1
Noah timed his return to the North American continent just after breakfast on Monday, September 27, 2123. He slowed as he approached the West Coast and shook his head with disbelief as he observed the coastline, which now appeared totally foreign to him.
‘The San Andreas must have finally let go when the comet hit,’ he thought. ‘Los Angeles and San Francisco are completely gone! Those must be the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range coming out of the ocean down there. Incredible.’
He noticed hundreds of offshore islands all up and down the coast, which he figured must have been the mountaintops of the old Southern and Northern Coastal Ranges. He suddenly realized,
‘We had thousands of time shifters on the coast of California. They must have all found themselves in the middle of the ocean after the shift.’ He shook his head from side to side, ‘They most likely all drowned.’
He zeroed in on the Pike’s Peak group by telepathically locating Jonesy’s time chip implant. He flew towards them from the south-westerly direction at about 100,000 feet above terra firma. His thoughts focused on the group for a moment.
‘There are seventeen survivors. That is really amazing.’
As he looked farther east out over the mountain peaks, some of which were over 14,000 feet high, he became distracted by the 30,000-foot column of smoke rising out of a giant hole in the Earth. The interesting thing about the column of smoke was how it bent 90 degrees to the east as it hit the jet stream. He marveled with amazement at the vast expanse of the impact crater in the distance. Although on the wane, the huge hellhole was still smoking after one hundred years. He re-focused his mind on the task at hand, the survivors. At that point he had no plan. There was no order, or directive, from anyone.
There was no strategy. All there had ever been was a decision to allow nature to do her work.
There was a program, based solely on volunteers, to try to rescue some of the Earth’s species. The idea for the rescue came as a result of the discovery of the time-shift technology, which was first successfully tested by the revered Iapetus. It was realized
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that, although not being much use in ordinary, everyday life, time shifting would be invaluable in an extinction-level event such as a comet strike.
The other thing about the comet strike on Earth, that was particularly ‘interesting’
to the Rama, was the fact that it would nicely solve all their visitation problems for them.
The main complication had been the over-militarized human population, which was highly over-prone to violence. It meant that the Rama, who just loved to visit Earth for fun, and ‘to get stuff’, needed to do it in total secrecy in order to avoid a downright irrational reaction by the locals. Even though they took all care to maintain stealth in their visitation activities, they nonetheless spawned a whole underground culture of witnesses, experiencers and researchers into the so-called UFO phenomenon. The military became the most interested, however they were the ones who were most avoided and kept profoundly in the dark. So, it was this unnatural situation as related to the visitation of Earth that stifled any will that might have existed in the Rama to deflect the comet from its trajectory, which, by the way, they could have easily done had they chosen to do so.
2
Noah stopped his forward motion directly above the location of his time shifter. He observed three large lakes in the vicinity of his target’s location. One was about fifty miles to the north, one about seventy to the west and one about fifty to the southwest. Although he didn’t know their names, 100 years before they used to be called, Lake Tahoe, Walker Lake and Mono Lake. He looked down the line of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and marveled at how they now butted up against the Pacific Ocean. Had he known the names of the towns of a hundred years before he would have known that Sonora, if it still existed, would now have been a beach town on the West Coast. It became very apparent to him that the old coast and the Central Valley of California were gone, forever, replaced by a new, much more interesting coast with hundreds of offshore islands.
He began a gradual descent straight down as he studied the terrain immediately surrounding his target’s location.
‘Nice country,’ he thought. ‘I love mountain country.’
As he descended through 50,000 feet, he worked out that the group had moved from where he saw them last, which was on top of Pikes Peak, to a new location about five miles almost due south of there on the shores of a small lake the name of which he didn’t know. He thought,
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‘Boy, that’s some rough country between the Peak and the lake.’
As he descended through 30,000 feet, he marveled at the beauty of the place. He veered in an easterly direction as he descended. He wanted to approach from out of the sun and not be noticed until he wanted to be noticed.
The first evidence of the group’s camp was the smoke rising from their campfires.
Spotting their tents was more difficult because they were made from camouflage material. When he finally discerned the tents, he found himself impressed by the neatness and organization of the whole camp, except for one tent, which was away on its own by the edge of the lake.
‘Ha ha, there is always a loner,’ he thought.
He silently descended out of the sun then came around in an ark until he finally settled into a hover about five feet above the water, about fifty yards out from the camp, over the lake, the elevation of which was about 5,600 feet above sea level. He sat there, observing the camp, and waited for someone to notice him.
