Chapter 10

We maintained our scouting flights to search for more trees being harvested. Nothing was found to indicate any new activity by the aliens. Nevertheless, we did keep looking. Logic said that even if we did drive away our "own" aliens, there had to be others around somewhere on Earth, and we didn't want them to show up unannounced.

However, we did find two more families who had survived the original attack and the hardships that followed. They were brought into our community, and they were very grateful to join us. One couple, Jim and Sue Wilson had a 13 year old son named Jeff. The other couple, John and Elsie Hanover had a 10 year old son named Charles. They moved into the last house of the three, and we now had a thriving community of 15 people. This could hardly be considered the ideal size for a viable community, but it was a good start.

Everybody chipped in and did what he or she could to keep the community going. Sarah recruited the children to help her with the garden. The new women took on additional chores around the house and ran "shopping" trips on the ATVs once they had learned to shoot well enough to protect themselves. Meanwhile, the new men became hunters and joined Sam and me at that job.

Ed was working full time as an electrician as he got all three houses hooked up to the AC power lines. Bill and Joe flew the scouting runs and worked on converting the other ultralights to two-seaters. Besides scouting for aliens, Bill and Joe searched for working freezers and refrigerators. We wanted the size freezers and refrigerators that were used commercially, and that meant a lot of searching.

Ed's solar farm grew to fantastic proportions as the demand for power kept growing. Ed was able to come up with 120 VAC (Volts, AC), 240 VAC, and 480 VAC for what we needed, but he was running out of solar panels. We needed so much power because we finally conceded that we were going to have to heat with electricity the following winter. We just could not find that much fuel oil close enough at hand.

By the way, the flying lessons were continuing for the new adults, and we could see that the older children would be ready for the lessons pretty soon. Bill and Joe conceded that the two older boys and Mary, the older girl, could learn to fly if they always flew with an adult in the second seat. That concession caused a lot of excitement, but there was also some envy from Ann, the younger girl. She was promised that she could learn as soon as she reached the age of 10. She started counting the days until then.

Most of the crops were harvested by early September. A few things that were planted late in the season were the only vegetables that still needed to be gotten in. Meanwhile, the women had started a massive program to can as much of the harvested vegetables as possible. We men were reduced to fetch and carry jobs, and it was amazing how many of those there were.

The jars had been found during the summer and had been stored in the cellar of house number 1. That was the kitchen used for the canning project, and it was a study in chaos in there at first glance. Actually, the women had the whole thing organized to perfection, and the project ran smoothly.

We finally finished that project and were looking around for something else to do before the winter weather arrived in full force. We decided to make a trip south to as near New York City (NYC) as we could get. We planned to pass over Providence, RI, and Hartford, CT, on our way down to see how much damage had been done to those cities. We assumed that the damage was comparable to what had been done to Boston, but we had never checked.

Our search party consisted of Sarah and me, Sam and Tilly, and Helen and Ed. Bill and Joe stayed behind to work on projects of their own and to finish converting all of the planes to two-seaters. We all carried the UHF radios to use to stay in communication with each other and with home base.

Providence was first on our list, and we expected to spend the night there before heading toward Hartford. Again, we would spend the night before heading toward NYC. We thought that we could get any gasoline and oil that we needed while in those cities or close to them. If all else failed, we could follow one of the major highways to find a service station where we could siphon gas from the storage tanks. We had a simple hand-cranked pump along with us for that job.

The flight to Providence was uneventful. We passed some large and dense forests which showed no sign of alien intrusion, and we were very happy with that. When we got there, we found Providence in a mess. It was similar to what we saw of Boston the few times we flew there. We did find a reasonably undamaged motel to stay in after we had covered as much of Providence as we could stand. The total destruction was too depressing to look at much longer.

Tilly used a special stove we had along with us to boil water for supper, and we had some coffee afterward. The coffee was really getting stale, but we found enough dry creamer and sugar to help the taste. We had some BLT (bacon-lettuce-tomato) sandwiches made from stuff we brought with us for supper, and that kept our spirits up as we went to bed.

The next morning, we cleaned up after ourselves and began the second phase of our trip. We swapped pilots, and that put me in the right hand seat to act as guard. I had my ray gun rifle handy just in case we ran into something worth shooting. As we headed west, we spotted a cleared area, so we turned off to investigate. This was the first time Ed and the women had seen the harvesting machines at work, and they were all quite upset. We were not prepared to take out a distillery, but we did reduce the harvesting machines to rubble before we left them.

Soon, we found another cleared place, and we treated the machines the same way. Unfortunately, we were spotted this time by a flying box that gave chase. Had it been a UFO, we would all have been vaporized on the spot, but we were able to attack the flying box from three different directions and shoot it down. I put a shot of narrow beam energy into the front of the flying box, and it immediately dove to the ground and crashed. I must have killed the pilot. The craft began to burn as soon as it hit the ground, so we did not investigate further. The crash had occurred in one of the scalped areas, so there was no danger of a forest fire.

We destroyed two more sets of harvesting machines as we approached Hartford. As was the case with Providence, Hartford was utterly destroyed. We were so moved by the destruction that we might have attacked a UFO if one had been around. Thank God that there were none.

We spent the night in a motel south of Hartford and headed toward NYC the next day after refueling at a service station. When we took off on this leg, we decided to put the best shooters in the right hand seats. That meant that the women were the pilots, and they may have been relieved by the assignment. After thinking about it while we were in the air, I figured that we were less likely to see UFOs around NYC because the area was so full of houses that there was no room for trees.

Nevertheless, we all kept a sharp lookout for UFOs. It would have been stupid to be hit by one because we had been goofing off. We flew over enough of the city to see that there was nothing there for us. If anything, the destruction was greater than what had been experienced in Boston. At least, we did not see bodies lying in the streets because the beams from the ray guns cooked them to ashes and left nothing behind.

We got out of NYC as quickly as possible. The destruction was just too depressing for us to want to hang around. We headed back toward Hartford with the idea of spending the night in the same motel that we had previously used. That evening, we decided to skip flying back to Providence and just to head northeast toward home on a direct line. We figured that we could get there while it was still daylight if we got an early enough start in the morning.

That's what we did, but we flew directly over a distillery on our way. Oh how I wished for a thermite bomb, but we had none with us. Well, we couldn't do anything about the distillery, but we did destroy five sets of harvesting machines on our way home. We arrived just as the sun was setting, and Joe had rigged up some floodlights just in case we had to land after dark. Never having tried that before, all of us were happy that we did not need them, but we did make sure that we told Joe how much we appreciated his effort.