Never Again

by M. A. Rothman

  The pilot waved at the hangar personnel and turned to his passengers. “Looks like your welcoming committee is here.”

  ###

  After being escorted away from the plane by two people who identified themselves as liaisons for the site, Dave found himself in what seemed to be a waiting area, staring at Bella. Evidently someone was supposed to take them to their final destination and what Dave hoped would be the location of the mysterious object.

  The cinderblock walls of the waiting room were painted a faded, ugly yellow. The sofa and chairs looked sturdy, but from the previous century. Bella seemed at ease just sitting back on the sofa, waiting, while Dave paced, and grew more and more anxious.

  Just when Dave thought he was about to burst, the metal door opened. A harried-looking man in a white lab coat stood in the doorway and blurted, “Doctor Holmes? Mrs. Holmes? I’m sorry to keep y’all waiting, but those morons only just now told me where they stashed you.”

  “Don’t worry about it, and please, call me Dave.” Dave shook hands with the dark-haired man with the strong southern accent. “And you are?”

  “Chris Wilkinson. I suppose my official title is Technical Operations Officer, but really I’m a signal processing geek. You know, RF and analog signaling and analysis.” He smiled warmly. “Oh, and I’m the guy who fixes the bomb tech robots when they’ve eaten one too many explosive dinners.”

  “So are you the one who’s going to show us this mystery object?”

  “Yup, let’s go.” Chris turned and waved for them to follow. “I only found out about this place just a couple hours ago, and truthfully, I’m thinking the folks at Langley put me on this just because I happened to be on vacation only about one-hundred miles away. I’m not sure how much help I can be on this.”

  Besides a thick southern accent, Chris also spoke very quickly, so Dave struggled to keep up with what he said.

  “I’m telling you guys, it was the strangest thing getting scooped up and raced out here in the middle of nowhere.” Chris zigzagged through a series of hallways and kept a count on his fingers for every left and right turn he took. “This place is a maze, so I don’t have a clue about what else is here, but I managed to find the entrance to where they’re hiding whatever this thing is.”

  Bella touched Dave’s arm as they hurried after the lanky engineer and murmured, “I can feel it.”

  Chris stopped at an office with a closed door that didn’t have any obvious knob. He pressed his finger into a recess next to the door frame and held it there.

  Dave turned to Bella and whispered, “What do you feel?”

  With a troubled expression, she shrugged. “It’s like a vibration, almost like a hum.” She pointed to the floor. “Somewhere down there.”

  The door before them quietly slid open, and as Chris walked in the room, Dave followed, realizing that it was actually an elevator.

  As the elevator doors slid shut and they began to descend, Chris turned to Dave and Bella and seemed hardly able to contain himself. “I began reading the notes left behind from the folks who’d studied this thing, and let me tell you,” he jabbed his finger in the air, “this is one strange thingamajig. It was built for some kind of skunkworks project located in the old Roswell Army Air Field back in 1947. And that’s when the shit hit the fan.”

  The elevator suddenly stopped and the doors slid open, revealing a long corridor ahead, hewn from the surrounding bedrock. Along the walls were tiny flickering lanterns that looked just like what Dave had seen in museums. “No electricity down here? Batteries?”

  “Nope.” Chris shook his head. “Ya’ll will read all about it, but when that thing acts up, it tends to eat anything electrical for breakfast. Evidently the scientists working on this thing realized that lanterns didn’t get knocked out, which is kind of a good thing. I’d hate to be stuck here in total darkness.”

  Chris stepped out of the elevator, and as Dave followed, he noticed that to his right were a pair of misaligned doors with a large gap above them. Sometime long ago, those doors had opened into an elevator, but now, their rusted remains only partly concealed the darkness of the elevator shaft behind them.

  Chris whispered, “Remember when I said that the shit hit the fan regarding this object at Roswell back in 1947?”

