by Ian Douglas
Welcome, President. You are welcome here. . . .
For forty-five minutes, Eisenhower spoke with the aliens . . . or, rather, he sat in a too-small seat and listened to their thoughts as they rose, unbidden, in his mind. He responded, and asked questions, speaking aloud.
He honestly wasn’t certain they were understanding him. Their answers to his questions were oblique.
You will sign this instrument, the taller, paler gray alien who Eisenhower thought must be the leader told him. We know your people give such agreements great importance.
“And if I don’t? My God, man—you are asking me for permission to abduct our citizens!”
I am not a “man,” and I do not understand what you mean by your “God,” the being told him, the mental voice cold and unemotional. We have already explained that they will be returned unharmed, and with no memory of what has happened.
“I can’t—”
President, if you want access to our technology you will sign this instrument, the being thought at him. If not, we will deal with others of your kind who will give us what we require. We have learned that the Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik is quite interested in signing such documents with us. Da?
The name of America’s Cold War enemies, in perfect Russian, shocked Eisenhower to the core. He’d refused the first offered treaty because it would have left America defenseless against the Soviets, who now possessed the hydrogen bomb. How much worse would it be to step aside and watch the Soviet Union win absolute domination over the planet because they had access to the super science of these enigmatic beings, and America did not?
The Soviets, he thought, would not hesitate to allow these beings to kidnap their citizens.
“The people you take . . . they will be returned?”
Yes.
“And you will tell us who you take? So we can check on their safety?”
Yes.
A document materialized, dreamlike, out of nothing, hanging in the air before Eisenhower. It laid out the details of the agreement as five concisely written and bulleted paragraphs.
Humans will not be involved in alien matters, and aliens will not be involved with human affairs. Aliens will not support the United States against Russia . . . at least directly.
Aliens will assist US scientists and technicians with certain unspecified advanced technologies.
Aliens will not make any kind of treaty with any other nation on Earth.
Aliens will be permitted to abduct a few humans a year for certain genetic experiments. Aliens will return them unharmed. Aliens will provide a list of names of those taken to the MJ-12 committee.
The people of Earth will not be told about the presence of extraterrestrials by either the Aliens or the American government.
Eventually, Eisenhower signed. He could find no other solution; at all costs, the secrets of craft such as this one had to be kept from the Russians. To do otherwise meant the Soviets would dominate the Earth, perhaps as puppets of these creatures. That it meant sacrificing Americans, even only momentarily, hit him to the core.
He’d already sacrificed enough brave men in his years as general and commander in chief.
But, like then, he had no choice.
Slowly he made his way back to Air Force One, belatedly realizing that he’d left his hat on board the alien craft. He was not going to go back for it.
It was a humbling, an utterly humiliating, encounter.
Hunter watched the movie, shot in color on an eight-millimeter camera back in 1955. The President’s plane was parked out on the tarmac, while the cameraman was presumably in the control tower, almost a quarter of a mile away. There was no sound, and the whir of an old-fashioned projector filled the auditorium.
Three glowing disks swept in from the northwest, hovered, and then one detached from the formation and touched down close beside Air Force One. A few moments later, a solitary man descended from the passenger plane, and walked across to the grounded disk.
“He actually gave the Grays permission to abduct humans?” Hunter asked, incredulous.
“He did,” Benedict said. “Don’t think badly of him, though. The aliens were quite clear that if he didn’t deal with them, they would go help the Russians. This was the height of the Cold War, remember, and the Russians were already ahead of us in missile technology. In another year, Khrushchev would tell a group of Western ambassadors at a reception in Moscow ‘we will bury you.’ In two more years they would launch Sputnik . . . while our rockets blew up on their launch pads. The military and the CIA both were desperate to stop the Russians at any cost. Eisenhower had to go along.”
“That’s awful,” Taylor exclaimed.
“My God . . .” Brunelli added.
