Independence

From CleanPosts

INDEPENDENCE

At the Triplett home of a young lady named Inge Hahn, a Sanitation Auditor mentioned that in recent months she had gone from a seven dollar subscription to five dollar a month can, and he wanted to know why.

"The war's over now and I lost my job to a returning soldier," Inge explained. "You know how it is. Money never seems to go far enough. I had to get my budget more in line with my income and trash pickup was a big item."

"How did you manage it?"

"Oh, you know, I just got a little smarter in the groceries I buy and in the way I prepare my trash. You can nest trash within trash within trash if you just give it a little thought. There isn't a weight surcharge, is there?"

"Only if there's evidence of compacting, which you've so far managed to avoid. Would you mind if I looked in your backyard?"

Inge was a little too savvy for that. "Show me a search warrant," she said firmly.

"How about your husband, Miss Hahn?" the Auditor tried. "Is he home? Would he invite me out back?"

"It's just me here," Inge said sternly. "And even if I had a husband, he wouldn't be the sort of fellow who does an end run around his own wife."

"You say you're looking for work?" he tried again. "You know, your future employer might blame the inconvenience of any greater scrutiny of their dumpsters on the uncooperative attitude of one of their new employees, if word got back to them."

"Get a warrant, clown!" she barked. "I know my rights!" The door was slammed in the Sanitation Auditor's face.

Damnation! he thought. And the way the liberal judges were ruling nowadays, it would take more than going from a medium can to a small can to get a search warrant. So he left for the easier target next door, who had gone from a family-size jumbo ten dollar a month can to the five dollar one. They certainly had some explaining to do. He made a note that if Inge Hahn's trash was so much as one inch overflowing, to charge her the full seven dollars of the next can up in size.

As soon as the door slammed shut, Jerry, Robyn, Hunky, and Dory came out from hiding to join Inge in her modest living room. Doris Day was belting one out on the large radio that was the center of entertainment in the home. Hunky and Dory, as usual, were holding hands. Robyn was a few months along in her pregnancy and starting to show.

"That was very satisfying," Inga told them. She was only a few years older than the four members of the Boda, and so blond that her hair was almost white. But she had an outrageous storm of brown freckles all over her face and body. She was being meticulously groomed to be the first new member to join the Boda.

"It only gets better," Jerry Shy Bear told her. "Are you ready to go to your training house?"

"Ready when you are."

Jerry brought out the phantom blade he had manufactured for Inge. It looked like an ordinary flashlight, but when Jerry turned it on it glowed purple, and hissed like an acetylene torch. He fed a banana peel into the lens of the flashlight, which gobbled it up with not a trace left over.

"Where did it go?"

"Each atom of the banana peel is scattered to a random point somewhere in a huge ball, fourteen miles wide and centered on your house. A couple three atoms of the banana peel might even be inside you, Inge, but you didn't feel them pop in."

"Why is it hissing like that?"

"That's the air in the house being sucked in," Jerry explained.

"Let me show you a neat trick," Hunky said. She tossed a bottle cap from six feet away. It would have missed, but the hissing air near the flashlight lens guided it in to its doom.

"What is that purple glow?"

"That's the actual phantomizer ray."

"It looks more like a steady flame. Why is it shaped like a cone?"

"It's because fresh air comes in from the edges, so the phantomizer particles meet them sooner, but in the middle there's a vacuum created so the phantomizer particles go higher before they meet their first atom of air."

"Is that as high as it gets?"

"Nope, more juice makes it taller," Jerry said, carefully twisting the lens of the flashlight and making the purple "flame" grow to three feet.

"It's good for cutting too," Robyn said. She passed Inga's softball bat through the purple light. The bat fell into two pieces with the middle section effortlessly carved out.

So with Jerry leading the way, he showed Inge how to open the phantomizer to wide beam and cut a tunnel from her basement to the next door neighbor's house, which had no basement.

The new tunnel was tall enough for them to walk through it without crouching. It ended with a little cave-in of earth. A small ladder from Inge's garage was brought forward. All of them quietly gathered under the floorboards of House Ten and waited for the sounds of footsteps above to stop. When they did, that meant everyone in the house had gone to work or school.

Inga and the Boda all entered through an access hatch in the floor of a closet that had been constructed to allow the owner to make an inspection under the house.

