Semper Fi

Patterns

2009-07-09T06:14:38Z

Everything that happens anywhere in the universe generates patterns. Those that happen here on Earth generate patterns that can be seen by us. The events of the last two decades have set off patterns which, more and more, show the ultimate extinction of all complex life on Earth -- not as a result of conservative policies, mind you, but rather actions and policies of the Left. In effect, the Left is slowly committing suicide, and taking the rest of the living world down with them. Why are they too stupid to see this?

They don't own Death

2009-07-09T05:50:33Z

With every horror that happens every day, I am glad that I am close to the end of my life, and that I've never had any offspring, who would have been corrupted, enslaved, and destroyed by the monsters who, more and more, have been taking over my country. I will make a prediction: Soon most Americans will wish they were dead, and those who have had children will wish they had not. The one mercy in all this is that the bastards who've done this to us all can't stay Death's hand, can't keep us from dying at our appointed time, whatever that may be. Once we are dead and gone, we are beyond their control. I swear they want to empty the Earth out -- but once they have, will they wonder why it is so silent, so quiet, so haunted? And will they wonder why they can no longer find anyone to find solutions to all the terrible problems that arise? And will they then have any good reason to go on living themselves? Their hubris has no bounds. And Nemesis awaits in the wings.

No We Can't.

2009-07-09T02:01:29Z

http://jasolater.livejournal.com/417888.html

jordan179 - Brushing Hair

2009-07-08T09:55:47Z

http://jordan179.livejournal.com/132479.html

This is something that should be on Tales From the Crypt. :-)

Discovery Space: Cosmic Ray: Government Hides Alien Moon Base!

2009-07-08T09:37:56Z

"Now that I've got your attention . . .
"Every time I take a stab at debunking pseudo-science topics like UFOs and the 2012-doomsday predictions, it’s like kicking a hornet’s nest, judging from some of the comments posted here.

"Some of these counterpoint arguments from readers are tied to references in clips on YouTube (truly a cesspool of idiocy) where self-styled 'experts' try and sound authoritative in front of the camera. More often than not these 'whistle-blowers' assert having special knowledge about 'government conspiracies.' They’ve discovered the Internet is a bottomless pit of people who feel powerless and suspicious of everything. Healthy skepticism is good, which means followers should not unequivocally swallow the tall tales from self-proclaimed 'insiders.'

"Occasionally I’m going to give out a Pants-on-Fire award to those individuals who make outrageous claims that are simply incredulous [sic]. Either they were duped or have endless other motives: selling books, videos, articles, going on a lecture circuit, getting onto radio shows or CNN’s Larry King Live (he loves UFO tall-tales), or simply bolstering their sense of self importance.

"My first winner of the Pants-on-Fire Award is to former Air Force Sgt. Karl Wolfe who was referenced in a comment on this site. First listen to the YouTube video from 2001 and then we’ll separate fact from fantasy: . . ." More: http://blogs.discovery.com/cosmic_ray/2009/07/journey-to-the-dark-side-of-rationality.html#more

Crescent Moon | TheSpacewriter

2009-07-08T09:30:49Z

http://thespacewriter.com/wp/2009/06/26/crescent-moon/

What if Earth never had a moon? Would we still have figured out that there were other worlds out there?

Mexico Builds Border Wall To Keep Out US Assholes

2009-07-08T06:01:01Z

The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Mexico Builds Border Wall To Keep Out US Assholes

FULL MOON

2009-07-08T05:38:24Z

From http://www.spaceweather.com/ :

Tonight's full Moon is more than just a source of light and beauty. It also makes a good footrest:

(And see http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2009/08jul09/P.Nikolakakos1.jpg?PHPSESSID=7p8hfucsh62j53qdmjjcen9qr7_

Greek photographer P.Nikolakakos took the picture from a Spartan beach on July 7th. "I used an off-the-shelf Canon 40D," he says. After the model's feet were sufficiently rested, she bent down and cradled the Moon (http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2009/08jul09/P.Nikolakakos2.jpg?PHPSESSID=7p8hfucsh62j53qdmjjcen9qr7) in her hands. "The Moon offers so many good photo-ops if only you are ready to take advantage of them."

Photographers, that sounds like a challenge. What will you do with tonight's full Moon? Submit your photos here (http://www.spaceweather.com/submissions/index.php?PHPSESSID=7p8hfucsh62j53qdmjjcen9qr7).

Laurel's Pluto Blog - Laurel Kornfeld's Planets: Adventures in Studying Astronomy

2009-07-08T05:04:31Z

http://laurele.livejournal.com/9483.html

She does a wonderful overall analysis of the modern view of the Solar System, which is very different in many ways than it was in, say, 1940-1960. I am sooooo tempted to enroll in a class on it myself, just to learn as much as I can -- there's never, ever enough. :-)

National Debt Road Trip

2009-07-08T04:15:13Z

Locomotive Vs. Tornado: Guess which wins? : Regretful Morning

2009-07-08T04:07:07Z

http://regretfulmorning.com/2009/07/locomotive-vs-tornado-guess-which-wins/

This is awesome -- after you peel yourself off the ceiling after watching this video.

Michael J. Totten: The Real Quagmire in the Middle East

2009-07-08T02:51:28Z

http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/2009/07/the-real-quagmi.php

I am so sick and tired of this shit

2009-07-07T06:07:23Z

This evening, for no apparent reason, software I've had on my computer for over a year suddenly didn't work. I got error messages saying "Error accessing registry" when I tried (my platform is Windows Vista, which is at least as bad as Windows for giving you error messages that tell you nothing useful). So I tried reinstalling it. I got the same error messages. I tried uninstalling the copy on my computer and reinstalling. Same deal. I used RegistryFix and CCleaner to clean up the registry and the disk, then rebooted, then tried reinstalling again. Same thing. I have no idea why.

But I can feel the same damned thing that is always there when anything bad happens to me sniggering away at the back of my mind over this latest bullshit. It's turned up every single time anything bad has ever happened to me, from the death of my fiance in an auto accident in 1963 to the time I was raped by a gynecologist at juvenile hall when I was 14, to, well, just about anything you could name. "Snigger-snigger-snigger." In other words, whatever it is has been responsible for all of it. Or might as well have been.

What I need is a way to haul the damned thing out in the open where I can beat it and beat it and beat it with something like a 9-iron or a crowbar, starting with crushing its kidneys and going on to wreck its skull, spine, guts, and everything else. Since it's "all in my mind" (we don't want to admit to the idea that there are such things as nasty disembodied spirits, now, do we?), that means I own it, it's part of me, and it doesn't exist anyway, which means I can do any damned thing I want to to it and can't be touched legally at all for doing so. It started in on me when I was an infant, and hasn't let up since. And won't let up until I beat it to mush, then burn the mush and throw the ashes into the sea. There has got to be some what to manifest it for that purpose, and not just psychodrama.

YouTube - Farewell to A Soldier

2009-07-06T23:08:05Z

For all those who have ever lost a loved one.

Tiny Toon Adventures - No Man's Land

2009-07-06T22:40:21Z

Come to think of it, the Swamplands are rather like that.

