1
Adam awoke startled. He scanned his bedroom like a man unsure of his surroundings. He suddenly sprang out of bed and ran down to the kitchen where he picked up a writing pad and a pen. He returned to his bed and began to write as fast as he could. He wrote,
I just had the most vivid dream. We met some people, Libby and me. Libby made the contact. I don’t know. They were very special. They could telepathically make you dream.
They told us stories by actually sending us into dreams. So, I experienced a dream within a dream. I remember remarking on how real this dream was. I even looked at my own body in my dream within a dream and it was real. It was like I was dreaming while I was still awake. I felt quite comfortable with it. I can’t remember the first dream I went into in my dream, but I remember the last.
First of all, we ended up in a lecture hall full of beings who all appeared to be from other worlds. The lecturer, who I was never going to see, was going to give me a special dream. This was actually part of a long story that they were telling me about themselves through my dream, which seemed to last the whole night. Anyway, this special guy, who I was told was one of their best dream givers, was going to tell me something about the past of his people. I actually remember waiting for his dream to begin. It was like entering a new reality. It wasn’t like dreaming. I thought I was there. The dream within a dream is fading, but I’m writing as fast as I can.
It was night. Pitch dark. I couldn’t make anything out. The ground was rutted and pitted with potholes and was dirt. There didn’t seem to be any grass or trees, or anything. I was running across what seemed like a field when I noticed a pillar of fire in the distance. It was almost silent. It appeared to be about 100 to 200 feet high, but I can’t be sure. It was spinning and seemed to be under some kind of control. It was making a muffled sound, sort of like electricity. It was as if it was in a vortex. It was wider at the top and bottom and narrower in the middle. It was rapidly travelling over the ground, darting to and fro. I began to run, fearing that it may get me. I ran in the darkness towards where I thought there might have been some buildings. I ran and ran and watched the pillar of flame systematically covering ground. There was no other sound. I didn’t see any other people. The flame was
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getting closer so I dove into a deep rut. Just when I thought I was a gonner, the flame retreated and then went out. The next moment, a young man appeared in front of me in the darkness. I could just make him out. All excited and afraid at the same time he exclaimed,
‘we’re safe, we’re safe, the fire stopped short.’ I began to walk back. As I walked back, I started to notice hundreds upon hundreds of dead and dying burnt bodies. I began to run, hopping over some. There was not much sound. All of a sudden, a small dog bit into my ankle and ripped out a bit of flesh. I think it thought that I was a bit of a meal as well. I had to flick it away. I ran and ran over the field of death until I reached these, what appeared to be like, stretched out horizontal nets. I jumped from one to another, like on trampolines, and became lighter and lighter as I did so. After the last jump, I reached the lecture theatre. As I got inside, the lecture had just ended. I was still light and I floated down to the front of the lecture theatre, taking ten steps at a time. Libby was there. I noticed that she was wearing a one-piece, skin-tight suit that looked like it was made out of fish scales. I now remember that I had seen that suit before. It was in one of my early gas trips. It was that girl with Scott.
I’ll never forget that suit. The girl had the same suit as Liberty. Same suit in different dreams.
Maybe it was the same girl? She must have known Scott. What does that make Scott? Maybe she met him on her surf trip? But why did I see them in my gas trip, years before I ever met Libby? Unless she planned it from way back then. Doyle! I’m side-tracking myself here.
The dream. In the end I can’t remember ever seeing the dream giver in my dream.
However, it is clear that he and many in the lecture theatre were from other worlds. They looked very cool and purposeful. They were into something.
Finally, Libby said, ‘let’s go,’ and I said, ‘where is Ben?’ and she said, ‘outside,’ and sure enough, there he was waiting for us, looking a little older, with fully-grown long hair now.
At that point I woke up here in my bed, in Stanwell Park. I can’t tell you how real this dream was. I was there.
Adam put his pen down, thought for a while and then continued writing.
