The Thaon Factor

by Eugene Wilson

  Daniels turns to face Detective Wright. “Officer Wright, I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and your department. We already had in custody three civilian personnel who were in partnership with three military base personnel. As it turned out, all six were best friends. In truth sir, criminal offenses committed against a U.S. military or federal installation would fall solely under the jurisdiction of the FBI.”

  “That being the case,” Detective Wright asks, “so how were Mr. Stone and Mr. Morgan able to involve these teenagers?”

  “Mr. Stone and Mr. Morgan,” Daniels continues, “had inside help. One week after the theft, three base inventory personnel; Daniel Bates, Larry Wallace, Steve Lanson were each paid $1000 to obtain and falsify several official documents regarding the actual theft of the military equipment.”

  “Falsify?” Wright asks.

  “Yes. Mr. Stone and Mr. Morgan presented these falsified documents to your department. These teenagers were not involved.”

  Wright looks at his men and then at the three teens. “Mr. Williams, as of now, I am summarily dropping all charges against you and your friends. We apologize for your friends’ arrest. We were simply acting on what we thought were valid criminal charges filed by Air Force military officials.”

  “Then my sons are free?” Janez asks aloud.

  “Yes ma’am, Mrs. Clark! Your sons are free.”

  “Thank God Almighty!” Janez says aloud.

  Tyrone and Nathan are released. Janez rushes to hug her sons.

  “Agent Daniels,” Wright continues, “how did you find out about this?”

  “In May of 1965, Stone and Morgan were arrested on the charges of conducting illegal black market activities. Although a Judge Advocate General had exonerated them, both were dishonorably discharged.”

  Wright is surprised. “How did you find them this time?”

  “Back in April of 1971, we began a new investigation of these men. They continued to use their former Air Force status to further their illegal activities. The theft and resale of sensitive military equipment is a huge problem within the U.S. military.”

  “Well, I’ll be! So…who in the police department informed you?”

  “An anonymous caller provided us with information we needed.”

  “I’m impressed! I would like to know who that caller was. But, I guess that’s classified.”

  “No sir,” Daniels responds. “The young man is standing right there.”

  Shocked, Wright turns to David. “You, Mr. Williams? How?”

  “Officer Wright!” David begins, “Initially, I had no idea that these men were already being investigated. I suspected something else about them.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Two days ago, I called and spoke with a Beale Air Base Information representative. I requested to speak with someone who could verify Mr. Stone and Mr. Morgan’s allegations. After being given the runaround, I talked with a real Air Force Officer, Major Donald Woods.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Major Woods indicated that Stone and Morgan were not listed as Air Force officers at Beale. However, Major Woods did say that the names of these two men were mentioned during a continuing investigation. After a lengthy discussion, he transferred my call to FBI Divisional Headquarters in Sacramento. I spent nearly an hour talking with Special Agent Daniels.”

  “Then what?” Wright asks, smiling proudly.

  “Yesterday, I drove all the way to Sacramento, California to speak with Special Agent Daniels. I provided FBI officials with relevant information regarding Mr. Stone and Mr. Morgan, along with their alleged charges. As Special Agent Daniels had indicated, Mr. Stone and Mr. Morgan had inside help on this. I was there almost the entire day.”

  “That must have been one long drive,” Wright concludes.

  “Yes sir, it was. I didn’t make it back home until one in the morning.”

  “Then what was that device that you had given to Mr. Stone?”

  “Officer Wright, that was an electronic idiot box that a friend and I had built. I simply used it as a diversionary measure.”

  “You set those men up good,” Wright says. “Still, why would Darryl and Paul go through all the trouble of having you three involved? The FBI had already arrested the ones involved and the stolen military transceiver had already been recovered. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “I agree,” Special Agent Daniels says.

  “Gentlemen,” David replies, “your guess is as good as mine.”

  “I’ll just have their car impounded. Regardless, that was a brave thing you did, young man.”

  “Of course, you did have help. Right?” Sylvia tells David, walking up beside him. David smiles and puts his arms around her.

  “Officers, this is Sylvia Clark. She helped me in this.” He pauses. “I thank God in heaven for her. My life would feel empty without her.”

  “Oh…wow!” Janez says to herself.

  “You better had said that,” Sylvia jokes.

  “Thank you, Mr. Williams and you, Miss Clark,” Daniels concludes, “The FBI appreciates your cooperation in this matter.” After a nod of agreement from Wright, FBI officials and police officers get into their cars and drive away. Two police officers remain behind to call for a tow truck. As the crowd begins dispersing, Janez walks up to David. To David’s embarrassment, she kisses him softly on the cheek.

  “Hey! What are you doing kissing my mom?” Tyrone asks, laughing. Nathan is ecstatic.

  “Tyrone! Leave him alone,” Janez objects as she turns her attention back to David. Looking at him, she begins thinking of what a fine son-in-law that he would make after all. “I want to thank you for what you did for my boys. I apologize for calling you all those names.”

  Diane walks up to him. “I apologize too for threatening you with that knife. Sylvia told me what really happened.”

