Prologue: April 4th, 2061 — Aboard the dirigible airship Plentywood
Marvin slept soundly, his face pressed against the cold glass of the porthole, lulled by the rhythmic woofing of the airship’s massive propellers. He would have slept all the way to LA had the pilot not broken his slumber with yet another sightseeing announcement (why did he always get placed directly beneath the loudspeaker?)
“If you look out your port-side window,” the voice crackled, sounding oddly like how Marvin imagined Mark Twain to sound, “you will see the 20 mile wide crater that used to be the city of Bozeman, Montana.
“ The large, red faced, touristy woman seated next to Marvin leaned over him to get a better look, goggle-eyed with curiosity. The better part of her upper body spilled into Marvin’s lap as she fought to take in the charred rubble and bubbling goo 300 feet below.
“Ooooooooooooooo!’ the woman yelled, directly into Marvin’s ear. Followed in quick succession by an “ahhhhhhhhhhh” and an “ohhhhhhhhhhh,” rounded off nicely, Marvin thought, with a shrill “Will ya look at that?”
And so he did.
The hole was impressive, you could not get around that. Large crags of rock jutted out from steaming pools of greenish liquid. A ghost-town of abandoned cars, faded signs, and dilapidated houses clung tenaciously to the hillside. The whole thing looked like a landscape picture hung slightly crooked. And then, of course, there were the monkeys.
You could not see them from the air, but Marvin knew they were there, infesting the houses and schools. Squatting in the hospitals and grocery stores. Doing unspeakable things to themselves in the reference section of the library. Generally acting as if they owned the place, which, he supposed, they now did.
“Do you know the story? Do you know what really happened in Bozeman?” the woman cooed conspiratorially, inching further into Marvin’s lap.
He smiled and shook his head in a non-committal manner. He’d heard it all before, the conspiracy theories, the rumors, the ghost tales. All half truths and paranoia.
It wasn’t worth arguing, he’d learned. No one believed him. No one believed that he alone in the world knew the real story of what happened to Bozeman. How the once thriving metropolis had been reduced to a sludge filled divot on the landscape. No…the truth was much more complicated than any fiction.
The red faced woman launched into the newest theory she’d read in a magazine about aliens and government cover-ups. Her eyes glazed over with excitement and she whispered the really important phrases like “Venusian landing strips” and “Aztec crystals channeling” and other nonsense that had played, at best, a marginal role in the whole thing.
Marvin “you-don’t-say’d” politely and closed his eyes. As the woman droned on, the engines hummed and the once great city slid by below him, he let his mind wander back to that day fifty-years ago when the whole thing began…