The Swamplands, 2047 -- from Dragon Drive

2009-07-06T22:37:06Z

Dragon Drive

Volume 3: The Drive

Book 1: To Socorro

Part 1: Dr. Zhivago

Chapter 7: The Balance

“Lieutenant, what’s that over there? Is that where the Swamplands are?” I asked, pointing out the window.

McGill, who had been about to tell Monty something about seemingly slight but ecologically important differences between some of the fauna in and around the old San Carlos Reservation from their analogs in Sonora, glanced out the window to see what I was talking about, then turned his full attention that way. “Oh, my.”

“What is it?” Monty asked him.

“I think we’re going to have some dirty weather, folks,” he said. “Better strap in tight. We’re going to have to go over that after our refueling stop in Tucson, don’t have enough time or fuel to go around, and we’re behind schedule now as it is. So we’ll land in Tucson, top off the tanks, and take off as quickly as we can, then head straight out across the Swamplands to Lordsburg, through rifts in those clouds. It’ll be rough,” he said, turning to check his own safety-harness.

Most of the way from Yuma to Tucson, we had noticed increasing numbers of vast, dirty veils, curtains, and scarves of sand drifting across the desert, twisting and rippling and dancing slow arabesques, thrown up by the ever-present winds. Though most of them never came up as far as our altitude at any time, they did frequently obscure the view of the ground, and created problems for the pilot due to the static they generated and its interference with the chopper’s instrumentation. Bile-green and baby-poop yellow and numerous other toxic hues in color, bolts of static electricity of sizes ranging from spark-sized to thousands of feet long darting among them and jumping between them and the ground, they looked demonic, alive with the frantic, febrile energy of a rabid coyote.

Now, approaching Tucson, we could see, far to the southeast, enormous blue/black/bile-green/tornado-purple thunderheads piled high in the sky, lightning flashing down and heavy, nearly black veils of rain slashing down from the clouds to the tortured earth below. Seeing the thunderheads out there, following McGill’s lead, Monty carefully checked his own harness and tightened it up as necessary, then turned to make sure I was strapped in tight, as well.

“To answer your question, Ma’am,” McGill told me, “those are indeed the Swamplands. What you’re seeing is a storm in progress above them – like firestorms, the Swamplands generate their own weather, only in their case, unlike the fires, the situation is an ongoing one. It rains virtually every day there, with big storms like that one about 2-3 times a week. We don’t call it a ‘rain forest’ for nothing.

“As it is, we’re going to have to fly over those clouds – well, actually, through openings in them, there’s no way we’ll risk these crates flying through a thunderstorm! Only damned fools would do that. But we will be daring the lightning at times, or very close to it. Otherwise we’d have to go hundreds of miles out of our way to avoid them. We don’t have the fuel for that, and on top of that, we’re supposed to have you safe in Socorro by this evening. So after we refuel in Tucson, we’ll head straight for Lordsburg, right between those thunderheads.

I was about to ask why we had to buckle in tight between here and Tucson when my question was answered by a sudden, drastic, unexpected drop in altitude of our chopper. The sensation was rather like that you feel when, having gone up a flight of stairs, expecting one more step before you reach the top, you raise your foot to take that step – and find out the hard way you are at the top as you nearly pitch forward on your face, the momentum of your ascent overbalancing you, unopposed by tread-and-riser.

“Whoa!” Monty said.

“Shit,” hissed McGill. “Goddamn showoff – soon as we land, I’ll go ask the Colonel what the hell’s going on,” he told us in a low voice.
It wasn’t long until we were down in Tucson, the rotors feathering, coming to a halt. Angrily McGill released the latch on his harness and stood up. “Wait here – I’ll go talk to him,” McGill told us. “Sorry about that.”

“Rough landin’,” Monty commented after McGill was gone. “I’m gonna have a talk with Steve soon as we see him in Socorro, Baby-Girl – that hotshot Colonel pilotin’ this bird had damned well better have a good excuse for that landin’,” he said.

A few minutes later McGill was back, looking stricken, his face drained of color.

“What’s the matter, son?” Monty asked him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

“I . . . the Colonel had a heart-attack. The base here is sending an ambulance to pick him up. Lt. Colonel Martin, our copilot, will take us the rest of the way to Socorro. They’re going to lend us a NAAF pilot to come along as substitute pilot.”

“Heart-attack – dear God, that was awfully sudden!” Monty said, looking as shaken as I felt. “He wasn’t that old, by any means!”

“I – they’ll doubtless find out what’s going on with him once they get him in the base hospital,” McGill told us. “I’ll be right back – need to help the ambulance crew aboard,” he said, heading for the big back doors.

It wasn’t long until the ambulance had come and taken the unconscious Colonel away. Even before it had left for the base hospital, a cheerful-seeming young NAAF officer came aboard. “Hi, I’m your new pilot!” he told us. “Lt. Colonel Daniel Goldwater,” he said, extending his hand to us.

“Good to meet you,” Monty said, taking his hand. “ ‘Goldwater’ . . . Hmm, you wouldn’t be a relative of Senator Goldwater, would you?”

“You remember him, sir?” the officer said, looking even more cheerful.

“Not remember him, exactly, but my Daddy told me all about him. A great man – if he’d gotten elected back in 1960 instead o’ Johnson, this country’d have been a lot better off. Might never’ve had to go through the War at all.”

“The Senator was my great-great-great grandfather,” the other man said. “It’s good to meet people who know about him. I hope I live up to him.”

“You will, son, you will,” Monty assured him. “—So, how’s our pilot, I mean the one they just took off?”

“Don’t know, sir, but I’ll check on that by radio after we get back in the air. It’ll take just a few minutes to finish refueling your bird, here, and then we’ll get going. I’m so sorry you had to go through this –”

“Aw, don’t worry about us – the copilot seems to have taken over the controls smooth as you could ask under these circumstances,” Monty told him, looking over at McGill, who was in the process of resuming his seat next to Monty, buckling himself in once again, for confirmation. When McGill nodded tightly, still looking very shaken up, Monty turned back to our new pilot, saying, “Anyways, I’m glad they could spare you. Thanks for steppin’ in like that on such short notice.”

“That’s quite all right, sir, glad to be able to help. Now, I’ll get up front and see how the refueling is going. I’ll let you know before we’re due to take off again so you won’t have any rude surprises,” he said, tipping his cap to us and, turning about, heading up the aisle to the cockpit.

“Can’t say we ain’t getting the VIP treatment, Baby-Girl,” Monty told me, chuckling. “Ol’ Senator Goldwater’s umpty-great grandson! Ain’t that somethin’!”

“Is that a note of sarcasm I detect there, sweetheart?” I murmured, just for him.

“I’m not sure, myself,” he told me, shaking his head. “Depends on whether he was just Hobson’s choice or they’re goin’ overboard to make Brownie points with Steve by puttin’ this guy in as pilot.”

“Oh, he’ll be fine, I’m sure,” McGill said. He looked nervous – and why not? Our former pilot had damned near crashed us during his heart-attack. Was this a jinxed mission? “Once we get in the air, I’ll go up there and see what he’s got on the Colonel. I never did much like Stan, Colonel Miller, that is, but the poor bastard shouldn’t have had a heart-attack now! He’s just too young for it. And he’s got a family, too. It’s a shame,” he said, shaking his head. “He was a good pilot, though, and I don’t know anything about this Goldwater. Hope he measures up, because as far as I know, we’re still on the same schedule, so we’ll have to go straight over the Swamplands to Lordsburg, and that means playing tag with those thunderheads out there for a while.”

