Chapter Thirty-Five
ZEKE
1
It was Sunday, March 22, 1992. Ambriel and her eleven-year-old son, Ben, hovered their family-sized, intergalactic spaceship just above the vicious lightning storm that was flashing and thundering above Zeke’s rusty, corrugated-iron shed, which was located about a mile to the west of a towering, coastal escarpment, below which lay the quiet seaside hamlet of Stanwell Park. They had flown there from Rama, their home planet, which was located in the Andromeda Galaxy, some two million light years from Earth. Their mission was to pick up Zeke.
The time was a couple of hours after sunset and the only light that was lighting up the area around Zeke’s shed were the continual strobing flashes of intense, staccato lightning.
Inside the shed, Zeke was preparing himself to become the first human to gravity fly in his own, home-made, gravity sail. With him were his two, stoned companions, Adam, the dentist, and Doyle, the detective. Zeke had built the gravity sail by copying and scaling up a small gravity sail, which was left behind by Adam’s son, Ben, prior to his disappearance. Zeke had discovered that the gravity sail generated more lift the hotter it got. He had set up an elaborate method of heating his man-sized gravity sail with twentyfour, electric, bar heaters all hose-clamped to the tubing at regular intervals. These were all plugged into the mains and the sail was tethered to the concrete floor by one-foot-long lengths of seatbelt webbing. The hold-down straps were bolted into the concrete with expansion bolts.
His spaced-out companions waited for Zeke to become ready for the big experiment. His idea was to hang in a seat in the middle of the tubular contraption and have them switch on the heaters. He hoped that the gravity sail would generate enough lift to lift him off the ground to the limit of the hold-down straps. There wasn’t enough ganja on the whole planet that could suppress their excitement at knowing that they were the first people in the history of the planet to partake in a bona-fide, human, gravity-flight experiment.
As the experiment began, and Adam turned on the heaters, it was Ambriel who linked up telepathically with Zeke via the mind thread she established with him through their friendship over the years, while she was on Earth posing as Liberty, the girl from California. Unbeknownst to Zeke, she arranged to have him time chipped before she left the planet with her son, Ben. She did this because she needed to, because she had a plan. Zeke was chipped while he was asleep, by a Rama time-chip-insertion specialist, and he never knew a thing about it.
As the gravity sail heated up, Ambriel telepathically entered Zeke’s psyche. When the sail reached critical temperature, she mind-activated the time chip, which was implanted in Zeke’s body, into a one-planetary-rotation time shift.
To Adam and Doyle, it appeared as if Zeke and the gravity sail blasted vertically through the roof of the shed and disappeared off the face of the Earth. In reality, though, Zeke dematerialised from within the gravity sail a fraction of a second before the empty contraption shot through the corrugated iron roof into outer space.
Ambriel and Ben left Zeke’s place and flew north towards Byron Bay for a day of sightseeing and maybe even surfing. They intended to be back in exactly twenty-four hours’ time.
2
Zeke suddenly found himself sitting on the ground, in the dark. The grass was damp, although it wasn’t raining anymore. He couldn’t make anything out, however the place felt strangely familiar. There was not a breath of wind at ground level where he was, and as he looked up, he noticed that the stars were all out, shining with the intensity that was common at his place. He felt a mild panic take a pathetic attempt at him, but it didn’t last. After all, he was Zeke, and he had a history, a noble history. Just because his whole reality changed in a heartbeat was no basis for any sort of anxiety.
All was silent, however as his hearing adjusted, he began to hear some sounds. He heard a faint, intermittent sound of a Harley Davidson speeding along a distant highway. As he listened more intently, he heard the soft sound of a zephyr shushing through the leaves of nearby trees. He continued to sit, frozen where he was, not moving a muscle. Suddenly he realised that he loved this.
‘This is ultimate,’ he thought to himself. A grin appeared on his face. Something very strange was happening with the universe around him, but strangeness was what he craved and yearned for all his life. Strangeness was his nectar of life. He needed it like oxygen.
As his one eye, the right one, slowly adapted to the pitch black that surrounded him, he noticed the silhouettes of tall eucalypts faintly materialise out of the darkness. After a moment, he recognised their shape. They were the tall gum trees that grew in the bush behind his place. He could finally set his bearings as to his location. He realised that he was sitting in his own backyard.
