“What question are you thinking of?”
“Are there more aliens out there, and are they going to come back?”
4
THE Y
The elaborate dinner the scientists had cooked up was reheated, but by the time the food was actually ready to be served, no one felt like eating after Radecker had gone off like a hand grenade for a second time.
He’d gone down to the director’s office to nose around in his new digs and found something that made him very, very unhappy. In fact, after a few minutes of examining the lab’s accounting ledgers, he was furious. Everyone in the kitchen stopped what they were doing and listened to the shouts bouncing off the walls. He came storming down the hallway and stopped in the doorway. In his hand he had a stack of receipts. On his face he had an indignant expression, which he focused on Dworkin. “Were you guys thinking I wouldn’t turn you in when I found out about this? Have you all gone crazy from living down here so long?”
I can’t really believe Spelman has given this barbarous hothead any real power, Dworkin thought, knowing he would have to defend himself against this uppity technocrat.
It hadn’t taken Radecker very long to discover some of the creative bookkeeping procedures the scientists had developed to help them through the lean years of underfunding. Among other things, he’d checked the active personnel roster. According to this document, there were supposedly nine old men working at the belowground facility—one of them 103 years old. Every month, a government paycheck came in for every name on that list. Radecker wanted an explanation. “What happens to the extra paychecks?” he demanded. Cibatutto suddenly remembered an urgent errand over near the oven, so the task of explaining fell to Dworkin.
“We cash them,” he explained.
The scheme had been in operation for several years. When it became clear that the flow of money for the project was slowly being choked down to a trickle, the staff had either resigned in protest or received transfers to other places. A hard-core group of twelve refused to leave. They all felt the questions surrounding these visitors were too urgent, too important, to let the lab die. So they dedicated not only their energy, but very often their personal savings as well to the effort. They had pooled their money to pay for new equipment and services such as the chemical tests they’d had done on several alien materials. When the members of this fraternity began to die off, their purchasing power declined as well. They couldn’t get at the money in their retirement accounts, so they created a new one. They’d found a small bank in Las Vegas, Parducci Savings, that was known for asking very few questions, and they opened a joint account. Every month the checks were endorsed and deposited.
“I knew something was wrong when I saw all that new equipment in the other room.”
“Sam,” Freiling whispered loudly across the table, “this young man is angry with us. Who is he?”
“And this is ridiculous!” Radecker blew up again, pointing at Freiling. “The man is senile, totally unfit to be working here. The only reason you’re keeping him down here is so you can collect his money. He’s leaving on the next cargo plane.”
“Mr. Radecker, please. We have maintained very detailed records, which I would be glad to have you examine. They show how every penny of the money was used to further our research efforts. Take a look around the labs, and you’ll see we haven’t used these funds on any extravagances for ourselves. We have dedicated our entire lives to the task of repairing and studying this vehicle. Area 51 is our home. It’s been Dr. Freiling’s home since 1951. He has nowhere else to go. We are his family now.”
Radecker stood in the doorway, shaking his head at the ceiling. Dworkin’s speech seemed to soften his stance, but only slightly. “Do you understand how much trouble you could get into for this? How am I going to explain this to Spelman? I suppose you want me to hide it from him and hang my own ass out on the line.” He waved the papers in the air once more. “This is corruption, gentlemen. This is theft, this is tax fraud, this is…” An idea suddenly occurred to him. With a sickened expression on his face, he gazed at Dworkin. “Tell me these dead guys aren’t buried down here.”
“No, no. We own a group plot at a cemetery outside of Las Vegas.”
Disgusted, Radecker marched away back to his office.
“Sam”—Freiling looked up at Dworkin—“don’t let him send me away.”
*
Brackish’s room was a former office suite on the same corridor with the other scientists. It came with its own bathroom and a plain steel bed with a lumpy mattress. He stretched out in bed that night and told himself he should think about everything that had happened on this, the most extraordinary day of his life. But he found he couldn’t stop thinking about the generator on the ship. He hadn’t gotten a chance to ask them why they called it the aqua-box despite its decidedly non-aqua color.
On the one hand, it seemed so simple: the ship’s power system wasn’t holding a charge. There must be a rupture in the circuitry. In that case, it was merely a matter of locating the broken line and stitching it together as Cibatutto had shown him. On the other hand, it could be some other problem, something totally unrelated to the circuitry, something so exotic no human being could even conceive of its existence. The first possibility was, as Dworkin said, like looking for a needle in a haystack. The second offered even lower chances of success.
