The Ganymede Project

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  Chandra trained his gun on the captives. “Please unlock yourselves, then join your friend at the center of the circle.”

  Yuri released his handcuffs, then unlocked Katrina. “We help each other,” he said, in Russian.

  Katrina nodded.

  “All set, then,” Chandra said. He walked to a cylinder and flipped a switch. A green ready light illuminated. Strobe lights flashed along the outer rim of the grid. From the air, it resembled a giant, flashing target.

  Katrina huddled close to Yuri and whispered in Russian. “What’s your plan?”

  “You know, it’s rude to whisper—especially in Russian. What did you say?”

  “She said,”—Yuri pronounced the words in Russian, for Katrina’s ears—”It’s a short distance, but I need a distraction.”

  “Okay,” Chandra said, “I’ll forgive you. This is your moment—your last moment. A secret moment. I’ll bury the thought.”

  He swept his arms in a broad, arcing gesture. “I call this the ‘multi-target test.’ It’s something I haven’t tried yet. The test objective is to see if I can effectively control multiple animals attacking multiple targets—you.”

  Chandra backed away. “Conditions for the test will be free-ranging movement—that’s why I’ve released you. Now let’s bring in the other players.”

  He removed a small box from his coat and pressed one of two buttons. Cage doors opened. At first, the rustling was muted, like a flock of birds hovering in unison. Then there were screeches, like hungry predators closing on prey. Rats poured from the cylinders, encircling the target pad.

  Chandra stood twenty feet away, at the edge of a sea of rats. A thousand red eyes pulsed in synchrony with the strobe lights. Wind blew across the site in a low hush.

  In the distant sky, a bright object moved toward the Test Site. Chandra didn’t notice.

  Katrina searched for something to throw—a rock, anything. But the target pad was smooth, clean concrete. A rock of the right size and shape lay just off the edge of the pad.My throwing arm is okay , she thought,but can I reach it ?

  “Everything’s in position,” Chandra said, adjusting settings on a video camera.

  Katrina pressed Yuri’s hand, then stepped away from him, moving slowly toward the edge of the concrete.

  “What the two of you are about to experience is truth and justice—the kind that nature herself metes out. Survival of the fittest. What could be more natural? What could be closer to the truth? The big fish always eat the little fish—that’s justice.”

  The sound of squealing animals slowly built to a frenzy. Chandra’s lip curled above his teeth, a mood multiplied without loss from one mind to all. He arched an eyebrow, licked his lips and lowered his gun. “So many mouths to feed.”

  Katrina grabbed at the desert floor.

  Rats scuttled in from all sides.

  She picked up the baseball-sized rock with her good hand, wound up and hurled it toward Chandra. It sizzled, captured in winking lights like a tumbling meteor, burning into the tissue and bone of his cheek, impacting with a dull thud. He went down.

  Yuri raced across the short, rat-filled distance, pouncing on Chandra.

  The bright light in the sky glided over the Test Area—like a helicopter, but silent, shimmering and unearthly.

  The craft dropped a blue beam. The sea of rats recoiled like a rippling wave. The blue light hit the wrestling figures, then Katrina.

  Time stopped.

  57. TSINDI

  25 July 1994

  Like a disembodied soul, Katrina seemed to float in the bright whiteness of a dimensionless chamber. The place appeared to have more of a mental than physical existence. She looked on as a detached observer. She could see Yuri gripping Chandra by the neck. Both men wore startled expressions. Both were naked. Yuri’s expression changed. Chandra’s face remained frozen. She tried to talk.

  “I think he’s dead,” she said.

  Yuri released Chandra. There was a deep whisper. His body floated upward. It dissolved in smoke, starting with the limbs. Finally the head—with frozen eyes and grinning teeth—melted into vapor. The Cheshire Cat vanished into hell.

  When the vapor cleared, nothing was left except Yuri, Katrina and the featureless white background. Then from behind:

  “We have removed your clothes to speed our analysis.”

