15

There are some things we persist believing in even though we know they’re not true. Normally I would say we should stop doing that but if it does no harm to believe, and if you get a pleasant sensation from thinking it true, then it’s probably okay. But when you think about believing and not believing in things, it’s always better to believe.

The trek continues. I’m now actively on the lookout for the FTLs, but since I haven’t come up with the right questions yet, I’m basically circling over the target, with the unfortunate realization I don’t even know where the target is.

Yet the story continues.

There are still plenty of small farms in 1962 America, especially in the southern region of the country. I spend a few days at such a place where cotton is more predominant than tobacco. Luckily, it’s not yet time to harvest cotton. I’m glad because picking cotton has to be one of the toughest jobs around. Even in my enhanced physical condition, it would be a tough, back-breaking experience. I respect those who are do it year after year. Those are the strongest individuals among us.

My job on this farm is to milk the cows, feed the pigs, and keep the chickens in line. The job is available because the youngest son is at football camp. I tell LB, the owner, I can only work for a couple of days. He says anything helps. Just don’t get a cow mad and have her kick me.

I start work on a Saturday, so that means my second and final day of work is on Monday. They take Sunday seriously around here. I’m expected to go to church with them in the morning as well eat Sunday dinner with them. It’s a family affair as the sons and daughters come over with their children in tow. One of the brothers, Cleve, who looks to be around age 40, is very quiet during the meal. Afterwards, he tells everybody he’s going for a walk. I asked LB, about him.

LB responds, “He’s never been the same since coming back from World War II.”

“What was his experience?”

“He was a tail gunner on a B-17 in the Pacific. He was firing at a Zero when another Japanese pilot who had bailed out of his plane parachuted into his line of fire. The pilot was cut in half.”

“That had to be a terrible experience.”

“It was near the end of the war. It was his last mission. At first, he handled it fairly well, but over the years the weight of it just keeps increasing.”

“What does he do to cope?”

“He probably had a bottle in his car. That’s why he went for a walk by himself.”

War is Hell. It always will be, I suppose.

After a full day of work on Monday, I said no thanks to supper, and told LB and his family goodbye.

By midnight, I was walking on an isolated country road when I came to a small church located not far off the road. The night was pitch black. When I glanced at the church, I saw pulsating lights through the windows of the church. I decided to investigate.

The front door was easily negotiable. When I entered the building, I did not attempt to turn the lights on. That would defeat the purpose of what I was trying to do. I had a pen flashlight that produced a very narrow beam. Just enough light so I wouldn’t bang my knee on a pew. As I walked down the main aisle between the two sections of pews, I spotted no lights, flashing or otherwise, in the main sanctuary. Behind the choir section, a door led into the back of the church. I slowly went through it.

On the other side of the door, I found myself looking down a hallway. Doors were to each side of the hallway, presumably leading to Sunday School classrooms. I knew that I had to look into each one. It was at the fifth door that I opened when I heard the voice:

“What are you doing here?”

I immediately turned off my flashlight. It was no longer needed. I was now staring at three beams of light. They were FTLs. They were vertical, about six feet in length, and a few inches across.

The voice that I heard, though, was a human voice. For the purposes of the following conversation, I’ll label the FTLs as L, C, and R (Left, Center, and Right). I knew which one was speaking because the light beam would vibrate slightly when doing so.

To regain the flow of the narrative, I’ll repeat the question:

FTL-C asks when I walk into the room, “What are you doing here?”

I did my best to sound calm, “I’ve come to see you, of course.”

FTL-R: “That’s quite impossible, you know. You shouldn’t even know we exist. How do you know, by the way?”

“Some friends from the future told me.”

FTL-L: “Are these friends the ones who sent you to find us?”

FTL-R: “That’s quite impossible, you know.”

FTL-C: “Please ignore him. He tends to get stuck in loops. He circled Antares for a million years before he finally realized he was getting nowhere.”

I tried not to laugh. FTL-C continued, “But why do you want to see us?”

“The people I represent live over a thousand years in the future. They think Earth is ready to visit the stars but attaining the speeds necessary to do that is beyond their technical capabilities and their physicists are telling them it may be thousands of more years before it will be attainable.”

FTL-L said, “What does that have to do with us?”

I was thinking, but I didn’t say it out loud, what the hell do they think I’m talking about? I said instead, “You are superluminal creatures and have been for billions of years. Because of that, they think you can help solve the problem of developing ways to go faster than light.”

