Vank Island©1992GIBSON

An eagle flying high rising in wide spirals in crisp sub-arctic air above the Alaska Range. Mt. Foraker’s white snows contrasted as super-reality with pastel blue and endless northern sky. At times it brought its wings in closer to its body and forward to vector downward into a southeast wind. Another low-pressure trough was forming at the Chugach Mountains beyond Prince William Sound and the central Alaska coast. A storm drenched/pummeled Valdez with near-freezing rain. The super-tanker oil slug staggered outward bound on a course to Bligh Reef. 1

Dreaming into a world the picture resolved from cold mist. An oil soaked pelagic cormorant raced in a flight of stupefaction skimmed the frigid waters toward a shoreline too far away.
Avery woke to an explosion outside the bulkhead that knocked him from the bunk onto the deck. The vessel rocking slowly and rhythmically hesitating at crests of waves, plunging into troughs that a gyro-stabilizer struggled with pitch and yaw. The seascape outside the portal seethed beneath twin gas giant planets.
He stepped over the threshold and looked right and left. No one in the corridor. Whiskered black-haired sailor ran his fingers over an open book lying at the base of the stairs. These words were printed on the fine vellum parchment in gold leaf-- Few there are that enter. He set down the book and climbed the stairs.
Steady wind tore whitewater from the waves. Howling winds brought memory of a Hendrix song he heard at an underground launching on Antares Five. The deck was dark,lit by planet and starlight. He saw no one.
A screeching gull skidded landing amidships knocking over a container of plastic explosive. The man walked up fifteen steps to top deck and found each decorated with a quarter-pound block of compound 936 explosive shaped as a Pershing donut. He wondered where the crew was.
Avery soon had the answer. The crew’s bodies were dumped on the deck above. He reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and opened the cardholder to make sure he had Plutocard.
He breathed heavily on the card to activate identity register. Card pops, a four-inch pyramid of rainbow colors appears above it. The shapes expand, showing a prior thirty minutes aboard Seascape. Events on top deck were recorded by particle-beam holographic imaging from the myriad commercial satellites that orbited Valdspleen.
Valdspleen is's new planet created by Inter-Loyal; an interplanetary cartel…a large common-poor of mining corporations. Three times mass of Neptune, solid enough to support surface continents, oceanic basins, and a deuterium-heavy sea, yet it won't collapse under gravity to form a protostar.
Sailor hadn’t considered the ratio of mass to volume for the planet’s stability, but he knew Valdspleen was stable because the planetary engineers at microcore said so. The information was written into the contract he signed with Inter-Loyal as an observer for the multi-phase material prospecting ship Seascape.
He watched for twenty uneventful minutes. Four crewmen from the midnight watch were visible in the wheelhouse illuminated in a half-circle around the radar screen’s green light. They seemed to be discussing something when an enormous tentacle reached through the starboard door of the wheelhouse, grabbed the four crewmen and mashed them into pulp. The residue of gore in rivulets flowed onto the wheelhouse floor.
The tentacle then changed shape until it was a duplicate of the captain, placed a hand on the intercom and spoke into it.
"My dear crew, I respectfully request your immediate presence at the helm"
Remaining crew members arrived within a couple minutes and stood opposite captain. He looked at the ten men and smiled. The crew was roused from their sleepy curiosity when the captain’s smile expanded until his teeth were like those of a Fluvial shark.
In moments the smile filled his face. In horror transfixed the crew watched without moving except Taylor, who burped and laughed with alcohol sodden-ed amusement. Teeth grew until they the spanned the bridge, reached and shredded crew.
As the final five minutes of the recording played from his Plutocard the sailor took out a Sticky-sweet candy bar,ate it. Sat down upon pile of reassembling corpses and rested feet on one. Watched alien go about its business.
It changed shape again. Soon, mouth with gore-filled sloshy stomach cast in red and green colors by the bridge lights altered. Alien’s true form slowly emerged as humanoid business agent of the cartel’s onerous rival Glom Interworld. The creature straightened its necktie.
In the past, Glom business operations had stunk, but once it ditched government regs steadily expanded started construction of thousands of mid-system planets through a new fusion architecture. Made big dent in Inter-Loyal’s busi. Sailor wondered what treacherouss tripper from Glom doing on Valdspleen.
He shifted on the bodies, which were finally beginning to show some signs of life. He felt disgusted that the glom regeneration formulas didn’t take more time to work.
"Get the hell off me Squid!" Tom said."If you ever rest your arse on me again when I’m dead I’ll body slam you."
"Yo!" Avery stood and grabbed bucket on rope. Threw it over side and brought back healthful water. Dumped ice-water on the nearest crew member. Most still unconscious, some coughed or cursed as repeatedly doused them 'til everyone reanimated fully at level four consciousness.
