The First Interbellum (1918-1939)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Seven Aces were barely underway before a sudden sound filled the air, followed
by a lower rumble, and a vibration that visibly shook the trees on the shore and stirred
waves on the river. Then the river began to churn and the current changed, as a new
channel appeared! What had appeared to be stable shore on the right hand side of the
river suddenly vanished, and the waters were rushing into the opening!

The pilot threw on the full power of the motor, and tried to ride the current to bring
the vessel past the gap without being swept through. The gap was small enough
that the entire river was not flowing into it, but it was large enough to represent a
serious threat to any craft nearby, as rushing water tried to find a shorter way down
the stream. They made it past the gap, though it was a rough ride and closer than
they would have liked, and then the gap suddenly closed again, as another rumble
heralded yet another shift in the local ground, closing off the gap.

(The gap had once led into an artificial diversion channel, with a disguised gate, the
gate had momentarily been opened by the tremors.)

The same tremors were shaking the ground a few miles away, near the expedition
with Zadatharion and Aradel. They had brought their craft ashore to reconnoiter,
just in time to be caught by the tremors. The two tired Avatars manager to react in
time to push their ship back onto the water psychokinetically, just in time to avoid
the vessel being crushed by a falling tree.

Though neither party knew this, the situation was about to get more eventful. The
tremors were the result not of fault lines but of local vibrations generated by the
malfunctioning paralenses under the ruins of the Refuge. Though much of their
large-scale power had been disrupted when Zadatharion and Aradel had forced the
machines out of synchronization earlier, they continued to operate. The problem
was that they were operating far outside their design specifications, and producing
effects never intended by their creators.

(Note that Zadatharion and Aradel did not know they had done this, it was an effect
of their counter-Manifestation that prevented the earthquake.)

The Flux, which would normally have been both calmed and stabilized, and focused
and amplified, by the machines, was now being ‘stimulated’, for lack of a better word.
A natural effect of that was to make the local Matrix/Flux ‘irritable’, again for lack
of any better word. Ancient Manifestations were coming on and off in strange and
unpredictable ways, producing effects quite at odds with the intentions of the fluxons
who had laid them down, so many thousands of years before.

To make matters worse, one of the ancient paralenses was...different.

In the last days of the Antediluvian Age, when the Unity had been pressing its Great
Project to the limit, trying to find ways to advance the work more rapidly, a way had
been found to make paralenses that was far faster and cheaper than the standard ways.
The problem had been that the paralenses so created were ‘tainted’ in ways that even
the Unity and its servitor fluxons had never recognized or understood.

There should not have been any of the ‘tainted’ paralenses at the Refuge. The man who
set up the Refuge and organized its creation had specifically forbidden this. He had not
understand the problem with the new paralenses at that time, but he had enough native
caution not to trust the process until it had been studied and tested, and he distrusted
everything to do with the Great Project, as a matter of policy.

However, simply because an order is issued does not always mean that it is obeyed.
Just as some of the first personnel had smuggled in some Flux revenants against the
policies of the group, another person had opted to use one of the ‘new’ paralenses
in the construction of the Refuge complex. In this case, the motive had been simple:
expediency. Construction had fallen behind schedule, budgets were overstrained,
and other schedules were being thrown off by the delays already experienced.

This had led one of the supervisors of the construction, a mid-level member of the
group, to permit the inclusion of a ‘new type’ paralens amid the network that was
to provide the operational basis for the technology and paranormal support of the
site. Just one, installed along with the others while the man responsible ‘looked the
other way’ in the phraseology of a later Age.

Just one...but sometimes one thing can make a large difference.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

For most of the history of the Refuge, both before and after the collapse of the colony,
the presence of the 'tainted' paralens had made little if any practical difference. It
worked just as it was intended to work, and most of the problems that had arisen from
the misaligned network of paralenses had actually come from the other units. The
necessary circumstances for the problems in the 'new type' paralens to arise had
simply never happened, and so the device had worked as its designed had intended.

Now, though, matters were different. Slumbering within the paralens was a living
entity of a sort, though the term ‘living’ might be imprecise. Arising out of the pain
and suffering of the living beings sacrificed to create the paralens, this entity lay
quiescent until the uproar associated with the arrival of Jurgensen and the Seven
Aces and the Avatars stimulated it into activity.

It had no consciousness (at this stage) but it did have instinct of a sort. It reached
out through the Matrix/Flux, trying to find a source of psychic energy upon which
to focus and feed, but there was nothing available within immediate range. In the
frustration of this, it ‘lashed out’. This shock through the Flux touched the other
paralenses, stimulating them to higher and higher levels of activity, and this in turn
drove the entity into more and more instinctive action, a feedback looped emerged.

