Oh yeah…the music…can’t have words without music.

Chapter 30.3

He wasn’t hungry, not in the least, but he had to order something…didn’t he? So he slipped a zofran under his tongue and let it dissolve, then ordered his usual escargot and roast duck in lingonberry sauce while everyone looked on to see what he was going to do. They relaxed after that and Dina turned to Edith…

“So, you knew Henry what he was…”

“Yes, we grew up together.”

“You were close, I take it?”

“Once, for a year or so, after my sister passed.”

“Oh? I’m so sorry.”

“Her name was Claire,” Henry said, breaking the sudden tension hanging in the air. “We were together, from the beginning – I guess you could say.”

Dina looked at Edith. “You were her younger sister, then?”

“Yes, by a year.”

“And did she look somewhat like you?”

And again Henry broke into the stream of interrogatories. “They might have been twins, Dina. But an interesting aside, they’re related to Olivia De Havilland. What do you think? Can you see the resemblance?”

“Indeed I can,” Dina sighed, acknowledging this sort of defeat – again, as she had all her life. “You were a most lucky man, Henry.” 

Taggart shrugged. “We were in love. That’s all that mattered.”

“Indeed,” Dina whispered. “So tell me. Did you love my daughter, too?”

+++++

“I’m going with you, Henry,” Rupert Collins said. “This is a military op, and as far as I’m concerned it makes no sense for you to go alone.”

“And it makes no sense to risk both of us, does it? Not when I can do this by myself.”

“My mind’s made up, Henry, and that’s all there is to it. You have no idea what kind of risks you’re facing…”

“And you do?”

“No, but I am a trained fighter pilot, and I have to assume my experience might come in handy.”

“You assume? That’s kind of funny, Rupert. Considering.”

“Considering – what, Henry?”

“That I’ll be flying the damn thing, not you.”

“Low blow, Taggart. Even for you, that was a low one.”

Henry smiled. “I have to keep in practice, Doc.”

“Gee, thanks. I think.”

“Maybe we should stop off in Ensenada on the way back. I’ll take you to see the donkey show.”

“Ha! There he goes with the mythical donkey show again. Ain’t no such thing, and you know it.”

Henry shook his head. “Is that so, Mistra Know-it-all?”

“Yeah, I picked up the truth about that shit from some shuttle drivers who went down to Hussong’s. All they picked up was a hangover to go with their crabs.”

“Hussong’s? You kiddin’ me, right, white boy…?”

“That’s the place, Taggart.”

Henry snorted. “Man, they were off by about thirty clicks. The real deal goes down in at a moonshine palace out in the sticks…”

“So, you’re saying you’ve been there? You’ve actually seen this thing?”

“Man, if I’m lyin’ I’m dyin’…”

“And a girl goes down on a donkey?”

“Now, I made no mention of the genders involved, Rupert.”

“Oh…Henry, that’s just gross.”

“I got another one, something even grosser.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear this,” Collins sighed, leaning closer to Taggart.

“Yeah, well, I’m taking this genetics class at Berkeley and the prof was a real stoner, really way out there…”

“Sounds like just your type, Henry.”

“No way, man. She wore socks with her Birkenstocks, and I doubt she had ever shaved her legs. I mean not once, Rupert. Ever…”

“Stop! No, no more! I repent…say no more, please…!”

“Anyway, she’d been showing us these reproductive biology films…you know…stick Tab A in Slot B and yada-yada-yada, that kind of shit. So one day on comes this film from the bio department at UC San Diego…”

“That’s the one in La Jolla, right?”

“Right. So yeah, where was I? Oh yeah, this title comes up, says something like ‘the following was shot at the San Diego Zoo on such and such date and then we’re looking at a bull elephant, a real ornery looking old bastard, standing in his enclosure. So yeah, this chick comes in wearing nothing but a blue bikini and some boat shoes…”

“No fuckin’ way, Taggart! No! Way!”

“Well, wait for it, Doc. So yeah, anyway, she comes up to the camera and explains she’s Doctor So-and-so and that they’re going to collect a semen sample from said elephant to use in some sort of artificial insemination experiment…”

“Henry? You pulling my leg?”

“Nope. Anyway, Dr. Blue-bikini has obviously been working with this old dude because she taps on a concrete bollard looking thing and then he kind of rears up and puts his front hands on it. And about that time two guys come in wearing yellow Haz-mat suit looking get-ups, and they’re carrying a little trash can with some kind of sterile collection bag in it. Yeah, so you gotta keep in mind that this old guy had been an inmate at the zoo for years, hell, maybe more than a decade, so this guy had Blue Balls, with big Bs if you know what I mean. So the guys in the yellow suits take their positions up there by the old guy’s front legs and get their little trash can in place.”

“Oh dear Lord…”

“Yeah. No shit, Sherlock. So yup, and now, here goes Dr. Blue-bikini; she slips on a windbreaker and begins to tickle the old guy’s tally-whacker and Rupert, you ain’t never seen eyes like this old elephant’s. Wide open is an understatement and as she gets after it those eyes are rolling all the hell over the place. Then the drool starts.”

“Henry, maybe you better stop now…”

“No way, Doc. We’re in too deep to stop now.”

“Bastard.”

“So it takes two arms to encircle his thing, right? And there’s Dr. Blue-bikini giving it all she’s got…and all in the name of science, you understand. Then the old fart kinda rocks back onto his hind legs and does a Louis Armstrong imitation and his eyes are spinning like cherries in a slot machine right about the time he’s had about all he’s gonna take…”

“Oh no…”

“Oh yes, and ten years of dammed-up splooge, who knows, maybe more, launches from this guy’s willy and those poor bastards holding that dinky little trash can were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rupert, it was more like a tsunami. Knocked ‘em off their feet and off they go, sliding for Hell and gone and out of camera, and their little trash can literally just disappeared within a flyin’ wall of goo. And then the old dude’s prick goes into recoil mode and about two or three gallons arcs back through the air and lands on Dr. Blue-bikini’s blue bikini, among other places.”

Collins’ eyes were wide open and rolling now, too.

“Then it’s like she assumes this classic pose, her hands are up and her fingers spread wide and you can tell she’s almost in a state of shock, and then the clip ends with some kind of admonishment about the dangers of hands-on science, some kind of shit like that…”

Collins was on the floor now.

“Yup. You earned that one, Rupert. Now tell me…how are we supposed to sneak into Russia and steal a fuckin’ Russian spaceship?”

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, pure and simple; the next element will drop as soon as the muse cooperates.

Short snippets for the next week or so; hope you understand. The little bursts of music highlighted here are meant as guides, mainly to inform the mood as you read. I hope you follow along. Question. Have you ever heard of something in psychology being referred to as the p-factor? If not, try to wrap your head around something akin to Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ and the cosmological concept of ‘dark matter’ and you’ll be on your way.

So, need some music to think about while you read Henry? Here are two worth a listen, here and here, because the music matters…

Chapter 30.2

He pressed his face to the glass, the cold on the icy pane almost shocking. Just as it had been a long time ago…once upon a time – when all his dreams looked like they might all come true one day.

And it was snowing out there beyond the glass, too, and that made the smile he felt coming on just a little bit sweeter.

Because it had been snowing the morning he and Claire last sat by a window just like this one, inside another train and bound for the same station they were headed to right now. Edith had been there that morning too, and wasn’t that so strange?

He turned to thoughts of Edith again, then he looked at her sitting across from Dina – and soon their eyes met. He tried to smile and her head nodded as she made the connection. She’d always been good at that, hadn’t she?

‘How very strange,’ he thought again. ‘In a few days she’ll still be here. She’ll still be breathing, still be feeling crisp air in her lungs. She might be on an airplane headed back to LA looking out a window kind of like this one, and her eyes will still see this world spread out below. But my eyes won’t, and isn’t that just the shit…?’

He turned away from the thought and faced his reflection in the glass, and suddenly his very existence felt as substantial as those features pinned behind a lepidopterist’s glass. ‘Turn out the lights and I’ll just disappear, won’t I?’

He looked down at his hands and the sight made his skin crawl. His flesh was yellow-gray now, his fingernails striated by deep grooves, and the discolored veins on the top of his hand seemed fragile, almost febrile. ‘I was a linebacker once upon a time,’ he reminded the reflection in the glass. ‘Kids on the other side of the line feared me. They feared these hands…and isn’t that just absurd?’

The train went over a switch and their carriage swayed to-and-fro before it settled down again, but just then he could caught a glimpse of the three spires of the cathedral in Rouen through time-streaked snow. He remembered how, one day, he and Claire had stared at the huge central spire above the transept – through a window just like this one, and she’d even said how odd it was to see her own reflection superimposed over the cathedral in the distance, Like maybe she was supposed to be there somehow, someday…just another butterfly in the collection.

She’d looked at him just then and kind of smiled. And he’d nodded as gently as he could, trying not to disturb the echoes pinned to the glass.

+++++

The impactor came out of Orion, out of the southeast sky and was now heading northwest across the Pacific. On its current trajectory it would make ‘landfall’ just north of Hokkaido and make its final plunge into the Arctic Ocean somewhere north of Svalbard.

The Pink had driven her ship hard and fast. It was a heavy lifter ill-suited to moving such a large mass, yet she’d made a rough landing on the craggy rock and was now using the ship’s drive to push the impactor down into the earth’s atmosphere. There, she thought, into the vast, empty forests west of Sakhalin…

She looked at the countdown timer and then at the ship’s central display, and she had just commanded the ship to decrease thrust when the impactor suddenly began to break apart beneath her ship…

+++++

The 2 July 1908 edition of the Sibir Newspaper quoted residents of the village of Karelinski as describing an odd event that had occurred just a few days previously. The sky had opened up, these peasants said, and a huge cylinder appeared up there in the dawn sky – just before first the sky turned to fire, and just before the forests around their village caught fire. One man described the cylinder as bluish-white and surrounded by lightning, and that the cylinder appeared to be driving something down into the earth. Then the noises came. At first like rocks tumbling in a landslide, these witnesses reported, but soon like an artillery barrage coming closer and closer, and they had listened in fear until one cataclysmic impact knocked everyone off their feet. That was before the forest began to fly through the air.

Almost fifty years passed before the cylinder was found, intact and at a depth of almost fifty feet in a small lake. It took almost a year to build a road in order to reach the site, then months to retrieve the cylinder and move it to the Dzyomgi Airport, located in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, in far eastern Siberia. Not one of the engineers at the Sukhoi factory knew what to think of the object, and only a few were willing to state that the surface of the cylinder was blinding white and appeared to be made out of some kind of unknown ceramic-like material. Not one scientist or engineer was willing to admit that the hardest drills and sharpest saws then known to Soviet science had produced not a single scratch on the cylinder’s smooth, matte surface.

The object was, however, huge. Fifty meters long and thirty meters in diameter, it nevertheless weighed nothing, apparently not even a kilogram. In fact, Sukhoi engineers had to tie the cylinder to the ground to keep it from floating away, and every physicist called to examine the cylinder claimed that this was a physical impossibility. The engineers nodded and sighed and walked away, the cylinder like forbidden fruit forever just out of reach.

Then one evening hundreds of people gathered around the original cylinder after several smaller cylinders appeared over the airport. Then one by one these new arrivals landed at the airport – right next to the original cylinder salvaged from Lake Cheko. The gathering looked on in wonder as several very tall humanoids exited these smaller craft and then entered the large cylinder, only to exit the craft a few minutes later – only now carrying the shattered body of one of their own – another being who had, apparently, been trapped inside for many, many years.

Without saying as much as a word to the assembled onlookers, the creatures boarded their smaller cylinders and left Soviet airspace, yet when the engineers turned to the huge cylinder – still strapped down where it had been for months – they found the doorway these creatures had deployed to gain entrance to the interior was still wide open, only now the interior of the craft was brightly lighted – as if these unknown creatures were inviting them inside, perhaps to come in and take a look around.

+++++

Milos picked up Henry’s group outside of the railway station in LeHavre, then he drove them to Honfleur, parking his Mercedes van by the park – the same little park adjacent to the quay where Time Bandits had tied off just a few weeks before, and which was the very same park Henry had taken Claire’s ashes before taking her to the Seine. Dina and Rolf set up Henry’s wheelchair and helped him get settled, putting a scarf around his neck and a blanket over his legs to ward off the snowy chill, then the group walked off to the restaurant overlooking the old port where he had first seen Tracy – just a month or so ago, wasn’t it…?

Henry’s head swiveled like an owls, his bright eyes taking everything in – as if, Edith thought, these new memories might sustain him through the looming darkness. The sight of him looking around like this frightened Edith as nothing ever had before, until she realized that not even Claire’s death had threatened such a rupture. Henry was too close to the moment and so much more fragile looking now, and walking by the old port it had hit her, and hard: ‘Henry is going to die. Soon.’ She tried to come to terms with the words in her mind and soon realized she couldn’t, and with this jarring realization she understood that after Henry passed she would finally, and irretrievably, come undone.

+++++

“The Air Force people in the Pentagon have referred to this as Operation Tantalus – for obvious reasons,” Dr. Collins told Henry. “Apparently when the passageway opened, a series of tests unfolded as well. No one passed and the cylinder closed up shop a few days later, and there it’s sat for the last sixty years. The word we have is Khrushchev was so pissed at the engineers out there he had about half of them shot.”

“And it’s not been airborne since, what, 1908?” Henry sighed. “Wasn’t that around the time of the Tunguska Event?”

“If those old Russian news accounts are to be believed, yes.”

“So, what makes you think it’s still flightworthy?”

Collins shrugged. “Just a hunch on my part, Henry. Again, those witnesses all said the Pinks left it open to the engineers out there, and for whatever reason they went in and screwed the pooch.”

