The Aliens Are Coming!

by Dayton Ward

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  eISBN: 0-7434-6454-0

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  Previously published as a story in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds III.

  The Aliens Are Coming!

  Dayton Ward

  July 10th, A.D. 1969

  Darkness faded as awareness returned, and he cautiously opened his eyes. Doing so sent a searing jolt of pain directly to the base of his skull.

  Captain John Christopher had one hell of a headache.

  He opened his eyes fully and took stock of his surroundings. The room he found himself in was a bare cinder-block affair, with no furniture or fixtures save a single lightbulb in the center of the ceiling, hanging inside a protective wire cage. The only door in the room was locked, a guess he confirmed when he tried to open it. He found the room stuffy, and he reached to unzip the top half of his orange flight suit.

  The simple action made him pause and realize that he had no idea what had happened. The last thing he remembered was walking from the flight line into the hangar facility containing the pilots’ locker room. He recalled starting across the wide expanse of the hangar floor when something came crashing down across the back of his head. Then…

  …then he awoke here, with a prize-winning headache.

  The room’s lone door abruptly opened to admit a man wearing a nondescript black suit with matching shoes and tie and a plain white dress shirt. He carried a manila folder in his left hand. Christopher noted the lines in the man’s face and the liberal smattering of gray in his thinning blond hair. He looked to be in his middle to late fifties, but the haunted look in his eyes made him seem older still.

  “Where the hell am I?” Christopher barked as the door closed behind the new arrival. He thought the man looked visibly uneasy, almost nervous, as though he was uncomfortable with the situation. Well, good. That made two of them.

  They exchanged stares for several seconds, then the other man said, “Where you are is not so important, Captain, as why you are here.”

  “Fair enough,” the pilot replied. “That was my next question.”

  The other man ran a hand across his face and Christopher saw that it shook slightly. With a smile that seemed forced, he said, “My name is Wainwright, Captain, and you’re here because I believe you have information I need.”

  “What kind of information?”

  Bringing up the folder, Wainwright opened it and withdrew a single large photograph, holding it for Christopher to see. It was a grainy, dark image, mostly black, but he recognized the curvature of the Earth as that seen in photos taken during various manned space flights.

  He also recognized the object floating over the Earth.

  “Oh my god,” Christopher breathed.

  As a boy, Jimmy Wainwright knew all about alien invasions. He read The War of the Worlds. He followed the adventures of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Captain Proton. In the pages of numerous magazines purchased at the drugstore in the sleepy hometown of his youth, Earth was threatened every month. Its men were enslaved and its women carted off to carry out the whims of alien emperors across the universe.

  But today, James Wainwright contemplated a real invasion by real aliens. He’d awaited their return ever since that fateful night in the New Mexico desert twenty-two years ago. Was the day he’d been dreading all these years finally at hand?

  He stood silently as Christopher studied the object in the photograph, watched as the man’s eyes traced over the large saucer shape and the three cylindrical projections, two above the saucer and one below.

  “This photograph was taken last year by a military reconnaissance satellite,” Wainwright said. “The object was discovered in high orbit above the Earth.”

  Christopher could not conceal his shock. “Last year? That’s the same thing I saw just this morning.”

  Wainwright nodded. “So I gathered from your cockpit transmissions. Captain, I need to know everything you can tell me about what you saw up there.”

  Relaxing somewhat, Christopher frowned. “There’s not much to tell, really. Air Defense Command tasked me to intercept an unidentified craft over Omaha Air Base. I got to the designated coordinates and there it was, high in the clouds and climbing away fast. At first I thought it was just sunlight reflecting off my canopy. I only saw it for a second or two, and then it was just…gone.”

  “But you’re sure what you saw was the object in this picture?” Wainwright asked, holding up the photo for emphasis.

  “Yes, I’m sure of it. What is it? Some kind of Russian rocket?” The pilot’s eyes widened at a sudden thought. “Wait a minute. Are they pushing for the Moon? They’re not going to beat us, are they? Not when we’re this close?”

  Wainwright shook his head. “We don’t believe it’s Russian, Captain.”

  “So what, then?”

  Pacing slowly around the room, Wainwright didn’t reply immediately. Christopher watched as the other man seemed to gather himself, as if preparing for a difficult task.

  Finally, he said, “Captain, I’ve spent the last two decades of my life mired in endless searching, fear, frustration, even humiliation. I’ve watched this country advance along the technical path toward putting a man on the Moon, all the while failing to grasp the very real dangers lying just beyond the boundaries of our tiny planet. The people of this nation, of this very world in fact, are oblivious to these dangers because those in power wish to keep them ignorant.”

  Christopher shook his head, annoyed. An edge creeped into his voice as he said, “What are you talking about?”