The womenfolk went to the kitchen. "Just grab a couple dinner plates," Dory said. "Just a couple of coffee cups. Not enough to raise alarms."

"I get it," Inga said. "Even if they miss them, they'll just assume someone broke them washing them or something."

"Right."

Jerry took care of the trash. "I'm leaving just enough to fill a five dollar can."

"Why not phantomize all the trash?" Inga asked him.

"We learned our lesson the hard way. No trash raises alarms. Less trash just raises eyebrows. Now if your hosts here in House Ten go to a smaller can just like you did, you'll be saving them five dollars a month. So you can skim five dollars a month in value from this host."

"Value in what?"

"A little food from the fridge, a little beer, electric power. I'm going to show you how to tap into their lines safely. When you get seven or eight host homes on your grid they shouldn't even notice the drain of your own use."

"Ah, but living in caves underground, though," Inga murmured, as though having second thoughts.

"It's not that bad," Hunky said. "Most days you spend in houses while the occupants are away, just like we are right now. Besides, no one is looking for you yet. There's no reason you can't keep living out of your own house for the time being."

"Until I get caught."

"If you get caught being the Trash Fairy," Robyn said, "do what I did when you caught me. Try to convert them."

"And if they refuse?"

"If they refuse," she said with a wicked grin, "just remember a phantomizer is the perfect tool to make problems disappear."

Everyone saw the hundred dollars of cash lying on the top of a dresser drawer in the master bedroom, but it remained to be seen what Inge Hahn would do.

Inga saw Jerry watching him. She looked at the money, then back at Jerry. "What, are you crazy? We take that money and our whole structure will come crashing down."

Jerry Shy Bear breathed a sigh of relief. A hurdle had been passed. In that moment, in fact, he believed he won.

In truth, Inge had all the money she could want or need. She lied to the Sanitation Auditor when she said she lost her job after the war. Inge had never held a job. She lived on a bottomless allowance from her father, but not even the Boda knew about that. She was, in fact, something of a mystery to them, but if Inge ever truly became one of them, and participated in the Sharing, everything about her would be laid out under the light of day. So they bided their time and guided her along forward.

Several months earlier when Robyn gave Hunky and Dory the Golden Gift and told them to think of something to do with it, they started to dig under the ground,just like Robyn's father had once done, but they did it to create a network of tunnels between many of the houses in Wiley and Triplett. Their happy pastime was to explore empty houses when the owners were away at work or on vacations, just as Jerry had explored the abandoned staterooms of Robyn's space station.

Some of the houses on their network were never occupied and became Boda "Safe Houses" most of the time, at least when Realtors were not showcasing them to potential buyers.

Other than Inge, who caught Robyn trying this game, Hunky and Dory recruited women looking for work. It was light industrial labor. Here and there in a variety of Safe Houses gals would do hit-and-run stints assembling parts for phantomizers. They had no idea what they were working on. There was no paper trail whatsoever, all the records were kept in the nanotechnology-enhanced minds of Boda members.

The workers were paid in cash, every day. Their partially completed units would be driven to other Safe Houses where only Boda members performed the final assembly and armed the self-destruct devices inside them before they could be put on the market.

At first, Phantomizers formed the heart of a water heater that ran on the equivalent power of a single light bulb (and that juice was just to maintain the supercooling mechanism). With a little extra effort Jerry could have made the device generate all its internal electic power, just like the Golden Gift, but then people would know something was fishy and never buy them.

Still, with the amount of electricity and natural gas that was saved, the device paid for itself in only three years. The Boda guaranteed the operation of phantomizers for five years, but the warranty was void if it had melted into a solid block of metal, because this meant that tampering by the user had occurred.

Other customers used the Phantomizer together with a creek running through their property as a source of electrical power, like a generator that never needed to be refueled and produced only water vapor for exhaust. This allowed them to drop off the centralized power grid and get back to their self-sufficient pioneering roots as Americans.

Still others modified their cars with turbines that ran on the ultra-hot steam that the phantomizer could produce. It was the very beginning of the Phantom Revolution, but the movement took so long building up speed that as far as the Boda could tell, it remained below the government's radar, and by the time the government knew enough to grow alarmed (for indeed, the phantomizer meant the end of the old order) too many early-adopters were already dependent on their units and the good word could not be stamped out.

