PHOENIX: (Projekt Saucer series)

by W. A. Harbinson

  He stopped talking in mid-sentence, realising that he’d just committed himself again, despite his lingering doubts. When he saw the grins on the faces of Epstein and Scaduto, he couldn’t help laughing.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said, when he had managed to contain himself. ‘You pair of bastards came all the way from Washington DC just to seduce me into going back to work.’

  ‘We sure did,’ Epstein said.

  ‘So are you in or out?’ Scaduto asked.

  ‘Count me in,’ Dwight said.

  The three of them raised their glasses in the air and tapped them together in a toast.

  It was the last of their good days.

  Chapter Forty Sitting on his rocking chair on the veranda, overlooking the fenced-in compound, Ernst Stoll observed the arrival of Wilson’s flying saucer with no great deal of pleasure. This time Wilson was coming in a medium-sized saucer, 150 feet wide, and carrying, so Ernst hoped, a 35-foot diameter, two-seater saucer with a cyborg pilot for his personal use. Ernst still had his own thoughts about that and they were making him nervous.

  Indeed, as he watched the Kugelblitz III descending vertically over the steaming canopy of the rain forest, he was torn between his need to escape this filthy hole and his dread of what might happen if he tried. Over the past few months it had dawned on him that he had now been here for years - nearly twenty years, in fact – and that there had been no indication that Wilson would ever let him leave. Ernst was rotting in this jungle; perhaps even losing his mind. With little stimulation, he could not stretch himself and was, he felt, becoming like a vegetable, blending in with the forest. So depleted was he that he could not even enjoy sex with his Ache comfort girls, let alone still be thrilled with the feeling of power that he had formerly received from running the compound like a merciless god. Now he wanted only to die in the Fatherland, preferably in Mannheim, where he had been born, and rest in the same soil that had taken his wife and children so many years ago.

  Naturally he was nervous about telling Wilson this, but was determined to do so. A man could only take so much and he, Ernst Stoll, had had enough. He would plead for release.

  As Wilson’s saucer descended slowly, majestically, into the clearing, its familiar bass humming sound grew louder and became almost palpable, an odd vibration that shook Ernst’s log-and-thatch house. Looking up, he saw the immense, spherical, deceptively seamless craft blocking out the tropical sky as it dropped lower. Still quite high up, the saucer was spinning rapidly on its own axis, except for the gyroscopically stabilised central fuselage. The rapid rotation of the circular outer wings slowed down as the saucer descended, creating violent currents of air that made loose grass, plants, soil and gravel swirl wildly, noisily, in the air, as if caught in the eye of a hurricane. As always, the native workers and captured Ache Indians were staring up in awe as the gigantic saucer descended, cocooned in a familiar whitish glow. This glow darkened to a more normal metallic grey when the saucer hovered just above ground level, bobbing gently like a cork in water, its thick hydraulic legs emerging from four points equidistant around its base, to embed themselves deeply in the muddy ground. The saucer bounced gently on the legs, but eventually settled and was still. Its rotating wings gradually slowed and then stopped altogether, as did the wildly swirling, artificial wind. Silence reigned for a moment.

  As a panel in the concave base opened up to form a ramp leading down to the ground, Ernst rose from his rocking chair, stepped off the veranda, and advanced to meet Wilson. The latter emerged from the holding bay of the saucer, tall, slim, naturally elegant, white-haired, oddly handsome with the aid of plastic surgery, and with a psychic aura as cold as a block of ice. Ernst practically trembled with fear the instant he saw him.

  Wilson did not offer his hand. He just nodded and said, ‘ Guten tag, Ernst. It is good to see you.’ Speaking German, he was inclined to become rather formal.

  ‘And good to see you, sir.’

  ‘You are well?’

  ‘Yes, sir, and you?’

  ‘I’m in excellent condition for my age, given all the medical and surgical aid I’ve had. You must try it yourself, Ernst.’

  Ernst felt himself smiling nervously, without humour. ‘I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet. Perhaps a few years from now.’

  Even as Ernst was speaking, four of the hideous cyborgs, mutated from unfortunate Ache Indians, came down the ramp behind Wilson, looking even shorter than they were beside the Frankenstein who had created them. Ernst shuddered to see them.

