My First Novel

Rocket Girl
by David Evans

Chapter: One
In my dreams, I can fly.

So, there I was, yours truly, Alexia “Lex” Raymond, age 17, zooming through the wild blue yonder at the velocity of an artillery shell shot out of a cannon, propelled relentlessly onward by the white hot, duel thrust of two twin kerosene-burning, inter-cooled, mini turbojets (of my own design) strapped to my back. Fluffy white clouds rushed towards and past me in the wink of an eye. Pleasingly warm stratospheric air currents whipped over and around my tightly fitting leather flight jacket and jodhpur breeches making me viscerally aware of every thrilling moment – which, as you might well imagine, caused me to smile.

When I looked down, I could see, far below, the gravity-enslaved, cloud-enshrouded rocky surface of terra firma. Above there was the velvety black, star-studded cosmos-at-large and way out in front, laid out before my eyes, was the vast, almost limitless, curvature of the horizon. It was all painted up in the multicolored twilight hues of the early morning sun as it slowly rose over the edge of the world. Here, I thought, in this glorious place of perpetual flight, all things were as they should be and I was at peace.

Then, I saw it.

“What in the hell?” I though. At first look, I did not know what to make of it. But on the second look, I still didn’t have a clue.

It looked as though one of the brighter stars suspended up in the heavens, I don’t know which one, was getting even brighter – in fact, ridiculously so. It was big, fiery red and plenty menacing looking – like a giant bloodshot eye that was hungrily leering at me. It was not the kind of star you’d want to make any kind wish on. That is, not a wish you’d hold out any hope of coming to a good end, at least.

Then, the unruly celestial body did something I thought, really strange. It started to beam a focused shaft of bright white light straight down through the atmosphere towards the Earth. But it stopped short. The ray dead ended on the unusually flattop surface of a large cloud formation up ahead. It looked, I thought, like a theatrical spotlight shining down onto an airborne stage. Freaky or what, I ask you?

Against what should have been my better judgment, I decided to investigate. I gently pulled back on the throttle mechanism embedded in the glove of my left hand, which cut down the air/fuel mixture for the engines of my jetpack. With my thrust decreased I started to shed velocity and slow down. Then, with the yoke control in my right glove, I manipulated the ailerons and the elevators in the carbon-fiber delta wings affixed to the sides of the pack. Without much trouble at all I was able to guide my flight to the spot where the starbeam was touching down atop the cloud.

Then, I got my next surprise. The cloud was all wrong. To my utter astonishment, the whole of the top of the cloud didn’t appear to be made up of gaseous water vapor as it should have been, but rather it looked like a solid sheet of polished white marble – rock hard and glass smooth. It spread out like the frozen floor of an ice rink for several football fields in area.

As I approached, my velocity lessened to the point where I was able to just hover over (what I guess I should call) the floor. For several moments, I lingered a scant few feet above the floor, kept aloft by the soft rhythmic pulsations of my engines. “This is impossible,” stated the Right side of my brain. “Yeah, maybe,” argued the Left, “but here it is. So, what are you gonna do about it Ace?” I just hate it when my brain quarrels with itself.

Making the kind of bold decision that often gets me in to terrible trouble, I eased down the throttle all the way and then switched off my engines completely. The thrust extinguished. The engines went silent. The exhaust ports went cold and the nozzles automatically self-closed. Gravity took over and I stared to drop. “This is it.” I thought. “Either, I’ll make a three-point landing or all I’ll fall through the top of this cloud like a rock and go plummeting straight down to my doom. Well, at least,” I mused, “my death won’t be boring.”

As it turned out, luck was on my side. The heels of the soles of my knee-high ridding boots came as softly down upon the floor as a mother’s kiss on the forehead of her newborn babe. Automatically, the foldable wings retracted into their hidden slots on both sides of the pack.

For a better look, I pulled off my aviator goggles and crash helmet. My long, dark hair tumbled down upon my shoulders. In my humble opinion, no adventure heroine ever looked better.

Before me, maybe twenty feet away, I could see the light stream. From this angle it looked ominous. At its base its width was only about ten feet in diameter. As for its height, who could say? I craned my neck upwards as hard as I could to look at the red star that was (I assumed) the beam’s point of origin. At the very least, I thought, it had to be several light years (meaning tens of trillions of miles) long. The distance, I though, was mind bending. The very thought of it nearly overloaded my limited human perceptions of size (and for an astronomy nerd, that’s saying something). Was this, I wondered, some kind of weird, freaky natural phenomena? Was it an engineering marvel of an alien (and somewhat deranged) intelligence? Was this an act of (even though I’m and avowed atheist) God? Or, perhaps, it belonged in some other category altogether?

I turned my attention back towards the base at floor level. It was an apparently opaque column of illumination – hard, white light. Despite the fact that I was more than a little intimidated by its shear size, I took a step towards it, then another. I kept on walking until I was near enough to touch it – in other words, too close.

As I approached, something new started to happen. Contained within the column I could see a smattering of multicolored lights. Shimmering reds, greens, blues and yellows blinked in and out of existence. Then there were more and more of such occurrences – until it was like a display of fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The lights started coalescing – taking shape, a human shape. Subsequently, the form became an apparently solid mass. At last, it was complete. It was a woman – a real woman. She was as unmoving as a statue, floating weightlessly within the light stream. Her eyes were closed and her face was peaceful as if she were asleep and blissfully dreaming, kind of like Sleeping Beauty, but vertical not horizontal.

The woman, I thought, was a strikingly attractive, 35-year-old, curly haired brunette with the innocent, wholesome face of a silver screen ingénue. Yet at the same time she was scantily clad in an embarrassingly revealing gown made of shimmering unearthly material and decked out in highly wrought Oriental jewelry complete with matching bracelets, arm bands and a crown-like tiara.

She looked (I thought), more than anything else, like one of those over-sexualized yet hapless, damsels-in-distress ladies who used to grace the cover art of vintage 1930’s pulp-era sci-fi magazines, the ones with over-the-top titles like Amazing Stories. Usually such women were drawn bound-up and imperil from the unwanted attentions of an approaching, lascivious alien monster just as some generic spacesuited heroic he-man was running up to save her sorry ass in a nick of time.

“What are you lady?” I said out loud, “Some kind of transvestite cross between Mata Hari and Flash Gordon’s girlfriend?”

Yet there was something more. The most disconcerting thing about this woman (I thought) was that, as strange as she was, she was also hauntingly familiar. I knew that I knew her. I just could not place from where. Damn.

Strangely, I was drawn to her.

Without stopping to think it over (which is never a very strong suit with me), I pulled off the glove of my right hand and reached up and out my arm and slowly pushed it through the outer membrane of the light stream. Less like light and more like a gooey gelatinous mass, it gave way slowly, like sticking your hand in wet plaster. I kept reaching in until I was all the way up to my upper arm inside the beam, at which point I was within reach.

I was holding my breath. My heart was pounding within my ribcage. With the lightest touch possible I laid the top of my finger tips down on her left shoulder.

Big mistake.

Instantly, in reaction, the space opera diva’s eyelids popped wide open revealing a pair of exotic jade green eyes. She stared straight ahead, as if not seeing. Her sweet voice whispered a single unfamiliar word: “A’Kalisa!”

“What? Who?” I thought. “Do I know that name?”

With that (and before I could demand an explanation), I was frightfully shocked out of the dreaming realm of slumber and into the unforgiving world of wide-eyed consciousness. Real world lights and noises came flooding in.

Chapter: Two
“Dagnabbit!” I scowled. “What the hell was that all about?”

“Huh! Did you say something sweetie?” asked my dad, Dr. Jason Raymond, who was at the wheel of the car.

“No Dad,” I said, straightening up in the passenger seat. “It was just a nice dream that ended up very screwy.”

“That’s nice dear,” replied Dr. Raymond absentmindedly, paying more attention to the road than my incoherent babblings.

Desperately, I tried to recall shards of the dream. The Evil Eyed star. The interstellar sky bridge. The bejeweled, raygun gothic princess. And, that strange word. What was it? A place? A name? But the harder I tried, the more it all washed away from my memory until it all went to that dark forgetting place that most dreams drain off to once we reawaken. At last, I gave up trying.

It was midday. The two of us, me and my dad, were still heading eastbound on Interstate 40 through the sun scorched heart of New Mexico. We were riding in our old, beat-up Chevy station wagon with California plates which was covered in three days worth of road dust. The wagon was stuffed to the gills with clothes, household knickknacks and family memorabilia. Behind us, hitched up in the back, we were dragging a rented U-Haul trailer equally jammed-up with odds-and-ends of furniture. It’s not easy to move your entire life from one part of the country to another (even if it is just two people).

I gazed out my window. It looked hot as Hades out there. Thank God, I thought, for a well-functioning air conditioner.

While I was asleep, I assumed, we must have passed through Albuquerque (the last bastion of civilization, I thought, before we hit the barren hinterlands.) Sprawling suburbs gave way to a landscape of rugged, stony hills that, I could see up ahead, climbed higher and higher towards a chain of high mountain peaks. According to the map, that was the southernmost tip of the Rocky Mountain Continental Divide that split the entire state into two equal halves – and we were going right though it.

It was, I thought, a far cry from the rolling green hills of southern California where I’d grown up. It was then that I let out an untypical girly sigh, as I thought back to the place I considered home. I was already missing it.

“Thinking about Pasadena, Ace?” asked my dad.

“Sorry dad. I’m trying to keep a good attitude. But it’s hard.” If you knew how much effort it took for me to say that with a smile on my face, you’d have pinned a medal on me right there and then.

“You know,” he said for what had to be the dozenth time. “In a dumbed-down, anti-scientific America, there really are fewer and fewer places for an unemployed nuclear physicist to get a good job.”

“I know,” I said. “I just liked Pasadena. That’s all. I felt, you know, tied to it - friends, school, home, that sort of thing. It was a winning combo, a hard thing to give up. You know?”

“Yeah, I understand,” he agreed.

Until recently and for most of my life, my dad had been a professor at CalTech (California Institute of Technology) which is only the second highest rated private research university for science and engineering in the whole wide world. At the same time, he also worked as a consultant for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) which was located nearby and managed by the school. He was sort of a resident genius who assisted on a broad range of projects from robotics to experimental rocket engines.

He loved his work. He had to stay busy. It helped fill up the big empty gap in our lives left by the tragedy-that-we-dare-not-speak-of.

Me? I loved my dad and warm, sunny Southern California. I kind of saw it as my job to keep him going, despite the pain and loneliness he sometimes felt. That’s why at age 8 I put away my Barbie Dolls and plunged in to do-it-yourself home science experiments and traded in my Judy Bloom chapter books for the hard science fiction of Arthur C. Clark and Larry Niven. It was the only way I could see to reach my dad and take care of him.

But everything changed six months ago when massive federal budget cuts forced both CalTech and the JPL to “downsize.” Dad got the double-whammy of being “let go” from both places within the span of two weeks. From that point on, while he was searching for a new job, we started living on his severance pay and savings. The clock was ticking.

“But on the bright side,” I added. “You now get to work for a mysterious, sinister mega-conglomerate that’s out to rule the world through nefarious means.”

I smiled. He smiled back.

“Look,” he said. “I admit that OmniCron is secretive. But they have to be. They’re a big contractor for the federal government. They do ultra high-tech work for NASA, the DoD and the CIA. All that conspiratorial website stuff you’ve been reading is – if I might say, using some decidedly corny descriptive nouns – hooey, humbug, hokum and hogwash.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But it is a fact that your new boss, the reclusive billionaire, the Jebediah “Jeb” Boone: A.) Does not have a verifiable past before the 1970’s. And, B.) Has not been seen in public -a la Howard Hughes- in at least ten years. True?”

To that, dad voiced his trademark, sub-verbal “Ah-hem!” that typically meant that he was getting tired of restating the same arguments again and again. “I don’t like going into a new job blind,” he said. “But being an unemployed scientist with mounting unpaid bills, a bank threatening to foreclose on my home mortgage and a daughter ready to go to college in a few years, I can’t exactly afford to be too choosey. Besides, do you think our government would let a company do all that super-secret research for them in fusion, space propulsion, anti-missile defense, energy weapons and nano technology unless the head honcho was thoroughly checked out?”

“I don’t know,” I countered. “Our beloved government can make some pretty monumental blunders from time to time.”

“Okay,” dad relented. “I’ll give you that.”

The highway snaked through a twisting-turning mountain pass called the Tijeras Canyon. Steep walls of sheer rock rose up on both sides boxing us in.

Ninety minutes later, we came out the other side into the Staked Plains. To me, it looked like what I might imagine the Dark Side of the Moon might look like during the daylight hours. As far as the eye could see, from horizon to horizon, the scenery was all tabletop flat, semi-arid desert country. The monotonous (let me think of a good word) boringness of the region was broken up only by the occasional outcropping of towering, jagged raw stone formations. They were kind of cool.

Round about three p.m. we turned off the high-speed, multi-lane interstate freeway and started traveling southeast on the secondary, two-lane state routes. These were lonely stretches of road where we saw only a handful of other cars. The few signs of human habitation we saw along these roads where either ranch houses or trailer parks set way the hell back from the road or postage stamp-sized small towns made up of weather-beaten wooden houses cloistered around the local, last chance filling station and block-shaped general store. The dry, blistering heat of the summer sun seemed to make all life (human and animal) in this area move at a zombie crawl. These places I found kind of scary.

But the scariest one of all turned out to be the one we were looking for - its name was Red Rock. We knew that because we’d read the name off the barely legible, shotgun blasted sign on the side of the road as we drove into what, I quickly assumed to be, a 100%, bona fide ghost town. Every one of the town’s dozen or so scarcely standing, long-abandoned buildings was overgrown with thick, prickly-haired, clingy vines. Tumble weeds and trash blew everywhere. The whole place just screamed dead silence, if that makes any sense.

“Dad this can’t possibly be the right place – and please do agree with me on this one. ‘Cause I’d really like it if we turned around and got out of here before something bad happened.”

“What kind of ‘something’ do you mean, Lex?” His voice was annoyingly calm.

“The kind of stuff that always happens to hapless travelers in 1970’s horror movies when they stumble into cursed dead end towns. They get captured and chopped up by a band of insane, killer hick mutants.”

“I hope your overactive imagination is getting paid overtime for all the hard work it’s putting in. Besides, this has to be the right place, it’s right on the map that the OmniCron HR people sent us in that packet in the mail. We just have to keep looking for it.”

Slowly, he eased the car down the town’s main drag. We looked left and right searching for some kind of marker telling us what our next step was supposed to be.

That’s when, from behind the corner of a two-story wooden ruin, the Thunder-Eater jumped out and almost bludgeoned us into oblivion.

Chapter: Three
A Tyrannosaurs Rex-sized, double-diesel semi-truck rig pulling no less then three trailers behind it. The monster must have been going way over whatever the suggested safe speed for making such a hairpin turn. Because, to our eyes, it was like a twenty-foot tall steel centipede shooting out of nowhere right in front of us.

Dad slammed on the brakes and we both lurched forward getting our breathe knocked out of our lungs as our shoulder belts immediately pulled us back into our seats. To top it all off, the driver, had the temerity (read: assholeishness) to blow his horn at us as he went by. I guess that was to show how annoyed he was with us for being in his way. Jerk face.

We just sat there in silence stopped with the engine idling as that wayward rig rocketed down the road and disappeared into the distance. There’s nothing like, out-of-the-blue, almost sudden death to curtail all conversation.

Then, where most adult men would have been tempted to swear and unholy oath, my always rational thinking, scientist dad calmly said “Well, I guess this must be the right place.”

Slowly and carefully, lest there be more psychotic truck drivers lying in wait, we turned the corner and saw, spread out in front of us, the beginning of a newly blacktopped four lane road that that ran ramrod straight southward into the empty distance. Right beside it was a band new road sign that read: New Horizon - 50 miles.

The private highway had no posted speed limit, which meant that the various tractor-trailer rigs and other oversized vehicles traversing up and down it were cruising along at well over 100mph.

As I looked from the left and to the right, all I could see was a broad, flat, empty landscape. Isolated was one word that came to my mind. Godforsaken was another.

But then we started to see glimmers of corporate capitalistic civilization. At first, it was a high, razor-wire topped cyclone fence that stretched for miles and seemingly guarded nothing but hundreds of empty acres of sun baked brush land dotted by prickly cactus plants. Bolted on the fence, at what must have been 100 foot intervals, we saw official looking signs that threatened heavy prosecution and bodily harm to any and all trespassers.

Then off in the distance, we saw a sprawling construction site. It was a massive engineering operation with gigantic, black and yellow painted, heavy diesel powered excavators, shovels, and bulldozers removing huge raw chunks out of the Earth, while the biggest dump trucks I’d ever seen where hauling it away, leaving behind seemingly bottomless pits. At the same time, cement mixers were pouring concrete down long chutes and cranes were lowering steel girders into the trenches while armies of workers wielded them into place. It was, I thought, similar to busy ants constantly tending their home nest hill.

“I’ll bet,” said dad, “that down below they’ve got one of those German-made tunnel-boring machines. Like a giant mechanical worm it uses rotary cutting wheels at the mouth-end to eat rocks and dirt then spits them out the ass-end, crawling ever forward on hydraulic jack tentacles. They’re going to connect the pits with a ring-shaped, subterranean tunnel.”

“Which I means that’s got to be site for the new Large Haldron Collider that OmniCron is building,” he continued. There was reverence in his voice. “It’s ambitious. It’s exciting. It’s going to be the largest particle beam accelerator in the nation. Once it’s completed there will be no limit to the kinds of high-energy research that we’ll be able to do.”

I noted he used the word “we” to signify that he was already mentally identifying himself with his new employer.

“You mean like for new fangled anti-ballistic missile and anti-satellite guns? Oh joy, a whole new, post-Cold War international arms race, but in space.” I was being smart-alecky but that was only a mask to hide what I really wanted to ask him.

“Yeah. There’s that,” said dad, not appreciating my sarcasm much. “But I was thinking more along the lines of nuclear-based propulsion drives for interplanetary space missions. With something like that, we could conquer the solar system, maybe even travel to the stars.” Now he was talking like a wide-eyed optimist, a scientist that was all enthusiastic over pure research into the unknown. But I knew there was something more, something he wasn’t telling. Damnit, I wished I had the guts to just come out and ask him what it was.


According to the thick “Welcome Packet” of brightly colored, laminated brochures that OmniCron had sent to our old house in the mail, the complex grounds covered over 300 square miles and encompassed some of the most advanced pure science and applied technology labs in the world. Every day 13,000 company employees -some of the best and brightest scientists, engineers, mathematicians, chemists and technicians- went to work at various high-security enclaves all over this area. OmniCron was a big place that worked on some pretty nifty stuff. But it also held secrets.

We also saw more ominous signs of corporate culture. Every couple of miles we saw, high steels poles that supported, what looked like to me, mounted surveillance cameras. Big Brother is watching you - always!

A road signs advised us to reduce our speed. So, we knew we were getting close to the entrance. But nothing could have prepared us for what we saw next. Spanning from one side to the other was a colossal, free standing, steel arch that supported a big, colorful corporate logo of retro-futuristic design. It read: OmniCron Aerospace: The Leader In Next Generation Technology. It was such a grand affair that the trucks coming and going could easily pass beneath it. Also, beneath it there were several guardhouse stations with toll gates manned by grey uniformed rent-a-cops in white hats with white gloves. It was, I thought, an ominous cross between the welcoming sign to the Walt Disney World Resort and a security checkpoint to a post-Soviet Central Asian dictatorship. Welcome to 1984.

We had to wait in line a bit before we could pull up to one of the gates. The extremely polite guard, whose silver name tag simply read “Chuck”, asked for dad’s state driver’s license. He scanned it with a laser into his flat screen palm pad.

The guard waited on his device to answer back to him. I was searching the guy’s face to see any kind of recognition that we would be approved. This did not look like the right place to try and gatecrash with a faulty ID.

When the guard turned around and returned to his little, transparent lucite guard station, I got a little tense. I was sure the guy was phoning a SWAT team to come swooping in by black supercopter and take up to some undisclosed location dungeon. But when he came back a moment later he was all smiles and holding a hard copy, color printout.

“Welcome to OmniCron Dr. Raymond,” he said. “It says here on the screen, that this is your first time here on ‘the Cron.’ Your new residence is all ready for you and if you follow the directions in this map printout, you should be able to find your way with no problem.”

“Uh….Thanks,” said dad.

The guard pressed a button on his hand-held, the toll gate when up, dad stepped on the gas, and we rolled on into our future.

Chapter: Four

A street sign for what turned out to be the main thoroughfare caught my eye. “Radio Ranch Drive?” I said. “Where does that come from?”

“It’s from an old Gene Autry film serial from the mid-1930’s called The Phantom Empire,” answered dad. “It was about a singing cowboy who goes head-to-head with the evil queen of an antediluvian, subterranean civilization bent on destroying America. It played in fifteen episodic chapters complete with cliffhangers endings where someone’s life would be in dire peril and you had to come back to the theater the next week to see how Gene would save them in just a nick of time. It had everything – goofy bucket head robots, death rays, art-deco cityscapes, comic relief sidekicks, precocious kids.”

“Dad,” I said. “I fear for your sanity. What in the world are you babbling about?” But there was no stopping him now. He was on a roll.

“The old sci-fi serials were a big draw in their depression-era heyday. The best were The Fighting Devil Dogs about how two US Marine Corps officers fight touch-and-go with an evil genius called The Lightning, the very first costumed supervillain. That scurrilous rogue wiped out whole armies with his arsenal of spark spitting, electrocution torpedoes fired off from his flying wing skyship.

Then there was Undersea Kingdom staring Ray “Crash” Corrigan about a cadet at the Annapolis Naval Academy who, with a doddering old scientist-professor, his spunky kid, a girl reporter and a trio of comic sidekicks. They ride a “rocket submarine” down to the ocean depths to accidentally discover the lost continent of Atlantis which turns out to be ruled over by a usurper tyrant planning on destroying the surface word with his arsenal of Atom-gun wielding robots, remote controlled Juggernaut tanks, sky chariots and his Sunday punch, an earthquake creating machine called the Disintegrator.”

“Oh, I guess that’s supposed to be interesting,” I said with mock interest and flexing my fingers to form air quotes on the word ‘interesting.’

Ignoring my sarcasm dad rolled on through. “But the King of the Serials, in my opinion, was the first Flash Gordon. It was epic in scale, kind of a Jason and the Argonauts in space. This had it all: dashing heroes, mad scientists, fainting ingénues, double-crossing femme fatales, runaway planets, aquatic shark-men, sky cities, man-killing monsters, amnesia potions, invisibility rays, aerial dogfights, poison gas bombings and the greatest archfiend of them all, the cackling megalomanic Ming the Merciless.”

