watch.”

“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t in the least bit sleepy. In fact, my mind was racing. I felt like an idiot because of the way I had been acting. Slipshod. From one thing to the next without bothering to think about it. We had seen a snake that was almost a hundred feet in length and I hadn’t been surprised, or excited. I had wanted to run. We had found spiders that seemed to work together with a rudimentary kind of intelligence, and I had wanted to flee. I hadn’t thought to make notes about it. I hadn’t wanted to learn more about them. Not exactly good science or the things of a great expedition. I resolved to be a better scientist and explorer, when the chance showed itself.

All this was swirling in my head when I heard something at the far end of the dungeon. “Eric,” I hissed. “They’re coming.”

I dug in my pocket for my matches. I scraped one on the rough stone and it blazed. I blinked rapidly and touched it to the straw. As that began to burn, I looked away, rubbed my eyes and turned back, watching the flames.

Eric was up doing the same, his pistol in his hand. He glanced at me and grinned.

As the fire died, I heard voices outside our cell. There were at least three men there. I didn’t worry about that. They would not expect an attack, and if they did, they wouldn’t expect firearms. We would be able to shoot all three before they could react. That was to our advantage, but we had to be ruthless.

As I heard the key in the lock, I hoped that Eric could be as ruthless as me. I had never seen him in battle. I would have to rely on him.

The door was shoved violently, sweeping silently across the floor to bang against the wall. The clang reverberated throughout the dungeon. A torch was thrust into the cell, obviously meant to blind us.

I dropped to one knee, holding my pistol out in front of me, aiming at the door. A guard appeared, holding a short sword in his hand. As he stepped into our cell, I fired, the flame from the barrel stabbing out to touch his chest. He grunted in surprise and pain as crimson began to stain his rough shirt. He dropped to his knees.

A second man appeared and Eric fired. That guard dropped his sword as he twisted to the right.

There was a shout in the corridor. I leaped forward, over the body of the man I’d shot. As I entered the corridor, I caught a flicker in the corner of my eye. Instinctively I ducked. The blade flashed over my head and I felt the wind of the blow in my hair. The sword glanced off the stone wall with a dull, metallic clang. The guard shifted, attacking me. I jerked around and shoved my pistol into his belly. I pulled the trigger, but nothing happened.

The man recovered. He thrust at me and I dodged his blade. I used the side of the pistol and slammed it into his hand. He cried out in pain and staggered back. He tried to stab me again. With my free hand, I grabbed his wrist and jerked him toward me.

There was a shot behind me and the man dropped without a sound. I turned and saw the last guard fleeing along the corridor. The torch he had carried had fallen to the floor and was sputtering on the cold, damp stone.

I turned so that my right side was toward him. Slowly, I lowered my pistol, aiming at the center of the back. I squeezed the trigger until the weapon fired itself. The man was lifted from his feet. He clawed the air and then hit the floor. He bounced once and slid. He tried to get up and finally collapsed.

Behind me were two more shots. I spun and saw another guard leaning against the wall, dying. The yellow of his shirt was nearly obscured by his blood. In one hand, he clutched a sword. In the other was a torch that now lay against the stone.

Eric and I stood nearly back to back, watching the length of the corridor. Two torches lay on the stone floor. Two more were set in racks on either side of our door. One of the guards was groaning in pain.

There was a whimpering and I saw the woman for the first time. She was dressed as the children had been. A white robe that covered her from neck to ankles but that was so shear that I could see through it.

She looked up at me with huge brown eyes opened wide in fright. She put up a hand, as if to ward off a blow and said, “Por favor. Por favor.”

“Eric?” I said.

“I’m fine. You?”

“I’m okay. Let’s get out of here.”

“Which way?”

I reached down and pulled the woman to her feet. She stood rigid, her eyes staring at me, waiting for death. I pulled her to the side and took a torch from the wall. I handed it to her. She took it reluctantly, holding it away from her as if it was a serpent.

Before we moved, I took a dagger from the body of one of the guards. It seemed to have a gold blade and a jewel encrusted hilt. I tucked it into my belt and then began working my way along the corridor.

The woman was behind me, and Eric behind her. We stayed close to the wall. I ran one hand along the rough, wet texture as a guide. I listened intently, waiting for sounds that would indicate that more guards were coming.

From behind us, there was shouting but it didn’t sound like guards. It sounded like prisoners trying to figure out what had just happened. Wondering what the strange noise was.

We came to the end of the corridor. Three stone steps lead to a wooden door reinforced with iron. There were huge hinges with giant bolts. I climbed the steps, sure that the door would fly open. But it didn’t. I took hold of the large, metal ring that was the handle, sure that it wouldn’t open.

It swung toward me freely and quietly. As it came open, I jumped back, down the steps, my pistol raised. Behind the door there was nothing. Just another dark corridor that turned and lead to a stairway that would allow us to escape the dungeon.

We entered it and kept on moving. There were cell doors on both sides of us, but they all seemed to be empty. If there had been prisoners in them, I would have opened them, only for the confusion it would cause.

We came to stairs and hesitated. I listened but heard nothing. It was like no one knew what had happed, or if they did know, didn’t care. I looked back at Eric. His face was pale and the knuckles of his hand were white around the butt of his Mauser.

“You think it’s a trap?” he asked me.

“Don’t know.” I leaned against the wall and sat down. I ejected the magazine of my .45 and reloaded it. As I jammed the new rounds into it, I realized why it had failed to fire. If you push back on the barrel hard enough, it holds the hammer in place so that pulling the trigger does nothing. I had shoved the barrel into the guard’s stomach as hard as I could.

When I had my weapon fully loaded again, I stood up. I glanced at Eric. “Ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” he said, grinning. “What about the woman?”

“We’ll kept her with us for a while. If nothing else, she’ll be able to answer a few questions.”

Without another word I was on my feet, moving up the stairs. Stone stairs worn in the middle from the feet of thousands of prisoners and guards.

As I climbed, I became aware of light filtering into the blackness of the dungeon. Bright light reflecting from the dull surfaces of the stone walls and knew that an exit was close at hand. I was worried about that. It seemed to have been too easy to escape from the cell. Everything seemed to be too easy.

Again, at the top of the stairs, I halted. I could see the rectangle because the sides were not parallel. It was a strange thing to notice then. Maybe I was beginning to pick up the scientific detachment that I had lacked earlier. Or maybe my mind was searching for the mundane because I didn’t want to think about what lay beyond the door. My thinking had only taken me to the entrance of the dungeon. I hadn’t thought about what we’d do once we had to leave the prison and try to reach the jungle.

I inched forward, waiting for guards to rush me. I waited for men to swarm in the door. But none of that happened. I could hear nothing from the outside. It seemed that the streets were deserted and I wondered if we had managed to escape into what would be the middle of the night.

I stopped at the entrance and dropped to one knee. To the right was the massive form of the pyramid that we had seen the day before. To the left was the empty plaza where the crowd had stood chanting and cheering. And directly in front of me, nearly a hundred yards away, were the houses of stone and thatch where the inhabitants lived.

There were no sounds coming from anywhere. The air was as dead as that in a graveyard. If it hadn’t been for the sun overhead, I would have sworn it was midnight.

Tentatively, I took a step out. I glanced to the right, at the smooth stone surface of the pyramid. There were a few high clouds behind it. This was a monument to the sun god. I was sure of that.

Without a word, I started across the plaza. Ornate symbols had been cut into the surface of it, hidden the day before by the thousands of people who had stood on it. The symbols were painted in a riot of color. Some of them so large that only someone standing at the apex of the pyramid would be able to appreciate them.

I glanced over my shoulder and found both Eric and the woman following me. We walked rapidly, hoping to reach the safety of the streets. With each step, I waited for the alarm that would signal that we had escaped.

We crossed half the plaza when a single long note sounded behind us. There was a rising shout from thousands of voices and the people flooded into the plaza from every direction. Leading them were warriors, dressed in padded armor, holding colorful shields and carrying a variety of weapons.

As soon as I saw the multitude, I halted. I turned so that I was facing the ramp where the youngsters had been murdered the day before and saw that the high priest, or whatever he was, stood upon it, surrounded by his protectors, watching the show.

Something bumped my back and I realized that Eric was standing behind me, his back against mine so that we could cover one another. The woman had fallen to the ground at our feet and was weeping as if she expected to die with us.

The warriors ran at us and then slid to a halt. They stood ringing us, their shields held chest high. They stared at us over the tops of them as the shouting seemed to reach a peak and then dropped suddenly.

All at once it was quiet in the plaza. There were thousands of people there. Men and women, all wearing knee-length robes in a variety of colors. Reds and oranges and yellows and bright greens and deep blues. Many wore hats of multicolored feathers.

When there was silence, the high priest began a religious ceremony. He would shout something and the crowd would respond. It went on for a few minutes and then there was utter silence. The thousands of people made no noise. Absolutely none.

The man on the ramp spoke quietly and the crowd drew back, away from the warriors that surrounded Eric, the woman and me.

“Looks like this is it,” I said, trying to sound brave. I felt a fluttering in my stomach, not unlike that which I felt as I had gone over the top in the war. I knew that any moment a German bullet would cut me down. Here, I knew that I would die. In only minutes.

On a command from the ramp, the warriors lowered their spears so that the tips were aimed about belly high. I thumbed back the hammer of my .45. Since no one moved, I didn’t fire. I didn’t want to start the bloodshed.

Behind me there was a shot and the sound of a body falling. With that, there was a surge at me. I fired at the man in the yellow shirt and the bullet slammed him to the ground. He rolled to his side, grunting, his blood staining the cut stones of the plaza’s surface.

Then I had no time to watch. The men were coming at me quickly and I fired as fast as I could pull the trigger. One man dropped at my feet but then my weapons was empty and there was no time to reload.

I grabbed the point of a spear thrust at my stomach and jerked it to the side. As the man stumbled close, I smashed his nose with the side of my weapon. He released the spear and grabbed at his face as he fell to the ground.

Behind me there were several shots and the I felt Eric bump against me. He said, “Oh,” quietly, almost under his breath and slipped to his knees.

The warriors all advanced, the spears leveled but stopped with the points only inches from my flesh. I turned and saw that the woman still lived, the hem of her robe stained with blood, none of it her own. Eric was on his knees, his hands raised, blood on the side of his head.

From the ramp I heard the priest speak, first in the language I didn’t know and then in Spanish. He told his warriors to escort us to our new quarters in the palace. We were not to be harmed and the woman would stay with us.

A warrior, dressed in finer clothes than the common soldier, a jeweled dagger at his hip, pushed his way through the crowd. He stopped near the man I had clubbed to the ground. The officer took his jeweled dagger from its golden sheath, flipped it in his hand, and neatly cut the throat of the wounded warrior. The blood splashed down the warrior’s chest as he toppled to his side with only a quiet groan. He must have known what was going to happen, but failed to protest or to try to protect himself. He accepted his fate with stoic silence.

With the wounded dispatched, the officer waved a hand, gesturing to the rear of the plaza. A corridor among the warriors and the citizens opened as magically as Moses parting the Red Sea. The officer then bent to help the woman to her feet and while he did that, I dropped the spent magazine from my pistol. As it clattered to the stone under foot, I slapped a new one in. If there was going to be any funny business, I wanted to be ready for it.

Eric touched my shoulder. I saw a cut above his right eye and asked, “How are you?”

“It’s superficial. Head wounds always bleed like that. It’s minor at best.”

As we began to walk across the plaza, under an escort of warriors, and toward the large building constructed of white stone that resembled marble, the crowd began to applaud and then chant. It seemed to be an approval of us. I didn’t know if it was because of the stand we had made, our escape, or just our bravery in general.

“Now what?” asked Eric.

“As long as they don’t try to take us into that prison again, Let’s see where we’re going and what is going to happen. This could be interesting.”

“More interesting than the dungeon?” he asked.

I knew what he meant by that. I said, “Let’s hope a little more hospitable, anyway.”

Land to the North - Chapter Nine

2011-05-11T12:38:00.000-07:00

I woke with a start, sure that something was wrong. I kept my eyes closed as I listened to the sounds around me. Nothing had changed from the night before, or the hours before. I opened one eye and saw Eric sitting erect on his sleeping bag. He was staring straight ahead, unmoving. I could see rivulets of sweat dripping down the side of his face and I wondered what had happened. My thoughts turned to half remembered stories of rattlesnakes and cobras crawling into sleeping bags so that neither occupant could stir.

I rolled to the right and saw four men standing there. Each held a long spear, the point tipped with hammered gold. The ornate carving on the long, black shaft suggested the weapons were more ornamental than dangerous, but I was sure that one could inflict a fatal wound if the bearer decided to try.

The men were dressed as if for war. They each sported a chest protector of padded armor. They were wrapped in capes of bright colors and held shields that were decorated with many symbols. Each wore a garment that reminded me if a knee length kilt and they wore knee high boots of a material that looked like snake skin. Two of them wore helmets that might be gold and the other two wore plain headbands.

As I sat up, one of them pointed his spear at me. He was a short, stocky man with long black hair, an oval face and oval eyes. His skin was a deep tanned and his nose was board. I shifted slowly and he said, "Manos arriba."

I shot a glance at Eric who shrugged.

"Manos arriba," the man repeated, his voice carrying a note of irritation now.

Slowly, I raised my hands as he had commanded. I couldn’t believe that he had spoken to me in Spanish. As I waited, one of the others began a long speech in a language that I couldn’t begin to understand.

While two of the men watched us, the other two moved so that they could search our packs. They pulled out the equipment, tossing away the things they didn’t recognize and stuffing the rest into sacks. They took the knives and the machetes from us but ignored both our rifles and pistols.

Later I would wonder why they ignored the firearms. They must have seen them before. Others had explored the Inner Earth and they had taken firearms with them. But these men didn’t seem to understand what they were or how important they would be to their civilization.

The two then went to our boat, searched through it, destroying some of our supplies, throwing some into the river, and stealing the rest including the steel headed axes, extra machetes and extra knives. When they finished, they chopped holes in the boat and pushed it into the river to sink.

As the two men approached, the one who spoke Spanish ordered us to our feet. I noticed that Eric was carefully measuring the distances among us, figuring the angles and wondering the same thing that crossed my mind. Could we draw and fire before these men could respond? Would the attack throw them off balance long enough for us to kill them?

Eric’s hand shifted closer to his holster. I noticed that his was unsnapped. Mine was not.

Just as it seemed that he had made up his mind, a dozen men, armed with long blowguns and crossbows appeared at the edge of the jungle. Their clothing, a uniform of some kind, matched that worn by the men who had captured us.

Eric grinned and said, "Wouldn’t have worked after all. Now too many of them."

I knew exactly what he meant.

The man closest to us snapped, "Silencio."

Prodded by the spears, we picked up what we could of our gear, salvaging some of the jerky and a couple of boxes of ammo for the rifles and the pistols. I was surprised they left those with us, after taking our knives, but it was possible they just didn’t recognize them as deadly weapons. They had left our first aid kits and canteens attached to the belts.

Again we crossed the meadow, but this time entered the jungle at the first real break in the foliage, the one that we had passed the day before. Two of the men with crossbows went in first, followed by two with blowguns and then our four guards surrounding us.

Within minutes, the jungle became so dense that it was like dusk. The trees and bushes that bordered the trail were lost in the gloom. They were shadowy shapes barely visible.

And the humidity seemed to climb about one hundred percent. It hung heavy in the air, almost visible. Around some of the trees, near the ground were wisps of white that looked as if the roots were on fire, but was a light fog.

Our captors didn’t waste time. They made good progress, prodding us with their spears when we slowed even slightly. None of them spoke and I was reminded of our patrols in the Army. Noise discipline once we were into the bush. These men hadn’t spoken to one another since we entered the jungle.

Around us, I could still hear the sounds of the animals and the buzz of insects. A huge, muddy looking moth dived out of the trees, flashed by me face and then disappeared again. When I flinched, ducking to the right, the men laughed and then we were again wrapped in silence.

After several hours of hot marching, we stopped and the men ate a quiet, quick meal. Since I could not see the sun, and even if I could, it wouldn’t have given me a clue about the time of day, I assumed it was lunch. Eric and I drank from our canteens and when our captors offered us nothing, we ate some of the jerky we had salvaged.

Before we had a chance to rest, we were up and moving again. Each attempt to ask questions was met with a quiet, quick rebuff. It might be a guard telling us to be silent or it might be a blow with the shaft of a spear. We gave up quickly, assuming that we would find out all we wanted to know before long.

Early on, I began hearing a babbling to the right. Water splashing over rocks. It seemed to come closer and I realized that we were paralleling a stream. It was a clue that might be valuable later.

Sometime in the afternoon, or what I assumed was the afternoon, I became aware of a roar, as if water was falling from great height. The jungle seemed to be lighter as if the sun was breaking through a think cloud bank. Then, suddenly, we were out of the jungle, standing on a high cliff, looking into an open valley several hundred feet below us. To the right, the water cascaded over the edge, dropping straight into a huge pool far below us. The mist rose from it creating a multicolored rainbow to the side of the waterfall.

We turned to the left where there was a rocky path that lead down. As we approached it, I saw the village spread out below us. Hundreds of thatched roofs along narrow streets that lead to a central plaza. It wasn’t exactly a square because only two of the sides were parallel.

The path changed to a stairway cut into the solid rock of the cliff. It was lined on one side with a low, stone wall that looked as if material had been quarried elsewhere and brought to the stairway.

Our captors seemed to be conditioned to using the steep stairway. They got into a rhythmic movement so that they were racing downward and Eric and I were hard pressed to keep up. Besides, there were no railings along the stairs, just the low stone wall on one side. A misstep could send one of us tumbling into space. But the men seemed not to mind the apparent danger and keep pushing at us.

By the time we reached the bottom, I was breathing hard and sweating heavily. When the men stopped, I bent over, my elbows resting on my knees as I gulped air. My legs ached from the strain of running down the steps. I turned my head and saw that Eric was in the same shape as I. Our captors, however, were showing no signs of the strain of the rapid trip and descent on the stairs. It was all a big game to them.

They waited patiently, letting us gain our breaths, and then urged us onward. The path we followed at a gentle slope had been paved with blocks of stone cut from somewhere else. They were polished by the feet of hundreds, thousands of people, and were as smooth as the finest marble. There were ditches along either side that were carpeted in short grass.

We entered the town, following a road that was also paved in stone. The houses on either side were of adobe with yellowing thatch on top giving them a golden color. As we moved deeper into the town, the inhabitants came out to watch us. Some deserted the fields where they tended crops. They lined the streets, at first, just scattered clumps of humanity staring at us. As we neared the center of the city, the number of people increased.

The were all short and stocky, each with dark hair and dark eyes. The men and women were about the same height, and the closer we moved to the plaza, the brighter the colors they sported. It was as if we were moving from the poorer sections of town, into the wealthy. And the more wealth, or the higher their station, the more colors they wore. Many had intricate capes that had been woven from the brightly colored feathers of birds. Many held ornaments of gold or silver.

The cheering began the closer we got to the plaza. As we moved into the center of the city, the people rushed forward, lining the sides of the plaza. At the far end was a tall building, a structure of pyramidal shape with a long ramp leading to a massive door. Men in white cloaks and holding spears of solid gold guarding the ramp, facing each other across it.

We were led to the foot of it. Around us danced children. Boys and girls, thirteen or fourteen years old. They were dressed in diaphanous white cloth. There was something innocent, yet sad about them.

The people now burst into cheering that I didn’t recognize, although, from their tone, I could tell that they were praying. A priest, at first, seemed to be speaking privately with his god, and then he began to shout, as if angry. He looked down at Eric and me, pointed, his finger stabbing down, accusing us of some unknown crime.

Two of the white-clad guards, dropped their spears and came toward us, but then grabbed one of the girls, lifting her to her feet. She wailed in fear as they dragged her toward the man on the ramp.

They left her standing in front of the man. Her posture was rigid. She held her hands behind her back, thrusting her chest out. She seemed to be shaking slightly as she held her head high, her eyes closed.

The man yammered on, lifting a sparkling knife high, the point aimed at the girl.

The crowd now looked up, fascinated by the show going on in front of them. They all seemed to hold their breath, anticipating the final act.

The man stopped speaking, looking at the sky, and then at the girl. He plunged the knife into her chest, just under her breastbone. For a moment she stood as if transfixed. As the crimson stain spread across her white garment, her knees buckled and she fell. As she dropped, her blood pumping from her to pool under her, the crowd began to chant again.

Once more the guards came down the ramp. This time I was sure they would come for me. Their eyes seemed locked on mine. I decided that I was going to sell my life dearly. I wasn’t a docile young girl. I would shoot the guards and then the man on the ramp. The crowd would probably tear me apart, but it was better than standing there quietly.

But they didn’t come for me or Eric. They selected one of the boys and took him up the ramp. He seemed to be oblivious to everything around him as he assumed the same position as had the girl. Arms behind his back and chest thrust outward.

Again there was a prayer and again the man killed the youngster in front of him, to the wild approval of the crowd. As the boy fell next to the girl, the chanting erupted again.

My arms were seized then and I struggled to free myself. I stomped on the foot of one of the men. He was startled enough by the pain of the assault that he loosened his grip. Free of him, I spun on the second, slamming my fist onto his jaw. He dropped to the ground, moaning.

My hand clawed at the snap on my holster, and as I tried to draw my pistol, three men rushed me. One held back as the other two waded in. I forgot about my weapon, punching outward. I hit one man near the eye and felt the fragile bones of his face break. He screamed in surprise and pain, but kept coming.

I twisted to the right and threw a punch at the other man. I missed and staggered forward, off balance. As I did, I felt a blow to the back of my head. There as an explosion of light and I sank to my knees. For a moment the world swirled in front of me and when my sight cleared, one man held a sword to my throat as two more lifted me to my feet.

This is truly it, I thought. I had been through a war, shot at by everything from pistols to howitzers, had fought the Hun hand to hand and I was going to die near the foot of a ramp, the sacrifice to some deity of which I had never heard.

I glanced at Eric and saw that he was held as firmly as I. At his feet lay the body of one man, blood pouring from his mouth. I didn’t know whether Eric had killed him or merely knocked him out.

With the chanting growing in volume, I fully expected to be taken up the ramp to where the bodies of the children lay, their blood staining the stone as it ran down toward the plaza, but that didn’t happen. Instead, we were dragged to the side. The crowd parted, letting us pass. We were taken through a stone doorway, down a hall lighted with flickering torches and bubbling fat lamps until we came to a stairway. We were forced down it until we had reached a stone passage. Our footsteps echoed as we walked along it. I could hear water dripping somewhere.

We stopped in front of an iron door. One man opened it, and stepped. Eric was shoved into the cage. Before he could catch his balance, I was pushed in after him. The door was slammed and locked. The men then turned without a word, vanishing from sight, taking the torches with them. We were left in the darkness.

My first reaction was to feel my along rough stone of our cell. I found a slit in wall that was barely large enough for my hand. I leaned into it and although couldn’t find the end I learned the walls were impossibly thick. I continued on until I came to the iron door.

As I touched it, Eric said, "I don’t understand this. Why throw us in prison?"

I kept my hands roving over the surface of the door. I could feel huge bolts on our side and I found a tiny slot near the floor so that food could be pushed through. At the thought of food, I caught another odor.

Trying to ignore that, I sat down, my back to the door and said, "They obviously think we’re someone else. Someone who has been here before."

"Took our knives away from us but not our guns. How do you figure that?"

I shrugged, knowing full well that Eric couldn’t see the gesture. "They’ve never seen guns before and don’t think of them as weapons."

I didn’t like that explanation because we knew others had explored the region before us. They would have had guns. If not pistols, rifles and should understand them, but they didn’t bother with them.

"I should have drawn when we had the chance at the boat. We let them take us too easily."

"And we would have died when those men with the crossbows opened fire."

"That’s better than letting that one jerk stick a knife into my chest."

I didn’t want to talk about what we should have done any more. There were other things we needed to thing about and do. I patted my pockets and found that I had no matches. I asked Eric if he had any.

"Yeah. I’ve got most of a box."

"Then we can have a little light." I moved to the right, feeling my way along the rough stone floor. It was damp and slimy. I hoped that it was mud that I was feeling. I came to a raised area covered with dirty straw. I twisted a handful together and said, "Use one of you matches on this."

The match flared and Eric touched it to the straw. That burned slowly and gave us the opportunity to examine our cell. It was a stone enclosure that was twenty feet across, twenty feet deep and twenty feet high. A green moss climbed the walls and I hoped that meant it received sunlight sometimes. I pushed my face into the slit and saw that it might be a window to the outside, although there was a stone now blocking it.

I turned back to the interior. There were six raised platforms, each covered with straw. There was a single hole in the floor that was giving off a stench that made me believe it was our toilet. The room could have held more captives. There was no sign that they had held anyone recently.

The stones of the walls were so well cut that there wasn’t the thinnest crack between them. We wouldn’t be able to climb them. The door was made of metal that could easily be iron. There was a lock on it and I thought about trying to pick it, but even if that was successful, I was sure that there was a bar across it on the outside holding it closed.

As the straw burned down close to my hand and I could feel the heat from the fire, I said, "I think getting out of here will be a piece of cake." I dropped the straw and was about to crush out the flames when I decided that wasn’t necessary.

"Getting out of here is easy?" said Eric. "How is it going to be easy?"

"Next time the open the door, we shoot the guards," I said

Land to the North - Chapter Eight

2011-04-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

We left the boat and crossed the beach, and then the grassy field in front of us. I glanced to the left where there was a stone cliff that seemed to climb into the very heavens and I could see no top to it. The cliff rose steadily, straight up until it was wrapped in a mist not at all unlike the one we had spent the morning in. I say morning because the sun looked as if it had just reached its zenith, indicating that it was noon or maybe a few minutes after.

We stopped at the edge of the jungle, some five or six hundred yards from the bank of the river. Looking down the pathway in front of us was nearly impossible. In only a few feet, a blackness wrapped the trail, making it seem like the bewitching hour of the darkest midnight. The sunlight was cut off completely by the dense, thick foliage. There were a few sounds from the dense vegetation. Animal noises like a giant snake slithering along the trail, or the rapid patter of tiny feet, as if an animal was fleeing the snake. There weren’t the calls of wild birds or the screams of monkeys that jungles on the surface would have rocked with.

Eric stood there, staring down the trail, as if he could actually see something, and then turned toward me. "What do you think?"

I scratched my head in thought and then wiped the sweat from my face. I turned, studied the cliff behind us and then looked at the perimeter of the jungle.

"We could either enter here, or work our way farther to the south," I said. I don’t know how I had determined that the direction to the cliff was north and the opposite way was to the south, but it seemed to make sense to me.

"I like the second choice. I don’t want to enter the jungle until we have to."

"The third option," I said, "is to return to the boat and let it take us farther downstream. That would be the easiest way for us to travel."

"Granted," said Eric. "But we wouldn’t have a feeling for the land then. It seems to me that the best idea is to search the land here until later afternoon, penetrate the jungle at some point, and return to the beach toward nightfall, if we haven’t found anything interesting by then."

"Good," I said, not relishing the idea of searching the foliage. I had read too many of the jungle adventure books and was concerned about what might lie in that direction.

We skirted the jungle, stopping occasionally to stare into the depths of the vegetation. Nothing was visible to us that we hadn’t seen before and if we wanted a clue about what was ahead, we would have to enter. We finally found another path that broke the nearly solid wall of green in front of us. We stopped to examine it. A dirt path that was well used. It ran straight for nearly fifty feet before we lost it in the gloom of the jungle.

"What do you think?"

"If we’re ever going to learn anything, we’re going to have to use a path. This one is as good as any."

"Right," said Eric. He unslung the rifle that he had over his shoulder and checked the safety. "Let’s go."

I followed him, holding my own rifle in my hands, my eyes leaping from side to side.

The path looked as if it had been graded through the jungle. The forest around us came together about ten feet over our heads making it look as if we were walking down a long, green tunnel. The dirt under our feet had been compressed by the pressure from a thousand others until it was as hard and as smooth as concrete. Very little light filtered through and that which did had a distinct, green cast to it.

In only a few minutes we were out of sight of the entrance to the jungle path. I turned once, glancing back, but could see nothing except the gloom around us.

And I could smell the jungle. First it stunk of mildew and rotting vegetation. It also was rank with the odor of wet dirt. I say wet dirt instead of mud. And finally there was the taste of humidity around us. Damp air that hung around us, soaking us like wet blankets in a sauna.

Eric’s pace slowed as the heat began to get to him. We had come up from the late winter or early spring of the Midwest, through the colder areas of Canada, to a point far above the arctic circle, and suddenly, we found ourselves in a tropical environment. The heat bothered us greatly.

But we continued on. The path widened in spots, the ground on either side bare, as if these were some kind of rest areas at the side of a long road. No shelters had been erected and there was no evidence of any fires, but then who would build a fire in this sweatbox of a jungle?

Finally we came to a much wider area where the canopy over us broke and the light from the sun filtered through. The grass had grown tall in the clearing. The path wound through the center of it, and there was a portal in the green that looked just like the entrance we had used to enter the jungle several hours earlier. To one side, it seemed that the trees had been draped with gauze that hung from the highest branches and brushed the ground.

Off to the right, there was a rustle in the grass, and I could see the blades rippling as if something was trying to sneak through it. I moved in that direction, wondering what was there. I spotted a large mass, maybe two or three feet across, brightly colored, as it slipped forward. I stopped, fascinated. Then the head poked out, onto the bare, brown earth of the path.

It was a scale covered, triangular head nearly four feet long. A thin tongue flickered from the reptilian lips as the hooded eyes blinked in the bright sun. As I stood transfixed, the massive head turned toward me. The beast stopped moving as the tongue probed the air and the eyes blinked rapidly.

I wondered if the rifle I carried had sufficient power to kill the snake. I had yet to see the whole thing, but it had to be sixty or seventy feet long and the pattern on its scaley back seem to be diamonds. I was afraid that I had found the largest rattlesnake that had ever lived.

Eric, who had frozen as the first sound, began to retreat very slowly, his eyes locked on the snake. He was mumbling, over and over, "Oh God. Oh God."

I heard a quiet click as he snapped off the safety and then the metallic rattle as he chambered a round.

At the sound, the snake drew itself up, as if coiling to strike. I knew the smaller American rattlers could lunge out to nearly one third of their length with ease. That meant we were well within the striking distance of this beast.

"Freeze," I hissed.

Eric followed my command.

The snake watched us, as if waiting for movement, or maybe wondering if we were prey. When neither of us made a threatening move, it began to crawl away, toward the gauze hanging from the trees.

We watched its progress through the grass, amazed at the size of the creature. I knew that the bite of a normal rattlesnake often was not fatal, but the danger here was not from the venom but the fangs. They could have pieced the body.

And I didn’t think about it then, but what kind of creature would a snake of that size attack? What was its prey? It could have swallowed an elephant had one been available for it to eat. It certainly could have swallowed a human.

The snake stopped when it reach the gauze curtain, seemed to inspect it and then turned away from it, and us, entering the jungle to what I thought of as the west. That was the direction we had been heading, but we now had no desire to travel that way or to find that snake again.

Eric slung his rifle after putting on the safety, but left the round chambered. He stepped from the path, into the thigh high grass, walking toward the gauze curtain.