  ‘As promised, I have brought your present,’ Wilson said, still speaking in formal German. ‘But let us have lunch first.’

  ‘Naturally. Yes, sir.’

  Ernst led his lord and master back to the house where, on the veranda, which was pleasantly cool, they had what Wilson considered to be a major meal: fruit-and-nut cereal, with a glass of cold, very dry white wine. While partaking of the lunch, he expressed his concern that the Americans and Soviets were, ironically with his help, progressing technologically much faster than he had anticipated.

  ‘Since Lyndon B.Johnson was sworn in as President,’ he explained, ‘after the assassination of Kennedy, both the Americans and the Soviets have had men drifting outside their spacecraft; two separate US Gemini spacecraft have met in space and flown side-by-side only six to ten feet apart – an achievement requiring astonishing technical accuracy by their modest standards – the first space docking has been made by a US astronaut; and, finally, an unmanned US Surveyor spacecraft has soft-landed on the moon.’

  ‘Well, sir, you did help them with that,’ Stoll dared to remind him, ‘even if indirectly, with your supplies of scientific drawings and a great deal of highly advanced technology.’

  Wilson nodded. ‘Yes. As part of that agreement I promised the Americans, through CIA agent Jack Fuller, that they would be the first to land a man on the moon. As always, I’d intended keeping that promise. However, the speed with which the Americans are advancing scientifically had made me feel that I must hinder their progress, as well as American and Soviet progress in general. It’s clear from my recent conversations with Jack Fuller that they’re growing arrogant, believing that they can somehow catch up with my achievements, which is why I arranged last year’s Great Northeast Blackout as a warning to them. After that, they cooled down for a while, but already they’re growing arrogant again, so clearly they need another lesson.’

  ‘What have you planned?’

  ‘I’ve learnt through one of my brain-implanted spies located within NASA that they have a rehearsal for another Apollo launch planned for January 27 next year. The same man – one of NASA’s top scientists – will therefore ensure that the spacecraft malfunctions and bursts into flames, killing all three of the astronauts on board. A couple of months later – I believe this will be April – when cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov is due to orbit the Earth in a Soyuz spacecraft, we’ll attack it with a laser-beam weapon fired by one of our saucers. We’ll make the spacecraft crash, killing Komarov. The combined deaths of the cosmonaut and three astronauts will almost certainly cause consternation and result in delays in the space race between the Americans and the Soviets. I think this will work, yes?’

  ‘I think so,’ Ernst said.

  When the meal was finished, Ernst made his usual report to Wilson, telling him about the negative or positive aspects of the capturing and holding of the Ache Indians and any difficulties presented by his dealings with Paraguay’s officials, most of whom were as corrupt as their master, President Stroessner. Eventually, when he’d completed his report, he glanced across the compound with its mud-and-thatch shacks, goats, chickens, mosquitoes, piles of shit and everything else he detested here, including the native workers, men and women alike, and suddenly blurted out that twenty years here was too much.

  ‘I desperately want to return to Germany,’ he said finally.

  ‘Why do you wish to return?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘It is the Fatherland...’
r />   ‘It is not,’ Wilson interjected in his remote, unemotional way. ‘The Fatherland died with the ending of the war. What you want is no more.’

  ‘Still, my wife and children died there. Everything I had was there. I have been here for twenty years and I’m growing old and I yearn for the past. Please, sir, let me go.’

  ‘I didn’t realise you were so sentimental,’ Wilson said with a smile that did not reach his eyes and held no warmth at all – a smile as cold as the grave.

  ‘Nor did I,’ Ernst replied, ‘but I am. It’s a sign that I’m growing old.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ernst,’ Wilson said, showing no sign of emotion whatsoever, ‘but I’m afraid I cannot say “Yes” to that just yet. We still need you here. You are doing invaluable work here. Rest assured that it will end in a year or two, and then we can consider this matter again. But why Germany? There’s nothing left for you there. In a year or two, when your work here is finished, you can return to Antarctica for medical and surgical rejuvenation. When that’s completed, we will find you something suitable to do there; or, if you prefer, somewhere else. But not Germany. There you could still be picked up as a war criminal and forced to stand trial. We cannot risk that.’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Ernst said, feeling even more desperate, knowing that he was going to lose out again to Wilson. ‘It’s not just a matter of getting back to Germany. The truth is that I don’t think I can stand it here much longer. This place is gradually driving me crazy. I have to get out.’

