A score of scientists and technicians moved around the ship, taking readings, making minor adjustments, scanning the surface with curious blue lamps, their equipment on portable tool carts, making them look like high-tech auto mechanics. In several places, long gray scars zigzagged across the surface, showing where the scientists had patched the craft up after it cracked apart in the New Mexican desert.
“She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” Okun wiggled his bushy eyebrows.
Julius whispered loud enough for everyone to hear, “Ha! Never any spaceships recovered by the government?”
Whitmore brushed past Okun to get a better look. He walked directly under the spacecraft and reached up to touch the surface. Etched into the surface of the plate armor were thinly cut grooves arranged in patterns.
“These designs,” the president asked, “what do they mean?”
“We have no idea,” Okun replied, as if he’d never thought about it. In fact, he’d thought about the markings obsessively. He’d even managed to arrange a security clearance for one of the world’s leading cryptographers, Dr. D. Jackson, who had once spent three frustrating weeks trying to figure the markings out before being called away to another government project.
“Are you telling me we’ve had one of their ships for forty years and we don’t know anything about them?” Whitmore asked testily.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Okun assured the president, “we know tons about them. But the supercool stuff has just started happening in the last couple days. See, we can’t duplicate their type of power, their energy. But since these guys started showing up, all the little gizmos inside have turned themselves on. The last twenty-four hours have been wild—really, really exciting.”
The president exploded. “Millions of people are dying out there! I don’t think exciting is the word I’d choose to describe it!”
The cavernous room echoed the words as everyone fell silent, letting the president blow off some steam. Whitmore walked to the far edge of the ship, trying to gather his thoughts, but a single image had plastered itself like a billboard to the inside of his forehead: his wife Marilyn being overwhelmed by a sea of fire. Staring blankly into the dim recesses of the room, his eyes began to fill with tears. He wasn’t going to cry, wouldn’t allow himself that kind of personal indulgence. He sucked in a long stiff breath, then wiped his eyes, trying to make it look like he was massaging a headache.
General Grey took over, filling the silence. “Doctor, I’m sure you understand we’re in the middle of a very severe emergency. Now, what can you tell us about the enemy we’re facing?”
Beginning to appreciate the urgency of the situation, the long-haired scientist answered more soberly than before. “Well, let’s see. They’re not all that dissimilar to us. They breathe oxygen and have similar tolerances to heat and cold… That’s probably why they’re interested in our planet.”
“Whoa! Why do you assume—” David started to blurt out a question, then stopped to check if that was okay. Grey and Whitmore both signaled it was. “What makes you think they’re interested in our planet?”
“Just a hunch,” Okun said, cleaning his glasses with his tie. “They’re animals like us and they have a survival instinct. Perhaps some catastrophe drove them from their home planet and now they’re wandering around. Also, I’m guessing they need space because they’re ranchers or farmers; they do some sort of animal husbandry.”
“How do you know that?”
“You’re standing under the answer. Those large plates, the ship’s armor. If you examine them under a microscope, you’ll find hairline striations and even pores!” Okun saw that none of the visitors understood the implication. “That means, of course, that the plates are grown rather than forged. Each one is as individual as a human fingerprint. We don’t know how they do it. I think it’s done through bioengineering, manipulating the DNA so that the shells grow to precisely the same size. But Dr. Issacs believes they grow the animals in molds, the way the Chinese used to bind women’s feet to keep them under a certain size. As to their age, we can’t be entirely sure. We’ve developed a variation of the carbon fourteen test which indicates the plates take about eighty years to grow. And, if our methods are reliable, the plates on this ship are between three and nine thousand years old.” Okun, still a geeky college boy at heart, looked around at the visitors mischievously. “Hey, you guys wanna see them?”
*
Reports of UFOs hovering in midair for several moments then darting off at unbelievable speeds were not uncommon over the southwestern desert of the United States. Nearly all of these sightings were made by unreliable witnesses who say they were alone at the time. Inevitably, reports filed by highly credible sources, such as the one made by former President Jimmy Carter while governor of Georgia, inspired dozens of copycat observances.
But on the night of July, 4, 1947, something happened that no one could explain away. Hundreds of citizens in and around the town of Roswell, New Mexico, claimed to have seen a glowing, disk-shaped object, about sixty feet across, streaking northwest across the sky. Immediately, they flooded the local sheriff’s office, radio station, and newspaper with a deluge of phone calls. Certain the thing they had seen was not of this earth, the entire town spent the night gathered in restaurants and the parking lots of supermarkets trading accounts of what they had seen and nervously watching the sky for signs of unusual movement. Public reaction bordered on near-hysteria at times: It was still the main topic of conversation when, a few days later, the United States military issued a press release: they had recovered the wreckage of a crashed flying saucer which they believed to be of extraterrestrial origin. This startling announcement was made by Colonel William Blanchard of the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell Field, who later went on to become a four-star general and vice chief of staff of the United States Air Force.