Up to this point in time, he still hadn’t moved from his sitting position on the damp grass. He now knew that he was facing south. He knew that his shed should be on his right and his hut should be behind him. He turned his head to the right and noticed that his shed was gone. A low baritone chuckle broke the hushed silence of the tranquil night.
‘Bull … shit,’ he whispered to himself and then chuckled again.
He rose to his feet, turned around and saw that his hut was gone as well. He laughed out loud then stopped suddenly as he remembered,
‘Me dope, the bastards have disintegrated me dope!!!!’
He looked in the direction of the missing shed and noticed that the whole space was beginning to brighten. Something was lighting up the night. Instinctively, he looked up and spotted a light shining directly above him, like a lantern. It was lighting up his backyard with a soft light. As he observed the light, he saw it becoming larger. He thought to himself,
‘It’s either gettin bigger … or it’s comin down.’
He looked towards the space where his shed should have been and noticed, highlighted almost in a faint spotlight, his paint tin, which was full of his precious Illawarra Gold, and his hand-carved, walnut, mull bowl and pipe. He stepped over and picked them up and thought,
‘Whoever’s done this mustn’t be all bad.’
His attention returned to the light, which he estimated was only about five hundred feet above him now. It was dimming slightly as it descended. He could see that this thing wanted to come down in his back yard so he moved himself off to one side in order to give it space.
By now he realized that the soft, round light, descending, was some kind of spacecraft. He could see that it was quite large, about a hundred feet in diameter, he guessed. The craft descended to about ten feet above the ground, where it came to a silent, softly-glowing stop right in front of him. He could now tell that it was almond shaped from the side, and it appeared to him that the material it was made of, some kind of polished-silver metal, itself glowed with a soft, yellow-white phosphorescence.
Thoughts of Liberty and Ben, and the gravity sail, flashed through his mind as he experienced one of his greatest life fantasies coming true. He stood back in awe, in animated wonderment, as the elegant spacecraft levitated in a soft glow right there in front of him. He chuckled as a panel opened underneath the ship and a thin ramp, which appeared to be covered in some sort of black, grippy rubber, descended at an angle towards the ground, finally almost, but not quite, making contact with it. Young Ben was first to run down the ramp and throw himself into Zeke’s arms. He was closely followed by Ambriel. All three hugged each other and cried.
‘What happened to you guys?’ Zeke exclaimed.
‘We missed you somethin terrible. Adam misses you somethin terrible. What happened to you guys?’
Ben just cried and hugged Zeke. Ambriel tried to explain between sobs,
‘We are so, so sorry, Zeke. We never wanted it to be like this, but we had to go, we had to, we had no choice,’ she kissed Zeke’s cheek, ‘but we are back, and we’ve come back for you, our friend, we’ve come back for you.’
‘Yeah, Zeke, you’re coming with us,’ Ben cried into Zeke’s black, Led Zeppelin Tshirt.
‘Where we goin?’ Zeke asked.
Ambriel stepped back and looked Zeke squarely in the eye. Her eyes shone bright iridescent green with the typical intensity of a full telepath. With a calm voice, like that of a person who had just successfully chewed through a tough piece of leather, she replied,
‘Where aren’t we going, Zeke, where aren’t we going.’
Zeke’s heart thumped in his chest. His concern focussed on his friend.
‘What about Adam?’
Ben and Ambriel glanced at each other. Ambriel replied,
‘Adam has to wait. It’s not our idea, but it’s how it has to be. We will all be together one day in the future however, and Adam will be kept safe until then. We’ll explain everything. Come, come with us.’
Ambriel took Zeke’s left hand while Ben took his right. As they led him up the ramp into the spacecraft, Zeke asked,
‘Is it a gravity sail, Libby?’
‘Why yes, it is, Zeke,’ replied Ambriel proudly. ‘We have no fuel and there is no engine. We are in great minority, we who choose to sail. However, ours is the most ancient and purest of all forms of space travel, and we do it because of our love for it.’ After a few moments, the ship rose silently into the starry void and disappeared.
…….