Given sufficient time even bumbling government operatives eventually had a few successes. They managed to capture a handful of phantomizers to see what the fuss was about and to see what could be done to neutralize them. The government even found a use for phantomizers. They were far more efficient at destroying incriminating documents than the slower paper shredders, which tended to jam. But any attempt to penetrate the secrets of the phantomizer resulted in an inert unit as the crucial components somehow disappeared.

When the Boda's secret network grew to cover the entire city of River City, with tendrils as far as Amnesty, forty percent of the people were only using the small five dollar cans. The county government made up for the shortfall by charging a flat ten dollars no matter what size can was used.

The Boda retaliated by going to total trash disposal...one hundred percent of their host's garbage was phantomized, and many of the citizens dropped weekly pick-up service altogether.

Citizens who cooperated with Sanitation Auditors and allowed them to come inside their homes were punished by the Boda most severely. The Trash Fairy never visited them again.

But those citizens who were ordered by a judge to allow a Sanitation Auditor to inspect their homes were not punished. Trash pickup continued through a small hole in the bottom of their trash can. All of the citizens treated in this way resented the courts enough not to mention the neat round hole that had appeared at the bottom of their trash can.

The City's next move was a ten dollar surcharge on electric power for every home not subscribed to weekly trash pickup service. Jerry Shy Bear countered with a type of phantomizer that ate only electrons. Tie your circuit to earth ground for a source of free electrons, and Jerry's phantomizer constantly disposed of them. You got a current flow.

Part of this was diverted to run the phantomizer itself but the rest was free juice. The electricity was ran through an inverter, phase-matched to the AC line current, and soon many houses went off the City's power grid for good.

The Boda wasn't just confined to the neighborhoods. A large fraction of the cost of doing any kind of manufacturing was in disposing wastes. The Boda would do that for one company at ridiculously low prices, allowing that company to pass the savings on to the consumer and drive all their competitors out of business. Then, armed with their monopoly, prices would creep back up and the Boda would squeeze them for a share.

Drilling for water costs five hundred bucks? The Boda will do it for one hundred. Drilling for oil costs ten thousand bucks? The Boda will do it for $200 with a phantomizer and a ball of twine to hang it from.

But life in the Boda wasn't all business.

In late spring of 1946 Robyn gave birth to her daughter, Joy Shy Bear. Because she was essentially a fugitive, it had to be a home delivery, a hospital was out of the question. The entire Boda, including now Inge, did what they could but there was no solution for Robyn's labor pain. She said, "It hurts like hell."

Still, she did not dare to compare her suffering to that of Bat-El or Ariel.

Robyn knew perfectly the reason for her suffering. Humans were the only animals on Earth that walked upright. At every moment, they were faced with the threat of being disemboweled simply by standing up. So the hole in the pelvic floor had to be as small as possible to prevent that.

At the same time, humans had the largest brains of any animal on Earth as a percentage of their total body mass. So the opening in the pelvis could not be too small, or the infant would be wedged in the birth canal and die. The baby's skull did not fully form until after birth, so it deformed during birth to ease the passage, but the ordeal was still very dangerous for both, and painful for the mother.

But when it was over Robyn had Joy, literally and figuratively. She was healthy and came with a little pad of soft black hair. Robyn found that words would always fail to fully convey the greatest possible human experience, that of bringing another human life into the world. Joy was:

Doll-like Dainty Ruddy Feisty Beautiful

Robyn loved to hold her face close to her own and sniff her soft baby scent, that special new person smell. Binah was a mother! She was Joy's mother! And Jerry's joy in Joy was just as great as Robyn's, even if he could never grasp the full depth of her joy in giving life to Joy. Ariel had tried to describe this to Binah, but it was something that had to be lived.

When Robyn was fully recovered, the Boda spent a lot of their time making music once again, just like in their school days. Inge was by far the biggest fan of the bebop jazz band named Hunky-Dory.

During the war there had been a strike by the unionized professional musicians, banning any form of recording, until a better royalty-sharing arrangement was conceded by the labels.

The most popular style of music going into the War was big-band swing, but the recording ban from 1942 to 1944 forced radio stations to feature crooners who would sing over recycled jazz recordings. These crooners such as Frank Sinatra became the first pop idols, and purely instrumental swing faded into the background. Only when the recording strike was over did audiences learn swing had given way to bebop jazz, which emphasized complicated chord progressions over melody, and at first they didn't like it, much as rap music took a long time catching on in the 1980s.