3
The morning of September 27, 2123, was as perfect an autumn morning as it is possible to imagine. There was not a cloud in the sky and not as much as a hint of a zephyr.
Pinecrest Lake looked like a painting. It was as if God used every colour on His palate to paint that tranquil morning, and then some.
Everyone felt well rested after a good night’s sleep. The men sat around the main fire drinking coffee and swapping ideas about some kind of plan. The women were mostly about organizing their tents. Carla spent the night with Melvin. Catherine and Connie, Jonesy’s two youngest daughters, were chasing butterflies in the bright sunshine down by the water, when one of them, Connie, spotted the shiny silver disc floating silently over the lake not more than fifty yards away. She stopped in her tracks and attempted to speak, but found it impossible to make the words come out. So, she just pointed. Catherine stopped chasing butterflies transfixed by the incredible vision.
It was Ludwig, while sitting around the fire with the group, who first noticed the two girls staring out into the lake. He looked for the thing that had captured their attention and spotted the spaceship. Summoning up all of his refined, calm demeanour, he comically announced the arrival of the extraterrestrial.
‘I say chaps,’ he said in his fake, snooty, English accent, ‘I believe that we have a visitant.’
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Everyone looked out over the lake at the levitating spaceship.
‘Holy guacamole,’ exclaimed Snake, ‘the aliens are back.’
Melvin, who was sitting by his campfire with Carla, and was messing about with a crossbow, rose to his feet and placed the crossbow in his tent upon seeing the spaceship.
‘No point lookin un-neighbourly,’ he muttered to Carla who stepped behind him for protection.
Everyone around the fire stood up and the women called each other out from the tents. Lori called her three youngest girls to her side. Jonesy whispered to Snake,
‘She looks pretty compact, Snake. Wouldn’t be much more than thirty feet across.’
‘Built for speed not comfort,’ was Snake’s reply.
‘Yeah, like my Lambo,’ DeRongo quipped.
In the end, they all, all seventeen of them, stood like Rapanui Moai staring out over the lake at the silent, levitating, polished-silver disc.
At this point in time the disc began to slowly move towards the shore. It made no sound, or any other kind of disturbance, as it defied gravity over a flawless reflection of itself. It settled into a hover at the shoreline, glistening in the morning sun, levitating about a foot in the air. Suddenly a panel opened on the underside and a thin ramp, which appeared to be covered in some sort of black, grippy rubber, extended out and downward. It almost, but not quite, touched the ground.
Although the group was used to seeing UFOs from up-close, and even aliens themselves, they were nonetheless rendered into a kind of speechless paralysis as they witnessed a reality-beyond-fantasy manifest right before their bewildered eyes.
Awe became mixed with surprise as they watched the alien step out of his spaceship. The first impression that struck them was Noah’s self-assured demeanor. He didn’t look like the sort of guy who ever took too many orders. He was tall, about 6’2”, broad across the shoulders and movie-star good looking. All the women’s hearts skipped a beat as they all suddenly felt the momentary mindspin of a psychosexual swoon. His skin was either dark or deeply tanned and he wore his sun-bleached, brown hair shoulder length. He wore a ratty, old, multicolored, what looked like hand-knitted, woolen jumper, with holes in it, over a blue T-shirt and a pair of very faded, blue jeans with holes in the knees. ‘Cool,’ Connie whispered to Catherine. He skipped barefoot from the ship’s ramp onto the green grass of terra firma, looked at them all, gave them a laconic smile and, in a calm, manly voice, like Chris Hemsworth’s, greeted them all with,
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‘Mornin.’
‘Who remembers his name?’ whispered Snake.
‘It’s Noah,’ Trixie whispered back.
Just as Trixie said Noah’s name, Connie and Catherine let go of their mother and ran over to the alien. Connie smiled and said,
‘Hello, Noah, I’m Connie and this is Cathy.’
‘Come back here you two,’ Lori called out.
Noah laughed and said,
‘It’s OK, I love kids.’ He looked down at the girls, ‘And may I presume that you are sisters?’
They giggled and each took one of his hands and walked him towards the group.
Everyone began to smile. Melvin and Carla walked over from their campfire. They were all together as Snake welcomed Noah to the camp.
‘Welcome to our camp, Noah. We’re sure glad that you could make it back.’
He stepped forward and put his hand out to shake Noah’s. Noah shook his hand and then gave him a friendly pat across the back.
