"Nowadays," Penny said, "they'll fly wherever they're needed, far above fortress walls and national boundaries, running blockades, feeding the hungry, sheltering the sick and persecuted . . . so of course they make enemies everyplace they go, they get fired at from the ground, all the time. But this was different. We happened to be up with them that one day, and it was just the queerest thing. Nobody saw any projectiles, but there was . . . a kind of force . . . energy we could feel, directed personally at us. . . ."
* * * * * * * * * *
"they'll fly wherever they're needed"
The "they" here are the Garçons de '71. Remember them?! Penny mentioned them earlier when she began this story of the Bindlestiffs over Mount Etna last spring. Apparently the Aeronautic Clubs aren't direct descendants of the Garçons de '71 like I thought. The Garçons de '71 are still out there floating their balloons twenty years after the Siege of Paris, going where they need to go to help out all the besieged people of Earth.
"they make enemies everyplace they go"
Of course they do! Nothing like helping out the oppressed by interfering with a nation's subjugation of people they've "othered" through national campaigns of propaganda to invoke that nation's wrath!
"Nobody saw any projectiles, but there was . . . a kind of force . . .energy we could feel, directed personally at us. . . ."
Whoa! This is the kind of thing Leonard Nimoy's "Mr. Spock" would have stood at attention for! On tonight's episode of In Search Of . . . "Invisible Forces." This is the kind of stuff that would have gotten its own edition in the Time/Life series Mysteries of the Unknown. This is the stuff I would have read about and believed in like a good little Fox Mulder wannabe in elementary school (before Fox Mulder existed so, really, he's just a pale imitation of me).
This invisible force didn't harm anybody though so why might it have been directed at them? Penny sets it up as if it were an attack, seeing as how the Garçons de '71 have made so many enemies. But nobody gets hurt so it must have been a . . . probe! The aliens were out there probing these kids!
Well, Penny, that's one hell of a sky-story! I think you win this round of frightening tales around the campfire!
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