One physical effect of this was the tremors and other effects now spreading out in
all directions around the ruin. Another was that the malfunctioning paralenses grew
very hot, their glassine surfaces reaching temperatures of several hundred degrees
Celsius in a matter of moments, leveling off at about six hundred degrees. Anything
flammable would have burst into flames, but the machines were buried in empty
stone cubes, within nothing present to burn.

Unfortunately, the underground cells had long since been broached by the tremors
and other uproar, cracks and channels opened them up to the tunnels under the ruins,
and those tunnels were bring flooded by the diversion channel that had come open
earlier. That water was filling the lower chambers, and now some of it flooded into
the chambers containing the extremely hot paralenses.

The temperature alone would not have harmed the paralenses, they were made of a
material akin to silicate glass, but with a higher melting point and considerably
greater resistance to softening. Likewise, simply being immersed in water, in and
of itself, would have little effect on the function of an otherwise normal paralens.

Now, though, relatively cold water came into sudden contact with objects heated to
hundreds of degrees Celsius, and the protections that might have dealt with this
issue were long since gone. The result was both predictable and spectacular, one by
one, almost on contact with the water, the paralenses shattered, physically disrupting
the internal mechanisms of the machines in the process.

The effects were instantaneous and spectacular.

A shock-wave spread through the local Flux, which writhed and twisted under the
final surge of pressure from the dying machines, then twisted back in response. The
local area, heavily laced with ancient Flux Manifestations, erupted into chaos as fire,
ice, heat and cold, tremors and flashes of light filled the area.

The half-dazed, half-conscious ‘ghosts’ began to dissipate, as their long-maintained
hold on the mortal world was finally disrupted by the destruction of the paralenses.
Their power evaporated almost instantly, though they emitted a single last blast of
telepathic energy, a mind-wail that afflicted sensitives for hundred of kilometers in
all directions, a wail of hate, pain, sorrow, and loss that lasted for several moments.
The strength of this dissipated rapidly with distance, but many people felt it and
had no idea why such a sensation filled their waking mind or distorted their dreams.

The wail had another effect: it awakened Karl Jurgensen.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Jurgensen had been unconscious ever since the hard head blow hours earlier. The
Aces had kept him bound hand and foot, and posted a guard to keep a weapon on
the man, but Jurgensen remained unconscious. This was both a relief and a worry.
A relief because it was one less than to worry about, one less thing to deal with
amid their troubles, and a worry because they wanted a live prisoner to interrogate
in due time. The man did not seem to be so badly hurt that he would remain
unconscious so long, and if he was so injured as that, he might die before any
useful information could be obtained.

As it happened, the reason Jurgensen was unconscious was that he was exhausted,
at a psychic level. The constant strain of resisting the psychic pressure of the area,
the ‘ghosts’ and the other phenomena, together with the stress and effort of the
ongoing battle with the Aces and the revenants and everything else, had taken a
toll on Jurgensen. Furthermore, he had been using the ryshyl drug to boost his
psionic powers, and this too put a strain on his body and mind.

Thus, when the head blow finally rendered him unconscious, Jurgensen remained
so much longer than would have seemed likely from a naive examination. On the
other hand, years of training from the Unity had led to him having the ability to
apply his own psionic healing abilities to himself, within limits, even while he
was completely unconscious. It was something few men other than Jurgensen
could have hoped to do, it was almost an internalized reflex.

This too contributed in its way to his remaining unconscious, paradoxically. Even
as he was healing his body and mind at a rate far faster than his captors would
have suspected, the diverted energy for this task kept him from waking up until
it was fairly well completed. Or it would have done so, under ‘normal’ conditions,
anyway. In this case, the telepathic ‘death wail’ of the ghosts was sufficient to
break through and awaken Jurgensen in spite of his condition.

Jurgensen awakened in better physical state than one would have expected, due
to the previous healing process. Still, he awakened to find himself bound, gagged,
and lying on the floor in a small corner of a river craft, watched over by a man with
a gun pointed in his general direction. The ropes that held him were thick and very
strong, much too strong for him to hope to break with his psychokinesis, even if he
had still been boosted by the ryshyl drug. In fact, however, the drug had long since
worn off, leaving his basic powers and only his basic powers available.

This was less of a problem than an asset, however. The ryshyl amplified his power
but made his skills harder to use, concentration harder to achieve. Even boosted,
his psychokinesis could not have broken the ropes, they were too numerous and too
strong. (Pyrokinesis might well have set them on fire, but this would have been a
rather doubtful tactic with the ropes wrapped around his body.)

