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HEREafter Book One: A Mild Case of Death. Volume 2
by James C. Harwood

    Long ago, an expedition to Earth fails. A violent mutiny results in a star ship falling from orbit and being destroyed. Eventually, the souls of the dead aliens are reincarnated, born into Earth human life. As they grow up on present day Earth, they begin to remember their past in dreams and nightmares. Slowly, by various methods, they become reunited and recover their ship's technology. Then, by other methods, they raise the money needed to construct a new star ship. 12,301 alien souls were on the expedition to Earth. Each of them, from different perspectives, has at least one story to tell about their home planets, the long voyage and failed expedition, their many human reincarnations, and now their present day quest to find a way back to the home and way of life they remember. These are their stories . . .

Volume 2
THE DEAD AGAIN CHRISTIAN

“All that we [science fiction authors] can imagine is
probably not half as crazy as the truth.” —Arthur C. Clarke

Part 1
THE AMBASSADOR TO EARTH

8:00AM, Saturday, 16 October 1993
Clueo Private Investigations agency, Dallas, Texas

CASE SUBJECT: HEREafter Caerulian Memories.
SOURCE NAME: Thomas Jefferson Harrow.
INVESTIGATOR: John Paul Drake.
TRANSCRIPT: 931016-0800. Voices recorded as follows…

[Transcript interview format leads into narration and dialog format.]

Drake
The recorder is now on. Thanks for coming back for another interview. Did you have a good week?

Harrow
It was OK.

Drake
You probably recall, at the conclusion of the previous interview, I said I’d like for you to cover present life events.

Harrow
Yes. And you want me to skip over the Novel expedition, and save that for a future interview.

Drake
That’s right. But if any of the events of the Novel expedition directly relate to present life events, then you may mention them. Otherwise we might cover the details of the Novel expedition if you come back for another interview next Saturday.

Harrow
OK. You recall what I told you about my first encounter with the Ambassador to Earth from the Kingdom of Heaven, which happened in 1958, when I was two years and four months old.

Drake
Yes, when he caught up with your soul after the Terrantus Station incident.

Harrow
After that, I hadn’t heard from the Ambassador in nearly five years…

Earth Year A.D. 1963, May 12, Sunday, 6:00AM
Hawthorn Hills, Harrow House

    As usual, I awakened on a Sunday without the aid of an alarm clock, before any other members of my family.
    I looked at the calendar hanging on the wall near my bed. Each month included an artist’s concept of one of the planets of Earth’s solar system… with the sun for January, the Earth’s moon for May, and a section of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter for July.
    This was the second Sunday in May of 1963, Mother’s Day.
    I realized then that I’d only have to attend the first grade of public elementary school for only about three more weeks. I had not enjoyed my first year of school at all, and so I very much looked forward to enjoying my freedom during the summer of ’63. My best friends lived in the Hawthorn Hills neighborhood, and all of them went to private schools. I had a few good friends at public school, but I was not well treated by the majority of students and teachers. Sunday school was worse. I had no friends at the church my family attended. I liked the pastor. But the Sunday school teacher, who taught the class for kids my age, was insane, in my opinion. And she was passing her insanity on to the other students. I was not as easily hoodwinked as the others were. I did not fit in there. And where I fit in was a question that had been bugging me for some time.
    That early on a Sunday, it wasn’t time yet to get dressed for Sunday school and church. I put on my robe over my pajamas, and then stepped into my house slippers. Quietly, I left my private bedroom, and then walked down the hallway toward the kitchen.
    In the kitchen, I pulled a chair over to a counter, and climbed up on the chair to reach a large box of cold cereal in a cabinet. While up there, I also reached for a plastic bowl. I obtained a spoon from a drawer on the way down. A glass jug of milk from the refrigerator was next. Then I sat on a bar stool over at the breakfast bar. There, I added just a few large spoonfuls of real sugar to the milk and cereal in the bowl. My sister would sometimes ask me about how many truckloads of sugar I put on my cereal. It would be two more years before I’d be diagnosed with fluctuating blood glucose balance disorder, hypoglycemia, opposite of diabetics. A genetic disorder. It tied in with my already diagnosed bronchial asthma.
    That was my regular routine for Sunday mornings. I had the usual cold breakfast before the usual hot breakfast. My father always fixed the hot breakfast on Sundays, so that my mother could have extra time to sleep. By 7:30AM, dad would start fixing the scrambled eggs, bacon, pancakes, and orange juice squeezed from fresh oranges. Before having any of those items, my father and sister would split a grapefruit. That was their usual routine. I’d try, without much success, to avoid being squirted in my eyes, each time they would stab their spoons into a section of the grapefruit. My sister was getting much better with improving her aim, I discovered. Lucy, my sister, was born four years before I was. I had no other sisters, and I had no brothers.

