by Ira Tabankin
“At least your call most likely came from the Pentagon, mine came from the President who wasn’t a happy man.”
“I don’t doubt it. With all this Watergate BS floating around, did you expect him to be happy? What does he want you to do? I know he wants to borrow our friend’s ship so he can come down off of Mount Sinai and end the war.”
“He wants me and our friend to go to Moscow to get the Soviets to call off their friends.”
“Good luck with that. Better you than me.”
In the end, all it took was the threat of another couple of earthquakes and the destruction of their space launching center to convince the Soviets to ask the Egyptians to back off, by which time it was too late as the Israelis were already crossing the Red Sea. The Soviets asked me to have President Nixon call off the Israelis before both major powers entered the war against each other. Cooler heads prevailed, and the war ended in six days. Both the Soviets and we were preparing to enter the war against each other, and both were preparing their nuclear arsenals. The world knew of the Six-Day War, but most never knew how close we’d come to a Third World War. I returned home and exhaled. Kalteck had told me had the missiles launched, he could have intercepted them once they exited our atmosphere. He thought each country could deal with each other’s bombers if they didn’t have the ICBMs blasting the way through the defenses. Kalteck told me he had to return to space to continue his search for the enemy and the Neanderthals, which worried him.
One of the results of the Six-Day War was the Arabs placed an oil embargo against us for supporting Israel. Kalteck laughed; he told me this was what we needed to wean ourselves off of oil, and once we developed cold fusion, we couldn’t be held hostage to anyone or until that time we could simply drill and use our own resources instead of importing what we needed. I don’t understand how if the sun is powered by fusion and it’s hot, but there’s a cold fusion too, there’s too much I don’t know. I feel like a retarded child. I remember one of the first nights I spent drinking with Kalteck, I asked him how long his people had been visiting the Earth, he smiled and told me to look at the Pyramids in Egypt. I asked him what he meant, and he laughed, his words still haunt my nightmares, “how do you think those stones got moved from the quarries to the building location? Over two and half million stones were moved by slaves? Did you think the early Egyptians knew the math to construct perfect triangles?”
I remember like it was yesterday. How shocked I was. Here was a member of an alien species which not only modified us, made us what we are, but then who knows what of our history they created. Pyramids in Egypt and in Central America and Asia now made sense. I asked him, “What were the purpose of the pyramids?”
“Look inside of them, there are paths which when looked through at the night sky point to two systems, Orion and Sirius, the two systems the Emperor’s people and mine moved to. We left a map so the people we left behind would remember us.”
“But we didn’t remember you. Your arrival here was a shock. What happened? What went wrong?”
He smiled and laughed like he was speaking to a child who didn’t understand anything. “Your ancestors who knew the story held it to themselves. They turned the story into a religion which was passed down from their appointed priests to priest, sometimes from father to son. I’m sure when you were a child you played the game of telling a story from person to person, by the time the story returned to the beginning of a large circle, the story had changed. So, it was with your people. The story changed. The priests altered the story to make themselves central players when, in reality, they were only supposed to record the story and keep it alive. Thousands of years ago, some called my people RA because, at the time, our ships glowed brighter than the sun when they flew through your atmosphere and when they landed. The bright white light would blind those who looked directly at them. The people thought we were their sun god. We helped the ancients. We gave them the beginning of math. We taught them farming. We gave your people civilization and look at what we’ve done to our gift?”
I sat there shocked. He’d told me before his people had what he called modified our DNA. In a way, they created us but he also said they weren’t our god, that was what he called the Creator of All, one supreme God, one who created the universe and all life.
The other story he told me, which shocked me as he claimed his people created the value of gold. When his people first arrived, they used our ancestors to mine gold and heavy metals for them. They told our ancestors that the gold had great value. Our ancestors didn’t understand that the value they spoke of was for their electronics. Since our ancestors couldn’t tell the difference between heavy metals and ordinary ones, but they could recognize gold, so gold became valuable. I laughed because the metal which was fought over for years had value in a far different way than our ancestors thought. Kalteck’s new systems were low on heavy metals and gold, so they mined them on the planets they discovered.
If, back when Truman had called me into his office, Truman had told me that this one alien was going to control both the Soviets and Chinese and later even us, I would have laughed. Now, it’s all happened, and while most think we’re fighting each other, we’re really working towards a common goal, our own salvation, of course, as long as we follow his rules.
Almost thirty years have passed since Kalteck arrived, he’s removed every politician that’s stood in his way, Stalin, Kennedy, and he even found a way to force Nixon to resign, a first for our country. Just last year, when Mao attempted to shoot down his ship, he responded by breaching the Banqiao Dam. It cost the lives of over 200,000. The Chinese played the game, and then they again attempted to shoot his ship down. This time he struck them as he did the Soviets, he created a 7.5 earthquake that crushed Tangshan, China. The earthquake killed over two hundred thousand while injuring another one hundred sixty thousand. After the two events, the Chinese decided to follow the rules.
