GENESIS (Projekt Saucer)

by W. A. Harbinson

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Stanford said. ‘Go with them and you won’t be coming back. Those bastards aren’t doing you any favors: once you go, you’ll be gone.’

  Epstein shrugged, smiling sadly. ‘So what?’ he said. ‘Look at me. I look like a shadow of my former self. I’ve only about a year left anyway, so what can I lose?’

  ‘You’re crazy,’ Stanford said.

  ‘I have to know,’ Epstein said. ‘I can’t die without knowing the whole story – and this is my chance.’

  ‘I won’t let you.’

  ‘Get the tapes.’

  ‘No, damn it,’ Stanford said. ‘I won’t let you stay here. That’s it. Now put your clothes on.’

  Epstein looked up at Stanford, smiling sadly, remotely; he was staring directly at Stanford, but not really seeing.

  ‘Leaving is pointless,’ he said. ‘If they want me, they’ll get me. It doesn’t matter where I go, where I hide, because they’ll know where to find me.’

  ‘Don’t bet on it.’

  ‘I would bet on it.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Stanford said. ‘I’m not listening. Now put your clothes on.’

  Epstein smiled and nodded agreement, swung his legs off the bed, stood up and started dressing himself like a man still asleep. It didn’t matter if he left. He was certain that man would find him. He was certain that no matter what he did, that man would know he was doing it. This thought offered him some comfort, eased his pain, helped him relax, now enraptured with the thought of the revelations that would soon set him free. He would not die defeated. Death would not have dominion. He would wait and they would come, the night would turn to dazzling light, and he would blink and then open his eyes and see a world beyond reckoning. Epstein put his clothes on. When he was dressed, he glanced around him. He had only been here a few hours and yet he felt an odd sadness. It was not a painful sadness. His feeling of loss was couched in joy. Epstein buttoned up his coat and smiled at Stanford, prepared for just about anything.

  ‘Okay?’ Stanford said.

  ‘Okay,’ Epstein said.

  ‘Right, Professor Epstein, let’s go. Let’s get the hell out of here.’

  They crossed the pine floor of the lodge, stepped out onto the porch, felt the cold and saw the snow falling as Stanford locked the front door. Stanford took hold of Epstein’s elbow, guided him down the slippery steps. The snow was thick on the ground, drifting lazily, as they walked to the car. Stanford helped Epstein in, holding his arm, keeping his eye on him, then he closed the door and went around the car and slipped into the driver’s seat. Epstein said nothing, simply smiled and looked ahead, as Stanford started the car and headed out through the tall, snow-lined trees.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Epstein said.

  ‘Are you sure? You’re being pretty quiet.’

  ‘I feel fine,’ Epstein said.

  Stanford drove between the trees, the snow gleaming in the darkness, the mountains jagged against the star-filled sky, rising up all around them. Stanford drove carefully, squinting against the falling snow, his headlights picking out tree-trunks and rocks and banks of exposed soil. He was nervous, excited, not sure what he was doing, glancing frequently at Epstein, at his smile, and wondering what he was thinking. The car rolled down the narrow track, the trees seeming to glide past it, the snow drifting dreamily across the track, the darkness total beneath them.

  ‘You know, it fits,’ Stanford said, breaking the silence between them. ‘A lot of what that guy, that Wilson, told you fits. The application of an antigravity shield could result in a virtually massless body. Now, according to technical analysis the lift-off of your average UFO would require as much energy as the detonation of an atomic bomb, would cause the body of the UFO to heat up to about eighty-five thousand degrees centigrade, and would lead to intense deposits of radioactivity. However, with an antigravity shield reducing the mass of the UFO to almost zero, it would only require a very modest force to reach exceptionally high accelerations. That would account for the UFOs’ ability to disappear in the blinking of an eye and for the fact that they can be brought to an abrupt stop. It would also explain why they can make such normally impossible right-angle turns. Since we can also assume safely that the inertial mass of such a UFO would decrease the higher it goes, we can then reason that such a mass would be reduced to almost zero by the time it reaches the limits of Earth’s atmosphere. This would explain why the UFOs invariably have what appears to be a twostage take-off: a slow rise to about a hundred feet or so, then a sudden acceleration and disappearance. Finally, since the UFOs’ performance is directly related to Earth’s gravity, and since the pull of gravity varies slightly from place to place, we now know why a UFO in horizontal flight often appears to rise and fall slightly: the increase and decrease of gravitational pull would affect the inertial mass of the UFO and make it bob up and down slightly; this would also explain why the UFOs appear to be able to automatically follow the profile of the terrain below… So, the facts fit.’

