by Dan Holt
“Well, Azell, I understand that you have something to show me; something that you could not courier here; something you had to deliver personally.” Azell, as if on cue, leaned forward, opened his briefcase, pulled out a file jacket, and then got to his feet. He looked at Stockton again, adjusted the nod, and then began to deliver a report that he’d waited fifty years to give.
“At first I thought it was just a power surge that fried the electronics in the IG519-A satellite,” he said. “But,” he indicated the file jacket, “as it turns out; it’s more—much more.”
“What?” Stockton said, interested. Azell walked across the office, turned an adjusted the nod again, then gestured with his hand.
“Are you familiar with the Missing Midget Summary presented to this office in late 1947?” Stockton frowned at the unexpected inquiry. “I know it was before your time...,” Azell added.
“I read it,” Stockton interrupted. “Two saucers crashed, a total of ten seats, only nine aliens were found, where’s the other one?”
“Ah, you read it,” Azell said. “It is well that you did…well that you did.” Azell paused, still looking at the agent, with his head cocked back and his mouth open.
CIA Agent Charles Manly Stockton began to get irritated with constantly looking up the nose holes of the older code specialist. He didn’t like him. He never did. The only thing keeping the obnoxious little seventy-one-year old here was his uncanny ability to decipher signals. The old fart knew it and chose to be deliberately irritating. He’d get rid of him as soon as there was a window of opportunity. Or, maybe he would die. Stockton leaned back in his chair.
“I can tell you where the Missing Midget is. He died on the way here and they committed his body to deep space. The military would have found him if he’d been on that ship that crashed in those trees. They sifted that area for twenty years.” Azell smiled, and then opened the file jacket. He pulled out a report consisting of several pages of technical information, and then a page typed in plain language.
“That power surge that destroyed the satellite was a very powerful transmission beamed toward the Orion Star Cluster.” Azell gestured with the report as he spoke.
“Beamed from where?” Stockton said.
“Roswell, New Mexico.” Stockton forgot about the nose holes. He unlaced his fingers, laid his hands flat on the desk and stared at the report in the expert’s hand.
“Now,” Azell continued, “I took the ten second signal, isolated it, then started slowing it down. When I got it slow enough, what it really was, jumped out.” Stockton straightened up in his chair.
“What was it?” he said, leaning forward. Azell stepped over to his desk and laid the plain typed paper in front of him.
“Coordinates,” he said. “A set of four coordinates.”
“Coordinates!” Stockton said and grabbed the sheet of paper and scanned it.
It read:
.611138791125 000000000000 .217680000004
3
33 23 46
104 31 22
“Our Missing Midget sent a message home,” Azell said. “Come and get me.” Stockton looked at the typed page again.
“Is this the whole message?” Azell nodded.
“How did you get that from this,” Stockton said pointing at the coordinates. He knew the old man was right. Hell, he always was.
“On the first set of coordinates,” Azell began, “the first set of numbers is how far the Solar System is from the Galactic Core, counting the distance from the Galactic Core to the edge of the Galaxy, as one. It checks out. The second set of numbers is the location of the Solar System relative to the Galactic Plane. It checks out. The third set—this took me a couple of hours, is…
“Wow,” Stockton interjected. Azell glanced at the agent for a moment then chose to ignore it.
“…is how far the Solar System is off a line drawn from the Galactic Core through the Orion Star Cluster to the edge of the Galaxy. It checks out.” Azell looked at Stockton. The agent’s eyes still showed question.
“The set of three groups of numbers is how to get to the Solar System from Orion,” Azell concluded. Stockton looked back at the list.
“And the second entry is….” Stockton looked up at Azell; they said it together, “the third planet.”
“The other two entries are Earth coordinates,” Azell finished.
“Where?!” Stockton said awkwardly.
“Roswell, New Mexico.” Stockton jumped up from his desk and walked rapidly around it toward the door. He abruptly stopped in the middle of the room and turned. He didn’t know where he was going. He quickly began studying the page again. He looked up at Azell.
“When? Do you know when they will be here?” Azell shook his head.
“The message did not conclude,” Azell offered. “Transmissions usually conclude with “Over,” signing off, awaiting your reply, etc.; there was nothing as if the transmitter was deliberately left open but only for incoming. I’m not sure what to make of it. My educated guess is the transmitter continually updates itself on his location so he can move around to avoid being discovered. Then the transmitter will update his rescuer when the ship communicates with it.
“You’ll be able to pick up that transmission?”
“Yes, and I will be able to tell you where the signal came from. However, there’s no way to know how much time you have to get there. Here’s another thing,” Azell continued: “The Orion Star Cluster is over a thousand lightyears away from Earth. Unless their communications are different from ours, his message will not arrive there for over a thousand years. It seems to me that there would be no point in sending it. Therefore, I believe they can communicate in the Quantum World where any distance is instant. Or, Agent Stockton, they have a mother ship nearby; out at the edge of the Solar System or perhaps at the Lagrange Point. At any rate our Missing Midget is still in Roswell; at least he was yesterday afternoon when this message was transmitted.”
