Then Hunter felt his own plane get hit. Suddenly there were flames all around him.
Instinct alone made him reach for the ejection lever. There was a burst of smoke and flames, and an instant later he was floating in the air. No noise. No motion. Just him floating and the bridge and flames below.
Then came a sudden jerk; his chute had opened, a small miracle. Now he seemed to be dropping even faster. The river passed out of view; he was approaching another killing field, a place where many more thousands of recent American graves had been laid out. American flags were everywhere, smoldering on the ground.
It seemed to take forever for him to make it to the surface. He hit hard, rolled, and came up on his feet. The chute disappeared. He was right in the middle of the field of the dead. American rifles with American helmets stuck on top of them. He heard gunfire. Bullets were suddenly zipping by him. He started to run.
Russian soldiers in perfectly pressed uniforms began chasing him through the graveyard. They were laughing at him even as they were shooting at him. Hunter looked down at his uniform and saw it was threadbare. His boots were suddenly without their soles. His hands were dirty, and his fingernails cracked and sore.
More bullets. More laughing. Tripping over freshly dug graves, he somehow reached the top of a ridge and found another small army of Soviet soldiers coming up the other side right at him. He turned left. More soldiers, bayonets extended, were rushing toward him. He turned right. At least a hundred more Red Army soldiers were advancing on him. He was absolutely surrounded and unarmed. At his feet, in the dust, a discarded American flag.
If only I had wings, he thought, / could get out of this—
More than a thousand Red Army soldiers were now converging on him. They'd stopped shooting at him and were advancing slowly, with bayonets out front.
If this was the end, then he wanted to do it right. He reached down and picked up the flag at his feet, intending to literally wrap himself in it, when suddenly it burst into flames. Bright orange fire, that covered his hands, covered his face, but did not hurt him.
And at that moment, it was as if a bolt of lightning hit him right between the eyes. Get a hold of yourself! You're in an amusement park! No one had been killed. No one had been shot down. This was all just a grand illusion. It was just so real, so personal, he'd gotten caught up in it to the point of not thinking clearly. Idiot…
The nearest Russian soldiers were just about ten feet away when Hunter simply held up his hand and started waving the twice-punched yellow ticket. This stopped the soldiers cold in their tracks. They all stared back at him for a moment, but then they all seemed to relax a little, too. The show was over.
He flipped the ticket and pointed to the picture of the Mad Russian.
"Anyone here know where this guy is?" he called out.
"That's Crazy Ivan, I think," one soldier said in broken English. "He's the guy who built this place."
Hunter got a bit excited. What better place for a Mad Russian to be than in a world where the Russians always win?
"So you've seen him around?" Hunter asked them. "Recently?"
But then they all began shaking their heads no.
One called out, "No, not in a long time."
"A very long time," said another.
"Last I heard, he was spotted over on Moon Three," said a third. "Or was it Moon Four?"
"OK, thanks," Hunter called back to them. "Sorry to bother you all—"
Most of the soldiers just nodded or waved and started to walk away. One officer was nearby. Hunter flagged him down and asked him if he knew where the next ticket booth was.
The officer just pointed to a nearby hill. Hunter had to squint to see it, but sure enough, there was a structure up there surrounded by banks of white carnival lights. He thanked the officer and then they shook hands.
"Das-vee-darn-ya," the officer said to him. "And come back real soon…"
Hunter started his way up the hill.
The answer here? Obviously this was a re-creation of what was known back in one of his lives as World War Three. But it was that conflict as seen not through the eyes of an American but of a Russian. Soviets invincible and courageous. The Americans threadbare and cowardly. And it had been done so realistically, and had been so close to an experience he'd had way, way back, Hunter had simply fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.
The Ancient Astronaut had said that the person who put this place together had a strange sense of humor and was also very jealous of the American way of life. In this place at least, he'd been right on both counts.
"Some joke," Hunter muttered now as he trudged to the top of the steep hill.
Two moons down, and many more to go.
5
This ticket booth looked lust like the last.
Same blinking lights, same cramped structure, same fake wood, same ancient computer.
The hand-painted sign above the door read, Zaidi v Strany Snov — Zdes vse tvoi Snovideniya stanyt yaviu. As translated by the quadtroclass="underline" Entering Dreamland. Where All Your Dreams Come True.
"Sounds better than the last time," Hunter muttered.
He went through the same routine, entering all his information, getting his admission ticket punched, getting past the security walls.
He typed in "Flying" once again, and then hit the Enter button—
The first thing Hunter noticed this time was a strange object sitting on his head.
He reached up and felt that it was dry and made a crunching sound when he squeezed it. He took it off and saw it was a hat, made of intricately wound straw, with a red band. A straw hat?
Who the hell would wear this? he thought.
He looked down at his feet and saw something even stranger. His flight boots were gone; he was wearing red button shoes with white coverings on them instead. Were those spats?
His wardrobe makeover didn't stop there. His pants were gray with blue pinstripes. His belt was made of cloth. He was wearing a vest, a red tie, a white shirt, and a very stiff white starched collar. Everything felt tight and ill-fitting. He didn't want to know what he was wearing underneath.
He tried to get his bearings. He was on a pier, on the edge of a bustling city. Sparkling clean water was lapping up against the pier's wooden posts. There was a huge crowd around him. All along the pier, along the adjacent sidewalks, even sitting on the roofs of the harbor buildings nearby, large numbers of people were gathered. Thank God, all of them were dressed as silly as he. Many were waving tiny flags of orange and blue, a sort of double cross design, while others were displaying flags of the more familiar red, white, and blue.
Multicolored bunting was in evidence everywhere, along with brightly painted signs that read, Welcome to New York City. Farther down the pier from Hunter, an oom-pah band was playing loudly. A man in a bright military uniform with sergeant's stripes was leading the en-semble. His name, written in stylized scroll across his sleeve, was Pepper.
Now the crowd began to roar. The noise quickly became deafening. Everybody's eyes went left. Flags were waved furiously. Hunter leaned forward a bit, enough to see around the corner of the building next to him. An enormous oceangoing ship was moving slowly toward the dock. It seemed to take up half the sky. Indeed as its shadow passed over the crowd, day turned to night. The ship was that big.
People lining the decks of the huge ocean liner were waving as enthusiastically as those on the dock. Streamers of bright blue and yellow cascaded down from the upper decks. A squadron of fire-fighting boats was escorting the monstrous ship into harbor; they were spraying great streams of water high into the air. The band tried hard to play over the sounds of the crowd and the blaring of the ship's horn, but it was a losing battle.