Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  Jenkins, subchief of the CIA’s Domestic Collections Division, did little to disguise his feeling that this meeting was a waste of time. “Are you proposing that the committee adopt the Wells plan?” The oft-proposed and always-rejected course of action recommended by Wells called for nothing less than a full-scale preparation for war, a series of projects so large that the presence of the aliens would soon become public knowledge. The plan was always rejected by an overwhelming margin. Secrecy was priority number one, and there were two reasons for this. In the wake of every group sighting of a UFO, civilians became hysterical. There was no telling what kind of mass chaos the country would face if the government were forced to confirm the presence of these visitors. The second, related reason, was that no one wanted to take responsibility for having kept the information hidden for over twenty-five years. Secrecy begat secrecy, one denial led to another, until the participating agencies found themselves, a quarter of a century after the crash at Roswell, sitting on a full-blown conspiracy to keep the American public—and the world—in the dark. There was not a chance in hell that anyone in that room was going to commit himself to an effort like the one Wells had envisioned, especially given the present unstable political climate. No one wanted to be caught holding the bag if Congress started one of its investigations into the nation’s spy agencies.

  Then Nimziki unleashed his bombshell. “I’ve decided to support Colonel Spelman. After reading through some past reports and looking at the tape we’ve just seen, I think the time has come to start taking this threat seriously.”

  Since Nimziki had joined Smudge, he had been the most ardent critic of the Wells plan, arguing that it was a gigantic waste of time and money, that the aliens posed no significant threat. In fact, he had taken a personal dislike to Wells and had not been content with kicking him out of Smudge, but had stripped him of any security clearance and had him run out of the government altogether.

  Jenkins grinned across the table. He knew Nimziki well enough to realize there must be some ulterior motive at work. “What exactly does the deputy director have in mind?”

  “The plan I’m proposing takes certain elements from the one dear old Dr. Wells drew up. But, as you might expect, it’s significantly more low-key. It calls for the formation of a rapid deployment alien-vehicle intercept force, a Special Weapons And Tactics squad capable of getting to one of these aircraft before it gets away. At the same time, I want to revamp and redouble our efforts at Area 51, to see if we can’t get some results from the craft we already have. I have some long-term plans to get things moving out there.”

  “This SWAT team. What would it do?”

  “The purpose of this force would be to gather better visual information on these craft, attempt to establish radio communication, and, if possible, to bring one of them down for further study and reverse-engineering purposes.”

  “You mean you want to shoot them down?” asked one of the Navy guys, visibly agitated by the idea.

  “Is that wise?” Dr. Insolo asked. “Let’s not forget, these airships are armed. They have laser cannons which, except in the Wisconsin case, they haven’t used. We don’t want to start a fight we’re not sure we can win.”

  Jenkins nodded. “He’s right. Besides, what good will it do to capture one of these rascals? We’ve already got the one that went down at Roswell, and that hasn’t done us a lick of good.” One by one, the members of the committee took turns raising objections and pointing out shortcomings of the plan. Then Jim Ostrom, aka the Bishop, asked the question that was on everyone’s mind.

  “This is an about-face for you, Albert. I remember when Dr. Wells used to make rather similar proposals, and you’d sit there and shoot him down. What’s changed? Is it this film we just watched?”

  “No, it’s a story I heard from your colleague at the NSA, Dr. Podsedecki.” Podsedecki, a former Wells-supporter and leader of the Walker Greens, a secret society within the already hypersecret National Security Agency, was a sort of legendary cult figure in spy circles.

  “It goes like this. Let’s say you’re out for a hike in the mountains with some old friends. You’re walking down a narrow trail surrounded by tall grass. It’s a beautiful day, and you’re looking around enjoying the scenery when the hiker right behind you suddenly shouts RATTLER! How are you going to react? Do you stop and consider the credibility of your source? Wait for additional evidence to satisfy your threat-assessment criteria? Or would you go into immediate action, doing everything in your power to locate the threat and determine its precise nature? The tape we’ve witnessed this morning is one of two things: it’s either a snake in the grass, or something that appears to be a snake in the grass. In either case, it’s our responsibility to find out.”

