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isa called to me from the porch, “Lover, what is that?” I went out into the night chill, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the night. Lisa was pointing to a bar of light in the sky, many miles away.
“Airplane?” I said.
“Can you hear the engines?”
I listened for a moment. There were the usual insect sounds, nothing more. It’s quiet in the country, but not without sound, and aircraft engines carry a very long way.
“No, but it must be a plane, maybe a passenger craft with the cabin lights on?”
“It’s moving awfully slow.”
She was right. It was loafing along through the dark, not at all like the movement of a plane (even though distance and angles make even a jetliner seem as slow as a sailing ship).
“Let’s have a better look,” I told her, and went back inside for the 7×50 night glasses. I let my eyes adjust again and put the eyepieces to my face, searched a few seconds and got it in the field of view.
It was still a solid bar of light, not a suggestion of windows, more like a fluorescent tube suspended in the sky.
I handed her the Bushnells, she put them to her eyes. “Still looks the same,” she said.
By now I’d noticed that there were no blinking red or green strobes, either.
The object began a long, slow turn to the right, a lazy maneuver that transformed it into a single point of light, then resolved into that bar again.
Lisa gasped, “Holy Crow, it’s a blimp!”
She handed me the binoculars, I looked, and sure enough, it was a long ellipse of barely illuminated metallic skin, with small sleek fins fore and aft.
“Not a blimp,” I said, gobsmacked. “It’s a frickin’ zeppelin!”
“It can’t be! There aren’t any!”
I gave her the glasses and ducked inside for another pair (we have several). I opened a modified steamer trunk by the door and fished out a small parabolic mike from our cache of such gear. When you do what we do, it’s good to be prepared. I fitted the earphones to my head and listened.
Nothing. It was as silent as an Egyptian tomb at midnight. The thing slipped into a cloud bank and out of sight.
Next morning, as we sipped our tea and nibbled scones, the telephone rang. Lisa snagged the celly, opened it and listened.
“It’s Carole,” she said. Carole was an old colleague from the paper; she and Lisa were still close. It was a brief call.
“Well,” she said, “if we’re crazy, we have lots of company. There are calls coming in from all over the county. A lot of people saw that thing.”
I pondered this as she tugged on her sheepskin-lined boots and a pile vest—it was too chilly for even her to be going barefooted that morning—and went off to tend the horses in the barn.
I fed the dogs, took some grain out to the chickens in our small flock, then returned to the house. When she came in I was laying out some gear on top of that trunk.
“Do you think we’ll see it again?”
“I don’t know, maybe, we’ll see.”
“What’s the plan?”
I had taken out the binoculars, the microphone, a digital compass and an optical range finder.
“We’ll need the map. If it shows tonight I’m going to try for a modified resection.”
“You do, and you’ll clean it up! What the Hell is that?”
“If we see it, I’ll shoot a compass bearing, then try to get the range. Once I have that, I can plot a line to it, mark the distance and we’ll know where it is, and how far away, from where the line is intersected.”
“I’ll get the camera and fit the telephoto lens, maybe we can get a picture?”
“Yes, indeed, I should have thought of that.”
“This is what makes us a great team, lover mine.” she said, brightly. She’s usually right, and this was no exception. Beauty and brains, that’s my Lisa.
It was very cloudy that night, but we saw it again.
I shot an azimuth, but the range finder was no help; it was too far away. Lisa got a few pictures. There still was no sound to be heard, until a flight of fighter jets, afterburners roaring, came over the horizon on an intercept course. The thing went into the clouds and didn’t come back into view.
I made some calls, and discovered that the craft had indeed been tracked by radar. They even had a location and an altitude, a very high altitude.
Modern science is indeed wondrous. The ability of sensors to get data never fails to astound me. The object was made of metal, full of gas, and nearly a quarter mile long.
Its means of propulsion was still unknown, though. And it had vanished from the scan when the jets arrived.
It had hit the media; the Net, TV and radio were full of it. Vans with uplink dishes were prowling around, reporters poking mikes into the faces of anyone who stood still for a few seconds. Dark speculation was rife; Harris’s Black Sunday was selling like Perrier in the Sahara; the prophets of doom were raving; yadada, yadada, yadada.
Everyone waited for sundown. There wasn’t a pair of binoculars to be had for love, money or dope in the area, and the Air Force was preparing to deploy as many active, Reserve and Air National Guard crates as it could get wheels-up, come dark. A number of private planes were also going to try to have a look, fixed wing and rotary, not to mention some ultra-lights, too. We expected and got a crowded sky that night.
There was all that, and two mid-air near-misses, but no airship.
Passenger flights were grounded that night, much to the disgust of any number of travelers. The failure of the thing to show up didn’t make them any happier.
When it was absent again the next evening, the furor began to subside. A lot of people had lost a lot of sleep, and most of their enthusiasm.
We watched two more weary nights, with no joy to be had, and decided to quit after one more vigil.
Wise man say, “Patience brings all things.” Indeed, at about 2 a.m. that last night, we saw the familiar line of white light in the sky.
Only it was very, very close to us this time. With our binoculars we could make out the rivets in the gas bag, and get an idea of just how large the gondola was—no telling if it had an internal compartment as well.
The huge ship floated low over the landscape, its light almost painfully intense through the lenses, and we knew awe.
A sort of cone formed of dim, silvery light materialized about a half mile off her bow, and the ship, with immense, silent dignity, floated toward it, then into it.
There was a dull crump, loud as the tramp of doom.
Then it was all gone, never to be seen again.
Lisa looked at me and shivered.
I said, “Jesus Boom!”
Then Lisa seized me fiercely and said, “I’m horny enough to bark. Let’s make love.”
So we did. |
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