“Man, tell me this isn’t where we’re going, man.”
Radecker, who was just as disturbed by what he saw out the window as Okun was, said nothing. Two days ago, before leaving Washington, he’d asked around and learned that Area 51 was “a backwater facility.” But the dusty collection of weathered buildings he saw from the plane didn’t even deserve the name backwater. It was more like tiny-scuzzy-pond-water about nine million miles from where the action was. This wasn’t a promotion; it was exile.
As the plane came in for its landing, they could nee that most of the buildings were boarded-up rthacks, the sleeping quarters of some long-departed army. A large 51 was painted in black on the doors of the corrugated-steel airplane hangar, before which a contingent of perhaps twenty-five people stood waiting to greet the new arrivals. A pair of antiaircraft guns stood guard over either end of this dusty little ghost town.
“Welcome, gentlemen. I’m Lieutenant Ellsworth,” rasped the man who opened the plane’s passenger door for them. “I’ll be responsible for your security while you’re here. My instructions are to escort you directly to the labs and try to answer any questions you might have.” Soldiers came forward and helped unload the luggage and other cargo. Ellsworth’s tough-customer face was obscured by reflective sunglasses and a baseball cap with a Groom Lake patch sewn on the front. As they marched across the warm tarmac, he explained that the base was under twenty-four-hour guard, and that someone would always be stationed at the phones in case there was any emergency. Everyone who worked in the underground lab was free to come topside whenever he wished, but, for security reasons, would the gentlemen please refrain from fraternizing with the soldiers. When they arrived at the hangar doors, they were met by a group of elderly gentlemen whom Ellsworth introduced as the scientific staff. There were four of them, all about seventy years old, dressed in lab coats and sporting beards. “This is Dr. Freiling, Dr. Cibatutto, Dr. Lenel, and I believe you already know Dr. Dworkin.”
Sure enough, standing there with the same avuncular smile Okun recognized from the interview in his dorm room, was Sam Dworkin. Standing next td the sun-darkened soldiers, the quartet of aging scientists looked extremely pale. After a round of handshakes and hellos, the party moved inside.
The hangar was empty except for a few jeeps. They came to a stairwell and began to descend the stairs in silence. Four flights down, it felt like they were preparing to enter an excavated tomb, and Okun could feel himself getting claustrophobic. He took comfort in the sight of telex cables and phone lines snaking up the bare concrete walls of the stairwell. Finally, after six steep flights of steps, they came to a set of heavy steel doors. Okun and Radecker both noticed that these could be bolted closed from the outside.
Okun stopped walking and raised his hand in the air. “I have a question.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Is it just me, or is this whole situation starting to feel like an Edgar Allen Poe story? You aren’t planning on locking us inside those doors, are you?”
Okun chuckled nervously, hoping the others would chuckle with him.
Ellsworth answered mirthlessly. “The doors are never locked, sir. The bolts are there just in case there’s an emergency.”
“Has there ever been one?”
“Not yet.” Ellsworth handed Okun’s suitcases over to him. “This is as far as I go. I’m not allowed inside the lab.”
“Except in case of emergency,” one of the scientists added.
*
Inside, each of the four elderly scientists carried a crate of new supplies that had been left by the door and led the new arrivals into a long, dimly lit room. Every few paces they moved into a pool of light cast by the lamps mounted on the ceiling. Although half of the light bulbs had died, Okun and Radecker could see the room stretching out to the length of a football field. Other than a few hundred crates and dusty filing cabinets, it was empty.
“Don’t mind this mess,” Dr. Cibatutto told them in what was left of his Italian accent. “It’s only a storage area for obsolete equipment and a lot of old documents nobody cares about. Someday we’ll clean it up, and put in a bowlin galley.”
“Put in a what?” Okun asked.
“A bowling alley,” repeated Cibatutto, shortest and plumpest of the scientists, enunciating carefully.
