by Mike Jenne
Their little apartment was a revolving door; Scott’s undergrad students came and went, frequently stopping by for a cup of coffee or to mooch a meal. He held court in the living room almost every evening, as they gathered to excitedly debate the advanced mathematics and other concepts associated with travelling to other planets and galaxies.
Although she didn’t comprehend the esoteric ideas they discussed, and probably never would, she appreciated their youthful enthusiasm and enjoyed listening to them. When they ventured out too far into the theoretical, Scott always seemed ready to point out practical concerns to bring them back into focus.
Listening intently, the students hung on his every word as he described potential issues with propulsion, fuel consumption, consumables, radiation exposure, effects of cosmic rays, skeletal degeneration, power supplies, and instrumentation. He spoke with such august authority, it was as if he had flown into outer space himself. Scouring a frying pan from breakfast, she smiled to herself, thinking of his space capsule mock-up amid the musty hay bales in his parents’ barn back in Nebraska. Then she frowned, recalling the Christmas Eve when he inexplicably burned the mock-up, on the same day that Drew Carson was shot down over North Vietnam.
As Elton John played his last poignant notes, Bea thought of Carson. For whatever reason, whenever she tried to remember his face, she could never see him entirely, but only seemed to glimpse his pale blue eyes. In her thoughts, his eyes always seemed filled with sadness and longing, like he was gazing at her across a broad void, pleading for a chance to return. She knew that Scott missed him—terribly so—and now she missed him also. She sighed, wishing that he hadn’t gone to Vietnam. Although his remains had never been recovered, the military assumed he was dead; if Scott knew otherwise, he wasn’t letting on.
As she rinsed Andy’s bowl, Bea heard a faint tap at the door. Expecting to shoo away an obnoxious salesman, she strolled into the living room and cracked open the front door to glimpse the grinning face of Death.
It was a horrific nightmare in broad daylight. She slammed the door with enough force to rattle the entire apartment. Screaming at the top of her lungs, she whirled around and scrambled into the kitchen. Crying, she sagged to the floor next to Andy. Clinging tightly to her, even though he could not possibly understand why she was so upset, the child bawled also.
The tapping persisted, progressively growing louder, accompanied by a voice: “Bea?”
“Please, please,” she blurted. “Please just go away.”
The door creaked open to reveal the gaunt specter. Outfitted in his customary cowboy garb, Virgil Wolcott tipped his white Stetson, grinned broadly, and drawled, “Mornin’, Bea.”
“Please, please,” she pleaded, standing up. She blindly reached into the soapy water in the sink, grabbed the first object that came to hand, and brandished an unwashed soup ladle toward him. “Scott’s not here. He’s teaching a lab this morning. Please, Virgil, just go away. Please leave us alone.”
“May I come in?” he asked, removing his hat.
“Please go away,” she begged. “Hasn’t he given enough? We’re happy now. Just leave us alone. Please just let us be, Virgil. Go find someone else.”
And then Wolcott uttered the words that chilled her to the bone: “I’m not here for Scott, darlin’. I’m here for you, Bea.”
“Me?!”
He nodded, stepping into the living room. Bea could glimpse someone else in the hallway, just outside the threshold, standing motionless in the shadows.
Closing her eyes and breathing rapidly, she couldn’t speak for over a minute. Her fear was gradually dispelled by sheer curiosity. As she calmed down, she opened her eyes and asked, “Me? What on earth do you want from me, Virgil Wolcott?”
“If truth be told, Bea, I’m here on behalf of Mark Tew.”
“But Mark is dead,” she replied, bending down to comfort Andy. Just as the toddler calmed down, Wolcott smiled at him, and he started whimpering again.
“True,” he replied, walking slowly toward the kitchen. “Mark is dead, but with his dyin’ breath, he passed on his last wish to me, and I promised that I would do my utmost to make it so. I’m beholden to him, Bea. I hope you understand.”
