Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The

by Molstad, Stephen

  Kepnik phoned the Hartford Air arrivals desk and discovered there was indeed an 11:45 from Denver. He confirmed that the pilot’s name was Mark Cassella and the copilot was Peter Tanashian. He didn’t ask about the potato chips.

  *

  Accompanied by her mother and Agent Kepnik, Bridget was flown to Arlington, Virginia, and taken to the offices of Project Aquarius. Aquarius, its critics said, was proof that the Army had too much money and free time on its hands. It brought together psychics, astrologers, mediums, and other practitioners of the paranormal arts and tried to channel their talents toward military goals. Twelve-year-old Bridget was what the people in the office complex referred to as an RV. This was not a reference to her weight. RV stood for Remote Visualizer, and the Army had six people with this special talent under full-time contract.

  The first step was to test her powers. She was introduced to one of the project’s researchers, a forty-year-old woman with huge blue eyes, Dr. Joan Sachville-West, who did everything she could to put the girl at ease.

  “We’re going to try a simple experiment with these cards,” she explained. “They’re called Zener cards, and each one has a design on it. There are five different designs,” she said, showing the icons to the girl, “and I would like for you to concentrate and try to guess which design is on the back of the card I hold up. Simple?”

  “Wavy lines!” the girl shouted the second Sachville-West lifted the first card off the deck.

  “Very good. You’re right.”

  “Star.”

  “Right again.”

  “Circle.”

  “Excellent.”

  When Bridget had gone fifteen for fifteen, the woman took her hands away and asked what the next card was.

  “I can’t see it until you pick it up.”

  “Guess.”

  “That’s not how it works,” she whined. “I have to be able to see it.”

  “Give it a try. Just for fun.”

  Unhappily, Bridget guessed. “Another wavy lines card?”

  Sachville-West turned it over: star.

  “See! I told you!” Angry that the researcher’s insistence had ruined her perfect streak, she retaliated by telling everyone what color underwear the scientist was wearing.

  The woman only crossed her legs under the table and smiled. “You’ve got quite a gift.”

  *

  The rest of the afternoon was devoted to giving the girl a crash course in geography. When her attention waned, and she refused to cooperate, her mother came to the rescue by opening her purse and pulling out a bag of candy bars. “My emergency kit,” she explained with an embarrassed smile.

  When Bridget had mastered the names of the seven continents and several bodies of water, the real work of Project Aquarius began. She was shown an aerial photograph of a Soviet Wolf-class submarine.

  “Young lady,” a man in an Army uniform began, “there are two submarines like this one in the water right now. Let’s see if you can tell me where they are.” The USSR had a total of four of these nuclear-powered subs. Two of them were in dry dock at that moment for repairs. One had been picked up on radar overnight off the Oregon coast and one was unaccounted for.

  Bridget, working over a wad of chocolate, studied the globe sitting on the desk beside her. This whole thing was starting to bore her. She plunked one finger down in the Pacific Ocean near the Oregon coastline, then pointed to the waters off Cuba’s southern shore. “Cienfuegos,” she read the tiny print on the globe through a buildup of chocolate saliva.

  “That’s amazing,” said the man in the uniform.

  “Don’t speak with your mouth full,” said her mother.

  *

  For the next six days, Bridget Jones was the most powerful weapon in the United States military’s arsenal. She located and described dozens of enemy positions around the world, many of them previously unknown. The girl loved being the center of attention, and she worked for peanuts—literally. Because of her penchant for prevaricating, each morning began with a series of new test questions. The researchers would ask her to remote-visualize locations they knew she had never visited, such as the Statue of Liberty, then ask her to count the windows in the observation deck. On the morning of her seventh day in Arlington, when asked about the leaning tower of Pisa, she answered that it was three stories tall. When asked what color socks the interviewer was wearing, she tried to sneak a look under the table. The experiment with the Zener cards was repeated. Her score was five out of twenty-five, the statistical average. Although she protested, it appeared that she had lost her powers. This seemed to be confirmed when Agent Kepnik came into the room holding a clear plastic evidence bag. A search of the young lady’s morning stool had turned up a small metallic object.

