Mesmerized by the discovery of this magic, Maria had forgotten that she had discovered the twelve alien DNA codes. Another piece of crystal was placed in the correct configuration and through the appearing dimensional door all three saw a serene planet with an ocean dotted with hundreds if not thousands of islands throughout. It looked so pastoral that Santo was compelled to comment,
“It doesn’t look like there is anything wrong with this planet.”
She had to agree and wondered why whoever once lived there would bother coming to this world.
Wanting to see more worlds she reached over and picked up another crystal. Pia removed the one in the depression and again the portal closed. When Maria inserted the other one in the appropriate indentation, this time the appearing image was from up high and looking down on a serene green pasture land with a bright yellow sun. Santo commented,
“Here is another planet that looks habitable.”
Maria agreed and wondered if her previous assumption about the others might have been in haste.
It was Pia’s sharp eyes that saw it first. She pointed to the portal image and said,
“Look down there. Look, there are two humanoids walking through the field.”
From this height it was hard to see the figures looking no larger than ants. However, Pia was correct. They were bipedal and walking away with their backs to the image. Maria’s squinting eyes noticed that they were holding hands. Santo commented,
“It looks like they are wearing something red.”
Suddenly Maria had a thought and voiced it.
“Do you suppose we are looking at this in real time?”
To Pia that sounded impossible. There was no way they could be looking at a planet on the other side of the universe and witnessing something in real time. However, both Santo and Maria knew that it was very possible. When the Great Grays were friendly to the House of the Nazarene, in the years that the Duchess Josephine de Mayer-David ruled the House, it was very possible. Kalian, the Great Gray living on Earth with the Duchess often communicated with her family across the cosmos in real image and time. What they were now looking at was not a farfetched impossibility at all.
Curious and wanting an answer, Maria looked at Santo and then over to Pia. Seeing the atmospheric diffusion instrument clipped to her belt, she pointed to it and said,
“Let me have that for a second.”
When it was handed over, Maria looked to the image and then to Pia’s great surprise, but not Santo’s, she tossed it into the doorway. All Pia could muster was an objecting, “Hey!” When it didn’t pass through the image and land on the other side of the floor, all three understood that it was more than an image. It was an active true time portal to another world.
Santo understood Maria’s voracious appetite for answers and exploration of alien worlds. He knew she was considering walking into the door sized portal to explore this world, maybe even meet those two aliens. Her great thirst for knowledge far exceeded any possible danger. It would not be the first time she hastily walked into a dimensional portal with total disregard to consequences. As she did when irrationally walking into the Sky People’s dimension and both lost two years, both painfully understood that not all dimensions operate on Earth time.
Santo knew that she was struggling with an uncontrollable urge to walk into the portal. After taking a precautionary step between her and the gate, he said,
“It looks like that gate is high in the sky. Unless you have wings, a step into that world would result in a plummet to the ground and a sure death.”
She slowly turned her gaze to him and with a blank expression nodded her disappointment of a sad truth. Pia had no understanding of what was going on between them. Turning back to the mysterious doorway, she pointed and said,
“It looks like something is happening to the image.”
Snapping back to the portal, both realized that it was wobbling. It was now like looking at an image through binoculars. The image rose up to the sky leaving the ground out of frame. Then, slowly the image lowered, this time again looking at the meadow below. It was clear that the portal was slowly lowering to the ground.
When it looked like it was possible to safely walk through the portal and onto the pasture land of another world toward the two children wearing a red jacket and walking away, in a halting manner Santo held out his hand and demanded,
“Don’t even think about it.”
Although she knew he was right, what actually stopped her was what again happened to the image in the doorway. It slowly started to rise again and only stopped when back to the original height high above the ground. The two bipedal images down in the field were still walking up a slow incline.
Chapter 22
Where ever Belle and Robert were, the darkness of night was so extreme that they may as well have been looking out into the night with closed eyes. The heat of the night was so intense that neither could sleep. While sweating from the humidity, Robert asked,
“It’s night. Why is it so hot?”
Belle had already pondered that mystery. Her only reasoning was that they were on another planet in a different dimension that did not obey Earthly dynamics or physics.
If she needed more proof of that speculation, it came when in the darkness of their shelter she turned on her flashlight. The beam was not piercing the night with the normal white light but rather, and for a reason they did not understand, it was a blue glow. Confusion was tripled when looking at the beam. It was not shinning straight out as it should have been but rather it curved sharply to the right. Robert, looking at the strange arc asked,
“How are you making it do that?”
Her only explanation was a repeat of,
“We are not in Kansas anymore.”
