by me, Kerry Burgess, 02/13/2025 02:43 AM
Yesterday, sitting here, as always, at this same stupid desk, specific thoughts formed in my conscious mind, among the constant flood of ideas I have each and every day
These thoughts yesterday strung along again about the founding of this United States of America
I was replaying my standpoint from a long time ago
My assertation that the USA is founded by thievery
Regardless of their original intentions all those centuries ago, which seem especially hollow to me sitting here after 21 years of constant seclusion, the fact is no person today in the USA would allow people to enter their homes and simply walk away with their property.
That's what happened with the USA in the 1700's
This land was legally the property of Britain's King George
And slave-owners such as George Washington used violence to take it away from that superstition primitive, England's King George.
I was thinking extensively about that again yesterday
Today, I am reading the news on the internet, scanning headlines and taking a closer look at some of the news items of the mainstream-media.
One fact is most certain: This United States of America was *not* founded on the superstition of the Jesus Christ mythology superstition. It was a lawyer's gimmick to counter England's King George and his God-Jesus-bunk
No matter what those Jesus-bunkers want you gullible and naive to believe, this country was never about the Jesus-bunk superstition.
Get over yourself. You're monkeys.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-rails-against-unelected-232243890.html
Yahoo! News
The Telegraph
Musk lashes out at ‘unelected’ officials in Oval Office – while son X picks his nose
Connor Stringer
Tue, February 11, 2025 at 3:22 PM PST
Elon Musk railed against “unelected” officials as he was grilled by the press for the first time since becoming the US government’s efficiency tsar.
Donald Trump hauled the tech billionaire in front of journalists in the Oval Office to fend off questions about his newly formed Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).
But attention was drawn away from Mr Musk by his son
From 11/9/1954 ( {Superstition-bunker-in-chief} Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of USA: Remarks to the First National Conference on the Spiritual [ Superstition ] Foundations of American Democracy ) To 2/11/2025 ( Tuesday ) is 25662 days
25662 = 12831 + 12831
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/19/2000 ( premiere USA film "O Brother, Where Art Thou" ) is 12831 days
From 8/3/1998 ( "Rainbow Six" by Tom Clancy ) To 2/11/2025 ( ) is 9689 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 5/13/1992 ( the Intelsat 6 successful rescue during US space shuttle Endeavour orbiter vehicle mission STS-49 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps commissioned-officer and United States STS-49 pilot astronaut and my 1st official United States of America National Aeronautics and Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) is 9689 days
From 12/17/2020 ( premiere CBS adaption of Stephen King's "The Stand" ) To 2/11/2025 ( ) is 1517 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/28/1969 ( Linus Torvalds ) is 1517 days
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/trump-musk-take-questions-white-house/
CBS News
Trump, Musk take questions at White House
President Trump and Elon Musk took questions at the White House on Tuesday after Mr. Trump signed an executive order telling federal agencies to cooperate with the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. CBS News chief Washington correspondent Major Garrett joins with analysis.
Feb 11, 2025
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 3
“But it ain’t cholera. And don’t you go scarin people sayin it is. There’ll be an autopsy and you can read about it in the paper.”
Miserable little pissant, Norm thought, slowly dressing himself in yesterday’s clothes. His headache was turning into a real blinder. Those kids had better be quiet or they were going to have a pair of broken arms to mouth off about. Why the hell couldn’t they have school the whole year round?
He considered tucking his shirt into his pants, decided the President probably wouldn’t be stopping by that day, and shuffled out into the kitchen in his sock feet. The bright sunlight coming in the east windows made him squint.
The cracked Philco radio over the stove sang:
But bay-yay-yaby you can tell me if anyone can,
Baby, can you dig your man?
He’s a righteous man,
Tell me baby, can you dig your man?
Things had come to a pretty pass when they had to play nigger rock and roll music like that on the local country music station. Norm turned it off before it could split his head. There was a note by the radio and he picked it up, narrowing his eyes to read it.
Dear Norm,
Sally Hodges says she needs somebody to sit her kids this morning and says shell give me a dolar. Ill be back for luntch. Theres sassage if you want it. I love you honey.
