by Ian Watson
“So I gathered.”
“What does the name mean? Does it mean that you actually know something, but it’s under wraps? I was at Muroc in 1954, Major—as an airman. What I saw there—” Shriver told of Eisenhower and the landing; the Major looked increasingly amused.
“Nothing happened at Edwards in ’54,” the Major said, when he’d heard Shriver out. “Five saucers landed? That’s a new one on me!”
“They weren’t real extraterrestrial saucers, you understand?” Shriver pleaded. “They were projections from the world-mind. The real aliens explained—”
“Maybe you saw some lights in the sky in ’54. I can’t agree that any flying saucers—”
“Not flying saucers in the mechanical sense! But phenomena, nonetheless, that can be detected and harnessed using the alien science! All that wreckage is up on the Moon just waiting for us.”
“Mr Shriver, if saucers landed at a US Air Force base over twenty years ago, wouldn’t the world be a different place today? Project Unsightly? It’s a low key affair. Still in a feasibility study stage, actually. We’re test-running a few cases here and there across the country, to cost the exercise. I guess you could call it a political thing. Election promises, you know? The President said he’d open the files. We’re concentrating on witnesses, as much as what they witnessed.”
“At least that’s an improvement on Blue Book! But this case is different. We’ve got a car here made over as a genuine spacecraft.”
“A psychological approach,” smiled Major Bower. “Something new. If we do decide to go ahead we certainly won’t make any secret of it. But to announce it first, then maybe cut it off because it can’t be done? No one would believe us. Once bitten, twice shy. There’s been enough paranoia about the whole business in the past.”
The Major trod on his cigar butt, grinding it out near Deacon’s cactus.
The Major was lying. Shriver knew. Something was happening.
A new organization had been set up.
“We can pack the three of you into the Cayuse, It’s only built for four, so you’ll have to squeeze up. We’d like to interview you all some more at Edwards. Have the Base psychologist run a few tests?”
A psychiatrist. Because they were crazy, thought Michael. This new project was set up to study craziness.
“Unsightly’s located at Edwards then?”
“No, we’re in Colorado. Edwards passed your report on. I flew down overnight. It sounded promising enough.”
“Got on the spot real quick,” grinned Molinelli.
“You’re at Boulder? Where the Condon Committee—?”
Major Bower shook his head, “We’re outside Colorado Springs, at the Air Force Academy. You see, no secrets?”
“What about the car?”
“Oh, we’ll call in a Chinook to lift this wreck out. Keep the desert tidy. I’m a great believer in ecology.”
“You said the new approach was psychological! If that’s so, what do you want the car for?”
“Part of your story, isn’t it? Material evidence.”
“Just one minute, Major,” interrupted Captain Dorris. “This car was stolen. That’s police business.”
Major Bower took the Captain aside, and talked to him for a while.
“It’s help,” whispered Deacon. “Don’t you see? Karama.”
Shriver shook his head frustratedly. He knew, and the Air Force knew. They were going to take the Thunderbird off him; and there was no other way out.
• • •
Squeezed into the Cayuse behind Major Bower and the lieutenant, they were soon flying west by north over the hot wasteland towards Four Corners desert crossroads and Edwards AFB.
Thirty-Two
The Air Force Academy Dance Band, “The Falconaires”, sat out in the sunshine under the Colorado sky rehearsing Dixie on saxophone, trombone, harmonium, trumpet, drums. A harsh bronze eagle, wingspread on a granite plinth, stood over them. Fountains sprayed from a moat, behind, surrounding a tiny concrete apron where a small white aircraft was parked on display.
Major James Bower paused to listen for a while, nostalgically. He’d played the moody horn himself when he was in that same band years ago. As a group of cadets marched past, his gaze drifted to the aluminium spires of the Chapel, those seventeen serried wings upright against the sky; beyond, pine-stippled hills rumpled upward towards snowy Pikes Peak…
A legend was carved in the plinth beneath the eagle’s beak.
MAN’S FLIGHT THROUGH LIFE IS SUSTAINED BY THE POWER OF HIS KNOWLEDGE
The motto had always existed for him as an item of given data rather than actual words to be read; but now he looked back to read them and wonder.