Nevertheless, he decided to center on the second possibility. His instincts told him to trust the work the scientists had done over the past twenty-odd years. Not only that. He didn’t want to be down there for twenty years himself duplicating their efforts. He decided to assume that the scientists had reassembled every piece of the ship correctly and that it was “good as new.” He found himself thinking about the little balsa-wood-and-magnet saucer he’d caused to fly over Caltech. If someone had come along and found that saucer on the ground and started looking for its power source, they could put it together ten million ways and never figure it out. The power wasn’t inside the ship. It was in the electromagnetic cannons strapped to the walls. Could the aliens have space-based generators? Of course, they wouldn’t be EMFs, or we’d have picked that up as radio and television distortion. He smiled at the ludicrous picture in his head of megamonster power stations circling the earth and beaming power down to the UFOs. But if the power wasn’t inside the ship and wasn’t being “beamed in” from the outside, there wasn’t any place left except for… That was it! In a flash, Okun hit upon, an idea that would obsess him for years to come. The power must somehow exist between the ships. Maybe the reason the system wouldn’t hold a charge was that it had been designed not to. Hadn’t Dworkin said something about the energy being drained out of the ship? “Purged” was the word he had used. If the power was being intentionally drained from the system, where did the energy go once the ship spit it out? It had to go to another ship, which would spit it right back. He had a vision of the stingray ships flying in groups, most likely arranged in rigid geometrical patterns. If this was a warship of some kind, it would make perfect sense from a tactical point of view. If every ship were continuously powering all the others, a squadron could maintain the power of its ships even if some of them were lost. There was only one problem: the idea contradicted something Radecker had told him about the so-called bigger picture.
Out in the hall he heard whispering. He got up and went to the door. Three of the scientists were out there holding a conference. As soon as they saw Okun standing in the doorway, they quickly said good night and broke their huddle.
“Pssst, hey, you guys. I think I figured out the power problem.”
The men didn’t seem to be at all interested and retreated toward their rooms. As Dworkin moved past him, Okun stepped out into the hall. “Sam, I was thinking about the power supply. What if—”
“Young man, I’ve had a very difficult evening, and I need some time alone with my thoughts.” Not only was Dworkin upset about his confrontation with his new boss, he knew from long experience that,
newly arrived visitors to Area 51 invariably had a middle-of-the-night epiphany that would miraculously answer, once and for all, all the mysteries surrounding the ship. Right now he was in no mood to listen to the uneducated guesses of this enthusiastic post-adolescent. It didn’t help that Okun was standing there in nothing more than his jockey shorts and a pair of mismatched socks when the long-established decorum of the labs called for robes to be worn when using the common areas at bedtime. “We can talk tomorrow.”
Dworkin disappeared into his room. When Okun turned around, both Lenel and Cibatutto were shutting their doors as well. He considered going to see Radecker, but thought better of it. If there was going to be a conflict between the misfit employees and the tight-ass management, Okun knew which side he wanted to be on. It looked like his theories would have to wait for the morning.
He had just resigned himself to going back to bed when old Dr. Freiling came shuffling around the corner. It took Okun about five minutes to explain the idea he’d hit on. When he was done, the old man looked up at him and asked him to say the whole thing again. Even though he thought it was hopeless, Okun knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway, so he went through the idea once more. When he was almost finished, Freiling surprised him by saying, “That’s a pretty dam good idea. If it were true, it’d explain a lot. But there’s a problem.”
“I know,” Okun said, beating him to the punch. “This ship came alone on a onetime exploration mission.”
“That’s a bunch of nonsense. Who told you that?” the old man demanded, even though he’d been standing right there when Radecker had explained this to Okun. “Don’t start making things up, young man. It’s tempting, I know. There are so many questions and so few answers, but you can’t start assuming things you have no proof for. We don’t know whether this ship came alone or was part of a group.”
“But Mr. Dworkin gave me the idea that—”
“Bah! Don’t trust everything Sam tells you.” The old man leaned forward and looked over the top of his bifocals. “Like the rest of us, he’s not getting any younger and, just between you and me, I think some of his screws are coming loose. No, the problem with your idea is proving it. If you think the ships work in groups, you’ll have to get another ship down here to see if you’re right.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Unless…”
“Unless what?” Okun asked. Freiling had gone into a long blank stare. It was hard to tell if he was thinking something through or had fallen asleep with his eyes open. But suddenly, the old-timer snapped out of his trance and began explaining a complicated set of procedures for testing the multi-ship theory. Once he had explained the whole idea, Okun glanced at him sideways, and said, “Can you say that whole thing again?”
*
Half an hour later, Freiling had rustled up the other scientists and herded them into his room. They listened first to Okun explain his ideas, then Freiling told them the experiment he’d come up with. The others were not as convinced as Freiling, but liked it nonetheless. Besides, they were desperate to show Radecker some progress before he had a chance to start shipping them out. Once they had all signed on, they shuffled down the hall to see the boss.
They found Radecker still awake, and, once the ideas were explained to him, surprisingly cooperative. So cooperative, in fact, that he didn’t even bother to think through the implications of what his science team was telling him. It was all mumbo jumbo to him. It didn’t seem to bother him that the whole idea contradicted the one-ship-onetime theory he’d been so insistent about earlier that evening.
It was near midnight when Radecker picked up the phone and got through to a supply depot officer in Colorado Springs. It was a chance for him to flex his muscles and feel like he could actually get something done. By the time he’d finished the conversation, the supply sergeant on the other end had been sufficiently intimidated to promise the equipment would be flown to Nevada the very next morning.
Temporarily a functioning and coherent team, the men of Area 51 said good night and went to bed.
