He had to admit that he did not and he sounded pathetic in his ignorance.
“No, but then again it’s not entirely important to the project that I do. The possibility of a contagion is something I want investigated. I was the one who suggested that you might understand microbial incursions.”
“So, it’s been established that the cause of death was a bacterial contagion?”
“Well no. The only thing established so far has been that the cause of death was not because of any malfunction of laboratory equipment. Everybody else in the laboratory seems to be okay.”
There was something wrong. She did not know if she was getting that signal from him, his seemingly nervousness or that it just did not sound right. Then it came to her. To his great disappointment she uncrossed her legs and asked,
“Because of a suspected contagion, am I to gather this is now a closed complex and nobody from the outside is permitted entry? Are we under quarantine?”
He had no choice but to concede to her reasoning. Reluctantly he replied,
“Yes, we are now officially a sealed compound until what happened in there is at least understood.”
“Then I’m not the most qualified medical person to go in there looking for a microbial germ that eats flesh am I? It’s because I am the only qualified medical person within the quarantine right?”
“If you were quick enough to figure that out then with any luck you will be just as quick to solve the mystery.”
As he got up to leave, he expected her to follow. She asked,
“Are we going to the lab now?”
“Yes. You do understand the ramification of this top level security pass now don’t you? By that I mean the consequences of you talking to anybody outside this lab about what you are about to see.”
“Are you threatening me with my pension?”
“No, not at all. I know you could care less about it.”
A sick thought shot into her. What was her accountability? What does she have that they could possibly threaten her co-operation with? It did not come to her. Instead she remained flippant and said,
“What have you got in there that is so secret? Are little green men from Mars explaining Aussie Rules Football to you Yanks?”
As he held the door open for her, he said,
“No. The Martians don’t even understand that game.”
With a playful performance, she thanked him for holding the door open for her.
“Thank you Whelan.”
He responded in kind.
“You are welcome Lynda.”
The lab was on the other side of the underground complex. Getting to it required passing through the main corridor and past Nancy at the reception desk. Walking beside Whelan, Lynda felt a revengeful desire to throw the high-level Apple Jack security pass in her face. However, intestinal fortitude and a tinge of professionalism prevailed and she merely smirked in passing.
They approached a massive steel door with hinges not needing to be that large to function. Maybe there was some psychological advantage showing opulence to security and strength. Whelan swiped the security unit with his card and then turned to Lynda and waited. It took a second for her to figure it out but eventually it came to her. Rather quickly, she reached for her own card dangling on a string around her neck. It was an awkward swipe but eventually she heard a hiss and the duel doors obeyed the command. As they walked through the door he said to her,
“The camera saw two people at the door. It will not respond until each has swiped their cards. Remember that next time.”
Lynda thought they were entering the elusive secret laboratory but upon a quick glance, the contrary became obvious. Looking around she saw a long row of what on first impression reminded her of gymnasium lockers in a changing area. There were rows and rows of lockers each with a name above denoting the owner of the cubicle. In front of the rows was a metal stool obviously for the comfort of scientists getting dressed or undressed as the direction dictated.
She saw an old man sitting there casually taking off his shirt and pants and to her great shock eventually strip naked. Without as much as a glance to the two new arrivals, he slung a white towel around his waist. As he entered what she thought was a shower area, a naked female scientist was on her way out, also and very casually holding a towel in front of her. There was not so much as a casual glance between them. The woman returned to her cubicle, faced it, doffed the towel and oblivious to Lynda or Whelan began dressing.
As Whelan sat down to undo his shoelaces, he casually pointed to a cubicle and said,
“You can have that one.”
When she realized what was expected of her, an embarrassing numbness flowed through her body. Her saving grace, the only reason she swallowed hard and conceded to the embarrassment was that it was not a bedroom. Turning her back to Whelan, resisting fingers started to undo her blouse buttons. She could not resist sneaking a furtive peek over her shoulder toward Whelan who was by this time walking bare ass into the shower area holding the towel by his side.
A quick glance confirmed that nobody else was in her row of lockers. The other female had dressed and gone. As quickly as possible she stripped down and with blinding speed tied the towel around her. Just in time for here came another man from the shower room. He smiled, nodded but said nothing. He continued past her and disappeared into another row of lockers.
