Trade-Off

by Trade-Off (retail) (epub)

  Chiang, though a scientist, had no illusions about the world of commerce, and knew that large meteorites were sometimes worth hundreds, and even occasionally thousands or tens of thousands of U.S. dollars, and he was quite prepared to sacrifice his scientific endeavours in return for instant wealth.

  At mid-morning he stopped beside the track, leaned his bicycle against a rock, ate one of his candy bars and drank a little water. With some reluctance he climbed back into the saddle – which had clearly not been designed for long-term comfort – and began pedalling again.

  He reached the foot of the most western of the hills a little before noon, and abandoned the bicycle with relief when the slope and terrain precluded further riding. He ate another candy bar and drank some more water. Then he hitched the rucksack more comfortably on his shoulders and began striding up the slope towards the summit of the hill. From there, he hoped, he might be able to identify the impact site using his binoculars.

  The slope increased the closer he got to the summit, and Chiang was panting when he finally reached it. He sat down to rest for a few minutes, then pulled his binoculars out of the rucksack, rested his elbows on his knees, and began scanning the valley in front of him.

  After about ten minutes he stopped and rubbed his eyes. There was nothing visible anywhere within sight that looked anything at all like an impact crater. The only thing that appeared to be worth investigating was in the stunted trees and bushes at the very bottom of the valley where something, some small object, or some small part of a larger object, glinted a dull silver in the early afternoon light.

  Chiang shrugged his shoulders, pulled the rucksack back on and started walking down the slope towards the bottom of the valley.

  When he was about fifty yards from the bushes where the silver object still glittered enigmatically, Chiang suddenly stopped.

  Emerging from the bushes in front of him was a small grey figure, human-like but unmistakably not human. Chiang stared at the figure for a few seconds, then decided very quickly that discretion was certainly the better part of valor, and turned to run. But he didn’t, because standing directly behind him was another, apparently identical, figure, and now Chiang could clearly see the tear-drop shaped face with the massive slanting black eyes which seemed to burn into his very soul.

  Even later, Chiang wasn’t sure if the small grey creature with the huge black eyes had actually talked to him, or if the words had simply appeared, fully formed and in perfectly fluent Mandarin, in his mind. Either way, the message was clear enough.

  ‘We have,’ the small grey figure announced, ‘a proposition for you.’

  Author's Note

  The book you have just read is a work of fiction, with all the usual disclaimers about people living or dead. However, the idea for the book was not derived solely from the typically fevered imaginings of a writer sitting scribbling in a lonely garret, but at least in part from an analysis of technological development in America in the second half of the twentieth century.

  At the end of the Second World War, the Manhattan Project had created the first nuclear weapons after quite a long gestation period which owed its origin to the work of Albert Einstein who, some forty years earlier, had conceived the mass-energy equation, usually written as e=mc^2^. The Manhattan Project was a massive undertaking involving thousands of people, the dedicated work of the best brains in the free world and a budget which ballooned from an initial $6,000 to a massive $2 billion (1945 figures) before the first working weapon was produced.

  With the end of the war, and with Germany and Japan defeated, the need – rather than the desire – for new technology effectively vanished, but curiously enough the pace of technological development actually increased.

  Radio valves were suddenly rendered obsolete by the announcement from Bell Laboratories of the invention of the transistor, the first solid-state electronic device, which had no known precursors. Over the following years, the American industrial machine, apparently with little development time or effort, produced fibre optics, tunnel diodes, holograms, lasers, masers, supertenacity fibres, and hundreds of other devices including the ubiquitous silicon chip. The one common factor about most of these devices was that they were all new – that is, new in the sense of being completely novel, rather than just logical developments of existing technology.

  It is almost as if some organization was drip-feeding American industry with technology which had already been developed elsewhere.

  That premise led to this book. Though it is – one certainly hopes – unlikely that the kind of exchange program described in these pages is actually functioning in America (or anywhere else), it is certainly possible that somewhere in the vast western deserts of the United States some kind of a trade-off is taking place, and has been since 1947.

  Readers who think the concept of a trade-off too far-fetched to be worthy of serious consideration are recommended to refer to the book The Day After Roswell by Colonel Philip J Corso, which they will find in the non-fiction section of a good book shop.

  So do UFOs exist? Are there really little green (or grey or any other shade) men working with the Americans or the Russians or the Chinese or the Indians? Possibly, perhaps even probably.

  Independent evidence for UFOs is strong, with hundreds of photographs and video films, inexplicable radar sighting reports, some physical traces and thousands of witnesses. The fact that these witnesses are almost all dismissed by the ‘establishment’ and by the professional debunkers as crackpots or worse is not too surprising if what they are saying is actually the truth.

  Reference is made in this novel to Blue Book, and Projects Sign and Grudge. These actually existed, and were precisely as described in these pages – simply exercises in whitewash with a remit to ‘explain’ every single UFO sighting in purely terrestrial or known astronomical terms.

  The techniques employed were simple. If there was the slightest possibility that the object seen was any kind of heavenly body, aircraft, weather balloon, marsh gas or anything like that, then that was accepted as the official explanation. The fact that Venus, say, wasn’t visible from the witness’s location at the reported time of the incident was deemed to be irrelevant.

  If the object or the sighting described was so bizarre that no conventional explanation fitted the bill, then clearly the observer had been hallucinating. If several people had all seen the same thing, then they were obviously suffering from a mass hallucination.

  And if neither of the above explanations could be employed without people openly laughing, then obviously there was insufficient data to categorize or explain the sighting. What was made perfectly clear by all the explanations offered was that there was no extra-terrestrial – in the sense of alien beings or technology – component.

  But despite these efforts by the American Government and federal agencies, there were and are numerous photographs and video films showing inexplicable objects. Many of these images have been subjected to exhaustive independent analysis and are demonstrably not fakes or hoaxes. There are numerous radar sighting reports which have been correlated with visual sightings. Occasionally, strange metallic debris is found in areas where objects have been seen. Subjected to metallurgical analysis, frequently the debris appears not to have originated on Earth.

  Belief or non-belief in UFOs and little green (or little grey) men is, like belief in God, entirely personal, and most people are highly prejudiced for or against. However, any truly open-minded and independent analysis of the evidence collected is almost bound to conclude that there is certainly something ‘out there’ that needs investigating. And nobody, not even the most closed-minded of the debunkers, really believes that we’re all alone in the vastness of the universe.

  Let us just hope that whatever creatures are out there have a substantially different agenda to those described in this book.

  Time is running out to catch a gruesome killer in this pulse-raising thriller

  Find out more…

  First publ
ished in the United Kingdom in 2012 by Endeavour under the name Tom Kasey

  This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by

  Canelo Digital Publishing Limited

  57 Shepherds Lane

  Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2DU

  United Kingdom

  Copyright © James Becker, 2012

  The moral right of James Becker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781788631778

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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