Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  “Some of it. We get a hew shipment every first Monday of the month. We look through the box and pull out anything that looks interesting, but mostly it just gets dumped out here. Years ago, there was a fellow named Pike who had everything organized. If you needed to see a particular report, you’d go ask Pike. When the new reports came in, he’d make sure they got into the right hands. After he quit, I took over the job.”

  From the looks of things, Lenel hadn’t been doing a very good job. Okun pulled open the top drawer of a file cabinet and looked inside. A few thousand pages of yellowing paper were strewn around in heaps. They had been stuffed carelessly into the drawer, with no regard for organization. “What kind of filing system are you using here?”

  “There is no system. The whole place is a damned mess now on account of Wells. That man was always in such a hurry. He’d come in here and take out a hundred files to find the one he was looking for. He never put anything back, and I got tired of doing his work for him. So I quit. I’ve had nothing to do with the stacks for the last ten years or so. Still, if there’s anything in particular you need, I can probably help you find it.”

  Until then, Okun hadn’t understood why he was being introduced to this ancient collection of worthless paper. He didn’t know what was going on in Lenel’s head, but apparently the old grump was expecting him to start reading this stuff.

  “I should warn you,” he went on, “that 99.9 percent of what’s in these reports is a bunch of hooey. First you’ve got your crackpots who make up stories to get themselves noticed. Then you’ve got your little old ladies who see a spark on a telephone pole and wet their pants because they’re sure it was men from Mars. But you’ve also got something that’s harder to spot.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Reports started leaking out about what we had down here. Since there was no way to keep the files completely hidden, the geniuses at the CIA and the Pentagon started something they call disinformation. As if there weren’t enough bogus reports of sightings and encounters already, they started making up new ones by the hundreds. Some of the most convincing stories were written by some hack sitting in an office making the whole thing up. They deliberately buried false leads, stories that seem like they’ll lead somewhere, but then the trail goes cold, and you’re back where you started from.”

  Finally, Okun had to ask. “Dr. Lenel, why are you showing me all this stuff?”

  “If you’re convinced there’s a second alien ship, this is the best place to go looking for it.”

  *

  It was three weeks before Okun made his first independent foray into the stacks. Life in the labs was beginning to settle into a comfortable routine. His elderly cohort continued with their repairs on the alien vehicle and, once his rear end had healed sufficiently, Okun joined them. Even though he was convinced they were wasting their time, they made pleasant company, and he assisted them as they puttered through repairs to the wiring system and damaged fuselage.

  The atmosphere underground improved considerably once Radecker began spending his days at the Officers’ Club. Groom Lake, the flat salt bed under which Area 51 was buried, was only a tiny fraction of the enormous Nellis Weapons Testing Range. At roughly five thousand square miles in area, the range was as large as a small European country. At its southern edge, near Frenchman Lake, was a cluster of buildings which, with their manicured lawns, swimming pool, and tennis courts could, from the air, easily be mistaken for a luxury hotel. It was a gathering spot for high-ranking officials from all areas of the base, a place to hold meetings or simply relax in the air-conditioned comfort of the bar. Radecker quickly discovered that a convoy of Jeeps traveled between Groom and Frenchman lakes twice a day, when a new group of soldiers came on duty. From six in the morning until six in the evening, his phone calls were rerouted to the lounge of the Officers’ Club.

  On one particular Friday, Okun was in the labs by himself. Dworkin and the others had left for their once-a-week excursion into Las Vegas. The previous two Fridays, the men had convinced Okun to join them. He was shocked by what he learned. After taking care of their banking business and other errands, the four old timers headed for the casinos, where they played high-stakes poker. They seemed to be on a first-name basis with nearly every dealer and pit boss they ran into. Apparently, they had been eighty-sixed from many of the major houses on the Strip because, although no one could prove it, they cheated at cards and always took home much more than they lost, often several hundred dollars between them. It was one more way they had found to end-run the funding restrictions imposed on them by the Pentagon.

