The Writing On The Wall
Midnight, Eastern Standard Time
The convict, Steel, sat on his bunk deep in thought. He was lost in visions of another land unfamiliar to our own. To the casual observer, it appeared as if he tripped on some psychotropic medication. He did not. His comatose appearance resulted from euphoric thoughts of a land far away. It was for that reason that he did not notice when the warden, the sergeant and five guards stopped at his cell.
“Steel!” said the warden in a voice filled with authority.
Steel lifted his eyes as his thoughts returned to the here and now.
“We have a problem. This…this beast…”
The warden’s voice faded with apparent discomfort. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, not enjoying speaking to a convict. He especially didn’t enjoy asking a convict for help. It was a nightmare.
The beast he spoke of was no regular beast. It was a beast that defied all scientific explanation. This particular creature was unknown to man. It resembled an armored tank in size, shape and strength. The black-green armor of its body sparkled like glass. It had no eyes, no head, and no legs. It had only arm-sized tentacles all over its threatening frame. Most astonishing was that it would instantly appear out of thin air and blindly thrash everything in a thirty-foot radius. The military had tried everything to either capture or destroy it without success. The strange monster would appear, reap havoc in the immediate area, then suddenly vanish as quickly as it had come. It seemed as if it was looking for something. It was. It was searching for the convict Steel.
The guards were uncomfortable as well. They fidgeted nervously as Steel slowly looked at each man in turn, meeting their eyes, adding to the tension before he spoke.
“You saw him!” Steel said, triumph in his voice. He paused for a second, but no one responded to the accusation.
“The Knelk is looking for me. I told you it would be looking for me. Unfortunately, our contact device was stolen by some of your crazies. When it doesn’t find me, the Knelk vanishes and appears at random. It enters other realms each time it disappears from this one. These realms are similar to Earth, some younger, some older, many further advanced. Even the older ones seem to be conditionally younger than this one. I’ve seen a few Earth’s like this one at the brink of destruction due to negligence.” He leaped to his feet, shifting quickly back and forth from one foot to the other next to the bars of his cell.
He studied the men on the other side of the bars, contempt in his eyes.
“I’ve tried to explain this to your officers and doctors,” he continued, “but they assumed me to be mad or on drugs. Now, you’re here seeking my help.” Steel shook his head in dismay. “It’s to our best interest that I go. Sergeant, could you please allow someone to return this to my neighbors? It was borrowed from them.” He gestured towards the items in his cell.
Up and down the gallery, prisoners were curiously whispering to each other, perturbed and curious about the late night visit, the unusual uproar that filled the cellblock.
“Don’t worry,” growled the sergeant, “I doubt anyone will need any of that junk --”
“Your mamma’s junk,” hooted one of the prisoners in the distance. Other prisoners laughed raucously. The sergeant ignored the remark and continued.
“-That thing has been killing a lot of people. I hope that you really have a way of stopping it. I don’t know, however, that I’m ready to believe all that other stuff you said, but I wish you good luck.”
The heavy door was unlocked with a clang and Steel came out slowly and warily. The prisoner and the other men moved quickly down the empty corridor towards the exit gate. The loud echo of their boots on the marble tile floor filled the cold air.
1:00 a.m., Eastern Standard Time
A line of unmarked government sedans sped down the highway.
“Hey,” Steel said, “before we see the Knelk, I want a big bag of dope.”
“A bag of what?” said the annoyed driver, hands heavy on the steering wheel. “You’re nuts. No fuckin’ way!”
“Then, I won’t tell you where the Knelk will appear next,” Steel growled. He sat in the back of the sedan with a stubborn look on his face. His thick black hair blew wildly as the wind whoosed into the car from the open window at his side. The agent in the front passenger seat pulled out his phone and dialed.
1:20 a.m., Eastern Standard Time
“Yeah,” Steel shouted, “I know where the beast is.” He slyly imitated a junkie’s nod that he’d seen back in the prison. He squirmed and scratched and frowned like crazy, pretending to be under the influence of drugs. In truth, however, his metabolism was not altered in any way.
