The theocracy is about to be overthrown … but there are problems.
The next few hours were a kaleidoscope: people, brief meetings in strange rooms and long journeys at night. I was taken across the country in small, very fast electric cars, traveling at breakneck speeds over bumpy back roads and around towns and cities. Once, we were stopped at a regular interstate checkpoint. I was afraid.
These people were scientifically advanced enough to unravel the mystery of reality travel. If they succeeded I had little doubt that our world, RPrime would be Smithson’s next target for conquest. When … if … I returned to RPrime it would give me little joy to find out I had brought a police state to my world.
Mirabelle and Peters seemed to know what to do. After a few moments of a short holdup by the officials, we were allowed to go on our way. For the last leg of our trip we took off from a small landing pad behind a barn somewhere in Michigan. The ship was like no aircraft I had ever seen. Wingless, the squat body lifted silently on antigravity into the air to treetop level. An hour later we landed in the countryside not far from the outskirts of New York City. We walked to a mound of earth that concealed a low, single-story building. This was headquarters.
I was questioned again. There was nothing I could do about it. I had to allow them to do what they wished. I especially worried when one of their psychologists, a Doctor Erinroot, hypnotized me after injecting me with truth serum. Fortunately for me, they never interpreted my answers correctly or suspected or imagined that I was a traveler from another world. Afterward, I saw the transcript. My last answers were dangerously close to the truth.
Dr. Erinroot: Why have you defected?
Cago/ Candella: I had to run. I didn’t want to be a part of the corrupt government any longer.
Dr. Erinroot: How long have you felt this way?
My answer made me think that Sam Candel’s deeper subconscious had, momentarily, expressed his feelings as well as mine.
Cago/Candella: All my life.
They failed to correctly interpret the importance of the meaning to Erinroot’s final question. The government would never have recruited a Secman with any such reservations. My answer divulged, under their drugs, that I could not possibly be Sam Candel … that I was not from this world. I learned that it puzzled them; they finally wrote it off as an effect of the drug.
Two days later I was in York City. I met members of the Resistance while Mirabelle remained at my side. I willingly gave them every morsel of information I had about the national organization of the Security apparatus. By this time Sam Candel’s subconscious was an open book to me and I told them all I knew. My information was important. They were about to launch a national revolution and I had supplied the missing data they needed so badly to destroy Dictator Smithson’s Home Defense Army of goons. The hour was 24 hours away.
Three weeks had come and gone. I was assigned to the planning division, which operated out of Kansas City. Mirabelle, a score of people on protected cellphones and computers, and I, made ready for the revolution.
At 8 p.m., that evening I was taken to the auditorium, A section leader had just begun an explanation of the Underground’s new grand strategy, based on my new information. There was an audience of 200 revolutionaries listening.
In the middle of the meeting the doors burst in. Hundreds of black uniformed Secmen surrounded us. There was scattered fire and dozens of the conspirators fell, paralyzed. We had no time to defend ourselves. We had been betrayed.
I watched helplessly as Mirabelle, the others and I were carried away on antigravity platforms. My greatest hope was that when I died that my mind and spirit would return to my own world.
At the end of six hours, my fingernails gone, the skin on my back had been partly removed and half conscious, I tried to will myself dead. I think that if they had continued another minute I would have confessed to anything. It was when they brought in their newest interrogation device, the Mind Probe that I translated …
Next episode: Sam is saved. However, he has unfinished business in the theocratic world.
Gene Paleno is an author and illustrator living in Witter Springs.
