—Andy
TOP SECRET
Second chance:
TOP SECRET
11/12/81
Andy,
No harm done. We can certainly use your quantum mechanics expertise on the communications link. I just want to be very clear on what the situation is. Once I give you access to the artifacts and the data, there is no turning back. It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah and the pillars of salt. Remember Lot’s wife. You don’t look back. And if you do, I can’t help you. So let me ask you one more time. ARE YOU SURE?
—Harry
TOP SECRET
Decision:
TOP SECRET
11/12/81
Harry,
I’m sure.
—Andy
TOP SECRET
Deal:
TOP SECRET
11/12/81
Come to my office in the Vault tomorrow. I’ll have the security people there and brief you in. Once that happens, you’ll be given access to Operation Majority documents on file in the System. See you then.
—Harry
TOP SECRET
After a little searching, Deke found the files on Operation Majority. He went in.
* * *
Gallagan pondered the situation. If what Katrina said was correct, then there really was no point in operating the SIGINT Center. It would only provide the Americans with information they could—at any time—use against Russia. If only there were a counterbalance. But they didn’t really have any cards in their favor.
Unless...
He swiveled slowly around to face Katrina.
“I want you to shut down the Center for perhaps six months. Meanwhile, I need leverage with the Americans. We will build the case against Groom. If we can prove a government cover up, then I’ve got something I can negotiate with.”
“Getting data will be difficult without the Center.”
“We have other sources. And what about this American?”
“The FBI man? Yuri Sverdlov?”
“Yes. See if you can get close to him. Find out what he knows.”
* * *
Deke applied UFO-ology logic to what he saw. It was like close encounters of the first, second and third kind, except it was a conspiracy.
What he had uncovered was a conspiracy of the Third Kind. A conspiracy of the First Kind is when you think you see or smell something funny. You’re suspicious. A conspiracy of the Second Kind is when you have data that is necessary but not quite sufficient to prove conspiracy. You’re on the trail. A conspiracy of the Third Kind is Contact. You have the goods. It’s go-to-jail time for the conspirators.
Deke blinked at what he saw on the screen. He had the goods.
37. MAJESTIC DECISIONS
2 May 1994
The Security Chief tried to rub sleep from his eyes, heart and blood pressure at low ebb. Chandra and the others didn’t seem affected by the early morning session, but without an injection of caffeine, the Security Chief felt intellectually challenged. The darkness of the closed conference room didn’t help matters.
He fumbled with the tape recorder, then pushed a button. A message played, left by Jill Sommer on Zfar Jafri’s answering machine:Jeez! And I thought prophets didn’t kid around! Listen, Zfar, I need to see you today about another shoot. We might be able to prove criminal action at Groom. Could be a great story ...
The Chief shut off the tape, then looked at Chandra. “We simply followed up on your suggestions, Richard,” he said. “The recording clinched it for Ms. Sommer. Then we had your report, and NSA’s phone tap on Fontanova at the embassy. We had to take action there, too.”
“It’s not the decisions that are at issue here, it’s the execution.”
“We made some mistakes. We can correct them. But if you’re trying to contest MJ-12’s authority to use deadly force to protect information, or MAJI’s oversight of security matters—”
“Of course not,” Chandra said. “Of course not. Let’s stay objective here. I’m just saying we can take a more effective approach. That’s all.”
“And what do you suggest, Doctor Chandra?”
Chandra looked down the conference table—a table that faded into darkness beyond the overhead projector. There was silence, broken only by a momentary cough.
“First, we need information,” he said. “We need to know what’s going on. Based on that knowledge, we can target our actions.”
“How?” the Security Chief asked.
“I want to run some probes. I want a field test of Project Ganymede.”
Chandra waited for a reaction. There was only another cough from the darkened room. He continued.
“I have some Ganymede prototype animals in my lab near Johns Hopkins.”
He lifted a rat cage onto the table.
“We can use those initially until I get the Advanced Demonstration Model from Groom. Gill Chisholm can help me set it up. I want control of the operation.”
From the back of the room came a German-accented response. “I have been listening patiently, Richard, but it seems to me that we are dealing with an unproven technology.”
“The Proof-of-Concept Test was a complete success,” Chandra asserted. “I—”
“Under very controlled conditions.”
Chandra shook his head, “No.”
“It was not the field. These Thought Tunneling Devices may be unstable.”
“We have no evidence of that,” Chandra replied. “I looked at the Roswell tissue. TTDs showed no deterioration. I also looked at some of the early prototypes. They’re still good. So is the recent Advanced Demonstration Model.”
“Maybe it’s only your brain that’s deteriorating, Richard,” the Chief remarked. “No offense.”
“We don’t know how well the animals can be controlled...”
Chandra opened the cage.
A large rat raced down the table in a beeline toward his German-accented opponent. There was a yell in the darkness as the rat made contact. Finally, it ran back toward Chandra, dropped the pencil on the table in front of him and re-entered the cage.