He handed her a small white envelope. She opened it, and found an embossed card. She read it; it was a formal invitation to the opening of a new exhibit at the US Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson. “This is nice, but I’m a little confused, Virgil. What does this have to do with me?”
“Well, Bea, it’s a long story,” he replied. “Would you mind if I asked my friend to come in? He’s here to help with the explanation.”
Wiping her eyes, Bea nodded.
“Ted, come on in,” said Wolcott. The man in the hallway came in. Dressed in a Harris tweed jacket, a blue button-down Oxford shirt and corduroy trousers, the handsome man could easily pass as an English Lit professor at any of the campuses that dotted the Boston area. The three sat down around the book-cluttered table.
“This is Colonel Ted Seibert,” explained Wolcott. “He’s going to help me explain the situation.” It took the two men almost an hour to present their case, and even then they said scarcely little.
“And so, that’s it,” Wolcott concluded. “I hate to be vague, but I can only say so much until you’re formally cleared. Can we count on you?”
“I’ll think about it,” she replied. “But if I decide to come to this opening of yours, I’ll make my own travel arrangements. And I also have a request for you.”
“Name it, darlin’.”
“If I’m going to be there, I would really appreciate it if you could send out a couple of additional invitations. I know a couple of other people who deserve to be there as well.”
“We’ll consider it,” said Wolcott. “But they would have to be cleared, just like you. Now, Bea, I’m sorry to pester you, but I really need an answer today. Can we count on you?”
“I suppose.”
Wolcott grinned. “Well, then, Ted has some paperwork for you to fill out. I know it’s a nuisance, Bea, but we can’t tell you any more until after your temporary security clearance has been approved.”
“How long will this take?” she asked. “I’ll need to start dinner soon.”
“The paperwork will take us a couple of hours, at least,” explained Seibert, proffering a multi-page form and a government issue Skilcraft black pen.
Looking at the form, she smiled. “So does this mean that you’re going to finally tell me what Scott’s been doing for the past five years?”
“Well, not exactly,” answered Seibert, slowly shaking his head.
“So are you still at Wright-Patt, Virgil?” asked Bea, as she started to fill out the form. “I was under the impression that your office had been closed down. That’s what Scott said, anyway.”
“That’s true,” replied Wolcott. “But there are still chores to be completed, junk to be packed away, and records to be filed. The Devil’s work is never done.”
Bea shuddered. “I suppose you’re right.”
Cambridge, Massachusetts
5:15 p.m., Friday, May 31, 1974
Nudging the door closed with her hip, Bea sorted through the day’s mail. Chewing on a No. 2 pencil, cross-referencing two thick textbooks and three notebooks, Ourecky was deeply immersed in his studies. She stood there for a moment and watched him. He finally looked up and smiled. She smiled back. In the living room, the evening news was on the television. Virtually all of the stories concerned the Watergate scandal and the Middle East.
“Did you stop at the post office?” he asked, tapping digits into his new Hewlett Packard handheld calculator. “My paycheck should have landed in the box today.”
“I got it,” she replied, nodding. “I put it straight into the bank. The deposit slip is on your desk. Did Andy ever settle down for his nap?”
“About an hour ago. Sound asleep.”
“I really don’t like him napping this late in the afternoon,” she observed. “He’ll
be awake late again. Are your undergrads coming over tonight?”
“They are. They’re bringing tomato pies from that Greek pizza place.”
“Pizza? Yummy. I guess there’s no need for me to cook, then. This came in today’s mail,” she said, handing him a large manila envelope. It was franked with an official stamp. “It was registered mail, so I had to sign for it. It looks important.”
He tore it open and examined its contents. “This is odd,” he commented, scratching his bearded chin. “This is from the Secretary of the Air Force. It’s an invitation to attend the opening of a new space exhibit at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patt.”
“Really? That does seem odd. Are you going?”
“I don’t have much choice. I know that you would like to forget it, but even though I’m a doctoral candidate here, I’m still an officer in the Air Force. There’s an instructional letter and a set of orders in here. And a round-trip plane ticket.”