They’d talked a lot about knowledge, those three! At least the two older ones. About alien know-how scattered on the Moon… and occult knowledge… The boy had soon started to deny it all.
Patting his briefcase contentedly, he walked over to the entrance of Fairchild Hall, the academic building.
The third floor housed Behavioural Sciences. He went along to the office of the Permanent Professor and Head of Department, knocked, saluted Colonel Paul E. Coleman. Also in the room were Tenure Professor Li Col. Walter “White” Sands and Associate Professor Major Leland Fischer.
Away to the east, beyond Eisenhower Golf Course, a pair of silvery high performance gliders could be seen executing tight thermal soaring, spiralling serenely up above Falcon Stadium, maintaining the notion of its perimeter high up in the air. As the two turned in the sunlight, they appeared to shift shape constantly—becoming boomerangs, then lozenges of light, then lazy aircraft again—as though one of them was losing mass to the other only to pick it up again half a turn later.
“I’m still concerned,” objected Sands, “at having Unsightly connected with the Academy. Our brief is simply to provide I cadets with the tools to become career officers, period. I Either the Advisory Council or the Board of Visitors are I going to kick up. We ought to be increasing the number of qualified minority candidates, etcetera.”
“Several hundred faculty members are already doing advanced research, White,” said Colonel Coleman. “It’s expected. The academic elite of the Air Force are here—the spearhead. Besides, this will only be the public face of Unsightly. You know that.”
“It’s like building a new weapons system. It isn’t our brief.” “But it is. This is an intellectual problem, not a simple nuts and bolts one. I’m sure we’re doing the right thing. Anyhow, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee thinks so—”
“Because he’s seen a UFO himself.”
“—which effectively squares the Board. And the C-in-C Europe is in favour; so there’s the Council sewn up.”
“It’s an educational problem too,” nodded Bower. “In a very real sense.”
“I feel even more dubious about teaching it—even at fourth year or graduate levels!”
Bower sorted through his briefcase. “White, it’ll be listed under Beh Sci 480 along with Psychological Warfare, and Beh Sci 495, ‘Psychological Operations’. Believe me, it belongs. It’s something in the mass mind: an image of deep I discontents, hopes and fears. We have to come to terms with it a damn sight better than Blue Book ever did. It doesn’t go away so what are we, ostriches? We need some decent I awareness of this in the upper echelons of the Service. What’s the point in talking about Psywar and turning a blind eye to this powerful form of Psywar already going on right within ourselves? Let me tell you about this latest case; it’s a real wow…”
• • •
“… so the boy showed obvious neurotic symptoms—sexually maladjusted, correct? And our ex-pilot Shriver had a way-back major delusional system festering in him—war trauma, guilt, resentment and fear brought to the boil by the loss of a strong father-protector, which happened to be his own role as a pilot. He lost his whole sense of role when his Dad got killed in a car smash. You’ll note how a car crops up again as salvation mechanism? The British professor Deacon seemed
to be the most normally adjusted, given the caveat that he does work in a very fringe area of Psychology—”
“What about the car itself?” asked “White” Sands.
“Oh, it was rubbish of course. It had been made into a sort of cargo cult object! A horsehair mattress and other muck was stuffed in the engine. Bits and pieces of this and that.”
“They hardly had time to mess it around, did they?”
“Well, they all had major blank-outs in their ‘experiences’. Which the good professor described as ‘exiting from normal cognition’. Don’t smile, it’s a good description. Collectively, they got up to some very strange antics. I personally think the car was stolen for some joyride and they happened on it later, in that state. Someone had really trashed it. Cannibalized the engine, used the car as a trashcan, put it through a crusher then dumped it Don’t forget that Shriver, our UFO buff, was heading back on a sort of pilgrimage to Edwards, as the original locus of his delusional system. Out in Adamski’s own desert! I don’t think it was any coincidence they all turned up there. Finding this trashed car when they were already in a highly abnormal state of mind, the whole moonflight delusion blew up. There’s no hint of anyone but their own three selves ever seeing that car in England, of course!”