  ‘You simply need a short break now and then,’ Wilson insisted in his coldblooded, icily pragmatic way. ‘You don’t need to return to Germany. You just need to get out of here more often, perhaps visit Asuncion.’

  ‘The journey is too difficult,’ Ernst said, aware that he sounded pathetic, his heart sinking with the knowledge that Wilson was going to be unbending about letting him leave here for good. ‘And besides, it’s too dangerous. This compound is in the middle of the rain forest, the jungle, and the only way out is by river. That makes short breaks difficult.’

  ‘Which is precisely why I’ve brought you a gift, Ernst. A small, two-seater flying saucer with a programmed, totally obedient cyborg pilot. Come and look.’

  Even as they stood up and walked down the steps of the veranda, a 35-foot wide flying saucer emerged slowly, gracefully, from the holding bay of its mother ship, barely inches above the floor, but certainly floating in mid-air, and advanced over the clearing, watched silently by the awed, terrified natives and Ache Indians. Made, like all of the flying saucers, from minutely porous magnesium orthosilicate and electrically charged, it was surrounded by that familiar whitish glow, caused by the ionisation of the surrounding atmosphere. With its outer rings rotating around its fixed, cupola-shaped central fuselage, it looked like a giant spinning top. Unlike the bigger flying saucers, however, it had a visible Perspex dome not much larger than the cockpit of a small airplane.

  Standing beside Wilson in the clearing as the saucer advanced towards him, Ernst could see, in that cramped, two-seater pilot’s cabin, the silhouetted figure of what had to be the cyborg pilot. A lump came to his throat as the saucer settled gently on the ground, its four legs extending to embed themselves in the mud. He was recalling how desperately, when an aeronautical student, first at the Institute of Technology in Munich, then in the rocket technology classes of Professor Karl Emil Becker at the University of Berlin, he had wanted to join the VfR, or Spaceship Travel Club, in the company of Werner von Braun, Rudolph Nebel, Willy Ley, and Hermann Oberth, to build rockets that would soar to the heavens. That dream had been crushed when he joined the SS and, eventually, came under the influence of the almost inhuman Wilson, who, for the past twenty years, had kept him imprisoned between helpless reverence and dread. Now, when he studied the small flying saucer, he saw the means of his escape and, formulating it, was filled with terror at the thought of what Wilson might do if he failed and was captured and brought back. Thinking about the possibilities, Ernst had to wipe sweat from his brow and control his body’s trembling.

  ‘Beautiful!’ he exclaimed softly, referring to the small flying saucer now resting in the middle of the clearing, dwarfed by the immense Kugelblitz III.

  ‘Yours,’ Wilson responded. ‘It’s not stratospheric, but its range is virtually limitless and you can use it for lengthy journeys at an altitude that will keep you well above normal airplanes, out of the range of radar, thus out of sight. Use it to give yourself some short breaks, away from this place. You’ll feel better then.’

  ‘It’s been so long,’ Ernst said hesitantly. ‘I don’t know how to fly any more. Certainly not...’

  ‘The cyborg pilot will do the flying for you when the saucer isn’t on autopilot. One of our first fully functioning cyborgs. Look!’ Speaking into the pinhead microphone strapped to his throat, Wilson ordered the pilot out. With the saucer being so small, the pilot emerged rather like the pilot of a normal airplane: by opening the domeshaped Perspex hood, which split into two parts, then clambering out and simply slithering down the sloping side to the ground. When, in this instance, the pilot had done so, Ernst looked at him in horrified amazement.

  He was both horrified and amazed because he actually recognised what was left of the original Marlon Clarke, the farmer abducted in Socorro, New Mexico, in 1947 and flown to the Antarctic after witnessing the crash of a flying saucer. Clarke had been turned into a hideous man/machine hybrid, or cyborg. His head had been severed, kept in cold storage, then transplanted to the body of a small, headless Ache Indian. Ernst was surprised that he still recognised Clarke, because there was so little of his original face to be seen. His skull was covered in the stereotaxic skullcap that kept electrodes implanted in his head at all times; and his lower face – ears, nose, mouth and jaw – had been replaced with an ugly metal prosthetic. The hands of the original Ache Indian had been sliced off and replaced with what would have looked to most people like vicious metal claws, though they were, as Ernst knew, CAMS, capable of highly sophisticated movements. Clarke looked like a monster.