“It’s in these nuts!” he shouted. He burst into laughter as he thought of his newly-met prison buddies. They had called themselves Reys. They said that he was one too. Nice fellows. They were the only ones who offered to help him with basic needs. Very humorous bunch, too. Steel continued to laugh out loud at the joke they had taught him. He didn’t understand the joke but laughed because it felt so good. None of the agents in the car thought it was funny.
Steel laughed again. That was probably why the world was so screwed up. These jerks didn’t see the humor but instead they worried that the junkie in the back seat was pulling a fast one on them. They feared, no doubt, that the strange beast would appear again to murder perhaps hundreds of people, innocent bystanders, like it did the night before. The Knelk had appeared in a crowded New Jersey shopping mall. It had just appeared and wreaked havoc.
1:45 a.m., Eastern Standard Time
The entourage of federal vehicles approached the area where Steel expected the Knelk to appear again. A battalion of marine tanks, helicopters, and frantic news reporters followed them. It was impossible to keep the event a secret. Soldiers struggled to keep the curious spectators back behind the parameters of the Bronx Botanical Gardens. The cold and rainy night did not deter them in the least.
The park was usually closed and quiet after dark, but tonight it was brighter and noisier than a World Series game at Yankee Stadium. The park was the center of attention for the whole planet. Almost everyone in the world had learned of the ‘strange man,’ the convicted madman who seemed to have all the answers to the questions the entire world was asking. “What is this creature?” “Where did it come from?” “What does it want?” There were hundreds of questions, more complicated questions, but the convict had only informed them that he was of another parallel world - that he would meet the Knelk at a given place, and that the creature he called Knelk was his traveling companion.
He had told them that Knelk meant traveling companion in his native language, but no one believed him. The whole world watched to see what would happen, thinking that if it were true, this would be a new era for mankind, a turning point where humanity for the first time would be in touch with a different and highly-evolved life form. Yet, a very similar lifeform.
Steel, which was not his name at all but a name given to him by his convict friends in the can, refused to answer any other questions. He felt these people wanted too many answers, answers they definitely did not deserve. Their treatment of him had been unjust, even savage. He was accused of crimes he knew nothing about. As a matter of fact, he was unable to commit a crime even if he wanted to do so. In prison, he was abused, beaten, threatened, and placed in a cage. Never in all the worlds he had visited had he witnessed a race that dealt with people with such wanton brutality, mass incarceration, murder, war and genocide as he had seen here.
The Knelk was indeed looking for Steel. It did not intend to harm him. Steel knew that. The Knelk was his protector. It was agitated at its failure to perform its duty to him. Each traveler in the universe had such a loyal companion, a protector against hostile life forms that, until now, they had never encountered. Some hostile life forms did exist in the known realms, but these were not a problem. Never before had a traveler and a protector been separated. Somehow, they had lost each other. Now the Knelk searched untiringly. It paid no attention whatsoever to anything in its path. It was intent only on the search for the traveler, for Steel. Those people who had died perished because of their own panic and the weakness of their own structures, the buildings that would topple on them at the slightest pressure.
Steel had originally appeared in Miami, Florida, where, without his Knelk in attendance, he had been robbed by thugs. The thieves had stolen his tracking device, which they thought to be some type of beeper. This device was what helped him reach and locate realms with intelligent life forms. It also enabled the Knelk to find him if they were separated, as was now the case.
What the Knelk found as it tried to locate its companion was a bunch of thieves doing drugs in an abandoned building. One of them had been tampering with the device, trying to determine how to operate it. They had all perished. The other places where the Knelk had materialized were all in the North American continent.
Steel felt somewhat annoyed at losing contact with the Knelk, but he also felt some relief at being able to travel freely once again. The Knelk was so very protective that its attention was sometimes oppressive.
