by Laer Carroll
Disclaimer, Credits, Copyright
Disclaimer: This story is from an alternate universe similar to ours. This universe is imaginary and should not be taken to represent any actual persons, places, things, or events.
Credits: The Lockheed 12A Electra with the same paint job as the one flown by Amelia Earhart is from aerial photographer ERIC SALARD from Paris, France, website www.flickr.com/people/16103393@N05. It is used under Creative Commons license Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic CC BY-SA 2.0). Info about this license is at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/.
The starry sky backdrop photograph is from Pixabay.com, photographer Felix Mittermeier: pixabay.com/users/felixmittermeier-4397258/.
The Earth photograph is a public domain image created by NASA.
Copyright © 2020 by L. E. Carroll
Books by Laer Carroll
Laer Carroll
The Eons-Lost Orphan
The Orphan in Near-Space
Voyages of the Orphan
The Once-Dead Girl
The Twice-Dead Boy
The Super Olympian: Bloodhound
The Super Olympian: Mystic Warrior
Sea Monster's Revenge
Shapechanger's Birth
Shapechanger's Progress
Shapechanger's Destiny
(forthcoming)
Amy and the Star Ranger
One moment Amelia Earhart was gripping the yoke of her Lockheed Electra plane and gritting her teeth as the Pacific Ocean rose to meet her. In the next moment the plane was floating in blackness illuminated by hard pinpoints of what must be stars, and by a brightly lit blue marble which took up much of the view out her cockpit windows.
"What the blazes just happened?" said Fred Noonan in the co-pilot's seat at her side.
Amy had seen that blue marble representing Earth on the covers of Noonan's pulp-paper science fiction magazines. They featured all sorts of aliens, usually green and bug-eyed, on the covers. The covers often featured blimp-like rockets with pointed noses and swept-back fins firing death rays at each other. The monsters were often tall and kidnapped scantily clad women for, supposedly, evil purposes.
That always had seemed silly to Amy. Especially the part where the silly woman fainted dead away in the arms of the aliens. SHE would bash in its head with a spanner.
"Fred, you read those magazines. If we were in space, what should be happening right now?"
He rubbed his long chin. She stared. His face looked younger, perhaps that of a nineteen-year-old.
Amy glanced down. All she could see of herself outside of her flight coverall was her hands. They were smoother than usual, looking to be the same age as his face did. And missing a nearly invisible long scar on the web of one hand which was the legacy of a tool which had long ago slipped and gashed her hand.
"We should be weightless, floating up against our seat belts. The air should be leaking out of here from a hundred places. We'd hear the hisses and squeals from the leaks."
"And we'd be falling toward that." She nodded her head toward the planet ahead of them, or below them, depending on how you thought.
"Well, not necessarily. We might be moving away, or to the side, just so slowly we couldn't see it. Or we might be in orbit around it."
"So maybe we're in some sort of diorama."
"Yeah. But a damned good one. None of the paintings I've ever seen on magazine covers and in astronomy books were as detailed as that."
They studied THAT, the blue ball. He began pointing out features such as the Mediterranean Sea, directly below them, and others on the several coastlines they could see. He'd spent more than twenty years as a merchant mariner and navy sailor and knew them well.
"And there're the stepping stones you took when you flew to Europe," he said, pointing.
She was saved from replying by a sound coming from the radio--the radio that had quit working hours ago.
"Hello the airplane. How do you read me?" There was none of the static and the occasional whining and humming noises which usually accompanied all reception.
Noonan snatched the microphone from its clip, keyed it, and spoke into it. "We read you five by five. Who are you?"
"Call me Anna. I'm the pilot of the craft that is coming up from below you."
Far in the distance down below them a tiny pearl drifted upward into view over the nose of the Electra. As it did so it grew in size. And grew. Until it floated, still, dead ahead, looking to be the size and shape of a large weather balloon. It was a slightly translucent off-white.
"Holy Jehosaphat! It's a spaceship!"
A wave of dizziness passed over her, a mixture of burgeoning elation and left-over tightly held-in panic. She reached out and took the microphone from Noonan's lax hand. Keying it, she said, "Anna, can you explain what has happened to us? Over."
"Yes, Amelia. But let's wait till I get you inside and in more comfortable surroundings. Is that OK with you?"
Amy keyed the microphone, agreed, and slotted it back onto its clip.
"I think I know what has happened," Noonan said.
Amy said, still gazing at the incredible machine in front of her, "What?"
"We've been kidnapped by aliens."
She glanced at him. He was serious.
She looked out the window. The scene was changing. The "balloon" was swelling. Or getting closer. Or--an image from one magazine's lurid cover came to her--pulling them in, though not with a yellow-orange ray.
From the strained sound of his voice Noonan might be panicking, something he had not done despite their hours of increasing peril and finally near-certain death in the ocean. She said the first thing which came to her.
"An alien with a woman's voice, a pretty good American accent, who is very polite? Who proclaims herself a pilot?"
