I was too far away to add my voice to theirs. I took Hannah’s hand and moved us along in the throbbing, jostling, jolting throng. Preceding me were Gus and Charlotte and my nephew Newman. I watched as Newman was shoved to the ground by a wild-eyed man, as he tried to rise and was knocked down again by the knee of a different man thrust stumblingly forward by the hysterical crowd. I reached down and strained to pull Newman to his feet.
The crowd crushed closer now and tighter still, as those having reached the door to the stairs bunched and bottlenecked themselves within the straitened stairwell. There were even more guns firing away at us now and more Dinglians dropping all round me: people I knew, people I did business with, people I wrote about, people I’d had a pint with, thrown a quoit with, people I esteemed, people I loved: Gummidge the lamplighter; Mrs. Flintwitch, the doll’s dressmaker; Mrs. Chillip, my brother’s neighbour; the schoolmistress Miss Clickett; the distiller Cratchit; the dentist Copperfield; the pieshop owner Mrs. Nickleby, the veterinarian Micawber, and the unfortunate Mr. Howler who in the end had done the right thing and perhaps would be rewarded for it in the quiet, far less flustering afterlife.
From the campanile, Antonia and Estella watched in terror as their friends, their neighbours, their surviving countrymen and women were stricken down one, two, three at a time by the diabolically-exacting aim of the Project marksmen — expert Outland sharpshooters hired to finish the task that the floodwaters had started.
The sound of guns was joined by the cries of those who had been hit and by the horrific screams of those who watched as others were shot, by the grunts and moans, gasps and sobs and hasty injunctions and brisk exchanges and nearly monosyllabic good-byes swirling from within that brutal, bloody, cold-hearted assault upon the “ant colony,” upon that cage of subhuman guinea pigs, upon the “Victorian freak show” darkening behind its descending curtain.
We had tried valiantly to save ourselves. We had engaged our intellect and our muscle and our intrepidity, we had come together as the Dell had never before united itself to deliver our valley from a powerful mysterious force that had played us like chess pieces until we should lose all of our crenellation, until we should be wholly discarded, disposed, ultimately destroyed. The fear in me gave way to deep, burning anger. How could such a thing be? How could the universe be so indifferent? Where was God? Where was fairness and justice in this cosmological equation?
I returned my ranging thoughts to Newman who stood before me. “Are you all right, nephew?”
He nodded. “I’ve lost Mama and Papa.”
I pointed. “They’re there. Just ahead. Keep moving along.”
But Newman didn’t keep moving. He stopped, risking again being swept under the mob. He cocked his head. Listening. Listening to something quite different from the tumult of panic and peril and death. He was the first to hear the curious drone of the manmade birds as they approached — the sound of their spinning horizontal wings, turning in rapid oscillations like the wings of the oddest sort of hummingbirds. The drone quickly became a steady mechanical groan, as the flying machines began to descend over Dingley Dell, moving both vertically and horizontally. There were twenty of them, then thirty, then perhaps forty of these manmade mechanical birds, less like a flock now than like a gathering swarm of giant mechanical bees, hovering above, spinning their blades in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci’s famed aerial screw.
Some drew so close that I could feel a strong wind from the air they displaced, so close that we could see the faces of the men and women who rode inside. They were drest as soldiers. They were pointing guns — not at us, but out and away — aiming their arms at those who were aiming their guns at us. The spinning, flying machines buzzed over Milltown as if to announce their arrival, and then they pulled themselves apart and spread themselves out along the periphery of the valley, fluttering over the place where the shooters had been about their killing business.
Here and there could be heard an exchange of rapid gunfire between the flying soldiers and the Tiadaghton marksmen. But quite quickly did the shots die away. The Project shooters were outnumbered. The Project shooters were fleeing back into the woods, fleeing Dingley Dell. The Pennsylvania Air National Guard under orders of the governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had come to Dingley Dell to save the aliens.
Chapter the Ultimate
ewman Trimmers touched the sky.
The mechanical bird called the helicopter lifted him, along with his mother and his father, up into the air, flying him high above the flooded valley and on to a place called the “FiG.” Fort Indiantown Gap, as it was also known, was headquarters for the Pennsylvania National Guard. All of the surviving Dinglians were airlifted there. The rescue operation continued throughout the long night and then through all of the next day and even through several days thereafter. By late afternoon of the second day, most of those who had made it safely through the flood had been taken away and put into an encampment that was being set up for them on the grounds of the FiG. There were a few Dinglians who had made their way into the Eastern and Western Woods and who, not trusting the Pennsylvania guardsmen, hid there for a while. These men and women would later be found and placed into the camp as well.
The Senator and the Governor appealed to the United States Congress for special emergency funding to provide for all of the displaced and homeless Dinglians. There were many months of investigations to be held, many charges of criminality to be prosecuted. These are ongoing even as I write this eighteen months later. Hundreds of Tiadaghton employees were rounded up and taken to prison. There were suicides. An arsonist took a match to New York’s landmark Flatiron Building and destroyed two of the upper floors. The newspapers called the growing revelations about the Tiadaghton Project the “The Scandal of the Millenium.”
“ExtraterrestrialsinPA.com” lost most of its readers and all of its advertisers.
Hundreds of questions remained: What would be done with those who had lived in Dingley Dell and knew nothing of the ways of the Outland? How would they be integrated into modern society? How would these relatively primitive people be protected from illness, from cultural prejudice, belittlement, and exploitation? How would their livelihoods, many no longer applicable in a modern world, serve them? Who would retrain these people? Who would re-educate them? Where would they live? For even as of this writing there has been no decision made as to what will happen to the ghost valley of Dingley Dell (Langheart Steel’s plans for the Dell having been declared null and void). Would the Dinglians be allowed to return to the valley and to live some semblance of their former lives? Things would, no doubt, remain unsettled for many more months, perhaps even a good many years to come.
But more immediately, there were funerals to be held and a search for places to inter the Dinglian dead. And there were, at final count, nearly three thousand of them. A Pennsylvania Congressman noted that the number almost equaled the final toll of death exacted by the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. In both cases, the deaths need not have happened. Religious obsessitors killed Americans in the fall of 2001. Corporate playfellows, crapulous with an overdose of power and privilege, killed the denizens of Dingley Dell on July 10, 2003. Greed, said one American newspaper columnist, will motivate a man or a group of men to descend to the depths of human depravity, but there are other reasons for degeneracy upon such a staggering scale. The corporate overlords of Dingley Dell were avaricious men and women who had become deadlier still in the manifestation of their boredom. The Dinglians were to be tossed out like a child’s toy that no longer enchants or enthralls. Wealth corrupts, said the columnist, but it also habituates one to lackadaisical acceptance of the inhumanity that may be engendered by it.