Outer Space Sweatshops:

     Is The Government Responsible?

Palo Alto: Here's one racket Kathy Lee Gifford can be thankful she doesn't have her name stitched to.

     "Aliens are not responsible for disappearances!" claims one Tom Dunson, an Emmetsburg native who greeted this reporter at the door to his lavish ranch house wearing a red dressing robe with a bright yellow paisley patterned scarf draped around his throat. He had been practicing for his upcoming lead in the Palo Alto Operetta Workshop's production of H.M.S. Pinafore when my arrival interrupted his singing. He is a heavy-set, effeminate man who beguiles others with an artificial air of confidentiality. An all too well studied act, I noted, deciding the actors' petty machinations at the Operetta Workshop rivaled the intrigues of Italian Renaissance courts.

     "They're not at all. I know," he says, sotto voce, guiding me to his white leather sofa. "I've seen the truth. I've been there. You look like you don't believe me. Frankly at times, I don't believe me, either."

     He clapped his hand firmly upon my knee and looked at me steadily. "Mr. Charnel, would you believe me if I told I have been to outer space? Would you believe me if I told you I was forced against my will to live there for two months?" He laughed a little light hearted laugh for a studied effect. "Incredible, isn't it?"

     I assured him I had seen and heard many incredible things in my line of work and he could tell me his story.

     "Two years ago, just a day or two before Christmas, we wrapped up the holiday production of Madam Butterfly---I should have played the male lead but I was relegated to the chorus---but that is neither here nor there. The ensemble headed off to McNamara's Band. I'm sure you're been there: billowing smoke, invisible ceiling, constant thrum of voices, obnoxious old german bartender. I detest it. I had no intention of going as well, but one must endure slings and arrows if one is to endure the theatre. I was there for an hour or so and about 1:30 I noticed these two very unusual coves come in and sit down at the far end of the bar. I couldn't see their faces, but they sported the most peculiar trench coats---had the most preposterous looking high collar on the back that went right up over the back of their heads. They resembled something from bad science fiction. Now, I wasn't drunk, I had been sipping at a cognac in a secluded corner of the bar, but their peculiar oddness attracted me while the regular louts about the place gave them a wide berth. This intrigued me all the more, so I went over and introduced myself.

     These two said nothing. They just tugged their hat brims lower and huddled closer. So I offered to buy them each a beer.

     "Bud! Bud!" they cawed and pounded their glasses on the bar. I mean they cawed like great big crows! All of sudden the two giant blonde Sons of Thor showed up on either side of me as if they materialized right out the cigarette haze. I thought, oh God, here it comes.

     Now these two rather fetching fellows smiled at me and one says, "Excuse our friends. They have just returned from---"

     "Zee dentist," the other added. "They have had very painful examinations."

     "Ja. You would care for another cognac?" the first one said and ordered me another drink without waiting for my answer.

     "Rather late for a dentist," I observed.

     "They were in great pain." His crystalline blue stare penetrated deeply into my own and his voice lapsed into a soothing drone. "I can see that you understand great pain. The way it invades your every fiber, how it seizes all of your attention and energy as it swells, becoming an obsession as it grows stronger and stronger..."

     I was just about to point out that he was standing on my foot when I suddenly felt sharp needle-like stab in my side. I whirled about in time to see the other guy smiling at me broadly as he tucked a syringe back inside his jacket. I would have punched him, but all of a sudden I felt my entire body turn into cold oatmeal and the sound of the ocean filled my ears. I know I heard a faint crash next me and saw some red sticky stuff in my hand then all evaporated into oblivion.

     I awoke in complete blackness with the sensation that someone had filled my mouth with kitty litter and that several cats had already visited. One of them had possibly been a lion or a tiger because my chest hurt as if a huge beast had been sitting on me. Apart from that, I felt nothing---not even the floor walls or anything beneath me. I was floating! Suddenly, part of the wall slid away and a bright white light shone in at me. I closed my eyes. Something grabbed my ankle and with no effort at all pulled me from my prison into which I had been so trepanned.

     I found myself in a brightly lit, trés ultra modern designed corridor---all polished white halls with bright bands of lights every four or five feet. Who ever it was that pulled me out looked like a refugee from a detergent commercial; entirely encased in a whiter than white clean room suit---the kind you see worn by people who build rockets and satellites and that sort of high tech thing. He had no face, just this reflective face shield thing. So there I am floating along as he steers me down the corridor. Somehow his feet stuck to the floor but he never made a sound or uttered a word. After a little bit, I tried to grab onto a part of the wall, but the guy pushing me just spun me around by my feet so that I got stuck in this violent pirouette unable to stop. I tried yelling, but all I could do was cough. He did nothing, just steered me down the corridor as I spun and twirled about two feet off the floor! Finally I smacked into a bulkhead or what ever it was and stopped. But oh, the vertigo! I just about puked!

