by Matt Eaton
They were six men and six women, ranging in ages from 21 to 66. Brown University English lit major Philippa Keen was the youngest of the group, while there two people in their 60s — Brooklyn Catholic priest Father Albert Peters, and housewife and grandmother Colleen Sprite from Detroit, Michigan. Miguel Romero was a youngish Hispanic doctor from San Diego. Sergeant Patrick Horton was an ageing and world-weary cop from Chicago who thought he’d seen it all.
There was San Francisco nurse Lucy Hernandez, along with two people from Washington D.C. — USAF staffer Therese Williams and black barman Beverley King. Office secretary Josephine Johnson hailed all the way from Savannah, Georgia. Then there were the two people who now held each other’s hands like star-crossed lovers — assistant bank manager Francene O’Leary from Boston, and Hollywood stage hand, Justin Cavitt. They had shared a bottle of bourbon the previous night and one thing had led to another. Edna wondered if they understood they would never be able to see one another again after today.
Garrick Stamford and most of his Lockheed personnel had been told to take a hike. One or two remained to help run the operation. The main Skunkworks hangar was bathed in light, but its regular personnel were absent as the bus drove in through the main hangar door. Sherman Adams stood waiting in the middle of the hangar floor. He shook the hand of each person in turn exiting the bus, thanking them for their service. The bus headed back out through the hangar door, where a short distance away a small twin-engine Piper Apache had just appeared. It taxied in through the hangar door and pulled up about 50 feet away from them. Elmer Deckard threw open a door, stepped down to the floor of the hangar and flipped his seat forward. The President emerged from the plane’s rear seat, stepping gingerly to the ground using Deckard’s hand to steady himself. Several of the group gasped in shock and amazement as the magnitude of the moment hit them.
Ike was officially on holidays in Palm Springs. He’d fled from his holiday home an hour earlier on the pretext of a tooth ache, claiming he urgently needed to find a dentist. He gave a wave to all assembled and walked over to join them. “Thank you all so much for being here today,” he said, nodding and smiling as she shook hands. The looks on their faces would have warmed the hardest of hearts.
“Now folks, we are here today,” Adams began, “to reveal to you all that your government has come to discover about flying saucers and visitors from other worlds.” A ripple of surprise died down quickly. Several of the group had already guessed as much by this point.
“I knew it,” said Beverley King, who must have had plenty of his own unanswered questions after his years working with Lee Tavon.
“First,” said Edna, “can I please ask everybody to step over this way and behind that yellow line on the floor.”
With everyone safely in the designated place, the floor of the hangar began to vibrate. A large crack opened and two massive concrete panels slid apart to reveal the cavernous underground section of the hangar. From here, Flying Saucer-1 rose slowly. It glowed pale blue and hung pulsing in the air for a few moments before skipping right over the President’s plane and out the hangar doors to the runway and the desert beyond. They watched in awe as it performed a sequence of extraordinary low-altitude aerial maneuvers then re-entered the hangar, stopping in mid-air at the edge of the opening in the floor.
“Oh, my Lord, that was incredible,” cried Josephine Johnson, clearly delighted and excited by the spectacle.
A hatch in the saucer appeared and Lee Tavon descended the stairs to meet them.
“Lee? That you? Damn,” yelled Beverley King.
“Hello Bev,” said Tavon, tossing a disc onto the floor just in front of him. Edna checked her watch. The others would be here in five minutes.
“Does anybody have any questions so far?” Tavon asked.
“Is that saucer one of ours?” asked Sergeant Horton.
“It is now,” said Tavon, “but we didn’t build it. It’s the handiwork of people from another world. More specifically, a people known as the Ryl who have lived in Earth for more than six thousand years. In the Old Testament, the Ryl were known as the Sons of God, the mighty men of old. The Sumerians called them the Anunnaki and at one time they lived openly among us. Their blood is also your blood.”
