Gods Without Men

1970

It was as simple as that. Step by step, she walked away from the town and into the Command, which absorbed her into its structure like a big soap bubble incorporating a little one.

Bubbles, said Wolf, were a good way to think about the future. Soon buildings would be more like them, soft and fluid, free to float away at any time and attach themselves to another cluster. At a moment’s notice you could change your mind about how you lived. You could be part of a city, or a village, or stay on your own. Just untether yourself from your surroundings and go. That, he told her, was what freedom looked like.

Dawn didn’t know much about freedom. All she knew was the life she wanted didn’t include working at the store or grappling on the backseat of Frankie’s Plymouth or her uncle running her over with his eyes all the time like she was something good to eat.

There were about ten of them. They lay out on the rocks by the Indian signs, climbing a route she’d known since she was a kid. The whorls and crosshatched lines scraped into the red-black varnish. The white bed of the dry lake leading away toward the mountains. They passed a joint. Someone was tapping out a slow, soft rhythm on a drum. Wolf laughed and stretched out flat, sunning himself on a ledge. Dawn peered over the lip at the construction going on below. Beneath the overhang, in a hollow whose roof was about fifty feet off the ground, nestled the half-finished skeleton of a dome, like a broken eggshell. People were clambering over it, winching up metal poles welded into triangular struts, bolting them to the structure. Raggle-taggle freaks in Goodwill finery, spidering over a huge frame. Already the cluster of huts and trailers where they lived seemed small and temporary.

From one of the huts emerged a long tail of cable. It snaked its way under the rocks, where it disappeared into a hole.

“What’s that down there?”

Wolf glanced down. “Oh, that’s my brother. He’s probably under us right now, listening.”

“Listening?”

“That’s what he does. He’s sneaky that way.”

“Did I meet him?”

“I don’t think so. You’d remember if you had. He looks like me, only uglier. Slant eyes, long nose?”

She laughed. “I don’t think I met anyone like that.”

“Like I said, you’d remember.”

As the summer wore on, Dawn spent most of her free time at the rocks, hanging out with Wolf and his friends. There were so many people to get to know. Pilgrim Billy and Floyd and Sal and Marcia and Yucca Woman and the Sky Down Feather Brothers. They were all older than her and about the most interesting and different personality types you could imagine. They were scary too, in a not-quite-good way with their weird talk about reintegration and the land of the dead and the community of the whatever-they-were planets. The person who freaked her out most was one-eye Clark Davis. He dressed like a fool, in a panama hat and Keds and a sort of biblical bedsheet robe. He must have been handsome once, in an old-fashioned Errol-Flynnish style. Before his accident.

Dawn tried to keep her distance from Davis, who was friendly in a manner she didn’t care for. She never saw much of Judy, who was usually shut up in one of the caravans or meditating with Maa Joanie. The girl wasn’t like anyone else at the compound. She never dressed up, always wore the same white shirt and jeans. She looked so neat and scrubbed it was hard to imagine she lived in the midst of all that dust and chaos. If you met her on the street, you’d think she was a secretary or maybe the nicer kind of student. A good Christian. She didn’t sing or play music with the others. She never hooked up with anyone, though you’d find her beautiful, if you went for the wholesome type. She looked healthy but at the same time far away, like someone had unplugged something she needed to connect her to the current of everyday life.

Dawn made a friend called Mountain. She had a southern-fried accent and green eyes that seemed to be looking at something just behind you, as if she could see what was coming up in the future. One night they went up on the rocks and Mountain told her the story of Judy and Joanie and what had happened back in the old days, when the First Guide had gotten himself killed trying to reintegrate the Earth into the Confederation. There was a terrible fire, something to do with the electrics in a machine he’d built to communicate with the Space Brothers. He was trapped inside a capsule and burned to death. Others were killed, too. Clark Davis had been there, and lost his eye trying to drag people out. After everything was cleared away there was still one person missing and that was Joanie’s daughter, who was only eight years old. Everyone thought she must have been killed, though they couldn’t find her remains. Joanie refused to believe them. She always said that little Judy had been evacuated by the fleet, and sooner or later she would come back. She knew that if she waited patiently, the Space Brothers would return her little girl. So she came out to the rocks and that was exactly what happened. One day Judy came walking out of the desert, looking like she’d been out for a stroll. She was older, of course, because time had passed on the ships just the same as it had on Earth. But Joanie knew her at once. Judy had spent ten years in orbit being educated and infused with higher knowledge. Now she had returned to be the new Guide.