Avery was the only crewman who listed to the rock and roll of the star chemistry over the ship’s multicom. That was why he missed the captain’s summons to the bridge. No one bothered to reprimand him yet. He wondered what the captain would say since he was the only one aboard, besides the glom agent, who hadn’t died during the last hour.
"So you escaped death again, eh?" The captain looked at Avery.
"It seems so."
"Don’t give me any of your intellectualizing you saltwater freak! I want to know who crushed my bleedn guts out and left you alive again!"
" Sir it was a Glom agent temporalizing in basic three-phase plasmid and conservative return sequence. He sure squished the stuffing out of you."
Knowing the captain always cursed roundly aft reanimation, Avery left and took charge of the crew, still in shock. The Seascape was slowly moving side seas pitching/rolling with increasing violence.
Captain staggered to the wheelhouse. Some of the crew members wandered back to their stations. Avery turned over the bucket, sat on it, and replayed the last three minutes of the hologram. The alien agent removed the optic core of the Bigintel dialectic prospecting computer on the bridge and altered several components. Then he removed it and placed it into a black velvet stealth bag replacing it with a Glom Control Processor. The captain would have a big headache when the ship arrived at the moat of nothingness in the middle of the Valdspleen Sea. Then the Glom agent particled into nowhere. The hologram ended.
Avery knew time for this aspect of the voyage was limited. Management would want a noumenal encounter of the Local Theory.
At the seventh hour of the third watch he saw the beginning of the decomposition of reality. White pinpoints of light appeared within his field of vision and body. His consciousness became aware of the plasticity of time and being. The moving deck of the Seascape became less substantial, and the twenty-one mile distant horizon of the ocean blued into the McAllister effect, the shift of being from environmental integration into the trans-substantial realm of ideas-in-themselves. The last thing he saw of the Seascape was the incoming materialization of an alien trader above the synthesizer pad on the back deck.
Avery tumbled downhill in an uncontrollable slide into and among dark wet tree stumps on the crusty frozen surface of a clear-cut mountain slope. He slid at high speed on his stomach. Side and back as he ricocheted against stumps through the depressions at their base’ and bounced on. The clear-cut was at least one kilometer long. He fell diagonally over two fall lines in the cut as the image of Thomas Beckett’s chapel in Salisbury England passed through his mind.
The sky was dark. Through the falling snow the moss-enshrouded green conifers gave no indication of direction.
He was lost. He knew he had to find shelter or die. All he thought of was his will to live. Like the experience of being the only bit of sensory feeling in existence, the mode of being in himself was reduced to essential simplicity. In the desperation of his struggle to live he managed to arrest his slide as his shoulder struck another tree stump before he continued into nothingness.
His feet had lost all feeling and he assumed they were frozen. In his wet, iced-over transport boots, his feet inside the Dun Angus leather had no warmth. He lay sprawled in the snow wondering how long it would take to freeze to death. He should’ve met the Executive Group of the Inter-Loyal cartel.
He took a frosted hand from a soggy, ice-encrusted glove and reached into his right pants pocket to extract a small flask. After popping the heat tab on its side, he raised it to his lips. Warm coffee and schnapps made the mountain mists seem like a glazed aesthetic element appended to his experience.
Quiet passed over him. Darkness was no longer darkness. Although he’d been lost, that memory disappeared too.
Avery entered the non-dimensional eternity of the Structure Group.2

"Good morning, Avery. How has life been treating you?" the clerk asked.
Avery looked up from the gutter outside the Mitkov management station into the clerk’s insipid face. "Got anything to drink?"
He lifted himself up onto an elbow and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The street and gutter were lined with brilliant new snow and splotched with vomit. Some of it was frozen on his blue-green wool shirt. His condition was disheveled.
"Where’s the missing Altereal unit, Avery?" the clerk asked.
Clerk made a few notes as a team of robot carriers grabbed Avery, placed him on a gurney, and wheeled him up the sidewalk and through the open doors of Mitkov Headquarters. Laura accompanied them to the medsax center for intensive debriefing, while med-techs began rewarming Avery from hypothermia.
Half delirious, Avery talked of his work on Valdspleen. In the dim twilight of the chamber, skim-suited femaletechs plied trade. The air temperature was one hundred sixty degrees F.Warmth only gradually reached Avery as the progressed.
A lot of time passed since Avery left the site of the altloss in Siberia to trace a lead to a ship on the Valdspleen Sea. Laura brought Avery’s report to Winslow’s desk.
"The unit might be on Earth again," she said.
"Maybe I should check into Glom’s regional op center in the Baltic," Winslow said.
"Your batteries were just charged." Laura winked.
"Tickets for world-vectors."
"It’ll be good to travel east, Laura. I’ve hardly had a day off since it disappeared."
"Yek."
Winslow’s car dropped out of the magway onto Petersburg Parkway. He drove to the Hermitage in heavy aftnoon traffic that glacially. The streets werelike slow flowing parking lots. At least the magways transits were nearly instant. Electric fields in the tunnels could propel the vehicles to three-quarters light speed theoretically.