Ming the Merciless? I thought. Why did that ring a bell? I tried to recall, but couldn’t. So, I let it go.

As dad droned on about God-knows-what, I turned my attentions out the passenger door window. At first sight, New Horizon looked to me like an architectural version of that old Cold War classic flick Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But in this scenario instead of just bodies and minds being swapped, it was whole a human community that had been had been replaced by alien substitutes. Traditional neighborhoods and main streets simply did not exist here. They’d been usurped by a post-modern, car-centric civilization of sprawling suburban subdivisions.

As far as the eye could see the arid desert moonscape had been bulldozed flat and paved over with an impermeable layer of concrete and asphalt. Upon that stratum stood a seemingly endless horizontal expansion consisting of strip mall shopping plazas, gigantic box-shaped monstermarts and neon-encrusted fast food franchises. Connecting everything to everything else were acres upon acres of blacktop parking lots and a haphazard network of ultra-wide, sidewalk-free roadways where everything was accessible only by relentless driving. In other words: nothing-was-built-near-anything-else and walking was a clear sign that you were either underage, indigent or suffering from severe automobile difficulties.

Past the commercial shopping district we entered one of the residential plats. I noticed a stately chiseled stone sign that read Aero Acres. Inside it was a confusing labyrinthine maze of curving switch-back roads and cul-de-sacs with odd-ball street names like Blast-Off Boulevard, Happy Landings, Thruster Trail, Rocket Road, Splashdown Circle or Missile Mile Court. Along these streets stood a monotonous string of cookie-cutter identical split-level, Ranch-styled tract houses. Each one was separated by white picket fences that bordered greener than green grassy lawns and mature green, leafy trees that must have been imported from another state. It was like an ironic parody of Midwestern, middle-class life or a real-life episode of Leave It to Beaver from a bizarro alternate universe.

Adults were out on their riding lawnmowers or washing their cars with the garden hose. Little kids were in their bathing suits playing in the sprinklers. We even passed a big community recreation center with an Olympic-sized outdoor swimming pool and a water park complete with towering water slides, geysers, waterfalls and –in what had to be the park’s feature attraction- a giant pool that generated artificial waves for surfing.

Where did all the water come from? I wondered. What an obscene luxury in the middle of a bone-dry wasteland. That’s when I first noticed the sheer number of water towers spouting up across the landscape. They were everywhere. But still, I wondered, where did all the water come from?

Our new house –I wasn’t ready to call it “home” just yet- was located on a street named Ion Drive. It looked just like every other house, a mass of low, long rectangles of minimalist design made of red brick, wood and stucco with a low strung roof, attached two car garage and large plate glass picture windows. It was situated on a large lot (perhaps a whole half acre) with that unnaturally green grass that looked like it had been recently cut and manicured.

But as we pulled in I could see the backyard. Bordering the rear was a tall cyclone fence and beyond that was the dry, dusty prairie - in other words there was nothing visible for miles and miles, just scrub brush and half dead-looking Joshua trees.

Already parked in the driveway was another car. No, it wasn’t a car exactly. It was more like a brand-new, all-white, electric gulf cart. The stylized OmniCron corporate logo was emblazoned across its driver’s side door and below that it read in stenciled letters: R.E.&H.D. As we crawled out of the car, which really isn’t easy after five hours of driving, I wondered who belonged to the cart.

“Dr.Raymond, Ms.Raymond,” rang out a voice. “Hello.” We turned and saw coming out of the front double doors of the house a chubby faced balding man in his mid-40’s come on out. He wore a blue suite and tie to match. “It’s good to meet you two at last” said the man, walking towards us. “I’m Barry Hayes of the Real Estate and Housing Department. We’ve talked on the phone.” He confidently thrust his hand forward to give dad a manly handshake and me one too for good measure. “I’m what you might call the official, unofficial welcome wagon around here. And, It’s my honor and pleasure to be the first to welcome you to your new home.” He waived his hands with a theatrical flourish to where the house was, just in case we hadn’t seen it standing behind him.

“As is our policy, we took the liberty of moving your furniture in when the moving van got here yesterday. But, of course, we understand that you’ll have your own ideas about where everything is supposed to go. So, I’ll have some of my guys come around this weekend and help you move around stuff and hang pictures and paintings. Also, we went ahead and made the beds with fresh sheets and blankets and stocked the fridge with a few essentials.”

“Uh...thanks?” uttered dad who was a bit overwhelmed and bewildered. “That’s all really nice of you. We didn’t expect....”

“Oh, no thanks required,” interjected Hayes. “I love my job. It’s great to help nice folks like you get a head start your first night here on the Cron. Besides, we know you’d rather spend your first night getting on a first name basis with your new hacienda than staying at the Holiday Inn.”

Then he handed dad the keys, which really weren’t keys at all but plastic laminated cards with holographic imprints embedded in them. “This is what you call a ‘smart house’,” explained Mr. Hayes. “All the automatic systems such and home security, central air, lighting, maintenance and parts of the kitchen are all tied in to one central brain. It can wake you up in the morning, help you make breakfast and be your guard dog while you’re away at work or school during the day. Plus if something goes wrong, like a leak in the plumbing, it can let you know immediately about that. And, while you’re asleep at night if anything bigger than a stray cat or dog walks across your lawn, the CPU will send a silent alarm to our own private security police who can be here in less than five minutes. So, you see, you’ve never been safer.” With that he touched two fingers to the top of his forehead in what was a kind of cross between a formal goodbye and a casual salute. He climbed into his Arnold Palmer golf cart and whizzed away.

Dad and I walked up the the front door. He ran his card through the reader affixed to the outside wall. Welcome home, modulated a robotic female voice from a speaker embedded over the door.” The lock unbolted and the door popped open. Just before dad turned towards me. “Ace, remember that Robosapien I bought you for your twelfth birthday?”

“Um...Yes. And, that’s a very random thing for you to reminisce about right now.”

“Not really. Because I remember how you couldn’t wait to open that sucker up and hack into its CPU. First you turned it into a mini soccer player and then into a gladiatorial deathmatch fighter. So what I’m getting to is this: No matter how tempting you might find it, I would really rather you didn’t try anything like that with our new house. Got it?”

“Yes, dad. ‘Got it.’” I answered back. Then we walked into our new home.


Chapter: Five
Inside, the center of the living room amongst the couches, overstuffed chairs and the 62 inch plasma flatscreen TV that I and played so many first-person shooter games down through the years was a mass of taped-up and labeled cardboard boxes stacked up on top of each other in neat towering columns.

By the phone on the wagon wheel coffee table -that dad had picked up during his college days at MIT- was a preprinted list of local carry-out Chinese and delivery pizza joints. We opted for the Chinese. It was located in one of the plazas in the nearby shopping district. Where in the world would the lonely widowers of America and their daughters be if it wasn’t for grand American tradition of ordering Chinese take-out?

As soon as we opened the little white boxes, the steam instantly rose of the white rice. The aroma of boiled veggies swimming in sweet and sour wafted through the air. It was nice and it made me very hungry. We dug in and ate like starving sailors who had been lost at sea for days and just rescued.

I don’t know if it was the food or the euphoria born of sheer exhaustion from the long trip, but that night dad was brimming with enthusiasm. He was revitalized. Gone was his weariness from the road trip. He proposed a toast to our good fortune with sparkling soda pop.

“The future,” he said, “from here, looks like it’s going to turn out all right.” I could tell, right there and then, that dad was going to hold forth and soliloquize. “OmniCron’s got all kinds of big plans for the future. Once the Large Haldron Collider is built and put on-line, they’re going to do all kinds of sub-molecular particle research which will lead, I think, to a working model of fusion power. That’s the holy grail, the magic cornucopia of plenty. This is important stuff. We could bring a bright new age to the world.”

Yup. I was right. Dad was now officially into full-scale lecture mode as if I one of his students and this was his classroom. Oh well, life could be worse.

“When I was a kid growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, we had this vision of what the 21st century would be like. It was supposed to be the big breaking point, the gateway threshold into The Future. A technological utopia would be ours. Sky high cities. Flying Cars. Robot servants. Orbital space stations. Domed colonies on the moon. Nuclear powered manned spaceflight to Mars.”

“Back then, we thought our future was going to be Amazing!”

“But it’s all different now. The future just ain’t what it used to be. Now it’s all cyberpunk and dark, gothic neo-noir. It’s all about VR and escaping reality because we can’t face the real world any more. It’s about science messing with the gene codes of every living thing trying to make gods but only manufacturing monsters. Flooding our bodies with botox and steroids. Injecting ‘smart drugs‘ into our brains. Having sex online because nobody dares to actually meet anyone else anymore. It’s all about people falling in love with their home computers, trying to shove themselves into artificial fantasy realms. Nobody wants to make the world a better place anymore.”

Dad was getting all kinds of preachy. It was a little manic. But it was the most alive I’d seen him since he got laid off. So, I didn’t mind it too much. “Dad,” I said in my most soothing voice, “It’s been a really long, strung-out day. And, I’ll bet you’re even more flat-out tired than I am. Maybe it’s time for bed. What’d’ay say?”

“Okay Ace,” he agreed. He seemed to have taken the hint about his ranting and started coming down from his mountaintop. “We’ll need plenty of rest. Tomorrow marks the start of our awesome new lives.”

That night I slept in my old, familiar bed in my new room. Just as my head was hitting the pillow I made some mental notes about how I’d set my new room up after I got back from school the following afternoon. I slipped into sleep almost instantly - and then the floating dream came.

At first, I became unerringly aware of my own breathing. Every husky breath in-and-out of my lungs rang in my ears as if I was trapped inside a tiny echo chamber.

Then, my eyes shot open - and I gaped in open-mouthed stupification at the panoramic spectacle all around me. I found my head surrounded by an egg-shaped fishbowl. And beyond the transparent membrane of the bubble, I could see that I was apparently floating weightlessly (my arms and legs flailing around) in the midst of a thick sea of mystery blackness that was punctuated by the multi-colored lights of stars, constellations, galaxies and glowing nebula clouds. They burned incandescently.

It took several seconds before my brain could catch up and process what my eyes were seeing. Was I really in outer space? I wondered.

Then I realized that the fishbowl was in fact some kind of crazy helmet. Instinctively I looked down, and I saw that the rest of my body was likewise encased inside, what had to be, a pressurized space suit. Yet it wasn’t one of those spotlessly white fabric and fiberglass suites that I’d seen countless photos of NASA astronauts wearing through the years when they did their spacewalks. No, this was a hardshell suite of armor made of some kind of gold and bronze colored metal with black rubberized joins.

And then I noticed, and I have no idea why I didn’t notice this first, that right in front of me was the biggest thing I’d ever seen or imagined in my whole, entire life. It was an absolutely gigantic brilliant, sparkling crystal. It was absolutely round like a deep blue marble, touched with shades of green, brown and gray. Overtop it were slowly swirling veils of white. A thin halo clung to its rim.

Yet, despite its size, I was terrified by its fragile appearance. So delicate it looked that, I thought, if I dared to touch it with but a fingertip it would crumble and fall apart. It was painfully beautiful, like a glimpse of divinity.

It was a planet - a whole freaking planet!- and it was just hanging there as big as God himself. But what planet? I wondered. Because, I had the sneaking suspicion it wasn’t the ever-lovin’ Earth. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. Maybe it was because the shape of all the continents were all just plain wrong.

Then over the horizon the sun came up like thunder. The sunrise was fast – taking only a few seconds. But in that time period I saw at least eight different bands of color – from brilliant red to the brightest, deepest blue. It was tremendous visual spectacle, but viewed in utter silence. No grand musical accompaniment, no triumphant, inspired sonata or symphony. Just dead quiet.
Then I heard the voice - it was a woman’s voice. It was hauntingly familiar. It came from everywhere and nowhere. Or, maybe it was just inside my head. She said, “A’Kalisa, this is Aesyra. This is your world. This is your home.”
Then came the onslaught of country and western music. The twangy lyrics were telling me that I had to repent my sins and accept the love of “Jesus” or forever suffer the “fires of damnation.” I opened my eyes and reached out to shut up my digital clock radio. Back home it had been tuned to 106.7 KROQ the best rock station in Los Angeles. Here that same frequency seemed to be some hellfire and brimstone holy roller station. I made a mental note to change that when I got back home tonight.

Little did I know then that I’d never get a chance to do that.

Chapter: Six

I had woke up in a snit. But this time, I remembered the dream a little better.

Crazy lady, I thought, why were you breaking into my dreams? Where did you come from? What Freudian subconscious memory did you rise up out of? And, could I send you back?

Later, in the bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror, I could not believe what I saw. You see, in New Horizon there was no public school. All the kids in town were automatically enrolled, tuition free, into the corporate-owned private Bullfinch Academy of Arts and Sciences. It was an original, no-nonsense, old-school school that took its cues from old New English boarding schools. So, there I was wearing the mandatory school uniform.

And yes, it was as bad as you could imagine. Saddle shoes, bobby socks, a dark blue pleated skirt and blue blazer to match over a white blouse with a red and gold stripped tie choking me around my throat. On the breast of the blazer was a sewn on patch which bore the official crest of the school, a stylized Oriental dragon coiled around an upthrust sword that pierced a blue, green globe of the Earth.

At least, I thought it was the Earth. I fingered the patch and had a dim memory of some other planet. The word “Aesyra” came to mind and I don’t know why. Then I looked at myself straight into the mirror - straight into my own jade green eyes and some other memory started to try to poke its head out of the sand. But it never got any further than that. So, my mind turned to other things and it was soon forgotten.

I looked foolish. I felt foolish. And, I hoped to God that Dad was not waiting downstairs with a digital camera waiting to record me going out to my first day at my new school. I took a deep breath and gritted my teeth. The quicker I got this day started, I thought, the faster I’d get this dreaded New-Kid-at-First-Day-of-School shtick over with.

As anyone who’s ever seen the John Hughes’ 80’ flick The Breakfast Club already knows, there was a severe pecking order at any high school. It was almost as bad at the caste system in India. And in that system the new kids are always automatically relegated to the bottom status. There was a word for what I was feeling right now. Hmm, what is that word? Oh, yes. It’s grrrr!

I snuck downstair and almost make my Escape from Alcatraz move out the front door when Dad cornered me. “Dad?” I said with mock surprise. I thought you’d be on your way to work by now.”

“Two things Ace,” said Dad in a tone that signaled that he was about to lay down some Sharia Law. “First, I don‘t remember seeing you eat any breakfast this morning and I’d like to rectify that before you go. And second, I’d like an oath out of you. No fighting with boys and no showing up your teacher.”

“Sure Dad,” I said. “I’ll let you watch me eat something if you like. No charge. And, I swear, I won’t kill anyone unless they really deserve it. And I promise not to say anything in class that will cause any local holy rollers to accuse you of raising a heretic. Good enough?”

“No,” he said. “There’s one more thing.” He looked me in the eye and suddenly assumed this embarrassingly sincere face. It took me by complete surprise. “You’re a smart kid and a good kid and I’m very, very proud of you.”

To this, I was a bit speechless. He was worried about something. But I could not figure out what. Me? His first day at work? What?

Breakfast was fun. Dad and I talked. He was hopeful about the future I made snarky comments. All in all, it was like old times again. Except, of course, we were missing that one element that we never talked about.

Luckily, we lived close enough to the campus that I could just walk on over. Well, that’s not 100% truth. It was about a full mile way, but I’m the kind of girl what would rather walk than ride. I find that a putting one foot in front of the other almost always serves to clear my overly busy mind - and that’s a good thing.


Chapter: Seven
The school campus was impressive for two reasons. First was because it was so large. It was made up of about a dozen interlocking buildings consisting of classrooms, lecture halls, art rooms, gymnasium, drama theater and a rugby field and a polo field. No, I’m not kidding. It had a field where students would ride around on horseback hitting painted wooden balls around with oversized mallets.

The second thing I liked about it was that it absolutely did not fit in with the rest of New Horizon. Whereas the town was ultra-modern and sterile, Bullfinch was a definite throwback to the Victorian Gothic Era when steam engines and horse drawn carriages ruled the day.

Covered in polished gray limestone and marble masonry the multi-storied structures looked like a medieval castle fortress. The hard-edge architecture was punctuated by narrow pointed windows, Romanesque arches, flat and gabled roofs with battlements and parapets topped by -Get this!- ghoulishly carved stone gargoyles. The overall effect was at once gloomy, somber, and -I’ll have to admit- kind of romantic.

In the early-19th century it had started out life as a grand manor estate in old New England for the mayor of New York City. But after he had lost his fortune to drink, gambling debts and expensive mistresses, he committed suicide. Which left his wife forced to convert the house to a preparatory boarding school for the sons of rich, aristocratic East Coasters and she became the first Head Mistress.

For almost a full century the school held up a tradition of transforming stuck-up, blue-blooded snotty brats with old money and no brains into young men of character ready to enter the Ivy League. Yet by the swinging 60s such stuffed-shirt and boiled-collar places went out of style and out of business. The school closed its doors and stood abandoned and in disrepair for decades. That was until wily Jeb Boone, flush with cash from all his whiz-kid inventions found it on a buying spree. He bought it from the last surviving owners who were all too happy to get rid of it, had it disassembled stone-by-stone and shipped the whole thing off, via flatbed, to his artificial oasis in the wilderness. There he rebuilt it, even grander than it was before, as an alma mater for his own private utopia. Now it was a tuition free school with grades ranging from kindergarten to the last year of high school for all the children of OmniCron employees and residents of the town.

For me, a girl from the sunshine and surfing state of Southern California who’s grown up in public school just a stone’s throw away from LA, this was all bizarrely surreal. But the kids there were nice. They offered up shy smiles and hellos. One of them even offered to help me out when I was looking lost on my way to the Main Office.

I had a very quick meeting with the current Head Master, a Dr. John Wesley Crowther. He looked over my records from Pasadena High and then came that inevitable frown across his face. “Ummm....Miss Raymond, I see here that you had more then one incident where you had mishaps in chemistry class. Something about experiments going, shall we say awry, causing damage to school property and endangering fellow students?”


“Well,” I began. “You see. I had built an engine for a toy car that would run off of McDonald's cooking oil as a fuel source. But, you see, I think I must have miscalculated the fuel-to-air ratio in mixture for the carburetor and then it kind or....well, went all kabluey.”

The disapproving look across Dr. Crowther’s face was, I thought, priceless. But he did sign off on my final paperwork, shook my hand and wished me good luck in my senior year at Bullfinch.

Chapter: Eight
For the rest of the morning it was a pretty good day. My first few classes had interesting teachers, who, I’m happy to say, had the decency not to force me to introduce myself to the rest of the class. However, that all ended when, out in one of the school’s grand hallways on the second floor of the northwest wing during class changes between 3rd and 4th period, I encountered Bartholomew “Bart the Fart” Hamilton.

He was what you might call a ‘nerd bully’.

What’s a nerd bully? You might ask. Well, it’s a kid who is himself a nerd, an outcast, a social misfit and therefore a target of public ridicule. But since nobody likes to be a victim, the nerd bully’s warped solution to that problem is to compensate by turning on his own kind. He persecutes, torments and terrorizes other nerds who might be smaller, weaker or more passive than himself. The twisted logic of this is that if you’re a victimizer (even of your own kind) then you can’t be a victim. But before you go judging poor Bart too harshly, you should consider the fact that adults and whole nations have been operating on that same rationalization throughout history.

The long corridor was packed with students running to their lockers to get their books for their next class. When I first laid eyes on Bart, who I guessed to be a sophomore, was -for no discernible reason- shoving a freshman kid into an open locker with one hand and punching him in the face with the other. Bart was tall for his age with broad shoulders and a broad belly to match, which made him look more massive than fat. His face was twisted in a comical sneer. Bullies usually think they are school comedians and their cruelty is the wittiest, funniest thing in the world - and those who don’t ‘get the joke’ and laugh along with him just lack a sense of humor.

The kid who was getting shoved halfway into the locker was short, skinny and did not look so much frightened as he did confused as to what to do. He was looking around for someone to step in and help him. But of course, everybody just stood there and watch the cravenly watched the spectacle like it was another form of entertainment. Some gawked. Others jeered getting a vicarious thrill out of this. Jerks.

I thought briefly about the promise I’d made Dad. You know, the one about not getting into fights. But this bullying offended me for two reason. First, I can’t stand to see anybody getting picked on. Second, I’ve got a soft spot for nerdy guys.

Bart’s fat knuckled fist was about to go careening into the skinny kid’s face once again, when I stepped in and did what I usually did best - got myself into trouble.

I reached up with one hand and grabbed Bart’s punching hand by the wrist. My fingers closed in tight. I’m stronger than I look - much stronger and I don’t know why but I just am. Not only was Bart unable to move his arm but I heard him wince in pain under my GI Joe kung-fu grip.

Not used to having is “fun” interrupted, Bart was momentarily taken aback. Then his dumbfounded face betrayed double-shock when he saw that the source of that interruption came from a mere girl.

I decided to break the ice. “Look, you knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, bottom-feeding waste-of-space oxygen thief, I’m going to give you a choice. Let him go and you can walk away. Otherwise, there’s the ‘or else’ option.” To emphasize my point I increased the pressure of my grip.

Old Bart looked puzzled. He wasn’t used to people standing up to him and was unsure as to what to do in this situation. His squinty-eyed face scrunched up as he started working his underused brain overtime to try and figure this conundrum out. His solution, as it turned out, was to go for broke and act like even more of an a-hole.

“So, the little sist’a thinks she’s all gangsta now. Huh?” He droned on in his best rendition of an upperclass, suburban white kid trying to imitate a reality TV version of urban streetwise. “Well, I’ve got nothing against lay’n down some hurt on some uppity Bee’otch.” With that he released the freshman and made ready wallop me. But not before, saying, “I’m about to get all prime-evil on yo‘ ass.”

I gritted my teeth, balled up the fingers of my free hand into a fist and made ready to fight it out. Sorry Dad. A girl’s got to do what a girl’s go to do.

But then, before Bart could let loose with his punch another hand came out of left-field and grabbed his fist in midair. My eyes tracked the hand to an arm and then onto the arm’s owner -a boy. He was about my age, maybe a bit older, tall and extremely muscular looking beneath his school uniform with the rumpled blazer and badly-tied school tie. He was, I’ll have to admit, kind of handsome in that high school star athlete, all around Lothario, heartbreaker sort of way. Clearly not my type...maybe, I think.

With, what I thought to be some pretty impressive upper body strength, the new boy held Bart’s arm completely immobile. As much as the bully tried to swing and punch at something, anything, he just couldn’t. It was a predicament that he found very frustrating.