As he approached it, I saw small, black creatures the size of dinner plates suddenly spring from the trees, catching themselves in the gauze. Some of them fled upward, as if escaping an enemy. Others seemed to slide downward, spreading out in a lopsided formation.

I followed Eric, stopping short of him. He was staring upward and then said, amazed, "They’re spiders. Big, ugly spiders."

I moved closer and at the bottom of the web, I could see the bones of the animals that had been caught and eaten. There weren’t just small animals either. Some of the bones were large and I was sure that I could see a human rib cage in the web.

Then Eric pointed and said, "That’s a skull. A human skull."

Almost as if the sound of his voice irritated them, the spiders began to swarm. One of them leaped clear of the web, sailing through the air, trailing a thin strand of silk.

Eric dropped to one knee and grabbed at the butt of his rifle, slipping it from his shoulder.

I aimed at the spider like it was a clay pigeon on a skeet range. I pulled the trigger and felt my weapon kick as it fired. The round caught the spider in the abdomen and it exploded into a red mist and fragments of dark meat.

Eric got to his feet and began to back up, his eyes on the spiders. They were all in motion now and there was a strange warbling sound coming from them. A trilling that rose and fell like the siren on a fire truck. Eric aimed his weapons at one of them still in the web and fired. The creature vanished in a flash of red that stained the gauze crimson.

One of them dropped to the ground near me and reared up on its hind legs, showing me its long fangs. It was waving the front legs in the air, as if to frighten me. I knew that if I turned, the spider would leap onto my back. Instead, I pointed my rifle at its head and fired. The creature flipped over, onto its back.

With that, they fell silent and stopped moving. Eric fired again and again, working the bolt of his rifle and ejecting the spent cartridges. He killed seven of the spiders and then glanced over at me.

"Let’s get out of here."

I didn’t need any encouragement. As soon as he passed me and back into the jungle, I spun and followed, expecting to feel one of those spiders leap at me. The skin on my neck crawled with the tension. Shivers ran up and down my spine. But the spiders didn’t attack. Maybe it was the deaths of their fellows that stopped them. Watching their brothers turned into splashes of blood and meat stayed them, although I couldn’t believe that spiders had any real intelligence. I knew there weren’t that many varieties behind us that worked in harmony, there were a few. Instinct rather than intelligence drove them.

Or maybe it was just that we stayed out of the web and because of that, they let us retreat.

When we were clear of the area, Eric stopped and turned. "My God," he said. "You don’t even have to get entangled in the web. They come out after you."

We’ll just have to be that much more careful," I said, surprised at how calm I sounded. The encounter with the snake and the spiders left me shaking. Spiders and snakes were two of the creatures that inspired the most ridiculous of responses. Nearly everyone feared them instinctively, but because we were so much larger, we could overcome that fear. Except here. Spiders that were over a yard across and seemed to attack their prey and a snake that dwarfed telephone poles.

Eric looked at me, a strange smile on his face. "I just had a thought. What if the spiders that attacked us were scouts and the big ones have yet to show themselves?"

I suddenly felt eyes on my back and I jumped. I spun, leveling my rifle but there was nothing there. Not even a bit of wind.

To Eric I said, "Let’s use the boat until we clear the jungle area. Drift on down the river."

"Well," he said, "I’m not convinced that it’s the best idea because the water could hide things worse than either the giant spiders or snakes."

"Thanks," I said. "Thank you for bringing that up."

"Any way," he said, "I think you’re right about one thing. We should get out of here. We can beat it back to the boat, gather some fire wood and set up camp for the night."

I wasn’t sure that I was keen on that plan either. It seemed that we would be safer in the boat, even if it was anchored only a few feet off shore.

We worked our way through the jungle and burst onto the open plain an hour or so later. I dropped to the ground, the breath rasping in my throat. Sweat was pouring from me and my clothes were drenched. I had already drunk all the water in my canteen and cotton had formed in my mouth. Relief, however, was only a few feet away, on the bank of the river.

I glanced up, at the sun, and saw that it hadn’t moved. I pointed and said, "Eric, the sun is stationary."

He glanced at me, raised a hand to shade his eyes and then looked up at the sun. It seemed as if it was only a few minutes afternoon, just as it had for the last several hours.

"Yeah," he said. "Just as my father described it. He said that on entering, he discovered that the sun didn’t move. The land of perpetual light.

I laughed. It actually took a load off my mind. I hadn’t wanted to spend the night ashore, not knowing what other creatures might be roaming freely. I envisioned giant leeches and giant tigers and massive lions. Now, they wouldn’t be able to sneak up on us in the dark because there would be no dark.

Eric took his watch from his pocket and looked at the time. "We’ve been traveling for several hours since we came ashore. Now we don’t know how long we were in the fog, but we were awake for several hours. I suggest we assume that it is six in the evening and plan from there."

"All right," I agreed. "Then it’s time for supper."

"You get that ready," he said, "and I’ll draw water from the river."

"Good."

We set up our makeshift camp on the edge of the grassy plain, close to the river and away from the jungle. The nearest trees were fifty or sixty feet away and the main jungle a good half mile away. Nothing could get to us easily, without us spotting it. Any creature would either have to cross the meadow or the mud of the beach.

We ate in silence. I had wanted to fish to add something fresh to our supper, but Eric had said that we could do that in the morning. Now, it was important to get the camp established and that a meal of jerky and coffee wouldn’t be all that bad. It wasn’t as if we hadn’t been eating that for some time now.

The fire was a smokey one because the wood was damp. I didn’t like that because I felt it was advertizing our presence, but I didn’t know to whom. I couldn’t explain the feeling. It had seemed that someone had been watching us from the moment we had come ashore, and yet, I had seen no evidence of that. I finally could stand it no longer and kicked the fire out, pouring water from the river on it to extinguish the last of the embers.

We talked for a while, our eyes drawn to the stationary sun waiting for it to dip to the horizon but it never moved. A few light, wispy clouds drifted toward it. The sky over us had a natural blue tint to it but it didn’t have the depth that the sky outside had. Rather than stretching toward infinity, it seemed that someone in a plane could actually reach the top of it where they wouldn’t be able to travel any higher. I didn’t know if the impression was because I knew that I was inside of the Earth or if it was because I could see something that wasn’t visible on the outside .

Eric finally suggested that we try to get some sleep. He didn’t think it was necessary to stand watch. Other than the beasts we had seen deep in the jungle, the animal and plant life seemed relatively harmless.

I agreed with him and watched as he spread his sleeping bag at the edge of the meadow, using the grass for a mattress. Because of the tropical heat, he laid on top of it. For a moment he was still and then he sat up to unbutton his shirt. He pulled his backpack close to use it as a pillow and then settled down again.

"Relax, Dave," he said, his eyes still closed. "We’re perfectly safe here. Nothing’s going to get at us."

"Sure," I said, and then spread my sleeping bag out near his. But I didn’t like the idea of both of us sleeping at the same time. Maybe it was my military training or maybe it was the strangeness of the land we’d found or maybe it was the few glimpses we’d had of some of the local fauna, but I was uncomfortable. I could still feel those unseen eyes on my. I knew there were dangers out there, even if Eric refused to acknowledge them.

It wasn’t long before I heard a single, ragged snore and knew that Eric had fallen asleep. He had one arm over his eyes to block that ever present sun. I sat there quietly, listening to the sound of the water in the river and the rustling of leaves as a light breeze blew. The last thing I wanted to do was go to sleep now, with Eric out of it.

It was just as Eric said, however. I sat quietly watching, but nothing left the jungle or the water. No beasts tried to creep up on us to devour us. Overhead I saw a bird or two and from the jungle came the occasional cries of animals, but nothing that was frightening.

Slowly, I relaxed, thinking of all the explorers who had set up camps all over the world and who had not bothered with guards or sentries. It wasn’t as if we had unlimited manpower. With five or six people we could have mounted a guard rosters and no one would have been taxed by it, but here, it was impossible. There were only the two of us.

Finally I laid back, my head resting on my pack. I placed my hat over my eyes and found that I didn’t like that. I put my hat on the ground beside me, telling myself that the slightest sound would awaken me, just as they had when I had been fighting they war in Europe. I could sleep through artillery barrages, but the scrape of a foot outside my bunker would bring instantly awake, a weapon in my hand.

For a long time I laid awake, listening to the sounds of this strange new world around me. Quiet, relaxing sounds that dulled the senses and helped bring on the sleep. Then, just like Eric, I was out of it.

Land to the North - Chapter Seven

2011-04-09T10:55:00.000-07:00

(Blogger's note: Earlier chapters follow this.)

Eric was right! Unless we both had gone crazy, and given the circumstances that seemed like a real possibility, it was suddenly much warmer, nearly tropical. I reached for the compass that lay on the bottom of the boat, warm water washing over it and retreating with the motion of the waves. I turned it over and looked at the needle. It was spinning wildly as if we were standing over a lodestone deposit.

Eric nodded as he saw that and said, "There is no way that we could have drifted into the tropics and still be alive. We’re talking about thousands of miles."

It wasn’t until then that I realized what the warmth and the fog meant. I felt the excitement course through me like an electrical charge. I was light headed with a stomach that was flipping over. I reached out and grabbed his arms.

"We’ve done it," I shouted.

He nodded happily and shouted right back. "Of course we’ve done it. We had the tools and we had the knowledge."

"A drink," I said. "A drink in celebration." I reached inside my coat for the flask and realized just how hot it was. My shirt was soaked with sweat. I laughed and stripped the heavy parka. I wiped a hand over my face and stared at the perspiration staining my palm.

"Eighty or ninety degrees," he said. "With humidity to match that."

I pulled the top off the flask and held it up high. I was about to speak when the words deserted me. I had planned to christen our discovery Jansenland or may Olafland when I realized that we had discovered nothing, other than a warm passage. A warm water passage that no one had ever written about with any authority.

But I was thirsty, and I wasn’t going to let a technicality dampen the excitement, so I said, "To us. Discoverers of the land to the north."

I took a deep drink and felt the liquor burn its way to my stomach.

Solemnly, Eric took my flask and grinned at me. He too, held it high, but said, "We have discovered no land. Yet. But to us, anyway, two of the greatest adventurers who ever lived.

I liked the sound of that. We could call ourselves adventurers because that was what we were. Explorers suggested that we were in virgin territory, but adventurers implied no such thing.

I took the flask back and said, "To us then. Adventurers."

As I capped the flask, I asked, "And now what?"

"I would suggest that we try to get our bearings and figure out what is going on. The maps and compass are of no use now. We need to see the sun and the stars so that we can get a navigational fix."

I nodded and looked upward. There seemed to be a bright ball hanging overheard just visible through the mist. I thought of the sun on a foggy day, but this, somehow, didn’t seem to be big enough or bright enough to be the sun.

I turned my head, but could see nothing near me. I reached over the side of the boat and let my fingers drag in the water. It was quite warm and I lifted them to my lips. The water was fresh, not brackish.

"This is a river," I said.

"A river?" said Eric. "That’s impossible."

"This water is fresh," I said. "It’s not salt water and it’s not cold water. We’ve entered some kind of inland waterway."

"But the current would take us toward the ocean," he said. "There is no way that we could drift into a river from the ocean."

"Are you suggesting the current carried us here?"

"No. That makes less sense than anything else. I don’t know what to think," he said.

Which puzzled me somewhat. He was supposed to be the expert on finding the way into the Inner Earth. It was his family who had visited there before, yet, here he was, denying what we were seeing, or feeling, or experiencing ourselves. His attitude was a bit frightening, given the circumstances.

As we continued to drift, I became aware of the sound of the water against stone. A quiet, wet slapping that penetrated the fog and echoed around us. We had been talking in quiet voices, as if afraid of something hidden behind the mist, but I suddenly shouted, "Hello!"

A split second later my voice bounced back to me as it reverberated around.

"We’re in a cave!" said Eric, amazed.

I shouted again and that seemed to confirm it. Somehow we had floated into a giant cave that was hidden in mist. And then I noticed something else. There was a low, quiet rumbling, like heavy machinery or artillery in the distance. An indistinct sound that I couldn’t quite identify. And the longer that we drifted, the louder it became.

"Maybe we should try to find the bank," I suggested.

For a moment Eric sat stonily still, his head cocked as he listened to the rhythmic pounding. He shook himself, almost like a dog that had just emerged from a pond, and then looked at me.

"The bank? Yes. Let’s try to get to the bank."

I reached over for the oars, which had been dragging in the water. I sat on the bench, facing the rear and asked, "Which way?"

Eric shrugged and said, "To the right?"

"You mean starboard?"

"Whatever," he said. Even with his claimed Viking heritage and the sailing exploits of his father, he knew very little about the sea. He had been born in the Midwest, about as far from a major body of water as he could get.

I used the oars to turn us and began to pull for the side of the river. Eric moved to the bow and held his hand out into the impenetrable mist, almost like a blind man feeling for obstructions. When he realized that his hand wouldn’t provide much warning, he took one of the axes, holding it out, like some kind of probe.

It wasn’t long before the slapping of the water against stone became louder and I knew that we were approaching the bank, or maybe more accurately, the wall of a cave. I stopped rowing, content to let our forward motion drop off as the current caught us again, dragging us along with it.

A second later, the axe scraped solid stone. Eric pushed against the rock and slowed us so that we kissed the stone wall. It extended upward, into the mist, giving us no clue as to its height.

Eric used the axe to push off, and we continued to drift with the current. Eric had moved so that he was sitting near the center of the boat, in the bow, using the axe to keep us off the rocks. I had pulled in the oars and was happy to sit quietly because it was so hot and humid.

As I stared upward, through the mist, wondering what was hidden behind it, I noticed that the sun was becoming brighter. At first there had been only a dim, glowing ball over us, providing a little light, making the fog seem like a steamed over window seen from two feet away. But now the sun was becoming a glowing orb that hurt my eyes to look at. And I saw that the surface of the water around the boat was clear. I could see down into it, almost to the bottom. The cliffs climbed high to become lost in the mist, but I realized that I could see much farther.

Of course, I hadn’t thought about being able to see the sun while we were inside a cave. The glowing orb had to be the sun, but if we were inside a cave, it couldn’t be. At the time, I just didn’t think about that.

There was a sudden wailing, like a giant beast caught in a trap. A trumpeting that came and fell and then there was silence. I felt cold shivers up and down my back, hoping that the animal was not aquatic. I wasn’t sure how the small boat would stand up to assault from some of the larger animals.

From overhead there was a leather flapping of wings, like some giant bird, or more accurately, a bat. The shadows obscured in the mist were huge but unrecognizable.

"Sounds like it’s above us," said Eric.

I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or not. Eric was saying that the animal was on the bank above us. I suddenly had the vision of a huge cat waiting in ambush, waiting to pounce on us, but that never happened.

And before I could worry about it, the fog vanished. We had drifted out of it. One second we were in the thick of it and the next we were clear of it. The rock walls seemed to have disappeared with the fog and to the right was a muddy beach. Behind it was a luxurious jungle growth of tall palm, teak and coconut trees. Broadleaf trees with deeply green branches. Below them were huge bushes covered with brightly colored flowers. Reds, yellows, and oranges punctuated the landscape. Farther away, was a meadow, carpeted with grass that didn’t look very tall. A breeze rippled it, making it look like the waves on a pond on a summer afternoon.

Eric moved to the center of the boat and put the oars into the water. He pulled us toward the beach until the bow scrapped on the soft mud.

"We’ve landed," he said.

"Yes," I agreed. I picked up my rifle and climbed from the boat. I dropped to the muddy beach and waited. When nothing happened, when no beast attacked, I took a step forward, toward the plain spread out in front of us.

Eric dragged the boat higher and then tied a rope from the bow to the nearest tree. That finished, he shouldered his pack and picked up his rifle.

"Let’s go," he said.

I turned and looked at him. I could see across the river now. It was wide and slow moving. Opposite us was another jungle, this one coming right down to the water’s edge so that the leaves and some of the trees and bushes dipped into the river. Overhead I could see a couple of birds windmilling on the air currents. Large, dark birds with huge, leathery wings that looked more bat like than bird. They were watching us and the ground under them, looking for easy prey. They were somehow both fascinating and disturbing.

Overhead, the sun had taken on a strange quality. It seemed closer and brighter than it should have been and I wondered if it was because we had traveled so far to the north. And then I realized I was standing in a tropical garden and not the frozen wastes that I expected.

I moved to the boat and pulled my pack from it. I struggled into it, shifting the weight until it sat on my shoulders comfortably. I fastened the straps, bent and picked up my rifle again. I turned, facing Eric and asked, "Now what?"

"We explore, of course."

When he said that, I suddenly realized what he believed. We had found our way into the Inner Earth and any doubts I once had were gone. Slowly, I examined my surroundings, so different than anything I expected and so different from anything that I had ever seen.

"Explore what?" I asked, although I already knew the answer to that.

"Explore the land we came to find. We’re inside the Earth’s crust now."

He didn’t say, "And to find my father." I wouldn’t learn about that until later.

Land to the North - Chapter Six

2011-03-15T13:45:00.000-07:00

(Blogger's Note: Earlier chapters follow this.)

Early the next morning we rowed across the Union Strait. There were small islands around it, some of them barren wastes and others covered with brush, bushes and trees. We landed on some, walking inland a few hundred yards before returning to the boat. None of them showed any sign of having a warm, concealed entrance to the Inner Earth. Each was just a frozen land with windswept plateaus waiting silently for the first warming rays of the late spring. We saw only a few animals, mainly in the distance, and the tracks of fewer large predators.

The whole day was spent slowly working our way across the Union Strait, spotting islands and checking them out. We ate a quick, cold lunch on one of the small islands, not taking time to start a fire but instead, sitting among the branches of a toppled tree for shelter. When we finished, we climbed back into our boat and continued rowing to the north.

By nightfall we hadn’t made much progress. The constant starting and stopping, not to mention the brisk winds, slowed us considerably. We finally landed on a large island with a single small hill in the center that seemed to dominate the island. There were a few short, scraggily trees and the occasional bush. We found enough wood for a fire for warmth and ate another meal prepared from our jerky.

It had been a long, hard, cold day, even though it was late spring. There had been little reward for all our work. We both were tired and we fell asleep early. As the sun climbed higher in the sky the next morning, we were both ready to go again.

By noon we had made our way across the strait and were close to the land of Victoria Island. Eric and I argued briefly over the next move. I suggested that we put into shore and make our way across the island on foot. Eric wanted to use the boat to scout the shoreline, working our way to the north. If we saw anything of interest, we could always land to chase it down.

As I studied the map, I could see the wisdom of Eric’s plan. We could carry much more in the boat rather than in our backpacks so we could continue farther to the north.

The currents suggested that the tree that Ramsey reported could have come from the northen edge of Victoria Island, or maybe even farther north. Since it was a warm weather tree and was found in an icy sea, it was probable that it had been growing on the edge of an island that had a warmer climate than anything we were finding here. We shouldn’t miss anything by using the boat. Travel would be simpler and maybe even faster that way.

"Yes," I conceded. "We should use the boat as long as we can."

So, we turned toward the west and continued the journey. Each of the days took on the sameness as the last. Rocking in the boat during the day and then putting into shore at night where I lay on the hard ground, the sensation of the wave motion still with me, trying to keep warm.

We rounded the Wollaston Peninsula and explored Prince Albert Sound. We crossed the Amundsen Gulf and surveyed the Minto Inlet. Finally we found ourselves in the Prince of Wales Strait, Victoria Island on the east and Banks Island on the west. With Banks Island so close, we alternated between it and Victoria Island, exploring each for a couple of hundred yards behind the beach and searching the open ground with binoculars.

And each day we saw fewer signs of life. We would see a bird overhead, or a fish in the water. The snow revealed the footprints of animals, but we rarely saw the animal. Of course there were no signs of human habitation anywhere close now. We were too far to the north and too far from anything that could support a family or a village.

And each day we were farther north. We broke out into the Viscount Melville Sound. We beached out boat on Russell Point late in the afternoon several days later. The sun was toppling toward the horizon and I was cold. Cold from the water sloshing in the bottom of the boat and cold from the wind that roared at us unabated. I was cold from sleeping on the ground and cold from eating cold food.

Annoyed with the lack of progress, I carefully unfolded the map, holding it low so that the wind wouldn’t rip it from my hand and said, "You realize we’re miles north of the farthest reach of any of Ramsey’s maps or photographs. We’ve really ignored what he photographed for us."

"I know," confessed Eric, "but I don’t think he was able to get far enough north. He needed fuel and a base. He could range much farther in a day than we can, but I believe he only eliminated the mainland of Canada. We have to push on."

"Melville Island is almost seventy-five miles across open water," I said. "We’ll never be able to navigate that distance in our boat."

I pulled my compass out of my pocket and opened it. Given where we were standing, with open water in front of us, and land behind us, I knew where north was supposed to be, but the compass pointed to the northeast. We were close to the magnetic north pole and that was going to make navigation across open water tricky at best.

"So, what do you suggest? asked Eric. "That we give up?"

"No," I said. "I think that we should explore Victoria Island more fully before we try anything else. I mean, it’s right here, in front of us."

Eric shook his head sadly and asked, "You really think we’re going to find our entrance on Victoria Island? If it was there, someone would surely have stumbled across it before now and we’d know exactly where it was."

"But there are stories of entrances in California," I countered. "No one has stumbled onto them and let the world know."

"David," he said, "this isn’t going to be easy. I never said it was, but if we’re going to find anything, then we’ve got to continue to the north, to Melville Island. Once we’re there, it’ll be simple to hop from island to island, but we have got to cross the Parry Channel."

I sat down then, on the cold, frozen sand, the wind tearing at my clothes and studied the map. I could see that Eric had a point. To continue around Victoria Island would only take us farther from the islands to the north. If we were careful, we could make it and although we didn’t have sufficient water for a long crossing, there was enough ice floating around us that water wouldn’t be a problem for us.

"Tomorrow then," I said.

Eric stood with his back to me, his eyes on the open water to the north where Melville Island would be if we could have seen it. "Tomorrow," he said. The word was torn from his lips by the cruel biting wind.

"Tomorrow," he repeated.

The next morning was a warmer, clearer day. We set out, taking turns rowing. By late in the morning, we were out of sight of land and I found that unnerving. The compass pointed to the east now and that made my head spin. I knew which way north was, but the compass didn’t care about what I thought I knew. It continued to point in the wrong direction.

We didn’t talk much, having long ago exhausted most of the topics. I wished that we had gotten a better boat with a motor on it, but then I hadn’t expected to spend so much time on the water. I finally said as much to Eric.

"I know," he said. "I didn’t have any idea that these islands were separated by such great distances. At least that was the impression I got from my father. I should have studied the map more closely."

It was at that point I realized just how amateurishly we had put this expedition together. We should have been studying the maps of the area we planned to explore. I hadn’t though much about it because I believed that we would be on the mainland of Canada, far beyond the arctic circle but still on the main land of the continent. Now we were hopping from island to island, driven on by the knowledge of how far we had come already. It would take weeks to get back to civilization and all the time we’d put in already would be wasted.

When night fell, we continued to row, and while Eric slept in the bottom of the boat, I was trying to stay warm and dry by rowing. As Eric dozed, I watched the luminous dial of the compass sitting close at hand. The stars blazed overhead. The air was crisp and cold, but the effort of rowing kept me warm.

I watched shooting stars flare into brightness and die quickly, more in one hour than I had seen in my whole life. Brilliant streaks of light in a rich variety of color.

There was almost no sound around me. Just the gentle slap of the water against the bow of the boat and the quiet, rhythmic breathing of Eric as he slept on.

A quiet, dark world that held no dangers except for the cold winds that blew constantly and tried to rob the body of its warmth, and an ocean that could swallow us completely. I felt myself grow drowsy and felt my eyelids shut. I would jerk awake as I relaxed and began to fall over. For minutes, my heart would pound and I would think that it would be hours before I would fall asleep again.

And then, suddenly, Eric was shaking my shoulder, shouting at me. I opened my eyes and found myself surrounded with a gray mist that obscured the bow of the boat only a few feet from me. Eric, although only inches from my face, was a shadowy shape.

"David," he asked when he saw my eyes fluttering open, "are you all right?"

I sat up and said, "I’m fine. I just fell asleep. That’s all."

"For how long?" he asked.

I reached up and rubbed my eyes. My hand brushed across the stubble on my face. More than could have grown in a few hours overnight. It felt like several days growth.

"I don’t know," I said.

Eric helped to a sitting position. My bones ached and I rubbed a sore spot on my shoulder.

"You notice anything?" he asked.

"You mean other than this thick fog?"

"Yes," he said. "Other than the thick fog."

"I’m hungry," I said. I felt my stomach rumbling as if I hadn’t eaten for a couple of days. "I’m thirsty too."

He waved an arm and said, "It’s warm. Much too warm."

Land to the North -- Chapter Five

2011-03-05T14:52:00.000-08:00

We left by eight o’clock the next morning, driving north on paved roads. For a while we followed the Missouri River but it broke away to the west and we continued north. We crossed the border into Iowa, ate lunch and continued on. By late afternoon we were at the Minnesota border. As the sun disappeared, the sky clearing and a sheet of late arctic air settling on us, we found rooms in a hotel only a few miles north of the border. It hadn’t been a bad day’s travel, though it had been tiring.

When I said my good nights to Eric and turned on the electric light in my room, I couldn’t help smiling. Here I was, starting on a great adventure that would rival that I had in France during the Great War. I was traveling into uncharted territory, into lands that no one suspected existed, and yet, on my first night of the journey, I was resting in a warm hotel room with electric lights, the latest newspaper on the desk and a hot shower down the hall.

The only way for it to be better was if I could write to Sara and let her know what I had seen and where I was. I had tried to telephone her the night before and she had seemed, momentarily happy to hear from me. I suspect that she thought I had finally come to my senses and was telephoning her to let her know the expedition was off.

But when I said that we would leave in the morning, her voice turned icy, hard, and without emotion. This was not the news she wanted and she made that clear. I had asked if I should notify her of my return but she was noncommital. I think she wanted to say yes but didn’t want to give me the slightest hint that her position was not as strong as she said it was.

We ended the conversation, if not affectionately, then cordially, much as a divorced couple might say good-by after a meeting with the lawyers.

I was sure that her attitude would change when I returned from a successful expedition. And successful it would be. We had carefully researched the history, we had made a successful reconnaissance by air. All that remained was to follow up on the ground.

The next morning we did the same thing we had the day before. We ate a large breakfast and were on a major highway out of town by eight. It was late afternoon as we approached the Canadian border, which I had thought nothing about. But as we neared it, I realized that we were carrying firearms and ammunition, not mention a large number of crates with food and other supplies. But as we slowed and then stopped, the guard just asked us the nature of our visit to Canada.

Eric smiled at him and said, as calmly as could be, "Fishing. We heard there are some great lakes for fishing in Canada."

"Right you are. The best in the world," said the customs man. He walked to the rear of the truck, peeked in the back and returned to the driver’s side of the cab. "Looks like you boys plan on being here for some time."

"Four or five weeks," said Eric. "We need some permits or anything?"

"Not from me," said the man, "but before you establish your camp, you better check in with the local authorities. Good luck to you."

We continued north then. Each day was a repeat of the last until we were far enough into Canada that the pavement changed to graded roads and finally to tracks across the tundra. The nights were cold enough that the ground remained hard, and the days warm enough to be comfortable.

As we made our way farther north, there were no longer bridges across the rivers. But there were fords and the truck handled them all easily. Finally, we found ourselves almost a far north as we could get without driving into the arctic ocean. The ground was still snow covered, the towns small and far apart, and the nights frigid. Sleeping in the back of the truck and eating cold food from cans made it seem more like a real expedition than it had in the earlier days of hotel rooms and restaurant meals.

The maps and aerial charts and photographs made for us by Randall Ramsey led us to the bare spot that we had seen on them, but it turned out to be nothing of use to us. A bog that generated its own heat because someone had set it on fire and the smoldering peat had melted all the snow around it.

We camped there that night because we didn’t feel like traveling farther. Eric had believed that the slash of brown earth, seen from the airplane, would provide us with our first real clue, but, of course, it didn’t. So we started our own campfire, ate our supper in silence and turned in early. I had known it wasn’t going to be easy.

The following morning, we left the bog, skirted it and headed to the west where Ramsey had claimed to have seen the tree drifting. By noon we had reached the end of the land and parked on a cliff that overlooked an expanse of open ocean.

Eric, standing on the cab of the truck and using his Zeiss binoculars, carefully surveyed our surroundings. Finally, he slipped to the ground, put the binoculars into their case and looked at me. His breath was smoking in the chilly air of the late afternoon.

"Nothing," he said. "Absolutely nothing. White as far as I can see with no break in the snowy surface except for patches of ocean."

We climbed into the truck for the protection it would provide. "Now what?" I asked.

Eric got out a map and studied it for a few moments. "I think," he told me, "that we’ll want to bear to the east from here. Then, if the ice is think enough, we can cross to one of the islands there, probably Victoria Island, and continue on to the north."

I leaned over and examined the map. "Ramsey puts his sighting of the tree farther to the west."

"Yes, but the current could have brought it from Victoria Island or somewhere even farther to the north. My father was well into the arctic circle when he first found his way in."

"I don’t know," I said. "Most of my research seems to indicate that the best entrances are in caves, some of them in California." With the cold beginning to seep into my bones, the promised warmth of California took on an added importance.

"But we’d have to walk a hundred miles inside the caves before we had the chance of finding anything. Those entrances are far from the center of things, and even if we find the right cave, there are so many ways to get lost. No, if we can find our way in up here, we won’t have to walk for hundreds of miles."

"Your father tell you that?" I asked.

"My father told me that," he said.

"Then I suggest we start a fire, cook our dinner and prepare for the morning."

Eric folded the map and jammed it toward the glove box. He glared out the window, at the sun as it slipped toward the horizon that was a long way from us. Reds and oranges blazed across the ice and snow, reflecting to the high cirrus clouds over us. I knew that he was angry about another day wasted, but there was nothing we could do about that. We’d want the whole day to make our way across the ice.

Early the next morning, after a cold breakfast eaten hastily out of cans, we tried to start the truck. I spun the crank, but the weather had been cold and the oil was thick. After nearly twenty minutes, my arms aching with the strain, we realized that we were not going to be able to force it to start.

For an hour, we roamed the plateau, searching for wood. Once we had a huge pile gathered, we build a small fire over several large stones. When the fire was good and hot, we retrieved the stones from the flames and rolled them under the crankcase and oil pan of the truck, being careful to avoid the gas tank because we didn’t want to blow ourselves up.

When those stones cooled, we rolled hotter ones into their place and in only minutes, we were able to start the engine. Eric was so anxious to get going, that he started to drive off and although I was sure the fire would burn itself out, I made him stop long enough for me to extinguish it completely.

Once I climbed back into the cab, we began a bumpy, slow trip across the open prairie or tundra, avoiding the deep ravines and sinkholes and skirting bogs and stands of trees, few through there were. We stayed near the coastline, looking for a way down to the ice choked water.

Victoria Island was off to our left as we drove to the east. Eric stopped periodically and used his binoculars to survey the island, but there was nothing visible to suggest a warm entrance to the Inner Earth.

We eventually found a way to the beach. We drove along the frozen sand but there was no way for us to continue to the island. Eric did find a place where the rocky cliff retreated so that there was an overhang. We decided that it was the perfect place for our base camp. Nothing would be visible except from directly in front. Our truck and other equipment would be protected from the elements while we were off exploring the island.

