The New World

by Toby Neighbors

  “It seems almost silly to think only of our nation now,” a tall man with thick glasses said. “I mean, it’s almost certain that the spheres were extraterrestrial.”

  “You don’t know that,” a woman in a cheap business suit said. “There are a lot of explanations more plausible than little green men.”

  “Well,” said Daniel, glad for the distraction. “Why don’t we share some of those theories as to what those spheres were and who sent them?”

  “I vote for the religious nutcases in the Middle East,” said a very fat man with a drooping mustache. “They finally figured out how to send us all to hell.”

  “I think it was our own fault,” said another man, this one in a plain, white t-shirt and blue jeans. “Did you ever read those old novels about the government secretly designing chemical and biological weapons? We probably just created the perfect weapon and someone accidentally pulled the trigger.”

  “Or maybe it wasn’t an accident,” a man in the back of the van said.

  “That’s a lot of B.S.” said the business suit woman.

  “What about the spheres?” said Jason from the front seat. “I don’t know about any secret labs, and I sure as hell never saw a vehicle the United States government created that could travel like that.”

  “On television is looked almost fake,” said the mustached man. “It could have been a cover-up to make people believe that the plague wasn’t our own fault.”

  “I thought you said the religious zealots did it,” said the man in blue jeans.

  “I’m just saying it didn’t look real on TV,” the mustached man said. “You have to admit it kept everyone from focusing on where else the plague might have come from.”

  “I saw the spheres,” Daniel said. “I was here in D.C. and I was at the Ellipse. I saw the sphere and it wasn’t a hoax. Whatever it was and wherever it came from, it was real.”

  “So what’s your theory?” asked the man in thick glasses.

  “I don’t have any answers,” Daniel said. “Only questions. Could the spheres have been manmade? I guess so. Although I’ve never heard of that kind of technology; I mean, there was no visible indication it was a machine at all.”

  “That’s what I meant,” said the mustached man. “It didn’t look real.”

  “It is just as plausible that an alien intelligence could have sent them,” Daniel continued. “But that raises the ‘why’ question. What would make another race send death probes to Earth?”

  “For our resources,” said the man in glasses. “They either wanted the earth’s resources for themselves, or more likely they saw that we were destroying the planet and felt obligated to step in.”

  “I don’t like the idea of that,” said the mustached man. “I’d rather have religious crazies than an intergalactic big brother who felt that extermination was a reasonable response to mankind’s problems.”

  “Either way,” Daniel said, trying to reel in the mustached man’s negative point of view, “it seems to me that they didn’t mean to wipe us out. It took the plague several days to bring people down and an advanced bio-weapon would probably have worked much faster.”

  “He’s got a point,” Jason said. “You wouldn’t want a lethal bug that didn’t show immediate symptoms. It would be too hard to contain if a person could be infected but not know it.”

  “It could have been just a foreign antibody that the aliens were totally unaware of,” the man in blue jeans said.

  “You think a virus from another planet could survive in space?” the business woman said.

  “It could have been contained in the spheres and then out gassed, or it escaped while the probes took air samples or something.”

  “Why would a vastly more intelligent species not be more careful to ensure that there was no spread of disease?” said the mustached man. “I mean, come on, I’ve seen War of the Worlds on television, but that doesn’t mean I buy it.”

  “You take for granted that an alien species has had our battle with germs,” said the man in blue jeans. “It’s entirely possible that on another world the microbial organisms were entirely beneficial and therefore quarantine procedures would be totally foreign to them. In fact, a more thoroughly evolved ecosystem would almost certainly be less hostile than ours. I mean, we’ve evolved despite the most basic organisms on our planet; how that happened is one of the fundamental questions of mankind.”

  “More fundamental than the existence of God?” asked Jason.

  Daniel wasn’t sure if his friend was stating his own opinion or just stirring the pot, but the van erupted into a cacophony of voices.

  “See, see, I told you,” cried the mustached man. “We can’t escape the religionists!”

  “Oh, good grief,” said the man in the back. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I couldn’t disagree more,” said the man in glasses.

  Daniel held up his hands. “Hang on, we aren’t here to try and prove our theories. The president’s journal said he believed that the generals at the Pentagon knew more than they were willing to share. That’s what we want to know, not whether God exists, or if J.F.K. was really assassinated by the C.I.A. I really need you to put your heads together and see if we can’t find some answers, and we won’t get very far if we’re rehashing old grudges and butting heads over philosophy. Can we at least agree to try and get along?”

  The passengers all nodded, although the mustached man looked thoroughly disappointed. Jason had made good time weaving through traffic that was abandoned, but rather light. It seemed that in the last days of the plague, not too many people were headed to the Pentagon. When they saw the famous facility rising up before them, most of the passengers were shocked, including Daniel. The Pentagon was the size of a small city.

