by Dominic Peloso
The Invisible College Press, LLC
Arlington VA
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Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, organizations, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-931468-76-3
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Tyler Memorial Hospital, Tyler, TX
“Push!”
Lorraine strained her stomach muscles. Her heart pounded, her feet struggled against the stirrups. “Push!” the doctor yelled again, louder this time. Tom looked down at his wife and rubbed his hand softly across her hair. Sweat poured down Lorraine’s face. She breathed, in out in out, it didn’t help. The doctor said that this would be a difficult birth owing to the baby’s size, but she hadn’t expected so much pain. The Lamaze lessons were useless. She was about to rip apart.
“Just a little more honey,” said Tom quietly, trying to sound reassuring. He wished that he could make it better somehow, help things along, but all he could do was stand there and squeeze Lorraine’s hand. With childbirth, men are just impotent bystanders.
“I see the head,” said the doctor, all crouched down beneath Lorraine like a catcher waiting for a pitch. “Give me one more big push Lorraine, just one more.” The doctor had his hands on the baby’s bald skull. Lorraine let out a moan. The doctor guided the newborn out of the birth canal. Tom heard a tiny cough, then another, then a child’s cry. He was a father at last. A nurse dropped a tool on the floor. It clattered loudly as Tom rushed over to see his child for the first time.
The doctor looked down at the small bloody creature he cradled in his arms. The most apparent thing that you could see wrong was the color. The child’s skin wasn’t the traditional peachy-pink, but instead a cold, dull gray. Its head was big, far larger than normal. The rest of its body seemed thin and underdeveloped in comparison. The thing looked up at him with its two large, insect-like, black eyes. A cry came from its tiny mouth– familiar sounding at first, but it grew more and more inhuman the longer you listened to it. “Let me see, let me see,” Lorraine called, still in a bit of a stupor from the drugs and the strain. Tom looked over the doctor’s shoulder and got his first glimpse of his child as it reached out and squeezed the doctor’s thumb with its tiny hand.
“What the hell is that?” exclaimed Tom.
Six months earlier, in Mercury, NV
Ray Johnston walked past the rows of empty newspaper boxes that line the path to the cafeteria. It was early morning in the secret city and the air was fresh and clean. He lit a cigarette and crossed the parking lot, his steps falling heavily against the worn asphalt. Under his arm was a package– an orange diplomatic pouch, with the seal still intact. Ray wasn’t normally a man to worry. He had spent almost twenty years of his life on the inside. He had seen all sorts of bizarre and dangerous things. He had come across everything from ricin-filled darts hidden in umbrellas to blueprints for matchbook-sized nuclear weapons, but nothing scared him as much as the thing in the pouch. He had spent twenty years as a spook, moving closer and closer to the inner circle, having more and more secrets revealed to him. He had always been ready to accept what they had told him. He had always been able to conceive of how all the schemes, all the betrayals, all the gadgets had been put together. Nothing they had revealed to him had truly surprised him. That was before his introduction to the Majestic-12 project. Now nothing made sense, especially the thing in the pouch.
But Johnston was a company man, and he wouldn’t let a little thing like abject terror stop him from doing what needed to be done. He couldn’t let his feelings show on his face. He had gotten so used to that attitude that his bravado came naturally. He spit out the remains of his cigarette and moved purposefully towards his car, parked near the dormitory. He walked past the dreary, yellow-shingled buildings that make up the secret city of Mercury, Nevada. Outdated signs hand-painted in 1950s style letters warned him to look out for radiological safety and to report all suspicious activity. He walked past the rusted spools of wire and the dilapidated Mobile Radiation Lab van. Mercury was a dinosaur, a last pathetic remnant of the Cold War. It was built in the 1950s as part of the Nevada Test Site, and it was used to house the thousands of workers that spent the later half of the Twentieth Century making bigger and bigger holes in the Nevada desert with nuclear bombs. After the U.S. stopped testing, there wasn’t much use for all the miners, geologists, and other workers, so they all left the secret city. It was mostly abandoned now. Just a few scientists scattered about, doing research on the environment, and of course the black projects. Johnston got in his car and turned on the ignition. He turned the air conditioner up to full. It would soon be very hot here in the desert.
The Nevada Test Site is larger than Rhode Island and was built to maintain secrets. They lie scattered out there, in the barren Nevada desert. Johnston drove north on the main road. As you pass over the initial ridge into the central valley, you can see small buildings, dirt roads leading to nowhere, esoteric arrays of pipes and wires. Johnston ignores them as he drives. What goes on in those buildings? Who works there? Those questions are not easily answered. Each place has its own secrets and its own cadre of workers. None of them know what the others are doing. That is the point of the site. It provides the isolation, the secrecy, the privacy that these groups need to accomplish their mission. The question of whether or not the missions are in the public interest never occurs to Johnston. He knows that they are. He’s a company man.