  Confronted with this evidence, Bridget told the truth. Her powers had deserted her. The BB, she said, looked different than it had when she swallowed it: it was half the size and was now completely bald, the fuzz of small bristles having apparently been eaten away by her digestive fluids. “So what happens to me now?”

  There was a period of waiting while the proper officials reviewed the case. Eventually, they decided to follow a little-known government protocol, MJ—1949-04W/82. The family was relocated to an undisclosed location in France, where they were housed in a luxury villa owned by friends of the U.S. government and guaranteed an income of approximately $100,000 per year in exchange for their cooperation in keeping the matter silent.

  Unfortunately, six months after moving to France, just as she was learning the language, Bridget and her family were killed when their car collided with a truck owned by the French postal authority.

  *

  Until he came to the ending, Okun found the story amusing. Remembering Dr. Lenel’s warning, he wondered how much of it was true. But more interesting to him than the story of the girl, were the handwritten notes jotted in the margins of the report. They seemed to have been written at great speed and most of them were absolutely illegible. Only two were carefully printed, and both of them startled the young researcher. The first one read: “obj housed at AF Acad Colo Sprgs, evid #PE—8323-MJ—1949-acc21,21a.” Evidence number? Okun wondered if there really were, somewhere in a warehouse at the Air Force Academy, a small plastic bag holding a metallic pea recovered from the excrement of a bratty twelve-year-old.

  The other piece of noteworthy marginalia was a doodled picture. On the last page of the report, someone had drawn a three-dimensional figure of the letter Y.

  6

  ROSWELL

  Every time Okun had tried to discuss the mysterious and troubling image of the Y, the scientists—normally so talkative, so eager to kick around ideas—would merely shrug their shoulders, agree it was very interesting, then go on to say they had no idea what to do with the information. After that, they changed the subject as quickly as possible. Up to that point, Okun had let them get away with it. But now that he’d seen the same image penciled into the margin of the Bridget Jones report, he was ready for a confrontation. His intuition told him the old men were hiding something, and he was determined to find out what it was.

  The next morning, he came into the kitchen and found Freiling counting money. Vegas had been kind to them once more, this time to the tune of $675. Dworkin was studying a copy of the Los Angeles Times he’d picked up in town.

  “Ahem.” The young man cleared his throat. “Where’s Radecker?”

  “Working on his tennis game, I suspect. He didn’t come back last night.”

  “Then we can talk.”

  Dworkin peered over the top of his newspaper. “Talk?”

  “You guys are holding out on me. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Dworkin feigned indignation. He began to rattle on about the ethics men of ideas must adhere to, but Okun cut him short by tossing the Jones report onto the table. “What’s this?” Dworkin asked.

  “Something I found in the stacks. It’s about a girl who swallowed an object she found in the gr
ass after a close encounter with a UFO.” Dworkin thumbed through the pages. He seemed more interested in the handwritten notes than in the report itself. Noticing this, Okun asked if he recognized the handwriting. After a moment of beard-stroking indecision, the old man admitted that he did.

  “This seems to be the chaotic penmanship of our dear friend Dr. Wells. Have I told you the interesting story of how he came to be named Director of Research for this project?”

  Okun wasn’t going to let himself be sidetracked again. “Check the last page.”

  Sensing he would find something unpleasant there, Dworkin reluctantly obliged. The sight of the block-perspective sketch of the Y seemed to startle him slightly. His mind scrambled to find a cover story. If only his long-haired coinvestigator had confronted him with this evidence during a poker game! In that situation, Dworkin was a different man, capable of saying whatever the situation required. He would have been able to make something up on the spot. But in matters of work, he was accustomed to always speaking the truth. He crumpled toward the tabletop like a house of cards under Okun’s stern glare.

  “Brickman, some stones are better left unturned,” Freiling broke in. “None of us knows anything about that darn Y message.”

