(this flurry of emails is because I will be busy tomorrow/Wed & away Thu/Friday.)
Frederick and Harriet Anderson were at dinner in their lodge high in the mountains when they heard the shrill whistle which betokened an approaching bomb; without a word Fred dived unceremoniously under the table, lay curled up waiting for the flash and roar of high explosive which would likely terminate both their lives. Instead, he heard the keening stop, followed by a dull 'WHUMP WHUMP"' from the snow covered outdoors. A little shamefaced, he crawled out from his shelter, stood and dusted his clothes off in front of the calendar on the wall which proclaimed the date to be January 15th, 2017. "Sorry," he said huskily to his wife who hadn't moved from her chair. "Automatic from Desert Storm, I guess." She nodded. "It's all right. I was as frightened as you, only I felt if it was going to hit us it wouldn't matter where we were. We should go and investigate, don't you think?" Minutes later, after pulling on parkas, gloves and thighhigh boots, they were on the back deck which Fred had earlier cleared of snow. Ahead of them, partially buried in a drift lay a giant Douglas Fir, clods of soil still falling from its outstretched roots. Wisps of smoke rose into the air from here and there along the trunk, in the sharp moonlight giving the scene a wraithlike effect. Cautiously, Fred stepped off the deck, sinking several inches into soft snow which overlaid the firmer cover below, before tramping stolidly rowards the fallen tree. Lifting the big lantern he always carried outside at night, he directed the light at the base of the tree. In the rays he saw an ovular object sitting in a space where the heartwood of the trunk would normally have begun.. Gingerly he reached out a hand; at his touch, gentle though it was, the 'egg' rolled from its resting-place, bounced off a root into the snow and disappeared. After waiting a moment to see if anything happened - nothing did - he squatted on his haunches, dug downwards and retrieved the egg, holding it tenderly in his gloved hands which it just fitted . . . . . "Pretty big for an egg, must have been a damned large bird," Harriet observed. The object lay in a nest of blankets on the dining-table, glistening in the electric light. "I don't think it is an egg," her husband said very quietly. "We need help here, I'll call Joshua." There was something in his tone that made her look at him curiously. Reverent, she thought, that's it, the way he's always been at the little church in the village since he came home from that terrible unnecessary conflict nearly thirty years ago. "Why Joshua?" "He'll know what to do." Bewildered, she watched him leave the room. . . . . "What do you think, Joshua?" The old shaman, the Andersons' next door neighbour scientist and a modern-day descendant of the once mighty Sioux nation, pursed his lips and shook his head doubtfully. "Come a long way," he finally allowed. "From space, I'd say. Shattered the inside of the tree, did it? Must be pretty tough then." Picking up a dessert spoon, he rapped the outer casing hard. A single chime rang out, echoed around the room; moments later the top half of the egg folded back as if on unseen hinges. "Well, now," breathed Joshua, "would you look at that? Who would have thought it?" He picked something out of the object and held it towards Harriet. "Know what it is?" he asked. "No," she answered shortly, feeling foolish. "Soybean. Lifeforce." the Native American said. "Protein, total nitrogen. Our bodies cannot live without it." He laid the plant back in the shell, plucked out another one. "Stinging Nettle - Iron." Another. "Rye - Calcium." The catalogue went on until he had exhausted the lode. "Everything the human race needs to live, as fresh as if they were uprooted this morning. Did you see they all had their roots still? That means they'll all grow. Look after them well, they're radiation-free." Without waiting for a comment, he fell to his knees before the egg, touched his forehead to the floor. When he clambered stiffly to his feet again, they saw his cheeks were streaked with tears. "Bad trouble coming quickly," he mumbled. "Glad to have known you, thank you for your neighbourliness." At the door, he paused. "Look after them well, they're radiation-free," he repeated and was gone. ************** ************** (In 1940 during the Battle of Britain, some WAAFs in their mansion house billet at RAF Biggin Hill, Kent, England, heard a falling bomb overhead and a single dull thud in the back garden. The next morning there was no trace of anything. 24 years later when I was serving at the base, a huge old elm tree behind the above house fell over during a wind-storm. The tree trunk was almost totally hollow and its inner shell was peppered with minute shards of rusty metal.) roger