Then came the secret meetings and the gambling to raise money for some sort of special project. I’ve had to assume new identities and either give someone nanites or give them information for something they were working on.
I think the strangest meeting Kalteck had sent me on was to have lunch with a very strange young man at Reed College in San Jose, California. I met him wearing a suit and tie, using one of the aliases he gave me. In this meeting, I was an angel investor, I was supposed to convince the young man, I’ll never forget his name, Steve Jobs, to drop out of school and go into computing. Jobs worried about money. I knew enough that Kalteck was usually correct, so I held the meeting, I offered the young man something called seed money for him and his friend to launch a new company. The money had come from my winnings in Vegas. This was the third such meeting where I gave money away to young people to start new companies. I don’t understand how Kalteck knows which ones will succeed or which ones have the technology he wants. Damn him, I bet he placed his nanites in them, so he knows, and he controls their thoughts. He is using them to spread his plans. I thought it was funny they named the company after a fruit, but Kalteck said it was okay with him because he loved our fruit. Kalteck told me the company would make huge advances in personal computing which was required if we were going to advance along his timeline.
A few months ago, I read the article about the new personal computer, from a new company called Apple and laughed. I recognized the young man I gave the money to. The decade of the ’70s is ending, I hope one thing the ’70s gave us will die along with it. I never did like disco music. He helped us develop the three best fighters we ever built, the F-14, 15, and 16. Kalteck said these three were excellent warplanes that would be viable for many years. He also helped us learn how to use the metal titanium, which led to the SR-71, which set the speed record of over 2,190 mph. I thought 400 mph in my old fighter was fast. Then again, I fly faster than the SR-71 when I fly in Kalteck’s ship, but due to his dampeners, I’ve never felt any of the G forces when we fly.
Then there was the Skylab, our first spac
e station. I was so proud of it when I showed Kalteck the images and data of it, but he burst my balloon when he laughed at me. He told me its orbit wasn’t high enough which turned out to be correct. NASA decided to drop the Skylab project while they moved on to the space shuttle project. Another project Kalteck told us was a ship that held huge promise as it was a more economical way to launch payloads into orbit quicker than using the old heavy rockets.
This has been a crazy decade, it seemed like new technologies launched every month, things I never thought of such as fiber optics, lasers, video recorders, personal computers, and cellular phones. Why would people want to carry around their own telephone or own their own computer? I know I’m missing something. It’s like Kalteck is playing with a million-piece puzzle that only he can see what the finished image will look like. He hands out little pieces that we fit together without us being able to see the final image. He told me he still hasn’t figured out where the Neanderthals came from, which is bothering him. He spends long months in space searching for clues as to why they’d come here and inspecting debris from the lower section he managed to blast off of one of the ships.
After living through one of the most hectic decades in my life, I wonder what the 1980s will bring. I wonder when he’ll return and what he’ll instruct me to do next. The one answer he never gave me was who the little gray men with the large dark eyes are and why they’ve been taking our people and what kind of experiments they’re running on them. All he told me was in time he’d tell me. He refers to them as maggots which doesn’t tell me a damn thing. I know he’s hiding something from me which I don’t understand since he’s allowed me entrance into his shrine. He’s also refused my requests to return to the lab inside of the Devil’s Tower. I wonder if the two are related.
Kalteck promised to return to meet our new President in 1980. This will be my eighth such meeting with a new president. Kennedy was bad and Nixon wanted to control Kalteck which didn’t end well for the President Ford didn’t want to rock the boat and just ordered me to go along with my previous tasks. Then there was Carter, who jumped with joy after meeting Kalteck. He wanted to spend long hours discussing philosophy and life in general with Kalteck, who, after the first five-hour session, told me when the President called to tell Carter that Kalteck was in space. Kalteck had such high hopes for Carter, who was a military man, a man who’d commanded a navy nuclear submarine. However, after meetings with President Carter Kalteck asked me if our military was made up of managers or warriors. I attempted to explain the situation to him, but he told me he was losing hope for us. He told me he thought we were losing our drive for the stars. That statement got me very worried. I better get some rest. Dawn will be here soon enough.
I silently walk upstairs to our bedroom, I have to double step to miss the fourth step, which always makes noise when stepped on, one I’ve promised to repair for years. My love is sleeping so peacefully. She knows not to wait up for me. I managed to slip into bed without waking her. I still don’t know how to answer Liane, who asks me every month why I never seem to age. Kalteck had been good to his word. She’s never suffered from any disease, not even a cold since I gave her the nanites. I know they won’t stop her heart from failing when it tires, or her valves fail. He’s promised me she’ll pass peacefully in her sleep so she won’t feel any pain, nor will she suffer. I hope I’ll get a couple of hours of sleep. The nanites allow me to go a couple of days without sleep, but to be honest, I like sleeping at night next to Liane, I miss not being here with her when I’m away.
