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The Jeep careened down the narrow highway at an ungodly speed. Its substandard, government-issued headlights were insufficient to illuminate the road before us. One errant tumbleweed, one slow-moving Gila monster in the road and we’d all be on our way to perdition. I told the Corporal behind the wheel repeatedly to slow down, but he was deaf to my protests. Perhaps my words were drowned out by Lieutenant Owen’s ceaseless stream of prattle, and the screaming of the desert wind in our ears.
“The General requested you specifically, Albert,” Lieutenant Owen screamed back at me as the Jeep teetered and totted back and forth across the two lane highway.
“I have no idea what could be so important that he had to get me up in the middle of the night!” I hollered back.
Owen shrugged, his epaulets bobbing.
“I am not of the habit of being at the General’s beck and call,” I added, but Owen had returned his attention to the road. The driver swerved to avoid something and the Jeep momentarily picked itself up onto its two left wheels. I hung tight to the seat-back before me, fearing greatly for my life.
“But the General said you’ll be the only one able to make head or tail of what he’s got!” Owen yelled back. “Says it’s right up your alley! You like spacemen stories right? Flash Gordon?”
My mother always told me that no good ever came from drinking whiskey. Here was definite proof. One evening, the General and I had split a bottle of Wild Turkey. After a pint, I’d started in on my theories of genetic variation and the possible applicability to radiation resistance. After a quart, I was painting with a decided broader brush, filling the General’s ear with the possibilities of extraterrestrial intelligence, vis-a-vis the military’s preparedness for an alien invasion.
Obviously, I’d made an impression.
While I did not expect the General to have engineered a race of nuclear supermen, or that the earth was teetering at the precipice of an alien attack, the reference to Flash Gordon caught my attention.
With the neighboring desert still aglow with the nuclear fallout of the Manhattan Project, a myriad of interesting mutations could easily have appeared in the surrounding flora and fauna. My imagination leapt at the idea of, perhaps, a new, undiscovered species of fern. Or perhaps a two-headed goat.
My imagination could hardly conceive of what I was actually about to see.
The Jeep swung off the highway and onto a dirt track. Even in the dark, I was able to get a rudimentary hold of my bearings. We were somewhere beyond the edge of the airfield, at the extreme limit of 1728’s northern border. (Sasha: 1728 was the PO Box Number for the Los Alamos Facility in Santa Fe. Dark uses it throughout his book as a code name for the lab.) We were well out onto the mesa here, as far from the dormitory facilities as humanly possible. I was vaguely aware of a cluster of mechanical workshops below my plane as I had flown in to 1728, but I’d never thought to explore so far from the main laboratories, even if my access had allowed it.
Hurtling toward the perimeter’s razor wire fence, I could see a gate flanked by machine gun nests. Beyond, lights in the workshops flickered in the pitch black of the desert. I could easily have been on the dark side of the moon, for all the civilization I could see.
The Jeep skidded to a half in the brackish sand before the chain link gate. An MP with a Grease Gun looked over our identification papers. He gave my press pass a good, long look. The men behind the machine guns looked nervous, and their Brownings were pointing directly at us.
Presently, the MP seemed satisfied, and he waved our Jeep through the gate. The driver exercised no less caution driving within the compound than he’d shown on the public highway. Thirty seconds after clearing the front gate, Owen and myself were before a nondescript prefabricated workshop, with blacked-out windows. Two more MP’s with Grease Guns guarded its door. They looked cold in the desert night air. Cold or nervous.
“Did the General drag me out of bed this evening because he has Ming the Merciless locked up in a tool shed?” I quipped to Owen as I stepped down out of the Jeep. Owen didn’t even crack a smile as he knocked the dust of the desert off his uniform. “But if you have Superman, in there, locked up with kryptonite chains, I should warn you, I will inform Beetle Bailey.” When the Lieutenant fixed me with a po-faced stare, I started to worry about exactly what they did had locked up in the workshop.
“Now, Albert, I don’t need to remind you that what you see in there is of the utmost confidence,” Owen said, pointing at the door.
“I know,” I dismissed. “As always, I write nothing that isn’t approved by the censors.”