“He should be pretty good,” Monty said. “I don’t think New Arizona wants to get Steve Yeats mad at ’em for crashin’ this bird with Steve’s friends aboard – not to mention that we’re the CEO of L.A. County an’ his wife! That’d be a little more grief than anybody needs, knowin’ Steve.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re right, sir,” McGill said. “It’s just – I sure didn’t expect this.”

“Who does?”

“Can you hear me?” The cabin intercom had suddenly crackled to life. It was Lt. Colonel Goldwater.

“Yes, sir,” McGill said, straightening up in his seat, speaking a little more loudly so that his response would be clear over the intercom.

“Good,” said Goldwater. “All right, we’re about to take off. Everybody strapped down for takeoff?”

“Roger, sir,” McGill told him. “What’s our itinerary from here, sir?”

“We’re heading to Lordsburg to refuel, and then straight on to Socorro, as quickly as we can get there, to make up for time lost here due to Colonel Miller’s, ah, problem. Okay, kids, hang on, here we go . . .”

And then we were airborne, and heading east, the motion of our chopper smooth as waxed glass.

“Well, he certainly seems to know what he’s doin’ flyin’ this chopper,” Monty said.
McGill gave him a sour look. Monty questioned him with his eyebrows. “Colonel Miller’s . . . problem. Kids,” McGill mouthed, shaking his head.

“Oh, he’s prob’ly just tryin’ to put the best face on things,” Monty said, chuckling. “I – Batrix! What’s the matter, darlin’? You’re shakin’ like a leaf!” Monty said, turning to me, alarm lining his face.

“I – I’ll be fine. Just shook up a little by the, by what happened to Colonel Miller.”

“That was a close shave,” McGill said. “If Eli – er, Lt. Colonel Stanton hadn’t moved as fast as he did . . . Well, he did, so everything’s all right. But I never want to go through that again as long as I live.” Oddly, his confirmation of my own fears was reassuring – I always feel like an idiot when I get wrought up over something that everyone else seems to take in stride. Knowing one of the experts backed me up somehow braced me, making me feel more solidly grounded. Don’t ask me why – I just work here. You’ll have to talk to God about the whys and wherefores of human psychology – and She usually isn’t talking.

“It was a heart-attack, you say?” Monty asked him.

“Yeah. Here,” McGill said, unbuckling his harness. “I said I’d go forward and find out whatever I could about it once we were airborne. Be right back . . .” So saying, he got to his feet and headed toward the cockpit.

A few minutes later he took his seat next to Monty again, and, as he strapped himself in, he told us, “Lt. Colonel Goldwater says the medics back in Tucson believe that the Colonel is suffering from a chronic viral infection of the sort that generally attacks the pericardium and the mitral valve of the heart. It’s a sort of biomedical time-bomb. It can go on for up to several years, establishing itself all over the heart but seemingly not doing significant damage, but in fact weakening the tissues everywhere it grows. Then, one day, the cumulative toll on the heart proves to be too much, usually during a period of elevated blood pressure of the sort stress and worry bring on – like piloting this bird, say. You worry all the way to your destination if you’ll make it there, and then you worry all the way back – just too many things that could go wrong if you relax your attention for even a few seconds.

“And when that happens, the progression of the virus and the stress of the moment can combine to bring about catastrophic failure of critical areas of the heart. Say, the mitral valve blows and the heart fills up with stale blood, blood that was supposed to be flowing out of it and not back in. Or the pericardium, the membrane around the heart, develops a tear and bacteria from the body-cavity get in and do horrible things to the heart the way intestinal bacteria can going the other way, into the body cavity, causing peritonitis. They can even attack the muscles of the heart and cause heart-failure.”

“Hmm . . . sounds like one o’ them pathogens that got turned loose on the East Coast when the asteroid hit in ‘22.”

“It probably is, or a variant of one of them. Viruses that affect the heart have been around for a long, long time, but this one is particularly nasty, because it does almost all the damage in such a way that it’s almost impossible to detect without actually opening up the chest and taking a look at the heart. Even a cardiovascular endoscopy might not see it. It takes a bit here, another bit there, little pieces of the heart that eventually finally add up to a disaster, but until then doesn’t let you know it’s there. Until then, it all seems to be working fine, heartbeat normal, even normal EKGs. Which is what you want if your aim is to weaken an enemy in ways he can’t detect until it’s too late and he collapses all at once – and want to weaken him rather than kill him, so that you’ll tie up men and equipment and hospital beds and supplies taking care of him, so they can’t do their work elsewhere.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. We used to do the same thing when we was out on patrol and ran into some o’ the enemy – shoot to wound, not to kill, so the ones we missed would have to tend to the ones we shot, which they wouldn’t’ve had to do if we’d killed ’em, instead. Then they’d’ve come after us without stoppin’ but usually, if we wounded a bunch of ‘em, the rest’d stay to help the wounded ones, an’ that’d slow ‘em down enough that we’d get away clean.”

“Yeah, same deal. Anyway, what happened to the Colonel is that his mitral valve suddenly started to give, and the blood that was supposed to get a one-way trip only from the atrium to the ventricle started to turn around and go back where it came from, and he collapsed because of what that did to him. It was very sudden. The Colonel just keeled over with no warning, just as we were beginning to descend to Tucson. If Martin, there, the copilot, hadn’t moved as fast as he did . . .”

“I get the picture,” Monty told him. “So, what’s his prognosis? Any hope?”

“Actually, yes,” McGill told him, suddenly sounding a good deal happier. “They got him into the base hospital’s cardiac unit just in time, they said. He should be up and around in a few days, according to the head doctor there, and then they’ll ship him to the Berkeley Clinics as soon as transport becomes available. I hear the Clinics can work miracles – somebody thinks they may be able to repair the damage so well you could never tell it happened, and clean the virus up completely so it’ll never happen again. A good thing for the Colonel if they can – flying a desk for the rest of his life would drive him crazy and probably kill him early, make him commit suicide, if nothing else. He’s an active man, the sort that hates being inactive for any length of time, and if Berkeley can do what the docs think they can, it’ll be a blessing for him. Not to mention his family – I’m sure they’d rather have him around, in the best shape possible, as long as they can.”
“Berkeley sure does some wondrous things, I hear,” Monty told him. “Me an’ the wife’ve been gettin’ treatments from ’em for all sorts o’ things over the years – not so much for Batrix, because her body don’t like most o’ the treatments, an’ seems to be able to do a lot of it for itself, as it is, but what we’ve had done is wonderful. Especially compared to doctorin’ afore the War – so much o’ the time, that was just the pits, especially with HMOs an’ their freakin’ attitudes.

