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“I am glad the snow has melted overnight so that we can see better what is going on up here in the upper fields. So the… object appeared several days back between rows 7 and 8 there so I’ve been waiting for something to show up. This time, the flying machine with the whirly top. Good timing with our visit!”

“A helicopter,” I offered, crouching by his side behind nearby row 5, looking down on it and hopefully out of sight. We’d been waiting all night, but since I changed from woman to man at dusk I wasn’t so threatened by him. Tough stretches in the night, though. The guy was frisky! “Sometimes called a chopper,” I added.

“Chopper?” He seemed surprised at the variant name.

“Yeah, you know. Chop chop chop chop chop,” I illustrated. “Like the sound it makes. Chop chop chop chop chop,” I repeated.

“I have a dog named Chomp,” he said in his intuitive, associative way. “I wonder if it’s related?”

“Chomp could be derived from Chop I suppose,” I said, playing along.

“Yes,” he said, raising his head to the approaching chopper. “Yes I think it is. I’m *remembering*.”

The helicopter landed just outside the field and a man jumped out…

… and ran toward the metallic silver object…

… making it disappear when reaching it.

“Ahh, the smart dressed pale man,” he said just above the noise of the still spinning blades, trying to control his anger. Thank Gods for the wads of cotton! “There’s three of them. This one, the sloppily dressed pale man with the wild look about his face — another monster, I sense — and then the dark man who dresses neutrally between the two. Can you hear me over the noise?”

I nodded; he continued.

“Any of them could show up in several modes of transport. There’s helicopter — chopper — today. There’s 4 wheeled machines other days, 2 wheeled machines other days, but… never one of your planes. The plane is separate. This doesn’t seem connected to that. This is an upper field event and that is in one of the lower fields, along with Viney. Although both often appear at 3 o’clock, PM here obviously.”

I checked my watch not on my arm. 3:01. Task apparently accomplished, the smart dressed pale man, as he put it, got back into the helicopter and took off northward, I noticed. Toward the swamplands.

“Well,” he said, standing up from his crouching position, noise abating (relief!). “Show’s over. The object does not return for days, sometimes weeks or even months. This inevitably attracts the machines when it does. And the men. Do you understand what happened?”

“Kind of,” I said, knowing I actually understood little.

“They’re building something. I know it. Something beyond mere ground and aerial machines. Something different. He turned his head toward me. My, er, half-cat senses tell me this,” he tried to explain the sensation, showing me his slitted eyes. “Half alien, actually.”

“Um hmm.”

“You look tired. I’ll let you get back to your kind.”

“Thank you.” Not captive, phew!

“One more thing before you leave if you don’t mind. I’ll even let you take a replica home with you. I’ll be needing your future knowledge in the future, I’m picking up. With your permission of course.”

“Who are you?” I asked, meeting a lot of strange characters online but this one taking the cake. So realistic, so believable. Indeed I needed a rest after all this weirdness.

“Call me Gerald,” he said, finally revealing his own name. We started back down the hill toward his house for that “one more thing.”

(to be continued)