That night, sitting near the fire which I now thought of as a luxury, Eric, having finished his meal, said, "This is taking longer than I thought it would."

I was a little surprised by his tone. I thought we had been making very good progress. We had already exploded a couple of promising places, and while they didn’t pan out, it just meant we would have to look elsewhere.

"Tomorrow we find a way to get to the island," I said.

"You don’t understand," he snapped.

I didn’t understand his impatience. We hadn’t been traveling that long, we had most of our supplies left, and the map told me there was a small town fifty or a hundred miles to the east where we could resupply if necessary. Our only real problem was the cold. I didn’t like it.

Eric stood up, hands on his hips and looked out, across the open water where Victoria Island stood. "That is the key," he said. "I should have gone... we should have driven directly here."

That confused me. "Why?"

He turned to stare at me and said, "Because that is where my father and sister were last seen."

He didn’t say more, but it now all made some sense to me. It wasn’t a great adventure for him. It wasn’t a lark that we could tell the grand kids about in fifty years. This was a quest for him, and that explained some of his fire, his passion, and his desire to keep moving.

There wasn’t much that I could say to that. I let the conversation die, but I had some questions I would want to ask. There were things that I wanted to know.

The next morning, the truck started easily, but probably because we keep the fire burning throughout the night and kept the oil warm. We spent most of the day driving along the cliffs and on the beaches. We could assemble our boat, a wooden craft that broke down for storage, but by the time we finished, it would be dusk. Another day lost on the preliminaries, which didn’t put Eric into a good mood.

Eric backed the truck into a sheltered area we had found, with me guiding him. When it was parked, he turned off the engine and removed the key. Then, thinking about it, he opened the hood and took the distributor cap, effectively immobilizing the vehicle.

Together, we unloaded the boat and out tools. We dragged the crates to the water’s edge and began the task of assembling the boat. With the cold wind whipping down on us, the job was harder than I would have thought. The thick gloves were clumsy and made the finer details impossible to work. We found that we had to use our exposed hands. That was something we could do for only a few moments at a time before we were forced to don our gloves again to warm our hands.

I stopped long enough to gather drift wood and start a fire close to us. The wind fanned the flames, once I managed to set the wood ablaze, and the fire burned hot. It warmed us quickly, making the job easier.

We finished in the twilight of the day. We left the boat there and walked up the beach to the truck. Eric suggested that we put up our tent and I heartily agreed. That seemed to be the last luxury we would enjoy for a long while.

After a meal cooked over the fire, we assembled our packs, leaving the canned foods and heavier items in the truck and opting for the jerky and dried foods. Eric found a space in his pack for a copy of the book about his father. We made sure that we had plenty of ammunition for our weapons and I realized that if we had been thinking, we would have purchased the same kind of weapons for each of us so that we could have shared the ammo. The 9 mm Mauser would not take the .45 caliber ammo I needed for my Colt automatic.

We both packed the handheld lamps and a supply of the batteries for them. We feared that we didn’t have enough. We had no idea how long our artificial lights would last, once we discovered the cave and began our descent.

With everything ready, we adjourned to the tent and wrapped ourselves into our sleeping bags. Even the building excitement bubbling in me didn’t prevent me from falling asleep quickly. I had just realized that we were finally on the expedition, as I imagined it would be, when I fell asleep.

Land to the North -- Chapter Four

2011-02-26T12:02:00.000-08:00

(Blogger’s Note: This whole book is being uploaded one chapter at a time and will therefore be in reverse order when completed. For those who have not yet read it, the earlier chapters and the Prologue follows this. I leave it that way so that those loyal readers who have been following the story won’t have to scroll down to find the newest chapter... Yes, it might be a pain, but that’s just the way it is.)　

Ramsey returned two weeks later. He called one morning, claimed that he had want we wanted and set up a meeting for that afternoon. Eric and I drove to the airfield, a tiny dirt strip outside of Kansas City. There was a large building, the hangar, a corrugated tin structure with a dirt floor and a windsock on the roof. To one side of it was a small, wooden building with a rusting pickup truck parked nearby. We walked across the patchy grass, scraped our feet on the cement step, and entered.

Inside there was a large table in the center of the room. Maps of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa dominated one wall. A counter, slanted, ran along one wall and was littered with flight planning aids including maps, charts, rulers, plotters and NOTAMS. A tiny office with large glass windows was stuck in one corner. A bright light burned inside and I could see Ramsey sitting at his desk in there.

Apparently Ramsey heard us and came out to greet us. He was a short, stocky man with black hair and bushy eyebrows. There was stubble on his chin and an unlighted cigar in his mouth, using it as a prop to prove how tough he was. He wore a leather jacket that creaked when he moved. He held out a beefy hand and said, "Welcome, gentlemen. Welcome."

As Eric shook his hand, he asked, "Have you had time to develop the film?"

"Don’t waste time, do you? said Ramsey. "Yes, I’ve developed the film and had blow ups made. According to my calculations, you fellows owe me an additional three hundred, eight dollars and ninety-two cents."

"Show me what you’ve got," said Eric, "and then we’ll talk about money."

Ramsey took his cigar out of his mouth, looked at the end of it as if inspecting its ash, though it was unlit. He leaned on the table, grabbed a packet and dragged it closer. "These are the photographs I made. All were taken from three thousand feet. I’ve only had the ones that show some landmarks blown up."

He smiled and shook his head. "Most of it was just miles and miles of white with nothing there to use to navigate."

As Eric and I examined the aerial photos, Ramsey pulled out a chart and laid it out. "Now, what I’ve done is this. I’ve marked each of your aerial maps with a number and then drawn a square on this map that shows where the photo was taken. Naturally there are some gaps, but it gives you a good idea of how to get from one square to the next."

Eric produced a magnifying glass. He thumbed through the photos quickly, separating them into two piles. When he was finished, he used the magnifying glass to examine each of the charts in the smaller pile. Once he called my attention to the corner of a photo and asked, "What do you make of that?"

I took the glass and leaned closer. There was a dark smudge that might have been an island in the sea, or bare ground in the middle of a snow field. Try as I might, I couldn’t see any detail in it.

While I looked it over, Eric questioned Ramsey. He asked him if he had seen anything strange on any of his flights.

Ramsey rubbed his chin and stared at the ceiling, as if there was the answer written up there. "What’d you mean?" he finally asked.

"Anything that didn’t seem to belong. Something out of the ordinary."

"No, I didn’t," said Ramsey. "Did notice a tree floating in the ocean. That was a little strange because it had leaves on it. This time of year and that far north, I’d have expected it to be bare."

"Where was that?" asked Eric. He pulled the map close and said, "Point it out to me."

Ramsey touched the map and said, "It was somewhere around in here."

Eric looked at the number in the square and lined it up with the photograph of the area. He set it next to the one where we had spotted the brown smudge. The two went together to form a single large chart.

I could see that Eric was excited. It was the first tangible evidence we had found that wasn’t from old texts and second-hand accounts. Granted, it wasn’t much, but then it was more than either of us had expected. A slash of bare ground and the trunk of a fully foliaged tree. Either could be explained by natural occurrences and Occam’s Razor demanded that the simplest explanation that accounted for all the facts was the best. That ruled out the Inner Earth, but Occam’s Razor was a logical argument and logic sometimes flew in the face of reality.

Eric questioned Ramsey further, asking him if he saw anything else that he found strange. When Ramsey came up came up with nothing, Eric to his credit, asked, "Where did you land your airplane?"

Again Ramsey referred to a map. "There’s a small town here, about a hundred miles from the major search area. I could refuel there and buy supplies. It was inconvenient and reduced the amount of search time, but it was the only town anywhere close where I could find the supplies I needed."

"Yes," said Eric. "You talk to the locals?"

Now Ramsey grinned, looking almost sheepish. "Found a small pub and did some time in it."

"Good. Good. Now in your conversations with the locals, did they mention anything to you that you found odd? Maybe talk about a valley nearby that is uncommonly warm? Or maybe people and animals disappearing? Or maybe strange looking and sounding people around?"

Ramsey took a new cigar from the pocket of his leather jacket, bit the end off it and spit that to the floor. He dug in his pocket for a match, didn’t find one and didn’t light the cigar. Instead he propped a foot up on the edge of a wastebasket, leaned an elbow on his knee and thought. After a few moments, he said, "Now, you have to understand that you didn’t ask me to look around on the ground or to talk to the locals. You didn’t say anything about any of that."

"Yes," said Eric agreeing, "I didn’t want to color your thinking and I didn’t want to divert you from your main mission which was the photography. Now, think back. Did anyone say anything that you thought strange?"

"I’m afraid not," said Ramsey shaking his head. "Our talk didn’t get around to that. Mostly, I told them about flying airplanes and about the Great War." He chuckled and said, "Didn’t have to buy too many drinks either. They kept them flowing as their reward to a war veteran."

"Well," I said, gathering the aerial photographs, maps and other charts into a single, large pile. "I think we have about everything we need."

Eric pulled his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket. He opened it and counted out the additional fee. He handed the money over and said, "I’ll need a receipt, of course."

"Of course," agreed Ramsey, chomping on the unlighted cigar. He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and scribbled, "Received $308.92, payment in full for services rendered. He handed over the paper took eight cents from his pocket, grinning.

We thanked him and he told us to come back anytime. He’d be right there and he’d love to work for us again.

Outside the door, almost before he had closed it completely, Eric spun on me and nearly yelled, "What do you think about that? We have something?"

His excitement was contagious. I stopped walking and said, "I think we have something. What do we do first?"

Eric hurried toward our truck and opened the driver’s side. He said, "We get back to town, pack our clothes and throw them into the truck. We then head north."

I looked at my watch. "First thing in the morning would be better. A good night’s sleep, a big breakfast and we’ll be on our way. It’s too late today to make much of a dent in the trip."

I didn’t say that I wanted to talk to Sara one last time. I just couldn’t leave it the way it was now. I hadn’t talked to her since she had walked out of the restaurant several days earlier.

Eric looked as if he was going to protest the delay and then nodded. "You’re right. I’ve waited this long, spent years dreaming of this moment and I suppose one night, either way, won’t matter all that much."

We climbed into the cab of the truck and Eric started it. He slammed it into gear and backed up. He turned onto the muddy road and we rattled our way back toward Kansas City.

"Damn!" he said. "I know we’ve got something now." He glanced at me and added, "It’s the tree you know. Currents are flowing in the opposite direction. There is no way for a tree with leaves to get into the arctic ocean unless it originated farther to the north. Not to the south."

I didn’t say anything to him, but I knew he was right. I could feel something and knew that we were about to embark on a great adventure.

Land to the North - Chapter Three

2011-02-19T12:39:00.000-08:00

Finding a pilot and a plane to rent turned out to be an easy task. After the war ended there were many men who still desired to fly and who had bought surplus aircraft from the American government. Any excuse to get into the sky for hire was good enough for them.

It was a little more difficult to find one who would fly toward the north pole. Aerodromes were few in the northern reaches of Canada and Alaska, but there were some. Our pilot, Randall J. Ramsey, who had shot down German airplanes and strafed German lines for the British was more than happy to take our five hundred dollar fee, plus expenses, our maps and camera, and fly over the frozen wastes and icy seas looking for the island that I sometimes thought of as mythical.

While Ramsey was in the north, having flown out a couple of days after we made our requests, Eric and I roamed downtown Kansas City searching for the equipment we would need for the expedition. Eric had arrived with a list of what he thought we would need and we spent a day in the library reading about the expeditions outfitted during the exploration of Africa. It gave us plenty of ideas.

Once that list was completed, we inventoried everything that Eric had brought. He had thought of rope, great coils of it, backpacks, knives and machetes, a high powered hunting rifle with plenty of ammunition, a Mauser broom handle pistol taken off a dead German officer, cartons of canned food, hand-held electric torches, shovels and axes. He was a little light on medical supplies but we remedied that easily. There was so much that forty men couldn’t have carried it all.

"Doesn’t matter," said Eric, crouching in the rear of the truck. "That’s what this vehicle is for. We drive as far as we can and then establish a base camp. We range out from there."

"Sounds good," I said. "We should add to the food supplies, we’ll need canteens and another weapon or two and ammo for me. Oh, and how about a short wave radio?"

"How would we power it?" asked Eric.

"Batteries. We wouldn’t have to us it all that much. Just in an emergency."　

"Yes," said Eric. "That’s something we should have."

He dropped from the rear of the truck and secured the flap. We hurried into the foyer of the nearest building, listening to the wind howl.

"I think we should delay our departure by two or three weeks," he said. "Let the weather have it’s last good blow."

I thought about that and nodded my agreement. I didn’t tell him that the more I thought about it, the less I liked it. We were heading into practically virgin territory. The map that Eric had given the pilot was marked with large white squares that warned "Topographical data incomplete or unavailable."

That was something that I just didn’t like and I imagined Ramsey liked it even less. When we went in, we’d have a better idea of what was there than Ramsey did, but then he was flying over it and could get out quickly if he had to. It made me think of the great expeditions to the Himalaya Mountains and the guides who led the parties up the slopes of the mountains. It seemed that someone always preceded the explorers.

Sara didn’t take the news with a great deal of aplomb. At first, she sat across from me, in one of the finest restaurants in Kansas City while a small band played quietly in the background. There was the clink of knives and forks against the fine china and muted conversation. There were white cloths on the table, a cut glass vase with a greenhouse flower as the center piece.

After we ordered, Sara waited, a half smile on her face. I knew that she was anticipating something and it wasn’t until later that I realized what it was. She thought I was going to ask her to marry me and I had been so caught up in planning the expedition that I hadn’t even thought about that.

When the wine came and the waiter left, having gone through the ritual of opening the bottle, allowing me to taste and accept the wine and then filling our glasses, I said, "I would like to propose a toast." I lifted my glass and said, with great enthusiasm, "To the North Pole!"

The fire went out of her eyes and her face paled. She set her glass on the table without drinking from it. She looked directly at me and asked, "What are you talking about?"

I felt a sudden panic. I thought that Sara would be supportive of the expedition, though sitting there I began to wonder why I thought that. Maybe I had believed that she would see the scientific contribution we would make. Maybe she would understand that this was something that would transcend our time and put me up there with Magellan and Columbus.

And suddenly I know that she wasn’t thinking in terms of scientific contributions. She was seeing her life collapse around her and she didn’t like it. The little things that she had ignored as I tried to talk to her about them were suddenly more important than she had thought.

Quietly, her voice icy and her words quite sharp and distinct, she said, "The North Pole." It was almost as if she had never heard the words before and that I had spoken a foreign language.

Feebly, I said, "Eric Jansen arrived here a few days ago. I introduced him to you, remember. We’ve been working up a plan to find the entrance to the Inner Earth. An entrance his father had seen."

"To the Inner Earth? The Inner Earth?" she said. "I told you that’s a myth and I thought we had finished with that nonsense weeks ago."

"Jansen has maps and descriptions from his father and grandfather. They’ve both seen it," I said, realizing that I didn’t sound convincing even to me.

"How much money is this going to cost you?" she asked, her voice still low but now dripping with sarcasm.

"Very little..."

"So an old Army buddy shows up and asks for money and you feel obligated to give it to him."

I was now on the defensive and unsure of how I’d gotten there. I didn’t like the feeling but said, "It’s not like that at all. I didn’t give him money and he didn’t ask. I contributed to the expedition. Money to hire a pilot and some for the supplies I’ll need when we push north, but I’ve given no money to Eric."

"Well, that makes it better. The mark doesn’t understand how the con works, but can tell me he’s given away no money."

I was surprised by her suggestion of a con. But I also knew that money wasn’t really the issue here.

She looked down at the table and fingered the silverware next to her plate. "So. When are you leaving and how long will you be gone?"

"Not long at all. A couple of weeks. We’re going to wait for the weather to warm up some more and I’ll be back by fall."

"A couple of weeks. Fall isn’t for months."

"I’ll be here until we leave. It’s not like I’m going off tomorrow."

"And what am I supposed to do all this time?"

"It’s really only a few weeks," I said. "It’s not as if we had anything planned."

"You’ve made that abundantly clear."

I realized what I had said and tried to recover. "I mean we haven’t planned..." But that wasn’t any better.

She stood up suddenly, tossed her napkin onto the center plate. She looked as if she was going to say something to me, but then just turned and fled.

I caught her at the front door where she was demanding a taxi. I touched her shoulder but she jerked away from me, refusing to turn around. The maitre ‘d was behind me, mumbling into a telephone while Sara stood facing the frosted windows, staring at the darkening street.

The one time I hoped the taxi would be slow was the one time that the driver broke the current land speed record. The maitre ‘d approached, glanced at me and said, "You cab is here, madam."

Without looking at me, she said, "Thank you." she slipped along the wall, keeping her back to me until she reached the door. With one hand on the knob, she hesitated. Without looking back, she said, "If you ever get over these childish adventures, you let me know. Until then, I don’t want to see you again."

She opened the door, letting in an icy blast of late winter air. She ran to the cab, climbed in and I saw her face at the rear window momentarily and then she was gone.

I went back into the main room, waved off the waiter and slowly drank what was left of the wine. When I finished the bottle, I staggered to the door and asked that someone find me a cab. Naturally, I had to wait thirty minutes.

Land to the North -- Chapter Two

2011-02-09T13:29:00.000-08:00

(Blogger’s Note: This whole book is being uploaded one chapter at a time and will therefore be in reverse order when completed. For those who have not yet read it, the earlier chapters and the Prologue follows this. I leave it that way so that those loyal readers who have been following the story won’t have to scroll down to find the newest chapter... Yes, it might be a pain, but that’s just the way it is.)
　
　
　
I spent weeks trying to find Eric Jansen. I wrote letters to the War Department but they were buried under requests from families of men lost during the Great War. I wrote letters to the newspapers in all the major cities from the east coast to the west. I tried to find Emerson, the man who wrote about Olaf Jansen and then I tried to locate Olaf. It seemed that Eric, along with everyone who knew anything about Olaf and his Smokey God had dropped from the face of the Earth.

Sara was beside herself. She tried to interest me in the theatre or vaudeville and even suggested that we spend some time watching the movies in the local movie house. They were interesting diversions, but couldn’t take my mind off the haunting stories told by Eric.

Then, out of the blue, the situation changed. There was a knock at my door one night and when I opened it, there stood Eric Jansen. He looked tired, pale, haggard. His blond hair was now quite long and he had grown a beard. His blue eyes had taken on a wild look. He had always been a tall man, but now he was thin as well. He didn’t look well, almost insane with the intensity of the fires that burned within him.

For a moment I stood there gaping at him, sure that he was an apparition conjured by my desire to find him.

"May I enter?" he asked, his voice low, quiet and a little raspy.

"Of course," I sputtered, stepping back and gesturing at the interior.

Jansen crossed the threshold, glancing around, and then fell into the only chair in my room. A thread bare, overstuffed chair next to a small table that held an electric lamp and one of the volumes I had been reading.

I shut the door and sat on the edge of the bed. I noticed that Eric’s clothes were old, patched and frayed, but they were clean. Although his boots were scuffed, there was no mud or snow on them. He carried an old satchel that he placed carefully at his feet, as if it held a great but fragile treasure.

"Did you mean it? He asked without preamble.

The question seemed to have nothing to do with the current situation, but I knew what he meant. After his stories on the ship and the books, magazines and the articles I had read, I was prepared for the question.

"Yes," I told him. "Yes. I meant it."

"Good!" he said, nodding. He gestured at the satchel and added, "I have had almost no luck. With Admiral Perry’s reports and the races to various poles, the scientific community laughed at my information. They claimed it was the delusions of a rather unstable mind."

I started to speak but he waved me to silence.

"Oh, they all said to come back if I found evidence. If I had real proof, but I knew they were laughing behind my back."

"Then the expedition is off," I guessed.

"No," he said tiredly. He closed his eyes as if resting, as I gathering strength. "No, I’m going north to look for the entrance. I’m going to make them eat those words."

"Then you have financing."

"I have," he told me, "a thousand dollars and no scientific backing. I have a truck, a camera, and a pistol. That is all that I have."

The disappointment I felt was overwhelming. I stood and moved to my window. Outside, on the street below me, I saw a few people. A horse drawn carriage rocked by. I turned and asked, "Then why are you here?"

"We don’t need much to get the expedition going. My thousand and my truck might be enough, but I can’t do it alone. There is too much, and when I succeed, I’m going to be in the same boat I’m in now. No one is going to believe one man."

"Two men might not be believed either."

"You are correct, of course," he said. "But two men, with different backgrounds who have documented their trip with photographs and artifacts, will have a better chance of convincing our learned friends. We’ll be able to gather enough raw data, I think, to convince them to finance a real expedition."

I turned from him and wandered around my room. I touched the low bookcase holding the volumes that I had yet to read. Books on a variety of subjects ranging from astronomy and anthropology to zoology. I had the layman’s interest in all the sciences and followed the latest discoveries. I knew that astronomers were searching for a mysterious ninth planet in our Solar System, that a few scientists were suggesting what was to be had on an atomic level, and that a theory suggesting that life evolved from lower orders into the higher were all the rage. But I wasn’t a scientist. I was a dabbler in science with no formal training. I said as much to Eric.

"Neither am I," he said. "But much of science has been explored by men such as ourselves. Men with vision. Men with a little information, who have the courage to follow their theories. You claimed to be such a man."

His statement was flattering. Me, a man of vision with the courage to follow that vision.

"If we have no backing," I said, "then how do you propose that we proceed?"

He grinned, but didn’t question my use of "we." Instead, he said, "It’s simple enough. I have mapped a route for us. Much of it is easy. We use the truck to drive north, into Canada, winding our way to the upper reaches of the continent. A small boat to take us to the icecap, and then we hike toward the opening that my father saw there."

"Your father said that he sailed into the opening."

"Ah," said Eric smiling, "you have been doing research yourself."

"Some," I said noncommittal.

"No matter," said Eric. "My father maintained there were land entrances as well. Caves that lead down and that one of them is in the arctic."

"It is my understanding," I said, "that the arctic icecap is just that, ice. There is no land under it. That it floats on the ocean."

"A theory," said Eric. "Who’s to say what lies under those tons of ice? I suggest that there is a volcanic island under a portion of the ice. A dead volcano with a shaft that will take us into the land that my father first explored."

That made sense, I had to admit. I nodded then and asked, "Do you have any idea where your island is?"

"A very good idea." He leaned forward, opened his satchel and pulled out a map. He opened it slowly, carefully, as if it was quite brittle, glanced at the table next to him and then stood but walked toward my bed. As he spread the map on the bed, he said, "My father gave me a few clues, and then researching the available literature, I picked up others. I believe that we can reach one of the caves. I have marked the search area on the map."

He had circled an area that was quite large. Parts of Alaska, Canada and the arctic ice cap were within the boundaries. It was literally hundreds of square miles.

"This is the best place," he said. "I think there may be an entrance in the mountains of Peru or Equador, but it would be disguised, hidden in the jungles and guarded by the Indians. If we managed to get close, I think the Indians would attack and prevent us from entering any of the caves."

"Just a very general idea," he responded. "But the jungle and the Indians make it a very undesirable portal."

"I’m not that keen on the arctic one," I said. "Especially in the winter."

"But it’s late February now. By the time we could get the expedition ready and travel north, it would be May. The best time of an arctic expedition to begin. We’ll have the whole summer in front of us."

I had to admit that it seemed that Eric had thought his way through the whole thing. He had arrived with his truck, his map, a little money, and his itinerary. I was reluctant to join him, only because I had become used to the luxuries of Kansas City. I liked the warmth of the steam heat, the convenience of the electricity, and the ease of restaurant meals.

"We’d want to be back by autumn," he said. "If we haven’t found anything by then, the weather would turn against us."

I sat on the edge of the bed and studied the map. As I looked at it, I realized that I had decided to go. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that I had made the decision, but I knew that there was no longer a question about it. I was going to go. I might have decided at the moment I opened the door and saw who it was, or it might have been when he pulled out the map. All I knew now was that I was in. I was going.

"An aerial search would help us eliminate a great deal of barren territory and open ocean."

"I thought of that, but I can’t afford to buy an airplane. Besides, I don’t know how to fly one."

"Neither can I, but I would imagine that we could find someone with both a plane and the experience who would help us with the search."

"We don’t have unlimited funds and there is a great deal of equipment and supplies that we still need."

The potential of the find was so great that a small investment could pay gigantic dividends. If nothing else, the story of the expedition would be worth something. An article, with suitable pictures for a scientific journal, the Saturday Evening Post or National Geographics certainly wasn’t impossible.

Eric looked at me and asked, quietly, "Then you’ll go?"

"Of course," I said. "Was there ever any doubt?"

Land to the North -- Chapter One

2011-02-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

(Blogger’s Note: This whole book is being uploaded one chapter at a time and will therefore be in reverse order when completed. For those who have not yet read it, the Prologue follows this. I leave it that way so that those loyal readers who have been following the story won’t have to scroll down to find the newest chapter... Yes, it might be a pain, but that’s just the way it is.)
　
　
My name is David Morgan Stone and until recently, I was an officer in the United States Army Expeditionary Force to France. A German artillery shell, directed at the trenches behind my command post fell short and the shrapnel killed both my aide and my first sergeant. I was wounded and by the time I was healed, the Great War was over and I wasn’t needed in Europe.

On the ship coming home, I met a man named Eric Jansen who claimed that his father had once visited a strange land that no one living on the Earth had ever seen. Now, traveling on a steamship loaded with soldiers returning from war is a fairly boring proposition. The government didn’t waste money on frills and the library of the ship, such as it was, consisted mainly of navigation texts and seafaring stories. In other words, Jansen’s stories were about the only form of entertainment available and he wasn’t shy about spinning these wonderful, if unbelievable tales. I found myself looking forward to our long afternoon chats.

There was a wardroom on the ship, used for the meals for the officers, but normally vacant during the middle of the afternoon. Jansen and I took to meeting there after the noon meal, sipping coffee from heavy mugs provided by the ship’s steward. I found myself drawn into the stories that Jansen claimed were all true.

"After we get home," he told me one day, "I would like to prove to you that my father was right and certainly wasn’t crazy."

I really cared, at that point, but there was, literally, nothing else to do.

"If I can get a university... or anyone else... to finance an expedition, I’m going to look for that underground land."

It was at that moment I realized that Jansen had shared his stories with me because he was looking for someone to go with him. I was the first step of the journey and if I ignored his invitation, then he would probably never have the courage to pursue it. At least that’s what I thought then. I had no way of knowing that his motivation for searching for this unknown land went further than a desire to prove his father right.

But, having spent several months in the trenches on the front lines and then more months in the hospital recovering, I knew how important dreams could become. They were a way of bridging the time between the arrival at the front and the time for going home. It was a way to keep sane in an insane place and a way to stay alive when there were so many ways to get killed. Many of the dreams became obsessions and once the man returned to his real world and normal life, the obsession faded away and was forgotten. Or so I thought.

I smiled and leaned back. I said, "Well, if you get your expedition together, give me a call. I’d like to go along with you."

"You mean that?" asked Jansen, his eyes sparkling.

"Of course," I said, believing it at the moment, but I also thought that once we reached port, he would forget about it and that would be it.

Two days later we left the ship to a cheering crowd on the pier. A band played and flags flapped in the stiff, cold breeze. As I came down the gangplank, I saw Sara standing behind a makeshift barricade, waving a white handkerchief and shouting my name.

As I started toward her, my heart filled with pleasure at seeing her again, I glanced to the rear. Eric Jansen was slipping off the ship, his duffel bag over his shoulder. No one rushed forward to meet him and a second later, Sara had wrapped her arms around me, kissing me with a passion that drove all thoughts of Jansen and his stories from my mind.

We pushed our way through the cheering throng on the dock, the band playing Sousa marches with great enthusiasm and little else and found a taxi. We leaped into the rear and told the driver to take us to the nearest hotel where we spent a week learning about each other all over again.

My mustering out pay that included a couple of bonuses, not to mention some savings, was more than enough to keep me happy for a year or more. Without the pressure of having to find employment immediately, Sara and I took a leisurely trip across the eastern United States. We stopped in Niagra but the falls didn’t inspire us to marry then and there. We planned to wait, and stuck to that plan.

We ended our journey in Kansas City where Sara had a job as a typist. I found a room where I planned to write my memoirs about the war. I had kept a diary but it had vanished in the explosion that had killed my friends and wounded me.

I spent much of my time in the library, reading the newspaper accounts of the war, surprised at how they differed from my memories. Mostly it was a description of the mud and the cold and the wet of the trenches that smelled like freshly dug graves. Water that stood in permanent pools in the bottom, rotting boots off the feet before attacking the flesh. It was a miserable existence that had to be chronicled because the people who sent their boys off to fight should know what it was like. Not a glorious adventure by any means.

During those tours in the library, I came across the story of Marshall Gardner, a fellow Midwesterner who claimed that the Earth was hollow. It was a fascinating account of life in the center of the planet. He talked about openings at the poles that led to a tropical paradise inside the Earth. Admiral Perry had found evidence of this during his attempts to reach the poles but had never tried to explore it.

I found myself swept up in the accounts of the Inner Earth. Garner described the trunks of unknown trees found drifting in the Arctic Oceans. He wrote about the flora and fauna that obviously belonged to a warmer climate, but which had been found in the frozen snows of the arctic tundra. Facts that seemed to contradict each other.

But Garner wasn’t the only man who believed that there was something hidden in the center of the Earth. Jules Verne wrote about an imagined trip through the caves of Iceland that took the explorers deep into the bowels of our planet. I began to suspect that Verne’s story wasn’t the fiction so many believed.

Sara found my intense fascination with the Hollow Earth annoying. She refused to listen to me when I came from the library loaded down with fresh facts. She forbid me to speak about it in her presence, even when she saw I was bursting to tell her of some new discovery.

On a bleak day, the sky a gun metal gray that threatened snow at any moment, I uncovered the account of Captain David Robson who claimed to have found a cloud enshrouded island where there should have been no land. Robson dropped anchor and a landing party rowed to the steaming, shell-studded beach. Fish, some of them still alive, were strewn across the muddy flats. Others, rotting in the steaming heat of the island, were beginning to turn.

Robson’s men worked their way inland, through a misty forest that was dripping salt water and draped with Spanish moss. They found a city of broken buildings, the stone walls slimed with moss. Scattered around them were the artifacts of a lost civilization. Bronze swords, iron-tipped arrows, metal pots, jeweled goblets and dozens of things that the sailors didn’t recognize.

They spent the morning exploring the island. They found no animals, other than the fish, living on it. There were no bones of the people who had built the city. No evidence that anyone still lived there until they discovered a large stone box. Several of them dragged it to the beach and wrestled it into a long boat to be taken to their ship.

On the deck of the HMS Jesmond, they opened it expecting treasure but found, instead, the mummified body of a large man. Captain Robson suggested that the man might have been an Egyptian. Others thought he might have once been a resident of Atlantis.

All this interested me greatly. Each article or book I found made me search harder for more information. I was rewarded daily. And then I came across the story of the Smokey God and I felt my stomach turn over and the blood drain from my face.

An old Norwegian, Olaf Jansen, told of sailing north until he came to a warm land of tropical plants, sandy beaches kissed by the sun, and plentiful fruits. He was captured by the kindly men who lived there and was taken to their city. The tall, statuesque people showed him their country, their cities and their farms. He toured their powerplants and schools. After several months in the Inner Earth, Olaf Jansen was allowed to board his ship and sail for home.