I am left with a final thought. I sense that the people, upon seeing the pillar of flame, ran out of the villages and into the fields thinking that they would be safe there. But in the end, it was the villages that were spared.
2
Adam’s concentration was suddenly broken by his ringing telephone. He stopped writing, went down to the kitchen and answered the phone. It was Zeke. Highly excited he announced,
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‘Adam, I’ve done a lot of thinkin an I’ve decided to build a full-sized version of Ben’s guard.’
He said that he had decided to scale everything up by a factor of four. He said that he would let someone else have fun designing the shaft turner.
‘I’m gonna build a big gravity sail, one that I can get in. I wanna fly one of these babies so bad. It’s all I can think about.’
Over the next few weeks he scrounged a number of lengths of thin-wall, 16-millimetre-diameter, steel tube. He spent the nights buried in his drawings designing the high-precision jigs he would have to build out of plywood. He found Heinz, a young German guy, who bent up eight perfect quarter-circles out of the 16-millimetre steel tube.
Zeke constructed a large, circular, plywood jig on which he twice welded four quarters into two perfect circles, each with a diameter of exactly 2096 millimetres.
3
The February night was warm and hazy. The doors of Zeke’s shed were wide open, inviting any cooling breeze to waft through his cluttered workshop. The soft light emanating out of the shed lit the back of Zeke’s hut and Adam’s car just enough to lift them out of the darkness. Music was blasting out of the giant speakers. Every now and then, the night was pierced by the noise of metal being ground and the light of thousands of sparks flying out of the shed. Sometimes there were longer, brighter flashes, accompanied by electric sounds, as Zeke welded pieces of tube together.
Within four weeks of commencing, Zeke had welded up the rings and welded them to each other via the 400-millimetre-long spacers. He let Adam grind and polish the ends of the tubes. Adam said that it came naturally to him because it was just like polishing dentures. They were very precise with the measurements, but were still limited to an accuracy of about half a millimetre. They both wondered if their limited accuracy would be enough to make the big gravity sail work. Zeke figured,
‘There’s only one way to find out, ain’t there?’
The construction of the jig that supported the angled uprights and the flat plate on top was one of the trickiest tasks. The boys found the setting and welding of the uprights at exactly 38 degrees 10 minutes the most difficult to execute. However, with care and perseverance they finally had the whole contraption built six weeks after they began.
Both Doyle and Adam were there on the night it was finished. They all sat around the big sail late into the night.
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4
Three nights later, they were all together again. In the interim, Zeke had set up a giant set of scales in the shed. He set up an elaborate rope-and-pulley system designed such that he could weigh the sail with sandbags.
The three of them turned the tubular construction over and hooked it to the rope via three attachment points so that it would hang level. As it sat on the ground, pointy end down, resting on the flat plate and hooked up to the pulley system, Zeke began adding sandbags to the other end of the rope until their combined weight started to lift the big gravity sail off the ground. He finely balanced the weight of the sail with the weight of the sand, down to the last spoonful. When it was perfect, he announced,
‘There you go, that sand represents the weight of the sail when it’s upside down. If it’s workin, this should be the heavy way up. Let’s unhook it an turn it over an see what it weighs the other way.’
The three of them unhooked the large contraption, turned it over and re-weighed it, pointy way up this time. Adam was the first to comment,
‘It’s not picking up the sandbags! It’s lighter!’
The next moment turned out to be the most hysterical moment ever experienced by the three of them together. They all went totally nuts screaming, dancing and hugging each other. Even Doyle’s usually morbid face lit up like a Roman candle. Finally, Zeke settled things down and said,
‘Let’s see how much sand we have to take away to balance it out.’
He started spooning sand out of one of the bags into a plastic container. When he spooned out about eighty spoonfuls of sand, the sandbags lifted off the ground. At eighty-five spoonfuls, it was balanced. Doyle and Adam watched Zeke’s every minute move, making sure that they didn’t miss anything. Zeke announced,
‘Now, all we’ve gotta do is weigh the sand an we’ll know the lift.’