“This way, gentlemen.” Dworkin turned into one hallway, then another, leading them into the most often used room in this top-secret government lab: the kitchen. In contrast to the murky light and cobwebs of the entrance hall, this room was brightly lit and tastefully decorated. A long table with picnic benches was elegantly set for six diners.
“We take turns cooking down here and, over the years, we’ve developed into rather adequate chefs, but none finer than Signor Cibatutto,” Dworkin told them, setting down the crate he’d carried in. “And, in honor of your arrival, he has prepared one of his most mouthwatering specialties.”
Cibatutto beamed proudly. “Tonight we’re gonna have a mushroom risotto with salmon and a delicious chicken cacciatore.”
“Dr. Lenel and I will show you to your rooms,” Dworkin said, picking up one of Okun’s bags. “We’ll give you a chance to relax from your journey, and then dinner will be served.”
Radecker wasn’t in the mood for a dinner party. “Is it just the four of you down here? Isn’t there anyone else?”
All the doctors glanced at one another nervously. “No, just the four of us. Were you expecting others?
“No, I didn’t know what to expect,” Radecker retorted.
“I remember now!” Freiling erupted. He’d spent the last few minutes staring at Brackish, scrutinizing him, but now he turned around toward Dworkin. “This is that hippie kid you were telling us about. I been standing here thinking it was a damned girl, but it’s not. It’s that hippie kid, isn’t it?”
Okun grinned sourly at the old man, not nodding.
Dworkin chuckled in blithe amusement and tried to dismiss the incident. “Dr. Freiling’s eyesight isn’t what it once was.”
“Look, gentlemen”—Radecker felt there was too much nonsense going on—“I appreciate the effort you’ve gone to, but Mr. Okun and I would like to get oriented right away. Why don’t you give us a tour.”
The old men stared at the young men, their feelings bruised. “Now, now,” Dworkin said, “there will be more than enough time for a tour later on. Whenever we show the place to visitors, there are invariably a thousand questions. It takes hours. Hut first thing tomorrow morning, we’ll be sure and—”
“Show us the vehicle!” Radecker demanded with a vehemence that surprised everyone, including himself. He was getting very nervous about the idea of being marooned in this concrete bunker for who knew how long.
The high-spirited mood in the room crashed like a tray full of fine china. The stunned scientists looked at one another. Who is this guy?
*
Dworkin led them through another set of hallways until they came to a steel door with a wheel lock, the same type found at a bulkhead in a submarine. He pulled the door open and stepped into the pitch-black room beyond. A second later, dozens of fluorescent tubes sputtered to life, illuminating the interior of a giant concrete cube, six stories deep. In the center of the room was the alien ship that had crashed at Roswell many years before. Okun’s jaw fell open, and his eyes glazed over. In the photograph, the thing had looked somehow ordinary, a machine and nothing more. But now, looking it in the face, there was an animal quality to its appearance, like a great black-gray stingray sleeping peacefully at the bottom of this large concrete tank. It rested seven feet off the ground on a series of wooden trestles. A pair of windows facing the visitors seemed to stare back like sharply focused eyes. Gulp.
They stepped through the doorway and onto an observation platform, as Dr. Lenel made his way along the underside of the beast and scampered up a ladder into its belly. In a moment, lights came on inside the ship, and Lenel could be seen behind the windows standing in the cockpit.
/> “This,” Okun said to no one in particular, “is far beyond cool.” Then, nodding for the first time since he arrived at Area 51, he stepped off the observation platform. Moving closer, he examined the large projection running along the ship’s backbone. “The fin,” as the scientists called it, started out some six feet tall just behind the windows, then tapered gracefully to a needle-sharp point at the tail. The ship’s exterior surface was composed of several armored plates which were etched with thinly cut grooves and embossed designs that looked somewhat like Egyptian hieroglyphs. “I don’t recognize this material. Do you know what kind of metal it is?”
“The vehicle’s carapace is composed of a very rigid material, but it isn’t metal,” Dr. Dworkin explained, moving past Okun to reach up and run his hand over the surface. “If you look very closely, you’ll notice something curious. Can you see these very small holes? We think they’re either pores or hair follicles. This armored plate was once the shell of a living animal.”
