The Meeting

The lion-headed man looked sideways at his companion, recoiling in anticipation.

"Martin's."

"Mart-...aww, hell, naw! The man's a damned Fundamentalist! Won't let me have a drink or smoke my pipe!"

A shotgun was racked behind them.

"I wish that yella so-n-so would tell me not to smoke..."

The lion-headed man merely smiled wryly at this intrusion. "You're not late this year. One wonders why?"

"One can wonder all he wants in one hand, and he can spit in t'other one, and watch which one gets filled up first." The woman readjusted her head scarf and uncocked the shotgun, glaring at the two men balefully.

The lion-headed man's companion, a thin man of calm demeanor, took his glasses off and wiped them with a handkerchief, chuckling softly.

"She came by my place a little while ago, wanting to know why that didn't work," he said, cocking a thumb at her massive shotgun.

The lion-headed man rubbed his eyes slowly, as if reminding himself to be patient.

"Harriet," he began, only to be cut off.

"Don't you 'Harriet' me! I know what that one told me," she said, pointing with her jaw, "and I might have some problems with it! I mean, here we are, in defiance of all plain sense..."

The lion-headed man threw his hands up. "I give up. Doctor...?"

The thin man, glasses in place, began speaking as though he were in a lecture classroom. "The problem is not one of existence, per se, but of the sort of existence. We seem to exist concurrently with the material plane, yet not upon that plane..."

"Plane, schmane, I'mo get me one of 'em at the very least!" Harriet shook the shotgun meaningfully. "I took this'un right off the shelf! Right off the shelf!"

The thin man nodded. "Of course, there are some areas of extra-spatial congress which I've not worked out just yet, not the least of which is the transfer of matter..."

"I worked it out, you old fool! I reached out with this hand right here," she said, shaking a bony fist under the thin man's nose, "and I took it!"

"Of course you did. The thing is inanimate. Whereas what you are suggesting involves that which is yet animate, and which, of course, is apparently subject to different rules than your widow-maker there."

The lion-headed man walked along behind them, listening to an argument that had been going on for the better part of 40 years. The way they'd argued this particular point, one might think that they were intimate, the very idea of which elicited an inappropriate and loud chuckle during that particular silence in a heated argument when both sides are reloading for Armaggedon.

When both whirled upon him, eyes blazing, he coughed suddenly to cover the chuckle and announced that they'd arrived.

_____

Martin's place was a neat, two-story house in what used to be a nice neighborhood in Atlanta. Many of the houses on his street were similarly built, with broad porches and lawns, except that most were falling into disrepair and decay. Yards were overgrown or patchy with debris, and houses went without paint or even roof shingles. Occupancy of a particular domicile was indicated by the decorative yet firm iron bars over the windows and doors; this is not to say that homes with no bars were necessarily unoccupied, but the occupants weren't terribly worried about anyone stealing from them.

By the time the three of them had arrived, everyone else was there. Martin, of course, greeted them warmly at the door, and there were handshakes and hugs all around. After the initial greetings had been made, Martin stood up among them and welcomed them.

"You all know me to be a man of many words," this to general laughter, "but, given the severity of the moment before us, I shall be brief. What progress have we made toward our common goal?"

There was a moment of silence, then a hand went up.

"I believe that I have solved our problem, suh."

"Please, sir, continue." Martin sat while the other stood.

"As has been noted befoah by my colleague and friend, the problem is that we can only make non-living things come ovuh to ouah side. Thus, I began to re-examine the problem from the other angle, to see whethuh o' not we could go ovuh to theyah side."

He paused for effect.

"We can...if we ride one of them like a horse." He nodded gratefully to the finely dressed woman who was taking notes. She smiled and nodded back. "A friend gave me the idea after watching some voodoo rituals."

There was a general clamor in the room, which quieted when the man raised his hands again.

"Temporarily."

The red-headed man leaned forward. "How temporarily?"

The engineer shrugged. "I don't believe it would be wise to cross ovah for longah than a day, for feah of madness. And..." this he added with a significant look at Harriet "we should only ride one of ouah own gendah...thangs will be confused enough as it is, without addin' hormone soup to the mix."

The poet smiled wistfully. "It would be nice to inspire one of them to something artistic," she said.

The red-haired one spoke again. "There is a problem. The others."

The judge nodded. "And their numbers are growing. A couple of them are almost as strong as we are, because they are remembered with more vitality and kept alive by that damned music. Soon, they'll make the connection too. We must move quickly before all of our work is undone."

Martin shook his head. "This isn't general surgery, friends. This is triage. We will only save the ones that we can. That's where we should concentrate our efforts. Find men and women of like mind and influence them as strongly as you might."

The well-dressed woman sighed. "But there are so few..."

The lion-headed man stood. "Thus shall we strive the harder! Did any of us back down when the fight was upon us? No sir! Here we sit, monuments to that struggle, still struggling! Still fighting! I don't care if there aren't but three, they will remember."

The doctor looked at Harriet. "Promise you won't shoot anyone?"

Harriet glared at him. "I promise that I won't shoot anyone that don't deserve it!" She spat, ignoring Martin's wince. "One of them tried to sell that p'ison to one of my gran'chirruns! Coulda been his brother, sellin' that damned p'ison!" She spat again.

The judge looked kindly at her. "In one sense, you are correct in your spirit, that such who do that deserve death and worse, but would you condemn the one you rode to satisfy your sense of justice? Remember, it might be you that pulls the trigger, but the law will only see a confused woman telling them she thought she was Harriet Tubman. At best, it will be a lifetime of narcotics in a mental institution. The other alternatives don't bear contemplating."

Harriet nodded with ill grace. "You always did have a way with words, Thurgood. A'ight then, I do it your way."

____

That evening, the seeds of a renaissance were planted in Atlanta's fertile soil. An angry young man discovered a burning hunger for words and began to hack his way up the mountain of literacy with his bare hands. A young woman found that she liked to observe people and write about their actions, that people being people supply all the comedy and drama and tragedy that any good book needs. A young man who used to fix stuff for his friends became curious about how those things worked and saw a future for himself in a laboratory, a future at odds with his present occupation, and he made a choice that night that saved his life. Another young man, sick of the inequities of the law in his own life, put his beer bottle down and began searching the internet for community colleges; he'd reasoned that if he got his G.E.D., he could attend university, and, from there, law school. An angry woman went to her sister's house, burned her drug supply in front of her and dared her to say anything other than "I'm going to rehab."

It was a start.