What the Seven Aces did not fully understand, as yet, was that there were multiple
aspects to such abilities. Jurgensen, as they suspected, lacked the raw power to just
break free, even after he had awakened. There was the issue of delicacy and skill,
however, and here Jurgensen far surpassed their estimates of his abilities. Slowly,
carefully, doing his best to appear unconscious and not raise the suspicions of his
guard, Jurgensen began to work on the knots and ropes that held him, examining
the knots with his clairvoyant abilities and undoing them using delicate telekinesis.

It was slow work, made the more so by both his own continued exhaustion, and the
need to avoid giving any sign that he was doing it. Jurgensen brought well over a
century of practical experience to his task, however, and was making slow but
steady progress as the minutes passed. He was not yet sure what he would do to
deal with the guard, but he was prepared to leave that problem until he finished
with his current issue.

As it happened, this problem was solved for him, when conditions outside made
his guard leave his post to deal with more immediate issues. Jurgensen did not
know what was going on outside, though he could hear a roar and confusion of
sound and the ship was rocking, and his espersenses flared into confusion when
he reached beyond his immediate person. Still, he could still work on the ropes,
and he was not about to waste the opportunity.

Now that he could work unobserved, he was free in a few minutes, and able to
stagger to his feet, with difficulty, a few minutes after that. His body was tired
and his circulation returning painfully, but he was awake and mobile.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The reason the guard had left his post was that the events initiated by the destruction
of the paralenses were reaching their culmination.

The effects did not peak immediately, instead they rose unevenly as the local Flux
at once relaxed and spasmed (imprecise terminology). Much of that consisted
of ongoing tremors, localized but none the less intense for that. The local weather
was also affected, as various ancient Manifestations malfunctioned or ran wild.

Within fifteen minutes of the destruction of the paralenses, the formerly cloudless
sky was filling with dense cloud masses, clouds that looked fundamentally wrong
to anyone familiar with normal weather of that region. The clouds were thick and
dark, and twisting into great rotating aerial columns under the influence of strange,
spiraling winds. Moisture was being drawn into the region from far away, against
the usual flow of the wind patterns, and within a few minutes the entire area was
being pounded by downpour rains and rivers of cloud-to-cloud and cloud-to-ground
lightning. Storms wracked the air even as tremors shook the ground, and stranger
things were happening as well.

All hands had to work to keep the vessel afloat, which was why Jurgensen was left
unwatched. It was a constant struggle to keep their craft moving, with constantly
shifting storm winds, trees falling into the water as they were uprooted by wind
and quake, and the only light coming from the lightning.

(It was technically day, but the clouds had become thick enough to cut off almost
all the sunlight.)

The other expedition was in no better condition, even the psionic power of Aradel
and Zadatharion was pressed to the limit in dealing with the situation. There was
no hope of shaping any counter-Manifestation to this, it was too much, too
fast, all anyone could attempt to do was endure from moment to moment.

It would be difficult to describe all the effects in play during those hellish, terrible
few minutes. Along with quake and storm, there were stranger effects, exploding
swirls of light, mental effects that attacked the very thoughts. One would have
expected the ongoing downpour to extinguish the fires, and in many places that
did happen. In other areas, though, the fires blazed on impossibly, apparently in
defiance of the laws of chemistry and physics, even spreading and growing. [1]

At the height of the entire disruption, a terrible low grinding rumble filled the air in
all directions for several kilometers, and the current went mad as the site of the Refuge,
the entire ruin, sank several meters, and began to flood from the nearby river, rapidly
turning into a new lake. This was not immediately known to anyone on either vessel,
they were too busy simply trying to survive as the path of the river changed.

To the end of his days, Nathan Conners was never entirely sure how they managed to
escape the chaos in those moments. The pilot worked a wonder under impossible
circumstances, but even maintained later that it was either luck or Divine mercy that
they survived. For Conners, that assessment seemed as likely as any.

Something Conners never knew was how close he personally came to dying amid all
this, not from the effects of the ongoing eruptions, but from a blade in a vital organ.
Even as the men aboard struggled to keep the ship afloat, upright, and intact, their
former prisoner had made his way from his cell. The guard had locked the door
to the compartment, but Jurgensen was an accomplished expert with locks, and armed
with clairvoyance and psychokinesis, could rapidly get past most such devices.