Lila.
Norm put the note back and just stood there for a moment, thinking it over and trying to get the sense of it in his mind. It was goddam hard to think past the headache. Babysitting… a dollar. For Ralph Hodges’s wife.
The three elements slowly came together in his mind. Lila had gone off to sit Sally Hodges’s three kids to earn a lousy dollar and had stuck him with Luke and Bobby. By God it was hard times when a man had to sit home and wipe his kids’ noses so his wife could go and scratch out a lousy buck that wouldn’t even buy them a gallon of gas. That was hard fucking times.
Dull anger came to him, making his head ache even worse. He shuffled slowly to the Frigidaire, bought when he had been making good overtime, and opened it. Most of the shelves were empty, except for leftovers Lila had put up in refrigerator dishes. He hated those little plastic Tupperware dishes. Old beans, old corn, a leftover dab of chili… nothing a man liked to eat. Nothing in there but little Tupperware dishes and three little old sausages done up in Handi-Wrap. He bent, looking at them, the familiar helpless anger now compounded by the dull throb in his head. Those sausages looked like somebody had cut the cocks off’n three of those pygmies they had down in Africa or South America or wherever the fuck it was they had them. He didn’t feel like eating anyway. He felt damn sick, when you got right down to it.
He went over to the stove, scratched a match on the piece of sandpaper nailed to the wall beside it, lit the front gas ring, and put on the coffee. Then he sat down and waited dully for it to boil. Just before it did, he had to scramble his snotrag out of his back pocket to catch a big wet sneeze. Coming down with a cold, he thought. Isn’t that something nice on top of everything else? But it never occurred to him to think of the phlegm that had been running out of that fellow Campion’s pump the night before.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190590/releaseinfo/
{by me, Kerry Burgess: Any "God" is mere superstition. You do not have an Imaginary Friend "up there" in the clouds. You do not have an Imaginary Friend that can hear your thoughts as you plead and beg with Him to not hurt you again. Do not believe the lies told to you by any clergy peddling their bunk. "Faith" is meaningless word that is merely their marketing-buzzword because they know you're gullible and naive and you cannot think for yourself and you stopped reading this after the first few words.}
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-first-national-conference-the-spiritual-foundations-american-democracy
[ by me, Kerry Burgess: The Catholic Pope and any other clergy of any religion are being paid real money to peddle their bunk to you. {Those Catholic-superstition purveyors and their gullible, willing victims just stopped reading at this point} *You* are gullible and naive and cowardly terrified of mortality and *you* are paying real money to those scam-artists to deliver their false promises and superstition to you. Pathetic. Immoral. Theology is nothing better than circular-reasoning. ]
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Prologue
“Was there an accident?” she whispered. “Oh Jesus Mary and Joseph, there was, wasn’t there? An accident. Out there.”
“I was playing solitaire,” he said. “I looked up and saw the clock had gone from green to red. I turned on the monitor. Sally, they’re all—”
He paused, looked at Baby LaVon’s eyes, wide and, although still rimmed with tears, curious.
“They’re all D-E-A-D down there,” he said. “All but one or two, and they’re probably gone now.”
“What’s D-E-D, Daddy?” Baby LaVon asked.
“Never mind, honey,” Sally said. Her voice seemed to come to her from down a very long canyon.
Charlie swallowed. Something clicked in his throat. “Everything’s supposed to mag-lock if the clock goes red. They got a Chubb computer that runs the whole place and it’s supposed to be fail-safe. I saw what was on the monitor, and I jumped out the door. I thought the goddam thing would cut me in half. It should have shut the second the clock went red, and I don’t know how long it was red before I looked up and noticed it. But I was almost to the parking lot before I heard it thump shut behind me. Still, if I’d looked up even thirty seconds later, I’d be shut up in that tower control room right now, like a bug in a bottle.”
“What is it? What—”
“I dunno. I don’t want to know. All I know is that it ki—that it K-I-L-L-E-D them quick. If they want me, they’ll have to catch me. I was gettin hazard pay, but they ain’t payin me enough to hang around here. Wind’s blowing west. We’re driving east. Come on, now.”