“Outta sight,” the younger scientist commented softly.
Lenel beckoned him even closer to the ship, pointing into the gap between two of the plates. In the crevice, Okun could see countless pieces of intricate machine tooling, tiny metallic gadgets set in place with the same extraordinary precision as the muscles in the human hand. This outstanding workmanship received a large and approving nod.
Mounted on the ship’s underside were what looked like a couple of thruster rockets. One of them had been sheared away in the crash and was currently held in place by an awkward network of spot welds and metal plumber’s tape.
Radecker, reluctant to move closer to the menacing ship, asked a question from the observation platform. “What about these symbols or designs?”
“They appear to have been pressed into the shells using some sort of mold. We can only speculate as to why they are there. They might be a brand, like the kind we use to identify cattle,” Dworkin offered.
“Or they could be technical details for the operation of the vehicle,” Freiling countered.
“I personally think they are some kinda heraldic device like the ones you find on a medieval coat of arms,” Cibatutto put in.
“We did have one gentleman down here several years ago who had received some training as a cryptographer, but he was not able to decipher their meaning. In short, we don’t know.”
As far as Radecker was concerned, this whole experience was quickly turning into a nightmare. For the second time since they were introduced, he raised his voice to these mild-mannered scientists twice his age. “Why is this place in such bad shape?”
Cibatutto and Lenel looked at Freiling, who looked at Dworkin. “Bad shape? In what sense?”
“Don’t act dumb with me,” Radecker shot back. “Look at this dump. It’s dark, it’s dusty, and it seems like you haven’t gotten diddly-squat done on the ship in the last twenty years.”
Dworkin, in his refined and gentle manner, offered his new boss some background on the lab. “Since the day the cranes lowered this ship to where it is sitting, no maintenance workers have been allowed access because of legitimate concerns for security. In years past, we did whatever repair work was necessary, but as we’ve advanced in age, we’ve been less able to do this work ourselves. And then there is the unfortunate matter of Dr. Wells, who was, until fairly recently, Area 51’s director of research. He was a brilliant man early in his career, but with age he became… oh, how shall I put this?”
“The bastard went crazy,” Dr. Lenel mumbled, speaking to the new arrivals for the first time. “Went right off the deep end.”
Dworkin attempted a chuckle. “That’s not exactly the phrase I was searching for, but it gives you the idea. In the early years, Area 51 was quite an exciting place to work. There were over forty of us on permanent staff, and we had several visitors each year. Perhaps you noticed the old sleeping quarters outside. But then Dr. Wells and his ideas became increasingly unpopular in Washington with the very people upon whom we depend for funding. We’ve had our operating budget reduced every year for the last seventeen years. When Wells was removed as director four years ago, we were optimistic about getting things back up to speed, but actually conditions have become even worse. Since his departure, we have received no money whatsoever.”
“So that’s why you guys are so old,” Okun blurted out, having put two and two together. “You haven’t been able to hire anyone new.”
“And that,” Dworkin said magnanimously, “is why we’re all so excited about your arrival. It represents a new chapter in the history of this project. We haven’t seen anything concrete yet, but Colonel Spelman has given us every reason to be hopeful.”
When Radecker heard their story he felt sorry he’d yelled at them. “I’ll get on the phone with Colonel Spelman this afternoon and see what I can do about this situation. But let’s have a look at the inside of this thing.”
A steel ladder led to a hatch door twice the size of a manhole cover that lead down to the sewers. And a sewer is what it smelled like as the men climbed up into the ship. The acrid, penetrating stench of ammonia hung in the air, like old urine.
