ENCOUNTER by Hep Aldridge (bill gates books recommendations .txt) 📕

had to do was to think up and keep thinking higher, and we would go up. When we get to the top, we can think forward, backward, left, or right, and we will move. Once we’re at the stone, we just think down until we touch down, and then off.” It was supposedly that simple, and it worked. Jeannie had locked these units into slow mode, so they would not be fast or move radically; therefore, controlling them was not difficult.

So, up we went, what a rush even at slow speed. I felt like a scaled-down version of James Bond with his jet pack. We all three made it to the canyon rim with no problem and set to work. Dimitri and I attached the anti-gravity devices to the broken halves of the collector/receptor. We activated them, and the halves lifted off the ground a foot. We had to adjust the power setting to raise it another two feet, so it cleared all the rocks around it. When it did, we gently pushed it back together until the break lined up perfectly.

Joe had the glove and rod in hand and slowly began the process of attaching the two pieces back together. I could see what was happening as he worked. The beam touched the crack, and as he held it there, the crack underneath it slowly disappeared. He had started at the top and worked his way down. This collector/receptor was about five feet on each side and ten to twelve feet long. As he got to the bottom, Dimitri and I slowly rotated the massive stone easily, and Joe continued his “welding” down each side until we had completed all four sides. He stepped back and said, “Now, that’s some nice alien device super-duper welding repair, if I do say so myself.”

We stepped out as the lintel hung in space and looked for the crack. It was gone, nothing to be seen anywhere along the repair. It looked as if nothing had happened to it.

“Nicely done,” I said. “Okay, Dimitri, let’s see if we can get this bad boy back in place. This was a little trickier than just moving it. We had to raise it and ourselves at the same time. One was a manual adjustment on the block; the other was our mental commands for our movement. When we got to the height just above the base, we had to move to one side and think forward as we slowly pushed it over the base. We could see there was a shallow indentation for the block to sit in, and it took us a couple of tries to get it to line up properly, but we got it and slowly set it in place with a solid-sounding thud. We removed the anti-gravity devices and returned to Joe standing on the ground. We looked at one another, grinning. “Damn, we did it,” Joe said.

“We sure did,” I replied.

I got on Comms and contacted Reggie and asked if they were able to follow the repair on the video feed we had set up with the trail camera. She said they did, and “Jeannie said it was a great job, but to leave now. The device would be automatically restarting soon, and she didn’t want you guys near this power source when it did.”

“Roger that,” I said. “Okay, guys, grab the gear, and let’s head down.” We got to the edge of the canyon rim, thought up, and slowly rose about five feet, then forward and moved twenty feet out over the canyon below and then slowly down. That’s when I heard Dimitri’s voice come loudly over the Comm, “To infinity and beyond…”

I looked up, and he was just coming over the rim, heading in our direction.

“Okay, Buzz Lightyear, get your ass down here,” I said as Joe started laughing uncontrollably.

“Knock it off, Joe; you’ll only encourage him.”

We were standing on the canyon floor when Dimitri arrived and stopped four feet off the ground, looked at us, and said, “You guys aren’t planning on walking back, are you?” as he began gliding back to the Citadel.

We soon joined him, and Joe said, “Sure beats walking.”

I agreed but kept quiet as we all glided back to and over the rockpile.

Stepping through the cloak, I called to Doc, “Is it working?”

Grinning like a Cheshire cat, he spread his arms toward the city and said, “You tell me.”

I hadn’t even looked around until then and was blown away. The Citadel was lit up like a Christmas tree. Multi-colored lights were everywhere; the fountain had color-changing lights underwater. There were blue paving stones lighting up the main street, and most of the buildings had lights on inside. I could see the strange, engraved lettering on the front of most of the buildings was glowing bright blue. But the most amazing thing was Jeannie, hovering ten feet off the ground in front of the first obelisk, arms outstretched and head thrown back, glowing so brightly it was hard to look directly at her.

As the three of us stared at the surrounding scene, I said to no one in particular, “I’ll take that as a yes.”

We made our way down the steps to our friends who were still staring at the transformation that had occurred in the Citadel. I now noticed the tops of all four of the obelisks positioned in the center median of Main Street were glowing bright blue, as was the capstone of the pyramid building across from our campsite.

You expected to see people coming out of the buildings and walking down the street at any minute. The Citadel looked alive.

“Wow!” Joe exclaimed.

Dimitri said, “I can hardly believe how different it looks.”

I had walked up next to Doc and said, “When did this happen?”

Without looking at me, he said, “Just a couple of minutes before you got here. Jeannie let us know it was going to be exciting when the power device re-started, but…”

I was staring at Jeannie, floating in the air. “Exciting