Prologue

I believe certain truths however marginal to be the primary binding forces which authors bank on to tell stories, which bring anything akin to magical powers, or subject matter presenting circumstances beyond scientific understanding, to the printed page.

Captain Gregory Desoto, our Houdini of the Sky, compromises his hard earned reputation as a decorated air force pilot in order to create and fly his magical airship, the Perihelion Express. His carefully chosen passengers, each pay one half million dollars for a three day trip of wonder through the sky. They are pampered entertained and astonished as you the reader will also be.

In checking with him in preparation for publishing this account, he reminded me that pure magic, the sort that bends spoons, and fuels Ouija Boards involves the skill of delusion, calling for presentations which depend on slight-of-hand which he terms as slightly-underhanded.

Understandably he has gone far beyond scientific premises by inventing logical substances and processes no other individual scientist or scientific community has yet recognized, and thereby has yet to embrace. The overall account may easily be described as magical in nature because of simple observable outcomes on so many voyages.

I wish to touch on a fear which has gripped me since beginning this project. Those in the know of writing, say Write only what you know! If I followed their advice, however, I would be totally unable to take you along on these marvelous three day voyages, on the Perihelion Express, because I absolutely and frankly know little or nothing about aviation, aerodynamics, jet airplanes, or advanced chemistries. I apologize by describing how the entire history of Superman could have been shelved if it were widely known and advertised that the author was not educated in the geology necessary to understand Kryptonite!

It’s as if my ignorance is fortunate, in a sense, because it allows me to plow ahead with contrivances central to the theme, and joyfully share unbelievable observations during the many flights of near-fantasy the captain has taken me on, and that I wish to describe to you. In so doing, I hope to entertain you.

Chapter 1

THE SUN DOG

The mercury stood at thirty-one as I cleared away layers of soft leathery ice, you know, the kind that rolls up like tiny morning newspapers as you scrape your windshield. I headed for the gym driving east down the frontage road adjacent to the freeway and fell victim to the somber sky. What I mean is that miles of gray clouds stacked in tiers stretching to the horizon had me taking my eyes off the road to stare in awe. It looked like a mix of blue denim patches stitched haphazardly onto the dawn with ice crystals leaking out and dusting the road as I drove. It was slippery, so I slowed to a crawl.

Off to the south, maybe a mile up, sun rays escaped from jagged holes in the clouds like squirts of yellow paint from a spray can. On either side of the rising sun, apparently placed there for my enjoyment, were two large sundogs, one on each side, nestled among the clouds sharing their vivid colors with them.

The one closest to me looked big as a house and had all the colors of a rainbow, and it had the shape of a giant flattened soccer ball. I knew a smidge about sun dogs and made a mental note to learn more, but the one thing I did remember checked out, and that was that a sun dog’s red layer was always closest to the sun while oranges, yellows, and blues fade outward and eventually disappear.

I turned onto a side road and coasted to a stop, sliding the last few feet on the icy skiff in order to safely enjoy the moment before taking some shots with my cell phone.

Then, blip! A spot, the same color as the gray clouds and the size of a bat flitted across the cloud bank and made a beeline for the sun dog. It could have been a tiny part of a cloud blown off by the wind, but no, it was actually moving fast as a plane would move from that distance. Then of all the crazy things, two seconds later, it did become a white jet plane buzzing back out my side of the cloud, leaving a gaping hole in the colors. What the heck? This is farfetched! I muttered. And to tell you the truth, I don’t remember ever using that word before. I pushed the video button and tried to steady my camera. A motor revved behind me, and when I glanced in my mirror, I saw a man in a pickup truck cussing and waving. I gunned my car, wheels spinning, to a wide spot in the road and let him pass. Fumbling in my console for the binoculars I hoped were still there, I located them, and standing outside, I rested my elbow on the roof.

These were foot-long glasses that I had paid $100 for at a garage sale two years back, causing my wife to treat me like a criminal for the rest of the day and the week. I had never touched them until now. Moving the thumbwheel, I saw finite details just as the military wife who sold them to me told me I would.

While focusing, I covered that old garage-sale discussion in my mind. Her husband, she said, had just returned home from New York after getting both legs replaced following his last tour in Iraq. He had paid $1,000.00 for the glasses, but now had no stomach for any of his possessions. His only goal, she said, is to someday fly again. These same electronic lenses, she had explained with a proud hitch in her voice, are used as auxiliary lenses in space exploration!