Winslow left the '30's FordGangsta replicar, stepped into a downshaft, and fell four thousand feet to the mall.3

"Need a guide?" a Chuckchi asked.
"No, thanks." Winslow walked to the canal and looked at the deep blue water of the Mediterranean tunnel until he caught the eye of a salmo-shaw and waved it to shore. Five sentient salmo-carp hybrid fish finned over from the Baltic Channel taxi stand.
"Where do you want to go?" lead carp asked.
"Inn of the Whales."
Seven-foot, nine hundred pound salmonids swam at high speed through a maze of luminescent, water-filled tunnels at a depth of over a mile from the surface of Peter the Great’s capitol.
Winslow’s pager broke silence amidst whoosh of bell and field contacts of the dark glowing water.
"Winslow", Michele Freidrichstein said, "We’ve gopped a feasibility study in finding the subatomic research hackers microwaving the employees in the Ukraine."
"Flam that off to Avery at Mitkov", Winslow replied. "He’s useful now. I’ve progress, not to digress. Would you arrange for Gretta to be front at the Inn of the Whales in a few minutes- Out."
One-way tunnels were lonely..
The fish charged into Neptune Grotto, slowed as they approached an intertidal area. They drew up to the entrance of the Inn of the Whales. A raven-haired, blue-eyed Gretta with blown-on plastic scales stood at the pier to greet Winslow with a kiss and a holodot.
In the lobby, bribes from the temporarily homeless busiers got rooms.
Winslow checked in and got a mantra to suite 456. The airshaft whisked him up in a moment. Power failed at the thirty-sixth floor, and he went into free fall. People above and below him were falling too, and screaming. The Inn of the Whales was a Glom interplanetary enterprise with tech glitches.
Bottom of the airshaft curved outward skidding hotel guests into recycling up shaft running on reserve power. Moments later, Winslow arrived at the forty-fifth floor and stepped into the hall.
Standing at his door he scracthed his head Om Rom Pski; a commercial-strength mantra. Arabesque of holograms and laser beams dissolve. Enter through the ion door. Commorupter playing the Marseilles.
"Winslow", a femish voice said, "A report that Yermak of Chrebet Spaceways sold ticket to Glom agent from Mars to the Yukon Territory today."
Voice stopped. Gentle breeze blew over desert sands carrying fragrance of oranges and goat roasting. Saturn channel holovisor with small altereal component recreated City of Venice within the oasis. Airbed floated on the Rio Canonica O Palazzo. After quick visit through Palazzo Ducale, Winslow slept.
Five o’clock, American tourist dumps her armful of leather clothes onto airbed. Rubbing her brow "Do you know where I could get directions?"
"I haven't woke up yet, right?" Winslow asked.
Morning alarm; wakening. Open eyes experience squad of Glomstop Security Force.
"Mr. Winslow", Gruppenfemnazi saith, "Off airbed hands up. Questions to ask."
How inconvenient it would be to leave before Sheila arrived for mission fine-tuning. "There are advantages to working for the management group Frau Reichmistress."
"I’ve heard it all before. Hurry along, Guinea Pig", she spake."I am the Oberkommando of the Kreigsmarine of Frederick Sound. You will jump when I say move."
"Well my frau undersea boattress, as we say in Alaska, Haa kaa gaa kuwatee "
Winslow’s stuck his finger in his ear to an altereal power overide; the suite was plunged into sensory chaos.
Winslow removed a third-face disguise falling down the airshaft. It occurrs to him that Cathy at Heathrow has no use for him.
Free fall twenty-four hundred feet to emergency chute/lobby. Salmo-shaw waiting, silver tray cheese and ham croissants, Specialfizz.
Gretta, wearing another color of scales, orders fish-team. Inn of Whales to recedes in distance. Sojurn the Neva Expressway.
A message appears on Earthwriter underground poemcom; encrypted communiqué from Simon, initial agent in charge of counterintelligence transports unit…4

Traveling from Kronstadt
to Helsinki Semolina
Island Naval Museum. Contact
with rival negotiators. Meet
us at gun emplacement
east wall, 23:00 Zulu time.5

Simonides 6

The missing agents who disappeared with the unit in Siberia hours before might, if they were still alive, be at one of the Tokyo-Dive public houses in Northern Europe. It was possible they could be in Petersburg, if not Murmansk or Archangelsk.
Simon’s team could’ve been turned to work for Glom, Earth Propaganda, Mynd Control, or even thieves Unlimited and provided with the coordinates for Valdvolene’s Seascape extraction exploration vessel. An altereal unit with the power of the one missing from the Seascape was worth more than the GNP of smaller Inter-Loyal worlds. The first word from Simon was enigmatic.
