A small tool to view real-world ActivityPub objects as JSON! Enter a URL
or username from Mastodon or a similar service below, and we'll send a
request with
the right
Accept
header
to the server to view the underlying object.
{
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"type": "OrderedCollectionPage",
"orderedItems": [
{
"type": "Create",
"actor": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586",
"object": {
"type": "Note",
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1201032882858307584",
"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586",
"content": "There's a bunch of new folks who have subscribed to my Minds posts, and I can't help but thank you. I said goodbye to 20,000 Twitter followers and left there because, well, let's face it....CENSORSHIP SUCKS! And, by the way, so does Jack Dorsey and the Zuch! For those of you who want good fiction where the hero wins in the end and there is no recourse to \"authority,\" you might try my Bill Travis Mystery series. It's all action and adventure, and the first two novels (The Last Call and Capitol Offense) are <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=FREE\" title=\"#FREE\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#FREE</a> on Amazon Kindle. You can check them out at www.georgewier.com. That will take you to the Bill Travis Mysteries website automatically. <br /><br />It's not easy in this new dystopian world we live in, and we have to stick together. I love all patriots---those who truly believe in America and are not ready to give in to the criminal Chinese communist democrat party (the CCCDP). Therefore, we have to create a parallel economy if we are going to survive at all. Please feel free to reach out to me and let me know what it is that you are selling (if anything) in order to survive, and I'll see if I can help. In the meantime, please help spread it around that my books are available, and a couple of them are free. I've written 40 novels, anthologies and collections, as well as numerous short stories. I can't thank you enough!<br /><br />Onward!",
"to": [
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],
"cc": [
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"published": "2021-01-27T05:15:53+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "There's a bunch of new folks who have subscribed to my Minds posts, and I can't help but thank you. I said goodbye to 20,000 Twitter followers and left there because, well, let's face it....CENSORSHIP SUCKS! And, by the way, so does Jack Dorsey and the Zuch! For those of you who want good fiction where the hero wins in the end and there is no recourse to \"authority,\" you might try my Bill Travis Mystery series. It's all action and adventure, and the first two novels (The Last Call and Capitol Offense) are #FREE on Amazon Kindle. You can check them out at www.georgewier.com. That will take you to the Bill Travis Mysteries website automatically. \n\nIt's not easy in this new dystopian world we live in, and we have to stick together. I love all patriots---those who truly believe in America and are not ready to give in to the criminal Chinese communist democrat party (the CCCDP). Therefore, we have to create a parallel economy if we are going to survive at all. Please feel free to reach out to me and let me know what it is that you are selling (if anything) in order to survive, and I'll see if I can help. In the meantime, please help spread it around that my books are available, and a couple of them are free. I've written 40 novels, anthologies and collections, as well as numerous short stories. I can't thank you enough!\n\nOnward!",
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"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1201032882858307584/activity"
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{
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"content": "This is my one public post of a political nature. Follows is the email I am sending today to each of my Representatives and Senators:<br /><br />Dear Honorable Sir:<br /><br />\tPlease take a moment to read this request with an open mind.<br />\tThe upcoming Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021 is the turning point not only for this country, but for the world. There should be no question in any rational person’s mind with regard to it, but these are trying times, and alliances have formed and those in power have divided into two aisles: on one side we have the might, power, and influence of a repressive communist regime that has infiltrated, co-opted, and suborned the most powerful people and institutions in this country. They have always promised that they would destroy us from within, and this is the exact time that all their efforts are bent upon doing so. <br />\tBut on the other side of the aisle we have a few strong men and women with forged steel for a spine and mercury for their life’s blood. On this side of the aisle are patriots who have not only taken an oath to the Constitution and the People, but who intend to never shirk that obligation.<br />\tI believe you to be an American Patriot, until and unless you prove yourself otherwise.<br />\tWe have finally come down to it. The storm happens to have arrived. It has blown down our front gate and the horde of the faithless behind it is encamped in our courtyard.<br />\tThe computer experts now are saying that it appears that Donald J. Trump has won well over 90,000,000 votes. But this is not a popular vote issue, but an electoral one. The truth of the matter is, the democrat party cheated, and so blatantly and so carelessly that the whole world now sees it.<br />\tBut this is not the first time. History well remembers Tamany Hall. It remembers Johnson cheating down here in Texas to win his congressional seat. I was actually in an after-dinner meeting with several of the old yellow-dog democrats a few years ago, and in it they were holding a brag session. Each would tell a story, and they would invariably preface each story with, “Now, the statute of limitations has run on this one, but....” Everyone laughed, including yours truly, thinking it was oh so funny. In one instance, the infamous Box 13, Jim Wells County vote, came up, and one of the old senators stated, “What nobody knows about is that if Jim Wells County hadn’t come in for us, we had another county down in the Valley waiting in the wings.” They cheated. They admitted it. They thought it was the height of wit. But this is what democrats have historically done. It is axiomatic.<br />\tThis time they cheated by switching literally millions of votes, and they did it right before our eyes. I, myself, saw the votes subtracted from Trump’s column on live TV, and placed in Biden’s column. <br />\tI believe that you know they cheated. I believe there is no doubt in your mind.<br />\tNow is your one chance to show who you are. <br />\tWe are never remembered for our lives of service, for our thoughtful and contemplative viewpoint, or even for being the one calm person in the room when pandemonium broke out. No. We are only ever remembered for that one event in our lives when we decided that we would stand, and with one great and well-considered decision, or with a cowardly or ill-advised one, the entirety of our existence is thereafter measured in the lives of men.<br />\tI strongly urge you. No matter the hue and cry, no matter the future political ramifications, if we do not in this one moment defeat them, and do so utterly, then they will be coming for us. They will first take away our Second Amendment. Thereafter, they will ramp-up the teaching of their Hate America doctrine in the schools. They will tear down the wall and open the borders to anyone and everyone. At that moment, this country dies, and with the death of freedom dies the hope of the world.<br />\tThe American People have spoken. I only ask that you hear them, and that you act accordingly.<br />\tI do not ask this for myself. I do not ask it for some political point. I do not ask this of you for any light and transient reason. I ask this of you for the sake of my grandchildren, and their children to come. They may live or die based upon your decision. They may live under totalitarian dictatorship. Or, conversely, they may live free.<br />\tPlease, be the first to raise your hand and shout out your objection to the slate of electors from each of the contested states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Then, during the ensuing debate, I would ask you to don the righteous cloak of Daniel Webster, of Abraham Lincoln, and William Jennings Bryan, and defend freedom with your fiery spirit and with the fervent words of all of your powers of oratory.<br />\tThank you for your service.<br />\tMay God Bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.<br /><br />\tHumbly,<br /><br />\tGeorge Wier<br />\tTexan and American Citizen ",
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"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1191874375546798080",
"published": "2021-01-01T22:43:15+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "This is my one public post of a political nature. Follows is the email I am sending today to each of my Representatives and Senators:\n\nDear Honorable Sir:\n\n\tPlease take a moment to read this request with an open mind.\n\tThe upcoming Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021 is the turning point not only for this country, but for the world. There should be no question in any rational person’s mind with regard to it, but these are trying times, and alliances have formed and those in power have divided into two aisles: on one side we have the might, power, and influence of a repressive communist regime that has infiltrated, co-opted, and suborned the most powerful people and institutions in this country. They have always promised that they would destroy us from within, and this is the exact time that all their efforts are bent upon doing so. \n\tBut on the other side of the aisle we have a few strong men and women with forged steel for a spine and mercury for their life’s blood. On this side of the aisle are patriots who have not only taken an oath to the Constitution and the People, but who intend to never shirk that obligation.\n\tI believe you to be an American Patriot, until and unless you prove yourself otherwise.\n\tWe have finally come down to it. The storm happens to have arrived. It has blown down our front gate and the horde of the faithless behind it is encamped in our courtyard.\n\tThe computer experts now are saying that it appears that Donald J. Trump has won well over 90,000,000 votes. But this is not a popular vote issue, but an electoral one. The truth of the matter is, the democrat party cheated, and so blatantly and so carelessly that the whole world now sees it.\n\tBut this is not the first time. History well remembers Tamany Hall. It remembers Johnson cheating down here in Texas to win his congressional seat. I was actually in an after-dinner meeting with several of the old yellow-dog democrats a few years ago, and in it they were holding a brag session. Each would tell a story, and they would invariably preface each story with, “Now, the statute of limitations has run on this one, but....” Everyone laughed, including yours truly, thinking it was oh so funny. In one instance, the infamous Box 13, Jim Wells County vote, came up, and one of the old senators stated, “What nobody knows about is that if Jim Wells County hadn’t come in for us, we had another county down in the Valley waiting in the wings.” They cheated. They admitted it. They thought it was the height of wit. But this is what democrats have historically done. It is axiomatic.\n\tThis time they cheated by switching literally millions of votes, and they did it right before our eyes. I, myself, saw the votes subtracted from Trump’s column on live TV, and placed in Biden’s column. \n\tI believe that you know they cheated. I believe there is no doubt in your mind.\n\tNow is your one chance to show who you are. \n\tWe are never remembered for our lives of service, for our thoughtful and contemplative viewpoint, or even for being the one calm person in the room when pandemonium broke out. No. We are only ever remembered for that one event in our lives when we decided that we would stand, and with one great and well-considered decision, or with a cowardly or ill-advised one, the entirety of our existence is thereafter measured in the lives of men.\n\tI strongly urge you. No matter the hue and cry, no matter the future political ramifications, if we do not in this one moment defeat them, and do so utterly, then they will be coming for us. They will first take away our Second Amendment. Thereafter, they will ramp-up the teaching of their Hate America doctrine in the schools. They will tear down the wall and open the borders to anyone and everyone. At that moment, this country dies, and with the death of freedom dies the hope of the world.\n\tThe American People have spoken. I only ask that you hear them, and that you act accordingly.\n\tI do not ask this for myself. I do not ask it for some political point. I do not ask this of you for any light and transient reason. I ask this of you for the sake of my grandchildren, and their children to come. They may live or die based upon your decision. They may live under totalitarian dictatorship. Or, conversely, they may live free.\n\tPlease, be the first to raise your hand and shout out your objection to the slate of electors from each of the contested states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Then, during the ensuing debate, I would ask you to don the righteous cloak of Daniel Webster, of Abraham Lincoln, and William Jennings Bryan, and defend freedom with your fiery spirit and with the fervent words of all of your powers of oratory.\n\tThank you for your service.\n\tMay God Bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.\n\n\tHumbly,\n\n\tGeorge Wier\n\tTexan and American Citizen ",
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},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1191874375546798080/activity"
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"content": "Omniscient, my latest supernatural thriller, is now vailable for Pre-order on <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=Amazon\" title=\"#Amazon\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#Amazon</a>. Get it while it's smoking hot!<br /><br /><a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08QH81485\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08QH81485</a>",
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"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1185058446776987648",
"published": "2020-12-14T03:19:11+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Omniscient, my latest supernatural thriller, is now vailable for Pre-order on #Amazon. Get it while it's smoking hot!\n\nhttps://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08QH81485",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1185058446776987648/activity"
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{
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"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586",
"content": "Okay, so this is happening. As of tonight I'm 18,000 words into this new book, and I believe it is among the best I've ever written. It's a supernatural thriller. Be looking for it soon on Amazon! I'd say sometime in mid December, but definitely before Christmas.",
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"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1178985045312839680",
"published": "2020-11-27T09:05:38+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Okay, so this is happening. As of tonight I'm 18,000 words into this new book, and I believe it is among the best I've ever written. It's a supernatural thriller. Be looking for it soon on Amazon! I'd say sometime in mid December, but definitely before Christmas.",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
}
},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1178985045312839680/activity"
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"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586",
"content": "Ahem! <br /><br /><a href=\"https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/us-raid-software-company-scytl-seize-servers-germany-intel-source-says-yes-happened/\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/us-raid-software-company-scytl-seize-servers-germany-intel-source-says-yes-happened/</a>",
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"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1174270188565331968",
"published": "2020-11-14T08:50:29+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Ahem! \n\nhttps://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/us-raid-software-company-scytl-seize-servers-germany-intel-source-says-yes-happened/",
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"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1174270188565331968/activity"
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"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586",
"content": "Sallie and I are today celebrating our 16th Wedding Anniversary. These years together have seemed to be no more than a brief and beautiful summer day in length, and we have every hope for many more years together.",
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"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1163970785523539968",
"published": "2020-10-16T22:44:19+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Sallie and I are today celebrating our 16th Wedding Anniversary. These years together have seemed to be no more than a brief and beautiful summer day in length, and we have every hope for many more years together.",
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"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1163970785523539968/activity"
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"attributedTo": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586",
"content": "I am at wits end and at a crossroads. This is my attempt to wean myself from Facebook, Youtube, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I will doubtless lose a lot of followers, but I'll be damned if I'll let them get away with censoring the truth. So, looks like I'm here to stay with Minds, Rumble, Duckduckgo, Gab, and Parler. It's alt-tech for me!<br /><br />In the coming days I'll try and say everything I need to say here and on the other platforms. God Bless all my Minds friends and followers. I know you're few, but this is the start right here and now.",
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"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1163367823312171008",
"published": "2020-10-15T06:48:23+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "I am at wits end and at a crossroads. This is my attempt to wean myself from Facebook, Youtube, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I will doubtless lose a lot of followers, but I'll be damned if I'll let them get away with censoring the truth. So, looks like I'm here to stay with Minds, Rumble, Duckduckgo, Gab, and Parler. It's alt-tech for me!\n\nIn the coming days I'll try and say everything I need to say here and on the other platforms. God Bless all my Minds friends and followers. I know you're few, but this is the start right here and now.",
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"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1163367823312171008/activity"