“He was told the aliens would only abduct a few of our people each year,” Benedict continued. “He took them at their word. Over the next few years, however, they drastically increased the pace of their operations. We estimate now that somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of all Americans have been abducted—many of them multiple times.”
“Why?” Hunter demanded. “What the hell are they doing? They don’t need three million–plus samples to conduct a genetic survey!”
“We agree,” Benedict told them. “And actually, so did the government. By the late ’70s, the treaty was breaking down. There was a firefight inside a secret base underneath Archuleta Mesa at Dulce, New Mexico. Sixty of our people—Delta Force mostly, but also some of our scientists and engineering personnel—were killed.”
“I read about that,” Nielson said. “I always wondered if that really happened.”
“This happened,” Benedict told them. “A few details leaked out. The story was pretty wildly distorted, but . . . yeah. It happened. We knew after that we couldn’t trust the little bastards.”
There were twenty of them now, gathered in the front seats of a small underground auditorium off the Blue Room, watching the scene unfold on a large screen at the front. A number of US recon Marines had joined them late yesterday, and there were more recruits from Delta Force, from SAD/SOG, and from USSOCOM.
Throughout that morning, the group had been shown plenty of visual proof of the aliens’ existence: films of saucer recoveries at Cape Girardeau and Roswell, a film of Eisenhower’s first meeting with aliens at Muroc, and one showing the dissection of a Gray alien’s body after Roswell—not the famously hoaxed Santilli film, but one in which President Truman himself actually appeared at one point, a worried, watching face visible through an observation window in the green, concrete block wall.
“That’s when we started seriously working hard,” Benedict continued, “through various black budget projects, to build up our own defenses and find ways to strike back. Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’? Wait until you see what we developed—not against the Russians, but to protect ourselves against attack from space! And at the same time, we were working toward Full Disclosure.”
Once more, Hunter wasn’t satisfied with the pace at which this so-called Full Disclosure was going, but knew he wasn’t going to get anywhere arguing about it again. He sat back as they started the next film.
This one showed a massive, cone-shaped craft on its side in the bottom of a wooded valley. Hunter suppressed a start of recognition. They’d seen that craft upstairs, in the Blue Room.
“Kecksburg, Pennsylvania,” Benedict said. “December 9, 1965. This was a crude time ship operated by a German SS officer who came down twenty years after he left Germany at the end of World War II. We believe the craft to be of Saurian design but refitted by the Nazis to accommodate both a Saurian pilot and a human passenger.”
A number of US Army soldiers in old-style uniforms were standing around the crash site, along with several men in civilian clothing. It was dark, with the ship illuminated by large, mobile spotlights. There were patches of snow on the ground, particularly at the bottom of the ravine. It looked like the craft had skidded down through the ravine, big-end first.
Someone was using a
pry bar on the craft’s side. A panel popped loose, and red interior light spilled out onto the snow. A moment later, a couple of soldiers were helping a human occupant out and into the open air.
“SS General Hans Kammler,” Benedict went on. “We had a good idea that he was coming, and had positioned a recovery team not far from Kecksburg. We also picked up the alien pilot wandering around out in the woods. Kammler became a part of the Apollo mission. I have no information on the pilot. . . .”
Master Chief Minkowski caught Hunter’s gaze, and rolled his eyes. Hunter smiled. This whole thing was becoming tedious. SEALs were used to physical training above all else—long runs in the sand, exhausting swims in freezing water, HALO-jumping out of airplanes at thirty-six thousand feet.
Somehow, sitting around watching ancient home movies of UFOs just didn’t cut it.
Doctor of engineering Ellen Michaels, Groton knew, was one of just a couple of dozen people or so who fully understood gravitomagnetics. She was razor sharp, a lifetime member of Mensa, and a research engineer with the RAND Corporation. He’d first met her at the RAND corporate headquarters in Santa Monica a couple of years ago, when he was a Navy liaison officer to the company during the final development of Operation Excalibur. They’d become close, but attempts to get her to be a close friend with benefits all had failed. “I do not date my coworkers,” she’d told him once, in no uncertain terms.