An hour’s drive north of Mercury is a mesa. You can recognize it easily; it’s the only flat-topped mountain around. Beyond that mesa lies Johnston’s destination. In the prospector days of the old west it was named Groom Lake. Today it is known by the more generic title: Area 51.
Tyler Memorial Hospital, Tyler, TX. Six months after Ray Johnston’s drive to Groom Lake.
Tom Miller sits in the waiting room of the sterile, white hospital. He sits uncomfortably and erect, hands in his lap. He looks like he’s not really sure that he’s supposed to be here. Up and down the hall, people come and go on seemingly urgent missions. The cacophonous noise of dozens of voices combined with the clattering of equipment fills the air. A television hangs in the corner of the waiting room. The drone of an old sitcom was intermittently drowned out by a siren or an announcement over the PA system. Tom wasn’t really listening. He was waiting for news. It had been over two hours already and still nothing. Tom’s gaze remained fixed on the swiveling door that led to the operating rooms. Men dressed in green scrubs kept coming and going, coming and going, but not his wife’s doctor. He was nowhere to be found. He was still in there, trying to figure out what happened, what went wrong. Tom pulled off his dirty baseball cap and dropped it in the chair next to him. He put his face in his hands in a combination of despair and fatigue. He and Lorraine had been trying for so long to have a child, to give a grandson to his father. And now this happens.
“Mr. Miller?” Tom looked up from his seat. His wife’s doctor was standing over him. “Mr. Miller we’ve examined your son. The good news is that he seems to be internally healthy. His heartbeat is strong and he is alert. That bodes well for the future.” The doctor sat down next to him. A second doctor came and joined them on the couch. “I’ve called in a specialist.” He looked over to the second doctor.
“Mr. Miller, I’m Doctor Robbins. I’m a pediatric surgeon. I’ve looked at your child.” He held out his hand.
“What’s going on doctor? What the hell happened? What is that monster?” Tom was desperate for answers. No one had told him anything.
“It’s not a monster Mr. Miller, it’s your son. It is a baby boy. You’ve got to be strong for him. He’s going to have a rough time ahead, if he even survives at all.”
Tom was a simple man. He had some corn fields on the outskirts of town. He knew the land, he knew how to drive a tractor. He wasn’t ready to deal with a problem like this. He wasn’t sure that he would have the internal strength to handle the responsibility. He wasn’t even sure what was going on.
“Mr. Miller, your son has severe birth defects. He is underweight, and his skull is much larger than it should be. There is also some major problems with his eyes. I doubt that he will ever be able to see very clearly.”
“Is he going to die?” asked Tom sheepishly.
“Well,” replied Dr. Thomas, “The prognosis looks good for now. As I said, he seems to be eating and alert. He seems to have a strong heartbeat, and he seems to be functioning quite normally. It doesn’t look like there is any neurological damage at this point. We can’t be sure that there won’t be any long term developmental consequences though.”
“What happened? What went wrong?”
“I don’t think that we will ever know the answer to that Mr. Miller. It might be radiation exposure, it might be pesticides, it might be just some rare genetic deformity. We will be doing some tests, but we won’t have the answers for a while.” The doctor flipped through the charts. “According to this, neither parent has any genetic disposition to the major things we check for. Of course we can’t rule out anything at this point.”
“Just before she got pregnant, Lorraine had a little cold. We both got sick.” Tom was stretching for answers.
“No Mr. Miller” Dr. Thomas said knowingly, “Colds don’t cause birth defects. It must have been something else.”
“What happens now doctor?”
“Well, we’ll keep him here for a while,” replied Dr. Robbins. “We’ll run some tests and try to determine what exactly happened. I have to warn you, although the child appears to be healthy right now, we have no idea how he’ll develop. He’s likely to have problems with his internal organs since his chest cavity seems to be undersized. Plus, judging by his skin color, his blood isn’t moving oxygen as efficiently, he seems rather anemic.”
Dr. Thomas continued, “You can see him if you’d like. He’s with your wife right now. We thought that it would be best to allow them to bond a little while they can. That child is going to probably going to spend a lot of his life in institutions like this.”
The two doctors rose to their feet and helped Mr. Miller up. His muscles were sore from sitting on the couch for so long. The doctors led him down the hallway to the rooms for new mothers and their babies. As he passed each door, he glanced inside and saw happy little families. Mothers, with hair still disheveled from labor, cradling their infants in brightly colored blankets. Doting fathers sitting by the bedside, playing cootchie-coo with their bundles of joy. Tom wondered to himself about his child. It was a freak. How could he deal with that? What would he tell his friends? This was a great shame on him. All those things he wanted would never come to pass. The kid wouldn’t be the star quarterback of the football team. They’d never go on their first deer hunt. He wouldn’t be able to pass on to his offspring his love of the land and knowledge of how to make things grow. He was saddled with a freak. This was going to screw up his entire life. Was it worthwhile trying to have another kid? Maybe that one would be normal. Maybe he could send this one away, to a home for freaks or whatever. Maybe try from scratch. Maybe that would be the best for it. He couldn’t give it the care it needed. He wasn’t sure that he could feel for this deformed thing. He wasn’t sure that he could love it in a way that a kid needed to be loved. On a subconscious level he began to doubt his own wife. What was wrong with her that she could bear such a hideous thing? There must be something defective about her womb. Or maybe it was him. He looked down at his pants as he walked. Was he defective in some way? Was there something wrong with his genes? He was less of a man, incapable of propagating the species properly. Was this some punishment from God for some unrecognized sin? Tom was not a particularly religious man, but he found himself asking his creator why this terrible burden had been laid on him.