  Still smiling sadly, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes slightly unfocused, fixed on the downhill road, Epstein nodded to indicate agreement.

  ‘Still,’ Stanford said, ‘it’s pretty fantastic. Wilson claimed he was a hundred and seven years old. If that’s true, he’s not human.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’ Epstein asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. If that guy comes from Earth, I can’t buy that. It’s just too incredible.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Epstein said. ‘Bear in mind that whoever these people are, they’re obviously extraordinarily advanced in their technology. Now, according to Wilson that technology includes medical and psychological research with no restraint on the part of the researchers. They’re definitely far advanced in parapsychology and prosthetics, and they practice vivisection on human beings.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Stanford said.

  ‘Yes,’ Epstein said, ‘it’s horrible. But no matter, that’s certainly what they’re doing. Now assuming that their medical and surgical research is as advanced as their other sciences, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Mr Wilson is the age he claims to be. What I can tell you is that his face was reconstructed with plastic surgery, that he uses a technologically advanced pacemaker, and that he’s had various organs replaced. He also informed me that the work on him was performed at an early stage of their technology and that those methods were now considered to be relatively primitive. Presumably, then, it is indeed possible that Mr Wilson is a hundred and seven years old.’

  ‘What does that make his date of birth?’

  ’1870.’

  ‘No,’ Stanford said, ‘I can’t accept this.’

  ‘Think again,’ Epstein said. ‘A few people have actually managed to live to that age – and without medical assistance. Add medical and surgical assistance of the most advanced kind, and Mr Wilson could be exactly what he says he is.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stanford said. ‘But who is he?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a Wilson in relation to UFOs?’

  ‘No,’ Stanford said. ‘I can’t think of anyone, except… No, it’s too ridiculous for words.’

  ‘What’s ridiculous?’ Epstein said. ‘Don’t be shy. I want to know what you mean.’

  Stanford shook his head from side to side, expressing disbelief regarding what he was thinking. The headlights of the car were boring into the darkness as the vehicle moved downhill, the road winding around canyons and ravines, the land on both sides below them.

  ‘The flap of 1897,’ Stanford said. ‘The first real modern sightings.’

  ‘Don’t blush,’ Epstein said. ‘Just keep talking. Make good use of that famous photographic memory of yours. I want every detail.’

  ‘Okay,’ Stanford said. ‘As you know, the first major UFO flap was in 1896 – about November of that year – and continued until May the following year. This was five years before the Wright brothers’ experiments, but there were, by tha
t time, various airship designs on the drawing boards or in the Patent Office. On August 11, 1896, a patent was given to Charles Abbot Smith of San Francisco for an airship he intended to have ready by the following year. Another patent for an airship was issued to Henry Heintz of Elkton, South Dakota, on April 20, 1897. However, I should point out that while many of the UFOs sighted were shaped roughly like the patent designs, there is no record of either airship having been built.’

  ‘But the UFOs looked like airships?’

  ‘At that time the general belief was that aerial navigation would be solved through an airship rather than a heavier-than-air flying machine

  – so most of the earlier designs looked like dirigibles with a passenger car on the bottom.’

  ‘Cigar-shaped.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Please continue.’