Still feeling half-asleep, caught in some awful grinding dream, she followed him out to the driveway where their fifteen-year-old Chevy stood, quietly rusting in the fragrant desert darkness of the California night.
Charlie dumped the suitcases in the trunk and the tote-bag in the back seat. Sally stood for a moment by the passenger door with the baby in her arms, looking at the bungalow where they had spent the last four years. When they had moved in, she reflected, Baby LaVon was still growing inside her body, all her horsey-rides ahead of her.
“Come on!” he said. “Get in, woman!”
She did. He backed out, the Chevy’s headlights momentarily splashing across the house. Their reflection in the windows looked like the eyes of some hunted beast.
He was hunched tensely over the steering wheel, his face drawn in the dim glow of the dashboard instruments. “If the base gates are closed, I’m gonna try to crash through.” And he meant it. She could tell. Suddenly her knees felt watery.
But there was no need for such desperate measures. The base gates were standing open. One guard was nodding over a magazine. She couldn’t see the other; perhaps he was in the head. This was the outer part of the base, a conventional army vehicle depot. What went on at the hub of the base was of no concern to these fellows.
I looked up and saw the clock had gone red.
She shivered and put her hand on his leg. Baby LaVon was sleeping again. Charlie patted her hand briefly and said: “It’s going to be all right, hon.”
By dawn they were running east across Nevada and Charlie was coughing steadily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 22
“I have business to attend to,” Starkey said.
“Yes, sir.”
Starkey slipped his West Point ring off his right hand and his wedding band off his left. “For Cindy,” he said. “For my daughter. See that she gets them, Len.”
“I will.”
Starkey went to the door.
“Billy?” Len Creighton called after him.
Starkey turned.
Creighton stood ramrod straight, the tears still running down his own cheeks. He saluted.
Starkey returned it and then stepped out the door.
The elevator hummed efficiently, marking off the floors. An alarm began to hoot—mournfully, as if it somehow knew it was warning of a situation which had already become a lost cause—when he used his special key to open it at the top, so he could enter the motor-pool area. Starkey imagined Len Creighton watching him on a succession of monitors as he first picked out a jeep and then drove it across the desert floor of the sprawling test site and through a gate marked HIGH SECURITY ZONE NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT SPECIAL CLEARANCE. The checkpoints looked like turnpike tollbooths. They were still manned, but the soldiers behind the yellowish glass were dead and rapidly mummifying in the dry desert heat. The booths were bulletproof, but they hadn’t been germproof. Their glazed and sunken eyes stared vacantly at Starkey as he motored past, the only moving thing along the tangle of dirt roads among the Quonset huts and low cinderblock buildings.
He stopped outside a squat blockhouse with a sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT A-1-A CLEARANCE on the door. He used one key to get in, and another to summon the elevator. A guard, dead as a doornail and stiff as a poker, stared at him from the glass-encased security station to the left of the elevator doors. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, Starkey stepped in quickly. He seemed to feel the gaze of the dead guard on him, a small weight of eyes like two dusty stones.
The elevator sank so rapidly his stomach turned over. A bell dinged softly when it came to a halt. The doors slid open, and the sweet odor of decay hit him like a soft slap. It wasn’t too strong because the air purifiers were still working, but not even the purifiers could dispose of that smell completely. When a man has died, he wants you to know about it, Starkey thought.
There were almost a dozen bodies sprawled in front of the elevator. Starkey minced among them, not wanting to tread on a decaying, waxy hand or trip over an outstretched leg. That might make him scream, and he most definitely didn’t want to do that. You didn’t want to scream in a tomb because the sound of it might drive you mad, and that’s exactly where he was: in a tomb. It looked like a well-financed scientific research project, but what it really was now was a tomb.
The elevator doors slid shut behind him; there was a hum as it began to go up automatically. It wouldn’t come down again unless somebody else keyed it, Starkey knew; as soon as the installation’s integrity had been breached, the computers had switched all the elevators to the general containment program. Why were these poor men and women lying here? Obviously they had been hoping the computers would fuck up the switch-over to the emergency procedures. Why not? It even had a certain logic. Everything else had fucked up.
