GENESIS (Projekt Saucer)

by W. A. Harbinson

  ‘And you believe it was intentional?’ Stanford said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Gardner said, ‘it was deliberate. In fact, once Ruppelt left for Denver, it became clear to everyone involved that the Air Force had deliberately not replaced him because they wanted to strip Blue Book of its one remaining figure of authority. With no experienced officer in charge, Blue Book had little means of resisting the numerous transfers and subtle pressures that eventually strangled it. Of course, a few of us had tried to speak out against all that, but it was the worst fucking thing we could have done. More and more I saw guys getting harassed for no good reason, having their confidence shattered, their good records ruined, and then getting transferred out by way of punishment – or being asked to resign. That happened to me. Those fuckers just went out to get me. I started getting reprimanded for negligence, for dumb insolence and other shit, and then they started moving me around from post to post, from one dismal hole to another. Eventually, I gave up. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was drinking like a fish, my wife packed up and left, and in the end, like a lot of the others, I just had to resign… You don’t go too close to UFOs. It’s a dangerous thing to do. If you go too close to UFOs you get burned – and you rarely recover.’

  Gardner picked his glass up and finished it off with one gulp, then wiped his lips with the back of his free hand and glanced blearily around him.

  ‘Christ, I’m drunk,’ he said. ‘I think I need a good fuck. I have to blow this out of my system. Let’s go find those two whores.’

  He stood up and swayed, grabbed the table and steadied himself, then Stanford stood up and took him by the elbow and turned him around. They pushed their way through the noisy crowd, passed the dancers near the jukebox, emerged from the haze of blue smoke and found the semi-dark stairs.

  ‘What happened to Ruppelt?’ Stanford asked. ‘You haven’t told me. You didn’t finish the story.’

  Still swaying, Gardner started up the stairs. The drink had suddenly hit him hard. Stanford slid an arm around him and helped him up, wondering how his old friend had come to this.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gardner said. ‘He just got fucked up like me. He came to see me shortly after he’d left the Air Force, and we drank beer and talked. His head was filled with questions. He couldn’t let the subject go. He had left, but the subject still obsessed him and kept him awake at night. He wondered what had gone wrong with Blue Book. He wondered why they had run it down. He wondered why the Air Force had played a double game – and he kept asking questions.’

  They reached the top of the stairs. The corridor was short and dimly lit. Gardner coughed, sounding choked up, then lurched forward, swaying dangerously from side to side. Stanford grabbed him and turned him around and pressed him to the wall.

  ‘

  What questions?’ Stanford asked.

  Gardner coughed into his fist. He stared at Stanford with bloodshot eyes. When he spoke, his voice was harsh and self-mocking, revealing his bitterness.

  ‘Why, when the Air Force was telling the whole world that the study of UFOs hadn’t produced enough evidence to warrant investigation, did they secretly order all reports to be investigated? Why, when all of us had actually read General Twining’s statement that the phenomenon was something real, did they deny that such a statement had ever been submitted? Why, when they themselves had initiated Project Sign and received its official report concluding that the UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin, did they dissolve the project and then burn the report? Why, when Project Sign was changed to Project Grudge, did they go all out to ridicule the reported sightings and then disperse most of the staff on that project? Why, when the Air Force continued to claim that they had absolutely no interest in UFOs, did they insist that all reports be sent to the Pentagon? Why, when Lieutenant Cummings and Lieutenant Rosengarten discussed UFOs in the Pentagon with the Director of Intelligence of the Air Force, was the recording of that meeting destroyed? Finally, why did the CIA lie to Ruppelt, why was the Robertson Panel report kept from him, and why was Project Blue Book run down? Those questions haven’t been answered.’

  Stanford opened the bedroom door. The light beamed out into the corridor. The two hookers were sitting up on the bed, drinking more bourbon and giggling. The room was small and shabby. The double bed was unmade. Stanford pushed Gardner in, shut the door with a bang, then turned and went back along the corridor until he came to the stairs. He stood there a long time. The bar below seemed faraway. The semidarkness was alive with possibilities and strange, formless mysteries.

