1
Mecca elegantly glided out of the Hawkesbury River, mid-morning, with her blood-red sails fully unfurled and glowing, wing-on-wing, picking up the light, westerly tailwind.
Alex sat on the bow trying to see ‘what the wind was doing outside’.
‘I think it’s a northeaster, Lloyd,’ he announced.
‘Well, that at least makes our minds up for us, Alex. We head south to Sydney Harbour.’
They drifted out to sea, past the demolished Barrenjoey lighthouse, and waited for the expected northeaster.
Sophia asked, ‘How many times have you predicted the wind, Alex?’
‘Never, one who shines like the sun. This is my first time.’
Eva chuckled, ‘That’s a chart topper. You never called me one who shines like the sun, Lloyd.’
‘Sincere apologies, exquisite perfection. I shall endeavor to rectify this grave error, on my part, and call you one who shines like the sun at first opportunity.’
‘Sank you,’ she said in a satisfied voice.
It did not take long for those first gusts to come wafting in and gently blowing the sleek sloop down the east coast of Australia towards Port Jackson and the imposing Sydney Heads.
They recognized all the beaches on the way down. Lloyd and Eva used to love driving ‘the Aston’ up to Palm Beach, for a seafood lunch. They sailed past Whale Beach where ‘Dr. Strangelove’ lived. That was their nickname for their eccentric biologist friend.
‘Avalon, oh Avalon,’ Lloyd sighed.
‘There are no houses anywhere, dear,’ said Eva. ‘It’s all bush.’
They were sailing about half a mile off the beaches and a little closer rounding the headlands. The sea was still ‘lively’ from the day before, but smooth on the surface. The pace was leisurely at about four knots.
‘Why don’t you throw up the kite, darling?’ Eva asked sunning her face.
‘Because, sweetheart, I know that as soon as I put it up, the wind will pick up and I’ll have to pull it down again. How many times has that happened to us?’
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‘Everyone for some peppermint tea and a biscuit?’ offered Sophia.
‘Yes please,’ they all replied.
It was a perfect, east coast, spring day. The temperature was about 26 degrees, there were only small tufts of cumulus in an otherwise clear, blue sky and the northeaster had picked up to about ten knots. It was a T-shirt and shorts kind of day.
‘Why don’t you put on some music, Alex?’ Sophia called from the cabin.
‘Yes, Alex, put on some music,’ Eva agreed.
Mecca cut a fine bow wave as she glided effortlessly in the gentle tailwind. Like a fractal of the whole, the delicate sounds of Seals and Crofts’ Summer Breeze embellished the air. Mecca sailed close to her 6-knots hull speed because she was designed sleek for efficient downwind running.
By the time they sailed down to Manly they were astounded by the lack of infrastructure. There was nothing anywhere on shore, no buildings, just bush, cliffs and pristine beaches. They sailed as close as they dared. They rounded Fairy Bower and sailed south.
‘About an hour and we’ll be in the Harbour,’ said Lloyd.
An hour later, they sailed through Sydney Heads directly into the setting sun.
2
‘We need to find a place to anchor before it gets dark,’ said Lloyd.
‘What about Watson’s Bay, darling,’ suggested Eva.
‘Good idea … and it’s close as well.’
Once inside The Heads, their first task was to roll up the jib and drop the main. After that was complete, and everyone was safely in the cockpit again, Lloyd kicked over the diesel and motored south, deeper into the Harbour. Ten minutes later, they putted around a small headland, to port, and entered Watson’s Bay.
‘Oh my God!’ exclaimed Eva placing her hands over her cheeks in total astonishment.
Lloyd shifted the drive into neutral and let the diesel idle. They glided to a tranquil stop. It was as if they were temporarily hypnotized, frozen in a stare, because everything was gone. The pier, the restaurant and pub, all the houses, all the moored boats, everything had vanished. They were staring into a calm bay, with a pristine beach backed by a natural grassy clearing, behind which was bush.
‘It looks like before anybody got here,’ whispered Sophia.
‘’It’s almost spooky,’ whimpered Alex.
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‘It’s beautiful,’ exclaimed Lloyd. ‘and as perfect an anchorage as one could hope for.’
