I woke up some time later. My mind swam up out of a fog and I was instantly alert. My eyes sprang open, but when I tried to move it was as if I was mired in quicksand. I was lying on my back with my head cradled on something soft. My legs were out straight and my arms were at my sides. I did not appear to be tied up; instead, it was as if all my limbs were asleep. I twitched just then as my muscles were starting to come back to life. The second time I twitched, Helena's head loomed over mine upside down. After a moment of confusion, I realized that my head was in her lap and she was bending over, looking at my face. I smacked my lips together and finally collected enough moisture in my mouth to talk.
"What happened?" I managed to croak.
"I am so sorry, Jeremiah," she moaned. "My crying out in passion woke up Sonja and Coleen. They came running out of the tent and saw you on top of me. They thought you were attacking me, so Sonja knocked you off me and Coleen zapped you with her stunner."
I could not help snorting in laughter. "It was you attacking me as I remember it," I said. "Where are those two anyway? I think I want a word with them about jumping to conclusions about me."
I was not really angry, because the other women had done the right thing and defended their friend. The stunner had not harmed me in the least, but my left arm smarted some from where I fell on it. Helena giggled and told me that the other women were in their tent, too embarrassed to face me. I grinned at that and sat up; I was feeling better by the second. I kicked the blanket off my still naked body and stood up to dress.
"Go get those desperados while I dress, please: it is their guard shift anyway," I said.
Sonja and Coleen shuffled out of their tent a few minutes later, both looking chagrined. I shushed them before they could apologize.
"I think we are all embarrassed enough about tonight without rehashing it. I say let sleeping dogs lie."
Everyone agreed to that immediately, so I grabbed my bedroll and went to sleep under my wagon, while Sonja and Coleen took up station around the fire.
The next morning I was up with the sun as usual. I sent Sonja and Coleen to bed to get a few hours sleep before their big day, while I tended my animals and made coffee. I was a bit surprised when both women kissed me before they disappeared into their tent. I was surprised, but not in the least displeased. The women from California might be unusual, but they were all attractive and smart; it was a combination I had always found irresistible.
All three women were up and stirring around by nine. Sonja joined me by the fire. She declined my offer of a cup of coffee, but did ask for a sip of mine. I could not help grinning at the face she made after taking a gulp.
"That's disgusting," she blurted.
I shrugged and took my cup back. We sat in companionable silence for a minute or two before Sonja spoke again.
"Jeremiah, I know it is not what we originally agreed to, but with Jonathan gone, we need your help today."
I was not thrilled with the idea of going up on the mountain, but I figured that if the women felt safe doing it, I could at least listen to what Sonja wanted.
"What do you want me to do?" I asked.
Sonja told me her plan and it did not seem foolishly dangerous, so I signed on to it.
Sonja wanted to take a wagon closer to the mountain so that she and Helena would not have as far to tote their equipment. I hitched up Zeke and three other mules to the smallest wagon and the women and I loaded four of their trunks on to it. We rode for about a mile; all the while Helena's silver box kept chirping and clicking. I was beginning to hear a pattern to the noise the box made as it clicked faster, the closer we advanced to the mountain. After that first mile, Helena dismounted the wagon and walked about fifty feet in front of us. We were almost at the base of the mountain when Helena signaled me to stop. She took one last look at her strange device and walked back to us.
"I'm reading two gray unit of radiation here, so this is as far as we are going unprotected. Anyone going further than that large square rock will need to be in full protective gear and wearing a dosimeter," she said.
After we dragged the metal chests off the wagon, the women flipped them open and started pulling out these shiny metallic cloth garments. The garments looked as if they were silver union suits with built in boots. Sonja and Helena unselfconsciously stripped down to their unmentionables and wriggled into the suits. As if the suits were not strange enough, both women then hooked a half circle looking thing over the tops of their heads. The thing covered one of their ears, had a curved twig like appendage that went from their ear to the front of their mouths and a part that looked like a spool of thread with a glass front. The spool looking thing gave the women the appearance of having three eyes. They next donned hoods made of the same shiny material. The hoods covered their heads and fastened to the suit at their shoulders. The front part of the hood was made of some sort of flexible clear glass, the likes of which I had never seen. They topped off the bizarre outfits with long gauntlet-like gloves.
While Sonja and Helena were busy with the suits, Coleen placed a smaller case on top of one of the big ones. The lid of the small case hinged up. The part that opened was mostly a black rectangle, while the bottom had some buttons on it with letters of the alphabet stamped onto them. I jumped back in alarm when the black rectangle came to life, showing a picture of Coleen and me. When I jumped, so did the Jeremiah in the picture. Coleen saw me jump and gave me a gentle, reassuring smile.