“So…your supposition is that you think, because it belongs to the Pinks, I will be able to fly the damn thing?”

Collins nodded. “Yeah,” the old man said as he grinned.

Henry nodded, then took a deep breath. “Okay, so let me see if I have this right: you think that somehow you can smuggle my fat ass onto the grounds of the most secretive Russian aircraft manufacturing facility in the dead of night, and that – again, somehow – I can just waltz right up to this fucking thing and steal it?”

“You can’t steal it, Henry, because it ain’t theirs.”

“Yeah? Boy, I’d sure like to listen in on that discussion when you bring that up.”

“SecState thinks she can handle it.”

Taggart chuckled at that one. “Okay…so tell me this? Does she think she can help me talk my way out of there if I can’t get the goddam thing to work?”

Collins looked down. “If that happens we’ll have to make a trade.”

“A trade? Like for what? My ass – for a couple of refrigerators?”

“Look Henry, it’s like I told you up front. If you decide not to do this, I understand.”

“You…understand? What I’d like to know is what kind of bargain have you struck with the boys back in Virginia? What have you promised them…hmm?”

Collins turned and walked over to the window on the far wall of his little office, and Henry could feel the old man’s shoulders sagging under an impossible load…

“Okay, Rupert…don’t tell me. We get to live. Is that it?”

Collins turned and looked at Taggart, but then he nodded. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it, Henry. We pull this off and we get more time…”

“Rupert, how many times do I have to tell you? I’m the only one who can fly their ship. They ain’t gonna put a bullet in the back of my head, okay?”

“I wish it was that simple, Henry. I really do.”

“Why isn’t it that simple, Rupert?”

Collins steepled his fingers and pushed inward, then he looked up at the ceiling. “I’m not sure I can explain the mindset, Henry, but if these guys aren’t in control of everything there is about this thing they’d rather the whole thing just went away…”

“So…because I’m the only one who can fly the thing…”

“Exactly. Our ship is of no real use to them, but maybe this cylinder in Siberia won’t be hard wired for you, and only you. If it isn’t…”

“If it isn’t, then I’m toast. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Pretty much. Yeah.”

“Rupert, I recall you saying once that you had a plan. Was that just bullshit?” 

Collins walked over to his desk and opened a locked file cabinet, then took out a large manilla envelope and handed it to Taggart. “Have a seat,” the retired Air Force General said. “Look this over and tell me what you think.”

A half hour later Henry Taggart looked up at Collins, then he shook his head slowly. “Rupert, this is insane; brilliant, but totally insane. It might work – Hell, it probably will work – but you know as well as I do that they’ll be after us until the day we die.” 

“May we be in heaven,” Collins whispered, “a half-hour before the devil knows we’re dead.”

Taggart shuddered, because now it was apparent no one had considered what the Russians might do if someone stole their little alien artifact.

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, pure and simple; the next element will drop as soon as the muse cooperates.

Sorry for the – pause – but another ambulance ride intervened and, for a while, the outcome appeared to be in some doubt. That’s the bad news. The good news? I’m home again and one of my youngest girls presented me with a litter of pups, so I’m busy making Momma-san my special concoction and doing my best to write a page or two.

And yes, of course, music always matters – so would you please tell me who I am?

Chapter 30.1

Early morning, Christmas Eve, Henry’s group standing on the platform at the Paris St-Lazare railway station. Henry in a wheelchair, Rolf by his side, while Dina stood behind the chair – grasping the handles possessively – as if daring anyone to challenge her right to take charge of Henry here and now. Anton stands off to the side, away from all three super-charged alpha-females, wary of them as he watches as they angled for position. He almost wished Captain Lacy had decided to join them, but on second thought he knew Lacy might prove to be the one volatile element that would send Dina over the edge. Rotterdam had been terrible, he realized, but Dina cutting loose today might mean the end of everything.

It was cold out on the platform, and as Anton watched little tendrils of steam waft away from the three woman he couldn’t help but think they looked a little like angry bulls readying to face a matador, and the sight confused him. He had simply assumed Dina no longer cared for Taggart, so much so he’d been more than a little surprised when he first saw her and Rolf stepping onboard Time Bandits. Hadn’t she run away? Had she not acquiesced and asked for a divorce? He could understand her return in terms of a protective impulse – to protect her grandson, Rolf – but he simply couldn’t fathom the fierce protectiveness he saw inscribed on her face as she stood behind Henry just then.

Yet Edith looked most seriously bent out of shape, like she hadn’t quite expected this last fight for the possession of Henry’s soul to be be held on such bitterly contested ground. This was, after all, Claire’s ground – and therefore her’s, too. Hallowed ground, terrain that had defined her entire life, but now – suddenly – this…imposter…was here, staking claim to a soul she had no right to possess. As Anton watched, malice seemed to drip from her eyes like pus from oozing sores.

And even Tracy seemed caught up in the moment. Standing back from the two divas, watching them, understanding what each felt yet pitilessly ready to push them out of the way at the decisive moment. She knew what was coming, and she was fairly sure she even knew when Henry would pass, so it looked to Anton like the youngest of the three was laying back in the shadows, like a lioness waiting to pounce on unsuspecting jackals.

Only Rolf seemed vaguely detached from the vulturine machinations beating the air over the grouped tendrils; only the boy seemed to cling to Henry with a kind of innocent purity, held within feelings he simply had no right to understand. To Anton, the boy looked suspended between love and fear – and a great, yawning unknown. His mother was gone now, taken from him by a host of unknowns and yet for all intents and purposes doing just fine – somewhere. And while Henry was like the father he’d never had, Henry was also the author of his mother’s disappearance, so how could a boy possibly love the dying man?

“I thought you had arranged for Milos to take us to Honfleur?” Edith growled.

“I wanted to take the train,” Henry sighed. “He’ll pick us up in LeHavre and bring us back tonight.”

Dina drummed her fingers on the wheelchair’s bicycle grips, her eyes inexplicably drawn to a locomotive’s lights as it pulled into the station. She watched the train glide to a stop and stood back to let passengers disembark from the First Class carriage, then she pushed Henry onboard…

“Where do you want to sit?” she asked Henry, leaning close to his ear as she spoke.

“Up there on the wheelchair row, by the window, please.”

Everyone settled in seats close to Henry, but for some reason he seemed lost to them already. He was, apparently, adrift in memory, and Anton smiled as the wonder of it all washed over the moment.

+++++

He’d made six flights already, but so far not one of the NASA astronauts assigned to the program had been able to get the ARV off the ground, and if Pinky knew the reason why she simply wasn’t going to tell anyone anything. Rupert Collins was, apparently, allowed onboard when Henry flew the beast, but as soon as anyone from NASA or the Air Force stepped aboard, the craft went into sleep mode and resolutely failed to respond to any commands – even Henry’s.

And people were pissed off. Some very important people, as it happened.

At Henry Taggart most of all, but some of that institutional anger had spilled over onto Rupert Collins, too. Yet the powers-that-be saw a way out of the dilemma, a plan that might even rehabilitate Rupert’s mojo enough to act as a kind of life preserver. Literally.

But Taggart?

By now, almost everyone in Maclean was certain Henry Taggart was behind this series of events, and they wanted him out of the picture. Not so much ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ but ‘dead and gone.’

+++++

An astronomer detected the asteroid on June 25^th, 1908 while conducting a routine sweep of the southern sky. When she realized what she was looking at she called one of the Blues.

This was their project, after all. And a chunk of rock this big would seriously disrupt their work.

“What have you found?” the Blue asked as soon as it popped into her observatory.

The Red looked at her display and a magnified image of the impactor appeared.

“Do you have mass and velocity yet?”

The Red blinked once and graphs appeared on one screen, while the most likely point of impact appeared on a much larger, central display.

The Blue assimilated the information then closed his eyes; a moment later several Blues and one Green appeared beside the astronomer’s desk, their eyes first taking in the central display, then the smaller panel displaying all other known or relevant data. The Blues turned to the Green, who nodded before he closed his eyes.

Moments later a Pink appeared and, terrified, the Blues winked out and disappeared. The Green nodded to the central display and the Pink read his thought, then the astronomers.

“It will impact the polar ice cap in four days,” the Pink began. “Tsunamis and concomitant sea level rise will inundate all coastal cities within eighteen hours. Loss of life should be between sixty and seventy percent of the existing human population; sea life will be eradicated and ninety percent of the planet’s surface will be icebound within a year.” 

Greens were decision makers, but when decisions like this one needed to be made all Greens were obligated to consult with at least one Pink before taking action. Pinks were primarily pilots and astrogators, but of most importance to the question at hand, they were empaths, and not surprisingly the teams’ Pinks had been in charge of all contact with the indigenous population for the last fifteen thousand years.

“Do you want to change the point of impact?” the Pink asked.

“Yes.”

“Is it possible to deflect into deep space?”

“No. With the available energy, an impact in this forested land mass will result in the least loss of life. However, in order to achieve this, the lifter will need to maintain contact with the impactor almost all of the way to the surface.”

“During breakup, you mean to say?”

“Yes. Neither the craft nor the pilot are likely to survive.”

The Pink understood before she disappeared. Blues are such cowards, she thought.

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, pure and simple; the next element will drop as soon as the muse cooperates.

A short romp today, just to fill in a few cracks.

Chapter 29.3

He opened his eyes, saw firelight flickering on stone walls the color of grainy old mustard, then he heard Doris singing Que sera, sera somewhere off in the distance. Then – he wrinkled his nose and sniffed the air…

“Hamburgers? Are you cooking hamburgers?” Henry asked.

“So what if I am?” a cranky, half-inebriated voice replied – only this voice sounded just like Thelma Ritter’s, the actress who’d played Alma – Doris’s ‘perpetually on the prowl for fresh gossip’ housekeeper in the film Pillow Talk. “You want maybe I should fix you a Bloody Mary?” Alma snarled.

“I want to fuckin’ wake up now,” Taggart grumbled, trying to sit up again, his head exploding like a Technicolor kaleidoscope – again.

“Take it easy, Sport,” Tony Randall said as he breezed through the ancient stone living room on his way to the kitchen. “Don’t push it. The first couple of days are the worst…”

When Rock Hudson came in the door Henry rolled onto his side and did his best to ignore everything about this place…until Doris came in and sat on the edge of the sofa.

“How ya feelin’, Hank?”

“Peachy. Let me know what you get the elephant off my forehead, okay?”

She chuckled. “Come on, let’s get you up and go for a little walk.”

Then another blinding flash hit and he was back in an emergency room…in the middle of yet another intricately choreographed life-saving ballet…

+++++

Collins was standing behind him, watching his every move. “Why does it feel to me like you’ve done all this before, Henry?”

“Because I’ve done all this before.”

“Indeed. Do tell…?”

But Henry had simply shrugged that question off – as he concentrated intently on all the things Pinky had shown him – which was, essentially, nothing at all.

“You’ll need to clear your mind,” she’d told him, “in order to make the initial connection. The reactor will automatically ramp up output to meet the anticipated demand based on your initial input…”

“And I still don’t have to do anything?”

“That’s correct, because the same process is at work here, just like we’ve been working on with the orca. Logical progression, remember? If you get in a panic and blow the order of operations you create a discontinuity, so just slow down and think about the next thing you want to do. The system is reading that information, remember? But it’s also programmed to look at the logical progression of operations based on your current thought patterns. Got it?”

“I think so.”

“Just remember this, Henry: discontinuities suck, big time.”

So he looked at the shuttle Discovery’s anticipated transfer orbit on one graph in the 3D interface, and then he looked at the diamond pattern he was going to make in order to get to the third Lagrange point – and then back to the airfield here in Washington – on the large central display, and when their own trajectory had been computed the lines inside the 3D display turned from red to blue.

Discovery was currently approaching Hawaii at a modest 17,700 MPH, and would enter North American airspace a few hundred miles north of Vancouver, BC in just a few minutes, and once the computer had made a few adjustments in its orbital calculations the blue annunciator on the main panel turned white – and then Henry did exactly what Pinky had told him to.

He leaned back and shut his eyes, visualized what he wanted to happen and then just let the computer take over from there.

Klaxons were blaring all around the airfield when a few people thought they saw something rise through the aperture and zip off into the northwest sky, but few had really thought it possible something so large could move so fast, or with so much speed milliseconds after lift-off…

+++++

He felt like he was caught in some kind of perverted tug-of-war – pulled into the light one moment, then back into flickering firelight the next – but once he felt Pinky there by his side he seemed to relax a little…

“You’re fighting it, Henry. You just need to let go, let it happen…”

“I’m not ready,” he cried. “I’ve got more things to get done.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, dammit! Let me get back to the boat! Please!”

+++++

He could see Discovery on the plot, then he realized he’d have to slow down, a lot, or they’d blow by so fast no one on board would see a thing…

And no sooner had he thought that than vectors started to shift on his primary display and their speed began to drop precipitously, and a moment later he watched as the two trend lines began to converge.

“What are you doing, Henry?”

“Did you guys paint any identifiers on this thing…anywhere?”

“Identifiers? What do you mean, like…”

“Anything. Like even a big fat Boeing logo somewhere on the bottom.”

“Yeah. Some of the guys put the Phantom Works logo on the bottom. Why?”

“Excellent,” Henry sighed.

And just then the General saw the shuttle a few miles ahead. “Taggart…what the fuck are you going to do…?”

“Time to play close encounters, Rupert.”

“What?”

And a few seconds later the shuttle was only a few hundred yards ahead; so Taggart thought “match velocities” as they pulled up alongside…

+++++

“Uh, skipper, I hate to mention it, but you need to take a look at this.”