I sat for a long time, staring at the people hurrying along the sidewalk outside the library. The women held their hats on with their gloved hands as the cold wind whipped at the hems of their skirts. The men, bundled in long coats and bent forward, rushed about their business.

Around me I heard almost nothing. A cough that was quickly stifled. A feminine laugh. A book dropped to the hardwood floor. I ignored it all, glancing occasionally at the story of Olaf Jansen and thought about the stories told to me by Eric Jansen. Maybe Eric did have something to go on. I wished that I had paid more attention to him, or had written some of it down because I found myself wishing that I could get in touch with him.

Land to the North -- Prologue

2011-01-30T11:04:00.000-08:00

(Blogger's note: This is the beginning of a novel. I will post the chapters as I finish them over the next several weeks... This means that the novel will appear on the blog backwards. The earlier chapters coming at the end. To read them in order, you need to begin with the Prologue, and then the chapters in order. You'll have to scroll down to find the earlier chapters.)

The old steamer trunk, a flat black, dented thing covered with stickers from some of the most exotic ports of call in the known world, stood at the far end of the attic, centered under the arch of the wooden beams. The path to it was partially blocked by a collection of fallout from the day to day task of living. There were broken lamps and scarred tables, ripped chairs and clothes that were so hopelessly out of date that they would never be back in style.

He found a variety of broken, old toys that predated the electronic fads of the late twentieth century that included a basketball backboard, a wooden box holding a Lionel train and a cardboard box containing nearly a thousand toy soldiers who had seen action in the Civil War, World War II, Vietnam and Iraq.

But Steven Morgan wasn’t interested in the debris of generations. His goal was the trunk that had disappeared when his mother had caught him studying the decals of far away destinations that his mother refused to talk about and that his father said had been in the family for more than a hundred years. When he was ten he tried to open it and when his father caught him, he had been sent to his room. The trunk had disappeared then, and the door to the attic acquired a new padlock with keys that were hidden.

Morgan found the keys by accident when he was twelve and he opened the long sealed door. Upstairs, hidden at the far end of the attic, under a bit of canvas that looked so out of place that it signaled the presence of some secret treasure, he found the trunk again. He ran his hands over the rough, pocked marked surface and studied the fading stickers in the afternoon heat.

Rather than escaping to the air conditioning of his bedroom or the family room or the computer room, he stood there, his T-shirt soaked and tried to imagine what would be hidden inside.

Finally, he went into the garage, found some tools, and returned to the attic. For a moment he stopped at the door. Both parents were gone for the day. His sister, an obnoxious youngster named Gracie who desired nothing more than to make life miserable for the majority of the human race, was visiting her latest boyfriend. The house was empty, the family gone for hours yet, and his curiosity overwhelmed him.

He closed the door, climbed the short flight of stairs and stood looking at the trunk as if it was some sort of idol in an ancient, ruined temple. The naked light bulb burned above it and sunlight streamed through the louvered vent near it.

With the odor of dust hot in his nostrils, he crossed the floor. He stood over the hasp on the truck, levered the screwdriver between the metal parts of the lock and pulled once, sharply. He was astonished at the ease with which the lock broke.

Morgan set the screwdriver on the floor and then hesitated. He wiped his face on the tail of his T-shirt, leaving a ragged, dirty smear. He grabbed the top of the trunk then, and pried it open. The disappointment struck his with an almost physical force. On one side were old clothes hanging from a short metal bar. Under then were shoes and boots. On the other side was a series of drawers. Morgan wasn’t sure what he expected but dirty clothes and ratty shoes was not at the top of the list.

Morgan fell back, into one of the old chairs creating a cloud of dust that swirled around his head. He coughed once or twice and closed his eyes as he breathed in the dust.

Feeling that a lifetime of dreams was slipping away, he reached out and opened the top drawer. It was empty. As was the second. The treasure was in the third.

Morgan reached in and felt the handle of the Mauser pistol with a broomstick grip. The magazine lay next to it, along with several loose bullets. This was the reason the trunk was locked and hidden.

The final drawer, at the bottom, yielded a leather bound book with a rotting ribbon around it. He picked it up carefully, afraid that it would fall apart in his hands. He opened it and looked at the first page.

The ink, that once might have been blue was now faded and brown. From the few notes on that page, it was clear that he had found a diary of an uncle he didn’t even know existed. An uncle who had vanished a long time ago, but had left a written record of his travels. Morgan pulled his chair around so that he could seen the diary better, and began to read.

Liar, Liar

2010-11-26T14:02:00.000-08:00

David Kelly had never told a lie in his life... until he was nine years old. After that, he rarely told the truth.

He discovered that nearly everyone would believe his lies because they were so much more interesting than the truth. So, his father became an FBI agent, an airline pilot, a selectee for the space program who had to drop out because the President had asked.

He had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroism in Vietnam... the Gulf War or Afghanistan. His father had been a hero in World War II, flying with Pappy Boyington, though his father hadn’t been born until after that war had ended.

In high school, the family moved, so Kelly thought up a whole new set of lies. In his old school he had been a star on the football team until he blew out his knee winning the state championship. He had been the editor of the school newspaper whose investigative journalism had gotten the principal fired for a fling with a well-endowed junior who had the IQ of a door knob.

He kept it up until his classmates realized that he would have had no time for studies unless there were thirty hours in a day and eight days a week. He couldn’t have done everything he claimed unless he was fifty years old and started when he was five. They realized that he was making it all up.

Not that it mattered to anyone. The stories were all told with a flair that suggested that Kelly believed them too and thought that everyone else should as well. They listened and smiled but didn’t believe a word he said. They did, however, vote him the most likely to succeed because they had watched the political commercials, watched as corporations ripped off everyone they could, and saw their heros peddling everything with all sorts of outrageous claims. Most thought Kelly would become a writer because he was very good at telling his stories.

None of that bothered Kelly. He dated frequently and told the girls the same stories he told everyone else. Some of them believed him, not because they were dumb but because they liked him. They wanted to believe a little of what he said. And he did have a scar on his knee that could have been from an operation after his winning touchdown... but it was really from a burn, self-inflicted, when he knelt too close to the hot exhaust of his brother’s mini-bike.

In college, then in the Army, and finally as he entered the world of business, he kept up his string of lies. As he moved into each new realm he learned that if he tempered his lies with a little restraint, he could convince some people that he was telling the truth. The trick was to make sure he did not tell one person two versions of the same story... not that it mattered.

Lying was his avocation and it was harmless. He didn’t do it to get ahead. He didn’t do it to make a fool out of anyone. He just did it for the entertainment value. He was happy and he kept his fellows happy.

And then he reached his thirty-fifth birthday. His business career, like his military career and his college career, was mediocre. Nothing spectacular until he had an experience that would put his lies to shame. It was so unbelievable that no one would, well, believe it.

It changed Kelly. For days he walked around the office, quiet, without a tall tale to be told. They thought he might have a touch of the flu... or that something tragic had happened. They tried to prompt him with questions about some of his adventures, but he wouldn’t take the bait.

Six days after the transformation, Kelly attended his regular Onota Meeting, an informal group who met for a cheap lunch, some cheap drinks and some tall stories. It might be said that this was like the "Liar’s Clubs" of the nineteenth century, although none of the members would have ever described it that way. It was really just an excuse to have a long lunch in the middle of the week. Like so many of his other activities, it could be described as harmless.

Kelly was late for the meeting and when he walked in, the chairman, Ruth Greenberg, was asking if anyone knew where Kelly might be. He strode to the front of the room, holding the latest edition of the newspaper high over his head and proclaimed, "I know that no one will ever believe this, especially after all the things I have said for all these years, but this is all true."

The chairman glanced around nervously because the program had already been set, or as set as it ever was. The featured speaker, a young woman who was going to talk of her days living aboard the space station nodded slightly and the chairman relaxed. There would be no confrontation as if there ever was, but she liked to worry about such things because it made her feel like a real chairman.

Kelly was waved over to the rostrum by the enthusiastic crowd. They knew that if he was going to speak, they would be treated to an entertaining program. Kelly, on the other hand was nervous for the first time in his life. Sweat blossomed on his forehead and he felt it drip down his back and sides. He knew that he was not dressed for the meeting, wearing rumpled clothes, but it wasn’t until the last minute that he had decided to attend. He hadn’t taken time to change.

As he poured himself a glass of water, more to give his hands something to do for a moment than because he needed a drink, he said, "I’m sorry to burst in here like this, but what I have to say is important. I know that you’ll find this story hard to believe, because I’m telling it, but I assure you that it’s true.

There was a murmur through the crowd because the one thing that Kelly had never done was assure them that a story was true. He just let think what they wanted to think about it.

Kelly took a sip of his water, started to set the glass down and then raised it again so that he could drain it. Then he leaned to the chairman and asked that someone get him a Vodka Collins and to keep them coming because he wanted to get drunk in the very near future.

Finally he began. "I didn’t recognize them at first. No one would have because they looked just like us. Oh, they talked a little strange, and they walked a little strange but when I was overseas in the Army, in Greece and not Vietnam like I told everyone, I had seen some strange customs.

"No matter. I answered their questions, and was mildly surprised that they knew my name. Just mildly surprised, mind you. Not that I thought I’m famous anywhere. I just figured that someone else in town might have mentioned me to them. It wouldn’t be that unheard of."

Kelly stopped talking long enough to take a drink from the Vodka Collins just handed to him. He noticed that the crowd, though still quiet was getting restless, and if he wanted to hold them, he had to get to the point.

"They thanked me for my help and left, saying that they hoped that they would meet me again sometime. I mumbled much the same thing and immediately forgot about it. That was something I shouldn’t have done.

"On my way home that night, as I passed that huge empty field on the edge of town, the one that used to be the National Guard armory, the car engine died. There were no other cars around so I grabbed my cell phone, but I couldn’t get a signal."

He held up a hand and said, "I know, we have complete coverage, but I just couldn’t get a signal. And with no help available, I got out to look under the hood. I knew there was nothing I could do but stare at the engine. I know I’ve said that there wasn’t a mechanical device ever made that I couldn’t fix, but it’s just not true. I had a hell of a time finding the safety latch just so that I could pop the hood. This might have been the first time I ever saw the engine of the car.

"There was nothing obviously wrong. The car just wouldn’t run. I touched a few wires, recognized the air intake, but I didn’t know what to do. Had I really been thinking, I would have realized that the electrical system had been suppressed in some fashion, but I didn’t give it a thought then.

"The sudden voice behind me startled me and I jumped slightly. It said, ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. We stopped your motor.’

"In what might have been my first real burst of insight ever, I said, ‘I know. Your magnetic field also killed the lights, radio and my cell phone."

"The voice said, ‘Very good, except it’s a little more than just a magnetic field.’

"Then I turned to look. I don’t know what I was expecting, but all I saw was a tall, rather average looking man dressed in a conservative, cheap suit. His hair was a little thin and his voice a little high but other than that, he was average.

"I stood there a minute, looking at him, before remembering that one of them had said, that they would see me later.

"He said, ‘Would you like to come with me?’

"I said, "Someone will be along in a minute. I don’t like leaving my car out here unattended.

"He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You won’t be needing it any longer.’

"I thought that was a rather esoteric thing to say. I didn’t think about the implications of it. I just sort of ignored it. I suppose I was more upset over the failure of my car than anything else. I thought the problem was shoddy workmanship rather than that nonsense about magnetic fields.

"The man asked, ‘Doctor, would you like to see what is causing the magnetic field that stopped your car?’

"I’ll admit here that he got my attention with the use of the title. I said, ‘You called me doctor.’

‘The man continued to stare and I hadn’t noticed him blink. I don’t know why that popped into my mind at that moment but it did. He said, ‘We understand that you hold a rather high degree from your university.’

"I nodded and said, ‘I hold no fewer than twenty-two degrees from various institutes of higher learning. I have also been given a few honorary degrees based on my work in thermodynamics, oceanography, and the fluid dynamic mechanism of meteorite pitting.’

"The man reached out, as if to take my hand and said, ‘Please, Doctor, come with me. There are a few friends that I wish you to meet.’"

Kelly stopped his narrative for a moment, drained his glass and then picked up the water as some sort of chaser. He had stopped sweating and was now cold as the air conditioning had caught up with the heat of the afternoon. He took the time to look at the audience. There were waiting for him to continue.

"Well," he said, "there didn’t seem to be anything that I could do about the car, and there was no traffic to help me. There was a house a couple of hundred yards away with a single light burning and I figured that I could use their land line, if they had one. I maybe could get someone there to help me out or to give me a ride. I agreed to go with him, figuring that was where he wanted me to go.

"We crossed the road, walked down a slight slope to a ditch, used a couple of big rocks to avoid the shallow water and stepped to a barb wire fence. He held the middle strand out of the way for me and then I did the same for him. I wondered where we were going because we weren’t walking toward the house... but I figured, what the hell. I had never really been out there. We walked across a plowed field and then to a tree line....

"It was then that I understood exactly what was happening to me. Exactly."

Kelly stopped again and stared at the crowd. Idly, his mind clicked on the phrase, pregnant pause. He had the audience and was keeping them by making them wait to find out the answer. Let them devise images of what he had seen. Let them imagine what was happening to him. Let them speculate. Let them condition themselves.

"It was about twenty-five or thirty feet tall and probably seventy feet long," he said. "There were dim lights around the center of it and it stood on three telescoping legs. I saw a ramp leading down, to the ground."

This hesitation was shorter. He said, "Like many of you, I didn’t believe. Not until the minute is saw it but I couldn’t deny what I was seeing. Probably one the Air Force would label as swamp gas or a misinterpretation of a natural phenomenon... This one had the classic saucer shape, one size fits all, and the color of your choice.

"The man gestured toward the ramp and said, ‘Go on up. They’re waiting to meet you.’

"At this point there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. The man had done nothing to force me to come with him. He had asked. And Richard Dryfeuss walked right into the spacecraft in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The aliens were friendly... well, the ones that we’re spewing acid and hugging your face.

"So I walked right up the ramp.

"The interior was nothing like I thought it would be. The whole room... the whole cabin... was bare. The floor was smooth. So were the walls. The ceiling was lost in a bright glare. At the far end I could see a number of figures, on the small side, but I couldn’t really tell.

"The man walked to the center of the cabin and spoke in some kind of a strange language like nothing I’ve ever heard, gestured at me and then said, in English, ‘This is Doctor David Kelly, the brightest Earthman alive today.’"

Kelly smiled. "I know. I know. But that’s what he said. Really. Not that I deserved the distinction.

"Anyway, he kept going with the description of my accomplishments, using the words that I, myself, have used for years. He listed all the fake degrees, all the inventions created by someone else, the war record I made up. Everything. On and on, as if he had memorized everything that I have ever said in the last twenty years. Every damned lie."

There was a murmur in the room. They were used to Kelly and his tall tales, but the one thing that had been consistent, the one thing that connected every thread was his insistence that his stories were all true. He told each one with the same enthusiasm that he told all the others, almost demanding that all who heard accept those lies as the truth. But he had never attempted to prove a new tale was true by exposing all the others as lies.

He was telling them, that unlike the pathological liar who told his tales, believing them himself, he knew the difference.

In one sense, he was violating the unwritten code among them. He could say anything he wanted and they would not challenge him by asking for proof. In return, he would believe them without asking for proof. And now here he was, standing in front of them, challenging all his statements to them and almost gloating over the fact that he had lied and lied and lied.

"Those creatures, I won’t call them men because they had only the slightest resemblance to me, came forward. They seemed to be discussing something in that strange language of theirs. The man with me tilted his head to one side as if listening, and then translated. ‘They all have questions if you would be good enough to answer them.’

"I told him that I would be happy to share my vast knowledge." Kelly winched at the comment and then said, "Yes, that is what I said. My vast knowledge.

"Anyway, he said, ‘First we would like to know the state of your space program.’

"That seemed like a harmless question and my first inclination was to say, ‘Florida.’

"Instead, I said that they probably knew that we had reached our moon, our natural satellite a number of years ago.

"‘With that goal reached,’ I said, ‘Six months early I might add, we shifted our emphasis to other things. We have sent probes to all the planets in our system and out into the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud, and launched additional probes to other solar systems.’

"I did not mention that the probe sent out of the solar system was a simple spacecraft that would never return and probably wouldn’t be to another system for eighty or ninety thousand years.

"This news seemed to upset them a little bit, but they went onto other subjects. They asked about our weather, our weapons, our military forces, the state of our atomic weapons, the histories of various nations and the attitude of various peoples.

"Probing questions that seemed to have some sort of focus. I mean, they weren’t random questions. They had a point but didn’t want me to figure out that point. It was as if they asked the wrong question, they would spoil the game or give away a big secret.

"After a while of this, I began to grow tired of it. Now you people know that I like to spin a story and can sometimes be goaded, with very little effort, into talking until late at night, long after others have grown tired and gone home. But this is at a party or a bar where we’re all comfortable and the booze is flowing and the Buffalo wings are coming. But these people... these things just kept me standing there as if they had never heard of a chair and never thought to offer a drink. I was tired, bored, thirsty and hungry and I suggested that I be allowed to return to my car.

"As I turned toward the ramp, the man who had brought me to the craft, put his hand on my arm and said, ‘We can’t allow you to return. You have been warned.’

"‘Warned?’ I said. ‘Warned about what? I haven’t been warned. But it’s getting late and I want to go home.’

"The creature. The man, didn’t remove his hand. He just said, ‘We can’t return someone of your superior intellect. You would be too much of a danger.’

"Honest, that’s what he said. That I would be too much of a danger. And suddenly, in my second flash of insight that night, I realized what they were talking about. These weren’t the darling little creatures of E.T., or the friendly aliens of Close Encounters. These guys were the beginning of the invasion. The reconnaissance force. The scouts who were attempting to learn all they could about the planet Earth. To find out how strong we were. To find out what kind of a fight we could put up.

"For a moment I was stunned. I had answered all their questions. I had told them about our defunct space program as if it was as robust and inventive as it once had been.

"And I told them about the military. An Army that was limited to weapons as defined by the Geneva Accords as if there was a humane way to kill someone. I had not told them about an Army that was fighting conflicts in some of the most inhospitable terrain in the world, worn out from a decade of those wars and that was spread about the world in policing actions.

"And on and on. Told them what they wanted to know, making it up as I went along and them believing it all as if I was compelled someway to tell the truth. I went on and on, enjoying my role as the smartest man on Earth. And I was turning out to be the dumbest. I had had the misfortune of contacting the enemy first and because they had stroked my ego, I had given them everything they asked for so they could invade.

"No, it’s worse than that. I gave them the reason to invade. I suggested that we would be able to find their home and wipe it out. Oh, not in so many words, but I was telling them we were traveling among the stars. That we had explored the other planets, and the moons of those planets, never mentioning that all that exploration was done by robotic probes controlled from Earth. I didn’t tell them that our space program was in disarray because too many people couldn’t see the real benefits of it. They just thought of money being blasted into space."

Kelly looked down at the floor and shook his head. "It was quite the shock, after living one way for all those years and believing, for all those years, that I was harming no one. A shock to learn, because of my own big mouth, I might have destroyed everything that the human race had ever built and I mean everything."

Kelly sighed. "Well, I knew that I might be able to save the day. I mean, these creatures had to be pretty clever themselves. They had managed to short circuit relativity by hopping through space. If they had known much about Earth I doubt that I could have fooled them for long. So, for once I decided to tell the truth. I could reverse everything that I had said. If I could do that, then I might be able to turn off the invasion."

The audience stirred and for the first time since he had walked into the room, Kelly smiled. He said, "Yes, I know. My ego knows no bounds. But I was in the right place at the right time. Maybe I could change some of their attitudes by adding to what I had already said.

"So, rather than demanding that I be let go, I decided to stay and tell them everything that I could. But to add a little spice to it. Liven up the stories a little for the audience. To make everything bigger and better and bolder. Make them think that they couldn’t invade Earth because of who we really were. Not knowing their time table, I don’t know if I was successful and probably will never know for sure, but I tried. Oh, Lord, I tried.

"They took the questioning back to our space program. I had told them that we had launched a number of probes and that things had been slow for the last few years. They wanted to know why.

"So, I told them. We had solved the problems of interstellar flight. We could get anywhere in this galaxy, almost immediately. A strange device that we had developed that worked along the lines of thought. We could visualize where we wanted to go and with the speed of thought, we could get there, taking with us all that we needed. We could drag all the equipment along with us that we wanted. But with this capability, we didn’t need artificial craft and that was why the space program was in disarray. We kept it going as sort of a hobby.

"And, of course, I told them of the super weapons we had developed. Planet killing weapons. Weapons that could cause a sun to explode. We didn’t keep those sorts of things on Earth because they were far too dangerous. We stored them on other planets in other systems. We could retrieve them in seconds, if we needed them for some reason.

"I made sure they understood the sacrifices that we have made to protect our freedoms and our way of life. About men and women who fought to the death rather than surrender. Lessons from history. Half remembered movies and TV shows. Anything that I could think of because I needed to convince them that we would fight on and on as necessary.

"I told them of the great inventions we don’t use. The invention that could terra-form a planet and would make it into a paradise. A paradise as defined by us and not necessarily those who happened to reside on that planet. We didn’t use it on Earth because we liked the unpredictability of the weather. We didn’t use it on Mars, because the gravity was too light for us and if we increased that, we would tend to complicate the dynamics of the Solar System. We’d tried it on planets around other stars and some of our people now inhabited those planets."

Kelly laughed. "That last got their attention because they stopped asking questions and went off to confer. It looked as if it got quite heated at some points but I didn’t know. Maybe then don’t get angry. They would sometimes gesture at me and I think they were trying to figure out what was going on.

"Finally the man came over and said, ‘I think it is time for you to leave.’ No preliminaries. No pleasantries. Just time for me to leave.

"I said, ‘I thought I had been warned.’

"He pushed me toward the ramp, which was opening again, and said, ‘I don’t think it matters now. Just get out.’

"Well, I did notice his attitude had changed. He wasn’t polite like he had been and he seemed to be a little scared of me. I wanted to get out so I walked down the ramp. Minutes later I found myself standing by the highway. A car had stopped behind mine. I crossed the road and saw a deputy sheriff. He wanted to know if everything was all right and I told him my car had stalled, but I thought I could get it running now. I climbed in, turned the key and it started right up. I waved at the deputy and he waved back.

"I’ve had a chance to think about this, and I think I know what happened. These creatures, these aliens, who wanted to invade Earth, didn’t have the concept of a lie. They believed everything I told them because they had never run into anyone, or anything, that would lie. They believed everything I told them without looking for proof. When I told them about our inventions, our military capabilities, our ability to destroy whole planets, they believed me. When they compared their ability to ours, they were convinced that they couldn’t strike Earth. They didn’t even know that we had colonies on other worlds which might retaliate. They thought our might far outstripped theirs. I think they decided to find someone else to pick on."

Kelly reached to his side and picked up the newspaper. "This was on sale as I came in. I know you people don’t believe me. I don’t expect it. But look at the headline. It says, ‘SAUCERS SIGHTED OVER CAPITAL.’ You see, there were flying saucers here, but they’ve gone now."

There was a moment of silence and then applause. Loud and long. Before it died out, the people were standing up. First just one, then two and then everyone. The whole group was up clapping and cheering.

Kelly held the newspaper high. It was his only piece of evidence because there had been nothing to grab in the spaceship. Nothing that he could get from them to prove his story. That’s what he told them when the cheering finally quieted and everyone was in his or her seat.

At the very end, after an extra hour, as the audience had tried to wring every little detail from him, one of the men in the back stood up and asked, in violation of their protocol, "Come on, Dave, is this the truth?"

Kelly leaned on the rostrum and clasped his hands in front of him. He stared at the floor as if framing his reply.

Finally he looked up and said the last word he would ever say on the subject. "Wouldn’t you like to know."

Richard Bachman (Stephen King) The Long Walk

2010-11-12T14:50:00.000-08:00

I have been reading Richard Bachman’s (Stephen King) The Long Walk because it is a fascinating story set in our near future now. The date of its creation is farther away than its predicted future of 2025. In other words, it was written in the late 1970s, more than thirty years ago and it now predicts a future only fifteen years in our future.

Here’s really the only problem I see with the book and it is that the world around the Long Walkers is the world of the 1970s. There is talk of a news crew using a film camera taken from the rear of their station wagon rather than a video or digital camera taken from the inside of their SUV.

Or one of the characters working in Phoenix for three dollars an hour when the minimum wage is now more than double that... and will probably climb in the future. Why not just say minimum wage rather than attaching a dollar figure?

Or one of the Long Walker’s watch stopped because he forgot to wind it. Does anyone have a watch that must be wound? I don’t even wear a watch thanks to my cell phone that tells me the time.

There is talk, just a small reference to the sun fading the image of a Polaroid negative, but how many such cameras exist today, outside the collectors? Yes, it’s a fine image, but it dates the book.

We are given just a little of the future. A society where "Squads" come in the night to take away those whose politics differ from those ruling... okay, they didn’t come in the night, but you see what I mean. King has set up a totalitarian state in our not so distant future that sanctions this "contest" of teenage boys to see who can walk the farthest and who is then given a "prize." Failure isn’t just the disgrace of losing but a bullet to the head... unless you have annoyed the shooters and then they exact a little revenge with a bullet to the stomach for a slow death.

Yes, I know the book is about the social dynamic that develops when this group of teenagers is thrown together. It’s about their interactions as they make the Long Walk... but it fails to capture a feeling of the future. It is about a society that never existed in a world of thirty years ago and not the future.

My only criticism is this small failure which isn’t even germane to the story. In the 1970s I don’t think anyone could have predicted the Internet which would have allowed live streaming of the Long Walk... even if the government didn’t want it to happen.

And, of course, who could have predicted cell phones that would have allowed the Long Walkers talk to friends and family... unless they had been banded by the rule of the Walk, or until the batteries failed.

Here’s the thing. This lack of prediction, which could have been accomplished had King thought about it, could have been covered. I was criticized for the third book in my Exploration series because there wasn’t a sense of the future in it. In the last book, The Gate, I tried to extrapolate from where society is today. I have the younger member’s speaking in the shorthand of text messages, but speaking English when addressing older members of society. I suggested a holographic entertainment system which would be an improvement over the 3-D technology springing up today. I tried to picture a society where social interaction on a personal level gave way to social interaction through an electronic medium. A society where all the information of the world was accessible through the Internet...

But predicting beyond these things is difficult. Who would have envisioned an Internet before the various components of it existed? Sitting in 1978 King wouldn’t have been thinking of a global connection through an electronic device that isn’t radio, telephone or telegraph. I understand the problem because I’m attempting to design a far future where we have little personal privacy for a science fiction novel called Forever.

I don’t blame King for this failure and suspect he never considered it, given the nature of the story. This is just something that dawned on me as I read this book in 2010 and not 1980. If this was 1980, I doubt that any of these... what, lapses, failures of vision... would have dawned on me. Today it seems glaring but then, it doesn’t spoil the story, so who really cares?

Cell Phones and Time Travel

2010-10-29T18:02:00.000-07:00

Not all that long ago I posted a story about time travel called Guidebook. I suggested that if time travel was real, then the time travelers would already be here. The point of the story was the hero was looking for evidence of that visitation. Now we seem to have it in the form of a photograph from a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film.

This would be the sort of proof that someone was time traveling because no one in 1928 would have a cell phone. As I mentioned in my article about my Star Trek communicator, the cell phone links me to all the knowledge of the human race. I would imagine if you are time traveling, then your cell phone would be able to operate over the span of time... maybe marking where you are for retrieval or to provide you with the latest information from your point of origin.

Yes, I know that Isaac Asimov explored time travel in The End of Eternity, which suggested you couldn’t really travel much beyond the point where time travel was created, except in very limited and very special circumstances.

And yes, I know that Wilson "Bob" Tucker explored time travel in his The Lincoln Hunters where they were very careful about leaving anything in the past that didn’t belong and worried about meeting their selves...

Or Ray Bradbury’s idea that even the slightest change in the past would have grave consequences as the change radiated outward. Which gave us some interesting variations on The Simpson's and A Sound of Thunder.

But all that is unimportant because we have the picture of the woman with a cell phone...

Okay, I don’t believe it to be a cell phone. Just something in the photograph that looks like a rather old-fashioned cell phone. It’ll be interesting to learn exactly what she is holding. And it’s fun to speculate about it... especially if it is a cell phone.

In the end, I’m sure we’ll find out that it is something mundane. But, until then, I think I’ll just call it a cell phone.

GENIUS

2010-10-15T14:22:00.000-07:00

(Note: The original idea for this story was much longer and I spent, literally years, trying to figure out how to make it work. There were many starts and stops. This is the end result. Something much shorter than the original idea, but something that works well, I believe.)

　
1. She sat partially hidden in the jungle watching several chimpanzees as they searched for food. She could understand their cries and calls to one another which sounded like a primitive language to the trained ear. The alpha male, that she thought of as Lion, was directing one of the other, smaller males into a tree to chase down a dark-haired monkey. Chimpanzees ate meat when they could get it and the often went in search of it. She had actively hunted other primates in the past.

She was alone in her position, set back in the trees, away from the main group, watching as the monkey attempted to flee but found its way blocked. Two other males, smaller than Lion, stood on the ground, staring up, almost as if they were observers rather than participants. The monkey, jumping through the branches, looked back, at the Chimpanzee, and leaped. It misjudged and fell through the tree, hitting one branch, grabbed at it, but missed. It hit the ground stunned, momentarily unable to move.

The two chimpanzees on the ground which she thought of as Snake and Pig, moved toward the injured animal. One of them carried a stick about as big around as an arm. When it was close, it swung the stick but missed the monkey.

The monkey raised its head and shrieked, but didn’t move and she didn’t know why. Maybe it was hurt too badly.

The Pig advanced, grabbed the monkey by one of its feet and swung it up and then back down. It hit with a sickening crack and went limp. It made no more noise.

Lion, looking pleased with himself, advanced on the dead monkey. Both Pig and Snake retreated as if leaving an offering for their god.

Lion picked up the dead monkey, shook it and then bent close and bit into it. He pulled it from his face, looked upward, toward a small blue patch of sky and let out a cry. He was telling others that he ruled this section of the jungle and all that intruded became his. He owned the jungle until someone else took it away from him.

She stayed where she was, even as the rest of the Chimpanzees, including a new mother began to gather around the dead monkey. Lion took another bite and handed the prey to Snake for him to eat. They kept at it, handing the carcass, one to another, going from the alpha male to the most important of the females, until the monkey was gone.

Now Lion looked around, surveying the Chimpanzees with him as a king might study his subjects after a good hunt or a good job well done. With a single sharp cry, almost as if an order from Lion, they began to move again, away from that section of the jungle. Hunting, for the day, was over.

2. She trailed with them at a safe distance. This was the band she wanted to join because it was the strongest that she could find. The males would protect the females from much of the dangers of the jungle and the open lands when they came to them. These chimpanzees were big, strong, vocal and had even stopped lions from attacking, though they often avoided lions by climbing the closest trees. Lions didn’t climb well.

The other big cats, cheetahs and leopards never threatened them unless they were caught alone and were sick or injured. She made sure that she kept some of the band in sight at all times so that she wouldn’t become prey to those lesser big cats.