  “This little project is going to take a while,” Jason said, smiling merrily.

  Chapter 18

  The parking lots surrounding the Pentagon were packed. It looked like a shopping mall at Christmas time. Jason bypassed the rows of parked cars and pulled the van right up the curb and shut off the engine. The group from the White House threw back the door and climbed out from between the vinyl seats.

  “Wow, this is not what I expected,” said the man with thick glasses.

  “Do you think the military personnel are still in there?” asked the woman in the business suit.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” Daniel said.

  They walked up the concrete steps and approached a doorway. Slumped against the tinted glass door was a soldier in military fatigues. Jason bent down and checked for a pulse. The soldier was dead, but, fortunately for the group, his keycard opened the doors.

  “Better hang on to that,” Daniel said as he held open the door for the rest of the group. “We might need it to open other doors.”

  When Daniel walked in it took his eyes a minute to adjust to the low lighting. They were in a large common area with an information booth rising up in the middle of the empty room, much like a volcano rising from the sea. They made their way to the booth and retrieved a brochure that listed the various offices in the outer rings of the Pentagon.

  “Should we split up?” asked the man in blue jeans.

  “That’s why we brought the walkie-talkies,” Daniel said, holding his up. “Is everyone’s turned on and tuned to channel 18?” The group checked their radios and nodded. “Alright, well, odds are that the doors to the offices will be locked, so let’s stay together until we get to a place to start searching.”

  “I’m not sure I’m comfortable being left alone in this place,” said the woman in the business suit.

  “I’ll stay with you,” said the mustached man.

  Daniel was astonished to see gratitude in the woman’s eyes. As they walked down the corridor, their shoes squeaked and clicked on the polished concrete flooring. When they finally came to an office that was marked official records, Daniel tried the door and found it locked again. Jason zipped his card through the lock and it popped open.


  “Success again,” Daniel said, but his heart nearly skipped a beat when he looked into the room. Slumped in chairs and stretched out on the floor were bodies. This was a civilian run office, and the people were all wearing their professional, yet casual, khaki pants and button down shirts. The women seemed to have huddled together and died near one another. The men were spread out, and most of them had died over the work they had been doing.

  “Oh my God,” said the woman in the business suit.

  “Looks like they died at their posts,” Jason said.

  “What did we expect, really?” Daniel said. “From the looks of the parking lot, everyone was called in when the spheres appeared.”

  “They were loyal, weren’t they?” said the man in blue jeans.

  “Or maybe they just didn’t have anyone to go to,” said the man in thick glasses.

  “That’s terrible,” said the man with the mustache, and the woman smiled at him.

  “Well, who wants to start in here?” Daniel asked.

  “I’ll do it,” said the mustached man. “Looks like there’s plenty to go through, and I don’t think I want to go much deeper into this place.”

  “Me, either,” said the woman in the business suit. She had moved up beside the man with the mustache. They made a very odd looking pair. The man was overweight, his clothes not quite the right fit. The woman was made up like a teenager on prom night, her hair was done, nails painted, eyelashes curled; she even wore perfume and jewelry. Her clothes were simple, even understated. His clothes were random, as if picking out a matching shirt and pants was too much of a challenge, so he had grabbed things off the first rack he came to. She wasn’t thin, but not fat, either, just thick through the middle, as often happens to people in their middle age. Her hair was dark, with just a touch of gray at the roots. His hair was bushy on the sides and thin in the middle. And for just a moment, Daniel envied them. He thought of Lana and his heart ached. He wondered where she was and if she was waiting on him to find her.

  He pushed those thoughts away and focused on the task at hand.

  “Aright,” he said, “you two stay here and get started. The rest of us will push on.”

  Before they left, Jason gathered up some more I.D. badges, “Maybe these will get us where we need to go,” he said, holding them up.

  Back out in the corridor, the three remaining men all took badges from Jason and headed off to search other offices. Jason and Daniel had decided to stick together, and when they came to a main artery between the concentric rings of buildings with a stairway that led both up and down, they had to make a decision.

  “Where should we go?” Daniel asked.

  “I don’t know, I always thought that the bigwigs were in the center of this thing.”

  “You think they’d be on the main floor here?” Daniel asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably not. You think they’re upstairs or down?”

  “Up, I guess. I’ve always figured the higher you are in the organization, the higher your office in the building.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  They took the stairs and went all the way up to the fifth floor. There was another dead security officer slumped across the doorway. Daniel felt a sick queasiness as he shoved the door, and subsequently the dead man, to get into the main corridor. They looked up and down the hallway and decided to go to their left. The names on the doors all said general and colonel above the names. They tried to open the first door they came to, but the security guard’s badge wouldn’t unlock the door.

  “Well, it’s like we figured,” said Daniel. “You want to see if we can find another badge or maybe an open door?”

  “Might as well,” Jason agreed.

