“Another thing. If this creature really was a scientist, then what was it doing hauling food around? That doesn’t make sense to me. Because I had shared a personal memory with it, I assumed it had done the same. It certainly felt like a personal memory, so immediate, so real. But how could those two animals be the same? Then it occurred to me: they share thoughts, they share a mind, they must share a memory.”
“Exactly. That’s the same principle they used in developing their ships. They share an energy source just like they share mental activity.”
“They’re a hive, my friend, and that makes them dangerous. Individually, they may not be as intelligent as you or I. But collectively, they may be more powerful than we can imagine. Did Sam ever tell you about my experiments with the bees?”
Okun shook his head.
“I kept a hive for about six months out in the old shacks next to the main hangar. As an experiment, I began hiding their food source. But every day they’d find it within minutes. I expanded the radius to about two miles around the hive, moving the food to random locations at random times of the day. Then the scariest damn thing started happening. After about three months of this, I’d go to the place I had decided to put the food and they’d be waiting for me! After that I tried as many tricks as I could think of to fool them. And they’d work for a while, but they never worked twice. This went on until it occurred to me that they had learned to anticipate me. They’d learned my moves well enough to predict my behavior. In the end, I set the hive on fire. Now if bees can do that, imagine what these other monsters are capable of.
“And we’re not even making it difficult for them. We bombard space with radio waves advertising our position. That must stop at once. They’re out there right now watching us, studying us, waiting for the moment to strike.”
“You’re absolutely right. So, you think there’s more than one ship?”
“Are you stupid? Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? There are hundreds of ships like the one we recovered, and they are nearby. They come every few months and snoop around our military installations or experiment on people and animals. Don’t you know about all those bloodless cattle mutilations? Call the Pentagon and tell them to send you the files. Soon the time of study will be over, and they will attack. We don’t know how powerful their weaponry is, but our Air Force won’t stand a chance against the speed and maneuverability of their ships. In a few months all of our planes and missiles will be spent. Then they’ll start picking off our ground forces. There won’t be time to build the weapons we’re going to need. We must sacrifice now to build a space defense network of our own. Satellite lasers, deep-space torpedoes, orbiting minefields of nuclear warheads. If we have time, we can put factories in space capable of building a fleet of warships, then launch an attack of our own. It may already be too late, but we’ve got to try. You have to get some good men and storm this place.”
In a strange way, the more he talked, the more sense he seemed to make. Okun was tempted to ask about these other visits, but steered back to his original topic. “I’ll look for the guys later. But right now I want to get my hands on a second alien ship.” He explained the experiment which proved the captured saucer could only fly with a companion. “Do you know if the government has any more of them from another crash?”
“What about Chihuahua, Mexico?”
“What’s that?”
“Have you seen the Majestic 12 documents?”
“The thing they wrote up for Eisenhower? Yeah, I saw them.”
“It’s in there.” Okun had read the top-secret documents but had concluded that they were fakes, just more disinformation generated by the forces of darkness. It had a description of the “seized flying disk” that was full of inaccuracies. There had been one paragraph in the document that had been blacked out.
“So what’s this Chihuahua thing about?”
“Simultaneous with the crash at Roswell, another streak of light had been observed moving due south. The Army collected scores of ‘hard’ sightings from people on the ground all the way from Roswell to Guerrero, a town in the mountains of Chihuahua State. A few days after the crash, we sent troops across the border. Just barged right in and surrounded the area where the local people said the thing went down. They searched for a long time, but didn’t find anything.”
“But you think there’s one down there?”
“I don’t know. I always meant to go down there and look around for myself, but I never did.”
“And where was this exactly,?”
“Right outside of Guerrero.” Once again, Wells began to explain why he had to get to the television station, but Okun interrupted him immediately.
“One last question. The Y. I saw it on one of the monitors inside the ship when we pumped some power into the system. I thought it was some kind of an SOS. Dworkin told me you had that same feeling.”
This time Wells only shook his head. “I haven’t figured it out. You say you spoke with Trina Gluck.”
“Yes.”
“Did you believe her?”
“I don’t think she’s lying. Yeah, I guess I believed her.”
“If she’s right, the aliens don’t know any more than we do what the Y is. For years I believed it was the alien equivalent of our SOS, but if so, why don’t they recognize it?”
“Agent Radecker,” the nurse called from the doorway. “You have a telephone call, sir.”
“Our reinforcements?” the old man asked eagerly.
“Either that or VDJ.” Okun extended his hand. “Thanks a lot for your help.”
Wells looked at the hand, horrified. “You’re leaving? You’re going to leave me here? NO! You tricked me! You’re with them, aren’t you? You never had any intention of helping. Get away from me, you filthy murderer.”
All the way through the house and back to the office, Okun could hear the old man howling curses at him. And it didn’t look like life was going to get any better. He was fairly certain that once he picked up the phone he would be nailed by some internal security guy in DC.
He took a deep breath and picked up the receiver. “Radecker here.”
“I thought your name was Bob Robertson.”
“Brinelle?”