“Interesting. Well, on the plus side, you do love museums, dear. When is it?”
“June 7. Next Friday. Aren’t you flying to Dayton next week to see Jill’s mother?”
“You know, dear, I think you’re right,” she replied. She pivoted around to refer to a calendar on the wall by the refrigerator. “Yeah, Scott. Wow, what a coincidence. Do you think maybe I might be able to see that museum with you?”
“You probably won’t be able to go to this opening,” he replied, studying the letter. “It’s apparently invitation only. If we stay for the weekend, maybe we can go the next day, after things settle down a bit.”
“Sounds good to me. So you’ll need to go in uniform?”
He nodded, and pointed at his beard. “I guess these whiskers will have to come off. And I’ll need to pay a visit to the barber.”
She grinned and bent over to hug him. “Well, I really wouldn’t miss the beard if you decided not to grow it back. I might even be motivated to kiss you more often.”
“Then consider it gone.”
United States Air Force Museum
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
9:35 a.m., Friday, June 7, 1974
If he wasn’t aware that he was just an average Air Force officer, Ourecky would have believed that he was some sort of VIP or show business celebrity. An official sedan, complete with an escort officer, had picked him up at the Dayton Airport to whisk him to the museum.
As he watched the familiar landmarks of Dayton pass by outside, he reflected on the events of the past few months. Shortly after Carson had been reported killed by NVA soldiers in North Vietnam, Ourecky was finally released from the Project. With Carson gone, he was finally able to convince Wolcott and Tarbox that he was no longer interested in flying in space, nor did he harbor any overwhelming desire to be publicly acknowledged as an astronaut.
It was just as well that he bowed out of the Navy’s MOL flight, because the program was cancelled before the mission ever flew. Shortly after Ourecky bowed out, the National Command Authority had rescinded their tentative blessing to allow the MOL to fly in public view. Just a few months later, any and all hopes of another clandestine mission were dashed as well. The last handful of military astronauts had already disbanded, and all of the MOL hardware had been summarily stashed in mothballs at some facility in California. Ourecky had an excellent source of information concerning the program’s demise; he ate lunch regularly with Gunter Heydrich, who now worked at MIT’s Draper Laboratories, the prestigious facility that designed the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft navigation computers.
From what Gunter had told him, the entire joint Air Force-Navy manned space program was also on the cusp of folding. Although Wolcott remained to finalize the close out, Tarbox had already moved on to another highly classified program within the Navy. Gunter confided that the joint program was deemed superfluous in the aftermath of a series of high-level secret meetings between US and Soviet officials, in preparation for an Apollo-Soyuz space mission slated to fly next year. In the course of the meetings, the militarization of outer space was discussed extensively. In response to very pointed questions from Soviet officials, who were perplexed about the untimely demise of several of their satellites, the US negotiators admitted to successfully fielding a system that could readily destroy any suspect object in orbit. And while they didn’t reveal how they did it, they did admit to knocking down a significant number of Soviet space vehicles and implied that the system was still fully operational. They also made it emphatically clear that a threat of orbiting nuclear weapons would not be tolerated, and the consequences—if it ever happened again—would be significantly greater than a warhead being harmlessly sent to the depths of the Indian Ocean. Both parties agreed to limit—although not entirely curtail—the militarization of space.
The sedan dropped him off at the curb directly at the front entrance, next to a white sandwich board sign that claimed the museum was temporarily closed for a special event. He noticed that the parking area entrances were sealed off with wooden barricades, and that all the vehicles entering the lot were stringently checked by SPs. He also observed three men in dark suits standing by the museum doors, and assumed that they were some sort of undercover security agents.
As he slid out of the sedan and closed the door, Ourecky recognized a familiar face. He strolled up to a broad-shouldered black man wearing Air Force blues and a distinctive red beret atop a closely cropped Afro. “Henson, right?” he asked.
“Yeah. I mean, yes, sir,” replied Henson, pivoting around and snapping up a sharp salute. “It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? Haiti was over four years ago.”
