*****
I thought for a moment that I had gone deaf. All I could hear was a rushing noise. When my eyes refocused, it was onto a vast field of soybeans, leaves quivering in a brisk breeze. A departing thunder of hooves made me climb to my feet to look. One of the ponies was headed away, fast. “Whoa, Princess!” cried the little rider. “Whoa!” Princess was not about to oblige. One side of the Canadian flag had worked loose, and flapped against her hocks, not helping matters in the least.
“Keep Petunia here,” ordered the lady in the cart to the remaining rider. The minis and the Pomeranian looked shell shocked. The little dog’s eyes were bugged out, and it had stopped panting. The lady scrambled out of the cart and went to the minis’ heads. One reached down toward the soybeans, but snorted upward again restlessly.
“Now see what’s happened!” cried Jeff in a shrill voice as he hauled himself up out of the soybeans a few yards to our left. Harry just stood there, mouth agape, staring at the Mark II. His car was nowhere to be seen. Overhead, a tiny tower of cumulo-nimbus was rapidly dispersing in an otherwise clear blue sky.
In all, our little contingent was comprised of myself, the equines and their humans, Harry, Jeff and the cart with its gizmo, which no longer twinkled and fluttered, Laura and the float with its shrubs, but not Ted and the pickup truck, two frightened little girl Drummers (Sara and Ashley), and one Shriner, complete with fright wig, red nose and clown suit, with the engineless plywood exoskeleton of his funny car. He put up a shaky hand and pulled off the fake nose and wig, and stood looking around, as lost as the rest of us.
“Fred?” Jeff said in a soft, astonished voice. The Shriner nodded sheepishly.
“After Nortel, Dianne and I sold our condo and moved to Brockville. It’s cheaper there. I’ve got a nice little mobile computer repair business going. Dianne works part time at a florist’s. What’s this?” he asked, nodding toward the Mark II.
The lady with the minis broke in. “I don’t care what it is. I’ve got one niece headed for where ever,” she waved her had in the direction Princess had gone, “and the other one needs to pee.” Petunia’s rider managed to look embarrassed and desperate at the same time.
Laura and I hastily hauled some potted cedars off the hay wagon and lugged them a few feet away to make a screen. I handed the little girl (another Ashley) a few tissues from the wad in my pocket, and she ducked behind the screen with a gasp of relief, leaving Petunia’s reins in my hands, without even asking if I knew anything about horses. Petunia started to dance and whinny, and in the distance I heard an answering whinny. Evidently Princess was on her way back.
“Oh, thank goodness!” the mini lady cried. “Kaylee, are you OK?”
“Yes, Aunt Mickey,” came the quavery reply. Princess trotted up, Kaylee with a big green stain on one knee, rattling around on the saddle like popping corn in a hot pan.
“So, gentlemen, where are we and how do we get back?” I asked of Harry and Jeff. Fred, who looked as though he might have gravitated toward that group, hastily backed away. I guess I can look rather daunting, when I’m in Organizational Mode.
Jeff glared at Harry, who rolled his eyes skyward, as though doing some mental calculations. “I, ah, think we’re south.”
Jeff threw up his hands then reached into a pocket of his corduroys. It emerged with what appeared to be a cell phone crossed with a slide rule. He slid the end out into an antenna and frowned at the screen. “No service off the tower.” He punched at the keypad. “Nor off the satellite, either.” He started to pace. Ashley Drummer started to snivel. Mickey the mini lady took her hand and Sara’s, and led them toward the cart, where Ashley Pony was sitting patting the Pomeranian. I still had Petunia.
Fred sidled over to Harry. “Are we talking two, three or four here?” I heard him ask in an undertone.
“Certainly three, possibly four. Or more,” Harry said, his eyes darting nervously.
Four? My heart skipped a beat. “Are you two talking dimensions?” I demanded. Harry nodded sickly, and Fred let out a slow, admiring whistle, aimed at the machine, not me.
“Will anyone be trying to locate us?” I asked. Harry shrugged; Jeff paced some more.
“I suppose, if the lightning didn’t fry the towers....” Jeff conjectured, “or our locator.” He popped open a hatch on the side of the Mark II and peered inside, shaking his head. Fred looked over his shoulder.
“Ted will be worried,” Laura fretted. “The whole town will be in chaos, I imagine.”
“There’s not much we can do about that,” I said. “At least we’ve got candy.” At that, Ashley Pony, Ashley Drummer and Kaylee looked interested. Sara hunkered down into the cart.