He poured the sand onto the digital scales. They all gathered around the scales to read the weight. Zeke read it out.
‘484 grams. 484 grams? Wait a minute!’ He started mumbling to himself, ‘484, four threes is twelve, four squared is sixteen, times thirty is four hundred an eighty. So, what’s the four? It must be the friction in the rope an pulley. In a perfect system, I bet it’d be 480.’
‘Would you mind letting us in on this, Zeke,’ said Adam.
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‘The lift goes up exponentially with size. We increased the size by four but got sixteen times more, naturally-occurin, lift. Of course, the 480 grams represents the difference between the two weights. Actual lift, at room temperature, is 240 beautiful, free grams.’
‘Exponential increase with size, that’s got to be good, ey, Zeke?’
‘It’s great, Adam, it’s better than great. Actually, it’s amazin that it even works. It’s gotta be the geometry. It can’t have anythin to do with the metal. It must have somethin to do with gravity-harmonic lengths, diameters an angles, but who’s to know?’
Doyle started laughing,
‘How are you going to boil this one, Zeke? You’ll need a bloody swimming pool.’
‘That’s a good question, Doyle. I’m gonna have to figure out some other way to heat it up.’
‘You’ll need lots of heaters, I think,’ said Adam.
‘How are you going to heat it evenly?’ Doyle queried. ‘It’s such a big bastard that you’ll get hot and cold spots.’
‘Yeah, it’s a problem. It’s the next problem.’
5
Through the following week, Zeke prepared himself for flight. First, he raised the gravity sail off the floor of his workshop and supported it on four besser-brick blocks standing end on. He owned an old, fibreglass, bucket seat, which came out of a wrecked rally car. He hung it from the square plate at the top of the gravity sail. When he sat in it, he was right in the middle of the two rings and his toes just touched the ground. He went to an old, second-hand shop where he bought a dozen, two-bar heaters. He took the heaters apart and mounted the individual heating elements to the tubing with hose clamps. He spaced them at even intervals attempting to get as even a heating of the tubular construction as possible. He bolted four lengths of seatbelt webbing into the concrete floor of his workshop, with expansion bolts, and then looped the other ends around the lower ring of the sail at exactly 90-degree intervals. The idea was that if the sail flew when it was heated up, it would be allowed to rise about a foot before becoming restrained by the hold-down straps. Zeke saw this as an easy-to-achieve safety feature.
He was already thinking ahead, though. He thought that it might be possible to control the gravity sail with weight shift, just like a hang glider. He thought that if the gravity sail successfully flew, he might be able to control it by swinging around in his seat, thus
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shifting the centre of gravity and thus redirecting the vector of lift. But at this stage it was still only a fantasy. He first had to get it to fly.
6
That same week, as Zeke prepared himself for gravity flight, Doyle visited Adam with the intent of finally attempting a deep probe into his memory. He came one evening carrying a folder full of photocopies detailing descriptions of what are commonly known as abduction experiences. He had phoned Adam the day before and explained to him that he wanted to enter into the subject of memories with him. He said that all Adam had to do was answer his line of questions.
They sat on the veranda where they ate dinner that Adam prepared for them. After dinner, Doyle opened his folder and began,
‘Whenever you deal with an abduction case you’re dealing with a memory, that’s all.
No different from any other memory. And something had to put that memory in there.
There are all kinds of things in these pages,’ Doyle flipped through the pages, ‘really strange stuff that people reckon they remember and even things they can’t remember.
Some have had unexplainable or missing lost time, some can remember flying through the air, some have strong marker memories that won’t go away and many talk about strange, recurring dreams. It’s all here in these pages. Most, if not all, have had strange, unexplainable events happen to them. Some think they’re psychic, some have memories of light and of being transported to different places, some remember seeing alien beings and some reckon that they’ve been poked and prodded. Personally, I find that the most hideous to imagine. Can you see where I’m going with this, Adam? I know you don’t talk about this sort of stuff … anyway, I’ve never heard you. Maybe you’ve got nothing to talk about, or maybe you just don’t like talking about stuff like this …’
‘Maybe it’s because I’m a dentist and I’m paranoid about things getting out that could adversely affect my profession.’