Winslow got out of the shaw and threw a package of freeze-dried herring from a tip dispenser to the salmo-carp. The static wind tunnel blew him up to the surface. It would be dark for several more hours. Freezing wet rain and snow whirled past the streetlights and stone buildings in the neo-darkness. Garish business signs and traffic lights were superimposed like pink flamingos at East Bygd, Greenland.
Dostoyevsky Prospeckt’s Tokyo-Dive never closed. Winslow stopped in for a drink and to consider Simon’s message. The news on the holo over the bar droned on about a total blow-up of the Semolina Island Fortress; DeamNN Finnish holovision news teams enroute to the scene. Live footage of fireball/instant replays were coming soon.
Winslow turned to look down the bar and saw magneto-pong players volleying back and forth in the perennial twilight of the Tokyo-Dive afterdeck. Glowing blue paddles arched an orange and green ball in lightening fast conic sections that erupted suddenly into tensor-altering course collisions with alternating warps and smashes. They applied alcohol-enhanced concentration and abandon into a synthesis of action and kinetic art which would likely continue until one side of the war was defeated or became hors d’ combat in drunkenness.
Winslow caught the bartender’s brown eyes. "I’d like a quantum phizz."
She dropped her white towel on to the bar and poured.
"What do you want for a song; Deutsch Peacework, the Gunalchéesh , or Womanome?"
"I’ll slurp up anything you’ve got."
She set down the quantum phizz and Winslow drank. Her eye shadow wavered looking through the bottom of the glass as he drained it. She turned and changed the holo station.
The holo soon showed interactive live footage of several places interpolated within a stream-of-consciousness performance of James Joyce’s novel Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. The corporation bought clandestine airtime to place a few recognizable people into the production.
With the last of his second quantum phizz in sight, Winslow knew something was coming. The Tokyo-Dive holo broke into a vortex of white dots and darkness. Somewhere in a chill and falling silence relieved only by a distant rush of wind, were several ice-ball comets moving away from the sun.
Avery and his girl sat in a glass geodesic dome on a comet named Peregrine Three reading reports. The purple neon lettering on the dome declared the comet to be the property of the Structure Group.
"Does this seem like heaven, Boss?" Avery asked. "I’d like to introduce you to my girl Yvonne, from Unalaska."
"Avery," Winslow said, "It wasn’t possible to find a solid lead in Russia to the lost component or the people who have it. Maybe Jakarta, Beijing or the Ukraine would have some resonance if it was moved to Earth that way…I don’t know. I do know that Simon called to arrange a meeting in Helsinki, presumably with an explanation but the fortress where the rendezvous was scheduled to take place was blasted down. I saw it on holo in a Tokyo-Dive."
Winslow settled into the comfortable for itself of the comet’s Jacuzzi and enjoyed the uncluttered view of the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy. His polymer space bodysuit melted luxuriously in the hot water. Breathing real air instead of absorbing oxygen through the liquid filling his lungs became an increasing pleasure as the liquid was consumed to zero remainder.
Winslow looking at Yvonne and Avery reclining on other side of whirlpool bath. They were relaxed and seem to enjoy their stay on Peregrine Three. They looked away from each other and the reports they compared to smile at Winslow. He smiles.
"Avery", Winslow said, "I weft some thought to matter of finding missing altereal component without expending more time on blind leads. The recursive nature of perception could send us searching through dreams within dreams winding up where we started from, only older.
"Some would give up on the search with the rationalization that insurance will cover it, or that the loss is joss. You and I know nature is one synonym for matter, and that inanimate senseless matter doesn’t have thoughts, intentions or purposes. The anthropomorphic oracle called nature is either the façade of the deity, or it’s an illusion of an illusion."
As Winslow spoke, Avery looked carefully at the report of prior web investigations into the missing component. The search had some of the aspects of a journey to meet the Wizard of Ooze, using cosmological theory and the System Patent Office for Guidelines.
"If Stephen Hawking had found a way back in the nineties to solve the quantum cosmological mechanics of the pre-expansion Universe at the beginning of time our search would dap easier."
Philosophers continued to search for gravitons like men search for the borders of a dream. Heaven’s Gate squared, a Babylon and Tiana/Tio-men/gate project of bureaucratic science Winslow contemplated.
"Winslow", Yvonne said, "If nature is lifeless and has no purpose or mynd, then by default, every other mynd that exists is the absolute ruler of its own fate, and life, so far as the decisions it makes moves inanimate matter about causally. Unless perhaps mass is a façade for the Diety."
Yvonnehe observed is a beautiful Cuban women with dark golden skin, long black hair and green eyes, She speaks English with a French accent.
"Yvonne", Winslow replied, "If life has no intention or purpose in itself and if God does not continuously and directly operate the affairs of the Universe, and if the human spirit isn’t free; then no will, reason, purpose or reality exists at all so far as one can meaningfully talk about it. Life isn’t as rational as a dream, and our missing altereal component is deterministically of no consequence.