“—Anyways, you say we’re goin’ straight over the Swamplands to Lordsburg? Through that?” Monty asked him, jerking a thumb in the direction of the window through which those frighteningly powerful thunderclouds over the Swamplands could be seen. We hadn’t gotten close enough to them yet to have a panoramic view – and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that, anyway, as black and scary and full of lightning as those great cumulus anvils looked – but what we could see from here was very, very impressive. – I lied. Let’s try that again: it quite frankly scared the holy living shit out of me!

McGill’s explanation of what the pilot would have to do to get us from here to there – there being Lordsburg – didn’t do much to reassure me, either.
Since a helicopter can’t fly over a thunderhead – the tops of those great cumulus anvils are far above the maximum altitude possible for any chopper – the pilot would therefore take us up to about 5,000-6,000 feet, then go through the spaces between the thunderclouds. Storms aren’t wall-to-wall over rainforests, except in monsoon seasons, which didn’t apply in this case, anyway. So there would be extensive breaks in those clouds, and we would take advantage of them, flying at mid-altitude as we sought out the holes and flew through those. We were running behind schedule as it was, and this would put us even more behind. We’d have a lot fewer problems with our schedule if we could go straight over the Swamplands without all that maneuvering and detouring, but only an idiot would try to fly through a storm like that. Better late than never – and, after taking a good look at those thunderclouds we were approaching, that was something I could really get into.
Once more, with McGill’s help, we checked our harnesses to make sure we were strapped in tight. Then we were coming up fast on the storm, approaching a vast rift between two gigantic thunderclouds, a vast, smooth blue highway between huge black banks of demon-haunted chaos. Moments later we had slipped into that opening in the clouds and were heading on in toward the very heart of the Swamplands.

For what seemed like eternity but was probably only an hour and a half or so, we and our two gunship escorts rode the winds like the Big Kahuna and two of His retainers surfing the Adriatic between Scylla and Charybdis during one of Poseidon’s nastier storms. I think the only reason I didn’t wet myself on at least three occasions during that wild ride was that in my terror I temporarily forgot how to pee.

As we flew into and through the maelström, light from the westering Sun illuminated the clouds towering to the heavens on our right, tinting them gold and rose and salmon and cerise wherever it touched them, leaving their unlit bellies and the valleys in their sides black as Hades’ own basements, save for flashing lightning strikes below and all around us. Hell on our left and below, heaven on our right and above, we sped on and on through one gap in the clouds after another, praying, as we entered each one, that it would connect to another before we got to a dead-end and had to risk flying through the clouds themselves or else turn around and go back to Tucson and try again when the storm was over with. Somehow our luck held all the way through to the easternmost edge of the Swamplands and Lordsburg, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been as frightened as I was, but all the way through that passage I knew I was in the belly of some terrifyingly vast, purple-black beast armed with teeth made of lightning and claws made of erratic, deadly winds that buffeted us from all sides and at times nearly succeeded in wrecking us.

For a while during that time my ego simply checked out, and while it did I was no more than a pure receptacle for taking in the terror and the glory of the chaos all around and below us and the pure blue void above. Perhaps that’s why I have almost eidetic recall for that wild ride over the Swamplands, the details as clear and sharp even now as if I had photographed them all and was sitting here at my computer desk, looking them over one by one. Among other things, I remember seeing, far below, fox-fire glimmering over a vast sheet of night, fireflies above water, perhaps, or maybe just swamp gas. I remember looking upward at that blue, blue late-afternoon sky and thinking, So this is what Andy and Liz mean by Void – a so-what idea now, but at the time that thought seemed to contain all the wisdom of the universe and eternity. I remember seeing lightning dancing, dancing, dancing through the clouds on either hand, so close it seemed that all I’d have to do is stretch my arm out through the window and I’d be able to touch those clouds, gather that lightning up in my fist like a spray of brilliant hellflowers. I remember arrowing through those abysses of cloud, radiant with unearthly beauty where they weren’t dark as the Devil’s heart and crawling with thunderbolts, thinking, I wonder if it would seem like this to an explorer descending into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.

All the while, the chopper shook as if some cosmic bulldog had taken it by the scruff and was trying to kill it by breaking its neck. And ours. If not for our safety harnesses, surely Monty, McGill, and I would’ve been pureed by it, bounced off the cabin walls until we were no more than soup. And all around us the lightning danced and crashed, each terrifying roll of thunder following right on the heels of the previous one, short, filling the cabin with one blinding white-gold and Cerenkov blue and blazing lavender-white glory after another, over and over and over. The noise-level – visual as well as auditory – was so high that there was no point in trying to talk over it, or even to attempt lip-reading. And yet I could still see beyond those blasting flares of light filling the cabin out the windows, into the spaces beyond, seeing the clouds on all sides and the sky above us and glimpses of the land below. How, I have no idea. I shouldn’t have been able to, not with those blinding bolts of lightning exploding on either side of us, yet I did. At the time, of course, I didn’t question it at all, just accepted it as one more impossible aspect of our impossible passage through the great beating heart of the storm, slipping between its vast cells like a dragonfly navigating through the tangled verdure over and around a pond in the woods.

The lightning probably wasn’t nearly as close as it looked out the windows – if it had been, we’d have been struck for sure, and I wouldn’t be telling this tale. Those pathways between the clouds were huge, innumerable grand canyons cleaving the vast massif of cloud-deck like arms of an Earthly, atmospheric Valles Marineris, and our pilot was careful to keep to the middle of them, as far from the clouds as possible, throughout our passage. We were likely a great deal safer than it seemed – but it sure as hell didn’t seem that way!
At one point I looked up at Monty, who was sitting straight up in his seat, peering avidly out the window, wearing an expression of pure rapture, his beautiful mouth curved in a blissful smile as he watched the cloud-packs pass by us, not at all shaken by the crashes of thunder or glare of lightning around us. On his other side McGill, who was leaning back against the wall behind his seat, was watching the spectacle with half-lidded eyes. For a moment I couldn’t place his expression, which was tantalizingly familiar – then I had it: in spite of his gender, he looked like St. Teresa d’Avila in the throes of the ecstatic consummation of her visitation by the angel. Ecstasy, rapture – both men regarded the savage glory through which we were passing like Medieval monks vouchsafed a place at the feet of the Throne of the Most High, caught up in a joy so great that nothing, not even being simultaneously torn to pieces by red-hot pincers, could have made the slightest impression on it.

I suppose if anyone had been watching me, I might have been wearing an expression much like theirs. On reflection, what I felt throughout that flight was not so much terror as it was a quasi-religious awe, a vast gratitude that mere I had been granted this view into the hot, beating heart of Creation itself. The terror was there, too, of course, but it only framed the wonder, the exaltation the way black velvet sets off a perfect diamond set upon it, or empty outer space sets off the stars. If there was such a thing as a visual thousand-year orgasm, I was having it then, lifted completely out of myself by the horrifying wonder and power and beauty of the experience, the horror and the terror only a spice enhancing the already unbearably orgasmic rapture inspired by our surroundings.
– Then suddenly, we were flying free, nothing but empty sky on both sides, all that vast cloud-deck and its demons of lightning behind us, leveling out, no longer rattled around inside our chopper like peas in a gourd-rattle held by a nervous baby. The radiant late-afternoon sunlight bathed us and our escorts in a warm, golden glow like a benison, warming the cabin, whose heat had been drained away by the icy air of the storm through which we had passed.