Bebob or rebop was lumped with rhythm and blues and termed "race music". Many whites shifted their tastes to "hillbilly" music, the progenitor of Country and Western, or to folk music which celebrated the politics of the labor movement.

Over the next ten years, bebop and hillbilly music would merge to become rockabilly, and merge again with 1930's style blues to form the final most stable genre of twentieth century popular music, rock 'n' roll.

Folk music would fall out of favor in the wake of the McCarthy hearings attempting to root all communist influence out of American culture, only to emerge again in the 60s and 70s when solo singer-songwriters became prominent.

After tape technology was introduced following the War, there was no longer any need to record a performance in one take directly to a shellac master disk. Musicians with less skill, therefore, could still create acceptable recordings by making numerous attempts. The number of recordings grew far beyond the ability to catalog them, and record companies began to compete for radio air time.

The major radio networks found that television was profitable indeed, and shifted their focus to developing shows for the new technology. Hunky-Dory's big break was on a television show called Sidney Buller Time, which featured amateur performers.

Hunky-Dory was the first white bebop quartet. Race music by a German-American band. It was quite a novelty in 1946, but there was much cross-fertilization of cultures after the war, and some dared hope for an end to racial inequality.

By the middle of the summer of 1946 Inge Hahn became something of a "roadie" ten years before such a thing became popular in the days of touring rock bands. Never without her clipboard, she became very good at directing work crews to set up Hunky's drum kit, Robyn's piano, the microphones, and the amplifiers.

Her organizational skills applied to the band as well. It was Inga who set up their gigs, and scheduled their tours. But the two biggest things she had going for her was that she was rich and bored.

Inge never mentioned that it was her father who kept her well funded, but she was quite generous in throwing it around so Hunky-Dory had everything they needed, from instruments to food for the band. This was important in the earliest day before they started to see a lot of income from phantomizers.

It was a curious thing, Inge's money, but no one in the Body probed too hard, because they didn't want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.

It was Inge's boredom that interested Jerry in particular. She was something of a daredevil. One time he cut the leads off from an electronic component called a capacitor and told her it was a narcotic. She instantly took it from his hand and swallowed it. After that, it took very little persuasion to get Inge to accept the Change by allowing herself to be skewered by the Artifact.

* * * * * 

Late in June 1947 a US Marine C-46 transport plane crashed on the remote western side of Mount John the Baptist, the highest peak in the Enfilade Range, and when word got around, a private pilot named Arnold Kenmore volunteered to aid with the search.

While he was circling the mountain on June 24 he spotted a cluster of nine brightly glowing meteors rushing past his plane toward remote Mt. Monroe in the south. Because they were pieces of a fireball in the process of breaking up, they seemed to be flying in formation, so Arnold assumed they were aircraft, and he interpreted their intermittent bursts of brightness to be the sun glinting off of polished metal.

The pieces were of irregular shape and tumbling and this made them appear to hop up and down in the airstream. Kenmore told the press they flew like "a saucer skipping over water." This was the first modern sighting of Unidentified Flying Objects and it sparked a national obsession with "Flying Saucers" that bordered on mass hysteria because people insisted on identifying them as spacecraft operated by aliens.

By July 7 there had been many more UFO sightings. Some were ordinary mistakes but most were outright copycat hoaxes. The reporters had garbled Arnold Kenmore's description. He was trying to convey that the objects moved like saucers, not that they looked like saucers. But it was too late, the erroneous quote was already in print, so everyone was seeing saucers.

Jerry Shy Bear was adapting the phantomizer to allow powered flight by constantly sucking in air from an intake manifold on the roof of the vehicle, and making the air "go away", leaving the central chamber ready for more. It would move much like a helicopter, but with an ability to stay aloft indefinitely. Jerry was, however, stumped on a final body design.

The first thing that came to Robyn's mind was the big national flying saucer craze. She said, "If we make it in the shape of a flying saucer, then even if people see us and report it, they won't be believed. If they photograph us in flight, they will be accused of taking a snapshot of a hub cap."

Jerry thought it was a brilliant idea and he built three flying saucers powered by the phantom process. He spent a week teaching Robyn, Hunky, Dory, and Inge to use them. Some of the UFO reports mixed in with the recent public hysteria, therefore, were genuine sightings.

The saucers had two means of propulsion. One was the new hover mode, using air, and it had unlimited time on station. The second method used the phantomizer core as a simple rocket.

