The Stainless Steel Coffin
Page 2
Excerpt from Alien Affairs
Pan-STARRS operates a 1.8 meter telescope at the summit of Haleakala on Maui with which the Near Earth Project tracks objects having the potential to collide with the planet. After explaining their camera’s enormous seven-degree field of view to the visiting high school class, the docent told them, “Your timing is great. Last night we found something pretty exciting.” He aimed a remote at a flat screen monitor. The students saw three specks of light against the background of stars. He clicked the remote again and with a laser pointer circled a bright star. “Notice that these three objects have moved relative to this star. These images were taken an hour apart.”
“What are they?” a boy asked.
“We don’t know. We estimate they are roughly two-hundred meters across and they are going to pass very close to the earth in about forty days. We’ve never seen an object moving this fast.”
“Cool. Three alien ships heading for us and you found them on Columbus Day.”
“What if they’re only asteroids and they hit us?” a Polynesian girl asked.
The docent said, “Either would be bad.”
NASA runs the Near Earth Project and duly notified the CIA. The director was unfamiliar with the events from the early fifties and had to make inquiries as to protocol. She was advised to call George Bush, Sr. who was thought to be the last person living with direct knowledge of the Roswell matter. When she got the aging former president on the phone, he sounded worried. “Madam Director, somewhere in your archives is all the information that you need. I just hope to God you can find it.”
Archivists, in their mole-like existence, had little trouble finding the files and a team of analysts began absorbing documents. Carrie Player was not one of them.
Carrie was at home fixing dinner and watching the news. The report from NASA of three objects travelling in apparent formation on a collision course with earth was not being treated as an alien encounter. Speculation about an asteroid having been broken into thirds by a collision with another remained in vogue. The next morning she went to her supervisor.
“I need to be involved in whatever we’re doing about the three alien craft that on their way here,” she said.
The man gave her a look that said he was thinking of calling security. “Alien craft? Have you had a psychological evaluation lately?”
“I’m not crazy. I know what they are and why they are coming.”
“And who is telling you this?”
“My late uncle, Miles Ashly, told me the truth about the Roswell incident and his part in it for twenty-five years.”
“Did your uncle tell you this before or after he died?”
“He told me on his death bed. Look, I speak their language.”
“You speak their language. Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s just say that you’re not crazy, what are you proposing?”
“The Company has vital information for dealing with this threat. I need to be part of the team evaluating it and making policy decisions.”
“You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”
“You’re damn right I’m serious, and I do speak their language.” She gave him a spoken sample that implied his parents were asexual degenerates.
“Right, I get that a lot. I’ll get this news to the director.”
The director said, “She speaks their language? I’ve got to meet this woman.”
During twenty years of service Carrie had never been to the top floor at Langley. In twenty years she had never been involved with or even heard of anything being done with respect to UFOs.
CIA Director, Georgia Turnbull, was a tall, broad-shouldered woman, who kept her striking figure into the latter half of middle age. She wore her platinum gray hair in a graceful sweep that framed her oval face in a dramatic manner. Her smile was wide and engaging but hardly anyone ever saw it.
Director Turnbull received Carrie warmly. She said, “You may be more up to speed on this than I am. Please tell me what you know and how you know it.”
Carrie took a seat and began. “In the fifties my uncle cracked the aliens’ language by studying a sort of ereader that was found at the Roswell crash site. He and two others translated hundreds of documents stored on the thing. The most important contained the information that they were here to destroy the human race by releasing something into the atmosphere that will make everyone sterile. My uncle’s team also figured out that, given where they were coming from, this year was the soonest they could get here to finish the job.”
“Good Lord. And it’s true you speak their language?”
“My uncle taught it to me when I was little.”
“Incredible. Well, you just won the top spot on the Alien Affairs team.”