“Made it,” McGill told us, his jaw clenched as if to hold back a scream – whether of terror or post coitus letdown I couldn’t be sure. “Lordsburg should be dead ahead.”
Indeed, we were already beginning our descent, gliding down in a long, elegant arc, a gorgeous aerodynamic cadenza to the intricate passage our pilot had just danced with the Swamplands storm. Before us, glimmering in the lengthening shadows over the land below, were the lights of a good-sized city.

“Is that –?” I began.

“Yes,” McGill told me. “Lordsburg. It’s about three miles from the edges of the Swamplands thereabouts.”

“Aren’t they worried about the Swamplands comin’ too far out their way?” Monty asked.

“They’ve got this wall – well, you’ll see. It’s really a series of dikes, staggered back from one another like a terraced field. They’re high enough up that they’re not worried about the water from the Swamplands coming up that far, but there are the things that live in the Swamplands that could cause trouble for them. So they built that system of dikes and ditches between them and the swamps. Anything that tries to come into the city from the Swamplands faces some pretty savage obstacles – ever read a story called ‘Leningen and the Ants’?”

“Oh, yeah!” Monty said, grinning. “One o’ my all-time favorites. First read it back when I was about seven – Daddy had it in a book in his library.”

“Well, they’ve built a system like that, only with some added improvements the author of that story didn’t think of. There are four ditches, each one higher up the hill than the last. Five rows of dikes, with ditches between each pair of them. All four ditches are flooded with water, and then a mixture of oil, gasoline, and napalm is added, which spreads out across the top of the water to form a skin of the stuff from one side of the moat to the other. Something coming out of the Swamplands headed for the town has to get into the water, where it either swims or drowns. If it drowns, no problem. If doesn’t drown, what they do is run a current through the water via electrodes set into the concrete lining the ditch. The water they fill the ditch with is brackish, salty enough to easily carry a current. Not only does the juice do a number on whatever it is in the water, it sets off the petroleum products and the white phosphorus in the napalm floating on top. If whatever it is tries to come out, it gets cooked by the stuff blazing away on top of the water; otherwise it gets cooked by the current. And if it somehow survives that sort of treatment going through all four of those ditches to get up to the top of the cliff, there’s a fence at the very top that carries about 50,000 volts of electricity with an amperage you don’t even want to think about. Between that and the fact that the city is now about 200 feet higher than the Swamplands, they don’t have that much to worry about. And if some flying creatures try getting into it from the air, they’ve got snipers on rotating shifts, twenty-four hours a day, who’ll bring them in no time. Even if there are too many for the snipers, the guys manning the machine-guns in towers spotted around the place can knock them out of the air in no time flat.”

“Lord, I guess! So, is the city open on the other three sides?”

“No, only toward the front and, of course, from the air, the way we’re coming in. The front, of course, being the eastern side, away from the Swamplands. They’ve got a railroad spur coming in from the east from the big rail nexus in Socorro itself – being the smart man he is, Baron Pushkin’s taking the rails around the Swamplands, to the north and south, rather than trying to go through, so the spur doesn’t go beyond the east side of Lordsburg. But rail traffic can get in and out on rails that connect with the lines going north and south, and they do a lot of business with other areas that way.”

“What sort of people live there? I reckon we won’t have any time to sight-see, not this time, anyways. What do you know about the place?” Monty asked him.

“It’s mostly occupied by vigorous people in their middle years, say, from around 18-19 years of age to maybe 45-50, who are trying to make enough money there to retire to somewhere else. It’s not a place you want to have children in, or where you’d want to live when you got old – in spite of everything, every once in a while something from the Swamplands or even from the deserts to the north, south, and east does somehow make it through the city’s defenses and carries off a dog, or even a human being, and generally messes things up big-time until they can put it down.

“Plus, there are allergens from the Swamplands – pollen and spores and that sort of thing blow in from the west from time to time, and if you don’t have a climate-controlled place that can screen them out to take refuge in at such times, you can become quite ill or even die from them. Most of the plants and fungi and so on growing in the swamplands are all post-War varieties or descendants of constructs created before the War, and our bodies haven’t had much time to develop ways to deal with their proteins. You eat some of the stuff that comes out of the Swamplands and you’ll die of it, even things that aren’t toxic in the way we normally use the word. The proteins in them are just too alien for our bodies to cope with.

“But it’s worth it to the people living there, because almost all of them are researchers or work for industries that make products out of Swamplands lifeforms that are in high demand and can’t be made from anything else, like some pharmaceuticals, and even furniture and that sort of thing. There are pet store chains that pay top dollar for some of the smaller Swamplands fauna, especially exotic fish and birds, and nurseries all over the West that will pay through the nose for orchid species and certain other plants that grow in there. There’s also a company up in Oregon – Morels and Puffballs and Amanitas, Oh My! Heard of it?”

“No. Sounds like somethin’ I need to check out,” Monty said, chuckling.

“You should. They grow fungi for export, some for pharmaceuticals, some for connoisseurs, both gourmets and heads. The heads mostly want psilocybin ’shrooms or one of the amanitas, but the company is always on the lookout for exotic fungi that give different and unusual highs.

“Anyway, they’re always interested in anything new coming out of the Swamplands, and there are certain fungi that only grow there – for some reason, nobody can recreate the conditions they like anywhere else, so they have to be harvested there. MPAOM is a steady customer of companies in Lordsburg that specialize in harvesting Swamplands fungi, and they pay very well – otherwise the people in Lordsburg wouldn’t take the risks involved in going in there for the product.”

“Sounds like people in Lordsburg are doin’ a land-office bidness that way!”

“Yeah. It’s risky, but worth it – so much of what comes out of there is utterly unique. You can’t get it anywhere else, and if you don’t want to take the risks involved in going in there to get what you want yourself, or you’re too far away to do so, then you have to go through the Lordsburg companies that specialize in that sort of thing. Those companies can pretty much write their own ticket as far as prices go. Even blue-collar workers make enough there in 10-15 years that they can afford to retire to someplace like Northern New Cal or Oregon or Idaho, and live there in comfort for the rest of their lives.

“For example, there’s one product that comes out of there, that you don’t find anywhere else and can’t be synthesized, called a Happy Cloak, that goes for about $15,000 in gold, retail. Heard of it?”

Giving a sharp whistle, Monty said, “Good God, what is it? Can’t be just a piece of clothing – nobody pays that much for clothing! Not since Paris went up in a fireball, anyway, an’ took all those fashion designers with it.”

“No,” said McGill, wearing a strange little smile. “It’s an organism, a very strange one. Or rather, a whole family of them – the Happy Cloak is just a couple of species of one genus of the things. Up close, spread out on the ground, they all look like big, more or less circular ponchos, some split partway through, some not, with a radius of anywhere from two inches to five feet or more, depending on their preferred prey. The ones that are harvested and sold commercially have the split in them – you can actually wear them like ponchos, or cloaks.