“Bart,” said the New Boy. “Do you remember back in grade school when I beat your brains out for harassing my little brother?” His tone was calm. Bart said nothing. I could see in his perplexed face that none of this was going the way it was supposed to in his mind. “Well,” continued the new boy. “Unless you want a re-run of that classic episode right here and right now, I suggest you let Max and the little lady go.”

“I’m not a ‘little lady,’” I said. My voice sounded a bit angrier than I really was. What can I say, my adrenaline was flowing.

“I’m trying to help,” said the boy.

“Don’t want it. Don’t need it.” I snapped back.

“Sure, I can clearly see that.” He groused.

While new boy and I were having our Tracy/Hepburn exchange, the freshmen, whose name I guess was Max, pulled himself out of the locker and made his exit. Bart on the other hand was considering his options. I’m sure he had to weigh getting physically hurt in a fight as opposed to suffering the social stigma of backing down in public. Reluctantly he stopped struggling and relaxed both his punching arm. In turn, new boy and I released our grip on him. Cowed, Bart the nerd bully slinked away. As he waddled way, I could here him mutter under his breath something about revenge.

“White azz-hole. You’ll get your’s, show-nuff,” said the pasty-white white bully boy as a parting shot.

Chapter: Nine
I and New Boy checked on Max. I think that he was grateful, not that we saved him but that someone actually cared enough to step in and do something even when everyone else did not.

After Max walked away, New Boy did what I half-hoped he would. He turned towards me, flashed a big broad, neon-electric smile and introduced himself. “Hi. Name’s Dash, short for Dashiell Hammersmith. You must be new.”

Inside my head I was saying Yes, I am new. God! You’re so handsome. Let’s be friends...and by friends I mean lovers. But my motormouth said something completely different. It was switched into total b-i-t-c-h mode. “Yeah, I’m new. So, what? What’s it to you?” Then I spun around on my feet and started walking away.

What the hell are you doing, I thought. He’s gorgeous and you’re walking away. What’s up with that?

Thankfully he was not the kind to take no for an answer. He followed along side me. “Hey! Why don’t we have lunch? I know a little place down on the first floor called the ‘cafeteria.‘ All the critics are raving about it. Come down after your next class. I’ll save a seat for you.”

I could not help but smile at that.

True to his word he did save me a seat. The cafeteria was an auxiliary gymnasium that doubled as a dinning hall during lunch time. Instead of big, long tables with benches like my old school. This had individual small tables. More intimate.

Over square pizza and french fries swimming in ketchup, we talked. He was, as I soon learned, good at chatting up girls. He was brimming with confidence and boyish charm. I learned that he was captain of both the school rugby and polo teams. He lived with his dad, who was never around and he did not seem to either like or dislike him. He didn’t say what he did, but that he was some kind of high executive up in OmniCon’s upper echelons.

He had a kind of magic charisma that I was falling prey to. I was, for a change, thoroughly disarmed. Unexpectedly I started talking about all kinds of deeply taboo subject - even the Forbidden Subject.

“Her first name was Medea, just like from Greek mythology,” I said. “Her family originally came from old Europe but she had grown up in the Midwest. After graduation from the Air Force Academy she went right into aeronautics. She met my dad when they both worked at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. He built the rockets and she would fly them. It was a match made in the ionosphere.”

“Hmm...,”said Dash. “Madea Raymond? I think I remember that name. Was she the one that died in that accident?”

“Yes. That was her.” I was surprised I wasn’t choking back the words. “When I was 8-years-old, she volunteered to be a part of a special project. They sealed her and six other astronauts into an hermetically sealed artificial environment. It was meant to simulate long-range interplanetary space flight - like a manned mission to Mars.”

“But something went wrong. Right?” He asked.

“Yeah, it went wrong big time,” I said. “There was a short circuit in one of the electrical systems. It ignited the pressurized pure oxygen atmosphere of the simulator. The very air burned like lit gasoline. It was instant chaos. Everything went out of control. They all burned to death in less then a minute. After the rescue team had been able to breach the sealed hatches, they found what little was left of their charred bodies melted and fused with their spacesuites.”

Wow! I was amazed with myself. I said all that. I didn’t even talk about that with my dad, or the therapist I saw after her death, or even myself. But I just said that all to a perfect stranger. It just popped out of my mouth without me even thinking about it.

Then I said, “But that all happened when I was just a kid. I can barely remember her now. It’s like I’ll try and get an image in my mind of what she looked like, or sounded like or smelled like. But then it will all float way. It’s like trying to grab smoke.”

I could feel a single hot tear running down the side of my cheek. Damn. I hate girlish crying.

Dash saw and put one of his hands over mine. “It’s okay,” he said. “I know it’s really hard to talk about this kind of stuff. But its easier with a stranger. I don’t know why, just is.”

That’s when Dash got a far away look in his eyes. “Besides,” he said. “I kind of know what you mean. I lost my mom as a kid too. It’s something you just don’t get over. Hell, you don’t even want to get over it. It’s like letting go of your grief would be a...betrayal.”

If it had not had been for the crowd of people all around us, I think I could have kissed him full on the mouth right there and then. Thankfully, before I could do anything embarrassing, the period bell rang and I knew I had to get to my next class. It was science - my worst subject. Not because I’m bad at it. Actually, I’m good at it....too good. That’s the problem. In science I always seem to get in trouble with the teacher one way or another.

As I stood up, said a hurried goodbye, touched him on the shoulder and walked away. Taking a moment to dump my trash in the one of the overstuffed trashcans and then laying the tray down on the conveyer belt that rolled on down to the dishwasher, I could not help but think that I should have looked back at him and smiled right then. Guys look for that parting smile as a confirmation that they made a good impression. But for some unknown reason, I just wasn’t able to muster it. Too many conflicting emotions going in within me right then.

Chapter: Ten
Upon entering 5th period science class, I got two surprises. The first was that Dash was already there sitting down and indicating for me to sit in an empty seat beside him. Damn, I thought. Can’t a girl make a dignified exit.

The second surprise was, however, kind of a whopper. The teacher of the class was no older than I was. That’s right. As far as I could tell, our science class teacher was no more then 17-years old. I later learned that Mister Osgood Ogelthorpe was a born child prodigy - a bonafide genius. As a kid he excelled at everything. He was a world-class chess champion at 8 and graduated high school at 10. Then at MIT, my dad’s old alma mater, he wowed his professors in every subject from mathematics to engineering to physics. But his advanced degree was in psychology. He wrote a ground breaking doctoral dissertation in games theory.

But here is the really strange thing about him, after school, when the government and various mega-corporations were practically begging him to come work for them and earn big bucks, he decided instead to return home, which was New Horizon, and teach at Bullfinch. Now, I ask you, is that too weird or what?

He was short and skinny with a wiry build and piercing dark eyes. No, ‘piercing‘ is not the right word. They were menacing - maybe even malevolent. Dressed in a freshly pressed gray three-piece suite, he looked over the class with a kind of cold detachment. It was as if he was calculating something about everyone sitting down. When his eyes fell on a student, I could see that it gave them the heebee-geebees. Not good.

Today’s class, as I learned, was about the formation of the Solar System and, as I also learned, he was kind of passionate about it. “Just try and imagine it all,” Mister Ogelthorpe said as he started drawing diagrams -quite well I might add- on the chalkboard. “Our Solar System didn’t just come from nothing and its birth was far from peaceful.”

As he talked and drew, I silently chanted a little prayer. Please, please, please, don’t be dull. “About 4.5 billion years ago,” he began. “There was a vast cloud of hydrogen gas and cosmic dust called a...” His words seemed to trail off into the distance as I drifted off to sleep, or something like it.

Chapter: Eleven
The first thing I noticed was how quiet everything got all of a sudden. I strained my ears trying to hear Mister Ogelthorpe’s lecture, but heard nothing. Then I tried to hear anything else, like other people breathing or the whirring hum coming out of the air-conditioning vent. But again, nothing. It was just dead silence.

This was just too darned weird. So, I opened my eyes and found myself in totally the wrong place. I wasn’t in the classroom anymore. Where I did find myself just made no sense whatsoever.

I was standing all alone in what had to be, a near as I could figure, a vast planetarium. You know, one of those domed-over theaters they have in nature history museums where super-complex projectors flash images (multitudes of shining stars, revolving planets and moons, shooting comets and meteoroids) against a rotunda ceiling that simulates the night sky. Except here everything looked multi-dimensional and seemed to hang in midair.

The enormous vaulted chamber was semi-dark and alit only by the celestial show going on above me. I looked up and the view was spectacular. It was like a cross-section of the whole of Universe laid out for just my benefit. I scanned the heavenly panorama of ten, of hundreds of thousands of points of light looking for something familiar.

I did make out the Big and Little Dipper, as well as Polaris, the North Star. Then my eyes caught sight of the Red Star. It seemed to rest in the center of all the other stars - like a hungry spider at the center of a web. But it didn’t shine with an incandescent glow like all the other stars did. Rather it was like a bloated blood slug that greedily sucked the life out of everything around it like a parasite feeding off a host body. I got the willies just looking up at it.

Then I looked down. The floor beneath me was a vast, glowing, gaming grid - like a chessboard built for life-sized playing pieces. Standing on squares all around me were women and men dressed in various kinds of unfamiliar military uniforms. They stood statue still, not moving a muscle, and silent as the grave. But I could tell, by their breathing, that they were still alive. They remained motionless as if obediently waiting to be pushed from square to square by an unseen force in some kind of game of grand strategy not of their own making.

I looked more closely and saw that some of them were not completely human. There were those, I saw, who had metallic scaly skin and throbbing gills on their necks like fish. Others had rough grey skin like rhinos and were built along gigantic muscular proportions like miniature versions of King Kong. As my eyes scanned the grid, I saw ever more increasing multi-various forms of humanity. But they also stood immobile as if waiting for the command to move - or maybe to attack!

What have I stumbled into? I wondered. Is there some kind of nefarious puppet master hiding behind the scenes, laughing at my confusion?

That’s when I first noticed the monster men. Okay, they weren’t really monsters, but they weren’t men exactly either. There were about a dozen of them standing on the sidelines of the big game board. None of them were looking at me but rather up into the artificial heavens.

They stood a good seven feet tall and had bodies that were as much reptilian as humanoid, meaning they stood on two legs had torsos and chests and two arms, but the similarities stopped there. Their naked skin was a brilliant green and scaly - you might even say armor plated. Their bald heads had no nose or mouth but rather where fronted by hard, sharp beaks, with four nostrils, two on each side. Their bird-like eyes were yellow and predatory. Their chests sported four breasts ending in white nipples and their long fingered hands ended in sharp, curved talons.

But I didn’t think they were at all ugly. In fact, the opposite. They were magnificent looking, almost godlike.

Was this a dream? If I could even ask myself that question did it mean that it wasn’t, kind of like the insane man who asks himself if he’s really crazy?

What was this place? What were these creatures? What were they playing at? And most importantly, why was all this high-weirdness happening to me? I was a little afraid and intimidated by all this, but even more I was feeling irritated. Who were these jerks to go mucking about in my dreams?

I needed to know, but I could only think of one way to find out. I was going to walk up to them, introduce myself and demand to know what this was all about. I started to walk towards them. Each time I crossed from square to square, I brushed past another uniformed game player who stood rooted to the spot with a transfixed gaze. Very, very creepy.

Then the chessmen pieces began to speak. Their lips never moved, but I could hear them muttering. “Is it her?” “Could she be The One?”

Huh? I thought. What was all that about? But I decided to disregard it all for the moment. Something told me that it was the demonic lizardmen who were pulling all the strings around here.

As I got closer to the edge where they stood, I started calling of to them. I shouted, “Hey! Hey you! Can you hear me?”

One of them must have heard me, because he turned his head and looked in my direction with those ominous golden eyes of his. (It might have been a she. I don’t know. They didn’t appear to have outward genitalia.) After giving me a long and decidedly creepy once-over, he pointed up to the hungry eye of Red Star and said a single word: “Morgoroth.”

But then I hear another voice. It said: “Miss Raymond? Miss Raymond? Miss Raymond, can you come back to class now?”

Chapter: Twelve
I was back in the classroom, sitting at my desk with everyone else looking at me. God! How embarrassing is that? “umm...Yes?” I heard myself say.

“Miss Raymond,” said the too young Mister Ogelthorpe. “Are you quite all right? You were mumbling a word. What is ‘Morgoroth’?” Unless I was very much mistaken, I think I did detect a trace of genuine human concern in his voice.

I looked over and Dash was looking back at me. He was concerned too. He reached over and took my hand and gave it a little squeeze. My heart rate and pulse might had quadrupled at that moment. “You okay, kiddo?” He said. Kiddo? What is this circa-1950?

“No.” I said. “I’m fine. I did zone-out for a moment. But, I’m okay now. Sorry about that.” Surprisingly, nobody laughed. At any normal school my fellow students would be taking utter delight in me being singled out in this way. But not here. Maybe, just maybe, I thought, I might like it here.

Ogelthorpe went back to lecturing. I found it all very interesting. He was one of the rare breed of teachers that could make a subject come alive when he talked about it.

“Some scientists believe,” he said, “that the solar system was formed when a cloud of hydrogen gas and molecular dust floating in outer space was disturbed, maybe by the tremendous explosion of a nearby star called a ‘supernova.” The supernova made waves in the spacetime continuum which squeezed the gas and dust causing it to collapse in on itself forming a solar nebula. Under the crushing forces of it’s own gravity the solar nebula’s compressed hydrogen attained a super-heated temperature of a million degrees Centigrade. Then, something amazing happened. It went critical mass and resulted in a gigantic thermonuclear ignition what we call a fusion explosion.”
“In other words, KA-BOOM!” he bellowed. “Our home star was born. It was heat. It was light. It was the force of life itself. The explosion also spit out both small and large chunks of molten matter. Some were hurled out into the nether reaches of deep space, never to be heard from again. The others fell back into the sun, and were burnt up - Poof! Yet a lucky few got caught in the sun’s gravity well and assumed permanent orbit. Against the frozen coldness of space these hot chunks eventually cooled-down to become planets, moons, asteroids and comets.”

Ogelthorp was doing his own version of a soliloquy and loving it. But then Dash raised his hand to ask a question. I saw a pained expression cross Mr. Ogelthorpe’s face. Something told me that the two of them shared a long-running relationship that didn’t always work out too well. He called on Dash anyway.

“Yes, Mister Hammersmith,” said Ogelthorpe. His voice was full of annoyance. “Did you have a question of something to add? Something constructive, I hope.”

“Oh yeah, very constructive teach,” said Dash, his voice full of cavalier devil-may-care. “Do we know what happened to all the chunks that got spit out when the protosun exploded? I mean, are there any we don’t know about?” I could tell by the way that Dash was asking this question, that he was relishing the idea of trying to put the teacher on the spot.

But Ogelthorpe quickly recovered. That’s when to my surprise -and utter horror- he called upon me. “How about you Miss Raymond? What do you think?”

How mortifying! To be the new kid in class and then to be asked to speak. Yikes, I thought. Like any modern American high school student, I knew that the surest way to social suicide was to speak up in class. No problem, said the right side of my brain. Just make a short-as-possible answer that does not call undue attention to yourself. Better yet, just utter the always safe three little words: I don’t know. Which actually might be four words if you counted the contraction.

Unfortunately, that’s not what came issuing out of my mouth. “Well, if it were possible,” I said “and that’s a really big if, then we could take the old cliche idea that sci-fi writers have been kicking around for decades of a ‘Counter-Earth.” In that scenario there was always a planet that inhabited the exact same orbit as our Earth, but always at the opposite side of the Sun. And since the Sun is about a million miles across our Earthbound telescopes wouldn’t be able to see what’s hidden behind it.”

I should have been able to stop my motormouth from running right there and then. But, as is the eternal curse with science geeks, it had broken free of my brain and was yammering all kind of technobabble. This was me being psycho-nerd to the third power.

“But none of that would really be possible. First, Earth’s orbit is not perfectly circular but elliptical which means that during different times of the year we are sometimes closer to the Sun and moving faster and other times further away and moving slower. So, there would be times that Counter-Earth might catch-up with us and we’d be able to see it on the horizon during the wee hours of the dusk or the dawn. Also, a planet with the same mass as the Earth would have the same gravity and that would throw-off all the other planets in their orbits around the sun. All our gravitational computations for sending off probes into the Solar System would be thrown off. And, since they aren’t, there isn’t.”

“The stability of twin earths staying in perfect diametrically opposed orbits would be pretty much a precarious balance. All it would take is the slightest gravimetric nudge to either Earth or Counter-Earth to knock either out of that configuration. The gravitational influence of a comet out beyond the orbit of Pluto would suffice. Counter-Earth would drift away from being exactly opposite Earth’s location – and that would eventually, inevitably result in either the two planets colliding into each other -Bam!- or they’d experience a near-miss that would derail them both from their current orbits - maybe sending them careering into the Sun or outward into the frozen depths of deep space. Either way, it would be bad news for both.”

There was a long moment of silence. I could feel the dread swelling up at the bottom of my stomach. Then, the silence broke and the laughter began. It was the ritualistic jeering like some primitive tribe stoning or shunning some upstart outcast who thought he (or she) could dare step out of line. I closed my eyes in a vain attempt to shutout the humiliation.

“Hey, I can’t believe what I’m hearing right now.” It was Dash. I opened my eyes. He was out of his seat, standing up and addressing the whole class. “Look, you meatheads. I don’t know about you, but I actually appreciate it when someone has the guts to sound-off with an intelligent opinion. I mean, just because we never heard about something before or even thought about it doesn’t mean it can’t be true. Or at least worth thinking about.” With that he sat back down. Everybody else went quiet.

My hero! I could have kissed him again. But the bell rang signaling the end of the class period and the moment was over.

Chapter: Thirteen

The next period flew by. I think it was an English class. The teacher took the whole fifty-five minute period to extol the virtues of Strunk and White’s Element’s of Style. But me, I think I spent the whole hour mooning over a heroic image of Dash. The one side of my brain was getting all mushy while the other side was pleading for calm.

After the final bell, I looked for Dash. I was hoping he’d ask to walk me home, carry my books, or some such saccharine sweet stuff. But he was nowhere to be found. Nonetheless, as I was walking home I did catch myself humming the schmaltzy lovey-dovey Queen tune from the first Highlander flick. Which is pretty sad considering the wife dies of old age at the end of the song leaving then-hunky Christopher Lambert to face the world all alone.

Chapter: Fourteen
But little did I know that literally everything was about to change. I got home (and, yes, I was going to start calling our new house, ‘home’) and stuck my key-card into they eyelet slot in the door lock. The lock recognized my card. The audio voice said: Welcome home Captain Lex! Okay, I did re-program the house’s CPU a little bit. So, sue me. The lock unbolted and I pushed my way in.

However, as I pushed my way in, I had that cold, creepy sensation of - something is wrong, really wrong! The feeling shot up and down my spinal column making my toes tingle.

It was dark and quiet inside. Dad wasn’t back from work yet. But there was no reason that he should be. Officially his workdays usually went on until 5:00pm, but him being a sometimes workaholic, those days many times stretched all the way to 7:00pm.

The lights were all off. The mid-afternoon sunlight was streaming in through the slats of the semi-closed venetian window blinds giving the first floor the look of a late-40’s film noir thriller. Piles of overstuffed boxes where still stacked up in the living room. There was no logical reason to think this, but I just knew that there was something wrong. I started stealthily creeping about the first floor rooms.

I tiptoed into the living room. I looked this way and that not really sure what I was looking for. I was tense. Every nerve ending was strained. My muscles were taut and I was ready to spring. But at what?

It didn’t help that my cellphone chose that exact moment to start vibrating. I jumped like a scream queen in a cheep direct-to-video horror flick.

It was Dad. I could see his caller ID on the phone’s tiny lit screen as I flicked it open Star Trek-style. “Hiya Dad. What’s up?” I said, reassured that he was on the other end of the line.

But everything wasn’t alright. He sounded anxious, out of breath, maybe even a little afraid. “Lex. I’m sorry. Any minute now, they’re going to find me, take me. If you’re home, you need to get out of there right now. You need to get out of this town and as far away as possible. Don’t try to follow me. You can’t go where I’m going. No one can. I love...” Then, the signal dropped. Dead silence.

I said nothing. I did nothing. I just stood there frozen like a statue.

What just happened? Was that real? Was he playing as some kind of cruel joke? My heart sank. I didn’t know what to think.

Then, I heard the heavy footsteps behind me.

Chapter: Fifteen
I turned round quick and came face-to-face, or rather face-to-chest, with an actual, honest-to-God, bona fide giant. And, let me be clear here, when I say ‘giant’ I mean an oversized behemoth dressed in a man’s business suit who could easily be mistaken for one of the man-eating trolls, ogres or goblins from Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Except this guy wasn’t an illustration in some creepy children’s story book, he was real, standing in my living room and it didn’t look like he’d come for afternoon tea.

He, and I think it was a he, stood well over seven feet tall, had the massively muscular body of a steroids engorged professional wrestler and hands the looked like they could pulverize small rocks. The features of his face were blunt, brutal, even primitive with eyes that were as vacant and expressionless as that of a Raggedy Ann doll. But the most amazing thing about him was his skin. It was rough and grey like that of a Rhinoceros.

I didn’t have much time to think about all the whys and wherefores about Jumbo’s unexpected appearance. Instead a pure, primal fight-or-flight instinct kicked in and, not surprisingly, I chose flight. I turned round again with a roughly sketched out plan in my head to make a sprinting beeline for the kitchen, then the sliding glass patio door and then the backyard. But when I did, that’s when I encountered his identical twin brother standing in the kitchen doorway blocking the way between me and any possible escape.

Hmm...What’s the proper English expression for this situation? Oh yes, Yikes!

Surprisingly, even though I had good reason to, I did not freak out. Instead I remained much calmer than I ever thought I might under these classic 1930’s Universal Studios monster movie circumstances. I decided to try some opening, tentative negotiations. “Uh....Hello guys,” I said in a voice far more relaxed than I was really feeling. “So glad you could make it here on such short notice.”

I looked from Jumbo Number One to Number Two and saw, for the first time, an emotion cross their faces. It was confusion. I took this and an opening. “Okay guys. Time to get this place straightened up. You.” I pointed at Number One. “Take the left end of the couch. And you,” I pointed at Number Two. “Take the right. We’re taking it up the stairs to my room.” Yes, I know what I was saying didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But I was amazed at how confident I was sounding under the circumstances.

Number One was looking at Number Two for some kind of confirmation as to what he was supposed to do next. Good thing neither one of them seemed too fast a thinker. I thought to myself that this would be a really good time to make a break for it. I started edging around Number Two in hope of getting through to the kitchen door.