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"content": "The first book in the 19-book Bill Travis Mystery series is FREE! Get it while you can! <br /><a href=\"https://amazon.com/dp/B004QWZCYC\" target=\"_blank\">https://amazon.com/dp/B004QWZCYC</a><br /><a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=freebook\" title=\"#freebook\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#freebook</a> <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=mysteries\" title=\"#mysteries\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#mysteries</a> <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=action\" title=\"#action\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#action</a>",
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"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1141450449045671936",
"published": "2020-08-15T19:16:34+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "The first book in the 19-book Bill Travis Mystery series is FREE! Get it while you can! \nhttps://amazon.com/dp/B004QWZCYC\n#freebook #mysteries #action",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
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},
"id": "https://www.minds.com/api/activitypub/users/739663530348781586/entities/urn:activity:1141450449045671936/activity"
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"content": "Hot New Release for Independence Day - Bill Travis #18, The Long Goodnight! Get it while it's smoking hot! <a href=\"https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089T89B3J\" target=\"_blank\">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089T89B3J</a><br /><a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=mystery\" title=\"#mystery\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#mystery</a> <a href=\"https://www.minds.com/search?f=top&t=all&q=newrelease\" title=\"#newrelease\" class=\"u-url hashtag\" target=\"_blank\">#newrelease</a>",
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"url": "https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/1126248890057846784",
"published": "2020-07-04T20:31:00+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Hot New Release for Independence Day - Bill Travis #18, The Long Goodnight! Get it while it's smoking hot! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B089T89B3J\n#mystery #newrelease",
"mediaType": "text/plain"
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"content": "An Open Apology to My Grandchildren and Great-Grandchildren<br /><br />Most of you I won’t come to know because you will come long after me. Please know that I sincerely apologize for having failed you.<br /><br />The country you live in once known as the United States of America, was also once a land of freedom, of patriotism, and of conscience. At one time here, people were free to voice their opinions. They were able to speak up and speak out when they witnessed something wrong, instead of being investigated, pilloried, and stripped of their rights and their property for doing so. The people were once free to travel as they wished. We loved freedom of expression, freedom to think, freedom to be, and freedom to strive to become something better. We factually cherished these freedoms. Men and women fought and died for these freedoms because they saw that their own lives measured little against doing what was right. You see, here freedom was once more important than life itself, because there exists no such thing as life without freedom. That so-called “life” without freedom is actually slavery—slavery of the mind, of the body, and of the spirit.<br /><br />And so you ask, “what happened?” Here is the cold, hard answer: we became cowards, over time and by degrees. We permitted government officials who had been corrupted and bought-off, corporations with vast influence and no allegiance to us or our flag, and political parties with malicious policies and intent to usurp our God-given rights. We permitted large mega-corporations to censor our speech, our thoughts, and even to control our movement. We permitted them to penetrate and spy upon our every utterance, each step we took, and each dollar we earned and spent. There is more. Oh so much more. You see, it was not the steps we took along the way that made all the difference, it was those we didn’t take.<br /><br />So, my beloved family, you can lay the blame for the blackness of the totalitarian nightmare in which you now live at my doorstep. You see, I did nothing. I relied upon others to fight the good fight. I acquiesced to those who exerted restriction and control. I did nothing to defend those good men and women who stood up, and bore silent witness as they were cut down one by one; as they were de-platformed, de-monetized, demonized, and exiled from our midst. I contracted and constricted in upon myself and said nothing while the entire populace donned a mask for fear of invented disease, and distanced themselves from their loved ones upon orders of the state. I permitted fiends to spit upon the graves of the heroes and to rend and burn the flag I once wept for with my right hand over my heart. I did nothing. You see, I thought not of you and your future. Factually, I was too selfish to consider anything beyond my own immediate safety.<br /><br />As the sun set upon the United States of America, I could not find it within myself to even weep, so stricken had I become, so numb had I become and by degrees to the magnitude of my loss, each small and seemingly insignificant loss compounded and stacked upon all the others until the weight of them all was more than the entirety of an ocean upon my heart.<br /><br />Still knowing the enormity of my crime—my criminal acquiescence—I humbly beg for your forgiveness.<br /><br />Sincerely,<br /><br />Your ancestor.",
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"content": "An Open Apology to My Grandchildren and Great-Grandchildren\n\nMost of you I won’t come to know because you will come long after me. Please know that I sincerely apologize for having failed you.\n\nThe country you live in once known as the United States of America, was also once a land of freedom, of patriotism, and of conscience. At one time here, people were free to voice their opinions. They were able to speak up and speak out when they witnessed something wrong, instead of being investigated, pilloried, and stripped of their rights and their property for doing so. The people were once free to travel as they wished. We loved freedom of expression, freedom to think, freedom to be, and freedom to strive to become something better. We factually cherished these freedoms. Men and women fought and died for these freedoms because they saw that their own lives measured little against doing what was right. You see, here freedom was once more important than life itself, because there exists no such thing as life without freedom. That so-called “life” without freedom is actually slavery—slavery of the mind, of the body, and of the spirit.\n\nAnd so you ask, “what happened?” Here is the cold, hard answer: we became cowards, over time and by degrees. We permitted government officials who had been corrupted and bought-off, corporations with vast influence and no allegiance to us or our flag, and political parties with malicious policies and intent to usurp our God-given rights. We permitted large mega-corporations to censor our speech, our thoughts, and even to control our movement. We permitted them to penetrate and spy upon our every utterance, each step we took, and each dollar we earned and spent. There is more. Oh so much more. You see, it was not the steps we took along the way that made all the difference, it was those we didn’t take.\n\nSo, my beloved family, you can lay the blame for the blackness of the totalitarian nightmare in which you now live at my doorstep. You see, I did nothing. I relied upon others to fight the good fight. I acquiesced to those who exerted restriction and control. I did nothing to defend those good men and women who stood up, and bore silent witness as they were cut down one by one; as they were de-platformed, de-monetized, demonized, and exiled from our midst. I contracted and constricted in upon myself and said nothing while the entire populace donned a mask for fear of invented disease, and distanced themselves from their loved ones upon orders of the state. I permitted fiends to spit upon the graves of the heroes and to rend and burn the flag I once wept for with my right hand over my heart. I did nothing. You see, I thought not of you and your future. Factually, I was too selfish to consider anything beyond my own immediate safety.\n\nAs the sun set upon the United States of America, I could not find it within myself to even weep, so stricken had I become, so numb had I become and by degrees to the magnitude of my loss, each small and seemingly insignificant loss compounded and stacked upon all the others until the weight of them all was more than the entirety of an ocean upon my heart.\n\nStill knowing the enormity of my crime—my criminal acquiescence—I humbly beg for your forgiveness.\n\nSincerely,\n\nYour ancestor.",
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"content": "Here''s a complete short story, THE TALE OF THE YANKEE TRAVELER. Please consider donating a minds token or two if you like the story.<br /><br />THE TALE OF THE YANKEE TRAVELER<br /><br />To the memory of Ray Bradbury, with love and respect<br /><br /><br />When you get to a certain age, you start to appreciate talk radio, particularly in the morning when you’re on the way to work in rush-hour traffic and it’ll take a minimum of forty-five minutes to get where you’re going, if you’re extremely lucky. The last thing you want to hear in that Almost Hour is some one-hit wonder from the 70s, or perhaps the 80s, and have the damned thing stuck in your head the rest of the day. That’s the way it works for me—the last song I hear is the one that gets itself lodged in the old noodle like ossified cow crap, stuck for days at a time. So it’s easier not to tune to those stations where I’ll hear them, nor to even flick past them on the dial because I know there’s always one waiting there in the ether somewhere between the low AM band and the upper atmospheric FM stratosphere out there on the edge of the Van Allen radiation belt. Waiting like a bandit waiting to rob a train. Waiting to snag me such that I find myself walking around the office at any given time of day humming—or perhaps in the most embarrassingly horrific instances, singing—something like Don’t You Want Me Baby? by The Human League, or worse, any given song by Chicago Transportation Authority. You know you’re getting old when you know who the hell Chicago Transportation Authority is to begin with, and you know for damned sure you’re starting to get up there when your radio stations are all pre-programmed on your dial and you know what the buttons will do—which set of voices they’ll summon forth, AM or FM, depending upon the time of day, like a Swami or maybe a Gypsy at an old-fashioned seance, channeling the voices of those in the Afterlife.<br />\tWhich was how I met Arch.<br />\tAbout six years back I made a call-in to the Arch and Barch show. The topic was one that, at the time, I had a definite bone stuck in my craw about, the subject of property taxes (another sign that your getting older than the gods of the Greek pantheon). It was my first time to call and talk on any radio show, and I knew that I was supposed to turn my radio off for the call because if there’s one thing radio jockeys hate worse than Batshit Banana callers it’s Feedback Mongers. So the time I called in to discuss the one topic near and dear to my heart (and my pocketbook), I did what I knew was right: I turned off the radio, made my call, inched myself forward in traffic toward the nearest turnoff where the way to work promised to be faster, if indeed farther, and was pleasantly surprised to get to talk to someone. It was Arch himself. After I had switched off they apparently went to commercial break, so it was kind of disconcerting to hear the voice of Arch Reeves. He asked me what I wanted to talk about and why, ascertained that I was neither a Feedback Monger nor a Batshit Bananas, and invited me to hold the line while he jumped back On the Air. He would invite me on board momentarily.<br />\tWhen it came my turn, I let them—and the rest of the morning travelers—have it on the subject of property taxes. About how we don’t really own property in the United States because if it can be taken away due to the nonpayment of property taxes, then it’s a leasehold interest at best. Bob Barch served the ball back to me adroitly and expertly by requiring me to give him a solution to the problem that wouldn’t disenfranchise every county, city and most importantly, school district across the nation. And of course, I didn’t have an answer for that apart from some snide comment about the fact that municipalities and local governments weren’t entirely necessary to begin with.<br />\tAfter I got to work that morning—that weird, foggy morning six years back—I got a call on my cell phone. It was Arch Reeves, asking me if I wanted to come in some morning and sit in on the show. So a couple of mornings later I found myself sitting in a crowded five foot by eight foot space with egg cartons stapled butt-down to black crepe walls and talking with the guys about anything they could think of to discuss. And to this day I have no idea what the hell I said, and there’s nobody who would give a damn one way or the other, but the salient thing about the whole affair was that I made a friend in Arch Reeves. Not so much Bob Barch. But Arch Reeves became a buddy.<br />\tFlash forward to just the other day and the whole weird thing about the Yankee Traveler.<br />\tHere’s what happened.<br />\tI got a call from Arch Reeves.<br />\t“Hey, Jimmy. You’re the resident expert on Ray Bradbury. When did he die?”<br />\t“I’m no expert, Arch, but if I recall correctly, Mr. Bradbury let loose the mortal coil in June of 2012. I think it was June 5th, to be exact, and the only reason I know the date is because it’s my wife’s birthday. The reason I know the year was because I was out there in California that Spring and I went by my favorite bookstore there in Glendale for his book signing but he was too sick to come down, so I had Christine and Malcolm take a stack of books over to his house for him to sign for me and mail them back. Sure enough, I got all the books in the mail, but then a couple months later on Sienna’s birthday, he shuffled off.”<br />\t“Wow. Way, way too much information, but that’s kind of neat that you were at least one remove from him. Did you ever meet him personally?”<br />\t“Never did. My best friend saw him once on the street in Paris, got his attention and asked him to wait while he ducked inside a bookstore, snagged a book and got Ray’s signature on it. I know the story because Bobby was so excited right after it that he had to call me to tell me about it. The book is on my bookshelf, and it’s his signature, all right. Also, I’ve met several of Mr. Bradbury’s author friends, including Theodore Sturgeon, Chad Oliver, and Jack Williamson.”<br />\t“I don’t know who any of those people are.” Arch laughed. “Again, too much information, but all right. How would you like to meet him?”<br />\t“Meet who?”<br />\t“It’s whom. Meet whom.”<br />\t“Arch, I’m from East Texas, and we murder the King’s English at every provocation. Stop correcting me. I know it’s whom. Like I said, meet who?”<br />\t“Ray Bradbury.”<br />\tI suppose that there was a long silence then, because Arch finally said, “Hmph, must have lost the connection.”<br />\t“No, I’m here. I’m just wondering what you’ve been smoking.”<br />\t“I don’t smoke anything. I have to keep my wits about me in order to do great radio, Jimmy. You know that. And I’m the best there is.”<br />\t“If you say so. So what the hell are you talking about?”<br />\t“What are you doing later today?”<br />\t“It’s Saturday. I’m already done with the honey-do projects for the day, I think. I’d like to see the grandkids, but I think that’s tabled for tomorrow. What do you have in mind?”<br />\t“I’m coming over. Give me twenty minutes.”<br />\tAnd then he hung up. But that’s Arch. The guy was incapable of signing off properly on the phone. I guess it’s a radio thing—there was always this momentary other-worldly sense that I was On The Air, even if it was in the middle of the night—and his demeanor was never otherwise than that I was the guest and that he was hosting me, and when the time came it was my job to withdraw, and his to wordlessly hang up, even if I didn’t say Goodbye. Usually, I never got the chance.<br /><br /><br /><br />Arch showed up out front nineteen minutes later, which to my way of thinking is somewhat of a miracle because he lives on the north side of Austin, while I live south near the airport. He was driving his little two-seater MG sports car—the kind of car you wear—with the top down and the sun pouring vertical upon his shiny dome (Arch has less hair upstairs than Kojak, and it wasn’t exactly an open topic for conversation). He was sporting a pair of sunglasses; the mirrored kind which always put me in mind of that psychopathic prison guard in Cool Hand Luke.<br />\t“Nice shades,” I said.<br />\tI got in and Arch drove me out of the neighborhood like the speed demon he is, slewing and winding his way along the snaky main road and dodged into traffic along Highway 183 without so much as a tap on the brakes at the stop sign. It made me recall that I had my life insurance in order as well as my will, and for a moment caused me to wonder what his auto policy declaration page might look like, but I let it go and let the wind tousle my graying hair (at least I’ve got some) and essentially settled in for an interesting trip. Interesting, that is, because I had no earthly idea where we were headed apart from some unsettling reference to one of my favorite—and deceased—authors.<br />\tArch dodged through weekend traffic like maybe he was Al Unser or Mario Andretti or perhaps AJ Foyt at the Indy 500, but it was clear we were headed east when he jumped onto Highway 71 and took me out past the airport.<br />\t“Hey, Arch! Austin is back that way.” I jerked a thumb behind us.<br />\t“We’re not going into Austin. You let me drive, kemosabe.”<br />\tI suppose I pursed my lips and nodded, but he checked his rearview, his sideview, and cast a quick glance over his left shoulder before whipping across three lanes of traffic and into the far inside lane. I thought of glancing at his speedometer and then thought better of it. If I didn’t know then I wouldn’t be able to testify about it later, if the subject ever came up. Past Austin-Bergstrom Airport, Arch turned off north on FM 973, catching the lights green. Inside of a minute we were past the Colorado River and I was checking out the new housing developments that had sprung up where the false high hills left over from strip mining lined both sides of the highway.<br />\t“When you see this guy, Jimmy, don’t stare at him too much. I don’t want you to scare him or freak him out or anything.”<br />\t“Oh. So you’ve found a lookalike for Ray Bradbury.”<br />\tArch didn’t answer. He raised his right lip into a smirking half-smile and gave me a “Hmph.” We could have been on the radio.<br />\tHe made a left, back east, on FM 969 and back toward town, but before we made it to the barbecue stand that I knew was up ahead somewhere, he turned off abruptly to the right and into a Flea Market. I didn’t recall ever seeing the place before, but it must have existed for many years prior because the place looked run down to hell and gone—the exposed and unpainted boards were bleached whalebone gray, the sign looked like someone had hung it fresh and new about the time Ron Reagan was taking the Oath of Office (which is to say that the letters had faded so badly that they would have been illegible but for the raised bumps spelling out the word New World Flea Market).