FTL-R blurted out, “Why not just talk to us then? We never die, you know.”

I was about to answer than when FTL-C asked me, “How do you know we’ve been around for billions of years?”

Now what I’m about to say sounds like what a smart-ass detective would say in a 1940’s B-movie:

“Because you just told me.”

FTL-C: “Well, you’re right. It’s no point in denying it. We came out of what your science euphemistically calls the Big Bang. We call it the Big Whatever.”

I couldn’t resist asking, “How did you become self-conscious?”

FTL-L: “That’s the embarrassing part. We don’t know.”

FTL-C: “And we’ve had billions of years to figure it out. I have no clue and I’m one of the smarter ones. But why tell us this now? Why can’t your friends just talk to us in their time period.”

I responded, “Seems you have quit coming to earth by their time. Do you have any idea why that might happen?”

FTL-L: “Absolutely no idea. We don’t think about the future. Que Sera Sera, as your lovely Doris Day would say.”

FTL-C: “What he means is that we don’t think about the future because the future does not affect us.”

This was going to be one tough nut to crack. I got the feeling my time was running out. The light beams were starting to fade. Before I could ask another question, they were gone. and I was standing in total darkness. I turned on my flashlight and exited the building.

I kept wandering for a few days after the encounter with the FTLs, and ended up in a seaside village. Quaint was too strong a word to describe it. Maybe ‘Beyond Quaint’. The few hundred people that lived there made their living being involved in one way or the other with the shrimping industry. There were nine boats that went out well before daybreak. They would return around noon with their haul. Some days were better than other days. But I won’t go on and on about the village and its people. They have been too many instances of periphrasis already and why add another to the list.

I was curious about what the sky might look like from the vantage point of a boat being out at sea. The old charm was still working, and that along with a fifty-dollar bill, secured me a ride on one of the shrimp boats. All I had to do was stay out of the way. I was worried about getting seasick, but I shouldn’t have been. The aura worked on that too.

We left the dock at 4:05 AM, chugging along against the incoming waves. It was a pleasant morning, though a little windy. My only chance to really talk to anyone was on the way out.

I asked Waylon, who was the one of the boat owner’s sons, “Seen anything strange in the sky lately?”

He responded, “What do you mean by strange?”

“A meteor or what you might call a shooting star.”

Waylon said, “We see those all the time.”

“Have you ever seen them bunched in a group? Maybe even in a sort of formation?”

Waylon took a few seconds to ponder my question, “I haven’t but my brother Ethan said he saw something like that just a few days ago. We didn’t think much of it.”

“Could I talk to Ethan?”

“He stayed home. Had a bad cough and was running some fever.”

I started to ask another question, but we had reached the area where the shrimping was to begin.

As it turned out, I enjoyed the morning on the shrimp boat. I even helped some with hauling in the shrimp. The owner told me I had the makings of a shrimper. I wasn’t about to tell him that without the aura working for me, I’d be sick as a dog.

It was the strangest thing when we got back to the dock. A television camera crew was setting up its gear for filming. I talked to a local and he said filming would start the next day on a location shoot for a TV series called ‘Route 66’. It was a show about two young guys driving a Corvette across the country and finding all kinds of adventures along the way. As the title songs goes, they “get their kicks on Route 66”.

Waylon had given me directions to the home of Ethan, his brother (the one who saw the strange formation of lights in the sky one early morning while heading out to sea). He lived in a small cottage with his new wife, Malaya. I knocked on the door.

A voice came from within, “Come on in, it’s not locked.”

Ethan was sitting on the couch with a blanket over his legs, obviously still recuperating. He was alone. Malaya had gone to the store.

I told Ethan why I had stopped by and asked him about what he had seen.

“I was sitting at the back of the boat sipping on a cup of coffee. We were headed north by northeast. For some reason I glanced behind me. That’s when I saw the lights.”

“Were they in the shape of a cross?”

Ethan paused, then said, “I haven’t told anyone this because they already thought I was crazy already the lights. They weren’t shaped like a cross, but they did have a shape.”

I must admit I was somewhat taken back by his statement. Every person that I had met had seen the coruscated cross.

I asked him, “What shape did you see?”

Ethan answered, “A star. A five-pointed star, and here’s the really weird thing. Even though the sky was black, and the flashing lights were white, I somehow got the feeling that the star was red.”