  Wainwright stopped his pacing and stared directly at Christopher. “In July of 1947, I was a captain in the Army Air Corps, stationed at Wright Field in Ohio. One night, an unidentified craft landed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico. It was retrieved by soldiers from the Army air field there and transported to us, along with its three pilots.”

  “Russian?” Christopher asked.

  “No. Definitely not Russian. They called themselves ‘Ferengi,’ though to this day I have no idea what that means.”

  “There’s no country called Ferengi,” Christopher said, and then his eyes widened. “Wait. Are you saying…?”

  Wainwright nodded, the look on his face chilling the pilot to the bone. “Yes. They came from another world.” He paused for a moment. The implications of that simple statement never failed to astonish him, even after all these years.

  “At first, there were those among us who thought they came in peace.” He shook his head in disgust, remembering how that idiot professor, Carlson, had them all slapping their heads and tugging their noses in feeble attempts to communicate. All the while, the aliens had been toying with them.

/>   “However,” he continued, “once we started interrogating them, the truth came out. They admitted to being advance scouts for their Ferengi invasion fleet. They were coming to enslave us. They had the ability to control our minds, and they used that power on Carlson and his fiancée to engineer their escape. They got to their ship and flew away, and when they were gone, there was no evidence that they’d ever been here.”

  He glared at Christopher. “But I saw them, Captain. I know why they came, and I know they’ll come back. They no doubt made it back to their leaders and told them all about our defensive capabilities, which compared to their technology were and probably still are pathetic.”

  Christopher was skeptical. “Mr. Wainwright, I admit it’s a fascinating story, but…”

  Wainwright cut him off. “For twenty-two years I and others like me have been planning for their return, Captain. President Truman empowered a group of us to investigate UFO sightings with the express purpose of learning as much as we could about them and formulating a defense against them. It was a top-secret program called Project Sign.”

  The haunted look returned to the man’s eyes as he recalled memories from long ago. “The things we discovered were staggering. We were being observed almost constantly. We investigated sightings and some of them did prove to be false. But others, many others, were very true. We compiled thousands of pages of information during the first year alone.”

  He was staring into the room’s lone lightbulb as he continued. “We obtained evidence of their presence, Captain. We captured crashed ships and retrieved alien beings, living and dead. When we started studying their technology, we realized just how out-classed we truly were.”

  Shaking his head, Christopher said, “This is unbelievable.”

  “Others thought the same way. Project Sign evolved over the years and its purpose along with it. Soon, our directive was to ensure that any sightings of UFOs were suppressed. We kept amassing the information, but our reports never saw the light of day.”

  Wainwright was pacing again, talking more to himself than to Christopher. The pilot could see anger welling up in the other man as he weaved the story. He couldn’t begin to guess whether the man was constructing his tale from tortured memories or thin air. Wainwright looked to him to be an unhappy man, a man who had seen his share of adversity and injustice, and who was now summoning some final shred of will and purpose in order to try for success one last time.

  Either that, or he was stark raving mad.

  “Our work was hushed up deliberately, with misleading reports forwarded up to the president. The people running the project wanted UFOs to disappear. They considered the whole thing to be a nuisance.” He snorted and shook his head. “Fools, all of them. They had no idea. But the public wasn’t stupid. They knew something was up, and they knew the government was trying to sweep it under the rug. They kept protesting, demanding more results. The program finally evolved into Project Blue Book in the early fifties, and for the first time I thought we’d finally get the support we needed.”

  Wainwright’s anxiety was climbing steadily, and Christopher was almost certain the man had forgotten he was even talking to the pilot. He’d unbuttoned his suit jacket and Christopher caught a fleeting glance of a pistol in a shoulder holster under Wainwright’s arm.

  The pilot stole a look toward the door. Who or what was on the other side? It didn’t matter, he decided. He’d take his chances, given the opportunity. All he had to do was get past Wainwright, who seemed to be growing more unbalanced by the minute.

  Stalling for time, Christopher asked, “So, what happened?”

  “Those idiots!” Wainwright exploded. “The same story all over again, only this time they wanted to take care of this ‘UFO craze’ once and for all. Evidence was destroyed. Witnesses were forced into silence, bought off, or suffered ‘sudden disappearances’ or ‘mysterious accidents.’ The people in charge, the same people I trusted, turned their backs on me. People I called close friends shunned me in hopes of preserving their own pathetic careers.”

  His eyes burned with hurt, anger, and defeat. “Now they’re beginning the first stages of shutting down the program and tying up loose ends like me. I still work on the project, but now I’m a professional disgrace, one of many scapegoats in a massive campaign designed to keep people blissfully unaware of their true status in the interstellar reality!”

  The man’s losing it, Christopher thought.