‘How are we going to get to the beach, Lloyd? The dinghy is full of supplies.’
‘Hmm, I guess we aren’t. We are as comfortable on board as anywhere … for the time being. We’ll see what we can do in the morning.’
As darkness descended upon the compact sloop, the two couples enjoyed ‘a glass of bubbly’. The girls, in a creative fit, cooked up a delicious spaghetti bolognaise. They ate their dinner admiring the long line of silver moon crystals reflecting off the water. Sophia whispered as if in a haunted reverie,
‘How the water shimmers like mercury.’
‘If it’s calm tomorrow,’ said Lloyd, ‘we can bring Mecca right up to the beach.’
They slept like babes in their bunks that night. They were adjusting to life on board and it was all beginning to feel like a long, coastal cruise away from civilization. They had enough food on board for a month, and plenty of fuel and water. Alex and Sophia slept in the bow, in the ‘luxury’, double-bunk V-berth. Lloyd and Eva slept in single bunks on either side of the main hatch. The ‘cozy’ bunks extended sternward under the cockpit benches. Lloyd preferred to sleep close to the open hatch, ‘to keep an eye on the situation’
he always said.
3
It was only the morning of the third day since the storm. It felt longer to them.
Although there was no way of them knowing it, it was the morning of September 27, 2123, East Australian Time, and some of them were already beginning to have trouble remembering the day.
‘It is my big failing, Lloydie,’ said Eva gazing across the bay at first light. ‘Whenever I go on these holidays, the first thing I forget is the day of the week.’
‘That is a positively catastrophic failing, scrumptious.’
‘I slide into trance marinara … and time ceases to exist.’
‘Nirvana … I’m so happy for you, darling.’
‘And I love our Mecca,’ she said fondly.
He looked across the water at the rising sun, then looked into her eyes and whispered,
‘You do shine like that sun.’
‘Oh, surely not that bright,’ she replied modestly.
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‘Brighter.’ He hugged and kissed her. With his arm around her, he looked at the beach and said, ‘We are together, that is all that matters.’ He thought for a while and concluded, ‘I’ll have to get a feel for the tide to figure out the best time to beach her. It should be done on a rising tide.’
They turned and looked over the stern. They had a view deep into the Harbour, right up to where the Bridge, the Opera House and all the tall buildings used to stand. It was as if everything had been swept away, erased. The treetops were the tallest things now.
‘A 500-foot tidal surge would have scraped the ground clean down to bedrock,’ he theorized. ‘Once the debris started, the city destroyed itself. I bet it’s all rubble somewhere on the other side of Penrith, piled up against the Blue Mountains.’
Alex and Sophia emerged from below.
‘Good morning. How does it look?’ Alex asked.
‘Pristine,’ replied Lloyd gazing over the water into the distance.
They decided to have breakfast. Eva scrambled some eggs and they had toast with strawberry jam and coffee. They each took their multi-vitamin tablets.
After breakfast, Lloyd finally figured out that,
‘The tide is going out. It looks about half tide at the moment. It won’t be good for beaching until this afternoon.’
‘Why don’t we go look at our house,’ suggested Eva soaking up the warmth of the morning sun.’
‘I have serious doubts that there’ll be anything left of it, scrumptious.’
‘We could have an explore around the Harbour, Lloyd,’ said Alex, ‘while we wait for the tide.’
‘I guess we could have a bit of a punt around,’ Lloyd replied.
They pulled up anchor and set off.
4
‘There’s not a skerrick of the house left standing,’ said Eva. ‘It’s as if it had never existed.’
‘It’s like the ground got swept clean,’ replied Lloyd, ‘and then the bush grew back.’
He panned around Rose Bay with his arm and speculated, ‘A five-hundred-foot tidal wave
… the water could have surged through here at 100 knots … carrying all the debris, it would have swept the ground clean … of everything.’
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As they motored past where the great colossus, The Sydney Harbour Bridge, once stood, they were amazed by the way even the huge concrete abutments had been ripped out of the earth and carried away by the tidal surge.
They motored around Circular Quay.
‘So much for the Opera House. What was that? 100 million?’
