Chapter Nine--Dream a Little Dream

I usually wrestle with sleep, uncomfortable in a strange room.  But the events of the day had exhausted me.  I slept deeply.  And dreamed.  Dreamed about Hunter.  The way it used to be with him.  Before he sold out.

When we met, he was an acoustical engineer (with a reputation as something of a maverick) working for a defense contractor.  I was a temp for the same firm, trying to scrabble together enough of a living from odd jobs to leave me the freedom to worship the muse when I chose.  Fate, in the form of a mandatory company holiday celebration, threw us together.  We were an unlikely pair, him with his overstarched shirts and black-rimmed glasses; me with my untamed hair and a skirt rescued from the bottom of my closet that morning. But we were both geeks in our way, resistant to corporate socializing, and inclined to sit in the back of the room making snarky comments about the human resources department and their juvenile addiction to parties. 

They say people bond over their dislikes of other people.  Well, Hunter and I bonded over our common distaste for the division's vice-president, whose mother had had the foresight to name him Dick.  We both agreed he was one--especially after he stopped by our corner to reprimand us for not participating in the gift exchange while rearranging the foil-wrapped hershey's kisses piled on the table in front of us into neat rows like good little soldiers.  When he turned his back, our eyes rolled in unison.  It was kismet.  

For the remainder of the six weeks I worked there, we met daily for lunch and far flung discussions of soundproofing and standing waves and string theory and vibrational healing.  It wasn't a big step from there to experimenting with a few vibrations of our own on his waterbed. Yeah, the man owned a waterbed. I said he was a geek.  At least he didn't have a blacklight hanging over it.  And it wasn't in his parents' garage.

As it happened, it was in quite a luxurious house in a gated community--one of those yuppie places with granite counters and stainless steel appliances and a fountain in one end of the swimming pool.  It was sparsely furnished though--it looked like all he had was leftover odds and ends from his college days and the obligatory big screen tv.  Until you went in the studio downstairs.

It had probably been the home theatre for the previous owner; or at least part of it had.  There was still a screen at one end, but the room was at least twice the size of any home theatre I’d seen.  In Hunter’s hands it had become a sonic utopia. Soundproofed, meticulously tweaked, it held both drum and vocal booths, editing bays, racks and racks of high-end effects gear, and an SSL board that would have been the envy of any recording studio in town.  

Off to the side was another room I assumed to be an additional booth of some sort, but when I tried the door, it was locked.  Hunter made a joke about it being for his “mad scientist experiments.”  He said he kept it locked because the equipment he used was really sensitive, and he hated to have to recalibrate it.  It all sounded reasonable at the time.  It was years later that I finally figured out what kind of experiments he had been conducting in that room, and realized that I had never really known Hunter at all . . .

Chapter Eight--The Hunt Is On

I had never seen Korak so excited.  It was his first interdimensional hunt, and his small frame practically quivered with anticipation.  Personally, I found the transference into physical form thoroughly annoying.  Too much sensory input overwhelming the capacity for reason.  But I am old and jaded. My son is not. I have led many of these expeditions, which have become something of a rite of passage for our cadet classes.

It was quite a task holding the concentration necessary to perform the reduction into three-dimensional space.  The parameters are tremendously restrictive; the natural tendency is to revert to light forms to avoid the terrible pressure of atmosphere, pull of gravity, slowness of time.  But we are a disciplined race and train long and hard for these excursions.  And we have learned to use a body design optimized for survival in this primitive field while providing the least resistance to its forces.

The coordinates of tonight’s raid were familiar.  I had personally visited this triangulation point numerous times before.  We had engaged in repeated practice runs to ensure that all the cadets would be able to maintain form while guiding their craft.  A minor slip in concentration could have devastating consequences, trapping the unlucky ones in this limited reality or, worse yet, ending their existence altogether.  Our colony had not forgotten the Roswell incident.  Neither had the primitives, from what intelligence we were able to gather.

The objective was simple.  Materialize in an isolated area, execute maneuvers, engage in weapons practice on some of the less sentient beings, and return to our own sphere of existence.  Ours was not a martial society on the whole, and the excursions into 3-D were frowned upon by those of the colony who were aware of them, but our own security demanded that we have the capability to function at this level if the primitives should ever mount a threat.  Certainly, they had not evolved that far, and were not likely to, but it remained a concern.  And the amusement factor provided a certain incentive for our young to serve in the corps.

The jump into slow-time was wrenching, but the formation held together as it had during previous exercises.  The cadets were performing well, selecting an area unlikely to provide primitive interference and selecting their desired targets.  Korak’s concentration was palpable; he wanted to be one of the top hunters, qualified to return with a trophy or two from his kill. 

It probably wouldn’t have seemed like much of a challenge from a primitive’s point of view, downing cattle with laser weapons, but to a hyperdimensional, actively applying physical force to a 3-D target while maintaining body image and avoiding the unintentional use of thoughtforms to accomplish the project was a tall order. So if those who were successful at the task chose to memorialize their foray with some crudely chosen bits of the unfortunate target, we tended to turn a blind eye.  Even among hyperdimensionals, boys will be boys.