  ‘Okay, what stands out in the 1896 and 1897 sightings is that the UFOs were mostly cigar-shaped, that they frequently landed, and that their crews, normal men, often talked to the witnesses, usually asking for water for their machines. Now, the most intriguing of the numerous contactee stories involved a man who called himself Wilson. The first incident occurred in Beaumont, Texas, on April 19, 1897, when a guy called Ligon, local agent for Magnolia Brewery, and his son, noticing lights in the Johnson pasture a few hundred yards away, went to investigate. They came upon four men standing beside a large, dark object that neither of them could see clearly. One of the men asked Ligon for a bucket of water. When Ligon gave it to him, the man gave his name as Mr Wilson. He then told Ligon that he and his friends were traveling in a flying machine, that they had taken a trip, quote, “out of the Gulf”, and that they were returning to the, quote, “quiet Iowa town” where the airship and four others like it had been constructed. When asked, Wilson explained that electricity powered the propellers and wings of the airship. Then he and his friends get back into the airship and Ligon, with his son, watched it ascending.

  ‘The next day, on April 20, a Sheriff Baylor of Uvalde, also in Texas, went to investigate a strange light and voices in back of his house. He encountered a parked airship and three men – and one of the men gave his name as Wilson, from Goshen, New York. Wilson then inquired about a Captain Akers, former sheriff of Zavalia County, saying that he’d met him in Fort Worth in 1877 and wanted to see him again. Surprised, Sheriff Baylor replied that Akers was now at Eagle Pass, and Wilson, apparently disappointed, asked to be remembered to him the next time Sheriff Baylor saw him. Baylor reported that the men from the airship wanted water and that Wilson requested that their visit be kept secret from the townspeople. Then he and the other men climbed back into the airship and watched it fly away northward in the direction of San Angelo. The county clerk also saw the airship as it was leaving the area.

  ‘Two days later, in Josserand, Texas, a whirring sound woke farmer Frank Nichols, who looked out of his window and saw what he described as brilliant lights streaming from, quote, “a ponderous vessel of strange proportions” in his cornfield. Nichols went outside to investigate, but before he reached the object, two men walked up to him and asked if they could have water from his well. Nichols agreed to this

  – as farmers in those days invariably did – and the men then invited him to visit the airship where he noticed that there were six or seven crew members. One of these men told Nichols that the ship’s motive power was highly condensed electricity and that it was one of five that had been constructed in, quote, “a small town in Iowa” with the backing of a large stock company in New York.

  ‘The next day, on April 23, witnesses described by the Houston Post as two responsible men reported that an airship had descended where they lived in Koutze, Texas, and that two of the occupants had given their names as Jackson and… Wilson.

  ‘Four days after this incident, on April 27, the Galveston Daily News printed a letter from Captain Akers, the former sheriff of Zavalia County, who claimed that he had indeed known a man in Fort Worth named Wilson, that Wilson was from New York, that he was in his middle twenties, and that he was of a, quote “mechanical turn of mind” and was then working on aerial navigation and, in his own words, something that would astonish the world.

  ‘Finally, early in the evening of April 30, in Deadwood, Texas, a farmer named Lagrone heard his horses bucking as if in stampede. Going outside, he saw a bright white light circling over the fields nearby and illuminating the entire area before descending and landing. Walking to the landing spot, Lagrone found a crew of five men, one of whom talked to him while the others collected water in rubber bags. The man informed Lagrone that his airship was one of five that had been flying around the country recently, that his was in fact the same one that had landed in Beaumont a few days before, that all the airships had been constructed in an interior town in Illinois – which, note, borders Iowa – and that he was reluctant to say anything else because he hadn’t yet taken out any patents. By May that same year, the airship sightings ended.’

  The car rolled on down the mountain, snow still sweeping across the road, the dense forests gliding by on both sides, white and ghostly in darkness.

  ‘Interesting,’ Epstein said. ‘It’s certainly beginning to add up. And this Wilson appeared to be in his early twenties?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Stanford said. ‘So assuming, as our Wilson claims, that he’s a hundred and seven years old, in 1897 he’d have been twentyseven.’

  ‘It fits,’ Epstein said. ‘Most of the facts fit. For instance, Wilson said that he’d originally studied aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then at Cornell, New York.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Stanford said.

  ‘No, I’m not. He said he went to the MIT, but eventually left it to study under Octave Chanute… Does that make any sense to you?’