The atmosphere in the neighborhood of the Bronx Botanical Gardens suddenly became dense as the air pressure increased. Those present felt the pressure pushing their chests inward and it became difficult to breathe. An unusual electrical storm erupted over their heads and terrible winds whirled overhead. The Knelk was coming.
Everyone in the world who was watching gasped in awe and fear. Many prayed to their gods. The soldiers tensed and stood ready to fire upon the creature when they heard the command. All eyes focussed on the lone figure in the open wet field surrounded by trees. All types of war machines converged on the park. The world watched live via television and listened to the radio.
In front of the watching world, the Knelk appeared in a blinding flash of light that temporally stunned people up to twenty yards away. It came thrashing, wailing, searching and calling with a foreign voice that deafened their ears.
When it heard an alarmingly shrill whistle from Steel’s mouth, the Knelk quietly relaxed. The man allowed the Knelk’s emotions of longing and affection to wash over him as he approached his companion. All witnesses were held spellbound by the unusual scene unfolding before them. The stranger and his terrifying traveling companion were engulfed in a bright electric blue aura that crackled with an audible hum, a sound similar to the sound those electric insect zappers make in your backyard.
The blue sphere began to pulse and rotate on its axis, spinning faster and faster. Within the electrified globe, Steel lovingly caressed the arm-like mandibles of his protector and companion.
“Do not be alarmed, my friend,” Steel whispered to his friend. The Knelk’s mental response pulsed into his mind:
No, friend. I fear not. These creatures appear too young and not fully evolved. We must return here on the next universal spin. Perhaps by then, they will be ready to see the Kingdom and glory that awaits them. Aye. The one that gave them manifestation.
Let us proceed. We must continue our search for intelligent life. These are not matured. They have no peace within their own hearts and thus they have not fully evolved. They have not learned how to live forever. Out of the hundreds of realms we have visited, you know that only a third are ready for the transition.
Steel rubbed the Knelk reassuringly. “In fact,” he said softly, “I have never witnessed any of our realms evolve so negatively as this one. With such hate, greed and division.”
Steel directed his thoughts to this race. He knew his people could not interfere with the growth of this species. There was not doubt that this one was yet too young and too wild to be let through the door into the knowing world. He feared, despondently, that these people might never make it through the metamorphosis. Didn’t they learn, he wondered, from the previous messages left by the travelers before him? Did they not understand the guidelines?
Meanwhile, outside, the observers grew worried as the electric blue sphere whirled and crackled with ear-splitting pops. The sound was caused by sudden atmospheric changes. They feared an explosion. However, instead of exploding, Steel and his Knelk simply vanished into thin air, leaving a faint odor of ozone and a worldly audience shocked beyond belief and muttering more questions than they started with.
And, perhaps, they will never find the answers. Because, as the strange man named Steel by his convict friends would have confirmed to them, Evolution is a process of growing better, not growing worse, while decay, which he had witnessed in this instance, was a process of corruption and extinction.
Perhaps they would make it, but it would take major change. It would take a change they could only willingly achieve on their own, if they woke up in time.
Within moments of their departure, on another similar earth-type planet orbiting a red giant star in the farthest arm of the Andromeda galaxy, the traveler and his Knelk found a peaceful race of highly intelligent tripeds,
As it happened, millions of tripeds made a special pilgrimage to a high plateau in the East of the second continent where they knew from study that the travelers would appear. The coming was anticipated and long awaited. It was simple. Ancient tripeds had left the message written on their pyramid walls during a much earlier visit, including primitive depictions of tripeds being schooled by such a traveler.
The red-giant sun shown majestically with pink rays of light bouncing off green cumulous clouds. The air was hot, but not much hotter than the last earth the traveler had left behind. Electric flashes zapped back and forth as the welcomed blue sphere appeared with the traveler and his Knelk within. He was the sole object of attention in the greenish alien sky.
Indeed, they had studied the writing on the walls and they were prepared.