‘Yep, Alex, one hundred, but money well spent,’ Lloyd replied.
‘Ooh, look over there,’ exclaimed Eva as she aimed the binoculars across the water towards the northern shore. ‘There is a flock of white cockatoos in the branches of a tall tree over there. Some are flying.’
‘And I’ve seen a seagull,’ added Alex.
‘Have you?’ Lloyd asked, surprised. ‘I haven’t seen any of those, although we know there are fish.’
‘And bellbirds,’ added Sophia.
They ate sandwiches for lunch while floating adjacent to where their house used to be, in their usual spot, except the jetty wasn’t there either. After lunch, they motored off in the direction of Watson’s Bay where they intended to make camp for the night.
5
Alex jumped off the bow onto dry beach sand. He was barefoot and wore a T-shirt and a pair of board shorts. He pulled on the bow rope.
‘I’ll bring the dinghy around, Alex,’ said Lloyd similarly attired. He walked the dinghy around and handed its rope to Alex who pulled it up onto the beach. Lloyd and the girls joined Alex on the sand. They began to unpack the dinghy. First were the three lightweight, four-person, dome tents, which they set up on the grassy clearing just above the beach. They transferred the rest of the gear and supplies from the dinghy into one of the tents. When the dinghy was empty, they pushed it back into the water. Lloyd and Alex jumped back on the sloop as Eva started up the dinghy’s outboard motor.
Mecca backed away from the beach and circled around to a good anchoring depth.
Alex ‘dropped the pick’. They closed the hatch and climbed into the dinghy for the ride back to shore.
Eva immediately began fishing for Bream, using ham as bait, while the boys placed some stones in a circle for a fire on the beach. They finally set up a small picnic table and four chairs and sat down. Sophia began thinking about making dinner, while Lloyd brought out four glasses and a bottle.
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‘I’ve got a nice Merlot,’ he said.
‘Caught one,’ Eva called out from down near the water, ‘and it’s a big one.’ She briskly re-baited her hook and cast the line for another fish. Lloyd filled her glass and brought it down to her.
‘A treat for my precious.’
‘Mind my equilibrium, Lloyd, I’m in the zone … thank you … ooh, ooh, I think I’ve got another one.’
By dusk, Eva caught eight healthy Bream. They fried them in olive oil in a pan over an open fire.
‘Delightful evening …’
‘It is indeed, Eva my darling.’
‘I’ll concur with that notion,’ added Alex topping up everyone’s glass.
‘Second boddle,’ said Sophia with a hint of a slur in her speech.
‘Feeling a little tipsy, are we darling?’
‘You know how it goes straight to my head, Alex. I am the cheapest drunk.’
‘Yes, I know, my precious. We’ve saved a fortune over the years.’
The last time they slept on land was in their homes, in their beds, six nights before.
The tents were much more comfortable to sleep in than the bunks in the boat. There was space enough for two people in one half and their things in the other.
6
Next morning, day four since the storm, found Eva peeking out of the tent, watching Lloyd and Alex collecting wood for the fire.
‘There is ample deadwood around,’ said Lloyd. ‘This is well established bushland.’
‘What do you reckon, fifty years’ worth?’
‘Fifty to sixty. Look at that big tree.’
‘Good morning,’ announced Sophia as she stepped out of her tent wearing her one-piece swimming costume. She was slender and very attractive. ‘The water looks so inviting.’ It was a crisp morning. She waded into the cool, crystal-clear water. ‘It’s all sand on the bottom,’ she reported then dipped down and wet herself up to her neck. ‘Brrr, it’s very refreshing.’
Eva joined her soon after, looking like a gazelle in her bikini.
‘It warms up as you become used to it,’ said Sophia.
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The men kept working on their fire. Occasionally they stopped and admired the way the golden glow of the morning sun lit up the opposite shore and the way Mecca floated there in the radiance looking like something straight out of a Turner.
Alex brought out eggs and bacon, a can of peeled tomatoes and some dehydrated mushrooms. He cooked them all up over the fire and toasted some bread. Lloyd got the coffee going.
After breakfast, they lounged around and sipped their coffees. They weren’t certain of their next move so they decided to spend another day and night there, ‘recharging the batteries’. They took swims and lay on the beach in the warm afternoon sun.
