Jamison was there, along with his Superior, Chief Superentendent
Barker, when the Army and Government officials arrived the next
morning, after hours of communication back and forth. After all,
it was his command. Once they were greeted though, it was a
different story. Barker took over as the Administration officer
in charge and the honors fell to him. And they were BIG brass.
These men had been brought in from all over the world and the
press got hold of it but the lid was clamped tighter than a drum
for a change. No one was talking. Not even to their wives this
time.
The Brass looked. The experts looked - and then they all went
into a conference room where they were locked in verbal combat
for three hours. When they came out, Jamison was ordered to
remove the staff from the second floor for half an hour. They
had decided to do tests on the rods to find out the power source.
They were going to take it apart.
It was on Barker’s insistance that that floor was to be cleared
and Jamison notified. It was Jamison who feared the ‘cage’ and
decided to hold a fire drill for the staff as a means of getting
them out of the building. He wanted his people safe
from harm. If the experts didn’t care, that was their problem,
but he wanted his own people out of the way if anything went
wrong.
He was clearing the last of the men out of the buildings main
doors when the blast came. They couldn’t even have waited until
the word came that his staff was cleared.
You couldn’t really call it a blast. There was a roar that built
up and ended in a shooshing of sound as the glass flew inward and
he was sucked backwards in the entrance hall towards the stairs
to the upper floors. Glass flew at him as he went, coming from
all directions, as did papers and light objects. Everything
seemed to be headed for the top floor. It was over in seconds and
there was only silence left at its end... and the faint rustle of
papers fluttering to the ground.
Stunned and bleeding from shards of glass imbedded in his body,
he lay for a few minutes amid the clutter on the stairs, where he
had been drawn by the force of the wind. Some of the men who had
been outside came in over the rubble and to his side. With their
aide he got to his feet and began to stumble up the stairs.
Picking their way over the clutter on the steps they reached the
second floor. It was as if some giant force had sucked everything
out of place on the second floor and piled it up against door
frames and the stairwell to the second floor landing. Glass had
been blown out everywhere. They could hear faint sounds of
moaning coming from the second floor where all the men and the
experts had been when the blast came. The evidence all pointed to
it having been an implosion of considerable force.
When they arrived on the second floor the sounds of men in agony
were coming from the conference room. Down the hall, where
Jamisons room had been, was a gaping hole. Inner walls were blown
in and only the main structural walls were still intact nearby.
There was nothing left but leaning walls and doors and furniture
and objects piled up against door jambs in the corridor outside,
along with fallen masonry. There were no men in sight.
When they got to the conference room, they found the doors were
buckled outward and collapsed. Bodies were piled up against them
like rag dolls.
They found Barker jammed against a group of three men. The bodies
of the men had cushioned him from broken bones and he was still
alive; but barely. As for the rest of the men, They were either
dead or dying. Barker was bleeding badly from the nose, mouth,
and ears. When they looked around at the rest of the men they
could see the same thing had happened to them also. It was hard
to tell if they had been crushed to death or bled to death. It
was as if they had all been in a mighty wind tunnel.
"What happened man?" Jamison asked as he knelt beside the dying
Barker and gently wiped at his face with a kleenex he took out of
his pocket. Barker hadn’t been in the office when the men went in
to dismantle the ‘cage’ so he couldn’t tell them much before he
died. It was two days before the investigating team could piece
together some of the story from the evidence of the blast area.
What they did learn from Barker, just before he died, was that
the physicists had gone to work on the ‘cage’ and because of the
size of the office not being able to hold all of them, the rest
of the men had remained in the conference room to wait for the
results. A few minutes later the blast occurred.
An analysis of the immediate blast area showed an implosion had
occured, sucking clean everything in the room and drawing all
towards the epicentre. It was as if a hole had opened in the
small space and gobbled up all that was there, like some hungry
force and even reaching out for those objects out of reach and
drawing them closer. Of the men in the room at the time of the
implosion, no trace existed. The force of the blast had drawn the
men in the conference room up against the walls and doors as the
air was sucked out, crushing them. At the same time as the loss
of air had collapsed lungs, a giant force had ruptured blood
vessels.
Jamison was becoming frantic now at the loss of precious time.
The blast of the room and the loss of the men had convinced him
beyond any doubt of the womans credability and powers. The
deadline was too close. They had wasted too much time and even
though the others were willing to accept the womans story now,
what could they do in the days left to them? He mourned the loss
of his friend, but the urgency he felt in trying to meet the
womans deadline took away the ability to grieve for one person
any more.
The question now was; What would the woman do if they didn’t come
through with the T.V. hookup she had demanded. Were the children
going to suffer for it?
To prevent or delay the panic that was sure too hit the headlines
if they announced it openly, they inserted a small ad in all the
papers in the vicinity:
ATT: Mrs. Fairway;
We are unable to meet deadline.
We ask for an extension of one
week to meet request. Please
respond immediatly.
That was inserted in the papers on the 23rd of May. Now all they
could do was hope to hear from her.
No word had been heard from Mrs Fairway by the time the deadline
drew near.
In homes all over the lower mainland of British Columbia, people
were preparing to sit down to the evening meal. Unaware of what
had been going on at the R.C.M.P. headquarters, they had their
televisions tuned to the local news anyway to hear if there were
any new developments from around the world. They lived in hope
that a solution would be found to keep one of the newborn babies
from vanishing like the others or even of finding out where the
others were.
