The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

        Something strange had happened.
        It had happened as we had said our farewells at the Wildside Roadhouse on that fateful night. As we were wading through the maddening crowd, up to our ears and elbows in fellow hicks, kissing babies and shaking heads, something strange had happened far above us, high in the still, silent reaches of the dark Florida sky. As the acrid cloud of burnt gunpowder from the business end of Franz Kafka's Colt drifted over the throng, it had happened, and we hadn't even noticed.
        Blame it on the bat.
        Old Franz had fired his final shot through the leaky tin roof, had leapt up onto the bar, and was now clogging to the rythmic handclaps of the roadhouse's appreciative patrons. His bullet, however, was not yet spent. It had soared upward until it approached the apex of its flight path, where it was preparing to turn, to begin its reentry into the lower atmosphere. That was when it happened.
        The bullet, after a rapid climb to the zenith of its trajectory, was now at a point of realtive stability, to wit: for an ever-so-brief period of time the bullet was, relatively speaking, neither rising, nor falling. However, as Egghead might have noted, the bullet was actually a tiny world in continual motion. The amorphic solar systems of its complex atomic structures were humming and contorting in quarkish convolutions, and we could have glimpsed such activity even during this period of relative stability. At the precise moment of equal balance between the propulsive force of the explosive discharge of the gun and the opposing force of gravity, however, we could see nothing at all.
        That is to say, the slug was buzzing and humming with atomic activity across time, but at the exact moment of balance between the upward and downward forces, at the precise moment of relative stasis, we could detect no motion; it is impossible to measure motion in an instant. A moment (if time can be sliced as thin as a moment or an instant, ie: sliced into nothing) cannot be measured, for it has no beginning or end, being, as it is, merely an instant, and therefore possessing no time frame in which we might undertake a measurement (how many instants are there in a second? or "excuse me, buddy, but could you hold that instant for moment while I measure it?") Because we cannot stop an instant to record it, "an instant" cannot be measured, and therefore its existance cannot be proven, although none of us has any trouble understanding the concept.
        But even though the existence of a moment is unprovable, two instants still come in mighty handy when we're measuring things to see what has gone where, and how fast it went when it was going there. To make a short story long, then, during that brief window of opportunity when the bullet seemed to pause before beginning its return to earth, the bat grabbed it.
        The little bat was sorry that he had grabbed the slug as soon as he had snatched it, but he didn't want to admit the fact. You see, this bat was a lean and hungry dreamer, a visionary with a slightly skewed take on the mission of bats on earth. His name was Cuddles.
        Cuddles had always loved to fly: to soar higher than any bat had ever flown. His yearning had turned into an obsession that had left him lonely, disheartened, and afraid of what he had become. But always for Cuddles there was the sky: the pristine primal canopy that welcomed him upward into the deleriously entrancing heart of the quiet Florida night. There, high above the wheezing slugs and unenlightened fellow bats that whined and puffed away their time of toil in the damp air of the lower atmospere, the bat would spin and dive and whirl and pirhouette as if he lived to fly, as if he feasted upon it, as if the food of his aerial ectasies could furnish the fuel to drive his endeavor. This was not the case, however, and eventually Cuddles would have to dip down low over the top of the live oak canopy to catch a meal. He would eat it in sullen silence, balefully rueing his fate, yearning once again to climb the aspiring coil up, up, and away, higher and higher again, up into the realm of eagles, into the highest heights: to walk among the stars, scouring the stellar pathways of the night.
        Now all of this background information is essential if we are to understand why Cuddles chose to fly south with Franz Kafka's bullet. You see, Cuddles had been insisting for quite some time to his fellow bats that there was a vertitable smorgasbord of huge, succulent insects flying high above the low altitudes that the bats always hunted in, above the damp tree-top air where they swooped and spun and deftly snapped up their nightly snacks. The other bats were skeptical of his theory, and also wondered just how they should deal with Cuddles. The little bat had become the laughing-stock of the cave, as a matter of fact.
        "Succulent bugs, eh?" asked Gash, the leader of the younger generation of bats, "I suppose that this is what has fattened you up, eh, Cuddles?" Cuddles emaciated form contrasted sharply with Gash's sleek physique. The other bats had laughed shrilly, their laser-thin squeaks filling the heavy air of the dank, mouldering cave.