Stockton hurried back behind his desk, sat down in his chair and grabbed the phone then looked up at the aging code specialist.
“Thank you, Azell. Not a word…”
“Of course not,” Azell interrupted then picked up his briefcase and stepped to the door, opened it, then stopped and turned toward Stockton. The agent put the phone back on the cradle without dialing then raised his eyebrows.
“What’s our Missing Midget been doing the past fifty years?” Azell said, holding the agent’s eyes for a moment, then went out the door and closed it.
Agent Stockton picked up the phone.
…
Chapter 10
HOUSTON
Brandon and Audrina, with their charge, left Elizabeth Rainwater in the late afternoon, planning a fourteen-hour drive with only brief stops for fuel and service station sandwiches, to finally pull into their garage in rural Houston. They plotted a course of heading south through Carlsbad and on to Interstate 10, and then follow it across the bottom of the country to Houston. Orion, sitting in the back seat, would wink out while passing through cities, towns, and oases on their route.
The Sun was just pushing away the darkness in the early morning sky when they arrived. Exhausted, they showed Orion to the guest room, pointed out the TV, and then informed him that they must rest. He nodded and turned on the TV and settled down in front of it.
Brandon and Audrina finished a bacon and egg breakfast at 11:00 a.m. Orion ate a piece of bread. Brandon looked at Audrina.
“Dad and Mom, especially Mom, have a right to know about the secret segment of Grandpa’s life. Grandpa kept it quiet because of orders by the military. But, I believe, considering what we found because of his gift to me, he would want his daughter to know. His experience in the military did affect his life. Also, his daughter faithfully keeping her promise to him turned out to be very significant. I’m going to call Dad and Mom and ask them to come down this afternoon and stay overnight so they can meet Orion.”
“I agree,” Audrina said. “Your mothe
r was magnificent with that promise. You’d better prepare them to meet Orion; let them read the letter, show the Keepsake and discuss it. What is your father’s position toward the possibility of extraterrestrials?”
“Average, I guess. We’ve never discussed the subject in detail.” Brandon picked up the phone, called his parents, and spent some time explaining that he and Audrina were back home early because of what Grandpa left him. It was so unusual that he wanted them to drive down to Houston for a visit so he could show them the gift. His mother, intrigued, agreed. They would leave in about an hour and arrive around 6:00 p.m.
Brandon and Audrina spent the afternoon communicating to Orion the details of the adventure they had experienced in past days that lead up to this moment. Their concern was that Orion might communicate with Ray and Kathleen without encountering difficulty. There was much to consider, especially if Orion’s rescue proved to be a long drawn out affair. They wondered what the wisdom was here. In a better world, they would be able to call the NASA Administrator and make an appointment to introduce him to Orion. Then he would make the arrangements to introduce Orion to the President and hence to America and on to planet Earth. Then have, on TV for the benefit of all, the meeting of all time. But, Earth was not ready for that simple approach. It wasn’t ready in 1938 during the Orson Wells radio show. The listening audience at the time, most beginning to listen after the fictional drama about aliens had started, believed it was real and panic spread rapidly throughout the area. There was an even worse reaction in the 1947 Roswell Incident. And, save for a group of dedicated scientists, Earth is not ready now. Brandon and Audrina had some serious thinking to do and a prudent action to take, or perhaps, not take.
6:15 p.m. - Rural Houston
“Okay,” Kathleen said, sitting at the dining room table with Ray, Brandon, and Audrina, “what did Dad give you?” Brandon, holding this grandfather’s letter in his hand, looked up at his mother.
“A fantastic adventure and an answer to a very big question. Mom, Dad, did Grandpa ever mention aliens or extraterrestrials to you?” Ray and Kathleen looked at each other then back to Brandon. Ray responded:
“Ah, he might have mentioned sometime through the years. You know, there has been lots of movies and books about the subject. I don’t recall any specific conversation on the matter. Why?” Brandon’s mother looked from Ray’s face to Brandon.
“When we opened the bank box in Wichita Falls there was a blue velvet draw string pouch inside. In the pouch was this.” Brandon handed his mother the Keepsake. She looked it over, noted its lack of weight then handed it to Ray. For a moment, they both looked up at Brandon. He handed them the letter. “This was in the pouch with it.” They read the letter together then Kathleen took it and read it again.
“Oh, my God!” She said looking from face to face. “The Roswell Crash; he was involved with the Roswell Crash!”
“There’s more,” Brandon said, “a lot more. When Audrina and I read that letter and saw the sphere we decided to go to Roswell and see what we could find out about it. When we got close to the crash sites,” Brandon picked up the Keepsake, “This started flashing.”
“Flashing?” Ray said.
Brandon nodded. “It turned out that this is a proximity device. You can locate whatever is transmitting to it by measuring how far apart the flashes are. We drove site to site and did some measuring and discovered that what it was transmitting to was at a house in a grove of trees out in the desert near Roswell.” Ray and Kathleen were listening intently. Brandon continued: “We got the number off the mailbox, went to the post office, and discovered that a doctor lived in the house. A doctor Elizabeth Rainwater.” Brandon glanced at Audrina and decided to skip the episode with Audrina’s collapse and visit to the hospital.