The only time the temperature became bearable was in the time of the exchange between night and morning. As the sun slowly rose over the horizon, tired eyes sluggishly struggled to open. For a reason not understood, the temperature dropped and it got colder. Within a very short time their sweaty bodies turned to shivering.
Still exhausted from a sleepless night, Belle started to gather her thoughts. That’s when the harsh realization of their situation came to her. She was not at home in her comfortable bed. While it slowly came to her where they were, she heard a strange clicking. It sounded like chomping teeth. Sitting next to the still sleeping Robert, with her back to the wall, she focused and when seeing what it was, screamed more in surprise than fear. Standing at her outstretched feet was one of those strange birds they saw flying overhead the day before. Its bright orange beak was chomping open and closing like a repeatedly slamming door. It had two short fat legs and looked like an evil penguin. It was staring at her as if she was breakfast. A desperate foot kicked at it and it squawked and waddled away.
Hearing the squawk, Robert opened his eyes, saw the bird disappear around the corner and asked,
“What was that?”
“I don’t know but let’s get out of here anyway.”
Robert followed her out of the derelict building and into the open and cold air. As Belle put on her red jacket, Robert asked, “Is it okay if I eat my sandwich now?”
Belle nodded and both sat on a broken piece of concrete not far from the building to eat their sandwich.
As the sun got higher, it became too cold to sit on crumbled concrete. While standing and eating her sandwich, she looked up and again saw great flocks of birds flying high overhead. The flock was so massive that for a fleeting moment, they cast a great shadow and blocked out the cold sun. Then, as if there was a leader to the flock, in response to a silent signal they all swooped down and landed in the nearby field. Belle thought there must be millions of them and she wanted a better look. Ignoring the decrepit city buildings in the distance, she indicated for Robert to follow her in the other direction.
It only took a few steps across the field when labored breathing returned as a reminder of how hard it was to move through the thick air. Although the l
andscape was covered with birds foraging for food in the tall grass and Belle and Robert were not too far from them, it still took a long time to struggle closer. When they were finally close to the flock and saw what the birds really were, both gasped in disbelief.
As Belle suspected, they were the same as the one that wanted to eat her foot for breakfast. They were large, about as high as her waist. Although surprised, she was not shocked to see that they had no feathers but were rather covered in what looked like short fine fur. The mystery of the birds, if they really were birds, was that they had no wings but rather what looked like little fins pressed hard into their sides. Robert whispered,
“How do they fly?”
That mystery was answered when the bird closest to them looked up from its grazing and saw the intruders standing there looking at them. It opened its mouth and shrieked a most horrific scream. Fearing that they were going to be attacked, both birds and human reacted to the warning. Belle and Robert turned and ran away as fast as heavy legs could carry them. At the same time, thousands of birds ran a few feet, spread their short wings and lifted high taking to the safety of the sky.
From what was perceived to be a safe distance, Belle stopped and looked back at the flock. To her amazement they were not flying by the flapping of skinny little wings but rather propelling through the dense air like a fish would swim through water. They were not flying but rather swimming. She understood that it was possible by the density of the air and lesser gravity of this strange world.
Robert suddenly had an idea.
“To get back up to the cloud, maybe we should try doing that?”
Although his comment was without merit or likelihood, she thought about it for a second but quickly dismissed as impossible. However, apparently Robert was not willing to dismiss the idea without experimenting first. As much as he tried to fly like the birds and for as comical as it looked, Robert was not able to duplicate the seemingly impossible feat. After achieving a few feet in elevation and crashing to the ground every time, the impossibility of it eventually came to him.
While he was running, jumping and floundering in failure, Belle looked up at the cloud high in the sky that they had fallen from the day before. It had to be the same one because it was the only one up there. It was then that she realized that it was not as high up as yesterday. It seemed lower this morning. She also realized that it was acting erratically. First the elongated shape seemed to turn skyward, as if looking for something in the heavens. It then turned down like it was looking for something in the field. What erased confusion and replaced it with excitement was seeing it lowering right to the ground. With hope that it would come all the way down she saw a glimmer of a chance to get back home. She yelled at Robert to quickly follow her.
She wanted to hurry across the field but it quickly became an impossible task. The air was too dense and slowing them down. Plus, the exertion was pounding at their lungs like fists hammering at their chest. They simply couldn’t go any faster than a labored slow walk. At this rate, her fear was that the cloud, or as she hoped, the dimensional portal leading home would lift up and again be out of reach. With visions of her mom and dad spurring her forward, super human determination prevailed.
With Belle in the lead and Robert only a few feet behind, they were close and it was still sinking to the ground. Suddenly Belle spotted something strange on the ground and came to a grinding halt to look at it. As she picked it up and put it in her pocket, Robert passed her and yelled,
“Hurry, it’s starting to lift again.”
