Footprints of Thunder

by James F. David

  Terry gently pushed Ellen into a sitting position, and then cleared his throat.

  “What is your name?” he said weakly. Then, in a stronger voice, he repeated himself. “It’s Kenny, isn’t it?”

  The kid raised his head, his eyes glassy. Slowly his head turned in Terry’s direction. Terry noticed the gun followed his stare. Even when Kenny was finally facing Terry, he wasn’t sure the kid was seeing him.

  “I said no talking.”

  The kid said it without conviction. Terry assumed he was as bored as the rest of them, and probably more scared.

  “It’s Kenny,” his sister answered for him. “Kenny Randall, the nut case.”

  Kenny glared at his sister, but the gun remained pointed at Terry.

  “I’m Terry, Kenny, and this is my wife, Ellen.” Terry thought about telling Kenny he was a psychologist. Sometimes troubled people found that reassuring. On the other hand, many people who have had institutional experiences harbor hostility toward psychologists. Terry decided it was too soon to mention his profession.

  “Kenny, Ellen and I are scared, and I bet you are too. Are you scared, Kenny?”

  Kenny’s eyes were still unfocused, but he seemed to be taking the whole group in. Terry wondered if he was monitoring the progress of the military man.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “What don’t you want to talk about, Kenny?”

  “About what is going to happen.”

  “Kenny, I want to understand this. What is going to happen?”

  Kenny’s eyes finally focused on Terry. His direct stare, gun in his hand, twisted Terry’s stomach into a knot.

  “I already told you. The world is going to end.”

  “How, Kenny? How will the world end?”

  “You don’t believe me. No one believes me. I tried to tell people but no one would listen. No one would believe me when I told them. I even tried to show them, but they wouldn’t see it.” Then with bitterness in his voice, and a nod toward his sister, he added, “Even my own family wouldn’t believe me.”

  Terry had worked with a number of paranoid patients before and Kenny seemed to have the symptoms. Kenny believed he had secret knowledge, something he had discovered and something only he could understand. If Kenny was paranoid then he was potentially dangerous.

  “Kenny, you haven’t told me about it yet. I promise you I will try to understand.”

  “I told you, he thinks the sky is falling,” Kenny’s sister said. Kenny’s eyes flamed and his face reddened. “You never really listened to me, did you, Jill? I never said the sky was falling. I said things were falling from the sky. There’s a difference, a big difference. I have the proof too, but you wouldn’t look at it, would you?”

  Terry saw Kenny’s anger was welling up and worried it might drive Kenny to lash out—-maybe with the gun. Terry decided to try again to deflect Kenny’s attention from his sister. He could see Kenny loved her, but her comments were provoking Kenny’s anger.

  “Kenny, I really would like to hear your story—theory.” Kenny sat silently, breathing deeply and staring at Terry. Terry, afraid that murder was going through the kid’s mind, was relieved when Kenny finally spoke.

  “All right, smart man. Can you understand why corn falls from a clear blue sky? Can you understand why people suddenly burst into flame? Can you understand how whole civilizations simply disappear? At first we couldn’t either. But then we found someone else who had seen it, someone a long time ago. Everyone thought he was crazy too. He understood it, and so did we finally. We proved it just as scientists should. We had the data, the theory, and the evidence, and still no one believed us.”

  Kenny looked lost in thought for a minute, a pained expression on his face. Then Kenny’s expression changed to profound sadness, and he spoke again.

  “I wish to God that corn had rained on someone else. Maybe I was meant to know. Maybe I stumbled into it accidentally. It doesn’t matter now, it will be over soon.”

  From a professional viewpoint, Terry saw much to explore in what Kenny had blurted out. He was emoting freely, and if this had been a therapy session Terry would have followed each lead deep into Kenny’s subconscious. Things falling from the sky, people burning, the mention of God. Were people being burned for their sins? Who were the “we” Kenny referred to and who was the person from long ago? But Kenny wasn’t a patient and certainly wouldn’t cooperate. Terry knew he had to focus on their immediate situation. Even the briefest therapy was no good here.

