Soon enough, a small truck stopped and a friendly voice from within boomed out: “Howdy, stranger. I’m Bob. Need a lift?”
Bennu: “Name’s Bennu, and I sure could use one.”
Bob: “Hop in. I’m not going too far - just to Smithburg, the local town, but in this weather, several miles is a big help. Where are you headed?”
Bennu: “Anyplace away from where I am now - my work here is finished. Speaking of work, I wouldn’t mind trading an afternoon of labor for a meal and some shelter. Looks like we might get a real storm later on.”
Bob: “Well, sonny, I don’t know if I can help you there. You look like a city boy, and I’m the local vet, so unless you’re real good with animals ...”
Bennu actually Smiled! Maybe today wouldn’t be a total loss, after all. “A vet! Looks like something’s going right for once. I really like animals, and they seem to sense it.”
Bob: “OK, Bennu, you asked for it! My helper’s injured and I really wasn’t looking forward to doing a difficult calf delivery by myself.”
Scarcely had they gotten to Bob’s office when the phone rang. “Bob, get over here quick. Bessie’s in labor, and it doesn’t look good!”
They sped the several miles to the farm in quiet. Bob was preoccupied with his upcoming task. He HATED it when things went bad for one of the locals; they worked so hard for their money, and his earlier exams didn’t look promising.
Sure enough, Bessie was mooing piteously and in obvious pain. Bob prepared a sedative shot. “Hate to do this, puts the calf at greater risk, but right now, I’m more worried about saving the cow.”
To everybody’s amazement, Bennu waved Bob away, put a hand on the poor animal’s head, and seemed to whisper into its ear. He blocked out the cow’s fear and most of its pain, and it settled down uneasily.
Bob performed the exam. The grim _expression on his face said it all.
With all eyes on Bob, Bennu slipped his hand under his shirt and grasped his medallion. He compared what he could “see” in Bessie’s womb with what Bob felt it ought to look like, and, with a sudden mental effort, twisted the calf into the correct position. Bessie then proceded to drop it easy as pie.
Bob: “Will you look at that! You’ve got a fine male calf there. I would have been happy to save Bessie.”
The farmer asked Bob: “That your new helper?”
Bob: “I wish! Just somebody passing through who offered to trade an afternoon’s work for a meal and a bed. I’d say he earned it!”
The farmer turned towards Bennu. “Uh - in the hurry to help Bessie, we didn’t have time to exchange names. I’m Frank.” Bennu gave his name in reply.
Frank: “Bennu, huh. Well, you’ve got a calf named after you - if you don’t mind.”
Bennu: “I’d be honored.”
So Bob drove Bennu back to his place. There, over a hearty home-cooked meal - Bob was a bachelor - the two of them chatted.
Bob: “You weren’t kidding about having a way with animals. Sure I can’t persuade you to stay - at least until I have a helper who learns to pick horses that don’t get scared by prairie dogs, or whatever spooked him?”
Bennu: “Would you abandon your town to follow me across the country? No more would I give up my search.”
Bob: “You win. Hope you find what you’re looking for. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to bed. We get up early in farm country.”
Bennu had been right. It WAS a dark and stormy night, but he didn’t care. He fell into a deep sleep. Uncharacteristically, his dreams had turned strange - a foreboding of great evil, mixed with an eerie wailing and a horrid roar.
He found himself being shaken awake by Bob. The wailing was real enough - clearly the town fire siren. So was the horrid roar.
“It’s a cyclone! Run for the cellar!”
Bennu got the impression of some monstrous thing reaching down from the sky, capable of swallowing a good-sized town. The two of them were just stepping into the cellar when WHAM! the house disintegrated about them.
A little while later, he regained consciousness. Much to his shock, he was half-buried in a mass of boards and rubble - all that was left of the house. He had a splitting headache, undoubtedly caused by a lump seemingly the size of the Moon. The pain was so severe it almost blocked out the psychic anguish of nearby residents.
Well, he wasn’t going to be of much help to anyone else until he could think clearly. Knowing he had to conserve his powers, he carefully wiggled an arm until he could reach his medallion. He healed himself enough to reduce the pain to a dull ache, leaving his body to finish the process.
He then used physical strength to free himself from the debris and looked for Bob. Fortunately, he was also in a similar state - bruised, battered, and half-covered with plaster, wood, and other likely items from a collapsed house, but not seriously injured.