Chandra closed the cage door and picked up the object.
“I needed your pencil to make a point,” he said.
“Come on, folks,” Billy said. “Let’s give Richard a chance.”
* * *
Deke Dobbs, body still reeling from a ‘Red Eye’ flight to Washington, D.C., listened to his stomach rumble hungrily as he followed Jafri through the lunch crowd at Mister Bill’s restaurant, searching for a table.
“Fast food, Zfar,” he said. “That’s what this is supposed to be. That means fast service, fast seating and fast eating.”
“I agree, Jafri said, hobbling to a stop. Time to invoke Plan B.” He cozied next to a table, waved a French fry like a conductor cueing a band, and startedThe Act, beard trembling.
“Open your mind. Transcend time and space!”
“Yes, Master,” Deke said, thumping the tuning fork against a crystal.
Jafri and Dobbs closed their eyes and made loud “Ommm” sounds at roughly the same pitch as the tuning fork. At the occupied table next to them, a woman’s jaw sagged in mid-munch. She looked incredulously at the two men.
They stared back, observing the bits of burger in her half-opened mouth.
“Now we’re coming toyour part,” Jafri said to the woman. “It’s a singing part.”
She picked up the remains of her meal and left.
Jafri smiled at Deke after she left the table. “Ommmm,” they said in unison.
“That was a move with a lot of finesse,” Deke said, respectfully, sitting down. “Very fitting for the Director of the International UFO Research Center.”
“The Center,” Jafri said, gesturing vigorously with the fry, “has definitely hit the big time. I don’t mean to sound uppity or Grey Poupon-ish, but I feel it in my bones. If these documents are half of what you say they are, this administration is finished. Finito. Maybe they’ll impeach the President and put all
the previous ones on trial for crimes against humanity.”
“Maybe they’ll kill us first,” Deke said.
“Huh?”
“Look, Zfar, there are a couple of potential problems here that we need to think through. In the first place, some people could argue that we’ve violated the Espionage Act.”
“We’re not foreign spies.”
“I broke into a classified system and stole copies of Top Secret files.”
“Yeah, but those files said the government was engaged in illegal activity.”
Deke framed a headline with his hands. “FBI kills hacker spies fleeing from arrest. News media bid to view stolen files rejected due to classification level.That’s how it’ll read.”
“What’s your other point?” Zfar asked, biting into a muffin.
“What?”
“You said there were a couple of problems. What’s the other one?”
“Oh. According to the operations order, the government can terminate leaks with extreme prejudice. They can kill to protect information.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Really.”
“You know,” Jafri said, “there may be a way out of this. Someone sent you the original program. You didn’t ask for it. It just appeared. Unexpectedly.”
“Is this a point for a debate team, or will it prevent us from being killed?”
“Don’t know,” Jafri said, “but a CEO like me has to figure all the angles. So who do you think sent it? The message?”
Dobbs shrugged. “Maybe it was an Operation Majority insider. Maybe the code is alien software.”
“One option is we just destroy the code. Erase it from the disk. Pretend we never saw it.”
“Zfar, this code will crack any system. If we erase it, THEY will still have it. THEY will be omniscient. WE will be blind in the face of this omniscience. Remember W. Ross Ashby’sLaw of Requisite Variety ?”
“No. Refresh my memory. I never was a good student.”
“Well,” Deke said, swallowing, “only variety can destroy variety.”
“Why is this relevant?”
“Variety,” Deke said, “includes information and options. They’re interchangeable, like knowledge and power, matter and energy. If we are playing a game, and I have more options and/or more information than you do, then I will win. For example, if I could see your poker hand, but you couldn’t see mine.”
“Your point is that they can dominate the world.”
“Precisely.”
“That’s a good point. Good point.”
“The dilemma is that they have the code, but we can’t give it to anyone. If it gets out, nothing will be safe. This is the respectable side of me talking now. Banks. Credit transactions. Personal e-mail. Military secrets. It goes on and on. Our civilization couldn’t function if every transaction, every thought, could be inspected by someone else.”
“Yup. We have truly got a dilemma. Give me the Majority papers and I’ll read through them tonight. Maybe there’s another way out.”
Deke grinned. “I’ll trade you the papers for some of that special sauce, Amigo.”
Jafri put the little cup of sauce in the middle. “We share everything. No spitting.”
* * *
So her Majesty will see me? Yuri thought.Great .But I don’t know if I can stomach this amount of ‘chutzpah.’
After playing telephone tag for nearly two days, he was surprised by Fontanova’s message on his answering machine at his Annapolis, Maryland residence—an unlisted number.
The message, an invitation to dinner, threw him off balance. He would have preferred to establish the Rules Of Engagement, to be in control. Still—she was showing off her ability to reach out and touch him. Her over-confidence was a vulnerability.
He thought carefully about how to exploit it.
38. SPECIES
3 May 1994
“One way to look at evolution is in terms of information,” Doctor Li said to a group of graduate seminar students seated around a conference table.
