Free The Unwelcome Guest Plus Nin and Nan by Eckhard Gerdes Page A

removing the road.
    Nan jumped out in front the Range Rover, which turned sharply to avoid Nan and rolled onto its side. A furious bear of a man with a cut on his nose that was bleeding a river clambered out. He was wearing a ranger uniform.
    Nan yelled at him, "You idiot! You're going through my vegetable garden! What are you doing?"
The ranger didn't seem to understand. He held up a finger as if to make a point and fell over dead. His brain had hemorrhaged.
Nin and Nan righted the Range Rover, pulled the ranger in, and then drove over the horizon. They jumped out just as the Range Rover and its occupant drove off a promontory point into the lake below.
They hurried back and wiped away the Range Rover's tracks. Nan spent the next two days re-seeding the dirt and swearing. Nin left Nan alone when Nan was like that. Nothing could have consoled Nan just then. The working of the dirt with fingers and replanting of seeds was therapy enough. And, for good measure, Nan also planted mustard seeds.
What worried Nin was that when one lone-wolf revenuer appeared, others were sure to follow close behind. They always worked in packs. The lone wolf was sent like the right eye, and having offended, it was plucked out. But now the rest of the corpus lupi had to be dealt with.
Nin and Nan dug pits in which they stood up logs with sharpened ends. They covered these pits with sod. The next Range Rovers would be skewered before they knew what had hit them. The fact that the dirt had turned to sod and that enormous piles of dirt stood alongside the road and wouldn't even be noticed by the revenuers, who were notoriously stupid, was fascinating.
Actually, seventeen revenuers came by to inquire, but all met mysterious disappearances, all obviously incapable of learning from the vanishings of their predecessors.
Eventually the revenuers stopped coming. Nin and Nan relaxed, confident, celebrated.
Chapter Four: A Pied Piper Arrives
     
Uncle Sam pulls them along in a sling towed by giant razortoothed clams. Or so went the song.
    Nin and Nan listened to American music. They liked America. They just couldn't suffer her misrepresentatives' intrusions.
    Musicians showed them a way to hear music as tastefully touching as they had sniffed it out to be.
Fanfare could have announced the approach of music but did not. Its arrival was sudden and surprising.
"Hullooo?" boomed a musical voice from outside of the hill one morning.
Waking up, Nin looked at Nan, and Nan looked at Nin.
"What in the realm of rowdy ratchets was that ?" asked Nan.
"A visitor?"
"Not another revenuer, I hope."
"I don't think so. We haven't seen a revenuer in nearly a year. This must be something else."
"Like a gypsy?"
"Or a salesman. Or an evangelist for a mistaken cult."
"Why mistaken?"
"No true believer would ever be so hostile as to use direct confrontation at someone's home as an evangelistic tool. True evangelism cannot occur in a hostile climate. That's the whole principle behind the Rogerian Strategy."
"The what?"
"Carl Rogers's conflict resolution model for argument and persuasion. Rogers said that to reduce the sense of threat that prohibits people from considering your ideology, you must demonstrate that you have carefully considered and respect theirs. Only then might you get someone to agree to reciprocate by listening to you. That's why confrontational proselytizing always fails. Forced conversions are false con-versions."
"Hmm..."
"I remember going to the grocery store once. I was standing in the cereal aisle, trying to find a breakfast cereal without BHA or BHT, which are carcinogens, when I felt holes being bored into the side of my face by some stranger's stare from down the aisle. I turned and looked to see a bug-eyed fellow coming toward me. I knew he was either a religious zealot or a drug addict. In either case, I did not want to talk to him. But then, sure enough, he confronted me. Without so much as a 'by your leave,' he asked me if I'd accepted the Lord Jesus