Brandon continued: “We went to the hospital, found her, and told her about the Keepsake leading us to her house. At that point she told us a most unusual and fantastic story; a true story.
This Keepsake was electronically connected to an alien device that was on the spaceship that crashed at Roswell in 1947. Elizabeth, twelve years old at the time, and her parents; Dr. Compton Rainwater and his wife, were camping about a quarter mile away from where the ship crashed that night. One of the aliens that was on that ship survived the crash. He was injured but was able to get out of the ship and hide in the forest. The alien made its way through the woods to the tent where the Rainwater’s were camping, approached them, and asked for help with its injuries. Dr. Rainwater exercised compassion and rendered aid to the Creature. They took it home with them to heal.
“The following day Compton Rainwater was called to the base at Roswell Army Air Field to do autopsies on the aliens that were killed in the crash. Seeing the Army’s reaction, he decided to conceal the injured one at his house.”
“Is it still alive, I mean, still living?!” Kathleen said.
“Yes,” Brandon said. “It’s a he, and his wounds healed and he was okay. Now, Mom, Dad, brace yourselves. Elizabeth Rainwater is in her sixties and she asked us to bring Orion, that’s his name, with us and watch out for him until his people get here to take him home. We agreed and…we did.” Kathleen and Ray stared at Brandon for a long moment then looked over at Audrina then back to Brandon.
“Where is he?” Kathleen asked.
Brandon paused a moment then turned toward the guest room door. “Orion.”
Ray and Kathleen’s eyes went to the door. It slowly opened. Orion stepped out of the doorway and into the room. Kathleen took a breath then her hand went over her mouth.
Ray caught his breath. ”Son-of-a-gun!”
Brandon spoke up: “Orion can speak directly to you mind. Just relax and let the thoughts in. Brandon nodded to Orion. He spoke to both Ray and Kathleen.
“Bandon told me about your father. I’m glad to meet you.” Kathleen, breathing heavily, nodded.
As the evening wore on communications with Orion became, more or less, conversational. If you didn’t look to see if his mouth was moving it seemed relatively normal. Orion, on his second day as a houseguest of Brandon and Audrina spoke to them dually.
“I have watched your television. I have learned many of things about you, your planet, and your culture. You are a planet of divided peoples. You war with each other. For this reason, you have developed monitoring machines. Those machines probably picked up my transmission to my people. What do you think they will do?” Brandon and Audrina looked at each other.
“I hadn’t thought about that,” Brandon said. “If they picked up the signal, and you can bet they did, they will send a team to Roswell to find you.”
“Elizabeth needs to be warned,” Audrina said and stepped over to the phone. She opened her purse and pulled out Elizabeth’s card then dialed the number for her home. Elizabeth’s voice seemed strong and upbeat.
“Dr. Rainwater,” came from the phone. Audrina sat down in her chair.
“Elizabeth, this is Audrina.”
“Well, Hello, how’s my alien?” Audrina laughed.
“He’s fine. We introduced him to Brandon’s parents yesterday; he was a hit.”
“I’ll bet he was.”
“Elizabeth,” Audrina began, “we wanted to warn you. Orion said that his transmission to his people was more than likely picked up by the nations monitoring equipment. NORAD, or JPL, or maybe other listeners of the sky. Brandon thinks they may send someone to Roswell to see if they can find something. They may be knocking on your door.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Elizabeth said, “I’ve got lots of practice.” Through the years, on several occasions, people have actually seen Orion. He would quickly blink out. Most of the time the witness simply would shake his or her head and dismiss it. A few times it took the victim a while to declare it a hallucination, with my help, of course.”
Audrina and Elizabeth visited on the phone for some time. Audrina gave Elizabeth an open invitation to come and visit Orion anytime. Perhaps he would be leaving soon and Elizabeth m
ight wish to say goodbye again. Elizabeth indicated she just might do that.
Brandon, Audrina, Ray, Kathleen, and Orion, sitting at an 8:00 a.m. breakfast, began discussions on a very awkward development. A houseguest from the Alnilam Solar System.
“Okay,” Brandon said, “we are sitting on a powder keg here.” Audrina looked up at Brandon then at Orion. He was eating from a box of Post Toasties, one at a time.
“What do we do now?” Brandon added.
Audrina responded. “If we are going to protect Orion until the arrival of his people we are going to have to go about business as usual so nobody will suspect he’s here.”
“That’s what you should do,” Kathleen said.
Brandon and Audrina walked Ray and Kathleen to their car. Kathleen looked up at Brandon.
“Let us know when his people get here and he’s actually safely with them.
Brandon nodded. “I will, Mom.”
Cha
pter 11
AGENT STOCKTON
Agent Charles Stockton stepped off the airliner in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Theron Wilson, black, too young to be smart, too smart to be young, an agent with the best of both worlds, met him; shook hands, then indicated the direction to the commuter plane to transfer them to Roswell.