“What about that bus three under-volt?”

“Not now, Skipper.”

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

The pilot pointed out his window and coughed once. “At the goddam flying saucer, sir.”

+++++

“Do I need to remind you this is a Top Secret project, Mr. Taggart?”

“It sure was, Rupert,” Henry said, standing and walking over to an exceptionally large viewing port. “Good job, too.”

Collins came over and stood beside Henry and they both peered into the shuttle’s cockpit; at least four helmeted heads were crowded around the cluster of windows on the shuttle’s starboard side, a couple of Nikons bursting away just for good measure, and Collins groaned. 

“Swell. I wonder if this will make the front page of tomorrow’s USA Today.”

Henry fiddled with his belt and unzipped his pants, and his cargo shorts dropped to the floor…

“Henry Taggart! You’re not…!”

+++++

“Uh, skip, he’s shooting the moon. At us.”

“Takahashi?” the shuttle commander growled. “You getting all this?”

“Hai! 400mm make very big moon.”

“Skipper? It looks like the other one is going to do it, too.” 

“Gotta be a couple of Air Force pukes,” the shuttle commander, a Naval Academy graduate, said.

+++++

Henry got back in his seat and rolled the craft to the right, exposing the underbelly – and the huge Phantom Works logo painted there – then he commanded the ship to make for L1.

+++++

“All right,” the commander snarled. “I want all your compact flash cards – NOW! And no one is going to say a goddam word about this, are they?”

+++++

Pinky had warned him, yet even so the sight was staggering.

There was another ship out there, already parked at L3, but this one was beyond huge.

“What is that, Henry?” the General asked. “It looks like another ship.”

“It is.”

“You knew about this?”

“I did.”

“Is it Pinky’s people?”

“No, General, but you should know that, uh, her people, well, uh, they borrowed the original spacecraft that you copied.”

“They…what? You mean they swiped a spacecraft – from these folks?” Collins said, nodding at the huge structure. “And we’re headed there now? In a copy of their ship?”

“Ah-yup, that’s about the size of it.”

“And is this going to be, well, you know, like First Contact?”

“Yessir.”

“Henry! You’re wearing cargo shorts and flip-flops!”

“My t-shirt is new, General. And…oh, before I forget, they’re telepaths so try to keep a lid on it, willya?”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Taggart?”

“Just try not to think about state secrets, shit like that?”

“Now Henry…just how the hell am I supposed to do that?”

“Hmm…you ever see Debbie Does Dallas?”

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, pure and simple; the next element will drop as soon as the muse cooperates.

A flight of fancy begins because everyone wants to, and yes, because you know this much is true.

Chapter 29.2

He felt someone attaching a line to the port in his chest, then he felt a needle in his arm as someone started drawing blood, yet he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open or not. He thought they were, at least it kind of felt like they might be, but he saw nothing but pure, blinding whiteness…and even that was tenuous…like looking through a veil of thin mist…until even that began to disappear.

+++++

It had been an Army Air Force base during the war, and not much since. Located about halfway between Seattle and Spokane, the facility had never been a particularly important one – used by primary flight cadets working out of Spokane on basic navigation exercises and doing touch-n-goes. There were the usual three runways in an equilateral triangular shape, one small tower and a couple of hangars for in-transit aircraft that broke down in flight – in short, it was just like any one of a hundred such airports around the country that had popped up overnight in the middle of nowhere right after Pearl Harbor.

And so after the war this airfield had sort of almost kinda maybe disappeared, except that Boeing liked to use it when a new aircraft popped off the assembly line and began pre-delivery flight testing. So in time Boeing built a couple of more hangars, the tower was enlarged and two of the three runways lengthened, and the airport never faded away, and when the DoD put the property up for sale Boeing snapped it up and, now a private airfield, it became ‘off-limits’ to the general aviation community.

Then, in the mid-1980s, the airfield’s status changed again.

The area around the airport was designated ‘restricted – military’ on aeronautical charts, so even innocent looking Cessnas and Pipers that intruded were run off by Air Force interceptors, yet because everything going on out there was in some way, shape, or form related to goings-on at Boeing no one gave it much thought. After all, a non-stop parade of 747 freighters was using the facility day and night these days.

And this parade really moved into high speed after Bechtel was engaged to build one of the largest aircraft hangars ever conceived, a building with three times the area of the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center, and at this old, barely used airfield, too. Construction proved time consuming and huge cost overruns plagued the entire project…if only because ninety-nine percent of the building was located underground. Still, five years after the project began the last construction vehicles left the area…tearing out all the local roads that led to the airfield as they withdrew…

+++++

Henry felt her fingers running through his hair and smiled, then he opened his eyes.

Yes, just so. Doris again. He could tell simply by the way air moved with her.

“You’re back with us, I see,” she said, wrinkling her nose, her eyes squinting just a little when she did. Then before he could say a word she looked up and it was like they could both see what was going on with him ‘back there’ – in that other place – and she took his hand and squeezed a little before she let go of him once again…

+++++

Rupert picked him up at the office on Lake Union and they drove over to an ancient chowder shack on the north side of the lake and hunted for a parking place before making their way in to wait for a table.

“Why don’t you buy a place around here?” the General asked. “Seems like it would be a good fit for you, and I wouldn’t need to spend a half hour looking for a parking place every time we come here.”

Taggart shrugged. “Don’t want to waste the money.”

“Seems like you got plenty of money, Henry.”

“I doubt I’ll stick around here much longer, Rupert. Maybe a year or two…then…”

But the General had scowled when he heard those words, then had kind of growled. “I’ve got plans for you, Hank, so don’t get all worked up about moving down to Hollywood just yet.”

Henry looked over the menu – doing his best to ignore the General – but they both already knew the damn thing by heart so that proved an unsuccessful dodge.

“Crab bisque and a seafood Louie, right Hank?”

“Yessir. And an iced tea.”

“Uh-huh. Look, we’re ready for you out in the desert. It’s time. I know you don’t want to be involved, but it looks like we’re stuck without you.”

But Taggart simply shrugged.

Collins took out a piece of paper and wrote a number on it and slid it across the table to Henry. “You get that just for showing up. You succeed…you get that fucker off the ground and you can multiply that figure by ten.”

And Henry had looked up at the General and nodded. “Okay. Then what?”

“We’ll need you to train a couple of NASA types…”

“Astronauts?”

“Yup.”

“And then I’m done, right? You just let me go?”

“Yup. That’s the plan,” General Collins said, looking right at Taggart while lying through his teeth. Because that wasn’t the plan…not at all and not even close. 

No…once Henry had a small group of Air Force pilots trained and fully up to speed, he’d have an accident somewhere out in the desert. Driving too fast probably, but it would be something like that. Collins had disagreed, of course, but people higher up the food chain had already made the decision, and that decision was final, someone in DC told him in no uncertain terms.

And so a few days later Henry waited on a bench not far from the software company’s office. He was going over some code while he worked on a bottle of Pellegrino, enjoying the midday sun when Rupert pulled up curbside and called out to him.

“You ready?”

Henry had ignored the question as he got in Ruperts old yellow Buick. “The money still isn’t in my account.”

“It will be, by closing,” Collins said as he pulled out into traffic.

“You know, General, when I was in that tank hooked up to the orca my memories were transferred to him…”

“Yeah, I think you told me that already.”

“Yeah? Well, the funny thing is, he still feels exactly what I feel.”

“You mean, like right now?”

“I think so, at least on some level I think he does.”

“That’s gotta be kinda weird.”

“Weird? Yeah, I guess so. But the weirdest part is really kind of out there, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t told you about this before.”

“Oh? Like what?”

“Yeah, I know. Now, I don’t really understand how all this shit works but now I can see things really far away. Maybe like orcas see things through echo location…that kind of far away…but on a practical level it feels more like I’m playing chess. Like I can see a couple of moves ahead, that kinda thing. And as a result, well, I can see when somebody lies to me…because lies aren’t logical moves.”

“What?”

“Yeah. And really, think about it. When you make a move on the board, say like when you tell me you’re going to cut me loose when I’m done with all this, I can see the next couple of moves you’re going to make. The logical moves, General.”

“Uh-huh.”

“An accident on a desert road? Isn’t that how they put it to you?”

Collins gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white.

“You see, that’s not really a logical move, because it doesn’t lead to you winning the game…”

“Why not?”

“Because the game just stops, General. There’s no next move, but you haven’t won, either.”

“So, who told you?”

“Who? No one told me anything.”

“Okay…so you can see ahead. Where are we headed right now?”

Taggart closed his eyes and his mind roamed for a moment. “Boeing Field, the general aviation ramp on the east side. There’s a red and white Cessna 150 waiting for us, registration is triple two-five-niner.”

Collins slammed on the brakes and pulled off the road, then turned and stared at Taggart. “You can see that? Now? Sitting here, right here, right now?”

Henry just nodded. “It’s…logical, General. And because it is I can see the way ahead, and if it’s not logical then there’s no way ahead, no next move, and I can see that too. And it’s getting like crazy weird as time goes by – because I can see other stuff, but only if it affects me in some way.”

“Henry, this is crazy.”

“Yeah, so tell me something, General. When they told you to get rid of me, why’d you go along with them?”

“Because, Henry…I have a plan.”

+++++

He almost ran down the curved stairway and out into New Orleans Square, and he walked as fast as he could as soon as he got into the milling crowd until he just melted away and was carried along with the rest of them, like a piece of debris floating away on a stream. He walked in a daze after that, through the castle to the merry-go-round, then past mad tea cups and toad rides until he found a bench in some shade. He grabbed a Coke and took a seat, and with his back to the passing throngs he leaned over and put his face in his hands, not believing he could have been so trusting of someone he knew he’d loved. She had all her life, too; he was sure of it, yet she’d dumped him when he went away to college only to turn around and spend Christmas with him. And the things they’d talked about? A life together? And she was hanging with Charles at the same time she was carrying our baby?

And then, apparently, the two of them had decided to end the baby’s life. ‘Not me. Not the father. The guy she was with while she was cheating on me…’

He spread his fingers and saw a green loden cape hanging before his eyes, then the silver filigree within the varnished cane.

Taggart looked up at the Old Man, surprised to see him here – 

“You look like you’ve seen better days,” the Old Man said. “Mind of I sit with you?”

Henry nodded. “Feel free.”

The Old Man sat and then sighed. “I’ve heard about this place. Very crowded, and it smells funny.”

Henry nodded. “It is that, and I agree.”

“Having a bad day?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“Women can be unpredictable. Some more so than others.”

Henry didn’t say a word, he just stared at the Old Man.

“What would you have done?” the Old Man asked.

“About what?” Henry replied.

“If she’d told you she was pregnant, and that she was seeing your friend.”

“He’s not my friend.”

“Oh, surely not now, but once upon a time he was your best friend, wasn’t he?”

Henry shrugged.

“So…no one was quite who you thought they were. A pity, I suppose, but life can be like that. Even the people who love you can be…deceptive.”

“What are you doing here?”

The Old Man tapped his cane on the pavement and thunder rolled over Anaheim. “The weather is about to change, Mr. Taggart. Dangerous weather, you might say, is fast approaching, and I’d be remiss if I failed to tell you that there are many people around you who are not quite what you think they are. Or even who they say they are, you might say.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Ah yes, sorry, but I must leave you now. Your companion has found you and she does not look at all happy…so…I will say goodbye for now…and auf weidersehen.”

Seconds later Edith walked up and stood in front of him. “Did you really think I wouldn’t find you, Hank?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled, “and I’m not sure I care anymore.”

She laughed a little then sat beside him, exactly where the Old Man had been moments before.

“You probably don’t remember, but one day you and Claire brought me out here and we had lunch at the club and I got mad at her and ran away…”

He looked up and nodded. “Yeah, I remember. We looked and looked for you, even had Disney people helping us…”

“Yup, and I came right here, right to this bench. I remember hearing all those stupid cars over there; they were so loud I couldn’t even think.”

“Claire was so mad at you…”

“But you weren’t, Hank. You sat beside me and held me. Do you know what I remember most about that day?”

“No,” he said, shaking his head a little, “not really.”

“You were running your fingers through my hair and the sun was shining on my face, and I loved you both so much it hurt.”

“And now your father is gone, and your mother is all that’s left. So, tell me, how do you feel now?”

“I’ll love you for the rest of my life, Hank. Marry me, move in with us, let Tracy be your daughter…”

He winced as those words bit into his flesh. “She has a father, Edith, and you have a husband. You made those choices a long time ago, remember? And you still have time to fix things with Charles – so do it. For her sake.”

“No, Hank, I won’t fix things by trying to make this right. Unfortunately you’re the only person who can make this right.”

“Could you take me to the island, please. I think I’m done for the day.”

+++++

It might have been the very next day, so bitter was the memory.

Standing over an open coffin at the very same funeral home, only this time he was staring at his mother, not Edith’s father. And it was just one more cancer in a world full of such things, wasn’t it, one more body prepped and ready to slip away deep into the deep freeze of memory. And another room full of shocked friends and dismayed business associates, everyone sorry to see her go but still more or less happy to still be there among the living and breathing. Edith was there that day, too, and with her little girl Tracy – who wasn’t so little anymore – and they all sat next to his father, Edith holding his hand and his father looking very much the fading paterfamilias.

Henry sat there, too, trying to remember his mother, but all that came to mind were pancakes and the smell of fresh laundry. ‘And that’s just not right,’ he sighed. ‘She was so much more than that, but I never took the time to get to know her…’

Then it hit him. His father would be gone soon enough and then there’d be no one. No one to tell him about all the little things his mother did around the house, or at the clinic where she’d worked for more than thirty years. He looked around the gathered crowd and saw all the shell-shocked faces of patients she’d cared for and it wasn’t a stretch to think that any one of them knew his mother better than he did. He looked down and stared at his hands like they were the hands of a murderer, and that he’d strangled her with his very own brand of neglect. 