Rainbow Six (1998) - Tom Clancy
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 33
Colonel Wilson Gearing was in his hotel room only a few floors above the Rainbow troops. His large bags were in the closet, and his clothing hung. The maids and other staff who serviced his room hadn't touched anything, merely checked the closet and proceeded to make up the beds and scrub the bathroom. They hadn't checked inside the bags-Gearing had telltales on them to make sure of that-inside one of which was a plastic canister with "Chlorine" painted on it. It was outwardly identical with the one on the fogging system at the Olympic stadium it had, in fact, been purchased from the same company that had installed the fogging system, cleaned out and refilled with the nano-capsules. He also had the tools he Needed to swap one out, and had practiced the skill in Kansas, where an identical installation was to be found. He could close his eyes and see himself doing it, time and again, to keep the downtime for the fogging system to a minimum. He thought about the contents of the container. Never had so much potential death been so tightly contained. Far more so than in a nuclear device, because unlike one of those, the danger here could replicate it, many times instead of merely detonating once. The way the fogging system worked, it would take about thirty minutes for the nanocapsules to get into the entire fogging system. Both computer models and actual mechanical tests proved that the capsules would get everywhere the pipes, and spray out the fogging nozzles, invisible in the gentle, cooling mist. People walking through the tunnels leading to the stadium proper and in the concourse would breathe it in, an average of two hundred or so nano-capsules in four minutes of breathing, and that was well above the calculated mean lethal dose. The capsules would enter through the lungs, be transported into the blood, and there the capsules would dissolve, releasing the Shiva. The engineered virus strands would travel in the bloodstream of the spectators and the athletes, soon find the liver and kidneys, the organs for which they had the greatest affinity, and begin the slow process of multiplication. All this had been established at Binghamton Lab on the 'normal' test subjects. Then it was just a matter of weeks until the Shiva had multiplied enough to do its work. Along the way, people would pass on the Shiva through kisses and sexual contact, through coughs and sneezes. This, to had been proven at the Binghamton Lab. Starting in about four weeks, people would think themselves mildly ill. Some would see their personal physicians, and be diagnosed as flu victims, told to take aspirin, drink fluids, and rest in front of the TV. They would do this, and feel better-because seeing a doctor usually did that to people-for a day or so. But they would not be getting better. Sooner or later, they'd develop the internal bleeds that Shiva ultimately caused, and then, about five weeks after the initial release of the nano-capsules, some doctor would run an antibody test and be aghast to learn that something like the famous and feared Ebola fever was back. A good epidemiology program might identify the Sydney Olympics as the focal center, but tens of thousands people would have come and gone. This was a perfect avenue for distributing Shiva, something the Project's senior members had determined years before-even before the attempted plague launched by Iran against America, which had predictably failed because the virus hadn't been the right one, and the method of delivery too haphazard. No, this plan was perfection itself. Every nation on earth sent athletes and judges to the Olympic games, and all of them would walk through the cooling fog in this hot stadium, lingering there to shed excess body heat, breathe deeply, and relax in this cool place. Then they'd all return to their homes, from America to Argentina, from Russia to Rwanda, there to spread the Shiva and start the initial panic.
Then came Phase Two. Horizon Corporation would manufacture and distribute the "A" vaccine, turn it out in thousand-liter lots, and send it all over the world by express flights to nations whose public-health-service physicians and nurses would be sure to inject every citizen they could find. Phase Two would finish the job begun with the global panic that was sure to result from Phase One. Four to six weeks after being injected, the "A" recipients would start to become ill. So, three weeks from today, Gearing thought, plus six weeks or so, plus two weeks, plus another six, plus a final two. A total of nineteen weeks, not even half a year, not even a full baseball season, and well over ninety-nine percent of the people on the earth would be dead. And the planet would be saved. No more slaughtering of sheep from a chemical-weapons release. No more extinction of species by thoughtless man. The ozone hole would soon heal itself. Nature would flourish once more. And he'd be there to see it, to enjoy and appreciate it all, along with his friends and colleagues in the Project. They'd save the planet and raise their children to respect it, love it, cherish it. The world would again be green and beautiful.