Just a few more steps and I’d run. But where would I run? Out of the house? Okay, but what then? Would they chase me? Where there other zombie guys waiting right outside? My mind raced with questions. But was laughably short on answers. I didn’t know.

But then I saw a glimmer of thought run through Number Two’s eyes. He looked to me with a touch of animal rage, the kind people usually reserve for someone who they realize has just made a fool out of them. From down deep in his throat he said something like, “Grrrr!” And, I didn’t like the way he said it at all.

But he was too late. By that time I’d worked my way around Number Two and


I didn’t have a clear shot at the kitchen doorway. So, I decided to change tactics. Like it or not, and I didn’t, it had to be fight. Thankfully the big, heavy brass vintage 1930‘s long-stemmed reflector-type floor lamp that my dad had purchased in his college days, that my mom had always hated, was conveniently in reach. I picked it up by the stem in both hands like it was a baseball bat and swung it hard. The thick, wide base came crashing down on the skull of Number Two.

But, nothing. I remember that there was a thumping noise like when something metal strikes a solid oak tree. Chuckles must have had some kind of reinforced skull because he didn’t go down like he should have. He just stood there bleeding from the side of his head, oblivious to the impact. His face didn’t even register any kind of pain. This was very much not good.

Instantly, I decided to change tactics yet gain. It was back to flight now. I dropped the lamp and bolted for the kitchen doorway. I shot through it in nothing flat. The gorilla brothers were big and scary, but they were also kind of slow. This gave me precious few seconds to shut the kitchen door. But it didn’t have a lock.

How was I going to keep them out? I looked around and saw it. The fridge! It was a big, double-doored refrigerator/freezer -and, as luck would have it, it was standing right beside the door. I put my back against one side of it and, using my legs, pushed it. God knows how much it must have weighed but it was heavy. It slid over the floor, scratching the linoleum tile. But it fit snugly right against the door.

That should hold them, I thought. Now, I have to get out of here.

I ran over to the glass sliding patio double doors that led to the backyard. I didn’t see anyone out there. Good. It was closed and locked, of course. I needed to activate the electronic mechanism on the wall that opened them. I hit the button. But nothing. And, I hit it again and again and again - and still nothing. Darned smart house. You picked a terrible day to play stupid.

The gorilla brothers were slow moving, but they were plenty strong and they making progress into the kitchen. Slowly they were forcing the door open even with with the massive fridge wedged in over it. It was, I thought, just a matter of seconds before they were able to shove their way in here.

I needed to get out and fast. I spied the microwave oven sitting on the kitchen counter. It was large, heavy, rectangular and still unplugged. I picked it up with both hands, hoisted it up over my head and -using every bit of strength I could muster up for the occasion- hurled it at the glass pane of the door.

Before it hit, I’d already closed my eyes and partially turned away. I was amazed at what a pretty sound shattering glass made. It was like hundreds of tiny church bells all rung at once. In my imagination I could see razor-sharp, crystal shards fly off in all directions. A second later I dared to look and saw the demolished remains of our back doorway. This was my exit.

I was all ready to take off at a gallop when a massive hand with a grip like a vice seized my arm at the elbow. I looked up and, I swear, there was the barest kind of a grin plastered across the ghoul’s face. I think I even heard something like a laugh come out of his mouth, but it was hard to tell. What would old Jack in that Beanstalk fairytale do now, I wondered.

Chapter: Sixteen
Game over, I thought. I was trapped, maybe even doomed. I didn’t know what these monster men wanted with me, but no way it could be anything good.

Then, came the momentarily blinding flash. It was a sudden burst of bright, hot, light. Yes, I did say ‘hot’, like when you suddenly open and oven after you’ve been cooking a Thanksgiving Day turkey at 450 degrees for 4 hours and the scalding hot air comes rushing out at your face. There was also a sizzling sound like frying bacon accompanied by the acrid tang of burning electric ozone and the sickening sweet smell of burnt roast beef

My eyelids had instinctively shut tight. But I could still see spots in front of my eyes. Yikes! Was I just blinded. Did I just loose my sight. While I was mulling this over, I realized that the giant’s claw-like grip on my arm had slipped away. I dared to open my eyes (the spots had faded away) and he was no longer there. I looked down and saw what was left of giant’s body. From the neck down it was a lifeless carcass collapsed chest-down across the tile floor. But from the neck up, what was left looked like a smoldering pile of chard black coal dust.

I looked to my right and saw, coming through the wrecked doorway -someone, a man- dressed in a grey suit that looked vaguely familiar. But I couldn’t tell who it was for sure because he had big, black wraparound sunglasses covering over his eyes and a good portion of his face. In his two hands he held something that made no rational sense whatsoever.

It was a gun. But not a real gun. I mean, it just couldn’t have been real. Made of unrelated looking parts of different kinds of metal, glass and plastic all bolted and fused together it looked, more than anything else, like a Buck Rogers in the 25th Century toy raygun, the kind a kid back in the 1950’s would get in the mail after sending in a collection of cereal boxtops. Except this was no mere toy. It was more like something a a mad scientist had assembled in his basement.

I know I shouldn’t have taken so long to look at it but it was just too weird. At its core there was a ring of compressed gas canisters fixed around a transparent glass bulbous chamber containing bubbling liquid. This was connected to a spinning array of wound-copper Tesla coils that flowed out into a short barrel the end of which was glowing red hot with little puffs of white smoke coming out.

I might have spent all day looking this home-made contraction over. But I didn’t on account of the fact that all 340 pounds of Zombie Number One was rampaging through the door. His eyes looked crazed with fury and he was roaring -Yes. Roaring!- like some kind of enraged African mountain gorilla on a rampage.

The man with the gun, shoved me aside, took aim and pulled the trigger. This time my eyes must have adjusted to see the flash and I actually saw it happen. At first I could hear the raygun itself emitting a high-pitched whine as if high-voltage capacitors were charging with energy. Then -and this all happened really fast- a steady stream of glowing, metallic blue-white energy gushed forth from the raygun’s muzzle, not unlike a pneumatic blast of pressurized water from a high-powered fire hose. The more-or-less straight-line beam, that reminded me of a lightning bolt, hit the charging goliath square in the chest.

The mammoth-sized man (or some version of a man) had a few seconds to realize what was happening to him. He stopped, dead in his tracks, looked down and watched in stunned bewilderment as a hole was being burnt right into his chest cavity. But at the same time I knew that the poor creature was being electrocuted right on the spot. His eyes bulged. His skin went bright red. His internal organs, I thought, must have been cooking like they got trapped in a microwave oven. The finger of his massive hands clenched tight and his limbs jerked violently about as if he were a mere rag doll being shaken by an insolent child. But, there was no blood. Everything, I assumed, was being cauterized way too fast.

The horrible ordeal lasted maybe 30 seconds, the longest half-minute of my life.

And, then -for the first time in my life- I saw someone (A real living person!) actually die before my eyes. His knees went wobbly and buckled. He teetered and then - like London Bridges- went falling down. Face forward, his body hit the floor with a thud. White smoke came gushing out of a perfectly round hole in his back.

Suddenly, there were two very big burnt corpses sprawled out on our kitchen floor. I’d never seen anybody dead before, except -of course- for my grandfather (my dad’s dad). But he had been an old man who died of a heart attack and his body was laid to rest in a casket at a funeral, ad we all paid our respects. That’s the way civilized people are supposed to die - not by fricking raygun!

That’s just all too impossible. Right?

It took a moment for my mind to process this all. It was terrible. Horrible. I just wasn’t used to this kind of thing happening to me. Who is? My feet and finger tips, I could feel, were going cold and numb. My head was feeling a bit light. My eyelids where feeling heavy and I suddenly felt sleepy - like I wanted to take a nap.

How strange is that? I ask you.

Chapter: Seventeen
Lazily, as my legs went all rubbery, I started to sink down to the floor. I looked over at the man, who -I guess- had just saved my life. As he pulled the oversized sunglasses off his face, I recognized who he was. It was my teacher. The 17-year-old junior genius Mr. Ogelthorpe.

Funny. How strange to see him here, I thought. Well, nighty night.

He looked at me, put a hand on my shoulder, and in a voice that was way too calm said, “Ms. Raymond, I know this has been a terrible experience for you. You’re probably experiencing some of the symptoms of your body going into shock. That’s only normal after a traumatic experience. But we have to get out of here right now.”

“What?” I heard myself say. “I feel kind of sleepy now. I think I’ll curl up on the floor and take a quick catnap. Could you call the police, or an ambulance or the fire department?”

Then, he slapped me. Yes, just like out of some kind of black and white melodrama, he slapped me hard across the face. It stung. I was instantly pissed. I remember saying something like “Bastard!” and I slapped him back across the jawline as hard as I possibly could.

But, instead of reacting, he just looked at me without flinching and said, “Good. Now, let’s get out of here.” With that he turned and walked back out the shattered glass patio doorway and into our backyard. Still pissed off, I followed him.

“Hey! Wait up!” I said shouting without really meaning to. My adrenaline was pumping. “You can’t just break into my house, kill two people and say ‘Come with me.’” As if on cue, I heard sirens off in the distance. Police sirens.

“That would be them coming for us,” said Ogelthorpe. He’s made it all the way to the back of the backyard and was now scaling our 6-foot-high chicken-wire cyclone fence that served as the boarding line between the green green grass of our yard and the dry, dusty desert beyond.

“Them?” I said. “Who is them? The police? Shouldn’t we wait and tell them everything?” Ogelthorpe was at the top of the fence with one leg over the other side. He reached a hand down for me.

“No. They are the enemy. They mean us no good.” He said everything so calmly and matter-of-factually, as if he was giving a lecture about the orbit of the planets. “You have a choice to make right now. One of many that will change your life forever. Either come with me now, or stay. Which will it be?”

Damn, I thought. This was a tough one. I didn’t really know what to do. The Right Side was saying: The rational thing to do was to wait for the police. But the Left Side was saying: The weirdo gun, the inhuman goons, Dad’s ominous phone call. None of that was rational. Rationality had left the building.

I reached up and took his hand.

Chapter: Eighteen
Once we got over on the other side of the fence, we ran and ran and ran - away from the sprawling suburban subdivision of Aero Acres and out into the forbidding desert. The running was good for me. It got my heart pumping, my lungs breathing and my blood flowing. My head, that had felt so muddled and fuzzy before, was clearing up.

How Ogelthorpe was able to run while lugging around that hunk-of-junk looking, but apparently real, raygun of his I could only guess. He must have been a lot stronger then he looked.

Suddenly, I was aware of where I was. All around, in every direction, as far as I could see, it was a rugged terrain of dry sand, tall prickly cactus plants and sharp rocks. And flat - all the ground, for as far as I could see was unceasingly tabletop flat. There was no hiding out here.

“Stop.” I said in a small voice. He kept on running and I was struggling to keep up beside him.

“Stop!” This time, I said it with a bit more zest. As well, I stopped, planted my feet and squared my shoulder to make myself seem more resolved. But he just kept on going without me.

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” This time I was shouting. “Who? What were those guys? Where are we going? What’s going on?” This time he stopped, turned and looked at me.

Mister Oglethorp (Why was I still thinking of him as Mister? He was the same age as me. Damnit!) stopped and looked at me with those cold, calculating eyes of his. I could tell he was thinking, thinking hard. Little clockwork wheels were clicking away in that finely tuned brain of his.

He spoke: “Those creatures are called ‘Anakim.’ Their ancestors were human just like you and me. But they were genetically manipulated for great size and strength. Those poor souls were lobotomized at birth with micro-miniature neurological transceiver chips implanted in their brains. That’s so they’d unquestioningly do the bidding of their masters.”

He paused and then added, “What I did to them was not murder. It was a mercy killing.” But from the way he said it, I think that he was still struggling with what he’d done. I don’t think he’d every killed anyone before today.

“Okay,” I said. Glad for some information, no matter how wacky it sounded. “Where’s my dad? Do you know what happened to him? Did you have anything to do with it?”

Ogelthorpe was about to open his mouth to speak again, when the ground started to shake beneath our feet. Being a Southern California girl, my first thought was that this was an earth tremor. But then we both heard a deep rumbling noise, like a mighty steam train approaching in the distance. We both turned our heads in the direction of the sound, which was coming from the west, deep into the desert. On an otherwise flat and empty looking horizon we saw a giant cloud of live steam violently billowing from up out of the surface as if a subterranean volcanic vent had just blasted open.

The rumbling sound gave way to a crackling like a barrage of backyard fireworks popping off all at once. At the base of the white surging mist, I could see multiple streams of red-orange flame blazing as if great reserves of wild energy were being suddenly released. With that came the most Godawful bass drum booming assault on my eardrums. It cut through the air like a thunderclap that just would not shut up and I had to plug my ears with my fingers or risk going deaf.

Then, slowly at first, a relentlessly phallic-shaped and silvery-skinned body emerged out of the white mist. Is that a rocket? I wondered. Was it really launching out here in the middle of nowhere?

As my brain reeled at the unlikelihood of it all, I saw the slender needle quickly accelerate, climbing ever higher and higher. It roared skyward as the nozzles of its thrusting engine nacelles glowed like flaming torches - eventually leaving behind them hard, gray-white columns of gaseous exhaust.

Taken aback, Ogelthrope and I stood in dumbstruck silence just watching the spectacle unfold in front of us. Within a minute, by my estimations, the rocket had climbed to an altitude of six miles and was moving past the speed of sound. Less than a minute after that it disappeared completely into the heavens. It was gone.

Ogelthorpe, in a classic example of, what I would later learn was, his gross social and inter-personal ineptness, pointed into the upper atmosphere where the rocket had slipped into the void of outer space and said matter-of-factly, “That would be your dad right there.”

Chapter: Nineteen
I stood there in utter bewilderment – an understandable symptom of momentary shock. What? What did he just say? My dad, my only surviving parent, just left Mother Earth in a frickin’-frackin’ rocketship for God-knows-elsewhere in the Solar System? The Universe? Did he really just say that?

It took a moment for all of that to sink in. Then, I attacked. I turned and grabbed Ogelthorpe by the lapels of his ugly gray suit jacket and yelled: “Okay, space case! You tell me everything and you tell me right now!”

“We don’t have time,” his voice was still annoyingly calm. “There’s too much to tell. They’re already after you and we’re still dangerously out in the open.” As if that would stop all discussions, with his heavy, home-made raygun still in hand, he pulled away out of my grip and started running again. He headed West .

Having no other recourse (meaning: I had no way to stop him), I followed. And, I’ll give him this, for a mad scientist, genius nerd, he moved pretty fast. So, I had to run full-out just to keep up with him. Which would not have been so bad except for two minor detail: First, it had already been a long, tough day and I was kind of tired. Second, I really wasn’t dressed for an adventure.

The late afternoon sun beat down making what was left of the day really hot inducing me to sweat right through the dorky school uniform. Moreover, the ground was rough, rocky and uneven. All this running (fast running!) was causing my feet to start to ache inside my stiff, new dress shoes. I was wishing that I could instead have been wearing some nice broken-in hiking boots.

After trudging through what must have been miles, the wild and unruly ground gave way to an unpaved but serviceably smooth dirt road that ran straight-arrow East-West though the badlands. It was abandoned and looked like nobody had used it in years.

When we got there, we were both winded and gasping to catch our breaths. After about a minute of rest, I was about to speak again, or rather shout at him, demanding answers. But he held up a hand for silence. He was listening for something.

I shut my mouth and listened along with him. The first thing I thought of when I heard the far off sound was that of the wind rustling through the trees of a forest, which made no sense whatsoever because there was no wind and there sure as hell were no trees or woodlands anywhere in sight of this place. So I shoved that image out of my mind. But then I realized that what I was hearing was the well modulated whirring of a very powerful electric motor. And that high-pitched sound was getting closer.

We looked in the direction of the sound. It was from the East, where the town lay. Squinting my eyes, I could just about make out a point –way down the service road- where a cloud of desert dust was getting kicked up into the air. That cloud was coming toward us. Was that a car? I wondered.

“Him?” said Ogelthorpe. “That can’t be him. He’s not supposed to be here. He’s deviating from the plan.” This time, I could see irritation in his face. Just who, I wondered, was ‘him’?

Ogelthorpe took up a position standing in the center of the road (there were no big boulders around to hide behind) and brought his raygun rifle weapon up to bare aiming the barrel directly at the advancing dust cloud where the mystery car was coming our way.

I saw him squeeze down on the trigger. The weapon started charging-up. Liquid in the glass bulb chamber boiled. The cylinder with the Tesla coils spun. The capacitors wined.

But, I could see, there was an unsure look in Ogelthorpe’s eyes. I think that killing the two Anakim (even ones who might have been trying to kill or kidnap us) had been more than enough killing for him for one day, and he wasn’t keen on doing any more. Yet, despite all that, he held the gun steady - and waited.

Then, from out of the distance, through the billowing mass of airborne dust and dirt, it came rolling out. It was a kind of weird mutant hybrid cross of a land vehicle. The dirt covered body shell was that of a tiny Japanese subcompact with only two doors and a hatchback. But that sat high atop a thoroughly American, heavy-duty, industrial-grade undercarriage suspension frame with obnoxiously oversized, deep-treaded tires (like the kind that belonged on a farmer’s tractor or a nutcase redneck’s monster truck). It was an insanely serious-looking off-road jalopy, a sort of motorized mountain goat.

The front windshield was covered with a thick layer of grime so I could not see who was at the wheel. It slowed and came to a stop about twenty feet up the road away from where we stood. The driver’s side door popped open a dark shape obscured by the cloud stepped out (and down) onto the road. A familiar voice said, “Oz, for crying out loud! I can’t believe you’d shoot your own brother.”

Chapter: Twenty
It was Dash, Dash Hammersmith, high school lothario - as if today was not yet overstuffed with goofy surprises. He still carried himself with the casual, confident air of the good-looking boy who usually got everything he wanted. That was kind of reassuring in a way, I thought. Even here, under these deadly serious circumstances, it was nice to know that at least someone could take all this craziness in stride.

Ogelthrope lowered his gun, but not his grim, humorless manner. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “This was not part of the plan.”

“Plans change Little Brother,” said Dash. “I was listening to the CB and heard that they’d scrambled the choppers. So, I thought it best to pick you up sooner than originally planned.”

“Wait a minute!” I broke in. “You guys are brothers?”

They both answered at that same time.

Dash said, “Yes.”

But Oglethorpe said “No.” Then he added, “Same mother, different fathers - as far as we know.”

“Still counts, Brother,” said Dash. His tone was playfully mocking of Ogelthorpe’s uptight stuffiness.

“That’s it!” I said. The proverbial straw had broken the camel’s back. My voice was controlled anger. “My dad’s missing, possibly taken off-planet. My house has suffered a home invasion from inhuman goons straight out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and you two are bantering off of each other like some old-time Vaudeville comedy duo. Now, you two can play out your little, family psychodrama on your own time, but right now I’d like some answers. Please bring me up to speed.” (And, no I was not hysterically ranting, even though it might have looked and sounded that way to the casual observer.)

A moment of awkward silence ticked by and then, Dash looked at Ogelthrope and said, “Well, Oz, I guess, you should tell her. It will sound more real coming from you. Besides, we do owe her an explanation.”

“Very well,” said Ogethorpe, or maybe Oz, as Dash called him. “Ms. Raymond, if you would be so kind as to get in to the car with us, I’ll attempt to relate the whole narrative to you.”

“I thought for a moment and said, “Okay, but only if I get to hold the raygun.” I could see Oz was thinking about that. Again, I wondered at the intricate processes that were going on in that exceptional brain of his. Then, without a word, he walked over to where I was standing and handed me the gun. It was heavy - really, really heavy. And, it occurred to me that I actually did not know the first thing about firing it. But still, it made me feel more secure to have it.

Chapter Twenty-One:
The car, I learned from Dash as I climbed in the back seat, was affectionately called “Rover”, short for Lunar Rover, after the space buggy the NASA astronauts took with them to the Moon on the Apollo missions. It was a 100% electric car with a hydrogen fuel cell power source and an array of high-density ceramic chemical batteries. Osgood had designed it and Dash, who I learned was a hands-on gear-headed grease monkey, built it. It’s good, I thought, when your Prince Charming/Knight-in-Shinning-Armor is also a useful handyman.

Oz took the passenger seat. Dash pulled behind the wheel. He turned the key in the ignition and the engine/motor started purring like a mighty jungle cat. He stepped on the accelerator and we started going West down the road, in the direction of where we’d seen the mystery rocket lift-off for the Heavens.

“I guess,” started Oglethrope, “the traditional thing to say under such circumstances is that: You’re really not going to believe this.”

“Try me,” I said.

“Your father was abducted by extra-terrestrial humans and taken to an alternate version of the Earth located within a parallel universe.” He stopped and waited for my reaction.

“Alright Brain Boy,” I said. “You’re telling me my dad has had his ticket punched for a planet in a whole other universe. Normally, I wouldn’t buy that, but here I am holding a sci-fi future gun that - I think- is a home-made, phased plasma cannon. That sort of thing shouldn’t exit in real life, but apparently it does. So, I’m open to new ideas - even wacky ones. The next question is: How do I get there and rescue him?”

“Easy, you don’t,” said Dash.

“Ha!” I laughed.

“What?” said both brothers at the same time.

“You heard me. I said ‘Ha!’ and I meant it. Look, my dad’s in trouble and I don’t think I can call the cops or the even the President in on this one. It’s up to me.”

They said nothing.

“Who is this them and they you keep referring to?” I asked. “Is it OmniCron? Are they in on this? And, why do they want my dad?”

“As to the ‘why’, I don’t know for certain,” said Ogelthorpe. “I do know that for several months now they’ve been disappearing various scientists sending them away via Area-X.”

“What’s Area-X?” I asked. There was irritation in my voice. I didn’t like him forcing me to play Twenty Questions with him.

“It’s an installation so secret there aren’t even any urban legends about it,” said Osgood. “Not even OminCron’s buddies in the federal government really know what goes on there. Just as long the Cron keeps launching ultra-secret spy satellites and even nastier anti-sat weapons into orbit for the CIA and NSA, they pretty much turn a blind eye to everything that goes on there.”

He paused –maybe for effect- and added, “But as for ‘who’, yes, it is OmniCron corporation that’s doing all this, but it goes much further than that. This is, I think, an interplanetary conspiracy that involves some very powerful game players.” I wanted him to say more but he seemed to have decided to choose his words way too carefully.

“What’s your part in it?” I said. “Why did you rescue me?”

