Independence Day: Silent Zone

by Stephen Molstad

  Bridget had never felt so insulted in her entire life. She jammed the BB into her pocket, got on her bike, and rode away. When she got home and examined it under brighter light, she noticed that the object was covered with tiny bristles. Even with the help of a magnifying glass, these spiky projections were difficult to see. But she could feel them when she squeezed the object hard. The bristles felt like electricity under her fingertips.

  *

  News traveled fast. By the time she got to school the next morning, all the kids had heard there had been a UFO sighting the night before. Bridget made sure everyone in the school knew of the central role she had played in the drama. She stuck to the facts for the most part, but couldn’t resist adding a few small wrinkles of her own. During the nutrition break, she told her classmates how she had driven the spaceship away by pulling the gun front the unconscious officer’s holster and using some choice language to scare “the Martians” off. By lunch, she had made eye contact with one of the blobbish creatures through the spacecraft’s windows and flipped him the bird. By the end of the day, no one believed a word. Just before the bell rang, Bridget raised her hand and asked whether there could be show-and-tell the next day. She promised to bring in the “Martian BB” she’d found. Her classmates jeered their disbelief, but Ms. Sandoval, her favorite teacher of all time, said it was a good idea.

  *

  The next morning Bridget smelled another trap. A black-and-white was parked in front of the school next to another, suspiciously official-looking car. A policeman and a man in a dark suit were standing outside of her room talking to Ms. Sandoval. When she walked up, she knew from their smiles that they were not to be trusted. The man in the suit asked her about the BB. She admitted that she had it, and offered to let them see it, on one condition. She made both men promise they wouldn’t take it away from her, that they wouldn’t even touch it. The men agreed. Bridget opened up her lunch bag and started rummaging through it. Suddenly the policeman snatched the bag out of her hands. “Here, lemme help you look for it.”

  “You big liars!” she screamed in anger. “Taking advantage of a little kid! You’re disgusting!” When the cop had emptied the sack out completely and determined there was nothing unusual inside, the men turned once more toward the girl. The chubby sixth-grader was smirking like a jack-o’-lantem, holding the BB between her fingers. “Ha-ha, I fooled you.” Before either man could get to her, she popped the fuzzy little pill into her mouth and swallowed it.

  *

  She was rushed to Merciful Redeemer Hospital and admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. After vomiting several times, she’d gone into a sustained fit of dry heaves. Covered with sweat and moaning between gagging spells, she was like an overweight kitten trying to pass a large hair ball. In addition to her nausea, she complained of dizziness and a ringing in her ears. The doctors took X-rays but could find no sign of the foreign object. A toxicologist ran several blood tests but could find no poison. None of the experts could find anything physically wrong with her. Her mysterious illness became more mysterious still when it suddenly disappeared without a trace moments before her parents arrived. When her mother and father accused her of making the whole thing up, the man in the dark suit who’d driven her to the hospital stepped forward.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Jones, my name is Bradley Kepnik. I’m with the Central Intelligence Agency.” He flashed them his credentials. “I was there when the girl swallowed the object, and I’m positive she’s not making this up. Could I have a word with the two of you in private?”

  *

  Bridget spent that night at home in her own bed. Agent Kepnik was there with her, sleeping on a cot in the hallway. He’d installed a lock on the outside of the bathroom door, which only he could open. They were going to wait this thing out. In the morning, the girl defecated into a shallow plastic tub which it was Kepnik’s job to search. To her delight, Bridget learned she wouldn’t be going to school for the next day or two. She spent the day raiding the icebox and watching soap operas. About three o’clock, under the watchful eye of her chaperone, she went outside to play handball against the garage door in the driveway. Despite her many invitations, Kepnik declined to join her, claiming old football injuries. Bridget stopped playing when a large passenger plane flew overhead. She watched it intently for a minute.

  “What’s the matter?” the fed asked.