  They turned. Ben Nightwalker stood before them. A bullet hole marked his forehead, wounds punctured his body.

  “You are being scanned,” he said.

  “Ben?” Katrina asked. “We thought you were dead.”

  “Nightwalker is dead,” he replied. “Nothing is what it seems. A familiar face. We’ve been listening. We’ve been waiting—ever since Chandra connected. We tried to communicate with your Operations Center and with another place. They murdered us. Majority murdered us.”

  “The talking printers!” Katrina exclaimed.

  “Subtlety is lost on your species. We need to be much more direct.”

  “Why didn’t you stop Chandra before now?”

  “We were curious. Like you.”

  “Why stop him now?” Yuri asked.

  “He infects us.”

  “What do you think—” Katrina began.

  “Yesss... Our question. Exactly.”

  The thing that resembled Nightwalker tossed a small, coin-like object in the air with a flick of the thumb. It levitated, spun rapidly and hummed with a sound like Jafri’s tuning fork.

  “A penny for your thoughts?” the Nightwalker thing said.

  The spinning object zipped to within an inch of Yuri’s face. He shielded with his hand. It shot laterally toward Katrina and burrowed into her forehead. She screamed in pain and surprise. There was no blood. No outer wound.

  As the object tunneled through tissue, Katrina’s view of the chamber changed. It was no longer white and featureless. She could make out machines, architecture and biological entities. The thing no longer looked like Nightwalker. It resembled an immense, unearthly insect.

  Its shape was at once solid and a shimmering mirage, changing appearance and color as a myriad of small pores opened and closed in organized waves, like the rainbow ripples of oiled water along its skin.

  The creature moved to within inches of Katrina’s naked body, forcing its way into her mind. “Thought Tunneling Devices are not for humans,” it said. “We forbid you to use the hive channel.”

  Katrina convulsed as the probe penetrated deeper into her brain. “We have destroyed the test animals. We have destroyed Chandra. We now destroy the fabrication plant,” the creature said. “We protect ourselves from infection, from entropy.”

  She heard a sound like a continuous exhalation. It began as a whisper and built in amplitude.

  “You will remember this,” the creature whispered. “You will be our eyes and ears.”

  Katrina struggled to respond. “Wait! Listen to me! Listen!”

  “Yesss... Yessssss... Yesssssssss”

  The creature’s voice seemed to melt into white noise. She heard an explosion, like the sound of rapid decompression. The alien face shrank like the residual trace of a TV image when the tube is turned off, dissolving like a white pill dropped in a dark glass. She blacked out.

  * * *

  For Yuri Sverdlov, the universe re-set. Time re-started. He lay face down in desert sand, naked. Whirling dust diffused light from the midday sun. Blue lightning slithered across the sky. He stood up and looked upon the stark geology of the Malebolge Test Site, devoid of animals.

  He shaded his eyes against the driving sand, then stumbled forward past dull green cylinders, limping toward the center, where the test rig’s metal fingers no longer clutched Nightwalker’s body. Below the framework, Katrina sprawled on the concrete pad. He kneeled and gently turned her over. She opened her eyes and coughed. Blood trickled from her nose.

  A brilliant blue light seared the sky. Yuri dropped to cover Katrina. The blast hit a second later, tossing the two bodies inches off the gr
ound.

  A fireball vaporized the distant research facility. Tornado-strength winds rushed inward. Materials and ejecta rocketed overhead. The two former enemies hugged tightly, holding their breaths, feeling each other’s racing, beating heart. Their trembling flesh seemed the only reality in a firestorm of shimmering blue magic; their mortality seemed the only anchor in a vortex of blowing wind.

  After five minutes, the tornado subsided. Two small figures lifted themselves up, as humans have always done after disasters, and surveyed the wreckage. The Research Center lay in flattened ruin—a smoking monument to technological hubris. The metal test rig still jutted upward from the pad, like an obscene finger pointed at the sky.