<br />\tThe New World Flea Market took up an entire city block, aside from the pea-gravel parking area to the west. We slid in between two King Cab pickup trucks, which made Arch’s MG look like one of those little cars the Shriners drive during the Christmas Parade, or a circus clown car.<br />\tArch killed the engine, turned to look at me and smiled a shit-eating grin.<br />\t“What?”<br />\tHe shook his head. “Nothin’. Just...nothin’. Let’s go.”<br />\tI followed Arch into the New World Flea Market.<br />\tLet me say that I’m an old horse-trader from way back in the wayback, which is to say that I’ve been to just about every flea market from Cut And Shoot the other side of Conroe in East Texas to Waco way to the north, to San Antonio back down south, and so the only thing that ever surprises me is to find something, or for that matter, anything, that might be considered surprising. Upon stepping underneath the tin roof of the New World Flea Market I found myself surprised and delighted. <br />\tFirst there was a fellow there selling some wonderful junk equipment. This guy had old guitar amps, ancient monochrome computer monitors, and even a functioning oscilloscope. The oscilloscope was plugged in and the wave form was busily flatlining itself in a bright green line across the little graphing screen. As I walked by, I picked up a speaker magnet laying on the table and waved it over the wire leading to the device and watched the green line jump as the magnetic field came into contact with the wire. The old man sitting there smiled at me.<br />\t“Twenty-five bucks for it,” the geezer said. I was tempted, but remembered that we were in a two-seater MG and I didn’t relish riding back home with a heavy-assed piece of equipment on my lap, nor hearing my wife asking me why I had brought home another dust collector. <br />\tI smiled and passed on by, but not before catching a couple of bonafide dowsing rods out of the corner of my eye that made me hesitate. In fact, I stopped in my tracks. I hadn’t seen a set of dowsing rods since Methuselah was a pup, probably along about 1977.<br />\t“Jimmy,” Arch said, and took my elbow. “He’s back here.”<br />\tI went, as directed.<br />\tWe passed a woman selling her own artwork, and it was good artwork. I wanted to buy a particular piece, but Arch’s unyielding hand never left my elbow.<br />\tPast yet another woman selling herbal remedies at about a five hundred percent mark-up, and then Arch stopped me in the middle of the narrow, bare-earth concourse. He turned to face me, and since we were in the full shade, he removed his sunglasses and hung them in the vee of his polo shirt.<br />\t“Now listen, Jimmy. Play this real cool-like, okay. We’ll start at this table over there and just move slowly along, checking things out. He’s three tables down, sitting in a chair looking straight ahead. I wouldn’t bother striking up a conversation with him unless you’re intent on going down the old rabbit hole. And if you go down the hole, or if you go too far, I may not be able to rescue you.”<br />\tI started to say something, but Jimmy raised his hand and shook his head, no.<br />\t“Trust me on this, okay. I know what I’m talking about. Just like you’re the resident expert on dead science fiction authors, I’m the resident expert on people. I wouldn’t fuck with this guy. He’ll look right through you at a thousand yards.”<br />\t“Okay. Lead on.”<br />\tSo Arch played it cool and flipped through a collection of vinyl record albums while I looked over a collection of pocket knives. I glanced quickly to my right, but in that fleeting instant I couldn’t make out Ray. Even though I hadn’t seen him yet, that’s what I was calling him in my head—just...Ray.<br />\tI eventually but nonchalantly came to him.<br />\tWhat can I say, except that it was Ray Bradbury. Not the wheelchair-bound Ray who received the Medal of Freedom from George W. This was the Ray of about the time of his Ray Bradbury Theater days—mid sixties, just starting to get good and chunky. <br />\tRay was selling, of all things, books. And they were science fiction books.<br />\tHis eyes met mine for a fleeting moment and I gave him a hello by way of a curt nod. This seemed to mollify him. I then turned my attention to the stacks. That’s what they always called the books in the local library when I was a kid, and I can’t walk into a library or a bookstore without thinking to myself, “I’ll just check out the stacks, see if they’ve got anything good.” Ray actually had stacks, by which I mean piles of bookage. And they were books from the Silver Age of science fiction and fantasy; the 1960s and 70s. On top of one stack I found all four of the Borrible books by Michael de Larrabeiti (another deceased author, this one a Brit). You almost never see those books anymore, and almost never all together. I was almost tempted to pick them up and buy them on the spot, not because they were priced so cheaply—a sign hanging behind Ray read ALL BOOK $2—but because they looked so damned new! Yet I knew they were all published in the 1970s and 80s. The problem was that I had each one of them on my shelf at home, sandwiched in between the modern James S.A. Corey The Expanse series and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and I instantly knew it was going to be the same issue as an oscilloscope in a sports car, only worse, and the same issue with the wife, only far worse. According to her, I had way too many books, and she was right about that. So, I reluctantly passed them by. <br />\tOut of the corner of my eye I noted that Arch was looking over some leather key-chain fobs at the next table over. Not too far away to be considered out of reach, yet not so close as to draw attention to himself. <br />\tI wanted to hear Ray speak. In fact, I had to. But Edgar Rice Burroughs’ entire Barsoom series was suddenly to hand, and I picked them up and examined them one by one. I smelled them, and I was transported back to my adolescence. <br />\tRay spoke first. “If you buy ten books, you get the eleventh free. Which works well with that series, since there are eleven of them. It’s a pity he didn’t write more of them.”<br />\tRay had Ray Bradbury’s voice as well.<br />\t“That’s a hell of a deal,” I admitted, and fished out my wallet and handed Ray a twenty dollar bill.<br />\tHe took it from me with his Ray Bradbury hands, folded it over and stuck it in his shirt pocket and gave me a smile. He reached beside his chair and picked up an empty plastic grocery bag—which in itself was odd, because those things are now illegal to give out in Austin grocery stores—and handed it to me.<br />\t“Much obliged,” I said.<br />\tArch stepped up beside me. “Find something, Jimmy?” he asked.<br />\t“Found a treasure trove. You got a trunk in that little jalopy out there?”<br />\t“Sure I do. It’ll hold a small suitcase, but not much more, so don’t get too carried away.”<br />\tI cast my eyes over the stacks and then lit upon a small stack of papers at the end of the table. The stack was threatening to fall off into space, so I reached over and picked it up and pushed it gently back into place.<br />\t“What’s this?” I asked.<br />\t“Take one. I give one to every paying customer, if they want it.”<br />\tIt was a short story. My eyes lit up at the title:<br /><br />THE TALE OF THE YANKEE TRAVELER<br />A Short Story<br />By Ray Bergen<br /><br />\t“You write this?” I asked Ray, and for a moment my legs felt a smidge wobbly, almost as if they weren’t there. His name is really RAY! my inner voice shouted at me.<br />\t“Sure. I wrote it. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. I’ll be minding my own business, then all of a sudden I get an idea, and I have to write it down. It’s not always easy to do. I can’t type worth a damn, you know.” And he made alternating poking motions in the air with his index fingers, miming the old hunt-and-peck method. Then he laughed, and it was, you know, an R.B. laugh.<br />\tLooking at the text on the page, where my eyes were drawn inexorably back to, I could see that they were indeed typed on an old-fashioned typewriter, a non-electric, to be exact, because in some places the letters were darker than in others. The same letter, too. Maybe he bought the typewriter from the oscilloscope guy, I thought, and chuckled. In my minds eye I could see him type THE END on the last page, crank it out of an old Royal typewriter with a series of wrist flicks, then get in his car for a quick run down to the local Kinkos to burn a few dozen copies or more. <br />\t“Yeah, and you wrote it with a manual typewriter, to boot,” I said. “My hat is off to you sir.”<br />\t“That I did,” he said. “I don’t have a computer. I wouldn’t know how to use it if I did.”<br />\tI nodded.<br />\t“Thank you kindly for this,” I said.<br />\t“Jimmy, let’s go,” Arch said. “Before you buy out this guy’s stock.”<br />\t“You fellahs take it easy,” Ray said.<br />\t“Same to you, sir,” I said, and turned and walked away.<br /><br /><br /><br />I don’t think that went so well,” Arch said as I put the sack of books into his tiny trunk.<br />\t“Why not. No rabbit holes. No harm, no foul.”<br />\t“Oh, there’s a rabbit hole all right. And you already fell in it. Come on. I’m taking you home while you’re still in one piece.”<br /><br /><br /><br />When Arch dropped me off at home and handed me my bag of books, I tucked the Ray Bergen short story under my arm and shook Arch’s hand.<br />\t“Uh, Jimmy. Don’t...uh...”<br />\t“Don’t what?”<br />\t“Just...don’t. I’ll be seein’ ya.”<br />\tAnd then he got into his car and sped off.<br />\tI stood there for a minute, breathing in the world around me. A distant red-tailed hawk did a circle over the trees to the south, a big rig was using his engine brake out on Highway 183. All was right with the world.<br />\tExcept it wasn’t.<br /><br /><br /><br />Three hours later I began to realize just how right Arch had been.<br />\tI had read the entire short story, all twelve single-spaced pages of it, three times. I found myself both enraptured and scared out of my wits.<br />\tFirst of all, it was written in Ray Bradbury’s voice and style. Second, the theme was decidedly a Bradbury theme, with a lover’s touch of horror to it, as in his Something Wicked This Way Comes, or possibly two of the last things he’d written, The Homecoming and From The Dust Returned. At a minimum the story was as haunting as The Martian Chronicles and as reminiscent of summertime in youth as Dandelion Wine or Farewell To Summer. <br />\tWhen Sienna came into my study to announce that she’d made us a snack, she frightened me so badly that I dropped the short story on my lap. She looked at me oddly, cocking her head to the side.<br />\t“What are you doing? You’re so absorbed in here.”<br />\t“Reading this,” I said, and raised up the short story. “I think it may be cursed.”<br />\t“Oh shit.”<br />\t“What?”<br />\t“You’re on about something. Got your head up in the clouds and can’t remember you’ve got feet.”<br />\t“Go away, woman. I’m busy.” I tried to make light of it. Nothing wrong here, folks. Move along.<br />\tShe smirked at me, shrugged, and then beat a hasty retreat.<br />\tFive minutes later I came upon her in our bedroom. She was going through one of her dresser drawers, organizing it. I slipped my arms around her, whispered an I love you in her ear.<br />\t“Where are you going?” she asked me.<br />\t“Uh, no biggee. I just need to check something out.”<br />\t“How long will you be gone?”<br />\t“A hour. Maybe two.”<br />\t“Maybe five or six.”<br />\t“That could happen. If it’s looking like it’s going to, I’ll call you.”<br />\t“Is it safe?” she asked.<br />\t“Utterly. It’s a book thing.”<br />\t“Those are the worst kinds.”<br /><br /><br /><br />I parked my Jeep Cherokee across the highway from The New World Flea Market and waited as the day wore on. I’d arrived a little after 3:30 p.m., and it was a quarter till five with the sun starting to go down in the late fall evening before the crowds became sparse and the parking lot began to clear. <br />\tWhile I waited, occasionally glancing up over the berm of the roadway that separated me from The New World Flea Market to make sure Ray Bergen wasn’t walking out to his vehicle and driving away before I got the chance to at least make out what kind of car he drove, I read snatches of The Tale of the Yankee Traveler once again:<br /><br /><br />\tWhen Mrs. Pinderhorst opened the front door of her hostel she was sure that she recognized the man who stood before her, but then on the heels of this came doubt. He was a traveler, as all her guests were, but he looked as otherworldly as a clergyman in a counting house. His leather bag, low slung from his right shoulder, made him for a traveler, but his clothes were pristine, his hair combed to perfection, and he bore no expression to read upon his countenance.<br />\tShe thought of waiting for him to speak but then with each passing instant became horrified that he might not.<br />\t“Good day to you sir.”<br />\t“Good day, madame. A room?”<br />\t“Yes. We have a room for you.” Mrs. Pinderhorst liked to think of her “we” as the royal pronoun, but it was nonetheless a prevarication. There was none other than herself to see to the paying guests, to cook for them, to change their bedding and to empty their chamber pots.<br />\tThen the traveler smiled at her, and she noticed his eyes were black. <br /><br /><br />\tI shivered and glanced up in time to see Ray Bergen walking slowly across the parking lot of The New World Flea Market. I could see no more than his upper half, as the lower was blocked by the roadway berm, but it was unmistakably Ray.<br />\tWhen he pulled up the hill to the highway and stopped to wait for the traffic to clear, I slid down in my seat, just in case he had excellent vision and might both see and recognize me, Arch’s words echoing in my head the whole time: He’ll look right through you at a thousand yards.<br />\tHe gave no signal, but because of the angle of his car—a late 1970s Lincoln Town Car, black, polished and gleaming like the day it rolled off the dealership lot—I predicted that he would turn left, headed away from the heart of Austin. Half a minute later this prediction was confirmed.<br />\tNeedless to say, I followed him.<br /><br /><br /><br />I hung well back as headlights turned on about me and the last of the daylight faded from the sky. Winter was coming like a rumor spreading through a retirement village. Winters such as we have in Austin are usually brief with no more than a handful of days of biting cold and bitter wind, and then everything returns to normal. But for some reason as I drove eastward along FM 969 in the wake of Ray Bergen’s taillights no more than half a mile ahead of me, I felt like there was a blizzard brewing somewhere with my name on it.<br />\tWhen the traffic thickened approaching the toll road that cut from north to south along the east of Austin, I jumped ahead so as not to lose Ray and ended up coming up directly behind him at a red light. But it was practically night and my headlights would be in his eyes were he to glance up into his rearview mirror, so I relaxed and waited.<br />\tThe light changed and he rolled on through. <br />\tAbout a mile down, he turned off to the left at what I knew to be a dead end lane, so I went straight on, then did a u-turn in the middle of the highway and came back and turned into the neighborhood.<br />\t“What the hell are you doing, Jimmy?” I asked myself, and realized that in my own head I was playing it in Arch’s voice. I shook my head to get rid of Arch and just managed it.<br />\tAbout a quarter of a mile ahead, Ray turned off into a driveway to the right. I gauged the distance, pulled over and parked where there seemed to be a vacant lot, or at least no lights and no house that I could discern back of the tall grass and the knotty pine fence, and switched off my headlights.<br />\tI waited until I a distant light came on—no doubt a porch light—and then a moment later it winked out again.<br />\t“This who you are?” I asked myself aloud. “A stalker?”<br />\tI waited a moment, then answered myself, “No.”<br />\tThe car was still running, so I turned the headlights back on, put the car in gear and took two or three stabs at turning around in the middle of the narrow dirt lane.<br />\t“This is what you get, bub,” I said to myself. “Never do this kind of shit again, okay?”<br />\tI finally got the car turned around and drove back down toward the highway. When I came to it, instead of pulling all the way up, I pulled over again and killed my headlights.<br />\tI sat in the darkness and the quiet and relived the events of the day. It had begun late that morning with a call from Arch. From there we went to the New World Flea Market and I met the doppelgänger of Ray Bradbury, whose name was Ray Bergen, and I’d bought some books from him and been given one of his short stories, nine single-spaced manually typed pages stapled together. Once back home I had read the short story three times through, and it had read like an actual Ray Bradbury short story. To top it all off—and this was the wild thing—he had signed his name using what appeared to be a Sharpie pen.<br />\tHe had signed it:<br /><br />Ray Bergen<br /><br />\tI had quickly pulled down one of my own Ray Bradbury signed books and compared the signatures. Ray had signed his similarly:<br /><br />Ray Bradbury<br /><br />\tWho was fooling whom, as Arch might say? All things being equal, Ray Bergen was Ray Bradbury. But of course at the same time he wasn’t. Ray was long gone from the world, and to my knowledge the mold was broken at his creation.<br />\tMy head swam in the darkness.<br />\tAs I saw it there were two options, neither of which were tenable: I could go home and try to forget about the whole thing—maybe try reading something innocuous and otherwise spend some quality time with my wife, maybe even take her out to dinner—or I could turn around and knock on Ray Bergen’s front door and try to confront him with the supernatural nature of the phenomenon I had stumbled across and try to convince him to confide in me. Both of these paths seemed equally out of the question for me, so I ended up sitting there.<br />\tIt was an hour before the dark figure appeared opposite me on the roadway, and I wouldn’t have noticed him at all were it not for a set of headlights coming from the west silhouetting him against the row of mailboxes at the lane’s entrance. For just a moment, the briefest of instants, I shuddered because I was certain it was the Yankee Traveler—the utterly black figure of a man with a smattering of stars and the vastness of the cosmos as his essential substance, just as described in Ray Bergen’s short story. But it wasn’t. It was worse than this, and my tongue swelled in my mouth and my stomach lurched. It was Ray Bergen, out walking his dog.<br />\tAs the car moved past us, he looked over at my car—looked straight through me, you might say—recognized me, and gingerly stepped across the roadway with his little dog in trail until he stood no more than a few feet from my car door.<br />\tHe motioned for me to roll the window down, and I complied.<br />\t“Hmph,” he said. “What was it? Was it the short story.”<br />\t“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”<br />\tHe seemed to consider for a long moment—I have no idea how long, because my heart was busily triphammering in my chest. I couldn’t make out the details of his face very well, so there was no help for it but to wait for him to speak.<br />\t“Jimmy, wasn’t it?” he asked, and for a moment I didn’t understand the question, and then I remembered the last thing Arch said while we were standing at Ray Bergen’s flea market table with all the stacks of science fiction and fantasy novels. He’d said, “Jimmy, let’s go. Before you buy out this guy’s stock.”