Okun sat down on the nearest coffin, thinking about the question of a second ship. “Am I being paranoid,” he asked the extraterrestrial life-form below him, “or does my government know about more of your guys’ ships? Maybe there’s even an Area 52 someplace. Otherwise, why would they be trying to discourage me from investigating that possibility?”
The aliens didn’t say it was all part of a plan to keep the young genius motivated.
*
“Just the man I’ve been waiting to see.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. What’s up?” Radecker, no longer trying to disguise the fact that he was on a five-year vacation, was dressed in tennis whites. A covered racket protruded from his small suitcase. He’d just returned from thirty-six hours of fun and sun on the shores of Frenchman Lake.
“Been playing tennis?”
“Yes, I have. You getting ready to head off to Woodstock?” the boss shot back defensively. Okun was wearing open-toed sandals and a grungy old T-shirt with Jimi Hendrix’s silhouette on it.
“That Wells report was pretty interesting. Did you read any of it?”
“Glanced at it. Why? Is there something I should know?”
Okun scrutinized him for signs he was lying and thought he saw them. “It’s just that the table of contents on the front page lists an addendum added a couple of years later, a section called ‘Revision of Preliminary Conclusions.’ But it’s not there. Those pages are missing.”
“And you think I took them?”
“I didn’t say that.” Okun tried to maintain a poker face, but failed. Radecker knew from the cocked head and the narrowed eyes that he was being accused.
“Look, you asked me for the report, and I got it for you. Why would I go to the trouble of having it sent here and then not show you the whole thing?”
Both of them knew the answer to that question. Because there might be information in those pages concerning additional ships. Brackish opened his mouth to say something, but stopped when he remembered the promise he’d made to Dworkin. He couldn’t let Radecker know what the old men had told him.
“I’m not saying you removed the pages, but it looks like somebody did. Maybe somebody in DC wants to keep us in the dark about something.”
“If that’s true, there’s really nothing we can do about it, is there?” He went off to his room to unpack.
Okun shook his head. He wondered if Colonel Spelman knew how Radecker was spending his time in Nevada. He knew from things the agent had said during their first days in the lab that he was ambitious, that he wanted to climb the career ladder at the CIA. But he appeared to possess only moderate intelligence and didn’t seem to be a very diligent worker. For the first time, the idea occurred to Okun that perhaps Radecker wasn’t a good CIA man. Maybe they’d chosen him because he was mediocre, expendable. But without a doubt, Radecker was right about one thing. If the Pentagon and the CIA didn’t want them to know something, they had the power to keep the men of Area 51 in the dark.
Okun followed the labyrinth of hallways toward the exit doors and turned on the long row of lights that illuminated the stacks. Somewhere in that welter of printed material, he sensed, was the clue he needed. But where? Since his introduction to this wildly disorganized library, he had finished reading over forty reports. He pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and used the palm of his hand as scratch paper. At his present rate of speed, he calculated it would take him 513 years to read every document in the room.
Suddenly dejected, he switched off the lights. It would be nearly a year before he turned them on again.
*
A month to the day after the arrival of the Wells report, Radecker came dancing into the kitchen waving a telegram in the air. “Pack your bags, gentlemen, we’re taking this show out on the road! This just came in from Spelman,” he announced, dropping the printout on the table in front of a gloomy Okun. “They’ve approved your proposal!”
“You must be kidding. I wasn’t serious about that.” After being depressed and listless for two weeks, Brackish had realized he had to do something, anything, to stay busy. With the help of his colleagues, he’d written a half-demented proposal to retrofit the alien spacecraft with human-built technology—half of which would need to be invented. The men had laughed at their ideas, realizing how ludicrous most of them were. For Okun, it had been just like sitting around brainstorming with the Mothers in his dorm room—except his new group would have been called the Grandpas of Invention.
One of the minor ideas called for in the proposal turned out to be astonishingly prophetic once the secrets of the alien technology were revealed years later. Although there was no particular need for it from an engineering standpoint, he decided to base the steering and velocity controls on telekinetic energy. Okun recalled Dr. Solomon’s theory on how the aliens controlled their biomechanical suits through acts of will. Based on their fetuslike riding position inside the chest cavity and the fact that the visitors had no tentacles, Solomon had ruled out the possibility of the suits responding mimetically to the physical actions of the wearer. It must have been done through mental signals. Okun wanted to apply similar principles to the operation of the ship. Years before there was any such thing as Virtual Reality, he conceived of a “sensory suit” to be worn by pilots which would read their slightest physical impulses and translate them into a series of commands intelligible to the ship’s control system. In his proposal, he’d called this function the “Look, Ma, No Hands Interface,” explaining that it would “significantly reduce pilot reaction time.”
Dworkin was struck dumb that the document had been taken seriously. He had urged his junior colleague not to submit it, warning that it would damage his credibility with the powers-that-be. After he read the telegram, he turned to Okun and raised his eyebrows. “Somebody up there likes you.”