Thank god the shower area was not communal. There were individual cubicles each with a door. She quickly ducked into an empty one. It was a surprisingly cramped stall with just barely enough room to turn around. Puzzled she looked around for the showerhead and taps. There was none.
She was suddenly bathed in a red light that emanated from each of the four walls and glowed over her skin like a heat light. The hum from behind the panels did little to erase her timidity. Just as fast as the intrusive light was turned on, it snapped off. She wondered what humiliation could be next. The latch she had so carefully made sure was locked, suddenly unbolted and the door swung open.
Because of a locked door, it was not possible to go back and reenter the changing area. Turning around, looking for another exit, she saw a door at the other end of the decontaminating room. As she approached, it hissed and swung open. After making sure the towel was doing its job, she stepped through.
It was another room filled with rows of lockers just like the other one with stools in front of each compartment. Whelan was standing there already clad in his white bio-clean suit’. The only thing left to do was to close up the Velcro seams. He looked over to see a white towel tightly wrapped around a pale white body. Again he pointed to a stall and said,
“That one’s yours.”
She gulped when noticing that it was uncomfortably right next to his.
As he snapped on his latex gloves, he had the courtesy to turn around. She dropped the towel and scampered into her ‘clean suit’ as quickly as modesty would permit. She thought he might have given her a quick one-eyed check but by the time she snapped her head around he had avoided capture. It appeared that he really was a gentleman after all. As she fumbled with the suit, he said,
“It’s a Clean Lab. You have just been decontaminated.”
“Thanks, but you could have warned me first.”
”Yea, I guess. It’s just that I didn’t think you’d go through it if it involved stripping down.”
“Well, thanks for not looking.”
As he got up, he looked her in the eye and teased,
“And what made you think I didn’t?”
Her jaw dropped. His smile was boyish and laced with teasing. She hoped that was all it was, just teasing. He said,
“Come on, the lab is waiting.”
Chapter 9
Again, an air lock hissed and steel doors opened. She saw they were not ground level to the lab but rather two stories above it. Looking down, she saw a cavernous laboratory. When she saw what was down there, shock and amazement struck her hard. Expecting her amazement, Whelan, using a
casual tone said,
“What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen one before?”
Still suffering amazement, she managed to gasp out,
“No, and it’s certainly not something one would expect to see two hundred feet underground.”
One more step carried them onto a rather flimsy elevator platform. Her eyes locked onto the center of attraction below. Just like a beehive, she saw uncountable scientists chaotically milling about performing various tasks. She noticed that everything in the lab was white and glistening clean.
In the middle of the floor was a huge steel contraption looking like a dead spider on its back with stiff legs sticking up and bending inward. The steel equipment or ‘dead spider’ was probably twenty feet long and ten feet across. The metallic legs protruded out to the side and as high as maybe twenty feet. It was what the legs were supporting that struck her numb. She managed to fumble out the question,
“Is that a flying saucer?”
His reply was casual.
“Yeah.”
Stunned eyes were held transfixed on what she couldn’t believe was really a flying saucer. In the clear Australian nights she had seen many strange things but never once did she think them to be extraterrestrial. After all, she knew about Air Force secret projects and test flights.
A loudspeaker echoed through the laboratory and snapped her out of her stupor.
“Commencing phase out in, five, four, three, two, one.”
Because Whelan knew what was going to happen, he held back on pushing the ‘down’ button. Inquisitively she looked around wondering what was going on down there. Suddenly an annoying droning sound vibrated through the air as if from nowhere. The tingles produced slight stings of pain through her spine.
She saw that the saucer looked as if it was made of stainless steel but knew better than to think it was. As the droning harmonics intensified, the saucer strangely started to undulate like a mirage in the middle of the desert. Then, although seemingly impossible, it disappeared. As she had still not come to terms with the impossibility of seeing a flying saucer, now seeing it disappear seemed anticlimactic. The voice over the loud speaker bellowed forth.
“Let’s get those numbers crunched. I need something to do up here.”
When the nauseating harmonics echoing through the laboratory as well as in her head became less irritating, she watched as a wave action between the empty struts started slowly undulating. When the droning finally turned off, like a figment of the imagination joining the real world, the saucer came back from wherever it had gone. She again heard a voice over the loud speakers,
“All right people. We have complete recovery this time. Let’s get those readings entered and try to figure it out.”
