The Third Craft

by James Harris

  David Bohr got his TV.

  CHAPTER40

  Bohr and Grayer had been friendly before the transition, but they became almost inseparable afterwards. Each had something the other wanted.

  Grayer needed to assimilate into society as seamlessly as possible. Since Bohr knew his history, he carefully guided Grayer through potential awkward moments.

  For Bohr, the benefits were immense. He had the companionship of an alien who was slowly spoon-feeding him scientific advances. He and Grayer continually engaged in captivating discussions on quantum physics, galactic travel, anti-matter propulsion, and non-metallic electronic impulse transfer.

  Grayer became a regular household guest in the Bohr home. Bohr’s wife, Rose, was especially fond of him.

  “He’s such a charmer,” she once confided in her husband. “But his diet is so strange.”

  His diet of protein shakes and purified water annoyed Rose, who was a great cook. Grayer continually declined the most tempting dishes. Luckily, Bohr was there to finish his portions. His waistline increased in direct proportion to the length of their friendship.

  Rose’s neighbor, Helen Ruscoe, was a good neighbor and a good friend. In December 1962, Helen’s niece came from Canada to stay with her for a few weeks. Her name was Sara Vaughn. Sara was a pretty brunette with a small, slightly upturned nose. She had a somewhat pale complexion because she was averse to spending time in the sun. When she did overstay her welcome under the sun’s rays, which happened often during her time in New Mexico, her skin went a delightful blush color and her freckles flourished.

  One day, a week before Christmas, Bohr was struggling with the charcoal barbecue. The coals weren’t glowing hot enough, so he decided more starter fluid was needed. He squirted the fluid at the BBQ, which ignited with a roar. He panicked and leaped backward, knocking over a startled Grayer who happened to be watching in fascination.

  A line of flame traveled along the grass, straight toward the can of fluid that Bohr still held in his hand. Grayer knocked the can from Bohr’s grip and the two rolled away from the imminent explosion.

  It never happened. The can’s contents burned off quietly and fizzled out in a sullen plume of gray smoke. Bohr and Grayer were huddled together as if in a World War II foxhole waiting for a grenade to explode. They smiled foolishly, untangling themselves and getting to their feet. Both men looked around, hoping that no one had seen the incident. They smiled and nodded to each other. All clear.

  Just then, Grayer thought he heard a giggle. He whirled and looked over the next-door neighbor’s fence. A pretty girl had covered her mouth with her hand, trying to hold back a laugh. She had seen the whole thing. Bohr caught Grayer’s eye.

  “Frank, I’d like you to meet Sara. She’s staying with Helen over the holidays.”

  “Hi there. So you saw …”

  She laughed and nodded.

 

  “The two of you were quite a sight,” Sara said. “Handsome flyboy shields brilliant scientist.”

 

  “How did you know I was in …”

  “… the Air Force? I saw your shirt,” Sara said, referring to the light-blue T-shirt he wore with “USAF TEAM #1” emblazoned on the back.

  “Oh that. Fastball team, that’s all. But yeah, I’m from the base.”

  “Why not come over and have a beer and burger?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’d have to ask my aunt …”

  “Ask your aunt if she wants to join us for some burgers,” Bohr suggested. “I have plenty to go around. Flyboy here doesn’t eat meat.”

  Sara laughed. “That’s interesting. I like a guy that stands apart from the crowd. I’ll check inside. I’m sure my aunt would love to come over.”

  Grayer smiled, eyebrows raised as he watched Sara turn and go inside.

  Oh, he stands apart all right, Bohr said under his breath. You don’t know the half of it.

  CHAPTER41

  Grayer and Sara were married within a year. They bought a house at 52 Manhattan Loop, off Canyon Road. It wasn’t large, but it was in good shape. Their back patio faced Pueblo Canyon. It had an unobstructed view of the craggy orange canyon wall, the color of which changed depending on what time of day it was. Their home was half a mile from the threshold of Los Alamos Air Force Base Runway 09. It could be noisy sometimes, with the experimental jets taking off and landing.

  One dark night in 1964, he and Sara were returning home from a party in the north hills. Sara was nine months pregnant with twins. As they rounded a corner, one of their car’s front tires blew. Frank lost control and the car careened into the side of a rock face, then flew across the road and flipped over as it rolled down a steep embankment. There were no shoulder or seat belts back in those years. Sara was airborne in the cabin, and she died of a broken neck as her head was pressed against the roof of the car.

  Miraculously, the twins survived the crash and were born at the scene.

  The next few years were tough on Frank Grayer. Assimilation into society was difficult enough without the burden of raising twins by himself.

  Grayer soldiered on. Fortunately for him and the boys, the women in their life rallied around them. Sara’s sister, Dianna, stayed with Helen for several weeks, helping Grayer adjust to the newborns. They found a nanny and a housekeeper, who were paid for by the Air Force trust fund. Through that first winter, Dianna and Helen nurtured Grayer back to normal through the sheer force of their caring for him and for his tiny sons.

