Dark as Daylight Ch. 17

We can also do a little work while we are there. We can fill up the exterior shell with water, and not have to worry about it when we get back here. It will be as easy as pie to do. We can open the outer hatches, and valves, and watch the gauges while we are submerged. Once we are at 104% of maximum, we will come up slowly, allow their sun to dry the exterior of our hull, and walk along the exterior of our ship and close everything up, exactly as we opened it. Doesn't that sound like a fun adventure to you, Teddy?"

Monty said, "Gordon, you are positively nuts."

He looked at her incredulously.

"...you are just figuring this out now!"

She picked up a full bottle of milk, threw it at warp speed, and hit him in the center of his chest.

"Ouch! Thank God that wasn't your knife."

"If it was my knife, I would have aimed lower."

"You really know where to hurt a guy."

"Couldn't you have smuggled a few chickens on board, along with those damn turkeys? The chef has run out of recipes for them."

"In the beginning of our journey, you didn't think I couldn't get the turkeys on board. Now you're complaining I didn't bring chickens along with them. Would you please make up your mind?"

"I am not ungrateful. It is just... I am beginning to hate eating turkey. I would love a chicken salad sandwich."

"I have an idea, senior captain."

"Someone shoot me, quickly. I hate it when he has new ideas."

"It does involve an element of risk, but the benefits far outweigh them. Will you listen, or should we start back to the comfort, and regimen of our ship?"

"Doc, do you have any tranquilizers with you?"

"Oral, and injectable."

"Good, stay close by me; I may need them both. What do you have in mind Gordon."

"We build 15 or 20 large bird traps to hang in trees, outside the exclusion zone, where only large birds can get trapped in them. We load them up with live little birds, seeds, berries, water and leave them there for a few days. We are not looking for the birds that we have flying around here. We are looking for birds the size of eagles, hawks, seagulls, cormorants, turkey vultures, geese, and anything that is a comparative size of a turkey. If we are lucky, we can find their nests, steal their eggs, and raise the birds in captivity. We pull their flight feathers so they can't go anywhere.

We must gather birds of both sexes for this to work, because, eventually, we are going to artificially inseminate our turkeys with their semen, and inseminate their eggs with the semen from our turkeys."

Bernice's eyes flew open. "We are going to do what?"

"You don't expect these birds to cross-inseminate for us on demand, do you?"

"No, I guess not."

"Do you have any other pressing needs on your schedule, for the next 20 to 30 years, Doctor?"

"I just became a doctor; now you want me to become a geneticist?"

"We have the equipment, Doctor. We have the study material. Why don't we uncrate everything we need, and start putting it to good use?"

"Captain, would God hate me 'Forever' if I shot him?"

"Forever is a very long time, doctor."

"Teddy, would you ask God how long forever is."

"I don't have to ask, She already told me. God said the 'End of Time' will come when ALL the peoples of her universe stop praying, and they believe they have no use for Her. That is when She will turn off all the stars, and day will turn into permanent night. There will be no energy remaining in the universe, and everything will turn cold.

Free Will is the only reason she allows us our continued existence.

She is the Beginning and The End of All Life and Reason!"

Gordon said, "Amen!"

"I can tell Teddy is being truthful. There is no other reason for your continued existence, other than Free Will, Gordon. Otherwise, I would have killed you when you were seven, eight, ten, eleven, or thirteen years old."

"You had many reasons not to kill me, Monty. My father was paying you a ton of money to keep me alive."

"Your mother offered me more, of her own money, to kill you."

"That is a lie. My mother loved me too much to have me killed."

"Ask her, if you have the courage to do so. Ask her, if on your 13th birthday, when you came within 9 seconds of blowing up the Fort Hood Army Base, and the city of Temple, Texas, because you were determined to set off a miniaturized version of the most lethal destructive compound short of a nuclear weapon known to man, and prove to your father's secret friends that they were wrong.

You believed your father's friends, from the ABC Company, when they said it wouldn't work after their experts tested it. In fact, their scientists were so disturbed by your discovery they wanted you to believe the device would not work.