<br />\t“Yes sir,” I replied. “Jimmy.”<br />\t“Jimmy, I think Edgar has finished with his doggie business. Why don’t you give us a ride back to the house. Then you can come inside and have a coke and the two of us can talk proper. That is, if you haven’t come out here to kill me or something like that.”<br />\t“I’m not sure I’m capable of violence,” I said. “Sure, hop in and I’ll take you two home.”<br />\tI unlocked the doors and Ray Bergen came around and got in beside me, reached down and lifted up Edgar, who in my dome lights I took to be some kind of a weird cross between a terrier and a pug. He was skinny and nervous and licked his own nose incessantly, as if tasting whatever it was he smelled.<br />\tI turned on my headlights, looked to make sure the traffic was utterly clear, then turned around in the middle of the highway and started back down the lane. During the brief trip, I thought of Arch Reeves, telling me if I didn’t go too far down the rabbit hole, then possibly he would be able to rescue me. I couldn’t imagine getting much farther down than I had already gone. But I was to find myself wrong about even that.<br /><br /><br />Ray’s home was a double-wide trailer, an older model constructed some time in the 1970s, as seemed to be everything associated with Ray Bergen, except possibly the dog, which I wanted to ask about as we pulled into his driveway. I decided to bide my time and wait until we were inside and perhaps seated. Before I killed the headlights and turned the engine off, I noticed a large storage shed past Ray’s car and back of the house, the aluminum kind they used to sell back in the day as a modular unit. Cheap, but functional. I wondered, absently, if the thing were filled with old books and then dismissed the thought. Books have to be well-preserved in a climate-controlled setting to pass the test of time, as had the eleven Edgar Rice Burroughs books I had bought from Ray had likely been kept. <br />\tAs we stepped up onto the front porch, Ray’s security light come on abruptly, which very damn nearly made me drizzle in my pants.<br />\tRay laughed. “It does that to people. I have so few visitors that I forget how people react to it.”<br />\tRay removed a key on a piece of coathanger wire bent back upon itself from his pants pocket and jiggled it in the lock and turned the knob. The door came open and I followed him and Edgar inside.<br />\t“Edgar, huh?” I asked.<br />\t“That’s right. Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. Or I should say, Edgar Allan Pug.”<br />\t“If Poe were a dog, I suppose this is the breed he’d be.”<br />\t“That’s right,” Ray said, and bent down and patted the dog’s head. “Regal. Proud. King of the Dogs.”<br />\tI took the time to look around Ray Bergen’s home, or as much of it as I could see from the entryway. It appeared be a homey, comfortable, place, with little knickknacks everywhere, but only the kind a man would have, or rather a fellow who collected things simply to have them, even if they were of no practical use apart from interest, solely. Above a faux fireplace was a coat of arms, a King Charles the Fifth shield for a backdrop, with what appeared to be a rampant dragon beneath a Tau Cross. Propped against the edge of the fireplace was an Indian Rain Stick, the kind that is hollow inside but for a number of beads to emulate the sound of rain when the stick is turned upside down. In the corner of the room was a double-barreled shotgun, a real one, and it made me remember where I was—inside a double-wide mobile home on the outskirts of Austin and well into the countryside, where there would be plenty of varmints, and quite possible not all of the animal variety. The couch and matching chair were genuine brushed suede leather, but both well worn. There were a number of throw rugs covering the linoleum of the living room and kitchen, each different from the other, Turkish, Persian and Indian. Along one shelf was a collection of elephant figurines, and beneath this was a collection of the old telegraph pole greenish glass wire insulators. Other than that, the interior of Ray’s house was filed with floor to ceiling bookshelves, and they were all full to brim with paperback books.<br />\t“So, Jimmy,” Ray said, “what’s got you so het up about The Tale of the Yankee Traveler?”<br />\tRight then I became certain of it. Ray Bergen simply didn’t know. He didn’t know about the similarities between himself and Ray Bradbury, from his features and the way he carried himself right down to his voice. He had no clue about how closely his writing resembled Bradbury’s, nor about the similarity between their signatures. He’d never read The Marian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine or Farewell to Summer. When I was standing at his table back in the flea market I’d thought he might sell a copy of one from time to time, but in that instant in Ray Bergen’s living room, trying to think of how best to respond to his query, I suspected that he’d never read a single one of them. That, quite possibly, when he came across a copy of any Ray Bradbury book, he didn’t see it. Perhaps like Randall Garrett’s magic spell, the Tarnhelm Effect, from his Lord Darcy series, it wasn’t that the object wasn’t there, it was that the eye avoided it as if it was a patch of null space—a hole in the universe that did not admit to light, interest or inquiry.<br />\t I found that words began tumbling from my mouth. “It’s that it should be published. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that would probably garner some kind of literary award. Or more than one. Be really recognized, you know? I read it three times through when Arch dropped me off at home from the flea market. I couldn’t stop reading it. Pardon my saying so, sir, but it was that good.”<br />\t“Uh huh.” He was dubious. “Well, thank you for saying so. It’s a mystery to me how I even wrote it. You want a coke?” He shucked his jacket, draped it over a hat tree by the fireplace and wandered in the direction of the kitchen with Edgar close on his heels.<br />\t“Sure.”<br />\t“Let’s sit at the kitchen table.”<br />\tIt was a command, and I followed him and sat down in a hardwood chair at a hardwood table and waited.<br />\tRay made a production out of getting ice out of his ice tray and dropping the cubes into a couple of fruit jar glasses, then finding a church key in a kitchen drawer and opening the tall bottle of Coke. He poured it and it was just enough to fill two glasses. One glass came to sit in front of me at the table and he took a seat at the other by my right elbow.<br />\t“Now, Jimmy,” he said and took a sip of his coke, “what are your questions about Yankee Traveler?”<br />\tAt this I was at first stumped, and then the seed of an idea took hold and I decided to run with it. The story itself was a little too close to the current situation for comfort, but I had never known myself to succumb to fear of any kind, and so found myself plunging on ahead.<br />\t“The Yankee Traveler is an American Gothic Horror, if I may say so.”<br />\t“Okay.”<br />\t“It’s about a strange man who comes to town whom everybody seems to know, but they’re not sure how they know him, at least until a fellow who had moved to the Connecticut village from Boston thought about it and realized that the man was Samuel Adams. He’d once seen Adams in his own Boston pub many years before. But the fact of the matter was that Sam Adams was long dead.”<br />\t“That’s right. So you did read it.”<br />\t“I did. Like I said, three times.”<br />\t“Okay, go on. I’m sure there’s a question in here somewhere.”<br />\t“There is. I promise, there is. Okay, so where did you get the idea for doppelgänger for a famous person? Only this doppelgänger is an otherworldy or maybe other-dimensional fellow.”<br />\tRay nodded. “Tell me, Jimmy, do you believe in aliens?”<br />\tI shivered.<br />\t“It’s an innocent question. The truth is that a high percentage of the American public now believe that we are regularly visited by aliens from other worlds and maybe other dimensions. Some think they are humans from a future that follows a nuclear war, where the remnant of mankind had to evolve into a gangly gray alien body in order to survive. That’s probably not too far out of the realm of possibility, either, given our penchant to want to destroy ourselves. So seriously, what do you think?”<br />\t“I...I’m not sure. I’ve read a few books on the subject, or tried to read them. I couldn’t get very far. It’s the science fantasy trying to mask itself as science fact that always throws me. Although, there was this one horror science fiction book I read by Judith and Garfield-Reeves Stevens that I finished. Can’t remember the title. The damned thing scared the bejesus out of me. I tried reading Whitley Streiber’s Communion when it first came out, but I just couldn’t do it. Too much cosmic consciousness for me.”<br />\t“So, you’re a straight science fiction man. Probably you like Larry Niven.”<br />\t“I adore Larry Niven.”<br />\tRay nodded. “What if I told you that I happen to think there is at least one group of aliens who are really here, and that they can shape-shift, but they don’t have a very great imagination and they have to copy people they’ve actually seen before?”<br />\t“I would want to see some proof of that,” I said, but found myself saying it meekly, as if it was hard to make the words leave my mouth. Thus they came quietly and uncertainly, like a thief might approach a seemingly abandoned home.<br />\tRay smacked the table with the meat of his hand and smiled. “You would, wouldn’t you? But somehow I didn’t think you’d want to actually see the proof, Jimmy. I mean, it’s a great concept to think with. It’s safe enough just to think about it. No, I believe you’d run from it the moment that it appeared in front of you.”<br />\tI swallowed. “Yeah. I might.”<br />\tI studied the man. I mean, in all respects, this was Ray Bradbury. Except it wasn’t. And the topic was starting to give me a case of the frights. The only time I had ever recalled being scared was seeing a truck burning out on the highway after a wreck. I thought the thing might explode, and then who knew what might happen. Of course, I was no more than five or six years old at the time.<br />\t“You see, that’s the thing,” Ray continued. “People think they want something. They say, ‘We want disclosure of the fact that aliens crashed near Roswell in 1947!’ But do they? I mean, do they really? I don’t think they do. You see, people...ordinary people. They get up and they go to work each morning. They put in their eight hours a day and they draw their paycheck and they barbecue and watch football on weekends. Their energies, their entire existences are wrapped up in doing this one thing. You could ask them, ‘Who are you?’ and they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. They’d probably say, ‘My name is John Jones.’ But that’s not what you mean when you ask that question. What you mean when you ask it is, ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing living the life of a human being, a homo sapien sapiens, on a mud ball wrapped around a flaming cinder traveling ninety-three million miles out from a small, dim, yellow sun in an orbit in a backwater solar system on the edge of an arm of a minor spiral galaxy?’ That’s what you want to know. And you know what? They have no answer for that, except, ‘I’m a bricklayer,’ or ‘I’m an accountant.’ No sir. They don’t want to know one scintilla about who they really are, what the universe is like, whether or not they are alone as a species in the unending black cosmos. And do you want to know something funny? It’s exactly that that the aliens want to know about. How can one species be so blissfully, so willfully stupid? What kind of reality is this? Is it cultural? Is it socio-economic? I mean, if the Galactic Confederation could thoroughly control the populations of its tens of thousands of worlds the way the people of Earth are controlled, then there’s a secret here. A great big and fat secret. The secret is not ‘out there.’”Ray used air quotes with his sausage-thick fingers. “The big secret of the universe is right here!” and he stabbed the table with is finger.<br />\tI didn’t know I was sweating until a bead of it fell from my eyebrows onto the table in front of me.<br />\t“Are you nervous about something, Jimmy?” Ray asked.<br />\t“No sir,” I said.<br />\t“Better drink that coke.”<br />\tI reached out, grasped the glass and took a long pull of it, then set it down again.<br />\t“So, let me ask you again, what if I told you there are aliens who can shift their shape and copy people? Would you really want to meet one? Would you want to see his flying saucer? Would you want him to give you a tour of local planets?”<br />\tI thought about Arch and his little MG, weaving in and out of traffic on the highway. I thought about my wife and how she is uber cautious in her driving. And then I thought about leaving the atmosphere of the planet, but not on a rocket or a space shuttle, but instead with an alien at the controls of the flying saucer.<br />\t“No,” I said suddenly.<br />\tRay relaxed and smiled at that. “Well now. There’s some truth for you. You want to know something funny?” He asked the question as if he’d never asked it before.<br />\t“Sure.”<br />\t“You want to know why they sometimes copy famous people?”<br />\t“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like to know that.”<br />\tRay seemed amused by the whole thing, as if it was an incredibly funny joke. “Okay. Get this, now. Say you were an alien, and you wanted to copy somebody. Who would make yourself look like?”<br />\t“I don’t know. I never thought of it before.”<br />\t“But you thought of it today, didn’t you? I mean, while you were reading my short story?”<br />\t“Oh. I guess I did. I don’t know. I thought I might make myself look like some famous author.”<br />\t“A science fiction author?”<br />\t“Maybe.”<br />\t“Which one?”<br />\t“I don’t know. Maybe Larry Niven. Or L. Ron Hubbard. Somebody like that.”<br />\t“Okay. How would people respond to that?”<br />\t“I don’t know. They might be a little freaked out, I guess. How would you respond?” The idea of turning the tables on him was far too tantalizing to pass up.<br />\t“Oh, I know exactly how I’d respond. I’d ask they what star they were from? Betelgeuse or Regula?”<br />\t“Then there’s two types.”<br />\t“That’s right.”<br />\t“What if he said Betelgeuse?”<br />\t“Then I’d tell him that he should stick to copying no-name types.”<br />\t“But what if he said Regula?” I asked.<br />\t“Then, I’d act like it nothing was out of the ordinary at all. That’s one way to find yourself very dead, Jimmy.”<br />\t“How’s that?”<br />\t“To run across a Regulan, and then challenge him on his appearance.”<br />\t“That’s your Yankee Traveler. That’s why the character—”<br />\t“Smith.”<br />\t“Right. That’s why Smith ended up with his head fried. Because he challenged the Yankee Traveler. He told him that he looked like Samuel Adams, that he was Samuel Adams, but that Samuel Adams was dead.”<br />\t“Exactly.” Ray smiled. “Because there’s something else funny about it. Regulans live for hundreds of years. And so Yankee Traveler is really a true story. That is, if everything else I told you is true.”<br />\t“I thought it was one of those Old World things. Like vampires, werewolves, gnomes and such.”<br />\t“It kind of is. But then again...”<br />\t“All of those are aliens,” I finished for him.<br />\tRay smacked the table, leaned back and drained his coke glass.<br />\tI found myself laughing. I yawned, stretched, then leaned back in my chair.<br />\tThe tension had drained out of the room.<br />\t“Mr. Bergen,” I said. “You are a natural storyteller. And a great one at that.”<br />\t“Thank you. Thank you, kindly.”<br />\t“Well, I bet my wife is getting worried about me. Thank you for the coke. I think it’s time for me to head on home.<br />\tRay stood up slowly. I could hear his knees creaking as he did so.<br />\tI got up, leaned forward and offered Ray my hand. He shook it.<br />\t“Okay, Jimmy. You’re welcome to come back by any time. Hold on a minute.” He fished his wallet out and withdrew a business card and handed it to me. “Here’s my number. It’s best that you call me before stopping by. I might think you’re one of the hoodlums who live around here and shoot first and ask questions later.”<br />\t“Don’t worry about that. I’ll call first.”<br />\tI bent over to pet Edgar Allan Poe—or Pug, whichever it really was—but he darted away from my hand.<br />\t“It takes some time for him to get to know you,” Ray said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”<br />\tI finally made it out the front door. A cool breeze had come up and I breathed in deeply the smells of the countryside.<br />\tMy car started without any trouble. I backed out and drove away, as if doing so was the most natural thing in the world.<br /><br /><br /><br />The next day was Sunday.<br />\tI did it, with malice aforethought.<br />\tFirst, that morning Arch tried to call me, but I dismissed his call without answering it. I didn’t want to speak with Arch Reeves. No way, no how. He would detect something and likely try to talk me out of it, even if he didn’t know what it was.<br />\tI drove by the New World Flea Market and saw that Ray Bergen’s long, black, polished Lincoln Town Car was there. I slowed to see it, but then continued on when I confirmed it was there. I drove down half a mile, turned off and took the long way around so that I didn’t have to pass by the flea market again. <br />\tI passed the turnoff to the lane that led to Ray’s house and parked at a permanently closed gas station about half a mile down and walked back to the lane and down it.<br />\tI came to Ray’s house, stopped at the foot of the driveway and looked back the way I’d come. I had not met eyes with anyone or for that matter seen another human being during my trek the length of it, and from where I stood, the foliage of the intervening abandoned lots screened Ray’s house and yard from view from outside.<br />\tI walked up his driveway avoiding the house, my eyes intent upon the storage shed I’d seen the night before, first in my headlights upon arriving, and then again upon leaving.<br />\tRay had been wrong about one thing, and at the time I had agreed with him on it. But it wasn’t true. I did have to know. It was imperative. It was an overall part of my essential constitution. I had to know whether or not it killed me to do so. <br />\tAs I came under the shade of the oak tree above the southern end of Ray Bergen’s double-wide trailer home, I fixed my gaze upon the shed and for the first time noticed the padlock.<br />\t“Shit,” I stated aloud.<br />\tI walked up to it, while casting my gaze around the rear of his house, placed my hand upon it and gave it a tug. No deal. Over by the small deck at his back door there was a barbecue grill, one of the cheap kind that could cook food for no more than a couple of people at a time. The grass was close-cropped out back as it had been in front, and the high grasses and small shrubs of a meadow strained against the hurricane fence from the other side.<br />\tFrom inside the house, Egdar Allan Poe set himself to barking, but it was a dim, distant sound. No one else would hear it, so I decided to ignore it. Unless there was a doggie door somewhere and he somehow magically presented himself, all it would take would be one swift kick and the little monster would find himself airborne.