The Gemini Divergence (64 page)

“Can I help you?” the man asked.

Gus spoke as officially as he could, but was
still scratchy at it, “We were sent here to represent the Air Force
sir. Are you the one that reported the UFOs?”

“Oh, so you’re here to talk about the
Martians?”

Jack, who was busting at the seams to play
his new role, pointed sternly at the man and beratingly queried,
“Who said anything about aliens?”

The frightened man back peddled, “Well I just
assumed…”

“How are you certain that it wasn’t something
else?”

Gus interrupted, “If my colleague can hold
his tongue for a moment. Could you please tell us what you
saw?”

The man still showing fear of Jack, looked to
Gus and explained, “I was giving a few of my employees a ride to
work, which is what I do every day, when all of the sudden we came
around a corner to find three disc shaped things in the road… Well
it scared the hell out of us… We didn’t know what to do, but as
soon as we arrived they started taking off and flew away until they
disappeared… I didn’t know what to do so I called the Sheriff, and
he called the Air Force… Then you guys showed up.”

“Did you see any people or markings on the
craft? Did they leave anything behind?”

“Oh, yeah… One of the saucers left a huge oil
slick beneath it when it left, and it dragged behind the others
like something was wrong with it.”

Jack touched his forefinger to his tongue and
made an imaginary hash mark in the air, as if to say; chalk one up
for our team.

Gus elbowed Jack lightly as he shot him a
very disapproving frown.

“Excuse me. Do you gentlemen know what they
were?” asked the man.

Gus turned to him and answered, “We’re not
sure, but don’t you think that it is odd that if it were a space
ship, that it would leave oil? Perhaps it may have been some form
of flammable fluid that leaked from a truck, and you and your
passengers may have just witnessed a fireball from some sort of
ignition of the vapors.”

“I don’t know,” professed the man, “they
looked awfully real to me.”

Jack leaned forward to whisper to the man as
he slightly winced away from Jack’s advance, “Why don’t you do us a
favor pal, and not tell anybody else about any Martians.”

When they had finished and were walking to
their car, Gus said, “I think that I’m going to be sick.”

Jack beamed, “Are you kidding, I am going to
‘love’ this part of the job.”

5 March 1965

Airmen at the Benton Air Force Station, 20
miles west of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, watched as a gleaming
saucer descended from the sky over their small military
installation.

The, up till now, silent object began making
an annoying humming noise, and then vehicles began to stall as
lights went out in the buildings around them.

Then there was a flash of light like
lightning. Soon after the burst of spectral scintillation, the
object flew away.

At first the incident seemed like it only
lasted a few minutes, but upon further discovery, the airmen were
stunned to realize that over an hour had passed.

*~*

Volmer walked into AFOAT’s Central
Laboratory, which was filled with Air Force personal working on
various analysis instruments and made his way to a group of men at
a central table.

At first it would appear to laymen that they
were playing with some type of blocks and pins, but in reality they
were trying to unlock the secret of the vril samples that they have
been analyzing.

“Oh, Dr. Volmer, I have been waiting for
you,” announced a lab coated technician as he dropped his blocks
and stood, picking up a clip board then holding it out for Volmer,
“We have finally attained the atomic count from our mass spec
people and we were just using the, now known open valence location
count, to try to piece together what the actual molecule may look
like.”

“Were there any surprise elements?”

“Yes sir,” explained the technician with a
smile.

“Well…what is it? I have been postulating
this in my head for years… I must know.”

“Iridium.”

“Iridium?” echoed Volmer, “but that’s as good
as inert. How could that possibly help a hydro carbon molecule with
its volatility and flammability?”

“By itself it has no explosive value, sir,
but what the Dr. may be overlooking, and what is causing us great
consternation,” as the technician pointed to the group of
technicians working feverishly with the blocks and pins, “Iridium
doesn’t have a single electron in its valence shell… so every
valence location is available for bonding with God knows what hydro
carbon chains, thus making the possible molecule shapes…”

“Almost infinite!” Volmer finished the
technicians sentence, “Oh my, this could be a problem.”

“Could be?” snorted the technician, “Sir…
even after finally attaining an adequate vril sample for analysis,
we could be just as far away from breaking its code than ever… All
we can hope is that one of our technicians may just stumble upon
the correct arrangement.”

11 March 1965

One of Schwerig’s subordinates, a Major
Gernstadt, in a vain attempt to impress Schwerig, had gone out on a
limb and dispatched a pair of saucers on a risky mission, without
Schwerig’s knowledge.

He had been assigned to monitor and attack
the upcoming Gemini 3 mission.

Major Gernstadt knew that the Americans now
had full time fighter patrols protecting their rockets, and that
they had also developed the ability to shoot down saucers loitering
in space above them as well. So in his own logic, he surmised that
it would be a great idea to have a saucer waiting, camouflaged on
the ground, when the Gemini mission unfolded.

On the day that his plan was executed, many
witnesses on the Florida coast reported the saucers as they saw
them arrive from the ocean and descend into the Everglades.

Air Force tower controllers at Patrick AFB
near Cape Canaveral tracked the objects as they came into American
air space and warned NASA of their presence.

AFOAT, at Patrick AFB, immediately summoned a
pair of WC-130 Aircraft from the 53
^rd
, Weather
Reconnaissance Squadron at Keesler AFB in Mississippi, to scour the
Everglades for the secreted visitors.

They searched in vain for a day.

14 March 1965

A group of men hunting and fishing in the
Everglades were shocked to come across a pair of camouflaged
saucers sitting quietly in the swamp.

As the men approached the objects they were
attacked and severely burned by artificial bolts of lightning that
emanated from one of the saucers.