And that was that.
“So why the delay?” she asked him. They were in the S4 cafeteria with their morning coffees. “I need to get to the Moon.”
“The word is we’re waiting on a load of new recruits,” he told her. “Our new strike force.”
She made a face. “Soldiers? Why would we need them?”
“This is a military operation,” he told her. “We’ll need a few military types around.”
“Anybody we meet out there,” she said, “is going to be so far in advance of us it’s not funny. Seriously—having troops along isn’t going to protect us, and it might make things worse!”
“Not my decision, Doctor. Or yours.”
“Turning Excalibur into a military mission is inviting disaster,” she said. “For the whole program.”
“We’ve learned a few things since Dulce,” he told her.
He’d been a kid in 1979, and hadn’t even heard about the clandestine firefight under Archuleta Mesa until he’d been transferred from Navy aviation to join Solar Warden thirty years later. The program had hand lasers now that matched what the Grays had used at Dulce. That didn’t mean American technology had caught up to theirs by any means, but it at least gave the humans a chance.
In theory.
Changing topics, he asked, “So why do you need to get to Big-H?”
She made a face. “It’s technical.”
“Try me.” He hated it when people were condescending to him.
“Um. You know physicists are having trouble folding gravity in with the other three forces, right?”
“Sure. The unified field theory.”
“Which we haven’t managed to figure out yet. We’re looking for what’s called a ‘theory of everything,’ which would reconcile quantum physics with Einsteinian relativistic physics. Basically that means we need to understand gravity as a quantum force, and that’s eluded us until now.”
“But now you have a way of doing it?”
“Maybe. Toland, on the Big-H, has come up with a scheme for accelerating particles gravitomagnetically, and in higher dimensions than the normal three. If I can run some tests in the ship’s power plant, I might be able to show how to resolve things by using string theory.”
He held up his hands. “Okay, okay. You win. It’s technical . . . and way beyond me. I’m just a simple flyboy.”
“Let that be a lesson to you!”
“These,” Benedict told them, “are Mark VII advanced Space Activity Suits, or Seven-SAS, also known as a ‘BioSuit’ or an EVS—that’s Extra-Vehicular Suit. The Seven-SAS is not inflated like conventional space suits, but uses mechanical pressure to compress the human body. The torso shell provides radiation protection, and anchor points for hardware. . . .”
Hunter examined his arms, encased in silvered, tight-fitting sleeves with an outer surface of Kevlar. His gloves were inflated, but at low pressure, allowing considerable mobility. His helmet looked like those used by ISS astronauts on their space walks, and was attached to a heavy PLSS unit secured to his back—a personal life support system. He took an experimental step . . . then another. It was not uncomfortable, and only slightly limited his mobility.
Hunter, Arch, Minkowski, and a Marine named Grabiak, with Benedict as their guide, were inside a vacuum chamber under Wright-Patt, getting used to their military EVS, while the rest of the team waited outside for their turns. Theoretically, BioSuits were designed to be worn inside a pressurized spacecraft like jumpers or military utilities, but could be transformed to full-fledged space suits in seconds by donning the clamshell torso and backpack, and sealing on gloves and helmet.
“You say these things protect us from radiation, Major?” Captain Arch asked, flexing his gloves in front of his visor.
“To a limited degree,” Benedict told him. “The suit includes built-in dosimeters that will warn you if you exceed allowable exposures. Your brain and your vital organs are pretty well protected regardless. Your legs and arms, not so much. And there are different kinds of radiation, remember. Most of the stuff coming off the sun—relatively low-energy protons and helium nuclei—your suits can handle that pretty well. Cosmic rays, though—those are high-mass nuclei traveling at close to the speed of light—are a different story.
“We don’t expect that you’ll be operating in hard vacuum for extended periods of time, however.”