  They held each other for support and walked slowly to the Groom perimeter.

  58. FREEDOM RIDGE

  25 July 1994

  The scrap of cardboard attached to the aerial read TOWING ORDER, and was signed by Sheriff Irving Gibson of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department. Yuri pulled it off the rental car, crumpled it with one hand and tossed it inside. “We can be grateful for small favors,” he said, picking thorns from his feet. “Like government efficiency and full-body suntans.”

  “And cosmic justice,” Katrina responded, sliding into the backseat of the car, out of the sun.

  “Don’t bet on cosmic justice. Chandra may have been right—survival of the fittest is nature’s justice. Why should we expect these entities to treat us any better than we treat ourselves?”

  They were at war, and Yuri knew it. Groom was the first battleground in a conflict of genes, ideas and information. A sense of déjà vu hit him. He had once again escaped an existential cusp, where death, technology, and the power of raw nature formed an inexplicable, naked singularity. And once again, he had nothing to show for it except ambiguous evidence, terrifying memories and troubling questions.

  Katrina handed clothes to him from an open duffel bag. “Can you start the car?”

  “Sure,” he said, dressing. “It’s not like this is alien technology.” He leaned into the back, searching the duffel bag for a tool to pry open the steering column.

  “I can’t tell Gallagan,” Katrina said, buttoning a blouse. “The cover story will be—”

  “No,” Yuri said. “You have to tell him as quickly as possible to save yourself. Write it up as an official, classified intelligence report. And we have to tell others—especially Jafri and Li. They’ll be targets, like us.”

  “There have to be some secrets, Yuri. Operation Majority has a covert network. We need a similar network—an organization protected from exposure and politics. And there is one more thing we must never disclose, except to the people we trust the most.” She tapped her forehead with a finger.

  He nodded, gently holding her chin with his hand, turning her head. He pulled back the hair from her brow. “I don’t see any marks,” he said, grinning. “You’ll pass for human.”

  She took his hand, and kissed it, holding it next to her heart. “It will be our secret.”

  Elsewhere in the universe, other minds concurred.

  59. EPILOG

  The lens adjusted automatically to the short focus across the tabletop. It recorded a kind of truth—a totally objective truth—different from truth seen by the mind’s eye.

  John Anderson prepared the camera on its tripod. Yuri Sverdlov, Zfar Jafri and Rita Li took their seats as spectators. Finally, Katrina Fontanova entered. Behind intense, darting eyes, she sat in front of the camera. Anderson turned on a goose-necked lamp, spotlighting her face with harsh intensity. He nodded at Katrina and began recording.

  “My name is Katrina Fontanova,” she said, nervously. She cleared her throat and read a prepared statement. “This videotape is a record of events surrounding the U.S. Government’s Groom Dry Lake Base. The Tellus Foundation will distribute copies to several locations world-wide. No single person knows all locations. Upon my death... or upon the death of any other individual associated with this video production, these copies will be made public.”

  “God, I need a cigarette,” she said.

  Yuri reached across the table with a match. The phosphor seared.

  Katrina inhaled deeply, then continued.

  “We all make guesses about our place in the universe. Sometimes we mistake our guesses for reality. We assume—incorrectly—that other people and other things feel as we feel and see as we see. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could be less natural. Sometimes, nothing could be more dangerous—than to think that our own viewpoints constrain the entire universe.”

  She paused briefly. “It is clear to me now what happened, and how humanity failed. We were naked before the power of their technology. They caught us hacking on the Galactic Internet. The owners of the patent don’t want intruders...”

  In the two-hour video taping session which followed, members of the ad hoc group, bound together by threat of death, described the evidence and events. Each contributed a piece to the story. They tried to make the record as accurate as possible, backed up by documents, photographs and artifacts.

  They placed 100 copies of the tape in various locations worldwide. They mailed one copy to the Director of Central Intelligence. They mailed the other copy to the President of the United States.

