“Of course. They always mumble about aliens.”
“Anyway, he spoke of Pickering. Claimed Pickering was his boss. He said that Pickering wanted to send him as part of a team out of the solar system to meet a quantum gate or some such thing.”
“There’s more to that than you may know. A colleague here maintains he has been to a quantum gate by way of Pickering’s space ship. Says he launched from that volcano they found. He wants to return to the volcano. Nothing else to corroborate his experience. But I do know he spent time with me in GC22.”
“I wish I could help you. The Pickering guys…they cover their tracks really well. Even if that volcano shaft did exist, it’ll be gone now that the story got out about it. I wonder just why the alleged expedition there had to quit early.”
“They claimed weather issues, but I don’t know. You don’t know any way to find Pickering, or any associate, do you?”
“The trail is cold as South Pole ice. But I’ll look into it some more.”
“I’ll be working on it too. Let me know if you learn anything more.”
“Roger that. Take care. Regards to your star traveler. I’m envious.”
“Thank you, that. Trans out.”
The next time I met with Drake he had been going over my notes, and speaking with Southby some more. “Don, you wrote something about how you were transported from our cave to the big rocket, didn’t you?”
“All I know is that it took time and lots of steps, lots of jostling, and lots of having no vision outside of the rooms I was kept in. But, yes, there was lots of flying, but I didn’t know if I was in a plane, a helicopter, or a spaceship. It went up and down and somewhere in between.”
“Interesting. Yeah, what you described sounded like a vertical takeoff long-rang jet. Southby says he’s going to look into that possibility too. I’ve never heard of one. It could be another of Pickering’s rather unique transportation modes though.”
“I hope the two of you can figure out something. Sue thinks I’m obsessed, and she doesn’t even know what I’m obsessed about. She thinks it’s all nutty UFO stuff. She doesn’t remember anything else. She thinks I disappeared for one night because I was lost in the woods.”
“It’s best if you keep it that way, Don. I know this is very frustrating to you.”
“I can’t even go to one of your meetings and tell my story?”
“Not yet. But that could change. Depends on who will be there. Where and when it will take place. I’m stuck here now myself. No one wants to get anything started right now.”
“Why? What is different about now? You said the sightings have quietened down?”
“If we start having a lot of drone sightings again, or worse, we’ll suspect that the Enlightened Ones are being less than successful. We don’t want that to happen. It’s best to keep things quiet. But I would like to locate Pickering. It will take some looking. Why don’t you and Sue take a vacation for awhile? The first frost is coming. You can leave the farm in other hands.”
“I guess you’re right. Now where do we want to go?”
“Someplace relaxing. And warm. Maybe a cruise?”
Chapter 9 – CRUISING
I thought the cruise idea would be great…until I got on the ship and it pulled out of port. What was it triggering? The launch? The being confined? The ship wasn’t really that confining.
“Just relax. Breathe deeply. Relax in the deck chair.” Sue was very concerned.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t breathe and my heart is pumping away.” I closed my eyes, but then I saw the inside of one of those damn masks or hoods. Or an oval. A big dark oval about to swallow me up. And worst of all the cloud with its visions of doom.
“I need to stay awake. And keep my eyes open. The sun is so bright, but I need to see.”
Sue led me to the ship’s clinic. They said I seemed to be having a panic attack and gave me something to help me relax.
“Have you suffered recent trauma?” they asked.
“You can’t understand. You wouldn’t believe. You don’t understand the gate.” I knew that was a strange thing to say.
“When we reach the next port, you can be flown home if this continues. But try to enjoy yourself.”
The pill helped. I relaxed, but I wanted to walk. And think. Everything that I thought I had put aside was crowding my mind. I walked to the bow. The very front of this great ship. Great ships. Will this one head into darkness too?
The sun dipped below the top of the land we were approaching. The island was dark, a silhouette against the sun’s dying rays. Energy writhing around darkness. The darkness nearing, inexorably. Even my thoughts seemed to change…the words that clanged about in my head.
“The gate remains,” a voice spoke to me from inside my head. “You are still on the other side, as indeed, you always have been and always will be. That side, and this. And the others.”
“Where are you coming from?” My lips silently formed the words. Men would think me mad. Hallucination.
“I am there, and here. You have forgotten the imperative. You must share. You must find the One. Otherwise the Others will come and with them the death and destruction you have seen.”
“But I can’t share. No one will believe me. What do you expect me to tell them? Do I just shout out ‘Repent for the end is near’?”
“The form it takes is your choice. You best know your own kind. But you must start somewhere. There must be One.”
It was overwhelming. I started crying, screaming. Standing in the very front, the bow of a giant cruise ship, I shouted out to everyone, to the wind. “The gate is here! There! That mountain! That energy! Don’t you see it? It’s here, now, it always was, we are there, we always have been, it’s our future, and past, it’s coming, going, it will swallow us…it is swallowing…eating us…we were eating us…the Captain is eating us…there’s nothing we can do…we must believe…we have to believe…it’s good to believe…and bad….”