     Well, he grabbed me by the neck and sort of threw me through the bulkhead or hatchway into a large room filled with people sitting at tables and peering hard through great big magnifying glasses attached to swing arms. The guy pushed me past all this and up to a long bench or table where there 20 other people seated. He shoved me into a stiff chair, buckled a seat belt onto me and locked it! I looked around but none of the other people even looked at me. They looked to be suffering some excruciating anguish but were too proud to breathe their pain to another soul---as if they were again enduring last year's highschool production of Once Upon A Mattress. At least here, there weren't as many injuries.

     I wasn't allowed to sit about idly for long because another one of those clean-room suited coves hove around and set a box of green wire with sockets and a foam tray holding these vials floating in front of me. So I looked up at him and shouted "What d'ya want me to do with this, then?"

     Rattlesnakes with asthma fits make better intelligible human speech than I could. I knew what I wanted to say, I just couldn't figure out how to make the correct sounds!

     In response to my sputtering and gasping, the guy in the suit brusquely pointed his gloved hand at the tray of stuff and walked away. There was little else for it but to do the work. I carefully plucked out one of the vials from the tray hovering before me, snatched a segment of green wire with a socket and plugged the vial into the socket. Then I did another and another, all the while trying desperately to say one simple word: pedicure. I don't know, I suppose at the time I thought one would be nice. But then I looked at one of the vials and suddenly I knew what I was making. It was a crazy idea but as I looked around me over the next couple of weeks, it was the only logical conclusion. But my biggest problem was getting out of there.

     As time went by, the clean-room suit guys replaced some of the others around the workbench with new people. They all had the same reaction I did when I arrived, they tried to speak but only hissed and sputtered. I tried to do my best to nod or wink encouragement or raise my eyebrows; one woman must have thought I was trying to come on to her. She ignored everyone and kept her nose stuffed into her work. After hours of work, I was taken back to my rooms. I was fed some awful stuff in plastic pouch once a day. Then they let me sleep. I never knew what time it was. I had no paper, no way of sending messages to another worker . Then I hit on an idea.

     As we were all hard at work, I took all the tiny vials out of the foam container and used them to form letters in the air in front of me. I spelled out: "Where?"

     But since I'd only written it forwards to my point of view, only the two people next me could read it. The one on my right looked at me and shrugged but the one on my left held up his a fist and drew a ring around with the index finger of his other hand, meaning we were in orbit. Since I already divined this from being weightless, I slapped myself in the head and mimed "Duh!" at him. He flipped his middle finger back at me.

     Something in me snapped then. I wanted so desperately to strangle him, but being belted into place, he was out of my reach. Seizing the end of the segment of wire I had in front of me, I whipped it sharply across the face with several of the sockets. He rasped out angrily. An instant later the clean suit guys grabbed us. Then one came up with a syringe and stuck me in the shoulder.

     I woke up in the Sioux City Bus Depot, stinking of cheap wine. The calender over the ticket window said January 10. I panhandled enough change by singing I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major-General to call a friend to come pick me up. There you have it, Mr. Charnel. What do you think? Am I crazy?"

     "No," I answered, taking him by the wrist and removing his hand from my knee. He smiled with pretended embarrassment. "But," I continued, "you didn't say what you were making with the tiny vials and the green wire."

     He crossed his arms and looked down at the white carpeted floor. For the first time, he looked genuinely worried. "Mr. Charnel, everything I've told you up to this point has been the truth---fantastic as it sounded---and you might believe some of it. But this one fact is pointedly too incredible. You could rightfully become infuriated with me at having dragged you so far out of your way for the ramblings of another kook."

     I gave him my most determined frown, "I came out here to get a story, Mr. Dunson. The whole story. If you leave something out, it's as bad as being a rambling kook."

     He fidgeted with his scarf and the collar of his robe, then looked at me straight in the eye. "We were assembling strings of Christmas twinkle lights. The kind everyone all over the country puts on their houses or Christmas trees. The little vials were bulbs."

     "Oh?"

     "Twinkle lights," he insisted, then added nervously, "the bulbs were very unusual, though. They didn't have the little filament wire in them; more like a silver rod."

     I laughed, turned off the tape recorder, and got to my feet.

     At this he furiously dug under his robe into his trouser pocket. Suddenly he held a tiny glass bulb out in front of me. Inside was a single silver pole.

     After promising to return it, Dunson let me take the bulb to an electronics wizard friend of mine at the University of Emmetsburg to study. I told my wiz friend that it might be much more than just a light bulb.

     His encrypted email came the next day: The bulb is actually a very sophisticated bug. It's little more than an LED piggy-backed on germanium/copper chip. The glass cover works as a transducer microphone and transmits its signal through the neutral line of the house hold wall socket. By itself, it has limited capabilities, it only uses little more than half a volt. But if strung with others, as you say it is, it becomes a very powerful listening device. Possibly millions of households decorated for the holidays through out the country are being monitored by whoever is making these lights. You may only guess why. Merry Christmas.