  “Shoot first, ask questions later,” Jenkins commented sardonically.

  If the comment bothered Nimziki, he didn’t show it. “There’s one aspect of this plan that doesn’t appear in your briefing papers. Given the political climate inside the beltway at the present moment, we all expect to see a slew of new appointees. Even if Nixon weathers this storm, his major appointments are sure to face scrutiny and possible replacement, most likely with a bunch of Midwesterners with spotless records—guys like Jim Ostrom.”

  Everybody who knew Jim laughed. He was a real Jimmy Stewart-type. “But unfortunately,” Nimziki went on, getting to the most delicate part of his presentation, “these people aren’t necessarily going to be as good at maintaining secrecy as Jim is. In other words, Project Smudge faces exposure, especially if we go ahead and adopt the proposals we’re considering today. Exposure of this information to the public would, of course, be a disaster, especially now. Americans aren’t sure they can trust the government at the moment, and we don’t want to do anything to exacerbate that perception. Therefore, I propose consolidating these programs under one roof.”

  “The question is: Whose roof?”

  “Mine.”

  “Yours? The CIA would take control of the project?”

  “Not the entire CIA,” he explained, glancing at the team from Domestic Collections. “Just me. At least until things settle down.”

  The generals could hardly suppress their delight. This young hotshot seemed to be offering them a valuable and unexpected gift, a way out of Project Smudge. If they understood him correctly, they would all be able to wash their hands of the government’s “dirtiest little secret.” After a long moment of silence, Dr. Insolo spoke up.

  “The Science and Technology Directorate, for one, would be extremely interested in such a proposal.” Knowing that Nimziki would have a price, he went on to ask, “What would a program like this cost?”

  Spelman and Nimziki took turns explaining the rather creative funding structure they had devised. It was something of a shell game that would cost each agency less than three million per year. To get out of the project, the agencies would have paid five times that price. Within a matter of minutes, the members of the committee voted unanimously for the official dissolution of Project Smudge. Then, all smiles and handshakes, they began heading out the door, anxious to get on with other business.

  Bishop Jim stopped in the doorway and leaned in for a private word with Nimziki. “It’s an awful risk you’re taking, Albert. All it would take would be for one of these ships to buzz over Cleveland during an Indians game and… well, it wouldn’t exactly be good for your career. But I trust you know what you’re doing.” What Nimziki was doing was following his instinct for accumulating power, for picking cards up off the table and tucking them up his sleeve until he needed them.’

  Before he went, Ostrom had one last piece of advice. “I like the idea of getting things running again out at Area 51, but be careful you don’t have too much success with it too quickly. If the military finds out you’ve got that ship up in the air, this committee will come back to life faster than you can say the words ‘Soviet Union.’ You need to be careful who you select as your new lead scientist out there. Make sure it’s someone you ca
n trust.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Nimziki replied, “I think I’ve already found the perfect guy for the job.”

  2

  RECRUITING FRESH BLOOD

  Brackish Okun was a certified, bona fide, clinically tested genius. But this wasn’t the opinion most people formed of the twenty-one-year-old science student upon first impression. He was often mistaken for a simpleminded hippie kid with very strange taste in clothings. It wasn’t so much the bell-bottom corduroy slacks or the riot of pens, calculators, and slide rules crowding the breast pocket of his Perma-Prest shirts. Nor was it the mop of long hair that straggled down to his shoulders. The thing that most made him appear to be nothing more than a simpering blockhead was his constant nodding. Whether he was concentrating on a lecture, listening to music, or working through a thorny mathematical equation, Okun nodded. His friends teased him about it. His mother tried to get him to stop, telling him it was an obnoxious habit akin to cracking his knuckles. But Okun continued to nod. And those who spent time with him, rather than convincing him to stop, often took to nodding themselves. Although seemingly insignificant, there is a case to be made that, contained in this single quirk of character, this continuous cranial quivering, was Okun’s entire orientation to life and the universe. The action signaled a positive and optimistic outlook, an ongoing acknowledgment and approval of the world around him. It was an affirmation of whatever or whomever he was focused on, especially when he nodded in conjunction with one of his favorite phrases, “groovalicious,” “I dig,” or “cool to the power of ten.” His nodding showed him to be fascinated and intimately involved with each of the billions upon billions of details that add up to create a day. But to those who didn’t know him well, it just made him look like a dimwit.