        "You'll see!" Cuddles had shrieked, "You'll see!" He had moped around the cave for days afterward, leaving only to skim the treetops for his meals. He had actually put on a couple of ounces by the time he gave up on his new lifestyle. "They can't fence me in," Cuddles had reasoned, "a bat can dream, can't he? I want to be free!" Once again the tiny bat took to the sky in search of the legendary stratopheric insects of the night.
        It was at this point in Cuddles's young life that fate, in the form of the fickle trigger-finger of Franz "Tex" Kafka, intervened dramatically, changing the course of his existence forever. He found the slug at the apex of its flight path and siezed the future firmly in his tiny, hairy paws. The .45 caliber slug snared by this curious bat was the first catch that he'd ever made at over 1,000 feet, and it seemed at once to validate his theory.
        "This bug is heavy," thought Cuddles, "and its shell is very hard." He could not even feel it yield when he squeezed it, and its weight made it nearly impossible to fly.
        "I can't give up," squeaked the little bat into the unanswering sky, which refused to comment on the matter, as was its habit. "I won't give up," he chirped, and he began to fly south. "Maybe I can drop it on a rock," he thought. "I've heard that dropping bugs on a rock can break them open."
        Soon the frail wings of the little bat trembled and fluttered uncontrollably as his strength began to ebb. His shoulders ached miserably, and he began to get delirious. "The rocks," he whispered in his piping, dog-whistle voice, "it will break on the rocks." As he continued to fly toward the south he began to lose his sense of time and place. It seemed now as if he had always been flying toward the rock formations that were rumored to exist in the mysterious depths of the greatest of the great Southern lowlands, The Grizzly Dismal Rotting Swamp.
        Cuddles had covered almost twenty-nine miles before the second hour was up. He flew at a low altitude now, barely clearing the tops of the barren cypress trees that were scattered here and there in the putrescent mire below him. Fetid clouds of powerful swamp gas barred his way, increasing the challenge as he struggled to remain airborne.
        The delerium took over just after midnight. The tiny black form of the exhausted bat veered crazily to the right and to the left, softly scudding over the tops of the beckoning trees, the swaying trees that seemed to sweetly whisper the name of the delerious creature. They called out to him, or so it seemed to little Cuddles as he limped by overhead.
        "Cuddles," they seemed to whisper, "come join us here in the dismal swamp. Come make your bed in the clean, springy moss that covers our feet. Make your cave in the depths of our cool, dark roots, where the water softly flows through the hidden caverns of the everlasting night." It was a wierd jazz chant, and it gave Cuddles the willies.
        Then, he saw it.
        He saw the big black rock.
        It rose from the middle of a foul swampen pond, glistening dully in the bleak, feeble starlight.
        "Climb!" he squeaked to himself, "Climb!" With one last push the tiny batling spiralled upward into the sky, climbing, climbing, fighting, and climbing yet higher until the rock was only a speck below him. He had done it; he was now high enough to shatter this rock-hard insect to smithereens. He lined the glistening boulder up in his sights and prepared to drop his load upon the unsuspecting target.
        Cuddles dropped Franz Kafka's bullet and promptly fainted dead away. But as he began to plummet back toward the earth, his head whirling as he suffered the throes of a near-total swoon, the blast of some horrifically potent force seemed to rip past him, sucking his frail body into its wake and snatching him with a sudden power that blew away the last shreds of his awareness and knocked him into the Land of Knod.
        Cuddles had been indelicately snatched by an extremely flexible nylon kite string that, for some illogical but very convenient reason, just happened to be trailing from the right wing of an F15 Tomcat. The Tomcat's pilot, Major Ephron Jameson, had been shaking down the newly refitted bird at an altitude of about 200 feet, skimming along above the tops of the trees at somewhere around 400 miles per hour: "losing lunch" as the fighter jocks call it.
        His little shakedown had gone well, and now he decided to make like a rocket; to discover the outer limits of the plane's capabilities. This type of maneuver had been polished to perfection by otherwise sane men long before the astronauts had followed them into the stratospere dressed in their expensive suits. The so-called "Verticle Stress Test" consisted of a brain-draining rush towards outer space: a stone-crazy-all-out-blood-rushing-rocket-shot straight up into the stratospere at full throttle until the air was too thin to burn fuel or the plane too wild to handle in the rudderless void. The stunt, called "mainlining in the carotid artery", was strictly forbidden (wink! wink!) by the brass in all of the branches of the service.