<br />\tAround beside the metal shed, I took stock of its condition. Lower down, closer to the ground it had a patina of mold where the sun seldom, if ever, hit it. I walked around back and noticed that there were a few popped rivets along one seam. I crouched down and ran my hand over the metal, then attempted to peel it back. It came, slowly, and as it did, another rivet higher up popped out. The piece of aluminum slowly peeled back to reveal a rusted metal frame and darkness beyond. It had only come out a few inches, thus far, so I stood, braced myself, and began to work on the other rivets. They popped, one by one, and after a few minutes I had the entire piece of aluminum peeled back upon itself. Ray would know that someone had entered his shed. It was my hope that he wouldn’t know who had done it.<br />\tI stepped between two of the metal cross braces like a rancher skillfully stepping through a barbed wire fence. <br />\tAnd there, at the center of the space was what I was after.<br />\tIt was covered with a tarpaulin, but a dim mauve light was cast on the ground beneath it. I took the small flashlight from my back pocket, clicked it on and looked for a light above, perhaps a bare bulb dangling from an electrical cord, but found none. That was all right. I didn’t need it. I had brought my own light.<br />\tI pulled on the tarpaulin and it slid slowly off and fell to the floor, raising a small cloud of dust. I didn’t care.<br />\tThe craft floated three feet off the bare dirt floor. It was no more than eight feet in length, six feet wide and at the edges two feet in height—a shiny black triangle floating in a old, cheap aluminum shell of a storage shed. Most people have riding lawn mowers, gardening tools, old wasp nests and plenty of spiders. Ray Bergen, however, kept a space ship.<br />\tI walked around it. At its widest point there was no more than a foot between it and the garage, but I tucked in my belly and went between them, rubbing against the side of the garage and avoiding the touch of the ship.<br />\tThe ship faintly hummed. I noticed that the hair on my arms stood straight up and my throat tingled. My ears likewise buzzed and my skin felt the way it does when I eat a chocolate bar—like little mites were running across the skin of my face, my chest and back, frolicking as they did so.<br />\tWhen I came around to the front of the ship, I stood there for a moment, trying to think of what to do. I crouched down and shined my light beneath it, but I could see no seam or joint that would point to a hatch opening.<br />\tI played the light along the flat edge of the ship and noticed there were letters there. They appeared to be hieroglyphics of some kind. There were half circles like little moons, stars, series of dots, crooked sticks, wedge shapes and all kinds of figures, but I wouldn’t have been able to make any sense of it had I six months and a supercomputer with which to attempt to crunch it all down.<br />\t“Alien,” I whispered aloud. “Regula.”<br />\tThe ship responded to my voice by throwing out a purple beam that struck me in the face. Instead of being stunned and my legs folding beneath me, I stood in place, unable to move, even to blink.<br />\tReal fear traveled through my mind and my body, but I could do little more than breathe. I was a fly captured in amber. Aware of little other than time, I waited for release. A release that was a long time coming.<br /><br /><br />Outside the car crunched on gravel and the engine killed. It was Ray, coming home. I had been trapped for the better part of the day, and I suspected it was approaching dark-thirty outside, but I had no way of knowing whether this was so. The beam still held me, as I had known it would. It would hold me until he found me. And then, there would be hell to pay.<br />\tIn the wake of the silence that followed the closing of Ray’s car door, Edgar Allan Poe set himself to barking again.<br />\tI could hear Ray’s distant footsteps on the front porch, the whine of the screen door and jiggling of his key in the lock. Edgar must have jumped between his legs because the dog’s bark grew louder and more insistent. Edgar banged into the shed door and set himself to barking fiercely, as if his life depended on it.<br />\t“Say, what’s going on? Why you want to go in there?”<br />\tThe response was continued barking.<br />\t“You see a squirrel or a raccoon or something crawl in there?”<br />\tMore barking.<br />\tAnd then came the sound I knew would next come: the jingle of keys, then turn of a key in the padlock, the rattle to get it out of its hasp, and then the creak of the shed door.<br />\t“Well. I’ll be damned,” Ray said.<br />\tHe stepped up beside me, and even though I couldn’t look at him—couldn’t, in fact, move a damned muscle—from my peripheral vision I could tell he was looking me up and down.<br />\tRay reached out and touched the ship and I found myself collapsing down into the dust.<br />\tMy vision faded to blackness and the last thing I heard before unconsciousness claimed me was Ray saying, “I guess I was wrong. That’s too bad. Too too bad.”<br />\t<br /><br /><br />When I came to, I was sitting in a chair. My eyes came fully open to take in the interior of a space ship and a viewing screen in front of me. To my left was the silhouette of a man who mirrored the star field up front.<br />\tEarth’s moon came into view and we moved towards it at amazing speed.<br />\tThe being spoke, and of course, it was Ray Bergen’s voice.<br />\t“I’m not often wrong, Jimmy,” he said. “So when I am, it makes me stop and think. I’ve missed something somewhere along the way. No matter how long I stay on your planet, I can’t seem to figure you people out.”<br />\tI found I could speak and I could move, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I desperately wanted it all to be a dream. I was in a hospital somewhere, under heavy sedation. Someone was talking to me and I was changing his words to fit the narrative of the dream. But more frightening than this was the fact that I felt myself breath in the air inside the spaceship, felt the weight of my backside and legs on the chair, felt the soreness in my throat from breathing in the dust of Ray Bergen’s storage shed.<br />\tThe moon swelled before us, and in the space of few breaths filled the entire screen.<br />\t“You’re going too fast,” I said in little more than a whisper. “You’re going to crash us into the moon.”<br />\t“Nonsense.” The Regulan reached out and tapped a small green stud and a hole opened in the moon, and we flashed inside of it, slowing as we did so.<br />\t“The moon is hollow,” Ray’s voice stated. “A few years back your NASA scientists hit the moon with a missile and it rang like a bell for hours. We didn’t like that.”<br />\tThe interior of the moon was well lit, and it was crowded with cities.<br />\t“How many....um...people...live here?”<br />\t“A few million. It’s sort of a galactic stopover. It’s settled by treaty. Your moon is an artificial satellite. Always has been.”<br />\t“You could wipe us all out,” I said.<br />\t“Oh. That. Yes, as easy as pouring gas on an anthill. Why would anybody want to do that? You’re the warlike race, not us.”<br />\t“You have wars. I’m sure of it.”<br />\tRay turned to face me. “Of course we have wars. Everyone has wars. But wars themselves are no more than tools to achieve an end, and it’s the last recourse when you can’t get something done otherwise. We never fight for control of land or space, or natural resources or for political reasons. We only fight when communications break down, and these days there’s always communication.”<br />\t“What else do you want to show me?” I asked. I suppose there was plenty of accusation in my voice.<br />\t“You’re the one who had to know, Jimmy. Now you know. Are you going to freak out on me? If you do, I can put you back in the freeze field.”<br />\t“That’s not a very technical-sounding name. I mean, freeze field. Sheesh.”<br />\t“It serves. You understood me.” And then he began speaking in what I would thereafter call Regulan. It was a harsh-sounding and loud language, like a couple of couple of semi-trucks vying for the same parking spot and coming into collision.<br />\t“Please, speak English!”<br />\t“You didn’t like my English when I said ‘freeze field.’”<br />\t“I’ll stop being a critic.”<br />\tRay turned the craft around and shot us back out of the moon and into open space. The Earth—no more than the big blue marble of astronaut description—hung in the sky half shrouded in darkness.<br />\t“Where to?” I asked.<br />\t“For you? Home.”<br />\t“You’re not going to kill me?”<br />\t“If I was going to kill you, I would have already done it when I found you in my shed. No, I’m going to do far worse than that.”<br />\t“Worse? What could be worse?”<br />\t“Putting you back where you were. Putting you back on Earth, back in Austin, Texas. Back in your science fiction-reading life.”<br />\t“You killed that one guy,” I said. “That Smith fellow who said you were Samuel Adams, only Sam Adams was dead.”<br />\t“I had to kill him. But I was young and new to the assignment, and he was just an ignorant alien. That’s a bad point about you, Jimmy. You like pointing out the failings of others, all the while omitting your own. Such as the fact of breaking and entering. Criminal trespass. Screwing up someone’s life and their assignment.”<br />\t“You’re an alien. I don’t know if it would stick in a court of law.”<br />\t“I’m not talking about a court of law. I’m talking about courtesy. Your species will never truly evolve until it embraces courtesy. Courtesy is what holds the galaxy together.”<br />\t“I thought that was the Force.”<br />\t“Too much science fiction with this one,” he said, but in Yoda’s voice, and I found myself laughing.<br />\t“You know, you shouldn’t take on the form of famous people. It’s not, strictly speaking, safe.”<br />\t“I have to. I’m a Regulan. But you knew that.”<br />\t“I’m not sure what that means, but I’m learning.”<br />\t“Well, you’ve learned enough. After today, you won’t be seeing me, Jimmy. Ever again.”<br />\tAnd then it hit me. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had not only destroyed a potential friendship, but I had gone down the rabbit hole—all the way down the rabbit hole to the center of the moon and back again—and there was no coming back from that singular fact. I knew and yet I couldn’t tell anyone. First of all, I had no proof of any of it, and therefore, Second, no one would believe me. I would have to keep my mouth shut. I would have to live out the remainder of my days with the knowledge of what the world was really like, and I would not be able to share that.<br />\tThe planet was coming up fast, and North America filled the viewing screen.<br />\t“Okay, this is it,” Ray stated. “Say goodnight, Jimmy.”<br />\tHis finger hovered over a button.<br />\t“Um...goodnight, Ji—”<br />\tAnd the lights went out for me once again.<br /><br /><br /><br />Mmy.” I awoke in my car outside the abandoned gas station with a start.<br />\t“No.” I shouted.<br />\tI got my keys out of my pocket, stuck them in the ignition and turned it over. I peeled out of the old station and turned back onto the highway, spraying gravel as I did so.<br />\tI turned right at the lane that led to Ray’s house and drove down it going sixty.<br />\tI slowed when I came to where Ray’s house should have been, but it wasn’t there. The shed wasn’t there, either.<br />\t“No! No no no no!”<br />\t<br /><br />The following weekend I found myself at the New World Flea Market, but completely different vendor was in Ray’s spot, selling beads. I went back home in a foul mood. Not only had I lost a friend and my old reality, but I had lost a source for procuring old science fiction novels.<br />\tArch tried to call me off and on for weeks, and it was on a Wednesday evening after work that I accidentally answered his call.<br />\t“Jimmy! You okay? Been trying to reach you.”<br />\t“Yeah, I had a cell phone incident. Had to get a new phone.”<br />\t“Well, sorry to hear that. Are you out of the rabbit hole?”<br />\t“Rabbit hole?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “Oh. You mean the Ray Bradbury guy. Yeah, that’s long gone. He was just a guy.”<br />\t“Hmph. Okay. You don’t sound wholly yourself. Say, listen. I was wondering if you’d like to come on my radio show, talking about your experiences. What the whole thing was like.”<br />\t“Oh. No-sirree-bob! I would not like to do that. But, we can get together for a beer or something.”<br />\t“Well, all right. That’s fine. Just thought I’d ask.”<br />\t“Listen, Arch, I’ll call you later. Trying to make it home in this interminable Austin traffic.”<br />\t“You should try driving like me. I get where I’m going.”<br />\t“Yeah, but I want to live a long time.”<br />\t“Okay,” he said, and hung up. But that’s Arch.<br /><br /><br />\t<br />I woke up in the middle of the night from a disturbing dream a few weeks later. I had been with Ray on his ship watching the destruction of Earth from orbit, and all Ray could say was, “It’s all right, Jimmy. To me they’re just aliens.”<br />\tI got up, went into my office and closed the door. Sienna was still fast asleep, and I didn’t want her to see my light or otherwise hear me and come asking what was wrong. But she knew I wasn’t right. It was there written on her face every day, and she also knew it was something I couldn’t talk about. Maybe she thought I was cheating on her. In a way, I suppose I was. My life had changed. It had changed forever, and I would have to come to grips with it.<br />\tSitting at my computer, I thought of Ray Bergen. About what he’d said about writing his short story. I replayed it in my mind. He’d said, “Sure. I wrote it. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. I’ll be minding my own business, then all of a sudden I get an idea, and I have to write it down. It’s not always easy to do. I can’t type worth a damn, you know.” <br />\tHe didn’t know what got into him, but I sure as hell knew what had gotten into me.<br />\tHe would be minding his own business, then all of a sudden—<br />\tI thought about opening up a word processor on the computer, then thought better of it. Like Ray, I couldn’t type worth a damn. Instead, I got up and went out into the garage and fished around until I found what I was looking for. It was my old Casio typewriter-printer. It was electric, but it made no noise. You fed a piece of paper into it and you typed and it printed the last line you typed when you hit the carriage return. <br />\tI dusted it off, brought it into the house and took a minute to wipe it down. I set it up on my desk, plugged it in and listened to it hum, then fished around in my office until I found a stack of blank paper and fed a piece into it.<br />\tI typed:<br />\t<br />The Tale of the Man Who Wrote About The Yankee Traveler<br /><br />\tI hit return and watched the line print. I could read it, plain as day!<br />\tThen I typed:<br /><br />By James M. Underwood<br /><br />and hit the return again.<br />\t“Oh Ray,” I said. “You managed to get your revenge. Now I’m going to get mine.”<br />\tAnd then I began.<br /><br />Finis<br />\t<br />",
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"published": "2020-05-17T06:30:55+00:00",
"source": {
"content": "Here''s a complete short story, THE TALE OF THE YANKEE TRAVELER. Please consider donating a minds token or two if you like the story.\n\nTHE TALE OF THE YANKEE TRAVELER\n\nTo the memory of Ray Bradbury, with love and respect\n\n\nWhen you get to a certain age, you start to appreciate talk radio, particularly in the morning when you’re on the way to work in rush-hour traffic and it’ll take a minimum of forty-five minutes to get where you’re going, if you’re extremely lucky. The last thing you want to hear in that Almost Hour is some one-hit wonder from the 70s, or perhaps the 80s, and have the damned thing stuck in your head the rest of the day. That’s the way it works for me—the last song I hear is the one that gets itself lodged in the old noodle like ossified cow crap, stuck for days at a time. So it’s easier not to tune to those stations where I’ll hear them, nor to even flick past them on the dial because I know there’s always one waiting there in the ether somewhere between the low AM band and the upper atmospheric FM stratosphere out there on the edge of the Van Allen radiation belt. Waiting like a bandit waiting to rob a train. Waiting to snag me such that I find myself walking around the office at any given time of day humming—or perhaps in the most embarrassingly horrific instances, singing—something like Don’t You Want Me Baby? by The Human League, or worse, any given song by Chicago Transportation Authority. You know you’re getting old when you know who the hell Chicago Transportation Authority is to begin with, and you know for damned sure you’re starting to get up there when your radio stations are all pre-programmed on your dial and you know what the buttons will do—which set of voices they’ll summon forth, AM or FM, depending upon the time of day, like a Swami or maybe a Gypsy at an old-fashioned seance, channeling the voices of those in the Afterlife.\n\tWhich was how I met Arch.\n\tAbout six years back I made a call-in to the Arch and Barch show. The topic was one that, at the time, I had a definite bone stuck in my craw about, the subject of property taxes (another sign that your getting older than the gods of the Greek pantheon). It was my first time to call and talk on any radio show, and I knew that I was supposed to turn my radio off for the call because if there’s one thing radio jockeys hate worse than Batshit Banana callers it’s Feedback Mongers. So the time I called in to discuss the one topic near and dear to my heart (and my pocketbook), I did what I knew was right: I turned off the radio, made my call, inched myself forward in traffic toward the nearest turnoff where the way to work promised to be faster, if indeed farther, and was pleasantly surprised to get to talk to someone. It was Arch himself. After I had switched off they apparently went to commercial break, so it was kind of disconcerting to hear the voice of Arch Reeves. He asked me what I wanted to talk about and why, ascertained that I was neither a Feedback Monger nor a Batshit Bananas, and invited me to hold the line while he jumped back On the Air. He would invite me on board momentarily.\n\tWhen it came my turn, I let them—and the rest of the morning travelers—have it on the subject of property taxes. About how we don’t really own property in the United States because if it can be taken away due to the nonpayment of property taxes, then it’s a leasehold interest at best. Bob Barch served the ball back to me adroitly and expertly by requiring me to give him a solution to the problem that wouldn’t disenfranchise every county, city and most importantly, school district across the nation. And of course, I didn’t have an answer for that apart from some snide comment about the fact that municipalities and local governments weren’t entirely necessary to begin with.\n\tAfter I got to work that morning—that weird, foggy morning six years back—I got a call on my cell phone. It was Arch Reeves, asking me if I wanted to come in some morning and sit in on the show. So a couple of mornings later I found myself sitting in a crowded five foot by eight foot space with egg cartons stapled butt-down to black crepe walls and talking with the guys about anything they could think of to discuss. And to this day I have no idea what the hell I said, and there’s nobody who would give a damn one way or the other, but the salient thing about the whole affair was that I made a friend in Arch Reeves. Not so much Bob Barch. But Arch Reeves became a buddy.\n\tFlash forward to just the other day and the whole weird thing about the Yankee Traveler.\n\tHere’s what happened.\n\tI got a call from Arch Reeves.\n\t“Hey, Jimmy. You’re the resident expert on Ray Bradbury. When did he die?”