Independence Day: Silent Zone

by Stephen Molstad

  “I don’t understand,” Dworkin whispered back. “Our appropriations have to be approved by Mr. Okun?”

  Radecker rolled his eyes as if to agree that the idea was ludicrous. “Spelman was pretty clear. Whatever Okun needs in the way of research materials will be automatically OKed.”

  Lenel asked, “So why do you say we can get anything we want?”

  “Oh, please,” Radecker said dismissively. “Look at this punk. He’ll do whatever I tell him to, and if he doesn’t obey, I’ll make his life miserable.” An idea occurred to him. “Now, listen up. I respect you guys, and I think we can work together. I’ll try to help you out with hiding the names of these dead guys. And I want just one thing in exchange.” The CIA operative leaned in even closer and explained what he expected of the gray-haired men. When he was finished, he looked them in the eyes, one by one. “Are we all agreed on that?”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Okun called from his daybed. No one answered, so he asked again. Finally Radecker turned around.

  “We’re discussing how we’re going to get this ship to fly. I just talked to my boss, and he’s convinced you can do it.”

  “I can,” Okun replied. “Just have your boss send us another ship exactly like the one we’ve got, and our problems will be solved.”

  “There aren’t any other ships.”

  “Well”—Okun grimaced as he rolled onto his side—“there are other ships. We might not have any of them, but there must be other ships. Otherwise, the aliens couldn’t have come to Earth.”

  “Sorry, pal. That’s not the way it works. I can’t tell you how I know, but I have it on very good authority that this ship came here alone.”

  Okun snorted. “Right. Who’s your authority, some palm reader?”

  “Military intelligence,” Radecker fired back, not liking the younger man’s tone.

  “Military intelligence?” Okun asked. “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms? Who are you going to believe, a bunch of Army dudes or what you saw with your own eyes? Our experiment showed the ship can’t fly without other ships just like it. It’s proved.”

  Radecker shrugged as he stood up. “All I know is what they tell me. And they tell me there was no second ship. From now on our official position is that there are no additional ships.” With that he left the room.

  Okun wasn’t finished with the discussion. He threw his legs over the side of the bed and was about to follow Radecker down the hall when he realized he was sitting on his burns. His face contorted into a silent howl as he lifted his buns away from the blanket. When his posterior pain subsided, he appealed to his senior coworkers. “There’s got to be a second ship, right? In fact, there must have been at least three ships at Roswell. If there were only two, both of them would have gone down. When this one crashed, it would have broken the power relay and knocked the other one down. Besides, what about all these people that say they’ve seen UFOs? Don’t they all describe something that looks remarkably similar to the one we’ve got?”

  Okun was angry and started pacing the kitchen as he talked. It was a side of himself he hadn’t shown the others until that moment. It wasn’t Radecker’s ignorance of technical matters that bothered him. It was being told what he could and could not think. The idea that future research on the spacecraft would be limited by some anonymous panel of military experts really chapped his ass, to speak. And then there was that phrase Radecker had used, I can’t tell you how I know. “There’s some kind of government conspiracy going on,” he burst out. “It’s the man, the establishment, the system. See what I’m saying?”

  None of the scientists knew quite how to respond to their companion’s ranting. “In fact,” Dworkin said, “except for our latest experiment, there is little evidence to support your multi-ship theory.”

  “But that’s all the evidence we need!… Isn’t it?” He could see the scientists were avoiding making eye contact with him. “You said it yourself yesterday: this ship cannot fly without the presence of another.”

  Dworkin hesitated, then finally replied. “It’s possible that we’ve misinterpreted the results.”

  “OK, what’s going on here?” Okun stood over the elderly gentlemen like an impatient schoolmaster who’d caught them hiding something. ‘This is about those paychecks for the dead men, isn’t it. Radecker’s holding it over your heads.” Of course, that was exactly what was happening. But none of them would admit it out loud.