It was an interesting relationship. They recognized her and knew, instinctively, that she wasn’t one of them. Lion or Snake sometimes attempted to approach, but she was frightened by them. They were large animals with great strength and she knew they would kill her if she annoyed them. She knew that they would tolerate a female that was submissive, but they would kill one that was not. She knew this because she had seen them do it to other lone females.

Lion and his band had found two small Chimpanzees in the forest about three weeks earlier. They had threatened them, they had charged and retreated, but in the end, they had caught them and killed them both. They ate from the bodies, but left most of them behind for the scavengers.

Those two had been part of another band that had strayed into the territory Lion claimed. He was leaving a message for others that might do the same.

She had seen lions attack other lions in a similar way. She had seen lions kill cheetahs and leave them lying on the dusty plains. She’d seen lions and hyenas line up for a fight and then using claws and teeth, try to kill one another in a battle that sometimes saw a dozen killed or maimed. The lions, because of their size and strength, rarely lost. It was only when the hyenas caught a lion alone that they were able to kill it.

So, for the day, she stayed back, watching the Chimpanzees as they walked through the forest, stopping to eat nuts or berries, or to rest. As the day became hotter, they slowed their pace.
As darkness fell, they stopped. They spread out slightly so that they could protect one another. She stopped twenty yards from them, near a large bush.

She began to gather the wide, thick leaves from some of the trees to build herself a shelter for the night. Looking into the sky, when it was visible, she had seen clouds gathering and knew that they could mean a coming storm. She’d been smelling, for the last hour or so, a musty odor that reminded her of wet ground and wet fur. This too, she knew, meant rain.

From the bag that she had found, dropped near a village, she took a knife, being careful with it because she didn’t want the others to see the tool. She used it to cut away some of the lower branches of the bush so that she could use its center structure as a support for the leaves. She tried to orient it so that the coming rain would fall on them, leaving her dry, or as dry as she could expect in the rain during this season.

There was a light in the bag but she hesitated to use it. The Chimpanzees always reacted poorly to that. She was using things she had that they didn’t and they seemed to understand that meant she wasn’t really like them. She didn’t know if her appearance was different enough that they were sometimes as wary of her as she of them, or if it was because she used things they didn’t understand like the light.

Sometimes she would see them watching her from the distance. She believed that she was accepted by them as non-threatening and she now understood the commands of Lion as he lead them, but there was always the chance they would attack her. She had to be careful when she was within easy sight of them.

She created her nest and then sat down in the center of it, facing the rest of the troop. They were dark shadows moving among the trees and bushes, searching for a place to spend the night. They didn’t seen to understand that a storm was coming, though they could smell the air and hear the distant rumblings as well as she.

She ate the berries she had gathered earlier. She didn’t want to leave the shelter now that she had it finished and she was comfortable. Instead she leaned back, against the thick trunk, and kept her eyes on the others. They seemed to have no interest in her.

The rain came about an hour later and she had guessed right. The rain hit the thick leaves that she had loosely woven together and that provided adequate shelter from the rain. The sound of frying bacon filled the jungle and she found the steady white noise soothing.

When she woke in the morning, the jungle was steaming from the rain but the insects and animals were subdued after the storm. It was a quiet time and she enjoyed the silence until the birds began to scream at the sun and monkeys began to shriek at one another.

At first light the troop began to move again, Lion in the lead, hunting for something to eat for breakfast. He moved fast, unconcerned with those slower and weaker than he was.

She watched from the safety of her shelter for a few minutes and listened to the cries between Lion and the rest of the troop. They were more like orders as he got them moving toward the edge of their territory.

She gathered her tools, keeping them hidden from the others and left the shelter. She stayed fifty yards back so that she could retreat if necessary.

After only an hour, after they had stopped at a stream to drink and to wash, after they had raided a termite mount, and after they had walked out into a huge clearing at the edge of the jungle that fronted a mountain, they found another troop of Chimpanzees.

Lion screamed from just inside of the tree line and waved his arms. He voiced his outrage at seeing others in his territory and picked up a stone to throw at them. His hand-eye coordination wasn’t as great as it could have been and the rock sailed off to the left, falling harmlessly in the jungle.

But the alpha male of the other troop picked up a limb and waving it, attacked, running halfway across the clearing. It stopped and threw the limb which tumbled and fell far short of Lion or any of this troop.

The attack infuriated Lion. He looked toward Snake and Pig and shrieked at them. Pig picked up a stick and advanced on the enemy Chimpanzees, but Snake didn’t move. He stood there, silent, almost as if afraid to move or afraid to fight.

The displays were about over. Neither side seemed ready to retreat though she was sure that the others would have to give way. Lion was too large to be defeated in a contest of strength.
But the other alpha male shrieked and holding a limb over his head, ran forward. When he was a few feet away, he swung the branch like a club.

Pig tried to attack, but the big male turned on him and struck him in the head. Pig fell back and lay still. Now Lion turned toward the threat.

All this time she was using her knife, scraping a point on a straight stick about as big around as a wrist. Satisfied, she advanced but the males ignored her because she was a female and wouldn’t be part of the fight.

She ran forward suddenly but didn’t scream to frighten. She wanted to attack from stealth. The big male didn’t see her and didn’t know she was there until she thrust the pointed stick into his side. He screamed his rage and spun, jerking the stick from her fingers. She stepped back, almost cowering, and the big male ripped the weapon from his side. There was a gout of blood and the male shrieked with a sound like tires on concrete as he fell.

Lion looked at her and then at the enemy alpha male lying in the grass. It didn’t move and those with him were now retreating. They were screaming and throwing stones, but they were fighting a retreating action.

Lion ran forward and slapped the downed male on the head. He leaned forward and took a bit from the neck of the victim and then whirled, his face and teeth bloody. He was telling his troop that he had killed the male. That he had defeated the enemy and those who challenged him would suffer the same fate.

She stood there for a moment, watching and then she stepped back, toward the safety of the trees. Lion had looked at her, stared at her, and she could see the hate in his eyes. She knew that he would kill her the first chance he got because he now saw her as a threat to his dominance. She had been the one to defeat the enemy, though he had taken the credit.

She knew that Lion now believed that she would attempt to establish her dominance of the troop and to do that, she would have to kill him. That was the way it worked. The strongest ruled while the weaker waited for a chance to break that dominance. Until that moment, the males had been bigger and stronger and more aggressive. They ruled by brute force, but she had killed the alpha male of another troop who was almost as big and aggressive as Lion.

3. Lion came for her late in the afternoon, after they had eaten and were searching for a place to rest during the night. He came quietly to kill her so that the others wouldn’t see. He came slowly, as if wanting to befriend her, or maybe to mate with her.

But she knew the truth and wished that she had prepared another pointed stick. She wished that she hadn’t believed she would be safe for a day or so. She thought it would take Lion that long to attack.

She fled the shelter, moving to her left, back toward where the troop waited. She was in a circle of sunlight, almost as if standing in a spotlight waiting for her opening cue. In her hand she held the knife low so that Lion couldn’t see it though she knew that he wouldn’t understand what it was. He had seen them being used in the distance but he just did not comprehend the significance of them.

Now, as Lion approached, she lowered her head and looked at his feet. She was drawing him toward her with a display of submission. Lion stopped short, grunting, and then shrieked at her as if to intimidate her. She didn’t move, holding her ground, knowing that the others in the troop were watching the blood sport.

Suddenly, almost without warning, Lion charged. She sensed it and then saw him. She stepped to the side, spun, and slashed out with the knife. She cut him across the shoulder and saw the blood darken his fur.

Lion roared with the pain and in surprise. He stopped and whirled, looking first at her and then at the cut on his shoulder.

She knew that he was trying to figure out what had happened. All he knew was that there was a burning in his shoulder and if she had cut deep enough he might retreat to ponder the problem.

Lion had other ideas. He beat his chest, grabbed a limb that was six feet long and as thick as his arm. He held it with one hand and pounded the ground with it, staring up at her. Challenging her.
At that moment she knew that this would be a fight to the death. Lion was not going to give up no matter how badly she hurt him. He would press the attack until he had defeated her. Killed her, as he reasserted his dominance over the troop. There would be no help for her but there would be no help for him either.

He threw the limb at her but it hit ten feet short, one end low, and then fell back. As it did, Lion attacked again, but this time he was more careful. He tried to stay to her left, but she turned as he circled and as he did she knew that he was losing support. He was beginning to look weak to the troop. He couldn’t handle one lone female. The other Chimpanzees were seeing that. For the first time Lion was acting more like a jackal.

He lunged at her, missed but jumped back quickly, out of her reach. Around him the Chimpanzees were hooting and calling, almost as if they were laughing at him.

She sensed the change in those others. Once frightened of Lion’s strength, they no loner were. She knew that they wanted Lion killed.

She put on another display of submission, as if tired of the game and willing to let him win. He came in close, flailing his arms and fists. She didn’t move and that surprised Lion but didn’t stop him. When he was in close, she stabbed with the knife, feeling it sink into the softness just below the breastbone.

Lion didn’t scream this time. He just sat down suddenly, as if stunned. He looked down, at his chest to see the dark handle of the knife sticking in him. With a muted cry, almost like a young Chimpanzee calling for its mother, he pulled the knife out. He held it up, in front of his face, turned it over and then slumped to his side and didn’t move.

She understood the ritual as well as any of the males. She stood over the body of Lion and reached down to touch it, push it, attempting to get any sort of a response from it. She knew that Lion was as dead as the moneky they had killed the day before and as dead as the alpha male she had killed earlier in the day.

The problem was that she was female and the male Chimpanzees didn’t understand this. She had turned the hierarchy upside down by proving she was stronger than Lion and by default, she was stronger than anyone else in the troop. She had assumed the role of the dominate male but she wasn’t male. They didn’t know how to react to this change in their society, in their history.

4. That first night, as she took her place in the center of the troop, she showed them how to weave the leaves together to make a shelter that would protect them from the wind and the rain. Through gesture, she made it clear that she expecting them all to make a proper shelter.

And she showed them the flashlight, though she didn’t know exactly what it was or how it worked she knew that it created light in the dark and when the light began to dim that she only had to shake it and the light brightened.

The Chimpanzees reacted with fear as she showed them the light but once she let them touch it, let them hold it, they were fascinated by it. They flashed each other and then howled with their thrill.

The next morning, when they left their camp to wander their territory, she was in the lead as Lion had been the day before. Rather than patrol the edge of their territory, she lead them back, toward the center where there were caves and plentiful water and bushes that held berries. There were termite mounts about a mile away where they could snack when they wanted and not worry about other Chimpanzees attacking them.

When they reached the caves, she picked a limb from the ground, one that was fairly straight and about five feet long. Using the knife that she had pulled from Lion’s body, she whittled a point on it. Then, carrying the limb in front of her, the point out, and the light in the other hand, she entered the cave. She was prepared to find a big cat, a lone leopard or cheetah but there was nothing inside. Just the bones of some animal that had crawled in and died long ago.

She lead her troop into the cave and watched them scatter around the entrance almost as if they were picking their spots. They understood that this was going to be their home. This would be where they lived, away from the wind and lightning and rain. A place that didn’t require them to create a shelter every night, though they could do that if necessary.

She let her territory shrink because they didn’t need all the land that Lion had ruled. She knew that they could find all the food they needed near the caves and in those caves there would be shelter from the elements.

She lead hunting parties, but now, rather than chase the animals, she arranged ambushes, letting some of the troop frighten the prey, driving it through the jungle to the trees where others, with sharpened sticks waited to kill them. She always took the first bite but then shared the kill with each of the others. She was aware of the necessary hierarchy and followed it because she didn’t want to have her authority challenged.

5. In the year since she had killed Lion, she and the others had acquired more knifes and more flashlights, though some of them dimmed and all the shaking did nothing to revive them. She didn’t understand why some failed and some didn’t, but that she had one that had burned brightly from the moment she first showed it seemed like magic to the troop.

There were voices in the jungle outside the entrance to the caves. She heard them when they were far away and was suddenly frightened by them but still she walked to the entrance to look out. She saw a few members of the troop in the clearing outside the cave, sitting in the sun grooming one another. The others were around, close, maybe searching for food or drinking from the stream but close.

There was a shout that caught the attention of all those in the clearing. One of the females and two of the males stood up and moved forward, toward the sound.

There was a quiet thump and a brightly colored object struck one of the males. He swatted at it as he would a stinging insect and when it fell to the ground, he picked it up. Holding it in front of his face, at eye level, he turned it one way and then another. A moment later he closed his eyes and toppled over.

The female turned to flee and then stumbled and fell. She tried to push herself up, but couldn’t do it. She sank back to the ground and was still.

The last male charged and there was a sudden crash. A single sharp sound that sent birds flying and monkeys screaming. That Chimpanzee fell face first to the ground, skidding three or four feet. It didn’t move again.

She stood in the mouth of the cave and saw the men enter the clearing. They were tall, dark, and carrying long sticks that weren’t pointed on one end, just narrow. She understood them in a primitive way though she didn’t understand their operation. She knew them to be deadly.

One of the men stopped near the female that she had called Gazelle. A slender, young female that should produce offspring in the near future. The man pulled a brightly colored object from Gazelle’s back and gave it to another of the men.

They spoke in a way she didn’t understand. She had heard men talk before and had listened carefully to them, but their meaning was just beyond her grasp. The sounds were quiet and different and filled with a jumble that just alluded her. She believed that if she could get close enough to the men for long enough time she would be able to understand them as she did the calls of the lions and the laughing of the hyenas.

The men moved through the clearing until they were close to the mouth of the cave. She had stepped back, into the shadows so that she was concealed. She reached back and picked up her knife, holding it down, away from her body.

One of the man carrying a short stick in his hand came forward. He saw the cave and glanced at it, turned and shouted something and stepped into it.

She knew that there was now nothing she could do but attack. She lunged forward as the man jumped to the right. The blade caught him on the side, cutting the cloth and skin. He shouted and pointed the small stick at her.

There was a sharp, single crack that reverberated through the cave. She felt pain in her chest. She fell back, against the wall of the cave and sat down, losing her grip on the knife. It clattered against the stone. And then everything started to get dark, like the sun setting in the evening.

6. "Hey," shouted the man. "Hey."

Two of his friends, both carrying rifles, one a tranquilizer gun and the other a rifle that fired a bullet large enough and powerful enough to bring down a water buffalo, ran forward.

"What happened?"

"That ape pulled a knife on me," he said.

"Bull."

He held up a hand that was stained with blood. "She cut me," he said. "If I hadn’t jumped, she would have stabbed me good."

"Bull," said the man.

The wounded man stood up and pointed to the knife laying on the cave floor. "She knew how to use it."

The rifleman looked around, at the interior of the cave and said, "There’s an awful lot of stuff in here. Flashlights, spears..."

"Spears?"

He reached down and picked up a long stick that had a point carved on one end. It was stained, probably with blood, though he wasn’t sure.

"A crummy spear I admit, but it was a spear."

The wounded man looked down at the dead chimpanzee and asked, "What was she? Some kind of genius?"

My Star Trek Communicator

2010-09-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

I had been thinking about writing an article about the vision of the year 2000 as it appeared in books and movies of the middle 20th century. Show, for example, that 2001: A Space Odyssey was not very predictive. There are no bases on the Moon. There is not regular travel between Earth and the Moon. And our exploration of the Solar System is limited to robotic probes.

On the other hand, the world of the 22nd century, as shown in the original Star Trek is badly behind the power curve.

Here’s why. In one episode, Spock is on a planet’s surface and he is attempting to fool a computer by loading into it small snippets of Kirk’s speech to answer questions. He’s standing there with a handful of colored objects and when a reply is required, he pushes one into a slot.

And now a little history. Back in the old days of the home computer, information was written to large black things called floppy disks because they were, well, floppy. They were about eight inches square.

Eventually these were replaced with smaller versions that were more rigid and those were replaced by little plastic squares about three and a half inches on a side but still called floppy disks. They originally came in black, but finally they came in a variety of colors. I still have a box of them. They were useful but only held about a megabyte.

But while watching Spock, I realized that he held floppy disks with wave files on them. A technology that was advanced in 1995 but now hopelessly out of date. Computers now have DVD drives that take silver disks and not little drives that take plastic squares.

And we can get so much more on a thumb drive including hours and hours of music and still have space from lots of other stuff. Thumb drives that I never saw in a science fiction movie or on Star Trek.

Those little plastic floppy disks were one thing that came and went long before Spock was on that planet with his wave files.

Here’s something else. I have a communicator. Oh, I don’t call it that. I call it a cell phone, but it really is a communicator, only better.

While we were at Fort Riley preparing to deploy to Iraq, our battalion commander didn’t want us to use the cells phones to communicate... his reasoning was that he didn’t like us spending our own money to communicate and he knew that when we reached Iraq we wouldn’t have that ability. Iraq had no cell phone infrastructure. That has changed.

Anyway, the Enterprise would carry it’s own cell phone infrastructure with it. And it would have access to all the data in the world in the computer. I know this because we can cram so much into a thumb drive and our cell phones have access to the Internet which gives us access to all the data in the world.

We have our communicators and they’re much better than those postulated in the 1960s by the science fiction writers on Star Trek. Who would have envisioned a world then where you could carry access to the knowledge of the human race in your pocket?

These are just two of the things that we achieved before we got to the turn of the century and long before the 22nd arrived. I just thought I’d mention it.

Travel Guide

2010-09-13T14:17:00.000-07:00

It was Professor James Johnson who made the incredible statement during a sophomore philosophy class that caught the fancy of one of the students. Standing on a raised stage in the huge lecture hall, Johnson, waving a hand as if to emphasize the point, said, "Time travel cannot exist because if it did, we’d already have it."

David Alexander, sitting in the back of the auditorium where he could hide from the prying eyes of the professor and his teaching assistants, thought, "That’s was an interesting philosophical theory."

Alexander was a science fiction fan who spent his spare money, such as it was, on conventions and fandom, which meant he thought understood the concept of time travel a little better than most of the other students in the class. Time travel, he believed, could solve some of the great mysteries of the past like what color were the dinosaurs and it could prevent the great disasters because to be warned about them meant they could be avoided.

Back in the dorm later, lying on his bed, his earphones on so that he didn’t have to listen to the music of a dozen other students, and staring at the ceiling, Alexander thought more about Johnson’s time travel comment. Alexander was well aware of the alleged paradoxes. He knew that going back in time and killing your grandfather which, some believed was the paradox to prove time travel couldn’t exist, meant nothing of the kind.

How could you kill your grandfather and not wipe out your own existence as those skeptics often said? Simple. The killer, as the instrument of the change, would still exist because he was the instrument of the change. His siblings probably wouldn’t be so lucky because the loss of the grandfather meant the loss of one parent and so his siblings would no longer exist, at least as he knew them. But he could go back and kill his grandfather, not that he ever would.

What troubled him the most now was the idea that if time travel were possible, then it would already exist. His descendants, or someone else’s descendants would be traveling in time and the historical record should show it. Somewhere, someone would have screwed up and left a sign of an advanced civilization in the middle of a primitive one. Someone would have left a clue, probably unintentionally, but the evidence would have to be there. If only he could figure out how to find that evidence.

And that, he thought, was the problem. What would be the evidence and where would be begin to look for it? He needed to find something that existed where it didn’t belong or something found where it didn’t belong. Something that shouted time travel to the enlightened researcher who was looking for evidence of time travel but that might only confuse and confound someone who was looking for something else.

Now he was beginning to get excited about it. He sat up, swinging his feet off the bed and looked at the computer sitting on his desk. He thought about going to the library, but why? The computer gave him access to everything in the world he needed and had more resources than the largest library ever built.

He moved to the desk and heard someone knock at the door. It opened a moment later and Sara stuck her head in. She waited until he reached up and pulled the earphones off his head and the she asked, "You going to eat?"

Ignoring that question, he said, "I was thinking about what Doctor Johnson said today. About time travel not being real because it would already be invented."

"Yeah," she said. "Stephen Hawking wanted to know where all the tourists were."

Alexander looked confused.

"Hawking thought that if time travel were possible, there would have been tourists from the future already. We’d have seen them."

Alexander grinned broadly, believing at that moment he was nearly as smart as Hawking because he’d thought of the same thing. He said, "Yeah, there should be evidence of it."

"Unless they have a prime directive a la Star Trek."

Alexander chuckled. "Even with their prime directive they were always interfering with someone. Even when they tried, they left behind clues..."

"That doesn’t tell me if you’re going to eat or not. I’m hungry," she said.

"You’re not worried about the freshman fifteen?"

"That was last year and I only gained five pounds. I needed those five pounds."

Alexander turned to face the computer, signed on, and then brought up his search engine. He sat with his fingers on the keyboard and stared out the window, into the deepening green of a late spring evening.

"Food?" she said.

"I don’t know what to search for," he said.

"Gees, David, what does it take to get through to you? I’m going to eat."

He was about to tell her to go on without him but he couldn’t think of a way to phrase his request. Time travel was too vague. Time travel facts would probably bring up scientific papers on the reality of time travel. He realized that he needed more information to make the right search but he didn’t know how to get that information.

He stood up and asked, "What’s the weather like?"

"Getting cool," she said.

She was standing there wearing shorts and a light jacket. It wasn’t getting very cool.

They left the dorm, walking along the tree lined street and turned into the downtown area. There were a dozen small places that catered to the college crowd which meant they sold beer, cheap fried food and had a sound system that threatened to create earthquakes.

They took a booth in the back corner, away from the bar, away from the speakers, and away from the entrance. It was slightly quieter and when the music stopped, it was almost peaceful. They ordered both beer and hamburgers and then waited for the food.

Jason Davies, a graduate student who didn’t mind talking to undergraduates came over, inspected the food and then dropped into the booth next to Sara. He grabbed one of her fries, ate it, took a sip of her beer and then sat back.

Alexander was slightly annoyed but didn’t want to offend Davies because he was a teaching assistant. He just said, "Make yourself comfortable."

"Always do. Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you what to study for the next test."

Sara said, "Sure you will.

The waitress appeared and Davies pointed at the glasses and said, "A round. Bring me a beer too." When she was gone, he asked, "What are you two talking about?"

Alexander didn’t really care to tell him so, instead he said, "Why we haven’t seen the time traveling tourists."

Davies grinned and said, "You’ve got Johnson for philosophy. He thinks he’s quite clever with that and never mentions that Hawking came up with it first or that Fermi said the same thing about alien creatures. Fermi wanted to know why we haven’t been visited yet, if there were other intelligences in the galaxy."

"If you’re going to keep eating my fries," said Sara, "get your own plate."

"I’m not hungry," Davies said.

Now that he had thought of it again, Alexander wasn’t willing to drop it. He said, "I was trying to think of a way to prove the point. I mean, I would assume that these travelers wouldn’t want to announce themselves. They’d be human so they’d look like us and I suppose they would have records so their clothes wouldn’t stand out."

Davies waved a hand to indicate the room and then the rest of the city, "I have heard that this is the only town where you could rob a bank carrying a sword and wearing a cape and disappear into the crowd. Clothing here certainly wouldn’t stand out."

"So," said Alexander, "we’d have to look for some other sort of evidence. Something that didn’t belong in our time, or something that didn’t belong in another time. Something that was out of place in time."

The waitress appeared with the beer, set it down and then disappeared quickly. She didn’t ask if they wanted anything else or if the food was good. She was just a college student trying to earn a couple of bucks and didn’t want to make a career out of waiting tables. It showed.

Davies took a sip and said, "You’re talking about Out of Place Artifacts."

"Yes," said Alexander enthusiastically. "That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Out of Place Artifacts."

"Well, all you have to do is type those words into your search engine and you’ll find dozens of web sites telling you more than you care to know about them."

Alexander sipped his beer and then said, "You already know about them."

"Of course. You’ve heard of the ancient astronauts. You know, the space travelers who came down to build the pyramids and leave drawings on the ground?"

"But that proves nothing. The Egyptians had the technology to build the pyramids," said Sara.

"I’m not advocating a point of view here," said Davies, "I’m merely providing information. He wants to check this out. I’m giving him a starting point."

Alexander leaned back, against the wall and put his feet up on the bench. He held his beer but didn’t drink any of it. He said, "You’ve checked this out."

Davies shrugged. "Some of it. Others have done it too. Johnson makes a good point and we’ve all come up with ways to search for the proof."

"These Out of Place Artifacts don’t do it?" asked Sara.

Now, like he was in a lecture hall, Davies began to pontificate. "Not really. Take the Baghdad Batteries. They’re about two thousand years old. Here are earthenware jars with copper and zinc rods in them and some kind of sealant on top. Fill it with a liquid like citrus juice and you’ve created a type of battery. Not one with much voltage, but a battery none the less. What did they do with it? I don’t know, but the existence of the batteries is well known. You can find pictures on the web."

"But from what you’ve described," said Alexander, "you’re talking about something that could have been made in Baghdad back then. It’s not like a double A battery I put in the remote control."

"Your point?" asked Davies.

"The Babylonians had the ability to make the batteries so it proves nothing."

"Precisely. They prove nothing."

"What we need is something that clearly doesn’t belong where it was found. Not some bizarre aberration in history."

"Now you’re talking," said Davies. "You mean like a molded metal bowl that was found inside solid rock. Something that had to be dropped before that rock was rock. Something that would indicate it was millions of years old."

"Exactly," said Alexander.

"It happened in 1852 in Massachusetts," said Davies. "Some kind of an metal bowl inlaid with silver that was found as workmen quarried rock."

Alexander looked at Sara who raised her eyebrows in surprise. He said, "You know about it?"

"Don’t take my word," said Davies. "Look in the Scientific American in June, 1852. The article is there."

"You’ve seen it?" asked Alexander.

"Of course." He drained his beer and stood. "It’s been real. See you later." He disappeared quickly.

"He didn’t pay for his beer," said Sara.

"No, but he never does."

* * *

The main library was nearly on the way back to the dorm and Alexander pulled Sara along with him to the front entrance. They climbed a set of stairs that looked as if they lead to the second floor at Tara and then took another set of stairs, as dirty and grungy as any in any other downtown building to the fourth floor where the bound periodicals were housed.

They entered, walked down a hallway that was lined with work stations that held computers tied into the main library index so that they could search for information on anything in the libraries massive holdings that included almost a complete set of government records.

Alexander always expected an old, musty smell in a dim cavern, but the truth was that there wasn’t a hint of dust anywhere, there were banks of windows along the walls and overhead lights that might have been useful in an operating room.

The stacks were marked, but there were three separate rows and Alexander had never figured out exactly how it worked. He could follow the alphabet back until he came to the "S" section and then worked his way along the shelves until he came to the right place.

The old Scientific Americans were bound in volumes that were a foot high and four inches thick. The dates were noted on the spine so it didn’t take him long to find what he wanted. He pulled the volume out and then walked back to one of the many tables available for use.

"You know you could have done this on line?" said Sara.

He grinned at her. "Sometimes it’s just more fun to look at the original. The book is over a hundred and fifty years old. It came from a time when there were no airplanes or electric lights or radio. It’s from a time when you could argue that the Earth was hollow and people would believe you."

Sara pulled out a chair and sat down. "It’s cold in here."

"It’s always cold in here," said Alexander.

On page 298 in one of the June 1852 issues, he found a story entitled, "A Relic of a By-Gone Age." It told of a metal "vessel" that seemed to come out of the rock in the quarry. But reading it carefully, he noticed that the "vessel" could have been lost in the dirt on top of the rocks and didn’t necessarily come from inside the rock.

To Sara, he said, "This isn’t quite what I thought it would be."

"Make a copy and let’s go."

"Why?"

"Because, tomorrow, you’re going to wish you had a copy and then we’ll have to come back here. This way you’ll have it and not have to find it again."

* * *

The physics building was a new structure that stood ten stories high and was set on the perimeter of the campus. Across the street were a couple of bars, a laundry, a restaurant, and several office buildings including an attorney. When they built the physics building, they were careful not to damage the trees that looked to be a hundred years old.

Alexander had taken several classes in the physics building including two in psychology and one in Spanish. Ironically, the astronomy class was held in one of the older buildings that was the home to the anthropology department.

The only physics professor he knew was Robert Carpenter, and Alexander only knew him because they both played pinball at a small hamburger joint. It had one machine and no one ever put money into it because they all knew how to beat it. They took turns at the pinball, drank Pepsi continuously and sometimes ordered food. Carpenter almost had a second office there.

Alexander knocked on the door and was told to enter. Inside was a small room of cinder block walls, yellow paint and more of the operation room lighting. Carpenter had his desk pushed up against the single narrow but long window so that he could look out. There was a chair for a visitor, a book case that held neatly arranged volumes, a small round table that held journals and a small rug on the vinyl floor.

"David, what can I do for you? Thinking of taking my physics class?"

"Nope."

"Well, have a seat anyway. I was trying to write an exam that I need to give this afternoon."

"I just have a question, but it can wait."

Carpenter grinned. "So can the exam."

Alexander sat down and suddenly felt a little foolish. Discussing time travel with friends was the sort of intellectual masturbation that all students engaged in, but now he was about to talk to a professor about something that belonged in the realm of science fiction.

He hesitated and then asked, "Can we travel through time?"

Carpenter laughed and said, "Johnson’s lecture?"

Alexander nodded. "Yeah."

"Hawking, I think, views time as a continuum," said Carpenter. "You can enter it at any point, not unlike a movie on a continuous loop. When you walk in has no real relation to the beginning or the end of the movie. You can leave when you want and walk in later finding yourself nearer the beginning of the movie, or the end, depending."

Alexander smiled, not sure if he really understood, but, at least, he didn’t have to take notes and there would be no test to worry about.

"Others think of it as more like a hose that you need to wind into it’s carrier. In other words, there is a specific beginning and an end and you have to move forward just one way. You might say that you’re always moving into the future and you have no control over it."

Carpenter held up a hand and said, "I know what you’re thinking. Einstein and time dilation. But that is still a one way trip. You just move forward faster than your fellows and you can slow down to join them."

"Which tells me," said Alexander, "that you don’t think we can travel into the past."

Carpenter leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. "A couple of years ago I would have agreed with you, but there has been some thought, based on new theories about gravity, that suggest it might be possible to travel backwards."

"So then Doctor Johnson’s comment doesn’t make sense, or does it?"

"If you think of time as a continuum and that the future to us already exists in some fashion, then the question could easily be, ‘Where are the tourists?’ But if it is more linear, then the future where they might invent time travel hasn’t arrived yet, so the answer is, the tourists haven’t left yet."

"Unless, of course, this isn’t our first go around," said Alexander, not sure exactly what he meant.

"Well, we know that time dilation works," said Carpenter, "and as we learn more about the nature of gravity, we begin to alter our concepts of time and travel through it. But as it stands right now, we have no evidence that travel back works and certainly no evidence that anyone has."

"What sort of evidence would you look for?" asked Alexander.

"For time dilation, the experimental evidence already exists. If you are looking for something more tangible about time travel into the past, I would think you’d want to examine archaeology. That might turn up something."

Alexander thought, "We’re back to the Out of Place Artifacts." He said nothing though, just nodded.

"Anything else?" asked Carpenter.

Alexander stood up. "No. I’ll let you get back to writing your exam."

"If you have any other questions, let me know."

