The Blue Lights

A short story based on a speech I gave to a Tall Tales Toastmasters Speech Contest a number of years ago. Is this what the present world situation is now like?

I was driving late one Sunday night, at two o'clock in the morning. I had just come from a Toastmaster conference which had some really unusual and good speeches. I had stayed overlong at the Hospitality suite afterwards and was feeling tired and a little out of sorts and I just wanted to get home, which was four hours down a long boring interstate highway. I tried hard to keep awake by playing the radio, by turning on the wipers, even though it was crystal clear with stars brightly shining. Mostly, I was humming along, through barren scenery with no one in sight.

Then I saw it. Behind me. Two blue lights in the mirror. They seem to be racing to me. I instantly looked at my speedometer. 74 mph! I did not realize I was doing that fast. I will have to let up. I wonder if the cop wanted to pull me over for speeding. I kept driving on to see what he would do. The blue lights got closer and closer as I neared an exit. I had an opened bottle of champagne that some woman at the Toastmasters meeting had given me and was afraid that he could charge me with something for that, even though the last drink I had was four hours ago.

I got closer to the exit. Padillo and Cranston, Route 144. Exit 37. I went past the exit and the blue lights kept on coming. My heart pounded as I wondered whether to pull over, when I saw the blue lights go off the main road. Apparently he took the exit. Whew! He was going after something else.

I slowed down to 65 mph and kept on going. I felt now like I had ghosts all over me, that there were spooks in my car, spooks on the road, spooks hanging from every bridge, spooks in the sky. I kept on going. Richmond 194. Still a long way to go. There was very little traffic out. It would be morning when I would get home and I wondered if I should pull off and sleep before then. I had a meeting to go to in the morning so I had to keep on going, and I glanced at the mirror.

YikES!!!!! It's blue lights again! They came towards me at a rapid pace. I looked at my speedometer. 67. Would I be pulled over for going just two mph over the limit? Or maybe I did something else wrong and they were going to catch me and arrest me and send me to the nearest hoosegow. I kept on going for fear of these things. The blue lights kept on coming, although I did not hear much of a sound. I kept on driving. Don't look at the mirror. I got to go somewhere. I kept on driving down a straight stretch of road.

It suddenly got darker. I looked in the mirror. The lights were gone! I guess I got away that time although I did not know what I was being pulled over for. Now I was really frightened. I had run away from two police cars. I know they are out to get me. I felt a jittery sense of security in the black inky starlit moonless night that covered everything, pierced only by my headlights and an occasional lamp at a house or a passing car. There seemed to be nothing around. I kept on going maybe half an hour, until I got past an exit saying, "Paxton Glanding Exit 79" and another one saying Richmond 67. The entire sky seemed to brighten with crystal blue. I looked in the mirror.

Oh, no!! Here they came. I saw four blue lights coming up on me, and another pair of blue lights way back down a highway a ways. The entire police station is out to get me. I got afraid that there may be a roadblock ahead. So I decided to pull over and get this over with. It could not be anything much.

So I pulled over to the side. To my surprise when I looked in the mirror, the blue lights went UP! They went over my head, over the car roof. Then a circular apparition came in front of me as I looked out the windshield. There were blue lights spinning everywhere. A light and door opened up on it, and a strange green being came out. I got out of the car to see what was going on.

I saw two or three creatures wandering around in the darkness, and one of them said, "Jixbo bobuct t'hyacx Pluzz etx Earth bxisto ut!" The other replied, "Ut, Bxisto earthlctx Pluzz". Now I know what happened. All those blue lights were aliens from another planet. I felt so scared that I could feel my feet drop off me, I was shaking so bad. I heard a loudspeaker or something then boom out. "You earthling will go with us to our Planet Pluzz. Please enter this doorway." No way. Then a bright beam shone at me and decided for me otherwise. I felt a pull on my body. I tried to run away but I could not make any progress. I kept slipping. I found my self going up in the misty damp air. "Let me go!!!" I said. But it was no use. Apparently that light was a tractor beam pulling me in their spacecraft. I got worried that these aliens would torture me or maybe humans were their favorite dish.

I looked down the road and saw more blue lights. The ones that were way behind. As they came closer, while I was being pulled, pulled, pulled, I made out that these lights really WERE a police car. The car came up to about two hundred feet away on the road. An officer stepped out and pulled his hand out. Bzingggg!!! He fired his pistol and I could feel the air whoosing by as the bullet raced within inches of my face. It went towards the spacecraft then into nowhere. He fired again. Help! The beam kept pulling me and I was about 10 feet away from the entrance. Bziingg! Bzingg! then all of at once I heard a tremendous CRACK!! and an explosion of purplish intensely bright light and shooting stars like fireworks. The next thing I knew I was lying on top of a haystack in the field, as if I fell. I saw a bunch of blue lights head up into the sky.

I saw what happened. The officer had shot out the tractor beam. I saw the blue lights head into the sky and get fainter. The ship was obviously limping and was apparently flying to a mother ship. The policeman saved my life. I wanted to go to him to thank him for his heroic deed. But when I looked down the road I saw nothing except my car and the inky black night darkness. I crawled back into the car but felt so exhausted that I fell asleep.

When I woke up it was morning. I looked around to see where the aliens were. I saw nothing except a slight indentation in the field. Surely I would see burnt out stuff. But I saw nothing. Someone came up to me and asked if I wanted help. I told him what happened last night. She said, '"you probably were dreaming. I heard nothing". But that officer, I said. I remembered his license number. 57-828. She said, that could not be an officer. All emergency vehicles, she said, had license numbers beginning with LE.

Well, maybe I was dreaming. I got into the car and drove on home. But I still was edgy and worried. If it was going back to have that tractor beam, there's a mother ship and surely that ship would come and that would be the end of…

Copyright 2005 by Jim.

Improv

One of the workshops I am taking this year at SUUSI is "Day at the Improv", a five-day workshop on something called Improv. It had a change of leader, and now a popular and respected musician is giving the workshop. But I am wondering, just what is Improv?

I looked at one site, and found that some exercises for it are games of various sorts. For example, one person shows an object and another says what it is not. Then that person picks up another object and so forth. I found a book at the Chesterfield library on "Improvisation" and I briefly glanced at some of the scenarios in it. What I get from it is that you need to make the characters authentic and believable. For example, someone concerned about a house foreclosure who sniggers would not be portraying the character authentically.

I enrolled in the workshop because I am always looking for something new at SUUSI. This one should be interesting.

By the way, I now have seven blogs, one for each day of the week. Blogtrek is my Saturday blog, so I normally will be posting on Saturday, but I may post at other times if something comes up that I want to post. This blog will usually contain items other than religion, astronomy, peak oil and running out of resources, nature and birding, mathematics, weather or opinions that I have, for those are covered by my other blogs.