Balgez Press
For communication, please contact Balges at [email protected]
cover design by Anatoliy Shlokin
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Plonix
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition: July, 2020
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020903536
ISBN 978-1-7345657-0-6 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-7345657-1-3 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-7345657-2-0 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-7345657-3-7 (Kindle)
ƒor my parents
Contents
Part One
1937
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two 2013
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Part Three 2015
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Deleted Excerpts
Excerpt I
Excerpt II
Part One 1937
Chapter 1
Texas Panhandle Region, Baseline Planet, 1937
The youthful woman walked through the knee-high grass and horned lark birds scuttled away. A mammoth trumpeted in the distance.
It was a hot, late afternoon in the grassy plains at the base of the terra-cotta hills. Meadowlarks were calling to one another, and the dry ground was alive with the snapping and crackling of grasshoppers.
She was near the Canadian River—at least, that’s what they called it on Earth. She was on the baseline planet, though. It had no people; Hagar was the only one. And she frequented this pristine world just once every few decades and had not bothered to name anything. Earth was identical to it—except for the presence of humans and the environmental impact they exerted. The untouched environment in the baseline planet gave her a better sense of how far astray the human populations on the various parallel planets may have gone.
Hagar worked her way around a copse of ancient junipers and reached the river bank, where dozens of large camels browsed the undergrowth. When she emerged from the trees, they stopped and studied her from beneath long dark eyelashes, some still chewing. The woman waded into the river and splashed water on her face. She dived in and came up.
Hagar was nude—but for a black ribbon fastening her hair and a double scabbard holding two swords strapped to her lean back. She brandished these only when in danger. She had no intention of killing any animals, except for food.
Hairless Columbian mammoths appeared through the cottonwoods at the opposite bank, raising small clouds of dust that eddied about their leathery skin as their massive legs steadily rose and fell. Hagar watched them. There were two calves, a few adult females, and a matriarch bringing up the rear. She swam upstream to get a closer look. Earth had no mammoths. That was one of the nasty surprises Hagar had found upon her first visit there. Elephants had been hunted and driven to extinction there, except those in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.
The hairless mammoths dipped their trunks into the water, curled them, and brought them up to their mouths. There was no urgency to their movements. Now and then, one of them flapped its ears.
Hagar was drawn to these earthy, giant beasts. A few weeks earlier, in the San Francisco Bay—as the matching bay was named on Earth—she’d floated on her back, enjoying the warm sun and the cool water. One mammoth she had bonded with previously, evidently thinking she was in trouble, swam over to rescue her.
After a while, a second herd of hairless mammoths made its way to the river, a bit downstream from the first. Although they probably belonged to the same clan, the two groups ignored one another.
A lion roar from behind a nearby hill, brought Hagar’s elephant-watching to an abrupt end and sent the dozens of camels galloping toward the mouth of the small clearing, creating high clouds of dirt and dust. More roars followed as new lions joined the first. And then came another roar, deeper yet. A short-faced bear.
That could spell trouble. If the lions didn’t back down, the short-faced bear would be in an exceptionally bad temper. Rearing on its hind legs, an adult male stood about twice Hagar’s height. Long ago, she’d managed to duck a swipe from one such behemoth that otherwise would have ripped her body in half. Although larger than an African lion, a single American lion was no match for the bear. A pride of lions may or may not surrender the carcass. And getting detected by a disgruntled pride could prove just as dangerous as running into a short-faced bear. Probably more so.
She plunged under the surface and with powerful strokes made it to the riverbank. Blinking water from her eyes, she came up, then swore under her breath as a few large bands of horses thundered out, blocking her path. There was nothing she could do but wait.
Dripping water, she darted to her hover bike and sped out of the clearing, leaving the roars of the apex predators behind.
Hagar burst like a cork from a bottle to the wide-open land, the grassland whipping by. After a time, she slowed down the vehicle until it came to a stop.
She slid off her hover bike and leaned against it, eyes alight. A low-hanging sun bathed the prairie grass with a golden glow to the far reaches of the horizon. Condors and their considerably larger brethren glided across the big blue sky, now gradually turning amber. The warm air was pregnant with the smells of wild things. Animal herds meandered across the vast prairie. She could hear the occasional calls and grunts from afar. Inhaling deeply, Hagar sauntered through the tall grass, and her bare feet registered tremors as one of the massive bison herds took off at a distance.
It was time for her to leave.
Something in the last report from Earth did not feel quite right. Besides, over two decades had passed since she’d last inspected the most environmentally troubled of the parallel planets she monitored. It was time to check on it.