He was still weak and shaky, but had stolen a knife from the galley, and made his way
up to the deck, only to find himself paralyzed in awe at the effects he was seeing, just
as shocked and stunned in his own way as any of the lesser knowledgeable Aces.

Regaining his self-possession, he looked frantically for a way out of the situation, but
nothing presented itself. Trying to jump from the ship into the river would have been
close to suicidal, but staying aboard seemed but little more hopeful. The storms and
quakes continued to mount up in violence, so much so that nobody even noticed their
former prisoner standing in the open doorway. They had too much else to occupy
their attention, simply surviving second-to-second was all they could manage.

It was then that Jurgensen saw something that captured his own attention. Standing
not five meters away, braced against the railing and frantically bailing water, was
Nathan Conners himself. He stood with his back to Jurgensen, and was entirely
unaware that Jurgensen was standing there, armed with a sharp butcher knife.

It was such an opportunity as Jurgensen had been fantasizing about for long years.

MORE LATER.


[1] In actual fact, Flux effects were keeping the water from touching the
burning materials. The defiance of natural law as an illusion, but a disturbing one to
terrified people who did not understand what they were seeing.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Jurgensen had been haunted by this man throughout his adult life, he had been having
warning premonitions about him long before the man himself had ever been born. He
had lived in a certain terror about this man, day and night, for decades. Now that man
was no more than a few meters away, facing away, and Jurgensen had a sharp butcher
knife in his hand. It would be dangerous to strike, the other men would certainly be a
danger, but to slay this man, to finally remove, once and for all, this source of terror...

Jurgensen was certainly not reluctant to kill. Over the course of his life, a man who
had once been a conscientious doctor and a decent person had been transformed into a
sadist, a murderer, a cold and callous plotter. It was neither mercy nor fear, on the
part of Jurgensen, that spared Nathaniel Conners that day.

What saved Conners was quite simply that, even as Jurgensen moved to strike, a wave
lifted the riverboat and nearly capsized the vehicle, knocking Jurgensen to one side, and
as the men turned in the confusion their eyes fell on their escaped prisoner. Jurgensen
slashed at one with the knife as he tried to grab at him, cutting a deep wound in his arm,
and then, before any further violence could ensue, the river again tossed the craft, and
Jurgensen was thrown overboard, into the churning waters!

The Aces had no time to try to recapture him, and at the time they gave him but little
thought, they were too busy trying to survive themselves. It seemed all but certain that
Jurgensen would be killed in the insanely roiling waters, anyway.

The struggle to survive went on for what seemed like an eternity, every passing second
stretching to forever, every new whitecapped wave, every new sudden change in the
path of the river, seemed sure to capsize and destroy their frail craft. Yet it did not, the
pilot somehow managed to keep them afloat, neither smashed to pieces against the
shore, nor drowned beneath the twisting, tormented waters.

On, and on, and on...trees were torn whole from the shore and thrown across the river
by the winds, some passing no more than meters from the boat. Each time it happened,
those men with enough attention to spare to notice thought it was the end, and each time
they forget it as soon as the danger passed, their attention on the next threat. Every
moment was timeless, the past and future vanished as they struggled to endure.

Then, with almost terrifying suddenness, it was ending.

The winds began to lesson, and once then did so the intensity fell swiftly. The river
began to calm, both because the winds were falling away, and because the depression
on the site of the Refuge had most filled (it was wide, but shallow). The raging flames
began to go out, as the remaining rain suddenly seemed to be able to drown them. [1]

The strange mental effects faded away, even more quickly than the winds slowed. The
clouds remained, and a slow steady rain was falling, but the sheets of lightning that had
formerly flashed forth with blinding brilliance now trailed away to the occasional burst.

The survivors clung to the railings of the riverboat, or lay exhausted on the decks. The
mere fact of continued existence seemed to be more than many could readily process,
it was as if the sudden absence of the storm and the tremors and the psionic effects was
more frightening than the struggle to survive them had been. It was some modest time
before one of the survivors managed to pull out a pocket watch, the device battered but
still functioning, and to realize that the entire event had taken less than an hour.

Now even the clouds were fading, showing signs of breaking up. The storm had bene
quite unnatural, after all, the moisture gathered by the power of the Flux from across
a wide region of relatively dry air. The volume of moisture had been very limited, in
absolute terms, and the clouds were almost literally ‘rained out’.

The Aces had survived.

MORE LATER.