  He spent much of his time in D.C. and flew home every second weekend. Each time he visited with the twins, there was that initial pang of loss and emptiness. He missed Sara so much that he tried to distract himself by working on government files and, in his spare time, tirelessly search for evidence of the two other spacecraft. On the one hand, the boys were a source of pride and comfort, and yet on the other hand they were a constant reminder of the life he could have had with Sara. Grayer mercilessly chastised himself for not being more agile during the crash. If he had been quicker, he could have grabbed Sara and engulfed her into the safety of his aura. But he had been too slow.

  He considered moving the boys to Washington with him, but thought better of it after having consulted with the Bohrs and Helen next door. They were receiving plenty of love and attention in Los Alamos. Not only that, he was engaged in AIA field ops overseas. He was on temporary assignment away from Los Alamos, travelling extensively outside the country.

  Grayer had no evidence about the event that had precipitated his ship’s crash. All the digital flight logs, which were stored chemically, had been destroyed.

  The sarcophagus containing Kor’s body was also missing. Grayer recalled that the ship had been programmed to jettison the pod in the event of an unavoidable collision with another solid body large enough to cause fatal damage. The collision with Earth, of course, qualified. He deduced that his sarcophagus must have been jettisoned, and was probably orbiting Earth. He wondered if it might be recovered someday.

  The remaining crewmembers would have to exist in limbo until a method of transitioning them was developed. It could take centuries.

  Grayer reached the conclusion that, although they were in the early stages of evolution, the inhabitants of Earth were probably too advanced for transitioning. Earth was not a suitable candidate for Sargon’s evacuees. He was astounded to find that they were not dissimilar in their emotional maturity to the inhabitants of Sargon. The majority of people on this planet would balk at assimilation with his people. They would likely revolt against the uninvited intrusion. Luckily for Kor, Grayer had been an exception.

  Grayer studied the rudimentary star charts available from NASA. He determined that this planet might have been chosen as one of the five suitable destinations for the evacuees of Sargon. Something catastrophic had caused the ship to crash land. Given the stage of societal evolution on Earth, they
had not traveled far enough back toward the center of the universe, back in evolutionary time. The star systems close to the center were the youngest of all and the species inhabiting them would have had little time to evolve. The less evolved the inhabitants, the easier and more humane it would be to assimilate into their bodies.

  He wondered what had happened to the other two scout ships. Had they avoided the planet altogether? Had they landed successfully and were unable to make contact? His ship had a preset destination, was it Earth? Why had it crashed? The ship’s memory of the trip had been destroyed. Based on the navigational charts, however, he figured that he could not have traveled for more than three hundred years. That was heartening. Given the relative speeds of the spaceships, the galactic fleet would not be far behind. There were many questions and few answers.

  His base of operations was the Pentagon, south of downtown Washington, D.C. The Pentagon building was the size of a small country, but his office reminded him of a tiny pocket in a huge honeycomb. As AIA he was routinely copied on NSA chatter from incoming intelligence. With DoD approval, he asked for and got any intell regarding UFOs, extraterrestrial sightings, and civilian and military encounters with extraterrestrial aircraft. Grayer spent much of his free time studying these sightings, searching for clues that the other two ships had survived.

  His research uncovered many mysterious accounts of ET encounters. His familiarity with the spaceships led to him to the exciting conclusion that some of the sightings may have been from his fellow scouts. The majority of the sightings were bogus. As far as he was concerned, the possibility of other aliens and spacecraft arriving about the same time as his fleet of three ships was nil. They may have landed hundreds of centuries ago, but he refused to believe that they would land at the very same time as he. No, it was more likely that the few legitimate UFO sightings were from one or both of the two other scout ships that were missing. At least he liked to think so.

  But he also considered the possibility that the other two ships had gone on to the next target planet. His entertained the possibility that the crash landing of his ship had been an anomaly – that he was marooned here on Earth. The other ships might not have realized that his ship had crashed and had moved on. If that were the case, their space beacons would lead the galactic cruisers to another destination far away.

  One of the key missing links was the absence of any evidence of the Electronic Locator Transmitter built into each of the spacecraft. The ELT was a distress transmitter designed to enable rescuers to find a stricken ship. He knew the distress frequency but had not intercepted the signal. It was true that the transmitters had a limited range, but Grayer had never picked up any traces of these signals on his travels. He became more and more doubtful that Alpha II and III had landed on the planet. Grayer meticulously studied intell from around the world to see if he could spot any signs of the missing spacecraft. They would have likely transitioned and assimilated, as he had, into the existing human population. Grayer decided that he needed a starting point for his search: He chose the initial transitioning stages of the assimilation plan. The role of the ship’s Bot was to go out and search for suitable candidates after the ship had landed. There would undoubtedly have been reports of people disappearing and then reappearing. That’s where he would concentrate his investigation.

