Majestic

by Whitley Strieber

  He kept a .38 Special in his bedside table. If he was quick he could probably get his hand on it before they moved, but I he'd be bound to take at least a couple of shots before he could bring his own weapon to bear.

  Hell.

  Moving his head very slowly he tried to look across the room.

  A woman was standing there, big as life. As on a stage she was lit from above.

  He sat up. She was young, and so beautiful he all but cried out from the pain of seeing her. There was recognition, shocked, confusing. He loved this woman as if he had always known her—as indeed he had. She was mother, daughter, lover, the betrayed woman within us all. She was the one in whose lap we lie when we are babies and when we die.

  When a boy on the battlefield calls for his mother, it is she who comes. She is why we make love so often.

  No matter how deeply we penetrate the bodies of our lovers we never reach her. Our eternal striving for her has brought the whole human race out of our loins. With the softest of smiles on her lips she rose into the air and went right through the ceiling, disappearing in a swirl of flimsy blue skirts.

  The synopsis of his hypnosis states dryly that he cried when he described her departure. And now in Will's garden, with the traffic hissing beyond the wall and a child singing next door, now I am also betrayed by the old man's traitorous tears.

  His unease, on that distant night, finally got the better of the admiral. He woke his wife. "I'm having trouble sleeping," was all he cared to tell her.

  "Would you like me to make some hot toddy?"

  "That would be a sainted act."

  She stretched and kissed his cheek and slipped from the bed.

  The admiral got out of bed and went to the divan under the window. From here he could see the moon's low sickle riding the oak tree that stood in the side yard.

  She brought the toddy and he sat sipping it. His mind went back to the dream, and he reflected that an old man running an organization like CIG really was playing with the futures of hundreds of young people.

  He knocked back the drink and returned to bed with his wife. He entered what was for him an unusual state between waking and sleep. The transcript of his hypnosis revealed a very strange encounter.

  A beam of blue light came down from the ceiling and began to move slowly back and forth in the room. Hilly was paralyzed. Finally it found the bed. It moved up the sheets, then up Hillenkoetter's cheeks, until it rested just between his eyes.

  The center of his forehead glowed white.

  And the beautiful lady walked into his dream. She was young, no more than twenty, and wearing a light-blue summer dress. He thought that she was the prettiest girl he'd ever laid eyes on. She had a piece of chalk in her hand.

  She turned to the blackboard (he seemed to be in a schoolroom) and wrote a single word in block letters.

  "MAJESTIC."

  Then she lectured. Even under hypnosis he was so taken by her beauty that he could not remember her words. That was the cunning part of it, of course. They were probably standing right around his bed with their big bobbing heads, pulling that girl out of his unconscious and making her their tool, their way into his deep mind. Their weapon.

  She laughed and tossed a curl from her eyes. And there his hypnotized narrative ended, as he recalled waking up. His ordinary file contained the rest of the story.

  He remembered being filled with a sense of malignant, creeping evil. Something awful was about to happen, some slouching horror to come through the dark window.

  Damned if he was going back to sleep now. Anyway, he'd had an idea. Really a hell of an idea. He put on his robe and slippers and went down to his study.

  There he wrote out the organizational plan that remains to this day the basis of majic. He created an agency that would oversee every detail of our relationship with the aliens, and designed it in such a way that it has kept itself almost perfectly secret.

  When he was finished he looked over the sheets of legal paper. He was excited.

  As he worked he had become more and more aware of just how urgent this really was. He saw that he also had a chance to make a lightning strike against Vandenberg and close this thing up now and forever as a CIG/CIA project.

  His sense of urgency was so great that he began to think that he ought to bypass everybody, Van, even Forrestal, and go to the President right this second.

  He'd also figured out something else. Once the initial leaks were fixed, this business of the aliens was going to stay secret forever.

  He knew exactly how to accomplish that goal. The secret would be permanent and it would be total.

  He had not only this night created the Majestic Agency for Joint Intelligence (MAJIC), but also conceived of this foolproof method of entombing it behind an impenetrable wall.

