Chapter Five
Palestine, the Netherworld
“Well?” Mr. Watts asked, trying not to appear anxious as his mistress drew near, crossing a field near his house. But he really wanted to hear what she had to say about the cooperative settlements.
“Well, what?” she snapped.
“Admit it, Boss.”
“So what?” She inhaled deeply from the cigarette-like object.
“So something,” he said.
Hagar shook her head, visibly frustrated. She blew out bluish vapor. “That’s exactly it, it’s not. It is just this one-time journey. These collective settlements draw their strength from the formation of the Jewish national home. It’s a fellowship of generosity, camaraderie, and sacrifice fueled by unique circumstances.”
Her eyes flitted across the field they were standing on. “And one day, their members may reach the mountaintop: the establishment of a Jewish state. They will stand, admire the view, and then settle in for the long haul. They will install air conditioners, pave their roads, and manicure their lawns. It’ll become just another community. The wonderful bad old days of hardship will be superseded by pedestrian good days. And the fish? Well, they’ll just taste like fish—nothing more.” She sighed, vexed. “This is also when they will have the luxury of time to note the terrible shortcomings of the collectives they have begotten.” Hagar knelt and absently traced some geometrical shapes in the dirt with her finger. “You know, when you first told me these communal settlements have been thriving for decades, I was astounded.”
“And now?”
“Having learned about their dynamics and culture, I’m even more astounded. It’s surprising they lasted a month, let alone twenty or thirty years, as some of them have.”
Mr. Watts raised an eyebrow.
“The kvutza was formed by adolescents, and its norms are fixed to that youthful phase,” she said. “Thus, aging members are not regarded as venerated elders, but as aging youth, addressed by their diminutive first names. The collective lacks a sense of social boundaries, essential in tight-knit groups. Desires for privacy are eyed with suspicion; the kvutza offers no space—both tangible and intangible—for amorous relations or divergent beliefs. Furthermore, this community lacks vital spiritual practices and rites.” Hagar clasped her knees. “Once the national goal is met, what will anchor these settlements in meaning?”
The two of them fell into a comfortable silence, pondering her words.
Hagar laughed softly with fondness. “I stayed in the dining hall, playing the accordion.”
Her analyst smiled in appreciation.
“Later in the evening, a lecture on the Spanish Revolution was to be held. Well over one hundred members filed back in and took their places. But the speaker? I looked around and ended up noticing a young man busy clearing some tables. When he finished, he removed his apron and worked his way to the front of the room—and started the lecture.”
Mr. Watts laughed and asked, “Was he good?”
Hagar grinned back at him.
She stood up, shook off the dirt, and said, “I’ve got a meeting with destiny near Cairo.” She eyed him kindly, bowed her head in farewell, and then disappeared.
With a spring in his step, Mr. Watts was walking alone toward his house when he unexpectedly felt hands seize him from behind in a powerful grip. Before he could shout, a needle pricked his neck. Darkness overtook him.
Chapter Six
A few miles south of Cairo, Egypt, the Netherworld
The sand, the leisurely flowing Nile, and the clusters of date palm trees were as she remembered them. The solar power plant was gone, though.
Hagar looked around. Over two decades had passed since 1913, when she’d visited this area. In her mind’s eye, she could see the ladies with parasols by the shade of the date trees; the German delegation walking through the mirrored parabolic troughs and heated pipelines, taking careful notes; and Lord Kitchener in an animated discussion with the inventor, Frank Shuman.
She caught sight of a small concrete block with a rod of rusted iron poking out. Hagar moved closer, knelt, and inspected it. Evidently, that’s all that was left of the beacon to humanity’s sustainable future.
“They dismantled it. Needed the metal for the Great War,” said a deep voice from somewhere.
Hagar looked up.
“It was the patriotic thing to do and all that,” said the same voice.
She spotted a lone, stocky figure in a violet robe seated under the shade of two date palms. With a white napkin fastidiously tied around his neck, he ate a stuffed, bright-red bell pepper with gusto, holding it in one hand. The other hand rested on a small table filled with an assortment of hors d’oeuvres.
He didn’t stop or even slow down his chewing, but his eyes tracked her approach.
“Howdy, Boss,” he said.
Bending over, Hagar kissed his mahogany-brown bald head. “Good to see you, Puddeck.”
“Those nipples of yours,” he said, ogling them admiringly as he reached out and ran a hand over her full breasts, tweaking a nipple.
She slapped his hand away. “What the hell happened to the power plant?”
“Oh, that,” he said, finally tearing his gaze away from her bosom to take a mighty bite from another hors d’oeuvre. “Gone,” he said after a bit, smacking his lips. A diamond-like decorative speck glittered in one of his white teeth.
She stared at him, unblinking, and waited for her old-time companion to tell her why in blazes the Earth people had dismantled the solar power plant.
His heavy shoulders sagged, but then his expression brightened. “You see, they had another one of their wars. You know how excitable Terraneans can get—”
She growled wordlessly at him, incensed.
“Come on, Boss, turn around. Let me see that tight ass. It’s been over twenty years.”