*
Spelman thought the plan was ridiculous. It showed how little serious work was being done at the secret labs. As soon as he was finished reading the document, he phoned CIA headquarters and asked to be put through to the Office of the Deputy Director. “Al, I’m worried about our boy. I think he may be losing his marbles. He just sent me this proposal to rebuild the blackbird with conventional technology. There are so many weird ideas in this thing my first thought was, ‘uh-oh, we’ve got another Manny Wells on our hands.’”
“What does he want to do?” Nimziki sounded like he was busy doing something else, not really paying attention. Spelman ran through the basic outlines of the plan, making sure to mention some of its nuttier aspects.
“And get this,” he quoted from the report. “‘In order to accomplish these goals, we will need to spend time at the following research institutions: the Los Alamos National Labs, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Lawrence Livermore Labs, the University of California at Berkeley, Oak Ridge’. There are about twenty-five places they want to go to.”
“Let them go, it can’t hurt.”
The colonel couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “In my opinion, it would be faster and easier simply to feed him some more clues. Radecker’s obviously doing a better job than you’d anticipated.”
“Not yet,” Nimziki snapped. “I have my sources, and everything’s going along fine out there. The kid needs a vacation is all. He’s been down there long enough. Let’s send them out. You take care of it.”
Reluctantly, Spelman agreed, but not before chopping back the proposed itinerary to just a pair of sites: Los Alamos and JPL. He also arranged special security procedures. Dworkin and the others, he knew, could be trusted not to reveal any information about Area 51, but Okun was untested. Although Spelman had never met him face-to-face, everything he knew about the young man suggested he would be a major security risk. He assigned two of his craftiest agents the task of getting Okun to divulge sensitive information.
*
Radecker and his staff were away from their labs for ten months. Seven of them were spent at the prestigious Los Alamos Nation
al Laboratories, where the group enjoyed full access to the knowledgeable technical staff and the ultramodern equipment, before moving on to a shorter stay at the Jet Propulsion Labs in Pasadena, Okun’s old stomping grounds. Twice a day, he glimpsed his alma mater from behind the tinted windows of the van that shuttled the crew between the labs and their hotel. Since they received the red carpet treatment everywhere they went, the trip turned out to be relaxing and enjoyable for everyone except Okun. Since he had never studied many of the subjects that the engineers around him—even Freiling—knew like the backs of their hands, he was forced to play catch-up. He spent most of the year with his nose buried in books about rocketry, aerodynamics, or the newly emerging field of computer science. It was his graduate school. Under the patient tutelage of his elderly companions, he crammed three years of study into ten months. Without revealing why they needed the information, the scientists were able to learn many things that would help them repair the ship once they returned—everything from advanced, solderless welding techniques to the design of microcircuitry. As for security concerns, Spelman’s worries proved unnecessary. Okun was far too busy to sit around gabbing with strangers. Besides, both facilities were staffed by very normal, very responsible, people, who had reached their positions by following the rules. They dressed, spoke, and wore their hair in the manner they felt was expected of them. When these squares saw Okun trucking toward them in a hallway, they dipped into nearby doorways to avoid him. He caused a small panic among a group of secretaries one morning when he came in wearing his security clearance card pinned to a happy face T-shirt worn over a brand-new pair of plaid pants which revealed—and this was what horrified them—he wasn’t wearing any socks under his EARTH SHOES. He had about as much chance of conversing about national security issues with these employees as if he had been a leader of the Black Panther Party. Spelman’s spies never got close to him.
They began their trip “home” on a warm spring morning. Okun persuaded Radecker to let him pay his mother a quick surprise visit. But when the van pulled up in the driveway, a neighbor told Radecker that Saylene had gone shopping. On the long drive back to the desert, Okun found himself thinking about his mom and his friends. But then something triggered another memory. This one concerned a film he’d seen at Los Alamos months before. It was a dull old documentary about the work of the labs—the Manhattan Project, rocket experiments, and the history of the U.S. nuclear program. In one clip, Brackish got his first look at Dr. Wells. He appeared in the background of a scene at the laboratory. But the footage that kept replaying itself in his mind had been shot in the South Pacific. It was a bald and awkward moment of military propaganda that featured a Navy officer speaking to a group of coyly grinning native islanders. They were being moved off the Bikini atoll, part of the Marshall Islands Group, in preparation for a test of the newly built hydrogen bomb. The officer made it annoyingly clear these simple people were leaving of their own free will and had plenty of other islands to go to. A disturbing moment of history caught on film, but Okun couldn’t figure out why he kept thinking about it. It seemed important somehow.
The moment he walked into his room and saw the Wells report sitting on his desk exactly where he’d left it, he knew. He stood stock-still staring at the pages, still holding his luggage. Very slowly he began to nod.
*
The next morning, after a phone call to Los Alamos, he gathered everyone for a meeting. “Remember that movie they showed us about Oppenheimer and von Braun? And there were all those scenes about the rocket tests they conducted around the time of the H-bomb?”
“Yes, what about it?”
“There was that one rocket that exploded, remember? It blew up after it left the atmosphere, and nobody could figure out why. This morning I called the labs and had them check the date of that footage for me. The explosion happened at 4:30 p.m. on July 5, 1947.”
“So?”
