by Cliff Ball
On a sunny, summer day, church and political leaders in Rome and other cities, and some artists, showed up at the location Michelangelo would launch himself in the glider. He chose a cliff overlooking the Adriatic Sea to launch the glider. Galileo helped the artist set himself up and then pushed the glider. The glider flew over the water for about five hundred feet, then Michelangelo steered it back towards land, flying over everyone’s heads. He flew for fifteen minutes and then glided in for a landing a hundred yards away from the group. Galileo jogged over to the glider, greeted Michelangelo, and said in an excitable voice, “That was wonderful! Everyone was speechless. I think you made a good impression.”
While the two men were talking, the Pope and his people walked over. The Pope interrupted their conversation, pretended he was clapping, and said, “Impressive Michelangelo, impressive. However, I think if we were meant to fly like the birds, God would have given us wings. We think you should continue painting and sculpting the projects we have asked you to work on, because this contraption is very close to making you look and sound like a heretic. Are we making ourselves clear, Michelangelo?”
“You have made yourself very clear, Your Eminence. Thank you for humoring me. I will get to work right away on all the projects you need me to work on.” said a humbled Michelangelo.
“You made the right choice, my son. Now, Galileo, do we need to tell you that all those theories about the solar system are wrong and go against doctrine? Your life would be so much easier if you confess your wrongdoing.”
“I’m not wrong about the solar system; you just don’t want your authority questioned, even though the Lutherans and Anglicans have already begun to. You can threaten me all you want, but you have no power over me, so I will not recant.” argued Galileo.
“You know, that’s too bad. For a person of your station and one who is intelligent, you seem to have no idea what kind of trouble you find yourself in,” then turning around to some of his soldiers, “take him into custody, we’ll deal with him soon,” then he turned back to Galileo, “I have the power to make your life a living hell as long as you don’t do as you’re told. So what say you?”
Galileo responded with obscenities directed towards the pope, questioning his manhood, and whether his ancestors were on the lower end of the food chain. With one look by the Pope, the soldiers took action by beating up Galileo. When the astronomer couldn’t get up from being in so much pain from being beaten, the Pope gave Galileo an incredibly hard kick to the side. The blow from the kick caused Galileo even more pain, so that he passed out from it. Michelangelo couldn’t do anything to help, especially when some priests took a lighted torch and lit the glider on fire. He wanted to stop them, but he found he had no desire to question such powerful authority or put his life in danger as Galileo had just done. Besides, he stole the glider plans from his archrival, Leonardo Da Vinci, so he had some satisfaction that if history ever recorded this event, Michelangelo would get the credit for inventing the means to fly. That is, assuming anyone ever tried again and had the approval of the powers-that-be.
Galileo was thrown into the deepest, darkest dungeon that could be found in Rome. The Pope complained, “You know Galileo, if I could, I would re-use the Coliseum and make heretics like you fight off lions and tigers or fight a gladiator to the death, like the Romans did during the days of the Empire. Unfortunately, in this day and age, everything is just too civilized. Torture can and will be used, and I’m sure the men torturing you will take great pleasure in your pain. If you don’t recant your absurd ideas, the trial will find you guilty of all sorts of crimes against church and state. Your punishment for your guilt will be execution, and not just any kind of execution; it will be the drawn and quartered kind. Do you wish to recant?”
Galileo kept his silence. The Pope responded by giving the scientist a backhanded slap, leaving a mark on Galileo’s cheek from the massive ring the Pope was wearing. The next day, the torture began.
Word reached Terra two months later that one of their premiere astronomers was in major trouble on Earth, and he could be executed at any moment. The head of the government’s science administration rushed into the President of Terra’s office and said, “Mr. President, I have some bad news. The corrupt Church authorities on Earth have captured Professor Galileo. They plan on putting him to death for espousing heretical ideas about the way the universe works. I need to ask the government for permission to extract Galileo from his impending death at the hands of this corrupt group of humans,”
The President sighed, “Earth had been nothing but trouble for us; however, I will authorize a mission for the Marines to send in their best covert ops team to extract Galileo. Provide me all the details of where Galileo is imprisoned and I will have the Marine Chief of Staff go over the details of how to get the scientist out of prison and back to Terra. Don’t worry; he will be back on Terra before we know it.”
The Terran Marine Special Forces, called Centauri Berets, were activated, given their orders, and the plans of the building that Galileo was imprisoned in. They practiced extracting Galileo on their base, and studied the plans shortly before leaving and while on their way to Earth. Their orders were to go in and extract the scientist by any means necessary, including killing humans if need be. Bring Galileo back to Terra as soon as possible.
The covert team arrived on Earth four hours later and waited until it was past midnight in Rome before making their move. Human guards were stationed at the entrance, so the covert team utilized stun grenades to put the guards out of action for a while. Two of the covert ops soldiers replaced the two guards, while the rest went inside. Everything was quiet, since the building was part of the Church administrative compound, but it could turn chaotic if someone saw the covert team and then warned others. The team made their way to the dungeon, where the stench was overwhelming, and there were groans of pain and agony coming from everywhere. The guard on duty was killed before he knew what was happening, and the Terrans began to search for where Galileo was chained. The team found Galileo ten minutes later, he was a bruised, bloody mess, and when the scientist saw the covert team, his mood brightened considerably. They released Galileo from his shackles and hustled him out of the building, while the men who were part of the demolitions team, placed explosive charges all over the building.