It was simplicity itself. Water was the propellant, steam was the only by-product. There was nothing flammable involved, the steam came out in an invisible hot column that quickly condenses into great clouds but no fire lit the clouds from within. The amount of total power was almost unlimited, depending only on how much water was simultaneously crammed into the combustion chamber to overlap in the phantom state.

Most of the interior of the saucer consisted of water tanks. When it was fully loaded, it was far too heavy for hover mode. So the procedure was to use the rocket mode to get to an area of interest, and then hover. Depending on the distance, returning home would require tanking back up on water from somewhere near the destination. The pilot entered the saucer from a hatch on the top, and climbed down through the central core to a round cockpit with glass windows which was slung underneath, providing a 360 degree view. While resting on the ground, the saucer was elevated slightly on three legs with footpads.

At the end of Training Week, satisfied the saucer had air-tight integrity and was capable of supporting human life with some degree of comfort, Robyn took one saucer, kissed her husband goodbye, and said she was off to cash in her one same-sex "freebie" that Jerry owed her.

Robyn wore a skin-tight gray nylon flight suit that looked much better on her now than it would have in her high school days. When Binah took possession of her, it was accompanied by a greater discipline when it came to eating the right kinds of foods, in the proper amounts, and despite her recently pregnancy she was now attractively slender. Jerry was loath to see her go, even for a short time.

Robyn loaded baby Joy into her saucer and launched at night. There was an unavoidable and ungodly roar, but nothing at all for the good folks of Wiley to see.

Jerry watched her depart high into the sky, arcing to the east, and he assumed Robyn was going to fly off to somewhere else relatively nearby, perhaps just over the Enfilade Range, but she in fact was doing a ballistic suborbital flight that would take her not only over the whole United States but over the Atlantic as well. She was not afraid. Four thousand years prior to this she often did the same sort of thing with the angel of Binah. It felt good to be back in the saddle.

• * * * *

As a consequence of her victory over the Ottoman Turks in the First World War, Great Britain became the master of the whole Middle-East. In the closing days of the War the British Foreign Secretary. A.J. Balfour, declared that "His Majest's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievment of this object."

In 1922 the Churchill White Paper put forth the premise that Jewish immigration to Palestine could continue until such a time as there was a Jewish majority there. But by 1939 Britain bowed to pressure from Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen to reverse this position, and it hit at precisely the same time that Jews were being exterminated throughout the growing Reich.

After the War, Polish Jews refused to be repatriated to their homes. Physical attacks on them continued, and several hundred were murdered in the first three months after hositilies ended. Hundreds of thousands of Jews ended up in Displaced Persons camps throughout Europe, where conditions were only marginally better than they had been in the death camps.

For the balance of 1945, only eight small ships carrying a thousand Displaced Persons reached Palestine from ports in Italy and Greece. For the first half of 1946, another 10,500 immigrants arrived on eleven ships. But the British quickly caught on to this trick. From August 1946 to December 1947, 51,700 Displaced Persons tried to make their way to Palestine on thirty-five ships, but were captured by the British and taken to camps on the island of Cyprus, where they languished behind barbed wire.

Many of the armed guards of these camps in Cyprus had liberated some of the same prisoners from the extermination camp at Belsen-Belson only eighteen months prior to this, and they knew it.

During this period, clandestine immigration to Palestine fell to a trickle. But Lilith Gervasi made her way there by a most unique and bizarre way.

Robin had gotten it into her head that she wanted to see Europe. But when she reached the top of her parabolic arc thousands of miles above the Earth, and was weightless for four minute, she looked down and saw much of Europe was shrouded in white clouds. Only the islands of Great Britain and Ireland were visible through partial clearing. She shrugged and made her orbital plane change accordingly.

Besides, she only knew English and the languages that Binah were familiar with, which did not include any of the Germanic or Romance languages of the Continent.

Her descent burn consumed the last of her water as she aimed for Land's End, which was easily discerned. After that, Robyn switched her saucer to hover mode and flew over the moors to visit Stonehenge, where she landed inside the circle of stones, directly over the central altar stone.

Briefly, Robyn got out of the saucer and walked around inside Stonehenge in her skin tight gray flight suit, while still wearing her bulbous grey crash helmet. Baby Joy remained inside the saucer all bundled up.