‘We’ll all turn into crocodiles,’ said Eva.
Later, she fished again and again produced a banquet.
After dinner, they lounged around the fire. Mecca glowed softly in the firelight, in the midst of a floating carpet of shimmering diamonds. In the starry heavens above, the silver Moon shone like a big, round, fluorescent light.
7
Eva stirred suddenly. She pointed into the sky.
‘What is that, Lloyd?’
Lloyd’s eyes needed to adjust from looking into the fire.
‘Where?’ he said.
Lloyd and Sophia looked in the direction Eva was pointing. For a moment there was nothing … then …
‘There! … It’s a light … and it’s moving.’
‘Life was becoming so delightfully dreary,’ Alex groaned as he struggled onto one elbow.
‘It’s gliding in a large circle,’ observed Lloyd.
‘Yes, around us,’ said Eva with a hint of zeal in her voice.
‘Doesn’t look like a plane.’
‘It looks like one of those UFOs in that TV show.’
‘Actually, it looks exactly like that,’ affirmed Lloyd.
They were referring to the record-breaking, UFO documentary, Incident at Green River.
The softly-glowing, almond-shaped disc glided silently across the Harbour towards the camp. It glided in over the water above its own imperfect reflection and stopped just
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beyond Mecca, silently hovering about five feet above the diamond-speckled surface. The four of them felt themselves being calmed.
‘UFO, Lloyd,’ whispered Alex. ‘Get ready for some bending of the mind.’
‘I’m ready,’ said Sophia, totally awestruck.
‘I wonder if it has anything to do with the light we saw in the storm?’ said Eva.
‘That one seemed friendly enough,’ replied Lloyd.
The spaceship slowly, completely silently, levitated around the boat and towards the beach. Its soft, yellow light made the beach glow like it was being illuminated by a dimmed garden light. They could see now that it was made of some kind of polished-silver metal.
It stopped just near the edge of the water, silently hovering about a foot in the air.
There was no breeze or sound. Lloyd estimated it to be about sixty feet in diameter. When it completely stilled, a panel opened in the lower hull and extended down as a ramp, almost, but not quite, touching the sand. A young man, longhaired, barefoot and wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt, sauntered down the ramp. He was followed down by an older, fit-looking man who was similarly attired.
The two couples were stunned speechless, a rarity for them. They stood there, around their fire, mouths agape in total disbelief.
‘Hello,’ said the younger spaceship fellow. ‘We spotted your fire.’
There was a momentary pregnant pause while they all looked at each other waiting for someone else to speak first. Suddenly Sophia blurted out,
‘Would you care for a Merlot?’
The younger spaceship fellow smiled, ‘A cup of tea would be nice.’ His older companion smiled as well.
‘Come and join us,’ motioned Lloyd. He surprised his three companions when he asked, ‘Will your, er … craft be all right hanging in the air like that?’
‘Yes, perfectly all right, thank you,’ the younger man replied, ‘I have her in park.’
They welcomed the two visitors into their camp and introduced themselves.
‘This is Eva …’
‘How do you do …’
‘This is Sophia …’
‘Hello …’
‘Er … this is Alex …’
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‘Good evening …’
‘And I am Lloyd, skipper of Mecca, our trusty sloop out there.’
‘I am Ben, and this is my father, Adam,’ said the younger man.
‘Lloyd and Eva, sounds vaguely familiar to me,’ said Adam. ‘What were you guys doing in ‘69?’
‘Sydney University,’ Eva replied.
‘Not genetics by any chance?’
‘Yes,’ she smiled.
He smiled and asked, ‘Do you remember Adam?’
‘The dentist?’ replied Lloyd with great surprise.
‘What are the odds?’ exclaimed Adam.
‘Oh my God, the quiet dentist?’ Eva remembered. ‘I had an eye on him, Lloyd.’
Adam laughed, ‘If I remember it correctly, Eva, everybody had their eyes on you.
You haven’t changed a bit.’
‘Ha, like half a century doesn’t make a difference.’
‘None that I can see.’