“The fumes make you crazy after a while.” This time, pudgy Dr. Enrico Cibatutto led the way. They climbed the ladder and came through the floor of the small spaceship to examine the spartan interior. There wasn’t much to see. The domed interior of the cabin was twenty by twenty at its widest point, and seven feet tall at its peak. The focus of attention was the command console. Two pea-pod-shaped chairs faced the windows, and, below the windows, a bank of instruments was mounted along the front wall of the cabin, in an arrangement the scientists called the dashboard. As Okun stooped over and followed the much shorter Cibatutto to the front of the ship, the scientist warned him, “Mind the pods, they’re covered in a thick jelly. Like the tar of a pine, if you get it on your hands, it takes a lot of scrubbing to get off.”
Okun regarded the slimy seats in the dim light. They were long arching structures, sticky hammocks connected to both floor and ceiling at forty-five-degree angles and kept in place by means of a web of solid bars. The sight of the chairs reminded the young scientist that spaceships don’t crash to earth by themselves. Not sure he wanted to hear the answer, he asked Cibatutto if there had been any bodies.
“Of course. You can see them later.”
“So they’re, like, down here? Close by?” Goose bumps erupted over most of Okun’s body.
The scientist laughed and stroked his short beard. “Don’t worry. Not only are they dead, but we have them locked away in a very secure place.”
Somewhat relieved, Okun returned to the subject. “I guess the pilot is supposed to sit in this chair, and the gum acts as a seat belt.”
Cibatutto politely pointed out that “at several hundred miles per hour, the resin might provide some safety, but its cohesion strength is not as strong as, say, a seat belt.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“So, this is the instrument console.” It was a mess, showing the signs of having been taken apart and reassembled many times. In an open toolbox, stray pieces of the ship mingled with hammers, soldering irons, screws, and a dozen notepads full of schematic drawings. Cihatutto seemed not to mind the clutter. Okun poked through the box for a moment, then picked up a particularly interesting fragment.
“Cool, an ankh.”
“What’s an ankh?”
“An ankh is the ancient Egyptian symbol of life, a hieroglyph.” He held the half-inch-tall figure up to the light and realized he had been half-right. Like the ancient symbol, the thing between his fingers was composed of a central shaft with a shorter bar crossing it like a stick-man’s arms and a rounded open head. But this one was 3-D. Instead of two little arms, there were four. Likewise, the hole at the top opened east-west and north-south. Ankh cubed, he thought. For whatever reason, it struck Okun as supremely cool, and he put it in his pocket. It’s not stealing, he told himself. It’s not like I’m going anywhere with it.
“Here we have the steering controls,” Cihatutto continued, pointing to what looked like a tightly folded bundle of greasy bones lying on the floor. “This mechanism goes here, in front of the pilot, and we think it opens outward.” It had been removed from its original position and was connected to the console by a series of thin strands that looked like roots or perhaps really hairy veins. “Dr. Lenel went to medical school, so he’s the one who sews up our patient after we amputate her a little bit.” Indeed, the vein-roots at the bottom of the bony mechanism had been severed and stitched back together using medical sutures. “She looks like a machine,” he said, rapping very hard on the dashboard, “but she’s actually alive, living tissue. Look closely, and you can see the little tiny scars.”
“What does that thing do?” Okun was already on to the next instrument on the dashboard, something that looked like a shell.
Cihatutto said no one knew, but he lifted the thing out of its resting place and held it up to the windows. The yellowish shell plate was thin enough to allow light to pans through, and was laced with a network of very fine veins. There were no dials or switches. As the scientist put it, “She’s a mystery.”
Cibatutto went on to explain that because the ship was not functioning, it was impossible to say with certainty what the various instruments were and exactly how they worked. Nevertheless, over the course of the years, Area 51’s scientists had made a number of highly educated guesses which, in time, would be discovered to have been surprisingly accurate. For Okun, Cibatutto’s thumbnail overview of each instrument in the cabin was like the opening pages of a long and fascinating science-fiction novel with him as the hero. He was confident he could figure all these gizmos out. By the end of his quick tour of the interior, he had completely lost his feeling of disappointment about this place. His mind was exploding with questions, possible solutions, and experiments he could run to test his hypotheses.
Independence Day: Silent Zone Page 4