Your father warned them the one thing they should not do was play with your pride. It would backfire in their faces!

They didn't listen to him. They hoped you would let the project die a natural death, and eventually, you would lose interest in it, and continue working on the spacecraft. They didn't want that explosive compound to see the light of day, ever. It was too dangerous. They weren't going to inform anyone about it, not even our allies, because it was so dangerous. It was kept secret at the highest levels of military and civilian government.

It was undetectable by any known screening process. It didn't have a nuclear signature. It didn't emit any explosive chemical isotope. It was the perfect weapon for any terrorist organization, or country to have, who wanted to put the fear of God into the heart of a strident enemy. They even loved the name you gave the device: 'The College Dropout'.

If a terrorist organization got a hold of the formula, they could form the compound to fit into a briefcase, as you did, or a seat like people take to a football stadium, and carry it in our hundreds of thousands are power and her. Imagine the devastation that could be brought about, on any given football Saturday. There is a minimum of 46 games played throughout the nation on any given Saturday during football season. Most of them are played in the largest cities in the state, and in the state capitals. An average of 60,000 people attend those games, and the cities they are played in average 50,000 people. In one day, a terrorist organization could kill 5 million American citizens around the nation, and laugh at us from a safe-haven 6500 miles away. It would take a minimum of 20 years for this nation to recover. We would recover, eventually, but the feeling of safety this nation once had, would never return.

Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratories stop all their other work to run particles of your compound through the heavy collider to break down its elements so the country could come up with a way to defend against.

Even you didn't realize how powerful the compound was. Your math was wrong, but not by a factor of one, or a factor of ten, or a factor of one hundred. It was worse than your sisters' estimates with freolyte. You were wrong by a factor of >13500."

"I know all this Monty. I lived through it, remember? It was the first time in my life my mother beat the crap out of me. I felt bad for her while she was doing it, because she was crying. I had to hold her when she was finished hitting me, because my father was on the phone explaining to the president why I shouldn't be put into the military, so he could put me into a military prison for my own good, and the good of the nation. Do I have to live through this again?"

"Turn around and look at the crowd gathered around us. Does that answer your question?"

He turned and saw over twenty people standing behind him. His mother was in Viggio's arms smiling, as she waved to him.

"You can go back to the ship mom, you know the ending."

"Oh no, my son, when I was told Monty was telling this story, I rushed over. When she's finished, I'm going to do a reenactment of what happened to you when you walked in the front door. Doesn't that sound like fun?"

"Oh..."

"Noooo, you promised," yelled Teddy.

He smiled at her, and messed up her hair.

"Young woman, you are going to be the death of me."

Teddy jumped into the air, with her fists raised.

"YES! I am a woman now. My uncle called me a woman, so it has to be true!"

His sister yelled at him.

"You are a dead man, Gordon. If any boy walks within 20 feet of my baby, you better be standing between them."

Teddy stamped her foot.

"Mother, I am no longer a baby. We have discussed this, haven't we?"

Delicious' lower lip began to quiver, as Gray's arms enfolded her.

"It's okay baby, I have you. Let's have some fun. Let's let Monty continue the story about Gordon's debacle. Afterwards, we can watch Jennifer beat the crap out of him again. On the way home, I'll buy you two scoops of ice cream with blueberry syrup."

"Can I get two of them; I'm pregnant, remember."

"Of course, you can, honey. It was my pleasure to get you pregnant."

"Monty, would you please continue your reenactment of Gordon attempting to rule the world, using explosives? I especially want to hear the part of his heroic arrival home."

"Of course, Gray, I can't beat the shit out of him anymore. With his father gone, only his mother can can do it now."

"Where was I; Yes, you were determined to test your compound and prove that all the experts at the nuclear test facility, at White Sands New Mexico, and Brookhaven, Long Island were wrong, and a fifteen-year-old boy was smarter than they were. Your sister did it with Isaac Newton and gravity, now you were going to do it with this explosive device.

You sent about making a "Portable" version of 'Fat Man,' the name of plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, and helped end World War II. Naturally, you named your 'Portable' bomb 'Little Man', the name of the hydrogen bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier.