  Wainwright pointed at him. “But now I’ve finally got someone who can help me, someone they haven’t gotten to yet. You saw that ship, Captain. You know it’s real.” He pointed to the photo that lay on the floor. “A year ago that thing destroyed a nuclear weapons platform we were trying to put into orbit. It was the most sophisticated piece of hardware in our arsenal, but they destroyed it easily and damn near started World War III in the process. Now it’s back, just as we’re getting ready for the most ambitious manned space flight in our history. Don’t you see what’s happening?”

  Christopher regarded the man warily. “You think an alien spaceship is here to disrupt the Moon landing? What will that accomplish?”

  Gesturing wildly with both hands, Wainwright said, “Can’t you see? They want to slap us down, keep us pinned to our own planet. That way, we’re all right here when they come to take us over. They can’t wait ten or fifteen years to make their move. By then we’ll have space stations and a base on the Moon. They’re striking now, before we have a chance to learn how to defend ourselves against them.”

  “You’re talking movie stuff, Wainwright,” Christopher said, his face screwing up in disdain. “Martians and mind control and taking over the world. It’s preposterous! There’s no such thing as little green men.”

  Christopher froze as the words left his mouth. Something was there behind the words, something teasing the edges of his memory. Ghostly images of wide corridors and bright colors called to him. There was a man in a gold shirt with an air of authority about him. Another man in a blue shirt with green-tinged skin and…

  “You believe,” Wainwright said, pointing at the pilot again. “I can see it in your eyes.”

  “No,” Christopher whispered. It went against everything he took to be true, to be factual. This was fantasy, and madness lay not far beyond it, if Wainwright was any indication.

  But the green-skinned man with the pointed ears haunting his memory told him otherwise.

  “I…I was there,” he said, his voice barely audible. “On the ship. They brought me aboard, destroyed my plane.” Confusion clouded his face and he shook his head. “But that’s impossible, isn’t it? There was no time for that to happen. I only saw it for a second. But I was there. I slept in one of their beds, ate their food.”

  There was more there, he knew, more memories stubbornly refusing to come forward. Saturn? Why did Saturn seem so important?

  “I have to report this,” Christopher said. “Tell them what I saw.”

  “Yes,” Wainwright replied. “You have to report it. We have to get this information out, warn people that there’s an alien ship up there waiting for God knows what.”

  “My superiors will inform their leaders. The President will take action, right?”

  Scowling, Wainwright said, “The president? Captain, this country is preparing to send three men to the Moon. They know about that ship just as we do, but they can’t afford to acknowledge it. Putting a man on the Moon is a political gold mine right now. There’s no way they’ll risk losing that, even if it costs the lives of three brave men and the work of thousands of other people.

  “But we don’t have to let that happen. We can take this to the newspeople, get it on television. The government won’t have the chance to bury it. They’ll have to delay the launch and deal with the problem.”

  Disbelief clouded Christopher’s face. “I can’t accept that. I have to believe my superiors will listen to my report and take the proper action. They already know I saw something. I have a duty to report in full det
ail what I know.”

  “No!” Wainwright screamed, drawing the pistol from the holster under his arm. “All these years I’ve tried to get them to understand, to accept the problem and deal with it. But they’ve ignored me! Destroyed me! They’re going to shut Blue Book down soon. This may be my last chance to prove once and for all that I’m right. You’re not going to take that away from me.”

  Christopher stared at the gun. “Shooting me won’t help, you know.”

  “I don’t plan to shoot you unless you force me to. But you should know that two of my agents are at this very moment sitting in a car outside your home.” He glanced at the watch he wore on his left wrist. “In about twenty minutes, if they don’t hear from me, your family will ‘mysteriously disappear.’ Their only chance is for you to do as I say.”

  Anger flared up in Christopher. It was obvious now that Wainwright was beyond reason. Years of humiliation and disgrace had robbed him of whatever sense of honor or duty he may have once possessed. Now he was nothing but a battered shell of a man, frantically seizing one final chance at redemption.

  “You bastard,” he breathed.

  “Desperate times, Captain,” Wainwright said. “You know what they call for. Now, please, don’t make this any more difficult than it has to be.” He motioned for Christopher to go to the door. “Let’s go.”

  Christopher stepped to the door and reached for the knob. This time it turned in his hand and he pulled the door open. Beyond, he saw a stark, gray-painted corridor perhaps a hundred feet in length, ending at a set of polished steel elevator doors. He was surprised to find no other people in the hallway.

  “Move,” Wainwright said, nudging him with the pistol. The pilot opened the door wider to step into the corridor. From the corner of his eye, he saw the other man move to follow.

  Christopher yanked the door open with sudden unexpected force. It slammed into Wainwright, catching the man in the face. He howled in pain and reached for his nose. Christopher hit him with the door again and Wainwright fell to the floor, his pistol clattering away across the room. The pilot took off running down the hallway.