Yet I believe that the world isn’t predetermined by non-sensible matter which has no purpose and compels what I think to be without my being aware of it simply for its own physical-chemical requirements. The fact of human intelligence is that which reality is. Intelligence creates itself as it were, choosing what to do, where to be and to some extent, what to think. Intelligence is the self-valuing reality which even within this enigmatic Universe provides its own meaning. To our knowledge, one from without the Universe has been in esse in this Universe only once-that was Jesus Christ.”
“Does he know where the missing altereal component is?” Avery asked.
“He probably knows where everything was, is and will be. That won’t be of immediate help in deciding what to do, though.” Winslow replied.
The comet passed the orbit of Mars. Its blue-green reflection and white clouds produced during the six months of terraforming in the early third millennium made it very much like the Earth. That section of the solar system was cluttered with the magnetic-field assembled artificial worlds made of charged particles from solar system planetesimals. Government in the system proved impossible with so many transient artificial spheres drifting through close to the sun and beyond the Oort Cloud.
The structure group was one of several corporate organizations which supported coordination in living and business relationships. In the off-world environment the concept of ownership evolved to include everything manageable in a time and space complex of coordinates. That fact meant that many chief executive officers became solipsistic; a condition prone to megalomania or personal egoist moral philosophy. A solipsist believes his is the only mynd that exists. It is paralleled in corporate psychology when the psychologist assumes everyone is sick, potentially a debtor, and needs treatment.
Germanic intellectual disciplines of the study of thought brought that nation into world war twice in the twentieth century. The interrelation of mynd, body and thought interpersonnaly and at the government level was one of the continual causes of conflict on Earth until the lateral component initiated a quantum theory of management. It was a slight improvement.
"Down past the rainbow", Yvonne said. "The comet’s the solar laser rainbow refractor. If you look at the ecliptic there is a real time halo image of new planets appearing. Lateral planets don’t have that shimmering definition. They have more of the Salvidor Dali-like super reality instead. I set these up a few minutes ago, so you’d have a reminder of what sort of trace we’re looking for. The component will bend reality into a superreal appearance in the way gravity attracts and minimalizes matter in space. Altereal isn’t a vacuum contrast like a hologram, but is a virtual attenuation of the Universe dreaming itself."
"Thanks, Yvonne", Winslow replied. "With Simon missing in action, the last of four transport agents involved with the missing altereal component is zeroed and our leads may be spent. Perhaps the Glom agent reversed the Seascape space-time delivery route to Alaska before returning to Siberia or Finland. Maybe I can find a lead there. Anchorage, Haines or even Delta Junction might have attenuation residual effects still. If the altereal component is in Alaska or the Yukon somewhere I might see the superreal environmental effects locally." Winslow got out of the Jacuzzi and readied himself for electromagnetic acceleration and H.A.L.O. contact to M. Logan.
"All the people buried here were killed at the top of the Chilkoot Pass in an avalanche one hundred seventy years ago."
The MI-6 spook spoke with his hat in his hand. A brown bear and her two cubs walked through the bushes at the periphery of the deep green old-growth forest cemetery in the ghost town of Dyea a Klondike days port of entry, two miles from Skagway.
"I asked you here for your help in locating missing altereal component", Winslow replied. " Suave from Ivory Coast ises Whitehorse for liaison while we’re in field. Surface effects craft scouring Inside Passage with surreal detectors.Your job will be to search Bennet Lake and headwaters of the Yukon. Students from Soapy Smith Business College in Skagway will be available to bring in the component should you find it. Call the President, Frank Reed, for help."
Burning daylight was once a criticism, not an achievement, Winslow thought, in the age before total social control. It was a reminder that even the surreal quest would proceed regardless of success. Time just passed. Conformity to socially conventional delusions was the prime directive of social reality.
Rain clouds rolled over the sharp glacially carved mountain peaks between Haines and Chilkat Pass, thirty miles away as the crow flies. Wind and rain on the ground was almost constant, except for brief dream-like appearances of the sun. The remnants of barrenness and natural austerity were a relief to the dense Babylon-like cloister of social reality.
"Winslow", his personal surveillance witness float sounded, "Surface effects vehicle is waiting."
Looking about, he saw a small car hovering in the lane to the cemetery near a decrepit white stix fence. He left the MI-6 spooks, and forty buried miners walking toward the gate. The spooks rocketed away using waist blasters toward the Chilkoot Pass.
"Ivory" Winslow addressed the witness float, "Ask Sourdough-I know he never leaves pagers open-if Simon ever lived in Telegraph Creek, Ketchikan or Watson Lake under an alias."
"Winslow", she answered, "Sourdough says Simon used to have a houseboat on the Stikine River Delta down from the hot springs near Dead Man’s Island. Did you learn anything in Skagway?"