  It was twelve-thirty. A hell of a nervy time to call the President.

  He looked at the phone.

  Roscoe Hillenkoetter was not close to Harry Truman and right now that was a problem.

  He had not often before availed himself of the private number in the apartment at the White House. But he didn't want to go through the staff. He wanted to reach out to Truman man to man. There wasn't any other way to do something as sensitive as this.

  He dialed the number. A woman's voice answered on the second ring.

  "Mrs. Truman?"

  "No. This is the night maid."

  "This is Roscoe Hillenkoetter. May I speak to the President?"

  "I will give you Mrs. Truman. She's up reading. The President is asleep."

  Bess Truman came on the line immediately.

  "Oh, hello, Hilly. Just a minute." He heard her waking him up, then a brief exchange as she identified his caller. Then the President's distinct "What does that old shoe want?"

  "What's the matter, Hilly. Can't sleep?"

  "No, sir."

  "Urgent?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'm up for it, if you don't mind pajamas and a robe."

  "I'll be there shortly."

  Hillenkoetter replaced the instrument. He went upstairs and dressed as quietly as he could. Then he kissed his wife's cheek and slipped out of the room.

  He took with him in his briefcase the report on the two missing soldiers, which he had received that afternoon, his handwritten outline of the Majestic agency and another couple of documents that would be relevant to the meeting.

  It was a muggy Washington night; he went to the garage and pulled out his car.

  He drove almost automatically, staring out the windshield, trying to frame his proposition in such a way that the President would accept it. Above all, he did not want to frighten Harry Truman. That was the trouble with this whole business: it was so full of scary implications that it made sound judgment almost impossible.

  Despite the late hour there were, of course, plenty of lights at the White House. The west entrance was actively guarded. He pulled up and got out of his car. He was taken through the dim public rooms to the private elevator. He was taken up to the apartment.

  Now things changed. Suddenly he was in the Truman home, a family's private sanctum.

  The President was in the sitting room. He wore the promised pajamas and robe. There was a smell of freshly brewed coffee. Harry Truman stood up and took the admiral's hand. "Hello, Hilly. We'll have coffee in a minute."

  "Thanks for seeing me, Mr. President."

  "Glad to. Since you've never before called me out of bed, I'm expecting something special." His eyes narrowed. "What happened? Stalin shave his mustache?"

  "My news isn't that big."

  "Then maybe it's something we can handle."

  "You've read this?" He handed the President the staff report on the two disappeared soldiers.

  "God, yes. It makes my blood boil. These bastards are kidnapping our boys."

  "Yes. And look at this." He brought out one of the other documents, this one from the FBI. It was a synopsis of the annual report on crime statistics for the period 1944-1946. "A substantial j
ump in missing persons."

  "A man comes home from the war. Finds out he doesn't really like his old life, decides to start all over. One more missing person. A lot of men have been coming home from the war just recently."

  "What if that's not what it means?"

  "Hilly, it's a horrible thing to contemplate."

  "It seems possible."

  The President looked steadily at him. "I wish I had something more than provocative speculations. These aliens or whatever they are could be entirely innocent."

  "Not entirely. The boy who disappeared at the crash site. That is certain. They took him."

  "Look, Hilly, what are we supposed to do?"

  "Well," Hillenkoetter replied, "first I want to point out to you that we're taking the disk and the bodies to Los Alamos for analysis."

  "Van made a case for taking the disk to Wright Field."

  "I know that!"

  "You and Van are fighting like a couple of tomcats in heat over this thing."

  "More like a couple of crazed weasels, Mr. President."

  Truman laughed. "You're an honest old bastard for a spy, Hilly. And I'm not unaware of the fact that the Hill is now under control of the AEC. And that the new administrator is a Navy man. Admiral."

  "Aye-aye, sir."

  They both laughed, this time. "You've got your disk unless Van stages some kind of a raid or Hoover commandeers it as state's evidence."

  Hillenkoetter went white. "I hadn't thought of that!"

  "Don't worry, Hoover hasn't either. So far all he's done is phone me and whine about the Joint Chiefs. He thinks it's Van's show. The question is, Hilly, how do we prevent this squabbling from messing up our project?"

