Who Loves Ya, Baby?

 

 

            I was just standing there staring at Levi, who had no idea what was going on.
            “Why me?” I pleaded. “Why not one of those other people who touched you in that hangar out at the plant?”
            “That’s easy, Jenae. You have the right kind of head. You can hear us!” Us? I had only heard from Raven at this point. I wasn’t getting any happier.
            “It’s here,” I said to Levi. “That flying saucer. Raven is floating over our lawn out in front!”
            “I thought you told it to stay in Texas with those two guys?” said Levi.
            “So did I.” I had been afraid that it might not work.
            “But you can communicate with it? Right?” he asked.
            “Oh yes, it feels like talking to myself, non-verbally!” I whirled around to face him, and then to the door, for the second time.  Looking out I could just see Raven there in the dark. Patient. Still. Enigmatic. Dull orange lights just visible.
            Levi was looking out there too. I knew he believed me, but believing and knowing are two separate realities. Now, he saw for himself.
            “What’s the big warning, Raven, why are you here?” I asked aloud. Now, I had never heard Raven audibly, but I wanted Levi to know what was up. So, I tried this mode.
            A very strange thing happened then. It made sense, but it was an odd experience. Raven had no physical way of speaking, but he could do something else in its stead.
            All of the things in the room which were light enough to vibrate easily spoke for him. He made pictures on the wall, papers, even the louvers on the window vibrate with the words he projected into them. It was like the room was speaking in hushed papery tones.
            “Tonight, Jenae. Not long from now! You must attend! Your ship and its designer know that destruction is coming upon this house. You weren’t very hard to find. They knew you worked for Ellis. Then they easily located your house and waited for you to return. There is nothing you can do but leave. You must bring your people and whatever you can grab in an hour. The only way to escape is within your ship.”
            “What? How? What are you talking about Raven?” I yelled into the vibrating room while Levi stared at me in disbelief.
            “The people your photos and Dr. Brown exposed, have one blow left to exert before vanishing and that blow is coming from a ship of their making. The plan is to fire on your house during the night with all of you asleep inside. The plan is to burn it to the ground. The fire will come from the sky, and no one will understand.” The sound died away; the room stopped speaking.
            Well. We had a choice. We could say what a crazy thing, laugh and forget it and go to bed.  Or we could grab our paperwork, thumb drives, wake up the kids and climb aboard.
            What would you have done?
            We woke Mark and Laura up, had them dress for an excursion, grabbed our stuff, and went out to face Raven levitating just a bit up off of the grass. It was very quiet and dark in our section of the block. Four people on a lawn facing an improbability.
            “Here we are Raven. Please open,” I spoke audibly.
            His side opened as smoothly and quickly as an eyelid opening.
            Mark was beside himself. “Oh, wow….” he said, looking inside. A boy’s dream come true.
            Laura was just shaking her head, as if to wake up perhaps.
            Levi looked all around, at the sky, maybe searching for the danger there, then up and down our block and back toward downtown. Counting the cost maybe. His brown eyes revealed nothing.
            He shrugged and climbed inside. Mark jumped in behind him. Then Laura looked back at me, shook her head, and climbed in behind her brother. Finally, it was my turn. I had seen this movie before, but it was still hard on my sense of everyday physics to see that the inside was much bigger than the outside.
            I told the kids why we were in a “flying saucer”. I knew they wouldn’t really get it, and they didn’t. But at least Mark was happy, inspecting everything. Laura just sat down, looking all around herself.
            “Apparently, this thing, I named him Raven, can go anywhere in space or on earth at the speed of thought,” I began. “It runs on the energy hidden in the fabric of the universe.”
            “Sure,” said Laura.
            “Want a demonstration?” I asked her. “Name a place, baby!”
            She began singing, “fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars….” I had no idea where she had heard that.
            “OK,” I said, and pictured in my mind photos I had seen taken on the moon. I asked Raven to just orbit the moon for a while.
            The rough light gray, pock marked landscape rolled along below us. Raven’s elevation wasn’t very high, maybe a few hundred feet was all.
            All four of us were silent, just looking at the screen. I had heard that there were some things on the dark side that shouldn’t be there. This is true, we saw them. They looked incredibly old and unused.  I wondered how long they had stood like that.
            “Jenae, your house is gone,” Raven told me.
            “Show me,” I said.
            Raven was correct. From a position low enough to recognize landmarks we saw that very little remained of the house. It appeared to be not only burnt but blown apart somehow. The fire department was there, trying to protect nearby houses.
            “Now what,” said Levi.
            “Not sure,” I said, listening to Laura cry. I felt like crying myself. Nothing was turning out as I had thought it would. I had thought that I would go home and pick up the threads of my life and continue raising my children and maybe find a different job. It was not to be!
            One bright thought occurred to me. Maybe the guys who destroyed the house thought that they had gotten us. Maybe. Depending on how hot it burnt.
            “Raven,” I said, “will you just fly us slowly over the land? Will you take us to Luminous? I think our future might be there.”
            “Yes, Jenae,” my ship told my heart.
            So, all through the night we drifted slowly to the southeast over the American landmass to an unknown future.