\n\t“I’m no expert, Arch, but if I recall correctly, Mr. Bradbury let loose the mortal coil in June of 2012. I think it was June 5th, to be exact, and the only reason I know the date is because it’s my wife’s birthday. The reason I know the year was because I was out there in California that Spring and I went by my favorite bookstore there in Glendale for his book signing but he was too sick to come down, so I had Christine and Malcolm take a stack of books over to his house for him to sign for me and mail them back. Sure enough, I got all the books in the mail, but then a couple months later on Sienna’s birthday, he shuffled off.”\n\t“Wow. Way, way too much information, but that’s kind of neat that you were at least one remove from him. Did you ever meet him personally?”\n\t“Never did. My best friend saw him once on the street in Paris, got his attention and asked him to wait while he ducked inside a bookstore, snagged a book and got Ray’s signature on it. I know the story because Bobby was so excited right after it that he had to call me to tell me about it. The book is on my bookshelf, and it’s his signature, all right. Also, I’ve met several of Mr. Bradbury’s author friends, including Theodore Sturgeon, Chad Oliver, and Jack Williamson.”\n\t“I don’t know who any of those people are.” Arch laughed. “Again, too much information, but all right. How would you like to meet him?”\n\t“Meet who?”\n\t“It’s whom. Meet whom.”\n\t“Arch, I’m from East Texas, and we murder the King’s English at every provocation. Stop correcting me. I know it’s whom. Like I said, meet who?”\n\t“Ray Bradbury.”\n\tI suppose that there was a long silence then, because Arch finally said, “Hmph, must have lost the connection.”\n\t“No, I’m here. I’m just wondering what you’ve been smoking.”\n\t“I don’t smoke anything. I have to keep my wits about me in order to do great radio, Jimmy. You know that. And I’m the best there is.”\n\t“If you say so. So what the hell are you talking about?”\n\t“What are you doing later today?”\n\t“It’s Saturday. I’m already done with the honey-do projects for the day, I think. I’d like to see the grandkids, but I think that’s tabled for tomorrow. What do you have in mind?”\n\t“I’m coming over. Give me twenty minutes.”\n\tAnd then he hung up. But that’s Arch. The guy was incapable of signing off properly on the phone. I guess it’s a radio thing—there was always this momentary other-worldly sense that I was On The Air, even if it was in the middle of the night—and his demeanor was never otherwise than that I was the guest and that he was hosting me, and when the time came it was my job to withdraw, and his to wordlessly hang up, even if I didn’t say Goodbye. Usually, I never got the chance.\n\n\n\nArch showed up out front nineteen minutes later, which to my way of thinking is somewhat of a miracle because he lives on the north side of Austin, while I live south near the airport. He was driving his little two-seater MG sports car—the kind of car you wear—with the top down and the sun pouring vertical upon his shiny dome (Arch has less hair upstairs than Kojak, and it wasn’t exactly an open topic for conversation). He was sporting a pair of sunglasses; the mirrored kind which always put me in mind of that psychopathic prison guard in Cool Hand Luke.\n\t“Nice shades,” I said.\n\tI got in and Arch drove me out of the neighborhood like the speed demon he is, slewing and winding his way along the snaky main road and dodged into traffic along Highway 183 without so much as a tap on the brakes at the stop sign. It made me recall that I had my life insurance in order as well as my will, and for a moment caused me to wonder what his auto policy declaration page might look like, but I let it go and let the wind tousle my graying hair (at least I’ve got some) and essentially settled in for an interesting trip. Interesting, that is, because I had no earthly idea where we were headed apart from some unsettling reference to one of my favorite—and deceased—authors.\n\tArch dodged through weekend traffic like maybe he was Al Unser or Mario Andretti or perhaps AJ Foyt at the Indy 500, but it was clear we were headed east when he jumped onto Highway 71 and took me out past the airport.\n\t“Hey, Arch! Austin is back that way.” I jerked a thumb behind us.\n\t“We’re not going into Austin. You let me drive, kemosabe.”\n\tI suppose I pursed my lips and nodded, but he checked his rearview, his sideview, and cast a quick glance over his left shoulder before whipping across three lanes of traffic and into the far inside lane. I thought of glancing at his speedometer and then thought better of it. If I didn’t know then I wouldn’t be able to testify about it later, if the subject ever came up. Past Austin-Bergstrom Airport, Arch turned off north on FM 973, catching the lights green. Inside of a minute we were past the Colorado River and I was checking out the new housing developments that had sprung up where the false high hills left over from strip mining lined both sides of the highway.\n\t“When you see this guy, Jimmy, don’t stare at him too much. I don’t want you to scare him or freak him out or anything.”\n\t“Oh. So you’ve found a lookalike for Ray Bradbury.”\n\tArch didn’t answer. He raised his right lip into a smirking half-smile and gave me a “Hmph.” We could have been on the radio.\n\tHe made a left, back east, on FM 969 and back toward town, but before we made it to the barbecue stand that I knew was up ahead somewhere, he turned off abruptly to the right and into a Flea Market. I didn’t recall ever seeing the place before, but it must have existed for many years prior because the place looked run down to hell and gone—the exposed and unpainted boards were bleached whalebone gray, the sign looked like someone had hung it fresh and new about the time Ron Reagan was taking the Oath of Office (which is to say that the letters had faded so badly that they would have been illegible but for the raised bumps spelling out the word New World Flea Market).\n\tThe New World Flea Market took up an entire city block, aside from the pea-gravel parking area to the west. We slid in between two King Cab pickup trucks, which made Arch’s MG look like one of those little cars the Shriners drive during the Christmas Parade, or a circus clown car.\n\tArch killed the engine, turned to look at me and smiled a shit-eating grin.\n\t“What?”\n\tHe shook his head. “Nothin’. Just...nothin’. Let’s go.”\n\tI followed Arch into the New World Flea Market.\n\tLet me say that I’m an old horse-trader from way back in the wayback, which is to say that I’ve been to just about every flea market from Cut And Shoot the other side of Conroe in East Texas to Waco way to the north, to San Antonio back down south, and so the only thing that ever surprises me is to find something, or for that matter, anything, that might be considered surprising. Upon stepping underneath the tin roof of the New World Flea Market I found myself surprised and delighted. \n\tFirst there was a fellow there selling some wonderful junk equipment. This guy had old guitar amps, ancient monochrome computer monitors, and even a functioning oscilloscope. The oscilloscope was plugged in and the wave form was busily flatlining itself in a bright green line across the little graphing screen. As I walked by, I picked up a speaker magnet laying on the table and waved it over the wire leading to the device and watched the green line jump as the magnetic field came into contact with the wire. The old man sitting there smiled at me.\n\t“Twenty-five bucks for it,” the geezer said. I was tempted, but remembered that we were in a two-seater MG and I didn’t relish riding back home with a heavy-assed piece of equipment on my lap, nor hearing my wife asking me why I had brought home another dust collector. \n\tI smiled and passed on by, but not before catching a couple of bonafide dowsing rods out of the corner of my eye that made me hesitate. In fact, I stopped in my tracks. I hadn’t seen a set of dowsing rods since Methuselah was a pup, probably along about 1977.\n\t“Jimmy,” Arch said, and took my elbow. “He’s back here.”\n\tI went, as directed.\n\tWe passed a woman selling her own artwork, and it was good artwork. I wanted to buy a particular piece, but Arch’s unyielding hand never left my elbow.\n\tPast yet another woman selling herbal remedies at about a five hundred percent mark-up, and then Arch stopped me in the middle of the narrow, bare-earth concourse. He turned to face me, and since we were in the full shade, he removed his sunglasses and hung them in the vee of his polo shirt.\n\t“Now listen, Jimmy. Play this real cool-like, okay. We’ll start at this table over there and just move slowly along, checking things out. He’s three tables down, sitting in a chair looking straight ahead. I wouldn’t bother striking up a conversation with him unless you’re intent on going down the old rabbit hole. And if you go down the hole, or if you go too far, I may not be able to rescue you.”\n\tI started to say something, but Jimmy raised his hand and shook his head, no.\n\t“Trust me on this, okay. I know what I’m talking about. Just like you’re the resident expert on dead science fiction authors, I’m the resident expert on people. I wouldn’t fuck with this guy. He’ll look right through you at a thousand yards.”\n\t“Okay. Lead on.”\n\tSo Arch played it cool and flipped through a collection of vinyl record albums while I looked over a collection of pocket knives. I glanced quickly to my right, but in that fleeting instant I couldn’t make out Ray. Even though I hadn’t seen him yet, that’s what I was calling him in my head—just...Ray.\n\tI eventually but nonchalantly came to him.\n\tWhat can I say, except that it was Ray Bradbury. Not the wheelchair-bound Ray who received the Medal of Freedom from George W. This was the Ray of about the time of his Ray Bradbury Theater days—mid sixties, just starting to get good and chunky. \n\tRay was selling, of all things, books. And they were science fiction books.\n\tHis eyes met mine for a fleeting moment and I gave him a hello by way of a curt nod. This seemed to mollify him. I then turned my attention to the stacks. That’s what they always called the books in the local library when I was a kid, and I can’t walk into a library or a bookstore without thinking to myself, “I’ll just check out the stacks, see if they’ve got anything good.” Ray actually had stacks, by which I mean piles of bookage. And they were books from the Silver Age of science fiction and fantasy; the 1960s and 70s. On top of one stack I found all four of the Borrible books by Michael de Larrabeiti (another deceased author, this one a Brit). You almost never see those books anymore, and almost never all together. I was almost tempted to pick them up and buy them on the spot, not because they were priced so cheaply—a sign hanging behind Ray read ALL BOOK $2—but because they looked so damned new! Yet I knew they were all published in the 1970s and 80s. The problem was that I had each one of them on my shelf at home, sandwiched in between the modern James S.A. Corey The Expanse series and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant and I instantly knew it was going to be the same issue as an oscilloscope in a sports car, only worse, and the same issue with the wife, only far worse. According to her, I had way too many books, and she was right about that. So, I reluctantly passed them by. \n\tOut of the corner of my eye I noted that Arch was looking over some leather key-chain fobs at the next table over. Not too far away to be considered out of reach, yet not so close as to draw attention to himself. \n\tI wanted to hear Ray speak. In fact, I had to. But Edgar Rice Burroughs’ entire Barsoom series was suddenly to hand, and I picked them up and examined them one by one. I smelled them, and I was transported back to my adolescence. \n\tRay spoke first. “If you buy ten books, you get the eleventh free. Which works well with that series, since there are eleven of them. It’s a pity he didn’t write more of them.”\n\tRay had Ray Bradbury’s voice as well.\n\t“That’s a hell of a deal,” I admitted, and fished out my wallet and handed Ray a twenty dollar bill.\n\tHe took it from me with his Ray Bradbury hands, folded it over and stuck it in his shirt pocket and gave me a smile. He reached beside his chair and picked up an empty plastic grocery bag—which in itself was odd, because those things are now illegal to give out in Austin grocery stores—and handed it to me.\n\t“Much obliged,” I said.\n\tArch stepped up beside me. “Find something, Jimmy?” he asked.\n\t“Found a treasure trove. You got a trunk in that little jalopy out there?”\n\t“Sure I do. It’ll hold a small suitcase, but not much more, so don’t get too carried away.”\n\tI cast my eyes over the stacks and then lit upon a small stack of papers at the end of the table. The stack was threatening to fall off into space, so I reached over and picked it up and pushed it gently back into place.\n\t“What’s this?” I asked.\n\t“Take one. I give one to every paying customer, if they want it.”\n\tIt was a short story. My eyes lit up at the title:\n\nTHE TALE OF THE YANKEE TRAVELER\nA Short Story\nBy Ray Bergen\n\n\t“You write this?” I asked Ray, and for a moment my legs felt a smidge wobbly, almost as if they weren’t there. His name is really RAY! my inner voice shouted at me.\n\t“Sure. I wrote it. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. I’ll be minding my own business, then all of a sudden I get an idea, and I have to write it down. It’s not always easy to do. I can’t type worth a damn, you know.” And he made alternating poking motions in the air with his index fingers, miming the old hunt-and-peck method. Then he laughed, and it was, you know, an R.B. laugh.\n\tLooking at the text on the page, where my eyes were drawn inexorably back to, I could see that they were indeed typed on an old-fashioned typewriter, a non-electric, to be exact, because in some places the letters were darker than in others. The same letter, too. Maybe he bought the typewriter from the oscilloscope guy, I thought, and chuckled. In my minds eye I could see him type THE END on the last page, crank it out of an old Royal typewriter with a series of wrist flicks, then get in his car for a quick run down to the local Kinkos to burn a few dozen copies or more. \n\t“Yeah, and you wrote it with a manual typewriter, to boot,” I said. “My hat is off to you sir.”\n\t“That I did,” he said. “I don’t have a computer. I wouldn’t know how to use it if I did.”\n\tI nodded.\n\t“Thank you kindly for this,” I said.\n\t“Jimmy, let’s go,” Arch said. “Before you buy out this guy’s stock.”\n\t“You fellahs take it easy,” Ray said.\n\t“Same to you, sir,” I said, and turned and walked away.\n\n\n\nI don’t think that went so well,” Arch said as I put the sack of books into his tiny trunk.\n\t“Why not. No rabbit holes. No harm, no foul.”\n\t“Oh, there’s a rabbit hole all right. And you already fell in it. Come on. I’m taking you home while you’re still in one piece.”\n\n\n\nWhen Arch dropped me off at home and handed me my bag of books, I tucked the Ray Bergen short story under my arm and shook Arch’s hand.\n\t“Uh, Jimmy. Don’t...uh...”\n\t“Don’t what?”\n\t“Just...don’t. I’ll be seein’ ya.”\n\tAnd then he got into his car and sped off.\n\tI stood there for a minute, breathing in the world around me. A distant red-tailed hawk did a circle over the trees to the south, a big rig was using his engine brake out on Highway 183. All was right with the world.\n\tExcept it wasn’t.\n\n\n\nThree hours later I began to realize just how right Arch had been.\n\tI had read the entire short story, all twelve single-spaced pages of it, three times. I found myself both enraptured and scared out of my wits.\n\tFirst of all, it was written in Ray Bradbury’s voice and style. Second, the theme was decidedly a Bradbury theme, with a lover’s touch of horror to it, as in his Something Wicked This Way Comes, or possibly two of the last things he’d written, The Homecoming and From The Dust Returned. At a minimum the story was as haunting as The Martian Chronicles and as reminiscent of summertime in youth as Dandelion Wine or Farewell To Summer. \n\tWhen Sienna came into my study to announce that she’d made us a snack, she frightened me so badly that I dropped the short story on my lap. She looked at me oddly, cocking her head to the side.\n\t“What are you doing? You’re so absorbed in here.”\n\t“Reading this,” I said, and raised up the short story. “I think it may be cursed.”\n\t“Oh shit.”\n\t“What?”\n\t“You’re on about something. Got your head up in the clouds and can’t remember you’ve got feet.”\n\t“Go away, woman. I’m busy.” I tried to make light of it. Nothing wrong here, folks. Move along.\n\tShe smirked at me, shrugged, and then beat a hasty retreat.\n\tFive minutes later I came upon her in our bedroom. She was going through one of her dresser drawers, organizing it. I slipped my arms around her, whispered an I love you in her ear.\n\t“Where are you going?” she asked me.\n\t“Uh, no biggee. I just need to check something out.”\n\t“How long will you be gone?”\n\t“A hour. Maybe two.”\n\t“Maybe five or six.”\n\t“That could happen. If it’s looking like it’s going to, I’ll call you.”\n\t“Is it safe?” she asked.\n\t“Utterly. It’s a book thing.”\n\t“Those are the worst kinds.”\n\n\n\nI parked my Jeep Cherokee across the highway from The New World Flea Market and waited as the day wore on. I’d arrived a little after 3:30 p.m., and it was a quarter till five with the sun starting to go down in the late fall evening before the crowds became sparse and the parking lot began to clear. \n\tWhile I waited, occasionally glancing up over the berm of the roadway that separated me from The New World Flea Market to make sure Ray Bergen wasn’t walking out to his vehicle and driving away before I got the chance to at least make out what kind of car he drove, I read snatches of The Tale of the Yankee Traveler once again:\n\n\n\tWhen Mrs. Pinderhorst opened the front door of her hostel she was sure that she recognized the man who stood before her, but then on the heels of this came doubt. He was a traveler, as all her guests were, but he looked as otherworldly as a clergyman in a counting house. His leather bag, low slung from his right shoulder, made him for a traveler, but his clothes were pristine, his hair combed to perfection, and he bore no expression to read upon his countenance.\n\tShe thought of waiting for him to speak but then with each passing instant became horrified that he might not.\n\t“Good day to you sir.”\n\t“Good day, madame. A room?”\n\t“Yes. We have a room for you.” Mrs. Pinderhorst liked to think of her “we” as the royal pronoun, but it was nonetheless a prevarication. There was none other than herself to see to the paying guests, to cook for them, to change their bedding and to empty their chamber pots.\n\tThen the traveler smiled at her, and she noticed his eyes were black. \n\n\n\tI shivered and glanced up in time to see Ray Bergen walking slowly across the parking lot of The New World Flea Market. I could see no more than his upper half, as the lower was blocked by the roadway berm, but it was unmistakably Ray.\n\tWhen he pulled up the hill to the highway and stopped to wait for the traffic to clear, I slid down in my seat, just in case he had excellent vision and might both see and recognize me, Arch’s words echoing in my head the whole time: He’ll look right through you at a thousand yards.\n\tHe gave no signal, but because of the angle of his car—a late 1970s Lincoln Town Car, black, polished and gleaming like the day it rolled off the dealership lot—I predicted that he would turn left, headed away from the heart of Austin. Half a minute later this prediction was confirmed.\n\tNeedless to say, I followed him.