[1] In fact, the Flux Manifestations were dissipating, and the rainfall began to actually touch the flaming matter.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

It would be very safe to say that the survivors of the American expedition, and their
Brazilian fellows, were more than slightly overwhelmed by their recent strange
experiences. For most of the first day as they fled down the river, little was said
and little was done, other than simply resting, trying to process what had happened.
Their riverboat, for a miracle, was in relatively good condition, even if the motor
was strained, and they were able to make modest time.

If the reinforcements coming up the river from the Unity had still been on track, it
is likely that the Seven Aces would have been killed upon encountering them, but
those reinforcements had been caught in the chaos of the final hours as well, and
were off the river, repairing their vessel and gathering their own supplies. Thus
the American group simply sailed past the region in which they would otherwise
have encountered a much larger and more heavily armed hostile force.

The Americans had to stop themselves, after another day, to refill their own water
supplies, make some necessary repairs to their craft, and otherwise recover. Then
they continued on, and a few days later, they reached Manaus. At last they were in
a position to contact the rest of the world, and soon messages flashed around the world
by telegraph and telephone, finally reaching Robert McLaird in Washington D.C.

McLaird had been waiting, doing what he could to keep things under control on the
Washington end, and in truth, nursing incipient ulcers. He was extremely relieved
to learn that the Seven Aces were alive, but their full report could not come in until
they reached the United States. It was simply too dangerous to send such sensitive
information by telephone or telegraph, under the circumstances.

McLaird had been dealing with a number of things, not least the mysterious and
still unexplained disappearance of the prisoners before they could be interrogated.
He had interviewed the guards in the prison. He had personally inspected the cells
in which the prisoners had been housed. He had inspected the grounds of the whole
prison as well, both in person and with close associates. There simply was no sign
of how those two men had vanished from confinement. There were no gaps in the
walls, no weakened bars, no indication of assistance from the guards or other prison
personnel. It was an utter mystery, the more dire for the lack of apparent fallout.

The Seven Aces reboarded their ‘special’ freighter, and were on their way back to
the United States. In order to get their report that much faster in person, McLaird
left his most trusted lieutenant (who was in fact a major) in charge in Washington,
and headed to meet the Seven Aces on the way.

McLaird, aboard a small ship that did not officially belong to the Department
of War, met up with Conners and his men aboard their own innocuous-seeming ship
somewhere in the warm waters of the Caribbean, not all that far from Martinique,
but far out of sight of those shores.

There, aboard the ‘freighter’, the Aces made their verbal report to the man who was
their liaison to the government, and there McLaird found himself digesting a report
that was scarcely credible. Even knowing that many strange and peculiar things
were true already left McLaird shaking his head in wonder. Had almost anybody
else given him the report he was receiving, he would have been more inclined to see
it as proof either of deception or insanity, but he knew better, when it came from them.

Of course, the Seven Aces did have some physical evidence as well. Several of
them had managed to bring back some items from the Refuge, and Howard Lake had
some sacks full of items and documents and other assorted bits and pieces. Some
of these items were unmistakable in their nature, including the presence of more
than some little Atlantean script and carvings. Though the experts associated with
or known to the Seven Aces could not readily read Atlantean (or not much), they
knew what it was when they encountered it.

The news that the man they had pursued to Brazil was dead, or so they thought at
the time, was a blow, because McLaird had badly wanted to interrogate the man in
the midst of the entire strange business, that had run from Chicago to the depths of
the Amazon jungle. The answers they needed appeared to have died with the man,
though, and there seemed little that could be done about it after the fact.

Unfortunately for the Seven Aces, for Robert McLaird, for the nations of Brazil and
the United States of America, and the planet Earth, Jurgensen was in fact alive.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Americans had every reason to believe that their mystery-man quarry was dead.
Under the circumstances, by any reasonable standard, he should have died,
and in fact, he very nearly did die. He had already been weak, tired, wounded,
and he had been thrown into a river that was roiled into insane upheavals, amidst a
storm of incredible fury. The only reason, in fact, that he did not die was that the
Unity was close at hand, and in a position to intervene.

The Unity, through its hyperattuned ESP abilities, had sensed the roiling eruption
in the Flux some moments before it happened, and so had time to prepare itself. [1]

Even as the chaos erupted, the Unity reached out, and found the mind of Jurgensen,
just as he was going into the roiling river. On his own, Karl Jurgensen lacked anything
close to the level of psionic power necessary to survive in the river in those moments,
but the Unity made contact with his mind, and poured additional energy through his
mind, body and soul and into his psionic faculty. This was something they had done
many times, for many reasons, and they had long practice in the technique.

