al2i
09-11-2007, 01:36 AM
Here is an excerpt from one of my short stories. Enjoy.
Much of what happened in the banquet room I either read in the paper or heard from Sylvia. Patricia Pittman, who had been hailed as “The Voice of Reason” in a recent news report, started her presentation with a couple of light jokes about installing spaceship landing pads, complete with spaceship parking meters when she was elected Mayor. After drawing some polite chuckles from the crowd, she noted that the City of Wasilla could have profited handsomely from the recent throngs of UFO seekers if her proposed “Tourist Tax” and some real parking meters had already been in place.
It didn't take long for Ms. Pittman to start in on Vic Marksman, who was out of town at a Mayor's conference and wasn’t there to defend himself.
“Mayor Marksman made his position clear when he said that he considered any collection of tax beyond a basic requirement to meet our city charter to be, and I quote, ‘morally suspect’. Furthermore, he acts as if he has an ethical problem with taking money from tourists, calling the progressive Tourist Tax plan, and I quote again, ‘highway robbery’. He has been lucky to be Mayor just when we've enjoyed the fastest growth in our history, but his dangerous lack of common sense is a threat to our economic future.”
Although her audience had their backs to the big picture windows that overlook Wasilla Lake, Patty Pittman was looking straight out the windows over the heads of everyone else in the room when she suddenly stopped bashing Vic and pointed at something outside the windows.
“What in the world is that?” she asked, causing the entire audience to turn around and look out the windows.
Sylvia, having planned ahead, was backed up to the light switches, and chose this moment to lower the room lights. There, hovering in the fog, was Ms. Pittman's first interstellar customer.
The audience was transfixed, every breath was held, and the UFO apparition was all the more impressive for the sudden silence in the room. A brilliant blue beam stabbed through the fog directly at Patricia Pittman for just a moment, and you could feel its power as the entire room vibrated and items of glass and silverware tinkled. The blue power beam was instantly followed by a brief display of silent red beams moving in random directions, and then no light at all, just the image of something otherworldly outside the window.
Although I knew exactly what I was seeing from my vantage point at the lakefront, the gloom, the fog, and the spooky appearance of the UFO overwhelmed me, and I shivered as much with frightful thrill as with the foggy chill in the air. I could only imagine the effect of our UFO on someone who did not know it was a hoax. I had to remind myself exactly how everything worked in order to control my instinctive fear.
The blue laser was mounted on the same pan and tilt controller that held the night vision camera, and was rigged to fire with a press of a button in Steve's van. He had marked a cross hair on his screen, so he could accurately shine the laser on some object that seemed to be of interest to an alien visitor.
Earlier in the day, Sylvia rented a hotel room as close as possible to the banquet area. Then Eddie and Jimmy installed a 20 Hz sound-cannon in the room and rigged it to generate a colossal bass note anytime the blue laser was triggered. The equipment produced an authoritatively deep and powerful vibration at the bottom frequency threshold of human hearing. Even from my vantage point outside the hotel, the effect was remarkable. At only 20 Hz, the sound seemed completely omni-directional, it could be felt in your chest and abdomen, and the psychological effect made it seem that the blue light carried unspeakable power.
The red laser was mounted up in the instrument pod and aimed down at a small cut-glass decorative prism that was dangling and twisting on the end of a thread. When triggered, multiple, moving, red beams rotated silently through the fog in all directions. Something about the effect it produced just didn't seem human, but of course, that was the idea!
In the banquet room, everyone had risen from their chairs when the blue beam hit. The people furthest from the windows were drawn towards them for a better look, whereas the people closest to the windows were driven to back away from them because they had already seen too much. The resulting ragged wall of humanity in the mid line of the room seemed to stagger every time the blue laser/sound cannon circuit triggered. Steve gave several more shots at the room for dramatic impact. When the UFO moved on down the lake, a few of the more boldly curious onlookers pressed to the windows, while most of the now badly frightened crowd found their way out of the room entirely and stood huddled like frightened sheep in a well-lit, windowless hall.