  Hilly jumped at the opening. "That's why I came here so urgently, Mr. President. I would like to propose the immediate creation of a secret agency to handle this. It would be a sort of clandestine Defense Department."

  "A big agency?"

  "As big as necessary."

  "Big is hard to hide. Especially if it has to stay hidden for years."

  "I've thought of that." He took a deep breath. The woman of his dream swam into vision. He pushed the memory aside. "We tell each man we involve that the aliens themselves are the architects of the secrecy, and that they will destroy the nation if we reveal the secret."

  Truman threw back his head. He made a short sound like a bark in his throat. "Goddamn. That'll sure as hell do it. That'll bury this thing deeper than King Tut's tomb." Suddenly the public face was there, bright and cheerful and reassuringly tough. "That's a hell of an idea, Hilly. A real motivator!"

  The public face collapsed, and Truman was Truman again. The fighter, and quick. He took a cigarette out of a silver box on the coffee table.

  As he was lighting it the night maid brought the coffee in. She placed the silver service on the table and poured. Hilly took his black, and found that even White House coffee could be overboiled.

  "Okay," Truman snapped as the maid withdrew, "you've had your pregnant pause. Get on with it."

  "I see the agency as having sealed compartments, sharing secrets on 'need-to-know' basis only. All reporting to a single administrator."

  "Tried and true structure for a secret operation."

  "It kept the bomb secret."

  "What're you going to call your baby?"

  "Majestic."

  "What a horrible name."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "It sounds like the King of England had a hand in it."

  "Well, something to identify it as awesome."

  "Majesty. Magic. The Magic Group."

  "There was a Majestic Group at one point. It would be a bit of a diversion if there's ever any digging."

  "Fine, then. Do what you want."

  "Yes, sir. We'll call it Majestic."

  Hilly saw Truman's eyes literally glaze over. It was as if he'd been turned off by some hidden switch. "I'll read your proposal and get back to you in the morning with any comments."

  "I'm sorry to do this in the middle of the night, sir."

  "You and me both, Hilly. Now do you think you can sleep?"

  "I wonder what happened to those boys."

  "We have about four thousand unknown soldiers. Now four thousand and two. Missing in action and presumed killed. It happens to soldiers. That's why they get their dogface pay."

  Hillenkoetter was surprised by the depth of emotion in the President's voice, the tenderness and deep anger behind the hard words. He could see why this man had dropped the bomb.

  He took his leave of Truman.

  What happened next isn't quite conjecture on my part, but Will does not possess a written record. He knows that Vandenberg visited the President shortly after Hilly left. What exactly was said we don't know, but I think we have the gist of it.

  The moment Hilly walked out the door the President called Van.

  Before he arrived Truman read Hilly's rough proposal a number of times, thinking matters over. He was forced to agree that secrecy should be maintained until we knew more. But it wasn't right and he knew it. The public should be told at the first possible moment.

  If he waited too long he would never be able to tell, because he would never be able to explain the reason for the delay.

  The first essential step was guaranteeing U.S. airspace against the intruders.

  He had worked himself into a state of considerable agitation by the time Van arrived in full uniform.

  "Why the hell'd you waste time putting on all those duds, Van? I've been waiting."

  "Sir, I'm ten minutes from a dead sleep."

  "Well, that's not too bad considering the brace of medals you've got to hoist. I've got a brilliant proposal from Hilly and I'm going to go ahead with it tomorrow morning. I'm setting up a new agency within the purview of Central Intelligence to handle this alien business."

  "Sir, the Air Force—"

  "I'll tell you what the Air Force is going to do!"

  Vandenberg looked shocked.

  "Sorry, Van. I'm on edge. Disappearing soldiers. Kids. That bothers me like the dickens."

  "What can I do to help, sir?"

  "You have full and complete authority to take immediate hostile action the next time one of these disks shows up within shooting distance of any gun in the possession of the Air Force! And you take that as an order!"