“Oh, my Lord,” said Father Peters, crossing himself. He began muttering a prayer to himself, as if seeking protection.
Right on cue, Paolo Favaloro materialized before the group, at his full eleven-foot height. “This ship once belonged to me,” he declared proudly. “I was known as Utnapishtim, the last antediluvian king of Sumer. I am of Ryl and human descent. I am six thousand years old...”
Teddy Stauffer didn’t know where to look. “Is he for real?” He stepped forward and over the yellow line, reaching out toward Paolo. His hand passed straight through him.
“Please step back behind the line, Teddy,” Edna urged.
Teddy’s mouth hung open in complete bewilderment. “Is that some sort of projection? He can’t be real.”
“I assure you I am real,” Paolo replied.
Francene hit the deck in a dead faint. Lucy Hernandez rushed to see she was okay as Justin lifted her head off the floor and patted her cheeks. It was a momentary distraction from the reality confronting them, because Lee Tavon quickly drew everyone attention back to the show.
“I too, am not of this world,” Lee Tavon revealed. He stepped forward and touched Teddy on the arm. “Physically, I am human. But mentally and spiritually, I am of an alien race known as the Outherians. We travelled here via meteor in a journey we believe took thousands of years in the form of a virus with which I infected my human host. But don’t worry,” he added cheerfully, “it’s not catching!”
“Shit, Lee,” said King. “I knew there was something strange about you, man.”
“Bev, as they say in the movies — you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Tavon pointed grandly to the floor. From a portal to his farm in Virginia, six more Lee Tavons stepped into the hangar, appearing as if from thin air. They were followed by seven Deborahs and the groups of two of her daughters. The Deborahs spoke together all at once. “We are both many and one, of like mind and body, sharing each other’s experience to vastly enhance our mental and physiological capabilities.”
Father Peters fell to his knees and began retching and vomiting.
Francene O’Leary, who had just been revived, screamed now like she had woken to a whole new nightmare.
“Please, there is no need for panic,” President Eisenhower assured them.
“Please, everybody, calm down,” yelled Edna. “You are safe. No harm will come to you here.”
But an air of panic had taken hold of people. It wasn’t just about feeling physically threatened. The world as they thought they knew it had just come apart at the seams. Philippa Keen started to run toward the desert with a look of abject terror on her face. She was joined by Francene and Justin, who were staggering like drunks because their terror had thrown them off balance.
Colleen Sprite simply held her head in her hands and kept repeating, “No, no, it’s not real, it’s not real...”
Beverley King was just shaking his head. “Shit man, this is fucked up.”
Dr Romero had crouched down to put his arm around Father Peters, but the priest looked catatonic. He was having an intense emotional and spiritual crisis. Teddy and the Horton the Chicago cop were bent down and talking to Deborah’s daughters, touching them gingerly like they might explode.
At that moment, Philippa, Francene and Justin ran back in through the hangar doors. The looks on their faces could almost have been taken for amusement, but they were actually in deep distress. “They’re here,” Justin yelled, his arm around Francene as they made their way back to the rest of the group. A reddish light appeared at the door of the hangar and into this light the figures of two Grar took shape. Lucy, Colleen and Josephine, who had started holding hands, now began to recite the Lord’s prayer together to ward off the evil.
&nbs
p; Sanity had left the building.
“That’s enough,” Sergeant Horton yelled at Eisenhower and Adams. “You need to stop this, sir. You’re scaring the life out of everyone, can’t you see that?”
Eisenhower stared grimly at the cop. “Wrap it up, Edna.”
Edna nodded at one of the Deborahs then walked quickly out toward the Grar, focusing her thoughts on them and doing her best to offer her thanks and to urge them to leave. She could only get so close before fear or involuntary muscle spasm forced her to a stop. She stared out at them, trying to offer an apology and ignoring her own growing sense of apprehension. Her ears were ringing and it kept getting louder, to the point where she couldn’t stand it anymore, and then they were gone.