*
It took two days to set the experiment up. The electromagnetic cannon was brought out of storage and given an overhaul while Okun, using mountain-climbing gear lent to him by Lieutenant Ellsworth, dangled from the sheer concrete cliffs of the bunker affixing dozens of sensors to the walls with duct tape. If his theory was correct, these sensors would give him valuable information about how the ships flew together—their positioning and distance. When everything was ready to go, the alien airship was hooked up to more machines than a patient about to undergo brain surgery.
Everyone had a job. Dworkin would monitor the input/output meters while Lenel operated the cannon. Freiling tracked the energy levels reaching the sensors, and Cibatutto stood ready to give the cutoff signal when the ship’s temperature climbed past 140 degrees. That left Okun and Radecker with their hands free to watch the show. A mirror was positioned at an angle below the generator to let them see how it worked. Special prismatic crystal goggles were distributed. If everything worked like it was supposed to, they would allow the team to watch the energy surge spit out of the ship and travel through the room. When everything seemed to be in order, Okun gave the final go-ahead.
“Okey-dokey, boys, let’s get it on.”
Lenel was standing on the operator’s platform of the cannon, a device that looked like a dentist’s X-ray machine built to battleship-sized proportions. He adjusted his goggles, then threw the switch. Everything happened at once. The cannon sent a beam of arcing electrical power through the air, penetrating the walls of the ship and coursing into the generator. A tremendous crack ripped through the bunker, and the ship seemed to explode into flames of blue light. The glass on the instrument panel in front of Dworkin shattered, and Okun was sure he’d ruined the ship forever. But Lenel continued to fire. A firestorm of hazy blue light flared out of the ship in all directions, stabbing into the air in a zigzag dance of truly alarming speed, like a thousand ghosts looking for a way out of a pillowcase at the speed of light. When Cibatutto directed his attention to the generator at the bottom of the ship, Okun instantly knew why they called it the aqua-box: green light was spilling out of the opening and, on the surface of the mirror, Okun could see energy racing around the inside of the generator chamber like a waterspout, a cyclone of crystal green water. Then Cibatutto waved his arms, Lenel killed the power, and it all came to a dead stop. The room echoed with silence except for the frazzled sputter coming from one of the lighting fixtures, which popped and died. The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.
The scientists all looked at Okun, who pulled off his goggles and stared wide-eyed at the ship. “That was pretty, trippy.” It was a few moments before the young genius realized what had happened. He had been proved right. The energy wasn’t simply leaching out of the ship; it was being forced out, purged, by the ship’s design. And the aqua-box, as he had predicted, seemed to function as some sort of capacitor, a device which multiplied the energy before passing it back to the system. It had more than quadrupled the power input from the cannon, overwhelming the meters on Dworkin’s output monitors and sending them into meltdown.
“Nicely done, young man, nicely done indeed! We haven’t made this much progress in years.” Dworkin and the others were jubilant. Even Lenel was smiling.
They began checking the registers on the meters wired to the sensors on the walls. Despite all the visual fireworks, Okun was surprised that they hadn’t burned up along with Dworkin’s voltmeter. In fact, the numbers were rather low. Very little energy had reached the sensors up near the ceiling. That, he realized immediately, spelled trouble for his theory. The energy was dissipating much more quickly than he guessed it would. Then again, the violent, flailing, spasmodic way the energy had shot around the room could indicate a mistake in the way the scientists had put things back together.
Dworkin was already calling for a bottle of champagne. He was busy extolling this advance in their knowledge to Rade
cker when Okun called across the room, “Something’s not right.” He came and explained the sensor readouts to the others. “It means these alien ships would have to fly wingtip to wingtip in order to keep their communal energy supply alive.”
“Still,” Dworkin countered, “you have proved that the ship is designed to take energy in, magnify it, and pump it back out. Perhaps the presence of other ships would attract or draw the energy from this one.”
Okun screwed up his face and shook his head no. “I don’t buy it.”
Lenel joined them and was characteristically blunt. “Of course this means we’ve spent twenty-five years screwing around down here for nothing. But at least now we know.”
“Know what?” Radecker asked.
“The kid just proved this hunk of alien junk can’t fly by itself. If we’re ever gonna get it to fly, we’ll need another ship just like it.” When no one backed him up, Lenel asked, “Isn’t that right, fellas?”
“That would seem to be the logical conclusion,” Dworkin agreed. “Didn’t we mention that part?”
“No! No one mentioned that,” Radecker yelled. “Did I mention the fact that I can’t leave until we get this thing to fly?” Radecker reached up and began massaging his temples. Obviously, he hadn’t understood the full implications of the test until that moment. When he felt the impulse to grab the first seventy-year-old he could lay his hands on and begin choking him to death, he reminded himself to breathe deeply.
Okun wanted to run the test again at a slightly higher input level and see if he could get a different reading on the sensors. And an hour later, when the ship had cooled down, the scientists agreed. After carefully setting the levels on the energy input cannon, Okun asked the others to tell him if the flaring aura of light behaved any differently, then headed off toward the center of the ship.
“Where are you going?”
“Um, inside. I noticed last time that some of the gizmos inside the cockpit lit up, and I want to check out what’s going on in there.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 35