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 3
“You want to watch that,” Joe Bob said. “Nothin any worse than a summer cold.”
“Don’t I know it.”
Suddenly, from behind them, Vic said: “Maybe it ain’t a cold.”
They turned to him. Vic looked frightened.
“I woke up this morning sneezin and hackin away like sixty,” Vic said. “Had a mean headache, too. I took some aspirins and it’s gone back some, but I’m still full of snot. Maybe we’re coming down with it. What that Campion had. What he died of.”
Hap looked at him for a long time, and as he was about to put forward all his reasons why it couldn’t be, he sneezed again.
Joe Bob looked at them both gravely for a moment and then said, “You know, it might not be such a bad idea to close the station, Hap. Just for today.”
Hap looked at him, scared, and tried to remember what all his reasons had been. He couldn’t think of a one. All he could remember was that he had also awakened with a headache and a runny nose. Well, everyone caught a cold once in a while. But before that guy Campion had shown up, he had been fine. Just fine.
The three Hodges kids were six, four, and eighteen months. The two youngest were taking naps, and the oldest was out back digging a hole. Lila Bruett was in the living room, watching “The Young and the Restless.” She hoped Sally wouldn’t return until it was over. Ralph Hodges had bought a big color TV when times had been better in Arnette, and Lila loved to watch the afternoon stories in color. Everything was so much prettier.
She drew on her cigarette and then let the smoke out in spasms as a racking cough seized her. She went into the kitchen and spat the mouthful of crap she had brought up down the drain. She had gotten up wrath the cough, and all day it had felt like someone was tickling the back of her throat with a feather.
She went back to the living room after taking a peek out the pantry window to make sure Bert Hodges was okay. A commercial was on now, two dancing bottles of toilet bowl cleaner. Lila let her eyes drift around the room and wished her own house looked this nice. Sally’s hobby was doing paint-by-the-numbers pictures of Christ, and they were all over the living room in nice frames. She especially liked the big one of the Last Supper mounted in back of the TV; it had come with sixty different oil colors, Sally had told her, and it took almost three months to finish. It was a real work of art.
Just as her story came back on, Baby Cheryl started to cry, a whooping, ugly yell broken by bursts of coughing.
Lila put out her cigarette and hurried into the bedroom. Eva, the four-year-old, was still fast asleep, but Cheryl was lying on her back in her crib, and her face was going an alarming purple color. Her cries began to sound strangled.
Lila, who was not afraid of the croup after seeing both of her own through bouts with it, picked her up by the heels and swatted her firmly on the back. She had no idea if Dr. Spock recommended this sort of treatment or not, because she had never read him. It worked nicely on Baby Cheryl. She emitted a froggy croak and suddenly spat an amazing wad of yellow phlegm out onto the floor.
“Better?” Lila asked.
“Yeth,” said Baby Cheryl. She was almost asleep again.
Lila wiped up the mess with a Kleenex. She couldn’t remember ever having seen a baby cough up so much snot all at once.
She sat down in front of “The Young and the Restless” again, frowning. She lit another cigarette, sneezed over the first puff, and then began to cough herself.
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 8
The next day they headed west, spreading the disease as they went.
Chain letters don’t work. It’s a known fact. The million dollars or so you are promised if you’ll just send one single dollar to the name at the top of the list, add yours to the bottom, and then send the letter on to five friends never arrives. This one, the Captain Trips chain letter, worked very well. The pyramid was indeed being built, not from the bottom up but from the tip down—said tip being a deceased army security guard named Charles Campion. All the chickens were coming home to roost. Only instead of the mailman bringing each participant bale after bale of letters, each containing a single dollar bill, Captain Trips brought bales of bedrooms with a body or two in each one, and trenches, and dead-pits, and finally bodies slung into the oceans on each coast and into quarries and into the foundations of unfinished houses. And in the end, of course, the bodies would rot where they fell.