Still, it would not have been so effective in this moment except that several unimems
were close at hand (or relatively so) to make the connection stronger, and the danger
was such that they dared use far more raw power than would normally have been the
case. To overcome the danger of the situation and the damage and exhaustion already
suffered by Jurgensen, a huge amount of power had to be channeled and this in turn,
all by itself, added to the damage to the mind and body of the recipient. The energy
was more than he could normally have hoped to safely handle and control.

In this case, though, Jurgensen had little to lose.

The raw power from the Unity flooded through him, focusing his mind, reviving and
strengthening his tired body, and most importantly, energizing his psionic faculty at
a level orders of magnitude beyond his normal capacities. He could not have hoped
to sustain this for more than a few moments, without permanent damage, but during
those few moments his psychokinetic strength was sufficient to protect him from the
waters and the winds and the things floating and flying about, his mind shield was
dense enough to withstand the telepathic static flooding the region, and he was even
able to levitate himself out of the river, over the nearby land, and far enough from
the shore that when he collapsed to the ground unconscious, he was safe from the
floods and the tremors for the modest time that they continued.

The residual energy supercharged his biopsionic ability and its self-healing aspects,
at least sufficiently that the man lay unconscious but otherwise alive while his master
arrived, over two days later. It was little other than luck that no predator molested his
helpless form during that time, though in fact the chaos and uproar of previous days
had driven most animal life far away anyway.

Be that as it may, the Unity and its minions found Karl Jurgensen, and retreated with
him, clearing the area because they knew that another danger would soon arrive, one
they did not have sufficient force on scene to cope with. They took Jurgensen, and
like the Seven Aces before them, retreated down the river as quickly as was practical.

It would be many weeks before Jurgensen would regain consciousness. It would be
the better part of a year before the man was back to his former level of physical, mental,
and spiritual strength. It would be well over a year before Jurgensen made even a
modest start on repairing the damage that had been done to his networks of operatives
and spies and agents, and to recoup the damage to the plans of the Unity, and his own
more personal agenda as well.

The entire operation, from its opening gambit in Chicago to its spectacular climax
in Brazil, had been a disaster. At every turn, his plans had been disrupted, his work
overturned, his goals destroyed, and almost all of the disruption had come from the
small group of Americans who had so suddenly obtruded themselves into his world,
led by the man who had been his personal demon for well over a century.

Is it any wonder that his psychological state in early 1926 was somewhat...touchy?

MORE LATER.



[1] The Unity could not use or manipulate the Flux, but it could sense it via ESP.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The Unity was also frustrated. It came as close to a state of fury as it was capable,
in the last part of 1925 and early 1926. The knowledge the could have been
obtained from that library would have been inconceivably useful to the Unity. The
gaps in the memory of the collective being could have been ameliorated to a large
degree by that knowledge.

The Unity also knew that it would be futile to attempt to recover that knowledge
now, indeed not merely futile but dangerous. The Unity had already sensed the
presence of Zadatharion and Aradel near the sight of the Refuge, and it knew all
too well that by the time it could get more forces there, with the necessary tools
and equipment to gain access to whatever survived, those two Avatars would
have brought in their own reinforcements and either removed or destroyed those
materials. To attempt to retrieve them would merely expose valuable assets to
potential capture or destruction. At best, it would reveal too much of the hidden
power and resources of the Unity to its enemies.

The concerns of the Unity were well-founded. Zadatharion and Aradel had both
survived the chaos at the end of the affair, and had managed to save most of their
mortal allies as well. Zadatharion had shortly scouted out the region, locating the
sight of the former Refuge, which was now a wide, shallow lake. The lake was
still growing, slowly, as the banks of the local river channels continued to settle
and sometimes river water spilled into the still-slowly-subsiding basin.

Zadatharion sent to Cyllellia for assistance, and with the air of several Avatars and
their associates, removed much of what remained under the waters of the new lake.
Then, wielding an especially potent, if locally contained, Flux Manifestation,
Zadatharion destroyed the remains that were too minor, too hard to retrieve, or
otherwise unsuitable for transport back to Cyllellia. This entire operation was made
more time consuming than it would otherwise have been by the need to keep the
Brazilians from learning what was going in this remote corner of Brazil, but before
the end of 1926 the task was completed.

Back in the United States, McLaird also considered sending a return expedition to
the site. The reasons to do so were obvious, but there were also three major factors
mediating against it. The first was that McLaird had limited resources under his
direct control, and other matters that required attention. He could have passed the
word to other power centers in the United States Government, but this would have
involved revealing more of the highly secret activities under his direction than he
would have liked.