He heard a rustle run through the crowd and turned to see Doris walking up to the casket, then she just stood there for what seemed like hours. Everyone was looking at her standing there, wondering what the connection was, but Henry knew, and so did his father. They’d both loved gardening and they’d talked and talked about the virtues of one potting soil over another and which flowers tolerated the afternoon sun better, and they’d done so for decades. Simple things and a simple friendship, and here she was paying her respects out of simple friendship.

Then she came and sat beside Henry and squeezed his hand once…

+++++

I’m not ready to leave yet. The nurse above him looked frantic, and overworked…

Something important left to do. Too many things left unsaid…

Push through the fear. Open your eyes and breathe, stay with the living a while longer.

+++++

“You ever flown before?”

“What? You mean…actually flown a plane? Hell no, and I don’t want to, either.”

Rupert laughed at Henry’s gnawing fear, but he respected where it came from, too. He’d shot down a few Migs, first over Korea then in Vietnam, but he’d trained pilots, and those who thought they wanted to fly until they learned what it was actually like, so he knew the score. The little Cessna 150 was built reasonably well but anyone inside wouldn’t survive any kind of crash in one, either. They were just too small, and too light, but there was always one good way to tell if a student pilot was going to freak out – and wash out…

They were over Leavenworth, Washington and already starting their descent for Phantom Field, as the place was known these days, and the General was apparently in a good mood. He reached over and made sure the right door was latched securely – and locked – then he looked at Taggart’s seat belt. Secure, looked tight enough so let’s see what kind of stones this kid has…

Collins started a gentle turn to the right, but then he kept turning and turning until the right wingtip was pointing straight down – and Henry Taggart was leaning against the door while looking down at the rolling hills just 1500 feet below.

But his hands, Collins saw, were relaxed, and he hadn’t tensed up, either…so he kept the turn going, rolling through 360 degrees using just the ailerons, and still Taggart seemed completely unperturbed – almost too calm, really.

“So, did you see that coming or did I catch you off-guard?”

But Taggart had simply shrugged, then resumed looking ahead.

“Man, you’re no fun, Taggart…you know that?”

“What…you’d be happier if I blew beets all over your lap?”

Collins laughed. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“I was kind of surprised you picked a little plane like this. What gives?”

“Good price. Picked it up cheap…thought it might be fun instead of making that drive over and over. After they tore out the roads I didn’t have a choice, so…”

“Oh, I hear Leavenworth is pretty fun. Ever stop there?”

“Oh, if you like beer and sauerbraten and all that it’s just about heaven. At least the first ten times it is. Now I just want to get out there and get to work.” He reached over and tuned in an NDB, a non-directional beacon, and then set up his VOR for the intercept. “Damn clouds,” he snarled. “We don’t have any kind of ILS up and running yet, so I’m gonna have to shoot an NDB approach.”

Henry shrugged. “As long as you don’t need me to do anything.”

Collins made a couple of turns in the clouds and a few minutes later the runway appeared right where it was supposed to, and the General slipped the wheels onto the ground so gently a sleeping baby wouldn’t have noticed.

“I hate to say it, but you made that look easy.”

Collins nodded. “It is easy, once you know what to do.”

“Students? Do they panic when they get into clouds the first few times?”

“Some do, sure. You wash ‘em out as fast as you can, too. No room for panic in an aircraft, Henry, ever.”

“Well, it was a treat to watch you fly. You look like someone in his element, doing what he loves best.”

Collins taxied to the spot indicated by the tech on the ground, then he killed the engine and set the brakes before he started in on his log book, noting times from his wristwatch and jotting down engine hours on the page. Henry saw the General had almost ten thousand hours and shook his head… ‘No wonder he made it look so easy…’

“They got a line shack here, gal in there makes a pretty mean burger. You buyin’, or is it my turn?”

They took an elevator deep into the earth after lunch, and that spit them out into a little room full of biometric scanners and one way mirrors. After those formalities were out of the way the General walked Henry down a series of long hallways until they came to another set of scanners. The men in this room, however, were not behind mirrors.

Then, one last hallway and another secure door flanked by heavily armed men in uniform.

“I have no idea what you’re expecting to find in here, but everyone who’s made it this far, well, some of them get kind of weird…”

“Weird?”

“Yeah. One old fart I know, an old timer with a cast-iron stomach, mind you, fell to the ground and start crying when he realized what he was looking at. Some have just run away. A couple have barfed, and there are buckets in there hanging from the wall, I think, so if the urge to purge hits try and do it in one of those.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

The door opened and about all Taggart could tell was that the lights were turned down low, but Collins headed in so he followed – at a distance – and the closer they got to “it” the brighter the light became…until Henry could just make out the barest outlines of the craft…

And his first impression was that he was looking at some kind of colossal jellyfish. Like maybe the thing was covered with some kind of semi-translucent gel, something that seemed to glow faintly blue, and that this goop surrounded something inside, but then, as they walked deeper into the hangar, the true scale of the craft inside began to dawn on him.

“Holy shit,” he muttered. “This thing looks bigger than the Nimitz!”

“It is, by about three hundred feet. The reactor plant takes up more than fifty percent of the interior volume, too, and eighty-five percent of the vehicle’s mass.”

“The original was this big?”

“Yup.”

“I hate to ask, but where did it crash?”

“It was on the arctic icepack, and it didn’t crash.”

“What?”

“It was sort of a gift, or maybe think of it as a loaner, if you get my drift.”

“You have any idea where it is now?”

“The original? Gone, I think Beyond that, no, I don’t…”

“What about the reactor?”

Collins shook his head. “That’s why you’re here, Henry.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, a lot of us have been having a kind of odd feeling recently, like the distinct impression that most of Them think we aren’t up to the challenge of, you know, building this thing,” Collins said, groaning at the thought. “There’ve been a couple of times when I thought they were right, too, so when one of them turns up and starts implanting technical data in your head…”

“And the enhancements to the toroids? Are those complete?”

“Yes, we’ve redone both the containment toroids and inductive containment sleeves. Nothing happened, no change, so right now the damn thing is still hooked up to the external grid; even the avionics and all our test instruments are dead.”

“Test instruments?”

“Basic flight data, envelope parameters, general telemetry…”

“None of that is in the original. You need to remove it.”

It wasn’t just that Taggart said something so uncharacteristically direct, it was his tone of voice that troubled Collins; if nothing else it let him know that Taggart was in direct contact with Them – probably even right now – and they wanted all Boeing’s instrumentation out. He’d argued as much  before construction began, but like everything else on this project he had been overridden at every turn.

“Okay, but it’ll take a week or so to remove.”

“Fine by me. Let’s head back to the city.”

“That might not be such a good idea, Henry. There are a bunch of people looking at our operation right now…”

“How many billions have you…”

“Enough. And Henry, we have full facilities here. Like a decent hotel, really…”

Henry ignored the General and resumed walking out to the craft, not even paying attention to what he was saying now…just trying to stay focused on the one he’d started calling Pinky. It took almost ten minutes but he approached the craft’s entryway and walked up the ramp, Collins now too stunned to speak. 

Henry walked through a maze of corridors designed for beings three to four meters tall, trying to let his eyes adjust to the low ambient light, but Pinky was, by and large, guiding him now.

And she led him to the reactor spaces, guiding him to the critical spots she needed to see, then, when she was satisfied, she led him up three levels to the cockpit, and then directly to the one thing onboard specifically designed for humans: the chair. Taggart sat where she indicated and it felt like the entire mechanism began shifting to accommodate his build…

“Open the roof now, would you?” he said to the General.

“What?”

“Open her up.”

“Who told you about the aperture, Mr. Taggart?”

Henry reached out and placed his hand on a curved glass panel and while the fusion reactor began its complicated startup cycle instruments started to come alive all around the cockpit.

“Rupert? The overhead aperture? Open it now, please.”

Collins got on his hand unit and called in the request…

+++++

Sirens blared and men cleared out of the small hangars that lined the ramps beside the old line shack, and moments later the hangars, and the foundations they’d been rebuilt on, began to slide away on concealed tracks, revealing a mammoth circular opening that extended hundreds of meters beyond the old buildings. Two F-16s spooled up, ready to take off in pursuit if the general gave the order.

+++++

“You’d better leave now, Rupert.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Suit yourself.”

Henry reached out and activated a 3D holographic display revealing just about everything in orbit around the Earth, from satellites waiting to burn up on reentry to the Space Shuttle on its way to the ISS to install a new docking module. He closed his eyes and commanded the display to plot a course through the junk, then the display shifted and flickered before the inner solar system resolved on the plot.

“Where are you taking us?” Collins asked.

“Just a point in space.”

“A point?”

“A LaGrange Point, General.”

“Which one?”

“L-3.”

“That’s on the goddam far side of the sun!”

“As this is a test run, are you sure you wouldn’t rather stay behind?”

Collins shook his head. “Not on your life, Henry. And the aperture is 103 percent open now.”

Taggart looked at the Space Shuttle’s track and grinned… ‘This could be fun,’ he said to no one in particular…

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, pure and simple; the next element will drop as soon as the muse cooperates.

Medium length this time out, perhaps ten minutes or thereabouts, so you might do with a cup of jasmine tea to go with today’s music.

Chapter 29.1

He knew where he was even before he opened his eyes.

He could feel the fine sand in his fingers, and even an errant breeze through the tall grass that lined the road sounded almost comforting. Then he heard Clyde stand and the pup groaned when he tried to stretch, and at that point Henry decided he might as well open his eyes and get on with it. 

He sat up and instantly regretted it – he felt light-headed and dizzy beyond belief, so bad that he reached out and tried to steady himself before he fell – and this time even that didn’t work. Like an old redwood deep inside an arboreal forest, he fell slowly back to the cool white sand of the roadway, and then a hot white fog enveloped him…

Until he was aware of Clyde licking his chin, thin his lips – and THAT got his attention.

“Clyde, no licking the mouth. You know better than that.”

Clyde laid down again, this time draping his muzzle over Henry’s neck, then the pup sighed before he started to snore.

Henry opened his eyes and, though he hated to disturb the pup, he rolled on his side and found he could just see down the road towards the white house above the beach, and – about a half mile away he could just make out someone walking their way.

A woman, it seemed. Walking a dog.

“This hasn’t happened before,” he sighed, trying to sit up again and failing again miserably. Clyde, however, sat up and took note of the woman and the other dog on the road and slowly began to growl.

Blond hair, Henry saw. Kind of short, too. Turquoise culottes and a white short-sleeved top covered in pastel colored daisies.

“Yup,” he said as she came close, “it’s Doris.”

And her presence was, by now, completely normal to him.

“Hi Henry!” she said as she walked up to him. “Hope you don’t mind, but I brought along a friend for your pup. Her name is Bonnie.”

“Of course it is,” Henry muttered. “And this is Doggie Heaven, right?”

She laughed at that one, her pert, squeaky laugh. “I don’t know about heaven, but it sure ain’t Upper Sandusky!”

“I see,” Henry chuckled. “Is that your house down there? The one by the beach?”

“No, that’s yours.”

“Mine?”

“Yes, Henry, of course. You’re home now, so…”

“What do you mean, home?”

“You’re here now. This is home now.”

“Now? You mean, like I’m dead?”

“That’s right!” she said, wrinkling her nose just a little, those precious little freckles dancing all across her face.

“But…”

Bright white. Searing pain. Lights in the ceiling, the same two-tone siren warning people to get out of the way… ‘But why me…now…I’m dead…right? Why won’t you just let me be…’

+++++

There were six of them now, forming an almost perfect circle around him, and the water was unbelievably warm here…like their bodies were warming the sea…

Then one of the younger males came to him and, with his head coming straight up out of the water, the orca hovered beside him, now almost motionless – yet he was eye-to-eye with the beast.

Then…a translucent sphere almost like a soap bubble…drifted down until it was half in and half out of the water and completely enveloping both Henry and the orca…

And a moment later they were airborne and arcing through the sky to the northwest, passing  over Vancouver Island at an impossible altitude…

Then, they were in a tank filled with water and the sphere – if it was indeed the same one – had enveloped his head. He turned to the orca and saw a similar sphere around its face and blowhole, and there appeared to be a bundle of cables connecting their two spheres.

Then he saw – Them.

Through a viewing port of some kind…dozens of them standing there on the far side or a transparent panel, staring at both the orca and him. Tall, feathery, and – at least one of them had wings!

Then he noticed the damndest thing…

…all of a sudden it felt like he was looking at himself floating there in the tank – only through the eyes of someone, or something else – but there was nothing else in the tank other than the orca.

+++++

Rupert stood. transfixed, staring at the sphere just outside of his cabin on the boat – and he suddenly felt almost afraid to move. There was something malevolent about the thing, almost like there was something – or someone – inside, staring at him…

…and a moment later the sphere seemed to expand – and then one of Them appeared.

Tall, covered in what almost looked like reptilian scales on first glance but were actually, he soon realized, feathers – white feathers tinged with shades of blue, from the color of a sunny day at noon to purest cobalt. And even its eyes were blue…a deep cerulean blue…and just now the creature was staring at him. Like it was waiting for him to make the first move.

“Do you have a name?” Collins asked. “What can I call you?”

The creature’s head canted to the side, then it smiled. “James Tiberias Kirk. Does that work for you?”

“What? Uh, no, not really.”