A red beam flashed from one of the other craft in the formation.  It was premature; I had not given the signal to execute.  But the beast was already downed, and it was too late to remedy the situation.  I authorized, making a note to admonish the first shooter on our return. 

It was only a momentary distraction, but one with terrible consequences.  While my attention was elsewhere, Korak’s  earlier excitement had turned into frenzy.  Unused to the emotions occasioned by physical form, he lost control, firing wildly in all directions.  There was a chain reaction among the other cadets.  I could feel their thought force surge and disintegrate. 

Try as I might to regain continuity, the formation wavered and fell apart.  Three quarters of the force simply dematerialized.  The remaining craft were scattered in several directions, zipping well past the appointed coordinates.  The beasts on the ground below stampeded into the trees, making it difficult to get a clear shot. 

Korak, determined to return with his trophy, piloted our craft east, toward a small herd outside a primitive habitation.  I fought him for control, but the boy had always been willful, and his single-minded purpose overpowered me.  He held my mind at bay, and hovered over his new targets.  As he readied his weapon, I had the barest glimpse in my awareness that we had become targets as well.  The explosion rang in my ears and I remember thinking that of all possible physical sensations, falling had to be one of the worst.

Chapter Seven--The Cattle Are Nervous

The rumors had started again.  People were seeing strange lights in the skies above the Sandhills.  On the prairie at night, the stars seemed so bright, so close that we were intimately acquainted with them  We knew when something was out of place.  It made us all uneasy.

You could feel the tension everywhere.  At the lumberyard. The feed store.  Bootsie’s Saloon.  Even as far away as the Super Store in Kearney.  It was an undertone, you know.  A buzz.  A whisper of suspicion.  You knew what they were talking about.  They were afraid the cattle mutilations were going to start again.  I was afraid too.

The last round had been about eighteen months ago.  Two Angus and a Hereford on Skelling’s spread.  Organs removed with surgical precision.  Exsanguinated.  The old man had been apoplectic.  When he arrived at my home shotgun in hand,  I thought he might actually put me out of my misery.  But Bert, my foreman, talked him out of it.  He insisted that I had been in Omaha for the past week, and had just flown the Piper Cub in that morning.  Which was the truth.

But Skelling would never believe it.  None of them would ever believe it.  All because of that incident years ago when I was 13.  There had been a mutilation then too.  Only that time, it was on my ranch.  And there was a witness to it.  Pop. 

“Old Martin,” as the neighbors called him, was always something of an outcast.  He had strange ways, they said.  He saw things, heard things that others didn’t.  He drank too much.  He spoke too little.  He didn’t participate in the social life of the town.  He ridiculed the Lutherans who did.

So when his prize Charolais bull was found lying by the roadside, genitals removed, anus cored out, one-eared like some bovine Van Gogh, people wanted to believe the worst, you know.  And when he told them aliens had done it, that he had seen them with his own eyes, they threatened to institutionalize him.  That’s when I told the Big Lie. It was me, I said. I had done it.  I had been reading about satanic cults and it was a ritual sacrifice.  Pop was just trying to cover up for me.

They were satisfied with that. My weekly visits to the county library had not gone unnoticed. This was not a community of readers.  And the librarian there was reputed to be a communist.  So they had no doubt she had introduced me to obscene and occult practices. 

My mother wasn’t sure what to believe. But attending the local high school had became an impossibility. So she convinced Pop to take a mortgage on the house and sent me off to be reeducated at a school for wayward youth high in the Rockies..

At first, I believed I had gotten the best of the bargain.  I had arranged an escape from that evil little town for most of my teenage years.  And managed to stitch up the tattered shreds of my father’s reputation.  My mother began attending Lutheran services every Sunday. Religiously, you might say. She learned to make frothy jello salads with mini marshmallows, you know. And she seemed to revel in the pity she received for her family’s indiscretions.  Eventually the town attributed Pop’s increasingly bizarre behavior to his disappointment in his only son. 

They hadn’t counted on me returning.  On living there for another quarter of a century. Neither had I.  They tolerated me while Pop was alive.  But when he finally succumbed to the alcoholism and the madness, and hung himself in the horse barn, my reprieve was over.  The icy silences turned to outright rudeness and occasional attacks.  

I don’t know why I stayed.  Stubbornness, perhaps?  A need to prove myself, redeem myself?  Maybe I was just too stuck.  Too stuck in the loneliness, in the despair, in the cloud of futility and failure that I had come to believe I deserved.  I was still punishing myself for giving up the one person I had ever really loved for some misguided sense of filial duty.

The dogs were barking.  Not a friendly kind of bark.  Not a someone’s coming up the drive bark.  This had a note of panic in it, a tang of fear.  Before I even slapped the screen door open, I could hear the bellowing of the half dozen dairy cows in the front pasture.  But I knew better than to look there.  They wouldn't come that close.

Instead I glanced west, to the range where the main herd grazed.  The lights were there, all right, moving in silently just above the windbreak of cottonwoods along the river.  There must have been at least a dozen of them.  Small craft, you know.  The stereotypical flying saucers.  They were back.  And they’d brought their friends.