The afternoon after the mass sighting, a local rancher, W.W. “Mac” Brazel, had found the wreckage of an unusual aircraft on his property. The pieces were made of a material he’d never seen before and some of them had markings on them, something like hieroglyphics. Mac followed the trail of debris out to where he found the ship—and the body he would never admit to seeing later. Figuring it was one of the experimental aircraft from the nearby army airfield, he drove into town and called the base at Roswell, seventy-five miles away. A squad of intelligence officers hurried to the scene to examine the wreckage. That night they broke the story to the press.
Then, just as surprisingly, they denied their own story. Following visits to the site by one high-ranking military delegation after another, a second news conference was called. They said it was a weather balloon. A strange new type of weather balloon, possibly put up by our dreaded enemies, the Soviets. No one believed a word of it, but the army stuck to its story. The reporters who had descended on the scene were not allowed to examine the evidence. It had already been airlifted out of Roswell to an undisclosed location, where it would undergo “further testing.”
The glowing object observed that night over Roswell was a scout plane that had broken off its much larger parent ship, which was hovering at the edge of earth’s atmosphere. Like hundreds of flights before and after it, the ship had conducted several hours of research and observation. It was only moments away from completing its mission when the parent ship was suddenly threatened with discovery and bolted away. The scout ship had wandered further than it should have and now lay behind the curve of the earth, preventing the energy flowing from the parent craft from reaching its engines. The occupants of the craft, realizing they only had a few minutes of reserve power, panicked. Rather than raise their ship higher into the air, they darted northwest, back to the area they were assigned to explore. As they tore along, their sensors screaming of imminent engine failure, a shield of negative ions covered the ship and, reacting with the ship’s own strange form of energy, created the soft moon-bright glow seen from the ground. Too late. The left engine exploded into a thousand fragments, and a moment later, the s
hip bottomed out on the desert.
Two of the aliens inside had survived the crash; the third was dead. The stronger of the two survivors struggled for over an hour before finally opening the hatch and pulling himself outside. He dragged himself off the edge of the ship and 120 feet across the sand before he was attacked by a pack of coyotes. As they nipped and gnawed him to death, his comrade inside the ruined ship felt every hideous bite and heard every soundless scream. He sat paralyzed inside the vessel until, the next morning, the earthlings began arriving. The surviving alien was airlifted by helicopter to Roswell Field, then flown by an army medical plane to a new super-secret facility, Area 51.
*
Okun led the way to a door as thick as a bank vault. Using a distinctive triangular key, he opened it. Issacs slipped into the pitch-black room and fumbled around until he found the light switch. Once a high-security lecture hall with theater chairs facing a podium, the room had become, over the years, a graveyard for Okun’s obsolete scientific equipment. The president and his entourage stepped over and between the piles of expensive junk, moving to the front of the room. The focal point of the space was a trio of metal cylinders, five feet wide, running from floor to ceiling.
“Is everybody ready?” Okun asked like a barker outside a circus tent. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we affectionately refer to down here as the Freak Show.”
He was on the verge of saying more—he had a whole routine he usually went through—but a frown on the president’s face made him cut it short. He entered a sequence of numbers into an old-fashioned security keypad and the three cylinders began to lift upward into the ceiling.
Behind the cylinders were three glass tanks, each one containing the body of a dead alien floating as peacefully as mermaids in a murky solution of formaldehyde. Their long frail bodies, orange and yellow under the lights, were in various states of decay. Their spindly bodies hung like kite tails from large bulbous heads. Gentle black eyes the size of eight balls on either side of a tiny beaklike nose gave the faces a startled expression, as if they were just as surprised as the earthlings on the other side of the glass.
Okun studied the faces of the visitors and noted all the usual reactions. Some looked frightened, some lit up with curiosity, and others turned away in revulsion.
“When my predecessor, Dr. Welles, found these three, they looked a whole lot different. They were wearing biomechanical suits, horrible looking things with long tentacles coming off the back and shorter ones on the face. The two on the sides died in the crash, and it was only during the autopsies that Welles discovered the creatures inside. Once the suits were off, we were able to learn a great deal about their anatomy. Their senses are many times more sensitive than ours. The eyes, as you can see, are much larger than ours and have no irises to limit the amount of light they can receive. The auditory nerves and olfactory organs are coterminous, ending here in the nose. Our theory is that they can not only hear sounds, but also smell them. The same goes for odors; they must be able to ‘hear’ the scent and smell it at the same time. Cool, huh?”
Oops, he’d done it again. Okun held up his hands, apologetically, but the president was too involved with learning about the aliens to pay much attention.
“Continue.”
“Okay, let’s see. Circulatory system. They don’t have a central organ, a heart, like we do. The blood is kept moving through their bodies by the peristaltic motion of the muscles. They have no vocal cords, so we’re assuming they communicate with each other through other means.”
“What kind of other means?” David broke in. “Obviously you’re not talking about hand gestures or body language.”
“No. They seem to use some kind of extrasensory perception.”
“Telepathy,” Issacs put in bluntly. “They read each others’ minds.”