To Sylvia’s complete credit, she had a videographer at the ready, and maneuvered Patricia Pittman into an interview at that very moment. Pittman, who was operating with a lot of post-traumatic adrenaline in her system and thought she had just been beamed by a UFO, hysterically babbled about her alien encounter and waved her arms around like a complete wacko. Sylvia encouraged the excessively chatty Patty to share her experiences, and cheerfully recorded everything.
As the UFO slipped into the fog I found myself in an almost trance-like afterglow of the surreal experience we had created, so it was quite jarring when Raymond Findorf started a noisy outboard motor and raced out after our UFO in a small boat. I noted that he had a camera, slingshot, and a flashlight, so it was obvious that he had known or suspected something would happen tonight and he was determined to expose our hoax.
I was informing Steve about the fresh danger from Findorf, when I saw Raymond take a sharp turn to the south and head towards the middle of the lake. There was almost no light at all, and I had to strain to see the ghostly outline of Ray and his boat in the thickening fog. It looked like he was using his slingshot. Just as I lost sight of him, I saw a distant green flicker of light in the fog right where he faded from view.
More flickers of light appeared in the fog, but these were red and blue emergency flashers from behind me as two Wasilla Police and an Alaska State Trooper pulled their squad cars into the Mat-Su Resort parking lot. The display of police flashers seemed to have a comforting and attractive effect, so the lot was soon filled with former banquet attendees talking ninety miles a minute and using expressive terms like “photon beams”, “mental vibrations”, and my favorite overheard term of the evening, “polarized proton particles”.
I could hear the sound of more and more emergency sirens from every direction around the lake, so it was apparent that the twins’ phone calls were having their desired effect. Then the fog was lit by moving beams of light on the road down to the lakefront, which soon manifested themselves as the headlights of media vehicles. A remarkable number of media cars and vans continued to pour into the parking area, eventually surrounding the crowd with eager reporters hungry for a big story. When I realized that the news coverage would probably be seen by a billion people world-wide, I was awestruck and proud of the stupendous amount of entertainment we few Geek Commandos had launched.
Much of what happened in the banquet room I either read in the paper or heard from Sylvia. Patricia Pittman, who had been hailed as “The Voice of Reason” in a recent news report, started her presentation with a couple of light jokes about installing spaceship landing pads, complete with spaceship parking meters when she was elected Mayor. After drawing some polite chuckles from the crowd, she noted that the City of Wasilla could have profited handsomely from the recent throngs of UFO seekers if her proposed “Tourist Tax” and some real parking meters had already been in place.
It didn't take long for Ms. Pittman to start in on Vic Marksman, who was out of town at a Mayor's conference and wasn’t there to defend himself.
“Mayor Marksman made his position clear when he said that he considered any collection of tax beyond a basic requirement to meet our city charter to be, and I quote, ‘morally suspect’. Furthermore, he acts as if he has an ethical problem with taking money from tourists, calling the progressive Tourist Tax plan, and I quote again, ‘highway robbery’. He has been lucky to be Mayor just when we've enjoyed the fastest growth in our history, but his dangerous lack of common sense is a threat to our economic future.”
Although her audience had their backs to the big picture windows that overlook Wasilla Lake, Patty Pittman was looking straight out the windows over the heads of everyone else in the room when she suddenly stopped bashing Vic and pointed at something outside the windows.
“What in the world is that?” she asked, causing the entire audience to turn around and look out the windows.
Sylvia, having planned ahead, was backed up to the light switches, and chose this moment to lower the room lights. There, hovering in the fog, was Ms. Pittman's first interstellar customer.
The audience was transfixed, every breath was held, and the UFO apparition was all the more impressive for the sudden silence in the room. A brilliant blue beam stabbed through the fog directly at Patricia Pittman for just a moment, and you could feel its power as the entire room vibrated and items of glass and silverware tinkled. The blue power beam was instantly followed by a brief display of silent red beams moving in random directions, and then no light at all, just the image of something otherworldly outside the window.