‘You have done well, Snake, very well. There are seventeen of you. I can barely believe it.’
‘Well, we can all thank Jonesy for that,’ Snake replied. ‘If it weren’t for him, I suspect that we’d all probably be worm food by now.’
Jonesy, who was standing right next to Snake, chipped in with,
‘More like charcoal I reckon, Snake.’
Noah put his hand out to shake Jonesy’s and said,
‘Jonesy, our time shifter, we chose you well. I would not be surprised if you hold the record for most people saved. I would not be surprised at all.’
Jonesy, putting on the old humble act, kicked some dirt and replied,
‘Oh, shucks, it weren’t nuthin.’
‘Why don’t you come and sit with us around the fire, Noah, and take a load off,’ said Snake, ‘and have some coffee. You drink coffee?’
Noah thought about how similar the Earth humans were to the Rama who also loved to sit around their fires. He replied, ‘I think that I am addicted to coffee.’
Everyone’s faces lit up even more when he said that.
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He sat with them and when they were all settled, he said, ‘I must learn all of your names and I must get to know you some.’
‘Plenty of time for that,’ said Snake, ‘unless you are in a hurry and need to be someplace else.’
Noah recognized an opportunity to use a line he once picked up from Adam.
‘I’ve got nowhere to go, Snake, and the rest of my life to get there.’
Snake looked deeply into Noah’s opal-blue eyes upon hearing that remark. He was a master judge of character, and he recognized a good man when he met one, but he’d never seen eyes like that before. They were intensely iridescent.
‘Where was it that you say you come from, Noah?’
Everyone listened intently to the conversation.
‘I come from a planet called Rama, Snake, which is located in the Andromeda Galaxy.
Rama is identical to Earth, except of course for the geography. It is basically the same size and pretty much the same temperature. The main difference is that we have two suns and two moons, which create slightly less and, occasionally, more well-defined tidal phenomena than here.’ Noah noticed some of them looking a bit vague and added, ‘but that is a minor thing. Basically, it’s the same. Same good air.’
‘The Andromeda Galaxy is two million light years away,’ said Ludwig.
Noah smiled, ‘Give or take.’
‘That is unimaginable,’ Ludwig continued. ‘How do you traverse such distances?’
Noah, who had his back to his ship, pointed over his shoulder with his thumb and said,
‘In that. My ship can do the speed of light squared. It takes a tad over an hour to get from there to here.’
‘Holy guacamole,’ exclaimed Snake. That was one of the phrases he used when there were ‘womenfolk’ around. Snake didn’t like to ‘cuss’ in front of the ‘feminine persuasion and younguns’. He pronounced the nine in feminine like the number 9.
‘It takes me that long to get from Venice Beach to Burbank,’ said DeRongo.
‘Do you have children on your planet?’ Connie asked.
‘Be quiet,’ said Lori, ‘the men are talking.’
Noah laughed. He leaned forward and looked warmly into Connie’s eyes.
‘Oh yes, Connie, Rama is full of children. We live for our children. Our whole planet is a playground for our children. You will love it when you visit one day.’
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Connie’s eyes lit up with anticipation and wonder at what Noah had just said to her.
Noah sensed the thoughts that flashed through the minds of the adults. He felt their sudden embarrassment and shame at how the people of Earth stole away the precious innocence of their own children by allowing them to be exposed to unrelenting moral degradation. Then he sensed a collective sigh of relief that all the sources of this evil were now dead and long gone. Lori was moved to say,
‘That is how we would like our planet to be as well, Noah.’
‘I suspect that it shall … er?’
‘Lori, my name is Lori. I am Jonesy’s wife.’
‘It shall be like that, Lori, if that is how you wish it to be.’
‘You want I should top up your coffee?’ Trixie asked.
‘An how about a flapjack?’ Snake added.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Noah. He looked around at everyone, ‘Gosh, I have to learn all your names.’
‘Plenty of time for that, Noah, plenty of time for that,’ said Snake. ‘You just make yourself comfortable first.’
As Noah relaxed, they gradually, one by one, introduced themselves to him.
4
As he sipped his coffee and munched on his flapjack, which was covered in delicious maple syrup, Noah asked,
‘It’s probably too early to be asking, but I was wondering whether you made any plans yet.’
The men all looked at each other. After a moment, Snake spoke.
