"Howdy, hot
pants," Lenel barked out for the benefit of the other scientists when
Okun
wandered into the kitchen. The young man ignored the comment. He
grabbed a box
of cereal and lay down, belly first, on the daybed they'd brought in
for him.
Cibatutto couldn't
resist cracking a joke of his own. "We were going to have hot dogs for
lunch,"
he sniggered, "but we can't seem to find any toasted buns!" The old
men howled with laughter.
"Fortunately,"
Dworkin added, "it looks as though there's plenty of rump roast."
This witticism brought on yet another round of guffaws.
When they were finished,
Okun turned a jaundiced eye on them and tried out a one-liner of his
own.
"Hardy har har. You guys are so hilarious, you should work in Vegas.
Call
yourselves 'Jerry's kids'—Jerry Atrics, that is." The scientists didn't
get it. "As in Geriatrics? Oh, forget it." The men had been in the
hole too long to know anything about the telethon.
For the next ten
minutes, these distinguished gentlemen of science devoted their
attention to
the creation of one butt joke after another. The wisecracks were their
way of
welcoming Okun into their clique. He'd passed a major test the day
before.
Although he hadn't exactly spilled blood for the good of the project,
he'd
brought it to the surface of his skin, and that was close enough.
Freiling called for
everyone's attention. "OK, Brecklish, I got one for you." He smiled
devilishly. "I made it up myself."
"Brackish. The
name is Brackish."
Freiling seemed to
blank out for a moment. "Now I forgot the damn joke! No, wait, I got
it.
Why did the newspaper editor call the lobster?"
Brackish knew he was
supposed to ask why. The Y! "Oh my God," he burst out, "I didn't
tell you guys what I saw inside the ship!" He turned to Cibatutto.
"You know that
yellowy shell instrument deal with all the little whatchamacallits
running
through it?"
Cibatutto nodded.
"When the energy
came through the ship, it had a
picture
on it, and—I don't want you guys to
think I'm a complete
weirdo for telling you this, but—it was giving off feelings, emotions.
Seriously, it was like the visual image was only one part of a larger
message.
There was another layer of communication going on, something meant to be
felt
—desperation, doom,
abandonment, something like that. Now that I think about it, it might
have been
some kind of SOS, a distress call."
This announcement
dramatically changed the mood in the kitchen. "That would fit nicely
with
your second-ship theory," Dworkin pointed out, skeptical.
"Did this image
look like anything in particular?" Lenel inquired.
"You bet. It
looked like a Y. Like a big old honkin' letter Y standing out in the
middle of
nowhere." His audience reacted strangely to this last bit of
information,
exchanging wide-eyed looks. "What's the matter? Did I say something
wrong?"
Before anyone could
answer, Radecker's footsteps came clacking down the hallway. Dworkin
looked
quickly across the table and put his index finger to his lips, telling
Okun to
keep this news quiet.
"It took all
day, but I finally got Spelman on the phone," Radecker announced,
marching
straight to the fridge and fishing out a soda.
"And?"
"Well, I didn't
explain all the particulars. I just told him we'd proved beyond any
shadow of a
doubt that the ship can't fly."
"And?"
"I don't think
he believed me. He said,
'Your assignment is to get that ship
to fly.'
So I said, 'I'm telling you it cannot and will not fly.' '
Well,
sir, I don't
know what to tell you. You're assigned to the project for a five-year
term or
until such time as blah blah blah.'
So I asked him what he
would like for
me to be doing out here. And you know what the son of a female dog says
to me?
He goes, '
You've got four years, eleven months, and twenty-six
days to
figure that one out for yourselves. Stay in touch.'
" Radecker
sat down with the others at the table and drowned his sorrows in a long
slug of
soda.
"Did you happen
to mention the matter of our finances?" Dworkin inquired gingerly.