  It was only when Dave heard what Chris had said and saw the number “51” stenciled in yellow and black on the rusted elevator doors that old memories snapped into place. His heart began racing.

  Dave’s eyes widened and he gasped, “You’re shitting me. That’s where we are? This is where the Roswell rumors and all the alien talk comes from?”

  “I know, can you eff’in believe it?” Chris shifted his weight from one leg to another, acting as if he would explode from excitement. “I never believed that there even was an Area 51 and that the Roswell stuff was just a bunch of malarkey, but now....” He pointed at the elevator shaft. “There it is, plain as day. It may not be aliens, but there’s something going on.”

  Motioning to the broken elevator, Dave asked, “So, is there another elevator?”

  “No, follow me.” Chris shook his head and began walking down the long stone corridor. “There’s a supply room where I’ve gathered a bunch of equipment and some of the cleanroom suits we’ll need. It’s about a half-mile hike, so let me summarize what I’ve learned so far about this thing.

  “Like I said, there was a big incident in 1947. But let me give you some of the background. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Manhattan Project. It was as top secret as it gets back in the day, but there were two twenty-three-year-old Alabama boys who most of the Project never knew about: Kyle and Peter Wilkinson. They were instrumental in helping get the equations right for that nuclear bomb.

  “You see, back then, they didn’t have proper computers. All they had was roomfuls of women on glorified calculators and the beginnings of the first analog punch-card-based computers. Running through the numbers, they had a hell of a time getting the math right for some of those equations. It took forever. Yet, from what I’ve read, it seems like the Wilkinson boys were some kind of geniuses. Their medical charts showed them as ‘psychologically inept, but highly talented.’ I’m thinking that might have been some kind of 1940s-speak for high functioning autistics; you know, idiot savants. The kind of folks who can’t really do much of anything but one or two things, but those one or two things, they can do better than just about anyone else in the world.

  “Well anyway, the government got the bright idea to start using them, and lo and behold, they cranked through those equations like a hot knife through butter.

  “After the war, the government gave them their own lab in Roswell and let them tinker, unsupervised. After a couple years, suddenly some kind of electrical explosion happened. That was 1947.

  “The boys vanished. Nobody saw hide nor hair of them ever again. I’ll have you know, I ain’t much for conspiracies and such, but it’s not hard to wonder why the Manhattan Project got disbanded right around when those boys disappeared.”

  Dave’s curiosity was piqued. “So what do we know about this thing?”

  “Well, their lab was pretty much trashed, and the only thing left in it was a beach-ball-sized metal sphere that sparked like crazy if you did much of anything to it. Unfortunately, those boys weren’t much for writing things down. There was almost nothing salvageable from their lab other than what we’re about to go look at.

  “Anyway, not long after, the object was brought to the Groom Lake facility here for further study. At the time, all they could tell was the ball-shaped metal object was highly reactive to just about any kind of stimuli. It sometimes shot arcs of electricity out the top of it.

  “As to its condition, it looked burnt, but other than the heavy discoloration, it seemed to not be heavily damaged.

  “The scientists at the time knew they were dealing with something nobody could explain.”

  Still walking quickly along the stone corridor, C
hris looked over his shoulder at Dave and Bella. “Well, anyway, they took all sorts of readings and even measured some of that power that spurted out of the thing. Let me tell you, if that asshole didn’t screw the pooch in ’81, we probably wouldn’t need to be on emergency power just to keep that DefenseNet thing running.” He huffed with frustration. “I just hope that NASA’s DefenseNet malarkey is worth it all, because whoever’s responsible for it is going to have to answer to a lot of people if it doesn’t do its job.”

  Dave smiled as it dawned on him that Chris had no idea who he was, and for some reason, that anonymity pleased him. “So, what happened in ’81?”

  Chris sighed. “Some crazy and likely underqualified scientist thought he knew what he was doing and managed to piss that strange thing off so badly it ended up freaking out. You’ll have to look at the details of what he was trying to do, because it didn’t make any sense to me. But that’s also when the reports ended. In fact, the entire project got sealed after that.”