“Because we’re the good guys...heroes,” said Dash. “It was the right thing to do.” I believed him. I thought that Dash was basically a good guy, who had dreams of adventure and performing feats of daring-do, no matter how reckless. But, as for Ogelthrope, I didn’t know. He seemed more like a single-minded man on a mission. But what mission? There was defiantly a dark aura about him - and I don’t know how I felt about him yet.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We are not going anywhere,” said Osgood. We’re getting you off the OmniCron reservation tonight. After that, we’ll find some way to hide you somewhere safe until all this is over. Do you have family anywhere else?”

“Hell no!” I said. “I told you. I want to help my dad. If you two are going where he is, I want in.”

“Absolutely, not,” said Osgood. “It’s too dangerous. You’d be getting in way over your head.”

“Look, get it through your heads,” I said. “I’ve already lost one parent because of circumstances-beyond-my-control. I’m not going to stand by and let it happen again.”

Nothing. They said nothing. That was infuriating. I decided to change tactics. I put a hand on Osgood’s shoulder. “Don’t you have anybody?” I said. “Someone you care about so much that you’d walk over burning coals, brave any fiery Hell just to save them if they were in trouble?”

That’s when they did something I did not expect. Dash slowed the car to a halt and looked over at Osgood. It was really hard to believe they were brothers. “She has a right,” he said.

Osgood looked straight ahead and he addressed me. “Do you realize that this will be extremely dangerous? The people involved in this are absolutely ruthless. They will go to any lengths. If you come with us, you will most probably get killed or end-up having to kill someone else (or many others) just to stay alive. Are you prepared to go beyond any known limits to accomplish your objective?”

Wow! He really meant this stuff. This was deadly serious for him. I thought for a minute and said, “Yes - whatever it takes. I don’t want to hurt anyone if I can help it, but I’ll risk everything if it means saving my dad.”

Osgood looked over at Dash. Dash gave him a nod that seemed to indicate that it was okay with him.

“Very well,” said Osgood. “But understand this. I’m in charge. I will do some things that you won’t like. I don’t want any arguments from you. When I tell you to do something, you do it. No debates. No questions. No criticisms. Just do as I ask. Understood?”

“Agreed,” I said. But at the same time, I told myself, that there really would be limits. I promised myself that I would not be ruthless. I would not do anything that I could not live with later on. I hoped that that would be enough to find and save Dad, wherever he’d been shanghaied away to.

By this time the sun, which now looked blood red, hung low on the Western horizon. Shadows were getting long. The Eastern sky was getting dark and a few faint stars could be seen twinkling. But strangely enough Dash did not switch on the car’s headlights. Instead, he donned a strange looking pair of home-made electrified goggles. Infrared hardware, I guessed.

Osgood opened the dashboard glove box door to reveal a laptop computer - an iMac, I think- built in. He started furiously typing away on the keyboard and scrolling with a wireless mini-moused bringing up a multitude of windows on the monitor screen. Among them were different kinds of topographical maps. I think, he was plotting our position with a GPS.

That’s when I zoned-out. I didn’t fall asleep, even though I was dreadfully tired. No. This was something different altogether. The best I can do to explain it was that my mind jumped out of my body and went elsewhere.

Chapter: Twenty-Two
The scene was tense – almost panic! I could hear the wump-wump-wump of helicopter rotor blades as they sliced through the air above kicking up a windstorm all around causing the cab of the car to violently jerk back and forth with us getting rattled around inside. Searchlights from three different sources above where glaring down on us. Dash, with a death grip on the wheel, was looking up through the windshield in stunned disbelief. Osgood, still composed, was opening up a myriad of windows on his screen, desperately trying to find some kind of solution with that razor sharp brain of his, but to no avail. Instantly, everything seemed hopeless.

“How did they find us?” Yelled Dash. “I thought we had it covered.”

“I know. I mean, I don’t know,” replied Osgood. His voice was still calm. How the hell did he manage that?

“YOU IN THE CAR!” came an amplified voice from above. “YOU’VE GOT EXACTLY FIVE SECONDS TO GET OUT, ON THE GROUND, WITH YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR, OR WE OPEN FIRE!”

The Voice started counting down, “FIVE!”

“Wait a minute,” said Osgood. He turned around in his seat and looked at me. He reached a hand inside my blazer and pulled out my cellphone.

“FOUR!”

“Blast!” he said. Blast? I thought. Was that a real swear word? “I’m such an idiot! They tracked us through the GPS on her cell. I should have thought of this.”

“THREE!”

“Don’t sweat it Bro,” said Dash. “Nobody can think of everything. Not even a genius.”

“TWO!”

“Dash,” said Osgood. “When I create a diversion, you and the girl make a run for it.” With that he grabbed the raygun out of my hands and bolted out of the car.

“ONE….HUH?”

All three spotlights focused in on Osgood as he stood out there alone on the desert plain. It made me think of Robert Redford and Paul Newman in the last scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as they ran out of that bank to face the combined firepower of the Bolivian Army, except that poor Oz was all alone without even a comrade-in-arms to stand alongside him.

He charged up the gun. Its multicolored lights and electrical sparks looked spectacular in the dwindling twilight of sunset. I think I heard him yell “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” just before pulling the trigger and letting loose with a deadly destructive torrent of shining metallic blue energy out of the gun’s muzzle.

He hit the first copter square head-on, bathing the whole aircraft in lethal energy. The aircraft lit up like an over-electrified lightbulb before it went pop. It must have been the whirlybird with the Voice on it, because the next thing I heard was, “WHAT THE? OH, MY GOD! AAAAHHHH!”

That’s when Dash took me by the arm and dragged me out of the car. Next thing I knew we were running away. I looked over my shoulder just in time to see one of the copters fall earthward and crash against the ground. Something must have caused the fuel to ignite because it instantly exploded into a ball of flame. But Osgood’s victory was short lived. The other two choppers opened -up with staccato bursts of mounted machine gunfire. The sound discharging hot lead ripped through the air and literally cut Osgood in half. Bloody pulps of flesh that had once been a boy genius - a brave boy genius, I might add- collapsed onto the cold Earth.

“No!” yelled Dash. That’s when roles reversed and I was suddenly pulling him away into the night.

Chapter: Twenty-Three
I zoned back in. Or, woke up. Or, something. I don’t know. But I was back in the Rover with Dash at the wheel and Osgood riding shotgun. Strangely, they didn’t look the least been concerned about anything. I listened hard but could not hear any choppers overhead.

What the hell? I thought.

Then, I thought of it: The cellphone. Hastily, I reached in my blazer and pulled it out. I took a full one-second to look the little troublemaker over and then I turned it over and popped out the battery.

There wasn’t a moment to loose. “Guys, I know I’m the newbie on the team, but you’ve got to listen to me,” I said. Oz turned to look at me, Dash kept his eyes on the road ahead. I didn’t know what I was going to say next. It just sort of blurted out of me. “Don’t ask me how I know all this, I just do. They’ve been tracking me through the GPS on my cellphone. I just popped out the battery, but I’m sure how much of a fix they might already have on our position. They might be on top of us in minutes, maybe seconds.”

Oz didn’t waste a moment. “Bring the car to a stop,” he said to Dash. “We’re going to pull out the camo.” He looked at me. “They’re looking for a moving target, so we’re going to stand still.”

Dash pulled the Rover off to the side off the service road and came to a stop. Immediately both brothers jumped out. I followed. They moved like they had a plan, something they’d practiced before. “Dash went around the back and popped open the hatchback trunk. Together they pulled out what looked like a really thick and heavy rolled-up Persian carpet. In one big sweeping motion, that only a guy with terrific upper body strength like Dash had could pull off, he unfurled the rug.

After it completely uncoiled and was flat on the ground, I could see that it was a circular shaped canvas tarp painted pitch black on one side while on the other it bore the sandy yellow and woody brown smoky pattern of Army desert camouflage.

Like a bolt of divine lightening from the Heavens above it hit me. I knew what they were up to.

I jumped in and started helping them. As we started to cover the sub-compact car with the tough, thick fabric, (desert camouflage side-up) I realized that the edges of the cloth had tiny weights sewn into the linings, which made it really heavy and hard to handle. I wondered about this for a full ten seconds until it dawned upon me that this was so, when a curious helicopter pilot tried getting too close, the wind kicked-up by his rotor blades wouldn’t send our only means of concealment flying off into the air.

In less then thirty seconds the car was covered and we were sitting inside plunged into total, absolute darkness. No one said a word. We just listened, straining our ears for the warbling sound of the chopper’s rotor blades.

But nothing came, it was total dead silence outside.

“Okay,” said Dash. “Does anyone have a good joke or story to tell? ‘Cause I think we’re going to be sitting here for a while.”

“Shush,” said Oz. “Mouth closed. Ears opened.”

Dash went silent. Then he said, “I hear them. They’re coming.” But I couldn’t hear a thing.

It was several seconds before I heard the slicing sound of rotor blades accompanied by the roar of airborne diesel engines.

“Oh-My-God,” I stammered. “That dream or whatever it was, it was real. They’re really here.”

“Relax,” Dash answered back. “That pilot doesn’t know we’re here. His tracker went dead the moment you popped the batter on your cell. Right now they’re going to follow a search grid.

“What do you mean about your ‘dream’?” asked Osgood. Even though I could not see him right now, I knew that his cold, calculating eyes were all over me, trying to figure me out.

Despite the fact that it was going to sound totally bonkers, I decided to hold nothing back. I told them about my flashback, or flash-forward, or flash-sideways. After I was finished, Osgood was the first to speak up. “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” He said condemning himself. “How could I have been so thoughtless as to miss your cellphone?”

“Relax, Little Brother...” started Dash.

“...Not even a genius can think of everything.” I finished for him.

“Hey!” said Dash. “That’s my line.”

We waited again in silence - listening and waiting. The pulsing drone of the copters didn’t seem to be confined to one place, but rather they seemed to criss-cross the area.

“You see?” said Dash. “It’s just a matter of time.”

“How long?” I asked.

Oz’s voice answered. “The choppers will form a search pattern looking for one fugitive on foot -That would be you- spiraling outward from your last recorded location, which, I must guess, was a few miles back down the road.

“Will the camouflage really hide us?” I asked. “It’s still semi-daylight outside. Won’t they see us? I mean, aren’t we as obvious as a big ugly zit on a kid’s forehead the night before school yearbook photos?”

“Yes. You’re right. We are,” answered Oz. “But that’s totally irrelevant. It’s the Twenty-First Century. Nobody uses their eyes anymore. Right now, they’re scanning the area using infrared equipment, looking for the body heat of anything that runs on less than four legs or that of a running automobile engine.”

“They can do that?” I said in amazement. This was all too big and too serious. It was starting to scare me badly.

“Sure,” said Dash. “OmniCron is like really tight with fedgov intel spooks, they have all kinds of toys. But don’t worry. Oz here has it all figured out.”

“The car’s body is lined with ceramic tile that absorbs most of our body heat,” said Oz. I guess I was going to think of him as Oz now. I mean, he did save my life. “And the car is electric which means we’ll put out a very small heat signature –too small for their instruments to pick up on.”

“As far as those pilots hunting us down are concerned,” added Dash, “we’re the Invisible Men - and Woman. You see?” He continued in a reassuring tone. “Little Oz here has been planning this since he was twelve. The bad guys don’t have a chance.”


Chapter: Twenty-Four
Forty-five minutes. That’s how long we sat huddled in the dark of the car’s cab with the tarp over us keeping out all the light. Oz explained that the choppers had only so much fuel to burn before they had to go back to base and refuel. And since their high-tech instruments couldn’t find me, because we assumed they were only looking for me, a lone girl on foot, they had to assume that I’d either burrowed into the ground like an animal, disappeared into thin air or maybe, I had spontaneously -and conveniently for them- dropped dead.

While we waited, Dash pulled a tiny pen light out of his pocket and switched it on. In the small confines of the car cab, it blazed like a torch. Having the illumination made the situation far less scary.

“I don’t know about you two guys,” said Dash. “But, I haven’t eaten since lunch. So, let’s break out the goodies.” He pointed to a small plastic camping cooler resting on the backseat beside me. “Lex, how’s about you opening up the fridge there and passing around the G-rations? And that’s ‘G’ as in, I really got’sta eat.”

I pulled the top of the cooler and found, packed in ice, a plethora of bottled waters and juices as well as an assortment of those muscle-headed power bars. Suddenly, I realized just how hungry and thirsty I was. I passed around double helpings to everyone and then dug in myself. In the past, on the rare occasions that I’ve been brave (or foolhardy) enough to try a bite of a power bar, I thought they tasted like sawdust wrapped in chocolate. But this evening, for some reason, they tasted almost as good as the roast turkey that mom used to make for Thanksgiving Day.

As strange as this sound, despite the really dire situation at hand, I was actually starting to have a good time. It was kind of like hanging out with friends back home. That’s when it popped into my head and out of my mouth to ask something really stupid. “So, Oz,” I said. “What does it mean, ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world!’?”

By the dim glow of the penlight I could see Oz’s normally expressionless face drop in astonishment. “How did you…” he began in surprise, but did not finish.

It was up to Dash to finish for him. “Why that’s only the most famous line from Oz’s favorite film of all time White Heat starring Jimmy Cagney. It’s some old black and white gangster flick he couldn’t get enough of watching when he was little. In it Cagney plays a crazed psycho named Arthur ‘Cody’ Jarrett who, in an epic shootout with the cops, goes out in a blaze of glory – literally. As he’s dying, that’s what he yells ‘Made it, Ma! Top of the world!’ Why he likes that film so much, I don’t know. It’s a secret he won’t even tell me.”

I looked at Oz, my eyes must have been big question marks, but all he said was, “It’s personal.”
In any case, they (the jerks flying the predatory supercopters) must have broken off the search because bit-by-bit all audible traces of the copters disappeared. “They’ll come back in the morning in land vehicles at the first crack of dawn to make a ground level search,” said Oz. “That gives us several hours yet to do what we have to do.”

We ventured outside, it was now completely dark outside. We looked and we listened. Nothing. I guessed we were safe - at least for the time being. We pulled the tarp off the car, neatly rolled it up again and stuffed in back in the trunk. Within minutes were were back on the road again.

“Where are we going?” I asked. But what I really meant was: What’s the plan? What’s supposed to happen next?

Oz looked back at me, “It’s a town called Trinity. It’s a dead-zone - a place you leave things you want to be forgotten.” With that he turned back in his seat to his computer and didn’t utter another word.

“Thanks,” I said, with a note of sarcasm. “Thanks for nothing. Real helpful. I feel all briefed now.

“Don’t worry,” said Dash still driving. “Little Bro here loves to play his cards real close to the vest. He hates to reveal anything to anyone, even me, unless he absolutely has to. It’s a bad habit that I’m trying to break him of.”

Chapter: Twenty-Five
Over a hundred years ago, the town of Trinity was a real place on the map. About a hundred settlers lived in the town and another three hundred cattle ranchers lived on the surrounding prairie lands. The train came through twice a week and the stagecoach once ever two days. As far as most towns of the Old Wild West went, it was a bustling metropolis.

But then, everything changed. The train changed its route. The stagecoach became obsolete. And, bit-by-bit, the people moved away and the town ceased to exit.

What we rolled into wasn’t even a ghost town. It was a sprawling mass of ruins. All that was left were the crumbling stone and dried adobe mud foundations of a few buildings along a straight line main drag. It was sad, brooding and -in the dark of night- kind of spooky.

It didn’t help that our first stop was the town cemetery. The graveyard was a small, square piece of land surrounded by a corroded iron fence. We got out of the car and it felt good to stretch my legs. I didn’t know what I was feeling right then. I was concerned about Dad. I was scared of being caught. And, I don’t know how I felt about Dash and Oz. I trusted them, I think. But I’d never met anyone like them before. There was something super-normal about them, like they were inhuman or extra-human. Not that I, Little-Miss-Strange-Dreamer-Girl, had any room to criticize others.

The headstones that sprouted out of the ground were simple, cut and shaved pieces of marble with names, dates and epitaphs chiseled onto them. The biggest one in the center read:

Here Lies
John Whales
August 26th, 1853 - May 19th 1895
He Was A Bad Man.

In front of the grave, it looked as though the dirt had been freshly disturbed. I had a sinking feeling that I knew what was coming next.

Oz, who’d carried out two shovels from the car, handed one to Dash. He looked at me and said, “And now, we dig.” He was about to stick his shovel into the dirt when I snatched it out of his hands.

“I don’t want it to be said that I didn’t pull my weight,” I said. Dash smiled and winked at me. I liked that - a lot. I thrust the steel blade of the shovel into the cold, hard earth and got to work. With me and Dash working together we were able to dig out a roughly rectangular-shaped pit that was seven feet long, four feet wide and six feed down. That’s when our shovels hit the top of the coffin. At least, I assumed it must be a coffin. Shivers ran up and down my spine.

Using ropes from the Rover we pulled the buried artifact up out of the ground. It was a good thing that I’m strong and Dash was even stronger, because it was heavy - very heavy. But when we did get it up to the surface, I saw that it wasn’t a coffin at all. It was a whatchamacallit.

Once we wiped the dirt off it, I could see that it was brand new with a shiny metallic body. It looked like a man-sized aluminum capsule. What in the world could this be? I wondered.

Dash and I hauled it out of the cemetery and hoisted it up on top of the Rover, where we lashed it to the roof with rope and bungie cords. That was hard work. But what was even harder was the fact that there were two more identical capsules in John Whales’ grave. Where, I wondered, were the remains of poor John?

With some trouble, we were able to secure all three lozenge-shaped, metallic shells to the car’s rooftop.

Chapter: Twenty-Six
Despite the double pair of heavy-duty shock absorbers affixed to each of the Rover’s over-big tires, the cross-country ride over the rough terrain of the barren plateau was uncomfortable, at times to the point of being bone-shaking. I kept wondering if the capsules lashed to the roof were going to go flying off into the darkness of the night or not.

What I really wanted was something to do. Dash had his driving with his fancy nigh-vision goggles. Oz had his computer with a cacophony of data on the screen to pour over. But me, I was left to sit in the backseat and worry - and worry I did.

Had OmniCron really called off its bloodhounds for the night? Did the Dynamic Duos here really know what they were doing? Was I really equal to the task of finding and saving my dad? And, what was up with the dreaming thing? What were all these strange visions? Were they real? Or was I just loosing my mind?

Among the other things I was worried about I came to the sudden conclusion that the desert, at least on that night, was way too clean. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m no fan of pollution. That would be ridicules. But the fact that the night sky above was totally smog free -unlike Home Sweet Home Los Angeles- meant that it was possible for every visible star in the Universe to shine down on us. In other words, these hundreds of thousands of pretty points of light were illuminating the desert making us viable at a time that I would much rather be invisible.

I would have thought on like that all night, if my eyes had not caught site of the Giant Snake. It’s slender black body weaved its way in serpentine fashion across the yawning landscape stretching from horizon to horizon. It was weird, kind of creepy and we were heading right for it.

It wasn’t until we were almost on top of it that I could see, by the starlight, that it was a massive, steel pipeline suspended on concrete pylons. It was at just that moment that the bumpy ride abruptly smoothed out. We were on a road, a real road with asphalt pavement and everything and it ran right alongside the meandering pipeline.

“It’s the Hondo Valley Water Resource System,” said Oz. “This pipeline transports water...”

“...That is steals it,” interjected Dash.

“...transports water” -resumed Oz- “from the Pecos River in the east, 50 miles away, and delivers it here to the OminCron reservation. Half goes to New Horizon. The other half gets distributed to the 80 different secret research and development sites the company has scattered across this desert. You see, industrial machines need water just as much as people do.”

“You see, that’s Oz talking code,” said Dash. “What he really means to say is that machines need love just as much as people do.”

To that, I think, I actually heard Oz use the retort, “Humbug.” This guy, I thought, had the weirdest vocabulary of swear words in the world.

Chapter: Twenty-Seven
After a couple of miles of driving the pipeline dead-ended into a massive poured concrete block building. Imagine one of the ancient Great Pyramids of Egypt with its top rudely chopped off leaving behind a flat roof. The building was surrounded by a brightly lit and nearly empty parking lot, which in turn was surrounded by a high security fence. The entrance was gated and beside the gate, instead of a guardhouse with a human sentry, there was an electronic card reader, perched atop a steel post rooted in the ground, that was slightly lower than the window level of the driver’s side door.

Bolted to the gate was a sign that read:
Warning:
This is a Restricted Area.
Trespassing is Absolutely Forbidden.
Use of Deadly Force Authorized.

Oz reached into his jacket and pulled out a plastic card and handed it to Dash. I saw the card’s front face flash in my direction for the briefest of seconds. It bore a color photo of a mean looking old man and the words:

Boone, J.
Platinum Clearance

Dash leaned out his open window and thrust the card into and open slot on the reader. The card got sucked in. The adjoining screen flashed the world Processing. Then it dinged like and egg timer and said in a flat, metallic voice: Jebodiah Boone....Welcome...Please proceed.....

The locks on the gate uncoupled, an unseen electric motor whirred and the gate door slid aside. The machine spat the card back out into Dash’s hand just before he stepped on the accelerator and brought us slowly into the parking lot.

There was only one other car in the lot, a broken down old Chevy. We parked right beside it. As we got out and started taking the capsules down from the car’s roof, I said, “So, how did you get the security badge of the CEO of OmniCron?”

“Yeah,” added Dash. “I was wondering myself how you got it off of Dear Old Dad.”

“Dad?” I said.

“Let’s just say that I don’t think he’ll be needing it during the hours while he’s unconscious.” said Oz.

“Awesome!” said Dash with amusement. “You slipped him a Mickey Finn? You drugged him?”

“Boone is your father?” I asked, not sure how to handle this new information.

“We’ll, I’ve never submitted him to a genetics test,” answered Oz. “But, as far as I know, yes.”

“But he will be waking up again? Right?” asked Dash.

“Unfortunately, yes,” said Oz. “He might prove useful later.”

I had no idea if Oz was trying, in is own nerdy way, to be funny or not. I decided to let the matter drop. That’s when I looked up and saw that there were security cameras mounted everywhere. “Shouldn’t we be worried about those cameras?” I said pointing up to one of them.

“Don’t worry,” said Oz. “OmniCron is a victim of its own paranoia. With over 100,000 visible and hidden surveillance cameras scattered all over the reservation, not even an army of techs can watch everything. Visible cameras are put up mostly to scare people or keep a running record. It costs too much to pay people to watch everything all the time.”

With each one of us, dragging his own pod behind him, we made our way to the front door. It was a massive pair of double steel doors with another camera mounted on the wall to monitor who went in and out and another card reader affixed to the steel doorframe.

Above the door, in big, black, block letters it read:
Pipeline Pumping Station Number Five.

