“Missing from where?”
“Around here mostly. Within 100 miles of here. Statistically there has to be some common denominator.”
“And you think they’re under my field?”
“OK, look. We’ll bring in some archeologists to study this data. See if they can make sense of it. That will limit operations and buy you some time. But you’ll be hearing from our lawyers to obtain the necessary papers for this investigation to continue. Now you can choose to cooperate or not, but cooperation would be in your interest.”
“How deep are the…is the…whatever you found?”
“Mostly in bedrock. It appears denser than the surrounding bedrock. Which is totally implausible. Look, I’m not accusing you of any wrongdoing. But you directed us to this finding. We don’t know what it is. And we have people missing. Including your Drake, if….”
“If he ever existed. I know what everybody says. Well, OK, bring in your people. I’ll be really interested if you find some of that glass.”
He gave me a strange look and walked back to his car. The guy who was driving, who’d stayed in the car the whole time, gunned it like he was in a hurry. This was upsetting. I was glad Sue had gone to the store.
****
“He thinks people missing have something to do with the field?” Sue was upset too. What would you expect?
“I think it’s because of the straw man thing. I told you I thought they disappeared.”
“But they couldn’t just disappear. And their tents. And their cars? No, this doesn’t have anything to do with the field. It’s interesting that they made an archeological find, but the only missing people are the Native Americans who built it eons ago.”
“They didn’t build structures in bedrock. Especially ones that radar can’t penetrate.”
“So you are saying it was built by little green men.”
“Little gray people maybe. I don’t know if they were men or not.”
“All from, you said…an oval?”
“It looked like an oval. A huge black one.”
“That floated. Don, really. I don’t know what to do for you.”
“Well, how else did the structure get there?”
“Maybe it’s magma. Magma chambers….”
“There aren’t any volcanoes around here.”
“Then it’s oil, natural gas. Maybe we’ll get rich.”
“Not if radar can’t even get through it.”
“Well, then people can’t get through it either…to go missing! This is crazy!”
“I know it is. It’s all been crazy. Including me being the one who knows.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.”
“I know it’s this Jim Drake stuff. He got you believing in his crap years ago. And now you’re lost in it. There’s going to be a logical explanation. That’s all there is to it.”
Logical, but by the standards of what universe? That’s what I thought anyway. Now I could only wait for the archeologists to come confiscate my farm and dig up the glass caves.
It wasn’t long till Driscoll was back, alone this time.
“I need to ask you some more questions about the burning man festival you had here.”
“What do you want to know about it? They were all abducted by aliens.”
“That isn’t funny, Mr. Henson.”
“Did I say it was funny?”
“As far as we can tell, everyone who attended is now missing. There’s no sign of any of the ones we can identify. That’s at least 20 people. How many were in attendance?”
“More than that, but I didn’t count them.”
“A few more? A lot more?”
“A lot more. Maybe fifty. Maybe a hundred. I didn’t count them. I didn’t pay them much attention until they disappeared.”
“What do you mean ‘disappeared’?”
I didn’t care anymore. “A conduit appeared. But this one looked like a cat’s eye. I ran to warn them, but I could feel pressure, and I slipped and hit my head on a rock, I think. Anyway, next thing I knew tendrils came out and just snapped them up, all of them, cars and all. Sue said they all left. But I saw them getting grabbed up and into the conduit.”
Driscoll looked dumbfounded. Gobsmacked, in English. He pulled out his phone and turned away to talk to somebody in a low voice.
I sat down in a rocking chair on my porch. I started to rock. This time, I thought, I’ll go back on more meds, and maybe they’ll stop asking me questions.
Driscoll met Sue when she got home. They talked for awhile, but I didn’t hear them.
“Agent Driscoll thinks I should take you back to the ER. He says they need to scan your head.”
I started to laugh. “Why are you laughing?” she asked.
“He, he, he, he…he wants to see if I have some of that special glass inside my brain.”
Sue went to the house phone and called 911.
****
Well, the hospital had no reason to keep me. They said I wasn’t harmful to myself or others, and it wasn’t illegal to believe in UFO abductions. I know Driscoll thought I was either crazy or pretending to be in order to avoid truthful answers. Ironic, since I wasn’t avoiding truthful answers for the first time.
The team out in the field had unearthed the shaft through which I got lowered into the caves. I don’t know what the outside of the shaft was made of…maybe the now-famous glass. The shaft had been sealed up with ordinary concrete. It went down pretty far, but I didn’t know how far because they wouldn’t tell me anything. It looked like they were starting to excavate some on the outside of the shaft since that was dirt instead of concrete like the inside.
I was supposed to stick around home so I could be observed if I went nuts again. That’s essentially what they told me. I imagined they thought they might find a hundred strawman-burners under there somewhere. And their little cars too.
Then one day the work stopped. All the men cleared out their equipment and left, not a word from anyone. I wondered if they’d accuse me of causing them to disappear too.