“In the wild, when you approach one of them, it will start producing a wild display of colors of every description, flashing them on and off across its entire exposed surface, making gorgeous psychedelic patterns. The closer you get, the faster it does this, the wilder the displays get, the more quickly each pattern is replaced by the next one. At the same time, the organism begins emitting the most heavenly perfumes and, at the same time, starts to produce music. The music isn’t anything specific, just runs of notes, chord-series, that sort of thing, but according to those who have encountered the things and lived to tell about it, there is nevertheless an underlying structure to the music that grabs you by the soul and holds on. Haunting. Like wind sounds sometimes, or the sea, only much more musical.”

“Chaotic. Plenty o’ room to find anythin’ you want in it,” Monty mused.

“Yeah! That sounds right. Not impossible for a wild thing like that, as long as it had the apparatus to produce sounds – and it does. It’s actually built rather like a very fleshy bladder partly filled with air, anywhere from an inch or less thick up to about two feet through along the vertical section in the biggest ones. The air-chamber isn’t just one big cavity. It’s filled with intricately folded and contoured flesh, sort of like the inside of your sinuses crossed with lung tissue. By expanding and contracting different parts of itself, it can produce a whole range of sounds, sort of like a living synthesizer.”

“Or bagpipe.”

“Yes, except that it can produce a huge range of sounds that a bagpipe can’t. I’m not sure how, but I have heard recordings taken right in the Swamplands of the organism doing its thing, and somehow it manages to mimic stringed instruments such as pianos, harmoniums, triangles, and harpsichords, as well as wind instruments such as violas and piccolos.”

“Anybody written up a dissection of one o’ the things?” Monty asked him, clearly intrigued.

“I believe so – I think in Southwest Journal of Xenobiology. Not sure of which issue, but I think I saw a paper somebody did on it there about a year and a half ago.

“Anyway, the music, the perfumes, and the light-show are, of course, designed to lure prey. Each genus of the things – there are about twenty, would you believe – has its own preferred prey. One eats nothing but insects, another prefers small mammals, another likes birds. The so-called Happy Cloak likes mammalian prey – but unlike some of its relatives, rather than physically consuming its prey, it feeds on its biological energy, keeping it alive for as long as possible while it feeds, jazzing the animal’s system with various stimuli all the while to keep its prey quiet and cooperative.

“Which is what makes it so valuable: when worn by a human being, the Happy Cloak starts emitting stimuli, including skin-contact stimuli, that apparently induce inconceivable pleasure in whoever’s wearing it. Or, at least, so the reports say. Those wearing Happy Cloaks have serious trouble describing the way it makes them feel, other than calling it ‘orgasmic’ or ‘cosmic pleasure’ or ‘intimations of the divine,’ that sort of thing. That may be because the experience is so overwhelming that words fail when it comes to describing it. Or it could be that if you wear it too much, too long, it causes progressive brain-damage, and your ability to communicate complex ideas in a satisfactory way goes down the tubes in proportion to the neurological damage.

“They aren’t sure what kingdom the things belong to – it has aspects of plants, animals, fungi, and some protoctists, all in the same creature, and I understand they’re thinking of either creating a new kingdom or domain just for it, or else creating a domain just for constructs, regardless of their actual ancestry, and lumping it together with those.”

“It is a construct, then.”

“Yep. Nobody’s sure where it came from, but a big, pre-War pharmaceutical company created it as something which someone suffering from chronic pain could wear all the time to block the pain. They got a little too good – okay, we’re down,” McGill said, looking out the window as he reached for the buckle of his safety-harness.

Following his gaze, I saw several helicopters and, beyond them, what seemed to be an endless expanse of afternoon sky, brightest to the far left. I was looking to the north. West of us were the Swamplands; to the east was the desert we would be crossing to reach Socorro. “The sky’s so bright out there, to the west,” I said. “Where have the clouds gone?”

“Oh, they’re still there,” McGill said, getting to his feet. “There’re openings all through them, though, like the ones we came through to get here. Must be a great big one there to the northwest. – Wait right here. Gotta go ask the pilot to do something.” So saying, he made his way up the aisle and vanished into the cockpit.

When he came out, a few minutes later, he told us, “We’re running real late, about two-and-a-half hours, three hours behind schedule. As you know, we were supposed to get you to Socorro about 7 p.m., but even if we don’t have any more trouble, we’re more likely to arrive there around nine or ten. So I asked the pilot to radio ahead to let Baron Pushkin know about the delay, and the reason for it, so he won’t worry, and everything will be ready for you when you get there.

“He did that. He told me that they also did that back at Tucson, about the time we took off from there. So Baron Pushkin knows we’re behind schedule, and that everything is all right.”

“Thanks,” Monty said. “I was gettin’ a little worried about that.”

“Not a problem, sir. All part of the service. We’ll be taking off from here in a little bit, as soon as we top off the tanks and the pilot runs through his instrumentation checks.”

“Great,” Monty told him with a smile. “—So anyways, I was wonderin' about something havin’ to do with them Happy Cloaks.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Who in the hell would buy such a thing, especially at that ungodly price? It sounds like an addicts’ wet-dream – unless he was a masochist, o’ course, into pain rather’n pleasure.”

“As a matter of fact, there’s a variant of it that produces painful stimuli, along with the perfumes, music, and so on. A little like an electric eel in the way it does it.”

“Yeah, well, I could see makin’ somethin’ like your Happy Cloak to help burn cases deal with the pain, that sort o’ thing, but this does a lot more, don’t it? It don’t just turn off pain – sounds like it hits the pleasure centers ever’ way it can. You’d get so you never wanted to take it off – and whilst you was wearin’ it, you wouldn’t be interested in doin’ much of anythin’ ’cept sittin’ in the corner, feelin’ good an’ high, not eatin’ or takin’ water less’n somebody made you, not wantin’ to get up for anythin’, not even to use the head.”

“That’s what it does to users, all right,” McGill said.

“One o’ my favorite pre-War science-fiction authors is Larry Niven,” said Monty “He had a dingus in some o’ his stories that hooked up directly to the pleasure-centers of the brain through a socket that was surgically implanted in the skull. Once that was done, all the addict had to do to get his pleasure-jag was push a button connected to that socket – or just turn on a switch and have his high as long as the switch was in the ‘On’ position, so’s he wouldn’t have to keep hittin’ that button, that way.

“This thing, though, you don’t have to go through all that hassle, sounds like. Just put the thing on like a poncho?”

“Yep. It does the rest. You have to leave certain parts of your skin bare so it can stimulate you there, of course, but you can pick and choose which, even go bare-ass naked except for the Happy Cloak, if you want to feel it all over.”

“Back to my original question,” Monty asked him. “Who on Earth would both have the money to buy such a thing an’ want to use it? Addicts don’t get rich – either they’re born that way, an’ are maybe kept alive by a trust fund or go broke maintainin’ their habit, or somebody else supports ’em.”

“I think that the man who was responsible for initiating the research that created the first Happy Cloak organisms wanted it for his wife. She was the darling of his heart, and she was injured horribly in some accident. Burns were involved, and other damage, and after that she was in chronic pain so bad it was driving her mad – her doctors refused to prescribe enough morphine to keep her comfortable enough to get through the day, that sort of thing. He didn’t want to buy opiates on the black market, because the quality was so dicey. So he had his company develop the things – it wasn’t anything anybody at the DEA had ever thought people might come up with, so there weren’t any laws against it, so why not?”