* * *

Alexander walked slowly back to the dorm, thinking that he was just wasting time. He allowed an off-hand remark by a professor in a core course distract him. He shouldn’t be chasing information on time travel, or attempting to search for evidence of it. Instead, he should be doing research for a paper or studying for one of his classes, or finding out what Sara was doing. Time travel should stay in science fiction where it belonged, not dogging him on campus.

When he got back to the dorm, his roommate was gone, but he had left on the TV, the DVD, and the coffee pot, not to mention every light in the place. The man never turned off anything. It was almost as if he owned stock in the power company.

Alexander turned it all off and then sat down in front of his computer. He typed in Out of Place Artifacts and came up with all sorts of hits. There were iron nails found in granite, but the circumstances suggested the nails might have been hammered into the stone rather than the stone forming around it. There were links of a gold chain found inside coal which was interesting until he learned that a coin, dated 1397 had fallen out of a lump of coal in England. It was clearly a manufactured item and it was found inside the coal, but the date didn’t suggest anything extraordinary.

He learned of a road found in Colorado under ten feet of sand in a region that hadn’t been inhabited by anyone who would have been building roads, but the "road" looked more like the remains of a dried up river bed than something of human construction.

With some excitement he read about a bullet hole in the skull of an long extinct beast. This was the sort of thing he had been wanting to find. Evidence of a technology that was far beyond that of the time when the animal was killed. Hunters from the future playing out their blood lust in the past. This was the stuff of science fiction but it might also be the stuff of science fact in the future.

But he learned that not everyone interpreted the hole in the skull as a bullet hole. There were more mundane explanations for it, and those explanations were more logical and more likely than a bullet hole.

There was something that looked like a sparkplug found inside a geode. If true, then the sparkplug was half a million years old. The problem was that the sparkplug was identified as having been manufactured in 1920 and the geode might not have been a geode. In other words, Alexander realized, it wasn’t the proof for which he searched.

After hours on the Internet, looking at site after site, after seeing the same items written about endlessly, he realized there was nothing definitive in what he found and therefore no proof. If the proof existed, he would have to go into the field to find it and an undergraduate didn’t have the money to make those sorts of trips even if he could figure out where to go and what to look for.

He stood up and looked out into the growing darkness of the late evening. There were students walking between buildings and a game of rugby going on in the field across the street. The lights were just coming on.

The door opened and he expected his roommate but Sara walked in, glanced at him and then moved directly to the bed. She sat down, looking shaky.

"What’s the matter with you?" he asked, somewhat annoyed.

She looked up at him as if surprised to hear his voice in his room.

She said, "I’ve just come from the library. I was in the Special Collections section."

"So?"

She stared at him. "I think you should come with me. I think you need to see this."

Without a word he walked to the door.

* * *

The Special Collections were held in a large room on the top floor of the library. In the hallway outside the room were display cases showing some of the more interesting items such as a Civil War journal by a soldier killed on Little Round Top that had a hole in the top of it, photographs taken by a student who had served in the First World War and a large collection of NASA materials that demonstrated the university’s participation in space exploration.

Sara grabbed the door and pulled it open. Since she worked, part time, in the Special Collections, no one stopped her to ask her reason for being there. She took Alexander by the hand, lead him through the large reading room and into the back which looked like a smaller version of the Bound Periodicals but that didn’t have the windows or lighting. The air conditioning was set to maintain a temperature of 72 and the humidity was regulated.

She stopped near a small table and pulled on a couple of cotton gloves. She said, "You’ll need to wear gloves if you want to touch anything."

Alexander took a pair of gloves but didn’t put them on.

She directed him to a small work room in the back. There was a table in the center of it, a light on a long pole that could be moved around and directed at a specific place, a magnifier and a stack of old books.

She pointed and said, "Willed to the university. We have to look through them and supply the estate with an estimate of their worth."

"You do that?"

"No, I just catalog the books, give a description, and then one of the librarians looks at the lists to see if there is anything unusual or rare on it. Most of the time it’s just old books that have no real value other than sentimental for the owners."

"I didn’t know this place existed," said Alexander.

"Not many do. Over in the vault area there are some books of real value. I mean one of a kind type things that are hundreds of years old and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to collectors."

Alexander pulled out one of the chairs and dropped into it. "What have you got?" he asked.

"I know that you’ve been searching for proof of time travel," she said.

He laughed and asked, "And you found it in this library?"

She didn’t like his tone and shot him a look. Then she said, "We got a collection in a couple of months ago and we’ve just gotten around to looking at it. Nothing spectacular, though I think there is a first edition of Poe that is worth quite a lot of money."

Alexander looked at the stack of books. They had gold-lined pages and the spines on some were broken and flaking. He saw one that was set aside that looked old but did not fit in with the other books.

The cover was colorful but the pages were stained with age.

Sara touched it with a gloved hand and pushed it toward him. The title was A Brief History of the 21st Century.

"Look at the copyright date," she said.

Alexander did and said, "It’s a typo."

"They don’t make typos like that," said Sara.

"I saw a book once called The Galactic Silver Star and they had misspelled galactic on the spine. Two Ls."

"They don’t make typos on the title page. Look at it."

He slipped on the cotton gloves and opened it to a color picture of American soldiers standing beneath the crossed swords of the Baghdad parade grounds. He recognized the picture from the news.

He saw a picture of the twin towers on fire and another of a space craft on Mars with a caption about it’s construction in California. There was a picture of a smoking downtown San Francisco that was reminiscent of the 1906 earthquake but the picture was in color and was dated 2025.

He looked up at her and said, "I don’t get it."

She rolled her eyes as if he was being obtuse. "That book reports on what happened in the 21st Century."

"So someone put out a book of predictions about what would happen and included stuff from the beginning of the century. Stuff that already happened."

"No, they didn’t. Look at the pages. They’re aged. The paper is old. This book was in with other books that were more than a hundred years old."

"Someone was playing a joke like those newspapers you see at fairs. Put a fake headline on it. Hell, today anyone with Photoshop can fake pictures and make them so real it’s impossible to prove they’re faked."

"You don’t get it do you?" she said.

"Get what?"

"That’s your proof. It’s not a book of predictions of what’s going to happen. It’s a book about important locations where things have already happened."
　
"It’s just some gimmick that was put together for a joke."

Sara shook her head sadly. She glanced at him and then the book and said,"This is what you wanted. This is your proof."

He looked at her astonished. "How is it my proof?"

"It’s a list of historic places to visit. It’s what those tourists that Hawking and Johnson and you have been talking about need. A way to find their way around in the past. It’s the Triple A guidebook from the future. It’s your proof."

He looked at her and then at the book. He felt chills along his spine as he reached out to touch the book. She was right. Time travel did exist and the tourists had been spotted.

On the Second Tuesday of Next Week - Chapter 1

2010-09-07T12:38:00.000-07:00

(Note: This is the first chapter of the time travel novel, On the Second Tuesday of Next Week. The rest of the book is available only on Amazon's Kindle. You can find it there using the novel's title. If you decide to purchase the rest of the book - Why thank you. If not, you have a sample of it here. Thanks for dropping by. KDR)
　
　
　
Chapter One
　
1.

Captain Jack Ellis stood at the hatch leading to the darkened, empty hangar deck and was overwhelmed by a feeling of deja vu. He thought that he had done it all before, and, of course he had. First in training, and then on active missions, and now, at the beginning of a combat patrol with the enemy ships out there, somewhere in the night.

Like most of his fellow pilots, both male and female, Ellis was young, just barely twenty-six. Unlike them, he was burly and tall, almost six three, which made it a tight squeeze into the cockpit. His hair, like that of his fellows, both male and female was cut short, only about half an inch long, which meant the helmet, with its electrodes, was a tighter, better fit. He didn’t like his hair cut so short, but longer hair sometimes interfered with the contacts, shorting them out in high stress situations when the perspiration soaked him and he needed the best the combat computers had to offer.

As he stood there, looking at the single and dual seat craft, the overhead lights suddenly brightened. Now, at the far end, tucked into a corner of the hangar bay near the main battle door, the lights of the control room came on. Behind the thick, debris resistant glass, were the men and women who would control the launch. They were all dressed in light gray coveralls and all wore tiny headsets with almost invisible thread microphones. They began to take their places behind the main consoles that held view screens and computer readouts, and sensor arrays.

A voice behind him asked, "You going in, or are you just part of the hatch?"

Ellis recognized the voice of Jim Jensen, a Navy pilot who Ellis didn’t like very much. Jensen had a bad attitude, thought that only the Navy knew how to operate in space, and often expressed his feelings that Air Force pilots should have stayed on Earth where they belonged. After all, there is no air in space.

He turned. As usual, Jensen’s gray Navy uniform was sweat stained under the arms. Jensen’s head glistened with sweat and his hair, short like everyone’s, was damp. He looked as if he had come from the shower and hadn’t bothered with a towel. Even the climate control on the ship couldn’t defeat Jensen’s perspiration.

"No," said Ellis. "I was just about to enter."

"Well, have at it, my man. There is fighting to be done today."

"You don’t have to sound so happy about it," said Ellis.

"Why not? This is what it is all about. This is what we’ve trained to do. This is why we joined up. I’m glad to get the opportunity. Finally."

Ellis shook his head in disbelief. Jensen sounded like the officers from the old Civil War. On for a promotion or a grave. On for a brevet or a coffin or on for the glory of the unit, at any cost. He had hoped that his generation was more enlightened than those of his great grandfather’s great grandfather. He hoped they had discovered that there rarely was glory in war, but the lesson had gone unlearned.

Before he was forced to reply, the other pilots swarmed onto the flight deck through a variety of hatches. He watched them move among the craft of dark composition materials, absorbing some of the sound they made.

Jensen slapped him on the shoulder and said, "This is it."

Ellis shrugged off Jensen’s hand and stepped forward, through the hatch. He walked across the hard metal of the flight deck and reached his fighter. It was a small ship, only about fifteen feet long, four or five feet wide, and made of a dark composition of carbon, plastic, and very little metal. There were no sharp angles on it to reflect radar, no shiny surfaces to pick up and reflect starlight, and baffles around the engine that dispersed the energy to reduce the heat signature, though in the cold of space, that was nearly impossible.

The canopy stood open so that he could climb in. His helmet was hung on the back of his seat. He grabbed it, fitted it to his head carefully, feeling the electrodes as they touched his scalp along the top and sides of his head.

Ellis put his foot up, into the small cutout on the side of the ship, and stepped up and in, onto the center of the cockpit seat. He then moved forward and sat down, struggling to push his body into position so that his feet were against the thruster pedals and his hands could reach the various electronic, radio, sensor and weapons controls. He wiggled a couple of times until the seat seemed to mold itself to his body and he was comfortable in his fighter.

The heads-up display, the HUD, setting directly in front of him, brightened, seeming to hang in midair. The holographic images were color-coded to show his own fleet and its swarm of tiny craft, and that of the enemy, still several hundred thousand miles away, but closing fast.

Ellis touched the trigger that would ignite the engine, but didn’t pull it. He moved his hand and allowed the canopy to close so that now he was encased in his ship, almost as if he was wearing it. He closed his eyes for a moment and leaned back, against the soft, yielding mass of the head rest and waited for the rally signal.

The lights on the hangar deck dimmed and then slowly turned to dark red. It changed the look of everything around him, making the other ships into dark gray lumps that seemed to have no shape or design. Tiny lights, red and green, flashed on as the ships began to start their engines. The main battle door shimmered and disappeared, revealing, beyond it, a sea of stars, and to the right, low, almost impossible to see, the crescent shape of Pluto and near it, Clarion. The other two, smaller moons were lost in the distance or the glow of the dwarf planet.

Ellis touched the switch for the flight command frequency. "Give me a quick commo check."

"Two," said Linda Schaffer, who was about the same age as Ellis, but had spent an extra year in civilian training so that she understood more about aeronautical and electrical engineering than he did, as it applied to space flight.

"Three." That was Jason Horn, a very young man who had finished flight training and had only just completed his combat check ride. He seemed immature and Ellis had to remind himself that Horn was only twenty-two.

"Four." Karen Davis who had been transferred over from another flight so that Ellis didn’t know her all that well. She was nearly as tall as he but was much thinner. She didn’t have to struggle so hard to fit into the fighter.

"Five." Tom Williams was the old man of the flight at twenty-eight. He had started out in a civilian college but then had decided that the military was for him and switched over losing a couple of years of credits. He was a small man with dark hair and large ears that stuck out like jug handles.

"Six," said Roger Douglas. He was an old pro of twenty-five who was given the last slot so that he could watch what the others were doing and offer them criticisms. No one liked him because he was too good at the job and let everyone know just how good he thought he was.

Ellis switched to the company frequency and said, "Raptor is ready."

With empty minutes to fill, Ellis closed his eyes and thought about the final briefing held late the night before. It had been a grim affair with the commanding general standing to one side of the podium as expert after expert had provided the bad news about the enemy. The normal joking disappeared as the facts and figures had been presented. The Denebians had them outclassed and outnumbered in every category. Their big fleet carriers were larger than those of Earth, carried more fighters or attack ships, and had better overall protection. They were almost impossibly difficult to detect in space because of their stealth capabilities. They were faster and better armed. Although, according to the experts, the enemy force wasn't absolutely overwhelming, it was close enough that no one in the human fleet was expected to survive to the end of the week. This included those who would not be taking a direct part in the fighting, but those who remained on the fleet carriers in various support capacities. Although no one said it, it was clear the brass hats were thinking in terms of a suicide mission that might dely the Denebian invasion long enough for the Earth to prepare a better defense.

Ellis, with the other flight commanders, sat around the huge table that looked to have been made of the finest mahogany and inlaid with dark marble. There had been a bottle of beer at each place, a PDA that no one was expected to use and roster of the replacement pilots available in case a flight commander was short a crew or two.

Over the center of the table, in a huge holographic display were pictures of the approaching enemy taken by remote controlled drones and tiny cameras scattered in their path as they approached the Solar System. It showed the enemy ships in a spherical formation that allowed them to create interlocking fields of fire and to protect one another during an attack. An assault on one ship would draw the fire of half a dozen others, reducing the chance of success for the attacker, not to mention the chance of survival.

At the center of the fleet, screened by smaller, dark ships that were probably little more than weapons platforms were the equivalent of the Earth’s fleet carriers. These were large, oval-shaped ships that could hold a hundred or two hundred of the smaller fighters used to break up the formations so that the destroyers or cruisers could get into attack the main body of the fleet. Ellis wasn’t so much intimidated by the size of the fleet carriers as he was by the number of ships in the formation. The foe had spent a great deal of economic wealth in creating the fleet and then sending it so far to attack Earth.

Once they had gotten a good look at the size of the enemy fleet, the leader of the free Earth had appeared in the holographic display. She stood about three feet tall, and was framed by the commanders of the Combined Headquarters and the Ground Assault Force. Her voice was high and annoying as she said, in her recorded, holographic message, "We are expecting great things from you all in the next few days. Never have so many owed so much to so few. Thank you."

She winked out of existence as Ellis identified the quote as a paraphrase of Winston Churchill made during War Two and said at the conclusion of a success rather than as a prelude to a failure.

The end of the briefing had been classic. The commanding general, his head bowed and his voice choked with emotion told them of the great defenses of history. The Spartans at Thermopylae, the Texicans at the Alamo, the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. All had been heroic holding actions that provided time for those at home to create an army or assemble reinforcements. What the general didn't mention was that the Spartans and Texicans had been massacred, and the 101st had been so badly mauled that they had operationally ceased to exist. Death was the reward for those who had been placed on the firing line.

As they had filed from the briefing theater, the general had reminded them that the contents of the briefing were highly classified. In the past Ellis had laughed at that. How would they tell the enemy even if they had wanted? But this time the general was telling them not to discuss it with the rest of the flight crews. This was a secret to be kept from their own people or the morale would plummet because it was clear that no one expected them to survive, let alone win.

Then, in another gesture of support, the general stood in the hatch and shook the hand of every one of the flight commanders as he or she left the conference room. That was almost as frightening as the facts given during the briefing.

The company radio crackled suddenly, breaking into his thoughts. "Let’s get ready to launch."

Near the main battle doors, the first flight lifted to about two feet above the deck and as one, slide forward. The lead ship jumped ahead, and disappeared out the battle door, the five other ships assigned to him, following. A second flight fell in behind the first.

Ellis said, "Raptors," and lifted his ship carefully. He slide toward the door without glancing at his display, knowing that his flight was behind him. As he crossed the threshold, he dived, relative to the big fleet carrier, and then broke down and to his right.

Spread out behind him, almost invisible to him, was the rest of the Earth Fleet. The ships had been called in from all parts of the galaxy, leaving human colonies on Tau Ceti, Epilson Eridani and Groombridge 1618 unprotected. Not that the fleets there had been particularly big to begin with or that they had been there for the protection of the colonists.

Around him, the other flights, made up of small craft, some that carried a single nuclear weapon, winked out as they turned off their lights and began masking their intentions. Stealth became the way to work as they searched for the enemy ships which would be surrounded by clouds of fighters.

They raced through space, the signals on the heads up becoming stronger. Ellis glanced out the cockpit window. His flight was still strung out behind him, right where it was supposed to be, just as it was displayed on the HUD.

"Check your heads up," said Schaffer in Number Two.

The Denebian fleet seemed to come apart at that moment. The huge, flashing red shapes of their fleet carriers fragmented as hundreds of smaller craft were launched. No where around him were the comforting orange of his fleet or yellow of the his fighter cover. He was facing the might of the Denebian invasion force, apparently alone.

As they closed on the enemy fleet, the Denebian fighters dived on them from above the plain of the ecliptic. Schaffer spun the control on her laser cannon, aligning her sights on the lead fighter. She keyed the mike. "Here they come."

Number Three, Jason Horn, echoed her words, "Here they come."

Ellis ignored them both, now concentrating on the gigantic enemy carrier in front of him. He scanned the heads up, checked the range and heard the warbling tone that told him his missiles had found a target, barely in range. To himself he kept repeating, "Keep them off me. Keep them off me."

"Let's hammer them," said Horn.

Almost everyone in space around him opened fire at the same instant, the beams flashing. An enemy fighter exploded into a short-lived ball of orange fire. The rest of the enemy swarmed around, firing rapidly, but failing to stop the attack.

"They're on us."

"I got one."

"Coming in from the twelve o'clock relative. Half dozen. Turning to engage."

"Negative," said Ellis. "Maintain unit integrity."

Ellis shifted slightly, pushed forward on the controls. Enemy fighters filled space around him, firing at his flight. Ellis shot back, launched an anti-ship missile and saw it spiral out of control.

"They're coming in from behind," said Schaffer. Her voice was high and tight.

Ellis ignored that too, twisting in the seat so that he could look behind him. The heads up was showing enemy all around. Bright spots sparkled and disappeared as individual ships were destroyed and pilots died.

The heads up was filled with enemy fighters. A half dozen of them swooped in. One of them disappeared suddenly, and then a second. Schaffer was using her laser cannon effectively, as were others in the flight. Space was filled with the bright beams as they danced around like the colored spray from a fire hose.

"We'll take the center carrier," said Ellis. "Concentrate on the center carrier."

Ellis touched the controls, spinning his ship on its axis so that he was now flying backwards. He used the thrusters, slowed the sudden retreat and then accelerated. One of the enemy fighters passed in front of him and Ellis snapped a shot at him. The beam sliced through the enemy ship like a knife taking the top off a soft boiled egg. There was a brilliant shimmer as the fuel exploded and the enemy was gone.

Spinning again, Ellis tried to find the remainder of his flight, but they were now scattered through space. The furball grew around the enemy as the ships engaged one another hiding the small, individual battles. The lights on the HUD were mixed. The pilots of the fighters and attack craft searched for one another as the Earth force tried to penetrate the Denebian outer defenses, taking the attack to them rather than waiting for it to near them.

Now the weapons on the Denebian carrier opened fire, the whole side seeming to erupt. Missiles and beams slashed through space. The Denebians were attempting to create a wall of hard radiation to kill Ellis' pilots and disrupt and detonate anything they tried to shoot through it.

The wave of radiation passed them but the shielding of the ships protected them. The Denebian fighters turned on them again. At the edge of his flight, two ships vanished in bright flashes of flame. A third was crippled, the ship dropping away from the flight, spinning wildly. Someone had squeezed a mike button and broadcast the scream until it was abruptly cut off. He thought it might have been Horn, but he didn’t know.

Now there was no chatter among the Earth ships. Each of the pilots was too busy trying to stay alive. Each engaged in tiny battles. Ellis felt his vision, and attention, narrow to a tunnel directly in front of him.

From far on the left appeared another flight. Space seemed to explode in that direction. A bright expanding cloud flared briefly and then disappeared. There was a single scream, like a war whoop, as the ships appeared, and then vanished in brilliant flashes of flame and light.

Ellis wasn't sure what happened. His attention was on the enemy ship directly in front of him. The sides of it were sparkling as it fired and took hits from beams and missiles. And then, suddenly, he was back in range, good, solid tones on all weapons. Ellis fired four nuclear tipped torpedoes, hesitated and then slavoed his missiles. As the weapons jumped clear, Ellis pushed forward on his control, looping down and away from the enemy.

Out of the corner of his eye he caught a flash and knew that another friend had just died. Ignoring that, he spiraled down as one more of the ships with him exploded. He knew that many had died, he just didn't know it had been almost all of them.

Schaffer, watching the scene on her sensors, suddenly screamed, "We hit him. We hit him bad."

Ellis glanced at the heads up, changed channels and focused on the Denebian carrier ahead of him. Torpedoes somehow jinked their way through the enemy defenses, hit the front end and crushed the big hangar doors. One of the torpedoes flew through the wreckage there and exploded inside the giant ship. The carrier stopped for an instant, shook itself like an overweight, drunken dinosaur and then flew apart in a brilliant flash of bright red light and a spreading cloud of glowing, twinkling debris, bodies, and broken equipment.

"That's it," shouted Schaffer. "We got him."

But Ellis didn't feel the joy. He had realized that he was nearly alone. His flight was long gone. "Forget it, Linda," he said tiredly, ignoring standard radio procedure. "It doesn't matter now."

Denebian fighters swarmed around the fleet carrier wreckage like angry bees from a ruined hive. They were targeting everything larger than a snowball. They were going to destroy all the Earth Defense Force craft and kill every human they could find before attacking the rest of the Earth fleet.

Ellis kept his camouflage on flat black, and then turned off all the internal equipment that could radiate any type of signal. He cut the engines to reduce the infrared signature and to disrupt the ion trail. He let the ship drift away from the battle, masquerading as another dead hulk.

From nowhere Denebian fighters appeared, angling down toward him. It was obvious that he had been found, and he fired his engines, kicking the ship back, toward his own fleet and apparent safety.

A bright red laser beam flashed, hit the rear of his ship, and cut through the armor plating near the thrusters. It felt as if he had been hit with a brick thrown by a hurricane. Ellis was slammed against the seatbelt and shoulder harness in the sudden acceleration. Instinctively he grabbed at the instrument panel to brace himself.

Ellis scanned the instruments. A single warning light was blinking. He punched a button and the light winked out. All systems and weapons were still operational, but the ship was slowing rapidly. Forward momentum had been absorbed in the energy of the hit.

He drifted to a stop, momentarily dead in space. The Denebians, closed for the kill, buzzed him as if examining him, and then broke off the attack. They passed without firing again, leaving him alone, far below the plane of the ecliptic.

For a moment Ellis sat quietly, his eyes on the heads up. His flight now gone but Denebian fighters were everywhere. They were attacking the various flights from the Earth fleet. The small yellow lights were winking out rapidly. Much too rapidly. The enemy fleet dominated the heads up.

Adding power, Ellis began to limp away from the point of attack, lost in the confusion of the fight. Ellis dropped down, relative to his ship, away from the enemy and the plane of the ecliptic. He tried to understand what was happening behind him.

A Denebian caught him about a thousand klicks from the battle. He made one pass, firing rapidly, and then spun away. Ellis fought to control his ship. Something exploded behind him. He was slammed forward again as another explosion rocked the front of him. Something slashed into his shoulder and pain flared hot and bright. He tried to turn and was unable to do it. A red fog grew in front of his eyes and he could see nothing around him.

The heads up was blank. He didn't know where the enemy was or where safety was. He shoved the throttles and felt a rumbling behind him that was not quite right. His speed increased slightly and he turned, trying to find his way clear.

Outside, the battle seemed to have ended. Ellis didn't know what had happened. The heads up was blank. He was flying blind, moving away from the enemy. That was all he knew for sure.

Again he tried the flight frequency but there was no response. When he tried to twist in his seat, he thought he would pass out. He sat up straight, not moving, trying to find the fleet. He squeezed the mike button tightly, cracking it and then shattering it. He whispered into the radio but there was no answer.

Ellis was now afraid to move. The pain in his shoulder grew, burning hot and flaring brightly so that it affected his chest and upper body and made him dizzy. He wanted help, needed it badly, but couldn’t raise anyone on the radio. He wasn’t sure where he was, where the fleet was, or where the enemy was. He was disoriented, sick, and almost unable to think.

Then, as the ship rotated slowly, he spotted Pluto, now a giant glowing ball rising from the left. Without thinking, he touched a pedal, felt a slight vibration, and watched as the nose of his fighter came down, centering on Pluto. Without thinking about it, he leveled the ship, bottom toward the planet’s surface, and tried to enter orbit, flying almost as if he was in an airplane.

As he entered orbit, he flipped on the nav aids, but there was no response from them. He punched the emergency transmit button, hoping that its signal was strong enough to be detected. Hoping that there was a signal to be detected. Then on the horizon, he saw the bright lights of the human outpost. He pushed the nose of the ship toward it, cut the power and tried to drop the several thousand feet to the ground.

He saw the outpost rushing toward him but it looked unreal, ghostly and tinged with red. Suddenly it seemed he was standing in a deep cave staring up, into a cloudless bright sky that was slowly changing to overcast.

He lost sight of the outpost, of the lights and even Pluto. To him it was strange because they had been there only minutes before. He looked around wildly, or thought he did, but saw nothing. Now there was only blackness, but not of space because he could see no stars or planets, or even the enemy fleet.

One More Time

2008-11-18T11:06:00.000-08:00

The sun was just setting, touching the horizon but the street lights were already burning and downtown Memphis had a just rained-on brightness about it. Deep colors reflected from wet sidewalks, streets, and standing puddles. The radio was filled with static as they announced the assassin had managed to wound Ronald Reagan after all.

This news, the wet pavement, the approaching darkness and an already long day behind the wheel caused James Bonham to search for a place to stay. The "no vacancy" signs were glaring everywhere it seemed and he wished he had planned his trip a little better.

On a side street, away from the flow of traffic, tucked away among a stand of ancient oaks, Bonham saw a small hotel with a small, nearly invisible sign, a large, white-pillared front porch that looked as if it belonged in another time, and a tiny parking lot devoid of cars. Bonham pulled in, parked and got out, walking across the gravel to the front door he wondered where the asphalt had gone.

Inside, the lobby had the overstuffed look and musty smell that made Bonham think of the Victorian era. No color TV in the lobby, no sign of telephones, and only a few lights that could have been gas rather than electric.

Behind the ornate front desk was a clerk who looked as if he belonged to that same era. He wore a vest, had long, slicked back hair, and a pocket watch on a chain. At least Bonham assumed that there was a pocket watch at the end of the chain.

Renting a room took no time. There weren’t many but almost all of them were vacant. The lack of a big, neon sign, the lack of easy access to the Interstate, and the old, rustic look conspired to keep the tourists away. Bonham didn’t care. He just wanted a place to sleep for a few hours.

When he had paid for the room, the clerk said, "If you’ll wait for a moment sir, I’ll by happy to help you with your luggage."

Bonham shook is head and said, "That’s okay. I’ve only got a small duffle bag."

He walked back out to the parking lot and saw that the clouds were gathering to rain again. He was suddenly glad that he had stopped. When he had his duffel bag, he walked back into the hotel and found the elevator.

It was certainly out of place. The doors gleamed like buffed aluminum. Above the door were ruby numbers that somehow reminded Bonham of a computer, or rather the computers he’d seen in the movies.

As he stood there inspecting the doors and lights, the doors opened and Bonham automatically stepped back, out of the way for the occupants. But there was no one on the elevator.

On the panel by the door, Bonham saw buttons numbered one through six but the hotel hadn’t looked tall enough for six stories. To the right were rows of unnumbered buttons.

Bonham had the urge to see what was up on the sixth floor so he pushed the top button.

There was no feeling of movement. The door opened at once and Bonhan expected to see the lobby again. But, instead, there was a brightly lighted corridor that was carpeted in a white shag. Bonhan stepped forward and looked both ways. Nothing but bright, white corridor. He couldn’t see the ends but what he could see was bright and seemed to glow with a white light.

Bonham, confused, stepped back and pushed one of the unmarked buttons. The doors closed and then opened immediately. The corridor was gone, replaced by sunlit green. In the distant were trees and the sky was such a deep blue that Bonham was lured out of the elevator. He didn’t notice it shimmer briefly and then disappear, leaving him standing in an open field in the middle of nowhere.

Before he realized that he was standing in an empty field, he noticed something hovering overhead. It made no noise and it didn’t look like any helicopter he had ever seen. It just hung in the air, silently, stealthily.

A man appeared to his right but Bonham hadn’t seen him approaching. He said something in a language that sounded familiar but Bonham couldn’t quite understand the words. It was like seeing a billboard through a thick fog. He could almost read it but he couldn’t quite decipher it.

The man was short, stubby, bald, and wearing a one piece suit that had a metallic sheen.

As the man continued to talk, Bonham pointed to his ears and then shook his head. When it was clear that Bonham was not going to respond, the man reached out and took Bonham’s elbow, moving him forward.

At the same time, the craft descended and touched down on the grass. There was no wind from it and no noise. Bonham allowed himself to be led to the craft and when a door opened, he climbed in, never wondering why he was allowing this to happen.

They lifted off, climbed up and through the windshield he could see a small city. As they approached, Bonham noticed there wasn’t a straight line anywhere. The walls of the buildings were curved, the windows were round and the doors oval. Nothing stood over three stories and all had been painted in pastels with wide greenbelts meandering everywhere.

They landed on a rooftop. Without any direction, Bonham stepped out of the craft. The man said something but Bonhan still couldn’t understand.

They walked to a door way, down a flight of stairs and into a large room filled with people. Most were dressed in a variety of the metallic cloth, some looking like togas, some like jumpsuits, and a few looking as if the wearer had just wrapped the material around him or herself. All were bald, both men and women.

It looked as if he had entered some kind of cocktail party with everyone jabbering in a foreign language. He was handed a drink but he was reluctant to sip it, suddenly worried about the intentions of his hosts.

A woman in a short toga walked up to him and lead him to the window where he could look down on the street. If it hadn’t been for the strange buildings, Bonham would have thought he was back in Memphis. That was the first time he’d thought about the city since he’d stepped out of the elevator.

The woman said something and seemed to smile. Bonham, of course, didn’t understand. She waited and when he didn’t move, she took the drink from his hand and took a sip.

Bonham did understand that. She was telling him that there was nothing wrong with the drink. So, he took a stip. It tasted something like lemonade and was cold. He took another, deeper drink and said, "This is crazy."

The woman nodded as if she understood and then pointed to the street.

Bright sunlight was in his eyes. He blinked and held up a hand to block the light.