Once they were all a safe distance from the building, one of them pushed a button on a control to set off all the charges. The resulting explosion and its fireball shook the ground, lit up the night sky, and could be seen for miles. Everyone who was asleep was now outside, trying to put out the resulting fires with buckets of water, while trying to avoid the intense heat coming from the fires. The covert team and Galileo watched as the compound and the neighborhood near the compound catch fire and quickly spread. They watched for nearly four hours as building after building was consumed, destroying nearly half of Rome. The Terrans then left Earth and headed back to Terra.
The next afternoon, once the fires burned out, the Pope, his priests, and his Swiss military contingent, inspected the burnt-out remains of the prison Galileo was being held in. Two guards reported that they must’ve been jumped because they woke up some yards away from the building when it exploded. Everyone went down into what was left of the dungeon, but found no evidence of human remains, at least none they could identify as human. The Pope was beyond furious, since he suspected that Galileo somehow broke out, because there was just no way that these buildings could explode the way they did for no reason. He ordered a search for Galileo by any means necessary, leave no stone unturned, and have people executed if it leads to recapturing Galileo. The Pope also tried to use the opportunity to root out more subversives and heretics, and made sure the locals also were much more afraid of the Church than they ever were before. Luther, Calvin, Anabaptists, and others who were never part of the Church to begin with, were put on a most wanted list for being heretics and teaching Biblical ideas that were not Church doctrine. Nobody in Europe even attempted to go aft
er the church leaders or smaller sects, even when the Pope offered up gold from the New World; he remained furious for the next few years, losing one’s total power tends to do that. After a year of searching for Galileo, including sending soldiers to the lands of the New World, the search for the heretic was given up.
In the meantime, Galileo was recovering in a Terran hospital from all the injuries he had received at the hands of the humans. Four months after being returned to Terra, he left the hospital and was soon summoned by the Oversight of Earth Committee to explain how he ended up in such a bad situation that he needed to be rescued by the best covert ops team on Terra. Originally, the Oversight Committee also tried and convicted Terrans for interfering, but that proved to be a lot more than the Committee could handle, so the local courts conducted the trials and convictions. Once Galileo was in front of the Committee, they began grilling him, “Galileo Galilei, you are here to answer for why you tried to interfere with human development by showing one particular human how he could build and fly a glider. We think you should’ve known that the Church authorities in that part of Earth would be not too crazy about the idea of flying or even the idea of Earth revolving around their sun, since they wanted to control human advancement and wanted no one to question their set ideas of how things worked. What do you have to say for yourself?”
“I thought by just helping Michelangelo develop the glider, everyone on Earth would be able to see what they could do, and aim to keep inventing stuff like gliders, instead of letting a bunch of corrupt Church officials tell them what to do. I thought encouraging one person to question authority would set the seed for them one day being free of such overwhelming government and religious control. That is my reasoning for doing what I did, sirs.” explained the scientist.
Other Committee members, after talking a little amongst themselves, explained to Galileo, “It really isn’t up to you to push for human advancement, they have to do it on their own, even if it takes another thousand years for them to become as advanced as our civilization. As far as encouraging rebelliousness against authority in Europe, it began before you arrived there, and will continue long after you are dead; you don’t need to be the sole reason for anarchy on that planet. The government of our planet also feels that the Ragnor aren’t that big of a threat to Terra for you or anyone else to interfere in the technological advancement of humanity. You know that you may have catastrophically interfered with the natural progression of human history by helping someone who may or may not have invented gliders and the means to fly if you were not there to help? Galileo, you are hereby ordered to stay on Terra and will never be able to return to Earth. You are discouraged from ever talking about your experiences, and you shall not encourage others to follow your lead. Do you understand the gravity of your situation?”
Galileo did understand and had no problem with the Committee orders to stay on Terra and not talk to anyone about his experiences, which would only encourage more Terrans to mess up the natural progression of history on Earth. After the beating he took at the hands of those humans, he really didn’t want to go back to Earth anyway.
Chapter Five
While certain Terrans were busy with manipulating the humans of Earth, the Ragnor were still attacking starships of the various space-going species in the galaxy. The Ragnor ships were still cloaked and sometimes impossible to fight against. The Terrans had improved the cloak detector to detect a ship a few million miles from a planet, but with space phenomenon, detecting Ragnor ships was still incredibly difficult. The Ragnor also began noticing many Terran ships heading off in a direction that the Ragnor had never gone before, so with their curiosity piqued, their cloaked ships followed the Terrans to a solar system with nine planets. The Terrans stopped at the third, a planet that was mostly blue. The Ragnor also detected radio signals coming from the fourth planet, so they now knew where the Terrans had set up a planetary base. A scan of the blue planet was conducted, and the Ragnor were surprised to learn this planet had humans living on it, albeit a bit on the primitive side. Since these humans probably had no idea about aliens in general, the Ragnor decided to start conducting more experiments, figuring there would be no reprisals from these humans.