“Hey, there was drugs then that could have cut her pain down to a low roar, at least, an’ then they could’ve used acupuncture to help her with the rest. So why didn’t they do that?”

“I don’t know,” McGill said, shrugging. “I’ve run across bits and pieces of the story here and there, but that’s all. This is just what I’ve found out on my own – I admit it doesn’t make sense in some ways, but that’s what there is,” McGill said, spreading his hands in a shrug.

“Sure. Sorry. Anyway, so his company made these beasts? Or their ancestors? Why so many different kinds?”

“Well, there wasn’t more than one type when they finally made the thing. The company was Torrey Biogenics, about twenty miles from Phoenix –”

“Old man Torrey? The guy whose company come up with that new type o’ insulin and was breedin’ goats that produced spider-silk before the War?”

“Right in one.”

“Hey, I met him when I was going to UAz after the War – he an’ his family lived way the hell away from Phoenix, about fifty miles southeast o’ there. They made it through the War just fine – well, as fine as anyone did, it was a pretty miserable time for ever’body, but you know what I mean.”

“Sort of. I was born just before the War started, no real memories of it, so everything I know about it I got second-hand. Anyway, yes, it was that Torrey.”

“Poor bastard – I remember how his wife died about six weeks after the War. Nobody’d talk about it. I got the feelin’ that ever’one felt she was better off that way, although her husband sure was broken up about it. – So he had it made for her?”

“That’s what I’ve heard.”

“How the hell did its descendants end up that far east, in the Swamplands? And why so many variants – fallout?”

“Mutations from fallout probably had a lot to do with it, not to mention the other mutagens that are there in those swamps. It’s kind of like some coelenterates, has an asexual phase interspersed with a sexual one. Only in the case of the Happy Cloak and its relatives, it reproduces maybe four or five times by budding before it produces sexual gametes. The sexual forms then produce asexual ones. That way, it recombines its genes every so often, which gives its descendants some advantages over disease pathogens, maybe other things, but most of the time it just buds off new ones, going through one generation every month or so that way.”

“Great Christ – why aren’t we ass-deep in the things by now?!”

“They’re like cod that way.”

“Most of ’em don’t survive. Yes, but why the horrific attrition rate? What the hell would eat somethin’ like that? Or do they die of other things?”

“As far as I know, there’s nothing particularly toxic about them, except a couple of glands here and there you can cut out quite easily. I imagine that when they’re tiny – and they are really small when they’re first budded off, an inch or two across at most – they haven’t yet started producing anything a predator could object to, and lots of things would find them good to eat then.

“They can get sick, too, just like anything else. They seem to be particularly prone to fungal and bacterial infections, and there are viruses they’re vulnerable to. Once they get some growth and start developing the mechanisms for taking prey, they get an edge on things, and their life-expectancy goes way up after that. Big ones have been known to eat whole monitor lizards – after all, the prey is seduced into walking right into the mouth of the predator, or what passes for its mouth, and doesn’t fight what’s happening to it. The Happy Cloak sort of folds around the prey, rather like a Venus’ fly-trap; the tissue making up its topside also contains digestive glands and special tissues for absorbing prey once the prey has been broken down by digestants. While the prey is being digested, it keeps stimulating the prey with pleasure-inducing signals, putting it into something like an erotic trance from which the prey has no desire to break free, no concern that something bad is happening to it. So as long as something is no longer than the width of the Happy Cloak, all the Happy Cloak has to do is call it in and close over it and eat it up. End of problem.”

“Arghh,” Monty said, looking a little ill. “But it don’t do that to humans?”

“The variants sold as pleasure-inducers, which are probably as close to the original constructs created by Torrey’s people as you can get, don’t do that. They latch onto animal prey and stay there, absorbing the prey’s life-energy but not otherwise damaging it, until the prey finally collapses because it’s several quarts low on various nutrients. In such cases, the Happy Cloak moves to the side of whatever trail or clearing where the animal it was riding has collapsed, and waits for somebody new to come by. In many cases, the former prey might even recover enough to get to its feet and leave the area, surviving the experience without much damage as long as it could find food and water to replenish itself quickly enough. Kind of like the old con-man’s motto,” McGill added, chuckling. “ ‘You want to shear your sheep, not kill them’.”

“ ‘Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs,’ in other words. I like that – a sensible organism. But not the idea o’ wearin’ the damned thing, myself.”

“Nor I, sir. To answer your question, though, the people who actually buy Happy Cloaks are probably not those who . . . use them. Oh, in a few cases, maybe, someone who is very wealthy and has some incurable condition that makes life unbearable or is going to kill him painfully in a short time might buy one so he could go out so bombed out of his skull on pure pleasure you could set him on fire and he’d never notice. In other cases, though, it’s a sure bet that whoever buys the thing isn’t the one who’s to . . . benefit from it.”

“I wouldn’t think so. Mebbe somebody like old man Torrey buys it, wantin’ somebody he loves to go out happy instead of in chronic pain?”

“Or maybe not so benign an application. I heard rumors of one case where a very wealthy man up in Utah who had a wastrel son, a spendthrift who’d also racked up some serious criminal charges in various places, bought one for the kid so the boy’d just curl up in a corner with it and die quietly, with a smile on his face.”

“In his stories about wire-heads – the idiots who had holes drilled in their skulls so’s they could have their pleasure-centers stimulated by electrical current applied directly to the brain – Niven said that wire-heads tended to have a much lower life-expectancy than the rest o’ the population. It was a cheap an’ beneficial way to chlorinate the gene-pool, not nearly as messy as addiction to opiates or cocaine would’a been – make it legal, let the addict go under the wire on a 24/7 basis if he wanted to, and he’d soon starve to death and be a problem for nobody. Sounds like the son of a bitch you’re talkin’ about had the same idea when it come to his son. He couldn’t’ve gotten away with killin’ the boy hisself, or hirin’ a hit on him, or didn’t think he could, so he give ’im one o’ those beasts and let the kid do hisself in, no fuss, no muss, no problem for anybody else.”

“That’s about right, sir. And you can bet that most other sales of the things are like that – bought by somebody to be used by someone else who the buyer finds . . inconvenient, I guess you’d put it, but whose death isn’t to be so messy or outright murderous that other people involved object to it. The sort of thing the very rich can get away with, not to mention afford, but the rest of us can’t.”

Monty shuddered, his eyes far away. Finally looking up at McGill again, he said, “So they make their money hereabouts by collectin’ things like that to sell to other people?”
“Yeah, but most of the time they deal only in things that are really of benefit to people, or, at least, don’t hurt them noticeably, like psychedelic fungi and that sort of thing. Always stuff you just can’t get from any other source – that’s why they make so much money here.”

“Sounds like they need it, if’n they want to be able to move someplace else and have kids an’ a happy old age,” Monty said.

“Yeah, there is that,” McGill said. He looked at his watch. “Hmm . . . wonder how much longer this is going to take. I’ll go up front and ask,” he said, getting up and heading for the cockpit.