  Lenel was fed up with the whole idiotic situation. “You want to look for a second ship? Follow me.” He marched out of the room, and, after a moment of hesitation, Okun followed him. The grizzled scientist led the way through the maze of halls toward the steel doors to the outside, muttering under his breath the whole while. Instead of turning toward the exit, however, Lenel stopped in the long hallway that the scientists used for storage and gestured toward the crates and filing cabinets pushed against the walls.

  “We call this mess the stacks. In these boxes you’ll find every government document associated with our research. You name it, it’s in there. That means every scientific report, every position paper from DC, every memo, every police report on sightings, reported abductions, strange dreams, everything. Anything and everything that has to do with extraterrestrial life-forms.”

  Nodding, Okun surveyed the room. He did a quick calculation and guesstimated there were two hundred crates full of documents, each one holding about twenty reams of paper. At five hundred sheets per ream that meant there were about two million pieces of paper. Adding in the filing cabinets would bring that number closer to three million. “You might want to change the name from the stacks to something like the piles. Does anyone actually read this stuff?”

  “Some of it. We get a new shipment every first Monday of the month. We look through the box and pull out anything that looks interesting, but mostly it just gets dumped out here. Years ago, there was a fellow named Pike who had everything organized. If you needed to see a particular report, you’d go ask Pike. When the new reports came in, he’d make sure they got into the right hands. After he quit, I took over the job.”

  From the looks of things, Lenel hadn’t been doing a very good job. Okun pulled open the top drawer of a file cabinet and looked inside. A few thousand pages of yellowing paper were strewn around in heaps. They had been stuffed carelessly into the drawer, with no regard for organization. “What kind of filing system are you using here?”

  “There is no system. The whole place is a damned mess now on account of Wells. That man was always in such a hurry. He’d come in here and take out a hundred files to find the one he was looking for. He never put anything back, and I got tired of doing his work for him. So I quit. I’ve had nothing to do with the stacks for the last ten years or so. Still, if there’s anything in particular you need, I can probably help you find it.”

  Until then, Okun hadn’t understood why he was being introduced to this ancient collection of worthless paper. He didn’t know what was going on in Lenel’s head, but apparently the old grump was expecting him to start reading this stuff.

  “I should warn you,” he went on, “that 99.9 percent of what’s in these reports is a bunch of hooey. First you’ve got your crackpots who make up stories to get themselves noticed. Then you’ve got your little old ladies who see a spark on a telephone pole and wet their pants because they’re sure it was men from Mars. But you’ve also got something that’s harder to spot.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Reports started leaking out about what we had down here. Since there was no way to keep the files completely hidden, the geniuses at the CIA and the Pentagon started something they call disinformation. As if there weren’t enough bogus reports of sightings and encounters already, they started making up new ones by the hundreds. Some of the most convincing stories were written by some hack sitting in an office making the whole thing up. They deliberately buried false leads, stories that seem like they’ll lead somewhere, but then the trail goes cold, and y
ou’re back where you started from.”

  Finally, Okun had to ask. “Dr. Lenel, why are you showing me all this stuff?”

  “If you’re convinced there’s a second alien ship, this is the best place to go looking for it.”

  *

  It was three weeks before Okun made his first independent foray into the stacks. Life in the labs was beginning to settle into a comfortable routine. His elderly cohort continued with their repairs on the alien vehicle and, once his rear end had healed sufficiently, Okun joined them. Even though he was convinced they were wasting their time, they made pleasant company, and he assisted them as they puttered through repairs to the wiring system and damaged fuselage.

  The atmosphere underground improved considerably once Radecker began spending his days at the Officers’ Club. Groom Lake, the fiat salt bed under which Area 51 was buried, was only a tiny fraction of the enormous Nellis Weapons Testing Range. At roughly five thousand square miles in area, the range was as large as a small European country. At its southern edge, near Frenchman Lake, was a cluster of buildings which, with their manicured lawns, swimming pool, and tennis courts could, from the air, easily be mistaken for a luxury hotel. It was a gathering spot for high-ranking officials from all areas of the base, a place to hold meetings or simply relax in the air-conditioned comfort of the bar. Radecker quickly discovered that a convoy of Jeeps traveled between Groom and Frenchman lakes twice a day, when a new group of soldiers came on duty. From six in the morning until six in the evening, his phone calls were rerouted to the lounge of the Officers’ Club.