Bennu freed him and set out to help people in real need. He climbed up out of the remains of the cellar - and gasped. Though the path of destruction was, thankfully, much narrower than it apparently could have been, the results were impressive. A band of wrecked homes stretched across the little town and passed right thru Bob’s house. Visibly shaken, he headed across the street to lend a hand.
A form, visible by lantern light, called out to him: “Guess you’re not from this part of the country. First tornado?”
Bennu: “Tornado? Bob called it a cyclone. And, no, I come from far away.”
“Tornado, cyclone, twister - it’s got all sorts of names. All of them can kill you if you’re unlucky. Just a fact of life in Tornado Alley. Some people have floods, or hurricanes, or earthquakes. Why, a couple of years ago, I even read about some Truman fellow, had a cabin near a volcano out west. The thing woke up and he wouldn’t leave. He died. We get these. America’s the greatest country in the world, but it also has most of the world’s tornados - hey, will you look at THAT!”
Bennu turned around. Off in the distance, lit fitfully by the thunderstorm that gave it birth, was a monstrous black column - the city-killer of Bob’s thoughts. Though he had prepared for violent death from any number of sources, the idea that something could, seemingly at random, reach down out of the sky for him, was deeply unsettling. Yet these Earth humans accepted it as one of the many risks of life on their planet. There was much good in them that was worthwhile to save ...
A lesson from his Childhood came back to him, something about a rare phenomenon called a “vortex cloud”. Apparently, on most of this planet, like on all of his, these things were rare and weak. Whatever he felt about the first one, he was most glad that this was another of Earth’s secrets!
He “came to” with a start. He must have been more shaken than he thought - there were people who needed his help, and a lesson in Earthly meteorology wasn’t really appropriate at this time!
In fact, the very house he was shifting debris at had a seriously injured person in the cellar. Ignoring warnings of personal danger, he climbed down and located the victim. Bennu was able to use his strength to unpin him, but had to draw on his medallion to repair a partially crushed chest. Unfortunately, injuries such as broken limbs would have to wait for time - and Earthly medicine - to heal.
From such a bad start, things, surprisingly, didn’t get too much worse. There was only one other serious injury requiring his Power. He did have to locate three missing people - two unconscious ones in cellars, and one a missing baby. With the whimsy that tornadic winds are capable of, it had been picked up and deposited - quite unharmed - in a tree.
He also had to use his medallion for one other task. Propane is quite commonly used in farm towns for cooking, heating, and a variety of other purposes, and there were broken pipes from which dangerous amounts of gas were escaping. Still, it took only a bit of Power to shut off a couple of valves, though he did have to exert his mind a bit to actually squish a cracked valve shut.
By then, he was starving and only too happy to accept an offer of an early breakfast. He also accepted the offer of a later ride to the nearest train station, about 30 miles away, and MOST reluctantly, the money for the ticket. Despite his protestations that “the town needs it for rebuilding”, grateful residents would not take no for an answer, and he really couldn’t refuse without being impolite. Nor could he refuse a “care package” of sandwiches and the like.
Then he got a pleasant surprise. When it came time for his ride, he was told “Debris all over the roads. Unless you can ride a horse, you’re stuck here for a few days.” I’m sure the hoped-for answer was NOT “No problem. I love horses and they love me,” but that, of course, was what he said.
The day had dawned bright and sunny, and by the time he rode out of town, following a local farmer, the Sun was well up. Bennu unbuttoned his shirt and took a long SunCharge. True, his fellow rider would have gotten one heck of a shock had he turned around at that time, but sometimes, disgression has to yield to need, and he was drained.
All too soon, from Bennu’s viewpoint, the ride was over. He DID love horses! He dismounted and sat down on the lone bench - there was hardly anything one could call a “station”, just a small ticket booth, unoccupied on the weekends.
His stomach was full and Power recharged, but he had expended a lot of physical energy the previous night. Combine that with a shortage of sleep and a warm, sunny, breezy - and, with the passage of the front, low humidity - day, and even Bennu found his eyes closing. He leaned back against the bench back and nodded off, the Sun beaming down on his medallion.
Normally, that would have been totally irrelevant, but he was so tired that his control began to slip. Fortunately, his dreams were of Bob’s large, furry cat (who, with more sense - and senses - than his master, had headed for the cellar and hidden under a spare mattress even before the siren had gone off).
Bennu’s medallion began to glow faintly. A nearby cat woke up, followed the thoughts to their source, hopped up on lap, snuggled in, and went back to sleep. The two of them began to exchange dreamthoughts. The medallion begain to glow more brightly, and soon every cat in the neighborhood was either purring at maximum loudness or yowling to go out and join the one on Bennu’s lap.
