by Eando Binder
So, they were going to try other tactics, following him and…what? Thane found out as he rounded a bend where the roadway at the right skirted a steep slope ending in rock rubble. With a roar, the black car came up behind him and tried to wedge through to the left.
You won’t run me off the road. Thane was already swinging left and blocking them off. Their fenders scraped a little but the black car had to withdraw or get squeezed against the rocky rise to the left of the road.
Now Thane stepped on the accelerator. His Corvair was still good for 100 mph plus on the straightaway ahead. But the big black car hung easily on his tail. Though it had an unfamiliar body style, Thane surmised it was some go-go monster like a Cadillac or Imperial.
Thane couldn’t hope to win this race and sooner or later they might maneuver him off the road at another bad spot. He tightened his grip on the wheel and a thin smile came across his lips. They didn’t know the trick he had learned while hot-rodding in his younger days.
Thane suddenly braked, taking them by surprise, but only enough so that the black car nudged into his rear bumper. However, when the surprised MIB driver also braked, in delayed reaction, that was when Thane swung a little left and braked hard.
This time, the black car’s front bumper struck Thane’s rear bumper at a sharp angle. The wheel was practically wrenched out of the other driver’s hands, as Thane could see in his rear-vision mirror. The black car careened off the road across a broad shallow ditch and kept on, weaving crazily in a bumpy field.
“Have fun,” laughed Thane as the black car disappeared in a tall cornfield. The car wouldn’t be damaged nor would the men be hurt, but by the time they got back on the road, their quarry would be out of sight. And Thane knew three different routes to town. Let them guess for the rest of the day which one he had taken.
Twice he had foiled them. Thane felt good. But he also felt a bit sick underneath. He began to divine what a grim game they were playing, and how determined they were to muffle him. What would this cat-and-mouse game escalate into, before it was over?
Arriving in town, with the MIB car nowhere in sight, Thane parked across from the police station. Clutching the envelope that held his report, and patting the pictures in his breast pocket, he took a breath and marched in.
* * * *
The desk sergeant slapped down the typed report. Leaning over, he eyed Thane up and down.
“Are you a drinking man, Smith?” His lip was curled.
“Do you beat your wife, Sergeant?” returned Thane in kind.
“Now listen here, you…” began the frowning officer.
“Look at these,” interrupted Thane, handing him his photos.
They made no impression on the Sergeant. “Anybody can fake pictures like that, mister,” he drawled, tossing them back. “Look, Smith. We’ve seen dozens of photos like this, of flying saucers, dishpans, hubcaps, and what have you. And that’s just what they are.”
“But what if some of the photos and stories are true?” argued Thane, feeling as if he were talking to a stone wall.
The Sergeant snorted. “If we believed every report we got, then we’d have swallowed the story a nice elderly gent came in with last month. How a flying saucer landed near his home and people with long golden hair got out. They flew him through space at a million miles a minute and took him to Mars, where he saw a great civilization. He has a message for the people of earth, that we must all live in peace and brotherhood or…”
He broke off, disgustedly.
“But I’m not a contactee,” protested Thane. He had read of them in the UFO book, the lunatic fringe of people who had hitched their wagons to a flying star. Most were sincere and harmless, but deluded. They always had a ‘message’ to get across to their fellow man.
The Sergeant’s phone rang. Waiting, Thane debated whether to add verbally his encounter with the three men-in-black. He shook his head to himself. What good would it do? He would surely be a nut in their eyes then.
This was the typical kind of stubborn disbelief all UFO witnesses met, when reporting to the authorities, according to John Sheel’s book. And truth to tell, Thane Smith himself would have listened to Thane Smith’s story with an amused smile—only 48 hours before.
The Sergeant hung up and turned back. “If you want to file your report for the record, Smith, it’s your right.”
“No, thanks.” Thane turned on his heel, taking his report and photos with him. The police would neither check his sighting nor hunt down the MIB’s, not on Thane’s unsupported word.