  Bella’s hand tightened on Dave’s arm and she asked, “What exactly does ‘freaking out’ mean and what happened to the scientist?”

  “Oh, whatever that guy did sent a surge rushing out of that sphere that was so huge, it ended up blowing out the power to darn near all of Utah. The agency ended up covering it up by blaming a fire at the Utah State Prison that had occurred on the same day. As to what happened to the scientist, well ... the report said he died, but it also said they never recovered the body. Just like those brothers, he vanished into nothing. Downright spooky, if you ask me.”

  Chris suddenly stopped and pointed straight ahead into a darkened corridor. “All right, there’s the stairs.” He turned to the right and walked into a twenty-foot-long room containing a long table at its center. On it lay a box filled with manila folders stuffed with papers, and lying on the ground near the table were several large unopened boxes. “But before y’all can even think about going down there, you probably want to skim the safety protocols that they used way back then, because I know one of them was that you needed to put on some bunny suits.”

  “Bunny suits?” Bella asked with a confused tone.

  “Sorry.” Chris smiled. “One of the safety protocols they wrote down said that anyone studying the thing had to put on a cleanroom getup. You know, booties, mask, the whole surgeon thing, just more of it.”

  With a healthy dose of caution built into him, Dave walked over to the table and glanced at the file folders. “These are all the files on this thing?”

  “Yup.” Chris nodded. “Everything from 1947 to ’81. Those are all copies, so don’t worry about messing them up. They just can’t leave this area.”

  Dave sat on one of the nearby wooden folding chairs and flipped open the first of the folders he extracted from the box.

  As Chris began opening one of the other boxes lying on the floor, he mentioned, “Since all the crap down here evidently got fried back in the day, I’ve brought some analysis equipment that might help you figure out what that beast down below is about.”

  ###

  “Aha, that’s why they insisted on treating the sphere with cleanroom procedures.” Dave tapped at one of the sheets stuffed into a three-ring binder and read it aloud:

  “March 19, 1953. This thing has been venting electricity regularly every forty-five minutes since the day it was found. Frank Burton, may he rest in peace, wasn’t paying attention to the time and got caught when this damned thing began to spark. Luckily, nobody else was on site, but it managed to knock out the elevator’s motor and there was a report from some tungsten miners about the Northern Lights glowing above Groom Lake. We’re pretty sure what they saw was the flash of the electromagnetic charge, which could have excited some of the clouds in the area to fluoresce.

  “September 5, 1953. Yesterday Carl Watkins inadvertently left the linen dust cover to the x-ray machine in the chamber when he wheeled it out. He didn’t have a chance to retrieve it before the thing was scheduled to blow its top, and boy, did it ever. Let’s just say that there’s no cover left and the electricity surge still has my hair standing on end—and I was standing up top.

  “September 9, 1953. We’ve confirmed that anything left in the chamber causes a spike in the forty-five-minute surge. Whatever is left behind, whether it’s a human, a screwdriver, or even something as small as an eyelash, is enough to make this thing go nuts.

  “September 10, 1953. All further analysis will be done using full sterile garb. Not even a flake of skin will be left behind in that analysis chamber under penalty of dismissal.”

  “Wow,” Chris said. “I must have missed that section.” He connected some metal probes to what looked like a very fancy voltmeter, then shuddered and pointed one of the probes in Dave’s direction. “I saw the warning about the bunny suit stuff in the front summary, but goddamn that thing sounds just downright ill-tempered.”

  Dave watched as Chris adjusted the electric field proximity sensor and saw a thick line crawl across the video screen.

  “That’s weird,” Chris commented. “I wouldn’t have expected to have any field, but I guess the thing down there is leaking some kind of energy all the time.”

  “Why’s the line so thick?” Dave asked. “Wouldn’t you expect a sine wave?”

  “Hold on, let me adjust the frequency ... weird, it’s still thick.”