She stood frozen to the spot, staring out at the desert in sheer relief. The only sound she heard now was the sobs of a terrified Hollywood stagehand and the persistent prayers of three women clinging to one another like their very lives depended on it. Edna made her way back to them.
The Deborahs ushered their daughters back through the portal, then began to move through the group, touching each of the twelve gently on the back of the head. Edna didn’t know how this worked, whether it was hypnotherapy or a form of telepathy, but the end result was all that mattered now. The Outherians could make it all go away, tucking the trauma deep down into the folds of each person’s subconscious. Moments later, as the Deborahs themselves departed, everyone was smiling.
The FS-1 craft remained in mid-air right in front of them, but now nobody saw it. In their minds, it was no longer there. To Edna, this was more profoundly disturbing than anything else they had witnessed, yet it was vastly preferable to the alternative. It was better for all concerned they didn’t remember.
One by one, the Tavons quietly slipped through their portal and disappeared.
SIXTY
Monday February 22, 1954
Verus Foundation headquarters in Church Street was deserted. There was a For Sale sign on the wall beside the front door. Edna climbed the stairs to the main entrance and noticed the front door was hanging open. She gave it a push. The foyer looked as run-down as ever, except now the absence of furniture added to the air of neglect. She stepped inside.
The door to Menzel’s office was open. He’d always kept it locked; entry was only by invitation. The book shelves lining the walls of the old study were empty save a single copy of Flying Saucers, a book written by Menzel himself the previous year in an effort to debunk every known avenue of inquiry into unexplained flying objects. She was sure it had been left behind deliberately as a message for her. She was out in the cold. Left behind. The doors to this building were open to her, but the doors to Verus itself had been slammed in her face.
Sherman Adams had this morning succinctly summed up their experiment as “a complete failure”. There would be no public disclosure, no mea culpa, no revelation of the grand conspiracy. People just weren’t ready for it. To say nothing of the institutions and the businesses that kept the wheels turning. Disclosure was just too much of a risk to life as they knew it.
Nevertheless, Adams had offered her a job as a special envoy to the President. It was a good offer. One that would resurrect her career. But it would inevitably become steeped in politics and after what had gone down with McCarthy, she didn’t trust them to have her back.
“We’re going to shut McCarthy down,” Adams had assured her. “The President is determined. And I’ve been talking with Ed Murrow. He’s getting ready to tear McCarthy apart live on national television.”
“I’m pleased,” she said. Somebody needed to stand up to that man.
“We feel real bad about what he did to you. Let us do the right thing. Come work for us.”
She told Adams she’d think about it. They both knew what that meant.
Lee Tavon was waiting for her on Church Street as she exited the building.
“I have a counter offer for you,” he said.
She smiled. Damn mind readers.
“Come work with us. I’ll pay better than whatever Adams is offering. There’s a project I need your help with.”
“I don’t have much of a head for technology.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “When we built our space-time matter translator...”
“You mean the portal?”
“Yes, the portal. To build it, we had to refine the design of what we call a crystal valve. Also known as a transistor. We have engineers working inside Philco on research and development. They’ve come up with something called a surface barrier transistor. It’s going to revolutionize communications.”
“I understood about a quarter of what you just said,” said Edna.
“We need to put more of a human face on our business. This transistor will be crucial in helping us miniaturize the matter translator and a whole bunch of other tech. There’s something else that might be of interest to you,” Tavon said, smiling knowingly at her. “We want to expand into the UK. I see a trip to London in your near future. Perhaps a chance to hook up with an old friend?”
She grinned. “You know Lee, this might actually be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
They started walking back toward Dupont Circle. “Of all the gin joints in all the world,” said Tavon, “she walks into mine.”
She grabbed him by the arm. “I don’t want you turning me into one of you. No alien mind soup. No more Ednas running around. You hear me?”
“Crystal clear,” he said. “Crystal clear.”