Her sightseeing, unfortunately, attracted a lot of attention from the other tourists, so Robyn decided to cut her visit short. She took to the skies again. And from that time forward, aliens would be depicted in the popular media as having girlish gray bodies and giant heads.

Robyn was banking on the authorities being too skeptical about reports of aliens and flying saucers to do anything, but she made a simple miscalculation. Britain still had Radio Direction Finding from the War, except now it had been refined and was now called RADAR. Two fighters were sortied from a Cornwall airfield to check her out.

The first pass was a close one to check her out. Robyn didn't wait for a second pass. She opened the phantomizer to full and did a climb straight up to thirty thousand feet, far beyond the abililty of the propeller-driven fighters to reach.

After that, the safety of her daughter Joy began to weigh in her mind much more than her desire to have a mini-vacation, and it shamed Robyn to realize it had not been so, no matter how briefly. So she resolved to tank back up on water and return home. The trick was to do it without being seen.

She found what she thought was the perfect place, at the extreme southern extension of the Isle of Wight, where a seacoast cliff and some hills would hide her. There was only a lighthouse there, and the nearest settlement was a sleepy one a mile away up a ravine which indented the cliff.

Robyn landed on the beach and began to unfurl the hose to siphon sea water into the saucer's tanks. Saltwater would work just fine, but Jerry would need to flush it with fresh water when she got home to prevent corrosion of the aluminum.

It did not occur to Robyn that her nighttime intrusion here at the lighthouse was exactly the same thing an SS U-Boat commando squad did in 1944.

It also did not occur to her that one Lilith Gervasi, an English Jew and eighteen year old survivor of the Holocaust, did not sleep nights anymore, but stayed awake, watching the coast with her war surplus Lee-Enfield bolt-action rifle for Nazis who would never come. For she suffered terribly from something 21st Century doctors would call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Robyn was not a Nazi, but she was a flying saucer driver and Lilith wasn't taking chances. She fired a round from fifty yards to get Robyn's attention, then advanced closer. This would prove to be a historic meeting.

Robyn had her hands over her head, palms forward to show she had no weapon. When Lilith drew close enough, Robyn told her, "Don't shoot again, I have a baby in the cockpit. Glass won't protect her."

"Who are you?" Lilith demanded. "You sound like a bloody Yank."

"My name is Robyn Shy Bear," she said. "And you are correct, I am American. Just a tourist, but I got something less than a warm welcome from your Royal Air Force."

Lilith's rifle dropped a bit from its sight-line on Robyn's head. It was now aimed at her heart. Lilith said, "What are you doing here?"

"Filling the tanks of my. . .airplane."

"With seawater? I'm sorry, I don't believe you, Miss Robyn. Airplanes do not run on water!"

"A sled doesn't run on bricks, either," Robyn said, "but if you throw them fast enough, your sled will start to move the other way. So who are you, if I may ask?"

"Lilith Gervasi," she said. Her rifle dropped a bit more, but Robyn was still wary. A gut shot would still kill her, but just take a bit longer, and be far more painful.

"I have enough water to go home now," Robyn told her. "If you will put your gun away, I'll leave, and you will never see me again."

Lilith lowered the rifle to point at the ground between them. "Do you really have a baby in that thing?" Robyn retrieved Joy (after waking her up) and set her down on the sandy beach. She was old enough to walk by herself now. Lilith saw Robyn standing there, holding the toddler's hand, and that was enough. She unchambered the round and slung her rifle over her back.

It was pre-dawn, and in the gloomy light that was beginning to gather, Robyn could take a better look at Lilith. The girl was three years younger than herself, but there was an aged look in her hollow eyes, as though she had already lived four lifetimes, and it haunted Robyn. A kind of Darwinian process in the camps had produced a girl who was able to outwit, bribe, or intimidate anyone to get what she needed to survive.

Robyn knew nothing of this yet, but somehow she saw the results right on Lilith's surface, and suddenly, more than anything in the world, she wanted the girl on her team.

"Do you live here, at the lighthouse?" Robyn asked her.

Lilith nodded. Robyn didn't know anything else about her, other than her name. The work camps had emaciated her body, and when she returned home to the Isle of Wight and was fed by her father, the weight came back in the form of strong, wiry muscles. She was eighteen but looked twice that. Robyn assumed she was married, and asked, "Is your husband here?"

"My father is here," she said. "He operates the lighthouse and runs a weather outstation."

