When he motored up to the X-shaped landing strip outside of Area 51, he could see evidence of construction. The shantytown of wooden houses which had once housed the lab’s staff had been torn down to make way for the construction of a giant sliding door, one that would allow the spaceship below to make a quick exit if the need ever presented itself. He drove the StealthWagon into the hangar and rode the new freight elevator down the six flights to the floor of the lab. Everything looked different. When he came into the long narrow hallway which had, for years, housed the chaos of the stacks, he found it freshly painted and brilliantly lit. A small work crew was busy organizing the files and entering their catalogue numbers on the lab’s new computer system. An elevated walkway had been installed down the center of the long room, which Okun planned to make a dust-free research area. As he walked farther along, he found a crew of hard hats excavating space for the new electrochemical research unit. He came to the huge concrete bunker that was home to the captured alien spaceship. The room was empty except for a giant crate seventy-by-seventy and twenty feet tall. Stenciled on the outside of this oversized wooden box were the words CHEMICAL EXPLOSIVES—NO SMOKING. He toured once around the box to make sure the ship within could not be seen. On his way out of the bunker, he noticed a doorway that hadn’t been there before and went inside. It was the new medical facility, complete with a glass-enclosed operating room. Although the workmanship was marvelous, something about the room gave him the creeps.
The door to the kitchen was locked. After pounding on it to make himself heard over the noise of the construction crew, the door was opened by a young man who stared at him in a slightly demented way. Dr. Isaacs, his first hire.
Even before he stepped inside the familiar room, he was getting an earful from Lenel. “What kind of boss are you, anyhow? Ever since you took over it’s been so darn noisy down here we can’t get any work done.” The old man was in a body cast that went from his underarms to his kneecaps.
“You look like a mummy in a swimsuit,” Okun opined.
While Freiling and Cibatutto stepped forward to welcome Brackish back, Lenel tried to sustain his grouchy demeanor. “If I do,” he snapped, “I’ve got you to thank for it.”
“That’s right,” Freiling came to Lenel’s aid. “We’ve heard all about how Dr. Lenel saved you from falling off that cliff.”
“Saved me?” Okun asked, flabbergasted. He turned to Lenel, who was shooting him a look that said don’t you dare tell. “Oh right, saved me.” He grinned. “By the way, Dr. Lenel, I haven’t had a chance to thank you for that.”
“All part of the job,” Lenel grumbled.
*
Owing to the presence of the construction crews, the staff was prevented from working on the ship for nearly three full months. During this time, they kept themselves busy with whatever small projects could be brought into their sleeping quarters or the kitchen. To everyone’s dismay, Issacs turned out to be a neat freak and was continually chiding his coworkers to keep the place organized. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” was the stock reply he received from the trio of senior citizens. But he kept after them, and slowly they began to see his point.
When the last new rooms had been finished and the last unauthorized personnel left the labs, the men descended on the alien spaceship like a pack of starved dogs. They were eager to apply all they had learned from the undamaged craft they’d found in Mexico. For six full months, they rewelded, rewired, rethought, and rebuilt every inch of the ship. After a series of preliminary tests they felt it was time to invite Spelman to Area 51for a demonstration.
He arrived on a cloudy morning in early July and brought some guests, all of them former members of the now-defunct Project Smudge: Jim “the Bishop” Ostrom, Jenkins, the new chief of Domestic Collections Department, whose men had found Okun sleeping in the desert, and Dr. Insolo from the Science and Technology Directorate. Okun recognized him from Sam’s funeral. After a quick lunch, the guests were invited into the concrete bunker to witness an experiment. They gathered on a newly built observation platform while the scientists readied their monitoring equipment. When everything was ready, Okun addressed his visitors.
“Several years ago, my predecessor, Dr. Wells, developed a technique of feeding high-voltage power into the ship’s energy system and found he could achieve low levels of performance from the instrumentation within. Partially because the design function which expels energy from this system was incomplete, excess or clogged power generated high temperature levels.” He was only at the beginning of his speech, but saw from the blank looks on the faces of his audience there was no point in continuing with the lecture. Instead, he simply said, “Watch this.”
