GENESIS (Projekt Saucer)

by W. A. Harbinson

  They would call me a genius. I would say ‘integrated’. My mind and emotions were fused to perform in calm harmony. No weakness. No digressions. My flesh never defeated me. Even later, as a young man, in the offensive throes of puberty, I would hold my yellow semen in my hand and try to sniff out its properties. The vas deferens and the seminal vesicles, the bulbo-urethral and prostate glands: my ejaculations were examined biologically and found to be normal. I thus conquered such distractions. I took the semen on my tongue. Various liquids and sperm, two hundred million spermatozoa; orgasm thus became a form of research and lost its great mystery.

  Hard to believe it now. All so very long ago. My parents ignorant with a Bible on the table, my head in the stars. The small farm was a prison. My decent parents were viewed as wardens. A teenager, isolated, my head bursting at the seams, the lack of books, or the means of education, drove me close to insane. I knew I was exceptional. I felt trapped by circumstances. Two or three times I ran away from home, but I was always brought back. So, I detested it. I just had to get away. This much I remember about my childhood: I grew up in Iowa.

  Such a long time ago. The late 1800s. I remained a prisoner by lieu of my background and suffered accordingly. A genius, by their terms. Had to be, even then. For my birthday, I received a microscope and then examined my own sperm. Fourteen? Fifteen? I can’t remember my age. In my room, I took my penis in my hand and let the semen stain slides. The mystery of life was in biology. Ejaculation was mere phenomena. I thus reduced my shifting yearnings and dreams to their most basic nature. The human body was just a vessel. Without the mind it was superfluous. I learned early, and had no cause to doubt, that the mind took precedence.

  Science. That is all. The pursuit of knowledge was all that mattered. Even then, growing up in Iowa, I had no other yearnings. The death of my mother pleased me. There was nothing personal in it. A good woman, she died as people do, and that gave me release. My father sold the farm. He took a job in Massachusetts. A small town, I don’t recall the name, quite close to Worcester. Thus was I set free. Universities and libraries. My mind was filled with energy and light and I crammed it with knowledge. The Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I wonder what they called it then. I remember that I came alive there and realized my potential.

  What year? Does it matter? I think 1888. Then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the thrill of logical thinking. I was an outstanding student. I was not very popular. The thrill was in logic, but the nightmare was in people: my genius isolated me completely from the other students.

  I don’t remember caring much. I don’t believe I cared at all. (Goddard would later suffer the same, and he, too, was a genius.) The behaviour of fluids at MIT. Wind pressure on surfaces. The dream of flight was what kept me alive and made the world seem more bearable. I rarely socialized. I only stopped for food and sleep. The dream of flight was my dream, aerodynamics my taskmaster, and my genius drove me forward relentlessly and would not let me rest.

  Inhuman? I wonder. I have often thought about it. Not then, but later, when I succeeded, when the skies shed their secrets. Yes, only then. I certainly thought about it then. Repulsed by abstract emotions, by the human need for self-esteem, by what was known as love and affection, I lived without women.

  I think I tried once. There are vague recollections. Not inhuman, I must have been concerned that they would see I was different. A girl with auburn hair. Perhaps a redhead or a blonde. Spreadeagled, her flesh as white as snow, her soft words unbearable. I tried, but I failed. I saw her body as meat. The act of love was as primitive and functional as eating and shitting. I do not recall passion. My rhythmic thrusting was demeaning. My partners’ groanings drove me back into myself and made me think scientifically. I studied my probing penis. The parting vulva held no charms. Her heaving body and my downward thrusting loins lacked aesthetic refinement. The caves are just behind us: this one thought I remember. Perhaps I thought of the spermatozoa in the womb and wondered how to control them. Such much for the act of love. My mind would not let me succumb. I gave up and returned to masturbation of a functional kind. This act was not for pleasure. The point was to kill the need. And my hand, which stroked my flesh without guilt, was just a means to an end.