"Maybe, Simon might have used the twenty-four tunnels station on Chief Shakes Island in Wrangell harbor to transport the altereal south. There is a weak signal on my LPM-19 altometer at that coordinate. Something may have crossed from there."
In thirty minutes Winslow’s vehicle crossed the four hundred miles from Skagway to Chief Shakes Island. The totem poles still stood on the small piece of land that was once the home of some of the first Athapascan Indians who ventured downriver from the Canadian interior to settle southeast Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago. They lived in that coastal archipelago for more than eleven hundred years. Newgrange Ireland is the oldest remaining Neolithic structure/earth mound still existent in Europe. As Winslow reached Wrangell he thought it a pity that the duplicate stone spiral carvings at Wrangell and Newgrange couldn’t be more accurately source-traced.
The Tlingit long house of the Raven Clan is a transport room for the twenty-four electromagnetic tunnels to North American and Siberian points. The altometer showed traces in the El Paso tunnel entrance. Winslow stepped in and a moiety’s realm receeded.
Falling he accelerated in stark darkness for twenty-nine seconds. He slowed with a rush of wind and emerged onto a moving sidewalk inside the replica Parthenon built atop the Franklin Mountains above Skyline Drive in El Paso. The statue of Pallas Athena, as big as that of Abraham Lincoln in the federal district, is untypical of pre-modern construction. It was left over from a concrete commercial for Glom and pressed into service as a magway depot.
El Paso didn’t look right. A snowstorm blew over the Rio Grande and a glacier occupied the once desertified McKillegon Canyon. The sun shone brightly over Ft. Bliss and the soldiers wore blue uniforms with cavalry stripes. The electromagway was built on an archaic solar cell with superconductor aggregation magnetic repulsion design while saguaro cactus grew too quickly on rooftops.
Winslow took out a small adhesive patch of the American flag and its fifty-seven stars and stuck it on his left shirtsleeve. The remaining Earth-dwelling Americans are fiercely proud of their constitutional origin. While much of the world becomes a living museum bound up in commuter woes and a nine to five tradition, Americans of the southwest retain individual liberty for free thought and speech sometimes producing a solar-class thinker.
Winslow’s altometer bounced from three to nine on the Nobel scale of ten. The arrow indicated the headquarters of the Bravo Battery of the 82nd Time Defense Artillery. Winslow hired a wetback who was dusting snow off his uniform to check the place out while he walked to his favorite restaurant for a bowl of chili and a beer.
Jose returned in a half an hour and reported that the army Echo Company was in fierce snowball combat with a Glom agent who had an altereal component in a shopping cart. In close proximity the altereal field vectored out weapons. The alien had several arms and an excellent fastball though. Even with a Kevlar helmet on a beaning was no laughing matter.7

"That is the gist of my report, Senor", Jose said.
"Take a chair, Kid." Winslow looked up from the nachos, burrito and guacamole that followed the chili.
Jose sat in one of seven chairs at the table. Rosita brought him another Montana Dark Ale.
"Help yourself", Winslow said.
"What’s your address Rosita?" Jose asked.
"Did the alien say or do anything?" Winslow said.
"En los tiempos de segundos…The alien said, and I will always remember, ‘You can go to Aransas Pass, Lake Charles, New Orleans or even Galveston but you won’t find good coral reefs for scuba diving!’ What does that mean Senor Winslow?"
"It means the creature tried to get to the old mission in order to sight in on the entrance to the Lost Dutchman mine. It’s said to be visible one day a year when the sun shines through a high window and reaches a spot on the floor providing an azimuth."
"Why should a Glom agent with a hot altereal worth more than gold wait to find a mine in a museum?" Jose asked.
"The Lost Dutchman mine is a totally screened Glom safe house, Jose. The creature was desperate to find a place to stash the component." Winslow finished his enchilada and chased it down with another dark ale. Rosita’s always has the best food Winslow thought.
Within five minutes he fell northward on the West American magway back to Chief Shakes Island. The altometer got active again reaching near to ten. Twenty-seven seconds later he stood in the black light of the Tlingit long-house station. The light allowed an easier visual transition to the darkness of the Alaska pre-dawn minutes. Simon’s houseboat was moored at Dead Man’s Island, the same coordinates the altometer showed.
Winslow said to his surveillance/witness float. "Ivory, would you call Sartre’s taxi on the thousand island web and ask them to pick me up at Shakes? Out."
They made a mile to Dead Man’s Island in ten minutes. Simon, armed with an acid ink cloud and umbrella-pike struggled with several large tentacles wrapped around his legs pulling him over the shear edge of the houseboat into the frigid archipelago waters.
"That will be five pesos, please, Senor", the driver said.
"Por que? You take Plutocardscards, right?"
The altereal unit rested on the deck of Simon’s houseboat.