  “Will we burst into flame, Kenny? Is that what’s going to happen?” Terry worried that Kenny might have a can of gasoline in that yellow backpack, and when the world didn’t end he might try to simulate it.

  “No, we’re not going to burn, at least I don’t think so. Not down this far. I hope not, but I don’t…” Kenny’s sentence trailed off and his face showed confusion and then anger. “How am I supposed to know? Jeez, I’m not some sort of Einstein. I only know it’s going to happen.” Kenny glanced at his watch. “And it’s going to happen soon.”

  “Are you expecting a nuclear attack, Kenny? Is that why some people will burn?”

  “No, nothing like that… well…” Kenny’s lips pulled up briefly into a smile. “In a way it is a nuclear attack. But it is more than that, it’s natural too.”

  “A natural nuclear attack. Can you explain that, Kenny?”

  Kenny quickly lost his smile.

  “No, I can’t. I won’t. If I’m wrong you’ll all be free soon. If I’m right you’ll be thanking me. I won’t talk anymore.”

  Kenny dug into his backpack and brought out a handful of granola bars and tossed them into the group.

  “Here, eat something.”

  Slowly the group passed them around. Only the children ate.

  7. Chicken Little Summer

  Seven solar ages are referred to in Mayan manuscripts, in Buddhist sacred books, in the books of the Sibyl…. The “suns” are explained (by the sources themselves) as consecutive epochs, each of which went down in a great, general destruction.

  —Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision

  Oregon Caves

  PreQuilt: Saturday, 4:15 P.M. PST

  Kenny sat with his back to the cave entrance and his eyes fixed forward. He couldn’t bring himself to look any of them in the eye. It was too painful. He could see what they were thinking. It didn’t matter what the old lady said, or the other man. They all thought he was crazy. But I’m not crazy, he told himself over and over again. I’m not crazy! He wished the others from Dr. Piltcher’s group were here so they could back him up, testify to what they all sincerely believed. They had figured it out, but more importantly they had proved it.

  Their first real success came just after the Fourth of July. Kenny and Phat had worked every night in June on the program, trying to refine the geographical and temporal predictions, but felt trapped in a vicious cycle. If they could successfully predict even a single fall, they could refine their model, but until they predicted a fall, the imperfect model couldn’t define the location of an event. So night after night the other students and volunteers sat at picnic tables in the campgrounds, and by propane light combed through newspapers searching for the impossible. Dr. Piltcher and Dr. Coombs sat at another table, poring over the Zorastrus manuscript and other ancient texts, trying to find historical data to help shape the model. Phat and Kenny sat in Dr. Piltcher’s RV, writing and rewriting the program. Around eleven the group would drift off to bed. Mrs. Wayne usually retired just before eleven, when her spirit guide Shontel made herself available. Sometimes Ernie Powell sat with Mrs. Wayne and listened to her messages from “Shontel,” but most nights he spent a few minutes in the minivan picking up the baseball scores before retiring to his tent. On some nights Petra Zalewski and Colter Swenson took a sleeping bag and went for a walk. Petra was a student at Oregon Institute of Technology, but Colter was enrolled at Southern Oregon State College, which he’d chosen from a list of best “part
y schools” he found in Playboy. They had been strangers before joining the group. Dr. Piltcher and Dr. Coombs often debated late into the evening, long after Kenny and Phat exhausted their creative reservoirs.

  The pattern continued, day after day, week after week. Every few days Dr. Piltcher and Dr. Coombs came to Kenny and Phat and asked for a location and a date. Kenny and Phat ran the program and made the prediction. Then the group would be on the move again. They had started in South Dakota and were working roughly west while zigzagging north and south. Kenny knew if the predictions brought them to the Pacific Coast without success it would be over.