  As for love: a mere illusion. Love is nature’s slyest trick. The emotion called love is but a tool in nature’s great building plan. Love encourages procreation. It protects the helpless young. Its true purpose is not to exalt us but to make us continue. Thus did I view it. I reduced it to biology. Love was no more than the semen in my hand, but it could be destructive. Men lived their lives for love. This made them weaker men. The need for love and admiration (for selfeffacement and inner power) was the need that made them abuse their full potential and remain close to primitive.

  The possibility was intolerable. I never wanted to let it happen. My genius, the ruthless brilliance of my mind, would not let me accept it. Thus I lived for my studies. I never let my flesh defeat me. My sexual needs were appeased by my own hands or by whores; my body’s hungers were not confused with love and could not then distract me. No, I wasn’t popular. The other students thought me strange. I think now of that time, of the bliss of isolation, and realize that my devotion to my mind made me someone unique.

  My fondest memories are not of people. My fiercest pleasures all came from facts. Angles of wind attack, lift, drag and airspeed: the experiments with the wind tunnel in the basement of Eng A, the revelations of the vane anemometer, the Lawrence Hargraves experimental reports, Sir Hiram Maxim and his engines and propellers, my mind glowing, expanding. The dream took root then. I wanted the conquest of all knowledge. I had a dream of a society devoid of conflict and dissension, a society subordinated to science and its ultimate truths. I had that dream and lived it. I devoted my whole life to it. And now, looking out at the glittering ice caps, I feel deep contentment.

  I never accepted the impossible. I refused to recognize it. I learned with a speed that was thought to be abnormal, living only for the lectures, for the libraries and wind tunnel, my hands black with oil, my eyes red from too much reading, breaking down and analyzing my teachers’ words, then racing ahead of them.

  My father died in that time. I can’t remember the funeral. A kind man, he had lived an aimless life and the lesson was clear to me. Nothing mattered but the mind. Common emotions were mere distractions. What mattered was the grandeur of science and where it might lead us. And so I continued studying. My intellect left me no choice. Then Sibley College, Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.

  All things were possible there. More than most of the students knew. I do not remember faces, but I do remember names: Rolla Clinton Carpenter, Octave Chanute, Oliver Shantz and Aldred Henry Eldridge and quite a few others. Machine design and construction, experimental engineering, electrical and mechanical engineering and aerodynamics. These courses were in their infancy, were the products of the New Age. It was an age of scientific innovation and grand aspirations. A Bachelor of Science in Aerodynamics. I remember that from Sibley College. I believe I gained it in 1895, but I cannot be sure of that.

  How stupid people are. How stupid they always were. The only emotion I can still entertain is that of contempt. For what they did to me. For what they later did to Goddard. They tried to use us and cast us aside and then control our creations. I think of the businessmen. I also think of politicians. Commerce walks hand in hand with politics, and both are corrupt. Man’s purpose is to build upon his past and thus conquer the unknown. All other aspirations are pointless: they are only of the moment. This is the dream of science. It is logic, not emotion. It is a logic that is not shared by businessmen or politicians – nor by the mass of normal men who mostly live without purpose. Such men have no real logic. They are moved by base hungers. They are blinkered and retain a narrow view that will never be broadened. They think only of the present. Their future is here and now. They take genius and fear it and use it and then cast it out. I did not know this soon enough.r />
  Within the ice is the New World. Beyond it is the old. I look beyond the glinting plateaus and think of where I came from.

  What an age it was then! So magnificent, so blind. An age of flowering genius, of corrupt commerce and politics, an age of the most insoluble contradictions, of builders and wreckers. I did not know soon enough. They financed me and used me. They took my enthusiasm and brilliance and then tried to pervert it. Yet what if I had known? Out of college, a BS in Aerodynamics, I had to take whatever they offered me.