"Good Morning, Mister Bonham," said the desk clerk. "You gave us quite the fright last night. You should be more careful on the stairs. The doctor gave you something to sleep and said that you would wake up about now. How do you feel?"

Bonham felt the cobwebs thin a little but enough to realize that the clerk was talking too much. Telling him too much too fast. The first question should have been how do you feel and not some nonsense about stairs.

"I didn’t fall on the stairs. I don’t remember any stairs. I took the elevator."

Ignoring that, the clerk continued, "The doctor said that everything was okay. Nothing broken, only a bruise or two."

"I was not on the stairs."

"Yes, sir," said the clerk. "Are you planning to stay the night? You missed the check out time..." He chuckled. "Not that it matters. Everything is on the house."

Bonham took a deep breath and decided not to argue. He sat up, realized that he felt fine and said, "I guess I’ll move on."

"Splendid. We’re sure sorry about your fall. We’ve been meaning to fix those stairs. I hope this hasn’t inconvenienced you." He stood up, looked at his watch and then slipped it back into his vest pocket.

"I wasn’t on the stairs," said Bonham quietly, to the clerk’s retreating back.

He felt rested and knew that it had to be something in the drink. Bonham grinned at himself. He’d take anything from a pretty girl and do what she asked, regardless of the consequence. All she had to do was smile at him. Someday he’d learn better.

He got up, saw that he hadn’t taken anything out of his duffle, not even his shaving kit. So, he got it out and brushed his teeth, and then put everything back.

He left the room and down the hall he found the stairs and had to admit they looked treacherous. Near them was a wire enclosed elevator that looked as if it came from the same turn of the century world that made up the rest of the hotel. It didn’t look remotely like the one he had seen the day before.

Downstairs the clerk made a final attempt to convince him about the fall. Bonham ignored that, got his receipt that showed a credit to his credit card and left the hotel.

In less than fifteen minutes, he was back on the road out of Memphis. Late in the afternoon, it began to rain again.

He thought about the hotel and the elevator ride into a field and realized that a fall made more sense. Elevators didn’t take you to open fields near strange cities. It had seemed so real. He could smell the cleanliness of the air. He could taste that strange drink which was about the last thing he remembered. The woman who had taken a sip of his drink but hadn’t been affected by it.

No. It wasn’t just a fall. He was sure.

The rain was coming down harder now, just like yesterday. The entire sky was dark, except for a bright band near the horizon, just like yesterday. And the radio was reporting on the attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Just like yesterday.

A New Dwarf Planet

2008-10-08T14:07:00.000-07:00

This one I missed. I was scanning the Internet the other day and for fun, I thought I would see if some of those sites that still talk of nine planets in the Solar System had been updated (No, they haven’t), when I discovered that the number of dwarf planets had increased by one. It seems that the object, once called Santa, was now named Haumea and was the latest of the Kuiper Belt Objects (aka Plutoids) to reach dwarf planet status.

This is a strange one for a couple of reasons. First, Mike Brown and his Caltech team said that they had discovered it in December 2004 while looking at images taken on May 6, 2004. They published an online abstract on July 20, 2005 and were going to announce the discovery at a conference in September. Before this got much farther, Jose Luis Ortiz and his team at the Instituto de Andalucia in Spain said that he had found the object on pictures they had taken in March 2003.

Brown learned that Ortiz had accessed his, Brown’s, observation logs, and Brown thought that Ortiz had done that so that he could backtrack to his own images. Ortiz denied that, but did admit he had accessed the logs, simply to be sure that they weren’t observing an object already cataloged.

I don’t know who is right here, but I do know that in the end, Brown’s team named the new object for the Hawaiian goddess Haumea. On September 17, 2008, the IAU said that this name had been accepted. This would seem to be proof that the IAU had accepted Brown and his team as the discoverers.

The second strange thing is that Haumea is elongated. It is not spherical, which means that it falls outside one of the criterion for a dwarf planet. They are supposed to be able to reach equilibrium, or, in other words, have a gravitational field strong enough to pull it into a relatively spherical shape. Since it rotates on its axis about once every four hours, it’s spinning faster than any other known equilibrium body in the Solar System, so this might account for its strange shape and allows it to slide past this idea that dwarf planets must be relatively spherical.

This is not to mention the size. It’s about 1150 km in diameter or about half the size of Pluto and Eris, a little smaller than Makemake and about twice the size of Ceres.

Like two of the other Plutoids, Haumea has a couple of moons, named Hiiaka and Namaka. Hiiaka was discovered first and is thought to be about 310 km in diameter. Namaka is smaller, closer to the planet, and was discovered not long ago.

There are quite a number of other objects that are being considered for dwarf planet status, including one in the asteroid belt, Vesta, which would join Ceres as the only dwarf planets between Mars and Jupiter. And there are discussions that one of the Trans Neptune Objects, something like two light years from Earth, is the size of Mars. Once the observational data are complete, it will be interesting to see how the IAU handles that. Will we get another class of planet that accounts for those at the edge of the Solar System, out beyond Neptune?

They’re still trying to decide if Charon meets the criterion for dwarf planet. Charon might not be orbiting Pluto, but the two of them orbit a central point not unlike a double star, and if true, then Charon would fit the definition of dwarf planet and its status would upgraded.

As I say, there has been quite a bit of change to the Solar System in the last few years. Planets demoted, dwarf planets defined, and the possibility of a Mars-sized object halfway to the next star, which might make an interesting way station if we get to the point of launching interstellar flights and it’s on the right side of its orbit... a bit of science fiction to brighten our day.

Planet of the Apes

2008-04-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

(Blogger’s Note: I had hoped to contribute more to this blog more frequently. My plan was to list science fiction conventions, review books and movies, put up short stories, and maybe tease with the beginnings of a novel or two. Unfortunately, mundane world events conspire against me on this. I will attempt to write more from now on... but I make no promises. Thanks for checking in occasionally.)

The other night I was watching Planet of the Apes and I suddenly realized that Chuck Heston and the boys should have known they were on Earth the very first night there. Once they got a look at the night sky they might have suspected that it was Earth but once they saw the Moon, they would have known the truth, which ruins the big ending.

True, early on we’re told that there have been clouds each night, but in the day there is no evidence of this total overcast and in one scene we see the sun setting, some scattered clouds to give sky color, but no evidence of that total overcast. Not to mention that the Moon had be seen in the daytime.

And, remember, this is Earth so we can’t postulate some kind of a natural phenomenon that forms each night to obscure the stars and the Moon. Nope, this is what, in science fiction, we should think of as a fatal flaw. Everyone pretending that the planet is something other than Earth, but the very first time they, meaning the astronauts, saw the Moon, they would have known they truth.

This reminds me of something that Isaac Asimov once said about Alien. Everyone who reads science fiction understands the big flaw in that film... Why not put on your spacesuits and see how well the alien breathes in a vacuum...

And, while I’m on this kick, why not mention the big problem in Starship Troopers. Remember the fort they find with the humans inside slaughtered? And then they’re attacked by flying bugs? If you face that sort of a threat, and you’ve built a fort, why don’t you put a roof on it?

Or what about Pitch Black? Here’s a planet that has three suns and once every twenty years, they all align so that the planet has night. So what happens? Creatures that can’t tolerate the sun come out and feed on everything that dwells on the surface. But what sort of environmental pressures would encourage such a species to develop? I mean, they can only live out of the light but the light is only gone once in every twenty years. It seems that such a species would fail to evolve, given the environmental pressures and they certainly wouldn’t be able to take down everything that can live in the sun.

Anyway, I wanted to mention this, and while I believe I’m probably not the first to think of it, I did make the connection on my own. As a writer, I try to anticipate the questions the readers are going to ask and try to provide answers for them. Unfortunately, in Planet of the Apes, there really is no way to answer the question about the Moon. But, if they see it, then the whole scattering scene at the end collapses.

Wilson "Bob" Tucker 1914 - 2006

2007-09-19T14:04:00.000-07:00

Science Fiction conventions are a good place to meet the science fiction writers and one of the first I met was Bob Tucker. He was surrounded by fans, many of them young and female and some known as granddaughters. He held a White Owl cigar and a bottle of Beam’s Choice was being passed around. When everyone of legal age had a taste, we all yelled out, "Smooooooth!"

I had a chance to meet Bob Tucker at his home in Illinois after Bob Cornett and I had received another rejection for our novel Seeds of Doubt. We began to suspect it might be fundamentally flawed. We talked to Bob on the phone and he said he would be happy to meet with us to discuss the book. Such was the kindness of one of the old masters.

When we drove up, he met us at the door and before we could say a word to him, he said, "I have to tell you guys one thing."

Naturally, I suspected the worst. We had screwed up the book in some fashion. But no, Bob, said, "I really enjoyed the book. Which one of you is the helicopter pilot?"

We talked about the book and then we toured, okay, looked around his study. We saw the "Bobby Block Black Block" which looked to be a hunk of two by four that had been painted black and had come from Robert Bloch of Psycho fame. We saw the original of a comic strip that had featured Bob (Tucker... yeah there are a lot of Bobs running around in this). He showed us foreign editions of his books, even gave us a couple of signed volumes (as seen here) and we talked science fiction... and movies.

Bob had been a projectionist during his life. I remember talking about Zulu, a film that somehow became important in Science Fiction Fandom for a while and it appeared on the movie programs at many conventions (I once stayed up all night to see it ... it began at something like four in the morning and the room was packed). Bob Tucker remembered when it played at the theater where he was a projectionist. He said he seen it everyday for two weeks and didn't care to see it again.

I saw Bob at many conventions after that. Yes, he had his cigars, he had his Beam’s Choice and he had his business cards for "Natural Inseminations." But I never saw him take an unwanted liberty with anyone. I never saw him drunk. I just saw a man who enjoyed Science Fiction like the rest of us and wanted to share that enjoyment with as many as he could.

Yes, I knew about the "Tucker Transfer" which was a benefit to raise money so that Bob could attend the World Science Fiction Convention, I think, in England. Bob never made much money as a writer and he had children to raise. In fact, his son, Robert, was the "real Bob Tucker," and the writer we knew was Wilson Tucker.

Anyway Bob (Cornett) and I wrote a time travel novel we called Remember the Alamo? (But the publisher changed to Remember the Alamo! for some strange reason and it was published under that name... it’s the exclamation point she added). In it we used Bob Tucker’s name, and the lead scientist was meant as a tribute to him, and, of course, the time travel process was called "The Tucker Transfer."

Bob (Tucker) was always interested to hear how we, Bob (Cornett) and I were doing with our writing. Yes, the novel he had read for us, after nearly thirty rejections, and several offers to publish (David Hartwell wanted to buy it twice and lost his job both times... no, I don’t blame the book) Ace finally published as Seeds of War... I once explained to the editor why we had called it Seeds of Doubt and she said I should have told her sooner and she wouldn’t have changed the name...

In the last ten years or so, I didn’t make many Science Fiction conventions. Other things got in the way (George Bush called me to active duty for the War in Iraq for example) so that I didn’t see much of Bob Tucker. I knew his health was getting bad and that he had been forced to give up cigars and Beam’s Choice, but not his love of Science Fiction or Fandom.

I was at home when friends from St. Louis called with the sad news that Bob had died. They asked that I call Bob Cornett because they had been unable to reach him. Bob Cornett called me a day later with the same sad news.

I never understood why Bob’s books hadn’t been better received in Science Fiction. He was a superb writer who understood the craft. Some of his books are classics. Maybe it was his slow output, or maybe it was his rather laid back presence. I don’t know. I do know that there isn’t a book of his I ever gave up on and I know that they hold there own in today’s world... okay, Year of the Quiet Sun is outdated because it is a look at the future of our world at the turn of the century and we have passed that now... but the story still works well and the ending is a surprise.

For those interested in this sort of thing, he was born on November 23, 1914 in Deer Creek, Illinois and died on October 6, 2006 in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was married twice, the first ending in divorce and the second when his wife, Fern, died in 2006.

He retired as a projectionist in 1972 and as a writer in 1981 with the publication of Resurrection Days.

He was a fine writer, a good friend and I regret that I waited until nearly the first anniversary of his death to say any of this.

The Exploration Chronicles

2007-09-16T10:30:00.000-07:00

One of my goals in life was to become a Science Fiction writer. I have had limited success with this, publishing a number of books but only a couple of short stories. I have come close with some stories, but somehow haven’t really broken through into that arena. Here, now, I can publish those stories and maybe find out if I was right about them or if Science Fiction Fandom doesn’t agree.

But I digress. I do have copies of my books and offer them for sale here. First up is the series known as Exploration and made up of the books, Signals, Starship, FTL and The Gate. The series looks at various ways to explore the galaxy, taking into account some of the problems faced by science.

The books retailed at $6.99, but I’ll let them go at five bucks each with five bucks for shipping and handling (and for those of you keeping score at home, that five bucks pays for the envelop and the postage). You can have all four for twenty bucks, but only have to spring for shipping and handling for one, or for a total of twenty-five bucks.

If you would like them signed, please let me know who to make it out to, and if you would like something specific written in the book, let me know. I’m game for nearly anything... but please note, I said nearly anything.

And no, I don’t make a lot of money on this, but see it as a way of introducing my work to a wider audience. And hey, you might enjoy the stories. Thanks.

Send you check or money order to:

Kevin D. Randle
PO Box 10934
Cedar Rapids, IA 52410

Time Chute

2007-09-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

It was supposed to be a matter transmitter and in fact, the transmitter worked quite well. Everything I put into it disappeared in a burst of shimmering light that surrounded and then engulfed.

But nothing reappeared. In the receiver I could almost see the screen of flickering electro-magnetism that was supposed to trap and reassemble the objects but which did neither. And nothing I did helped.

The glass of milk vanished completely and I wondered if that was because it was an organic compound that might confuse the receiver. But the folded newspaper that I hadn’t taken time to read disappeared as completely and I wasn’t sure if there had been any organic compounds in either the paper or the ink. The metal ashtray, a relic from another era, and the small polished stone never reappeared even though I left the machine operating for an hour burning up enough electricity to illuminate a star.

I knew that eventually I would solve the problem and teleportation would move from science fiction into science fact just as trips to the moon and planets had done so long ago. The problem was that I didn’t have all that much time left because the government research grant was running out. If there wasn’t something to give them, if there weren’t some positive results, I would spent the next several years filling out papers explaining why my project had cost so much, why it had failed so miserably and why I shouldn’t be charged with fraud. The sandals of the last years from Watergate to Halliburton made Congress suspicious of all research projects funded by the government, especially those that failed.

When the white porcelain nude failed to appear, even after I had gone to the expense of shielding the lab to block all extraneous signals that might compromise the experiments, I was ready to quit. The shielding had broken the budget.

I ran a hand through my hair, realized, once again that it seemed to be thinning at an accelerating rate, and moved slowly to the table piled high with research notes. This failure was particularly unpleasant because it meant that I had run out of ideas.

Flipping through the stack, I climbed on a stool. Resting my elbows on the smooth obsidian surface, I reviewed the math and could still see nothing wrong with it.

The math was right. Or, at least, half of it was right. The transmitter transmitted. If only the receiver would receive. There was always the possibility that the objects would reappear after several days or weeks, having blasted into space to be somehow reflected, but that meant it would no longer be real teleportation. Besides, that really didn’t make any sense.

Elizabeth Anderson, the graduate student who was helping pay for her education as a research assistant, brought in the hot coffee. I was tempted to put it into the transmitter, make some adjustments and try again, but I needed the coffee more than I needed another failure.

Liz shifted the stack of papers, CDs an DVDs from the other stool and sat down. Although she had just come from glass, she was already wearing the white lab coat. She set her coffee on the table, putting it on a paper so that she wouldn’t mark the obsidian, as if she could. I cringed wondering why she couldn’t be that careful with the notes.

As she crossed her legs and put one hand in her coat pocket, she noticed my expression and said, "Missed again, huh?"

From someone else that would have been insulting, but she had the ability to make her voice reflect her concern. Instead of anger, I sort of felt like laughing.

"Yup. Failed again."

"And now what?"

I glanced at the piles of papers that looked more like a snow drift sprinkled with shiny silver disks than a carefully thought out filing system and said, "I guess we take the receiver apart."

She scratched a knee that was just visible below the hem of her long skirt. "We’ve done that. Did you ever think that maybe the transmitter is operating on a frequency that the receiver can’t receive?"

I bit at the corner of my mustache. "Yeah, I thought of that. I just don’t like fooling around with the one piece of equipment that seems to be working."

"But it’s not working, really," she said as she sipped her coffee. "I mean, if you don’t transmit right, you certainly won’t receive."

"That’s good as far as it goes, Liz. But it makes more sense to try to adjust the receiver since it hasn’t ever worked."

"But that’s the point, Steve. We don’t know if it has worked."

I had to admit that there was a certain amount of logic there. I couldn’t see where a disassembly of the transmitter and a careful reassembly would hurt. It certainly couldn’t make the situation any worse and it might, in fact, provide the clue that I needed.

I looked at the clock above the lab door. "When’s your next class?"

She put down her coffee and slid off the stool. "Not until tomorrow afternoon. And then it’s just an English class that I took on a lark. I can miss it."

I took a deep breath and said, "Then let’s get started."

Since we were being careful, recording each move on DVD and with written back up on a Blackberry, it took an extra few hours. We were interrupted once when a teaching assistant stuck his head in the door and asked, "Are you teaching your seminar today, Doctor Connor?"

I waved a no at him and said, "You take it."

He disappeared without another word.

Liz was replacing the front panel as he closed the door. She said, "It looks fine to me."

"Good," I said. "Let’s give the receiver the once over."

Unfortunately there was nothing wrong that we could spot. We put it back together very carefully hoping that a crossed wire, a misplaced chip or printed circuit was the villain.

When it was ready, I said, "I guess we make another test."

I scanned the lab, looking for something to put in the transmitter, something that had no value and wondered, momentarily, if I shouldn’t just stick the receiver in there. It seemed to be the only really worthless thing in the lab. Liz picked up the paper sack, stuffed with the remains of the sandwiches and the Starbuck’s coffee cups, and handed it to me.

"If this doesn’t reappear," she said, "at least we won’t have to find a garbage can."

As I set the sack into the transmitter and closed the door, something flittered across the back of my mind, something about Liz’s words, but I didn’t know why. I let it go, knowing that if it was important, I’d figure it out.

Liz crossed the lab and flipped the switches on the receiver, waiting until the ruby-colored light recessed into the top began to pulsate, and then hit the button on the recording equipment. She picked up her Blackberry, and cleared the screen. She said, clearly, as she used her thumbs to type, "Experiment ten four one, at..." There was a pause as she looked at the lab clock, "Zero two fifteen."

At the control panel, I flipped a switch and then stabbed a button. Behind the reinforced plexiglass, I watch the glow build around the limp brown sack. There was a flash as the bag vanished and I leaped across the room. The receiver was as empty as the Sahara Desert.

We waited for two hours but the bag didn’t return, at least then. I looked at Liz who, extraordinarily, seemed on the verge of tears. None of the other failures had affected her like that.

I put an arm around her shoulder and asked, "What’s wrong?"

I felt her shrug and she said, "Nothing, really. I’m just tired. Really tired."

"Well, I’ll give you a ride home. At least we don’t have to clean the lab."

Liz didn’t return after that. She dropped by the lab once or twice but the department had reassigned her so that she wouldn’t be hurt by any of the fallout for my failed line of research. Not long after that, I was told to clean out the lab so that it could be given to someone whose line of research was a little more promising, or, at the very least, had a more lucrative potential.

So, I worked on cleaning the lab. I went to my desk, which belonged to the university and looked as if it had seen service in the Vietnam War, and opened the bottom drawer. I found nothing I needed and decided to throw it all away. When the waste basket was filled, I realized that I didn’t know where to dump it because the waste basket was always empty when I came in each day. Since the teleportation transmitter had a habit of getting rid of everything nicely, I filled it and turned it on. Moments later, the trash was gone.

I picked up the now empty waste basket, walked back to the desk and started filling it again. As I pulled a handful of old research papers out of the back of the drawer, I suddenly froze, realizing that the transmitter wasn’t a failure. I knew how to make it a success.

Idly, I wondered how many inventions were mistakes that worked out well. I knew that Alexander Bell wasn’t trying to invent the telephone but some kind of hearing aid. At least I wouldn’t be alone and no one had to know what I was trying to do. And this would give me time to work on the real project.

I called Liz and told her to come back to work. If she would be at the lab at three on Thursday, I would show her, as well as the head of the physics department, Doctor Carpenter, the liberal arts president, Sarah Buller, and a couple of Congressional assistants that things really worked.

When Liz heard that, she said, "You figured it out. You finally figured it out."

"After a fashion," I told her. "You’ll have to wait and see."

The new suit that I bought for the demonstration fit all right, but I had to force the store to make the alterations on Wednesday night. I’m not all much over the average height, but I’m thin so that it’s difficult to get a good fit off the rack. I thought the extra money that cost wouldn’t manner soon.

The demonstration was to be held in my lab which I had not vacated yet. Work-study students had cleaned it much more thoroughly than I ever had and then set up chairs for the visitors. I had moved and covered the receiver so that it wouldn’t be a distraction. It was also a reminder that I was only partially successful.

The guests arrived and I ushered them to their seats with the department chairman and the liberal arts president right in front of the transmitter. When Liz arrived I put her next to the department chairman and then seated the Congressional aides, one man and one woman looking like a matched set the way salt and pepper shakers were a matched set, on the ends. The curious and a couple of my friends were in the back two rows.

I stood in front of them, next to the transmitter and said, by way of preamble, "Many of our scientific breakthroughs have come suddenly and unexpectedly. Bell discovered the telephone trying to help the deaf. And sometimes a scientist becomes so engrossed in his or her research that the side benefits of the experiments are sometimes lost as he or she searches for the total solution."

The audience muttered, wondering what kind of hocus-pocus I was planning. But I was winding down anyway, saying, more tongue in-cheek than seriously, "Garbage is one of the biggest problems facing the modern world. We have polluted our streams, rivers, lakes and now our oceans with our garbage. A major objection to nuclear powerplants is that we can’t safely and economically dispose of the waste. It piles up and we try to hide it in mountain caves, leaving it for future generations to find. That is, it was a problem until now."

I reached over and pulled the cover from the matter transmitter. I heard Liz gasp in surprise and I winked at her.

Carpenter stood up and said, "If this is some kind of joke Connor, you’re going to be sorry."

One of the Congressional assistants, and for the life of me I didn’t know if it was the male or female, said, "This is obviously not a joke. Let him finish."

I thought about saying more but figured they understood. I picked up a small box of trash and a couple of bottles. As I shoved them into the transmitter, I said, "Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, I realize this invention doesn’t rank up there with space travel, heavier-than-air flight or the micro-processor, but it does solve a minor problem that threatens to become a major irritation."

With that, I pushed the button and the trash vanished. I waved a hand in front of the door as if doing magic and said, "The power required to operate this is minimal, the components are fairly inexpensive, costing about the same as a smaller flat panel TV and it does serve a useful purpose."

Carpenter asked, "Who’s going to pay three hundred bucks for a garbage disposal."

I smiled. I had been waiting for that question. "The same people who pay two hundred dollars for a trash compactor so that they can put all their garbage into a single sack and pay the city five dollars a week to haul it away."

The assistant who had spoken earlier and I realized that it was the woman, asked, "Where does it go? The trash I mean."

I made an educated guess. "The atoms of the objects inside are broken down into their basic components and beamed out of the machine. It makes little difference if they are sent into space, into the atmosphere or into the ground since they are the single, pure atoms. It does nothing to harm the environment."

Now I felt like lecturing, especially when I saw the look on Carpenter’s face. I don’t know if he wanted to cry because of the notoriety this would bring to the department, or cheer because of the funding boon it meant.

So, I said, "As I’m sure you all know, garbage is made of useful things but it’s in the wrong form. We have recycling plants to fix that, but now, if we can break the garbage into it’s basic units, we make it useful again without the expensive plants to convert it. There is no threat to anyone or anything, no matter what happens to the garbage."

The discussion continued for another hour or so, but the moment the trash disappeared, the product was sold. It was useful, practical, cheap and with certain modifications that the Congressional assistants insisted that the product safety people would require, and of course, inspection by the environmental and atomic energy people to make sure I was right, they could see great things for the invention. My funding was secure, my position assured, my fame guaranteed and my fortune made.

The unions didn’t like it. Garbage collectors, truck drivers, land fill operators, junk dealers all over the country were demanding the machines be regulated so they wouldn’t lose their jobs or source of income. Other city employees and the oil companies joined the protest. The machine, they claimed, would cost hundreds of thousands of jobs. Manufacturing the machine wouldn’t begin to replace those lost, not to mention the cost of retraining people.

The environmental people didn’t like it either. They said it would lead to more nuclear powerplants and they believed the world had enough of them. The danger was no longer in the waste materials, but the possibility of meltdown.

The machines were denounced as some kind of communist plot or a devil’s invention. We still continued, making several working models, including one large enough to handle the university’s garbage. That angered the city because it was now losing a large amount of money that had been received for garbage removal.

Several huge models were field tested by the feds. The Army used twenty on twenty different posts, cutting the operating costs to almost nothing for garbage removal. Food and Drug, who had somehow gotten into the act, certified the machine as safe for use by the population. The Consumers Union did the same. The Environmental Protection Agency didn’t, saying they wanted to know where the garbage was going first.

And, so did I.

In all my experiments, I had not been able to answer that simple question. All I knew was that it just went, somewhere and the idea that the atoms dispersed into the environment seemed as good as any.

Recording the experiments didn’t help. I had used every trick available to modern science including ultra-violet, infra-red, slow motion, color, black and white, and about seventy-five different filters. I tried all methods of electromagnetic recording without finding a clue. The garbage, or anything else put into the transmitter just vanished.

It was late June when I finally found out where the garbage had gone. I was alone in my office. Because of the success of the garbage disposal, and the scientific breakthrough of atom dispersal, the university had given me a wood paneled, thickly carpeted office with a view of the river and the students circulating as they walked to class. I was alone, trying, half-heartedly, to find out why the receiver refused to receive.

I looked up when someone knocked at the door, irritated because the whole building was supposed to be locked and there was a secretary who was supposed to intercept visitors before they reached the door.

He was a smallish man, dressed in blue jeans and wearing a dark blue windbreaker with NYPD in yellow letters embroidered over the heart. He stood there, looking at me, waiting.

"Yes?"

"Doctor Connor?"

When I nodded he said, "We’ve been looking for you."

I didn’t like the sound of that and wondered if campus security was still around. As I set my pencil down, I asked, "Why is that?"

"Doctor Connor, I’m assisting the Greater New York Sanitation Committee on special detail. I’m afraid that it’s my unpleasant duty to arrest you for..."

"Arrest me? Are you out of your mind? Do you even have jurisdiction here?"

The man rubbed his eyes as if extremely tired and then sighed. "Doctor, please. You have been causing all sorts of problems with your machine."

Now I laughed. "Oh, I get it. Well, you’ll have to see the manufacturer about that. I have nothing to do with the operational aspects of the business..."

He interrupted and asked, "Have you ever wondered where the garbage goes?"

To myself, I thought, "Well, of course," but I said nothing.

He said, "You’ll have to come with me."

"I don’t think so. Even if you are a policeman from New York, you’re way outside your jurisdiction. I don’t have to go with you or anyone else."

"Then you won’t know where the garbage goes," said the man simply.

I sat still and said, "Where does it go?"

"Let’s take a stroll down to your lab. You have a working model of your transmitter there, don’t you?"

So I followed him out of the office building, across the grass field in front of the student union, across a foot bridge and into an older section of the university. We entered the building, climbed a set of stairs that had to be old a hundred years ago and finally made it to the door of my old lab. I hadn’t been there very much in the last couple of months.

When I had unlocked the door, the man moved to where a large model of my transmitter stood. He flipped a switch to activate it, made a couple of adjustments to it and then opened the main door, something that I had never done with the machine running.

"Come over here," he said.

I didn’t like the tone of his voice, but I was curious. As I approached, I asked, "Just what do you think you are doing?"

I didn’t notice that he had moved behind me until I felt the push on my back. I stumbled forward, reached out to break my fall and slipped into the interior of the transmitter. Just before that happened, I realized that I was being murdered.

There was a flash of light and I felt a tingling all over which I thought were the atoms in my body disintegrating, which, it turns out, it could have been. But then, the next thing I realized, I was in a room that was bare. Just a hardwood floor and windows in the walls but no furniture, no books, nothing. I had no idea where I was.

I moved toward one of the windows and an instant later there was another flash, behind me, and I turned around. The man was now standing there, looking a little green.

"Where are we?"

"Why, New York, of course."

I was too stunned to speak, not to mention happy to be alive. "What happened?"

"Your machine is not really a transmitter. It works more like a projector. It requires no receiver. You have been sent to New York City."

I really didn’t understand this. I thought he had just explained why the receiver never worked. There was nothing for it to receive. Instead, the machine just projected the material to another location... which, I suddenly realized, is exactly what I had been trying to do. My matter transmitter did, in fact, transmit matter. I just had to figure out how to calibrate it.

Just as all this was beginning to sink in, the man said, "You are to appear before the magistrate at four this afternoon. You will be charged with creating a health menace, unlawful dumping of waste, creating a general nuisance and resisting arrest."

"Wait," I said, feeling the panic rising. "Just wait a minute. How can I be guilty of all those charges."

He walked to the window and pointed down at the street. "That is your fault."

I looked down, but all I could see was a scene that had played out several times. A strike in New York was causing trouble for one segment of the population. Huge stacks of brown plastic bags lining the street. I didn’t see the obvious then because I was lost in the charges and the realization that my matter transmitter worked.

By the time we got to the courthouse using an underground tunnel so that we never set foot on the streets, through the metal detectors at the doorways and passed the guards standing next to them, down a corridor that had glass for an outside wall that looked out over Central Park, it was time to appear before the judge. She glowered down from the bench, wrapped in white robes and was pronouncing sentence on a young woman. The judge mumbled something about the penal colonies and I sudden wondered if this was all a bad dream brought on by too much pepperoni pizza and dark beer.

The judge nodded and a bailiff escorted the woman, visibly crying, from the court. My first instinct was to think she had brought it all on herself, but then remembered why I was there and I developed a total understanding of her plight and a sympathy for her situation.

A different bailiff stepped in front of the bench and said, "Before her magistrate, this twenty-seventh day of October, two thousand, one hundred, eighty-nine, Doctor Stephen Connor on the charges of..."

I didn’t hear the rest. The date screamed at me. Twenty-one, eighty-nine, which was impossible, of course. I kept playing that over in my mind, knowing that it really was just a bad dream but unable to break out of it. Someone poked me in the ribs as the judge was repeating, "How do you plead."

I hesitated and then said, "Not guilty."

"Will the Prosecution present their case."

I was pushed toward the defense table and sat down. The man who had dragged me to this point was sitting in a chair just behind me. I turned and asked him, "How did we get here?"

He leaned forward and said, "Your time projector did it. Once we learned to use it, we could project ourselves whenever we wanted."

The judge looked down at me and I fell silent.

For twenty minutes I watched as a variety of exhibits, many drawn from the Internet, were paraded before the court. They even had the original patent applications in full holographic splendor. They showed the garbage as it sprang into existence in their city and traced it back to my invention and my time. Letters, newspapers, test papers, and anything else I had thrown into the machine was displayed, pointing directly at me as the original source of the garbage.