Lloyd chuckled and said, ‘You shall go far, Adam.’
‘I can still remember your talk in the café at the uni, Lloyd, about evolution and telepathy, and Hiroshima. I’ll never forget it.’
‘I loved those times back then,’ said Lloyd. He looked at the space ship and announced, ‘I have an Aston Martin, you know.’
Eva interjected, ‘ Had, darling, had.’
‘How does my student buddy, Adam, from the university cafe, get to ride in one of those?’ Lloyd pointed at the levitating space ship. ‘It must be quite a story.’
‘It’s a story and a half,’ replied Adam, ‘enough to fill three books.’
‘And you had a son?’
‘Yes, Ben here. He’s the pilot and it’s his ship. I’m just the father.’ Adam leaned over towards Lloyd and lowered his voice, ‘Let me tell you, Lloyd, be nice to your kids …
because you never know … you know?’
‘Eva and I were married,’ said Lloyd, ‘and we have twin sons, Leon and Russel. They live out on the cotton farm in Warren. It depends on the present time … er … to guess how old they are. We have no idea what year it is, although we suspect that it might be in the future.’
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‘Affirmative to that,’ said Ben. ‘It is Tuesday, September 28, 2123.’
‘2123? … really?’ said Eva, amazed.
‘Everything is gone,’ said Alex looking around the dark bay.
‘Yes,’ nodded Ben, ‘the planet has been through a very rough patch, but, from what we have seen so far, it appears to have recovered exceptionally well.’
‘How did we get here?’ asked Lloyd.
Ben looked at everyone and finally looked at Alex and said,
‘Alex was time shifted one hundred years into the future and everything that was physically connected to him shifted with him.’
‘I believe you postulated that theory, Sophia,’ said Eva. ‘Would you fellows like some maple syrup in your tea? It’s peppermint.’
‘Oooh, maple syrup, yes please, Eva,’ said Ben.
‘You don’t know how amazing it is to see you both after all these years,’ said Adam.
‘I hadn’t even met my friend, Nancy, when I knew you.’
‘How fast can you go in one of those things?’ Alex asked pointing at the spaceship.
‘My Pantera could do 160.’
‘My ship maxes out at the speed of light squared, Alex.’
He proceeded to tell them about the ship and the comet, and the time shift.
‘So, is everyone dead?’ Eva asked rather dramatically.
‘Long time ago,’ responded Ben calmly. ‘A hundred years have passed since then.’
‘We saw our sons two weeks ago,’ said Lloyd.
‘You are far from there now, in terms of time.’
‘If they survived,’ said Eva, ‘our grandchildren could still be alive.’
Ben harboured no such illusions, however, seeing his father’s friends begin to grow concerned, he offered,
‘Dad and I could stay the night and I could take you up in the ship tomorrow, and we could fly out to where your sons lived.’
‘Oh, could we?’ Eva replied pleadingly.
‘That would be very magnanimous of you, Ben,’ said Lloyd.
‘And dad could keep Alex and Sophia company while we are away.’
‘By the way,’ remembered Lloyd, ‘did you fellows retrieve our dinghy the other night?’
‘I don’t recollect retrieving any dinghies,’ replied Ben.
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‘Me either,’ added his father.
8
They sat around the fire all much more relaxed now. They were becoming used to the levitating spaceship, and the visitors seemed ‘normal enough’.
‘It seems to me,’ said Eva, ‘that your non-coding DNA thesis results have come to fruition, Alex. Everyone died on the 23rd of September, 2023. The only mystery that remains is how we manage to live for centuries.’
Ben, who was listening attentively, smiled and suggested that he may be able to solve that mystery for them. He rose to his feet, popped back into the ship and returned carrying a small container. He sat back down amongst them and showed them an intricately-carved, gold box. He opened it and explained the brown crumble inside.
‘This is Mana,’ he said. ‘It is for wellbeing and longevity. One ingestion of Mana will double your lifespans. Regular use will extend them up to nine-hundred years.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ responded Alex, his voice breaking into falsetto.
They smoked the Mana that night and smoked it again after breakfast in the morning.
9
Ben reclined in the pilot’s seat, Eva lounged in the passenger seat, while Lloyd straddled a duffel bag behind them. They were awestruck.