‘So, there is something. Adam, how long have we known each other?’
‘I know, Doyle.’
‘Look, this isn’t about you, it’s about them. What do you think I’m going to do, call up the Dental Board?’ Doyle began to laugh. ‘Do you think I’m going to tell them that they’ve got a fruitcake dentist out there, running amuck with his drill? I want to know why they came, that is all. I’m not here to judge you, or report you, or to even take notes.’
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Doyle looked Adam squarely in the eyes. ‘I just want to know the truth! … So, what did you do that was so bad?’
‘I got into the laughing gas, big time. Just for fun at first, with my friends. We all got stoned and laughed our heads off. We played music. You know how it is, Doyle, it was all recreational.’ Doyle lit a cigarette as he listened attentively. ‘Then, one day, I had the most incredible experience.’ Adam proceeded to describe his first reality-change experience. It was the first time he ever mentioned Nancy. ‘The whole surgery became the stage of a huge lecture theatre full of people studying us. What really got me at the time was not the detail of the changed reality but the fact that there was a reality change at all. It completely blew me away. I had to find out more about it. I was young and I thought that I had stumbled onto something that nobody knew anything about. It was so exciting, I can’t tell you, Doyle.’
‘There is documentation of reality-change experiences in abductees. They are described as involving all five senses and being indistinguishable from real reality.’
‘Well, it was happening to Nancy as well. She was having her own trips.’
‘Nancy, what happened to her?’
Adam sighed deeply, ‘Ohhh … she got killed in a boating accident.’
‘That’s a shame.’
‘Yeah.’
‘She sounds nice.’
‘You know, Doyle, I’ve been having dreams of Libby and Ben on a regular basis.’
‘Since they disappeared?’
‘Yeah. And there are a couple of things that I’ve noticed.’
Doyle leaned forward.
‘Yeah?’
‘Ben and Libby are not staying the same, as if I was dreaming them out of my memory. They’re changing. Ben is getting older and he has grown his hair really long, and Libby, who looks as stunning as ever, has cut her hair shorter. That seems strange to me.
And in my last really weird dream of her, she was wearing this one-piece, fish-scale suit.
It looked incredible. And I remembered that suit because I’d seen it maybe more than fifteen years before, in a gas trip. It was one of my earlier trips when Nancy was still around. Oh, Doyle, what a gorgeous girl she was … anyway, I saw a girl, in the gas trip, wearing the same suit. She was with a guy I actually met, years before, way back in ‘68 on
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a trip up north. His name was Scott. He was out here from California on a kind of a surf trip. He was living in a camp near Broken Head, this fabulous surf place just south of Byron. I made good friends with him and we met a couple of beautiful girls together. Wow, I remember now, what a time that was. I never saw him again until years later when he popped up in my gas trip, and now I realise that the girl with him was Libby. She was years younger, just a child. It was always hard to tell her age because she looked so childlike. I now think that I saw Libby with Scott, in my gas trip, years before I met her.’
‘When did you have the last dream?’
‘A couple of months ago. I wrote it down. I can show it to you if you like. You can read it, but I’ve got to warn you, it’s very strange.’
Adam retrieved his notes from his bedroom and gave them to Doyle to read. Doyle took a small plastic bag out of his pocket, placed it on the table and suggested,
‘Why don’t you try to figure out what to do with this while I read your notes. And what do you reckon about a coffee?’
After Doyle finished reading Adam’s account of his dream, he commented,
‘That’s some weapon you describe.’
‘I just wrote what I saw.’
‘You also wrote what you felt and you seem to have got quite an insight into the dream-giver concept. If it was a real thing, it would have to be some kind of telepathic technique.’