  Smiling, David looks at them with no ill feelings. “I’m not angry with either of you. I honestly feel that all of us can learn much from this. I’m simply glad that this is all over.”

  “Well, in that case, you can have Sylvia back,” Janez tells him.

  “Have Sylvia back? What am I? A piece of ham?”

  “No, you are the woman I love,” David replies smiling.

  “Kids.” Janez mumbles as she rolls her eyes away. She walks into the house.

  Tyrone turns to the others. “David! Why didn’t you tell Officer Wright about Weiss? During all the commotion, I saw a white woman get out the car and take the device. After that, both she and the driver took off in a hurry. I’m certain that it was them.”

  “Oh, it was them all right. But I still couldn’t.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot.”

  “That’s right,” David agrees. “We’d all be in trouble if the police and FBI had found out about the real alien devices.”

  “I am so glad this is all over,” Nathan exclaims loudly.

  “No, it’s not,” David reminds him. “Company is coming.”

  “Who?” Sylvia asks.

  “David!” Tyrone begins nervously, “tomorrow is Saturday.”

  The Weiss Residence

  “I pay those stupid idiots forty grand and all I get in return is a stupid idiot box!” With anger, Anthony throws the box and smashes it against the fireplace wall. Pieces of plastic and electronic parts fly out. Still cursing, he storms out the room. Arlene walks over and picks up the damaged box. Within the box is a folded slip of paper. Opening the paper, she frowns as she reads the handwritten words: Queen’s Gambit declined: Checkmate!

  The Clark Residence

  After Diane leaves the room, the others begin working feverishly on putting what they have deciphered together so far. They have until tomorrow evening before Tyrone has to bring David to meet with the alien party. All of them are sitting in a semi-circle with numerous pages of deciphered and undeciphered alien text. “I’m confused,” Sylvia speaks up.

  “These people don’t appear to be li
ke the ones that we learned about.”

  “Sylvia! We don’t know these aliens personally,” David states. “All we did was decipher alien data. Now, they threaten to kill us. First, we had to deal with Anthony and his Nazi goons! Now this!”

  As David refocuses his attention back on his composition notes, Sylvia feels disappointed. She felt that Quafeira was far more amiable. “I still don’t understand,” she states. “Are you certain about this alien female? She may have been Quafeira.”

  “I don’t think so, sis,” Tyrone replies. “The way she was pointing that weapon at me didn’t convince me she was looking for her old man.”

  David looks up from his notes. “I’m still wondering. Why do they want the extraspatial otivicon? That thing is utterly lethal. If it was up to me, I would destroy it.”

  “What changed your mind?” Nathan asks.

  David sighs. “Nathan, here’s the thing with Hilexos. Amazingly, these guys found a way to access a higher extraspatial dimension.”

  “Oh no, here we go again,” Tyrone thinks to himself, “the East End ghetto physicists!”

  “Right,” Nathan surmises as he looks at his own journal notes. “But, they couldn’t build a generator powerful enough to supply the enormous amount of energy needed to open a dimensional portal.”

  “So, they succeeded in tapping the immense gravitational energy of a black star,” David concludes. “Absolutely phenomenal technology!”

  “What’s this black star y’all keep talking about?”

  “Tyrone! What selothian physicists call a black star, our physicists call it a black hole.”

  “Huh? A black ho?” Tyrone objects. “What’s some hoochie mama have to do with any of this?” The others break out in a loud, hard laugh.

  David shakes his head in disbelief. “Not a black ho, a black h-o-l-e!”

  “Oh! Okay. So what’s a black hole?”

  “You are so-o silly,” Sylvia laughs. She feels incredibly happy to have her brothers back home again. Tyrone just laughs in return.

  “A black hole,” Nathan begins after calming himself, “is the remnant of a massive star that collapsed in upon itself. Back in 1783, John Michell, a black Cambridge physicist and a contemporary of Henry Cavendish, was the one who first developed this term.”

  “John Michell?” Tyrone asks.

  “Yeah, at the time, however, Michell used the term Dark Star. Still, whatever lies at the center of a black hole possess an almost infinitely powerful gravitational field.”

  “Some physicists,” David tells them, “use the term singularity to refer to whatever exists within its center.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Tyrone surmises. “It’s something like…uh… earth’s gravitational field. Right?” Tyrone feels proud of his conclusion.

  “Yes! But the gravitation field of a black hole is billions of times more powerful,” David relates. “In essence, a black hole of sufficient mass could pulverize our entire planet if it came close enough.”

  “You have to be kidding!” Tyrone objects.

  “Nope. He is not kidding,” Nathan interrupts. “These stellar objects are extremely dangerous to go near, provided you have a space ship capable of reaching one and you are stupid enough to get too close to one.”

  “He’s right,” David concludes. “Any object that crosses a black hole’s event horizon or the point of no return, is doomed to destruction.”

  “So how is this extraspatial otivicon thing involved?” Tyrone asks.

  “Technologically,” David continues, “the extraspatial otivicon is centuries ahead of earth’s most sophisticated devices. So, don’t ask me how it works. All I was able to learn is that it literally creates a physical extraspatial tunnel.”