He passed out pairs of prismatic goggles, then gave a signal to Freiling, who was standing on the operators platform of the energy cannon. The old man threw a switch, and the room filled with a shrill buzzing sound as the gun began bombarding the alien ship with power. A loud crack ripped through the vessel and bounced off the concrete walls. Lenel gave an OK sign from the output meter he was watching. Cibatutto directed the visitors’ attention to the mirror at the bottom of the ship, where they watched the swirling green cyclone being created by the aqua-box. And, through the special filters of the goggles, they were able to watch the energy being purged from the ship’s system. Instead of the spasmodic and undirected waves they had seen before, the energy was now channeled through the arms of the whirling ankh. Four pinpoint beams traveled around the walls of the bunker, searching for another ship to power.
A moment later, the wooden trestles holding the ship off the floor groaned as the weight bearing down on them began to ease. Slowly, like an ancient pterodactyl riding an updraft, the ship lifted into the air. The moment it did so, the scientists abandoned the monitors they were watching and threw their arms in the air, cheering.
“Holy guacamole!” Okun gasped. When a nod wasn’t enough to express his excitement, he began bouncing up and down, then turned and grabbed the first body he could find—it happened to be Spelman’s—and bounced around with the colonel wrapped in his arms. He leaped from the platform to the floor of the bunker, still bouncing. The ship had lifted two feet above the trestles. He gave Cibatutto five, then bounced over and kissed Lenel on the forehead before the old man could swat him away. When he came to Dr. Issacs, a little of the air went out of his tires.
As calm, cool, and collected as ever, Issacs indicated the heat gauge. “The temperature inside the ship is 160 and climbing,” he called out over the screech of the electro-cannon. “It’s time to shut down.”
Okun turned and waved the cutoff signal. But Freiling remained oblivious, hypnotized by the dark bird floating before him, until Okun ran up next to him, and yelled, “TURN IT OFF!” The old man flipped the kill switch, abruptly bringing the power level down to zero. The saucer crashed down onto the trestles, which cracked and teetered, but, fortunately, did not collapse.
“Gotta work on the landing,” Freiling observed, pulling off his goggles, “but I’ll be damned if we didn’t get her to fly.”
“We sure did, Daddy-o!”
“I only wish Sam could’ve seen this.”
Okun smiled sadly. “Me too.”
The scientists rejoined their visitors on the observation platform, then repaired immediately to the kitchen. According to the long-established rules of procedure at the top-secret facility, champagne was served.
*
Somewhere between the uncorking of the bottles and the departure of the visiting dignitaries late that afternoon, there was an important exchange of documents. Okun went first.
As Spelman had requested, he’d prepared a report detailing everything he knew about the aliens up to that point. It ran to over two hundred pages. At the end of it, he tried to answer the question of how great a threat the aliens posed to the world in general and the United States in particular. He found the question nearly impossible to answer. Despite all that had been learned about them, the most bas
ic question of all remained a mystery: What did they want? The possibilities ranged all the way from the hope they were beneficent beings bearing gifts to the fear they had come to invade the planet and take it away from us. Okun took both possibilities seriously. But his gut told him it was bad news, VDJ. They were dealing with an intelligent race with advanced technologies. Their ships were armed, they used other beings as armor, and they had offered no sign of friendship. If Wells had interpreted the vision of the alien planet correctly, they were also dealing with a catastrophic food shortage. Perhaps the encounters were few because they were only scout ships. On the other hand, they had made no sign of being hostile either. Never once had they demonstrated a clearly malicious intent to humans, with the possible exception of the Eau Claire case. They had ample opportunity to torture, maim, or kill any of the people they’d captured. Instead they had been released unharmed, and although many of these people came away from the experience traumatized, an equal number longed for it to happen again.