Passengers were approaching. They were watching me. The staff was running. They were grabbing my arms. I fell to the deck. It was hard, hard, no lack of gravity here. The mountain loomed. The sky turned a deep orange-red, like fires…and blood…so much blood…. I screamed.
“Pickering! Drake! Where are you? Damn you. You brought me to hell!”
The ship’s doctor had now arrived. He gave me an injection. Waves of floating quiet swept over me. The deck felt soft. I felt softer. The darkness enveloped me, sweetly, securely. It held me. Just before I fell asleep, I whispered, “Out there, beyond Pluto….”
I was under sedation when they flew us to Orlando, not far from where our ship had departed from Port Canaveral, Florida. I wanted to go on home but instead they admitted me to a psych unit at one of the hospitals there. They told me I needed to be cared for right away. Sue could stay at a nearby hotel where patient families often stayed. The unit wasn’t locked, which made me feel better. They assured me that I could leave at will but that they didn’t recommend it. I agreed as long as I was allowed to write.
Well, they let me write, but they were nosey about it. They wanted to see what I was writing and inquired about it over and over. I told them it was just therapy for me and I wanted to keep it private. I thought they’d lock me up forever if they saw it.
Sue wanted to see it too. I told her if she didn’t remember sewing, there was no reason for her to see it.
Then there was group therapy and individual counseling, all of which seemed completely irrelevant. The drugs helped me feel better, but they made all the events I was writing about seem more and more distant and unlikely. Was I writing hallucinations and delusions, the impossible? I asked for Jim Drake to fly down, but nobody could locate him. I asked for a computer and internet.
I kept pondering the meaning of the Enlightened Ones showing me actual views of mankind’s fate, saying there was nothing we could or can do to change what was and is happening, then telling me I need to reveal these visions,
promote knowledge of them, get people, or One, to believe, and that would save humanity. Now that is completely contradictory and doesn’t make any sense. They spoke of the paradoxes of causality. I was surprised I could even remember all that, but it seemed fixed in my mind like an ear worm. Fate, belief, salvation, paradox, causality, the quantum gate. Except for the last it all sounded like religion. The Angels of the Quantum Gate, I mused. Could be the name of a book.
And that was my answer. If I wanted people to hear my story, and not immediately discount me a nut, I could turn all this writing into a book...and call it fiction. People will read fiction and believe all kinds of things because they know it’s fiction, but they want to believe it while they’re reading it. They’ll believe the unlikely, the fantastic, the totally crazy, the impossible. Move over King Arthur and Moby Dick, now there will be Angels of the Quantum Gate. Not that I thought myself that good an author. But I’d had lots of practice by now.
“So how are your writings coming along?” The doctor asked. “You still won’t share them with us?”
“Well, I’m writing a book, like a short novel. It’s just some fiction. It’s not that interesting.”
“That’s a first. You never told me you were working on a book. Is that how you are working through your issues?”
“Oh, exactly that. It’s very therapeutic. I’m putting my issues into a story. Different things symbolize different things for me. My fear of being cooped up becomes a scary rocket ship ride. Stuff like that.”
“I’d like to read it then.”
“Oh, it’s not ready to be read. It needs a lot of polishing. And it’s not finished.”
“Very well. I’m glad you’ve found a positive activity.”
“Oh it’s positive all right. Except for the scary parts. But it’s sci-fi, so it has to have scary parts.”
“I suppose so. Does it have aliens?”
“Oh yeah…it does. Pinks and Grays and Enlightened Ones…and shape-shifters.”
“Shape-shifters?”
“Well, if someone looked just like you but they weren’t you, they’d be a shape-shifter, wouldn’t they?”
“Or a twin. Do you think you are seeing someone who looks like me but isn’t?”
“Oh no, nothing like that.”
“That’s good. Otherwise we’d need to adjust your meds.”
“Right. But I really think I’m ready to go home now.”
“Let’s see…your review is coming up shortly. We’ll give you our recommendation when it’s completed.”
“Thank you, doc.”
“And thank you.”
Shortly after that, one of the nurses came to me and announced, “Don, you have a visitor. Of course your permission is needed for him to see you. His name is Dr. Pickering. Do you want to see him?”
“What? Huh? Dr. Pickering?”
“Do you know him? He says he knows you.”
“Yes, yes. I want to see him. It’s been a, uh, long time.”
“He’s waiting for you in the conference room.”
I was dumbfounded, confused, excited, puzzled, worried. Where did he come from? How did he find me? What does he want from me?
I walked into the conference room. He rose. He didn’t look the way I remembered him. I didn’t know if he had changed, or if it was just my memory.
“Mr. Henson. It’s good to see you again. I’m very sorry for the trauma all this has caused you. If we’d had any other choice…. Just be assured that I, and many others, are sorry.”
“I can’t say forget it. Since I can’t seem to forget it. Or certain parts of it. The rest seems very blurry.”