“Yeah. Listen, Secret Agent Whatever-Your-Name-Is, you are majorly busted. Two guys were just here from the FBI asking about you and, sorry, but we had to tell them where you were going. So you might want to get out of there.”
“Thanks, Chief, I’ll get on that right away.”
“Are there people standing there listening to you?”
“Affirmative.”
“And you want to sound like you’re on official business?”
“Exactly.”
“Cool. You better hit the road, but use that phone number I gave you, OK?”
“Will do. Over and out.”
*
Okun started out the door, but thought better of it. Why should he run? What did it matter how he got back to Nevada? It might be a more pleasant trip if he had some company. So he sat down in the waiting room and looked through some magazines until he heard a car skid to a stop in the parking lot.
11
A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
Brackish Okun spent the night behind bars. As he’d guessed, the FBI guys who took him into custody drove him all the way to Nevada, to the main entrance to the Nellis Weapons Testing Range. They were very polite with him the entire time, even friendly. He was never handcuffed or treated as a prisoner in any way—except for them following him into the rest room when they stopped for lunch. But it was a different story when they handed him over to the Military Police waiting for him at the front gates. He was searched, handcuffed, and tossed in the back of a Jeep. The MPs drove him to the Military Intelligence building and locked him in a windowless cell. He was woken up in the middle of the night and taken to an interrogation room, where he was questioned by a pair of officers. They demanded to know everywhere he’d gone and everyone he’d spoken with dur
ing his twenty-seven-hour absence. They warned him, however, not to tell the whole story. If he had divulged any compartmentalized information, anything about the work being done at Groom Lake, they wanted to know to whom he had done so, but reminded him they were not cleared to hear such information and telling them would constitute a violation of the law.
He told them the whole truth, but they acted as if they didn’t believe a word of it. They grilled him for two hours, subtly leaning on him to change his story. When the session was over, he was taken back to the cell. At 7 a.m., he was awoken once again, this time by Radecker, who stood on the other side of the bars looking like a high-pressure radiator hose about to split open and spray the room with dirty boiling water. He screamed at Okun for a long time, telling him what a stupid and dangerous thing it had been to disappear like that. When the enraged CIA man stopped for breath, Okun tried to lighten the mood.
“Aren’t you even gonna compliment my haircut?”
Radecker skewered him with a hard stare. “I trusted you,” he hissed, “and you double-crossed me. You stabbed me in the back. Now you’re going to pay the price. There’s going to be a court-martial. A legal team is preparing charges against you right how. You’re looking at some serious prison time.”
“For what?”
“Let me see. Being absent without leave, impersonating a federal officer, trespassing, violating the Federal Espionage Act. All together you shouldn’t get more than ninety-nine years. You’ll be eligible for parole in about twenty.”
“I didn’t reveal anything,” Okun assured him. “I swear. The only person I talked to was Wells.”
Radecker flashed him a wicked smile. “Wells no longer has a security clearance. He doesn’t have any official ties to this program. You blew it.”
“You’re kidding me, right? I didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know.”
“The guys outside don’t know that. I guess I could talk to them for you, explain the situation, try to get the charges dismissed. But I’m not going to do that, and I’ll tell you why. Because you intentionally embarrassed me. I get sent out here to baby-sit your hippie ass, and you pull this stunt. Where do you think that leaves me? I’m finished at the CIA, I’m a joke. Even the friggin’ FBI is laughing at me.”
*
But Okun was never charged with any crime. Apparently, he had unseen friends in higher places. A phone call from the Deputy Director’s Office of the CIA instructed the base’s legal affairs office to drop the case and overlook the entire incident. Radecker was told to restrict the young scientist to the labs and immediate environs, but to take no further disciplinary action. He was furious, but powerless to strike back.
When Okun returned to the underground labs, the mood was indeed somber. He wasn’t the only one in the boss’s doghouse. When Brackish had failed to rendezvous with them for the ride back from Vegas, the old men had tried one trick after another to stall the van’s departure. First Freiling wandered off, pretending to have a senile episode, then Lenel complained of chest pains and was taken to a hospital. At dawn, when Okun still hadn’t returned, they gave up and came home. Radecker was convinced they were in on the plot. The Vegas trips, he announced, were history. The old men would be allowed to drive into town only long enough to transact their banking business and fill their prescriptions at the pharmacy before returning to base. For Dworkin and company, being robbed of their only form of recreation was a crushing blow, and they couldn’t help blaming Okun.
Spirits were low, and there was a poisonous atmosphere in the labs. Cracks began to appear in the block of solidarity shared by the older men. They began to quarrel with one another, and they made no secret of the fact that they were angry with Okun. Lenel confronted him one morning, asking if his “lark” had been worth it.
“What was so important that you had to go talk to him?” When Okun tried blaming the whole thing on Radecker and his lies, Lenel asked him again. “We told you Wells was crazy. Now I’m asking you if you learned anything by going to see him?”