‘I know about that, Doyle. It’s got a name. It’s called creative telepathy. It’s a skill.
The closest analogy to it would be silent movies. Pictures are the universal language, you know.’
‘How would you know about something like that?’
‘That’s the weird thing, Doyle, I just picked these things up as I went along.’
‘Some abductees claim to have attained an understanding of some of the aliens’
techniques, especially in the area of telepathic communication.’
‘I imagine that that would be one of the first things.’
‘So, you saw Libby in a gas-induced, what … stone?’
‘No, more like a trance. And it’s not just the gas, it’s also the yoga.’
‘What, pretzel bending?’
‘No no, it’s breathing, concentration, stillness and non-reaction. This might be a bit outside of your scope, Doyle.’
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‘Just a bit. Lucky it’s got nothing to do with what I’m after. So … let’s assume that Libby knew this guy, what was his name?’
‘Scott.’
‘Let’s assume that Libby knew Scott and that he came here before her and then went back. You were friends you say?’
‘Yeah, we ended up good friends.’
‘Good enough to establish some kind of telepathic link perhaps. Who knows what they are capable of.’
‘Couldn’t my mind just have juxtaposed them into the same trip?’
‘No, because, as you have stated, you hadn’t met Libby at that time.’
‘Oh yeah, that’s right. Hey, you’re pretty sharp, Doyle.’
‘It’s just my job, mate. You know what I reckon? I reckon they had you picked out years before she came on the scene. There was no accident about your meeting. I bet if you analyse it, you’ll realise that it was all orchestrated.’
Adam reflected back to the day he met Liberty.
‘You know, she was travelling in a camper van. On the side of the van she spray-painted a picture of Broken Head, an image instantly recognisable to me and probably only me. I used it as an excuse to talk to her. She looked so hot … blew my mind …’
Adam’s voice faded away as he drifted into his memory of Libby. Doyle snapped him back to the present.
‘So, now there are three of them, Liberty, Ben and Scott, and how long have I been here? Hey, you got any intentions of rolling that joint, or what? So, you had your first gas trip in which you were in a lecture theatre. You also had a gas trip in which you saw Liberty years before you met her. What other gas trips did you experience?’
‘I can’t remember all of them, I can only remember some of them, but there are some I can’t forget.’
‘Those ones are called marker memories.’
‘Oh? Well, I’ve got a couple of beauties. Do you want to hear about the white bird?’
‘I’m all ears. Fire away.’
Adam related his fantastic story of his flight on the back of the big, white bird. He told him about flying over the giant, molten canyon.
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‘I don’t know if it was a canyon or a crater. All I know is that it was huge, horizon to horizon, and that it was all boiling lava and sulphur smoke everywhere. It was like a giant, red-hot hole in the Earth. What do you make of it, Doyle?’
‘It sounds more like a religious experience than an abduction experience. You describe a vision of hell.’
‘I know, and it was so real. I was there. I can still hear the sound of the big bird’s wings.’
Doyle rubbed his chin. ‘Hmm, we’ll have to put that one into the memory banks to give ourselves a chance to think about it.’
‘Well, I’ve thought about it. It doesn’t make much sense until you put it together with what happened to me the very last time I ever used the gas.’
Doyle was barely managing to contain his excitement. He lit another cigarette and sucked in a deep lungful of smoke as Adam continued.
‘I had a number of trips where I never left the surgery. What I mean by that is that I didn’t get taken anywhere in my mind. I used to use a dot on the wall as my focus of concentration. I would breathe the gas and focus on the dot. It was a game.’
‘A game?’
‘Yeah, the concentration game. Whoever was laying the trips on me was also helping me to become better at concentration, like a teacher was guiding me. He made me aware of a telepathic game called concentration. I concentrated on the dot, trying to not-think, while somebody tried to break my concentration with a telepathic distraction. I’ve got to say it worked, and most of the time it was fun. Actually, it was probably one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done. I got better at concentrating and the distractions got more and more … ah … distracting. You know, Doyle, the only way you can intensify your concentration is by dealing with more intense distractions. That’s what was happening to me. If there was some kind of constant thread running through my trips for all the years that I messed around with the gas, that was it.’