Dawn didn’t know what she thought of that. She busied herself helping out with the earthly business of the Ashtar Galactic Command, fetching and carrying, chopping carrots and potatoes for huge pots of the tasteless vegetable stew that was all anyone seemed to eat. The food was one thing she found hard to get along with, but she was prepared to suffer a few hardships because her new friends turned out to be on a mission to achieve the salvation of Earth.

Here are some of the things Dawn wanted: to be herself, to live in a bubble, to make it with Wolf, to experience Divine Universal Love. She diced onions and humped scaffold poles and stared into the fire and little by little the Pinnacles became more real to her than the dusty streets of town, more real than the high school or Hansen’s Service Station or the Dairy Queen or even the General Store, though she still spent long hours dreaming behind the counter, tuning out Old Man Craw’s lectures about morals and Communism and the correct way to stack egg noodles. Wolf said the purpose of the Ashtar Galactic Command was to reintegrate the Earth into the Space Confederation. At first she just laughed at him and he laughed along with her, as if he didn’t really believe it, either. But he was serious. They were all serious. There was some kind of project, and thinking about it scared her slightly, but for the moment all she wanted was to be part of something bigger than herself, to clap her hands in the circle and sometimes get up to dance.

Soon the dome started to shine. The Command was cladding it in metal from car tops, which could be had for twenty-five cents a time from a wrecker’s yard in Barstow. The guys drove over in the school bus, and since they didn’t have cutting torches they just chopped the tops out of the cars, standing on the roofs and swinging axes like giant can openers. Back at base, they beat the metal into triangles, hammering them over the frames. The dome looked like a shiny ball trapped underneath the arch of a foot. The metal surfaces caught the sun like a beacon, which was the way they wanted it, except they were trying to signal outer space rather than town, and town was where people found they couldn’t ignore it. At certain times of day, particularly late afternoon, the glare fishhooked you, caught in your eye as you tried to go about your business. A lot of folks found it a provocation.

In town they grumbled. Out at the rocks, girls perched thirty feet off the ground, their bare breasts swinging back and forth as they swung a mallet at some nut or bolt.

“Our job,” confided Mountain one day, “is to reconnect the Earth to the current of spiritual impressions.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re surrounded by negative energy and it’s beginning to tilt the Earth on its axis.”

“What’ll happen when it tilts?”

“Tidal waves. Massive destruction. The devastation of almost all life on the planet.”

She must have looked freaked out, because Mountain stroked her cheek.

“You don’t have to worry, honey. You’re part of the Light now. The Command is monitoring us on all frequencies. If it happens, they’ll evacuate us. It’s the others we’re worried about. There’s not going to be enough room for everyone.”

Dawn tried to imagine a tidal wave rushing across the desert. Like a flash flood, only a million times greater. There were many things she had to learn. It turned out there were many sources of negative energy vibrations, including:

War

the H-bomb

cities

greed

artificial fibers

the financial markets

television

needle drugs

plastics

fear rays

other dark-side weapons

Of all these, the H-bomb was the worst. Not just because it was nuclear. Because it used hydrogen. Splitting hydrogen atoms threatened the life force. It was in air and water, part of the Earth’s very soul. Also, the burning of hydrocarbons such as coal and oil (whose atoms contained Earth memories of the Ancient Times when dinosaurs roamed and man was unconscious of his inner truth) was combining with the modern-day projections of human negativity to produce smog, which lay over big cities and made it hard for Lightworkers to signal the fleets. That was one reason the Earth base was located in the desert. Pollution.

It was a beautiful thing, reconnecting the Earth. It was going to save billions of lives. So it was frustrating that Dawn’s school friends didn’t seem to understand. Whenever she said a word about the Command, they treated her like a mental case. They couldn’t see beyond the lack of air-conditioning and the dust and the vegetable stew. She tried to tell them there was something wondrous about life in the Ashtar Galactic Command. Something real.

