by A. D. Winch
Agent Angel slowly bent forward, so he was face-to-face with Kurtz. He was so close she could smell the cigarette on his breath.
“I’m now going to ask you a question and I want you to cut the baloney and give me a solid, straight answer. Can you do that?”
“Yes, Sir,” replied Kurtz, a faint quiver in her voice.
Speaking very slowly, one word at a time Agent Angel asked, “Can…, you…, create…, my…, Identical…, Hybrid…, Beings?”
“Well, we’ve had some set-backs with the DNA. Plus the four discs you gave me have been helpful but not conclusive. In addition, the pods are not opening. But given one of those kids and a bit of time…”
Agent Angel raised his hand, “Cut the crap, I don’t have time for it. You will get your kid, don’t worry. I will ask again. Can you create my Identical Hybrid Beings? One word – yes or no?”
Kurtz hesitated and then quietly replied, “No.”
It was the answer Agent Angel had expected but not wanted. He promptly raised himself to his full height, clipped his heels together and strode away from the scientists.
“Schwarzkopf will be here by the morning and make sure he does not see any of those four discs,” he boomed as he left.
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Chapter 3 - Summoned
It was late morning, but Professor Schwarzkopf had changed back into his tartan pyjamas and was lying on his four-poster bed. He had needed some time alone and had given Henry and Martha two days off. They had protested, especially as they had already made plans for his birthday on the following day. However, Professor Schwarzkopf had insisted and in the end they had to abide by his wishes.
A hollow laugh escaped from his mouth that led to a coughing fit. Tears of laughter, rage and sorrow fell from his eyes. When he finally calmed down, he could hear a heavy pounding. For a moment, he was convinced it was his heart, but then he realised it was coming from the front door below.
“Henry! Martha!” he called out of habit and then remembered that he had given them time off.
Irritably he got up, placed his feet in matching tartan slippers and, like the very old man he was, slowly went downstairs. At the front door, he adjusted his glasses and put an eye to the peep hole. Two heavily-built men stood uncomfortably on his porch. They wore ‘regulation’ civilian clothing; matching black suits, white shirts and black ties. In no way did they look like civilians.
Professor Schwarzkopf bent down to the letterbox and shouted through it, “I’m not interested.”
“We would like to talk to you, Sir,” replied the slightly taller man, smiling falsely at the door.
“You can talk here,” answered Professor Schwarzkopf tetchily, looking through the peep hole.
“I’m afraid we can’t do that, Sir. Official secrets, I’m sure you’ll understand.”
“Screw official secrets! I’m not opening the door.”
The taller man spoke again. His voice had adopted a more serious and business-like tone.
“We have orders to knock down your door if necessary and then escort you to another location.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” stated Professor Schwarzkopf confidently.
There was silence for a second. Professor Schwarzkopf eyed the taller man as he shook his head.
“You’re right, Sir, we wouldn’t do that,” he paused and his partner dangled something shiny in front of the peephole. “Not now that we’ve found your spare key under the doormat.”
With the look of a beaten man, Professor Schwarzkopf turned away from the door.
“You can let yourselves in,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll get my things. Just tell me, where I am going?”
“Roswell, New Mexico,” replied one of the men as he opened the front door.
“What a surprise!” muttered Professor Schwarzkopf under his breath as he climbed the stairs.
Another coughing fit prevented Professor Schwarzkopf from falling asleep. The I.D. card and heat sensor on his chest bounced up and hit him in the nose. He ripped it from around his neck and threw it on the floor. It was the fifth time since laying down that evening that he had woken himself up. The bright lights of the alarm clock read 23:07. Professor Schwarzkopf watched as the seven turned to an eight. He knew it would be a long night.
Instead of trying to sleep, he chose to lay on his bed looking up at the bottom of the bunk above him. His quarters were not pitch black as green emergency lighting strips ran around the edge of the floor casting a dim glow into the room. Professor Schwarzkopf wondered what possible emergency could affect this base. The American government knew next to nothing about it; American allies had not been informed, and enemies would have had a hard job finding it. From the air, it looked like just another dry, barren mountain in the desert near Roswell.
This was the perfect hiding place. Even when he was stationed close-by he had known nothing about it. All eyes looked upwards for UFOs, and nobody strayed into the desert. The only possible emergency, thought Professor Schwarzkopf, would be an accident inside the giant cave that served as the base’s hangar.
For more years than he cared to think about, he had stayed in this part of New Mexico without Ingrid. Looking back now, he realised it wasn’t pleasure that kept him here. It wasn’t even the thrill of so many new discoveries. He had stayed because the work was never-ending and never gave him time to dwell on the fact that he was alone. Alone and lonely. The constant assignments he was given, or led, kept him extremely busy. He was not busy enough to forget Ingrid, but he was busy enough to keep his mind occupied. Privately, in his heart of hearts, he had also hoped Ingrid would miraculously come back to him. She never did.
You can’t bring back the dead, he thought.
Now he was in New Mexico again, Ingrid returned to his thoughts once more and with her a simmering hatred for all those years that he, or they, had missed out on. They could have been happy; they could have had children; they could have…
Laying in the bunk, he tensed as he remembered when she had started to move away from him. He remembered how, as an idyllic young scientist, he had simply ignored it and had not attempted to bring her close again.