“Then I guess Luke Skywalker is out of the question, too?”

Collins nodded. “Yup.”

“Then let’s just settle on Yoda. I think that one fits me best.”

“Whatever you say, blue eyes…”

“Blue eyes? Say, I like that. Go with that one, will you, Rupert?”

“So, you know my name? What else do you know?”

Blue Eyes shrugged, an odd gesture considering his drooping wings spanned from ceiling to floor. “The craft you salvaged. You’ve made good progress everywhere but with the power plant. You’re about the screw the pooch big time with that one.”

“You don’t say. And you know this, how?”

“Rupert? Let’s just be friends, okay? No suspicions, no blind prejudice…”

“Uh-huh. You say so.”

“Okay, Rupert, we’ll do this your way. You’re building a tokamak reactor, but the walls of the toroids will never withstand the temperatures you’re going to generate. Your ship is going to just melt down, and years of work will melt down with it.”

“And why do you want us to succeed?”

“Well, Rupert, we’re the ones who left it for you in the first place, so please, give some credit where credit is due.”

“What material do you recommend we use?”

“Try graphite, Rupert.”

Collins looked up then sighed. “Alright. What else?”

“The boy out there in the water? Henry?”

“Yes? What about him?”

“You’ve been thinking he might be useful on the project…”

“And how could you possibly know what I’ve been thinking! I haven’t said anything to anyone…”

Blue Eyes smiled, then his eyes focused on Collin’s with feral intensity. “You and Henry. When you think about things in a certain way, we can hear you.”

“Just Henry and myself?”

“Yes.”

“So…you know what I’m thinking right now?”

“Yes, of course – and oh, by the way, you left your 50mm lens in the top drawer. You’ll need at least that much aperture to catch those whales in the moonlight.”

Rupert blinked rapidly as he digested the implications of the creature’s words, then he shook his head. “Lucky guess,” he said, backing up a step and growing very anxious.

“Rupert, just relax, would you – you’re starting to scare the shit out of me!? But one thing to consider…Henry would do well when it comes time to actually fly the craft.”

“Oh? He’s not a pilot, just in case that matters, and he’s certainly not a qualified test pilot, so why would…”

“Do what you want, Rupert,” the exasperated creature sighed. “It was just an idea…”

+++++

One of them appeared in his mind, and he felt almost certain it was one of the creatures on the other side of the viewing port, but this sudden, new presence was beyond disconcerting. Not like a thought, the creature was just – there – in the middle of his mind and pushing everything else aside. Standing there silently while looking him in the mind’s eye, the impression of strength and compassion he felt was overwhelming. 

“Hello,” Henry said. “Do you understand me?”

The creature nodded and stepped closer. “I like your eyes, Henry,” the creature said, and without quite understanding why he knew he was speaking with a female. “They’re – almost – honest, but to be truthful I’ve never seen brown eyes before and I find them kind of interesting. Almost shocking.”

“My eyes? Is that why I’m here?”

She smiled and looked at the orca hovering a few feet away from Taggart. “Did you know that their brains a similar to your own? The biggest difference we’ve found is that there is a larger part of their higher brain function dedicated to compassion and empathy than in you humans.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, no I’m not. Similar areas in your brains seem dedicated to organizational logic, a minor difference from your Neanderthal ancestors and very interesting. And do you know that orca family structures are more highly specialized than human families? The pods we’ve observed spend a much greater percentage of their time on child rearing activities, and teaching, than humans do. Much more than modern human families, especially.”

“Okay, so you’re an anthropologist. What can I do for you?”

“Anthropologist?” she said, chuckling. “Oh…no, not really. You would do better to think of me as a geneticist, but even that misses the mark.”

“What’s this cord between me and the whale?”

“He’s not a whale, Henry, and we’re implanting memories.”

“You’re…what?!”

“Implanting memories, into the orca.”

“My memories?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But…”

“We need to see if the biochemical structures of your memories are compatible with theirs.”

“Structures?”

“Yes, of course. Your memories are simply encoded biochemical sequences, and while the chemicals you use to encode memories are identical to what his brain uses, we became concerned that the storage and retrieval mechanisms of your brains might be sufficiently different to inhibit functional transfer.”

He nodded and shrugged. “At one point it felt like I was inside him looking at me. Were you expecting that?”

She shook her head and looked concerned. “No. We will stop now.”

And with that she blinked out of his mind and he was aware of his surroundings in the tank again – and that the cord linking him to the orca was now gone, too.

+++++

Edith was waiting for him at the gate when he came out the jetway, and with red-rimmed eyes and a tear-streaked face she ran into his arms. He didn’t know what to do now, either, as her father had just passed away and she’d always been close to him so he assumed she was coming undone more than just a little. He folder her in his arms and held her close, phasing between the reality of her and the shattering echos of her sister crashing all around them, falling to the floor like broken glass falling like tears from a broken dream.

He drew a deep breath and images of Claire filled his mind’s eye – just as Edith’s scents pushed aside everything else he’d been thinking on the long flight down the coast. Her hair, the perfume she had chosen, even the clothes she wore – everything was an echo. A consciously chosen echo, he noted, instantly on guard again.

His father had called the night before and told him to come down as soon as possible, and when his father told him why he understood all the reasons. For all concerned…but he knew he wasn’t prepared for her…

“How’s your mother doing?” he asked, and Edith stiffened.

“Fine, I assume.”

“And Charles? How’s he doing these days?”

She pushed away and looked Henry in the eye. “Please don’t bring him up, Hank. Promise me, okay? Not this time.”

“Yeah, sure. Okay.”

“And before you ask, yes, Tracy is fine. She loved your Christmas presents too, by the way.”

He smiled. “I’m glad.”

They walked down the long tunnel to the baggage carousels and collected his two silver Zero-Halliburtons, then made their way to her car…to her father’s station wagon, as it turned out. She was living at home again these days, and had been for almost a year now, at least ever since she and Charles had separated. She drove – maybe out of habit? –  and soon they were on the 405 headed south for Newport Beach.

“Dad didn’t tell me too much last night. Does anyone know what happened?”

She nodded. “Yes, it looks like a heart attack, a big one.”

Henry looked away, shaking his head at the inevitability of such things, but he was still of an age when things related to sudden death still seemed remote and untouchably far away. Now, this death was hitting a little closer to home, and he felt a sudden icy grip around his own chest and shuddered at the idea of things just stopping with little to no warning.

Edith got onto the 405, preferring – it seemed – to remain quiet, and he saw no need to break through that wall right now… but then…

“Do you remember that awful weekend, after our trip to Snowbird? You flew down for the weekend and I started pushing you away almost as soon as you got here?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget that one, Edith.” She nodded as he spoke, and when he looked at her he could see tears streaming down her face. “What’s wrong, kiddo?”

“That weekend, Hank. That was it, the moment when everything started to go wrong with my life.”

“Why do you say that?” She looked away and a moment later cars were honking as she drifted out of her lane. “You want me to drive?” he added nervously.

“I was pregnant, Henry. With our baby. And dad insisted I have it terminated.”

He was sort of conscious of his eyes twitching, and even the corners of his lips began trembling. “What? Pregnant?”

She nodded, her eyes focused on traffic ahead now.

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I was going to, that weekend. But dad told me not to; he said it would distract you from your studies and that school was more important.”

Taggart reached over and turned the air conditioning up to full and aimed all the vents at his face; he knew his face was turning red now, but all of a sudden he felt like he was on fire, too.

“You always do that, you know?” Edith sighed.

“Do what?”

“When you get mad. You turn red and start to sweat.”

“I’m not mad, Edith. I think I’m in a state of shock.”

She sat in silence for a while, then she looked up. “The exit for Disneyland is coming up. Wanna go?”

He took a deep breath and looked at her, then he grinned a little, and nodded. “Sure, why not. Sounds good.”

She exited onto the Garden Grove Freeway and a few minutes later made for the main entrance gates. When she got to the parking kiosks she presented her father’s 33 Club membership card and was waved through to the special parking lot for club members. They made it to the club after the short walk down Main Street and through Frontierland, and rang the doorbell next door to the Blue Bayou restaurant and waited for the attendant to buzz them in. After they made it upstairs they sat at a table overlooking New Orleans Square and Henry looked down at the line snaking into the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, every now and then catching hints of “Yo-ho! Yo-ho! A pirates life for me!” blasting from somewhere inside the attraction…

Then a wave of pain and nostalgia came for him.

“Why did you want to come here?” he asked Edith.

“I’ve been thinking about what our lives would have been like,” she replied, and he stood and went to the restroom when the waves of pain became too much.

They split a Monte Cristo – just like he and Claire used to do when they came here – and yet he drifted over memories that had never had a chance to see the light of day. Little pieces of fiction, really. Edith and this kid that never was walking hand in hand to the Haunted Mansion on Halloween, or as they walked down Main Street at night, maybe a few days before Christmas…

+++++

“One of the big differences we have observed,” the creature said as Taggart drifted in the tank beside the orca, “is that the orca live completely within the moment. Your kind, on the other hand, seem to become easily overcome with concerns about the future and even guilt over past excesses.”

Henry looked at the creature, then at the great black and white creature hovering by his side. “I thought you said that the parts of their brains that govern empathy are bigger than ours? Wouldn’t that mean…?”

“No, not really. All his empathy is directed to the family’s offspring, with some left for the other members of his immediate family.”

“Pods,” Taggart said.

“What?”

“Their families. We call them pods.”

“Really? Why? Doesn’t that simply make it easier for you to put some intellectual distance between you and all the others you feel yourselves superior to?”

Taggart shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose…but…what would you have us call them?”

“How about…families? Or would that make it too difficult for you?”

+++++

In his mind’s eye this little boy – his little boy – was walking along beside him, and they were holding hands while they waited in the long line to get on the log ride at Splash Mountain. The little boy grabbed hold of his leg when he watched logs full of screaming people make the plunge, then he hid his face with delight and giggled when he saw all of them getting drenched at the bottom of the chute. Henry could feel the little boys upturned eyes and the tiny, warm fingers in his hand, then like a wave the realization would come that this little boy had never been. They had never walked around Disneyland, and they never would, and suddenly everything about his life felt wrong…like he was marching out of step now, dancing to the beat of a different drummer…

+++++

“What are you thinking about, Henry?”

“An afternoon…that never was.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I.”

“Why are you crying so?” the strange creature asked.

“Because I still don’t understand,” the even stranger creature replied.

+++++

“How come you decided to tell me now?”

“Because dad is gone now, Hank. I guess I always thought you’d kill him if you found out.”

“Kill him? Why would you think that?”

“You were always so…conservative…about things like that.”

“Conservative? Me?”

“Do you remember talking about it when we were up at Snowbird?”

“About what?”

“Having a family someday. You told me you wanted to have a bunch of bambinos. Your words exactly, too.”

He drifted and tried to find the moment but instead he found Claire and remembered having the very same conversation with her one afternoon…here…maybe even at this same table overlooking New Orleans Square…with all the smiling faces down there, waiting for their ride to begin.

+++++

He had curled up in a fetal ball and was crying hard now, lost beyond and within Claire’s and Edith’s echoes, caught up in what was and what had never really had a chance to be. 

And the creature was staring at him, this much he knew, but then he felt extreme warmth and knew the orca was moving close. The huge pectoral then seemed to cup him and pull him close, and Henry could feel the bones in the orcas hand bending to cradle him…so he reached out to take it in his own.

And then the orca’s song began to fill the tank…

+++++

“Maybe we should go now,” Edith said as she watched the change come over his face.

“Why would he have done that, Edith. I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t make sense to me.”

Edith looked away, then she nodded. “He didn’t, Henry.”

“So…who did? You?”

“No, of course not.”

“So? Who?”

“Charles did, Henry.”

“What?”

+++++

“When you were joined,” the creature added, “when your memories were being transferred, it seems he also gained the ability to feel your emotions…”

“You mean…in real time?” Henry asked.

“Perhaps so, but we have never seen this across species before, so we will have to wait and see. But for some reason it seems there is a profound sympathy between the two of you.”

+++++

“So…you and Charles were…together? While I was at Berkeley?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Hank, but I thought you knew.”

“How would I have known that?”

“Because you stopped calling me. So…I thought you knew…”

“Communications breakdown, it’s always the same…”

“What?”

He shook his head and looked away. “Doesn’t matter. Say, why don’t we go down and do the Haunted Mansion?”

+++++

Rupert Collins helped Taggart climb up the midships boarding ladder, but after he took the offered towel Henry turned around and looked at the small male half submerged on his side down there in the inky water…

‘I know,’ he thought to the orca, ‘I will try to stay close, at least as close as I can…’

The orca nodded once and then slipped beneath the surface and was gone; Henry felt a flinching sadness and took another deep breath, not yet wanting to break the link…

“What was that all about?” Rupert said, clearly perplexed.

“I’m not sure.”

“Where were you? You’ve been gone for almost three hours!”

Taggart turned to the general and studied the man for a moment, then he took the next leap of faith. “Tell me about the ship. What kind of problems have you run into?”

It was Collins turn to stare now, but his was a withering glare that hinted at betrayal – or worse. “I’d advise you be very careful now, Mr. Taggart, with your next words.”

Henry met the glaring eyes and held them in his own for a while, then he grinned. “Well General, the only thing I can tell you right now is I can fly the thing.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. A bunch of ‘em just gave me a kind of flying lesson.”

“I see.”

“And the reactor. The problems you’re having? Well, I have the solution.”

“Oh? Give you a set of plans, did they?”

But Taggart pointed to his head. Nope. Everything’s right up here…”

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | this is a work of fiction, pure and simple; the next element will drop as soon as the muse cooperates, or the music intrudes.