  But it was too late to back out now, and Dworkin knew it. He braced himself with a sip of tea, then explained. “Dr. Wells had a long obsession with this form, this shape. He claimed it was communicated to him by the alien shortly after the crash at Roswell. Like you, he said there was a feeling of urgent desperation associated with the transmission of the image. I believe you used the words ‘doom’ and ‘abandoned’ to describe it. In his last years he became more and more obsessed with deciphering the meaning of the symbol, until it got to the point of blocking out other thoughts. It drove him to insanity. As this mania progressed, he neglected more and more of his duties as director. We were able to mask the situation for several months, hoping he would make a recovery, but then he was called away to meetings in Washington. Apparently he behaved himself quite poorly and was not allowed to return to Area 51.”

  “Poor dude.”

  “Yes, indeed. The disintegration of his personality was a difficult thing to watch.”

  “Let’s be honest,” Freiling said. “The man was loopy to begin with. Slightly off-kilter.”

  “So what did he figure out about the Y?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Okun asked, suspicious again. “He must have made some progress on it if he worked for years. Didn’t he even have a theory?”

  With a worried look on his face, the old man finally came completely clean. “Wells suspected a second ship. He believed that the Y was a signal, the alien equivalent of our SOS. There! Now you know.”

  Okun nodded with satisfaction. Once more, his gut instincts had proved to be correct—or, at least, he wasn’t completely alone in having them. Someone else had arrived independently at the same conclusion, even if that someone was a mental case. There had to be a second ship.

  “But Mr. Okun, I must ask you in the strongest possible terms to keep this information secret, especially from Mr. Radecker. As unsavory as this might sound, I promised him I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “We all did,” Freiling added. “If we didn’t, he threatened to tell his bosses about the extra paychecks we’ve been collecting. Next thing you know, we’d all be doing twenty years at Leavenworth.”

  Without endorsing that last comment, Dworkin admitted, “Mr. Radecker has found our soft spot. None of us wants to leave Area 51 at this late date. I hope you can understand that.”

  Again, Okun’s head bobbed up and down. He knew how scared the old men were and realized he’d never be able to betray them. Still, thinking ahead to his next encounter with Radecker, he could feel the urge to lay the whole matter on the table. “Why doesn’t Radecker want me to know about the stupid Y?”

  “We made a deal with him. We’re not to give you any information which might support your theory of a second ship. In fact, we’re supposed to try and talk you out of it.”

  “But why?”

  Freiling and Dworkin shrugged their shoulders simultaneously. “That’s all the man wanted, so we agreed.”

  “It’s especially curious,” Dworkin added, “when you consider that there really isn’t much evidence to support such a theory. It’s rather far-fetched in light of the accumulated evidence.”

  Okun narrowed his eyes. “Are you trying to talk me out of it?”

  “Don’t take my word for it. Ask Dr. Wells.”

  *

  “What the hell are you doing in here?” Radecker asked, poking his head into the vault.

  Okun responded with his Bela Lugosi imitation. “I have come to the crypt to visit my long-lost friends.” He had developed a morbid fascination with the alien bodies and came into the secured room every couple of days to watch them floating in their tanks. “It’s like having an aquarium full of really strange dead fish.”

  “Well, I’ve got the information you wanted. If you want to hear it, come outside. This place gives me the creeps.”

  Okun stepped into the hallway and fastened the thick steel dead bolt, locking the bodies inside. He’d asked Radecker for help in finding the whereabouts of Dr. Wells. None of the scientists knew what had become of him after he failed to return from his trip to the capital. There had been a phone call from Dr. Insolo of the Science and Technology Directorate saying that Wells was being held for psychiatric observation and that Dr. Dworkin should take over his responsibilities as director during the interim. That had been four years ago.

  “The good news is I found a copy of the report you asked for, the one Wells wrote in ’47. That should be interesting. It’s in Washington, but they’re going to send us a copy. The bad news is he’s dead.” Radecker feigned disappointment. “The story I got from headquarters was he was in a meeting back in DC when he snapped. Just went berserk. Started shouting and throwing things at people. They took him to Seabury Psychiatric Hospital, where he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. Then about six months later, he was transferred to Glenhaven Home in Richmond. That’s where he died about two and a half years ago.”