Driscoll had come by several times, always unannounced. He always brought another agent with him. He said he just wanted to keep checking on me to make sure I was all right. I told him I was fine.
After the crew left, it was no surprise that Driscoll showed up again. I asked him why everyone had gone. Did they give up? Did they find something? He avoided answering, which, of course, didn’t surprise me at all.
“Did any of those festival people ever turn up?”
“No,” he said, very matter-of-factly.
“Well, I hope they will one day. Those who get abducted usually turn up again eventually.”
Driscoll gave me a disgusted look and exchanged glances with his partner.
Some men came out later and removed the fences they had put up around the dig site. I was surprised that they didn’t bother to cover or rope off the excavation. They just left it open. So, of course, I had to investigate what was on my own land. What surprised me was that the shaft itself was gone. There was a big hole with a circular column of concrete sticking up about 6 feet in the middle of it. There were several deeper holes surrounding the concrete. I couldn’t see how deep they were. The whole thing looked dangerous. Surely they couldn’t just leave it like that.
Driscoll appeared again right after that.
“Hey, ya’ll made a very dangerous mess in the middle of my field,” I told him.
“They’re supposed to come fill up the holes. The excavation is finished for now.”
“Well, it looks like ya’ll wasted plenty of time, effort…and money! You didn’t find anything but a concrete plug, looks like.”
“We found some glass.”
I was surprised he told me that.
“And you were able to remove it? I thought you couldn’t cut it.”
“How do you know it wasn’t in pieces already?”
“Oh I just assumed that it was making up the wall of that column. Somebody must ha
ve poured all that concrete into that glass shaft to seal it up. So you took the glass and left the concrete.”
He looked like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to ask me anything else or not.
“You seem to know more than you’re saying,” he said to me. He was fishing without giving me information, I’m sure.
“Well, I guess the aliens built their tunnels and caves with that glass you like. I don’t know who poured it with concrete though. They sure messed up some nice construction.”
Driscoll looked uncomfortable. His assistant remained absolutely expressionless.
I added, “Have you tried throwing anything like a notepad at that glass. It sticks…part of the time.”
“I don’t understand that statement, Mr. Henson.”
“Never mind. Maybe you’ll figure it out. You should have lots of that glass by now. Just imagine how much is still underground. Now you’ll be wanting to dig up my whole field once again. OK, you can have it for a million, after taxes.”
I chuckled to myself. Oh lord, I shouldn’t do that.
****
We celebrated that night. Sue and me. And neighbors and friends. The neighbors and friends liked me again. All it took was a million dollars, tax-free.
And then I had company again. Word had gotten out. The news people were all excited over the huge ancient glass structure that was being excavated from under my cornfield.
Reporters wanted to interview us. I told them that I thought it was all supposed to be secret, but personally I thought that aliens had built it there. Some of them said they considered my theory plausible.
One or two asked me about the burning man festival and the missing attendees. I told them that the aliens responsible for the glass structure probably took them. They mostly thought that was in poor taste.
The digging was massive and proceeded rapidly. I had a mountain of dirt on one side of my field. There was a massive hole in the ground with ramps leading to the bottom. Within the hole there was a very tall tower of concrete and then glass leading all the way to some very deep bedrock. I never knew I had so much dirt and rock under that field.
They kept stripping glass off the shaft/tower using special lasers. Huge generators supplied the power that was needed. But the bedrock was a problem. They had to cut through it slowly using the radar maps so as not to damage what lay beneath. I knew that one day they would break into the glass caves and tunnels. I wondered if they would be filled with cement, but then no, that would be equivalent to building a dam, and a big one at that. I reasoned then that someone, probably the men-in-black and cohorts, had merely pugged up the shaft, which was the entrance to the caves from ground level. The caves and tunnels would still be open. I wondered what they would contain. Would my hospital room slash “habitat for many weeks that collapsed into days” remain?
And then they stopped excavating. Suddenly. They’d carefully done more radar studies everyday or so. The structure they were looking at was impenetrable to radar, but they expected to find its glass walls soon. They would find where the shaft adjoined the greater structure as well.
But they stopped.
The excavation team was silent, in more ways than one. They not only weren’t working; they weren’t saying a word.
Of course Driscoll appeared.
“So what’s happening now?” This was Driscoll asking me!
“How should I know? I was going to ask you!”
“You seem to have the answers. Did the aliens come and take the structures away?”
“I haven’t seen any aliens. Not lately.”
“You know it’s gone, don’t you?”
“What’s gone?”
“The whole damn structure. Even the tower except for its concrete. No more glass. No more…anything. There’s only bedrock. That we paid you a million dollars for, by the way.”
Was I surprised? I was perplexed mostly. How did the aliens get all those caves and tunnels, all that glass, out of there? I knew that the men-in-black couldn’t do that!