  The break came one night in a Montana campground near Glacier National Park. They spent the early part of the evening shooting off fireworks to celebrate the Fourth of July, and then settled down to comb through local newspapers for any strange events that would fit the model. It was nearly eleven that night when Petra found a story in a local weekly paper about a boy swept off a three-wheeled motorbike by a flash flood. The boy suffered a broken arm. Two peculiarities made the story stand out. First, although flash floods were common, there had been no rain to account for the flood, at least none anyone reported. The article quoted a weatherman describing it as a freak local shower. The second peculiarity was that the nearly drowned boy said the water tasted salty. After hearing the story, Dr. Piltcher finger-combed his thin white hair ten strokes before responding. Ten strokes meant he was convinced.

  “That’s one,” he said, turning to look at Dr. Coombs. “It’s coming, Doctor.”

  Dr. Coombs nodded solemnly.

  “Mr. Randall, Mr. Nyang,” Dr. Piltcher continued. “Add this to your model.”

  Kenny and Phat had taken the data and tried to fit it to the model. Failing that, they worked late into the night adjusting the model to the data. The next morning Dr. Piltcher and Dr. Coombs arrived with the expected request for the location and the time.

  “Thirteen days, plus or minus forty-eight hours,” Phat said.

  “And the location?” Dr. Piltcher asked.

  “I’ve always wanted to see Yellowstone National Park,” Kenny answered.

  They stayed three more days in the campground, making side trips to libraries, retirement homes, and newspaper offices in local towns, looking for more reports of unusual events. Petra and Mrs. Wayne were assigned to find and talk to the boy or his family about the incident. They found the boy and visited the site, but found no evidence that would help confirm the incident. No pockets of water, no fish, no aquatic vegetation. Dr. Piltcher remained certain though. “This,” he said after finger-combing his hair six times, “was an event.”

  They camped outside of Yellowstone for a few days, making side trips to libraries, newspaper offices, and museums, and then moved in early one morning to make sure they could get enough campsites together. Yellowstone was the worst possible location to experience an event. It was forested and mountainous, and while there were numerous meadows and fire-thinned sections of forest, visual identification of an event would be near impossible. Dr. Piltcher was particularly frustrated, because he felt so close to success and saw it slipping away. As the first possible date approached, Dr. Piltcher and Dr. Coombs worried over how to distribute observers. Finally they decided on high viewpoints, open meadows, and the flat open spaces that housed the tourist facilities.

  The first day of the event window Kenny was assigned to a spot near Old Faithful to watch the open areas around the lodge. Petra was assigned a trail head leading to a high meadow where she camped and watched. Mrs. Wayne drew a viewpoint overlooking the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. Phat Nyang was dropped at road’s end on Mount Washburn, with a backpack full of camping gear and enough food for a few days.

  He was the most experienced backpacker in the group and the best equipped to climb the trail toward the peak of Mount Washburn. Colter Swenson went to Roosevelt Lodge to watch the open meadows there. Ernie Powell stayed at Lake Village by Lake Yellowstone, although Dr. Piltcher admitted if it happened somewhere over the huge lake, it would be hard to spot. Dr. Coombs and Dr. Piltcher were kept in reserve to begin a rotation in the watch they might have to keep up for eight days.

  Everyone rotated from site to site, taking turns off watch to sleep and eat. Dr. Piltcher even admonished them not to go to the bathroom unless they were relieved from watch. “But don’t just watch,” he told them over and over, his hands relentlessly combing his hair. “Listen. Listen to what the tourists are saying around you. This park is full of tourists, all of them with their eyes wide open, and their camcorders running. We might not see it, but somebody must.” It was painful to see Dr. Piltcher. He finger-combed his hair incessantly and was always flushed and sweaty. He was short, overweight, and two years past retirement age, and Kenny sometimes worried that he might have a heart attack.

  Kenny had gone to Dr. Piltcher the previous November, after his experience with the com fall. Dr. Piltcher was the only one who had listened to him. Kenny had tried to interest his friends and family in what had happened, but to no avail. His father had just laughed at him. His sister was skeptical. Still, Kenny’s obsession with the corn fall grew.