The world’s only viable solar power plant, gone. She’d hoped that this place, this project, would be the start of a more sustainable chapter. Now, the odds seemed daunting, the future grim. Hagar screwed her eyes shut and braced herself against a palm tree. The wind picked up, and she felt the grit of sand on her bare arms.
Puddeck’s voice reached her. “You must be wondering by now if they ever constructed the solar power plant to irrigate the thirty-thousand acres in Sudan.” For Puddeck, it was just another planet on which he’d spent a few centuries, just another entertaining assignment. Like Hagar, he’d been on multiple worlds. But unlike Hagar, who cared deeply about the ecosystem, Puddeck paid little heed to the natural world.
Hagar massaged her temples then opened her eyes, fixing him with a baleful look.
“Get real,” her long-time companion finally said. “The Terraneans intended to pump water to grow a shitload of cotton for export. That would have salted up the land in a few decades anyway and made the area uninhabitable.”
Hagar ran a hand angrily through her hair. “Never mind that. This technology could have been used in other ways. This could have been the beginning. A beltway of concentrated solar power plants across the Sahara, British India, the Gobi, and the Chihuahuan Desert would have set the people here on a cleaner path.”
Puddeck picked his teeth with a fingernail. “I don’t see how. Humanity’s centers are elsewhere.”
“Long-distance transmission lines—that’s how. It’s a stretch, but it’s not impossible given their current technological stage.”
“They might as well do it the right way and lay down underground superconducting cables,” he suggested.
She ignored the sarcasm. “Think about it, Puddeck. A beltway of solar farms providing power for humanity. In perpetuity.”
He absently rubbed the back of his neck. “Come back to Earth, Boss,” he said finally. “They know how to use solar energy to transform the seawater into potable water and power up their gizmos with it.” His laughter was low, as he savored the irony. “They could’ve set up those shiny troughs along the shore. Instead, the locals use their rustic bucket-on-sticks, the shadoof, to fetch their water, while the elite cart coal from thousands of kilometers away for a bit of juice.”
Hagar turned away. She wasn’t sure how much to confide. Could Puddeck have been the orchestrator of the colossal sabotage of her data-gathering network and the fabricated reports?
“Oil’s hit the big time,” he said from behind her. “And it’s getting started. Over the past few years, Standard Oil has drilled at several locations on the Saudi coast, right across from Bahrain island. It’s probably only a matter of months before they hit the mother of all gushers.”
“Blast it!”
Puddeck joined her. “I doubt their mythological hell has more fire than what they’re about to unleash with fossil fuel.”
Hagar didn’t bother to inquire about Thomas Edison and Henry Ford’s electric car project. Announcing the intent to mass-produce the cars by Ford had happened all right; she’d attended the press conference at Belmont Hotel herself—January 9, 1914, the last night of her previous stay on Earth. However, the cheery reports that had been submitted to her in later years were undoubtedly bogus. Now that she thought of it, maybe it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Instead of petroleum, cars would have indirectly run on coal, which was the likely candidate to generate the electricity needed from the grid.
She decided not to share her musings and to mask some of her ignorance. It was impossible that Puddeck had betrayed her or that he’d authored the fabricated reports that had reached her. And it was impossible that her analyst network would be taken out. But there it was—all but two of her analysts gone. Now, she was grateful for a moment of paranoia she’d experienced in the 1860s that had pushed her to set up a far-fetched backup plan.
She glanced at him. “What about Schlichten’s decorticator?” Depression and numbness were setting in.
“The machine that separated the hemp fibers from the woody interior?”
Hagar didn’t deign to reply. They’d both seen the decorticator stripping off the leaves and then crushing open the stalks through a series of rollers and flappers. The machine made the process of producing paper from hemp economically viable.
“Nah. It never got commercialized,” Puddeck said. He picked a piece of lint from his sleeve. “In the end, the money guy decided to stick with good ol’ trees as a feedstock for paper.”
“And Schlichten?”
“Got old and died.” The figure in violet robes shrugged. “Happens even to the best of them.”
She screamed out of pent-up rage. Her hopes for a more sustainable future were being dashed one by one.
At long last she asked, “So it’s noisy gasoline cars and foul coal plants throughout?”
“Pretty much.”
Puddeck eyed his mistress. He found her irresistible when she was furious.
Minutes went by.
Hagar turned and faced Puddeck. “Time to put a stop to it.”
He inclined his head. “I kind of reckoned you wou—” Puddeck’s body froze, his mouth hanging open mid-sentence.
Hagar whirled around, and her eyes widened in disbelief. “You!” As she started to move, her arms froze still at her sides.
A man and a woman stepped forward. The man held a small black device in his hand. They both regarded Hagar, suspended motionless, like an insect trapped in amber. Hagar and Puddeck were in a timefold. As long as they remained in stasis, the mountains of Earth would grind to dust and the oceans would dry up before a second passed for them.
“That takes care of Hagar and her bid to cut things short,” the woman said. She leered at the still figure up close. Then she spun away and shrieked in laughter. “Oil and guns,” she hollered, spreading her arms wide. “Hot vinyl pants, supersonic airplanes, and power boats. Let the party begin!”