“What’s not real about here?” asked Sheri. “No one place’s realer than another.”

They were sitting in the Dairy Queen. Dawn shrugged. From the look of Sheri and Janet Graves and Diane Castillo, surrounding her in the booth, it didn’t seem worth trying to argue. She could talk all day and they wouldn’t hear a thing.

Sheri was suspicious. “Have they got you hooked on something?”

Another unanswerable question. Of course they had. Energy, Reality. Whatever you wanted to call it. There was stuff out there those girls had no idea existed, alien ships big as cities hovering invisibly a thousand miles over their town.

“It’s about love,” she said. “What can I tell you? It’s about shining forth with the Light.”

“Oh my goodness,” said Sheri. “Oh my.”

By the time the nights started getting cold, things had pretty much broken down with Aunt Luanne and Uncle Ray. Old Craw fired her from the store for running off with Wolf too many times and Uncle Ray told her she was going to have to find some other kind of work and quick, because he sure as heck wasn’t going to carry freeloaders. He had a whole lot more to say, about decency and the young men fighting in Vietnam and the obligations that came with living under his roof. When she told him she was against the war and suggested he’d probably be less uptight if he was to get rid of his stupid roof and float free of the rest of town in a personal bubble, he got mad and slapped her face. He would have done worse had her aunt not intervened.

Dawn knew what really bothered the old bastard: the thought of her having “sexual relations.” He’d come home from work (he drove a back-hoe out at the borax plant) and start right in on lecturing her. It was sexual relations this and sexual relations that, and she had the idea that he sat there in his cab, pulling levers and imagining in fine detail who was or wasn’t getting into the white cotton panties she pegged out on the line in the yard. He’d always been sort of touchy-feely, even when she was a little kid and first went to live with him and Aunt Luanne. He’d pinch her thighs and pat her on the tush in a way that always meant more than he was letting on, but in the last year or so he’d really let the cat out of the bag. If she was sunbathing, he’d find some reason to be outside with her, fooling about in the rain gutter or tinkering with his truck. He had this whole routine of walking in on her when she was in the bathroom, pretending he hadn’t heard the shower running. She’d taken to wedging a chair against the door, and even then he kept on trying the handle. She knew what he wanted, and he knew she knew. The idea of her making it with “some greaser” was probably more than he could bear.

She’d have been out of that cramped little ranch house like a bullet if only she’d been confident she could support herself. She was half sure the Time of Tribulation was coming, in which case money wouldn’t matter soon enough. The other half of her mind was full of inconvenient questions about where she’d be in five years’ time and how she was going to pay for it. So she went to speak to Mr. Hansen about a job, and he said he might have something because he was opening up a new location over in Morongo. She might be suitable, just as long as she kept up her appearance. He asked why she’d stopped doing her hair. She’d given up on the spray and curling iron and was wearing it straight, or else tied up in a bandanna like the other girls at the Command. Lena and Sheri had said flat out it was a cry for help.

Eventually Uncle Ray banned her from going out to the Pinnacles, and for a while she did as she was told. Then Pioneer Day came along and the folks from the Command drove into town in their school bus, which they’d freshly painted silver like a NASA rocket and wanted to run in the parade. Mayor Robertson and the other committee men refused to let them, though the parade was a small, drab affair, just the high-school marching band and the veterans and the fire department and the Cholla Queen and her cactus maidens waving from the back of a convertible. With their costumes and that great glittering dazzle of a bus, the Command would have livened things up, but those committee boys had some excuse about permits and applications needing to be made in advance and right then and there she decided she couldn’t stand it anymore. It was time to pick sides. That afternoon, when the big silver bus drove out of town, she was on it.