Hagar smiled and saluted a farewell to a giant condor-like bird as it flew toward the fiery horizon and the setting sun.
Mounting her hover bike, she gunned the engine, and tore through the air. Almost immediate
ly, undergarments materialized on her body, followed by an aviation leather jacket, riding pants, and tall boots.
The sky began to churn and boil with differing shades of light blue as she transitioned from one world to the other. Underneath her bike, the blur of grass abruptly became short and patchy. The animals pacing in the distance dwindled, then disappeared, along with the wild scents carried by gusts of winds. A dirt path materialized. Slowly descending mid-flight, Hagar’s hover bike sprouted wheels, converting into a motorcycle with an attached sidecar typical to those on Earth. Lurching briefly as it touched the ground, the motorbike righted itself and sped on. As if from nowhere, Hagar pulled out a leather aviator helmet, goggles, and driving gloves.
The dirt road transformed into a paved one. And everything alive winked out of existence.
Chapter 2
Oklahoma Panhandle, Earth
Hagar stared in disbelief.
She parked the motorcycle by a small, wind-scoured house and surveyed the forlorn land. She must have been about fifty miles north of the grassland she had just toured on the baseline planet. The landscape couldn’t have been more different, though.
Back in 1842 she’d stood at that very spot on Earth, when it was at the heart of the Comanche empire, which was at its zenith. That might as well have been a thousand years ago. The Comanche were gone. The bison were gone. The grass was gone. Hagar now stood in the middle of a desert strewn with sand dunes. A reverse mirror image of the parallel, Earth-like planet she’d just left.
Recollections of past status reports she had received drifted through her head as she pieced together what had taken place here. A report had mentioned black rain in Syracuse in 1860, as a storm carried sand from Kansas Territory. In 1887, another report described dirt storms of biblical proportions accompanied by pitch-dark skies in parts of Texas. Thousands of cattle had gathered at dwindling water holes and expired in the heat, their tongues swollen black.
What Hagar was looking at, though, was much worse. And she didn’t need to look far for the reason. She examined the gleaming steel plow half-buried in the side of a sand dune and her jaw clenched in anger. Morons.
“Storm winds blew, droughts came and went, hail pounded the land,” a voice said from behind, and an old man joined her in the sand-filled yard. “Yet, as long as the tough, wiry buffalo grass covered the earth, the thick tuft of interwoven roots held down much of the soil when it got dry.”
“Hello, John,” Hagar said gravely, seeking to make eye contact, frowning with concern when her analyst evaded her eyes. His beard was longer and far more unkempt than she remembered it. And his leather suspenders were cracked and flecked with tiny dirt clods. “How long has it been? What’s the year?” she asked.
“It’s 1937. Saw you last in 1912. So, yeah, that would be twenty-five years,” replied the old man, and his eyes flicked over the picket fence. It could have been white once, but the winds had stripped the paint. Now the fence was ashen.
“How are things?”
He jammed his hands deep in his pockets. “The farmers who migrated here in the twenties were surprised when the drought hit.”
Hagar smiled grimly. “In that case, it’s only because they didn’t want to face reality. Thousands of wagons heading back East in the previous droughts had taught them nothing.” Her mouth pressed into a hard line as she surveyed the desolation. She would have turned off the lights on the Earth people—pulled the plug right there and then—if she’d thought they had fouled up the land as badly elsewhere on the planet.
John kicked at the sand and winced when it raised a cloud of dust. “Are you surprised?”
Hagar shook her head. “At least I shouldn’t have been.” Her features clouded. “It all repeats itself. Seventy years ago, the railroad companies had a small army of writers and reporters on their payroll. They churned out pamphlets and magazines. And hundreds of thousands migrated here, lured by the promise of new hubs of prosperity.”
He cackled. “Same thing this time. ‘Riches in the soil, prosperity in the air, progress everywhere.’ Said so right in the brochure.”
“But this time they had tractors.”
“This time they had tractors,” he agreed. “They ripped out the great mat of grass, opening up the land for the seeding of wheat.” He coughed violently. Hagar waited until the coughing and muttering subsided. “They called it ‘sodbusting’ and ‘breaking the land.’ And they were pleased with themselves, at that.” The old man massaged his temples and grimaced as if in pain.
He continued, “With the big farm equipment came the big loans, and people mortgaged their houses. The math seemed simple enough: you plow more of the prairie and get to put more seeds in the dirt and ultimately more dollars in your pocket. You’re looking here at the epicenter of unfettered individualism.
