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     After drinking a little wine Joe stood up, “We can no longer get more than halfway down the hill.  Neither can anyone else come up to the cave.  There are guards all over down there.

     “They must have intercepted everyone trying to get up here for over a week now.  I don’t know what they have done with these people but it scares me to think about it.”

     Everyone began talking at once.  I could feel a wide range of emotions from everyone, fear, anger, sadness, and desperation
,
to name a few.  There seemed to be more anger than anything else but I was terrified.  I wanted so much to be able to help
new people
to be healed and to live in peace like we were doing.

     I surprised myself with what I said when I spoke up, “I’m sorry but this is war.  And it’s not war like Vietnam.  That war made no sense.  This time we need to fight for
our freedom.”

     “What’s Vietnam?” Ina asked.  She and Robert had been married when Joe and I were and she was six months pregnant now.

     “Never mind about that, i
t was a senseless war that took place during my time.  In fact, it was still going on when I left.  I don’t even know how it turned out.

     “But this is different.  To me, we would be fighting to protect ourselves from the kind of li
fe you lived
when you did
n’t
know any better.

     “Are any of you willing to go back to the way you were living before?”

     We voted and it was decided that we would go to war.  The cave had so far provided us with the good things we needed but I didn’t know if we could get weapons.

     The cave would not provide any kind of weapons no matter what we tried.  Even the rocks we picked up at the mouth disintegrated when w
e
picked them up as if the cave knew we had planned to use them to hurt someone.

     I went into labor a few days later.  I was scared at first since there were no hospitals but the other women helped me and it was an easy birth.  I gave birth to a hot tempered little girl with a full head of hair
.  I named her Josephine after Joe.

     Joe had tears in his eyes when he saw her and held her tenderly and whispered to her.  I only caught part of what he sad but it
was
about protecting her and never letting anything happen to
her.

 
   When we had another town meeting, everyone had to take their turn holding Josie, as Joe and I had started calling her.  She seemed to love everyone.

     Even though Josie was the center of attention, the purpose of the town meeting was to decide what we could do to help the people from other sectors to get to the cave and join us.

     Surprisingly it was Pud who came up with an idea that we all wondered why anyone else hadn’t come up with it.

     “If Joe and Ashley were able to come up through our dwelling into the city, then why can’t we go down through the dwellings and bring people in that way?”

     We all laughed with relief.  “The onl
y question I have,” Ina said, “Is
how are the people who are trying to get to us going to know to come inside the dwellings?”

     It was Joe who answered, “If the guards are busy guarding the mouth of the cave, then they’re not going to be guarding the dwellings.  They can’t guard all the dwellings even if they tried.  There aren’t enough of them.

     “I propose we split up into pairs to go down to the dwellings and we can keep a look out for anyone coming by then bring them inside and up to the city.  We will probably miss some of them but we will rescue more than we are now.”

     “Like the underground railroad,” I said and then had to explain about slavery and the attempt to help get some of the slaves away from their masters.

     It took awhile to find the entrances to the tunnels that went down to the dwellings, but once we did, we were able to rescue a lot of people, even more than I had anticipated.

     The guards continued to guard the entrance to the cave but soon gave up when so few people attempted to come in that way.
  We were afraid they would now resort to violence.
  We were right.

     One day one of the women who had been helping to bring people in through one of the dwellings didn’t come back.  Her name was Rowena and she was a petite blond who had only been with us for about two weeks.  She had been excited about saving others and would sometimes go out by herself.

     Joe and I decided to go to the dwelling she had been assigned to and investigate.  When we came out of the opening in the ceiling of the kitchen, we didn’t see her at first.

     We found her outside and she had been stabbed through the heart.  She had come to the cave with her mother who was in her fifties
.  Rowena was probably in her early thirties and Emmitt had been mating with her.  They had planned on getting married.

     Joe and I took Rowena back up with us and we all did a lot of grieving for over a week.  Emmitt was so angry he threatened to go down and kill as many of the guards as he could but we talked him out of it.

     No one went down into the dwellings for almost a month and then when we did go down we could not find anyone.  I suspected that the guards had been capturing people trying to get to us and implanting them with programs to try to kill us.

CHAPTER 21

     One morning Irene knocked on our door.  It was early for us and we were still asleep.  “I need coffee,” I said as I
got off the sphere.

     Joe put on the coffee while I opened the door.  “Don’t bother with coffee.  Just come with me to the cave entrance,” Irene said.  “I see some guards and other folks coming up the hill.  Can you see them, Ashley?”

     I closed my eyes, “Yes I see them.  But how are we going to stop them?  We aren’t allowed to have weapons.”  I said as we were running toward the cave entrance.

     “I have no idea but we need to get there.  It’s just a feeling I get.”

     “I feel that too,” Joe said.

     They must have both been wrong for when we got almost to the cave entrance, it felt like we were having an earthquake.  There was a loud rumble and the floor shook like it was trying to break loose.