Problem was she was under twenty-one. Uncle Ray must have infected the mind of Sheriff Waghorn with imagery of her panties, because the next day Waghorn was out at the rocks, purple-faced, bellowing about how he was going to commission a medical examination to check she was still “intact” and threatening all kinds of legal consequences if she wasn’t. “Are you here of your own free will?” he kept asking, repeating the question when she said yes, thank you, as if putting it a third or fourth or God help her a fifth time might produce a different answer. “Did they give you anything? An injection? Did you eat something made you drowsy?” She’d have laughed out loud if she weren’t also scared to hell. When she refused point-blank to go back with him, the sheriff got so angry he snorted the breath out of his nostrils like a bull.

She thought the Command would just put her out. She was bringing trouble on them. But Clark Davis took her over to Maa Joanie’s shack for a meeting. It was one of the buildings on the compound that was kind of off-limits and she’d never had reason to go in there. The shack turned out to be just one room full of all kinds of books and papers and religious items, crystals and Buddha statues and candles and pictures of Jesus opening up his bleeding heart. Maa Joanie had hung it with electric Christmas lights, which made the whole place look like a cantina in Mexicali she’d once been to with Uncle Ray and Aunt Luanne. There was a little bed covered with a patchwork comforter and an old-fashioned washstand with a basin and jug and a big round mirror and a few photographs in frames that mostly seemed to feature groups of people in shiny uniforms, with sashes and tunics and little hats like tin soldiers or majorettes.

Maa Joanie was sitting in a rocking chair. Judy stood behind her, brushing her hair with a silver-backed brush. She was concentrating real hard, her eyes sparkling like it was some sort of treat.

“Hundred strokes before bedtime,” said Maa Joanie, who looked contented, half asleep. Clark Davis turned a wooden chair backward and sat down heavily on it, rotating his hat nervously in his hands.

“Well, little Dawn, you’ve certainly put the cat among the pigeons.”

“I didn’t mean to. I just want to be here, you know? Be part of the Light.”

“I can understand that. But, as Sheriff Waghorn was at pains to remind me, your uncle’s still your legal guardian. He’s got the right to decide what’s best for you.”

“My uncle’s an asshole.”

“That’s as may be.”

“It might be best if she goes,” said Maa Joanie, who didn’t even look over, just stared off into the distance with that dreamy expression on her face.

“Do you want to?” asked Davis.

“No! You don’t know what it’s like. My uncle’s a creep, and my aunt doesn’t do a thing about it.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I–I don’t know.”

“You’re saying he’s interfering with you?”

“Well …” She thought about it for a moment. “Yes.” It was true enough. It was what was on his mind.

“I want to be clear. This involves touching and such? Sexual touching?”

“Yes,” she said more firmly.

“Clark, I don’t like this,” said Maa Joanie. “We’ve got a burden on our shoulders as it is.”

“But if what Dawn says is true, then her uncle’s in league with the Dark Forces. Look at this girl, Joanie. She’s a starchild! You can see the mark on her brow. We can’t just throw her out. We have a duty.”

“They’re going to come after her. They’ll start hassling us, and we’re too far along just to up and move to another place.”

“Then we’ll fight. That’s what we’re here to do.”

“This isn’t the Tribulation. It’s not that time.”

“It’s close. We all know that. We need to take guidance. We ought to contact the Command.”

While they were talking, Judy stood behind Maa Joanie, the hairbrush held limply in her hand. The faintest trace of a smile played about the corners of her mouth. Dawn didn’t see what was so funny. This was her life they were talking about.

Maa Joanie got up and switched off the Christmas lights, leaving only a candle burning on the nightstand. Everyone settled themselves down. Not really knowing what to do, Dawn just followed the others, sitting with her hands in her lap, dropping her head like she was praying in church. It was clear that Judy was now in charge. She did some kind of strange breathing thing and began to speak.

“Calling Command! Calling Command! Beloved Commanders, are you monitoring my wave? Come in, if you are receiving this signal. We of Earth desire contact with the Light.”

There was a silence, then a deep male voice spoke. Dawn didn’t dare open her eyes, but it sounded as if it was coming from where Judy was sitting.

“Salutations! I am Argus, director of Earth Missions, 325th wave. I am standing by. Discontinue.”

Maa Joanie spoke.