For the second time that night, Dash used his stolen car by slipping it into the reader’s slot. There was a buzzing sound and the heavy vaulted doors automatically popped open. As we walked in, each lugging our own long, silvery capsule behind us, I said, “But won’t the owner of the car be inside? You know, like working? Won’t he call security or someone when we walk in uninvited?”

“I’m 95% sure that the man on duty won’t be paying any attention to us,” said Oz.

The inside of the building consisted of one very large room that housed the mechanical guts of the water pumping station. A veritable maze of steel pipes, valves and gears criss-crossed the length and breadth of the cavernous chamber. Two rows of massive vertical turbine pumps erupted out of the concrete floor and reached all the way to the blue-green neon lit ceiling. The whole place pneumatically throbbed with the sound of gurgling water under high pressure as well as the hum of powerful electric motors.

“Every ten miles,” said Oz, “a station like this is necessary to push the water further on down the pipeline. This is the last station before the water gets to Area-X.”

I reached out and touched one of the vibrating pipes. It was ice cold. “And this information helps us how?” I asked.

“Because,” said Dash, “we’re taking the scenic route.”

Dash led the way in, I was second and Oz brought up the rear. We followed Dash as he weaved his way through the baffling tangled web of interconnected pipes until we came to a huge, lone pipe that branched off the main network in a Y-configuration. Across the pipe’s funnel shaped mouth was a massive sealed hatchway door. The door, I noticed, was just big enough to swallow up one of our man-sized capsules.

Leading up the hatchway was a pair of guide rails. Dash laid his pod on the rails. It fit perfectly. I was starting to get an idea of what to expect next - and I didn’t like it.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Dash with a mock theatrical flourish, “I present to you the Pig Launcher.”

“Pig?” I said.

“Yes, it’s supposed to stand for Pipeline Inspection Gizmo,” he answered. “It’s a robotic device that they shoot down the pipeline that checks the integrity of the steel skin. It lets them know if there are any weak points that they might have to patch up.”

“I know that I don’t like where this is going,” I said. Buy this time I noticed that Oz was working on hacking into a nearby computer terminal.

“But tonight,” said Dash. “We’re going to try something a little different.” He reached over to his capsule and fingered some hidden clasps along the sides. There was a hiss of compressed air escaping as the panel plate unfastened itself and peeled away revealing the hollow cavity inside of the pod. But it wasn’t empty. Dash pulled out a medical oxygen canister with a hose and breathing mask attached. Also, there was what looked like a school backpack sealed in shrink-wrapped plastic and a white, plastic egg.

“It’s simple,” he said. “We climb inside our capsule, which is both airtight and watertight. The computer will load us into the launcher and Bang! we’re going to be shot down the pipeline like bullets out of a gun.”

“Ending up where - exactly?” I asked.

“Uh...erm...yeah...about that,” Dash was hedging. “Well, we’re not like 100% sure we know where that’s going to be.

“What?” I said. “What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Well, it will be close....close-ish to where we want to be.” He said. Do you know what a cistern is? It’s an underground reservoir of water. We’re pretty sure we’ll end-up there - pretty sure.”

“What’s your input on this Big Brain Boy?” I said to Oz.

He looked up from his terminal. “Remember when I said there would be parts you didn’t like. Well, this is one of them.”

“Sorry, not good enough,” I said. “Try again.”

“Look,” he said. “This place has the highest security measures on the planet. Fences. Guards with machine guns. Choppers. Dogs. Cameras. It would be easier to get into North Korea. This is the only way I could think to do this. This way we’re going to pass beneath all their security, and nobody gets hurt. If this doesn’t work for you, you can stay behind. But Dash and I are going.”

That seemed to end the discussion right there. I decided to drop it and just go with the flow.

Turning back to Dash I said, “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s in the egg?”

Dash cracked his plastic egg open. Out of it popped some kind of clothing made of shiny white, wafer thin material. “Thermal coveralls,” he said. “It’s going to get really cold in there.”

Next, Dash touched a finger too his lips and said in an affected voice, “Now, be vewy, vewy quiet. We’re hunting wabbits.” With that he pointed up to the second story of the building. It was ringed by a steel balcony that wrapped all the way around the inside. He guided me to a steel staircase that led up to the balcony. On the upper level there were a series of glass enclosed offices. All of them where empty except for one. Sitting, slumped over in a reclining chair in front of a desk console with multiple flat screens and control panels was an apparently unconscious looking, twenty something tech with chocolate cake smeared over his face.

In a hushed voice Dash said, “Lex Raymond, meet Herbert Ensweiler. Herbert, vice versa.”

In an equally hushed voice, I said, “You’re not going to hurt him, are you?” It wasn’t so much a question as it was a statement on my part that I wasn’t going to let this guy, Herbert, be hurt.

Dash feigned a wounded look. “What? Me, hurt poor Herb here? Perish the thought.” He continued, “You see, Oz has been anonymously writing love letters to Herbert posing as a secret admirer, using the photos of some Czechoslovakian fitness instructor hottie, I think.”

“And, let me guess,” I interjected. “He sent him this chocolate cake.” I picked up what was left of the half-eaten confectionary treat wrapped in crumpled aluminum foil, “and asked him to taste it at work tonight. Her plan was that they’d both bite into their own separate pieces at the same time - and it was doped-up with knockout drops.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” he concurred.

“That’s so mean,” I said.

“True,” agreed Dash. “But, this way nobody get’s hurt. I mean, what would you have us do? Break into the joint with guns a-blazing?”

While I thought this through, Dash leaned over Herbert’s desk and started flipping switches. These flipped switches caused several lights on one of the monitors to change from red to green.

“Okay,” said Dash. “We’re done here.” He started to go but I lingered behind.

“This guy’s going to get fired. Isn’t he?” I asked.

“Probably,” said Dash, who really wanted to get back downstairs. “But he’ll be loads better off not working for evil, old OmniCron.”

I was feeling very sorry for poor Herbert. When he woke up, he’d realize that there never really was a Czech girl writing him love letters and -as if that wasn’t bad enough- OmniCron might sack him for sleeping on the job. Not to mention letting dangerous fugitives into a secure area.

I leaned over, pursed my lips and laid upon the still sleeping Herb the biggest, softest kiss I could muster and whispered in his ear, “I want you to dream really pleasant dreams about the girl that I just know is waiting out there for you somewhere.” Even as I spoke the words, somehow I actually could see Herb and a beautiful young woman together in the not-too-distant future. How could I possibly know something like that? I pushed that image from my mind and pulled away. Herb cuddled up in his chair with a big smile on his face.

Back downstairs we found Oz doing a final checklist on the pig launcher. I turned my head as Dash pulled off his jeans and t-shirt and poured his muscular frame into the stretchable thermal jumpsuit. I watched as he climbed into his foam rubber lined pod. Oz placed the breathing mask over his mouth, flipped open the air valve and resealed the panel over the pod locking Dash inside.

“First, I’m sending in Dash, then you and I’ll be the last to go,” he said. “It’s all computer driven.”

I watched as electric motors unscrewed the restraining bolts and flung the hatchway portal door open. A robotic hammer arm pushed Dash’s pod (with a defenseless 17-year-old boy in it) down the rails of the sluice trough and into the chamber. The hatchway door closed, the bolts locked back into place. Valves opened up letting massive amounts of icy cold water into the chamber. And then -Pow!- the pig launcher’s inner hatch popped open sending Dash’s pod down the pipeline with the explosive energy of a rocket.

No way, I thought. No way could this be good. But I bit my lower lip, screwed up my courage - cause I was going to do it anyway. So much for logic.

Next was my turn. I suited up in the high-tech long johns and crawled into my pod. Oz placed the mask over my face and turned on my O2. The pure oxygen had an immediate calming effect on me, which was good because, this was scary.

I found my mind traveling back to my first trip to Six Flags Magic Mountain Theme Park in LA with my mom and dad. I had begged my parents to let me ride the Goldrusher roller coaster. I was only 6 and Dad was against it, but Mom -the ever adventurous one- was my ally and she talked Dad into letting me do it. Just as we sat down on the hard plastic seats of the ride and the padded safety bar came down, I felt a rush of adrenaline and a touch of fear. It was exhilarating and scary both at the same time. I was feeling the same sensation right now.

Oz sealed the plate over my head and I was plunged into total darkness. All the sounds took on a new and ominous meaning, because this time around it was all happening to me. I heard the hatch open. The hammer arm shoved me into the chamber. The hatch closed. The water came flooding. And, then - BANG! The pressure in my ears popped as the pod got shot down the pipeline.

This was crazy. No, it was worse: It was super-crazy. Not only could I die from this, if it went wrong, but I could die in a most horrible way. But at the same time I felt a sense of acceleration - of pure speed and velocity. It was intoxicating.

I thought of the wormhole scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the astronaut gets shot through time and space. That was overwhelming, mind-boggling and cool. But this was cooler, because it was actually happening to me!

Then I had the flashes.

I was standing in my room back in California. I could see my 8-year-old self, clutching a Barbie Doll with a death grip as my dad -trying desperately to hold back his own tears- was trying to explain why mommy was never coming home again.

I was lost in a hot and steamy alien jungle swamp with black water up to my knees. Nasty creature were swimming all around me and I was lugging someone over my shoulders.

I was on a frozen glacial plain caught in a blizzard approaching the wreckage of a crash-landed spaceship.

I was in a grand palace of obscene opulent luxury sword fighting -Like with real swords!- with a decidedly EVIL looking man costumed in a comic opera military uniform. He came complete with a waxed mustachio, sculpted goatee, skullcap and a leering grin across his satanic face.

I was in a golden throne room in the presence of a regal queen, a beautiful older women with fury skin and catlike eyes. She smiled at me revealing sharp teeth and a pair of fangs.

I was standing on an active volcanic moon at the center of an aged and dying universe. Multicolored, exploding suns crowded the skies. Sprawled out before me, like an amorphous version of the Supreme Being, was an immense, blood-red monster with a thousand limbs resembling tentacles that bathed itself in a frothing geyser of nuclear chaos. I could feel the creature’s terrible mind invading my brain - ripping it apart!

Then came the splashdown.

Chapter: Twenty-Seven
It was painful. I mean, it really hurt. It was like the agonizing aftereffects of taking the Mother-Of-All-Bellyflop dives off the high-board into the hard waters of the pool. Ouch!

For a moment the sudden pain shoved out all the troubling visions and brought on a kind of Zen clarity. All I could think about was nothingness, and that was kind of restful. But then the moment was over and I was back in the real world.

I was trapped in the dark, in a floating metal coffin and it was high time to be breaking out. I reached around with with fumbling fingers and found the spring-loaded drawstring cord and pulled it. The hooded panel jettisoned off and water started seeping in - icy cold water. I sat up and found myself in the center of a subterranean, black water lake. I thought of the River Styx from Greek Mythology- the one that led to the underworld Realm of the Dead.

My capsule floated on the waters like a canoe. I blindly groped around inside the pod and finally pulled out the tiny backpack sealed in shrink-wrapped plastic and ripped the material open. Among the items found inside was a high-intensity flashlight (which, unlike every flashlight Dad ever bought at a dime store, really worked). I shined the beam in ever direction in an attempt to get a handle on my surroundings.

Far off into the distance, I could see high walls that supported an overarching concrete roof. At regular intervals, in a geometric pattern, thick, black pipes erupted out of the water and extended all the way to the far-off ceiling.

Then, I saw another light bobbing up and down in the distance along one of the far walls. It must have been Dash, I thought. I pulled out the fiberglass oar and dipped it in the water. It had been a long time since I’d been to camp with the Girl Scouts, but I managed to row my pitiful makeshift raft in the direction of Dash’s light.

As I rowed, I heard the sound or rushing water - much like the white water rapids of a rushing river. I turned my light in that direction and saw a surging jet-stream shooting out of a horizontal pipe projecting out of one of the walls. That, I thought, must be where the pipeline emptied out and where I came into this gloomy place.

Oz’s pod would be spitting out of there any minute, I thought, and we three would be together again. There was a comfort in that. It was as if, the three of us where somehow meant to be together as a team - All For One And One For All and all that stuff.

As I approached Dash, I could see that he’d anchored his floating pod, using a rope attached to a grappling-hook, to the lowest steel rung of a ladder that climbed up the side of the wall.

“Is that the way out,” I asked.

“I think so,” answered Dash. “This underground water reservoir feeds all the water towers for the rocket range.”

“Well, up’s got to be the right direction,” I said.

We heard a sound like a gunshot (not that I really know what that’s suppose to sound like) followed by a heavy splash. Dash and I turned our lights in that direction. We trained out light beams on the surface of the black waters waiting for Oz’s pod to come bobbing back up to the surface. For a moment it did and then it sank back down again.

“Uh oh,” said Dash. “That’s very not good. His capsule must of cracked,” There was dire concern in his voice. “It could be taking on water - sinking.”

There was no time to think. I turned to Dash. “You stay here.” I dove out of my pod and into the drink. God but that water was icy cold. It was actually painful to swim through it. I could feel it sapping my strength with every stroke as I swam to where -in my mind- I assumed Oz sank below the surface.

When I was right above where I think he was -and this was taking a whole lot on faith- I took a big, double-lungful gulp of air, kicked my feet up and headed straight down to the bottom. I didn’t even bother opening my eyes. There was no light down here. I might as well have been swimming in ink. I remember reading once in National Geographic Magazine about fish that lived in the Marinas Trench, seven miles below the surface of the South Pacific. Some spent their whole life blind, others could make their own light. Something like that would come in really handy right now.

Don’t ask me how, but somehow, in my own mind, I had a fix on where he was. I could see him trapped in his own claustrophobic sarcophagus. The composite resin shell had cracked and was taking on water. The drawstring escape mechanism was malfunctioning. Oz, imprisoned within, was desperately trying to stay detached and unemotional in an attempt to think of some kind of brilliant Harry Houdini escape.

The bottom must have been a good 30 feet down. I knew I had one chance, and one chance only. After that, I’d be too frozen and exhausted to try again. I stuck out my hands in front of me with my fingers extended - kind of like a bug’s antenna feelers. I was searching for the pod stuck somewhere down here. But all my numb fingers could feel was the flat, smooth concrete floor of the bottom.

Damn. I did not want to fail. Yet, part of me did want to give up and let the cold embrace of oblivion take me. They say drowning and freezing to death are really very pleasant once you stop fighting it. As the strength left my limbs, I felt myself relax and go limp. Was I dying? Was this it? The End?

“A’Kalisa!” It was a woman’s voice. The Woman. The Mystery Woman from my dreams.

“What?” I said back. “Who the hell are you? What do you want from me? It’s all too hard. I just want to fall asleep forever right now. Okay?”

“A’Kalisa, you can’t give up and you can’t give in. Too much is dependent on you.” Her voice was so very familiar. But I just couldn’t place it. “Your far stronger than you know.”

That’s when I felt something smooth and curving under my fingertips. The pod! I thought. I found it.

Hastily, I felt around the rounded capsule’s edges for the grooves of the seams. I found them. I felt around some more and I found the outer catch to the mechanism. I pulled it. Nothing. I pulled it again, even harder this time. It gave way. The hood popped open just slightly. I got my fingers around the edges of it and pulled with all my might. I was surprised with how much might I actually had left.

The hood plate pulled away a little. Then it pealed right off. I cast it aside and went feeling around for a body. He was like a rag doll, limp in my arms. I wrapped one arm around his waist and pushed off with my legs.

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized the my lungs were aching for air. Scissoring with my legs and using my one free arm to paddle, I made a beeline to the surface. It seemed so far away.

I kicked and kicked, but it seemed as thought the blackness just went on forever. Then I saw a light. It was dim, but shinning down on me. I swam up towards it. As I got closer, it got bigger.

Then I broke through to the surface. My first gulp of air was the best thing I ever tasted. Waiting for me up there was Dash, flashlight in hand, in his pod, dragging mine behind him with a rope. I guess he’d decided that I might need some help after all.

He pulled Oz into his pod. I climbed into my own. I was shivering.

We both looked at Oz. His body was limp and apparently lifeless. His skin was cold and pallid. It reminded me of this poor frog we had to dissect in biology class at my old school. I hated that.

Dash’s eyes were full of worry. It was at that moment that I realized how close the two constantly fighting half-brothers really were. Each other was the only family they really had.

“Damn-it Oz,” yelled Dash. “You cannot die on me.”

Tense moments passed and then....Oz started spitting out water and coughing.

Dash and I both breathed a sigh of relief. A visibly weakened Oz looked over at us and said, “Well, if you two have finished playing around, I suggest we climb out of here.” I saw Dash smile.

We rowed back over to the wall where the steel rung ladder started. Each of us sopping wet and carrying out backpack started the long climb up. Dash was the first one up. He pushed aside a steel manhole cover at the top and climbed through to the surface. Oz was second and, because of his weakened condition took a bit longer. I was last.

With my feet once again on dry ground, I looked up. I was never more happy to see the twinkling stars in the sky.

Chapter: Twenty-Eight
Under the starry night sky, I could see that the Area-X Rocket Rang was a broad, seemingly boundless, expanse of tabletop flat badlands that stretched out in every direction. It was immense; comprising what must have been hundreds of square miles of mostly empty space - all of it well beyond the borders of the outside world and the prying eyes of an unsuspecting public. But the wonders that really grabbed my attention were the massive, human-made marvels of steel and concrete engineering that dotted the landscape here and there - launch complexes, assembly plants and fueling stations. All of it was glaringly lit by near-blindingly bright, white sodium floodlights and connected by a network of double-wide, crisscrossing superhighways.

The place was blatantly, perhaps even obnoxiously, alive with activity. A cacophony of white noise rumbled out of a myriad chorus of industrial machines. The acrid smell of burning ozone gushing from bleeder valves permeated through the air. And, from our hidden vantage point, we could see in the distance hordes of technicians, mechanics and engineers crawling all over the place performing their various functions much like dutiful worker ants in a bustling hive-nest. The swarms of busy-bee laborers frantically rushed around going from job to job -some on foot, others on goofy two-wheeled Segways or four-wheeled vehicles of every description either carrying passengers or hauling freight.

The sight of it all brought up archaic 1950’s-like, sci-fi words from my mind such as “spaceport,” “astroport” or “cosmodrome”. No way, my rational mind was screaming. No way this all could really be for real. But there it was, right there before my mesmerized and -Dare I think it?- delighted eyes.

Just standing there was giving me a sense of exhilaration. Because this was just the kind of place I had dreamed about for so long. In those dreams I would be all grown up and an Air Force officer and a test pilot and a scientist and -best of all- an astronaut, just like mom. Mom…gosh…how much I really miss you. Why’d you have to go so soon?

Then my thoughts turned to my father. Dad? I wondered. Just what kind of terrible funny business had you gotten yourself involved in? And, how was I –just some teenage kid way over her head- supposed to be able to do anything to save you?

Fortunately, for us, everything on the range seemed to be so spread out and widely spaced apart that, from where we had emerged out of our rabbit hole, nobody was close enough to have spotted our unannounced entrance. In fact we were all alone on an isolated, and presently uninhabited, concrete island from which sprouted a veritable forest of mushroom-shaped water towers that loomed large above us. From the base of each tower we could hear automated pump systems hydraulically churning away sucking the water up from the subterranean depths of the cistern below through a massive root system of vertical pipes and then force feeding it through horizontal pipelines to the surrounding industrial parks.

To my right, which I thought might have been west, stood a long line of enormous, raised multi-sided platform slabs, which I guessed must have been rocket launching pads. Each was accompanied by its own 300-foot tall gantry tower of naked girders.

To my left, which I guessed to be east, I saw a sprawling mass of interconnected, rectangular buildings. I assumed those to be assembly plants for the manufacture of rocket components. And, dominating that complex of long buildings, standing head and shoulders above the rest, was a massive monster of a steel structure. It stood about 500-feet tall (half as high as a skyscraper) and twice as wide on every side. It was a gigantic cube-shaped edifice with enormous sliding shutter doors down one side (at least the one facing us) big enough for Godzilla herself to walk through without having to stoop her head over. (Oh, yeah? You prove to me, she wasn’t a girl. Where, I ask you, in any of the movies was her outward genitalia?)

Oz pointed to the leviathan and said, “That’s the VAB, the Vehicle Assembly Building. That’s where we’re going.”

As he said the words, I could feel a misty fog of sleepiness sneaking into my brain. After the exhausting, near-death ordeal with the freezing, black waters below and being hit with the hot, dry desert air above, I was feeling very tired. My eyes were taking those long blinks that usually are the precursors to yawns. It had already been a long day and not a very nice one. I could have lain down on the hard, concrete ground, curled up like a little kitty cat and fallen asleep right there on the spot.

Stop it! I snapped at myself. No time for sleepy bye. You’ve got to mentally take that dreaded drowsiness and stuff it back into its’ box. So, that’s what I did. I gritted my teeth, scrunched up my face and shook my head like a wet dog drying itself off until the grogginess went away.

That’s when Oz came over and put and hand on my shoulder and said, “I know you’re tired. You have every right to be. But we have to push though.” Then he held out his hand, “Here, this might help.” I saw that in his outreached hand he held a big, fluffy white towel. I assumed that he must have pulled it out of one of the watertight backpacks.

I accepted it gratefully. It felt luxurious to run the towel over my wet hair drying it out properly. Now, if only I had a hair brush. Yes, I thought, it did make me feel much better. But I didn’t like what Oz had to say next. “Everybody strip down to your underwear. It’s time to get in character.”

I saw that Dash pealed off his wet close-fitting one-piece bodysuit with gusto. Apparently, he could not wait to dry himself off with his towel. This was a guy, I thought, who had no qualms or hang-ups about showing-off his nakedness. My eyes caught a momentary glimpse of his incredibly well proportioned muscular frame. Not too bad, I thought.

Sheesh! What are you doing girl! I told myself. Turn away already!

As well, Oz did the same. He was thin and ropey, like the kid who always gets terrorized by vindictive, dictatorial gym class teachers. (Like there’s any other kind?)

The next thing they pulled out of the packs were grey construction worker’s coveralls with the OmniCron corporate logo emblazoned across the back. Me? I was still standing there dumbfounded. No way was I stripping in front of two boys I hardly knew. Talk about your awkward situations.

“Sorry,” said Dash noticing my hesitation. “We can turn around while you change if you want. But still you have to strip down. If your wet bodysuit soaks through the work togs people might ask more questions than we really want to try to answer right now.”

I could not argue with him because he was so infuriatingly right. Cold, cruel logic was just against me. I turned around (hoping they did the same) pulled off the wet one-piece and toweled myself off. I was forced to admit, that felt good.