To make matters the more delicate, there was the fact that the entire expedition to
the Refuge had been illegal in the first place. The Seven Aces had violated the
territorial sovereignty of another state, without approval by American diplomatic
or executive authorities, on a mission involving matters that were extremely
sensitive. To send more personnel in, in secret, would be to again risk exposing
the entire operation, which argued against taking any such action.

There was another reason as well, one that left McLaird feeling distinctly disturbed.
McLaird had superiors, and colleagues, and he was receiving fairly strong hints
from that direction that there would be no backing for any further activities along
those lines. What worried him was that there it was coming from places where he
would not have expected that reaction, and he was unable to discern why.

McLaird was the furthest thing from a naif. He was experienced in both the ways
of actual warfare, and the struggles of political power and influences within and
behind the scenes of the government. He could sense that someone, somewhere,
was pulling strings and applying pressure to prevent any further activity in the
region from whence the Seven Aces had recently returned. He could guess that
whoever was doing this manipulation was doing so indirectly, and he hoped very
fervently that whoever was doing this had no direct knowledge of his own forces
and activities. Still, it was clear that someone with connections into the
United States Government was now using them to try to influence his actions.

When he considered all the factors, McLaird reluctantly decided against any more
activity in that direction. He also began considering how he could trace down
the source of the manipulations in the internal decision-making processes of the
government, and how to shield his own assets and department from that source.

McLaird was right to suspect this, because the source of the manipulation was the
Avatars, Aradel and Zadatharion. Aradel, especially, had plants and cut-outs and
agents in place, and though she did not know anything in detail about the mystery
men who had suddenly appeared in 1925, she knew Robert McLaird was involved
with them in some way, and had sufficient ‘pull’ to apply pressure in that direction.

McLaird had taken sufficient precautions that even she had difficulty in tracking
anything in detail, but she had his name and rank, and that was a major thing in and
of itself. One of her hopes, in fact, had been that McLaird would press against her
own pressure and thus reveal more of his own network, but he did not do so.

In the meantime, Nathaniel Conners went on vacation.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Nathaniel Conners, by the time he finally arrived back at his modest home in Miami,
Florida, was an exhausted man. He had been under constant pressure and stress for
the better part of a year. He had been working exhausting hours, day after day. He
had been wounded, beaten, struggled to deal with a deadly and mysterious threat
first in the domestic environs of Chicago, and then in the remote depths of the
Amazon Jungle. It was February of 1926 by the time he finally returned home, and
when he did, he spent most of several days sleeping, more or less.

When he recovered enough to think straight, he spent some time and attention of a
neglected subject: his wife Melissa Conners. Conners had married Melissa Helen
Graves two years before, and had been able to spend all too little time with her since
then. Now, though, he had leave time coming, it would be some time before the
Seven Aces were back in action, for various reasons, and Conners had in mind taking
his wife and spending some time with his family in Illinois.

So it was that Nathaniel and Melissa Conners were leaving the train station in the town
of Grandfield, Illinois in the mid-morning hours of Monday, April the 12th, 1926.

“So how were you able to arrange a car this time, Nate?” Melissa
asked. “The last time we visited we had to ride in your uncle’s wagon.”

“My brother asked a friend of his if we could borrow his car,”
Conners explained. “Assuming I agreed to pay for the gas. I
figured it might make for a little faster trip than riding behind
Uncle James’ old mares.”

The borrowed car, a 1923 model, carried them from the train
station past a dry goods store, a clothing store, and a grocery
store, all in narrow two-story brick buildings facing Market
Street. At an intersection they turned south, and headed down
a long gently sloping road, the Main Street of the town, which
had a population of about 10,000 in 1926.

Eventually the reached the southern edge of the city, which lay
on a modest river that Melissa recalled being told was called
the Little Belknap River, apparently named after some official
in Civil War times. A road lay along the north shore of that
river, while a branch crossed the river on an iron bridge.

Their route, however, lay on the north side of the river, and took
them to the east of town. On the opposite side of the town from
their road, towering above them but dropping lower as they went
east, was a high wooded hill.

“Nate,” Melissa asked as they road along an unpaved dirt road,
“what did you say that hill was called again?”

“Devers Bluff,” her husband replied absently, most of his attention
on avoiding the many potholes and gaps in the dirt road. It was
dry enough, but the winter had not been over that long and the
road could have been smoother. Melissa was sure that her
husband was particularly anxious to avoid doing any harm to the
car, since it was borrowed.

After a few miles, they came to a country-lane crossroads, and
turned off down another dirt road. This one Melissa remembered
the local name for: Five Springs Road.