  “The guy who’s driving that plane is named Cassella. He’s the pilot. The copilot is named… I can’t read it, Tenashi, Tanashawsee, something like that. They’re eating potato chips. And there’s another guy sitting behind them with head-phones on.”

  “I see,” Kepnik said smoothly. By now he knew all about the girl’s mythomania. “And what’s his name?”

  “I don’t know,” she hissed back at him, annoyed. She knew when she was being treated as a child. “He doesn’t have a jacket on, so there’s no name tag. If you don’t believe me call the airport. The company’s name is Hartford Air. It’s written on the backs of the seats.”

  Kepnik was beginning to get interested. By now the plane was nearly out of view. “Where’s the plane going to land? And where’s it coming from?”

  “Well of course it’s going to land in Cleveland, the airport’s right over that way. But where are they coming from?” She closed her eyes and concentrated as if she were hunting around the cockpit. “Denver. And they took off at 11:45. This is neato. I can see inside the plane. Let’s call the airport and find out if I’m right.”

  Kepnik phoned the Hartford Air arrivals desk and discovered there was indeed an 11:45 from Denver. He confirmed that the pilot’s name was Mark Cassella and the copilot was Peter Tanashian. He didn’t ask about the potato chips.

  *

  Accompanied by her mother and Agent Kepnik, Bridget was flown to Arlington, Virginia, and taken to the offices of Project Aquarius. Aquarius, its critics said, was proof that the Army had too much money and free time on its hands. It brought together psychics, astrologers, mediums, and other practitioners of the paranormal arts and tried to channel their talents toward military goals. Twelve-year-old Bridget was what the people in the office complex referred to as an RV. This was not a reference to her weight. RV stood for Remote Visualizer, and the Army had six people with this special talent under full-time contract.

  The first step was to test her powers. She was introduced to one of the project’s researchers, a forty-year-old woman with huge blue eyes, Dr. Joan Sachville-West, who did everything she could to put the girl at ease.

  “We’re going to try a simple experiment with these cards,” she explained. “They’re called Zener cards, and each one has a design on it. There are five different designs,” she said, showing the icons to the girl, “and I would like for you to concentrate and try to guess which design is on the back of the card I hold up. Simple?”

  “Wavy lines!” the girl shouted the second Sachville-West lifted the first card off the deck.

  “Very good. You’re right.”

  “Star.”

  “Right again.”

  “Circle.”

  “Excellent.”

  When Bridget had gone fifteen for fifteen, the woman took her hands away and asked what the next card was.

  “I can’t see it until you pick it up.”

  “Guess.”

  “That’s not how it works,” she whined. “I have to be able to see it.”

  “Give it a try. Just for fun.”

  Unhappily, Bridget guessed. “Another wavy lines card?”

  Sachville-West turned it over: star.

  “See! I told you!” Angry that the researcher’s insistence had ruined her perfect streak, she retaliated by telling everyone what color underwear the scientist was wearing.

  The woman only crossed her legs under the table and smiled. “You’ve got quite a gift.”

  *

  The rest of the afternoon was devoted to giving the girl a crash course in geography. When her attention waned, and she refused to cooperate, h
er mother came to the rescue by opening her purse and pulling out a bag of candy bars. “My emergency kit,” she explained with an embarrassed smile.

  When Bridget had mastered the names of the seven continents and several bodies of water, the real work of Project Aquarius began. She was shown an aerial photograph of a Soviet Wolf-class submarine.

  “Young lady,” a man in an Army uniform began, “there are two submarines like this one in the water right now. Let’s see if you can tell me where they are.” The USSR had a total of four of these nuclear-powered subs. Two of them were in dry dock at that moment for repairs. One had been picked up on radar overnight off the Oregon coast and one was unaccounted for.