Sarah Bradford and Angela Dupray walked back to their parked cars together (infecting four or five people they met on the street), then pecked cheeks and went their separate ways. Sarah went home to infect her husband and his five poker buddies and her teenaged daughter, Samantha. Unknown to her parents, Samantha was terribly afraid she had caught a dose of the clap from her boyfriend. As a matter of fact, she had. As a further matter of fact, she had nothing to worry about; next to what her mother had given her, a good working dose of the clap was every bit as serious as a little eczema of the eyebrows.
The next day Samantha would go on to infect everybody in the swimming pool at the Polliston YWCA.
And so on.
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 14
“I saved the worst for last. We can declassify Princess back to plain old Eva Hodges, female, age four, Caucasian. Her coach-and-four turned back into a pumpkin and a bunch of mice late this afternoon. To look at her, you’d think she was perfectly normal, not even a sniffle. She’s down-hearted, of course; she misses her mom. Other than that, she appears perfectly normal. She’s got it, though. Her post-lunch BP first showed a drop, then a rise, which is the only halfway decent diagnostic tool Denninger’s got so far. Before supper Denninger showed me her sputum slides—as an incentive to diet, sputum slides are really primo, believe me—and they’re lousy with those wagon-wheel germs he says aren’t really germs at all, but incubators. I can’t understand how he can know where this thing is and what it looks like and still not be able to stop it. He gives me a lot of jargon, but I don’t think he understands it, either.”
Deitz lit a cigarette.
“So where are we tonight? We’ve got a disease that’s got several well-defined stages… but some people may skip a stage. Some people may backtrack a stage. Some people may do both. Some people stay in one stage for a relatively long time and others zoom through all four as if they were on a rocket-sled. One of our two ‘clean’ subjects is no longer clean. The other is a thirty-year-old redneck who seems to be as healthy as I am. Denninger has done about thirty million tests on him and has succeeded in isolating only four abnormalities: Redman appears to have a great many moles on his body. He has a slight hypertensive condition, too slight to medicate right now. He develops a mild tic under his left eye when he’s under stress. And Denninger says he dreams a great deal more than average—almost all night, every night. They got that from the standard EEG series they ran before he went on strike. And that’s it. I can’t make anything out of it, neither can Dr. Denninger, and neither can the people who check Dr. Demento’s Work.
“This scares me, Starkey. It scares me because nobody but a very smart doctor with all the facts is going to be able to diagnose anything but a common cold in the people who are out there carrying this. Christ, nobody goes to the doctor anymore unless they’ve got pneumonia or a suspicious lump on the tit or a bad case of the dancing hives. Too hard to get one to look at you. So they’re going to stay home, drink fluids and get plenty of bedrest, and then they’re going to die. Before they do, they’re going to infect everyone who comes into the same room with them. All of us are still expecting the Prince—I think I used his real name here someplace, but at this juncture I don’t really give a fuck—to come down with it tonight or tomorrow or the day after, at the latest. And so far, no one who’s come down with it has gotten better. Those sonsofbitches out in California did this job a little too well for my taste.
“Deitz, Atlanta PB facility 2, this report ends.”
He turned off the recorder and stared at it for a long time. Then he lit another cigarette.
Rainbow Six (1998) - Tom Clancy
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 24
"The toughest part was the environmental systems. That's the most demanding set of specifications I've ever seen. What's the big deal, Dr. Brightling?"
"Well, some of the things we work with demand full isolation Level Four, we call it in the business. Hot Lab stuff, and we have to treat it very carefully, as you might imagine. Federal rules on that we have to follow."
"But the whole building?" Hollister asked. It had been like building a ship or an aircraft. Rarely was any large structure designed to be completely airtight. But this one was, which had forced them to do air-pressure tests when each module had been completed, and driven his window contractors slightly crazy.
"Well, we just wanted it done our way."
"Your building, Doc," Hollister allowed. That one specification had added five million dollars of labor costs to the project, all of it to the window contractor, whose workers had hated the detail work, though not the extra pay to do it. The old Boeing plant down the road at Wichita had hardly been called upon to do such finely finished work. "You picked a pretty setting for it, though."