  It was spooky being down there by himself, so he didn’t linger in the long dim hallway that housed the stacks. After a quick look around, he found the sloppiest box of all, the one that looked like it had been organized by a madman. He lifted out the first two hundred pages and took them back to his room, locking the door behind him—a habit he’d gotten himself into after the scientists showed him the corpses of the alien astronauts. Even though they were very very dead and floating in steel-reinforced tanks of formaldehyde, this extra precaution of locking his door provided the young man with the last little bit of psychological reassurance he needed to sleep peacefully. He put the documents on his desk and began to sort through them. He had intentionally selected the most disorganized set of files on the assumption that it would contain the last papers this mysterious Dr. Wells had been reading before they carried him away. He didn’t expect these pages to lead him anywhere. But if they did turn out to be Wells’s last readings, well, that would be pretty cool. Most of the pages were single-sheet memos concerning mundane topics like equipment orders, travel arrangements, and test results. He put these aside and turned his attention to one of the thicker documents. It was a report entitled “National Security Briefing Paper on Project Aquarius/B. Jones, Subject.” At the bottom of the title page, there was a typed note:

  WARNING! This is a TOP SECRET—EYES ONLY document containing compartmentalized information essential to the national security of the United States. EYES ONLY ACCESS to the material herein is strictly limited to those possessing Project Aquarius clearance level. Reproduction in any form or the taking of written or mechanically transcribed notes is strictly forbidden.

  Bridget Jones was an unpopular, pudgy twelve-year-old from a well-to-do family living in a farming community about thirty minutes outside Cleveland, Ohio. She was a notorious liar, with a specialty for inserting herself into factual events. Whenever something newsworthy occurred, Bridget was there. When, for example, the Farlin brothers totaled their GTO into the front wall of the high school, Bridget told everyone she’d been riding in the backseat. When a half dozen sheep turned up missing from a farm a few miles down the road, Bridget filed a police report, complete with her own pencil sketches of the suspects. She claimed to have been out on a walk when she noticed four men loading the animals into the back of a Volkswagen. So when Bridget found a tiny artifact left behind after a close encounter with an alien spaceship, no one was prepared to believe her story.

  About 9 P.M. on a Sunday evening she had been in the garage listening to her father’s brand-new police scanner radio—just another one of dad’s electronic toys—when she heard a voice she recognized and two words that caught her attention: flying saucer. The voice belonged to her neighbor, County Sheriff Jon Varner.

  “Looks like we got a plane on fire out here, repeat, there’s a plane coming in low, and it’s on fire,” she heard him yelling into his radio. “I’m on Brooderman Road, near the old Chalmers place. It seems to be flying level to the ground. My God! It’s not a plane. It’s a flying saucer!”

  “Jon, what are you seeing out there?” the female dispatcher’s voice broke in.

  “About the size of a two-story house. Orange light, it’s glowing, I guess it’s red and gold, but it’s hard to make out. Now it’s halfway between the railroad tracks and Brooderman Road. It’s getting closer.”

  “Jon, are you all right?” />
  “Jeannie, you should see this thing, it’s unbelievable. It’s going to fly right over me. It looks like there are some windows. I can see light coming from inside. I think it’s—”

  The patrol car’s radio died. There was panic in the dispatcher’s voice. “Jon? Officer Varner, are you all right? Can you hear me!”

  Bridget switched off the radio, grabbed the flashlight off the shelf above the washing machine and jumped on her bike. The Chalmers place wasn’t more than a mile and a half from her house. She tore down the driveway, then turned onto the main road. It was the fastest she’d ever gone on a bike, and she nearly lost control more than once as she scanned the sky for signs of the UFO. The warm breezy night and darkness of the road made her feel like she was racing through a dream. She turned onto Brooderman and saw the headlights of Varner’s car far ahead. When she came within seventy-five feet, she got a bad feeling—like she was being watched—and slowed down, turning her head sideways to get the wind off her ears. She listened for footsteps, a murmur of conversation, anything that might signal this was a trap. But the only sound was the purr of the police car’s idling motor, so she rode cautiously forward. The driver’s door was open, and Varner was laid across the front seat flat on his back. Bridget pulled up, grabbed his foot, and gave it a shake.