  Bella leaned closer and suggested, “Go as high as you can.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Chris began spinning one of the knobs clockwise, making the line thicken just a bit, but even at the highest frequency, the display couldn’t resolve it to anything more than a thick, fuzzy line. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Chris muttered, with awe in his voice. “Whatever that thing is doing, it’s doing it with a frequency past what I can resolve.” He glanced at Dave, who was already wearing the cleanroom suit. “Are you sure that the lead foil lining in that getup is enough? For all I know, this thing is spitting out gamma rays at us.”

  Suddenly the display turned white with a signal overload and then fell back to its previous pattern.

  “Looks like our baby just burped,” Dave said, as he pulled the hood down over his head and adjusted the collar so he could see clearly. He glanced at Bella, who’d done the same, and then winked at the worried engineer. “Don’t worry, that’s why we’re paid the big bucks.”

  ###

  Dave kept a close eye on the time, turned on his headlamp, and began climbing down the long set of stairs.

  As they descended, he suddenly felt that vibration Bella had sensed much earlier.

  Even though he felt the vibration, to him it had a sound—almost like nails against a chalkboard. Almost like an engine that had something wrong with it and was about to have a catastrophic seizure.

  After five minutes, Dave finally reached the bottom and angled his lantern ahead.

  The light poured over a large cavern with twenty-foot-high ceilings. The open area underneath the roof was easily fifty-feet wide. At the center lay a blackened object that looked more like a large, black and silver beach ball than anything else.

  Taking a few steps forward, Dave tilted his head, and something struck him as odd about the charred object. A chill suddenly swept through him just as Bella gasped.

  “Holy crap, that thing looks almost exactly like Frank’s drawings.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “Oh, thank God we reached you! Princess, the authorities are taking your Mum and I out to Corsham. Even though we’re nowhere near the coast, they said we’re on a special list for safety’s sake. They’ve not given us much choice, but evidently there’s a huge underground bunker that the Prime Minister has reactivated and it will keep us safe. Neeta, are you in a safe place, too?”

  “I’m safe, don’t worry.” Neeta got out of her chair and stared blankly at the back of her office door, stunned by what her father had just said.

  Burt had mentioned in passing about how the world’s governments were scrambling for u
nderground bunkers. He’d also mentioned that the Burlington bunker was being used to evacuate the British government. Neeta knew that Corsham had a huge decommissioned bunker, and suddenly it dawned on her.

  There’d be no reason for her parents to get special treatment unless someone had pulled some strings. Tears spilled onto Neeta’s cheeks and her throat felt thick with emotion.

  “Neeta, it’s me,” her mother said. “We’ve just arrived and they’re saying we won’t get signal underground. I love you, baby. Stay safe.” Her mom breathed heavily, and every word came slowly, as if she didn’t want to hang up, ever.

  “I love you too,” Neeta said, and just listened, her heart hammering.

  The signal disconnected as Neeta leaned against her office wall and slid to the ground. Wrapping her arms around her knees, she leaned her face into her legs and cried like she hadn’t done since she was a child.

  ###

  With a renewed feeling of determination, Neeta walked into the Jet Propulsion Lab’s control room and clapped her hands to get everyone’s attention. “Okay folks, let’s get our crap straight. We’ve only got twenty-four days before the first wave of these space rocks reaches us. Our job is to try and buy some time. Who has the latest survey plot of the incoming debris?”

  Standing in the middle of a forty-by-twenty-foot room, Neeta scanned the dozen or so tables where a handful of scientists stared into their computer screens. A blonde scientist poked up above a monitor and responded, “Doctor Patel, I’ve got the completed survey from yesterday. I’ll put the data up on screen number three.”

  Neeta turned to the front of the room where a series of monitors were mounted on the wall. Most screens were filled with the constantly-updated status for the DefenseNet power levels, but screen number three flickered and showed a large white image with a cloud of various-sized dots scattered across it.