The cloaked ship entered Earth’s atmosphere and flew around the planet a few times, when the crew noticed a ship leaving a small island off the coast of the northern hemisphere. There was a small village on it, with no other noticeably sizable population centers for hundreds of miles. Since the Ragnor always conducted experiments when people were asleep, they waited until well after midnight to begin their experiments. The ship flew over the biggest house on the island, since the Ragnor figured the leader was living there, and used their beaming technology to bring the human leader aboard their ship. The human male was still deeply sleeping when he was put on the lab table to be examined. The Ragnor examined his DNA, finding nothing of particular interest, so they woke him up to interrogate him about the Terrans.
The man woke up to see a tall, bluish skinned, gangly looking, long-armed, small eyed non-human looking right at him, which frightened him beyond belief. He began praying out loud for deliverance from this evil demonic being, the Ragnor looked at each other, not understanding what this foolish human was doing, and then one spoke in a weird sounding mechanical voice, “We are the Ragnor; we are not from this planet. We gain knowledge from experimentation on others. We would like to know what you know about the Terrans.”
The man was still frightened, but had the wits about him to say, “I know not of any Terrans. Are they anything like thee?”
“Terrans are nothing like us, but they are like you. They are on your planet to get your species to help them defeat us. We have determined your species is too backward to help the Terrans. We will, however, continue our experiments on you and the others. When do you expect another ship to come with supplies?”
“This is all so confusing to me. I have no idea when England will send us more supplies; Sir Francis Drake pledged he would return though. His ships could not possibly be a match for whatever thou are, please let me go and I won’t tell a soul.”
The Ragnor response was to put the man back to sleep and experiment with his DNA and brain. They transported him back to his bed five hours later, erasing his memory of this experience. They transported others aboard and did the same thing for more than six months. Some of the inhabitants though, claimed they had nightmares of weird creatures experimenting on them, that this island was evil, and that the colonists needed to leave Roanoke Island and go to one of the neighboring islands to get away from these demons. So, the leader giving in to pressure, wrote Croatoa on a post, since that was the name of the neighboring island, and the colonists left the island. When people from England eventually come back to Roanoke, all they find is the writing on the post, but when they attempted to go to Croatoa, a storm prevented them from being able to get there. Eventually, the former residents of Roanoke left the island for the mainland and mixed with the local Native American tribes, settling in the Appalachian Mountains to hide from the rest of civilization. For centuries after that, people in the Appalachian region claimed to see blue eyed Indians with blonde hair who always avoided strangers, until the late twentieth century when DNA testing confirmed these people may have been the ancestors of the lost colony of Roanoke. The Ragnor though, decided to continue on a twisted mission to mess with the humans of Earth under the Terrans’ noses.
The Ragnor were a species that were militaristic for their entire existence. Once they learned the secrets to space travel and learned of other space-faring species in the galaxy, they turned their attention on going to war with those species. The Ragnor quickly learned how to disguise their ships and their warriors through cloaking technology and then attacked unsuspecting ships for no reason other than that they could. Ragnor scientists even managed to develop the means to cloak their entire solar system, including disguising all energy transmitted by their sun, so no one could ever find the Ragnor homeworld and take rev
enge. Eventually, they even decided, that if they could cloak themselves, then what was to stop them from abducting members of other species and then experimenting on them. The Ragnor had no reasons for conducting the experiments on other species; they did it because they felt they were superior to everyone else in the galaxy, and really, who was going to stop them? So, they started with the Talgerians and continued on from there to experiment on every species they ever encountered, eventually finding the Terrans, who were oblivious to what was going on in the galaxy when they first traveled the stars.
The Terran government publicly treated the rumored abductions and the occasional attack on their ships as a small nuisance, but everything the Terrans did indicated that the Ragnor really scared them. The Ragnor hacked into Terran computers and found that they were the reasons the Terrans had built warships and a sizable army to begin with, even going so far as to travel to their original homeworld to see if they couldn’t get help in defeating the Ragnor, but, found instead a really primitive society. The Terrans, even if they wouldn’t officially admit it to themselves, began to slowly manipulate the development of the humans on Earth, which was how the Ragnor noticed so many ships headed in a direction the Ragnor starships had never gone before.
Once arriving on Earth and conducting a few abductions, the Ragnor were delighted that these primitive, pre-technological humans blamed all these mysterious happenings on dark, evil, supernatural forces. They were responsible for what eventually would happen in Salem, Massachusetts, when people began to be accused of witchcraft for behaving in a stranger manner than usual for Puritans; those humans were actually victims of abductions and experimentations by the Ragnor. The aliens watched with some humor, as those humans who were being accused of witchcraft, were put on trial, were automatically found guilty, and given their punishment. The punishment, the Ragnor thought, was very creative for such primitives, like dunking the accused in water to see if they could survive being underwater for longer than their lungs could sustain them. Of course, all these humans who were given this punishment ended up dead, since none of them could breathe underwater. Once the Ragnor were done playing with these particular humans, they went somewhere else on Earth to cause more havoc.