Thane decided to tackle the Air Force, despite its unsavory reputation as the greatest UFO skeptic of all, at least officially. Watching in his rear-vision mirror as he drove away, he saw no big black car trailing him. Had they given up harassing him?
It was 76 miles to Robbins AFB. The gate guard perfunctorily stopped him, then let him through with a pass to Colonel Taggert, who received all UFO reports.
Broad of shoulder and with a dapper mustache, Colonel Taggert was excessively polite. “We are always glad when the citizenry reports an alleged UAO to us.”
“You don’t use the term flying saucer, do you?” said Thane, feeling him out. “Or even UFO—Unidentified Flying Object.”
A pained expression crossed the Colonel’s face. “We prefer the term UOA for Unidentified Aerial Object. After all, nobody has really proved they fly under their own power.”
That was a good start, thought Thane, already kicking himself for coming. The Colonel read his report with practiced eyes. He whistled a bit on the second page and raised his eyes.
“A dogfight between two UAO’s, no less,” he remarked in tones carefully kept noncommittal. “I must admit this is a new angle we’ve never heard reported before. Well, no matter. It says you have photos.”
Thane handed them over, narrowly watching the Colonel’s reaction. He did not even raise an eyebrow as he shuffled through the four prints slowly. But Thane could detect the slightest quiver of his lip as he asked: “We like to check all photos in case they are of any significance. May we have the negatives, sir?”
“No, you may not have the negatives, Colonel,” said Thane flatly. He had been warned by Sheel’s book that, in too many cases, the Air Force had permanently ‘borrowed’ negatives, which were never returned to their owners. Or so, at least, it had been alleged and Thane was taking no chances.
The Colonel shrugged. “You can leave your written report. Mr. Smith, if you wish. It will be thoroughly and scientifically analyzed by our experts and sent to the ATIC at Wright AFB for further evaluation.”
“Just what do you think of the report, Colonel?” Thane knew it was a loaded question but he was curious to hear the officer’s verdict, on the spot.
“As you know,” said the Colonel carefully, “I’ve examined literally hundreds of UAO reports sent in. I’ve become something of an expert in, shall we say, diagnosing them.”
He put his fingertips together. “In my opinion, Mr. Smith—mind you, only an opinion—what you saw were two hawks having a fight, perhaps one having invaded the other one’s hunting territory, so to speak.”
“Hawks?” Thane was staggered, even though he had been somewhat prepared by classic examples of USAF ‘explanations’ in Sheel’s book. Naming them stars that weren’t even in the sky at the time. Calling them balloons that strangely went against the wind at supersonic speed. Saying they were the planet Venus at midnight when any school kid knew that Venus always set long before midnight.
But this—two hawks!
“Why didn’t I hear their screeches?” Thane demanded, irate now. The Colonel was treating him like a child. “How could they fly 40 degrees of angular distance in seconds, at a speed of 5000 miles per hour? Why were there no legs or claws or heads or beaks to be seen? Why didn’t any feathers drop from their battle?”
/>
“My dear sir…”
“And how could one hawk explode into a shower of sparks?”
“Well, now…”
“Lastly,” shot back Thane on his way to the door with his report and photos, “did you get eagles on your shoulders, Colonel, for making UFO’s—UFO’S, I said—into hawks?”
Thane could see that the Colonel’s aplomb had been shattered, by the way he angrily bit his lip. But polite to the last, he merely waved and smiled. “We do our best, sir.”
Chapter 6
If the saucers could overfly the country day and night with impunity, by the thousands, what security was there? Therefore, as a plain matter of policy, the USAF was forced into the position of denying the existence of craft they most likely believed existed.
In a way, one could sympathize with the Air Force’s dilemma and perhaps forgive it for its campaign of deception. As long as the UFO’s showed no hostility—and they hadn’t made any hostile moves for over 20 years—the Air Force was content to let well enough alone and ignore them, officially.
