d r e a m 9 8

The vapor trails lifting up from the gantry were still and quiet when the Jeep turned right, along the waterfront, to face them. There was a cruise ship resting offshore, just out of reach; I looked up from the left back seat, straining to see, and managed to glimpse, at the top of the pillar of water, a small puff of smoke as the trail stopped, and started again.

"Staging!" I cried, excited. The others craned necks. Three glowing dots became clear through the vapor. "Shuttle, it's a shuttle launch!"

"Where?" asked the driver. I don't know her.

"Look, up...hold it, stop the car, stop the car." She did so. "Now, up, through the moonroof...see? three glowing dots?"

"Yes, yes! I see it, there..."

The glow rose, silhouetting the impossible object attached to the shuttle's external tank...a torus of steel and aircraft aluminum larger than the shuttle itself.

"It's the first component of Freedom! They were going to launch that, I didn't realize, this early..." My voice breaks; the three glowing dots of the shuttle main engines are growing, impossibly, larger; and as they do so, they are changing from orange and blue to glaring white, burning through the cloud layers...

The torus and the external tank slip, and begin to fall, straight down. "No! No, no, no, oh, no..." There is a massive shock, entirely visual, as the torus vanishes into a cloud of soil and rock; the external tank, strangely shaped, crashes down near it, where it sits and sheds plating in a strangely fluid manner; it is shaped as a double funnel, or hourglass, and is grey with red paint trim.

"Back up! Back up, go-" I am screaming as the car comes alive and begins to retreat, and she is looking over her shoulder and past me as we whipsaw around a corner to avoid the water, but I am left watching forward, hoping, waiting for the shuttle to abort, but it, too, has stopped moving upward, and as I watch, falls backwards and begins to drop, spinning around its wings. The ejectors never function; I watch it spin into the turmoil, a brief flash of a section of aircraft labelled 'Boeing 767' spinning towards me out of the smoke and debris to crash up against a barrier fence before retreating into the chaos.

Then, suddenly, there are huge crowds of people, and business jets which all read 'Business Air Charter,' and buses, yachts, cars; all with people streaming back towards them away from the launch site. Two men in front of me, walking towards me, have badges on, and one is shaking his head complaining that his people secured the load, but now-

I have a vision of congressional committees, years of investigation, never to find out what made the load fall. One woman walking away from the scene passes us, talking to another about how the pilots shouldn't have been up drinking four nights before, nodding knowingly, and I can't believe that, but have no choice, and then the sirens start and the cyclone lights begin to converge on the obscured buildings.

-fin-

Hmm. I don't know what to make of this one, except that it was one of those dreams where you pray as it's happening that you are dreaming; only to convince yourself that you're not. Sort of the opposite of lucid dreaming; you're caught watching the story you desperately want not to be true. Not precisely a nightmare, as there's little if any fear; but definately not a pleasant imagining.

-the custodian