‘Well, Noah, our first hurdle was to find the shippin container we buried over there a hundred years ago.’ He pointed at the container. ‘Now that we’ve found it, it gives us a year’s breathin space. We got twelve months supplies stored away …’
‘Plus, we can hunt game for fresh meat,’ Melvin cut in. Carla hugged his arm tighter feeling proud of her man.
‘That’s right, we’re pretty well set up for livin off the land. We also got a sizeable seed bank stored away in that container, but we’d wanna be in better growin country to be plantin any of that.’
‘Actually,’ said Noah, ‘that’s exactly what I was thinking about. September is autumn up here in the northern hemisphere. It’s going to get pretty cold. Had you considered
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setting up camp down lower off this mountain for the winter? Won’t it be in snow up here?’
‘He’s right,’ said Jonesy.
‘Actually, we did talk about sendin out a scoutin party down the mountain,’ said Snake. ‘We figured that they could go fifty miles before they needed to turn back, an that’s just livin off the supplies they carried on their backs.’
‘That’d get them off the mountain and near to twenty miles out into the valley,’ said Ludwig. ‘The winters are quite mild down there.’
‘They’d be able to find a good campin place for us, I reckon,’ said Snake. He then explained the problem as he saw it. ‘The main problem, Noah, is the container. Everything we need to live on is in it, and it’s up here … see?’
‘Yes, yes, I see,’ said Noah now fully understanding the predicament of the group.
Noah put aside his concerns about the group’s ability to survive in the short term.
If needed, they could be assisted, although he preferred not to interfere too much. He figured that life should be an adventure, which shouldn’t be spoilt. He felt that the men and women of the group were capable and resourceful enough to make their own way into the immediate future. He contemplated whether he should tell them about the sinking of the coast of California or whether he should let them find out for themselves.
He imagined the high adventure of being the first to discover the Pacific Ocean lapping up against the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Range. In the end he decided to ponder on it for a while before he made up his mind. He figured that he could let them scout out the terrain for themselves and maybe just keep an eye on them. He also knew that sooner or later they would come into contact with other of his fellow Rama and their highly venturesome spirits. He knew that this first twelve months that they had, this twelve-month link with their past through their container, was a highly temporary situation that should not be ruined. Very soon, perhaps too soon, he thought, their lives were going to take a quantum leap into a future none of them could ever have imagined in their wildest dreams or fantasies. Their memories of the past and the container would eventually disappear in the wake of time gone by, completely erased by the adventure of a previously unimaginable, oncoming future.
Noah took a sip of his coffee, looked at Snake and asked him,
‘Do you have a Geiger Counter?’
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‘I got six of em, Noah. I also got a big box of batteries and a couple of decent solar chargers. We’re all set up. Why? Are you expectin radiation?’
‘There must be, without a doubt, total no-go areas around the place. Although I haven’t checked, I suspect that every nuclear power station on Earth has crumbled in a heap and must be avoided, although I think you might be in the clear here, but I doubt that you should send your scouts out without a fully charged Geiger Counter.’
‘Got ya,’ said Snake.
‘You want I should make you another griddle cake, Noah?’ said Trixie.
‘He might be wantin more coffee as well, cupcakes,’ Snake suggested.
‘Yes please,’ said Noah. ‘Er … now let me try and see how I go remembering all your names. I shall begin with the most important first.’ He looked at Connie. Her face beamed into a huge smile. Everyone’s face beamed into a huge smile.
‘You are Connie and you are the youngest of Jonesy’s girls. And how old would you be exactly?’
Connie giggled and looked at her mother.
‘Tell him, sweetheart,’ said Lori.
‘I’m nine going on ten, Noah.’
‘Nine going on ten … ahhh, what a wonderful age.’
‘How old are you?’ Connie asked.
‘Don’t be rude,’ said Lori.
‘It’s not rude,’ said Noah. ‘The question actually allows me a segue into a subject that I have been meaning to broach with you all, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it.’
‘What’s segue?’ asked Catherine who was sitting next to Connie.
Ludwig, who directed all of their documentaries and understood a segue like he understood a hard edit, said,
‘It’s an uninterrupted transition from one scene to another unrelated one.’
‘I was thinking more like one subject to another,’ added Noah. ‘Be that as it may, would anyone care to hazard a guess at my age?’
Lauren Cole, Cowboy’s girlfriend and famous movie star, always thought that she was a great judge of a person’s real age. Her technique was to just look past all the makeup and plastic surgery and see the ‘decomposing wreck’ underneath. ‘I would put you around twenty-eight,’ she said confidently.