\n\n\n\nI hung well back as headlights turned on about me and the last of the daylight faded from the sky. Winter was coming like a rumor spreading through a retirement village. Winters such as we have in Austin are usually brief with no more than a handful of days of biting cold and bitter wind, and then everything returns to normal. But for some reason as I drove eastward along FM 969 in the wake of Ray Bergen’s taillights no more than half a mile ahead of me, I felt like there was a blizzard brewing somewhere with my name on it.\n\tWhen the traffic thickened approaching the toll road that cut from north to south along the east of Austin, I jumped ahead so as not to lose Ray and ended up coming up directly behind him at a red light. But it was practically night and my headlights would be in his eyes were he to glance up into his rearview mirror, so I relaxed and waited.\n\tThe light changed and he rolled on through. \n\tAbout a mile down, he turned off to the left at what I knew to be a dead end lane, so I went straight on, then did a u-turn in the middle of the highway and came back and turned into the neighborhood.\n\t“What the hell are you doing, Jimmy?” I asked myself, and realized that in my own head I was playing it in Arch’s voice. I shook my head to get rid of Arch and just managed it.\n\tAbout a quarter of a mile ahead, Ray turned off into a driveway to the right. I gauged the distance, pulled over and parked where there seemed to be a vacant lot, or at least no lights and no house that I could discern back of the tall grass and the knotty pine fence, and switched off my headlights.\n\tI waited until I a distant light came on—no doubt a porch light—and then a moment later it winked out again.\n\t“This who you are?” I asked myself aloud. “A stalker?”\n\tI waited a moment, then answered myself, “No.”\n\tThe car was still running, so I turned the headlights back on, put the car in gear and took two or three stabs at turning around in the middle of the narrow dirt lane.\n\t“This is what you get, bub,” I said to myself. “Never do this kind of shit again, okay?”\n\tI finally got the car turned around and drove back down toward the highway. When I came to it, instead of pulling all the way up, I pulled over again and killed my headlights.\n\tI sat in the darkness and the quiet and relived the events of the day. It had begun late that morning with a call from Arch. From there we went to the New World Flea Market and I met the doppelgänger of Ray Bradbury, whose name was Ray Bergen, and I’d bought some books from him and been given one of his short stories, nine single-spaced manually typed pages stapled together. Once back home I had read the short story three times through, and it had read like an actual Ray Bradbury short story. To top it all off—and this was the wild thing—he had signed his name using what appeared to be a Sharpie pen.\n\tHe had signed it:\n\nRay Bergen\n\n\tI had quickly pulled down one of my own Ray Bradbury signed books and compared the signatures. Ray had signed his similarly:\n\nRay Bradbury\n\n\tWho was fooling whom, as Arch might say? All things being equal, Ray Bergen was Ray Bradbury. But of course at the same time he wasn’t. Ray was long gone from the world, and to my knowledge the mold was broken at his creation.\n\tMy head swam in the darkness.\n\tAs I saw it there were two options, neither of which were tenable: I could go home and try to forget about the whole thing—maybe try reading something innocuous and otherwise spend some quality time with my wife, maybe even take her out to dinner—or I could turn around and knock on Ray Bergen’s front door and try to confront him with the supernatural nature of the phenomenon I had stumbled across and try to convince him to confide in me. Both of these paths seemed equally out of the question for me, so I ended up sitting there.\n\tIt was an hour before the dark figure appeared opposite me on the roadway, and I wouldn’t have noticed him at all were it not for a set of headlights coming from the west silhouetting him against the row of mailboxes at the lane’s entrance. For just a moment, the briefest of instants, I shuddered because I was certain it was the Yankee Traveler—the utterly black figure of a man with a smattering of stars and the vastness of the cosmos as his essential substance, just as described in Ray Bergen’s short story. But it wasn’t. It was worse than this, and my tongue swelled in my mouth and my stomach lurched. It was Ray Bergen, out walking his dog.\n\tAs the car moved past us, he looked over at my car—looked straight through me, you might say—recognized me, and gingerly stepped across the roadway with his little dog in trail until he stood no more than a few feet from my car door.\n\tHe motioned for me to roll the window down, and I complied.\n\t“Hmph,” he said. “What was it? Was it the short story.”\n\t“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”\n\tHe seemed to consider for a long moment—I have no idea how long, because my heart was busily triphammering in my chest. I couldn’t make out the details of his face very well, so there was no help for it but to wait for him to speak.\n\t“Jimmy, wasn’t it?” he asked, and for a moment I didn’t understand the question, and then I remembered the last thing Arch said while we were standing at Ray Bergen’s flea market table with all the stacks of science fiction and fantasy novels. He’d said, “Jimmy, let’s go. Before you buy out this guy’s stock.”\n\t“Yes sir,” I replied. “Jimmy.”\n\t“Jimmy, I think Edgar has finished with his doggie business. Why don’t you give us a ride back to the house. Then you can come inside and have a coke and the two of us can talk proper. That is, if you haven’t come out here to kill me or something like that.”\n\t“I’m not sure I’m capable of violence,” I said. “Sure, hop in and I’ll take you two home.”\n\tI unlocked the doors and Ray Bergen came around and got in beside me, reached down and lifted up Edgar, who in my dome lights I took to be some kind of a weird cross between a terrier and a pug. He was skinny and nervous and licked his own nose incessantly, as if tasting whatever it was he smelled.\n\tI turned on my headlights, looked to make sure the traffic was utterly clear, then turned around in the middle of the highway and started back down the lane. During the brief trip, I thought of Arch Reeves, telling me if I didn’t go too far down the rabbit hole, then possibly he would be able to rescue me. I couldn’t imagine getting much farther down than I had already gone. But I was to find myself wrong about even that.\n\n\nRay’s home was a double-wide trailer, an older model constructed some time in the 1970s, as seemed to be everything associated with Ray Bergen, except possibly the dog, which I wanted to ask about as we pulled into his driveway. I decided to bide my time and wait until we were inside and perhaps seated. Before I killed the headlights and turned the engine off, I noticed a large storage shed past Ray’s car and back of the house, the aluminum kind they used to sell back in the day as a modular unit. Cheap, but functional. I wondered, absently, if the thing were filled with old books and then dismissed the thought. Books have to be well-preserved in a climate-controlled setting to pass the test of time, as had the eleven Edgar Rice Burroughs books I had bought from Ray had likely been kept. \n\tAs we stepped up onto the front porch, Ray’s security light come on abruptly, which very damn nearly made me drizzle in my pants.\n\tRay laughed. “It does that to people. I have so few visitors that I forget how people react to it.”\n\tRay removed a key on a piece of coathanger wire bent back upon itself from his pants pocket and jiggled it in the lock and turned the knob. The door came open and I followed him and Edgar inside.\n\t“Edgar, huh?” I asked.\n\t“That’s right. Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. Or I should say, Edgar Allan Pug.”\n\t“If Poe were a dog, I suppose this is the breed he’d be.”\n\t“That’s right,” Ray said, and bent down and patted the dog’s head. “Regal. Proud. King of the Dogs.”\n\tI took the time to look around Ray Bergen’s home, or as much of it as I could see from the entryway. It appeared be a homey, comfortable, place, with little knickknacks everywhere, but only the kind a man would have, or rather a fellow who collected things simply to have them, even if they were of no practical use apart from interest, solely. Above a faux fireplace was a coat of arms, a King Charles the Fifth shield for a backdrop, with what appeared to be a rampant dragon beneath a Tau Cross. Propped against the edge of the fireplace was an Indian Rain Stick, the kind that is hollow inside but for a number of beads to emulate the sound of rain when the stick is turned upside down. In the corner of the room was a double-barreled shotgun, a real one, and it made me remember where I was—inside a double-wide mobile home on the outskirts of Austin and well into the countryside, where there would be plenty of varmints, and quite possible not all of the animal variety. The couch and matching chair were genuine brushed suede leather, but both well worn. There were a number of throw rugs covering the linoleum of the living room and kitchen, each different from the other, Turkish, Persian and Indian. Along one shelf was a collection of elephant figurines, and beneath this was a collection of the old telegraph pole greenish glass wire insulators. Other than that, the interior of Ray’s house was filed with floor to ceiling bookshelves, and they were all full to brim with paperback books.\n\t“So, Jimmy,” Ray said, “what’s got you so het up about The Tale of the Yankee Traveler?”\n\tRight then I became certain of it. Ray Bergen simply didn’t know. He didn’t know about the similarities between himself and Ray Bradbury, from his features and the way he carried himself right down to his voice. He had no clue about how closely his writing resembled Bradbury’s, nor about the similarity between their signatures. He’d never read The Marian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine or Farewell to Summer. When I was standing at his table back in the flea market I’d thought he might sell a copy of one from time to time, but in that instant in Ray Bergen’s living room, trying to think of how best to respond to his query, I suspected that he’d never read a single one of them. That, quite possibly, when he came across a copy of any Ray Bradbury book, he didn’t see it. Perhaps like Randall Garrett’s magic spell, the Tarnhelm Effect, from his Lord Darcy series, it wasn’t that the object wasn’t there, it was that the eye avoided it as if it was a patch of null space—a hole in the universe that did not admit to light, interest or inquiry.\n\t I found that words began tumbling from my mouth. “It’s that it should be published. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that would probably garner some kind of literary award. Or more than one. Be really recognized, you know? I read it three times through when Arch dropped me off at home from the flea market. I couldn’t stop reading it. Pardon my saying so, sir, but it was that good.”\n\t“Uh huh.” He was dubious. “Well, thank you for saying so. It’s a mystery to me how I even wrote it. You want a coke?” He shucked his jacket, draped it over a hat tree by the fireplace and wandered in the direction of the kitchen with Edgar close on his heels.\n\t“Sure.”\n\t“Let’s sit at the kitchen table.”\n\tIt was a command, and I followed him and sat down in a hardwood chair at a hardwood table and waited.\n\tRay made a production out of getting ice out of his ice tray and dropping the cubes into a couple of fruit jar glasses, then finding a church key in a kitchen drawer and opening the tall bottle of Coke. He poured it and it was just enough to fill two glasses. One glass came to sit in front of me at the table and he took a seat at the other by my right elbow.\n\t“Now, Jimmy,” he said and took a sip of his coke, “what are your questions about Yankee Traveler?”\n\tAt this I was at first stumped, and then the seed of an idea took hold and I decided to run with it. The story itself was a little too close to the current situation for comfort, but I had never known myself to succumb to fear of any kind, and so found myself plunging on ahead.\n\t“The Yankee Traveler is an American Gothic Horror, if I may say so.”\n\t“Okay.”\n\t“It’s about a strange man who comes to town whom everybody seems to know, but they’re not sure how they know him, at least until a fellow who had moved to the Connecticut village from Boston thought about it and realized that the man was Samuel Adams. He’d once seen Adams in his own Boston pub many years before. But the fact of the matter was that Sam Adams was long dead.”\n\t“That’s right. So you did read it.”\n\t“I did. Like I said, three times.”\n\t“Okay, go on. I’m sure there’s a question in here somewhere.”\n\t“There is. I promise, there is. Okay, so where did you get the idea for doppelgänger for a famous person? Only this doppelgänger is an otherworldy or maybe other-dimensional fellow.”\n\tRay nodded. “Tell me, Jimmy, do you believe in aliens?”\n\tI shivered.\n\t“It’s an innocent question. The truth is that a high percentage of the American public now believe that we are regularly visited by aliens from other worlds and maybe other dimensions. Some think they are humans from a future that follows a nuclear war, where the remnant of mankind had to evolve into a gangly gray alien body in order to survive. That’s probably not too far out of the realm of possibility, either, given our penchant to want to destroy ourselves. So seriously, what do you think?”\n\t“I...I’m not sure. I’ve read a few books on the subject, or tried to read them. I couldn’t get very far. It’s the science fantasy trying to mask itself as science fact that always throws me. Although, there was this one horror science fiction book I read by Judith and Garfield-Reeves Stevens that I finished. Can’t remember the title. The damned thing scared the bejesus out of me. I tried reading Whitley Streiber’s Communion when it first came out, but I just couldn’t do it. Too much cosmic consciousness for me.”\n\t“So, you’re a straight science fiction man. Probably you like Larry Niven.”\n\t“I adore Larry Niven.”\n\tRay nodded. “What if I told you that I happen to think there is at least one group of aliens who are really here, and that they can shape-shift, but they don’t have a very great imagination and they have to copy people they’ve actually seen before?”\n\t“I would want to see some proof of that,” I said, but found myself saying it meekly, as if it was hard to make the words leave my mouth. Thus they came quietly and uncertainly, like a thief might approach a seemingly abandoned home.\n\tRay smacked the table with the meat of his hand and smiled. “You would, wouldn’t you? But somehow I didn’t think you’d want to actually see the proof, Jimmy. I mean, it’s a great concept to think with. It’s safe enough just to think about it. No, I believe you’d run from it the moment that it appeared in front of you.”\n\tI swallowed. “Yeah. I might.”\n\tI studied the man. I mean, in all respects, this was Ray Bradbury. Except it wasn’t. And the topic was starting to give me a case of the frights. The only time I had ever recalled being scared was seeing a truck burning out on the highway after a wreck. I thought the thing might explode, and then who knew what might happen. Of course, I was no more than five or six years old at the time.\n\t“You see, that’s the thing,” Ray continued. “People think they want something. They say, ‘We want disclosure of the fact that aliens crashed near Roswell in 1947!’ But do they? I mean, do they really? I don’t think they do. You see, people...ordinary people. They get up and they go to work each morning. They put in their eight hours a day and they draw their paycheck and they barbecue and watch football on weekends. Their energies, their entire existences are wrapped up in doing this one thing. You could ask them, ‘Who are you?’ and they wouldn’t know what you were talking about. They’d probably say, ‘My name is John Jones.’ But that’s not what you mean when you ask that question. What you mean when you ask it is, ‘Just what the hell do you think you’re doing living the life of a human being, a homo sapien sapiens, on a mud ball wrapped around a flaming cinder traveling ninety-three million miles out from a small, dim, yellow sun in an orbit in a backwater solar system on the edge of an arm of a minor spiral galaxy?’ That’s what you want to know. And you know what? They have no answer for that, except, ‘I’m a bricklayer,’ or ‘I’m an accountant.’ No sir. They don’t want to know one scintilla about who they really are, what the universe is like, whether or not they are alone as a species in the unending black cosmos. And do you want to know something funny? It’s exactly that that the aliens want to know about. How can one species be so blissfully, so willfully stupid? What kind of reality is this? Is it cultural? Is it socio-economic? I mean, if the Galactic Confederation could thoroughly control the populations of its tens of thousands of worlds the way the people of Earth are controlled, then there’s a secret here. A great big and fat secret. The secret is not ‘out there.’”Ray used air quotes with his sausage-thick fingers. “The big secret of the universe is right here!” and he stabbed the table with is finger.\n\tI didn’t know I was sweating until a bead of it fell from my eyebrows onto the table in front of me.\n\t“Are you nervous about something, Jimmy?” Ray asked.\n\t“No sir,” I said.\n\t“Better drink that coke.”\n\tI reached out, grasped the glass and took a long pull of it, then set it down again.\n\t“So, let me ask you again, what if I told you there are aliens who can shift their shape and copy people? Would you really want to meet one? Would you want to see his flying saucer? Would you want him to give you a tour of local planets?”\n\tI thought about Arch and his little MG, weaving in and out of traffic on the highway. I thought about my wife and how she is uber cautious in her driving. And then I thought about leaving the atmosphere of the planet, but not on a rocket or a space shuttle, but instead with an alien at the controls of the flying saucer.\n\t“No,” I said suddenly.\n\tRay relaxed and smiled at that. “Well now. There’s some truth for you. You want to know something funny?” He asked the question as if he’d never asked it before.\n\t“Sure.”\n\t“You want to know why they sometimes copy famous people?”\n\t“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like to know that.”\n\tRay seemed amused by the whole thing, as if it was an incredibly funny joke. “Okay. Get this, now. Say you were an alien, and you wanted to copy somebody. Who would make yourself look like?”\n\t“I don’t know. I never thought of it before.”\n\t“But you thought of it today, didn’t you? I mean, while you were reading my short story?”\n\t“Oh. I guess I did. I don’t know. I thought I might make myself look like some famous author.”\n\t“A science fiction author?”\n\t“Maybe.”\n\t“Which one?”\n\t“I don’t know. Maybe Larry Niven. Or L. Ron Hubbard. Somebody like that.”\n\t“Okay. How would people respond to that?”\n\t“I don’t know. They might be a little freaked out, I guess. How would you respond?” The idea of turning the tables on him was far too tantalizing to pass up.\n\t“Oh, I know exactly how I’d respond. I’d ask they what star they were from? Betelgeuse or Regula?”\n\t“Then there’s two types.”\n\t“That’s right.”\n\t“What if he said Betelgeuse?”\n\t“Then I’d tell him that he should stick to copying no-name types.”\n\t“But what if he said Regula?” I asked.\n\t“Then, I’d act like it nothing was out of the ordinary at all. That’s one way to find yourself very dead, Jimmy.”\n\t“How’s that?”