Dang right! I said under my breath, as more shocking details came into view. The plane broke through from the other side again, slowly stopping midair where it hovered like a mosquito. In order to park stone-still like that, I knew it had to be an Osprey—half helicopter and half a plane—but it looked more like a larger version of an F15 fighter jet, except for two rows of glass bubbles on top! Its exhaust melted a hole the size of a school bus in the cloud behind it as I watched. What the devil? I muttered as streams of shiny, glistening white smoke-like material poured out of each wingtip and also from a hole on top near the middle of the plane and from each side of the tail. I swear it was like a magic act where clowns pull crazy amounts of silk cloth out of their coat pockets. In an instant five silvery-gray columns looking nearly identical to the clouds around them and each the size of a boxcar were inflated and stood on end, stabilizing the plane and holding it like a baby in a cradle. The engine stopped, and it was quiet as a tomb up there.

Snow clouds seemed to hover nervously near the plane and moved aside just enough for me to see the passenger door opening and a narrow set of metal steps with handrails extending downward until they were even with its belly, directly in front of the sun dog, which had somehow regained its surface composure and looked shiny and colorful again even after the double fly-through had roughed it up.

A tiny figure emerged from the doorway, and from that distance, it looked like it could be a robot or an alien. I fumbled with the glasses trying to get a better look, and when I discovered the right button to synchronize each eyepiece, everything intensified and I could have kissed that garage-sale wife and her husband. The tiny figure was a man in uniform, and I saw his breath, white as doves, darting around his face as he exerted himself at that altitude. Reaching the bottom stair, he pushed a handle forward and turned a crank, and a thin platform appearing to be made of gargantuan, stiff white industrial-grade mesh wire with the area of a flatbed farm truck seemed to ooze on rollers from under the plane.

A tiny beep sounded and a red dot flashed in each eyepiece, telling me the solar battery had charged enough to kick in. This time when I pushed on the switches, the visual drama went from barely distinguishable images to IMAX movie quality, and I could clearly see features, including an ear-to-ear grin on the man’s face. I even noticed how rosy his cheeks looked! Now if I could only take good pictures.

I put my cell phone camera lens on the eyepiece and snapped shots, but they were blurry. So I collected regular pictures, hoping my trusted computer lab would be able to blow them up and give them definition. They had saved important junky photographs for me before, which instead of ending up in the landfill, had been edited, blown up, framed, and were now on my den walls.

Big silver letters outlined in black, each as tall as a yardstick, jumped out at me along the plane’s dark-blue body, Perihelion Express.

Perihelion? Where had I stumbled on to that word? I said it out loud a couple more times and got back to the business of observing before it hit me. It was the weatherman on Good Morning America, a few months back. Sun dog is the old Eskimo term for a perihelion, he had said, rubbing his chin, means they’re like the sun’s own faithful dogs. They tell us when rain or snow is about to happen while rainbows show the opposite, that moisture, already present, is about to cease for the moment. Perihelions, in science talk, he continued, are masses of flat hexagonal ice crystals formed high above the earth in the thin icy air, and they then fall parallel to the ground like miniature Frisbees by the zillions! Sunlight beaming down, and I recalled him thrusting out his arms as if trying to fly in order to show us. Hits the top of each crystal, dividing it into visible colors which our eyes can then distinguish. The red is always closest to the sun. Now I remembered, and I looked again up at the sun dog and noticed a yellowish-blue haze near the nose of the plane with orange at a distance. A narrow red band was closest to the sun!

The man up there made little sense to me as he slipped chest-high metal stakes into rectangular pockets a couple of feet apart around every edge of the platform that he had securely hooked to his plane with silver carabineers, and he clamped a red safety rope to the top of each stake. He was working fast and his breaths now were like spurts of cotton candy. A woman stepped from the door next, carrying a red backpack down the steps, which she hung from the railing. Right on her heels, in single file, came six more what I assumed to be passengers, all hooked together with lengths of white rope snapped to rings on their belts. Each person was gripping the red side rope tightly for support, and each one was dressed in white, puffy, subzero gear with blue scarves blowing behind them.

They gathered in a semicircle near the end of the platform, and the man, who I assumed was the captain, began pointing out different areas across the surface of the sun dog with a red laser pointer.

These glasses were worth a million! The colors in the sun dog shrank like grape and strawberry popsicles under his laser beam, and little black holes formed as they might if someone threw a ball right through a rainbow.