Noah smiled a modest smile and replied,
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‘You are very kind, Lauren.’ He remembered her name after only being told once.
He looked at the others and added, ‘Any other guesses?’
Everyone nodded their heads and mumbled and generally agreed with Lauren’s assessment.
He suddenly sprang to his feet and said, ‘Just a moment, please,’ and zipped back to his ship. Almost immediately, he re-emerged carrying a small shoulder bag, made of hemp fibre, and sat back down with them. He put his hand inside and pulled out a small, shiny, intricately-carved, gold container. He placed it on the ground in front of him and took another sip of his coffee. ‘Good coffee,’ he said. ‘Now, any more guesses about my age?’
Everyone shook their heads wondering at his game.
‘OK, I am actually not 28. Er … I er … am … er,’ he sighed, ‘367 years old.’
There were gasps all around and a subtle ‘bullshit’ could be heard masked under a throat-clearing cough.
Noah laughed because he sensed their skepticism.
‘It’s true,’ he said cheerfully, ‘and this is the reason.’ He held up the gold container, opened it, and showed them the brown crumble inside. ‘It is called Mana, and we partake of it every day. It gives us longevity and wellbeing.’
Jonesy, who was an expert in such things, said, ‘It looks like hash.’ Lori gave him a dirty look. Jonesy saw it and said, ‘I was just sayin, sweetheart, that it looked like … you know …’
‘A very astute observation, Jonesy,’ said Noah, ‘because Mana is made from a plant that is a distant relative to the Cannabis sativa plant that grows on your planet.’
Jonesy looked at Lori in a fashion as if to say, ‘See?’ She rolled her eyes to the sky as if to say, ‘Lord, give me strength.’ She didn’t like Jonesy partaking of any kind of drugs.
Cowboy, who didn’t mind the occasional ‘tug on a doobie’, asked,
‘So, what? Do you smoke it?’
‘We smoke it and we cook with it. Our children usually begin smoking it at the age of seven, however it is incorporated into their food much earlier than that. Actually, they receive it from their mothers from birth through their breast milk.’
‘And it’s supposed to be good?’ Lori asked.
‘Oh yes.’ Noah replied nodding his head. ‘If, for example, any of you partook of it only once, either by smoking it or, say, eating it in, er, say, one of these griddle cakes here,
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your lifespan would instantly be doubled to about 150 years. If you kept taking it every day, your lifespan would eventually stretch out to eight, even nine hundred years.’
There were gasps of shock all around the camp. Noah continued,
‘And you would much more likely live all those years enjoying perfect health. It’s amazing stuff.’
‘Who do you have to murder to get some?’ said DeRongo.
Noah laughed, ‘Nobody, Dirk. It grows wild on an uninhabited planet called Canaba.
As well, all Rama cultivate it in their gardens. We make the crumble in a similar fashion that the Moroccans, on your planet, used to use to make their hashish. The best Raman Mana grows on the slopes of Mt. Ourea, our highest mountain. There is no shortage of Mana, Dirk, so no one will need to be murdered.’ Noah said the last part with a smile on his face. He continued, ‘We can make tea from the leaves and drink it that way. We like to add peppermint leaves to it for flavour and we like it sweetened with wild honey. Mostly, however, we enjoy smoking it.’
‘Does it get you high?’ Jonesy asked nervously, glancing at Lori.
‘In its own unique way, yes,’ replied Noah. ‘It’s not like Cannabis. It’s different and it’s permanent. It makes you feel more, er, it’s really hard to describe in words, alive I guess, and that is a real high. The best way to find out is to try it.’
‘So, let me get this straight, Noah,’ said Snake, ‘if I smoke some of your, er…?’
‘Mana.’
‘That’s right. So, if I smoke some, I get to live to be one hundred and fifty years old?’
‘That’s affirmative, Snake. Longer if you smoke it a second time.’
Snake shook his head and said, ‘Holy crap.’
Noah rummaged in his bag and brought out a beautifully-ornate, small, white, ceramic pipe. Then he said, ‘Anyone care for a puff?’
5
By lunchtime, everyone had had a single inhalation of Mana smoke through Noah’s tiny, white pipe.
‘It’s very mild,’ was the most common comment.
‘I feel all tingly,’ said Connie.
They all felt ‘all tingly’. The best way they could describe it was that it gave the feeling of being more alive, like when they were little kids.
…….
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