Midnight, Eastern Standard Time
The convict, Steel, sat on his bunk deep in thought. He was lost in visions of another land unfamiliar to our own. To the casual observer, it appeared as if he tripped on some psychotropic medication. He did not. His comatose appearance resulted from euphoric thoughts of a land far away. It was for that reason that he did not notice when the warden, the sergeant and five guards stopped at his cell.
“Steel!” said the warden in a voice filled with authority.
Steel lifted his eyes as his thoughts returned to the here and now.
“We have a problem. This…this beast…”
The warden’s voice faded with apparent discomfort. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, not enjoying speaking to a convict. He especially didn’t enjoy asking a convict for help. It was a nightmare.
The beast he spoke of was no regular beast. It was a beast that defied all scientific explanation. This particular creature was unknown to man. It resembled an armored tank in size, shape and strength. The black-green armor of its body sparkled like glass. It had no eyes, no head, and no legs. It had only arm-sized tentacles all over its threatening frame. Most astonishing was that it would instantly appear out of thin air and blindly thrash everything in a thirty-foot radius. The military had tried everything to either capture or destroy it without success. The strange monster would appear, reap havoc in the immediate area, then suddenly vanish as quickly as it had come. It seemed as if it was looking for something. It was. It was searching for the convict Steel.
The guards were uncomfortable as well. They fidgeted nervously as Steel slowly looked at each man in turn, meeting their eyes, adding to the tension before he spoke.
“You saw him!” Steel said, triumph in his voice. He paused for a second, but no one responded to the accusation.
“The Knelk is looking for me. I told you it would be looking for me. Unfortunately, our contact device was stolen by some of your crazies. When it doesn’t find me, the Knelk vanishes and appears at random. It enters other realms each time it disappears from this one. These realms are similar to Earth, some younger, some older, many further advanced. Even the older ones seem to be conditionally younger than this one. I’ve seen a few Earth’s like this one at the brink of destruction due to negligence.” He leaped to his feet, shifting quickly back and forth from one foot to the other next to the bars of his cell.
He studied the men on the other side of the bars, contempt in his eyes.
“I’ve tried to explain this to your officers and doctors,” he continued, “but they assumed me to be mad or on drugs. Now, you’re here seeking my help.” Steel shook his head in dismay. “It’s to our best interest that I go. Sergeant, could you please allow someone to return this to my neighbors? It was borrowed from them.” He gestured towards the items in his cell.
Up and down the gallery, prisoners were curiously whispering to each other, perturbed and curious about the late night visit, the unusual uproar that filled the cellblock.
“Don’t worry,” growled the sergeant, “I doubt anyone will need any of that junk --”
“Your mamma’s junk,” hooted one of the prisoners in the distance. Other prisoners laughed raucously. The sergeant ignored the remark and continued.
“-That thing has been killing a lot of people. I hope that you really have a way of stopping it. I don’t know, however, that I’m ready to believe all that other stuff you said, but I wish you good luck.”
The heavy door was unlocked with a clang and Steel came out slowly and warily. The prisoner and the other men moved quickly down the empty corridor towards the exit gate. The loud echo of their boots on the marble tile floor filled the cold air.
1:00 a.m., Eastern Standard Time
A line of unmarked government sedans sped down the highway.
“Hey,” Steel said, “before we see the Knelk, I want a big bag of dope.”
“A bag of what?” said the annoyed driver, hands heavy on the steering wheel. “You’re nuts. No fuckin’ way!”
“Then, I won’t tell you where the Knelk will appear next,” Steel growled. He sat in the back of the sedan with a stubborn look on his face. His thick black hair blew wildly as the wind whoosed into the car from the open window at his side. The agent in the front passenger seat pulled out his phone and dialed.
1:20 a.m., Eastern Standard Time
“Yeah,” Steel shouted, “I know where the beast is.” He slyly imitated a junkie’s nod that he’d seen back in the prison. He squirmed and scratched and frowned like crazy, pretending to be under the influence of drugs. In truth, however, his metabolism was not altered in any way.