  Bridget, working over a wad of chocolate, studied the globe sitting on the desk beside her. This whole thing was starting to bore her. She plunked one finger down in the Pacific Ocean near the Oregon coastline, then pointed to the waters off Cuba’s southern shore. “Cienfuegos,” she read the tiny print on the globe through a buildup of chocolate saliva.

  “That’s amazing,” said the man in the uniform.

  “Don’t speak with your mouth full,” said her mother.

  *

  For the next six days, Bridget Jones was the most powerful weapon in the United States military’s arsenal. She located and described dozens of enemy positions around the world, many of them previously unknown. The girl loved being the center of attention, and she worked for peanuts—literally. Because of her penchant for prevaricating, each morning began with a series of new test questions. The researchers would ask her to remote-visualize locations they knew she had never visited, such as the Statue of Liberty, then ask her to count the windows in the observation deck. On the morning of her seventh day in Arlington, when asked about the leaning tower of Pisa, she answered that it was three stories tall. When asked what color socks the interviewer was wearing, she tried to sneak a look under the table. The experiment with the Zener cards was repeated. Her score was five out of twenty-five, the statistical average. Although she protested, it appeared that she had lost her powers. This seemed to be confirmed when Agent Kepnik came into the room holding a clear plastic evidence bag. A search of the young lady’s morning stool had turned up a small metallic object.

  Confronted with this evidence, Bridget told the truth. Her powers had deserted her. The BB, she said, looked different than it had when she swallowed it: it was half the size and was now completely bald, the fuzz of small bristles having apparently been eaten away by her digestive fluids. “So what happens to me now?”

  There was a period of waiting while the proper officials reviewed the case. Eventually, they decided to follow a little-known government protocol, MJ— 1949-04W/82. The family was relocated to an undisclosed location in France, where they were housed in a luxury villa owned by friends of the U.S. government and guaranteed an income of approximately $100,000 per year in exchange for their cooperation in keeping the matter silent.

  Unfortunately, six months after moving to France, just as she was learning the language, Bridget and her family were killed when their car collided with a truck owned by the French postal authority.

  *

  Until he came to the ending, Okun found the story amusing. Remembering Dr. Lenel’s warning, he wondered how much of it was true. But more interesting to him than the story of the girl were the handwritten notes jotted in the margins of the report. They seemed to have been written at great speed and most of them were absolutely illegible. Only two were carefully printed, and both of them startled the young researcher. The first one read: “obj housed at AF Acad Colo Sprgs, evid #PE—8323-MJ—1949-acc21,21a.” Evidence number? Okun wondered if there really were, somewhere in a warehouse at the Air Force Academy, a small plastic bag holding a metallic pea recovered from the excrement of a bratty twelve-year-old.

  The other piece of noteworthy marginalia was a doodled picture. On the last page of the report, someone had drawn a three-dimensional figure of the letter Y.

  6

  Roswell

  Every time Okun had tried to discuss the mysterious and troubling image of the Y, the scientists—normally so talkative, so eager to kick around ideas—would merely shrug their shoulders, agree it was very interesting, then go on to say they had no idea what to do with the information. After that, they changed the subject as quickly as possible. Up to that point, Okun had let them get away with it. But now that he’d seen the same image penciled into the margin of the Bridget Jones report, he was ready for a confrontation. His intuition told him the old men were hiding something, and he was determined to find out what it was.

  The next morning, he came into the kitchen and found Freiling counting money. Vegas had been kind to them once more, this time to the tune of $675. Dworkin was studying a copy of the Los Angeles Times he’d picked up in town.

  “Ahem.” The young man cleared his throat. “Where’s Radecker?”

  “Working on his tennis game, I suspect. He didn’t come back last night.”

  “Then we can talk.”

  Dworkin peered over the top of his newspaper. “Talk?”

  “You guys are holding out on me. There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  Dworkin feigned indignation. He began to rattle on about the ethics men of ideas must adhere to, but Okun cut him short by tossing the Jones report onto the table. “What’s this?” Dworkin asked.