With only a few feet to go, she knew they were going to make it. As young as Belle was, she had learned many survival skills from her dad. One was an adage, ‘When in a bad situation and getting out of it was starting to look good, be careful and take a second to check your back’. With those warning words screaming in her head, still struggling to run fast she looked over her shoulder and saw danger approaching fast.
The flock of birds had landed and were staring at her with a mean and hungry look. With bulging eyes and determination, they marched toward her as if a crazed army marching to an attack. Although stunned at the strange and dangerous sight, she was alert enough to understand that they were in attack formation and coming dangerously closer. Beaks were opening wide and slamming shut like a herd of scissors coming to cut her head off.
When she snapped around to the cloud, she saw Robert standing by it with one foot ready to jump in. Looking back at Belle and seeing the precarious situation he held out his hand and yelled,
“Hurry, it’s starting to lift again.”
As she turned to jump into the mist, to her horror she discovered that one leg was stuck, she couldn’t reach Robert’s outstretched hand. With a strong beak, one of the birds had managed to nip at her pant leg and was holding on tight. It wasn’t a calculated move but rather one borne out of panic and desperation. With her other foot she kicked at it as hard as she could.
When it didn’t let go and the others were only inches away, she made a desperate leap of faith, turned, grabbed Robert’s outstretched hand and both jumped into the cloud. The cloud slowly lifted high into the air with its two passengers and a strange hitchhiker still clamped tight to her pant leg.
Chapter 23
Suddenly all three heard Henrik’s loud and desperate voice through their earpieces.
“Something is happening to the computers. I’m losing the embolic connector. I think you all better get back here as fast as you can.”
There was no need to question the warning. His desperate voice made it crystal clear that something was deadly wrong. Although there was intention to return here later with a full crew of scientists, Maria made sure that her first visit was going to be rewarding. As Pia turned toward the exit, Maria snapped up all twelve DNA codes encased in the panel and shoved them into her back pack.
Looking at Santo, she pointed to what was clearly the crucial mechanism for opening the portals and snapped,
“Grab that panel.”
It was about the size of a large laptop computer but thicker and as he discovered when picking it up, much heavier. Objecting to the delay, more attuned to heed warnings, he looked to her and while dripping with sarcasm said,
“Anything else? The kitchen sink maybe?”
Not recognising the cynicism she was already on her way to the exit saying,
“No, that will do for now. Let’s go.”
Pia was the first running into the entry chamber and float through the gravity free tube. Maria wanted to go last but Santo was stronger and pushed her through. Once out of the satellite but still in the tube, he turned to close the latch. To his great surprise and adding to the danger of what was coming, the latch obeyed a mysterious command and slowly sealed on its own. Deciding to question it later, as per a plan previously discussed by Maria, he quickly reached into his back pack and pulled out a small but powerful transmitter beacon. With the help of a strong epoxy it was adhered to the haul.
Still gravity free, he pushed through the tube and into their space craft. Once inside, he was still floating as were Maria and Pia. Looking to Henrik sitting in the co-pilot seat, Santo yelled over,
“Turn the gravity field back on.”
Henrik snapped back.
“I can’t. We are quickly losing control of all the programs. Something is deleting them.”
Quick to realize the first dangerous problem, Santo put the dimensional transmitter down and quickly sealed the open port. At least now they were in a self-contained unit.
Maria quickly floated into the pilot seat and blurry fingers flew over the keys. When nothing happened she turned to Henrik and asked,
“What happened? Did you change something?”
Indignant that it might have been his fault, he was quick to proclaim his innocence.
“No, until a minute ago, all was functioning properly. I thought maybe you did something in there.”
Maria wondered if lifting the crystals out of their slots could hav
e trigged something.
Pia looked out the window and saw the connector tube was detaching from the satellite hull. She pointed and said,
“Why are we being disconnected from the satellite?”
There was a strong denial in Henrik’s excited voice.
“It’s not me.”
Maria was not able to recover any of the computer commands. Defeated, she looked to Santo and said,
“All the functions are dead. I have no control of the ship.”
Santo looked out the canopy and saw that they were drifting away from the black satellite.
He understood that no matter the direction they were drifting, unless they could regain control of the ship they were dead. Without gravity control there was no way of slowing their re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. There were no heat shields on the belly of their craft and desperately needed gravity control to slow re-entry down. When colliding with the atmosphere they would ignite faster than a lit match. If their bearing was in the opposite direction, into the depth of outer space, the end result would be just as deadly. Pia, understanding their dire situation, turned to Maria and asked,
The Noah Satellite Page 10