  “Mr. Varner, are you all right?” The officer stirred slightly, so she gave him another shake, harder this time. “Mr. Varner, wake up.”

  She heard someone behind her and spun around. A tall stooped figure stepped onto the road. “Is that Jon Varner in that car?” he said, cinching up his housecoat. He was an older guy she’d seen in town before. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Bridget said. “I think a flying saucer got him. I heard it on my dad’s radio.”

  The old man stepped past her and pulled the officer into a sitting position. Varner woke up but had no recollection of what had happened to him. The last thing he remembered was standing on the pavement watching the saucer moving overhead. “Didn’t you see it?” Varner asked when he learned the man’s house was close by. “It lit up the field like it was noon.”

  The man swore he hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual. He’d been inside watching television when he got a call from Jeannie down at the station house asking him to come outside and check.

  A few minutes later, two more police cars arrived with sirens wailing. The noise attracted more neighbors into the street. Passing motorists stopped to find out what was going on, and soon there were two dozen folks standing in the middle of the road listening to the officer tell and retell his story. Bridget joined a group of people who started searching the edges of the road for clues. She wandered several feet into the waist-high field of wheat and came across something strange, a depression in the grass. It looked like somebody had been lying in the spot only a few minutes before. She could see the tall grass untangling itself and trying to stand back up. Like a good detective, she made sure to check for footprints. There were none. There was no pathway leading to or from the place where the person had been lying. She turned and saw that her own path into the field was clearly marked by the trail of trampled grass.

  “Hey, people, I found something! Come and look!”

  Before anyone got there, she looked down and noticed something metal near the head of the body-shaped depression. She reached down and picked up the shiny object, which looked like a BB pellet.

  “Honey, you shouldn’t be knocking down that man’s wheat,” a woman’s voice called out. “What did you find?”

  “Mrs. Milch? It’s me, Bridget. Come and look at this; I think it’s important.”

  If the woman was reluctant to step onto the damp soil before, she was doubly so now that she knew who was asking her to come. Everyone knew about Bridget’s little problem with telling the truth. But this was an urgent situation, so she followed Bridget’s trail out to the spot. “OK, what is it?”

  “Look, this is where the aliens probably held Mr. Varner down.”

  The woman didn’t believe her. She said the depression in the grass was too small to have been made by a man. That it looked more like a little girl had made it. She asked why there wasn’t another set of man-sized tracks between there and the road. When the girl protested that this time she was telling the truth, Mrs. Milch shook her head and pointed out the grass on the girl’s knees. Bridget explained to the woman about having bent down to pick up the BB and tried to show it to her, but Mrs. Milch walked away.

  Bridget had never felt so insulted in her entire life. She jammed the BB into her pocket, got on her bike, and rode away. When she got home and examined it under brighter light, she noticed that the object was covered with tiny bristles. Even with the help of a magnifying glass, these spiky projections were difficult to see. But she could feel them when she squeezed the object hard. The bristles felt like electricity under her fingertips.

  *

  News traveled fast. By the time she got to school the next morning, all the kids had heard there had been a UFO sighting the night before. Bridget made sure everyone in the school knew of the central role she had played in the drama. She stuck to the facts for the most part, but couldn’t resist adding a few small wrinkles of her own. During the nutrition break, she told her classmates how she had driven the spaceship away by pulling the gun from the unconscious officer’s holster and using some choice language to scare “the Martians” off. By lunch, she had made eye contact with one of the blobbish creatures through the spacecraft’s windows and flipped him the bird. By the end of the day, no one believed a word. Just before the bell rang, Bridget raised, her hand and asked whether there could be show-and-tell the next day. She promised to bring in the “Martian BB” she’d found. Her classmates jeered their disbelief, but Ms. Sandoval, her favorite teacher of all time, said it was a good idea.