  Masking a wave of authentic disappointment, Okun shrugged. “No biggie. Thanks for checking it out.”

  “Just doing my job. I’ll tell you when the report comes in.”

  Brackish smiled pleasantly until Radecker disappeared around the corner. Then he kicked the wall and used language his mother wouldn’t have approved of. He was sure Wells, demented or not, could have given him information about other ships. He had already imagined the scene a dozen times: him walking down the deserted institutional corridors with all the windows heavily barred, a pair of bodybuilder orderlies unlocking a heavy steel door and pulling it open to reveal the insane scientist, hair standing on end as if he’d recently been struck by lightning, eyes bulging wide as he struggled to escape from his straitjacket. Oh, well. Lenel had warned him about promising trails suddenly going cold. After a moment of consideration, he realized he had no other choice: he headed back to the stacks.

  This time, he was looking for something in particular. And even with Freiling’s help, it took the next twenty-four hours to find it. Realizing it would take the rest of his life to read through the anarchic accumulation of archives in the stacks, Okun needed to limit the scope of his search. There had to be a way of separating the genuine reports from the rest. He had no idea how to do it, but reasoned that the logical place to begin would be with the one alien encounter he knew for sure had taken place: the one at Roswell.

  *

  The incident actually began two days before the crash. On July 2, 1947, radar screens scanning the skies above the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico picked up an unsteady blip wandering back and forth. It appeared to pulse larger, then smaller, every few seconds, and the crew in the tracking room suspected an equipment malfunction. They called two other facilities, one in Albuquerque, the other in Roswell, and asked if they could co
nfirm the sighting. Within hours, they had. There was no doubt that something was up there. All three tracking stations went on alert as Intelligence Officer Ian Leigh boarded a plane in Washington, DC. If the same phenomenon had occurred in another part of the state, there would have been less concern. But White Sands was a highly restricted area. Besides the secret rocket and missile tests being conducted there, White Sands had been the site, a couple of years before, of the world’s first nuclear explosion. The Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer, had caused a “controlled detonation” near Alamogordo in a quiet valley once called Jornada de los Muertos, or Trek of the Dead.

  On the Fourth of July, the blip returned at approximately ten-thirty. This time it didn’t wander across the radar screen; it tore across. According to those most familiar with the tracking technology, it reached speeds of better than a thousand miles per hour. What made these speeds all the more amazing was that the plane—or whatever it was—seemed to accelerate, then come to a dead stop, then accelerate again, racing helter-skelter over the southeastern part of the state. At 11:20, the blip flared into a wide splotch of light and vanished from the screens. After communication between the various tracking stations, they decided the ship had gone down somewhere north of Roswell. The search began at dawn.

  *

  Caesar “Corky” Riddle slammed the door of his pickup and started the engine. He was frustrated, more frustrated than his kids were, and now all of them were soaking wet. For a month, he’d been promising his three daughters a big fireworks show on the Fourth. He’d driven all the way to Albuquerque and spent a fortune at the Red Devil stand. Then he’d put up with the girls’ impatience all day, telling them to wait until dark. But by the time evening began to fall over the desert, a storm had blown in. Thirty-and forty-mile-per-hour winds were gusting, pushing a thunderstorm up from the Gulf of Mexico. The Riddle family gathered on their front porch and watched the situation grow worse. Finally, about ten-thirty, the winds died down. The girls wanted to light the fireworks out on the road in front of the house, but Corky insisted on sticking to the original plan. So they piled into the truck and raced toward the park in downtown Roswell. As long as they had all that gunpowder, Corky figured, they ought to put on a show for the whole town. But at nearly 11 P.M. on a stormy night, the streets were deserted, and the park was empty. As soon as they were ready to start lighting fuses, the winds picked up again, knocking the blast cones on their sides. They kept at it anyhow, trying various ways of anchoring them to the ground. Then the rain came out of nowhere—it poured down in sheets—drenching the Riddles and their stockpile of fireworks.