  Anderson, Li and Jafri began sharing communications on a regular basis, putting in place an organization to observe and analyze the technology and political aspirations of Operation Majority.

  Yuri Sverdlov, now a man without a country, went underground, assisted by a loose network of people associated with the Tellus Foundation.

  Katrina Fontanova, a politically well-connected diplomat, now respected within the SVR for plucking secrets from a deep black U.S. program, remained at her post in the Russian Embassy, determined to expose the truth, and to help Yuri Sverdlov in whatever way possible. It was a noble goal.

  * * *

  Jafri moved theInternational UFO Research Center to new quarters in Rachel. The Tellus Foundation provided funding to monitor Groom using Russian satellite imagery. Jafri failed to observe any further tests at the Groom Dry Lake site known as Malebolge.

  Two years after the Event, Jafri received untraceable e-mail reports from an anonymous Internet host. It suggested that the Russians initiated a series of tests similar to Ganymede in an underground complex at Yamantau Mountain in the Beloretsk area of the southern Urals. The Russian government would not sell Jafri coverage of this site. He informed Katrina Fontanova of the development.

  * * *

  The news of Deke Dobb’s death shocked the small community of Rachel, Nevada. Mister Randall R. Sandall, the Third, discovered Deke’s body inside the burned trailer on his way to work.

  Several of Dobbs’ friends said they received a strange e-mail message claiming to demonstrate the existence of extraterrestrial life and a government cover-up. However, the binary file attached to the messages proved to be garbage. The consensus, even among friends, was that Deke Dobbs perpetrated another space alien hoax in an attempt to bolster revenue of the financially shaky International UFO Research Center. The hoax left friends with doubts about his character, and muddied the waters in the murder investigation.

  Local law enforcement quickly announced that they found Deke’s killers, with help from a special FBI team led by Agent James Stone. The killers were transients masquerading as Jehovah’s Witnesses. One of them had artifacts belonging to Deke Dobbs in their pockets. The circumstantial evidence seemed compelling. A plea bargain arrangement gave one man immunity from prosecution in return for testifying against his accomplice. A jury found the accused guilty and sentenced him to death. Agent Stone received the FBI’s highest award for a superb investigative effort and rapid capture of a possible serial killer.

  The award was presented to him by the Attorney General of the United States.

  * * *

  Three years after the Event, an archeological team found a body in an ancient Indian burial ground near White Mountain. It was an anomaly.
Teeth showed modern fillings and dental repairs. Radioactive carbon dating confirmed that the skeleton was recent and did not match other remains found in the same geologic strata—dated at 2,000 years. There was a bullet hole in the skull.

  The archeologists notified the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department of a possible homicide. A police forensic team initially identified the body as that of Ben Nightwalker, based on dental records and several other pieces of evidence. However, the investigation halted abruptly after ten days.

  Jill Sommer, hailed by news professionals as ‘an incredible survivor,’ attempted to follow up on the Nightwalker story after a tip-off from the Tellus Foundation. She was told by Sheriff Irving Gibson that carbon dating and all subsequent forensic tests had been mistaken, and that the remains had been returned to the burial site. This action could not be confirmed by either the local Tribal Council or by the archeological team that found the remains.

  In the absence of evidence about Nightwalker, Sommer’s team turned their attention to a piece about the sexual peccadilloes of small town sheriffs, which later drew a large audience onGeraldo .

  Nightwalker’s friends speculated on his disappearance. Some thought he may have encountered drug runners while patrolling the Groom perimeter. Others thought his disappearance and death were the result of a government plot against Native Americans. The more superstitious talked in hushed tones about how he was possessed and killed by Tsindi, and how the spirits moved his dead bones.

  Doctor Richard Chandra was never found—dead or alive.

  And then there was Billy...

  * * *

  They say the night smelled of cherry blossoms and early spring when Billy vanished forever. There was no evidence. No trace. Only a vaguely remembered dream told by his wife.