That last was the most reassuring quality to Amy. She had met many pilots of all shapes and sizes and sexes and even colors who nevertheless acted as if they belonged to the brotherhood--and sisterhood--of the air. She figured she could be tolerant of a pilot who was a tall green lizard-like alien with popping yellow eyes.
Noonan was silent for long moments. When he spoke the tremor had disappeared from his voice.
"They say truth is stranger than fiction. So maybe no little green men!"
"You're correct, Mr. Noonan." Anna's voice came out of the air, not the speakers on the console in front of them, Amy noticed now.
"Let me show you my image. It will blank out your outside view for a few moments."
Suddenly an image of a woman stood before them just outside the aircraft's windows, standing in front of a beige wall which looked as if it sliced off the front of the Electra.
She was dressed in a skin-tight blue coverall with a V neck and long sleeves. The immediate impression was that of a fairy-tale elf, for she had slightly slanted eyes. She also reminded Amy of those women athletes against whom she had competed in lower school and college. Smooth muscles adorned her arms and legs and she had wide hips and shoulders and a narrow waist--just the sort of physique of a distance runner who could also throw a javelin well past the world's record.
"You've no scale to judge my height, but I'm a couple of inches taller than you, Ms. Earhart, and three inches shorter than you, Mr. Noonan."
"Mizz?" Amy said.
"Oh, pardon me. It's a term which came after your time. It's a marriage-neutral female salutation.
"Now let me let you see out again. You will find it interesting."
The image vanished. The round vessel outside had grown closer. Its image grew to fill the windows, then occult them. At the same time a tiny black rectangle became visible directly in front of them. It grew larger and larger.
Then yellow light flicked on inside
the rectangle, which was now revealed to be an airplane hangar of some kind if you could judge by what it contained. This was several dozen--vehicles?--arrayed in a gigantic three-dimensional web with line upon line across and row upon row up and down and extending far back into the larger vehicle.
Or maybe several hundred-- No, several THOUSAND smaller vehicles!
The sight was stunning. So too was the sizes of the vehicles, none of whom had wings. They were small to huge, she saw as they passed into the cavern, arranged in blocks of uniform sizes. Some were so huge that smaller blocks or webs of craft were nestled between them.
"How many are there?" Amy murmured.
"Perhaps more to the point, how big is this vessel?" Noonan said.
"Just over three thousand," came Anna's voice. "And I am the size of small moon. I even sometimes masquerade as one by giving myself a suitable surface."
Amy caught strangeness. "I AM? Giving MYSELF?"
"Oh, excuse me. My mind is linked to the mother craft and to each of the craft within it. When I pilot any of them it feels as if the craft and I are one. I just decide where I want to go and how fast and GO. It's rather like being a bird and flying by instinct much of the time."
Fred Noonan had seized on another perspective. "We're in an aircraft carrier. Or, spacecraft carrier."
"Oh." Amy shrugged off that thought and focused on the thought of flying like a bird. She had flown several sorts of craft thousands of hours in several sorts of situations. Piloting had become so automatic it sometimes seemed as if she was a bird. But those moments were few and short.
She instantly wanted to be Anna's kind of pilot with a longing inside her chest so fierce that it hurt.
Meanwhile the Electra, as if on an invisible conveyer belt, had begun to travel to the right and then, in a curving turn to the left, deeper into the hangar.
"Just a minute more," came Anna's voice.
Amy and Noonan said nothing, both busy eyeing the vehicles they passed. The craft all had a smooth white exterior and an ovoid shape, though the shape of the smaller tended to be very stretched out, almost pencil thin, and the larger closer to an egg shape.
"What are they?" Noonan said so quietly it was almost a whisper.
Anna answered. "I'm sorry to say that many of them are war craft, though many are also construction vehicles which can carve and shape matter. I can dig a river or a canal within a few hours, quicker if I don't have to worry about tectonic instability. I can divert a flood or a hurricane. Build or level mountains. And much else."
Their travel was coming to an end, for up ahead a wall rose up and to each side which might extend for miles. Centered in it was another rectangle, another entrance. Standing in its center was Anna.
As they came closer the outside view changed. It seemed the aircraft was pivoting right around its center to present its port--left--side to the rectangle. The image of Anna slid to the left and disappeared. Finally the view stopped changing.
"You are home now. You can come out. I'm waiting just outside."
Amy was the first to stand and, bent over, left the pilot's cabin. In the central aisle she could stand upright and walk between the various equipment boxes and the extra fuel tanks. Nearing the door just behind the wings she had to bend again as the fuselage grew smaller and narrower. She worked the door handle and swung the door outward. Just under the bottom of the door was a grass-green floor.
She took a deep breath, carefully stepped through, and stood upright.
Her first impression was of enormous space and a cliff face a few dozen yards beyond her. In it was the rectangular entrance. To each side of the floor on which she stood, which was a walkway, a fence or balcony rose up to chest height. But she had little time to notice details, because a dozen feet ahead of her Anna had advanced onto the walkway to meet them.
"Welcome to my home, Ms. Amelia Earhart. And Mr. Fred Noonan."
Her co-pilot and navigator stepped up beside Amy.