  Finance. Equipment. The world opened up to me. The secret hangars in the wilds of Illinois formed my bridge to the future. Myself and some others. The very cream of young scientists. Sworn to secrecy, we worked night and day to make miracles commonplace. We tolerated the businessmen. We rarely thought of the politicians. With the innocence of all passionate dreamers, we just worked for our pleasure. What year was that? Probably 1895. A full year before Langley’s first successful test flights, we had already surpassed the airships and were moving toward greater things.

  The work never ceased. The secrecy was total. More hangars in Iowa, in the Gulf of Mexico, yet another in a place near Fort Worth, all producing components. My first lesson in secrecy: a wide spreading of the work force. Who would know in Iowa or New Mexico or Fort Worth what the individual parts they were making would ultimately form? Thus we moved forward. Thus did I create them. The skies opened up and gave me their secrets and the dream became real.

  The second lesson in secrecy: that men will not believe their eyes. Or that men, if they do believe their eyes, will be ridiculed for it. We flew right across the country. The huge winds and rotors glinted. They were very primitive flying machines, but they must have looked awesome. And so we could land. Our crude flying craft needed water. And like all young men who feel that they are conquerors, our mood was ebullient. We played jokes on those who saw us, told the truth and then told lies, and later, when we read the newspapers, we knew the ruse had succeeded.

  Such a secret cannot be kept. Nevertheless, it can be protected. To protect a secret you must give away part of it and turn it into a rumor. Who mixed half-truths with lies. Speculation did the rest. Who believes what they now see in the skies and can say so with ease? The world’s governments understand this. It is a tactic they learned from me. We flew across the length and breadth of America and were never discovered.

  All else was superfluous. It was fodder for the masses. Langley’s flying machines, the Wright brothers’ manned flight, the later flights of Wilbur Smith and Louis Blériot – all were highly publicized trifles. Such events were mere distractions. The real progress was made in secret. By 1904 we had crossed the Pacific Ocean, and our lights, which were seen by the US Navy, were called natural phenomena. Such descriptions were reassuring. I had no desire for glory. My one wish was to continue my life’s work without interruptions.

  How stupid they are. How stupid they always were. Now they see us in the skies and close their eyes and still refuse to believe it. That’s why we are winning. That’s why we could never lose. They could never accept what is possible – but for us, all things are.

  Chapter Five

  Epstein stood like a ghost before the open door, hesitant, his heart beating uncomfortably, feeling nervous and childish. He was nervous because the door was open, because the house was in darkness, because Irving Jacob’s death and his own failing health had reminded him of life’s callous betrayals, its indiscriminate brutality. Now, in the darkness, in the silence of Camelback Hill, preparing to step inside and loathing the thought of doing so, he trembled with a youngster’s baseless fear and was ashamed of himself… Irving’s death and Mary’s grief; his own mortality and passing time; he grew old and his childhood returned with all its haunting uncertainties… Had Irving committed suicide? Or had he been murdered? Why was Mary’s front door wide open? Dr Epstein, stoop-shouldered and disconsolate, felt close to ridiculous.

  Too melodramatic for a scientist. Perhaps the chief of police had been right. Epstein stood on the porch and looked up to see the sweeping night sky. The stars glittered above the clouds, the latter wispy and sullen, drifting languidly, serene and mysterious, the black sky over all. It was quiet up there. Empty. Epstein shivered and lowered his gaze. He saw his own shadow trailing out from his feet, his unreal other half. We are not what we appear to be, he thought. We live and die in ignorance. He felt deep grief, an aching loss, then he knocked on the open door.

  ‘Mary? Are you in there?’ There was no response. The darkness led into silence. Epstein shivered and then stepped inside, wondering what he would find there. The hallway led past closed doors, through the kitchen, into the living room; he saw the back of Mary’s head above the back of a chair, the chair facing a garden. Mary’s head was very still, her black hair turning gray, and Epstein stood there, transfixed, seeing moonlight in the garden, and then coughed and whispered Mary’s name, the pain twisting inside him.

  ‘Frederick?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought you would come.’

  ‘Is that why you left the door open?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That was dangerous.’