On the beach, Sophia complained, ‘I’m so envious. I want to have a ride in the spaceship too.’
‘I’m sure Ben will give you a ride when he gets back,’ Adam consoled her. He held onto a carry bag containing his levitation pack and suit, which he retrieved from the ship before it launched.
Bathed in the soft interior glow, they watched the ship’s hatch seal.
‘You’ve brought your surfboards,’ said Eva a little surprised.
‘Yes, they go everywhere with us,’ Ben replied.
Openmouthed, Lloyd and Eva witnessed the translucent, spherical, holographic display materialize out of thin air. They could see everything in the exterior and hear all the ambient sounds. As the interior light dimmed, it appeared as though there was no hull surrounding them.
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‘The first thing you’ll feel is mass neutralization,’ instructed Ben. ‘Movement will become effortless. Try to keep still. After the mass is neutralized, it will all seem like a big movie.’
As they began to rise vertically, Lloyd observed,
‘Ah yes, I see, I’m weightless and there is no momentum or inertia. On the screen we look like we’re moving, but it doesn’t feel like we’re moving in here.’
‘It feels like sitting in a weightless theater,’ added Eva.
‘What do you use for controls?’ Lloyd asked.
‘My mind,’ replied Ben.
‘Would you mind refraining from asking those questions, darling,’ Eva pleaded.
‘With your mind?’ Lloyd repeated.
‘Yes, like you move your arms and legs.’
Ben knew better than to venture too deeply into the telepathic realm with a non-telepath.
They rose six hundred feet above Mecca. They were facing due west. Lloyd was awed by the broad expanse of thriving vegetation where the city used to be. There were just bays, rocky headlands and pristine bush everywhere.
They rose further upward, in a backward drift, to three thousand feet. The Harbour beaches glistened in the morning sun.
‘It’s completely erased of civilization,’ said Eva looking up the Harbour.
‘Yes, water-blasted clean,’ added Lloyd.
They began to fly forward at about 80 mph. They flew over Watson’s Bay and Mecca, headed in a westerly direction.
‘This used to be nothing but roofs,’ said Lloyd.
‘We’re coming to a stream,’ said Ben pointing.
‘I think it’s Cook’s River. See, it flows into Botany Bay where the airport used to be.
I think our heading should be a trifle more north-west for a heading towards Warren.’
‘I agree with you sweetheart,’ added Eva.
A few minutes later, headed in the new direction, Lloyd noted,
‘There are the Blueys, and I think we’ve found our city.’
Piled up along the base contours of the Blue Mountains was a line of heaped-up rubble and debris, partially overgrown by vegetation. The tallest piles were over 300 feet high. There were whole chunks of buildings protruding out of some of them. A section of
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the Nepean River was completely dammed up by concrete rubble. There was a lake where the town of Penrith used to be.
Behind the rubble, the Blue Mountains rose to the Mount Bindo maximum elevation of 4,468 feet.
The flight arc of their spaceship curved upwards gently as they flew towards the dissected plateau.
‘It looks identical to how it always looked,’ noted Lloyd.
‘I believe that most of it used to be national park, darling,’ said Eva.
‘This really doesn’t feel like flying, Ben,’ Lloyd chuckled.
‘Off planet, Lloyd, you’ll be glad that you can’t feel some of the moves we pull out there. By the way, how far is Warren from Sydney?’
‘Oh, as the crow flies, about 250 miles due north-west. … Off planet??’
An arc of light appeared on the holographic display, which rested on the horizon away in the distance.
‘That is the 250-mile line northwest of Sydney. Your farm should be somewhere near that line,’ said Ben.
They skimmed a few hundred feet above the mountain plateau, silently slipping over the treetops, and glided out over the western slopes doing something like 150 mph.
So far, they had not seen one building or section of road, anywhere. As the trees thinned out into the western plains, they began to see clumps of rubble dotting the ground up ahead.
‘It looks like smaller chunks of Sydney got swept right over the Blue Mountains,’
exclaimed Lloyd.
‘The plains must have flooded with catastrophic floods,’ said Ben.