"Not yet,"
he said, with a look which suggested he still might. Glancing over his
shoulder, he noticed Okun across the room, preoccupied with a
reexamination of
his burns. Radecker leaned in and whispered to the scientists, "I might
be
able to keep you guys off the hook. It didn't sound like Spelman plans
to come
out here for a visit anytime soon, so we might be able to just start
killing
off the other names on the payroll one by one. Every couple of months,
we'll
call the Treasury Department and say another one has died. By the way,
I saw
your life insurance policy. Cute trick naming one another
beneficiaries. How
did you ever get a policy like that?"
"Our banking
friends in Las Vegas are very flexible."
"Also, it sounds
like you guys can get everything you want in the way of materials and
equipment—as long as Boy Wonder over there approves it."
"I don't
understand," Dworkin whispered back. "Our appropriations have to be
approved by Mr. Okun?"
Radecker rolled his
eyes as if to agree that the idea was ludicrous. "Spelman was pretty
clear. Whatever Okun needs in the way of research materials will be
automatically OKed."
Lenel asked, "So
why do you say
we
can get anything we want?"
"Oh,
please," Radecker said dismissively. "Look at this punk. He'll do
whatever I tell him to, and if he doesn't obey, I'll make his life
miserable." An idea occurred to him. "Now, listen up. I respect you
guys, and I think we can work together. I'll try to help you out with
hiding
the names of these dead guys. And I want just one thing in exchange."
The
CIA operative leaned in even closer and explained what he expected of
the
gray-haired men. When he was finished, he looked them in the eyes, one
by one.
"Are we all agreed on that?"
"What are you
guys talking about?" Okun called from his daybed. No one answered, so
he
asked again. Finally Radecker turned around.
"We're discussing
how we're going to get this ship to fly. I just talked to my boss, and
he's
convinced you can do it."
"I can,"
Okun replied. "Just have your boss send us another ship exactly like
the
one we've got, and our problems will be solved."
"There aren't
any other ships."
"Well"—Okun
grimaced as he rolled onto his side—"there
are
other
ships. We
might not
have
any of them, but there must be other
ships. Otherwise,
the aliens couldn't have come to Earth."
"Sorry, pal.
That's not the way it works. I can't tell you how I know, but I have it
on very
good authority that this ship came here alone."
Okun snorted.
"Right. Who's your authority, some palm reader?"
"Military
intelligence," Radecker fired back, not liking the younger man's tone.
"Military
intelligence?" Okun asked. "Isn't that a contradiction in terms? Who
are you going to believe, a bunch of Army dudes or what you saw with
your own eyes?
Our experiment showed the ship can't fly without other ships just like
it. It's
proved."
Radecker shrugged as
he stood up. "All I know is what they tell me. And they tell me there
was
no second ship. From now on our official position is that there are no
additional ships." With that he left the room.
Okun
wasn't
finished with the discussion. He threw his legs over the side of the
bed and
was about to follow Radecker down the hall when he realized he was
sitting on
his burns. His face contorted into a silent howl as he lifted his buns
away
from the blanket. When his posterior pain subsided, he appealed to his
senior
coworkers. "There's got to be a second ship, right? In fact, there must
have been at least
three
ships at Roswell. If there
were only two, both
of them would have gone down. When this one crashed, it would have
broken the
power relay and knocked the other one down. Besides, what about all
these
people that say they've seen UFOs? Don't they all describe something
that looks
remarkably similar to the one we've got?"
Okun was angry and
started pacing the kitchen as he talked. It was a side of himself he
hadn't
shown the others until that moment. It wasn't Radecker's ignorance of
technical
matters that bothered him. It was being told what he could and could
not think.
The idea that future research on the spacecraft would be limited by
some
anonymous panel of military experts really chapped his ass, to speak.
And then
there was that phrase Radecker had used,
I can't tell you how
I know
.
"There's some kind of government conspiracy going on," he burst out.
"It's the man, the establishment, the system. See what I'm saying?"