“That means,” Okun announced proudly, “it was 10:30 P.M. on July 4 in New Mexico. Which in turn means…”
“…it was just before our alien vehicle crashed,” Cibatutto finished the sentence.
“Yup.”
“And you think there’s a connection between the two events?”
Freiling interjected. “That test was halfway around the world in the Southern Hemisphere. How would that affect something in the skies over New Mexico?”
“I have no idea,” Okun lied, “but it’s too much of a coincidence not to investigate.”
Dworkin glanced at Lenel, and said, “I seem to recall seeing a report on that rocket’s failure.”
“Of course there’s a report,” Lenel groused. “Anytime you blow up several million dollars’ worth of government equipment, you end up writing a report. Finding it is going to be a different matter.”
Okun gestured grandly in the direction of the stacks. “After you, gentlemen.” The old men let out a collective groan, realizing they would spend the rest of the day thumbing through old documents. Reluctantly, they allowed themselves to be herded toward the stacks.
A day and a half later, they found what they were looking for. The staff members opened a bag of pretzels and passed them around the kitchen table as Okun read from the report.
*
“We have returned to the Garden of Eden with the intention of blowing it up. The beauty of this tropical island is so astonishing one senses everywhere the hand of God in its creation. We can only pray He will forgive us.” So wrote an English electrician of the Bikini atoll. He was one of over two hundred men employed by the Manhattan Project for a series of rocket and bomb tests to be conducted in the Marshall Islands. Although the tests were classified experiments conducted by the United States, half of the conversations took place in German. A large contingent of technicians who had been working for the Nazis a year earlier now formed the backbone of the U.S. rocket program. In the closing days of the war, Wernher von Braun and his crew had been ordered to return from the northern island of Peenemünde to a country inn near Berlin. Hitler, determined to prevent them from joining the allies, sent a team of SS agents to execute them all. By sheer luck, a cousin of von Braun’s learned of the assassination plot and led the engineers into American-held territory, where they surrendered. Within weeks, these talented scientists were reunited at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico.
“During the war, they had developed the deadly V-2 rocket, the world’s first ballistic missile, which was capable of reaching altitudes of seventy-five miles. But the new rocket they were preparing to test at Bikini, the first of the Redstone weapons, would reach higher still. It would soar three hundred miles above the earth before making a controlled reentry and exploding a small bomb in its nose cone on the nearby island of Kwajelin. The film crews and reporters who had come to the island ignored the Germans, focusing instead on the upcoming test of the first hydrogen bomb. Nevertheless, these engineers felt their experiments were just as significant as those being conducted by Oppenheimer and company. If the launch was successful, it would mark the beginning of the space program.
“State-of-the-art equipment had been brought to Bikini in order to monitor the rocket’s flight. High-speed cameras with newly improved telephoto capacity, ultrasensitive radar equipment along with infrared and radio tracking systems were set up under thatch huts not far from the launchpad. After a final check of all systems, the countdown began. Liftoff occurred without complications at 4:18 p.m. local time. With an earsplitting roar, the forty-ton assembly lifted into the cloudless sky, leaving the graceful arch of a contrail in its wake. The ground crew watched it rise until it disappeared from view, then gathered around the banks of monitors. Without warning, the rocket disintegrated at 185 miles. Until that moment, everything had gone exactly according to plan—a rarity in highly complex tests of this kind.
“Radar watchers reported seeing something in the rocket’s vicinity flash across the screen a split second before the blast. The ‘ghost’ had appeared out of nowhere and vanished
just as suddenly. The consensus among the technicians was that it had been a false reading caused by energy related to the explosion. There was just one troubling aspect to the way the shape had moved. It seemed to accelerate. As one of the observers put it: ‘It was like a fish resting in the sand that darts away a moment before you step on it.’”
The report advanced several explanations for the cause of the explosion. One of these concerned “a layer of radiation in the atmosphere at an altitude of 185 miles.” The authors of the report were puzzled and somewhat alarmed by the discovery of this layer. Okun would have read right past this section if Cibatutto hadn’t interrupted him.
“The rocket ran into one of the Van Allen belts, that’s what they’re talking about.”
Lenel grimaced. “Hogwash! The belts wouldn’t cause a rocket to explode.”
“Actually, since this rocket carried a signal bomb in its nose cone, the sudden shift in magnetism could have activated the detonator cap.”
Lenel disagreed and began explaining why when Freiling interrupted with views of his own. Soon all the old men were talking at once, shouting to be heard over the others. Just as the argument began degenerating into finger-pointing and name-calling, Okun held his hand high in the air and screamed over the top of the noise.
“Excuse me! I have a question!” The room went suddenly quiet. “What is a Van Allen belt?”
Cibatutto recited from memory. “The Van Allen belts are two rings of high-energy-charged particles surrounding Earth, probably originating in the Sun and trapped by Earth’s magnetic field. The lower, more energetic belt, is at an altitude of 185 miles from Earth’s surface while the outer belt is at ten thousand miles. They were discovered by physicist James Van Allen. Their shape and intensity vary significantly with fluctuations in the solar wind.”
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 42