When the face of Mrs. Fairway appeared on the screen after a
second of picture interruption, it was recognised by only one or
two people but one of those was Corporal Collins, who phoned
Jamison and let him know.
Her first words stopped everyone in their tracks.
"Do not touch your dial! I am here to speak to you of the missing
children. Please sit down wherever you are and listen. And for
the owners of this station who are trying to find out how I am
overriding their broadcast, I suggest you cease any useless
efforts and listen too, for you will not be able to track it
down.
"One week ago today I walked into the offices of the Burnaby
detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and told them I
would give them proof that I knew the whereabouts of your babies
and in return for that proof I wanted a world wide television
hookup so that I may tell the people of Earth my message. I used
a device called a ‘cage’ to bring five of the Earth children
through from my world so that they could see them. They had their
proof, but they failed to meet my terms. I am therefore breaking
into your local station here to let the people themselves know
what my terms are so they may act on them.
"Do not blame your local police or your government for not
meeting my terms. I did not expect them to be met. However,
nothing I do is without reason or purpose.
"The purpose of that effort was to establish two principles: I
want your full and voluntary cooperation on any requests I make
to you, with the clear understanding that it is within your
rights to refuse to act on them. But do so with the full
knowledge that you accept the responsability for all the
consequences of your actions. The second principle I want you to
understand is that I do not lie. EVER!
"So that you may be made to understand clearly, I will explain
the reasoning behind my actions. I could as easily have gone to the
top, to the men who govern, to make my requests. I am quite
capable of reading who your leaders are and where they are. For
you on this planet,that would be the closest thing you have to a
world form of government; the United Nations.
"That brings us to the reason that this world body was formed,
doesn’t it? It was formed to speak for the nations of the world.
But what are nations? Nations are people. No more, no less. And
people are individuals. YOU! Have you forgotten that?
Without you there are no villages, no towns, no cities, no
countries, no nations. Without you there is no need for governing
structures. These weighty organizations that you have built to
govern you, are that way because you made them so. Do you blame
your child because he has your red hair? That sounds silly
doesn’t it. And yet that is exactly what you are doing.
"You are wrong to make a man king over you and then hold him to
account when he does what he desires and not what you desire.
Just as you are wrong when you create a police force and give it
authority over you and then complain because you don’t like their
idea of authority. When you abdicate your personnal
responsabilities you lose the right to complain.
"each man and woman can hear clearly what is inside their own
mind but unless you develope telepathy you cannot know what is in
the mind of another. That is why no one on this Earth should have
abandoned his own responsabilities for his own existance.
"I tried to prove this to you by my actions and the actions of
the men who direct your lives. By starting at the bottom of
command at the desk in the R.C.M.P. office, in an ordinary suburb
of the community, I have shown you how your words become lost. I
was heard and believed by the man behind the desk. He was still
just one of the people. Still responsable to himself for making
his own judgements and his perception of his world and
experiances, but no longer able to act on his own authority. He
had given that right to his immediate superior.
"His words were heard and believed only if he could show proof.
That proof was myself. The next in command had to be given more
proof from the person that told him about me, before he would
act. That was the ‘cage’ and the children and myself. I then
withdrew the last two, which left only the ‘cage’ and the eye
witness account of six of their own men for the next in command.
That was no longer enough. You no longer had a voice that could
be heard. Even six voices together weren’t enough to be heard.
"Proof was becoming a hard thing to achieve for the chain of
command. The farther from the people, the fainter their voices
became and the harder it became to show proof of what the people
believed in. It then became possible to prove the words in the
only way those in power will listen to. A very loud noise.
"I had left the ‘cage’ for them to see as my proof of intentions,
with the warning not to touch it as it was only there to give
them faith in my words. They had eyewitnesses to what it could
do, but they were not listening anymore. Men lost their lives
because of this. It wasn’t neccessary.
"I did not tell them what the cage was, but I will tell you now.
It was a doorway. That’s all. It was a field force of energy
connecting that spot, with the world were the children are being
kept. As long as it remained untouched, it was a doorway from
here to there. The only doorway on the Earth that connected our
separate worlds. They were told that to touch the ‘cage’ would
disrupt the field and destroy it. When they attempted to gain
proof that I was telling the truth, they tried to take it apart
to see what makes it work and what it was. Many men lost their
lives to prove that I was not lying to them. Nor were the men
under them lying to them. Must you always wait for a ‘big noise’
before you will believe what people say to you? That is why I
want to speak directly to the people themselves; not the mighty
organizational structures they have built. I want to be heard. I
do have powers, but a loud voice isn’t one of them. The plain,
simple fact is that with my present equipment, I can break into a
local station, but so far you do not have a world wide hookup
that I can use. Nor can I reach all the people on Earth. If you
want to know the fate of the children I need that type of
communication in one weeks time. I also think it would be a kind
gesture if the Earth got itself together enough to see that as
many of the people as is possible are given access to the
broadcast. Oh, and don’t concern yourself with them not being
able to understand me, I well take care of that little problem.
"I will approve of the United Nations Headquarters in New York as
the proper place to give my speach to the world and I will appear
in person when everything is ready. I said earlier that this is
your decision to make I will not extend the time for you as we
are aware of what you are capable of and we are not asking
something that is beyond those capablities. If the request is
denied we will simply leave. We are not threatening you with
reprisals of any kind and you will be allowed to continue as you
are..Good night."