Five Springs Road seemed to Melissa like a slightly grand name
for what amounted to a one-lane dirt track through the farmlands
outside Grandfield. It ran north-south, one end heading north
toward Devers Bluff, the other down to the river. At the river, the
land crossed the Little Belknap River on a very modest stone bridge,
barely wider than the car itself.

Melissa breathed a sigh of relief when they reached the other side.
She was not exactly afraid of the water, and she knew how to swim,
but the narrow bridge definitely made her nervous.

Once on the north side of the river, they turned to follow the road,
twisting back and forth through the countryside as the road ran
from one farmhouse to another.

While Nathaniel and Melissa make their trip through the countryside of southern
Illinois, we can briefly turn our attention elsewhere.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

At about the same time that Nathaniel Conners and his wife were driving through
the countryside of southern Illinois, Karl Jurgensen was also busy, though with
darker work and in a darker mood. As to the where, he was dwelling in one
of his ‘safe houses’, a residence owned under a legend in a fairly expensive area
of the city of Berlin.

Jurgensen was still far from recovered from his recent experiences. When he had
been recovered by the Unity, he had been unconscious, the combined effects of
deep stress and strain and fear, wounds and damage, impact and exhaustion, had
left him beyond the end of his normal resources. He had remained unconscious
for weeks, while the doctors and psionic adepts of the Unity, and the Unity itself,
had labored to undo the damage, restore his strength, and renew him.

It is rather more likely than not that absent this attention, Jurgensen would never
have awakened at all. Instead, he finally did regain consciousness, many weeks
after he was rescued, in pain, exhausted, but alive.

What followed was weeks of bed rest and recovery, followed by more painful and
frustrating weeks of what a later time would have called physical therapy. This
was intense at first, but continued at a gentler level even as late as April of 1926.
It was painful, dull, and progress was slow, adding to his dark mood.

Jurgensen had made his reports to the Unity, which added to his fear and worry,
because of the necessity of hiding his own ‘personal’ agendas in the business
from his master. He believed he had succeeded, based in part on the fact that he
was still alive, but he could not be certain.

As he contemplated the events of the previous year or so, waves of rage and fear
would come over him, so intense as to be almost paralyzing. Anxiety attacks and
nervous tremors tormented him, and his sleep was shaky and nightmare-haunted.

Throughout most of his adult life, he had been haunted by the prescient sense of a
threat from a particular American military officer, a fear that had come to him
long before that man was ever born. Jurgensen had known that such prescient
warnings were never certain, but now he knew from experience that the man had
been born, he did now physically exist, he was no longer simply a possibility.

Jurgensen had known that, of course, since the end of the Great War. There had
been another encounter, and setback, in Petrograd somewhat later.

Now, though, to add to his knowledge that the man was real, came the experience
that he had just come through. Several times over the course of the business, from
Chicago to Brazil, he had come within moments of death. He had been wounded,
he had been struck, he had been attacked physically and mentally, and his entire
elaborate and carefully worked out plan had come undone in multiple ways. Not
all of this was directly attributable to his mysterious nemesis, but it was true to say
that the overall disaster had arisen out of the activities of that man.

When Jurgensen contemplated the sheer knowledge that he had been so close, oh
so close to possessing, he actually felt nauseous. The thought of all the knowledge,
all those possibilities, lost to him was actually painful. The recognition of how he
had spent so many assets, so many resources, so much time and money, only to have
so little to show for it, left him grinding his teeth in a transport of loathing hatred.

He had enormous challenges ahead of him, simply in recreating the networks
and resources that had been lost in the previous disaster. He was still tired, still in
pain, and he knew that it would be at least months before this ended.

Something else haunted Karl Jurgensen, as well.

When he looked in a mirror, he saw what appeared to a man who could be anywhere
from his late forties to his late fifties, with thick silver hair, and a tired mien that
was quite natural given what he experienced. What he knew, though, was that the
man looking back at him from the mirror was in fact closing in on the middle of his
second century of life.

The key to his very long lifespan was psionic. He was highly skilled in the use of
various esoteric disciplines that could slow the aging process. Unfortunately, those
disciplines required both skill and power, and the power available to him was
limited. To make matters worse, as he grew older, more and more power was
necessary to offset the advance of the inevitable.

The Unity provided him with that power. The Unity continued to do so...but this
left him utterly dependent upon it, which was a precarious existence. Worse yet,
as time passed, the power necessary to that goal would only grow, until at some
date the cost to the Unity of sustaining him would exceed his value to that being.

Karl Jurgensen had no illusions about what would happen then.

MORE LATER.