Next I dug into my own pack and found my own pair of coveralls and slipped them on. Also, In the pack I found a heavy pair of engineer’s boots, a fiberglass hardhat and an official looking ID badge with my photo plastered on it.

Let me say that again. It had my photo on it! This bears repeating yet again: Somehow, someway the Trouble Brothers had got a hold of my photo, maybe from the net, and placed it on a phony, but genuine looking ID badge, placed it in the backpack and had it ready before they’d ever met me. Somebody, had some serious explaining to do.

Chapter: Twenty-Nine
“Hey! What is this?” I said more to myself than to either Dash or Oz. Then it all began to dawn on me. I started to realize a few things that I, someone who likes to think of them self as a smart girl, should have caught before. But, I guess that recent, not to mention traumatic, events had moved by so fast in the past few hours that I hadn’t had time to question any of this before. But questions were starting to erupt out of my brain like hot magma out of an active volcano. What I needed now were answers.

“Okay I have a question for both of you two- in fact many questions. And, I expect some damned answers!” I looked at Oz. “How is it that you just happened to be in my backyard, coming through my broken backdoor with an atomic popgun while I was being attack by animal/human crossbreed from The Island of Doctor Moreau? How come there were three capsules in the grave when there are only two of you? And, the best part, the piese de resistance, how is it that you have my face, my photo on this ID, when you two only met me today?” I gave them both a look that said “Spill it now!” and started tapping my foot letting them know the clock was ticking.

I saw that Dash’s face immediately took on a guilty look, like a puppy dog just after it got caught being naughty. By contrast, Oz’s face stayed as impassive as that of a veteran Las Vegas poker player in a high stakes game who refused to let on what kind of hand he was holding.

“Well, gee whiz,” started Dash. Pangs of remorse hung heavy in his tones. “Sorry we didn’t tell you everything up front. But, it’s not like we really knew anything. It’s more like we’ve been doing a lot of guesswork lately. And, we’ve been betting our lives that we were guessing right.” He looked down at his feet as if there were a whole lot more to tell, but was unprepared to tell it just yet.

“He’s correct,” said Oz taking over the conversation where Dash had left off. But there wasn’t the slightest hint of self-reproach in his voice. “We didn’t know anything. But we were told, by a third party that you would be coming our way. And, like it or not, and I certainly did not, we needed you a helluvalot more than you would need us.”

To that the most intelligent sounding response I could muster up was, “Huh?”

“You see,” he continued, “you’re special - one-of-a-kind, one-in-a-million-billion and we’d be fools not to bring you along.”

“Me?” I said. “Special? That can’t be right. There’s gotta be some mistake. I’m just your average everyday nobody. And, who? How did you know I’d be coming?”

Dash spoke up. “The Voice. The Lady.”

“Who? What?” I was getting frustrated. “I wanted complete sentence-statement answers and all I was getting were vague references. “Who’s the Lady?”

“You know,” said Oz. “She’s the woman in your dreams, the one who’s told you your real name.”

A single word came to my mind: A’kalisa. I knew I’d heard it before. But it was a fleeting memory, a breath on the wind, a whisper in the darkness. It was all so truly, profoundly weird. But, I recovered quickly.

“So why didn’t you tell me all this up front?” I said.

Not even sounding the least bit defensive, Oz said, “How would we have sounded? Some pair of guys you don’t know saying that they know you from a shared dream? And, Oh! By the way, would you like to travel to another planet in an alternate universe with us?”

This was way too much to think about, but then it hit me. “But what about my dad?” There was a touch of anger in my voice. “If you knew all this stuff, why didn’t you warn him?”

“I suspected that he might be kidnapped. But even if I had been able to convince him that our wild story was true -and really doubt I could have- they are always watching and I couldn’t take the chance of exposing my plans. We have a mission, and when I say ‘we’ I mean all three of us. What we’re going to do is more important than even you could imagine right now.”

“And what is that ‘important’ thing? What is it that’s more important that the life of my dad?” I said. I don’t know if I was angry or what right then. Too many ideas, too many emotions were squeezing into my brain.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “Come with us and find out.”

“I don’t really have a choice. Do I?” I said.

“There’s always a choice,” said Oz. Much later, I would learn that that was his favorite catch phase – and it would become mine too.

Without saying a word, I started walking toward the gigantic, box-shaped building. Dash and Oz fell in behind me.

Chapter: Thirty
The inside of the VAB was one vast, cavernous chamber. Imagine the biggest aircraft hanger you’ve ever been in and then multiply that by a hundred. The ground floor was easily eight acres square. I craned my neck way back to see the ceiling which soared upward to a dizzying height of over 50 office building stories above our heads. You could have fit an entire professional baseball stadium in that place. But instead contained within those walls was an honest-to-goodness spaceship assembly plant.

It was an impressive site. Walking through one of the mammoth-sized main doorway was an overwhelming (read: scary) experience. It made me feel like I was an ant crawling through an open doggy door. And, wouldn’t you know? Me, without a camera.

By my old, beat-up digital watch, I could tell it was well past midnight but the joint was rock’n. Construction workers -and I’m talking about a couple of thousand, in their coveralls, hardhats and safety goggles- were bustling all over the place toiling away as if this was the most important job anyone in the world could possibly hope to be doing. Compressed-air rivet guns rang out with staccato booms. Arc welding torches were spitting showers of sparks (looking very much like swarms of summer night fireflies). Hefty bridge cranes suspended on trolley rail tracks in the lofty ceiling overhead were lowering multi-ton flanges of shaped metal into place. The room was alive with the sound of industrial tools grinding away. It was a flurry -Or is the word fury?- of activity.

This was a good thing because it meant that the three of us could walk right down the middle of the factory floor without anyone really noticing us. Amongst all these high-achieving, nose-to-the-grindstone, go-getters we could remain safely anonymous.

I noted that the room was split into four giant bays. Each one accommodated a 300 foot tall, upright rocket fuselage -each in various stages of completion. A bewildering array of platforms and scaffoldings surrounded each one allowing various teams of techs, mechs and engineers access at every level to the yet unfinished space vehicle.

It was mesmerizing for me to watch them work away. Oz kept having to tug me by the elbow so I wouldn’t just stop and gawk in wide-eyed wonderment like a country bumpkin on her first trip to the big city.

Three of the rocketships-in-the-making were -at that point- just skeletal frameworks of interlocking beams and girders made of some kind of gleaming solid alloy the color of liquid quicksilver. Within them I could see component parts that I couldn’t identify - except for one that looked like a super-jumbo-sized version of the hydrogen fuel cell on Oz’s raygun. That, I guessed, must have been the ship’s power source.

The fourth one looked, I thought, as if it were finished. And look I did (more like stare) because it didn’t look right at all. Inasmuch as it looked nothing at all like any of the stubbornly straight-laced, cylinder-shaped and cone-topped multistage missiles my dad had helped NASA design and build over the years. No this was a different animal – way different!

The shape of the main body frame of the rocketship was that of a keenly slender upside-down teardrop-configuration which stood firmly atop a tripod of three shark fin rudders that ended in bulky but elegant engine nacelles with bell-shaped exhaust nozzles. The nose section was broad, blunt and crowned by a geodesic, blue crystalline dome bisected by a razor-sharp spear-like spire. The strangely ornamental design of the burnished outer hull was full of sweeping curvilinear lines and eye-catching V-shapes. It looked like a giant-sized version of one of those crazy chrome platted hood ornaments that you used to find at the head of old-time classic 1950’s Oldsmobiles.

Why? I wondered. Why was this all so ding-danged-darned strange? There was a word for this. My mind hastily searched through my brain looking for it. I knew that it began with the letter A. Apple? Anaconda? Aardvark? Then, in a flash, it came to me - Anachronistic: a thing belonging to or appropriate to a time period other than that in which it is found. Yes, that was it. These ships looked like they’d fallen off the color panels of a Flash Gordon comic strip. It wasn’t possible, but here they were just the same.

“What it the world is that supposed to be?” I heard myself saying. “It doesn’t look like it could be for real. It looks like something out of a late late show 1950’s black and white sci-fi movie. I mean, there’s no way that cacamami thing could actually fly. Right?”

“It’s called an Argo Mark IV,” replied Oz. “And, as to if it can fly or not, we’re going to get to test out that question personally. As he was talking one of the heavy-duty bridge crane trolleys up in the ceiling started dropping down thick steel cables where crews of roustabouts around the Argo would attach them to the sides of the rocketship.

We watched as the silvery, would-be space vehicle was hoisted up into the air and slowly shifted to a new location. That location was atop a broad, flat, two-stories-thick, gunmetal gray steel platform that itself rested on top of what had to be the biggest, most badassed heavy cargo hauler I’d ever seen. Imagine a giant, vertical X-shaped frame with each of the four legs suspend on a double-pair of tank treads each one as big as a Greyhound Bus. This mother-of-all-titanic-tractor-rigs sat, with its noisy engines idling, at the far end of the chamber in the central aisle just inside one of the VAB’s mega-massive doorways. Looking at it put me in mind of a motorized insect, so I decided I’d call it the Crawler.

“Let me guess,” I said. “That flatbed platform is a mobile launch pad and it’s going to transport the Argo out to one of the launch complexes.”

“Perfect prediction, Lex,” said Dash. “But there’s even more. It’s also our hotel. It’s where we’re bedding down for the night.”

Again, I think I responded with something truly insightful like, “Huh?”

Oz made his way, with Dash and I right behind him, toward the Crawler. Again there were so many people doing so many jobs all around us that nobody, apparently, had the time or the inclination to question our presence there. He found a steel ladder that led up to a catwalk that wrapped around the X-frame and climbed up. We followed.

When we got to catwalk that’s when the full personality of the Crawler really struck me. Not only could I hear it’s massive engines rumbling in my eardrums but I also could feel the pulsating vibrations they caused through my booted feet on the grated walkway. As well, I could smell burning diesel fuel and lubricant oil in my nostrils.

Oz started pulling on handles of various hatchway doors. The first three were locked from the inside, but the fourth one opened for him. With him in the lead, we walked into the rumbling belly of the beast. Inside it was a maze-way of tunnels strewn with multicolored pipes, cable troughs, conduits and control boxes all of it lit with glaring naked neon bulbs. It reminded me, I thought, of the time mom had arranged for me to tour the engine room of a luxury ocean liner that was docked in Houston.

We turned this way and that through the labyrinth. I started to wonder if Oz had any idea whatsoever where he was going. But finally, we came to a door that read:

No Admittance
Authorized Personnel Only

The room was dark and lit only by the glow of computer and video screens at the control console. There were also several very big -and I might add inviting looking- padded lounge chairs bolted to the floor in front of the consoles. Just looking at the chairs made my legs feel wobbly. It suddenly seemed as if it had been days since I last allowed myself the luxury of sitting down.

“This is the auxiliary control room,” said Oz. “It’s very unlikely that anyone will try to get in here.” With that statement he locked the only door into the room from the inside. “This vehicle moves at the velocity of one-mile-per-hour. At that rate, with the nearest launch complex more then ten miles away, it will be sunup before we get there. Until then, we sleep.”

Dash wasted no time. He plopped himself down in the nearest padded chair making himself look as comfortable as possible, closed his eyes and -almost immediately- started snoring. I came to the conclusion that he was the kind of guy who could sleep anywhere, eat anything and brave any adventure no matter how harebrained.

Oz did the same and picked a chair. I was the last to sit down. No way. I thought. How was I ever going to just fall asleep under these circumstances? But as my backside experienced the simple, but rapturous joy of just sitting down, I could feel waves of tiredness flow all over my body. My eyes fluttered and then closed. I was fast asleep before I knew it.

Thankfully, there were no weird dreams to haunt my slumber.

Chapter: Thirty-One
To the best of my recollection, that was the first time ever in my short seventeen years of life that I actually slept for ten hours straight. What finally woke us up was a sudden lurching in the Crawler. It was like a minor Earth tremor. My eyes popped open and I sat bolt upright in my chair. Instinct took over and before I even had time to think I was on my feet poised like a boxer fists in the air ready for a fight. I saw that Dash had done the same. Only Oz remained sitting down.

“It’s okay,” he said. His voice was reassuring. “They’re raising the mobile launch pad, with the rocket on it, off the Crawler. The shaking is just the shock absorbers readjusting to the lighter load.”

“Oh!” said Dash, now feeling a bit silly. “Then I guess it’s up-and-Adam.”

“I believe the correct phrase is up-and-at-them,” responded Oz.

“I know,” said Dash with a smirk. “I just wanted to see if you’d go to the trouble of correcting me.”

Oz groaned. Dash, it seemed to me, was the only person alive that could provoke an emotional response out of the normally dispassionate teenage super-genius.

We made it outside without incident. In the morning the desert plain of the rocket range was a whole new world. By my watch it was 10:00am and the sun was well over the horizon. It shined down brighter than I ever remember seeing it before. I squinted hard and wished I had a pair of dark shades.

Where we found ourselves, when we stepped off the still moving Crawler, was at the foot of a massive inclined ramp-way that led down from a massive multi-sided concrete edifice of poured concrete with gently sloping walls. The Crawler, after having discharged its cargo, was slowly but surely making its way down off the ramp. At the apex of the edifice stood the Mobile Launch Platform and atop that -standing in all its glory with the morning rays of sun reflecting off its shimmering hull -was the Argo rocketship.

I marveled at it. Not only was it an engineering masterpiece but also there was something, I thought, almost mythological about the mystique that this great hunk of dead metal held for me. It was -my brain scrambled to think of the right word- my destiny.

To one side of the Argo was a gantry tower, a skeletal framework of interlocking steel girders that stood just a bit taller than the rocket. Between the two, I could see, multiple swing-arm bridges running from the tower to the rocket. Strung across many of the bridges were bulky black hoses and cables feeding the rocket like umbilical cords to a unborn fetus. Some of the hoses had a thick layer of icy frost on them. Super-cold liquids, I thought, like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (maybe even kerosine). Both were extremely combustible (as in explosive!) and therefore highly hazardous. It only made sense that they wait until that last minute to start filling up the rocket’s tanks. No need to take any chances. Spaceflight, even under the best conditions, was already a deadly dangerous game. Fully fueled-up a rocket like this would have the destructive power of a small atomic bomb.

The immediate area around the edifice was, as Oz began to tell us, Launch Complex-16. It was a roughly octagonally shaped plot of layered land committed to one phase of rocketry - the blast-off. Just like the VAB the night before, this place was bustling with ground crew workers and service vehicles going in every which-way direction, each with their own specific job to do. Thankfully, we were lost (and more importantly ignored) in the crowd.

It was at that moment that I realized that my neck ached and that my shoulders and back felt stiff. Which might, I suspected, have had something to do with me sleeping upright on a fricking chair all night long. I also realized that more than anything else, I would have loved to have been able to take a hot shower and brush my teeth, which I’d follow up with coffee and a hearty breakfast.

As it turned out, I had to settle for just coffee and something that almost counted as food. Dash, who I was starting to suspect was part bloodhound, had sniffed out a lunch wagon truck that was serving piping hot java and a plethora of sugar coated, high-fat, high-calorie confectionary snack treats - the kind that are turning most of America into even chubbier version of comic relief sidekicks.

Normally, I never touch stuff like this, but I was starving! So, I surprised myself by wolfing down a whole bear claw. I immediately felt guilty. But then felt less bad when I saw Dash had eaten two.

As we ate and drank, Oz started to give us the rundown on the Argo. “They’re not” he explained between sips of coffee, “anything at all like the rockets that NASA has been launching out of Florida for the past five decades. It doesn’t use conventional chemical rockets but advanced thermo nuclear engines.” Dash groaned as a way of signaling that he’d heard this lecture more than once before in the past and wasn’t enthused about a repeat. “Superconducting electromagnets in the booster cores are used to force the atomic nuclei of the ship’s liquid hydrogen fuel to fuse together in a reaction chamber creating vast amounts of superheated plasma which the rocket uses as thrust that propels it through space. Making it more than twice as powerful as anything NASA ever shot into space.”

“But that’s not possible,” I said without thinking (or rather over-thinking). “I mean, sure -I guess- it’s possible, the same way anything in science is possible. But nobody knows how to achieve cheap fusion power -at least not yet. If OmniCon really had that kind of technology they would have it patented already and would be selling it to the rest of the world. It would be a trillion dollar business. But they’re not, so they don’t. Right?”

“Oh sweetheart,” said Dash with a sly grin, “You have so walked into his trap.”

Sweetheart? Normally I didn’t let boys get away with calling me by silly pet names. But, I thought I’d let that slide -this time- because I really wanted to hear whatever Oz had to say.

But Oz was on to the next subject. He was pointing to the base of the rocketship where the three engine nacelles stood upon the flat surface of the launch pad. That’s when I first noticed stubby structures like steel clamps that seemingly locked the rocket down to the pad.

“Those are the hold-down arms,” said Oz. “They have me worried. Their purpose is to keep the rocket pinned down during the blast-off until all three engines are stabilized.”

“Where are they controlled from?” I asked.

“You see, that’s the problem,” he said. “They’re operated from the Master Computer in the Central Control Complex.

“So, unless they release the arms, we stay locked down Right?” I said. “So, what do we do?”

“Well,” said Oz a bit embarrassed. “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

“So, it will be game of chicken,” added Dash. “If they don’t blink first and let us go, we’re stuck.”

“No,” I said. “It would be worse than that. We’d probably blow up on the pad - like Kaboom!”

“Oh! Yeah,” said Dash a bit defeated. “That would be a royal day spoiler.”

It was at that moment that I spied an impressively-sized converted airstream RV with the word AstroVan stenciled on the side in big letters. It pulled up the road and came to a stop at the base of the massive concrete island that served as the support platform for the launching pad and the rocket. Modified double-doors swung open and out came six men in bulky, square-shouldered astronaut pressure suits (all colored in traffic stopping, fire-engine red), minus helmets or gloves.
They moved slow and deliberately. Those suits, I thought, must have really weighed them down.

We were close enough that I got a good look at their unsmiling faces. But they didn’t look, to me, at all like an astronaut should. Grim, swarthy and, in some cases, even scarred. One had a massive vertical scar running up his face stopping just below his right eye and then continuing from the eyebrow up. It wasn’t the face of a test pilot or a scientist but of a hardened criminal - maybe even a murderer. I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what it looked like. We watched as (I could not bring myself to call them pilots so I called them) “The Killers” walked up the ramp to the base of the gantry tower.

“Okay kids,” said Oz. “That’s our cue. We’ll give those esteemed gentlemen five minutes and then we’ll follow them up.” It might have been my imagination, but it seemed to me that Oz said the words ‘esteemed gentlemen’ the same way anyone else might say ‘dirty rats.’

Unnoticed amongst the swarms of work crews we made our way up the ramp. The closer we got the taller and more impressive the gantry tower looked. The red-pained multistory metal superstructure soared into the air like an ugly stepsister standing beside the Argo. Inside I could see open cage elevators moving up and down their shafts carrying personnel and machines.

I also saw, for the first time, armed security guards. They were menacing in their smart, dark blue uniforms complete with their Fritz-styled combat helmets, bulletproof vests and heavy-duty semi-automatic machine guns strung over their shoulders. But worse than that, they had forbiddingly stern looks drawn across their faces, as if they took their job of security very seriously, which -I thought- could be very bad for us.

There were four guards stationed at the bottom of the tower. What they seemed to be guarding was a gated chechpoint that was the only entrance into the tower. Two were on the outside. One stood and, it seemed to me, had the job of looking alert and ready to shoot anyone or anything that just didn’t look right. The other sat at a security desk and had the duty of inspecting everyone’s IdentaCard. The remaining two stood inside guarding the bank of elevator doors. In short, we had to get through them, to get up there.

Cool as an ice cube in Antarctica, Oz walked right up to the guard and handed him his fake card. The unsmiling sentinel took it, (with the lackluster ease of someone doomed to do the same exact thing over and over again during the course of his workday) looked it over (or maybe just pretended to), looked Oz over and then swiped it over the electronic card reader on his desk countertop. A friendly sounding ping tone reverberated out of the reader and a green light on the side of the machine lit up. The guard, not even bothering to look at Oz again, handed his card back to him allowing him to walk through the checkpoint into the tower. The same exact thing happened for Dash.

Then it was my turn. But, I wasn’t so lucky. The moment the guard swiped my card over the reader pad his computer spat out an unfriendly buzz, like in the kid’s board game Operation when you accidentally kill the patient. But in this situation the word “kill” might have a more literal meaning. The desk guard immediately stood up and at the same time pulled out his sidearm. As he pointed the gun in my direction he also pointed to Oz and Dash who were standing trapped in the fenced-in anteroom and yelled to the two guards inside, “Detain them. Now!”

After a split second’s worth of disbelief (I guess they were just slow to actually believe that something interesting was actually going to happen on their shift) they started to unsling their machine guns and point them at the boys. But the boys where quicker - especially Dash. In fact, he moved so fast his body was a blur. The man blinked several times in the direction that Dash had just vacated as if the teenage boy had simply vanished in front of him. The next thing he knew was that the boy was standing behind him grabbing his gun with one hand and chopping him on the back of the neck with the other. The guard went down unconscious.

Oz had been less direct and more devious. As his guard had been pulling his machine gun up, the boy genius reached over (and his hands were as fast as a steam-age riverboat card shark’s) to the hip holster hanging from the man’s web belt and pulled out his automatic pistol. Before the guard knew it Oz was taping him (I hope not too hard) on the noggin with the butt of the gun. Then, he went down.

My situation was a little more tricky. The desk guard was standing if front of me with his sidearm drawn and pointing at me while the guard behind me had his machine gun out and pointed at my back. All I had going for me was that they were both staring in slack-jawed surprise at what had just happened to their compatriots. That was my opening.

Don’t ask me how I did it. I don’t know. All I know is that I saw all of it happen in my mind a split second before I really did it. Then, I did it. In a flash, I grabbed the desk guard’s pistol by the barrel (No way that could have been smart.) and then I yanked it out of his hand. He must have had time to squeeze down on the trigger because I heard it go off. Bang!

Yikes! But that was loud.

Then it was Ouch! -because suddenly the barrel was too hot to handle. I instinctively dropped it like a hot potato.

Without stopping I spun around on my heals grabbed the other guard’s trigger finger hand and pushed up. The bullets out if his gun sprayed out rata-tat-tata-tat-tat! They ricocheted off the solid steel ceiling above us making all kinds of wicked echoing noises. While he was looking up, I balled up the fingers of my hand and smacked him across the jaw with a right cross. He went down. I think that immediately after that I said something like, “Sorry. Sorry. Didn’t really want to do that. Hope you’re okay.”