‘Did it ever occur to you that you were dealing with alien intelligence?’
‘No, not in the way you think, not at the time. It’s hard to explain … ah … it’s sort of like … there are no aliens in the mind plane.’
Doyle’s jaw was beginning to hang open in amazement as Adam continued his incredible explanation.
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‘Everyone is the same in the mind plane, except that some of them are very advanced at what they can do in there. Let me tell you about the hand.’
‘The hand?’
‘Yeah. I’ll never forget the first time I saw the hand. I was concentrating on the dot on the wall, playing the concentration game, when a hand appeared.’
Adam told Doyle the whole story about the clever distraction in which the hand sprinkled the black dust past his concentration point. He then proceeded to tell him about the second time he saw the hand.
‘It was the last gas trip of my life as I had already sold my surgery in the city. What looked like the same hand appeared above my dot, but this time it was holding a pencil.
It began to draw a diagram on the wall, circles in a line. First a big circle, then smaller ones, then a sixth, bigger one.’ Adam drew an invisible diagram on the table with his finger as he spoke. He continued. ‘After a while, I think it was when the hand got to Saturn, when it drew the ring around the seventh circle, I recognised the drawing as representing our solar system.’ Doyle leaned forward across the table, listening to Adam intently. ‘It seems to me that the hand might have known the moment that I recognised the drawing as our solar system because it didn’t draw any more planets after that. Instead it began drawing a long, parabolic line from the upper right. The line curved towards the sun. It looked like a classic parabolic arc, like that of a comet or something. As the line approached the sun, it started to curve down towards Venus. Instead of going around the sun, the line dipped down and hooked tight around Venus and headed straight for Earth. The hand drew the line straight into the Earth. I think that’s the main part of it.’
Doyle sat back in his chair, totally stunned. For once he was speechless. He could feel the hair on his back standing up on end. Adam kept talking.
‘It was so real, Doyle.’
Doyle sat there mute, just staring at Adam, who continued,
‘Initially I didn’t put two and two together, but when you look at it now, with everything that has happened …’
Doyle sat there in silence.
‘So, what do you reckon, Doyle?’
‘About what?’
‘About what I’ve just told you.’
‘I’m thinking.’
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‘You’re not often lost for words.’
Doyle took another cigarette out of his packet and lit it off the one in his mouth.
After thinking for a while, he spoke in a low, suspicious voice.
‘I think the bastards have known about this for thousands of years.’
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Adam asked.
‘I’m thinking that judging by what you have told me …’ Doyle paused, then continued, ‘judging by what I have read, the reports, scriptural prophecy, the Bible, what’s happened, the hybrids, everything, it all seems to point to one thing.’ Doyle looked Adam squarely in the eyes. ‘It all points to the Earth getting whacked by some huge, er, meteor or comet or something.’
Both men stared into each other’s eyes. Within them they could both see shock, surprise, fear and uncertainty. Adam spoke first.
‘You know, Libby said something once in a conversation with my dad. They were talking about the great tribulation out of the Bible. She said that the only kind of future that could be predicted by anyone, other than God, is one with mathematical certainty.
Then she gave an example, like the orbit of a comet. I didn’t take much notice of it then.
Come to think of it, when I think about it now, I didn’t really take enough notice of anything she said.’
There was another long pause. Adam lit the joint he’d been rolling and passed it to Doyle who said,
‘I think I need this.’
There was more protracted silence as the two men passed the smoke between each other, when on one pass, Doyle held the joint out to Adam, but as Adam put his hand out to take it off him, Doyle hung onto it. Their eyes met again. After a momentary, frozen silence, as if they were suspended in time, as if they each read each other’s minds, they both uttered the same words in perfect unison.
‘Twenty … twenty … three!’
…….
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