“Beloved Commander Argus! Greetings and salutations to you and your Supreme Commander Ashtar. In the name of Lord Jesus-Sananda, we need advice. Earth base is threatened by law enforcement operatives in league with the Dark Forces. We need to know if we should protect a young Lightworker, or if we should ask her to sacrifice her connection for the greater good of the mission.”

“I hear you, Beloved. Your emotions are imprinted on my soul. You are in doubt. I am sorry that it should be so. This is a complex problem. I will consult my colleagues in council. Please stand by.”

The silence seemed to last forever. If it really was just Judy using a weird voice, Dawn was sure the “aliens” would tell them to send her back to Uncle Ray. Her thoughts drifted on to whether she should beg Old Man Craw to reconsider or just get on a Greyhound and leave town. Where to? L.A.? San Francisco? Then Judy did her strange breathing thing again.

“Beloved, we have met in telepathic council and all are in accord. The girl is a special one. She has the solar seal on her brow. You are to protect her from the Dark Forces. Use any means necessary. My blessings and the Blessings of all the Solar Hierarchy fall upon you. Dwell in the Light. I am Argus. Discontinue.”

Dawn looked up at Judy in wonderment. Judy smiled. And winked at her, she was sure. Maybe it was just a trick of the light.

And that was how Dawn found herself in a law office in Victorville with Maa Joanie and Clark Davis, who was wearing ostrich boots and a bolo tie and a new felt hat for the occasion. She said the things he’d schooled her to say, about how her uncle came in when she was in the shower and touched her inappropriately and made remarks, and how she feared if she stayed under his roof he would fall into sinful ways. Sheriff Waghorn sat and stared goggle-eyed and Ray cursed and waved his hands and the lawyer told him he didn’t look kindly on such displays in the presence of a young lady. Then the sheriff told Ray flat out to drop it, said it wasn’t worth his while to keep hold of her if she didn’t want to stay. Ray looked like he wanted to strangle her with his bare hands but settled for calling her a tramp. All the while Aunt Luanne cried bitterly. Dawn felt sorry for Luanne, who’d never done anything to deserve a pig like Ray.

Looking back, that was the real start of the war between the town and the Ashtar Galactic Command. Each side thought the other was in league with the Dark Forces, and each side was prepared to do whatever it took to ensure right should prevail. A couple of days later Sal and Marcia came back from town all covered in red house paint, saying some boys in a green-and-white Mercury drove past on Main Street and threw it over them. Dawn knew exactly who it was. Frankie and Robbie and Donny Hansen and Kyle Mulligan and some of the other jocks had taken to driving out to the Pinnacles to hang around. They’d play music and lean on their cars, drinking beer and throwing the cans over the compound fence. If Wolf or Gila or any of the other guys came out they’d take off, but sometimes they shouted things about Dawn being a hippie slut and how they hoped she liked being fucked by niggers. Hurtful things, especially from Frankie, who always used to be so sweet.

Of course everything the good old boys at Mulligan’s thought was going on up at the rocks really was, and more besides. It took a while for Dawn to cotton on to why people who were sometimes so talkative could spend whole days lying silently in the dome or trudging naked circles on the dry lake. At least some of the money for food and building materials was coming from the drug runs being made to L.A. and San Francisco, which seemed to be almost a full-time occupation for many of the Children of Light. Whatever was getting bought and sold wasn’t really any of her concern. As for being “intact,” whatever that meant, the night of the Pioneer Parade Wolf had taken her out on the rocks and calmly stripped her of her shorts and halter top and licked her pussy with his long tongue and then fucked her slowly and methodically until she whimpered and scratched his back. Afterward she felt more intact than she’d ever felt in her life.

It wasn’t all good, though, not by any means. She thought she and Wolf were together and he more or less acted that way until the night he took his bedroll and went to sleep next to some new girl from Wisconsin, calmly, like it was nothing. Dawn had been studying hard. She understood possessiveness was a kind of negative energy and true souls of Light shone their love indiscriminately on the world, but she still felt hurt and more or less followed Wolf around until he told her to stop. She said she loved him and he said he loved her too but his love was too big to be confined to any one person or thing. For a while she holed up on her own and even thought about leaving and going back to town, but Pilgrim Billy talked her out of that, and soon enough she was snuggling down next to him under a scratchy Indian blanket, while his big gentle carpenter’s hands explored her body, making her feel the world wasn’t so bad.