“It’s in these nuts!” he shouted. He burst into laughter as he thought of his newly-met prison buddies. They had called themselves Reys. They said that he was one too. Nice fellows. They were the only ones who offered to help him with basic needs. Very humorous bunch, too. Steel continued to laugh out loud at the joke they had taught him. He didn’t understand the joke but laughed because it felt so good. None of the agents in the car thought it was funny.
Steel laughed again. That was probably why the world was so screwed up. These jerks didn’t see the humor but instead they worried that the junkie in the back seat was pulling a fast one on them. They feared, no doubt, that the strange beast would appear again to murder perhaps hundreds of people, innocent bystanders, like it did the night before. The Knelk had appeared in a crowded New Jersey shopping mall. It had just appeared and wreaked havoc.
1:45 a.m., Eastern Standard Time
The entourage of federal vehicles approached the area where Steel expected the Knelk to appear again. A battalion of marine tanks, helicopters, and frantic news reporters followed them. It was impossible to keep the event a secret. Soldiers struggled to keep the curious spectators back behind the parameters of the Bronx Botanical Gardens. The cold and rainy night did not deter them in the least.
The park was usually closed and quiet after dark, but tonight it was brighter and noisier than a World Series game at Yankee Stadium. The park was the center of attention for the whole planet. Almost everyone in the world had learned of the ‘strange man,’ the convicted madman who seemed to have all the answers to the questions the entire world was asking. “What is this creature?” “Where did it come from?” “What does it want?” There were hundreds of questions, more complicated questions, but the convict had only informed them that he was of another parallel world - that he would meet the Knelk at a given place, and that the creature he called Knelk was his traveling companion.
He had told them that Knelk meant traveling companion in his native language, but no one believed him. The whole world watched to see what would happen, thinking that if it were true, this would be a new era for mankind, a turning point where humanity for the first time would be in touch with a different and highly-evolved life form. Yet, a very similar lifeform.
Steel, which was not his name at all but a name given to him by his convict friends in the can, refused to answer any other questions. He felt these people wanted too many answers, answers they definitely did not deserve. Their treatment of him had been unjust, even savage. He was accused of crimes he knew nothing about. As a matter of fact, he was unable to commit a crime even if he wanted to do so. In prison, he was abused, beaten, threatened, and placed in a cage. Never in all the worlds he had visited had he witnessed a race that dealt with people with such wanton brutality, mass incarceration, murder, war and genocide as he had seen here.
The Knelk was indeed looking for Steel. It did not intend to harm him. Steel knew that. The Knelk was his protector. It was agitated at its failure to perform its duty to him. Each traveler in the universe had such a loyal companion, a protector against hostile life forms that, until now, they had never encountered. Some hostile life forms did exist in the known realms, but these were not a problem. Never before had a traveler and a protector been separated. Somehow, they had lost each other. Now the Knelk searched untiringly. It paid no attention whatsoever to anything in its path. It was intent only on the search for the traveler, for Steel. Those people who had died perished because of their own panic and the weakness of their own structures, the buildings that would topple on them at the slightest pressure.
Steel had originally appeared in Miami, Florida, where, without his Knelk in attendance, he had been robbed by thugs. The thieves had stolen his tracking device, which they thought to be some type of beeper. This device was what helped him reach and locate realms with intelligent life forms. It also enabled the Knelk to find him if they were separated, as was now the case.
What the Knelk found as it tried to locate its companion was a bunch of thieves doing drugs in an abandoned building. One of them had been tampering with the device, trying to determine how to operate it. They had all perished. The other places where the Knelk had materialized were all in the North American continent.
Steel felt somewhat annoyed at losing contact with the Knelk, but he also felt some relief at being able to travel freely once again. The Knelk was so very protective that its attention was sometimes oppressive.