"Relax, Jeremiah, it's nothing to harm you. I'll explain it all later," she said softly.
I nodded dumbly as Helena and Sonja turned and the picture changed to a view towards the mountain. Right then I knew that there was much more to all this than I had even imagined before. I knew that because, up until the strange picture I was seeing, all of the Californians' marvels could be explained as something similar to, although much better than, things I had seen before. Not now though, and especially not after what happened next.
Coleen slipped a device over her head that was similar to the one Helena and Sonja wore, minus the spool with the glass front, and started talking.
"I have two good video feeds, Sonja, now let's do a comm check." she said.
By now, Sonja and Helena were at least fifty yards away, too far to hear Coleen's voice, I thought. So much for what I thought, because suddenly Sonja's slightly echoed voice spoke out of the machine that I was looking at.
"Good. I hear you loud and clear. Do you have radio also, Helena?"
Helena's voice jumped out of the machine too.
"Roger," she said.
Sonja and Helena disappeared from our view a few minutes later. When we were alone, Coleen tried to explain what I was seeing. Her explanation did not help me at all, because I could not find a frame of reference for what she was saying. Until thirty minutes ago, the telegraph was the most sophisticated communication system in the world as I knew it. Now I was privy to something that not only sent your voice from one place to another, it sent your picture too. What I was seeing was impossible, yet here I stood, watching it happen. It was either real or I had finally slipped into insanity. While I was hashing all this out in my mind, Coleen was watching me closely. I realized that she was afraid that I would do something irrational. I gave her a reassuring lopsided grin.
"You ladies are full of surprises, but I think I know you well enough to trust you. Tell me you aren't witches and this isn't some witchery magic, and I will stay with you."
Coleen laughed, threw her arms around my neck, and kissed me soundly. Her kiss almost made me forget all that happened that morning. She finally leaned back and looked into my eyes. She was tall enough that she did not have to look up that far. "You are an amazing man, Jeremiah; we've never met one like you. We were lucky beyond belief to have found you here. As far as witchcraft goes, if anyone here is casting any spells, it is you. How else can you explain all three of us being crazy about you in only four days?"
I gave her another grin, slipped my hand down off her waist and cupped her shapely derriere.
"I would be more flattered if I was not the only man you have met here in Wyoming, but I am not complaining one bit."
Coleen laughed and squirmed out of my grasp.
"Later big boy," she said. "Right now we have work to do."
I loved making Coleen laugh. She was probably the best humored woman I had ever met. I sighed theatrically and nodded my head. She laughed again, grabbed my hand and pulled me over to one of the open metal chests. She was in the middle of telling me what we needed to do next, when she held up her hand to shush me and cupped the other hand to the thing on her ear. She listened intently for a few seconds, then said, "I copy, Sonja, and I have the camera's recording."
Coleen stopped talking and grabbed me in another tight hug. She sure was excited and she quickly told me why.
"They've already found some Hawkingium. Helena says it's lying all over the place, instead of being buried as she thought it would be. Hurry up and help get this suit out so we can watch them on the monitor."
I helped Coleen lay out another set of the shiny union suit, then sat beside her on one of the camp chairs and watched the incredible moving pictures on the small black rectangle. As I watched the picture in utter fascination, I noticed that Helena was talking the entire time. She was using that nearly indecipherable California dialect with many Latin sounding words thrown in. I glanced over at Coleen and whispered, "Who is she talking to?"
Coleen pointed to the box with the picture on it. "She is narrating the video we are recording. What they have found up there will be of great interest to the scientists back home," she said.
Coleen and I watched the small picture for another hour as Sonja and Helena found more pieces of the metal they sought. By then the novelty of the device was wearing thin, so I stood up and stretched. While I was up, Coleen asked me to place one of the trunks on the ground about thirty yards in front of us. After I completed that task, she had me fill this silver metal five gallon bucket with water from the barrel lashed to my wagon. The cover for the bucket had a pump handle and a small flexible tube mounted on it. I lugged the bucket over to where I placed the trunk. As soon as I sat the bucket on the ground, Coleen shouted to me that the other women were headed back.
When I returned to where we had been sitting, Coleen stood up and started disrobing. I had to comment on how quick she and her friends were to do that.
"You all are not very modest," I opined.
Coleen draped her frock over the camp stool and turned to face me.
"It's just a body, Jeremiah. Everyone alive has one just like it," she replied.
I chuckled and shook my head.
"I doubt if five percent of the women in the world are as desirable as you, Coleen," I said sincerely.
Coleen had turned around and was picking up one of the shiny long john suits when I said that. She dropped the suit and spun around to face me.
"What made you say that?" she squeaked.
I looked into her big green eyes and told her, "Because it is true, Coleen. You are smart and beautiful, with an exceptionally well formed body. That is a devastating combination that all three of you share."