Bennu drifted off - quite literally. WHY he started levitating a few inches would always be a mystery, but it let the breeze slowly blow him clean off the bench.
Then train pulled in and tooted its horn. Bennu awoke with a start, and THUD! hit the ground quite solidly. OOF! He dusted himself off and boarded the train. Maybe this would be the lucky site ...
A few days later Preminger came to town. Bennu had definitely been remembered by the conductor of the train (LEVITATING??), and he had also been seen heading for those Indian mounds the day before. Obviously, his path had taken him to Smithburg.
Preminger felt that it would be easiest to talk to everybody at once, and had already gotten off to a bad start by disrupting everything from rebuilding to farmwork. Furthermore, he had a habit of using his government credentials to bully people, and small farm town residents have a strong resentment of “the Government” telling them what to do. The meeting at the town hall was not going well for him. Those who had been helped by Bennu certainly weren’t going to tell Preminger anything, and, under the circumstances, who else but the farmer whose horse Bennu had used could have seen him?
One townsperson stood up. “Let me get this straight. You want to ‘talk’ to this Bennu fellow on a matter of national security? Got a warrant?”
Preminger: “I don’t need a warrant.”
Then he made a serious error. “You know, your town has suffered a fair amount of damage, and how fast those claims get processed might depend on some cooperation.”
The townsperson left in disgust, only to return a few minutes later with an implement common to farm towns. Preminger, still being nasty, didn’t notice. He DID recognize the “CLICK!” and looked to find a double-barrelled shotgun being pointed at his head.
The holder spoke. “I can swear on the Holy Bible that I didn’t see this person. What, if anything, anybody else might have seen, I don’t know. I DO know that we don’t like threats, and, IF anybody had anything to say, all you’ll get from them now is the directions to Hell. Come to think of it, I’ve got those in my hands.”
Preminger: “How DARE you threaten a Federal agent?”
The reply he got was simple: “You have no warrants. You’re a government bully of the worst kind, it’s a free country, and if I were this Bennu fellow, I wouldn’t want to talk to you, either. I’m the town undertaker. You’ve got five minutes to ‘GIT’, or you’re staying permanently. Your choice.”
Preminger “got”.
Naturally, that encounter got the townspeople curious. They held their own town meeting that evening.
Bob and Frank told the tale of Bennu - the person AND the calf, first. The person whose ribs Bennu had fixed was next. “I know I could have been delirious, but I swear that my chest was pretty messed up, and then he appeared, there was this nice light, and - nothing a couple of casts couldn’t fix. People commented on how Bennu could find the missing so easily. Finally, one person stood up.
“I thought I was crazy. Now, maybe, I’m not so sure. Come with me.”
Everybody followed him to his back yard. He picked up a good-sized propane tank and took a flashlight out of a pocket. “Look at that valve. Cracked right across. Looks like somebody pinched it shut!”
It was one of those moonless nights with low humidity, in an area of the country free from smog and the bright lights of nearby cities. Somebody spoke.
“He said he came from far away. Farther than we think, I guess.” He looked up at the sky and pointed to the Milky Way, its stars burning brightly ...
ONE YEAR LATER
One of Preminger’s co-workers (what did you expect - “friends”?) walked into his office and asked him: “Does the name ‘Smithburg’ ring a bell?”
Preminger allowed that it did - after all, people DO tend to remember the location of a close encounter of the third kind with a shotgun.
Co-worker: “Thought so. You might find this interesting reading.” With that he handed Preminger what looked like a folded-up newspaper.
And indeed it was - the “Smithburg Weekly Sentinel” - the “Special State Fair Edition” in fact, which explained why it was double its usual thickness, and so all of 4 pages long. The headline - in undoubtedly the largest type available - trumpeted “Smithburg Bull Wins First Prize”. It was accompanied by what, as far as Preminger could tell, was a LARGE picture of a perfectly ordinary-looking young bovine.
His eye slid down to the caption. “Bennu, owned by Smithburg resident Frank -” He slammed the paper to his desk. “Son-of-a ...” (Wait until he read the rest of the story!)
Copyright June, 2000/rev 4/28/02 Three Cheeks Productions (Richard Kaplan)
Note: considering that he spends most of his time poking around in ancient burial sites, Bennu’s insistence on dusting himself off is quite curious. If you remember, in “In Search of Mira”, he even did it before entering his getaway car after breaking out of jail!