GENESIS (Projekt Saucer)

by W. A. Harbinson

  ‘It’s political leapfrog,’ Stanford said.

  ‘That’s right. A kid’s game. But somebody’s going to trip up and get hurt – and then all hell will break loose.’

  ‘Are they Nazis?’ Stanford asked.

  ‘No,’ Fuller said. ‘They’re a society of masters and slaves, but they’re no longer Nazis. That Wilson is a genius. His genius extends to organization and so he runs that whole place. He’s into parapsychology, electrodes and prosthetics. He has his people implanted when they’re born, and they grow up like zombies. There’s never more than a thousand of them. The system is based on euthanasia. When someone ceases to be of any use, Wilson has him put down. There’s no possibility of resistance. They’re all disciplined with electrodes. They all exist just to work, and that work is for the glory of science. Human beings are vivisected. What he doesn’t have, he steals. We know he steals people from us, but we discreetly ignore that fact. We can’t afford to rock the boat. We have to stay on the seesaw. That colony represents the balancing power and we just can’t catch up with it.’

  ‘So the Americans and Russians actually work with him?’

  ‘In truth, he’s what we need. The whole world’s out of control. We all need what that bastard has, but he’s buried down there. So, we continue trading. He lies to us, we lie to him. We keep building more satellites, pulse beam weapons, more powerful saucers, and we think that in a couple of years we might be ready to tackle him. The Russians think the same. Wilson knows what we’re both thinking. When we slip up, he demonstrates his technological superiority and then we promptly correct ourselves and back down. It’s like I said: it’s a seesaw arrangement, a tricky maneuver, but sooner or later it’s bound to explode – and I don’t like to think of that.’

  ‘So,’ Stanford said. ‘This explains the secrecy about UFOs. It also explains why the Russians and Americans cooperate in the Antarctic.’

  ‘You’ve hit the nail on the head, pal.’

  Fuller carefully raised his head, lay it back against his seat, then just sat there, breathing deeply with relief, gazing into the darkness.

  ‘Where are they?’ Stanford asked.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ Fuller said. ‘You go there and you’ll never come back, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Where

  are they?’

  Fuller sighed wearily. ‘They’re in Neuschwabenland. You fly along the zero meridian, straight in to Queen Maud Land, and about two hundred miles in from the coast, you’ll find a range of low mountains. It’s really Norwegian territory. It’s really part of Queen Maud Land. You usually only find it marked on German atlases, and they call it Neuschwabenland. The Antarctic colony is in those mountains. They’ve hollowed out the base of the mountains. There’s an area where the ice forms a huge circle that resembles a volcano. The carrying ships are down there. They come up out of there. Beneath the circle of ice is solid rock, now honeycombed with long tunnels. The tunnels lead into the colony. They all live and work there. The whole area is protected with a force field that makes unwanted aircraft malfunction. We found that out to our cost. We stopped trying years ago. That whole area is liked the famous Area of Inaccessibility – and our pilots avoid it.’

  ‘I’m going there,’ Stanford said.

  ‘You’re going nowhere,’ Fuller said. ‘I once like you, but you can’t walk away with this. Understand? You’re a dead man.’

  Stanford suddenly heard the noise. Glancing out automatically, he saw bright light flashing on and off the trees, beaming down through the darkness. Then Fuller made his move. Stanford turned back and saw him. Fuller had opened his door and was falling backward, one hand inside his jacket. The pistol bucked in Stanford’s hand. Its bang was deafening in the car. Fuller cried out as his body struck the ground, but then he quickly rolled over. Stanford dropped across both seats, heard the roaring helicopter, saw Fuller rolling away from the car, a pistol clenched in his right fist. Stanford fired and Fuller jerked, dropped his pistol and flopped over. Stanford sat up and turned the ignition key as the roaring grew louder.

  He didn’t bother closing the far door. A cloud of dust and stones swept over him. The chopper roared descending over the trees and bathed the car in its fierce light. Stanford cursed and put his foot down, reversed, the wheels squealing, shot forward and made a tight turn as Fuller staggered toward him, swaying weakly from side to side. Stanford couldn’t avoid him. He heard a sickening thud. Fuller bounced across the hood of the car, limbs akimbo, his eyes large, mouth wide open, waving frantically and rolling off again. Stanford put his foot down harder, racing straight at the trees, swinging the car wildly from left to right and staying away from the road.