“I have no doubt. Well, I am an astrophysicist, not a psychiatrist. But I wanted to be more involved in your debriefing, and I wanted you to have all the support and therapy you needed...need. Unfortunately, those who insisted on utmost secrecy preferred that you would vanish, unrecognized, considered, well, crazy, like most UFO abductees seem to be.”
“I’m not ‘most UFO abductees’. You put me on that rocket ship, with no training. I couldn’t even get out of my spacesuit.”
“Mr. Henson, it was the Enlightened Ones, as we call them, who insisted that we send you to them. No one else. And immediately. It was very hard to reject the demands of such advanced beings, especially when they insisted that the fate of humankind would depend on their demand being met. As you certainly must have ascertained, the whole launch system, including the hideaway in the mountain and that incredible rocket, were built with other plans in mind. Still, we had nothing else that would get you where you were going and with the secrecy that this mission entailed.”
“I understand, I guess. Still, I’m going to make my story known.”
“We wish that you would not do that. We also wish you would make all your medical records known to us. We cannot force you to do that of course.”
“I do not give you permission to have my records. But my story will be known in my book.”
“I see. It is unlikely that your story will be believed. Not without some kind of evidence.”
“Which I’m sure you have destroyed. But my book will be considered fiction. People will believe fiction.”
“People will believe what they want to. Still, we may have means to obtain your records. Your non-cooperation will simply delay us.”
“Do what you have to do. It won’t be legal. But my book will be released.”
He stared, and his look suddenly changed completely.
“Damn it, man…don’t you know there are those who would have you silenced in any way possible? I am concerned for your safety. You should be too. If I can track you down, so can others.”
I had thought of this. I didn’t really believe it, but everything else had been unbelievable.
“Call this number.” He handed me a card with no other information. “If you decide to cooperate on the medical records. Or if anything happens. We truly want to help you. I’m sorry it has to be so clandestine.”
“Clandestine? The hospital knows you’ve been here.”
“I’m not the Dr. Pickering. Evidently you don’t remember as well as you think you do.”
“Oh, are you an alien like Fake Drake?”
“I am not. Call us. Goodbye for now.”
“Bye.”
He turned and walked out. I never saw him again. And I never called that number.
Chapter 10 – JACKSONVILLE
Finally, it was decided that I could go home. Sue had been back at home for some time, since I had been “incarcerated” in the psych ward for a number of weeks.
But now she was driving down from Grover to pick me up and take me back to my home and my farm. Her arrival, and our departure, were both happy and uneventful. We paid tolls for the umpteenth time in order to be free of Central Florida, and we were heading north on I-75 when I heard a news story on the radio.
The radio news reported that a flight from St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands had mysteriously disappeared from radar, accompanied by an absence of communication. An emergency had been declared and search resources were being put on the ready when the plane reappeared some 500 miles off course in the Bermuda Triangle.
“Bermuda Triangle again,” I said to Sue who looked at me quizzically. “That hasn’t happened in awhile. I don’t like the sound of it either…what it means….”
“I wish you wouldn’t be thinking of Drake stuff and the like again, not now. You’re on your way home…you need a life away from this.” Sue looked worried.
Suddenly from me, “Turn onto I-10. We need to go to Jacksonville.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?”
“That’s where the plane landed. I want to see that plane!”
Sue objected strongly, and she was driving. But I did manage to persuade her to turn onto I-10, if only to humor me for awhile.
“OK…if you insist on this new venture, you need to take over driving. I don’t know my way around Jacksonville.” I was already setting the GPS fo
r the Jacksonville airport.
I don’t know what I was thinking. No one at the airport, or at the airline’s ticket desk would tell me a thing. I couldn’t find out where the flight crew or the passengers had been taken. But there was one local broadcast truck in the parking lot. A TV camera with a big lens was trained on the plane in question, still isolated out on the tarmac. Sue went back inside while I stared at the plane.
“Can I help you?” It was the man who went with the truck; I don’t know in what capacity.
“Do you know anything about that plane?”
“What? The one that allegedly disappeared for awhile and then turned up off-course? I don’t know any more than what everyone is seeing on the news.” He swung his arm toward two monitors I could see through the truck’s door. One was the view from the camera trained on the plane. The other was normal TV for that channel.
“I haven’t seen the news since I got here. What’s up with the plane?”
“It was headed to Miami from St. Thomas. Lost communication and navigation evidently. The pilots didn’t catch it till it was well north of its intended flightpath, so they brought it into Jacksonville. I’m glad it had enough fuel to do its extra flying around out there and still come in safely. Now there will be an investigation…the usual questions…malfunction or pilot error. We have a reporter inside, but they’re not telling us a thing. Since everyone is safe, there’s not a lot of interest.”
“I see.” I didn’t know what else to say or ask, or if I should be concerned. I wished Drake would show up. I’d take real or fake. I called Sue on the cell phone, and we met at the car.
“I guess you missed the latest,” she said. “Four or five passengers are missing. They are trying to find them. I was lucky to get out of the airport before the lockdown. We’d better go before they shut down the roads too.”
Angels of the Quantum Gate Page 5