The students began scribbling.
“A species,” she continued, “is a stable genetic configuration. If variety is introduced into the gene pool, then you don’t have a species. No stable configuration. What we callcommunications focuses narrowly on members of the same species. And the purpose of that communications is tominimize genetic variety—just the opposite of what evolution does. From the point of view of the gene pool, cross-species communications is really just so much noise.”
A portly male student with an unwashed pony tale put his pencil down and propped his fat chin on two palms. He emitted a suppressed fart that echoed in the room as a quiet, but audible ‘pop.’ “What about predators and prey?” he asked, unmindful of the socialfauxpas . “Why shouldn’t they intentionally communicate? I mean, if the Orca could disguise its voice, and tell seals, ‘Hey kids, I’m giving away free fish—meet me behind a rock,” why wouldn’t that be adaptive?”
A female student, offended by the body odor of the portly student, shifted her chair slightly, wrinkled her nose, then attempted to disguise the movements as a spark of academic interest. She raised her hand.
“Yes, Jan?”
“Dr. Li, couldn’t you argue that concepts and ideas may be different even among thesame species. Humans, for example. When humans communicate with each other, we make the ‘assumption of normality.’ That is, we assume that everyone else thinks as we think and feels as we feel. This going-in assumption could be flat wrong. I have this view that the only thing some people have in common is their bodily functions. For example—Jeffrey Dahmer and Mother Theresa. Their brains and thought processes are as unique as beings from different galaxies.”
* * *
The microtome sliced brain tissue into pieces thinner than onion skin. Anna, Li’s white-smocked assistant, prepared them for microscopic viewing while Li, Anderson and Jafri watched.
Li put her hand on Anderson’s shoulder. “You’ll be happy to know, John, that we found no evidence of communicable disease—or at least diseases that I’m familiar with. We may be able to rule out the germ warfare hypothesis. Thank God.”
Anna finished preparing a slide and handed it to Li.
“My friend at Groom will be happy to hear that,” Jafri said.
Li smiled. “Since we couldn’t find viral or bacteriological pathology, I’ve stopped using biohazard procedures.”
She led the two men to viewing station, placed the slide on the microscope, adjusted the focus and backed away. She motioned to Anderson.
“Hmm? Look at it, John.”
Anderson looked through the microscope. Li stood next to him, bending toward the instrument. Jafri, on the other side of the table, bored with the science, watched Li’s full figure.
“Do you see the faint objects that look like small asterisks?” Li asked.
“Yes,” Anderson said.
“That pattern is formed by converging dendrites—the branching ends of nerve cells. The patterns you see are not found in a normal rat. It’s as though an additional structure has been overlaid onto the neural matrix.”
“How localized is the pattern?”
“You are looking at the Tractus Opticus. I’ve also found it in the Polus Frontalis, the Cingulum and the Commissura Anterior. In fact, I can find it anywhere I look. It appears to be a regular feature of this nervous system.”
Jafri beamed, “I love it when you talk medical, Rita.”
Rita Li appeared amused by the remark, but stayed focused. She removed a photograph from an envelope and placed it between Anderson and Jafri.
“Here’s an electron micrograph of one of these asterisk-shaped areas. At the center of the ‘star’, there’s a very large macromolecule. It’s regular in shape... almost crystalline and roughly the size of a cell. It’s most extraordinary. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Can we tell what it’s made of?” Anderson asked.
“I think it’s mostly a hydrocarbon with a
lot of trace elements. It’ll take some time to characterize it in much detail.”
“Please work on it, Rita,” Anderson said. “It may be important.”
“I’ll get some help from our research group,” Li said. “We’ll give it priority.”
* * *
“Billy, I...” Dr. Whit Constantine ran his hand over an aging, threadbare head, uncomfortable with what he was about to say. “I think we need a backup for Richard. I’m concerned that he’s becoming unstable. That demonstration with the rat at the Majestic meeting was just so”—he searched for the word—”atavistic.”
“Dunno, Whit. We tried creating a backup once before.”
“We should try again. We can improve our procedures.”
“It wasn’t procedures that screwed us up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it was Richard. I can’t prove it. I just think he knew. As soon as we activated that embryo, he knew. He knows about everything that gets connected to TTDs. It’s some sort of a dominance thing. He wants control. I don’t know whether that’s the human part of
him or—”
“All the more reason for a backup. Look, we’re Operation Majority. We have the brightest people, and the most resources at our disposal. Richard’s one person. We’ll just tell him. Lay down the law. Wewill have backup.”
“How will infinite resources protect you personally from some small animal that sneaks into your bed at night and eats your carotid artery?”
“If he’s that much of a danger, then—”
“He’s a national asset, Whit. You don’t just ‘off’ a national asset.”
“Well, I don’t like it. We’ve put all our eggs in one basket, and his eggs look scrambled. I’m going on record—”
“Then Richard will know. Are you prepared for that?”
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