“Well, now, Dr. Issacs,” Okun looked up at the ceiling, a sarcastic tight grin smeared across his face, “as we have discussed many times, there is still no trustworthy scientific evidence to support that claim. I don’t want to start engaging in speculation and give our visitors the impression that we’re a bunch of crackpots.” He shot a dagger glance at Issacs, who stared back just as icily.
“What the hell are you two talking about?” demanded the no-nonsense Grey.
Issacs came forward out of the shadows and explained. “The one in the middle survived for eighteen days after the crash. Dr. Welles did everything he could to save the creature’s life. On the tenth day, he reported having the sensation that the thing was reading his mind. On the eleventh day, he claims that he and the creature ‘spoke,’ not with words, but in images and feelings. These conversations continued until the creature became too weak and eventually died. The sense he took from these ‘conversations’ was that these beings meant us no harm, that their intentions were peaceful. That’s why we didn’t warn anyone. We had no idea anything like this was going to happen.”
When the bearded doctor finished speaking, everyone looked at Whitmore for his reaction. If they were expecting him to forgive the scientists for not alerting the world to the danger of invasion by these powerful predators, they were wrong. Instead, he turned again to Okun.
“I’m still thinking about something you said out there by the ship. You said ‘that’s probably why they’re interested in our planet,’ and then you said they raise other animals. Do you know what these things eat?”
The image of humans being herded together in pens, fattened outside the doors of the slaughterhouse, naked and crowded, occurred suddenly to everyone.
Julius couldn’t bear the thought of it. “That’s revolting. Are you saying these things are going to make us into sausage?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking the doctor,” Whitmore replied.
Okun was visibly disturbed out by the idea. The way his face twitched, he must have been imagining it pretty vividly. For the first time, he started to understand just how serious the situation was.
“They do have mouths, very small ones right there under the beak, but they’re nothing more than slits in the skin. The autopsy also found a set of digestive glands that secrete a highly corrosive substance. Nothing was found in any of the stomachs, so we don’t know what they eat.”
“One more question.” The president walked closer to Okun. “How can we kill them?”
“Geez, that’s a toughie,” he said, lacing his fingers on top of his head to help him think. “Of course, their bodies are even more frail than ours. The real problem is getting past all the technology they’ve developed to protect themselves. And judging from the little bit of it we’ve seen, that technology is far more advanced than ours.”
David had wandered around to the other side of the glass tubes and was making a close inspection of the sinewy corpses when his nation’s leader called on him.
“David, you’ve already unlocked one part of that technology. You cracked their code, translated their signals in a relatively short time.”
David hadn’t realized that he and the president were on a first name basis. With the curve of the tube distorting his face, he answered, “Oh, I don’t know about that, Tom. All I did was stumble onto the signal because it was disrupting the… I don’t know how helpful I can be.”
“Show them what you’ve discovered. I want the two of you,” he meant Okun and David, “to put your heads together and, hopefully, come up with some answers.” Then he leaned close enough for David to know it was a challenge. “Let’s see if you’re really as smart as you think you are.”
UNAUTHORIZED VISITORS SUBJECT TO IMMEDIATE ARREST.
TRESPASSING ON THESE GROUNDS IS A FEDERAL OFFENSE PUNISHABLE BY UP TO THREE YEARS IN FEDERAL PRISON.
The signs were posted every five hundred feet beside the single lane of asphalt leading toward Groom Lake. Other signs warned of hidden cameras and radar observation. All the warnings were real. They were put in place to discourage the intrepid UFO fanatics who were always trying to infiltrate the area for a look a
t the flying saucers the government had either developed or captured, depending on whose story you believed. If this were like any other day, two teams of military police would have been lurking in the sagebrush, waiting to make arrests. But it was like no day the earth had ever known.
Steve was riding in the back of a pickup truck with his prisoner and four men carrying shotguns. They kept a close watch on the thing beneath the orange parachute. If it woke up, they were ready to open fire. It seemed to take forever before they reached the tall chain-link fence with the barbed wire looped around the top, and the guardhouse that stood at the main entrance.
Two enlisted men, unfortunate enough to draw gate duty on the day the world was ending, shut off the news and came outside holding some serious-looking assault rifles. When Steve stood up in the back of the pickup, one of them hollered to him.
“Sorry, Captain. We can’t let you through without clearance.”
“You wanna see my clearance. Come over here, Private, I’ll show you my goddamn clearance.”
The soldier reluctantly came toward the bed of the pick up truck. Steve grabbed a fistful of the guard’s collar and tore back the parachute, holding his face inches away from the ghastly exoskeleton.
The guy jumped back, shitting in his pants.
“Jesus Mary Joseph! Let ’em through,” he yelled to the other guard. “Let ’em through.”
*
When David’s head popped up through the floor, he experienced the sensation of entering a strange, darkly exotic galaxy. The interior of the attacker was a dim, oppressive chamber. Its rounded walls, dripping with creepy, semiorganic technology, felt more like the inside of a crypt than a flying machine. His first impulse was to call the whole thing off and climb back down the ladder. Okun, already inside, made matters worse by grinning maniacally through the gloom and saying, “I think you’ll find this supremely cool. I do.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 19