‘Maybe not so catastrophic,’ whimpered Eva.
‘The whole Pacific Ocean must have surged over the Great Dividing Range and poured into the plains,’ said Lloyd in a dejected voice.
As they flew out over the western plains at an altitude of about 3000 feet, and a velocity of about 250 miles per hour, towards the arc of light, Lloyd remembered,
‘This reminds me of a drive I once had with Alex. We christened his Pantera The Beast on that trip. We cruised at 150 miles per hour on a road that obviously doesn’t exist anymore.’
‘There are no roads on our planet,’ said Ben.
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‘No roads?’ asked Eva, surprised.
‘No. Everyone flies.’
‘You don’t say.’ said Lloyd.
‘People do walk, though,’ added Ben.
‘Oh, they do?’
‘Yes, but not very far.’
‘That is positively incredulous, don’t you think so, darling?’
‘I know a guy that builds levitation backpacks for non-telepaths such as yourselves,’
said Ben. ‘Perhaps I can hook you up with him?’
‘Levitation backpacks sound like a hoot, Lloyd,’ said Eva.
‘I presume that they are some kind of gravitational device?’
‘Affirmative, Lloyd.’
As they approached within fifty miles of the lime-green line, they plainly made out a new type of rocky debris radiating out from the target area ahead. It looked like ejecta.
They soon spotted the circular shape of a giant crater up ahead.
‘It must be thirty miles across,’ said Ben.
As they approached closer, they could see into the crater. There was a small lake at the bottom of it.
‘It looks like about a hundred years old,’ observed Ben. ‘See, there’s not much water erosion on the sides.’
‘I see,’ said Lloyd.
‘Thirty-mile-wide crater, 3000-feet deep, … it would take about two and a half million mega-tons of TNT to make that kind of hole in the ground. That’s about a two-mile chunk of rock impacting at about twelve miles per second. Nearly twenty cubic miles of ground was either melted or vaporized here.’
Lloyd and Sophia were amazed by Ben’s grasp of the statistics. He slowed and stopped above the centre of the crater.
‘The visible fireball would have had about a thirty-mile diameter and got about a thousand times hotter than the sun.’
‘Is this close to where our farm was, darling?’
‘I doubt far from it, precious.’
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‘A big rock, eh? … It grieves me to say it, but I think they might have bought it,’ said Eva speaking in the fashion her parents used to speak about life in World War Two. ‘Even if they survived a flood, the meteor would have finished them off.’
‘I think that the meteor may have preceded the flood, darling.’
‘Yes, I agree,’ said Ben. ‘The cometary debris would have come in a wave, all over the planet, behind the main comet. First the debris peppered the planet, then the tidal waves raged. Some of the debris landed on terra firma and caused huge explosions.’
‘This did happen a hundred years ago, didn’t it?’ Eva asked sadly.
‘’Lloyd consoled her, ‘Yes, it has been over a hundred years, darling.’
‘We are all that’s left of our families.’
‘Darling, it’s far too early in the morning …’
‘Do you mean for mirroring?’
‘Precisely, precious. You know how unhealthy it is.’
Mirroring was a mental process of self-reflection. When one mirrored, one ceased to look out and deal with life as it happened. Instead, one shifted out of one’s centre of consciousness, located between the eyes, and focused back on oneself, analyzing and making comparisons with the fate, fortunes and achievements of others. Lloyd determined that mirroring, done by whoever, for whatever reason, was always self-destructive, and if not recognized and stopped as quickly as possible would lead into a downward psychological spiral from which it may ultimately be very difficult to recover.
Mirroring had to be stopped as soon as it was recognized within oneself. According to Lloyd, there was never a valid reason to ‘mirror’.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ said Ben.
‘Thank you, Ben,’ Lloyd replied. ‘It’s just that for us it’s a trifle more recent than a hundred years. We saw our boys a couple of weeks ago.’
‘But it has been one hundred years since it happened,’ said Eva taking stock of the overall situation, ‘and we must look ahead.’
Lloyd, who read Eva like a book, followed up with,
‘I just have a question about those levitation packs, Ben.’
‘I know the guy who makes them, Lloyd. He’s like my uncle.’
…….
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