They fled the swamps and checked into a
hospital where they were questioned by Air Force personnel about
the location of the objects, but none of the men could remember the
exact location. They could only give a general area.

AFOAT then concentrated its aerial
observation onto that particular area, but still could not discern
the camouflaged craft from their surroundings.

The saucer pilots observed the WC-130s
searching overhead and reported them back to their Major.

15 March 1965

Another group of Outdoorsmen enjoying the
secluded Everglades also errantly came across the pair of saucers
and were again attacked; this time more severely.

Yet, when these men made their way to the
hospital, they were able to give the Air Force an exact
location.

The Air Force immediately dispatched a pair
of their new ‘F-4 Wild Weasel’ ground attack fighters, to destroy
the intruding spacecraft.

Soon after, one of AFOATs immediate response
teams arrived and carted the saucers away.

When Schwerig found out, he was furious that
anybody had been so naïve as to put Raumsfahrtwaffe spacecraft into
such a situation that could provide the Americans with such an
easily retrievable amount of vril, as well as other Raumsfahrtwaffe
technology.

He immediately had Major Gernstadt arrested
and placed into a cell with the Fort Riley pilot, until he figured
out what to do with them.

23 March 1965

NASA launched Gemini 3, the first manned
Gemini mission.

Capsule Commander Gus Grissom jokingly named
the capsule ‘Molly Brown’ as a way to project better luck than his
Mercury 7 capsule which sank after re-entry.

Because of the Gernstadt debacle, the
Raumsfahrtwaffe had no plan remaining to attack Gemini 3; therefore
the NASA mission was executed flawlessly.

Energized by the elation of surviving his
latest mission unscathed, Grissom bragged about how McDonnell had
outdone themselves with the development of their latest space
capsule yet.

Soon after this mission, McDonnell introduced
an even more advanced version of the Gemini capsule.

The newest variant was capable of missions to
orbit the moon as well as having a paraglider re-entry system with
tripod landing gear that could allow the capsule to land at Air
Force bases within the continental United States; freeing the Air
Force from forced coordination with the Navy.

NASA rejected the proposal outright, viewing
it as a threat to the Apollo program, but the Air Force secretly
showed great interest in the newest capsule because they had
already been wondering how they would be able to defend the Apollo
capsules as they traveled to the moon in the coming years.

18 March 1965

The Soviet Union launched Voskhod 2.

Cosmonauts that were on Voskhod 2 returned to
earth with stories of an object that did not appear or perform like
anything they had ever seen. The Mysterious object followed them
and flew circles around their craft during the mission.

*~*

Schwerig had Major Gernstadt and the Fort
Riley pilot brought to him in the grand hanger.

Both men were being led to Schwerig with a
guard on each of their arms.

“Gentlemen, I can not tolerate subordinates
that do not appreciate the grave error of carelessly allowing our
enemies to obtain our technology,” professed Schwerig as he stood
before them like an unflinching stone statue, “I must make an
example of you men in order to prevent further digressions from my
other pilots and officers.”

Pilots and mechanics throughout the hanger
began to stop what they were doing and watch what Schwerig was
doing.

Under normal circumstances Schwerig would
have scolded them to stop gawking and get back to work, but he
chose this location intentionally, so that there would be many
witnesses to carry the word to the rest of the Raumsfahrtwaffe.

Schwerig walked over to the wall and pulled a
large yellow lever causing a large airlock about the size of a
loading dock door to open while alarms and flashing yellow lights
blazed.

The open door revealed another door several
feet behind that was the last layer protecting them from the vacuum
of space.

He then signaled for the guards to force
their prisoners into the open airlock. Then, he closed the airlock
door behind them.

Schwerig looked behind himself and over his
head to see how many were now watching. It seemed as though he had
the attention of every single man in the large circular hanger.

Without a blink of his eye or any noticeable
change in expression, he turned and pulled the red lever next to
the last one that he had pulled causing even louder alarms and
flashing red lights to start blinking as a display over the lever
started counting down from ten.

Schwerig took a few steps and stood with his
hands clasped behind his back as he looked through the window at
the two condemned men realizing that they were only moments from
their death.

Neither cried or screamed, but they both
turned their heads back and forth from the countdown to the space
side door and back until the countdown reached zero and the space
side door cracked open.

Far before the door could open far enough to
see out from, the vacuum of space vacated every molecule of air
from the air lock, causing their blood to boil and their bodies to
inflate like balloons until they burst.

Schwerig watched in amazement as the blood
simply evaporated into vapor and disappeared, much like a boiling
pot of water.

The blood evaporating out of the now exposed
veins and corpuscles acted like tiny jets, causing their bodies to
flail about like a bunch of broken compressed air hoses.

A red vapor or fog appeared at the edges of
the window and then dissipated.

Once both of the condemned men floated into
space, Schwerig shut the space side door.

He turned and looked expressionless at all of
his watching men and without a word… he turned and left the
hanger.

21 March 1965

NASA launched Ranger 9 to once again try and
photographically map the moon.

Once again the probe rounded the back side of
the moon and started to send back images until it also was suddenly
silenced.

Upon analyzing the images that it was able to
attain, they could see the ruins of the previously detected city
and realized upon further inspection that they had discovered yet
another city.

NASA immediately conveyed the images to the
White House.

23 March 1965

A man in Bangor, Maine was driving down the
road when he realized that he was being followed by a very bright
object in the sky behind his pickup.

He tried to speed away when he noticed his
engine stall, as the lights and radio fell dark and silent.

Now the only light was from the object that
was rapidly positioning itself over his vehicle.

Once it was directly over his head and
started to descend, he noticed everything in his truck start to
vibrate.

Frightened out of his mind, the man pulled a
pistol from his glove compartment and started firing at the saucer
directly over his truck.