        So here went Major Jameson, chasing the stars, going straight up into the night, his big jet engines throttled to the max, moaning and shivering and howling like a banshee. The jet and its engines were also making a lot of noise. Straight up he shot, I say, like a pea from a nuclear-powered shooter: like a laser-guided smart pea, slicing straight up into the pristine Jello of the night.
        Cuddles came to at about ten thousand feet, flying along at mach 1.6 with a notable tingling down deep in his tiny bat ears. It must have been the silence out there in the sound-free zone that allowed his ears to actually feel their own clanging; the little tripwires that fed from his cochlea into his brain must have been going haywire; I guess the roar ot the afterburner must have just been too much for all of those sensitive little nerves. They vibrated and hummed like powerlines in a wind storm, mercilously lashing his badly-blown brain like whips on a horse that just can't get to its feet.
        Cuddles was securely snared in a rats-nest tangle of soft nylon twine that had jerked him abruptly away from the safety of the swamp and had simultaenously saved his life with its springy, lumpy bulk. It had snagged him snugly, evenly snaring his entire body and thereby avoiding rather nasty accident. Cuddles was rigid and taut, drowning under a mighty Niagra of wind, making an incredible journey that defied both logic and good sense. His eyes were peeled open: he hurtled headfirst: his lips were being stretched thinner moment by moment until the wind almost ripped them from his head. It was fiercer and fiercer and fiercer and then..........ahhhhhhhhh...........sweet relief!
        He was falling. He was drifting, lazily rolling over again and again, high above the distant, massive earth. The nylon string was left behind and the little bat revelled in the quiet beauty of the crystal-clear sky, in the spell-binding celerity of this bright, splendid stroll among the stars.
        "I'm falling," he thought, but he didn't feel like he was. He felt marvelous. "I'm falling," he remembered sleepily, but the beauty of the celestial heights belied the verity of his observation. Cuddles had popped loose from the string at up around 17,000 feet. He tumbled toward the earth slowly, majestically, dreamily, turning around and around as the wind tickled his ears and the ground below him began to draw nearer.
        Now this was flying!
        Suddenly the cobwebs in his head were whisked away by the stunning realization of what had just happened. He had done it! He had proven that life really existed in the darkened reaches of the nighttime sky! The fact that he had almost been squished like a bug in the talons of some amazingly huge monster of the upper atmospere merely confirmed his hypothesis beyond the shadow of a doubt. The life forms of the upper atmospere were obviously inedible, but who could have guessed that this was the case? Cuddles had been vindicated. He was a pioneer, a Galileo of the bat world. Now, plunging toward earth at better that a mile a minute, he savored the sweet taste of sublime success, revelling in this dramatic confirmation of his ground-breaking paradigm.
        "This will change the way that bats think about the universe," he mused, spiralling swiftly downward, closer and closer to the good earth.
        When he got down to about 1,000 feet, still plummeting headfirst toward the darkened earth, the little bat began to slowly stretch out his wings until he went into a tightly controlled power glide. Like an experienced veteran he slowly came out of his wild free-fall, lowering his flaps and angling gradually into a horizontal flight path. He finally levelled out just above the tops of the trees.
        Now this was living!
        Suddenly he was swarmed by a dull black cloud of amazed compatriots. with a shock he realized that he had come down right into the midst of the hunting grounds of his own cave-family. He was even more surprised to discover that they had somehow already learned about his Great Breakthrough. The soon-to-be-famous "Midnight Ride of Cuddles" had caused quite a stir in the old bat cave. Happy little baby bats now swarmed him; the children of his former detractors were proceeding to make him a star.
        "Welcome back," their tiny signs and placords read; "We missed you, Cuddles!" and "Attabat!" their banners proclaimed. He was swept up in a wave of popular adulation. Deleriously happy, chirping and squeaking for joy, young Cuddles was enthralled with rapturous bliss at the sheer ectasy of his moment of glory. He had finally made it. He had been vindicated.
        Cuddles was now a hero for the ages.