  *

  The next morning Bridget smelled another trap. A black-and-white was parked in front of the school next to another, suspiciously official-looking car. A policeman and a man in a dark suit were standing outside of her room talking to Ms. Sandoval. When she walked up, she knew from their smiles that they were not to be trusted. The man in the suit asked her about the BB. She admitted that she had it, and offered to let them see it, on one condition. She made both men promise they wouldn’t take it away from her, that they wouldn’t even touch it. The men agreed. Bridget opened up her lunch bag and started rummaging through it. Suddenly the policeman snatched the bag out of her hands. “Here, lemme help you look for it.”

  “You big liars!” she screamed in anger. “Taking advantage of a little kid! You’re disgusting!” When the cop had emptied the sack out completely and determined there was nothing unusual inside, the men turned once more toward the girl. The chubby sixth-grader was smirking like a jack-o’-lantern, holding the BB between her fingers. “Ha-ha, I fooled you.” Before either man could get to her, she popped the fuzzy little pill into her mouth and swallowed it.

  *

  She was rushed to Merciful Redeemer Hospital and admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. After vomiting several times, she’d gone into a sustained fit of dry heaves. Covered with sweat and moaning between gagging spells, she was like an overweight kitten trying to pass a large hair ball. In addition to her nausea, she complained of dizziness and a ringing in her ears. The doctors took X-rays but could find no sign of the foreign object. A toxicologist ran several blood tests but could find no poison. None of the experts could find anything physically wrong with her. Her mysterious illness became more mysterious still when it suddenly disappeared without a trace moments before her parents arrived. When her mother and father accused her of making the whole thing up, the man in the dark suit who’d driven her to the hospital stepped forward.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Jones, my name is Bradley Kepnik. I’m with the Central Intelligence Agency.” He flashed them his credentials. “I was there when the girl swallowed the object, and I’m positive she’s not making this up. Could I have a word w
ith the two of you in private?”

  *

  Bridget spent that night at home in her own bed. Agent Kepnik was there with her, sleeping on a cot in the hallway. He’d installed a lock on the outside of the bathroom door, which only he could open. They were going to wait this thing out. In the morning, the girl defecated into a shallow plastic tub which it was Kepnik’s job to search. To her delight, Bridget learned she wouldn’t be going to school for the next day or two. She spent the day raiding the icebox and watching soap operas. About three o’clock, under the watchful eye of her chaperone, she went outside to play handball against the garage door in the driveway. Despite her many invitations, Kepnik declined to join her, claiming old football injuries. Bridget stopped playing when a large passenger plane flew overhead. She watched it intently for a minute.

  “What’s the matter?” the fed asked.

  “The guy who’s driving that plane is named Cassella. He’s the pilot. The copilot is named… I can’t read it, Tenashi, Tanashawsee, something like that. They’re eating potato chips. And there’s another guy sitting behind them with headphones on.”

  “I see,” Kepnik said smoothly. By now he knew all about the girl’s mythomania. “And what’s his name?”

  “I don’t know,” she hissed back at him, annoyed. She knew when she was being treated as a child. “He doesn’t have a jacket on, so there’s no name tag. If you don’t believe me call the airport. The company’s name is Hartford Air. It’s written on the backs of the seats.”

  Kepnik was beginning to get interested. By now the plane was nearly out of view. “Where’s the plane going to land? And where’s it coming from?”

  “Well of course it’s going to land in Cleveland, the airport’s right over that way. But where are they coming from?” She closed her eyes and concentrated as if she were hunting around the cockpit. “Denver: And they took off at 11:45. This is neato. I can see inside the plane. Let’s call the airport and find out if I’m right.”