It had all started the day they were granted ‘Access all areas’ passes and were taken to see the dead aliens. In all of the nineteen years he had known Ingrid she had always been calm, logical and rational but on this occasion she was the exact opposite. Despite his age and degenerating body, Professor Schwarzkopf knew his memory was faultless. Even now he could picture her standing by the doorway of the tiled operating room.
Ingrid stood with her arms crossed. She was dressed in a white lab coat, and she wore her blond hair in a beehive, the style of the day. Her sky blue eyes were fixed firmly on the two child-sized bodies laying under sheets on metal tables in the middle of the room. She was the only woman. Accompanying them were Major Marshall and another scientist. The three men approached the table, but Ingrid stood frozen at the door. When she spoke her voice, which was usually confident and assured, was barely a whisper.
“They’re not dead,” she announced and fled from the operating room as fast as she could.
The journey back to the surface was silent except for Ingrid tapping her shoes continuously on the floor of the lift. Only when they stepped back into the daylight did he dare to talk to her again.
“What did you mean down there?” he asked, holding her hand softly.
“Woman’s intuition,” she replied, kissed him on the lips and walked off towards Hangar 84.
Behind him, Major Marshall sniggered, “Broads, I’ll never understand them.”
Over fifty years later, Professor Schwarzkopf still did not understand why Ingrid had reacted this way. Whenever he had tried to discuss the subject, she had refused to talk about it. During the following years, he had come to the conclusion that Ingrid’s natural maternal instincts had overruled her rational and logical behaviour. Even though she was looking at sheets covering aliens, Professor Schwar
zkopf believed she had seen sheets covering children, and she just couldn’t deal with this.
From that point onwards, there was always some distance between them. Ingrid was still his wife; he knew she still loved him, but something was missing. He often wondered if that something was children and whether a child would have brought them closer again. They had tried for one but with no success.
In nineteen sixty-one, they were given separate assignments for the first time. Ingrid moved into the new fields of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics. His assignment involved working with other scientists on the alien bodies. He only ever saw one of the aliens. He was told the other had been transferred off the base to another facility.
The work was fascinating, but he never discussed it with Ingrid. The base had not given him clearance to do so, and he followed orders. From working together and seeing each other twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they fell into a more common routine of only seeing each other at home. He remembered overlooking the lost spark in their relationship and the acceptance that, like the honeymoon period, it had gone. Five years later, Ingrid was also gone but he still couldn’t accept this. The day it happened seemed like yesterday, and Professor Schwarzkopf began to recall for the hundredth time the events of that evening.
He was sat at a spotlessly clean desk writing his notes. During a routine examination of the alien, he had taken a glass of water and spilt some on the alien’s thin arm. The skin had darkened, appeared to age suddenly and released a smell that he had never experienced before. He was having trouble describing it in words. Beside him was a metal ledge containing what he thought to be the breathing organs of the alien and a liquid nitrogen canister, which he used to stop the alien from thawing out. Behind him, on a steel autopsy trolley, was the opened up body of an alien. He had made a ‘Y’ shaped incision just below each shoulder and down to where humans have a belly button. The skin had been peeled back, and he had removed all the organs. Despite conducting a thorough autopsy, there was no red blood on any of the white tiles that covered the walls, floor and ceiling.
He finished his sentence the best he could and looked at his watch. The time was eight minutes past seven and under his breath he cursed in German. He had promised Ingrid he would be back by six, in fact, she had made him promise. He was about to pack the notes into his bag when he remembered that she had also made him promise that he wouldn’t bring any work home. As quickly as he could, he shuffled up his papers into an organised pile on the desk, scribbled a note to himself entitled ‘water reaction’ and jumped up.
The autopsy trolley’s wheels were stuck and, after kicking the locks off, he pushed it towards a door in the corner of the room. It was an awkward, heavy door which never stayed open unless it was wedged. He gripped the door with two hands, pulled it open and stepped inside. The freezing temperature of the alien morgue made him shudder, and he had no desire to stay in there for longer than necessary. Crouching down he scanned the floor for the wedge, but he could not see it. Once again he looked at his watch. It read sixteen minutes past seven and once again, he cursed in German. This was going to be Ingrid’s and his last night together for three days at least. One of the very few occasions when they were going to spend time apart. In the morning, she was going to leave the base and before she went he would like to tell her that he lov…
Suddenly, without warning, he was thrown backwards by an invisible force. He smacked against the back wall so hard that all the air was knocked out of him. It felt as if he had been hit by a speeding car. He dropped heavily to the floor; the buckled door fell over him like a roof and the body of the alien landed nearby. His ears were ringing; he was seeing double and for a short while he struggled to remember where he was or what he had been doing. His white lab coat was dirty and torn; he could not feel his left arm, and he ached all over. The morgue rapidly warmed up, and he felt his skin begin to prickle. As his skin started to burn, his mind shot back to life. The room was slowly filling with smoke and, though his vision was coming back, he was struggling to see. Acrid fumes filled his lungs. He began to cough, and his whole life flashed before his eyes.