None of the
scientists knew quite how to respond to their companion's ranting. "In
fact," Dworkin said, "except for our latest experiment, there is
little evidence to support your multi-ship theory."
"But that's all
the evidence we need!... Isn't it?" He could see the scientists were
avoiding making eye contact with him. "You said it yourself yesterday:
this ship cannot fly without the presence of another."
Dworkin hesitated,
then finally replied. "It's possible that we've misinterpreted the
results."
"OK, what's
going on here?" Okun stood over the elderly gentlemen like an impatient
schoolmaster who'd caught them hiding something. 'This is about those
paychecks
for the dead men, isn't it. Radecker's holding it over your heads." Of
course, that was exactly what was happening. But none of them would
admit it
out loud.
Lenel was fed up with
the whole idiotic situation. "You want to look for a second ship?
Follow
me." He marched out of the room, and, after a moment of hesitation,
Okun
followed him. The grizzled scientist led the way through the maze of
halls
toward the steel doors to the outside, muttering under his breath the
whole
while. Instead of turning toward the exit, however, Lenel stopped in
the long
hallway that the scientists used for storage and gestured toward the
crates and
filing cabinets pushed against the walls.
"We call this
mess the stacks. In these boxes you'll find every government document
associated with our research. You name it, it's in there. That means
every
scientific report, every position paper from DC, every memo, every
police
report on sightings, reported abductions, strange dreams, everything.
Anything
and everything that has to do with extraterrestrial life-forms."
Nodding, Okun
surveyed the room. He did a quick calculation and guesstimated there
were two
hundred crates full of documents, each one holding about twenty reams
of paper.
At five hundred sheets per ream that meant there were about two million
pieces
of paper. Adding in the filing cabinets would bring that number closer
to three
million. "You might want to change the name from the stacks to
something
like
the piles
. Does anyone actually read this
stuff?"
"Some
of it. We get a new shipment every first Monday of the month. We look
through
the box and pull out anything that looks interesting, but mostly it
just gets
dumped out here. Years ago, there was a fellow named Pike who had
everything
organized. If you needed to see a particular report, you'd go ask Pike.
When
the new reports came in, he'd make sure they got into the right hands.
After he
quit, I took over the job."
From the looks of
things, Lenel hadn't been doing a very good job. Okun pulled open the
top
drawer of a file cabinet and looked inside. A few thousand pages of
yellowing
paper were strewn around in heaps. They had been stuffed carelessly
into the
drawer, with no regard for organization. "What kind of filing system
are
you using here?"
"There is no
system. The whole place is a damned mess now on account of Wells. That
man was
always in such a hurry. He'd come in here and take out a hundred files
to find
the one he was looking for. He never put anything back, and I got tired
of
doing his work for him. So I quit. I've had nothing to do with the
stacks for
the last ten years or so. Still, if there's anything in particular you
need, I
can probably help you find it."
Until then, Okun
hadn't understood why he was being introduced to this ancient
collection of
worthless paper. He didn't know what was going on in Lenel's head, but
apparently the old grump was expecting him to start reading this stuff.
"I should warn
you," he went on, "that 99.9 percent of what's in these reports is a
bunch of hooey. First you've got your crackpots who make up stories to
get
themselves noticed. Then you've got your little old ladies who see a
spark on a
telephone pole and wet their pants because they're sure it was men from
Mars.
But you've also got something that's harder to spot."
"What's
that?"
"Reports started
leaking out about what we had down here. Since there was no way to keep
the
files completely hidden, the geniuses at the CIA and the Pentagon
started
something they call disinformation. As if there weren't enough bogus
reports of
sightings and encounters already, they started making up new ones by
the
hundreds. Some of the most convincing stories were written by some hack
sitting
in an office making the whole thing up. They deliberately buried false
leads,
stories that seem like they'll lead somewhere, but then the trail goes
cold,
and you're back where you started from."
Finally, Okun had to
ask. "Dr. Lenel, why are you showing me all this stuff?"