Thankfully, because of the size of the legal briefcases you purchased, you had to scale 'Little Man' down. Your scaled down design turned out to be so elegant, our atomic scientists, military planners, and government officials fell in love with you. You put us ahead of the Russians in nuclear warheads per missile. You help this nation add 2 nuclear warheads to each Intercontinental ballistic missile, because of the design of each honeycomb holding each element. You made the honeycombs out of household aluminum paper, which stunned the experts. When they tested your design, not only was it thinner, and lighter, it was 63% stronger than the manufactured aluminum holding the nuclear missiles in our Minuteman and Poseidon missiles, and less prone to failure due to vibration.

Our nuclear community loved you for what you invented. The executive branch of the government and military branches wanted to kill you for what you tried to do with your compound.

Fear force them to test 'Fat Boy', after your debacle was over. They tested it underground; very, very deep underground, in an abandoned silver mine, near Las Vegas, Nevada. The mine was greater then >7 miles deep. They sealed off more than >½ mile of it, before it was detonated. The damn thing set off seismographs, as an earthquake, all over the world.

What worried the civilian government, and the military was 'Fat Boy' only weighed 209 pounds.

Like all good criminals, you didn't want to go to jail alone. You didn't want to die alone, either. And you couldn't leave well enough alone. You had to drag your idiot cousin into this scene with you. He was only nine years old, and he jumped at the chance to go along with you to see you set off your little 'fireworks' display.

You taught him how to disable the sophisticated, military grade, home alarm systems. You showed him how to get out of his home through his bedroom window, and beat the motion and heat sensors that were buried in the ground, and to avoid eight roving agents.

I didn't fire those agents. What happened to them was worse than being fired. I wouldn't let them quit either. I had them carry around likenesses of the two of you for the next month. Every hour they were at work they held either one of you at their sides. The ribbing they received from their brothers in arms was merciless. Several fights broke out because of the severity of the ribbing.

I warned all the agents that the two of you were going to be allowed to escape on certain evenings, and if they got by the 8 guards who were on duty, guarding you homes, they were going to eat what they were dishing out.

After that a great deal of the rhetoric died down, and the tone of it was not as brutal.

Your escape route was one we had guarded for infiltration, not exfiltration. We never figured on someone trying to escape by boat. So what did the two of you do; exactly what we didn't plan for. You walked to the edge of Stillhouse Lake, uncovered your uncles boat, and put the miniaturized device inside, before you pushed it into the water. The two of you paddled out a hundred yards, or so, before you started the boats' electric engine, and motored off to the center of the lake, and Cashew Island.

Your mother was lying comfortably on your father's chest, when the alarm on his watch went crazy. He sat up so quickly, he nearly threw her off the end of the bed.

Before she had a chance to say a word he yelled, "I'm going to kill our son."

"Even, be more specific, we have two more boys now."

"I'm not going to kill the ones that are still in the crib, dear. I'm going to kill the one who kept asking me questions on the airplane on our way to Fairbanks. I was in love, and wanted to be with you in the worst way."

"He's in his room sleeping. What kind of trouble can he possibly get into doing that?"

"I will bet you $1 billion that he's not in his room."

"I don't have $1 billion. What do you want from me if he's not there?"

He kissed her nose, and patted her ass.

"That will do nicely."

Your mom sat on the bed and covered her behind.

"You may keep your $1 billion sir. You are not getting my ass."

The crowd laughed, and Jennifer blushed.

She said, "That bastard never got my ass either."

Gordon said, "Mom, there are children here."

"No there's not. There is a baby in John's arms, and according to you, a young woman standing beside you."

Teddy shouted, "Thank you grandma."

Delicious retorted, "I hope your baby comes out green."

"I wouldn't care, as long as he is healthy."

"How do you know it's a boy?"

"My soon-to-be husband told me so."

Everyone applauded the good news, but when the applause died down Delicious asked, "Do you believe everything that Alien says?"

"Gordon please?"

"Okay, but you have to remember how to say it sooner or later, mom. Viggio is not an alien. He is a Nasralvhrnecian."