The desk guard was still up and had the presence of mind to hit the panic button. Loud klaxons started going off. Red emergency lights started flashing. Over a public address system I could hear a recorded announcer’s voice saying, “Attention. We are now at Code Yellow. I repeat. We are now at Code Yellow. Security personnel initiate all Code Yellow procedures. All non-essential personnel please go to your assigned shelter positions.” Then it repeated.

I looked to Oz. I think that my eyes said: Okay, so what do I do now? He must have understood because he pointed to the only remaining conscious guard and said, “Bring him in here.” I looked at the desk guard who was now trapped behind his counter. He was looking around for a way to get out or for the cavalry to come over the hill. There was a little bit of fear in his eyes. I felt sorry for him. He was just a 9-to-5 clock puncher who probably never signed on for this kind of action.

With agility that surprised even me, I jumped over the desk like a gymnast. I looked at him and he at me. I could tell he was going to try and punch out my lights. I grabbed his punching hand in mid-flight, twisted it around his back and whispered in his ear, “I really don’t want to hurt you, but I will. Open the gate.”

He did. Keeping his arm pinned I waked him through the doorway in front of me. Now we were all in the anteroom. Oz walked up to the man. “Give me the key, so I can lock the gate.” He looked into the man’s eyes with a cold stare. There was something inhuman in that look. And, I could not tell you if that was an act or if he really meant it. I could however tell that the guard was considering, weighing what OminCron would do to him if he complied versus what Oz might do to him if he didn’t.

He gave Oz the key. My one-time science teacher took it and locked the gate mechanism. Several solid steel bolts slid across locking the gate down. By this time Dash had called down one of the big cage freight elevators and was holding the door open. Leaving the guard behind, unhurt and keyless we loaded in the lift and made our way straight up to the top.

Chapter: Thirty-Two
The lift accelerated upward so fast that we had to bend our knees to keep from falling over. I looked over at Oz. “So, where to now?” I asked.

“All the way to the top,” he said. “It’s called the White Room.”

As the levels of the tower zipped by and our view of the Earth below got more and more impressive, my eyes drifted over the guns that Dash and Oz were holding (the ones they’d taken off the guards below). I thought for a moment and then said, “Guys we need to loose the guns.”

“What?” said Dash astonished. Oz said nothing.

“Look, if we have guns there probably will be shooting. And, if there’s shooting, somebody’s going to get killed. Do you really want that on your conscience?”

Dash thought for a moment and said, “Well, I don’t want to kill anybody, unless I really, really have to. And, if I carry this in, the chances of a firefight go up.” Dash laid his gun down on the grated floor of the lift.

Oz looked unhappy. “I’m against this,” he said. “But I’ll bend to the will of the majority -for now.” He laid down his gun and looked me in the eye. “But know this: The time will come when you won’t have the luxury of a clear conscience.”

When the elevator lift came to a stop we got out and walked across the topmost swing-arm bridge. At its end was a block-like structure as big as a small house that half-embraced the nose section of the Argo. The entrance was a stainless steel door that opened with a hiss after Oz swiped his father’s all-access security badge over its card reader. We walked in, and as you might have already guessed, everything inside was antiseptically white - the walls, the floor, the furniture, the glowing ceiling, even the spotless hooded coveralls, booties and latex gloves that the ingress tech crew wore. At the far end I could see the silvery hull of the Argo snugly scrunched up to the side of White Room. There was an open circular hatchway but no apparent door.

The only thing in the room that was not white were the astronauts (You know, the ones I call “The Killers”) in their bright scarlet pressure suits. They had been sitting down in big, overstuffed couch chairs while the white suited techs did last minute checks on their equipment and screwed on their space helmets which were black and crested with -I kid you not!- dark bronze dragon sculptures. I couldn’t even begin to speculate what the story on that was.

Nobody noticed us as we walked in. But, I think, Dash meant to change all that. His voice was loud but not intimidating or mean. It was like he was determined to have fun with this and not take it too seriously.

“Okay everybody,” he said. “If I could have your attention please. There’s an orange Datson in the parking lot, license plate number B210. Your lights are on.” Everyone in the room, including me turned to look at Dash with a perplexed looked their face. From Oz this earned Dash an angry scowl.

“Ooops. Sorry. Sorry. Wrong speech,” Dash said with mock embarrassment. “What I really meant to say was that this is a...Oh? What is that word? Oh yes, a kidnapping. But we’re kidnaping your rocketship. So if you’d all just file out of the room without raising a ruckus or any troubling questions that would be very much appreciated.”

Everyone in the room still wore that perplexed expression on their face. But then one of the Killer astronauts stood up. This was the one with the long evil scar running down his face and he was a very big man. Think Bigfoot without the hair. When he spoke is voice was deep, gruff and very strangely accented. “What in the Seven Hells be this madness? Be this some kind of ugly jest?”

“Face it Scar Face,” said Dash determined not to take this with any seriousness at all. “You’re being spacejacked.” Spacejacked? I thought. Did he just make that up?

“Very well, Little Man,” said Scar Face. “If you’re going to take my ship away from me, where are your weapons?”

“Ah! Well, about that,” said Dash unintimidated by the man’s size. “I’m not so much a planner as I am an improviser.”

Scar Face, apparently unamused with Dash’s sense of humor let out a low growl like an old Grizzly Bear that some reckless fool had annoyed. I saw his hand reach into one of his red pressure suit’s many deep pockets. When he drew it back out he was holding a very long and wicked looking dagger.

Beside him one of his fellow Killer Astronauts stood up. In his hand he held a gun. No, not a gun, a raygun. But this was not some oversized, home-made contraption like Oz’s gun. This was small, compacted and lethal looking. With deadly menace in their eyes the two Killers started walking toward us.

This was crazy, I thought. But the really crazy part came next. Dash looked over at me with that boyish sly grin and said, “Okay Ace. You take the Little One and I’ll take his big brother.”

Huh? I thought. The ‘Little One’? Which one was that? But before I had time to ask any questions, Dash was stealthily walking up to the knife-wielding Scar Face.

Oh, great! I thought. I get the one with the gun. What, I ask you. What did Dash think I was going to do?

The gun holder, you know the ‘Little One’, had his gun up on me and was stepping towards me closing the distance. I saw that his finger was pulling down on the trigger and that a small glow of red energy was erupting out of the end of the barrel. It was charging up to fire.

He was going to shoot me. I thought. I could die here and now - and that would really stink. Next thing I knew I was running at him at top speed. Which was, I guess, fast enough to take him by surprise. Because, I was able to reach and grab his gun hand by the wrist and jerk it up toward the ceiling.

It went off. A torrent of hot plasma issued out. There was a bright red flash. I could feel scorching heat against my face. I heard a sound like zzzzitttt! We, me and the Little One, both looked up and saw where a crude hole had just been burned through the ceiling. Plastic, glass and metal were charred and smoking.

A heartbeat went by. We looked at each other and that’s when the wresting match to see who got control of the gun commenced. He was strong -really strong, determined and had no compunctions whatsoever against fighting dirty. He fought with his fists, feet, knees and elbows. This was a guy, I thought, who’d been trained to fight - and fight mean. How in the world I was deflecting his blows and able to punch him back just as hard, I don’t now - but I was.

One thing in my favor was that his bulky pressure suit was weighing him down and restricting the freedom of his movement. But I knew I had to end this and end this fast. Sooner or later (probably sooner) he was going to get lucky and either deck me or get his gun hand free of my hand and cut me in two with his raygun.

He had sheer physical brute power, but I had speed. So, I balled up the fingers of my free hand and started pummeling his face with blows. I concentrated and tried to work my arm as fast as I could. It became a blur. I felt a real connection. My knuckles drove right into the side of his skull. His eyes bulged. A silly grin crossed his face. His knees appeared to buckle and he slowly slid to the floor. He was out cold.

The gun? Where was it? I looked around and it was not in his hand. Nor was it close by. Yikes? That’s when I heard another zzzzittttt!

I saw Scar Face go down. There was a silly grin on his face too. Dash, who had blood on his knuckles turned around to see where the shot had come from. What we both saw was Oz holding the raygun. I guess he must have picked it up.

“Darn it Oz!” yelled Dash. “I just about had him.”

“Sorry,” said Oz. “You can get me back by saving my life at a later date.” He turned to the rest of the room. “He’s not dead. I had it on it’s lowest setting. Now if you’d all be so good as to disarm.” Another one of the red suited astronauts made a grab for his pocket. Oz zapped him in the hand giving him a nasty burn. That stopped all further attempts at resistance. With Dash’s and my help we disarmed the last of the red suits.

Then, Oz addressed one of the techs, an older man whose hair was as white as his jumper. “Dr. Klinghoffer, if you’d be so good as to step forward.” The man did and I instantly disliked him. His face was full of sour meanness.

“Ogelthorpe,” he said. “Have you gone loopy? What is this all about?”

While still holding the gun, Oz handed the man the key to the downstairs locking mechanism. “Take this Doctor. You, your crew and everyone else has about five minutes go get away from here. I suggest you be at least three miles way before we blast-off.”

The old man was indignant. “You had a bright future. You know what vast power they would have brought us all. I thought you were one of us.”

Oz looked the old man straight back in the eye. “Doctor. You’re the one who must be ‘loopy’ if you think that they see you as one of them. To them all of us are merely pawns in their game -and pawns get sacrificed.” He hesitated and then added, “That’s all. Not another word. Get out.”

The three of us stood to one side as the old man led the tech out. The still walking killer astronauts helped their semiconscious, but still very much alive compatriots stagger out. We watched as the stainless steal door of the White Room slid shut behind them.

We were alone now. It was just us three and a rockestship waiting to take off.

Dash was excited. This was a real thrill for him. “Wow! I never thought we would get this far. I was sure we would die trying.”

Oz was impassive. “We have about 60 seconds until a commando team comes tearing up the tower.” He stuffed the raygun in the seam of his pants and knelt down to where one of the discarded gaudy space helmets where lying on the floor. He tugged at it and pulled a radio headset out of it and plopped it on over his head. Dash and I each found a helmet of our own and did the same.

I turned toward the circular hatchway opening into the Argo and stepped through. Call me selfish, but I wanted to be the first one to set foot on the Argo. Dash and Oz followed close behind.

Chapter: Twenty-Three
I don’t really know what I had been expecting to find inside the Argo rocketship. Cramped quarters? Boxy functional shapes? Auster utilitarian hardware? Glaring neon floodlights? You know, the way a gang of straight-laced (stressing the word ‘straight’) engineers might decorate the interior of an Antarctic research station.

But what I found really flabbergasted me. The spacious, uncluttered interior was elegantly designed with slick rounded edges and shiny surfaces of louvered glass and lucite panels adorned with grooved, serpentine lines of chrome trim that suggested motion and speed. Round porthole widows set in the bulkhead were encompassed by bronze sunburst frames. All of it was illuminated with defuse noir-ish mood-lighting from hidden sources. It reminded me of a a scene I’d seen in a circa-1930 Busby Berkeley musical once, something about a thoroughly sophisticated, art-deco night club set in an ultra-swanky New York City that never was.

The circular rotunda chamber we found ourselves standing in after passing through the outer airlock seemed to me to be both the galley and sleeping compartments. But I’ll tell you more about that later. Piercing the center of the room, running from floor to ceiling, was a vertical core column (that I guessed to be an electrical circuitry conduit) that appeared to traverse the length of the ship from stem to stern. It was octagonal in shape with bulging rivets. Just off to the side of the column in the ceiling there was an open hatchway with a corresponding one in the floor directly below it and a ladder running between the two.

“That has to be our way to the upper decks and the cockpit,” I said to the others pointing to the ladder. “You guys go on ahead. I’ll be along in just a minute. I want to do a pre-flight check and make sure all the airlock doors are closed before lift-off.”

“Aye! Aye! Mon Capitaine,” said Dash with a grin and a faux snap-to salute. “I think I like this take-charge side of you that I see coming out.” Oz, on the other hands, said nothing. I could see in his eyes that he was not used to someone else giving the orders, but he complied without issue.

But before he followed Dash, who had shimmied up the ladder to the flight deck, Oz handed me his recently captured raygun pistol. “I counted six astronauts coming out of the Astrovan down on the ground,” he said. “But there were only five in the White Room. Simple mathematics would dictate that one was leftover somewhere. Be careful.” As I took the gun in hand, he paused for a moment and added, “Lex, there are some really big changes coming for all of us. I know they’ll be hard. But if it will be any consolation for you, I don’t think either I or my brother are any more ready for them than you will be.”

Two thoughts popped into my head. The first one was, in a word: Yikes! One of the Killers was unaccounted for? Was I really going to have to shoot somebody before this was all over? And the second one was: Double yikes! Changes? What did he mean by that? I don’t want any more changes in my life? Puberty was embarrassing and stressful enough. I don’t need any more.

“But what about you?” I said. “What if the rouge astronaut is up in the cockpit just waiting for you?” Did he think that because I was a girl and he was boy that I needed a weapon to defend myself and he didn’t? I’m not sure I liked that thinking at all.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said pulling the Scar Face’s jagged dagger. “Believe it or not, a weapon like this is actually more my style.” I knew that I didn’t like the sound of that. But with that he turned and climbed the ladder, disappearing into the upper decks.

Pushing the troubling thoughts aside, I turned and looked for some kind of control to close the open (and apparently doorless) circular airlock valve behind me. I wasn’t going to feel safe until there was some plenty thick steel between us and any heavily armed stormtroopers that might come up the gantry elevator after us. What I found were a set of heavy levers in the bulkhead wall with brightly colored handles. I chose to pull the red one (the illogical logic behind that being that red is my favorite color). I picked right, but was a bit startled to see seven curved triangles (like the diaphragm aperture of an mechanical camera) come sliding out of the the sides of the doorway and converge in the center to make a perfect and (I hope) airtight seal.

Okay, I thought, that was just too weird. However, things were promising to just get weirder and weirder as this bizarre adventure progressed further.

As quickly as I could, I climbed down to the deck below which seemed to be a maintenance level full of humming machines and exposed pipes running this way and that. I did a quick check, sneaking around the rows of equipment with my gun drawn and at the read to fire. Behind every corner I half expected a hiding Killer to be waiting to pounce. But I didn’t find any airlocks nor stray Killers to deal with. Yet, I did find a sealed hatchway in the floor that I could not open. What was locked-up underneath it? I wondered. My curiosity was piqued. I’d have to come back later and find out what that led to.

At last I was satisfied that we were properly sealed in. Moving as fast as I could, I climbed up the ladder along the ship’s axis to the topmost level, the nose section which was the flight deck. It was a disconcerting room in that everything in it was oriented upwards. Through the center of the room the axis core column rose from the floor and penetrated the crystallin dome ceiling ending in a long, slender lance-like spike that pointed defiantly towards the blue skies of the heavens above. Ringing the column, just below the dome, was a trio of dashboard consoles each one jam-packed with instrument panels robustly built with pushbuttons, knobs, dials, switches, gear shifts, glowing gauges and a steering wheel helm control that looked to me much like the ones I’d handled in small aircraft.

Below each console, suspended on sliding rails, hung a high-backed and heavily padded contoured couch chair. Each was angled in such a way as to put the recliner’s back against the floor and his or her feet into the air. Dash and Oz were already sitting (or lying) down in their seats and strapped in.

Both seemed to know just what to do running through their avionics doing pre-flight checks. They must have been studying this stuff for years, I thought. Good thing they weren’t going to expect me to do anything. I’d just sit back and watch and try to take it all in. At least, that was my thinking at that moment. But little did I suspect.

“Good,” said Oz, not even bothering to take his eyes off his flickering display screens. “You’re here just in time. We’re all ready for you.”

“Yeah, Lex,” added Dash. “This is your big moment. You wouldn’t want to miss it.” He pointed to the empty seat indicating for me to take it. I hesitated. I could feel that something was up. I could sense that this was another situation where the Two Unlikely Brothers had a surprise in store for me -one I was not prepared for. But there was no turning back.

I climbed into my seat (which meant I was facing upwards toward the geodesic observation bubble and the sky), fastened the cross-belt restraining harness across my chest and nudged the controls for the motors in my chair so that I was properly and comfortably shoved up into my cockpit console niche. As I scrunched in, I found there were movable pedals at my feet.

“Okay,” said Oz finally looking over at me. “I’ve broken all connection between our on-board computer and the master computer at ground control, which is both good and bad. It’s good because we now have complete control and they can’t cut us off. But it’s also bad because that means you’ll be doing everything manually by the seat of your pants.”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean me?”

But Oz continued without stopping. “The ignition engagement sequence are the primary colored and numbered buttons on the upper right of your board - red three being the final one.”

“Excuse me,” I broke in. “Why are talking like you’re expecting me to do all this?”

“The levers in the gearshift to your left,” he said, “control the throttle which will control the amount of thrust coming out of the engine nacelles in the aft section. The peddles at your feet manipulate the side-to-side pitch and yaw of the ailerons and slats in the rudder fins. And the steering wheel controls the gimbal ball joints that swivels the rocket nozzles. It also controls the vanes, which are finlike devices inside the exhaust ports of the rocket engines. Tilting them deflects the exhaust, and by action-reaction the rocketship responds by pointing in the opposite...”

“Stop! Stop! Stop!” I shouted. “Why are you talking as if I’m the one who is supposed to pilot this thing?”

“Because Lex...Ace,” said Dash, “you are. The Voice Lady told us. You’re the one to light this candle up and fly this big bird off the pad.”

I was about to raise my objections when a fourth party broke into the conversation.

“In the Name of Holy Havoc!” shouted an angry voice over our radio headsets. “Who in the Neitherealms are you people? And what in Blue Blazes do you think you’re doing?” It was a man’s voice. I guessed that he was talking from the Central Control Complex. He sounded about fifty years old, like he was used to getting his own way and was very comfortable being mean to people. I instantly didn’t like him.
Chapter: Twenty-Four
“Oh, hello Father,” said Oz. His voice was dripping with sardonic sarcasm as if he was holding back years of cold, pent-up rage against this man. “I’m so glad you woke up to witness the blast off. Did you have a nice nap?”

There was a long silent pause and then, “Osgoode? Son? Is that you? But I don’t understand. You’re one of us. Aren’t you?” This had to be, I thought, Jebediah Boone, founder and CEO of OmniCon and my dad’s old boss. You know, the one who had him kidnapped and shipped of to another planet in an alternate universe. The word grrrr came to mind.

“You know Father,” said Oz. “Every once in a while reasonable persons need to ask themselves: Is there really a ‘them’ and is there really an ‘us’? Or is that just an artificial concept deviously concocted by con artists who wish to manipulate us?”

“You soulless creature,” said Boone. “You were always too smart for your own good. I knew that I should have had you strangled as a child. Even back then I could see there was no controlling you.”

“Well Father,” said Oz nonplused. “We all have our little regrets. Oh! By the way, Dash is here. Say ‘Hi!’ Dash.”

“Hey Daddy-O! What’s happening?” Dash’s voice sounded jovial over the headset.

“What?” screamed the old man. “Not you too? You were to be a general in my army. Don’t you realize, there was role for both of you to play in The Plan, a prominent place of glory in the New Order. Why are you throwing it all away?”

“For starters Dad,” said Dash, “I never liked The Plan. Conquest and domination were never my style and secondly...” there was a catch in his voice, “there’s the issue of our mothers.” For the first time, that I could remember, there was a deadly seriousness in Dash’s voice. “You took them from us. For that, I should kill you.” He said this with disturbing black menace in his voice. “But I’ll settle for going out in search of her. After that, I’ll do everything I can to put and end to The Plan.”

“Even dying you little traitor?” said the old man’s voice.

“Talking of death,” interrupted Oz. “Order all your ground personnel to get at least three miles away from this launch pad at once, because we plan to launch in five minutes. Oh! And, by the way, it would really be kind of you to jettison the hold-down arms at the base of the rocket. Otherwise this rocket might blow up in an explosion big enough to be heard across the entire state of New Mexico. And, I don’t think you’d like all the media attention that might bring. Or all the pesky questions from your friends in the DoD or the CIA. I don’t think they would much care for The Plan if they got wind of it.”

“I’ll kill you all before I’d let you go - even that little chickee you’ve got with you. Missy, what do you have to say about all this?”

Yikes, I thought. The Devil was talking to me. “What in the Hell did you do with my Dad, you old bastard?” I said. The words had just popped out of my mouth before I had a chance to even think them through.

“Ha!” said the Boone. “Who do you think you are? You don’t even have the slightest idea what kind of forces you’re up against?”

“Who do I think I am?” I shouted back. “I’ll tell you. I’m the Little Missy that’s going to launch this rocket in about four-and-a-half minutes. So, move your people back, unlock those arms and bid us ‘Bon Voyage!’ because we’re going up. Okay Oz, flip a switch. Cut him off. I’m tired of talking to him.”

“You’ll die. You’ll all d...” Oz cut him off.

Chapter: Twenty-Five
I reached up to the pushbuttons on the ignition sequence. I pressed the blue one marked One. Almost immediately, I knew that the ship’s ceramic battery was starting to run current through the electrodes in the heavy water tank, separating the hydrogen from the oxygen for the fuel cell. It really didn’t make logical sense for me to know all that. But none-the-less, I did.

After 60 seconds, I pushed number Two. The fuel cell began charging up the electromagnetic superconducting coils in the three booster cores. As they warmed up, supercold liquid oxygen was being pumped in flowing around them to cool them down. How did I know all this? Don’t ask. I don’t have a proper answer. All I knew was that I could see it all in my mind- Third Eye and all of that.

They say you’re supposed to feel a blend of excitement and fear just before your first blast-off. Me? I was feeling both in spades. As well I felt the anticipation was mingled with a sense of time taking on a weird dimension. There was a for me a tremendous sense of all the people that I’d ever come in contact with during the years of my life. These were the people who had helped me along the way, that had shaped me, my parents, my friends, my teachers. I got this feeling that I was a composite of all of them.

Finally, it was time. I knew it, without even looking a the digital chronometer on the dashboard.

Lastly I pushed Three, which started the motors for the hydraulic pumps that channeled the flow of liquid hydrogen to the reaction chambers. Then I oh-so-slightly eased down on the throttles that opened the valves that controlled just how much fuel got fed to the engines.

I could not hear the rumble of the engine in the aft section revving up so much as feel them, causing the platinum titanium alloy of the ships body to vibrate. The thrust out of all three had to be the same or I’d loose control of the rocket. Black and white images of film strip footage I’d seen as a kid flashed through my mind of early experimental rockets blasting off, almost immediately loosing control and crashing straight into the Earth.

The ship moaned and howled. It was incredible the sounds coming out of it. This mean machine was serious about blasting off.

Some of the ships clamor surprised me, worried me. The constant thrusting was one long, drawn-out boom sound. Was it supposed to sound like that?