  ‘Why?’ Stanford asked.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Why?’ Epstein asked. ‘We always come back to “Why?”. There are too many contradictions and ambiguities. We have to know a lot more.’ Stanford sighed and nodded wearily. The Caribbean sun stung his eyes. He glanced back at St Thomas, at the bubbling white wake of the boat, feeling the deck trembling under his feet, hearing the engine’s dull rumbling.

  ‘I haven’t finished yet,’ he said. ‘That Gardner was just the start. I have an old CIA friend in DC and he’s promised to talk to me.’

  ‘He’s still in the CIA?’

  ‘You’ve got to be kidding. No, he left about ten years ago… but he was pretty high up there.’

  ‘I want to know more about Ruppelt. I want to know what happened to him. I want to know what the Robertson Panel actually said behind closed doors. I want to know who was on that panel. I think that’s fairly important. I want to know who they were and I want to know their precise recommendations. We were wrong about the Air Force. We’ve been fooled for twenty years. The Air Force and the CIA and the Pentagon have been involved, and that involvement has been kept under wraps. I want to know why.’

  ‘This friend was in on it,’ Stanford said. ‘He assured me of that much. He said there were strange things going on and that they hadn’t made sense to him. He’s willing to talk. He’ll pick up where the tapes left off. I’ll go see him as soon as we get back and then give you a transcript.’

  Stanford glanced around the ferry. There weren’t many passengers on board. He saw a blonde-haired Dutch girl with the brown skin of a vahine, a couple of dusky workers arguing loudly in Creole French, a few American holidaymakers, gesticulating excitedly, snapping pictures, and a black woman of African descent selling mangoes and pineapples. They were all framed by the sea, which was calm, a dazzling blue, sweeping out to the cays and islets of the American Virgin Islands, their rolling hills blue-gray and parched green, a few clouds in the silvery sky.

  ‘This is some place,’ Stanford said.

  ‘What did you think of St Thomas?’

  ‘It looked like 42nd Street.’

  ‘You should know,’ Epstein said.

  Stanford squinted against the sun. ‘Is that the hotel?’ he asked. He was looking at a sprawling, white-painted complex dominating an islet.

  ‘That’s it,’ Epstein said.

  Stanford nodded and turned around, leaned against the iron railing, let the trade winds blowing in from the northeast drying the sweat on his face. His gaze fell on the black woman, selling her fruit from a woven basket. She was wearing a white blouse and a skirt, a colorful apron over the skirt, and had a bright orange turban on her head, her black hair piled up under it. Stanford kept looking at her. She saw him staring and smiled back. She had laughing brown eyes, a sort of innocent sensuality, and he thought immediately of the girl on the porch of the ranch outside Galveston. He thought a lot about that girl and still couldn’t understand it. He thought about that girl night and day, and was becoming obsessed with her.

  ‘Remember Galveston?’ He said.

  ‘Could I ever forget it?’ Epstein replied.

  ‘I’m thinking of going back there,’ Stanford said. ‘I want to talk to those people.’

  ‘That was a year ago.’

  ‘So, it was a year ago.’

  ‘That’s a pretty long time,’ Epstein said. ‘You won’t do any good.’

  ‘Why do you say
that?’

  ‘They wouldn’t talk when we were there. The old man was possibly mad and the girl was dumb. I don’t think they’ll talk now.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Stanford said. ‘I want to try anyway. I want to know what those people really experienced, and this time I’ll push harder.’

  ‘The Army might still be there.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Stanford said.

  ‘Okay,’ Epstein said, ‘please yourself. We have nothing but time.’

  Epstein’s gray hair was being blown by the breeze, his jacket draped over his left arm, his grubby tie hanging loose. He had aged a lot in the past year, had thinned down and was coughing more, the lines on his face more predominant, his movements slow and exhausted. Stanford had noticed the change. It had begun with Irving’s death. Dr Epstein now looked his true age and was shrinking each day.