Privately, however, Sheel’s book maintained that the USAF avidly followed up sightings and invariably sent jets in chase if UFO’s were detected by radar. There was the belief among UFOlogists, too, that the Air Force secretly gave instructions for jet pilots to shoot at UFO’s and try to force them down.
Naturally, one captured saucer and America might learn the great secret of its miraculous propulsion system. But this was futile as the UFO’s easily outmaneuvered our best jets and no UFO craft had yet been forced down, as far as anyone knew.
The inherent danger of this course had been pointed out by Sheel too. What if the flying saucers fired back, sometime? Or what if, by sheer chance, a UFO was shot down in flames? Would that precipitate hostilities—a war of worlds?
Back in town, Thane regretted the time lost in visiting Robbins AFB. He had almost forgotten his movie film, which should be ready for pick-up.
“It’s here,” said Bert as he walked in, waving the box. “Listen, Thane. Would you like to see them right away? I’ll set up a projector in the back room and run ’em off. Naturally, I’d like to see them myself.”
Both men gasped as the film suddenly switched from early footage of Thane’s fishing trip to the edge of the pine grove near Thane’s cabin, and the sweep of sky to the north. Two UFO’s were cavorting through this arena, most often as a blur of speed. But at times they stood out in clear-cut detail—the flat disk and the domed saucer—unmistakably craft not of this world.
Some of the rays that they shot at each other showed up in the film as faint violet or rosy beams. The dogfight went on, the two craft weaving their unearthly paths through the air.
“Lord!” whispered Bert as the grim pageant ended with the domed disk bursting into a Fourth-of-July shower of sparks. He opened the blinds, his face frozen in amazement. “I’m all shook up,” he admitted. “But I still don’t believe in ’em.”
“You’re just like the Air Force,” said Thane bitterly. “And the police. Those two agencies, and all authorities, will no doubt continue to deny the reality of UFO’s. The only way this can ever be brought into the open is through scientists, as John Sheel said.” He grinned. “Then even you will believe, Bert.”
Thane next went to a corner phone booth and called Theodore Jansen’s shop. “I’ve pinned down what that metal isn’t,” informed Jansen. “It’s not aluminum, magnesium, beryllium, scandium or any of the other well-known light metals. The Fraunhofer bright-line test gives a puzzling spectrum, as if it has lithium in it.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Thane wanted to know, then bit his tongue, remembering his college chemistry.
“My dear fellow,” Jansen was saying witheringly, “Lithium is as soft as soap and can’t be alloyed into a structural metal for a flying craft…or can it? Maybe we just don’t know how to do it on earth.”
“Do you have to make more tests, Professor?”
“Plenty more,” said the phone. “Try me tomorrow, Mr. Smith.”
Thane hung up thoughtfully. If the piece of UFO metal turned out to be some unheard-of alloy, not known to earthly metallurgy, then he really had something. That, plus his movies and still photos, should be a triple-threat set of proofs that no authority or scientist could brush off.
There was one good way to blast this whole thing wide open—write an article for an illustrated magazine that would show his photos and the best frames from the movies, and the full analysis of the saucer metal. That, plus his own meticulous sighting report, ought to raise a rumpus.
* * * *
The leader of the men-in-black spoke in a monotone. “We have come for your movie film.”
“How did you know I made a film?” Thane gasped. “Are you mind readers?”
He had arrived home to find the three inside his cabin.
The leader laughed. Though he gave no signal, his two men began to circle around Thane from either side. They suddenly rushed him with upraised clubs. Thane brought his hands around, gripping a baseball bat. He was too fast for them.
“When will you three goons learn,” panted Thane, “that I can take care of myself? Get going. And if you try to sneak back later, you’ll find a loaded shotgun resting in my lap as I type out my UFO article for national circulation. Understand?”
Without a word the three MIB’s staggered away. Thane watched them head for the bushes where no doubt they had parked their black car. He started and peered closely. Were they now floating above the ground, rather than walking?