…all alone in dreams of silence…you might find a memory waiting to be rediscovered…

Chapter 59.4

Callahan heard a door open and close somewhere beyond this little room, and he tried to push himself up on his good arm – and failed – then he looked at his left foot down by the end of the bed, and to the empty space where his right foot used to be. 

“I’m turning into a vegetable,” he mumbled at the hollow. “If I keep this up I might as well just pull the trigger.” He hadn’t stood to take a leak since the night he’d been shot, and he had absolutely no idea if he’d taken a dump or not since then. Probably not, he thought. He hadn’t had anything solid to eat since that night on the patio, so how could he have…?

Ida came in and opened the drapes and sunlight from beyond the cerulean Mediterranean sky flooded the room – then he squinted and tried to cover his eyes…which caused him to fall back into the pillowy bed.

“It’s not always going to be this bad, Harry,” Ida said, smiling at his frustration. “You’re going to get better. Trust me.”

“Right, if you say so. Any word on Lloyd?”

But Callahan needn’t have bothered looking for a reply; he already knew the answer to that one, didn’t he?

“No. Nothing,” she said.

Callahan nodded. “So? What’s on the agenda today? Maybe turn the cauliflower onto his left side? Baste him a little before putting his useless ass under the broiler?”

She grinned but shook her head. “No, you’re not getting off that easy! Today is strength training with your right arm and then, after lunch, the prosthetics people are coming out to do the second fitting.”

Callahan looked at the woman and sighed. “What are you doing here, Ida? You didn’t sign up for this…you don’t have to stay…”

She came close then and leaned over, put her hand on the side of his face. “I’ll leave, Harry, when you can beat me in a fifty meter dash,” she said, laughing and smiling and lighting up the room with her loving blue eyes.

And Harry nodded. “If that’s the deal then I guess you’re with me for the duration.”

“Then maybe you’d better get used to me.”

“Get used to you?” he said, voicing mock-angst. “Hell, I can’t exist without you!”

She leaned over and kissed his forehead, then she pulled back, wrinkling her nose. “That shirt’s coming off today, Callahan, and you’re getting a sponge bath!”

“Oh…joy…” he sighed, rolling his eyes and turning to sniff his pits. “I can’t wait.”

+++++

Colonel Goodman walked into a very plain looking office building and took the elevator to the eleventh floor; when the door slid open he was greeted by two soldiers aiming automatic rifles at his face. When the soldiers recognized the colonel they went back to their duty stations, and Goodman walked into the prime minister’s office.

Actually, into an outer office guarded by the most ferocious person in Israel – the PMs appointments secretary – who nodded at the colonel as he walked in and took a seat near her desk. She resumed typing and talking to someone on the telephone, presumably juggling fifty other tasks as she talked on the phone, deciding the fate of nations.

Then the PMs chief of staff walked into the outer office and looked at Goodman. “Okay, he’s ready for you.”

Goodman nodded and followed the chief of staff into the PMs office.

And this was not a ceremonial spot; no, this office was overflowing with papers and blueprints and two walls covered with aerial and satellite reconnaissance imagery – though most were crystal clear black & white photographs of a nuclear reactor under construction in Syria. 

“So, Benni, what the Hell went wrong?”

“Well, sir. just about everything that could go wrong – did.”

+++++

A hulking nurses aide lifted Callahan into his wheelchair and helped get his stump covered, then the aide pushed him out to the little porch off the living room. It was a nice view and Callahan hadn’t tired of the juxtaposition of city and sea, at least not yet, but there wasn’t a piano anywhere in the place and he felt naked without one.

The aide rolled him up to a table set for three, and he looked through the glass rail at the bustling city twenty floors below while the chair’s wheels were locked, then Ida and Didi came out and joined him.

“Chicken salad today, Harry,” Ida said cheerfully. “And some fruit I see, too. Think you can manage that for me?”

Callahan looked at the food and his stomach growled. “I’m not real worried about input right now,” he said hopefully. “It’s output that has me stumped.”

“We’ve got that figured out, so – you ready to dig in…?”

“Yeah…fix me a plate. It looks too good to pass up.”

“Ida made it, Harry,” Didi said, smiling at his reluctant salivations.

“Yes, it’s my mother’s recipe,” Ida added, “so if you don’t like it you’ll have to answer to her.”

Harry looked at the plate and reached for the fork by his plate; his hand was trembling and both Didi and Ida was trying their hardest not to stare at him as he reached for a piece of chicken.

Harry took a bite and everything about the food felt strange; the unusual spices, the different textures – all of it – yet he was so hungry none of that mattered and after he finished that first bite he was off to the races…

…at least, he was…until the first wave of cramps hit…

+++++

“So, what you’re telling me is that shooting Callahan proved, in the end, unnecessary?”

Goodman looked down, but even so he nodded. “Given what happened, yes.”

“So he really is our responsibility now,” the prime minister sighed, looking out the window to the sea. “You knew his mother, correct?” he added a moment later.

“Yessir.”

“And so I would assume you know she would not be at all happy about how this played out?”

“I think that’s a safe assumption, yessir.”

“So, let me see if I have this right. We decided that Callahan’s – gift – is too dangerous so we decided to take charge of his access to music, which, again, correct me if I’m wrong, appears to be the gateway he uses to travel through time. With me so far?”

“Yessir.”

“So, someone decides that maybe we should take control AND at the same time reduce the chances of his getting away from us by shooting him in the hand. Is that about right?”

“Yessir. But our sniper missed on the first shot…”

“And then blew his fucking leg off!” the PM screamed, so loud that the armed guards by the elevator jumped and picked up their rifles.

“Yessir” Goodman said, his voice a coarse whisper.

“And then it turns out that Callahan’s son – what is his name again?”

“Lloyd, sir.”

“Yes, just so. But, oh, where was I? Oh, yes, that this boy knew all about Callahan’s time traveling and could, apparently summon this Old Man at will? Then for some unknown reason the boy kills a degenerate musician…?”

“We don’t know that, sir. Not for a fact.”

“We don’t know what, Colonel Goodman?”

“Well, witnesses saw the boy shoot this musician, one Todd Bright. There’s no question about that, sir.”

“Oh boy, here it comes. The part that is going to just make my day…”

“Well, sir, you see, Mr Bright’s body was never found.”

“What?”

“That’s correct, sir. No body, so…”

“So we don’t even know if this Bright fellow is alive or dead? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yessir. That’s correct.”

“Dear god, what a clusterfuck.”

Goodman did not reply to that one – if only because he’d used the very same word to describe the operation two days ago.

“So, how’d you convince Callahan to come here?”

Goodman looked down. “I sent Major Hartmann to visit Callahan in the hospital. Uh, he was impersonating a police inspector, I might add, and he…”

“Dear god. Stop. Please. I don’t want to know any more…”

“Yessir.”

“So, what about this Callahan? What are we going to do with him?”

“Obviously, sir, we get him physically able to…”

“To time travel? Is that what you think is going to happen? My god, Goodman! He could kill us all, unravel – everything! And he’d most certainly discover what our role in all this was…”

Goodman smiled. “Yessir, of course he would.”

“So…how do you plan to contain the risk?”

“Well sir, I have my two best agents assigned to him now, and they assure me they have him completely under control…”

+++++

Ida leaned forward and fed him another grape, smiling and encouraging him to have just one more bite. “Oh, Harry, you’re doing so well! At this rate you’ll catch me – in no time at all…”

+++++

“And then what, Colonel?”

“Well sir, one of my agents is a musician, actually a brilliant pianist. I assumed at some point he’d teach her, and then…”

“I see. Okay, proceed with the next phase of your operation. Now, what’s this I’m hearing about Northrup-Grumman?”

“They’re building a, well sir, what has been reported to me is best described as an alien vehicle. Wrecked. They are trying to rebuild it.”

“Wrecked? How? Was it shot down?”

Goodman shook his head. “No sir. Recall the Soviet submarine that went down in the North Atlantic three years ago?”

“Yes, of course.”

“The submarine collided with the object and subsequently sank.”

“So, this alien craft doesn’t fly, it…”

“It can do both, sir. It reportedly moves through water as easily as air.”

“And is capable of spaceflight, I take it?”

“Those are the initial reports, yes.”

“How far along are they? With their work, I mean?”

“Work on the craft is complete, but it appears they can’t figure out how to operate the bloody thing.”

“Okay, Benni, so what are you not telling me?”

“Well sir, what if we could get Callahan into the ship? The original ship. And watch the operators at work.”

The PM looked at his chief of staff – who looked away.

“And then what, Colonel?”

“We take the ship.”

“Take it? And do what with it?”

Goodman smiled. “Anything we want, sir.”

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse…[but wait, there’s more…how about a word or two on sources: I typically don’t post all a story’s acknowledgments until I’ve finished, if only because I’m not sure how many I’ll need before work is finalized. Yet with current circumstances (i.e., Covid-19 and me generally growing somewhat old) waiting to list said sources might not be the best way to proceed, and this listing will grow over time – until the story is complete. To begin, the ‘primary source’ material in this case – so far, at least – derives from two seminal Hollywood ‘cop’ films: Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The first Harry film was penned by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner, John Milius, Terrence Malick, and Jo Heims. Bullitt came primarily from the author of the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, Alan R Trustman, with help from Harry Kleiner, as well Robert L Fish, whose short story Mute Witness formed the basis of Trustman’s brilliant screenplay. Steve McQueen’s grin was never trade-marked, though perhaps it should have been. John Milius (Red Dawn) penned Magnum Force, and the ‘Briggs’/vigilante storyline derives from characters and plot elements originally found in that rich screenplay, as does the Captain McKay character. The Jennifer Spencer/Threlkis crime family storyline was first introduced in Sudden Impact, screenplay by Joseph Stinson, original story by Earl Smith and Charles Pierce. The Samantha Walker television reporter is found in The Dead Pool, screenplay by Steve Sharon, story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. I have to credit the Jim Parish, M.D., character first seen in the Vietnam segments to John A. Parrish, M.D., author of the most fascinating account of an American physician’s tour of duty in Vietnam – and as found in his autobiographical 12, 20, and 5: A Doctor’s Year in Vietnam, a book worth noting as one of the most stirring accounts of modern warfare I’ve ever read (think Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H, only featuring a blazing sense of irony conjoined within a searing non-fiction narrative). Denton Cooley, M.D. founded the Texas Heart Institute, as mentioned. Of course, James Clavell’s Shōgun forms a principle backdrop in later chapters. The teahouse and hotel of spires in Ch. 42 is a product of the imagination; so-sorry. The UH-1Y image used from Pt VI on taken by Jodson Graves. The snippets of lyrics from Lucy in the Sky are publicly available as ‘open-sourced.’ Many of the other figures in this story derive from characters developed within the works cited above, but keep in mind that, as always, the rest of this story is in all other respects a work of fiction woven into a pre-existing cinematic-historical fabric. Using the established characters referenced above, as well as the few new characters I’ve managed to come up with here and there, I hoped to create something new – perhaps a running commentary on the times we’ve shared with these fictional characters? And the standard disclaimer also here applies: the central characters in this tale should not be mistaken for persons living or dead. This was, in other words, just a little walk down a road more or less imagined, and nothing more than that should be inferred. I’d be remiss not to mention Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, and Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt. Talk about the roles of a lifetime…and what a gift.]

Another brief snippet to round out the day, another little burst of story to set the stage. And so, yes, the music plays on and on, bringing us closer and closer to…the 88th key…?

Chapter 59.3

And then one day Todd didn’t come to the clinic.

And even Harry’s nurses and therapists stayed away that day, too.

And the next day? No one came, once again.

Yet on the third day several people dropped by for a visit. Detectives and uniformed police officers from the cantonal police department. And, as it happened, perhaps because it turns out that irony is a given that bedevils us all, most of those who walked into Callahan’s room were homicide detectives.

And they wanted to know if Lloyd had been in contact with him.

“No? But will someone, anyone, tell me what’s going on?”

But no, not even one of them would. Not a single one. 

And still the staff at the clinic stayed away from Harry Callahan, and soon he began to think the whole world had forsaken him.

+++++

It was almost two weeks before Didi came to his room, and she did not look or act like herself.

She was evasive, she didn’t make eye contact. She spoke in oblique references to vague goings-on far, far away, until Harry had had enough.

“You need to tell me what’s happening, Didi. You can’t keep me in the dark forever.”

“It is very complicated here now, Mr. Callahan…”

And it was the way she said ‘Mr Callahan’ that cued him in. She was wearing a wire, and was under duress. 

“Just the broad strokes, Didi. What’s happened?”

“Lloyd and Mr Bright got into an argument – in the meadow behind the house. It appears that someone, perhaps your son, concealed a firearm when he entered the country, and during this argument your son shot and killed Mr Bright…”

“I see.”

“There were several witnesses, Mr Callahan, so there is no doubt about what happened.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There are, however, several questions about events immediately after Mr Bright’s murder.”

“Okay.”

“It seems that an Old Man appeared beside your son just a few moments after the event, and then both simply disappeared.”

“Disappeared? What do you mean, disappeared?”

“Just that, sir. And all the available witnesses report exactly the same thing; that within seconds of the single gunshot an Old Man appeared in the meadow beside your son, and almost as quickly your son disappeared, and I believe the Old Man, as well.”

Callahan nodded. “What gun did he use?”

“Your old duty revolver. The Smith & Wesson model 29; it is still registered with the police department in San Francisco so there is no doubt of ownership.”

Callahan shook his head. “I left it in the safe. At the house. And there’s no way Lloyd knew the combination to that safe…which means someone…”

And then Callahan remembered she was wearing a wire.