Winslow slipped a skiff from the quay and engaged a fuel-cell charged electric motor.
Simon struggles with tentacles. Umbrella and acid ink prods creature to extend more tentacles from below surface. Standing waves one hundred yards offshore send brownish-green half-waves slamming over the deck.
Simon fought the creature vigorously for moments then they went over the side disappearing without a trace before Winslow could reach them. The altereal component in its clear emerald cube was needed by a Siberian client.
Winslow grasps the component’s carrying handle and places it in the skiff returning to the taxi ashore.
A large gold cross on the summit of distant Rynda Island glowed resolutely unto the dawn. A cold north wind blowing at thirty knots carried a wind chill and words from the C.I.S. Shoppers band…8

"In this primordial creation swirling
the small voice cried out in another language
viva la world revolution, hurling
a million stars to crash onto the Earth
…the night beckoned us onward
we sailed to shopping malls." 9

Laura interpolated through the surveillance/witness, "Have you got it yet?"
"Yek", Winslow answered. "I’ll is you at Yakuskt.
And Laura,check super-cell brain wave isolators to look for traces of Simon’s brain freq signature from Galena to Yukon-Charlies. If he floats up you find it direct chronotromp to broadcast an attack program onto his freq. If Simon surfaces somewhere from the Alexander Archipelago and tries to recover the altereal component he might choose to snatch it at our transshipment depot along the highway from Fairbanks to the Taymyr Peninsula. If he heads northwest I want to make sure his brain’s scrambled and fried. With luck he'll bite it with frostbite."
"Winslow", Laura replied, "Chronotromp has been active on his freq since Simon was listed as M.I.A. We have enough experience with double-agents and entrepreneur sell-outs to talk such precautions at first report."
"Thanks,but don't reply thanks".
Winslow rode the Sartre’s taxi directing it to hover along the Gulf of Alaska out of Icy Strait beyond Lituya Bay and Yakutat to Valdez and the Chugach Mountains then got out and stepped into a pipeline to Fairbanks. Since a terrorist detonation of a primer charge induce Mt. Illiamna on the Alaska Peninsula to catastrophically erupt and cover the main Thompson Pass freight routes with heat absorbing tephra, melting grainy residual ice quickly, most cargo shipments were sent through pigs in the old Alaska oil pipeline.
A new extension of the system carried material underground west of Fairbanks to Nome under the Bering Sea and on to Moscow. The structure group would expect Winslow to accompany the altereal component the remainder of the way to it’s new emplacement in a chamber below the Arctic Ocean without the yellow and green illumination of Northern Lights, the crackling gossamer strands of magnetically charged particles said by Yupik legend occasionally to reach down and remove hunters from the world.
The freight system was somewhat more secure from attempted surveillance/hijackings than the magways although it was slower. The absence of civilians made it harder for a camouflaged adversary to hide.10

Winslow fell out of the pipeline with a lurch and stepped onto the ramp at a pig unloading station located outside the Elmer Rasmussen Library on the University of Alaska-Fairbanks campus. Stunted, snow-dwarfed conifers still were as he remembered them when he worked there as a visiting professor of engineering. That was before budget restrictions replaced the department with a bionics and psychology department. The change in his career brought about his association with the Structure Group.
It was thirty degrees below zero outside. Winslow was grateful for the parka a guard handed him. He put it on and adjusted the wolf-hair lined hood to fit snugly around his face. His breath froze on his eyebrows and beard with every exhalation.
One of the guards suddenly punched Winslow’s chin and tried to kick his left calf. Winslow sidestepped and countered with a right front kick to the man’s thought and parried another guard’s right hook with a forearm block. He followed up with a right knee to the groin and a ram’s head thrust to the floating ribs.
The guard collapsed with a cold grunt. In the midst of the fray Winslow thought of Laura’s determination to confront danger head-on like a musk ox. She learned her Kung Fu technique at a Shaolin Twenty-One dojo in Athens.
Winslow had split second to avoid round kick aimed at head, ice-climbers crampons from the third guard’s right foot raking air. Fourth guard and evident leader stood aloof from fi-ing taking notes on Universal tablet. He is's amused, like a Hawk on roadside power line watch ground squirells squishy squashy were rubber meet road.
Winslow ducked under the foot and caught the lower leg with a forearm block then terminating the contest with electric charge and chemical spray.
"You might have selected a better staff Chief", Winslow said.
"Sure. You must be from the Structure Group to survive that. What’s up? Will you need any more help? I can send for reinforcements from Cowles Street to provide protection?"
"No more help now Chief, please. Just get a box carrier here immediately from the pool."
The Chief’s brain was continuously monitored as a flunky on the company’s infrared and electric field personnel surveillance remote sensing system derived from Operation Igloo in the Vietnam conflict. Unshielded human brains were monitored by sensors and computers, which translated the heat and electrical signal into actual words and images. It was a method of thought control unparalleled in history. Controllers actually saw through a target victim’s eyes and saw his thoughts in real time on remote monitors. They could interpolate superpositions as they chose.