     All three of us fell as the passageway we were in began rocking as if we were on a swing.
  Then it felt like we were swimming under water and it was a smooth ride.

     The walls of the passage became transparent and we could see out.  “We’re in the air,” I said.

     Irene squealed with laughter, “It’s just like my old skywheel.  I’m loving it!”

     We looked down and below us the guards and the people were looking up at us.  There was no longer a hill and
I
realized the hill was part of the whole thing we had been living in.

     “Look, the dwellings are attached and are floating along with us,” Joe said, pointing.

     I gazed in wonder.  The tunnels we had been using to go to and from the dwellings looked like arms attached to the dwellings.  Like they were some sort of hollow appendages and that’s what was being used to propel us along through the sky.

     We went back inside the city and could see through to the outside here too.  Everyone was standing looking out as we glided along among the stars.

     “I wonder where we’re going.”  I heard someone say.

     “I don’t know where we’re going but this thing we’re in looks like a giant jellyfish.”

     Everyone turned and looked at me, “What is a jellyfish?” Someone asked.

     I started to explain but stopped when I realized these people didn’t live near the ocean and had probably never been there.  “Never mind,” I said.

     The city and countryside looked the same as it always did except we could see out.  We ate and laughed and
danced to music provided by Joe
and his band.  We finally went to bed as we continued on our journey.

     No one knew where we were going and no one seemed to care.

CHAPTER 22

     Josie
was almost two years old when we finally landed.  We had been moving through space for so long I had almost forgotten we had left earth.

     We had spent the last two years living a serene life with plenty of food and laughter.  Pud was now seven and Ina and Robert had a 15 month old baby boy named Seth.  He was adorable with red hair and freckles across his nose.

     Pud had named him and she, Zen, and Z
oe spent a lot of time with Seth and Josey
.  Zen and Zoe were 16 and 17 and had started dating some of the older men.  There were no males their own age.  No one thought anything about them dating men in their thirties.

     Our community was very unique from anything I could have ever imagined.

     On
the day we finally started landing, it felt like we were floating down like a feather floats through the air, so that there was a gently rocking motion along with the sinking feeling.

     We were very excited and most of us were standing along the wall of the thing we were in, which no longer looked anything like a cave.  It looked more like a jellyfish as I’ve said before, but when we were finally on the ground, it turned into the cave-like structure and I realized it was
the way it disguised itself
.

     We could no longer look out and made our way to the entrance of what was now a cave again.  It looked like it had before but the old dwellings had been tucked underneath so that they couldn’t be seen.

     There was a crowd of us who went down the hill that day and I could feel the excitement.  My heart was beating very fast and I could sense Joe’s excitement
too.  We had left Josie
with the girls
and Seth.

     At the bottom of the hill we hiked quite a ways before we finally came to a village.  It looked more like the houses and road in my t
ime.  The roads were either sand
or some sort of
hard material that resembled coquina which is made up of small pieces of shell cemented together.

     I knew this couldn’t be earth because we had come so far but it looked just like the Florida I had left and the time I had left.

     “You know what,” Joe said.  “This surface hurts my feet.  Maybe we need to think about getting some shoes.”

     We all looked down then and we were wearing sandals.  They were very comfortable and enabled us to walk more easily on the coquina.

     The houses we were passing were all made of wood and all had porches.  There were no lawns but the yards were all sand.  We noticed one house at the end of the road we were on that was huge with two stories.  It was painted in white and had orange shutters.

     Some of the houses had cars parked in front that looked pretty much like the cars in my time but they didn’t have any names on them.

     The rest of our group were talking and pointing at the cars and I explained what they were.

     We headed toward the big hous
e
thinking it was some sort of t
ow
n hall or something
but before we got there a tall thin man with long dark hair and full shaggy beard came out of one of the houses.

     “Hi, friends,” he said.  “Welcome.  Won’t you come in and share a meal with us?  My name’s Ted Monroe.”

     I looked down and noticed he was wearing sandals just like the ones we were wearing.  He was also wearing bellbottom
jeans like everyone was wearing when I died in my time and a long-sleeved tee shirt in rusty red.

     I liked him right away.  He reminded me of Joe.  We all introduced ourselves and four of
us followed him inside.  They
were Joe, Ina, Robert and me.  The others said they wanted to continue exploring.

     “I wouldn’t go near
the pig’s house if I were you,” Ted called after them as we started inside.

    
When we got inside it looked just
like many houses
in my time.  A lot of people were living here and, instead of regular furniture there were mattresses on the floors in every room but the kitchen.

     The kitchen was located at the back of the house and Ted lead us back there.  I looked out the kitchen window and noticed a garden growing in the back.  It looked like the gardens of my time.  The vegetables didn’t grow as lush as they did in our city.

     There were three women cooking vegetables in the kitchen.  They looked li
ke the hippies of the 60s
.  They wore long skirts and peasant blouses and were barefoot.

     We all introduced ourselves and they did the same
as they began filling plates with a variety of vegetables.  There was no meat and I remembered that most hippies
in the 60s
were vegetarian.