  If the other two scout ships had made it to Earth, he was obligated to find them. They would surely do the same, wouldn’t they? Wouldn’t they try to find other survivors? Grayer estimated that the three ships would have crash landed about 1949, if all three had made it to Earth. That was almost twenty years ago. How could he communicate with possible survivors? His ship was wrecked. Maybe theirs had been damaged too. He monitored the ELT distress frequency whenever he could use a portable transceiver. He kept the device with him whenever he travelled and continually listened for the ELT frequency but hadn’t picked up a signal. If the other two had landed safely, there would be no ELT signal. Maybe they had started lives of their own. It was twenty years ago, maybe they gave up trying to find the other surviving ships. Or maybe they were flying continuous reconnaissance, still trying to find the others. They couldn’t just put an ad in the paper: Lost alien seeks similar in age and looks.

  Grayer began with the FBI. He made the requisite contacts in Washington and received appropriate clearance. He perused case file after case file.

  He was looking for a very specific pattern. First, a brief disappearance followed by a sudden, unexplained reappearance. Second, the person involved showing a distinct change in personality – so much so that it was reported to the authorities or recorded or the individual was hospitalized. Grayer found no factual cases that fit the profile he was looking for.

  CHAPTER42

  Grayer was grateful to have Bohr as a friend, because he treated the boys as his own. He and Rose hadn’t been able to have children, but had always wanted to have a family. The Grayer twins seemed to fulfill their wish. The boys were always over at their house.

  Truth be known, there was also an underlying scientific reason for Bohrs’ interest in the boys. The science was too compelling to resist: They were humans from two gene pools, one from the present and one from the future. Bohr oftentimes had a twang of guilt about his scientific motivations for taking care of the twins. In his heart he knew they weren’t a science project, but his analytic side was constantly studying the boys for aberrant behavior.

  How would they process information?

  What would they look like?

  What mental powers would they possess?

  Would they be superhuman?

  The twins always referred to the Bohrs as “Doctor” and “Missus” out of respect for their elders. That’s how they were raised. But the Bohrs were sometimes an inadequate substitute for their real father. Joe, especially, was troubled by the continual absence of his father. He couldn’t understand how a job could be more important than watching him play little league baseball. His dad was his dad and he didn’t care how important Grayer was in Washington, he needed him home.

  Grayer wasn’t insensitive to this, and he struggled to overcame his guilt about Sara’s death and reluctance to see the boys. It wasn’t their fault they reminded him of Sara. He understood that he was using his workload as a crutch to avoid spending time with them. He began feeling guilty about avoiding them. He fought two devils at the same time: the guilt pain of loss, and the guilt pain of neglect. Grayer tried his best to spend time at home. These were his boys’ formative years, after all, and he had an important obligation to raise them properly. They had a right to a normal life. Soon it might be too late to bond with his children, no matter how much he might want to.

  As they matured, the twins began to develop distinguishing features and traits. Most striking was their eyes. They both had large eyes with black irises framed by long, stark black eyelashes. Harry’s eyes were so piercing that, at age five, he earned the nickname “Hawk.” Joe named him after seeing a close-up picture of a swooping hawk hunting for prey. Adults were always a little unnerved when they had to talk to or deal with the boys. Their calm yet piercing stares were unsettling, to say the least. It was as if the boys could read minds.

  The twins were always polite and respectful. They grew up just like any other American youngsters living in a small town. They attended Mountain View Elementary School on Central Avenue, not far from their home. The school was also only minutes from the Bohrs’ house on Oppenheimer Drive, so the boys got into the routine of going directly from school to Rose’s house for their daily ration of juice and cookies (they were intolerant to milk and did not eat meat products).

  To Bohr’s astonishment and dismay, it appeared that the twins were not exceptional students. It would be several years before they seemed to catch fire academically.

  Bohr knew they were intelligent well beyond their years. He had tested them, as inconspicuously as possible (with Grayer’s full cooperation), at the AFB lab and in his home environment. They had scored o
ff the chart in almost every area. But in school, they seemed to be satisfied to remain in the middle of the pack. It was as if they understood the importance of peer-group acceptance and figured that scoring high on irrelevant assignments and tedious tests at school wasn’t worth it if it meant alienating their peers.

  Joe and Harry would always be seen together. They were best friends. They were paternal twins, not physically identical, but nonetheless strikingly similar in appearance.

  Joe was shy with girls but excelled at sports. He would rather play sports than do anything else. Joe would finish his homework assignments with blinding speed in order to free up time to play outside with his friends.

  Joe had uncanny reaction times when it came to motor skills. It was as if the rest of the world was operating in slow motion. He could pick a ball out of the air that was going so fast others didn’t see it. In baseball, he played second base. Whenever a ball was hit, he plucked it out of the air as casually as if he were picking an apple. As everyone knows, ground balls have an unpredictable trajectory because of uneven surfaces. Joe could predict where the ball would be, scoop it up with his glove, and rifle the ball to first base before the runner was halfway down the base line.

  Joe was a great hitter, too. He could line up the ball in his sights immediately as it left the pitcher’s hand, and follow its trajectory with ease. He made it look easy – as if the ball was spinning toward him in slow motion – and then he would belt it home. Joe was on a different clock than the rest of the boys. They had to live with sixty seconds in a minute, while he appeared to have the luxury of ninety.

  While Joe excelled in sports that required hand-eye coordination, he was only average at ones that required physical stamina. He was slow at track and field. He didn’t make the football team. He didn’t try out for wrestling.