The stewardess handed each passenger a tall stem glass she had filled from a spigot in the backpack. All glasses pointed toward the captain, and I could almost hear the toasts given in his honor. One by one, each person went to the head of the line and handed their empty glass to the stewardess, leaned over the rail, and began touching the colors, sifting them lovingly in their hands as first graders do with play dough. Blues and oranges bent, waved, and jitterbugged like a technicolor electrical storm.

The last in line was a tall woman with auburn hair flowing from beneath her cap and covering the shoulders of her shiny white coat. With her glass in her left hand, she touched the bands of color, and they reacted as though she were a living magnet with brilliant flashes traveling up her arms, turning her clothing bright blue and orange. Her champagne glass flew from her hand and came sailing down. I took my binoculars off the plane and followed the glass until it disappeared behind a screen of trees which circled an open hilltop about four miles west near one of my favorite trout lakes. Lucky for me, I’d driven the road many times and knew exactly where the branch was that left the main road and wound up the hill to where a tall cell phone tower stood. What if? I thought out loud, It landed in new snow or that maybe a ponderosa pine tree near the top should cushion its fall, and I could go there and find it?

However, I reasoned, any idiot would know a glass would be broken to smithereens after sailing down from the clouds.

Returning my attention to the plane, the words Perihelion Express were now displayed in lavender letters, changing to dark purple, light blue, and back to silver as I watched. The woman set up a camera on deck while the captain helped another much taller man, also in uniform, carry a blue plastic box the size and shape of a new lawnmower crate from the cockpit door down the steps, and together they clipped and pinned one end of it onto brackets on the side of the platform. Then stretching it like a measuring tape, two or so feet wide, they pulled out maybe twenty feet or more of flexible walking plank that disappeared as they pushed it directly into the sun dog.

Ceremoniously waving goodbye, the captain snapped a safety rope on his belt and handed one end to his helper. Then amid the swirling phenomenon, he walked the plank and the surface closed behind him. There was no safety net below and the plank, by now, had to be sopping wet! I feared it would be him spiraling down next with his helper struggling to hoist him back.

A moment later, he returned and stuck his smiling face through the vivid-colored screen, and I exhaled and took pictures of him waving at everyone. He slipped on a pair of illuminated gloves and sent electricity flying from his fingertips into the matrix of colors, carving and churning columns into shapes, including dolphins, rabbits, and fish that he then sent spinning crazily away as if they were alive. I remember thinking to myself, Geez, how often do you see a blue-green shark and a pink pig floating out of the sky this early in the morning?

When he finished, they all clapped and headed back up the stairs and disappeared into the plane. As soon as the railing, deck, and stairs were stowed, the air was rent with the scream of jet motors. The plane shook like an NRA race car as it pushed its way into the sky sucking the balloons back inside the plane. As it rose and banked away from me, I got a glimpse of three whirling silver rotors, one mounted under the middle of each wing and the third near the middle of the plane. The main jet roared, and the Perihelion Express was gone.

I focused on the sun dog and watched as it lost contact with the sun until all that was left was a sky filled with shattered clouds.

Cranking my engine, I headed for the gym. Pulling in where I generally park, I stopped, thought a minute, changed my mind, and backed out, driving instead down the main road leading west out of town for about three miles. I reached the branch and turned onto the gravel road leading through the field and climbing up to the tree grove, where I surmised the glass would be.

The next mile or so was peppered with potholes, partly hidden under one or two inches of fresh snow. As I crawled slowly through the craters heading up the hill turning this way and that, I noticed no one had used the road since the new snowfall and although a full sun was out now shining like crazy and lighting up the snow in all directions; it became deeper on the road as I traveled. I guessed it was five or six inches deep by the time my wheels began to spin. One touch of a button, however, and my front tires kicked in, and I purposefully slowed to a crawl and peered through openings in the trees, searching in all directions for a glint or glitter. Bingo! At a right angle to the road, I saw a tall slender ponderosa pine which was green on top, and driving another fifty feet towards it, I saw a clump of bunchgrass near the road which was the only one visible without snow on it. Staring right at me was the glass. I threw my car in park and couldn’t get to it fast enough.

