There were Only Fourteen of the Slim....

Thousand+ Words for Dec 12, 2025

There were only fourteen of the slim metal cylinders on the table when Ronald clunked through the door; he didn't bother to count them. A single glance told him that Ronald, Jr., had not had a good day down at the river. "Ronnie!" he bellowed.

A beat, and then a response from upstairs: "What?"

Ronald shrugged off his backpack and let it fall heavily on the kitchen floor. He left it where it fell, the dust produced from the slow fall wafting up to the ceiling fan and being dispersed by it to every corner of the room. His wife, Katie, heard him and came in from the adjoining room, frowning. "I asked you to leave that pack outside, Ron," she said. "Now you can wipe down every surface in here when all this settles."

"Get the boy to do it," he said. He pulled out a chair from the small table and sat down heavily. "That's all he got from the river today?"

"I guess so," she answered. He just got in ten minutes ago, and straight upstairs without a word.

"Ronnie!" the man bellowed again.

Again, a beat, and then "What?" from upstairs.

Come down here, Son," Ronald said patiently despite his rising blood pressure. "I want to talk to you."

After a period of silence during which Ronald tried to determine how much energy he had for a conflict with the boy, there was clunking upstairs, then heavy footsteps, a slammed door, and more clunking down stairs and the boy appeared. "What?" he said.

Ronald rose. "Come outside." He stepped toward the door, opened it, and held it while Ronnie stepped through onto the small porch--really more of a stoop, although the family referred to it as a porch--and down three steps to the dusty ground.

Above them, the shiny, threadlike tendrils that seemed to come from far behind, run directly overhead, behind the scatted cumulus clouds, and plunge to the horizon were the remains of the Moon, destroyed on November 21, 2080 by the first of a delegation of Kroner ships that arrived on that day.

The explanation eventually produced was that in Kroner culture, large satellites around planets were seen as esoterically objectionable; from the Kroner perspective, they were doing us a favor.

The effects included a good deal of damage as a result of a hail of rock. Most of it burned up on the way down; most of the bits that didn't burn up hit the oceans; most of the bits that hit land hit out in the middle of various nowheres, but there were some lucky--or unlucky--shots, including the fall of a 60-meter stone smack dab in the middle of the city of Rome, and another 40-meter stone on the outskirts of the city of Nairobi, Kenya.

The Kroner remained in their ships; apparently they were unwilling or perhaps unable to leave them. The ships are small, no larger than a city bus, and many even smaller, but it is said that the ships have their major spaces in a fourth and fifth spatial dimension and that the portion of the ships that is visible to three-dimensional eyes is only a tiny fraction of the size of the space which the Kroner occupy.

Ronnie stopped and looked up at the tendrils. "So all that really used to be one big rock," he said.

"Yeah." his father answered. Ronald had been five years old when the Kroner arrived; he thought he remembered seeing the actual Moon, or maybe what he was recalling was photos of the Moon after it was gone. "Why didn't you get water while you were down there?"

"I did get water. Didn't you see the cans?"

"Yeah, I saw them. I gave you thirty cans. There's only ten or twelve there."

"The net broke and so I couldn't carry all the bottles," Ronnie said.

"Mmm-hmm." There was a tense pause. "So where are the rest of the bottles?"

It was the question Ronnie had been dreading. Not having a compelling good answer, he decided to tell the truth as a sort of Hail Mary. "I left them at the river."

"Ah." Ronald said. He coughed strongly and then cleared his throat. "Tell me, do you suppose we'll ever see them again?"

"I hid them in the brush, Dad," Ronnie said. That too was true. He had burrowed into the brush, stashed the bottles, and the covered them with loose foliage. "This late in the day, nobody will be down there until tomorrow."

"You better bring those bottles--" Ronald became conscious of a noise behind him somewhere, behind the house. In the short time it took him to turn around, the noise got louder and Ronald knew what it was.

Ronnie had heard it too. "It's kind of late for them to be out, isn't it?" he posited.

"Get back inside. I'll deal with them," Ronald said. "And bring back those bottles first thing tomorrow."

Ronnie proceeded inside without a word--the roar was getting loud enough to have interfered with a response anyway. As the Kroner constable ship rose up and over the roof of the house, the constable or whomever it was that was controlling the ship turned off the engine or whatever it was that made that awful noise and the ship floated to a position just above the dirt road in front of the house.

The ship was about the size and shape of a washing machine, or at least that was its three-dimensional appearance. Ronald knew, as did everyone, that the inside of the ship was much larger than the outside, and that any amount of material could be ejected from it, far in excess of what the apparent size of the ship would suggest. Even knowing this, it was still perplexing to watch herd feed or that odd sand the Kroners liked to spread around everywhere be ejected from some small floating container in an amount far beyond what the container could possibly hold. It was presumed that if they wanted to, some massive population of Kroner could come pouring out of some little box, an entire army fully locked and loaded; this had never happened. In fact, no Kroner had ever showed so much as a whisker, if it were whiskers they had.