Rather than answer, the young man with the crew cut retreated to his room. What had he gained by taking his trip up the coast? The onetime director of Area 51 had told him several interesting things, but nothing he could really use. The matter of the telepathic Y-message remained a mystery, and he had less freedom than ever to research the possibility of a second ship. Perhaps the only thing he’d really taken away from the meeting was the haunting vision of the earth being invaded by a conquering species from a distant galaxy. As preposterous as some of it had sounded at the time, Wells’s words were taking root in Okun’s imagination and growing stronger by the day. He tried to talk to the other men about them, but it was almost as if they were afraid of these ideas. Why else would they dismiss them so quickly when there was ample evidence to support them?
Radecker wasn’t finished. He instituted an insidious new paperwork regime. Crate after crate of new equipment had begun to arrive for work on the retrofitting project. Under the new system, every piece of every shipment had to be cataloged in triplicate before it could be used. This meant separate forms to fill out for each bolt, each O-ring, each spool of wire. Then there was another piece of administrative sadism—the daily work proposal. The first hour of every morning was spent filling in these tedious forms.
Things improved slightly over the next two weeks. Cibatutto rigged up a discarded telex machine to help them get around some of the new paperwork, and Dworkin introduced a new card game—bridge—which the old men quickly mastered. One Friday night, Radecker came into the kitchen and found them playing a rowdy game of cards while Okun watched. Just when the wounds Okun had caused began to heal, Radecker tore them open again. He realized Okun had gotten away with humiliating him without suffering a scratch. Something must have snapped, because the next day he dug his claws into Okun the only way he knew how. If he couldn’t punish the boy genius directly, he would hit below the belt. He had Freiling sent to a nearby Air Force base for psychological testing to determine if he was mentally fit to continue working at the highly classified labs. Freiling returned shaken and confused. The shrinks had ganged up on him, he said, deliberately done things to confuse him. The old man was terrified at the prospect of being sent to a retirement home-prison like the one Okun had described in San Mateo.
The whole group of them marched off immediately to Radecker’s office, but he wouldn’t talk to them. “I thought we had a deal, Mr. Radecker,” Dworkin called as politely as he could through the closed door.
“Don’t talk to me about it; go ask Okun. And think about this the next time one of you decides to cross me.” They spent the rest of that Saturday taking care of Freiling, assuring him they wouldn’t let him be sent away. When he finally relaxed and fell asleep, it was late at night.
Okun came into the kitchen and found Dworkin sitting there in the dark.
“What’s goin’ on, can’t sleep?”
“A case of indigestion,” Dworkin said. When Okun switched on a light, he saw a glass of water and a bottle of pills on the table. “It’s probably just heartburn caused by a stressful day.”
“You sure you’re all right? Should we call somebody?”
The old man laughed. It wasn’t that serious. He invited Okun to sit down, and asked him about his visit with Wells. He wanted to know all about the place he was being held and what he had said. After listening for a while, he asked Okun for his opinion. “Do you think he’s right? Are we criminals for not telling the world?”
“Maybe. Especially when you look around here and consider the kind of manpower the government is devoting to this research. There ought to be hundreds of people down here, and what have we got? Four men over seventy years old and one doofus who doesn’t even have a Ph.D. They aren’t taking this project seriously at all. I think Wells is right about one thing. We need to get lots of people working on this. If word got out, people would have to take it seriously and band together to get ready.”
“Possibly,” Dwo
rkin mused, “but I’m not convinced people would band together. I think it more likely that society would disintegrate. The way you reacted to learning about the ship and seeing the alien bodies was far from typical. When people really begin to believe we are facing annihilation, as Wells does, they tend to withdraw into themselves. I can imagine groups of frightened people abandoning their normal lives and retreating deeper into private misery, or forming private armies and taking to the hills. But that’s all speculation,” he said, finishing off his glass of water, “and it begs the question, because people are not going to be told. Even if one of us succeeded in putting ourselves on the evening news and telling the whole thing, no one would believe us. You know what happened at Roswell. They’re quite skilled at making intelligent persons seem crazy.”
“So what’s the answer? Just continue going through the motions down here?”
Dworkin stared into his empty glass for a few moments. “I’ve spent most of my adult life in these rooms, and I’m not sure I have anything to show for it. I was married, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that. Any kids?”
“No, thank heavens. But if there had been, I still would have left them. Dr. Wells and I had our differences over the years, but we always agreed the work being done here was important enough to justify our personal sacrifices. The work has been everything, and now I’m afraid it’s over.”
Okun knew what he must be talking about. “Because you’re getting too old?”
“Precisely. It’s been a few years since we’ve lost anyone, and I’ve allowed myself to forget what it feels like. If he sends Dr. Freiling away, we’ll be reduced to four. Soon we’ll all be gone, and I worry about what will happen then. I don’t know if you are prepared to carry on here by yourself.”
They let that idea hover in the air for a while. Brackish considered the possibility of following in Dworkin’s footsteps, trading in all his possible futures for the lonely life of a lab rat. He thought briefly of Brinelle, her gangly limbs and wide smile. He knew he’d probably never see her again, but for the moment he let her represent everyone he might meet. Did keeping the labs open mean he would never again have a crush on a girl? Or decide at the last minute to go catch a movie with some friends?
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 45