Gripping the stem, I gingerly picked it up, dumped out the snow, and noticed half of the upper part was missing. I also observed a heavy smudge of lipstick on the rim and the words Fly Me To . . . embossed in gold near the top of the glass. My knees felt weak and my mind and body numb as I opened the passenger door and laid it carefully on the seat as if it were a tiny alien. Searching through more clumps for the other half left me empty-handed and led me to look in all directions for another brown clump of grass at the point of contact. Young, scraggly snow-covered pine trees, which were eight to ten feet tall, stood along a fence row, and I did see one with snow missing near the top of its branches. Oh yeah, I said out loud, come to me, baby! You gotta be close by! And I crawled around in circles until my knees were frozen. But I finally gave up and headed back to my gym.

I wasn’t on the treadmill five minutes before I realized I could think of nothing else but the Perihelion Express. I knew I had to do something. I knew I had to get this screwball thing on the news, but I didn’t know what or where. I knew my running coach works for the morning paper as a reporter, and I figured he was my go-to guy here, so I grabbed my bag and ran in my gym shorts to the parking lot through the icy wind without feeling a thing. Halfway to town, I realized I hadn’t called my wife yet, and I fumbled in my gym bag for my cell. I always put it in the same place, but this time it was not there. I pulled over to the emergency lane and dumped everything out on the seat. No phone! No earphones! My brain was in a rage! This was not the time to have it stolen. I wondered if I should turn back to the gym, but I knew there would be no resolution there, and anyway, I had the glass for evidence. So I parked across from the Review Building and dodging the morning traffic, jaywalked across the street.

Chapter 2

FLY ME TO THE MOON

Harold Derr was in his forties, tall, thin, and looked up at me with deadpan blue eyes, raising his bushy blond eyebrows as he listened intently. His nose looked as wide as two of my thumbs, and his shiny pate had assorted scars from God only knows what mishaps. Shaking a lemon cough drop out of a bag, he sucked it through his lips like a vacuum cleaner picking up a penny, squinted at me, and in a raspy voice with a friendly edge, asked point-blank, Are you certain about all of this, Pier?

You might as well ask me ‘How much of this have you made up?’ I said biting my tongue.

To be honest, yes, precisely! he agreed as if reading my secret thoughts. I mean pink pigs, come on! he argued and then scrunched his upper lip and nose together just long enough to let me know he had other important stuff to do. He offered me a lozenge and in the same breath said, Not whether I’m ungrateful and don’t appreciate your visit, Pier, but whether your astonishment this morning got in the way of objectivity, causing some exaggeration. As a reporter, I’m all about accuracy. And was the other creature a blue-green shark?

If you, Chief Editor, don’t believe me, I countered, popping his offering into my dry mouth, where do I go next?

He shrugged but didn’t tell me in so many words where he wished I would go. The only reason I’m listening to you right now is because you’re in my runner’s clinic, right?

I hate to admit it all of a sudden, I replied hesitantly. But yes, who the crap else would I trust?

Pier, Pier, you’re exactly right! Trust. That’s a good word which I hope you’ve experienced with some awe, sharing my wisdom on the trail . . . Ha, ha . . . and you should know by now, I’m a straight shooter! Most runners are honest with themselves, and I think you are too. So where are the pictures?

That tumbled me to my senses, and like morning fog rising off a meadow, I could see clearly now. His eyes were beholding a nut case, and it was—you guessed it—me.

Here I was in the first and coldest week of February, shivering in gym shorts and a T-shirt, gesturing wildly about a perfectly ridiculous, unbelievable experience I had this morning but with no pictures to prove it! More than once during my rattling report, I suffered him making eye contact with one or another of his staff who happened by his desk, and his expression looked like, Help me! No, wait—shoot me!

Harold, I begged, holding my fingertips together like someone had mischievously super glued them in place. Whoa! Let me put the brakes on this freight train.

Clang goes the trolley, ding goes the bell! Now show me the pictures, he kidded, cracking the rest of the lozenge between his teeth like a circus glass eater.

First, Harold, I’ve made nothing up, but tell me this, am I the first one to report this story?

Judy? he said sneering ruefully at his red-haired, freckle-faced secretary hovering nearby. Pier says it’s a story now that we’re dealing with. Have others reported it?

She managed a smile while shaking her head from side to side.

I was so confused I called my wife, I blurted.

Well, duh! Harold remarked. About time you called her! What happened to your wedding vows to quickly call your mate the minute either of you lay eyes on an alien or a bigfoot?

His secretary giggled.

You’re right, I admitted, turning the