  In April of ’72, staring down the barrel of graduation and, beyond that, the frightening prospect of holding a real job, Okun began having second thoughts about the way he’d spent his years at Caltech. Earlier that semester, recruiting officers from major corporations like Lockheed, Hughes, and Rocketdyne had come to the campus and hired a bunch of numbskulls just because they had good grades. Okun had earned mainly As or Fs, leaving him with a dismal 2.1 grade point average. After a stellar performance in high school, where he’d won several awards and citations, crowned by the achievement of being named the winner of the nationwide Westinghouse Science Talent Search, he’d squandered his time in college. It’s not that he’d stopped learning. His mind was still an unquenchable sponge thirsting for knowledge and all of that, but he’d spent way too much time applying his prodigious skills to a series of oddball projects that the school’s administration had classified as pranks.

  One such stunt, which Okun thought he should get course credits for, happened during Caltech’s annual “Hawaii Week.” After gaining unauthorized, after-hours access to the chancellor’s office, he and his friends—who called themselves “the Mothers” in honor of Frank Zappa’s band—carried in a few dozen sandbags, some surplus tubing, and a giant polyvinyl tarp. They set to work constructing a small heated swimming pool right under the noses of the school’s founding fathers, whose stem portraits hung on the walls of the office between its floor-to-ceiling bookcases. By the time the campus police arrived in the wee hours of the morning, the stuffy office had been transformed into a tropical paradise. Dozens of undergrads were skinny-dipping in the pool or lounging on the leather sofas sipping Mai Tais and listening to ukulele music. After a stern lecture from the chancellor, the incident was forgotten.

  But the incident that was to shape the life and career of this young Einstein-with-a-mood-ring was to involve a flying saucer, and it would take place in broad daylight.

  One afternoon, as students and faculty began filling Caltech’s central plaza to enjoy the sun during their lunch hour, Okun and the Mothers were holding a secret meeting in the stairwell of an adjacent building that bordered the plaza. After a final check to make sure the plan was ready, they broke off in separate directions to launch the attack. Okun and a couple of other Mothers climbed the stairwell with a box of radio equipment and began setting up their command post on the roof. Peeking out between the balustrades, they could see the unsuspecting crowd below without being seen themselves.

  A few moments later, precisely on schedule, a Mother named Chris Winter sauntered into the plaza carrying a nine-foot ladder under one arm and a large cardboard box in the other. Something about the way he walked through the quad announced the fact that something mischievous was afoot. Winter set up the ladder, climbed to the top, opened the box, and removed a perfect balsa-wood replica of a flying saucer. He lifted the twenty-two-ounce vehicle over his head until he could feel it react to the invisible field of energy shooting through the air. Slowly he took his hands away, and a roar of approval erupted from the crowd. He quickly grabbed the ladder and disappeared, leaving the little saucer hovering in midair.

  From his hiding place, Okun looked down on his audience and nodded in satisfaction. He tested the joystick on his remote control, and found it worked tolerably well. The radio waves sent the small ship wobbling first this way, then that. Inside the saucer, a supercharged, plate-sized magnet reacted to his command, causing the saucer to bob and skitter over a strong field of electromagnetic energy being pumped into the quad by a trio of cleverly disguised wave-particle generators the Mothers had liberated from the applied sciences building. Undergrads rushed up to get a closer look at this strange spectacle, laughing, catcalling, and looking everywhere to see who was making it fly. But the fun really started when Okun switched on his microphone and began talking to the crowd via the transistor radio speaker he’d built into the saucer.