  “You mean something like that hyperspace illustration that you showed me last week?” Tyrone asks.

  “No. An extraspatial tunnel and hyperspace are not the same, although both can serve a similar purpose.”

  “I don’t get it,” Tyrone admits.

  “Just like a tunnel can link two specific points on land, an extraspatial tunnel or conduit can physically link any two points in the galaxy.”

  “So why is that so bad?”

  “Tyrone,” Nathan interrupts, “these selothians found a way to create an artificial tunnel linked to the vicinity of a black hole.”

  “And this link,” David continues, “can funnel immense gravitational forces to be converted to a form of usable energy to power whatever they used to access a higher dimension and—Oh My God! I just remembered something.”

  “What?”

  “Some military agency tried to reconfigure the extraspatial otivicon as a weapon.”

  “Yeah, I had already figured that out earlier. Apparently, during a lab test, something went wrong,” Nathan states as he flips some pages over in his notebook. “Over six hundred workers were killed during a test.”

  “How?” Sylvia asks. “In what way were they killed?”

  After an affirmative nod from David, Nathan continues. “According to the details, all those people were trapped in a building that was pulled into the extraspatial conduit. The building and all those people were reduced to sub-atomic particles.”

  Sylvia closes her eyes in horror.

  “Project Hilexos was a terrifying experiment,” David continues. “Yet, there is something more to this.”

  “What’s that?” Nathan asks.

  “The information is still sketchy. According to what I have deciphered so far, there appears to be another device called the trephasian cohibitor, which is based on an alien science called bio-spatial nebulonics.”

  “Trephasian cohibitor? Bio-spatial nebulonics?” Nathan asks.

  “Like you, I’m still trying to grasp much of this,” David admits.

  “What does this trephasian cohibitor do?” Nathan asks.

  “Supposedly, the device enables a person to transport himself, via an extraspatial conduit, to another planet surrounding a distant star.”

  Briefly, Nathan is speechless. “Wow! That has to be some phenomenal technology! What are we getting ourselves into?” After walking over and removing the extraspatial otivicon from the dresser drawer, Sylvia comes back over and sits down. “Let them have this thing.”

  “Good point,” David tells her. He slowly puts his arm around her.

  “Now, here’s my question to you, lovely lady.”

  “What?” she asks with a profuse smile. Their eyes meet.

  “Even after we give it to them, they would probably kill us anyway.”

  Sylvia’s smile vanishes as her eyes widen. David removes his arm from around her and continues to look down at his notes.

  “Heck! Call the fuzz,” Tyrone suggests. “We have no choice now.”

  “Tyrone,” Nathan states, “we’ve just been through this with the cops.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Tyrone agrees.

  “Come on everyone. Let’s go for a drive,” David suggests. “We can think better once we clear our heads. We have until tomorrow evening.”

  “Yeah, we can stop at McDonald’s for our last meal,” Tyrone replies with an ominous tone.

  “Don’t give up yet, buddy,” David states. “We thought our way out of past situations. We can think our way out of this one. Besides, I prefer a Burger King Whopper than a Big Mac anytime. Let’s go. I’m starved.”

  Chapter 5Arrival

  9:20 PM

  “I think it’s a good idea,” David replies as he is driving the car along the highway. Night has fallen and all are heading back toward Anonwood. Nathan and Tyrone are in the back passenger seat while Sylvia is up front with David.

  “Whatever comes up,” Sylvia states, “I think that we can pull this off.”

  “We have to,” David agrees. “Something about this still puzzles me.”

  “What do you mean?” Nathan asks from the back.

  “Well, I—” David stops talking as he sees a brightly illuminated spherical object floating directly in his p
ath a short distance away. As he swerves the car to the right, he brakes and brings his car to a stop on the dirt shoulder. The floating spherical object begins moving toward the car and stops two feet from the windshield.

  “Oh My God! What is that thing?” Sylvia shrieks in fear.

  Suddenly, the object begins flashing a pattern of lights. It then circles the car twice before repositioning itself in front of the windshield.

  “It’s them!” David replies nervously. “They’re watching us again!”

  “But it’s too early,” Tyrone objects. “They told me tomorrow at a different place.”

  “David! Drive off,” Nathan demands. David puts the car into reverse.

  “Do not attempt to move your transport! We wish you no harm,” a strong male voice emanates from the object. All look at each other after hearing that strange voice.

  “It’s no use. They can follow us anywhere. Let’s see what they want,” David concludes. He shuts off the engine.

  Moments later, all exit the car. David sees the fear on Sylvia’s face. “Don’t worry, girlfriend, we’ll be okay,” he tells her as he dares to approach the spherical object first. “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “Your questions will be answered in time. Please walk and follow our probe toward the area where it will lead you.”

  “How can we be sure that you will not harm us?” Nathan asks.

  This time, the answering voice is feminine. “Had we wanted to harm you, we would not have gone through the trouble of trying to get your attention. We fully understand your fear and concern in this matter.”