\n\t“To run across a Regulan, and then challenge him on his appearance.”\n\t“That’s your Yankee Traveler. That’s why the character—”\n\t“Smith.”\n\t“Right. That’s why Smith ended up with his head fried. Because he challenged the Yankee Traveler. He told him that he looked like Samuel Adams, that he was Samuel Adams, but that Samuel Adams was dead.”\n\t“Exactly.” Ray smiled. “Because there’s something else funny about it. Regulans live for hundreds of years. And so Yankee Traveler is really a true story. That is, if everything else I told you is true.”\n\t“I thought it was one of those Old World things. Like vampires, werewolves, gnomes and such.”\n\t“It kind of is. But then again...”\n\t“All of those are aliens,” I finished for him.\n\tRay smacked the table, leaned back and drained his coke glass.\n\tI found myself laughing. I yawned, stretched, then leaned back in my chair.\n\tThe tension had drained out of the room.\n\t“Mr. Bergen,” I said. “You are a natural storyteller. And a great one at that.”\n\t“Thank you. Thank you, kindly.”\n\t“Well, I bet my wife is getting worried about me. Thank you for the coke. I think it’s time for me to head on home.\n\tRay stood up slowly. I could hear his knees creaking as he did so.\n\tI got up, leaned forward and offered Ray my hand. He shook it.\n\t“Okay, Jimmy. You’re welcome to come back by any time. Hold on a minute.” He fished his wallet out and withdrew a business card and handed it to me. “Here’s my number. It’s best that you call me before stopping by. I might think you’re one of the hoodlums who live around here and shoot first and ask questions later.”\n\t“Don’t worry about that. I’ll call first.”\n\tI bent over to pet Edgar Allan Poe—or Pug, whichever it really was—but he darted away from my hand.\n\t“It takes some time for him to get to know you,” Ray said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”\n\tI finally made it out the front door. A cool breeze had come up and I breathed in deeply the smells of the countryside.\n\tMy car started without any trouble. I backed out and drove away, as if doing so was the most natural thing in the world.\n\n\n\nThe next day was Sunday.\n\tI did it, with malice aforethought.\n\tFirst, that morning Arch tried to call me, but I dismissed his call without answering it. I didn’t want to speak with Arch Reeves. No way, no how. He would detect something and likely try to talk me out of it, even if he didn’t know what it was.\n\tI drove by the New World Flea Market and saw that Ray Bergen’s long, black, polished Lincoln Town Car was there. I slowed to see it, but then continued on when I confirmed it was there. I drove down half a mile, turned off and took the long way around so that I didn’t have to pass by the flea market again. \n\tI passed the turnoff to the lane that led to Ray’s house and parked at a permanently closed gas station about half a mile down and walked back to the lane and down it.\n\tI came to Ray’s house, stopped at the foot of the driveway and looked back the way I’d come. I had not met eyes with anyone or for that matter seen another human being during my trek the length of it, and from where I stood, the foliage of the intervening abandoned lots screened Ray’s house and yard from view from outside.\n\tI walked up his driveway avoiding the house, my eyes intent upon the storage shed I’d seen the night before, first in my headlights upon arriving, and then again upon leaving.\n\tRay had been wrong about one thing, and at the time I had agreed with him on it. But it wasn’t true. I did have to know. It was imperative. It was an overall part of my essential constitution. I had to know whether or not it killed me to do so. \n\tAs I came under the shade of the oak tree above the southern end of Ray Bergen’s double-wide trailer home, I fixed my gaze upon the shed and for the first time noticed the padlock.\n\t“Shit,” I stated aloud.\n\tI walked up to it, while casting my gaze around the rear of his house, placed my hand upon it and gave it a tug. No deal. Over by the small deck at his back door there was a barbecue grill, one of the cheap kind that could cook food for no more than a couple of people at a time. The grass was close-cropped out back as it had been in front, and the high grasses and small shrubs of a meadow strained against the hurricane fence from the other side.\n\tFrom inside the house, Egdar Allan Poe set himself to barking, but it was a dim, distant sound. No one else would hear it, so I decided to ignore it. Unless there was a doggie door somewhere and he somehow magically presented himself, all it would take would be one swift kick and the little monster would find himself airborne.\n\tAround beside the metal shed, I took stock of its condition. Lower down, closer to the ground it had a patina of mold where the sun seldom, if ever, hit it. I walked around back and noticed that there were a few popped rivets along one seam. I crouched down and ran my hand over the metal, then attempted to peel it back. It came, slowly, and as it did, another rivet higher up popped out. The piece of aluminum slowly peeled back to reveal a rusted metal frame and darkness beyond. It had only come out a few inches, thus far, so I stood, braced myself, and began to work on the other rivets. They popped, one by one, and after a few minutes I had the entire piece of aluminum peeled back upon itself. Ray would know that someone had entered his shed. It was my hope that he wouldn’t know who had done it.\n\tI stepped between two of the metal cross braces like a rancher skillfully stepping through a barbed wire fence. \n\tAnd there, at the center of the space was what I was after.\n\tIt was covered with a tarpaulin, but a dim mauve light was cast on the ground beneath it. I took the small flashlight from my back pocket, clicked it on and looked for a light above, perhaps a bare bulb dangling from an electrical cord, but found none. That was all right. I didn’t need it. I had brought my own light.\n\tI pulled on the tarpaulin and it slid slowly off and fell to the floor, raising a small cloud of dust. I didn’t care.\n\tThe craft floated three feet off the bare dirt floor. It was no more than eight feet in length, six feet wide and at the edges two feet in height—a shiny black triangle floating in a old, cheap aluminum shell of a storage shed. Most people have riding lawn mowers, gardening tools, old wasp nests and plenty of spiders. Ray Bergen, however, kept a space ship.\n\tI walked around it. At its widest point there was no more than a foot between it and the garage, but I tucked in my belly and went between them, rubbing against the side of the garage and avoiding the touch of the ship.\n\tThe ship faintly hummed. I noticed that the hair on my arms stood straight up and my throat tingled. My ears likewise buzzed and my skin felt the way it does when I eat a chocolate bar—like little mites were running across the skin of my face, my chest and back, frolicking as they did so.\n\tWhen I came around to the front of the ship, I stood there for a moment, trying to think of what to do. I crouched down and shined my light beneath it, but I could see no seam or joint that would point to a hatch opening.\n\tI played the light along the flat edge of the ship and noticed there were letters there. They appeared to be hieroglyphics of some kind. There were half circles like little moons, stars, series of dots, crooked sticks, wedge shapes and all kinds of figures, but I wouldn’t have been able to make any sense of it had I six months and a supercomputer with which to attempt to crunch it all down.\n\t“Alien,” I whispered aloud. “Regula.”\n\tThe ship responded to my voice by throwing out a purple beam that struck me in the face. Instead of being stunned and my legs folding beneath me, I stood in place, unable to move, even to blink.\n\tReal fear traveled through my mind and my body, but I could do little more than breathe. I was a fly captured in amber. Aware of little other than time, I waited for release. A release that was a long time coming.\n\n\nOutside the car crunched on gravel and the engine killed. It was Ray, coming home. I had been trapped for the better part of the day, and I suspected it was approaching dark-thirty outside, but I had no way of knowing whether this was so. The beam still held me, as I had known it would. It would hold me until he found me. And then, there would be hell to pay.\n\tIn the wake of the silence that followed the closing of Ray’s car door, Edgar Allan Poe set himself to barking again.\n\tI could hear Ray’s distant footsteps on the front porch, the whine of the screen door and jiggling of his key in the lock. Edgar must have jumped between his legs because the dog’s bark grew louder and more insistent. Edgar banged into the shed door and set himself to barking fiercely, as if his life depended on it.\n\t“Say, what’s going on? Why you want to go in there?”\n\tThe response was continued barking.\n\t“You see a squirrel or a raccoon or something crawl in there?”\n\tMore barking.\n\tAnd then came the sound I knew would next come: the jingle of keys, then turn of a key in the padlock, the rattle to get it out of its hasp, and then the creak of the shed door.\n\t“Well. I’ll be damned,” Ray said.\n\tHe stepped up beside me, and even though I couldn’t look at him—couldn’t, in fact, move a damned muscle—from my peripheral vision I could tell he was looking me up and down.\n\tRay reached out and touched the ship and I found myself collapsing down into the dust.\n\tMy vision faded to blackness and the last thing I heard before unconsciousness claimed me was Ray saying, “I guess I was wrong. That’s too bad. Too too bad.”\n\t\n\n\nWhen I came to, I was sitting in a chair. My eyes came fully open to take in the interior of a space ship and a viewing screen in front of me. To my left was the silhouette of a man who mirrored the star field up front.\n\tEarth’s moon came into view and we moved towards it at amazing speed.\n\tThe being spoke, and of course, it was Ray Bergen’s voice.\n\t“I’m not often wrong, Jimmy,” he said. “So when I am, it makes me stop and think. I’ve missed something somewhere along the way. No matter how long I stay on your planet, I can’t seem to figure you people out.”\n\tI found I could speak and I could move, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I desperately wanted it all to be a dream. I was in a hospital somewhere, under heavy sedation. Someone was talking to me and I was changing his words to fit the narrative of the dream. But more frightening than this was the fact that I felt myself breath in the air inside the spaceship, felt the weight of my backside and legs on the chair, felt the soreness in my throat from breathing in the dust of Ray Bergen’s storage shed.\n\tThe moon swelled before us, and in the space of few breaths filled the entire screen.\n\t“You’re going too fast,” I said in little more than a whisper. “You’re going to crash us into the moon.”\n\t“Nonsense.” The Regulan reached out and tapped a small green stud and a hole opened in the moon, and we flashed inside of it, slowing as we did so.\n\t“The moon is hollow,” Ray’s voice stated. “A few years back your NASA scientists hit the moon with a missile and it rang like a bell for hours. We didn’t like that.”\n\tThe interior of the moon was well lit, and it was crowded with cities.\n\t“How many....um...people...live here?”\n\t“A few million. It’s sort of a galactic stopover. It’s settled by treaty. Your moon is an artificial satellite. Always has been.”\n\t“You could wipe us all out,” I said.\n\t“Oh. That. Yes, as easy as pouring gas on an anthill. Why would anybody want to do that? You’re the warlike race, not us.”\n\t“You have wars. I’m sure of it.”\n\tRay turned to face me. “Of course we have wars. Everyone has wars. But wars themselves are no more than tools to achieve an end, and it’s the last recourse when you can’t get something done otherwise. We never fight for control of land or space, or natural resources or for political reasons. We only fight when communications break down, and these days there’s always communication.”\n\t“What else do you want to show me?” I asked. I suppose there was plenty of accusation in my voice.\n\t“You’re the one who had to know, Jimmy. Now you know. Are you going to freak out on me? If you do, I can put you back in the freeze field.”\n\t“That’s not a very technical-sounding name. I mean, freeze field. Sheesh.”\n\t“It serves. You understood me.” And then he began speaking in what I would thereafter call Regulan. It was a harsh-sounding and loud language, like a couple of couple of semi-trucks vying for the same parking spot and coming into collision.\n\t“Please, speak English!”\n\t“You didn’t like my English when I said ‘freeze field.’”\n\t“I’ll stop being a critic.”\n\tRay turned the craft around and shot us back out of the moon and into open space. The Earth—no more than the big blue marble of astronaut description—hung in the sky half shrouded in darkness.\n\t“Where to?” I asked.\n\t“For you? Home.”\n\t“You’re not going to kill me?”\n\t“If I was going to kill you, I would have already done it when I found you in my shed. No, I’m going to do far worse than that.”\n\t“Worse? What could be worse?”\n\t“Putting you back where you were. Putting you back on Earth, back in Austin, Texas. Back in your science fiction-reading life.”\n\t“You killed that one guy,” I said. “That Smith fellow who said you were Samuel Adams, only Sam Adams was dead.”\n\t“I had to kill him. But I was young and new to the assignment, and he was just an ignorant alien. That’s a bad point about you, Jimmy. You like pointing out the failings of others, all the while omitting your own. Such as the fact of breaking and entering. Criminal trespass. Screwing up someone’s life and their assignment.”\n\t“You’re an alien. I don’t know if it would stick in a court of law.”\n\t“I’m not talking about a court of law. I’m talking about courtesy. Your species will never truly evolve until it embraces courtesy. Courtesy is what holds the galaxy together.”\n\t“I thought that was the Force.”\n\t“Too much science fiction with this one,” he said, but in Yoda’s voice, and I found myself laughing.\n\t“You know, you shouldn’t take on the form of famous people. It’s not, strictly speaking, safe.”\n\t“I have to. I’m a Regulan. But you knew that.”\n\t“I’m not sure what that means, but I’m learning.”\n\t“Well, you’ve learned enough. After today, you won’t be seeing me, Jimmy. Ever again.”\n\tAnd then it hit me. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I had not only destroyed a potential friendship, but I had gone down the rabbit hole—all the way down the rabbit hole to the center of the moon and back again—and there was no coming back from that singular fact. I knew and yet I couldn’t tell anyone. First of all, I had no proof of any of it, and therefore, Second, no one would believe me. I would have to keep my mouth shut. I would have to live out the remainder of my days with the knowledge of what the world was really like, and I would not be able to share that.\n\tThe planet was coming up fast, and North America filled the viewing screen.\n\t“Okay, this is it,” Ray stated. “Say goodnight, Jimmy.”\n\tHis finger hovered over a button.\n\t“Um...goodnight, Ji—”\n\tAnd the lights went out for me once again.\n\n\n\nMmy.” I awoke in my car outside the abandoned gas station with a start.\n\t“No.” I shouted.\n\tI got my keys out of my pocket, stuck them in the ignition and turned it over. I peeled out of the old station and turned back onto the highway, spraying gravel as I did so.\n\tI turned right at the lane that led to Ray’s house and drove down it going sixty.\n\tI slowed when I came to where Ray’s house should have been, but it wasn’t there. The shed wasn’t there, either.\n\t“No! No no no no!”\n\t\n\nThe following weekend I found myself at the New World Flea Market, but completely different vendor was in Ray’s spot, selling beads. I went back home in a foul mood. Not only had I lost a friend and my old reality, but I had lost a source for procuring old science fiction novels.\n\tArch tried to call me off and on for weeks, and it was on a Wednesday evening after work that I accidentally answered his call.\n\t“Jimmy! You okay? Been trying to reach you.”\n\t“Yeah, I had a cell phone incident. Had to get a new phone.”\n\t“Well, sorry to hear that. Are you out of the rabbit hole?”\n\t“Rabbit hole?” I asked, feigning ignorance. “Oh. You mean the Ray Bradbury guy. Yeah, that’s long gone. He was just a guy.”\n\t“Hmph. Okay. You don’t sound wholly yourself. Say, listen. I was wondering if you’d like to come on my radio show, talking about your experiences. What the whole thing was like.”\n\t“Oh. No-sirree-bob! I would not like to do that. But, we can get together for a beer or something.”\n\t“Well, all right. That’s fine. Just thought I’d ask.”\n\t“Listen, Arch, I’ll call you later. Trying to make it home in this interminable Austin traffic.”\n\t“You should try driving like me. I get where I’m going.”\n\t“Yeah, but I want to live a long time.”\n\t“Okay,” he said, and hung up. But that’s Arch.\n\n\n\t\nI woke up in the middle of the night from a disturbing dream a few weeks later. I had been with Ray on his ship watching the destruction of Earth from orbit, and all Ray could say was, “It’s all right, Jimmy. To me they’re just aliens.”\n\tI got up, went into my office and closed the door. Sienna was still fast asleep, and I didn’t want her to see my light or otherwise hear me and come asking what was wrong. But she knew I wasn’t right. It was there written on her face every day, and she also knew it was something I couldn’t talk about. Maybe she thought I was cheating on her. In a way, I suppose I was. My life had changed. It had changed forever, and I would have to come to grips with it.\n\tSitting at my computer, I thought of Ray Bergen. About what he’d said about writing his short story. I replayed it in my mind. He’d said, “Sure. I wrote it. I don’t know what gets into me sometimes. I’ll be minding my own business, then all of a sudden I get an idea, and I have to write it down. It’s not always easy to do. I can’t type worth a damn, you know.” \n\tHe didn’t know what got into him, but I sure as hell knew what had gotten into me.\n\tHe would be minding his own business, then all of a sudden—\n\tI thought about opening up a word processor on the computer, then thought better of it. Like Ray, I couldn’t type worth a damn. Instead, I got up and went out into the garage and fished around until I found what I was looking for. It was my old Casio typewriter-printer. It was electric, but it made no noise. You fed a piece of paper into it and you typed and it printed the last line you typed when you hit the carriage return. \n\tI dusted it off, brought it into the house and took a minute to wipe it down. I set it up on my desk, plugged it in and listened to it hum, then fished around in my office until I found a stack of blank paper and fed a piece into it.\n\tI typed:\n\t\nThe Tale of the Man Who Wrote About The Yankee Traveler\n\n\tI hit return and watched the line print. I could read it, plain as day!\n\tThen I typed:\n\nBy James M. Underwood\n\nand hit the return again.\n\t“Oh Ray,” I said. “You managed to get your revenge. Now I’m going to get mine.”\n\tAnd then I began.\n\nFinis\n\t\n",
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"content": "By the way, I just recently published Bill Travis #17, Bexar County Line. You can get it on Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and even Amazon. Just grab the one of the providers links from my recent \"ANNOUNCEMENT\" on my website at my billtravismysteries website. Thanks!<br /><br /><a href=\"http://www.billtravismysteries.com\" target=\"_blank\">http://www.billtravismysteries.com</a><br />",
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