Watching the local tv news...

A few hours earlier this morning I wrote about my very initial plans for my next excursion.

They're showing images of the tornado today in Dallas, Texas, and I am thinking about the work very early this morning I did very early on the excursion I'm planning.

Those plans are showing up in the work I have ongoing this moment on my next blog post.

My next excursion is one I've been thinking of for more than a week. But those thoughts, I suspect, won't be part of my observations, I am guessing, because what I planned to looked for probably, possibly, won't be there by the time I get back out there. However, certain other content turned out to be interesting and forms the reason I'm going out there. Don't know what I'll see, what I'll find. I don't know the specific day I will try to get out there again. Haven't checked the calendar day because I don't know when it will be.

These notes will be more explanatory when I make that post but I don't know when that will be. And I don't know who's reading these posts, or why I'm even trying to convey notions to you, but I doubt I will mention today's news about Dallas, Texas, and why that caused me to stop and make this note.








The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition

Stephen King

(from internet transcript)

Chapter 4

It was an hour past nightfall.

Starkey sat alone at a long table, sifting through sheets of yellow flimsy. Their contents dismayed him. He had been serving his country for thirty-six years, beginning as a scared West Point plebe. He had won medals. He had spoken with Presidents, had offered them advice, and on occasion his advice had been taken. He had been through dark moments before, plenty of them, but this…

He was scared, so deeply scared he hardly dared admit it to himself. It was the kind of fear that could drive you mad.

On impulse he got up and went to the wall where the five blank TV monitors looked into the room. As he got up, his knee bumped the table, causing one of the sheets of flimsy to fall off the edge. It seesawed lazily down through the mechanically purified air and landed on the tile, half in the table’s shadow and half out. Someone standing over it and looking down would have seen this:

OT CONFIRMED

SEEMS REASONABLY

STRAIN CODED 848-AB

CAMPION, (W.) SALLY

ANTIGEN SHIFT AND MUTATION.

HIGH RISK/EXCESS MORTALITY

AND COMMUNICABILITY ESTIMATED

REPEAT 99.4%. ATLANTA PLAGUE CENTER

UNDERSTANDS. TOP SECRET BLUE FOLDER.

ENDS

P-T-222312A

Starkey pushed a button under the middle screen and the picture flashed on with the unnerving suddenness of solid state components. It showed the western California desert, looking east. It was desolate, and the desolation was rendered eerie by the reddish-purple tinge of infrared photography.

It’s out there, straight ahead, Starkey thought. Project Blue.

The fright tried to wash over him again. He reached into his pocket and brought out a blue pill. What his daughter would call a “downer.” Names didn’t matter; results did. He dry-swallowed it, his hard, unseamed face wrinkling for a moment as it went down.

Project Blue.

He looked at the other blank monitors, and then punched up pictures on all of them. 4 and 5 showed labs. 4 was physics, 5 was viral biology. The vi-bi lab was full of animal cages, mostly for guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys, and a few dogs. None of them appeared to be sleeping. In the physics lab a small centrifuge was still turning around and around. Starkey had complained about that. He had complained bitterly. There was something spooky about that centrifuge whirling gaily around and around and around while Dr. Ezwick lay dead on the floor nearby, sprawled out like a scarecrow that had tipped over in a high wind.

They had explained to him that the centrifuge was on the same circuit as the lights, and if they turned off the centrifuge, the lights would go, too. And the cameras down there were not equipped for infrared. Starkey understood. Some more brass might come down from Washington and want to look at the dead Nobel Prize winner who was lying four hundred feet under the desert less than a mile away. If we turn off the centrifuge, we turn off the professor. Elementary. What his daughter would have called a “Catch-22.”

He took another “downer” and looked into monitor 2. This was the one he liked least of all. He didn’t like the man with his face in the soup. Suppose someone walked up to you and said: You will spend eternity with your phiz in a bowl of soup. It’s like the old pie-in-the-face routine: it stops being funny when it starts being you.



- posted by Kerry Burgess 11:10 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Sunday 10/20/2019