It was only a fleeting glimpse, then they vanished in the brush. But only a moment later, a disk-like shape with a dome on top shot up out of the woods.
Thane was thunderstruck. What were the men-in-black doing in a flying saucer…unless they were saucermen?
Chapter 7
“It’s lithium,” stated Theodore Jansen, the next day at his store.
“But you told me yourself it’s soft as soap,” protested Thane. He turned over the piece of hard, shiny metal in his hand. “So how can this be lithium?”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you. It’s hardened by potassium.”
“Professor, if you are making jokes…”
“What they’ve done is to subatomically link the atoms together. Locked their protons and neutrons into a bond so rigid that the two soft metals come out one supremely hard alloy. Harder than any metal known on earth. As for its other remarkable qualities…”
Jansen counted off on his fingers. “Melting point unknown, way beyond my electric furnace. Magnetizes instantly, then demagnetizes as soon as the coil turns off. Is completely scratchproof and non-breakable by ordinary forces. Non-brittle in liquid nitrogen down to minus 345 degrees Fahrenheit. This product was made on some world unthinkably superior to earth in science and technology.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Thane practically. “You’re extrapolating too much from one bit of stuff, Professor. But along with my pictures, it makes for mighty strong proof that UFO’s are real. That’s all I hope to prove. Finding out who or what the saucerians are will be a tougher job.”
Thane was thinking of the men-in-black as he left. Yes, who or what were they? He was dismayingly reminded of them again, on the drive home, when he saw the domed disk that suddenly shot down from the sky like a striking eagle.
They had waylaid him in a lonely stretch of side road, with no farmhouses in sight. And they must know, by reading his mind, that he now carried with him the damning piece of saucer metal, as well as his negatives and movie film. All three items within their reach…
Thane cursed himself for not bringing his shotgun along, as he leaped from the car and raced for the brush. Over his shoulder he saw the UFO hover low as a hatchway opened. The three men-in-black floated down to the ground and started to give chase on foot. Thane
sped into a dense growth of scrub hoping to hide. But if they could pick up his thoughts, by telepathy, how could he avoid capture?
Got to sneak to the small bridge, thought Thane desperately, and cut across the field to the lumbermill…lots of men there… I’ll be safe…easy does it, through the bushes to the small bridge….
The three MIB’s were waiting at the small wooden bridge that crossed the crick. Thane grinned, watching from a hundred yards away. He had fooled them with his false thought of getting to the bridge. All the while he had been creeping the other way, toward the gully that led back to the road.
Taking the chance that nobody else was in the saucer, in the air, Thane dashed into his car. The engine started perfectly. He had read in Sheds book that the electromagnetic force did not damage car engines, merely killed them temporarily.
With a roar, the car shot away. Thane thumbed his nose back at the three startled MIB’s who turned and ran from the bridge. Swinging off the side road, Thane got on the highway where traffic was heavy and state police cruised by regularly. The saucermen wouldn’t dare show their craft to hundreds of pairs of eyes.
There was no further pursuit and Thane pulled off the highway onto his private dirt road. Again he was alone, but the road led through lofty pines that formed a shield overhead so that a car was just about invisible from the air.
Thane reached his cabin safely, ran in, and barricaded the door. Then he picked up his shotgun, checked that it was loaded, and put it across his knees as he typed. He was facing the door and main window. They would have no way of surprising him.
That’s what he thought. The next moment, his eyes bugged as he looked up, to see a hole forming in the roof. Not a hole exactly. The roof was simply turning transparent. And above he could see the circular bottom of a saucer.
What kind of weird powers were they using now? Thane’s hands went limp. The shotgun slid to the floor. His whole body was paralyzed. Then some invisible force gently seized him and lifted him up through the hole in the roof. Suspended in the air and rising, Thane looked down to see the roof solid again. He had somehow been whisked through solid matter. Things had gone from the incredible to the fantastic.