A few minutes later he was back. “If it doesn’t rain, it pours,” he said, looking unhappy. “Another delay – that rotor that had to be replaced back in Yuma, the new one’s giving problems. They’re having a flight mechanic open up the housing and check on it. Pilot says they estimate it’ll take another half hour or so. He’s going to radio ahead to Socorro and let them know.”

“Oh, well, I always did like the slow train,” Monty said. “Hey, you want somethin’ to eat?” he asked McGill. “Batrix, what’ve we got left from what we picked up in Yuma?”
I checked. We still hadn’t eaten the pizza slices, and there were some deviled eggs, boiled eggs, and sandwiches left, as well. There were also three bottles of Coke, one of lemonade, a slice of German chocolate cake, and one of the cheesecake still untouched. McGill happily accepted a sliced mutton sandwich, two deviled eggs, a slice of pizza, and a bottle of Coke.

“This is good,” he said between bites of his sandwich. “God, you must think I’m a real pig,” he added. “I have no idea why I suddenly got this hungry – maybe it’s something about the desert air out here.”

“Oh, you’re fine,” Monty told him. “Don’t worry about it – we can’t possibly eat all o’ that before we get to Socorro, anyway, so why not?”

“Just don’t tell my CO. He doesn’t want us fraternizing with the enemy – uh, civilians,” McGill said, grinning impishly.

“As for that ‘desert air’ around here, from what I’ve heard, it’s more likely to make a man want to puke than eat anythin’,” Monty said with an answering grin. “Gotta be somethin’ else.”

“This is true. Maybe it’s the company – I’ve really enjoyed this trip with both of you,” McGill said, giving us a nod and smile.

“You’re pretty good company yourself, son,” Monty told him. “Hope we’ll see you again sometime – if you’re ever out our way, anywhere near Diablo Keep, hope you’ll drop in and say hello.”

“I’ll do that, sir. I’ve always wanted to see more of L.A. County – maybe you could show me the sights. Griffith Park still there? I heard it didn’t get hurt nearly as bad in the fires as other parts of the county.”

“As a matter of fact, it is. Me’n the Governor’ve established a, well, a sort of conservancy over the place. The observatory never was hurt at all – place was built strong enough to take a nuke and not show it, an’ then some smart boy turned on all the sprinklers in the park for around three hours afore the fire could get up that way! Some o’ the zoo was spared, too – it didn’t burn, but the quake o’ ’25 did a real number on it. For some reason the observatory wasn’t touched by that quake – mebbe because it was built so strong. One o’ these days Griffith Park’s goin’ to be restored to what it was afore the War, only better, ’cause now we can add creatures like some o’ the less . . . energetic types from the Swamplands, desert animals, all sorts o’ constructs, an’ other exotics from outside our state, as well as more local types.”

For a while the two men talked about the Los Angeles Basin, McGill asking Monty about the ecological dynamics of the region, problems with banditry, cultural resources, the region’s economy, etc., Monty lapsing into his “professor” mode as he amiably answered McGill’s questions. Clearly the young man was happy to be the older one’s student, if only for a little while – and why not? In addition to his position as CEO of L.A. County and baron of our Keep, Monty was world-famous as a field biologist and researcher, his articles published in scientific journals not only in the West, Canada, and Mexico, but also in Australia and what was left of civilization in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Of course Monty, as he always was, was delighted to be a teacher again, however ephemeral the assignment might be. It dawned on me that Monty was really looking forward to the drive – out there, he would have to be a teacher to most of the hands, the source of the information they would need to have the best possible chance of staying alive and in one piece until the end of the drive in the face of everything the desert could throw at us. It would also give him a golden opportunity to do real field research again, as he hadn’t had for years – no matter how much we had learned about the world out there on our last Drive, thanks to genetic drift, climatological change, and all the rest of it, there would be countless new hazards out there we would only discover once the Drive began, and Monty would have to check them out himself to make sure we didn’t run into any catastrophic surprises on the trail. McGill was giving him useful practice at getting back into teaching mode, and he was enjoying the opportunity to the full.

Suddenly the intercom erupted in a crackle of static, followed by the voice of our pilot: “The techs say we’re good to go. Everybody strapped down tight and ready for takeoff?”

Tiny Toon Adventures - Toons From The Crypt - Cryptkeeper Segments

2009-07-06T22:13:50Z

Yet another horrid thought miscegenation

2009-07-06T21:03:34Z

What do you get when you cross Luis Royo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Royo) with Gary Larson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Larson)? -- Ans.: I don't want to know, and neither do you.

-- Hey, I just thought of something: throw in Lewis Carroll and "Yakety Sax" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnHmskwqCCQ), and you've got Washington, DC.

Conquest of fire

2009-07-06T20:58:53Z

Psilocybin mushrooms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The writer Carmen Hillier speculated that hallucinogenic mushrooms may have a history that dates back as far as 1 million years ago, originating in East Africa. He suggests that early hominids such as Homo africanus, Homo boisei, and the omnivorous Homo habilis expanded their original diets of fruit and small animals to include underground roots, tubers, and corns. Terence McKenna claims that at this particular time, early hominids gathered Psilocybin mushrooms off the African grasslands and ate them as part of their diet. He suggests that the Psilocybin-containing mushrooms that were thought to have grown on the grasslands at that time were the Panaeolus species and Stropharia cubensis, also called Psilocybe cubensis, which is a famous 'Magic Mushroom' widely distributed today. . . ." More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushrooms

Well, now we know. Only a stonehead -- or a teenager having problems sorting out the big head from the little head -- would be stupid enough to play with the stuff.

Writer's Block: Firsts

2009-07-06T20:32:31Z

What was the subject title of your first-ever LJ entry?

Submitted By paperxflowerz

View other answers

Hell, I couldn't remember that to save my butt! It was years ago.

Nation About Due For Big Cult Suicide

2009-07-06T20:31:39Z

The Onion - America's Finest News Source

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/nation_about_due_for_big_cult

You know, some would say this is in bad taste. However, it could be life-saving. I.e., after reading this, any such group who were thinking of committing a mass suicide would give it up as a bad day and go home. Thanks to The Onion, it would look just too stupid if they did carry out such a plan.

Cordite weather

2009-07-06T19:43:14Z

Last night, the Full Moon was hazed somewhat, though not as heavily as it had been on the night of the 4th. Clouds began to gather, especially over and in front of the Cascades. Now, this morning, we're socked in here, it's actually cold (Yaaayyyyyyyyyyy! I hate high heat, especially when it's also muggy, the way it was for the past few days), there's a wind up, and AOL weather is predicting "some chances of rain." That "some chances" may be meant for downtown Seattle -- there's enough bite in the air now that the likelihood of rain must be significantly higher here than there.

So much cordite from fireworks explosions was in the air the night of the 4th that clouds began to form wherever those drifting streaks of cordite were -- and that meant low clouds, because the cordite trails couldn't have been more than a thousand feet up, if that. Now those clouds are much thicker, and there's actually a cold front bearing down on us. :-)

Crazy Lightning/Thunder -- Eye of the Tiger

2009-07-06T04:31:43Z

YouTube - Lightning Storm Santa Maria, California

2009-07-06T04:20:56Z

Gorgeous!

Badfinger - Carry On Till Tomorrow

2009-07-06T03:50:15Z