“They do seem to have got from London to the Mojave pretty quickly,” remarked Major Fischer. “With no documents!”
“They obviously flew to LA International then made a lucky connection with a Greyhound bus or something. They just had time to. Or they flew to Las Vegas, to be on that side of Edwards. Nobody saw them after lunchtime of the day they ‘took off’—on their own admission—even though they swear they left in the evening. That’s Greenwich time. It’s a tight schedule—but possible. Anyway, our Professor Deacon pulled this very same trick before—flying oil to Egypt just as ‘inexplicably’ by jet. So Shriver was Mojave-bound, mentally. They collaborated psychically, as it were—creating a triple folk. Pretty weird, I grant, but no!, much weirder than a lot of so-called UFO events.”
“You’re sure they don’t realize this?” pressed Fischer.
“Our base psychiatrist at Edwards wanted to question them under hypnosis, but the boy got hysterical. The Professor had a magnificent excuse involving ‘void-minds’ and ‘jokes’ to explain why it wouldn’t do any good. Shriver had a fit of temperament about custody of the vehicle. Anyway, they’d only have told us what they believed.”
“One thing I’ll say, it beats hijacking planes into a cocked hat.”
“Nice analogy, Leland. In many respects hijacking’s a kind of mental epidemic. People who’d never have behaved that way normally get triggered by hearing about other hijacks. Just as potential suicides are switched on by seeing car smashes on TV. Likewise with UFO flaps. We aren’t as fully conscious and rational as we think we are! The sad truth is that most of the damn population is maladjusted one way or another. There’s a deep irrationality just under the surface veneer. Psywar? Like I say, society wages it on itself! We have to understand these irrational forces. We need to diagnose them and be able to use them. What price ‘Man’s Flight through Life’ if an aircrew were to enter this ‘UFO-conscious’ state on a mission? Or, God forbid, astronauts? Obviously it’s a very powerful psychic factor in a lot of people’s minds. One day we might actually need to Use these forces for, well, national motivation, or abroad. The Russians aren’t into psychic research and UFOs just as a hobby.”
“Thus the hidden face of Unsightly,” nodded Colonel Coleman.
“So the Professor and the boy got repatriated?”
“Best course. Immigration saw to it. Couple of illegal aliens.” Bower chuckled appreciatively. “Our professor told us he felt like an alien. He was damn well right! That man Shriver still has the bit between his teeth. Believes there’s a cover-up—all the old paranoia. We tried telling him the car was junk, but would he listen? I guess there’ll be a fair amount of idiot publicity. Self-defeating, needless to say: obviously nobody drives to the Moon. Speaking for Unsightly, though, I await developments with interest.”
In the thermal over Falcon Stadium, the twin gliders exchanged shape once more as they spiralled. They swelled and shrank, swelled again and shrank again. Reaching the top of the heat funnel at last, they shared mass equally and floated off westwards over the Douglas Valley housing area in the direction of the mountains…
Part Five
Thirty-Three
Suzie waited beyond the ticket barrier, her hair a crackling flame. She wore jeans, a black pinstripe jacket with frilly-fronted white blouse, and a green scarf knotted round her throat. She smiled, she waved. She skipped up and down. Michael picked his way through the mass of holidaymakers hauling suitcases and children along. The train driver sat high in his diesel cab watching with blank detachment. Sunlight filtered from a glass canopy through fumes.
They kissed quickly. Suzie held both his hands, squeezed them tightly, then drew him away through the black stone arch out into the biting freshness of sea air, which wasn’t so much cold this June day as incisively, almost surgically cleansing.
“Look, we have come through!” she laughed. “You made it too, Mike. I’m so happy!”
“Yes, I came through.” Not, he thought, John or Barry.
Gulls mewed overhead and swooped down the blue slate roofs of boarding houses. Lace-curtained windows, steps and stonework shone with distemper, ornamental street-lamps had been freshly painted white and blue. The world was new, refreshed. He even started to admire a stepladder on a window cleaner’s barrow, till he realized that he’d seen barrows and stepladders before.