“No,” Owen corrected, gravely. “You don’t understand: Nothing you see here can even reach the censors, alright? This whole operation is strictly off the books.”
I raised an eyebrow. Now I was painfully curious about what they had inside. “You have my word,” I said, giving Owen the Cub Scout salute.
Owen nodded. “Good. Then come on.”
The workshop contained nothing by a blinding, white-hot light. At least, as I stepped through the door, that was all I could see. I blinked and covered my face, but the shift from dark desert to burning glare blistered my eyeballs. I could hear a voice speaking to me, but I couldn’t tear my attention away from the light to listen. As my eyes began to adjust, the voice began to resolve to the familiar, gruff monotone of General Groves.
“Dark, good that you could make it,” he barked. Every word that the General uttered sounded like an order, if it was or it wasn’t.
“What’s that light?” I asked, blinking at the swirling red blob before my eyes.
“You’ll see,” the General said, cryptically.
“Turn it off,” I asked, holding my hand before my face.
“Can’t. Too dangerous. You’ll see.”
I blinked, attempting to make the blob before my eyes resolve into the head of General Groves.
“It’s very late for games like this, General,” I said, turning from the light. My eyes were adjusting, I could make out the silhouettes of drill presses and lathes. A standard machine shop. I looked back and could just make out the source of the bright, scalding light. A brace of large, focused spotlights, like those used in motion picture production.
They sat at the four corners of a quadrangle, beaming down on an inert, raggedy figure, slumped in a wooden chair at the epicenter of the lamp’s heat. The man’s hands were chained behind him, and his head of wild, unkempt locks hung down, obscuring his face. The need for such brilliant illumination on such a wretched sight escaped me.
“What? Who?” I looked at the General in incomprehension. “What’s going on? Who is this man?”
The General signaled with his right hand and a lab-coated technician appeared out of the shadows and handed him a clipboard. As my eyes continued to compensate for the contrast of light and darkness, I could see more lab-coats skulking in the shadows. There seemed to be quite a few of them, actually, operating various devices, some of it very high technology for a simple machine shop.
The General looked at the clipboard and read, “Private First Class Michael Elton.” And he handed the clipboard back to the technician.
“I’m sorry? He’s one of ours?” I asked in confusion. My first instinct had been that the wretched man, shackled to the chair was some sort of POW.
“Perhaps,” the General growled. From his uniform he removed a pouch of tobacco and began to fill his cheek. “The dog tags check out. But the face doesn’t match the file.”
“And impostor then?” I took a step forward, looking closer at the man in the chair. The lights were so bright, and his condition was so wizened. His skin appeared to be literally cooking in the bright lights, small whiffs of smoke rising up off of his hunched shoulders. The lights were hot, but...
“I wouldn’t get any closer if I was you,” the General warned around his mouth full of chew. “The lights keep him docile, but don’t let it fool you, he’d still dangerous.”
“Danger
ous?” I scampered back. “Contagious?”
“Perhaps,” the General said, wearily. “We just don’t know. That’s why I called for you, Dark.”
“What? Why? I’m no doctor.”
“No,” General Groves pointed at the mess of dirty hair and flesh slumped in the chair. “And he doesn’t need one. He has no pulse.”
“Pulse?” I said in shock.
“Right.”
“No heartbeat?”
“Nope. None.”
“He’s dead.”
“Sure enough.”
“Then, how is he dangerous?”
“Dead, maybe. But nobody’s told him that.”
“What?” I asked the General in incomprehension. I moved a little closer to the hunched figure, sure there was nothing to fear from a dead body. I’d seen my share. I was at Dachau when the Allies liberated it. But as my shadow fell across the prisoner, he stirred in his chair, perhaps sensing my presence.
“He’s not dead!” I screamed, leaping back.
“I tell you, he’s got no pulse!” the General dismissed. “His skin is as cold as ice.”
“But...he’s still...alive?”
“And dangerous,” the General corrected. “Without these lights, he’d break those chains and kill us all.”
“That’s...that’s not possible.”
“Yet, here he is. My question to you, Dark,” the General stepped in the light, letting the burning white glare form a halo around his peaked cap. “Is what the hell is he?”
That Nietzsche Thing Page 17