  “Something I found in the stacks. It’s about a girl who swallowed an object she found in the grass after a close encounter with a UFO.” Dworkin thumbed through the pages. He seemed more interested in the handwritten notes than in the report itself. Noticing this, Okun asked if he recognized the handwriting. After a moment of beard-stroking indecision, the old man admitted that he did.

  “This seems to be the chaotic penmanship of our dear friend Dr. Wells. Have 1 told you the interesting story of how he came to be named Director of Research for this project?”

  Okun wasn’t going to let himself be sidetracked again. “Check the last page.”

  Sensing he would find something unpleasant there, Dworkin reluctantly obliged. The sight of the block-perspective sketch of the Y seemed to startle him slightly. His mind scrambled to find a cover story. If only his long-haired coinvestigator had confronted him with this evidence during a poker game! In that situation, Dworkin was a different man, capable of saying whatever the situation required. He would have been able to make something up on the spot. But in matters of work, he was accustomed to always speaking the truth. He crumpled toward the tabletop like a house of cards under Okun’s stern glare.

  “Brickman, some stones are better left unturned,” Freiling broke in. “None of us knows anything about that darn Y message.”

  But it was too late to back out now, and Dworkin knew it. He braced himself with a sip of tea, then explained. “Dr. Wells had a long obsession with this form, this shape. He claimed it was communicated to him by the alien shortly after the crash at Roswell. Like you, he said there was a feeling of urgent desperation associated with the transmission of the image. I believe you used the words ‘doom’ and ‘abandoned’ to describe it. In his last years he became more and more obsessed with deciphering the meaning of the symbol, until it got to the point of blocking out other thoughts. It drove him to insanity. As this mania progressed, he neglected more and more of his duties as director. We were able to mask the situation for several months, hoping he would make a recovery, but then he was called away to meetings in Washington. Apparently he behaved himself quite poorly and was not allowed to return to Area 51.”

  “Poor dude.”

  “Yes, indeed. The disintegration of his personality was a difficult thing to watch.”

  “Let’s be honest,” Freiling said. “The man was loopy to begin with. Slightly off-kilter.”

  “So what did he figure out about the Y?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Okun asked, suspicious again. “He must have made some progress on it if he worked for years. Didn’
t he even have a theory?”

  With a worried look on his face, the old man Finally came completely clean. “Wells suspected a second ship. He believed that the Y was a signal, the alien equivalent of our SOS. There! Now you know.”

  Okun nodded with satisfaction. Once more, his gut instincts had proved to be correct—or, at least, he wasn’t completely alone in having them. Someone else had arrived independently at the same conclusion, even if that someone was a mental case. There had to be a second ship.

  “But Mr. Okun, I must ask you in the strongest possible terms to keep this information secret, especially from Mr. Radecker. As unsavory as this might sound, I promised him I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “We all did,” Freiling added. “If we didn’t, he threatened to tell his bosses about the extra paychecks we’ve been collecting. Next thing you know, we’d all be doing twenty years at Leavenworth.”

  Without endorsing that last comment, Dworkin admitted, “Mr. Radecker has found our soft spot. None of us wants to leave Area 51 at this late date. I hope you can understand that.”

  Again, Okun’s head bobbed up and down. He knew how scared the old men were and realized he’d never be able to betray them. Still, thinking ahead to his next encounter with Radecker, he could feel the urge to lay the whole matter on the table. “Why doesn’t Radecker want me to know about the stupid Y?”

  “We made a deal with him. We’re not to give you any information which might support your theory of a second ship. In fact, we’re supposed to try and talk you out of it.”

  “But why?”

  Freiling and Dworkin shrugged their shoulders simultaneously. “That’s all the man wanted, so we agreed.”

  “It’s especially curious,” Dworkin added, “when you consider that there really isn’t much evidence to support such a theory. It’s rather far-fetched in light of the accumulated evidence.”