Then there was Okun’s own experience. He recalled how wildly terrified he’d been of being detected by the aliens outside the cave. But looking back on it, they must have known he was there all along. Instead of harming him, the Tall One had given him the ankh, allowing research to continue. It might even turn out they were shy tourists ferried through a time warp in the Van Allen belts for five-day vacations, observing earth from the safety and comfort of their flying fortresses—their version of visiting a safari park. Who knew? He concluded that it was too early for conclusions and called upon the military and intelligence branches of the government to aid in the recovery of more evidence. To this end, he proposed a handful of clever stratagems designed to lure the creatures into traps.
Spelman accepted the report with the promise that it would circulate through the highest levels of the government.
“Including the president?”
“Especially the president.”
Okun actually breathed a sigh of relief when he learned that soon this important information would be in the right hands. It was too heavy a responsibility for him to carry around, and he didn’t feel right about the CIA and the Army being the only ones to know about it.
“Now we’ve got something for you.”
Dr. Insolo snapped open the locks on an attaché case and pulled out some pieces of paper. “The only reservation any of us had about appointing you director concerned your educational qualifications. Something isn’t quite right when the leader of one of the nation’s top laboratories doesn’t hold a Ph.D. But given the restrictions on your travel, we knew you wouldn’t be able to attend classes. So, we took the liberty of transferring your credits from Caltech to the United States Naval Postgraduate School, where I’m a member of the faculty. Hope you don’t mind.” He held up what looked to Okun like a diploma and read what was printed on it. “Whereas the candidate. Brackish Okun, has exhibited full mastery of the body of knowledge and technologies associated with his field of study, and whereas he has made a unique and original contribution to this field, he is hereby awarded a doctorate of philosophy in Xenoaeronautics.”
Spelman was the first to extend his hand. “Congratulations, Doctor Okun.”
“How utterly cool,” Okun enthused, reading over the diploma. When he looked up he was surrounded by the smiling faces of his friends and guests. Without realizing it, they had all begun mirroring the minuscule cranial motion so characteristic of the labs director. The entire room was nodding.
*
“The end.” Nimziki smirked when he saw those words on the last page of Okun s report. “What does he think this is, a bedtime story?”
“Sometimes he’s a little weird.” Spelman chuckled.
“What did you think of it?” Nimziki asked, tossing the report onto his desk.
“It’s wordy, and parts of it don’t make much sense, but the ideas are strong. Overall, I’d say it’s a balanced presentation of the evidence. I’m anxious to hear what the president has to say about it.”
“Yeah, me too,” Nimziki said absently. He wasn’t any great fan of President Ford’s. When it had been time to appoint a new director of the CIA, Ford had ignored the unanimous recommendation of the intelligence community that Nimziki get the job. He had named one of his longtime political allies to the post instead.
“I especially liked his ideas about how to capture another ship.”
“Yeah, I’ll have to reread those. Smart.”
“And what about his ideas for slowly introducing the truth about the aliens to the public?”
“The stuff about saturating the media with alien stories before breaking the true story. Interesting. I’ll have to give it some more thought.” Spelman could see Nimziki was tired and distracted by other thoughts. That was understandable. It was almost eleven o’clock at night, and they’d both been at work since early that morning. “I think I’ll get out of here and let you go home.” Spelman walked to the door, then turned, and said, “Please let me know as soon as you get any reaction from the White House so I can pass it along to our team out at Groom Lake. I’m as anxious as they are. And, Al”— he waited for Nimziki to glance up—“we all did a hell of a good job on this one, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, we sure did, Bud. But listen, don’t expect an immediate response from the president. You know how they are over there. They want to preserve their plausible deniability option. But the moment I hear anything, on or off the record, I’ll let you know.”
When Spelman was gone, Nimziki thumbed through the report once more, then walked into the next room and fed it into a paper shredder. He turned out the lights and went home.
Independence Day: Silent Zone Page 21