  On one particular Friday, Okun was in the labs by himself. Dworkin and the others had left for their once-a-week excursion into Las Vegas. The previous two Fridays, the men had convinced Okun to join them. He was shocked by what he learned. After taking care of their banking business and other errands, the four old timers headed for the casinos, where they played high-stakes poker. They seemed to be on a first-name basis with nearly every dealer and pit boss they ran into. Apparently, they had been eighty-sixed from many of the major houses on the Strip because, although no one could prove it, they cheated at cards and always took home much more than they lost, often several hundred dollars between them. It was one more way they had found to end-run the funding restrictions imposed on them by the Pentagon.

  It was spooky being down there by himself, so he didn’t linger in the long dim hallway that housed the stacks. After a quick look around, he found the sloppiest box of all, the one that looked like it had been organized by a madman. He lifted out the first two hundred pages and took them back to his room, locking the door behind him—a habit he’d gotten himself into after the scientists showed him the corpses of the alien astronauts. Even though they were very very dead and floating in steel-reinforced tanks of formaldehyde, this extra precaution of locking his door provided the young man with the last little bit of psychological reassurance he needed to sleep peacefully. He put the documents on his desk and began to sort through them. He had intentionally selected the most disorganized set of files on the assumption that it would contain the last papers this mysterious Dr. Wells had been reading before they carried him away. He didn’t expect these pages to lead him anywhere. But if they did turn out to be Wells’s last readings, well, that would be pretty cool. Most of the pages were single-sheet memos concerning mundane topics like equipment orders, travel arrangements, and test results. He put these aside and turned his attention to one of the thicker documents. It was a report entitled “National Security Briefing Paper on Project Aquarius/B. Jones, Subject.” At the bottom of the title page, there was a typed note:

  WARNING! This is a TOP SECRET-EYES ONLY document containing compartmentalized information essential to the national security of the United States. EYES ONLY ACCESS to the material herein is strictly limited to those possessing Project Aquarius clearance level. Reproduction in any form or the taking of written or mechanically transcribed notes is strictly forbidden.

  Bridget Jones was an unpopular, pudgy twelve-year-old from a well-to-do family living in a farming community about thirty minutes outside Cleveland, Ohio. She was a notorious liar, with a specialty for inserting herself into factual events. Whenever something newsworthy occurred, Bridget was there. When, for example, the Farlin brothers totaled their GTO into the front wall of the high school, Bridget told everyone she’d been riding in the backseat. When a half dozen sheep turned up missing from a farm a few miles down the road, Bridget filed a police report, complete with her own pencil sketches of the suspects. She claimed to have been out on a walk when she noticed four men loading the animals into the back of a Volkswagen. So when Bridget found a tiny artifact left behind after a close encounter with an alien spaceship, no one was prepared to believe her story.

  About 9 P.M. on a Sunday evening she had been in the garage listening to her father’s brand-new police scanner radio—just another one of dad’s electronic toys—when she heard a voice she recognized and two words that caught her attention: flying saucer. The voice belonged to her neighbor, County Sheriff Jon Varner.

  “Looks like we got a plane on fire out here, repeat, there’s a plane coming in low, and it’s on fire,” she heard him yelling into his radio. “I’m on Brooderman Road, near the old Chalmers place. It seems to be flying level to the ground. My God! It’s not a plane. It’s a flying saucer!”

  “Jon, what are you seeing out there?” the female dispatcher’s voice broke in.

  “About the size of a two-story house. Orange light, it’s glowing, I guess it’s red and gold, but it’s hard to make out. Now it’s halfway between the railroad tracks and Brooderman Road. It’s getting closer.”