  ‘Plastic artificial heart,’ Wilson explained. ‘Bionic audio transmitters to replace the mechanism of the inner ear. Plastic arteries. Synthetic bones in both legs and the lower arms attached to the CAMS. The latter, while looking like metal claws from afar, actually have fingertips of polyvinylidene fluoride, which detects alternations in pressure and delivers the appropriate impulses to the nerve ends. Brain-implantations, of course, and programmed for absolute obedience – you speak, he obeys. Here... strap this pinhead microphone to your throat.’

  Ernst took the tiny microphone, wrapped the strap around his throat, and clipped it shut with the microphone resting on his Adam’s apple.

  ‘Now identify yourself,’ Wilson said. ‘Tell the cyborg your name,’

  ‘My name is Ernst Stoll.’

  ‘Good,’ Wilson said. ‘That’s all he needs to know. He now knows the sound of your voice and will react automatically to it with total obedience.’

  ‘Amazing,’ Ernst said, feeling hope even in his despair, seeing light where only darkness had reigned.

  ‘He’s a gift for your years of devotion to duty,’ Wilson said. ‘Use him well. Now I must be going.’

  Nodding at Ernst, since he rarely shook hands these days, Wilson went back up the ramp of the bigger saucer, followed by his four cyborg guards. Once they were all inside, the ramp closed and the saucer lifted slightly off the ground. Shortly after it had lifted off, and while it was still hovering above the ground, its hydraulic legs were drawn back into the base of the central body and the panels closed so precisely that the joins around them could not be seen. Then the saucer rose vertically, slowly, to just above the canopy of the soaring trees, hovered there for a few seconds, then abruptly shot upward, shrank rapidly, and then disappeared.

  The cyborg pilot, Marlon Clarke, was standing silently in front of the small flying saucer, practically brain-dead until activated by instructions from Ernst. Both ter
rified and exhilarated by what he was contemplating, Ernst hurried back into his log-andthatch house, to have a strong drink of schnapps, which helped give him the courage he needed to do what he was planning.

  Sitting there on the sofa in the middle of the room, he looked around at the photos that showed his own history: a golden-haired child in the courtyard of his parents’ imposing neo-Gothic house in Mannheim; a handsome youth sitting with a pretty young blonde-haired lady, Ingrid, later to be his wife, at an outside table of the Kranzler Café on the Kurfurstendamm in Berlin; clambering out of an army car at Stadelheim Prison, Berlin, in his black SS uniform; posing, already cynical, in the same uniform outside Gestapo Headquarters in the Prinz Albrechstrasse with friends Brandt and Ritter, both killed in the war; celebrating with those same two friends and some whores at the Schauspielhaus in 1937, all drunk and holding up steins of beer; wrapped in a greatcoat covered with snow as he hammered swastikas on steel poles into the hardened snow of Neu Schwabenland, Antarctica, in 1938, claiming the territory for the Third Reich; already ageing and embittered when with the flying saucer team – Wilson, Rudolph Schriever, Klaus Habermohl and Otto Miethe – outside the hangar of the research centre at Kummersdorf, located at the other side of the firing range separating it from Werner von Braun’s Rocket Research Institute; twice with the Reichfuhrer, Heinrich Himmler – first looking icily controlled in the SS headquarters in Berlin, then, six years later, looking deranged in the sanatorium of Dr Gebhardt at Hohenlychen; finally, with generals Nebe and Kammler in the great underground complex of the Nordhausen Central Works in Kahla in the Harz Mountains. And, of course, the women, his few women... That erotic dancer, Brigitte, from the White Mouse in the Franzosischestrasse; the sensual, treacherous Jew bitch, Kryzstina Kosilewsky, from Cracow; and, coming last, but in a framed picture hung on the wall directly facing his desk, his wife, Ingrid, and their two children, Ula and Alfred, taken two weeks before they died in an Allied air-raid...