Everyone who was seated around him stood up and applauded, while roaring with approval. Viggio released his mother, walked over and hugged his son.

"It is the greatest sign of approval for someone from another culture to be able to pronounce our culture's name. Our children start out at the age of four trying to say it, and many never learn how to do it properly. Thank you my son, thank you very much."

"You're welcome dad. I want you to know that I am very protective of my mother. If you treat her well, we will be the best of friends. If I find her crying, and you are the cause, we will be the worst of enemies. Let's be friends."

Viggio replied, "I agree, let's be friends." They hugged again and parted.

"Now that all this family crap has been taken care of, I'd like to continue, because I want to see Jennifer beat the crap out of this little runt."

"The last time we got together, you couldn't walk for two weeks, and then only with crutches."

"That's not the point. Now where was I. Yes, your father was explaining to your mother that her ass was safe. However; their son was assembling his explosive device somewhere close by."

"Kill that boy, Even. You ordered him not to assembled anything like that ever again."

"I did, didn't I."

"Get your ass out of this room and find him, before he levels this town, and possibly half this state."

"We could buy oceanfront property on the cheap."

"Move Even, put your ass in gear, and neutralize that bomb."

"That is my intention dear. I will kill him right after I do it."

"Permission granted, now go."

Even opened his bedroom door, turned right took two steps and grasped the handle to your room. It was locked.

"Gordon, if you're in there, you have three seconds to open this door. 2, 1, 0." The door opened, but you were not the one that opened it. Your father's shoe did the job.

He turned on the light, looked around your room, and saw what you had done to escape. He smiled at your genius, and frowned at what you were about to do to the city of Temple, and the Army base 10 miles west of it. He opened his cell phone, hit number nine, and waited for the operator to answer.

"Yes, Doctor Luck, how may I help you?"

"Larry condition red. Get all the principles out of a 20-mile area now. My son is getting ready to test his toy. Call the police and have them move everyone as far away from the city as possible. Advise them it's a chemical accident, and we are attempting to get it under control, but an explosion is imminent. Call the Army next, and give them the same instructions. I will tell them the truth later, myself. I will cover all costs personally, no questions asked. Explain to them in the harshest terms that this is not a drill. Oh, and I need the helicopter an hour ago."

"You got it Doctor."

The lights went on, in every home that had an employee of the Deep Space Science Project within minutes. As those people were getting ready to leave, they banged on their neighbors' doors, waking them, and warning them of the impending disaster. They had to leave their homes immediately, and drive away from the science building, in any direction for at least 20 miles, as quickly as possible. The message would be all over the local radio stations by now, or soon would be.

The officer in command at Fort Hood received the message from their switchboard, but didn't believe it until he picked up the phone and heard it from Larry, at the switchboard at the Science Center himself.

True to his military breeding he asked, "Is there any way we can be of help?"

"Thank you, Colonel, but Doctor Luck wants you to get your people out of Dodge now. He wants you safe and he will talk to you, if he's alive, later."

"You can tell him the Army is moving."

Nearly simultaneously, as Larry disconnected his call, he could hear the sirens at the Army base, 10 miles away, sound off. The military is known for its ability to move men and machines with speed and precision. That night, under the harshest circumstances, they did both magnificently.

The warnings were on the local radio and television stations already, and CNN, in Atlanta, had just picked it up. There were no details, but the evacuation of Temple, Texas and Fort Hood were underway.

The Pentagon was informed, and they informed the White House; which went into crisis mode. The country went to code yellow and all airports, train stations, and bus terminals, because information was so sketchy.

The military lowered the nations Defense Condition from DefCon 5 to DefCon 3, in preparation to move men and material to the disaster area.

When this happened, Senior Members of the military establishment, were assembled in the Kremlin to speak with their civilian counterparts. They were called into emergency sessions to find out what the hell they were did that got the American's so pissed off, and they were getting ready for war.

The military men said nothing unusual was going on, so a call went out to the American ambassador at his residence to come to the Kremlin immediate for urgent consultations on this matter.