If the population of the Earth hadn’t left for space opportunities early in the third millennium overused environmental resources and cruel competition would have solved the problem by thought subjugation of the masses with their cooperation.
The box carrier arrived in seconds. The campus reactive repulsion field allowed her to jump off the top of the Security Pool Tower safely and land next to him.
“Ready to go?” Winslow asked her.
“Right. What have you got?”
“A package for Russia.”
“You look like you could use a rest and clean. My cabin isn’t far. Want to come?”
“All right”
It was seven miles from the pipeline pig depot to Swan Dring’s cabin on Cannae Road in Goldstream Valley in Fairbanks Burrough. The light came from the moon, stars and Aurora in the short day.
She drove Winslow in her snow machine through the wind chill of one hundred ninety degrees below zero. Winslow was tired from being on the trail and happily hugged her waist with both arms. His head rested on her shoulder.
“Hold on,” she called over her shoulder. “This hill has a steep decline and we’ll hit it at fifty miles an hour. If we don’t make the turn we’ll wind up in the trees below the bank.”
The machine blew through the turn in a bullet-like plow. Powder snow exploded in an arctic haze and floated into the darkness beyond their vision. Swan Dring maneuvered the sled the remaining distance and down the willow-lined lane to her secluded cabin. She turned off the power and stood leading Winslow into her sauna.
She tenderly stripped off his winter clothing and turned on the fires and some music. The ceiling was a galactic video observatory and they reclined on a water couch to enjoy the view.
“You didn’t say what your name is Miss?” Winslow said.
“Swan Dring. This is one of my favorite places to get away from it all. I’m glad you arrived tonight. In the middle of the semester it gets lonely cracking books night after night.”
Swan Dring removed her warm-gel hat and let her gold hair cascade upon her shoulders. They relaxed together several hours.
As they ended the sauna Swan Dring opened the door to allow in the frigid arctic air. Together they walked through the snow to her cabin two hundred feet away.
Winslow woke before dark at three in the afternoon. The radio played the last sad bars of a song by the Social Delusions Band, then the Martian disc jockey read the findings of the latest Planetary Bureau of Investigation report on the Kennedy Assassination.
He opened his eyes and found a large Siberian husky with blue eyes looking into his face. The animal’s muzzle rested on the edge of the bed.
Swan Dring walked in with a cup of coffee noir. “Winslow, this is Cane, Cane, meet Winslow”
“Good morning Swan,” Winslow said. “We need to get underway to Yakust with the altereal component soon. Lets check the pig schedules along the west pipe. Is it still on the snow machine?”
“Yes” Swan said.11

She booked a pig leaving the Livengood Station beyond Fairbanks at five. They had time to relax, eat a large breakfast of sourdough pancakes, huevos rancheros and salsa before doing research. It was well-spent time.
They went outside and found a moose asleep in the driveway beside the snow machine. It apparently liked the compacted snow to the deeper drifts. She coaxed it to move, started up the machine and they set off on the winter trail to Livengood arriving at four fifteen p.m.
Simon chose the moment to strike. He stumbled through late season drifts edging the forest into the parking lot babbling incoherently because of the chronotromp. He mouthed guttural yells and primal oaths raving of the battle with the Glom tentacles beneath the icy water near Dead Man’s Island and shouted his wish to regain the altereal component.
“Don’t move Swan.” Winslow said as they stood near the station entrance. “In his present condition he might not be able to coordinate his will with his body. It’s remarkable that he even reached this station. Look at his bare feet and hands. They’re frozen solid.”12

“Who is he?” asked Swan.
“One of the structure group’s initial control and transport agents for the altereal component. They stole it.”
A Glom agent appeared in the station doorway. “Thanks for bringing us the altereal component Winslow. I expected you sooner. It looks like I won’t make it to the L-5Club for lunch. Most unsporting of you old chap.”
“Thanks for bringing in Simon.” Winslow replied. “You haven’t introduced yourself Sir.”
“Yes, quite so.” He raised a weapon. ”There’s no need for that. Just kiss your a…”
Winslow sounded reverse eagle fifth and waveform detonated a structure group land mine at the Glom Agent’s coordinate, which was placed during construction. The blast tossed Swan and Winslow into a snow pile ploughed up near the entrance. The Glom agent was scattered throughout the lot. Simon froze solid were he stood and was splattered with Glom fragments.
Swan and Winslow settled into the velvet-lined transport pig in pipe with mag of champagne & altereal component.
The pipeline in the Russian sector was made of polyglass and lay on the surface of permafrost. Absolute space ises virtual creation of existential facts.Appreciate gravity’s kindness in holding them against the Earth. Accelerated through pipe toward Yakutia and Sakhast. 13