The atmosphere in the neighborhood of the Bronx Botanical Gardens suddenly became dense as the air pressure increased. Those present felt the pressure pushing their chests inward and it became difficult to breathe. An unusual electrical storm erupted over their heads and terrible winds whirled overhead. The Knelk was coming.
Everyone in the world who was watching gasped in awe and fear. Many prayed to their gods. The soldiers tensed and stood ready to fire upon the creature when they heard the command. All eyes focussed on the lone figure in the open wet field surrounded by trees. All types of war machines converged on the park. The world watched live via television and listened to the radio.
In front of the watching world, the Knelk appeared in a blinding flash of light that temporally stunned people up to twenty yards away. It came thrashing, wailing, searching and calling with a foreign voice that deafened their ears.
When it heard an alarmingly shrill whistle from Steel’s mouth, the Knelk quietly relaxed. The man allowed the Knelk’s emotions of longing and affection to wash over him as he approached his companion. All witnesses were held spellbound by the unusual scene unfolding before them. The stranger and his terrifying traveling companion were engulfed in a bright electric blue aura that crackled with an audible hum, a sound similar to the sound those electric insect zappers make in your backyard.
The blue sphere began to pulse and rotate on its axis, spinning faster and faster. Within the electrified globe, Steel lovingly caressed the arm-like mandibles of his protector and companion.
“Do not be alarmed, my friend,” Steel whispered to his friend. The Knelk’s mental response pulsed into his mind:
No, friend. I fear not. These creatures appear too young and not fully evolved. We must return here on the next universal spin. Perhaps by then, they will be ready to see the Kingdom and glory that awaits them. Aye. The one that gave them manifestation.
Let us proceed. We must continue our search for intelligent life. These are not matured. They have no peace within their own hearts and thus they have not fully evolved. They have not learned how to live forever. Out of the hundreds of realms we have visited, you know that only a third are ready for the transition.
Steel rubbed the Knelk reassuringly. “In fact,” he said softly, “I have never witnessed any of our realms evolve so negatively as this one. With such hate, greed and division.”
Steel directed his thoughts to this race. He knew his people could not interfere with the growth of this species. There was not doubt that this one was yet too young and too wild to be let through the door into the knowing world. He feared, despondently, that these people might never make it through the metamorphosis. Didn’t they learn, he wondered, from the previous messages left by the travelers before him? Did they not understand the guidelines?
Meanwhile, outside, the observers grew worried as the electric blue sphere whirled and crackled with ear-splitting pops. The sound was caused by sudden atmospheric changes. They feared an explosion. However, instead of exploding, Steel and his Knelk simply vanished into thin air, leaving a faint odor of ozone and a worldly audience shocked beyond belief and muttering more questions than they started with.
And, perhaps, they will never find the answers. Because, as the strange man named Steel by his convict friends would have confirmed to them, Evolution is a process of growing better, not growing worse, while decay, which he had witnessed in this instance, was a process of corruption and extinction.
Perhaps they would make it, but it would take major change. It would take a change they could only willingly achieve on their own, if they woke up in time.
Within moments of their departure, on another similar earth-type planet orbiting a red giant star in the farthest arm of the Andromeda galaxy, the traveler and his Knelk found a peaceful race of highly intelligent tripeds,
As it happened, millions of tripeds made a special pilgrimage to a high plateau in the East of the second continent where they knew from study that the travelers would appear. The coming was anticipated and long awaited. It was simple. Ancient tripeds had left the message written on their pyramid walls during a much earlier visit, including primitive depictions of tripeds being schooled by such a traveler.
The red-giant sun shown majestically with pink rays of light bouncing off green cumulous clouds. The air was hot, but not much hotter than the last earth the traveler had left behind. Electric flashes zapped back and forth as the welcomed blue sphere appeared with the traveler and his Knelk within. He was the sole object of attention in the greenish alien sky.
Indeed, they had studied the writing on the walls and they were prepared
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