Coleen looked at me wild-eyed.
"No one has ever said anything like that to me. It makes me tingle thinking about it," she said with a sigh.
I gave her a rueful grin.
"Now you know how I feel when I am around any of you. I know that I should be running for the hills because of all the strangeness about you, yet here I am, smitten to the point where it does not matter a whit to me."
Coleen smile so sweetly, it took my breath away. Then she reached up and patted my cheek.
"We definitely need to finish this conversation, Jeremiah. But it is going to have to wait until this evening."
As soon as she said that, she turned around and stepped into the legs of her shiny suit. I had to wonder about her getting dressed when the other women were headed back. When I asked her about it, she told me that she needed to be protected when she went out to meet Sonja and Helena.
"They'll be covered in radioactive dust," she explained.
Next time I was at the general store, I was going to order a California dictionary.
I stood back by my wagon when Coleen met the other two women at the trunk and bucket I had placed out in front of us. Coleen pumped the handle on the bucket a few times and then rinsed off Sonja and Helena. She also rinsed off the smaller trunk Sonja and Helena had carried with them. They placed the small trunk inside the large one, then all three women quickly shucked out of the shiny suits, threw them into the big trunk, quickly closed the trunk's lid and fastened its latches. Helena and Sonja picked up the trunk by its handles, Coleen grabbed the bucket and all three of them, wearing nothing but their skimpy undergarments, headed back to where I was standing. They had to know I was ogling them, yet they seemed unconcerned with the attention.
When they were dressed, we loaded the wagon and headed back to our camp. Sonja rode in the wagon seat with me, while Helena and Coleen sat in the back on top of one of the trunks. I asked Sonja if they had found enough of what they were seeking, or would we need to come back another day.
"We found much more Hawkingium than we thought we'd find," she said excitedly. "It was strewn across the mountainside in large fragments, instead of being buried in the ground. I guess the explosive impact of the meteor tossed it back out of the earth. We were hoping to gather a couple of pounds, but ended up with ten times that much."
It was late afternoon by the time we made it back to camp and unpacked the wagon. I tended my livestock then started a fire for the evening. The women were happy and cheerful and I could not help being caught up in their ebullient mood. We finished supper just after sunset. As soon as we cleaned up after the meal, I hustled over to my big wagon and pulled out my fiddle. While I was at it, I grabbed the bottle of tequila that I had tucked away for emergencies. I reckoned that a couple of shots of the fiery liquor would put the perfect cap on our successful day. I rejoined the women, poured us all a snort of loud mouth and proposed a toast.
"Here is to the three most beautiful ladies I've ever met," I said.
The women were all smiles until they took a taste of the tequila.
"Yuck, that stuff is horrible!" Sonja sputtered.
Coleen and Helena seconded Sonja's low opinion of my tequila, as I threw back my shot and felt it burn its way down my throat.
"Yeah, it is nasty, but after a couple of glasses of it you will feel too good to notice the taste," I said.
"Hang on a minute, I have something that will make you feel just as good, works quicker and won't burn out your esophagus," Coleen said as she jumped up and headed for their tent.
Coleen returned with a little clear pouch of greenish looking tobacco and an ornate ivory pipe with a hinged silver cover. She packed the pipe full of the tobacco and lit it with a sulfur match. Coleen passed the pipe around peace-pipe style. When it reached me, she told me to take a big puff and hold it as long as I could. I did as she asked and by the time the pipe had passed by me twice, I felt as if I'd slugged down half a bottle of tequila.
"What is this stuff?" I asked in awe.
"It's Paradise Pride, an engineered cultivar of cannabis. Our agro engineers are especially proud of this variety, as it doesn't have a harsh bite to it," Coleen explained in Californese.
I think that of all the wonderful things the women possessed, this sweet tasting tobacco was by far my favorite. When the women invited me to see the inside of their tent, I floated over to it as if I were a butterfly. Time took on this weird quality for me as it vacillated between speeding by and almost stopping. One minute we were laughing about some silly nothing, and the next we were weepy-eyed about poor Jonathan. I was wearing nothing except my long johns. The women were in their underwear as well; our outer garments were neatly folded on a camp chair outside the tent. Sonja was the one who instigated the disrobing by telling me that they would feel more comfortable in fewer clothes.
I woke up the next morning to the first light of the rising sun. The first thing I noticed was that I did not have a hangover; the second was that I was lying on my side with my arm draped across someone. Someone else was pressed tightly against my back. I smiled as I extricated myself from between Sonja and Coleen, as I recalled everything from the evening before. It was the most interesting evening of conversation and good company I can ever remember having, and that includes the marvelous times I spent at Camille's in Boulder City.