  First the darkness, then the light: the helicopter was right above him. It came down above the trees, whipped the dirt up, swirling and hissing. Stanford wrenched at the steering wheel. He hit a tree and bounced off. The car shrieked and then shot forward again, crashing through the undergrowth. The chopper roared and deafened Stanford. It was just above the trees. It was whipping the dirt up to his right and forcing him back to the open road. Stanford cursed and kept going, weaving left and right frantically, tearing branches and bark from tree trunks, the car howling dementedly. He managed to keep away from the road. The forest suddenly opened out. The roaring chopper descended into the clearing and smashed the car with its skids. The impact blinded Stanford, made him release the steering wheel. The car shot off to the left and started skidding and he grabbed at the steering wheel again. He went with the skidding, shrieked around in a full circle, was blinded by the chopper’s glaring lights, almost choked in the dust. The car raced toward the chopper. The chopper jerked up and shuddered. A rotor snapped against the branch of a tree and flew away as the chopper tipped over. The car raced right beneath it, shot back into the forest, was shaken by a thunderous explosion, bathed in fierce, jagged lightning. Stanford managed to glance back. A ball of fire filled the clearing. The fire swept across the field and up the trees, its flames hissing and spitting.

  Stanford turned the steering wheel, heading straight for the road. He bounced back onto the road, took the fork to Washington, DC, glanced across the road and saw the burning trees illuminating the forest. The flames soon dropped behind him. He slowed down and drove more carefully. He saw the dark night on all sides, the moon, the glittering stars, and he knew that he would have to leave the country and never return.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Awakening in that bitterly cold dawn of January 28, 1979, still not believing where he was, Stanford shivered and closed his eyes again and thought of how he had come here… He saw the harbor of Manzanillo on the western coast of Mexico, the one hundred and twenty-five-foot ship, its wooden hull creaking rhythmically, moving out in the gray, early-December afternoon, its engines and generators and air-conditioners filling his ears with a muffled roaring. Then due south to Easter Island, the turgid waves rolling slowly, the frigate birds sailing by on their fluttering black wings, the swarm of Galapagos storm petrels like a cloud of locusts. Blue-gray flying fish, the sea’s monotonous rise and fall, the sun rising as orange fire, turning into a dazzling white, the pink sunset, then sharp, abrupt darkness, the stars glittering in velvet sky. The gradual death of December. The dawn an eerie green glowing. The sun forming an arch, stretched across the horizon, first green and then turning to red and setting the clouds on fire. The clouds shifted and changed, tinged with pink and orangeyellow, touched here and there with glinting gold, the sea violet, languorous. America was no more. Other worlds were now beckoning. The South Pacific, Cape Horn, the seas rough and uninviting, flocks of whalebirds with blue and white plumage, then the Tropic of Capricorn. White-breasted, dark-backed shearwaters, gliding through the troughs of waves, the southern latitudes with their long ocean swells, the smaller waves in between. The great wings of albatross, their graceful soaring and gliding, then past the southern coast of South America, rain and fog, the winds moaning. Buoyant Magellanic penguins.
More birds high and low. The barren, forbidding rocks of the Ildefonso Islands, the Beagle Channel, its dark, humpbacked islands, brown and bleak and forlorn. Then the New Year coming in, the sea foam-flecked and grim, giant petrels and skuas overhead, the cold winds unrelenting. Farewell to the Old World. No escape from the future. The primeval forests and glacier-encased peaks of Tierra del Fuego. Then the stormy Drake Passage, the current driven by the westerlies, waves fifty to a hundred feet high, the green water smashing over the bow and sweeping back out again. The New Year, a new person: Stanford losing himself. Over the Antarctic Convergence, past Elephant Island, great blocks of rock and ice, flashing ribbons of snow, a shroud made of smokey, drifting cloud, a sudden upthrusting glacier. Time passing and then stopping. Stanford’s gloved hands on the railing. Then the ice-encased mountains, seals and whales and pelagic birds, the air brilliantly clear, the cascading ice blue, the mountain ridges of Gibbs Island, the penguins circling the ship, the crevassed ice cliffs sliding past as if not really there. Stanford’s gloved hands in the air. A bird fluttering on the deck. More islands, more snowbanks, penguins crowding on the rocks, Greenwich Island, high waves exploding fiercely, the spray cascading and settling. Then a white line in the distance. The approaching Antarctic Peninsula. Then the glaciers and icebergs, huge umbrellas and arches, flat islands of sea ice, the grottoes and canyons and fjords reflecting sun on the green sea. A world like no other. Silent, Majestic. Sweeping plains of packed snow, soaring peaks of glittering ice, the peaks yellow and pink and sometimes black, a blue sheen over all… Stanford opened his eyes again. He looked around him and shivered. He was now at the bottom of the world and could scarcely believe it.