“And with the scent of money in the air came the suitcase farmers, who had jobs back East. They came in the summers with rented tractors to reap the golden straw.
“Hell, everyone knew this area was no good for agriculture. But no one wanted to hear that. They just kept talking about bushel prices and freight rates.”
The man stared fixedly at something only he could see.
“Back in the day, they’d missed out on the land grabs,” he said. “But finally it was their turn. Their tractors rolled on, the grass was torn up, the earth was turned inside out. Wheat seeds poured in and gold came out. The good times lasted as long as the rains: all through the twenties. And then the drought hit. As eventually it always does around here.”
Hagar shot a disgusted glance around. What a disaster!
“The sun baked out the last drop of moisture,” John went on. “The soil was pulverized by the disk plows and dried to a powder. A big chunk of Kansas went bye-bye. Heard that high winds carried the dirt all the way to the Atlantic.”
She looked at him, dismay mixed with anger. What the hell? she wanted to say. Why didn’t you report the situation years ago? Why hadn’t I heard about any of this?
It was his job to alert her! His and the dozens of other analysts deployed throughout the planet. That was why she had stationed them on Earth. But there was something odd about John. She decided to stay quiet, for now, and listen.
The old man bit a nail. “The suitcase farmers moved on. And they left behind millions of acres of torn-up land devoid of any vegetation. Most people stayed, though.
“Let me see.…” He scratched his tangled beard. “It was either 1930 or 1931. The farmers had debts on all those fancy combines and shiny disk plows—not to mention the land, which was purchased on credit. They took the tractors to the plains like there was no tomorrow, hoping to make up in production volume for the plunging wheat prices. They figured they would still come up on top. They figured wrong.”
“So it’s over now.” Hagar brushed away hair from her face. “What are people still doing here? The only crop they seem to be able to grow now is sand dunes.” She tried to keep the growing fury out of her voice.
John chuckled mirthlessly. “Doing nothing much. Pushing a broom, resealing the cracks in the doorways. But mostly trying to wait out the drought and to wait for the return of the rains and with them the good times of wheat and opportunity. They still want to provide a good life for their families, you know. They are tough as old boots, them folks here.” He shook his head as if in wonder. “They refuse to be browbeaten. And the baseball games in town are played, and everyone comes to cheer them on, sandstorm or no.” For a moment, a shadow of a smile crossed his face.
“True pioneers,” the old man added. He studied his worn shoes. “Misguided pioneers.”
John hobbled toward the house and she walked alongside him. “Aldo Leopold is right,” he said, half to himself. “Communism, fascism, capitalism…in the end they are but apostles of a single creed: salvation by machinery. Their programs differ only in how they mobilize the machines.”
John halted, adrift in his thoughts. “They are completely alienated from the interdependence of life,” he muttered. “And there you have it in a nutshell. They replace man’s attachment to the earth with an out-and-out dedication to profit-making.”
He suddenly looked up. “Florence!” he called, turning to the small house.
Silence.
John nodded. “Yes, I’m coming, Florence. Was just talking to the old boss, you know.” He turned his face in the general direction of Hagar. “I have to go back in.” He grinned. “Florence is calling me.” Without saying another word, he determinedly marched into the run-down house. The hinges protested briefly, the door slammed with a shudder, and was still.
Hagar stayed rooted in place as the realization hit her hard. John was insane.
At long last, she walked to her motorcycle and climbed on.
There was nothing she could have said or offered him. His mental condition did provide her with an answer, though, as to why she hadn’t had a report from this sector in years.
She was about to start the motorcycle but then froze. A buzz filled the air and grew louder as a low cloud moved across the sky. In short order, a vast swarm of grasshoppers descended and blanketed the ground. A few leaped about her bike and over her boots.
She sat there immersed in dark thoughts until the grasshoppers lifted off in search of anything else remotely edible. Soon, a hush settled over the land.
Hagar slowed down and stopped the motorbike by the roadside as she spotted a figure in a white dress farther down the otherwise empty road. She turned the engine off and sat astride her bike next to a half-submerged wagon wheel poking through the sand.
Hagar studied the girl in white as she drew near. She seemed to be about twenty and was carrying a small suitcase in one hand and a satchel strapped on the opposite shoulder. The untamed sway of her breasts made it obvious she wore nothing underneath her plain, loose dress. Her flame-red hair tumbled carelessly down her back.
The Earth Hearing Page 1