At that time they were all sleeping in the big dome, except for Judy and Joanie and Clark Davis, who had their own cabins. The metal skin made it stifling hot during the day, and even at night it was a sweaty, busy place, the air roiled by body smells and mesquite smoke from the cook fire and farting and coughing and the sudden flickerings of pipes and matches and the rake of flashlight beams as people hunted about for space to crash. They were naked most of the time, and though she was shy at first, she gradually got used to it, to the sight of bodies, to the hearing and the seeing of sex, which was natural and beautiful, not “intercourse,” full of fear and guilt. She thought about Uncle Ray, and Frankie and the red-faced sheriff, about how scared they all were, and to her surprise, she actually began to feel a little sorry for them.

Further on down the line she found out nothing came for free. She was a starchild, a love giver, but it was easier to shine your light on some people than others. After Billy there was Guru Bob and then Floyd, who she didn’t really want to go with, because he had a skin condition, but it was hard to deny someone without generating negativity and giving aid to the Dark Forces. Then one night Mountain told her Clark wanted to see her. She knew what was coming. He’d let her know in small ways that she owed him, and though he was supposed to be with Maa, he liked to get laid and was persistent and paranoid about rejection and sooner or later everyone had to give it up, just to get some peace. You were only unlucky if he took a shine to you, was what she’d heard. Dawn made sure he got bored quick enough. She lay there like a dead fish while he did his business, thinking about how righteous and moral he’d been with Ray at the law office, and how he and her uncle were probably more or less the same age.

None of the bad stuff mattered. Not when you were in contact with beings from other stars, part of the earthly salvation mission of the Ashtar Galactic Command. Wolf and the others had a saying: Music is the message. That was to say, it was communication, a way of making contact with the Command. Almost everyone on the compound played an instrument, and those that didn’t, like Dawn, knew how to chant or bang something or clap in time.

Listen. We repeat. Listen.

They’d meet in the dome, or just sit out under the stars. And it would start, the low bass drone of the Tronics circling round and round, opening a space for the drums to make patterns. Then the strings and pipes would add their lines and the great noise would swell and people would begin to chant this is our message this is our message are you receiving us are you receiving come in and soon they’d feel the presence of others, higher-density beings, contributing their beautiful overtones to the cosmic music, until all were one with the harmonic vibrations of the Universal Field.

We speak in the names of all sentient beings in the thirty-three sectors of the Universe, in the name of the Ascended Masters and the Conclave of Interdimensional Unity. We bring this music to you, the Star People, so that you may understand.

Of course there were sugar cubes and blotters and acid punch, and this was where she learned how to let her mind shatter without feeling afraid, how to open up to the wonder of existence and let the vastness of the Universe enter in. It altered her on the molecular level, changed her from little Dawnie Koenig into a true starchild, the substance of her body stretching out through time and space, making contact, bringing her closer to the celestial realms of Jesus-Sananda and the Ashtar Galactic Command.

It wasn’t the drugs. The drugs were just a tool, a key to unlock the door. The other tool was the Tronics, built by Wolf’s hermit brother, who spent his time alone in a room dug under the rocks, fooling about with wire and valves and solder. He made oscillators, tone generators. He made filters and processors. He took the sounds made by the musicians, transformed them into cosmic energy and sent them up into space. He was a scientist, Coyote, though Dawn suspected he stole a lot of the things he said he made himself. The Tronics looked too sleek and expensive to be cooked up in a dusty hole under a rock.