“She’s allergic to peanuts,” Ashley Drummer said. “And bees, and milk products, and perfume and pollen.” She puffed up a bit. “I’m her Watcher at school. I’m supposed to help her with her EpiPen or her inhaler if she has a reaction.”
“Do you have your EpiPen and inhaler with you?” I asked. Sara looked dismayed. “I guess it’s still on the float.”
I turned to the M II crowd. “Is there anything you can tell us about how far, and how ‘when’ we moved?”
Harry gave me a distracted look. “About 45 km due south. That’s all I can tell. The lightning did some damage....”
“That would put us ....” I tried to picture a map in my mind’s eye, “somewhere south of the St. Lawrence, not too far from Ogdensburg,” I guessed. “As to the when, the cropping system looks like what we’re used to, highly mechanized, but I’m not good enough with my soybean varieties to know if these are the same as ours.” I looked to Laura and Mickey, who both shook their heads. “Well, then, we should go north out of this field, then follow the roads to Ogdensburg. I don’t suppose any of you has a Passport with you?” Jeff dragged one out of his back pocket. I rolled my eyes. “This should be interesting, at the border crossing.”
Jeff said a bit haughtily, “They might find us before we get that far.”
“Was anybody in the office?” Harry asked.
“G.W.,” Jeff replied. “He ignores Canada Day and celebrates on the Fourth,” he explained to us. “I’ve never figured out why he moved up from the Odgensburg office.”
“Health care,” muttered Harry. “Got a sick kid, in and out of the Children’s Hospital.| He shook his head at the gizmo. “I don’t understand why this worked. It shouldn’t have. The lightning must have done something. We never had enough power to get this one up to firing level.”
Well, that would explain the digging to the hydro substation, I thought.
“Are they going to have enough power to get us back?” Fred asked. He continued to take in the details of M II.
“We’re up to M V now. Much more compact. New surface plasma circuitry.” Fred nodded as though he understood. All I could think of was the nefariously mis-led M 5 desctructo-computer of Star Trek fame.
“Providing the lightning didn’t damage things in the shop,” Jeff grumbled. “I wish we could contact them.” He tried his phone again, then shoved it back into his pocket with a look of disgust. “We must have moved ‘when’. If it was a straight 3-D move, I should have been able to make contact. I’m guessing either there are no satellites, or they’re not transmitting on the frequencies we generally use.”
“We can’t stay here while you fellows tinker with the machinery,” Mickey said. “I need to get my nieces home, and Sara is starting to wheeze. Come along. Ashley and Sara, you can squeeze into the back of the cart. Jingles and Star can handle your weight.”
“Wait, shouldn’t we all stay together, in case they get that thing working?” I insisted.
“Action is better than standing around,” Mickey insisted.
Laura half-nodded in agreement. “What about the border crossing?”
“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Mickey replied.
“Just a minute,” I said, thinking furiously. “Mickey, can your team pull M II
on its cart?”
“If it’s not heavier than it looks. But the girls will have to ride double on the ponies.”
“Fine. Harry, can you sit on the edge of the cart and work on M II while it’s moving?”
“Not on this rough ground. Maybe on the road.”
“OK. Laura, let’s see what we can scrounge off our float to hook the garden cart to the mini cart.” Between the two of us, we found enough pieces of baling twine and the draw pin from the hay wagon tongue, to make a rather wobbly but hopefully safe connection. We gathered up all of the candy and piled it into the back of the mini cart. The Drummers wouldn’t leave their gimbes behind, so we squeezed them in under the seat. “Does anybody else want to use the, ah, outhouse, before we go? Ashley Pony did again, and then the rest of the girls, and after adding a taller Cedar to the array, so did us ladies. I had barely enough tissues. The fellows ducked self-consciously behind the bushes too. They declined my last ragged, lint-infested tissue.
“It’s a shame to leave all this potted stock behind,” Laura said, looking over the items on the hay wagon. “There’s more than a thousand dollars worth of stuff here.”
“I suppose it can’t be helped,” I said sympathetically. “Some farmer’s going to get a real surprise! All set?” Shriner clown Fred looked down ruefully at his size 32 shoes, then took them off and set them on the hay wagon. His bright white athletic socks quickly took on the hue of the local topsoil. “All set,” he said. “Wagons Ho!”
Our motley little caravan waded through the soybeans, Fred, Harry and Jeff making sure that M II stayed steady on the cart. I helped Kaylee with Princess, and Laura walked beside Petunia, keeping an eye on little Sara, who’s eyes looked a bit puffy. It took us more than half an hour to reach the edge of the enormous soybean field.