    Getting dressed on Sundays was a bit more complicated than other days of the week. School days were not really too difficult. I was free on Saturdays to dress for my own interests. But on Sunday, I was required to wear a three-piece suit, a tie, and polished shoes.
    My brown hair was real short at that time, so it was not necessary for me to spend much time getting it to look just right, unlike my mother and sister. My father didn’t have to spend much time fixing his hair.
    There was no need for us to hurry to get ready. We would not need to be at the church until a few minutes before 10:00AM. My father was the church treasurer that year, and he would work on the financial books and relating paperwork while most of the adult members would attend their own bible study classes. And that is when the children would attend Sunday school classes, a different room for each different age group. Then, at exactly 11:00AM, the main church service would begin in the main building for all of the adults. It would start for all of the children, up to and including age seventeen, in a separate building. I guess, that year, our church had about three hundred adult members.
    Until it was time to leave for church, my father usually read the newspaper. After getting ready, my sister would read the comics section, and my mother would search for any useful coupons. I would spend that part of the morning pursuing a variety of interests, and thinking about how I’d spend the rest of the day after attending church. We would usually stop and get hamburgers, fries, and malts, on the way home. Then I’d have the afternoon free to play outside, or play in my room, or watch sports on TV with my father. Then we usually went out for a fried chicken dinner. After that, there would be a couple of good shows on TV. For a long time, nearly every Sunday was like that.
    My father had some drafting tools, and would let me use them to do a lot of drawing in my free time. I liked to draw landscapes and maps, but the end results did not look like anything of this world. And that Sunday morning, while dad, mother, and Lucy were dividing up the newspaper, I made a drawing of a small city surrounded by farmlands. While I worked on the map, I thought about the events of the past week at public school, and how it related to attending Sunday school.
    Monday through Friday, I attended the O’Hara Elementary School at the Great Plains Education Center for students who lived in our area. Michael Harrow, my father, was the president of the Harrow-Wells Oil Company. My grandfather, John Harrow, started the business in 1935 with Bob Wells, and both of them died in a plane crash in 1949. My father would leave the house every work day with his briefcase full of papers, and make the long drive into Kansas City, Kansas . . . the office being only about four blocks west of his boyhood home in Kansas City on the Missouri side. I would leave the house at about the same time as my father, carrying my miniature version of his briefcase, full of homework and schoolbooks. I had to ride a school bus with children who were enthusiastically interested in the destruction of my homework papers and drawings. At that time in my life, going to school, I believed, was just like going to work. And it was OK to work Monday through Friday. But not on Saturdays. And certainly not on Sundays!
However, Saturday mornings, my father would sometimes go to his office for a couple of hours, or go tour some of the nearby well locations of his company. He would often take me with him. I was free to do most anything I wanted to do during Saturday afternoons, and evenings. Also, I was free to stay up as late as I wanted to on Saturday nights. I believe it was a Saturday night, when my sister introduced me to science fiction, and talked me into watching with her the movie titled The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Sunday school was becoming complicated, and more like elementary school work. From my viewpoint, I believed it was becoming a significant contradiction. It was my understanding that we were not to work on Sundays, reserving that day for praying and worshiping, and resting and relaxing. I’d often hear it described as “a day of rest” –but there was nothing restful about it. And I wondered, what about athletes in sports? –they certainly don’t get to rest. More and more, I was enjoying Sunday school less and less. I discovered it to be full of contradictions in logic. However, I still liked the sermons at the 11:00AM main service. Rarely, children were allowed to attend the adult service with their parents. Because my father was church treasurer that year, I got to attend the adult service with him more than usual. But I still had to go to the Sunday school class before that. I liked what the pastor was teaching the adults, because it usually made good sense. I did not like what the Sunday school teacher was teaching the students my age, because it usually made no sense at all.
    I think perhaps the most outrageous claim ever made by that Sunday school teacher was that all of my friends, who did not attend that same church, even if they attended any other kinds of churches, were all going to fry in Hell.

    When she made that claim, she clearly crossed a certain line. Her arrogance angered me.
    There was also the teaching about all men being created equal. Some years later, it would be changed to all people being created equal. Even so, the focus was still on material and physical values, rather than the spiritual. Still, the people remained unequal in material and physical matters. The equality subject was and still is one of the greatest contradictions. No one is equal, unless we are all equally different. I could accept that. I recalled an incident at the public elementary school . . . a couple of them actually, the week before that Sunday. At lunch, the cafeteria workers, who were adults –some of them being parents of students there, served a smaller portion of food to me. I was told that big boys need bigger portions, because they are bigger. It never occurred to them that the smaller students needed more food so that they could become bigger. Discrimination against size, being one of the oldest forms of discrimination. Likewise, flowers were being handed out to all students to take home to their mothers for Mother’s Day. The tallest, not just the oldest students, got first pick for the best flowers. What was left for me to choose from would not survive the bus trip home anyway.
    Earlier the past week, I had to go to a new doctor for my allergies, and was told to stay away from flowering plants, anyway. Testing determined me to be highly allergic to certain pollens, grasses, molds, dusts, cat hair, horsehair, hay, and a few other things. New medicine had been prescribed. I noticed that it tended to heighten my senses. I had to take some of it that Sunday morning, just before we left the house to go to church.

    We left the house about 9:30AM, and got into my father’s Morris Minor station wagon.
    It would take about fifteen minutes to get to the church from our house. The car had a full tank of gas. There would be no stops.