  He sat up on his bunk, yawned and blinked, glanced around him, saw that the other bunks were already empty, the Norwegians out at their work. He sat there for some time, staring through the window opposite, seeing nothing but the wall of the dome that surrounded the base. Stanford still felt stunned. He had finally arrived. He swung his legs off the bunk and stood up and hurriedly dressed himself.

  The Nissen hut was long and bleak, a converted army barracks, the blankets rumpled on the bunks, clothes and boots scattered all over the place, the walls covered in pinups. Stanford zipped up his jacket, shivered again as he picked up his gloves, then he walked along the hut, between the bunks, and entered the washroom. He splashed water on his face, combed his hair, put his hat on, made sure that his ears were well covered and then looked in the mirror. A stranger stared back at him, a long-haired, bearded man, his eyes uncommonly hard and intense and possibly mad. Stanford wondered about that. The possibility didn’t bother him. Then he turned away and left the hut and looked around the Norwegian base.

  The whole camp was inside an enormous, glittering geodesic dome that shielded it from the wind and snow. Beneath the dome were mess halls, administration huts and accommodations, power plants and machine shops and garages. All the buildings were painted red, were square and rectangular, took the form of cylindrical Quonset huts, and were made of corrugated steel. The generators were whining, the power plants hummed steadily, as Stanford passed the research laboratories for meteorology and atmospheric physics, the library and medical center and radio masts, and stopped in front of the mess hut. He glanced directly above him, at the immense, glittering dome, then slapped himself to get warm and entered the mess hut for a strong cup of coffee.

  It was a self-service canteen, the food stacked behind glass, plastic trays piled up beside the metal urns and the white cups and plates. Stanford poured himself a coffee, studied the food and decided against it, turned away from the steel-framed glass cabinets and looked around the mess hut. Most of the tables were empty, the men already out at work. He saw the pilot at a table near the wall, a steaming mug at his lips.

  Stanford went to join the pilot, wending his way between the tables, a pulse beating nervously in his stomach, feeling bright but unreal. The pilot looked up and grinned, wiped some coffee from his beard, his hair, just like Stanford’s, long for warmth, a wild gleam in his eyes.

  ‘Hi, ho,’ he said. ‘How’s my buddy? He don’t look too good.’ Stanford pulled a chair out, sat down facing the pilot, noticed that his pupils were enlarged and did not feel encouraged.

  ‘I’m fine, Rocky,’ he said. ‘Just wind me up and I’ll go. One coffee – just this single cup of coffee – and my day will begin.’

  Rocky grinned and scratched his beard, inhaled luxuriously on his cigaret, blew the smoke to fill the chilly air with the sweet aroma of pot.

  ‘Oh, my,’ he said. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘You’re stoned,’ Stanford said.

  ‘Damned right, I’m stoned,’ Rocky said. ‘A man needs a good breakfast.’