"I should like to meet him," Robyn said.

Lilith spat at the ground. "He has sold his life to the Goy and betrayed the destiny of my nation to rule Palestine."

"The Goy? Goyim. You're Jewish!"

Lilith nodded. "I am a member of a people whose very right to exist is always being questioned."

"And when you say your nation, I presume you are not speaking of England."

"My father rendered a service to the Crown that went far beyond the sacrifices that any other Britons were asked to make. No doubt you have heard of the cross-Channel invasion of France. I believe you American's refer to it by 'D-Day'. My father provided the weather forecast that made it possible. But beyond that, he was used by the government to help deceive Hitler as to exactly where the invasion was going to take place. A British admiral came here and told my father we were going to land at Calais on June the 20th, 1944, and not at Normandy on June the 6th. He was told this knowing there was a strong possibility that a team of Nazis could storm the lighthouse from a submarine and force my father to talk."

"The cynicism of such a thing is breathtaking," Robyn said.

They planted false information on my father," Lilith continued, " and the Nazis did indeed arrive, and not only did my father talk, but he was kept silent about his talking by the simple device of taking myself and my moth-er to occupied Europe as insurance. We ended up in camps, and I watched my mother die in a most horrible way."

And Lilith showed Robyn the six numbers tattooed to her arm by the SS at Ohrdruf. Robyn gasped, knowing that Lilith had come through such suffering and human degradation and evil that she could never begin to understand the mere periphery of it, let alone sympathize with the core of the girl's ordeal and her memories of it.

"So you see, the Crown owes a very large marker to my father, but he will not cash it in to obtain a thing, a concession of such little import it could not possibly disconcert the government in the smallest way. The Foreign Secretary refuses to allow Jews to immigrate to the British Mandate in Palestine. Not even Jews who are already British subjects."

"Why not, Lilith?"

"Oil."

One word, but it explained everything. The Middle-East was awash in petroleum, but if the Arabs could not be assured that the Jews would never have an independent state there, they would attack the wells owned and operated by the British. So the Balfour Declaration and the Churchill White Paper were torn up for the worthless pieces of paper they always were, and all bets were off in the Holy Land.

“The admiral who deceived my father is dead. My father is willing to let the whole matter go.” Joy started to cry. It was cold, dawn was just breaking, and she wanted to crawl back into the warm saucer and go back to sleep. Robyn picked her up and said to Lilith, "What would you do if I said you could come with us, and be in Palestine within the hour?"

“What would I do?”

Lilith did not hesitate at all. She went into the grounds of the lighthouse complex, and returned ten minutes later carrying a small tote bag with clothing and her personal effects. She also carried her rifle, but now she also had several boxes of .303 caliber cartridges, carried on little straps. But she had not taken the time to wake her father and notify him that she was leaving, and Robyn had an intuition that Lilith could never be persuaded to do so.

In the saucer, Robyn took Lilith directly from the shore of the Isle of Wight to a coastal village in Palestine. The flight took only about thirty minutes.

Somewhere over the Alps they topped out, and enjoyed two minutes of free fall. Joy giggled as she bounced around the inner core of the saucer. Lilith found the hem of her dress flying up, as though she was immersed in water. She gathered Joy to herself and held her in her arms when gravity slowly returned to them. Astonished, she stared hard at Robyn, who remained in her seat, and said, “Who are you really?”

“Hopefully, Lilith, I will be your lifetime friend.”

Holding Joy in her arms had an effect that Lilith could never put into words.

After they landed Lilith was whisked away by a number of Jewish farmers who lived a few miles inland from the Mediterranean, at a kibbutz founded by Polish immigrants in 1943 named Yad Mordechai. The settlement lay on the coast highway only eight miles north of the city of Gaza and today lies only two and a half miles outside of the border of the Gaza Strip.

Lilith spoke no Polish, nor at that point had she learned Hebrew (which had been revived from extinction to become the tongue of Eretz Yisrael). But all she had to do was brandish the tattoo on her forearm, and it was enough for the pioneers. They did not even question her unusual mode of transportation.

In the weeks and months that followed, Lilith began to suspect she had been taken to her new home by an angel of G-d. That morning began to seem like a dream. But much fighting lay ahead, and none of that was a dream. She didn't see Robyn again until after the armistice agreements of 1949, when the new state of Israel had won the War of Independence.