  “Greetings, Earthlings. My name is Flart. We are from the planet Crapulong. We come in peace. But we demand your cafeteria stop serving those cruddy fish sticks on Friday. This is a crime against the universe. We also demand that the one you call Professor Euben get a new toupee.” It wasn’t high-caliber comedy, but it put the crowd in stitches. The voice coming from the teetering saucer was distorted and full of static owing to the magnetic energy in the air, which only made Okun sound more “like an alien.”

  The charge in the magnet should have lasted a full hour, but the flight was cut short when Flart made the mistake of flirting with the wrong earth girl, telling her that he, master of the universe, found her extremely desirable and would she consider spending an intimate evening with a being one-tenth her size? The crowd and the girl found all this hysterically funny, but after a while her boyfriend had had enough. He shouted to the unseen operator of the remote control vehicle to knock it off.

  “Lieutenant Zarfadox,” came the answer from the saucer, “prepare the anal probe. This Earthling obviously has something stuck up his ass.” And so ended the flight of the alien Flart. The boyfriend hurled an apple, which struck the ship broadside just hard enough to dislodge it from the invisible net provided by the three generators. It crashed to the pavement with Flart shouting a long string of expletives. Once the generators were safely back in their labs and the Mothers had sat through a stern lecture from the chancellor, the whole incident should have been forgotten.

  But the next morning, a brief account of the event appeared in the LA Times. Although the three-sentence article explained it had all been in good fun, it sufficiently impressed one reader, one of the CIA’s army of “burrowers,” who clipped it out and started a file: “Okun, Brackish (?)” In years to come, this one-page file would expand and multiply until it had become a monster, filling a cabinet all its own.

  *

  That April, the file grew considerably when the CIA came visiting. At eight in the evening during midterm week, Okun and the other Mothers had decided not to brave the crowds in the library. Instead, they’d retired to his dorm room, affectionately known as the Pad of Least Resistance, to engage in certain herbal rites. As smoke filled the room, they engaged in what was, for them, a rather typical conversation.

  “Dude, you know what we should do?” Wint
er croaked, struggling to keep from exhaling as he passed the ceramic vase-shaped instrument back to the load-master. “We should put up mirrors in fill the halls so when you’re going to class the whole school is like a hall of mirrors at a carnival.”

  “Cool squared,” Okun nodded. “We could invent a new product called Mirror Paint and coat every surface in the room with it.”

  The Mothers were pleased and showed their approval with a round of silent nods. “Mirror paint. I like.”

  “What if everything in this room was covered in mirror paint? The walls, the bed, the plants, all these books…”

  “And dig this: the final step would be to dip our bodies in mirror paint so everything in the room, except your eyes, was a mirror.”

  “Then we could make mirror contact lenses, so we’d disappear completely and you’d have to feel your way around the world.”

  More nods.

  This important research discussion was interrupted by a knock at the door. It was an official-sounding man-knuckle rapping that sent the Mothers into immediate action. While Okun stashed the bag, Winter opened the windows and began fanning smoke out of the room. The knock repeated itself, insistent.

  “Just a minute,” Okun yelled. “I just need to finish this one thing.” Grabbing a textbook off the bookshelf, he opened the door a crack and saw a man in a suit standing in the hallway. He banged the door closed and mouthed the word “NARC!” to the wide-eyed Mothers.

  “Excuse me,” the voice came through the door, “I’m looking for Brake-ish Okun. My name is Sam Dworkin, and I’d like to speak to him about possible employment.”

  After a moment of indecision, Okun opened the door six inches and slid through the gap into the hallway, a little puff of smoke trailing him outside. Once he got a good look at the man, he relaxed a little. He was about sixty-five and seemed to be alone.

  “Are you Brake-ish Okun?”