I enjoyed very much sitting in close quarters with the women as we talked. They made the evening even better for me because one or the other of them was continually touching me. As we sobered up from the strange tobacco, the conversation turned to me returning to California with them. They made a strong argument that had two branches. One was us staying together to explore the strong attraction I felt for them and they felt for me. The other was that they, most especially Sonja, thought I could be some help with a difficult situation their community faced. They would not tell me what the situation was, but promised to tell me before we departed, if I agreed. How could a man such as I refuse an offer for a new adventure with three beautiful women?
Nothing sexual had transpired between any of the women and me during the night. The reason for that was none of this muleskinner's fault; I want to make that clear. Rather, we first had to, in Sonja's words, "work out the mechanics of our relationship." They told me plural relationships of all combinations were quite common in Paradise Valley, but none of those relationships had a sexual component as vibrant as we would have. That was why we had to 'communicate and be willing to renegotiate our expectations'. "After all," Sonja said, "you will be the only fully functioning male among the twenty-five thousand residents of the valley. What if other women want us to share you?" I swear, a platoon of Philadelphia lawyers could not think up more convoluted arguments than those three women. How was I supposed to respond to a statement of which I understood not one word?
I had the fire burning nicely and my teams all hitched by the time the women dragged themselves out of the tent at seven. I teased them about sleeping their life away while they carped about my jumping out of our warm bed at such an ungodly hour. We were packed up and on the trail by eight that morning. We made excellent time traveling, and arrived back at their little cave on the third evening after departing Evil Spirit Mountain. The nights in between were spent most pleasurably as we became better acquainted with each other. To my huge disappointment, we still had not consummated our new relationship by the time we were back at there little cavern near South Pass.
We fooled around plenty, and I was able to demonstrate many of the things the other women in my life had taught me, but intercourse was a no-no.
"We can't risk becoming pregnant, at least not until you have been given a complete physical and have your genes mapped. Helena was lucky that we stopped you two when we did. You are going to have to be the strong one here, Jeremiah, because for some reason, none of us can resist you when you touch us," Coleen the doctor said.
I did not much like it that the women were putting the onus of that on me. That I could be so stoic about it was because I knew the women were as eager as I was for us to be together in that way. Coleen might have been stretching the truth somewhat about them being unable to resist me but I ended up always being the one who had to say stop. The women kept me from becoming completely frazzled. They were ever eager to put little Jeb the Reb at ease every time he sprang to attention, and they had some truly novel ways to keep me from suffering too much. They were totally uninhibited.
On the morning after we returned to the cavern near South Pass, the women helped me hitch my team into a twenty mule configuration for the trip back to Cheyenne. We all worked together with practiced ease now, so it was only a matter of twenty minutes before I was ready to roll out. Our plan was for me to take my rig and animals home and return on horseback. Even though I had asked more than once, the women had refused to accompany me home. Instead, they said they would wait for me here. When I suggested that we could find our own way from Cheyenne to California, Sonja answered firmly. "No we can't Jeremiah. We have to leave from here and it has to happen in exactly one hundred and fifty-one hours."
By then I was beyond questioning anything the women said.
"Then I will be here with bells on," I promised.
With empty wagons, good mules and much personal motivation going for me, I made it home in two days. I spent two nights and a day with my family and headed out the fourth morning. I told ma as much of the truth as I thought she would understand.
"I took a job from some folks I had met on the road, Ma, and I'll be gone a couple of weeks, maybe longer. The job doesn't involve hauling freight, but I do not believe it is anything dangerous."
She replied that she understood and sure hoped that I would outgrow the need to always want to know what was over the next hill.
I trotted out of the yard just before sunup, riding one of the horses we had captured from the Indians and leading a second one. By changing horses every couple of hours and only taking a few short breaks, I arrived at South Pass about nine that evening. I swear that no prodigal son ever received as warm a welcome as I did from those amazing women. Within ten minutes of arriving, my saddle sore butt was comfortably perched on a soft cushion and I was nursing a cup of excellent coffee. Coleen and Helena even unsaddled my mounts for me and brought in my gear. I was not taking much with me on the trip, because Sonja asked me to travel light. All I had with me was what I was wearing, plus one clean suit, my pistol, gun belt, shotgun and my fiddle.
I was expecting that we would all climb in our bedrolls so we would be fresh to start our trip the next day, but the women had other ideas. As we sat companionably by the fire, Coleen pulled out her little pipe, packed it with that amazing tobacco and handed it to Sonja. Sonja lit the pipe and passed it too me.
"Take a few puffs and relax, Jeremiah. We have a story to tell you that might make you change your mind about going home with us," she said.
I nodded and absently pulled in a lungful of the sweet smoke, as Sonja squared her shoulders, took a deep breath and started talking.
This is what she said...