  Stanford shrugged and drank his coffee, let it burn down inside him, neither angry nor pleased with the pilot, knowing what he was like. Rocky was a freelance, working on commission for the Norwegians, a kid with scrambled brains and experience in Vietnam and the ability to fly just about anywhere, under any conditions. The Norwegians called him the Mad Bomber. He lived up to his reputation. He would do things that no other pilot would do, which is why Stanford wanted him. The other pilots avoided Neuschwabenland. It was officially forbidden to fly there. Learning that fact pretty quickly, Stanford had thought he was sunk. Then he heard about Rocky. He started to get stoned with Rocky. He told Rocky where he wanted to go and Rocky giggled with pleasure. Rocky liked the forbidden. He was just out for kicks. They had scrambled his brains in Vietnam and now he lived like a wild man. Still, he could fly. He had his own airplane. It was an old transport plane with skis attached, and Rocky knew how to handle it. He had loved the idea of this particular flight, had wanted to see them goddamned UFOs. He had, like everyone else in the Antarctic, seen them flying around. Now he had the chance to see them up close and he couldn’t wait to get out there. Rocky wanted to go down in a blaze of glory, stoned out of his skull.

  ‘What’s it like outside?’ Stanford asked.

  ‘Minus fifteen degrees. I hope you’ve got your balls wrapped in velvet – you might lose them out there.’

  Rocky grinned and scratched his nose, inhaled some more pot, the pupils of his eyes extremely large, hiding dangerous dreams.

  ‘Can you fly?’ Stanford asked.

  ‘Zip your lip,’ Rocky retorted. ‘I could fly that fucking airplane through a pinhole with a girl on my cock.’

  ‘You must have tried it,’ Stanford said.

  ‘That’s my secret,’ Rocky said. ‘Finish your coffee and let’s get out to the plane. I don’t want them checking us.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘That we were flying to Cape Norvegia. I said we were picking up some supplies, and the dumb bastards believed me.’ Rocky giggled at the thought of it, finished his smoke and stood up, looking bulky in his boots and padded clothes, a pair of gloves in his right hand. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here and have us a good time.’

  Stanford gulped down his coffee, grabbed his gloves and stood up, then he and Rocky left the mess hut and headed straight for the airstrip. Stanford repeatedly glanced around him, still not used to being here, the geodesic dome soaring above him, sunlight pouring down through it. They passed the power plants and garages, then a line of snow tractors, cut around a cylindrical Quonset hut, approached a door in the curved wall. They both put their gloves on. Stanford followed Rocky out. His boots sank into the snow, the bright light stung his eyes, then the cold clamped around him like a vice and rushed into his lungs.

  Ice. All ice. Hills and valleys made of ice. The sun was brilliant and it flashed off the ice and the light almost blinded him. It was incredibly beautiful. It nearly took his breath away. There was nothing out there but the ice and the dazzling white light. The ice went out to the horizon. The sky was sheer blue. He looked up at that sky and saw a green field surrounded by more ice. The sky acted as a mirror, reflecting the land below. The green field was an ice-free mass of land many miles to
the west. Stanford looked all around him. The view never failed to stun him. The ice was everywhere – at his feet, up in the sky – and looking at it, he thought it was beautiful and mysterious and frightening.

  They walked together across the snow, both bulky in their heavy clothing, exhaling clouds of steam, a light frost already forming on their beards, the gloves protecting their hands. The airstrip was fairly close, nestling under a towering ice cliff, its lowest peak two hundred feet above the airplanes, the sky a white haze above.

  ‘Fucking crazy,’ Rocky said. ‘I can’t believe we’re actually doing this. I mean, you say we’re gonna see some flying saucers, and that’s it: we’re off. We must both be fucking mad. You must be as mad as me. What the hell are you gonna do when you see them? Just answer that question.’

  ‘I’m going in there,’ Stanford said.

  ‘From what I’ve heard, that would be nuts.’

  ‘You can land about five miles from the mountain, then I’ll take the snow tractor.’

  ‘It’s really true, then?’ Rocky asked.

  ‘It’s really true,’ Stanford said. ‘All the UFOs you’ve seen were real, all the rumors you heard were true: there’s a colony hidden deep in those mountains and they’ve got flying saucers.’

  Rocky shook his head with wonder. ‘Oh, boy,’ he said, ‘that’s great. That’s absolutely fanfuckingtastic and it’s blowing my mind.’ He giggled with pleasure, rolled his stoned eyes, the frost thickening on his bushy red beard, the sun flashing around him. ‘I can’t wait,’ he said. ‘What a wild fucking gig. What a story to tell when I’m old and gray. I won’t believe it myself.’