  Kenny spent most evenings and weekends in bookstores looking for books on the kind of events he had experienced. He found those books, and more. He found old newspaper records of things falling from the sky, and of people disappearing. He found records of people and things bursting into flames. He found mystery after mystery; but he found no theory to link these events, let alone to explain them. Then he found the story in the newspaper about the mother and daughter in a park buried in flowers that poured from the sky. That’s when he got his idea.

  He began working on his computer, logging the events, looking for patterns, looking through the eyes of his theory for a way to explain away the mystery. Kenny wanted corn, ice, water, and fish falling from the sky to become natural and predictable. But he had little success until he met Dr. Piltcher. On a flyer tacked to a bulletin board in the Student Union building, he read that Dr. Piltcher would be giving a talk the next night on “Cataclysm and Its Role in Cultural Development.”

  Kenny had heard of Dr. Piltcher. Among the students, the professor had a kind of disreputation as a brilliant man who collected degrees like others collected coins. He wandered from university to university teaching different subjects and earning new degrees. He started at Yale as a geologist, then taught at the University of Michigan as a zoologist, and then briefly at BYU and Oregon State University as a lecturer in paleontology. Somewhere along the way he picked up degrees in computer information science and management. His interest in systems approaches to civilizations and organizations, and the climate of southern Oregon, lead him to OIT. Kenny overheard one faculty member describing Dr. Piltcher’s academic career as working down the ladder of success.

  His last eight years had been spent teaching in the systems science program at OIT. Until his retirement he had been a lackluster teacher in his field but dynamic when chasing rabbits through his lectures. All a student had to do was make a reference to some obscure subject and Dr. Piltcher would be off on the new topic, only to discover twenty or thirty minutes later he had been sidetracked. His passion for the obscure shone through as he held bored management students spellbound when he rhapsodized about the books of the Sibyl, or the annals of the kings of Tezcuco as recorded by the Native American scholar Ixtlilxochitl. Where Dr. Piltcher was dry as dust when talking about Theory Y management and the Hawthorne effect, he would speak with passion about the Buddhist sacred book Visuddhi-Magga.

  The flyer’s reference to “cataclysm” brought Kenny to the lecture hall the next night. Thirty people sat scattered in a room built to hold one hundred. Most were community residents who lived on the fringe, drifting from one New Age philosophy or religion to another. Some of the others were elderly, drawn to anything that was free and maybe interesting. There were a few students there besides Kenny. Although Kenny didn’t know Petra’s name then, he picked her pretty face,
long brown hair, and slender shape out of the stragglers who entered as the lecture began. Mrs. Wayne was there too, the opposite of Petra, plump and busty, with rounded features and bottle blond hair.

  Dr. Piltcher was introduced by Dr. Coombs, whom Kenny didn’t know. Dr. Coombs wasn’t on the faculty at OIT. A tall man, well muscled and tan, Kenny would later discover that Dr. Coombs was a local chiropractor who had taught anthropology for years at the University of Oregon but then opted out of the publish-or-perish environment of academia.

  Dr. Coombs listed Dr. Piltcher’s numerous degrees and papers, and then introduced the night’s topic by describing Dr. Piltcher’s research into ancient history and geology. The introduction ended to light applause. Kenny noticed Mrs. Wayne applauded loudest of all. At the podium, Dr. Piltcher placed a sheaf of yellow paper on it, pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket, perched them on his nose, and began.

  The lecture described how fossil remains of hippos were found in West Yorkshire, England, 1450 feet above sea level. Dr. Piltcher pointed out the absurdity of hippopotami in the northern latitudes of England, climbing the hills to their resting place so far from the sea. Dr. Piltcher argued the only reasonable explanation was geologic catastrophe. In the past when the climate of the earth was uniform from pole to equator to pole, the poles were thirty degrees warmer than they are today. Under those conditions the planet would support near-tropical growth from the equator to near the poles. In that era, Dr. Piltcher theorized, there was no tilt to the earth’s axis. But the passage of a large comet or planet changed all that. The resulting tilt cooled the poles, warmed the equator, and created the distinct seasons we experience.