“Which means someone broke into my house and removed the pistol. You’d better call DD and let her know.”

“I already have. There was no sign of forced entry or anything else to indicate the safe has been tampered with.”

“So…somehow Lloyd got the combination.”

“You didn’t bring the weapon with you when you came?”

“Didi, how could I have. I never left the hospital, remember? I didn’t pack my bags, I didn’t even know we were leaving…”

“Is there anyway Ida, your employee from the Music Company, might have gotten hold of the combination?”

“There’s no way I can think of, but then again I have no idea how Lloyd could have gotten hold of the combination.”

+++++

A few hours after Didi left his room a police inspector came to visit Callahan. He was an old man, maybe about the same age as Callahan, but there any similarities came to an abrupt end. This inspector was short and lithe, more like a coiled spring that Harry’s lanky slouchiness, and his close-cropped hair was steel gray – like his eyes. He was a cold looking man, someone used to being lied to and then breaking down the liar piece by careful piece.

“You know,” the inspector began, “I believe you. At least I believe there were people who packed your belongings and moved you here. So, we have removed the hold we had placed on all your accounts. The good news is that the clinic will resume treating you; the bad news is that until your son is located and this matter is cleared up there is no way in hell someone like you will be permitted to reside in Switzerland. But here, Mr Callahan, things become tricky for you, because it appears you left the United States without officially clearing, so you are in Switzerland illegally. Also, for some reason the authorities in the United States will not re-admit you, so, technically, you are now a stateless person. Your U.S. Passport has been revoked and confiscated, I’m afraid.”

For some reason it was the cold, emotionless voice that bothered Callahan most of all. But no empathy for a brother police officer? That just grated him the wrong way.

So Callahan said not one word, he just looked at the other man eye-to-eye.

“You have nothing to say?” the inspector said. “Nothing at all?”

Silence.

“You do know that we have nothing like your Miranda protections here, Mr Callahan, so I would advise you be very, very careful what you say on your way out of our country.”

Still Callahan remained silent.

“I see. Well then, until we meet again, Mr Callahan.”

A minute after the inspector left a uniformed officer came into Callahan’s room and sat. And though the officer turned on the television, he sat in a chair staring at Callahan, and not knowing what else to do or say Harry closed his eyes and returned to the comfortably open arms of waiting sleep.

+++++

It was after midnight, at least he thought it was, and a second policeman was, apparently, gone for the night. Callahan sat up a little and looked out the window, then he realized he’d heard something unusual.

‘What is that? A helicopter?’ he asked himself…and not a minute later several men in black commando uniforms entered his room, then a large gurney was wheeled in and several nurses and orderlies helped transfer Harry to the gurney. The next thing he knew he was up on the clinic’s roof, and a huge Sikorsky was waiting for him up there – with no markings visible and with its massive rotors drooping low and barely moving in the still night. Men loaded him in the Sikorsky by pushing his gurney up the aft ramp, and seconds later the helicopter’s twin turbines started to spool up…and then he grew concerned. No one had said a word to him during this transfer, and he’d had no idea about the move beforehand…

After an hour flight through the mountains the Sikorsky landed at a large airport, and Callahan’s gurney was transferred to a waiting aircraft, and while he wasn’t sure Harry thought it looked like the US Navy’s version of the DC-9, the medevac version if he wasn’t mistaken, and he didn’t know what to think after that. Were they taking him back to the states? If so, who was ‘they’?

The jet started to taxi almost immediately and was soon airborne, and still no one came to speak with him. All the window shades were down so he couldn’t even tell what direction the aircraft was headed, then a military medic was by his side.

“How’s the pain?” the teenager said, and the kid sounded like he was from Brooklyn so that answered that question.

“I’m okay. Where we headed?”

“Home,” the kid said, and Harry nodded.

He drifted off again, trying to fight off the disorientation and the sense of rootlessness that had engulfed him after the inspector left his room the day before…

He woke up to the sounds of flaps extending and landing gears rumbling into the ‘down and locked’ position, and then the young medic came and opened up the window shade next to Callahan’s head. Sun streamed in through the scratched plastic outer pane and Harry squinted, trying to make out…

But…the sun was rising over land, so this wasn’t the United States – and now he was thoroughly confused.

“Where are we?” Harry asked the medic. “I don’t recognize this coastline.”

The kid knelt beside Callahan’s gurney and pointed to a city in the distance.

“That’s Tel Aviv, right over there.”

“Tel Aviv? You mean…Israel?”

“Yes, Mr Callahan. And the Colonel told me to tell you – Welcome Home.”

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse…[but wait, there’s more…how about a word or two on sources: I typically don’t post all a story’s acknowledgments until I’ve finished, if only because I’m not sure how many I’ll need before work is finalized. Yet with current circumstances (i.e., Covid-19 and me generally growing somewhat old) waiting to list said sources might not be the best way to proceed, and this listing will grow over time – until the story is complete. To begin, the ‘primary source’ material in this case – so far, at least – derives from two seminal Hollywood ‘cop’ films: Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The first Harry film was penned by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner, John Milius, Terrence Malick, and Jo Heims. Bullitt came primarily from the author of the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, Alan R Trustman, with help from Harry Kleiner, as well Robert L Fish, whose short story Mute Witness formed the basis of Trustman’s brilliant screenplay. Steve McQueen’s grin was never trade-marked, though perhaps it should have been. John Milius (Red Dawn) penned Magnum Force, and the ‘Briggs’/vigilante storyline derives from characters and plot elements originally found in that rich screenplay, as does the Captain McKay character. The Jennifer Spencer/Threlkis crime family storyline was first introduced in Sudden Impact, screenplay by Joseph Stinson, original story by Earl Smith and Charles Pierce. The Samantha Walker television reporter is found in The Dead Pool, screenplay by Steve Sharon, story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. I have to credit the Jim Parish, M.D., character first seen in the Vietnam segments to John A. Parrish, M.D., author of the most fascinating account of an American physician’s tour of duty in Vietnam – and as found in his autobiographical 12, 20, and 5: A Doctor’s Year in Vietnam, a book worth noting as one of the most stirring accounts of modern warfare I’ve ever read (think Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H, only featuring a blazing sense of irony conjoined within a searing non-fiction narrative). Denton Cooley, M.D. founded the Texas Heart Institute, as mentioned. Of course, James Clavell’s Shōgun forms a principle backdrop in later chapters. The teahouse and hotel of spires in Ch. 42 is a product of the imagination; so-sorry. The UH-1Y image used from Pt VI on taken by Jodson Graves. The snippets of lyrics from Lucy in the Sky are publicly available as ‘open-sourced.’ Many of the other figures in this story derive from characters developed within the works cited above, but keep in mind that, as always, the rest of this story is in all other respects a work of fiction woven into a pre-existing cinematic-historical fabric. Using the established characters referenced above, as well as the few new characters I’ve managed to come up with here and there, I hoped to create something new – perhaps a running commentary on the times we’ve shared with these fictional characters? And the standard disclaimer also here applies: the central characters in this tale should not be mistaken for persons living or dead. This was, in other words, just a little walk down a road more or less imagined, and nothing more than that should be inferred. I’d be remiss not to mention Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, and Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt. Talk about the roles of a lifetime…and what a gift.]

A brutally short snippet today, hardly enough for a sip of Coke let alone a cup of tea. But then again, music matters, so…

Chapter 59.2

After their first afternoon together on the clinic’s sun terrace, Todd Bright returned almost daily to visit Harry. And who knows, maybe Callahan was indeed truly clueless, or maybe he was just lonely – because – who wouldn’t be? And because Todd wasn’t just a vestigial remnant of his other life – the life he’d been forced to leave behind in California – Harry must have begun to see and feel that Todd Bright was a kind of life preserver. Tossed to a drowning man clinging to the last of his reserves, Todd was a musician speaking to the same needs Callahan had tried to address his whole life – first with and through his mother and then by playing the piano more and more on his own. And now, as they’d embarked on this peculiar musical journey together, Todd and Harry had formed a rather unique type of bond – that of creative collaborators. 

You just had to speak the language to know what it was that had developed between the two. It wasn’t a romance even if, on some levels, their collaboration was about romance. Their affinity wasn’t sexual, at least not on Callahan’s part, because he’d long known he simply wasn’t wired that way. Yet Didi saw something…an unusual attraction developing between the two…even if Todd was the one smitten.

So when he came to the clinic to visit Callahan, Todd came both as a musician and as a kind of paramour, if one coming at Callahan from an unexpected angle. Nurses and therapists saw it and were ‘sophisticated’ enough to ignore Bright’s surreptitious sidelong glances, yet when Didi was around she sensed trouble. Maybe, like seismic shifts deep within the earth and how clusters of such events foretell a magmatic eruption, she felt she was watching two men with wildly different expectations working towards a single outcome – the composition of a piece of music – yet the inevitable outcome was anything but a foregone conclusion to one of them.

And maybe Callahan felt the first rumblings of that peculiar shift when Todd started being a little more physical when he visited. Little things, really, like a hand on the shoulder, or pushing Callahan’s wheelchair, even when orderlies were standing by to do the chore. Then he showed up in time for physical therapy one morning, watching Callahan’s struggles with even the simplest arm movements, once the shattered arm was removed from cast and traction. And so Todd was there, always there, but now more as a cheerleader, pushing Harry to work harder because so much was at stake now.

Lloyd dropped by from time to time and he had no trouble at all seeing what was going down, and though he did indeed think his father was clueless that didn’t, in his mind anyway, excuse him. In fact, his father’s apparent cluelessness only made him angrier.

Perhaps because Lloyd saw this whole Fandango thing as a means to an end. Todd’s means to Todd’s ends. And then Lloyd simply decided he wasn’t going to be drawn into such a charade.

So when Todd started to talk openly about moving into the house, Ida was gobsmacked – but Lloyd wasn’t…not even a little bit. By that time, after Todd’s open flirtations and what Lloyd perceived as his ruinous influence, the boy had made already up his mind and he knew what needed to be done.

And one morning, while Todd was visiting Harry at the Clinic, he found a copy of his grandmother’s Fourth Piano Concerto and began playing – right through to the bitter end.

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse…[but wait, there’s more…how about a last word or two on sources: I typically don’t post all a story’s acknowledgments until I’ve finished, if only because I’m not sure how many I’ll need before work is finalized. Yet with current circumstances (i.e., Covid-19 and me generally growing somewhat old) waiting to list said sources might not be the best way to proceed, and this listing will grow over time – until the story is complete. To begin, the ‘primary source’ material in this case – so far, at least – derives from two seminal Hollywood ‘cop’ films: Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The first Harry film was penned by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner, John Milius, Terrence Malick, and Jo Heims. Bullitt came primarily from the author of the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, Alan R Trustman, with help from Harry Kleiner, as well Robert L Fish, whose short story Mute Witness formed the basis of Trustman’s brilliant screenplay. Steve McQueen’s grin was never trade-marked, though perhaps it should have been. John Milius (Red Dawn) penned Magnum Force, and the ‘Briggs’/vigilante storyline derives from characters and plot elements originally found in that rich screenplay, as does the Captain McKay character. The Jennifer Spencer/Threlkis crime family storyline was first introduced in Sudden Impact, screenplay by Joseph Stinson, original story by Earl Smith and Charles Pierce. The Samantha Walker television reporter is found in The Dead Pool, screenplay by Steve Sharon, story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. I have to credit the Jim Parish, M.D., character first seen in the Vietnam segments to John A. Parrish, M.D., author of the most fascinating account of an American physician’s tour of duty in Vietnam – and as found in his autobiographical 12, 20, and 5: A Doctor’s Year in Vietnam, a book worth noting as one of the most stirring accounts of modern warfare I’ve ever read (think Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H, only featuring a blazing sense of irony conjoined within a searing non-fiction narrative). Denton Cooley, M.D. founded the Texas Heart Institute, as mentioned. Of course, James Clavell’s Shōgun forms a principle backdrop in later chapters. The teahouse and hotel of spires in Ch. 42 is a product of the imagination; so-sorry. The UH-1Y image used from Pt VI on taken by Jodson Graves. The snippets of lyrics from Lucy in the Sky are publicly available as ‘open-sourced.’ Many of the other figures in this story derive from characters developed within the works cited above, but keep in mind that, as always, the rest of this story is in all other respects a work of fiction woven into a pre-existing cinematic-historical fabric. Using the established characters referenced above, as well as the few new characters I’ve managed to come up with here and there, I hoped to create something new – perhaps a running commentary on the times we’ve shared with these fictional characters? And the standard disclaimer also here applies: the central characters in this tale should not be mistaken for persons living or dead. This was, in other words, just a little walk down a road more or less imagined, and nothing more than that should be inferred. I’d be remiss not to mention Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, and Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt. Talk about the roles of a lifetime…and what a gift.]

Perhaps. Perhaps not. You decide.

Chapter 59.1

DD and the doc stayed at the place in Davos for a week, and then, after making sure Harry was in capable hands, they returned to San Francisco. Didi and the Colonel stayed at a rented chalet not far away, until Colonel Goodman returned to Israel, that is. After that, Didi moved back into her room in the main house, leaving the two remaining bedrooms for Ida and Lloyd. Harry, of course, remained hospitalized, only now at an orthopedic clinic down the valley, where reports were that he was sleeping twenty hours a day and not at all interested in his physical therapy sessions.

Didi took Lloyd to look at a couple of boarding schools, which only seemed to depress the boy more than he already was, then DD sent word that Todd Bright wanted to come visit and the boy’s spirits picked up a bit, and Todd arrived a few days later, riding up from Zurich on the train. For Didi, anyway, things began to look up a bit after that.