  "Mr. President—"

  "Look at this damn FBI report. Disappearances doubled between 1944 and 1946. Is that related? These two soldiers—you've seen Hilly's report?"

  "Yeah."

  "Van, we are under attack and I want action! I want response!"

  "Mr. President, you will get armed response from the Air Force."

  "You tell your pilots to shoot down anything that looks like those gun-camera photos you have."

  The visitors had very cleverly left him without choices. Tell the public they might be kidnapped by aliens and the government was helpless? Hilly was dead right. You had to bury this in a tomb.

  "Mr. President, it's possible that I will be unable to shoot the craft down."

  "Then get the capability! If you can't shoot one down then I'll declare a project bigger than the Manhattan Project on this. We've got to regain control of our airspace, General!"

  Vandenberg's eyes hardened. "We will, sir."

  Truman dismissed him. For a few minutes he sat smoking and thinking, shuffling Hilly's papers. But he was not a reflective man. Shaking off his upset he returned to the bedroom. He tossed his robe on a chair.

  Bess half woke. "Is it all right?" she asked.

  "Hell no," he said as he got into bed, "it's not all right. Not by a long shot."

  Being Harry Truman, he then turned over and slept like a baby until morning.

  July 12, 1947 TOP SECRET/MAJIC

  EXECUTIVE ORDER

  SUBJECT: ESTABLISHMENT OF MAJESTIC AGENCY FOR JOINT INTELLIGENCE (MAJIC) Copy 2 of 1 2

  The purpose of this agency will be to coordinate all United States activities connected in
any way with nonhuman alien presence, including the management of the Majestic Scientific Group, military BLUE TEAM activities and FBI/CIA(G) surveillance activities designed to establish and maintain all MAJIC-related operations at the highest level of security obtainable.

  The TOP SECRET/MAJIC classification is now the highest level of classification.

  MAJIC Initial Organizational Structure—MJ-1

  MAJIC is a coordinating and management group, reflecting the same centralization concept contained in recent legislation establishing the Central Intelligence Agency. MAJIC will be overseen by the Director of Central Intelligence, who will report on all MAJIC activities to the President as appropriate and advisable. DCIA will receive the MAJIC

  Designation MJ-1. Admiral Hillenkoetter is appointed MJ-1(1) by order of the President. Positions MJ-2-4 are MAJIC administrative positions. Should project SIGMA (referenced below) succeed, MJ-1 will institute project PLATO, seeking to establish ongoing communications of a diplomatic or negotiational nature with the aliens. The first objective of this project will be to attempt to control alien incursions into US airspace and alien contact with US citizens.

  MJ-2 Position

  MJ-2 is the designation for director, MAJIC Operations. Mr. Wilfred Stone is appointed Director, MAJIC Operations, MJ-2, by order of the President. Further appointments within the Operational Group to follow. The primary responsibilities of the MJ-2 position will be two. The first will be administrative and collational, gathering and synthesizing all output from all other MAJIC positions and transmitting them in an orderly manner to MJ-1. The second will be diplomatic. MJ-2 will create an office (Designation: SIGMA) that will seek means of communicating with the aliens.

  MJ-3 Position

  The MJ-3 position is the Civilian Operations Coordinator responsible for propaganda and maintenance of public ignorance in the face of extensive and obvious alien activities, which include substantial and publicly visible flyovers of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and Identified Alien Craft (lACs). They also apparently include the abduction of civilians as well as military personnel for unknown reasons. The primary MJ-3 mission is to guard the fact that government cannot prevent these activities and does not know their purpose. MJ-3 will operate a program of denial and ridicule. The natural skepticism of journalists will be enlisted by total, absolute and blanket denial of any and all sightings, disappearances, observations of landed craft, etc. This program will be carried out no matter how obvious the truth of a given report. It is essential that NO sighting no matter how obvious be explained as an "unknown." Such explanation may lead to difficult questions and journalistic demands and will threaten this program. Further, MJ-3 will orchestrate the ridicule of civilians who come forward with witness accounts. If they are persistent, such civilians will be methodically discredited. Persons associated with scientific institutions and universities who are too interested in this subject will be warned away.