I had no explanation for Driscoll. He had no more questions for me. I think he sensed that I really didn’t know anything. I was hoping they wouldn’t want the money back.
Just to be sure, they did finish excavating down to where the concrete tower ended. And they also went past the margins of the “structure” as shown on previous radar maps. There was nothing else. Solid bedrock. Granite mostly, they said. No more cutting to be done.
Now I had what the press was calling a multimillion dollar boondoggle in the middle of what used to be my field. Some sources called it a scam. Some tried to blame me. Some said I fooled the government to get a million bucks. Some said I was a reptilian alien shape-shifter.
The people of Grover didn’t know what to think. They considered me a bit of a celebrity, and by Grover standards a rich one, but they were uneasy and generally very reserved. I was used to their distrust, so I didn’t worry about it. But now there were cranks again, although not the one who used to be there.
The hole, which now looked like a strip mine, was all fenced off very securely. But it now had become a tourist attraction. People came from miles around, even other countries, to see the burning man site where the festival goers, and their giant underground glass houses had disappeared. There were vendors selling T-shirts, and one was selling, genuine, he claimed, “Grover Glass.” For some reason this particular “Grover Glass” was easy to break.
When the reporters appeared, Driscoll stayed away. I could say anything to the reporters. The only ones who seriously questioned me were the ones who were actually comedians.
Since the dig had been a federal project, a special federal investigatory panel was convened. The panel investigated the agencies that were involved in instigating the dig, and hiring and paying the contractors who performed it. They were investigating how and why I was paid too, so I had to hire a lawyer. A Senate committee was investigating the investigators.
There were lots of discussions going on about what to do with the site. Some wanted to give it back to me, if I would give the money back. That wasn’t going to happen. I was truly done with that cornfield. I had made a living from it, lived underneath it, nearly died because of it, and lost a friend, Drake, who should never have told me anything would happen, including him.
Still, I remained, I suppose, the one who knows, the one who knew too much, the failed savior, the crazy old coot who in knowing it all lost my sanity and almost everything else. Not to mention astronaut. Oh yeah, I used to want to be an astronaut. I was the most famous of all, and nobody knew it.
The theories accumulated. Why did geological radar show a giant structure, impenetrable to the radar? Why was there a shaft of glass and concrete leading down to it? That aliens built it was the most popular explanation, hence my questionable but nevertheless intriguing status. A cover-up of a failed government project was another theory. I guess that one was at least partly right. It was a government project that failed, but the cover-up idea only worked if you assumed they were doing something different from what was apparent. The “most plausible” explanation, among the “most plausible explanation” folks, was that there was something about the bedrock itself that fooled the radar. There were still “official” folks who came from time to time to sample the granite, presumably to study it for its stealth properties. They sampled the concrete too. They couldn’t sample glass as there was none, not even trace amounts.
I would go out and, over time, watch the stars seemingly rotate above the site. Yes, it was the Earth’s rotation that was making the stars seem to move. But once, I had seen stars, or planets at least, move past me and behind me, and I was the one who had seen places and times where stars can live, and others where they will never be.
For an ordinary man, I had seen a great deal, more than most, more even than my imagination. But that was among those of my own pixel, small among the infinite pixels that expanded and collapsed beyond me.
****
“You’ve
created quite a mess here in this cornfield.” It was Drake’s voice, the returned voice of one who had never, but always, existed.
I turned, but no one was there.
“You are in my head once again. I think you are the messy one.”
“Well, yes, my house wasn’t neat, but it didn’t deserve incineration.”
“That was its last best hope. But your glass house used to be out there in that hole. What do you think of that?”
“The aliens are neat. They always were, remember. They clean up the messes they make.”
“Not the mess they’ve made in this neighborhood, or in this country, or inside my head.”
“No, that will take more time.”
“What happened to the festival people? They didn’t deserve to be hunted away, or whatever….”
“They are probably being held someplace safe. But they may not return for a long time.”
“What did you do with their cars?”
“I didn’t do anything with them. Besides, that’s just metal and other materials. No life force.”
“Yeah? What if they had leather seats?”
“Well, yes, the hunters might have liked the seats. And any natural fabrics. They like to use organics. Did you know that their glass is alive?”
“The glass is alive? Huh? What are you telling me?”
“It’s a living organism…or rather collections of many organisms…like jellyfish. Hard jellyfish…with a consciousness. They can be persuaded to assume certain shapes, to be useful for building purposes. They can also make notepads stick to themselves, if they want to, or, if they prefer, extract the lifeforce from fingertips to feed the hunter they enclose.”
“Oh, my. Oh my!” Sometimes I did not like for things to make sense. Ignorance wasn’t bliss, but it was more comfortable.
Drake’s voice departed, and I was left with the stars…and my own thoughts. The stars were surely more comforting.
Angels of the Quantum Gate Page 10