  “Jon, are you all right?”

  “Jeannie, you should see this thing, it’s unbelievable. It’s going to fly right over me. It looks like there are some windows. I can see light coming from inside. I think it’s—”

  The patrol car’s radio died. There was panic in the dispatcher’s voice. “Jon? Officer Varner, are you all right? Can you hear me!”

  Bridget switched off the radio, grabbed the flashlight off the shelf above the washing machine and jumped on her bike. The Chalmers place wasn’t more than a mile and a half from her house. She tore down the driveway, then turned onto the main road. It was the fastest she’d ever gone on a bike, and she nearly lost control more than once as she scanned the sky for signs of the UFO. The warm breezy night and darkness of the road made her feel like she was racing through a dream. She turned onto Brooderman and saw the headlights of Varner’s car far ahead. When she came within seventy-five feet, she got a bad feeling—like she was being watched—and slowed down, turning her head sideways to get the wind off her ears. She listened for footsteps, a murmur of conversation, anything that might signal this was a trap. But the only sound was the purr of the police car’s idling motor, so she rode cautiously forward. The driver’s door was open, and Varner was laid across the front seat flat on his back. Bridget pulled up, grabbed his foot, and gave it a shake.

  “Mr. Vamer, are you all right?” The officer stirred slightly, so she gave him another shake, harder this time. “Mr. Varner, wake up.”

  She heard someone behind her and spun around. A tall stooped figure stepped onto the road. “Is that Jon Varner in that car?” he said, cinching up his housecoat. He was an older guy she’d seen in town before. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “I don’t know,” Bridget said. “I think a flying saucer got him. I heard it on my dad’s radio.”

  The old man stepped past her and pulled the officer into a sitting position. Varner woke up but had no recollection of what had happened to him. The last thing he remembered was standing on the pavement watching the saucer moving overhead. “Didn’t you see it?” Varner asked when he learned the man’s house was close by. “It lit up the field like it was noon.”

  The man swore he hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual. He’d been inside watching television when he got a call from Jeannie down at the station h
ouse asking him to come outside and check.

  A few minutes later, two more police cars arrived with sirens wailing. The noise attracted more neighbors into the street. Passing motorists stopped to find out what was going on, and soon there were two dozen folks standing in the middle of the road listening to the officer tell and retell his story. Bridget joined a group of people who started searching the edges of the road for clues. She wandered several feet into the waist-high field of wheat and came across something strange, a depression in the grass. It looked like somebody had been lying in the spot only a few minutes before. She could see the tall grass untangling itself and trying to stand back up. Like a good detective, she made sure to check for footprints. There were none. There was no pathway leading to or from the place where the person had been lying. She turned and saw that her own path into the field was clearly marked by the trail of trampled grass.

  “Hey, people, I found something! Come and look!”

  Before anyone got there, she looked down and noticed something metal near the head of the body-shaped depression. She reached down and picked up the shiny object, which looked like a BB pellet.

  “Honey, you shouldn’t be knocking down that man’s wheat,” a woman’s voice called out. “What did you find?”

  “Mrs. Milch? It’s me, Bridget. Come and look at this; I think it’s important.”

  If the woman was reluctant to step onto the damp soil before, she was doubly so now that she knew who was asking her to come. Everyone knew about Bridget’s little problem with telling the truth. But this was an urgent situation, so she followed Bridget’s trail out to the spot. “OK, what is it?”

  “Look, this is where the aliens probably held Mr. Varner down.”

  The woman didn’t believe her. She said the depression in the grass was too small to have been made by a man. That it looked more like a little girl had made it. She asked why there wasn’t another set of man-sized tracks between there and the road. When the girl protested that this time she was telling the truth, Mrs. Milch shook her head and pointed out the grass on the girl’s knees. Bridget explained to the woman about having bent down to pick up the BB and tried to show it to her, but Mrs. Milch walked away.