  Stanford was also changing, was more tense, less ebullient, now driven by forces beyond his comprehension, seduced by riddles and mysteries. He thought constantly about the flatlands, about the lights in the sky, about the dust and the wind and the butchered cattle and the girl on the porch. Stanford couldn’t understand it. It was much more than sex. He had thought about the girl for a year and now she seemed to be part of him. There was something unreal about it. He felt as if the girl was calling to him. He was losing track of time, losing touch with reality, and often felt that he was trapped in an eternal present, still blinded by dust clouds.

  Life was an illusion. He believed that more and more. He had pursued the invisible for too long and now was paying the price. Nothing seemed real anymore, nothing here, nothing immediate; his sole reality was a night of wind and dust and strange lights and masked men. What did it all mean? Why was he now so driven? Stanford glanced around the ferry, saw the faces black and white, the blue sea and cays and islets that burned under a white sun. He felt hot and suffocated, almost dissolving where he stood, and he turned toward the prow of the boat as it approached the small island.

  ‘That’s some hotel,’ he said.

  ‘It collects the vacation crowds.’

  ‘It looks like an old Moorish castle.’

  ‘A touch of Hollywood,’ Epstein said.

  The ferry was nearing the island, heading straight for the rocks, then it turned and drifted toward a wooden dock and then bumped alongside it. One of the crew jumped off the boat, started tying the ropes to rusty bollards, while Stanford gazed up the climbing, parched land to the walls of the hotel. The walls were whitewashed and gleaming, broken up by Moorish arches, rising up in tiers above a swimming pool and lined with exotic plants and flowers. It was a single-storey building, sprawling across the upper slopes, dominating the sunbleached, rocky island with serene grandiosity. The ferry bumped against the dock. Crew members put the gangplank down. Stanford looked along the dock, saw a bus and some cars, a few people milling about in drifting dust, examining the disembarking passengers.

  ‘Is he there?’ Stanford asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Epstein said. ‘The man in the sports shirt and shorts.

  ‘They’re all dressed like that,’ Stanford said.

  Epstein nodded and smiled, watched the passengers disembark, waited until the last ones had stepped off the ferry and then followed them down. He walked slowly and carefully, as if not sure of his footing, gazing down past the gangplank at the water which eddied and rippled. Stanford followed him down, glancing keenly around him, as the crystal-clear blue of the sea, the green islets, the silvery sky. The heat was incredible. The air shimmered before his eyes. He stepped onto the wooden dock, following Epstein’s stocky form, and a short man wearing a sports shirt and shorts stepped forward to greet them.

  ‘Long time no see,’ he said to Epstein. ‘You look pretty tired.’

  The man was short and too fat, his shirt loosened around his belly, white hair blowing over bright green eyes and a tanned, good-humored face. He and Epstein shook hands, exchanged a few jocular pleasantries, then Epstein introduced Stanford, who also shook the man’s hand.

  ‘Robert Stanford,’ Epstein said. ‘I just call him Stanford. The name has a certain crass elegance that suits him quite well. Stanford, this is my good friend, Professor Tom Gerhardt.’

  ‘You’re still young,’ Gerhardt said to Stanford.

  ‘Is that surprising?’ Stanford asked.

  ‘I suppose not,’ Gerhardt said with a grin. ‘I just didn’t expect it.’ He waved his hand airily, indicating the whole island. ‘How do you like it?’ he asked.

  ‘A good place for a vacation,’ Stanford said.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Gerhardt said.

  Epstein glanced up at the hotel, located at the top of the steep hill. ‘Do we have to walk up?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Gerhardt said, pointing at the dusty Volkswagen Beetle parked behind him. ‘I didn’t think you’d make it that far, so I brought my own transport.’

  The other passengers were boarding the hotel bus that was parked just beyond the Volkswagen. The car and the bus were both parked on a tract of flat earth that overlooked the gently rippling azure sea. Beyond the bus, across that broad expanse of clear blue water, was St Thomas and the capital, Charlotte Amalie.

  ‘I come here every year,’ Professor Gerhardt said. ‘I come because there’s nothing to do here and that suits me fine… At least it did until this year.’