“Get up!” he willed himself.
Gradually he untwisted his legs, crawled out from under the door and away from the fire next to him. From his gaping pocket, he removed a plain handkerchief and tied it around his nose and mouth. Through gaps in the grey smoke, he could see fires burning in an environment he barely recognised. Walls had been knocked down; ceilings had caved in, wires hung from buckled pylons and the only light came from the flickering orange flames. Tentatively, and trusting his instinct, he began to walk over the piles of rubble and around the fire to where he thought the elevator was. Along the way, he stumbled over debris but every time he fell he picked himself straight back up again.
Involuntary tears streamed down his face, his lungs screamed for fresh air, and his left arm hung limply by his side. It was impossible to follow where the corridor to the elevator had once been but, through a combination of both luck and judgement, he reached his destination.
The doors had been forced open as if hit by a battering ram and behind them what remained of the elevator tilted dangerously to one side. Above him, the roof of the elevator had come away, and the bent metal had left a gap just big enough for a man. Smoke floated through the hole, rising up the elevator shaft towards ground level and the outside world.
He put his right hand up and took hold of a metal pipe. Holding tight, he pushed his feet against the wall and scrambled up through the hole. The shaft was solid concrete but on one side he could see a ladder. The bottom few rungs had come away, but the higher ones looked secure. The heat below him was increasing, and he saw flames creeping towards the shaft. With no other option, he gingerly stood on the ladder.
The smoke turned from grey to black and continued to rise up the shaft as if it were a chimney. Using his one good arm to pull himself up while his legs pushed, he began to climb. In spite of his handicap, he made good progress but the smoke continued to rise with him. Around halfway he had to stop. By wedging the shoulder of his damaged arm under a rung, he was able to take the load off his good arm and catch his breath. However, the air was getting worse, and he ended up coughing so violently that he almost threw himself off the ladder and into the inferno below. There was no other choice but to continue upwards as fast as he could.
Visibility soon reduced to a few centimetres, and the smoke became so thick that he had to close his eyes tightly and climb blind, relying on touch alone. On two further occasions, he had to stop as the smoke became too much for his lungs and forced him to cough. His fingers turned white with the strain of holding on to the ladder. His limbs were tiring, and every rung was harder than the one before. He had no idea how much further he had to climb and willed himself on by setting small, achievable challenges.
Just five more rungs, he encouraged himself. He would then count one, two, three, four, five as he climbed up each rung. On reaching five he would do the same again, and again, and again until finally his head hit an iron pylon.
The elevator support, he thought. I’ve reached the top.
For a split second, he opened his eyes. It felt as if someone was stabbing his eyeballs with pins. He closed them again quickly and tried to think what to do next, but it was hard to stay focused. His left arm was throbbing painfully, and his remaining limbs were beginning to seize up.
Think, he ordered himself, what are you going to do now?
Slowly his mind cleared, and he could see in his head the wooden doors that had to be pulled open to enter the elevator. He tried to picture how they opened, and he remembered the magnets that kept the doors shut until the elevator arrived. The smoke made his face itch as it blew across his skin, and he realised that there must be an opening in the direction it was blowing to.
He wrapped his good arm carefully around a rung and clamped himself to it. Warily, he took his foot off another rung and softly kicked the wall to his right. His foot hi
t something solid. He kicked again, as far away as he could and this time made contact with wood that gave way a little. He kicked again, harder this time, but the door did not budge. He kicked again and again but still nothing. His energy levels were almost spent, but he made one last, great effort and swung both his legs as far out as he could before they collided with the door. There was a crunch and the door opened. Without pausing to think, he opened his eyes, saw the light from the open doorway, turned his body towards it and jumped through. He landed on his damaged arm, screamed with pain and instinctively twisted onto his back. For a while, he had no idea how long, he simply lay there looking up at the cobwebbed beams of the hangar. Gradually some energy returned and, after drunkenly standing up, he stumbled out into the fresh air.
The sun was setting behind a hill in the distance, and everything was bathed in a rich, amber glow. He thought it was the most beautiful view he had ever seen and sat down heavily on a large rock. In front of him was a runway and at the end of it he could see fire engines and ambulances coming his way. Behind him, great plumes of smoke blew out of the old hangar, looking like candy floss in the evening sky.
The vehicles skidded to a halt near the rock, and a medic ran to him. While he was being examined, the fire fighters entered the hangar to find the source of the blaze. The adrenalin that had been running through his body, keeping him going, keeping him alive, was rapidly disappearing, and he fell from the rock. His lungs were still burning and every time he coughed his left arm moved, causing him agony. A large cylinder was dropped on the ground near his head, and an oxygen mask was placed over his nose and mouth. Two soldiers carefully placed him onto a stretcher and as they did so, an army jeep arrived on the scene.
Major Marshall climbed out of the jeep, a grim look etched upon his face. The base commander reluctantly approached Professor Schwarzkopf and stood to attention at his feet. Without speaking, he rocked forward and backwards on the balls of his feet, his uniformed arms crossed behind his back, searching for the right words to say.