  Mary chuckled sardonically, still seated in the chair, facing the

  moonlight that fell on the garden beyond the glass doors. Perhaps it was the grief, a release from her shock; nevertheless, the chuckle cut through the silence and made Epstein wince. He had come here prepared for tears, for hysteria or rage, but now, in the presence of that ghostly chuckling, he felt only bewilderment.

  ‘Dangerous?’ Mary said bitterly. ‘You think an open door is dangerous? Irving kept the doors closed all the time – but then he went for a drive. What’s a closed door these days?’

  The moonlight stretched out to the chair, glinting off her grayblack hair, the back of the chair bisecting her neck, the space around her in darkness. Epstein coughed into his fist, feeling slightly absurd, then he nodded, a silent gesture of agreement, and sighed and sat down just behind her.

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Yes, I saw him.’ Epstein sniffed and rubbed his short beard. He was staring at the back of Mary’s head, at the dark, silent room. ‘He’s been brought into Phoenix.’

  Mary leaned forward and sobbed, covering her face with her hands, bent over in the chair, in the moonlight, trying to choke back her weeping. Epstein watched her, feeling helpless, filled with grief and despair, recalling better days, her smiling face, before the work became dangerous.

  ‘Please, Mary,’ he said.

  ‘It’s all right, I’m all right.’ She straightened up and wiped her face with one hand. ‘Oh, my God, what a day it’s been.’

  ‘If I can do anything… Anything.’

  ‘You can’t do anything. He’s dead.’

  ‘I just thought…’

  ‘There’s nothing to think. He’s dead. It’s all over. Finished.’

  She was sitting up straight again, staring into the moonlit garden, a clenched fist shoved into her mouth, knuckles tapping her teeth. Then she sighed and stood up, went to the windows and walked back, turned her chair around and shook her head sadly and sat down facing Epstein. The moonlight formed a halo above her. Epstein saw her tearwashed eyes. She was in her middle forties but her face retained its beauty, an elegant mask now ravaged by loss, the eyes brown and large. Epstein sat there before her, feeling defeated, his love for her and Irving boiling up and turning rancid with guilt.

  ‘Here in Phoenix,’ Mary said softly.

  ‘Yes,’ Epstein said. ‘The autopsy.’

  ‘And presumably they’ll call me tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes… The arrangements.’

  Mary nodded and sighed, her gaze roaming around the room, her white hands twitching restlessly in her lap, trying to hold on to something.

  ‘Why did you come here?’ she asked.

  ‘You knew I’d come, Mary.’

  ‘To offer your condolences?’

  ‘Yes.’

  �
��And to ask me some questions.’

  It was a mean, honest statement, making Epstein recoil within, flushing, the guilt rushing through him as he stared at her grim face.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can’t help that.’

  Mary nodded, smiling bitterly. ‘You just never give up,’ she said. ‘All of you. You just can’t give up, no matter what happens. I suppose I should accept it – the good wife supporting the cause – but I can’t. And now Irving is dead. So to hell with your institute.’

  ‘I have to know, Mary.’

  ‘You have to know what? That my husband was driven mad by his work and now he’s found peace at last? There’s your answer. Go home with it.’

  ‘No,’ Epstein said. ‘I don’t think that’s the answer.’

  ‘Yes, it is. It’s the only answer available.’

  ‘I don’t think it was suicide?’ Epstein said. ‘I feel I should tell you that.’

  The anger was quick to come, flashing out of her brown eyes, her head shaking from side to side in denial as she rose to her feet. She looked down at him, this old man, this professor who felt his age, and her lips, a tight line below the pert nose, spat out all her grief.

  ‘Damn you!’ she snapped. ‘Damn you and your pride! It’s not that you don’t believe it – it’s that you can’t… because you need your obsession. Irving committed suicide. Your work drove him half crazy. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t eat, he started ignoring his whole family, and it happened because of your damned obsession, your belief in conspiracies. Of course he didn’t kill himself! Of course it has to be murder! You’ve been at this game for twenty-five years, so now it has to be something!’