  He opened the door of the Volkswagen and pulled the front seat forward. Stanford scrambled into the rear, resting his overnight bag on his knees, and sat there, bunched up in the cramped space, feeling uncomfortable. Gerhard sat in the driver’s seat and Epstein sat beside him, slamming the door as the car coughed into life and started up the steep hill. The road snaked around the islet, climbing toward the hotel on its summit, passing coco palms and divi-divi trees and tracts of parched, windblown grass. Stanford looked out the window. The sea was spread out far below him. He saw the cays and scattered islets, the sea blue and sun-reflecting, motor launches racing around coral reefs, helicopters above them. Then the Volkswagen reached the hotel and spluttered into silence, stopping between dazzling white walls and high, white-washed arches.

  ‘Home sweet home,’ Gerhardt said.

  He opened his door and clambered out, pulled the seat up for Stanford, and the latter, pushing his bag out ahead of him, emerged gratefully onto the driveway. Epstein clambered out the other side, slung his own bag over his shoulder, stretched himself, nodding his head in appreciation, and then grinned at Stanford.

  ‘The one advantage about this job,’ he said, ‘is that a man gets to travel.’

  ‘It’s damned hot,’ Stanford said.

  ‘It’ll soon become cooler,’ Garhardt said. ‘The sun will go down in an hour or so; then you’ll feel a lot better.’

  ‘We’d better check in,’ Epstein said.

  ‘I booked two rooms the minute I received your cablegram confirming that you could come, so you just have to pick up your keys. Now do you want to go immediately for a rest or would you rather we talked first?’

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ Stanford said.

  ‘We’d better talk straight away,’ Epstein said. ‘We’ll be leaving first thing in the morning, so let’s go to the bar.’

  ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then let’s eat,’ Gerhardt said. ‘I’ll tell you the whole story over a meal, and then you can sleep on it.’

  They left their bags at the reception desk, collected their room keys, then were led by Gerhardt across a cobbled courtyard, emerging into the gardens. He then led them up some steps, across a cool, covered patio, and finally into an open-air restaurant overlooking the sea. The restaurant looked like an expansive terrace, its white walls strewn with flowers. Lanterns dangled from the ceiling, glowing red, green and yellow, though their light was rendered redundant by the sunlight pouring in over the verandah wall. Gerhardt sat them on the verandah, at a table against the low wall, and Stanford looked down to see the parched earth fallin
g away to a crowded swimming pool. There was a bar by the pool. Girls in bikinis and men in swimming trunks were drinking fancy cocktails. Beyond them their distant, shadowed figures was the sea and the crimson sinking sun.

  ‘Apart from fish,’ Gerhardt said, ‘I couldn’t honestly recommend the menu. Most of the food in the Caribbean comes in cans. Only the fruit and the fish are fresh.’

  ‘I’ll have lobster,’ Epstein said.

  ‘Crayfish,’ Stanford said. ‘And I’ll start with a very tall rum and Coke to make myself feel at home.’

  ‘I’ll just have a cold beer,’ Epstein said.

  Gerhardt ordered for them. Over the meal, he and Epstein talked about old times, when they had both been young, fresh-faced physicists working at a variety of government-sponsored research establishments in the White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, before going their separate ways, Gerhardt to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado, Epstein to his UFO work for the APII. Stanford studied Gerhardt carefully. He liked the man a lot. Gerhardt had a sense of humour, a natural openness and ebullience, but beneath his spontaneity was a tension that was finely suppressed. And although he talked a lot, he didn’t mention why he had called them to the Caribbean until they had all finished eating. The sun was going down by then. The sea resembled flowing lava. The islets dotting the crimson water were casting shadows that undulated and deepened. Gerhardt sat back in his chair. A yellow lantern shone its light into his eyes. He sipped his beer and glanced uneasily around him and then focused on Epstein.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘So why did I ask you to come and see me?’

  ‘I’m dying to know,’ Epstein replied.

  ‘As you know, I’m still working for NORAD in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.’

  ‘Yes.’