He walked through the door of Lorraine’s room, still looking blank, hat twisted up in his hands. Most of his attention was directed inwards, and he didn’t have the energy to project expression. She was lying in the bed, hair all a mess, cradling their little boy in her arms. She looked as gorgeous as the day he first met her. Tom moved closer, hesitantly, not sure what to expect, not sure what to feel. The little hairless thing in the blanket looked up at him with its big black eyes and cooed softly. “Isn’t he beautiful?” said a sobbing Lorraine. Tom leaned over to get a closer look. It wasn’t that bad really. He moved his hand to touch the child’s head but pulled back instinctively when the boy fidgeted. It would take some getting used to. He tried again. The forehead was warm and soft. Tom could feel the life flowing through it. The young boy reached his tiny hand out and wrapped its impossibly long, slender fingers around Tom’s thumb. A tear welled up in his eye. He tried to hold it back, after all, men don’t cry.
Outside the room, down the hall, another man was meeting his son for the first time. He shouted loudly over and over again, “I’m a father! I’m a father!” The Millers could hear the anonymous man quite clearly. They could tell the joy in his voice as he celebrated the miracle of creation. Tom stood silent over his progeny.
That same day, in an unmarked building in Groom Lake.
“I’d like to welcome you all to the annual status meeting of Project Beachcomber.” The general continued with his opening remarks. Ray Johnston sat stiffly in his seat. He wasn’t a “suit guy” and having to spend the afternoon with a silk noose tied around his neck made him uncomfortable. He looked about the room, scanning the crowd. There were a lot more people here than usual, many new faces. The project was expanding. To Ray, that implied that there was more serious interest at higher levels. Someone up there was listening. As the general droned on, Ray nodded and bobbed his head in a half-sleep. He didn’t have the proper temperament for meetings. He was more action oriented.
“Since we have so many new faces here, I thought that I would begin with a little history,” said the general. Unlike Ray, Brigadier General Dumphries was a “suit guy.” That was how he made it as far as he did in the Air Force. Meeting after meeting in sharply-pressed, blue, polyester suits, looking good and being punctual. It was the clean, crisp look of his uniform that got him that first star. It was his crisp, clean look that made him appear to be the ideal candidate for such a high-security assignment. He was getting quite pudgy around the waist. His PT scores were pretty poor, even for a general. However, his attention to detail, regulation, and following orders to the letter had always caught the eye of superiors. His evaluations were always exemplary, even if most of his accomplishments were simply dull reports that were shelved and never read. Such is the life of an intelligence officer.
“Project Bluefly was started during in the Cold War. Our original mission was to search out and recover film canisters from spy satellites. Back in the old days, there wasn’t digital transmission of images, so the only way to get photos back to earth was to drop them from orbit. Of course, they didn’t always land where they were supposed to land. The Soviets knew what was going on, and they were trying just as hard to recover our canisters as we were, those things were valuable. The U.S. government couldn’t publicize the fact that these canisters were landing all over small town America because we didn’t want to admit that we were spying on anyone. It was all hush-hush stuff back then. So we sent out our boys to investigate any reports of ‘strange things’– stuff falling from the sky, alien artifacts, whatever. It was from our efforts, and the Ruskies, that led to the myths about ‘men in black.’” To emphasize the point, General Dumphries made the little “quote” sign with his hands when he said “men in black.”
“Of course, once we started broadcasting analog data from our satellites the number of canisters that dropped to earth declined rapidly.” There was some scattered giggling. “The problem was though, that it didn’t go to zero. We were getting ready to shut Bluefly down, but we kept getting reports of stuff falling from the sky. We kept checking it out. Sometimes it was Russian film canisters, but even those stopped falling after a while. The rest of the stuff was unknown– strange metals, pieces of things, who knows what. Not all of it could be identified by the science boys. Instead of shutting Bluefly down, the President gave us a new mission, to seek out and find any anomalous objects that we could and to try to identify them. We were renamed Beachcomber to allow the government to declassify the Bluefly documents without admitting that the mission was ongoing, and we were moved into the Majestik-12 security compartment. And that brings us here today for our annual meeting.” The general cleared his throat. “I can see that we’ve got all the usual suspects here today, so if everybody has had their donuts and bagels, I’ll introduce our first speaker...”