Although I knew exactly what I was seeing from my vantage point at the lakefront, the gloom, the fog, and the spooky appearance of the UFO overwhelmed me, and I shivered as much with frightful thrill as with the foggy chill in the air. I could only imagine the effect of our UFO on someone who did not know it was a hoax. I had to remind myself exactly how everything worked in order to control my instinctive fear.
The blue laser was mounted on the same pan and tilt controller that held the night vision camera, and was rigged to fire with a press of a button in Steve's van. He had marked a cross hair on his screen, so he could accurately shine the laser on some object that seemed to be of interest to an alien visitor.
Earlier in the day, Sylvia rented a hotel room as close as possible to the banquet area. Then Eddie and Jimmy installed a 20 Hz sound-cannon in the room and rigged it to generate a colossal bass note anytime the blue laser was triggered. The equipment produced an authoritatively deep and powerful vibration at the bottom frequency threshold of human hearing. Even from my vantage point outside the hotel, the effect was remarkable. At only 20 Hz, the sound seemed completely omni-directional, it could be felt in your chest and abdomen, and the psychological effect made it seem that the blue light carried unspeakable power.
The red laser was mounted up in the instrument pod and aimed down at a small cut-glass decorative prism that was dangling and twisting on the end of a thread. When triggered, multiple, moving, red beams rotated silently through the fog in all directions. Something about the effect it produced just didn't seem human, but of course, that was the idea!
In the banquet room, everyone had risen from their chairs when the blue beam hit. The people furthest from the windows were drawn towards them for a better look, whereas the people closest to the windows were driven to back away from them because they had already seen too much. The resulting ragged wall of humanity in the mid line of the room seemed to stagger every time the blue laser/sound cannon circuit triggered. Steve gave several more shots at the room for dramatic impact. When the UFO moved on down the lake, a few of the more boldly curious onlookers pressed to the windows, while most of the now badly frightened crowd found their way out of the room entirely and stood huddled like frightened sheep in a well-lit, windowless hall.
To Sylvia’s complete credit, she had a videographer at the ready, and maneuvered Patricia Pittman into an interview at that very moment. Pittman, who was operating with a lot of post-traumatic adrenaline in her system and thought she had just been beamed by a UFO, hysterically babbled about her alien encounter and waved her arms around like a complete wacko. Sylvia encouraged the excessively chatty Patty to share her experiences, and cheerfully recorded everything.
As the UFO slipped into the fog I found myself in an almost trance-like afterglow of the surreal experience we had created, so it was quite jarring when Raymond Findorf started a noisy outboard motor and raced out after our UFO in a small boat. I noted that he had a camera, slingshot, and a flashlight, so it was obvious that he had known or suspected something would happen tonight and he was determined to expose our hoax.
I was informing Steve about the fresh danger from Findorf, when I saw Raymond take a sharp turn to the south and head towards the middle of the lake. There was almost no light at all, and I had to strain to see the ghostly outline of Ray and his boat in the thickening fog. It looked like he was using his slingshot. Just as I lost sight of him, I saw a distant green flicker of light in the fog right where he faded from view.
More flickers of light appeared in the fog, but these were red and blue emergency flashers from behind me as two Wasilla Police and an Alaska State Trooper pulled their squad cars into the Mat-Su Resort parking lot. The display of police flashers seemed to have a comforting and attractive effect, so the lot was soon filled with former banquet attendees talking ninety miles a minute and using expressive terms like “photon beams”, “mental vibrations”, and my favorite overheard term of the evening, “polarized proton particles”.
I could hear the sound of more and more emergency sirens from every direction around the lake, so it was apparent that the twins’ phone calls were having their desired effect. Then the fog was lit by moving beams of light on the road down to the lakefront, which soon manifested themselves as the headlights of media vehicles. A remarkable number of media cars and vans continued to pour into the parking area, eventually surrounding the crowd with eager reporters hungry for a big story. When I realized that the news coverage would probably be seen by a billion people world-wide, I was awestruck and proud of the stupendous amount of entertainment we few Geek Commandos had launched.