Because more than anything – or so it seemed after his arrival – Todd wanted to spend time with the boy. So Lloyd took him skiing, and Didi spent a whole day with them at the new studio’s construction site – with Todd pouring over plans with the local architect who had sketched out ideas based on Cathy’s original work at the house on the cliffs. Lloyd joined in these brain-storming sessions and that seemed to lift his spirits further, and in the evenings Ida and Todd listened as Lloyd worked through new ideas on a new Bösendorfer in the living room. So, in a way, Lloyd seemed to break free of his own emotional lethargy, though the change itself seemed to be dependent on Todd Bright.

But then one day Todd announced to one and all that it was time to go visit Harry in the hospital, and Didi – looking closely at the boy for any kind of reaction to this unexpected development – thought she saw a shadow cross over his face. ‘He feels betrayed,’ she said to herself. ‘I wonder why?’

+++++

The orthopedic clinic was located atop a small hill between Davos and Klosters, and every patient room had spectacular views of the alps to help enliven their spirits. Some noted that the views were present to lend credibility to the somewhat exorbitant costs of treatment at the facility, but such people can never be pleased, can they? Todd Bright was impressed with the sprawling view from the sun terrace, that much was clear, and when a nurse wheeled Callahan out into the sun Todd seemed to blossom.

Didi and Ida saw it in an instant, though Didi was almost certain that Lloyd was too inexperienced to pick up on the signals Todd was putting out. And Todd was putting on a real performance that morning, as nurses and orderlies and even a few physicians had come out to the sun terrace to see, and perhaps even meet, the most famous grunge rocker in America. Then Todd told the gathered medicos that the real star of the show was actually Harry Callahan, because Harry had helped structure their last album from beginning to end. And of course how could they not recognize Lloyd Callahan, who had played lead guitar on their tour last summer. And the truth of the matter was that everyone at the clinic had heard about Lloyd, and when they realized who he was the youngest nurses seemed to grow more vapidly clinging than either Didi and Ida thought humanly possible.

For his part, Harry sat in his wheelchair under a very heavy blanket, his attentions focused somewhere in the clouds, and Ida couldn’t stand it anymore. She went to Callahan’s chair and pushed him to a far corner; then she pulled up a chair and leaned into him, kind of like a face to face meeting, some of you might even say.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Harry?” she hissed. “Have you decided to sleep your life away? Is that it? When you have before you the most important task any man can have? To raise a son, to make for the boy a life both can be proud of? You will meet this need by…sleeping? By…staring, at the clouds? Harry? What has happened to you?”

Harry looked at her, his eyes glazed and unfocused. “Morphine,” he managed to say as a wad of spittle formed at the corner of his mouth, before the goo rolled down his chin.

“What? Do you want more morphine?”

Harry shook his head. “No. Too much morphine. Stop them.”

Todd came over and sat with Harry after that. In fact, Todd spend over an hour with Harry, talking incessantly about the new album, hoping Harry would still be able to add a few more contributions before Todd wrapped up production.

“Harry? You look positively stoned!” Todd said at one point, and Harry nodded.

“Morphine,” he managed to say.

“Ooh, isn’t it wonderful? I am so envious!”

Callahan felt like he was trying to walk up a mountain through mud up to his armpits, and he couldn’t understand how anyone could find that wonderful. “How is Lloyd doing,” Harry asked Todd when he found his breath.

“Wonderful, Harry! Just peachy! He’s not quite as accomplished on the piano yet, but in a few years? Who knows…?”

Harry smiled. “I’m glad you think so. But you’ll need to push him, to keep him focused.”

“Okay. What did you have in mind?” Todd asked, his interest brightening.

“The piece we were working on? Have you shown it to him?”

“The Fandango? No, not yet – I was waiting for you. Do you want me to show it to him? Really?”

But then, yes, Harry nodded. “See what he comes up with on his own. Work with him, give him your input after that, then drop by and show me what you two come up with before you show him what I was working on.”

And now, by effectively pushing Todd Bright into the role of intermediary between father and son, Harry had given Todd just the entry he needed…and everyone noticed how happy Todd became after that one brief exchange.

But when Ida came over and tried to speak to Lloyd, she found an entirely different reaction than what she had expected. “What’s wrong, Lloyd?” she asked, because she had seen the dark look in his eyes, a look that had, for a moment, well and truly frightened her. “Did something…?”

But then Lloyd had cut her off with a curt nod as he stood and walked away, yet with a faraway look in his eyes that somehow, to Ida, anyway, seemed alive with barely restrained fury. “Yeah,” the boy added a moment later, after she caught up to him. “It kinda looks like Todd wants to be my mother, doesn’t it? And you know, the funny thing is – I’m not so sure dad would mind if that happened…”

+++++

Bright had toured in Spain several years before and one evening, with no concert scheduled, the group had gone off in search of fun. For Todd Bright, fun meant inspiration, and as he’d heard all about flamenco off the group went – in search of Spanish dancers. Yet flamenco is more like a regional dialect, with different regions in Spain and, to a degree, Portugal, practicing different forms and, at the same time, celebrating different aspects of the confrontation between guitarist and dancer. In many parts of Spain, and yes, Portugal, there is another form, a perhaps even more celebrated form of ‘flamenco’, referred to as a fandango. And this is what Bright found that night…

At their heart, these dances appear to be contest of wills, so yes, in a sense the musical representation of human confrontation, yet Todd Bright found that he was captivated by the dialogue between the guitarist and the dancer, or between the hands of the guitarist and the dancer’s feet. When he learned that he had just seen the performance of a fandango, not what some might argue was the more generic flamenco, he became intrigued. First with the conditions that gave rise to the form, then more and more with the specific structures of the dance.

And at one point that night, while talking with the guitarist, he ran into an interesting anecdote about the fandango that captured his imagination, and he was soon consumed with the idea of writing a song that captured the essence of the tale. In the telling of the tale Todd heard, the clergy in Spain had, several hundreds years ago, first heard about the fandango and had immediately decided to issue a decree that such exhibitions of godlessness were a form of heresy and would henceforth be prohibited. But as sometimes happens – though perhaps not frequently enough – the voice of reason interrupted these sainted proceedings and one of the clerics advised that it was simply unfair to ban such things without first hearing and experiencing the music for themselves. What followed was, for Todd Bright, the start of a quest birthed in a moment of pure reason…

The clerics invited the best fandango dancers and musicians in the region to perform, and in short order the magic of the music captivated everyone in attendance, and so, of course, all talk of banning the music simply vanished without a trace. And while this episode is instructive it is not the equal of, say, rediscovering Aristotle’s lost manuscripts and kicking off the enlightenment, yet, for artists and musicians in ultra-conservative Spain, freeing the fandango of clerical restraint was a sort of watershed moment…

…and it was this moment that fascinated Todd Bright…

Because in the America of the 1990s and early 2000s, there was even then a hidden hand restlessly and relentlessly at work, a re-emergent censoriousness in the evangelical community trying to reassert control over young peoples’ minds all around the country, and through both ecclesiastical as well as political means. And without being too blunt about these things, groups like Bright were nothing less than the antithesis of this power grab by political Christians; yet in the centuries old anecdote of the fandango Todd Bright had found the germ of an idea he just couldn’t shake…

So when he first voiced his desire to work with Harry on a new fandango – an American Fandango, as he called the idea he was working on – he saw Harry’s as the perfect voice to help construct the foundation of this piece. Gershwin had been a heretic, at least for most classically trained musicians in the 1920s, when his works first gained wide appeal, but then again so had Elvis Presley’s gyrating electro-acoustic songs in the 50s. The same impulsive reluctance greeted Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, then it almost engulfed artists as different as Marvin Gaye and Stephen Stills. What Todd wanted to explore was as complex as it was enduring; was this reluctance a simple generational conflict or was something far more destructive at work? Were the inherent romanticism in voices like Gershwin and Presley and Wilson, like the ecclesiastical power structures in 17^th century Spain, so threatening to the pillars of the establishment, and that they felt they had no recourse other than to resist change? Given that change is now and has always been inevitable, Todd felt he was onto something.

After listening to Todd lay out these ideas, Harry simply got into the whole thing. Todd had constructed a puzzle with no easy way out, however, and yet Harry saw this puzzle from the inception. How could modern forms of rock, especially something as powerfully dissonant as Seattle Grunge, produce a coherent narrative about what amounted to a cyclical romantic impulse always challenging established forms of expression – and in just a few minutes?

Impossible? Not hardly, or so Todd said. Zeppelin had done as much, he added, with both Kashmir and Stairway, and The Beatles had done so more times than he could count, so really, the only differences involved incorporating the structural elements of the fandango into the grunge-rock soundscape.

For Harry, however, his idea of a solution grew simpler still. 

The fandango employs a beat in 6/8 (classical) or ¾ (modern) time, and employs octosyllabic verse, so those two elements would provide the only constraints Harry would have to deal with, and because Todd wanted to stick with the older time structure that wasn’t going to be an issue Harry would have to deal with. The only question left to be answered was key, and Todd wanted to keep to a major key, even though older forms employed a minor-major format. So…done…again.

And while Harry and Todd had worked on ideas, even getting as far as putting a few down on paper, the next thing Harry knew he was flat on his back in a hospital and it was beginning to feel a little like music was the latest thing about to be yanked from his life. On the crest of that revelation Callahan found the idea of writing music quaintly quixotic and suddenly out of reach, and his descent into the darkest imaginable places began in earnest. 

Now sitting in the sun and looking down the valley towards Klosters he felt a sudden elation. ‘Maybe I can do this,’ he thought as the shock of an alpine breeze ran through his hair. ‘Maybe I can work through my son’s hands, realize what I saw in my mind…’ 

“At least until I can knock out rehab and get back to the piano…” Callahan said.

“What did you say, Harry?” Todd asked.

“I’ve got to get back to my piano.”

“Your piano?” Didi said, clearly concerned now. “Which piano, Harry?”

“Mother’s. The old Bösendorfer, from the house.”

Didi grabbed her notepad and began a new to-do list. “What else do you need, Harry?”

“Why am I in this wheelchair?” Harry asked.

Didi and Todd came close now, and she took his hand. “Harry? Your right leg was in bad shape. Your femur was shattered and the knee wasn’t replaceable, then an infection set in. They took your right leg two days after you…above the knee.”

“Oh,” he said, interrupting her. “That’s strange. Why didn’t anyone tell me?”

“We did, Harry.”

“It’s the morphine,” Callahan sighed. “Tell the docs no more. None. I can’t do this if they keep me doped up.”

Lloyd walked up and looked into his father’s eyes, not sure what he was seeing now but oddly reassured. “Dad, you feeling okay?”

And Harry nodded. “I am. And son, I need you, so stop trying to avoid me. Please.”

© 2021 adrian leverkühn | abw | and as always, thanks for stopping by for a look around the memory warehouse…[but wait, there’s more…how about a last word or two on sources: I typically don’t post all a story’s acknowledgments until I’ve finished, if only because I’m not sure how many I’ll need before work is finalized. Yet with current circumstances (i.e., Covid-19 and me generally growing somewhat old) waiting to list said sources might not be the best way to proceed, and this listing will grow over time – until the story is complete. To begin, the ‘primary source’ material in this case – so far, at least – derives from two seminal Hollywood ‘cop’ films: Dirty Harry and Bullitt. The first Harry film was penned by Harry Julian Fink, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner, John Milius, Terrence Malick, and Jo Heims. Bullitt came primarily from the author of the screenplay for The Thomas Crown Affair, Alan R Trustman, with help from Harry Kleiner, as well Robert L Fish, whose short story Mute Witness formed the basis of Trustman’s brilliant screenplay. Steve McQueen’s grin was never trade-marked, though perhaps it should have been. John Milius (Red Dawn) penned Magnum Force, and the ‘Briggs’/vigilante storyline derives from characters and plot elements originally found in that rich screenplay, as does the Captain McKay character. The Jennifer Spencer/Threlkis crime family storyline was first introduced in Sudden Impact, screenplay by Joseph Stinson, original story by Earl Smith and Charles Pierce. The Samantha Walker television reporter is found in The Dead Pool, screenplay by Steve Sharon, story by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson, and Sandy Shaw. I have to credit the Jim Parish, M.D., character first seen in the Vietnam segments to John A. Parrish, M.D., author of the most fascinating account of an American physician’s tour of duty in Vietnam – and as found in his autobiographical 12, 20, and 5: A Doctor’s Year in Vietnam, a book worth noting as one of the most stirring accounts of modern warfare I’ve ever read (think Richard Hooker’s M*A*S*H, only featuring a blazing sense of irony conjoined within a searing non-fiction narrative). Denton Cooley, M.D. founded the Texas Heart Institute, as mentioned. Of course, James Clavell’s Shōgun forms a principle backdrop in later chapters. The teahouse and hotel of spires in Ch. 42 is a product of the imagination; so-sorry. The UH-1Y image used from Pt VI on taken by Jodson Graves. The snippets of lyrics from Lucy in the Sky are publicly available as ‘open-sourced.’ Many of the other figures in this story derive from characters developed within the works cited above, but keep in mind that, as always, the rest of this story is in all other respects a work of fiction woven into a pre-existing cinematic-historical fabric. Using the established characters referenced above, as well as the few new characters I’ve managed to come up with here and there, I hoped to create something new – perhaps a running commentary on the times we’ve shared with these fictional characters? And the standard disclaimer also here applies: the central characters in this tale should not be mistaken for persons living or dead. This was, in other words, just a little walk down a road more or less imagined, and nothing more than that should be inferred. I’d be remiss not to mention Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, and Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt. Talk about the roles of a lifetime…and what a gift.]