Whelan then pressed the descend button and the elevator started with a slight jerky motion. She quickly gripped a metal pipe serving as a handhold. She noticed that all scientists gravitated to computers and started entering the results of whatever had just happened. Slowly descending, she could not take her eyes off the center of attraction.
Lynda Gray was accustomed to secret projects. Her years in the RAAF were often wrought with surprises and secrets. Although the presence of an object disappearing and then materializing right in front of her eyes astounded her, she was determined not to show it. Mustering as much restraint as possible she looked to Whelan and casually said,
“Isn’t that interesting? Are we retro-engineering flying saucers now or trying our best to make one that works?”
He noticed her laid-back pretense and gave one of his own.
“That requires an answer beyond your classification.”
Not accepting defeat, she pried deeper.
“Can you at least tell me if it’s ours?”
He shook his head and said,
“No.”
“No what? No it isn’t ours, or no you cannot tell me?”
Seemingly enjoying the game, he smiled and said,
“That’s right.”
As much as she tried to retain a detached facade over seeing a flying saucer, she was still staring at him waiting to get an answer that was not coming. He saw something in her eyes that shut the teasing down and prompted a return to purpose. A mild jolt indicated they had reached the floor. He conceded to the glare and said,
“We have work to do. Let’s get to it.”
As they stepped onto the floor, nobody noticed the new face in the crowd. All were too busy staring at their monitors or running around seemingly pushing buttons at random. He led her to a metal table off to the side, away from the scientists all so busy pounding on their computers. The whole chamber echoed with keyboard clicking. There was a black case sitting on the table about the size of a briefcase, which he opened. She saw five hermetically sealed vials and thought it was to collect bio-samples of the scientists. She had a stunned thought. ‘What the hell are they expecting me to find in this place?’
Not knowing exactly what was expected of her, she thought it best to go along with their feeble attempt at locating germicides. Making sure her rubber gloves were tight, she pressed her fingers together and said,
“Well, first I’m going to need to know where poor Jimmy Hatcher was working when it happened.”
She turned to Whelan, gave him a wry smirk and added,
“Unless of course my security clearance is not high enough for that.”
Not wishing to play this game anymore, he simply walked away and she followed.
He led her to a metal desk about four feet from being directly under the lip of the saucer. The table was covered with a white sheet. Because all the scientists were busy analyzing data, she and Whelan were the only ones near the table. The table was empty so she assumed somebody had removed all of Hatcher’s things and spread this sheet over it, perhaps to keep it clean for another scientist. Whelan said,
“This was his work area. Whether he managed to get the hole in his hand here or somewhere else is not known.”
After pulling the sheet off, she placed the medical case on the table. She snapped the latches and pulled a hermetically sealed cotton swab out of a glass vial. Under Whelan’s scrutiny, she swept it across the table as if doing a miniature dusting and then carefully replaced in the sealed vial. Preparing to do it again, she said,
“I presume you are going to send these samples out. I have no idea what you are looking for nor do I have the equipment to look for it.”
Whelan did not answer or even indicate that he heard her. As she was placing the second swab into another vial, she happened to notice that the cotton tip of this one was frayed. It was a puzzle because the table was smooth. As it seemed to be the only thing out of order in this neat and orderly place, she ran another swab over the same location and this time she saw why. Because she did not know if it was supposed to be there or not, she turned to Whelan and whispered,
“Why is this hole here? Is it supposed to be there?”
Puzzled, Whelan peered hard until he too saw it.
Almost in the middle of the table was a hole the diameter of a thick needle. For a reason still not clear, she thought of the hole in Hatcher’s hand and how it went straight through it. Her next question puzzled Whelan almost as much as why the hole was there. She whispered,
“Do you have a torch handy?”
Not clear why they had to whisper, he responded,
“What do you need fire for?”
Deciding not to go there, she quickly rephrased her request.
“How about a small flashlight then?”
He could not find a flashlight but returned with a laser pointer. She did the same thing with the table as she did on Hatcher’s hand. It was placed over the hole and turned on. After telling him to hold it in place, she knelt down and placed her open hand under the table. There was a small red dot on the palm of her hand. When she took her hand away, she noticed that the beam continued downward to the floor. Somehow she was not surprised. She called up to Whelan,
“Get down here and l
ook at this.”
They were on their hands and knees under the table looking at a hole in the floor. She asked,
“Is that supposed to be there?”
Quagmire's Gate Page 9