Returning the salute, Ourecky clasped his stomach and grimaced. “Haiti? Afterwards, they told me you were there, but all of that was like a dream to me. A bad dream. Forgive me if I don’t remember too many pertinent details.”
Henson laughed. “I’ve tried to forget most of it myself.”
“So long before that, when we met on the plane, didn’t you tell me that you were interviewing for some sort of mining company? Was that just some sort of cover story?”
“Apex Exploration? More or less,” replied Henson. “But I did marry the boss’s daughter.” He pointed at a strikingly attractive woman waiting at the museum’s entrance. The mocha-skinned beauty, who appeared to be in her late twenties, was standing next to an elderly white man leaning on a cane. “That’s my old boss, Abner Grau, and my wife, Adja.”
“She’s pretty,” commented Ourecky, shielding his eyes from the bright morning sun. “He’s her father?”
Grinning, Henson nodded. “It’s a very long story. I also made enough money at Apex to send Adja to medical school. She’s in her second year right now.”
Ourecky studied Henson’s uniform. “So I take it that you left Apex Exploration and went back into the Air Force?”
Henson nodded. “I did. Not too long after Haiti, I went back on active duty and volunteered to transfer into the pararescue field. From there, I went straight to Thailand, and then…”
“Then what?” asked Ourecky.
“Uh, nothing, sir.”
“So, PJ’s, huh?” Ourecky pointed at a silver badge on Henson’s uniform and read its inscription: “That Others May Live. Do you believe in that?”
“Very much so. I can’t quite explain it, but I heard the calling after I worked with Steve Baker in Haiti. He’s the guy who kept you alive between there and Cuba. Anyway, the PJ training pipeline took me about a year. After I rotated back from Thailand, I went to Lackland, near San Antonio, training PJ recruits. That’s where I am now, but I get out in two years, roughly at the same time Adja finishes medical school. I plan to finish my degree and go to medical school myself.”
“Good for you,” said Ourecky. “What sort of medicine you want to practice?”
“I’ve thought about going into the emergency field. Adja and I have even seriously talked about going overseas, kind of like missionary doctors, maybe to Africa or even back to Haiti. There’s a French outfit cal
led Médecins Sans Frontières—Doctors Without Borders—working in Biafra and Nigeria. We might throw in with them, or maybe even set up our own operation. My father-in-law has a lot of experience all over the world, especially in Africa, and he said he would help us get started.”
“Interesting.”
“So whatever happened to that Delta stewardess?” asked Henson. “The really cute blonde who had such a shine for you?”
“Bea? I married her.”
“Well, Major Ourecky, good for you. Try not to lose her.”
Smiling, Ourecky replied, “Good advice. I’ll make a point to work on that.”
Henson started to say something, and then fell silent. A strange expression passed over his face, like he was recalling a particularly bad experience.
“Something wrong?” asked Ourecky.
“Maybe, sir,” said Henson. “Are you going to be around later?”
“I assume that I am. There’s supposed to be some sort of reception after the ceremony. It’s on my invitation, so I guess that I have to attend it.”
Henson nodded. “If you don’t mind, sir, if you’re going to be there, I would sure like to talk to you. And there’s someone else you need to talk to.”
10:00 a.m.
Once inside the huge museum, his escort officer guided Ourecky into a dimly lit auditorium and showed him to his designated seat in the front row. The seat, like several others in the first two rows, was marked by a diagonal strip of red fabric. As he waited, he looked around; the space looked like it could accommodate roughly two hundred spectators. It was rapidly filling up, mostly with people who had previously been assigned to Blue Gemini, along with their families.
As he spotted Gunter Heydrich entering the auditorium, it finally dawned on him that the ceremony probably had nothing to do with a new exhibit and obviously had something to do with the Project.
As more attendees filed in, he was joined on the front row by Parch Jackson, Mike Sigler and Ed Russo. Wearing dark glasses, apparently almost blind, Russo looked terrible; Ourecky had heard through the grapevine that he was currently suffering serious health problems.