"Thank you," said the two almost in unison.
Anna turned slightly and looked at the Electra. Amy and Fred turned also and looked back. The plane was a bit worse for wear but the silver body was only slightly dimmed. The red paint on the wings' leading edges and those of the tail was faded and chipped, however. And the main antenna on the bottom of the craft was snapped off.
"So that's why we had communication problems," Amy said.
"Looks like it," said Fred.
"It's beautiful," said Anna. She was still gazing at the plane when Amy turned back toward her.
It was indeed, thought Amy, glancing back at her plane, then she turned her face away from it. She walked up to Anna and held out her hand to shake.
"Pleased to meet you. You mentioned answers."
Anna shook it, shook Fred's as he stepped near, said "Come with me," and turned toward the entrance.
Amy and Fred caught up to her to walk side by side into and along a long corridor with a green carpet and yellow walls and ceiling. He took up station to Amy's side, opposite the alien.
"How come a youngster like you gets to pilot something this big?"
Anna looked across Amy at Fred. "First, I'm close to four centuries old. People where I come from don't age. Second, I worked up to it, taking over two hundred years to get here."
Fred made a face, which might have meant he was taking it in or was not being taken in.
"What is it you do?" said Amy, still remembering the war-craft remark.
"I'm police, somewhat like your Texas Rangers, working alone most of the time. Like the Rangers I have excellent equipment and training and skills. And a large territory to cover."
Ahead the corridor opened out into a small park with lots of green grass and small trees. There were several pretty splotches of small flower gardens. The high ceiling mimicked a blue sky with a few small white clouds. It did it so well that it was hard to believe it was not real.
Wending through the greenery were small paths paved with white shell. They followed one to a small blue swimming pool which had three white lounge chairs beside its concrete edge. The chair's feet were arranged so they faced the pool and inward of a semicircle.
Anna took the farthest and sank gracefully to rest in it. She waved at the two chairs beside her. Amy took the closest to their hostess and Fred the next.
Anna waved at the narrow tables between the chairs. A clear glass pitcher of iced water shimmered into existence on both and a set of low glasses appeared beside them. She took up one glass, poured water into it, and sipped from it.
"This is pure water. It may taste a little flat to you."
Amy imitated her, as did Fred. She took a sip while he eyed his near-filled glass cautiously.
The water was heaven to Amy. On the Electra they'd not drunken anything for hours and her mouth had been dry with fear for a long time.
"Explanations?" Amy said.
The alien said, "You were snatched from death by an automatic machine programmed to do so under certain circumstances. One of them was to get natives who could explain much to strangers to your planet. Native guides, so to speak. Then you were frozen, in a sense, while your bodies were...fixed. Made better. You'll never get sick and you'll never age. If you have children they will be the same way."
"How long ago?" said Noonan.
"This year in your calendar is 1964."
Amy set her glass down on the table with a barely audible click. The enormity of what had happened poured in upon her. More than two decades had passed while they slept.
Mother! Did she still live? And her sister and nieces. And her husband George? And all the others?
Noonan must have been as stunned but he recovered more quickly.
"Can we go back home?"
Anna was silent for long seconds, then answered him.
"You can if you take up a new identity and accept a block on your ability and willingness to talk about your rescue and all else I'm about to tell you. It's too early for Earth to learn about the wider uni
verse, particularly their place in the Human Interstellar Confederation.
"Now let me give a larger context. A much larger one, but you need to know it to make sense of matters.
"This is your world." A large black rectangle appeared a dozen feet in front of them. It seemed to hang unsupported in the air a few feet above the blue water of the pool. In it quickly appeared the un-twinkling pinpoints of light which in an earlier view Amy had taken to be stars. In it the blue ball took up much of the window.
"That is Africa directly below us, or in front of us, depending on how you want to see it. Notice that even the deep blue of the atmosphere can't totally wash out the brown waste of the Sahara desert. It's a testimony to the power of the human race that it was once green and fertile, but men's animals denuded the vegetation."
She went on to remind them that Earth was one of several planets which swung around the sun. The image drew back swiftly to show the sun in the center of the window, its brilliant yellow surface swimming with sunspots. The view paused several seconds, then even more swiftly drew back. The sun shrank to a pinpoint and other pinpoints crowded inward till it was lost in a sea of stars.
"The sun is only one of about 430 billion stars. Together they make up what you call the Milky Way galaxy."
The stars crowded together to form a cloud of dust, the dust motes mostly white but many of them all the colors of the rainbow. The cloud shrank and was joined with other clouds and the whole array shrank more and more until they became a great whirlpool of light tilted down at the nearest edge.
"This is an actual view from a tiny spaceship about the size of your fist, one with a mechanical mind piloting it. It's actually copied from the library of a race which disappeared millions of years ago. We don't know, but we believe they did not die out but evolved to a higher state of being."
Anna was silent for a time. Happily, because Amy needed that time for the incredible light show and words to settle into a comfortable state. Her mind touched and turned over all that had been presented to her and touched and turned them over again.
How many times had Anna given this same presentation to ignorant beings like themselves?