"Didn't we, though?" All around, the land was covered with a swaying green carpet of wheat, just about a quarter way into its growing cycle. There were some farm machines visible, fertilizing and weeding the crop. Maybe not as pretty as a golf course, but a lot more practical. The complex even had its own large institutional bakery to bake its own bread, maybe from the wheat grown right here on the campus? Hollister wondered. Why hadn't he thought about that one before? The farms that had been bought along with the land even included a feedlot for fattening up cattle, and other land used for truck-farm vegetables. This whole complex could be self-sustaining if somebody ever wanted it to be. Well, maybe they just wanted it to fit in with the area. This part of Kansas was all farms, and though the steel-and-glass buildings of the project didn't exactly look like barns and equipment sheds, their surroundings somehow muted their invasiveness. And besides, you could hardly see them from the interstate highway to the north, and only from a few public roads closer than that, and the gatehouses for limiting access were stout buildings, almost like pillboxes - to protect against tornadoes, the specifications had said, and sure enough no tornado could hurt them -hell, even some loony farmer with a.50-caliber machine gun couldn't hurt those security huts.
"So, you've earned your bonus. The money will be in your account by the close of business tomorrow," Dr. John Brightling promised.
"Suits me, sir." Hollister fished in his pocket and pulled out the master key, the one that would open any door in the complex. It was a little ceremony he always performed when he finished a project. He handed it over. "Well, sir, its your building complex now."
Brightling looked at the electronic key and smiled. This was the last major hurdle for the Project. This would be the home of nearly all of his people. A similar but much smaller structure in Brazil had been finished two months earlier, but that one barely accommodated a hundred people. This one could house three thousand - somewhat crowded, but comfortably even so-for some months, and that was about right. After the first couple of months, he could sustain his medical research efforts here with his best people - most of them not briefed in on the Project, but worthy of life even so because that work was heading in some unexpectedly promising directions. So promising that he wondered how long he himself might live here. Fifty years? A hundred? A thousand, perhaps? Who could say now?
Olympus, he'd call it, Brightling decided on the spot. The home of the gods, for that was exactly what he expected it to be. From here they could watch the world, study it, enjoy it, appreciate it. He would use the call-sign OLYMPUS-1 on his portable radio. From here he'd be able to fly all over the world with picked companions, to observe and learn how the ecology was supposed to work. For twenty years or so, they'd be able to use communications satellites no telling how long they'd last, and after that they'd be stuck with long-wire radio systems. That was an inconvenience for the future, but launching his own replacement satellites was just too difficult in terms of manpower and resources, and besides, satellite launchers polluted like nothing else humankind had ever invented.
The Stand - complete edition, by Stephen King
(from internet transcript)
excerpts, Chapter 45
Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face, he who stalked her dreams?
She never saw him; she didn’t have to see him. He was a shadow passing through the corn at noon, a cold pocket of air, a gore-crew peering down at you from the phone lines. His voice called to her in all the sounds that had ever frightened her—spoken soft, it was the tick of a deathwatch beetle under the stairs, telling that someone loved would soon pass over; spoken loud it was the afternoon thunder rolling amid the clouds that came out of the west like boiling Armageddon. And sometimes there was no sound at all but the lonely rustle of the nightwind in the corn but she would know he was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was within touching distance of the dark angel that had flown silently over Egypt, killing the firstborn of every house where the door post wasn’t daubed with blood. That frightened her most of all. She became a child again in her fear and knew that while others knew of him and were frightened by him, only she had been given a clear vision of his terrible power.
“Welladay,” she said, and popped the last bite of toast into her mouth. She rocked back and forth, drinking her coffee. This was a bright, fine day, and no part of her body was giving her particular misery, and she offered up a brief prayer of thanksgiving for what she had got. God is great, God is good; the littlest child could learn those words, and they encompassed the whole world and all the world held, good and evil.
“God is great,” Mother Abagail said, “God is good. Thank You for the sunshine. For the coffee. For the fine BM I had last night, You was right, those dates turned the trick, but my God, they taste nasty to me. Ain’t I the one? God is great…”
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 04:06 AM Pacific-timezone USA Thursday 02/13/2025