“Perfectly safe . . .” Hunter murmured. “Your government says so.”
“What was that, Commander?” The voice was not Major Benedict’s, but came from one of several observers outside the vacuum chamber waiting with the other recruits—Admiral Charles Carruthers. Hunter knew little about him, save that he was evaluating the recruits for their upcoming mission.
“Nothing, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Briefly, Hunter considered the possibility of deliberately ticking the admiral off and getting dropped from the program . . . but he still wasn’t sure what failure meant for any of them. Deployment to Kazakhstan? Or a mysterious disappearance? Admiral Kelsey’s insistence that there were two sides in the secret program, good guys and bad guys, still resonated with him, a major unknown.
It had been so much easier going up against the North Koreans. You knew who the hell your enemies were there.
Until he had a better idea of who was who, he would call superiors “sir” and stay below their radar. “On the table over there,” Benedict told them, “are your Sunbeams. They’ve been safed so that you people don’t put a hole in the side of this very expensive vacuum facility. Go over and pick one up. See how it feels.”
The hand weapons were large and heavy, designed like a pistol but clumsy to hold one-handed. They looked a lot more like something out of an old Flash Gordon serial than the sleek and lightweight phasers of Star Trek.
“The Sunbeam Type 1 Mod 3,” Benedict said. “A 20-megawatt pulse laser operating off a grip-housed liquid-metallic suspension battery that will give you four shots. Or you can plug it into a larger battery mounted under your PLSS, and that will give you juice for twenty-five shots. The pulse, lasting one-fiftieth of a second, will deliver about four-tenths of a megajoule of energy to the target. That’s the same energy, roughly, as a tenth of a kilogram of plastic explosives, or your standard blasting cap. Keep that in mind when you draw down on a target. Drop your batteries.”
They’d studied the weapons earlier, under normal pressure. Hunter found the release button and pressed it, and the heavy battery slid free of the grip. His gloves interfered slightly with his freedom of motion, and he noticed that he was having trouble feeling the weapon’s ridged grip
through the heavy Kevlar material.
But it was doable.
“Good,” Benedict told them. “Pick up the batteries and reload them.”
Hunter did so. They were using dummy batteries that matched the size and mass of the real things, presumably so that some idiot didn’t blast a bulkhead and explosively compress the place. Normally, he’d been told, EVA troops would carry ten to fifteen reserve magazine batteries in a case mounted on the right side of their suits.
He did wish that one unit allowed more than four shots, however. His usual sidearm, a nine-millimeter Glock G19, was a more traditional slug-throwing weapon, with a magazine capacity of seventeen rounds plus one up the spout. Four shots seemed . . . a bit on the skimpy side.
Of course, nine-millimeter rounds didn’t generally run the risk of blowing holes in steel pressure bulkheads.
“This,” Benedict continued, holding up a much larger weapon, “is a RAND/Starbeam 3000 variable-stream heavy laser rifle. You can adjust the timing, anything from a one-second continuous beam down to a hundredth of a second. Normally, it’s set for a tenth of a second, which gives you a power output of fifty thousand joules. That’s a tenth of a kilo of high explosives—about what you get in a modern hand grenade. It takes a while to recycle, though, and it requires bigger batteries. You’ll get between four and fifty shots out of this before you have to reload, depending on the setting.” He handed the big weapon to Gunnery Sergeant Grabiak. “How’s it feel, Marine?”
Grabiak raised it to his shoulder, aiming at the far end of the chamber. Hunter noted that he seemed to have no problem aiming the weapon while wearing the BioSuit. Had he been sealed up inside a regular space suit like the ones on the ISS, he never would have made it.
“A little trouble aiming,” Grabiak told Benedict. “Can’t get my eye up behind the sight.”
“There’s a button on the side of the weapon marked ‘EV-sight.’ See it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Press it.”
The Marine seemed startled by the result. “Son of a—”