Finally the Prosecutor said, "I rest my case."

The judge turned to me but I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t know what to say.

The judge finally asked, "Did you invent the machine?"

Without thinking, I said, "Yes."

She said, "Guilty. Bailiff, take Doctor Connor into custody. He will spend the night in the county jail and tomorrow, he will begin to clean up the mess he has made.

As deputy sheriff took my elbow to lead me from the courtroom and off to jail, I sighed with relief. First, I had learned where the garbage was going. I learned that I had a projector and not a transmitter. I learned that we could move through time and that it was possible to calibrate the machine so that we could pick a time and a destination. With all this, I could readjust my machinery so that it worked the way it was supposed to work.

And second, how much garbage could there be? There were only a few test models out there and they probably were all set to a different time and place so there wouldn’t be much garbage for me to clean up. Maybe a week or two, living in the future. I laughed out loud now that the tension was broken.

The deputy said, "What’s so funny."

"The sentence, of course."

"Mister, I wouldn’t be laughing if I were you. You have no idea what’s happened out there."

We reached the door and I looked out on the street that had bags of garbage lined along the curb. I thought nothing of them because New York had a habit of letting the garbage pile up.
I said, "It can’t be too bad."

"Monday, it began to rain. It rained all day. The sky was thick with it and it piled higher and higher. It blackened the Sun. Some people were injured before they could get inside."

"What do you mean rain?"

"Garbage. Tons of it. Hundreds of tons."

"But there can’t be that much. The machine has been..."

"Operating for nearly two hundred years, Mister. Two hundred. And most of them sent the garbage here. To this place. Right here. You have to clean all that up."

The deputy pushed open the door and the odor, the stench, nearly overwhelmed me. It was so thick you could almost cut it.

"But that would mean... mean," I stammered, "a life sentence."

"At the very least," he said.

The Death of the World

2007-04-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

My plan had been to add stories, reviews, and even a list of science fiction conventions to this blog on a regular basis, but I didn't plan on a hard drive crash or AOL deciding that I owed them money. I've been fighting with them for the last six weeks and the latest was that there was nothing to do to resolve the problem they had created. I told them that I could switch my home page to whatever server pleased me but that made no dent in their last position. There was nothing they could do to resolve the problem they had created.

But enough of that. I'll try to add things more frequently, as I get them ready. This next story is one that I wrote in one short sitting, almost as fast as I could type it. I "dreamed" it up one night and got up the next morning and put it down. The dream didn't translate to the computer screen exactly but the modifications were few.

I have never had much luck with short fiction and have only sold a few stories to various publications. I might be the only writer to ever publish a science fiction story in a magazine called Combat Illustrated... but hey, you take the sale where you can get it.

One other point about this story. Since I wrote it, I had the chance to watch a documentary on the History Channel that dealt with meteoric impacts and one of the ways the world, as we humans know it, might end. Their scenario differs from this one, but the two run in parallel.

And as they used to say on HBO... "And now, TSFS presents the original story, Death of the World..."

So, what do you do when you know the day you’ll die and you can do nothing to alter it? No, I’m not talking about a condemned killer or a cancer patient with weeks to live hanging over his head. I’m talking about a much more wide ranging event that will be a disaster for the whole world. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I have always had a fondness for the military and the moment I was old enough, I joined the Army. This was back when there was a draft and teenagers were being inducted into the military with great regularity. If you planned on college, then you could get a deferment, if you wanted. If you were female, you didn’t have to worry at all, gender being a deciding factor. But if you were young, in the middle class or poor, hadn’t really thought about college, didn’t know about the concept of a safety school, and found yourself graduated from high school, then you were prime cannon fodder.

No, not everyone in such a state would be drafted, but you certainly had none of the protections of those others. Friends had told me of warrant officer flight training which meant the Army would take high school graduates, even those who had just turned eighteen, and make them helicopter pilots. With the Vietnam War heating up and helicopters being one of the things the Army was promoting, it wasn’t difficult to get a slot for training. Staying in, because the Army needed pilots badly, wasn’t difficult, and activities that would have seen you tossed from the program six months earlier were now just another way to get demerits but not find yourself on the outside wondering what happened.

So I made it through flight school and like everyone else in my class, with a single exception, found myself with orders to Vietnam. I had hoped, through school, that the civilians would find a way to end the war before I was called, but, of course they failed. After all, they weren’t going and most of their families wouldn’t be going. Just people like me with no political clot and no real thoughts of self-preservation. I just sort of wandered into this and could think of no real way to get out.

The interesting thing here, see, was that I hadn’t really been thinking beyond the next few weeks, and like every other soldier, didn’t see myself as being one of the unlucky ones to get killed. That was something that happened to others. I’d just drift along, happy, doing what I had been trained to do, and then go home with a pocket full of war stories to impress my fellow students at the bar. I had realized my mistake and college was now clearly in my sights.

One night, sitting in the officer’s club, which was a run down building that had lights strung near the ceiling, walls that were mostly screen and an overhead fan that did nothing but rotate slower than an elephant trying to dance, there were several officers from another unit visiting. Men we didn’t really know, but for some reason found themselves in our club, drinking our cheap booze, and talking to us about their unique experiences.

One of the men, an older guy, maybe about thirty, maybe not that old, wearing faded jungle fatigues which meant he’d been in-country for a while, with the pistoleer moustache, shaggy hair, and attitude of a short-timer, meaning his tour was winding down, got drunk with us. Gripping a glass of bourbon like one of us would try to steal it, he leaned forward and said the most provocative thing.

He said, "I’m not from here."

And I said, "My neither. I’m from Colorado."

So he said, "No, I mean from this time."

Well, I wasn’t very experienced, just having turned 19, but I knew a line when I heard it. Science fiction was fun and I read as much as I could, but here was a guy claiming to be a time traveler. Well, I thought that was what he was claiming, and I didn’t believe him... then.

Martin Cadiz, who was only slightly older than me but who was losing his hair which was bleached almost white, whose attempt at a moustache failed because his hair was so light you could barely see his eyebrows, let alone the moustache, said, somewhat drunkenly, "I don’t understand that."

He said, "I come from the future."

At which point Cadiz leaned back, laughed out loud and said, sarcastically "And I come from the past."

The conversation was taking on a Dickensonian flavor, which was really odd for a bunch of drunken and horny soldiers because the topics usually ran to women and tales from the land of the big PX and the all night generator, which meant in soldier talk, the United States, and, of course women.

He said, slurring the words slightly, and then stopping to reform the thought and speaking precisely, "I can prove it."

"Of course you can," I said.

He leaned in, looked around as if he was worried about spies, and said, "President Kennedy will be assassinated on November 22, 1963 in Dallas. You wait and see." He leaned back, grinning.

"That happened six years ago," I said.

The look on his face changed and then he grinned again. "Oh, yes. I forgot. We jumped forward."

"Me too," said Cadiz.

"Okay. Okay," he said. "The space shuttle Challenger will blow up about seventy seconds after launch in January, 1986. There."

"I don’t know what a space shuttle is," said Cadiz.

"That’s what, seventeen years in the future," I said. "Tell me whose going to win the Rose Bowl this year."

"I don’t know what the Rose Bowl is," he said.

That, I believed then, was a ridiculous thing to say. How could you be an American and not know what the Rose Bowl is? It’s embedded in the culture, like TV dinners, Fords, and Albert Einstein. I mean, you might not care for football or understand anything about the game, but you would know about the Rose Bowl.

"So tell us something that will happen soon."

He leaned back, glanced up at the ceiling as if seeking divine inspiration and said, "Richard Nixon will resign after Watergate."

Well, I knew who Nixon was since he was president but I didn’t know what the Watergate was or that it would eventually become the standard for scandal with everything having "gate" hung on the end of it.

Now that he was talking, we couldn’t shut him up. He said, "You want to get rich, look for a company called Microsoft in the what, 1980s, and buy stock in it. Just a little will make you rich. Buy a lot and retire."

He said, "Ronald Reagan will be president and he’ll surprise people. Bill Clinton will be president and he’ll surprise people with an intern. George Bush will be president twice but we think there were two of them. We’re not sure."

"Well," I said, "if you come from the future, why wouldn’t you know if there were two of them?"

He leaned forward and said, "Fair question. Fair question. Our records are incomplete."

Back then, at nineteen, I didn’t realize how complete records in the future would become. I didn’t know about the Internet, or computers or electronic data storage, but I did know that in the Army I had filled out papers for what seemed like days. Everything we did was documented six ways from Sunday and those documents always seemed to return to haunt us.

"How can your records be incomplete?"

"Fair question," he said again. Then dropping it casually into the conversation, he added, "An asteroid, the size of Mount Everest will hit San Diego on June 12, 2016. The devastation will be worldwide and civilization will collapse in the weeks to follow."

My first reaction was to laugh. I mean, people had been predicting the end of the world for centuries. This was a new variation and it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that I would learn about the cataclysmic event 65 million years ago that created what scientists would call an extinction level event. Here this guy had just dropped into conversation the precise date of an extinction level event.

I thought I saw the logical flaw in this even though I had been drinking as much bourbon as he had, and said, "Well, if civilization collapses and everyone dies, where do you come from?"

"There will be survivors and eventually civilization reappears."

Cadiz took a deep breath and said, "This has been entertaining for a while but now it’s boring. I think I’ll go."

He stood up unsteadily, almost fell, and then staggered toward the door. He didn’t look back. Three weeks later he was killed when his aircraft was shot down near what we called the Parrot’s Beak on the Saigon River. So much for corroboration.

In Vietnam, it didn’t take much to entertain us, so I sat there, wondering how far he would take this charade of his. I asked, "What else do you know?"

"The United States will launch a war against Iraq at the beginning of the next century. Another space shuttle, Colombia will disintegrate on reentry. A mountain in Washington will blow up providing just a little clue about what is coming. Computers will be the big thing and everyone will have one or two. Europe will form an economic partnership and the Soviet Union will collapse in 1991."

I waved that away thinking of it as political events and asked, "So how do I become rich?"

"Computers are the key. Learn about them. Invest in them. But be careful of the dot coms. Lots of people will lose a lot of money in the dot com bust."

He rattled on like that for a while but I grew tired of it. I finally said, "It would be nice if you could prove it now."

He said, "Ho Chi Minh will die this summer and your president Nixon will announce troop withdrawals, but he’ll keep the war going until 1972. Then, just before the election, he’ll announce, or Henry Kissinger will announce a peace agreement."

"Fine. This summer I’ll learn if your prediction is right, though Ho is getting up there in years so saying that he’ll die soon isn’t much of a prediction." I smiled to myself thinking that I was pretty clever, thinking of that through the fog of alcohol.

He leaned back, twisted around slightly and dug into his pocket. He pulled out a handful of coins and dropped them on the table. This was odd because when we arrived in-country we had converted all our money into MPC which was Army money printed to help stabilize the local economies or some such nonsense. Anyway, we didn’t have any real American money. He sorted through the coins and pushed a quarter at me.

"Look at the back."

I turned it over and saw, not the eagle, but a scene of some kind. I flipped and saw Washington, but not the picture I was used to. This was a different Washington and the date was 1999.

"Nice piece of work," I said. "But this isn’t a real quarter."

"Sure it is. They’ll change the design to celebrate the new millennium. Each state will have it’s own."

"So I wait until then to see if you’re right about this."

"No. Look at the date man."

"Nice prop," I said finally. "Where’d you get it?"

I could see by the look on his face that he didn’t like the question and I knew that the answer was that it was counterfeit. He’d had it made so that he could convince people about his story. Here was a con-man, pure and simple, though I didn’t know who he was trying to con or for what purpose. Maybe he was just scamming drinks. Cadiz had bought a round and I had. I couldn’t remember if the guy had or not.

One of the guys at the bar, a man I didn’t recognize turned and said, "Jason, you about ready?"

The man scooped the money up and dropped it back into his pocket. He stood and said, "Sure."

I wished I had tried to snag that strange quarter. Then it would have been an interesting conversation piece. Today, it would have been one of a kind because it was the first of those quarters I ever saw. When the government announced the minting of those coins at the end of the 1990s, I felt little. There had already been so many confirmations of what that guy said that one more meant nothing to me.

He, with his two friends, walked to the door and disappeared into the night.

Davis, one of the commissioned officers, a captain who was nearing his DEROS, which was his date of estimated return from overseas, dropped into the chair vacated by the man. He asked, "What were you two talking about?"

"The future," I said.

"Yeah? That guy," he stopped and pointed at the door, "was asking about the war."

"You mean gathering intelligence?"

"Nope, just general questions. Strange, it was like he didn’t have the basic knowledge and was trying to gather it."

I laughed then. "Well, it takes all kinds. The conversation was interesting for a while."

Davis stood up and said, "I’m off to bed."

So I sat there and thought about writing down the predictions the man had made. I had once gathered, from the tabloid newspapers and magazines, the predictions made for the coming year to see how many times the psychics were right. This was just one more exercise in that "research." But the truth was, I was tired, slightly drunk, and didn’t really care.

And when Ho Chi Minh died that summer, I didn’t think much of it because he was an old man. And when Nixon announced troop reductions, my only reaction was that I would get to go home ten days earlier than I had thought. Nixon had lopped ten days off my countdown to DEROS.

But then Kissinger went to Paris and days before the 1972 election announced that he’d achieved peace with hononr with the North Vietnam. And then, there was a break-in at the Watergate in Washington that kept expanding until Nixon was forced to resign. And then Mount St. Helens in Washington blew up. So I began looking for a company called Microsoft so that I could put every dime I could scrape up into it. I invested heavily, worried that my money would float away on someone else’s dream, but then the Challenger exploded 70 seconds after lift off and I knew that my money was safe.

Everything the man had told me was coming true. It was as if he had read a history book written a hundred years in the future. He knew what was going to happen and he told me. And by 1990, I believed him. I didn’t need to see the quarter design change, or the war in Iraq to know that he knew the future.

Then I thought about something else. Why would that guy, a traveler from the future tell me, a nineteen-year-old kid about his time travels? Why would he give me the glimpses into the future he had? Why work so hard to convince me he was from the future when, if he really was a time traveler, it made more sense to keep that information to himself? But more importantly, why tell me to look for Microsoft and to hint about the future of computers?

By the 1990s, scientists had learned about the layer of iridium in what is known as the K-T boundary. Below that layer, you find fossils of dinosaurs. Above it, there are none. Iridium is an extremely rare element that is most common in meteorites. To produce a worldwide layer of iridium, something huge had to smash into the Earth, in this case about 65 million years ago. It created that extinction level event that the man had talked about.

In the 1990s, after a comet, Shoemaker-Levy Nine, broke up and smashed into Jupiter causing damage that was unbelievable, scientists began looking seriously for Earth crossing asteroids, mapping the skies and charting their orbits. Plans were drawn up with an eye to preventing one of these massive things from hitting the Earth and causing global destruction. Given the history of the planet, it seems to be something we should take seriously.

So now that I have hundreds of millions of dollars, based on my investments in Microsoft and computers, and my dodging the dot com bust because I finally knew what dot com meant, I can fund research. I can help those who are looking for the Earth crossing asteroids. I know that an asteroid, large enough to be detected before it slams into the Earth on June 12, 2016 can be spotted. I know that I can gently nudge some of those scientists into looking in the right place to spot this asteroid, and once it is spotted, things can be done.

I have about a decade to get this thing found and convince the president to do something about it. I have a decade to make sure research goes in the right direction so that when this asteroid is spotted, and because we are looking for it, we’ll be able to push it off its path or destroy it so that there won’t be global destruction.

Thinking about this all these years, I’ve decided that the man was there, in our officer’s club to give me this information. No, I don’t mean me specifically, but some of us, so that we would be able to prepare. I would bet that they flooded the Earth with these people, studying their past and giving some of us a glimpse of our future. Their mission, was not historical in nature, it was preventative. They were giving us fair warning. I just hope that I can get the right people to listen.

THE CITADEL

2007-02-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

What follows is a complete science fiction novel that was published in the 1990s. It was the last of a three book series that dealt with military intelligence in the future. It was an outgrowth of what I was doing for the Air Force in the 1980s and it reflects that.

They entire novel is published, through some of it might need to be accessed through the February 2007 archives. I wanted to publish it in order and started with the last chapters, working forward. I thought it might be too confusing for the first chapter to be at the end.

I know that some people like to know how a book comes together. Robert Charles Cornett and I were writing a short series known as "The Fifty Million Years War" (the first of which was "Seeds of War."). We have envisioned something longer and in the course of putting together one of those books, I realized that I had actually written two short novels. One took place on a water world and about halfway through that book, the action shifted to the world of The Citadel. I realized that the reader might not like that transition. Because of that, I chopped this story out of the other series (and the book which became "The Aquarian Campaign").

But when it came time to write the last of the books in what is known as the "Military Intelligence" series, I thought that his might be a good place to rewrite that part of a book I had edited out. The Citadel was born in that way.

I wanted each of the books to be stand alone, which means that if you picked up the third book first, all the information you needed to understand that story was in that book. It didn’t rely on a reader who had already read the first two books. So, as they refer to the asteroid that had trapped them, they are referring to events in the second book called "The Rat Trap". There is no need to read that book to follow the action in this one.

This book contains the complete text of the published novel, though there have been slight modifications so they do not agree exactly.

So you now have all the information you need to read this book. Enjoy.

Prologue

2007-02-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

"This, ladies and gentlemen," said the Colonel, "is our enemy."

He pointed at the holographic orb that hovered over the conference room table. It was a large ship that they had captured a few weeks before. "We know next to nothing about them," he continued, "except they are the only other living spacefaring race we have encountered."

Captain Joshua Price, known as Tree to his friends, wasn't sure the Colonel was right about using the term enemy. Price had been on the ship, a huge asteroid that had been converted into a ship by encasing it in metal and adding engines to it. As they had tried to explore it, Price and his team had been captured by it and held for testing. Of course, that was a little strong. The ship had been like a giant rat trap, letting them enter but then sealing itself so they couldn't escape. There didn't seem to be a hostile intent behind it. A yearning for knowledge, a way of exploring the galaxy using a device that was ingenius because it was not faster-than-light, but was fully automated. That seemed to be the key.

There hadn't been a biological entity on board for the purposes of regulating the testing or even designing the testing. But there had been one to repair the machinery if it broke down and the self replicating technology needed something a little more individualistic. It had been held in statis until its special skills had been needed.

Price didn't want to be in the conference room or to listen to the Colonel's briefing. He knew more about the internal workings of the "enemy" craft, of the living, intelligent creature found on board, of the whole system as anyone who in the fleet. Hell, the Colonel was reading from a report that Price had helped construct.

"We believe," said the Colonel, "based on what we've been able to learn from the computer systems and records, that the asteroid... the ship, came from a point very near the galactic center."

Price closed his eyes momentarily. There were a dozen things he'd rather be doing. He opened his eyes, turned slightly and glanced at windows, thick blocks of glass that looked out on the blackness of space. The closest stars were light years away. Some were very bright, like Venus when it was near Earth. Others were tiny points of dim light almost invisible in the thick haze of drifting hydrogen atoms and space dust.

The Colonel studied the faces of the officers around the table and saw that they were bored. He grinned and touched one of the buttons in front of him. The orb vanished in a flickering of light. An outline of an alien body appeared, filled in and then turned at the same speed that the orb had revolved earlier. It gave everyone at the table a complete view of the alien but more importantly, something new to look at.

It was a small creature with long hair from the elbows to the wrists and from the knees to the ankles. It was a feline looking creature with pointed ears and yellow eyes. Of course Price didn't have to see the holo of it. He'd seen it when if first appeared on the alien ship and then had worked with it as they tried to construct common ground for his interrogation of it.

As he watched it rotate above the table, Price thought that it didn't look like much of an enemy. There had only been one of them on the ship and it seemed to function as a maintenance man. At the moment there was absolutely no reason to call it the enemy.

"The autopsy," said the Colonel, "revealed a very simplified internal structure. It looked as if someone had taken the human body, figured the best way to restructure it, and then genetically engineered it to a specific function. One adapted to the function that it fulfilled...that is, sleeping most of the time."

Price hadn't been listening closely. He'd been wondering how soon he could get out of the meeting. There were things that he wanted to do. People he wanted to see. And then the Colonel's words sunk in.

"Autopsy?" said Price, not realizing that he had spoken out loud.

The Colonel turned his attention on Price, seemed to pin him to the chair with his gaze. He stared at Price for a full thirty sceconds and then nodded. "Yes, autopsy. I'm afraid that the creature died two days ago."

Price was going to protest, to suggest that it had been healthy enough the last time he'd seen it, and then decided to say nothing. He was not an exo-biologist, knew next to nothing about the study of anatomy and didn't know how to begin. Even with that, it didn't seem right that the alien should have died with no warning.

"Dr. James?" said the Colonel.

James stood up. He was a short man with pasty white skin and jet black hair. There were black circles under his eyes and he had thin lips that made his face look skull like. His hands shook, as if he didn't like the idea of speaking to the group of officers assembled.

He opened a folder, took a sheet of paper from it and placed it on the table in front of him. He glanced at it, looked up at the holo and said, "I have made a detailed study of the internal organization of the specimen..."

Price watched the doctor rather than listening to him. He was standing with his hands behind his back, rocking from heel to toe, speaking in the monotone that put generations of medical students to sleep and giving his information in such detail with so many technical terms that no one other than another doctor would understand it. If, however, he could stay awake long enough to hear much of it.

James wound down and the Colonel took over again. He left the holo of the alien spinning slowly above the table, talking around the problem, letting the ship's chief navigator speak, letting the astronomer speak, and adding his own comments after each.

Finally, when he had dragged it out as long as possible, the Colonel touched a button and alien vanished. He dropped back into his chair, turned so that he was staring into space and said, "A spacefaring race we don't know is a danger to us all. They may know exactly where we are but we can only guess where their home world is."

He paused dramatically and then said, "That is why we have been given a new mission. Find them and fit the if necessary, destroy them."

Chapter One

2007-02-16T09:13:00.000-08:00

The intelligence office was a small cabin on the main deck of the flag ship. It was one of the few with a hatch that could be locked because of the nature of the work done on the other side. When Price arrived and centered himself, the hatch irised open without his having to use the combination.

Sitting at the console, her back to him, was Lieutenant Emma Coollege, know as Jackknife. She was looking up at a display screen, her fingers on a keyboard. The information was parading across the screen and was easily visible from the hatch.

"If you're reviewing classified data," said Price, "the hatch should be locked."

She glanced over her shoulder at him. She was a tall, slender woman with delicate features and short black hair, the result of a recent assignment. She was as deadly as any member of the team yet looked sweetly innocent. It was the best disguise she could have.

"I know the security regulations as well as you, Tree. I don't have to be reminded."

Price stepped deeper into the office and let the hatch iris shut. He stood looking at the array of screens attached to the bulkhead. The smaller, satellite screens were dark. Only the center screen was being used.

He dropped into the chair next to Coolledge and twisted around so that he could watch as she worked. Finally he asked, "Is that anything important?"

"No. Idle curiosity," she said. She let her fingers fall from the keyboard and looked at him. "I was trying to figure out the most likely candidates for the home world... Is there something wrong?"

"We lost our major asset."

For a moment she was confused and then said, "What happened? He escape?"

"After a fashion. He died. I just heard the results of the autopsy."

Coollege fell silent and then put her hands back on the keyboard. She cleared the data from the screen, thought for a moment and then tried to access the new data. She couldn't find it on the menu, and tried to access security files from the flag area. When that failed, she tried the medical section, science section, and finally the intell section though she knew that they had added nothing to it. Access to the intell section was strictly limited to only a few people and it seemed logical that someone else who had that access might have added the data in there.

"I find nothing here," she said.

Price had been watching. "The doctor might not have his notes input yet... or it might be under the captain's log or in the regimental commander's private logs."

"Uh-huh." She thought for a moment, glancing up at the top of the bulkhead as she concentrated and then began to type again. When the security screen flashed, she only grinned, shot a quick glance at Price, and typed in a six digit code.

"Where in the hell did you get that?"

Still grinning, she said, "I'm in intelligence and part of my job is to know these things."

The menu came up and she began to scroll through it. "Might be here."

The screen showed a coded document labeled simply, "Alien Harvest."

She opened the document and saw that it was nothing more than a report to higher headquarters detailing the finding on the alien ship, including pictures of the equipment found, the interior of the ship, and a brief look at the powerplant. It suggested where detailed information could be found under various tabs in the supporting documentation.

"Hell of a lot of work when into that," said Price.

"Nothing about the alien being."

Price leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin. He realized that he was going to have to shave soon. As a teenager he couldn't wait for his beard to form. Now it was becoming courser, darker, and the chore of shaving was beginning to annoy him. He thought about having it permanently removed but hesitated. There were still areas where beards were grown and to fit into the local population he needed to be able to grow his own.

"There is something fishy about this," said Price. "I don't like it."

"Why? Because you weren't told that the being had died?"

"That's part of it. We should have been informed immediately. And, I should have been at the autopsy."

Coollege shook her head. "You ever been to one of these autopsies?"

"Hell, this wasn't a human. Nothing to get squeamish about. I would have liked to watch just to make sure that everything was done according to the book."

Coollege laughed. "Talk about your intelligence officer getting paranoid. What in the hell are you thinking?"

"Nothing," said Price. "I just don't like relying on information supplied by others when I haven't seen the source of that information."

"I'm sure the doctor was qualified," said Coollege.

"Yeah," said Price.

Coollege turned her attention to the screen and then the keyboard. She closed the files and returned to the main menu. "I don't know where to look for the data."

"Well, we're authorized to see it, so I guess I'll ask the chief of staff where it's hidden."

"Today?"

"No," said Price. "It's too late for us to do anything constructive anyway. Tomorrow. At which time I'll brief both you and Rocky on the next mission."

"Let me guess," said Coollege. "We're going to make a concentrated effort to locate the alien's home world."

"How'd you know?"

"Just makes sense. We find an alien intelligence out there and the first thing we're going to want to do it learn where their home world is located."

Price didn't respond for a moment, thinking. There was nothing else he could say. The briefing in the morning would cover the mission and until that time there was nothing more to discuss.

Finally he said, "You interested in getting something to eat?"

"You know, Tree, that is the one thing we seem to do all the time. Work awhile and then you want to get something to eat."

"Is that a no?"

"It's merely a comment on the situation. It's more of 'a just a minute and let me get ready.'"

"Shut down the computer and lock up," he said, "and I'll meet you in the corridor."

"Right."

Chapter Two

2007-02-16T09:11:00.000-08:00

Rachel Susan Monier stood at the hatch on the shuttle deck, waiting for it to cycle open. She had arrived on the shuttle, having come by courier ship from Earth and had been told that she would be met. No one had met her, other than to place her on the shuttle. Now she stood at the hatch, her small duffel bag in one hand and her computer, containing her orders in the other. But no one had told her a thing other than billeting would be found outside the shuttle bay, that the regimental office was located near the bridge, and that she was now on her own. They were too busy to have someone take her up there.

Of course she hadn't needed the advice of those others about the locations of the billeting cabin or the regimental office. Even though no one had briefed her on it, she knew where they were. Just as she had known that no one would meet her at the shuttle bay or that the mission coming up would move them all from the explored section of the galaxy into an area where only a few scout ships had ever ventured and from which none had ever returned.

The hatch irised open and Monier stepped through into a dimly lighted corridor. Only a few people were walking along it and none of them looked as if they wanted a thing to do with her. They didn't even seem to see her.

She was wearing the uniform of a first lieutenant, though the rank was more honarary than real. She was a short woman, thin with jet black hair and large brown eyes. There was nothing unusual to distinguish her from any of the others in the corridor.

Without asking directions, she walked aft, studying the corridor. She reached a lift, waited, and then took it to the main deck. She exited, walked down a corridor that was brightly lighted and filled with people doing their jobs. She found the regimental office and entered.

In all the videos and holos she had ever watched, the new man reported in saluting. She stepped to the desk, glanced at the man sitting behind it, tried to salute and said, "Lieutenant Monier reporting in." She dropped her hand.

The man kept working for a moment and then slowly looked up at her. "First, you don't report to me. Second, you outrank me so there is no need to salute. And third, I'm a sergeant. You never salute a sergeant except in return."

"Sorry..."

"Orders," said the sergeant gruffly.

Monier set her duffle on the deck, shuffled through it and held out the computer disc. The sergeant tapped the desk on the right with his index finger and let her set it there. He didn't pick it up right away, but closed out the document he had been using.

"You reporting in?" he asked.

"Yes, sir."

That stopped him again. He looked up at Monier, at the silver bar on her collar and asked, "How long you been in the service?"

Monier focused her attention and began to understand. She smiled and said, "Long enough, Sergeant. I'm just overly polite to my elders. Now please do your job and let the Colonel know that I have arrived."

"Yes, ma'am." He picked up the disk, shoved it into the disk drive, and watched as the screen lit. He read the information, scrolled down and then laughed.

"I was right," he said. "You were called to active duty just three months ago."

"That's right, Sergeant, but I'm a very fast learner."

He scanned more of the information and asked, "Just what is Long Distance Data Processor? Sounds like something that should be part of the computer."

One of the few things that she had learned was to say as little about her job as she could. There were those with the need to know and those with none. "It means that I work with computers," she lied.

"Oh."

She stood watching as the sergeant added her to the computer data base, checked on the authorization codes embedded on the disk and then removed it from the drive. He held it out. "Here you go. I think before you meet the Colonel you should meet Captain Price. He'll be your boss."

"Price," she said.

"Nice fellow."

"Okay," said Monier. She stuffed the disk into her pocket. "Thanks."

"You go out the hatch, take the mid-lift down two stations. Intell office will be on the right. There is no sign on the door. That's how you know it's the intell office. Everything else is labeled."

"Thanks," she said again.

She left the regimental office and walked to the lift. She rode it down and saw Price leaving the office. Without being told, she knew the officer was Price.

"Captain?"

"Yes."

"Good afternoon, sir. I'm Rachel Monier. I've been assigned to your office."

"Nope," said Price. "I've heard nothing about it."

"You will, sir."

Price waited until Coollege joined them and said, "You know Lieutenant Coollege?"

"Called Jackknife," said Monier.

"Right," said Price.

"You've been doing your homework," said Coollege suspiciously.

Price stood for a moment and then said, "You want to join us? We're going to get something to eat."

Monier looked at Coolledge and then at Price. "No," she said. "I think that I should get settled in first. Find my billet." That was a word she remembered someone using to describe the cabin she would use.

"If you are truly assigned to us," said Price, "then this would be a very good chance for us to get to know one another before we start in the morning."

"I believe..." started Monier.

"Join us," said Price. He turned to Coollege. "No reason for her not to join us is there?"

"Nope, Tree. None at all." Her voice had a sharp edge to it that Price ignored.

"Then it's settled."

"I need a place for my duffle."

Price waved at the hatch. "Drop it in there and we'll lock up."

"Yes, sir."

As Monier stepped around him, Coollege leaned close and said, "I thought it was just going to be just you and me tonight, Tree. I wasn't counting on reinforcements."

"She's new and is assigned to us."

"So she says."

Monier tossed her duffle through the open hatch and straighten. She was smiling broadly. "I'm ready."

"So are we," said Coollege.