Chapter 15
I have really high hopes for the upcoming meeting. First of all, our new President called me to set up a meeting before he even took the oath of office. That was a first. President-elect Reagan himself, not a staffer, called to ask me to bring my friend and myself to his ranch. He asked if we could arrive in my friend’s plane since he couldn’t wait to see it. I guess he got very excited after President Carter briefed him on us.
I removed the small glowing box from the small safe Kalteck had given me. I placed my hand over it and said his name. I hadn’t used it for a while. I was surprised when he answered through the box. We chatted a few minutes and then he quickly agreed to return. I called the President-elect to set a date. We agreed we’d land at night. Since his ranch covered 688 acres, I knew we’d find a nice out of the way location to land.
President-elect Reagan met us on horseback. The poor horse didn’t know what to make of our landing or Kalteck. The President warmly greeted us, he showed us to a small hidden cabin close to our landing spot. Colonel Johnstone and his new people, they were rotated out every ten years, had arrived two days before us to provide security since Reagan’s Secret Service staff in California weren’t yet read into Kalteck.
We met for hours which seemed to pass in minutes. The President-elect asked for and received a first for our Presidents. He got an orbital trip in Kalteck’s ship. The image of Earth from space and the explanation of the risks of other species and events out of our control required action. Reagan smiled and agreed. One of the first things the new President announced was a massive increase in American defense spending and increasing our technology used in our military. President Reagan shocked the Soviets when he announced his “Star-Wars” program. He further shocked the world when he announced he wanted to develop laser weapons and a new type of weapon almost no one had heard of before, bomb-pumped X-rays which used a nuclear explosion to generate massive X-rays.
Everett laughed over his beer with Kalteck when Reagan announced his Star-Wars program. “I see you had a real influence on him. Bomb pumped X-rays? It seems I heard of this type of weapon. Lasers in space? I think you finally found someone to listen to you. He’s going to carry your water like no other President. He’s already announced a huge increase in our military spending.”
Kalteck looked at me, “Why would he carry water for me? My ship can make its own water. I don’t understand.”
Everett spit out his beer while coughing. “It’s an expression which means he supports you and will carry forward your plans.”
“Ah, I understand. Based on his plans, it’s time for me to seed additional designs through you to your DARPA organization. Have they realized where these new designs have been coming from?”
“I believe some inside of DARPA believe I’m getting some strange help, but their commanding general only cares about the designs which I’ve told him I’ve collected from outside sources. He doesn’t care as long as the designs are handed to them without strings.”
“Excellent. By the way, I heard the President is finally giving you your third star. I think you’ve spent the most time in one rank than anyone else in your military.”
“I know, but I can’t complain. You saved my ass when Kennedy and Nixon wanted to fire me…”
Laughing, Kalteck nodded his head as his long right arm reached out to grab another beer. “I guess I showed them. They both wanted to fire you and announce your people are not alone, so I fired them. They thought if they made you go away; their problems would go away with you gone.”
“I can’t tell anyone about my promotion until Congress approves it.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t. Congratulations on your promotion.”
“Thank you, but remember when this happened under Truman? It’s normal. I gave up hoped for my third star a long time ago.”
“I know, but your Congress will approve. By the way, I saw some strange new airplanes inside the special hangars. I’m happy to see you’re making some advancements in your warplane development.”
“We are testing some very unique designs. Someone helped the Skunkworks with the design of stealth airplanes.”
Kalteck smiled and nodded, “Of course ‘someone’ helped them, did you enjoy your time with Kelly? May I see them?”
“Yes, but we can’t take one for a joy ride. They are classified above top secret. We don’t want anyone to know we have them. They are usually based at another secret location fi
fty miles from here. Some are here for further testing to see how they do flying against the experimental types of radars we’ve installed on the base.”
“My AI noticed the new radar. Have no worries, even your newest updated radars can’t spot my upgraded ship. It could have spotted my old one. In this area, you’re progressing well. I assume these stealth warplanes can fly through contested airspace?”
“So far, they can. We still have a lot of work to do. The CIA arranged for us to acquire radars and antiair missile detectors from both the Russians and the Chinese. The base is now being used to test our planes against those other systems. It’s helping us develop coatings and new materials which help our planes reduce their radar signature. You’re right about your new ship, I checked the radar recordings for the nights you’ve come and gone. They never registered seeing you.”
“I’m very pleased that they gave you additional tasks to do. I suggested that since you’re my primary interface on Earth, you should have a hand in the development and deployment of new technologies. I see you’re now using the technology in different ways. This is a good sign and long overdue. I’d like to spend some time discussing the President’s new programs so I can see where I can help advance them.”
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