  They set off, checking every door they came to. In some of the offices there were windows in the door. As they peered through, they could see the sunlight filtering through the blinds in the office windows. They could also see the men and women lying slumped in their offices or stretched on sofas. They had been walking and checking doors for over an hour with no luck when at last a door swung open.

  “The badge didn’t unlock this door,” Jason said.

  Daniel looked at the soldier and then at the doorframe. Silver duct tape was covering the lock housing.

  “I guess someone wanted us to get in,” Daniel said.

  Inside the office, the windows were covered with thick, metal blinds, but the overhead lights were on. There were dark green filing cabinets all around the room and in the center was an old, metal desk. In a large, leather office chair was the corpse of a high ranking general. Daniel couldn’t tell how high, only that there were enough ribbons and metals to decorate a school trophy cabinet. There was an envelope clutched in the officer’s hand; it stood tall and bright against the dark green of the man’s dress uniform. Daniel stepped forward and pulled it from the man’s death grip.

  On the outside of the envelope, in what appeared to be a third grader’s handwriting, was printed, “Please Read.” Daniel looked at Jason, who was waiting for him to open the envelope, and shrugged his shoulders. He tore the letter open and pulled out a poorly folded piece of stationary. There was more of the same sloppy handwriting on the paper.

  “My name is General Stephen Teddy Mainheim, III. I’ve been in charge of Operation Chimera for fourteen years. In the file on my desk is the absolute truth of what we did and what we knew. This was not our fault.”

  The signature at the bottom of the page was a scrawl that Daniel couldn’t make out, except for the three Roman numeral I’s at the end. He looked up at Jason, who had read the letter over Daniel’s shoulder.

  “You ever hear of an Operation Chimera?” Daniel asked.

  “Nope.”

  Daniel looked on the desk and found a file folder filled with papers. They opened it and began to read page after page of outrageous documents. According to the file, Operation Chimera was started in 1934 when the idea of extraterrestrial life took hold in the high ranks of the Department of Defense. The theory was that if aliens made contact with Earth, there would need to be a way to contain the news. After the panic during Orson Welles’s radio broad cast of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, money began being secretly budgeted for the unofficial military operation. During World War II, the project was put on hold, but as the fifties boomed, the project was reopened and a new strategy devised.

  General Hooper Caldwell, Chimera’s chief officer at the time, instituted a scheme to discredit the idea of alien contact. Everything from cattle mutilation, to the Roswell incident, to crop circles was carried out under the guise of national security. According to the files, various ideas were instituted, such as aircraft with variable lighting to give the illusion of unfamiliar shapes and terrific speeds. There was even a short period in the seventies when human abduction was studied, with military personnel actually abducting individuals and studying the stress levels experienced when the subject actually thought they had been in contact with alien life. The follow-up studies allowed the project to create a model of actual post-abduction behavior upon which to compare the behavior of people who claimed to have been abducted. The overarching conclusion was that all claims of alien contact or sightings were either fraudulent or the work of Operation Chimera.

  Daniel closed the file and looked at Jason. “Do you believe any of this?”

  “Don’t know,” said the soldier, his face a mask that gave away no clue as to how the man was feeling. “I wouldn’t put it past the Pentagon to put something like this together, but it’s a big pill to swallow.”

  “I agree, but at least we have a place to focus our search.”

  “My only reservation is that this might be a ploy to keep us from the real information.”

  “Yeah, that thought crossed my mind, too. I wonder if the head honchos here would have destroyed the actual documents.”

  “I think they would have had time, but I doubt they would have wanted to do that. It is definitely against military protocol to destroy records.�
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  “Okay, let’s go see what the others found and then call it a day.”

  After gathering the other groups, they left the Pentagon. The van ride back through the abandoned city was a flurry of excited and opinionated conversations. Nothing else that related to the spheres or the plague had been uncovered, but many things had been learned, some of them controversial, but almost all were irrelevant now. When they reached the White House and climbed from the van, Scott ran out to meet them.

  “We’ve had two new groups arrive,” Scott said excitedly, “neither was very large. The first group refused to give up their weapons and is waiting to see you. They’ve camped out on the back lawn. The other group is up in the East Room, I didn’t want to move them into the bunker without your okay.”

  Daniel sighed, then turned to the group of researchers he had spent the afternoon with.

  “If you guys could take a few moments and jot a brief report of what you found, that would be extremely helpful. You can leave those reports with me or Scott, or even just in the Oval Office.”

  The group nodded and moved away.

  “You want me to go with you to meet the people with guns?” Jason asked, grinning.

  “Yes,” Daniel said as they began to walk through the White House toward the North Portico.

  “You know this is the front entrance, right?” Jason asked in a joking voice.

  “Not anymore,” Daniel said with mock sternness. “Okay, what have you got on the people upstairs?”