In a small park, among begonia beds, boys crouched found the cobbled rim of a pond trapping sticklebacks in nets on bamboo canes. The sun shone through the curved glass of their jam-jars to a point of focus, sending the tiny fish clustering to the surface gulping air. He saw it all magnified; an enlarged reality. Each, fish, each flower petal.
“It was madness,” he agreed. “A sort of shared psychosis spreading its suckers like an octopus, pulling us all in. It’s gone now. It’s all over.” For us two at any rate. “I’ve been reading a lot of Industrial Psychology lately.”
“Yes, you wrote.”
“I’d like a solid down-to-earth job. If I can get any sort of degree after all this.”
“I’m not worrying about any of that right now. I might retake the year from next October.” She grinned. “Or I mightn’t. Just now I’m quite simply busy being happy. Enjoying health. My God, not being haunted with sickly nightmares! It’s something I can feel like an actual physical object, this happiness—the business of being sane and properly alive! I can feel it as clearly as I feel this pavement under my feet. Do you feel the pavement with every step you take?”
The terrace, descending, met the Esplanade arcing its way around the wide sands from Bean Head to the south (with its chalk stump of a lighthouse and rolling grassy dunes—steps of sand from which Sandstairs took its name) northward to the old-time fishing village of Liddle Bay, mainly a caravan site nowadays. Dominating the sweep of promenade was a stranded whale of a palace, a grounded zeppelin sprayed with cement, its ground floor sheltering amusement arcades, souvenir shops, cafés, and its belly housing an icerink and bowling alley. From each end of this mock palace rose belfries without any bells, suggesting a seaside cathedral. The open skating rink behind had been lapped by drifting sands, which a small bulldozer was spreading back across the beach. A tractor dragged a litter scoop along, sieving out yesterday’s broken glass and other droppings.
Real. Real.
“You’re better off out of College at the moment,” Michael said. “It’s pretty embarrassing. Reporters have been turning up, even a few Americans and French—and there was a Japanese bloke. Bloody Shriver! And UFO nuts too. Some TV mob wanted to do a nice little documentary reconstruction. That’s why I pushed off this weekend. Welt, one I reason. A minor one. The main one being…” He smiled at her.
Two rheumy-eyed pensioners wat
ched them abstractedly from inside a bus shelter as they crossed the Esplanade.
Next to the shelter, the blood-globule of a wartime German mine was painted bright red, set on a plinth for children to rattle pennies into as they clung to the black detonator spikes.
Real.
White railings were bobbly with salt rust under their coat of fresh paint. Grassy banks dropped down to the beach below them. A wedge of black rocks emerged from the sands; the rocks ran out to sea in long slabs supporting a sewer pipe buried in a concrete pathway. Glassy rolling pins of waves rippled in, parting like a head of hair along this walkway, tumbling into cracks and traps among the rocks, shattering into soda spray, leaving only a stain and a gleam behind.
He stared out to sea, where the flux of water perpetually and indefinably shifted its contours without resolving on any definite final form. A sense of boundless possibilities opening out in all directions was the sea’s gift; so people came to it. Yet it had no will, no object-consciousness, to settle for one I possibility rather than another; it was pure potentiality—a I whole sea full of it. The sea seemed to be nothing but muscle; muscle at rest, muscle at play, rippling and rolling. It gleamed like a wrestler freshly oiled. Pure muscle without a bone in its whole body, yet stronger than if bones constrained it. He watched that plane of muscle with its fretted edge grow thinner as it flowed up the beach, fatter as it slid back again. People, incredible to contemplate, were standing up to their waists in this muscle, even ducking themselves head over heels in it, heedless of the infinite slab of idiot tissue it was.
“A nervous breakdown,” he murmured. “Somehow it existed out there, not just in my own head. Collectively for all of us. It was a collapse of rational connections, of the links between events—between cause and effect. Links between people too: my parents, you and me. That was the worst part. Sanity—the texture of reality—got frayed. I’d say it was like crowd hysteria, a kind of collective irrational vision—Nazism on a minor scale—in this little bubble of our lives…”