They timed the sessions to important cosmic events — solstices, the Perseid meteor shower. People would arrive days beforehand, on bikes gleaming with chrome, in beat-up buses, carrying instruments and amplifiers, eating and crashing together amid snaky tangles of cable in the dome. Ash-covered sitarists, Nashville junkies in soiled Nudie suits with pedal steel guitars. Once an old flatbed truck sputtered its way into the compound, disgorging the entire congregation of a peyote church from over the border in Arizona, solemn men in workshirts manhandling giant drums, their women following behind, carrying cauldrons of corn mush and foil-wrapped rounds of fry bread. Here was some fat old poet, withered buttocks wrapped in a sarong, twanging on a Jew’s harp and pronouncing the scene wholly holy. There was a tattooed vet, hair only half grown out, stalking around with a bedroll and a harmonica, looking for a place to dig a foxhole. All come to plug into the Tronics, to have their sounds converted into etheric waves. To feel the Universe unfolding, the drone sweeping them far away.

When the compound was full of strangers, setting up for the session, you’d spot Coyote flitting here and there, setting up microphones, adjusting settings. It was more or less the only time you’d ever see him out of his cave; he was so secretive that for a while Dawn thought Wolf was playing some kind of joke on her, and he didn’t really have a brother at all. They weren’t alike. It wasn’t that Coyote was bad-looking, exactly. Uncouth would be a word. Flea-bitten. He looked like someone who ate out of dumpsters. For ages you’d never run into him and bit by bit you’d start forgetting he existed. When he turned up it’d be a shock. Always, every time. You’d stumble on him doing something low and disgusting, flopping his cock out of his filthy jeans, rummaging through your stuff. You’d try and avoid him, but suddenly he’d be everywhere, standing over the lunch table, grabbing food and chewing with his mouth open, making lewd remarks at you when you were getting ready to go to sleep. His teeth were mossy. His grimy hands were twisted back on themselves, the nails black with dirt. Amazing he could do anything with electronics. Dawn always thought you had to be clean for that. Before a session he’d rush through the dome with a damp joint glued to his bottom lip, splicing things, coaxing dead connections into life, sticking his nose in and upsetting everyone, but somehow getting it all together, making the thing happen. In a manic mood like that he’d electrocute himself once, twice a day. Plugging in the wrong cable, knocking over a bottle of water. Before a session, he always carried the stink of burned hair. He smelled like the onset of a migraine.

In the early days, before the paranoia set in, Clark or Joanie would lead everyone in the invocation. In the name of the Great Master Jesus-Sananda and of Ashtar, Commander of the Brotherhood of Light … They’d talk about the project, about the tsunami of negative energy emanating from the darkness and the certainty that, unless it was countered by an intergalactic union of Lightworkers, the Earth would tilt on its axis and human civilization would be wiped out. Think of the libraries, the great repositories of knowledge! Think of the treasure houses of gold!

All the works of all the hands.

We will not fear, says Clark Davis, as the drone of the Tronics cranks up into life. Worlds unfolding, vibrating deep in the body, sending waves shuddering through to the bone. Forty million are with us, forty million souls!

This message is going out to whosoever will listen and understand.

During the evacuation, explains Maa Joanie, some will be lost, but others, who make it to the motherships, will undergo extraordinary experiences. Your minds will be quickened by the rays in which you bathe, the blue rays and the green rays and the violet ray and the elemental ray, the carrier of all our higher communications. Your cells will be regenerated. You will live for two hundred years.

We will not fear

Know that attempts have been made by powers on Earth to persuade you that your reality as Star People is false. These powers, strongly magnetized to the Darkness, must be resisted at all costs. They seek to destroy you, and plunge you into the brute negativity of matter.

We are pure spirit.

We are the high gods.

Do not fear

Do not fear, Children of Light! Each of your names is punched into record cards held in the brains of our giant computers! We know exactly where you are!

We know exactly where you are! Do not fear!

Do not fear! Fifteen fleets of ships are orbiting the Earth. Millions of vessels, each one assigned a quota of souls. Families separated during the evacuation will be reunited. Special care will be taken of the children. Release your hold on the ones left behind. They shall only be left behind because something in the core of their being tells them to stay. Release those souls into the infinite world soul, the many-mansioned House that is the body of the Father. The ships are beautiful. The ships are filled with joy. Your children will play in huge soft rooms filled with light.

Remain calm when it comes. There are no accidents. There are no coincidences. All is in the plan.

The ships are beautiful.

The ships are filled with joy.

Remain calm.

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Do not fear

Discontinue.