  ‘Oh, Christ, yes,’ Stanford said.

  The snow swept across the headlights, the alluvial hills slid past, the sky formed a long, glittering ribbon between gaps in the trees.

  ‘It’s hard to believe,’ Stanford said, ‘but it’s possibly true. Although there were no formal aeronautical courses at the MIT during the early 1890s, there were plenty of informal courses on propulsion and the behaviour of fluids. However, by 1896 instructors and students at the MIT had built a wind tunnel and were experimenting with it to get practical knowledge of aerodynamics. Wilson – our Wilson – could have attended those courses and then gone on to Sibley College, Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, where, by the mid-1890s, it was possible to get a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics.’

  They were coming out of the mountains, the road straightening and leveling out, a dizzying drop on one side, soaring hills on the other, the snow banked up on both sides of the car, gleaming white in the darkness.

  ‘So,’ Epstein said. ‘Wilson was born in 1870. In 1890, at the age of twenty, he was studying propulsion and the behaviour of fluids at the MIT, after which he went on to Cornell to study aerodynamics. Let us say, then, that by the mid-1890s he’d obtained his Bachelor of Science in Aerodynamics. Assuming he’s a genius, we can then also assume that when he left Cornell, he went straight into the designing and constructing of flying machines. Now, bearing in mind the enormous interest there was at that time in the possibilities of such machines – and the fact that numerous researchers and inventors were obsessed with the possible theft or plagiarism of their designs – the need for secrecy would certainly have been paramount. Given this, it is possible that our Wilson was financed by some stock company in New York to set up a secret aeronautical research complex in the sparsely populated wilds of Illinois or Iowa. It is therefore also possible – still assuming that our Wilson is a genius – that he could have built the first airship by 1896.’

  ‘Christ!’ Stanford exclaimed. ‘Jesus Christ! Which gets us to your tapes.’

  ‘Correct,’ Epstein said.

  ‘What’s on them?’ Stanford asked. ‘Tell me what’s on the tapes. I can’t wait till we get to DC. I have to know now!’ />
  Epstein didn’t reply. Stanford turned and looked at him. He just sat there with his head tilted toward one shoulder, his eyes closed, breathing deeply. Stanford smacked him on the shoulder, but Epstein didn’t respond. Stanford cursed and glanced out at the swirling snow and then looked back at Epstein. He was still breathing deeply, his eyes closed as if asleep, and Stanford shook him and received no response and felt a sharp, stabbing panic. He shook Epstein again, loudly called out his name, but Epstein still didn’t wake up. Stanford was confused, not knowing what was going on, thinking Epstein might have had some kind of stroke, wondering what he could do. They were a long way from Washington. The mountains soared behind them. Ahead, on both sides of the road, the hills climbed into darkness. Stanford cursed and stopped the car, twisted sideways, shook Epstein. The latter blinked and then opened his eyes properly and looked vaguely around him.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked.

  ‘Nowhere,’ Stanford said. ‘I had to stop the car to waken you. I was worried that something had happened to you.’

  ‘I fell asleep?’

  ‘That’s what it looked like. I just blinked and you were gone. I’ve never seen anyone fall asleep that fast and it gave me a fright.’

  Epstein smiled. ‘My apologies.’

  ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’

  ‘Of course,’ Epstein said. ‘I feel fine. I don’t know what happened… All the flying… Jet lag.’

  ‘Can I go now?’ Stanford said.

  ‘Certainly. Please do.’

  ‘Good,’ Stanford said. ‘I’m relieved. I don’t like it out here.’

  He turned the ignition key. When nothing happened, he tried again. Nothing happened and he cursed and tried a third time, but still nothing happened. He glanced at Epstein, saw his eyes gradually closing. Stanford cursed and then tried the car a fourth time, but still nothing happened. The engine was completely dead. Stanford didn’t understand that. He looked around him, saw the thick, spiraling snow, the hills covered in pine trees. Stanford looked again at Epstein. The old man was asleep. Frightened, Stanford opened his door and slipped out of the car.