As the pulse and the Daggers met at a single point in the distance, he thought at first he had missed. Nothing happened.
‘Maybe the pulse looses power over distance,’ he thought.
As he brought the two jets up in his vision again, he saw the wing-man stop his turn and fly a tangent course while the lead continued turning, if only for a moment. The plane that had leveled off suddenly showed a puff of smoke as the canopy was jettisoned. That was quickly followed by the bright yellow flame from the ejection seat. The lead Dagger’s turn radius began to increase until it was in a tight turn, its nose eventually pointing toward the ground. Kelly watched as it exploded below and to the north, expecting, but never seeing, the bright light of hope from the ejection seat.
Now there were two Daggers left and he had them spotted to the south, but they weren’t turning to engage. In fact they were holding course due south. They were running for the Air Base at Yuma.
THE BUNKER
Kelly looked back in the direction of the bunker. He could see that a small convoy of vehicles had started making their way in that direction. He figured he could beat them to the blast door and get inside before they started offering fire.
With the hole in the wing not mending as fast as he would have liked, he still managed to cover the distance in no more than twenty seconds. He was at the lock-box and trying the various keys when he heard the first long shots whizzing overhead, making dull thuds as they struck the bunker’s earth-covering above him. The fifth key on the ring did the trick and he was at the number pad; punching as fast as his chrome fingers would move. As he entered the last number he heard the loud whine of a huge electric motor somewhere in the dark recesses below ground. As it came up to speed the, huge, five foot thick steel door began to slide sideways.
“C’mon, c’mon,” he said as the massive door barely crawled along its tracks. Finally, he was able to step inside and when the door was open wide enough, the disc followed. He ducked behind a short wall that held the green and red buttons that Bailey had told him about. He slammed his palm against the red one as stray bullets began clanging and whining off the disc and interior walls of the bunker. And, finally, it was closed.
As he turned away from the buttons, a small flashing sign at waist level caught his eye. Bending for a closer look, he was mildly surprised.
The Lieutenant had failed to tell him, on purpose no doubt, about the emergency intruder lock-out. As he hit the un-assuming little button next to the flashing sign, three six inch steel rods began to slide out from the wall on the opposite side from where he was standing. He watched as they buried themselves inside three large bosses built into the door. When the rods had quit moving with a bang that seemed to echo endlessly, three more small rods slid into each boss from positions above and at right angles to each, effectively locking the huge rods in place. ‘Nothing is getting in here,’ he thought, ‘unless I push that button again.’
He turned around and gazed into the near darkness behind him. The lighting in the bunker was subdued, with only small recessed lights along the walls at floor level. The main lights had been turned off when everyone was told to report to hangar two to back-up the main force welcoming the visitor.
“Ah, there it is,” he said, moving to a panel mounted in a small guard shack that was all but hidden in a dark niche just a few feet to his right. The sign, in typical military stencil-font said: WHEN ABANDONING SITE SECURE ALL LIGHTING. The small arrow pointed to the big switch. Kelly pulled the locking pin from the guillotine type cover and lifted it up and out of the way. With his thumb, he pushed the green button until he heard the electric solenoid snap shut behind the panel. As he turned, he watched in amazement as the lighting seemed to cascade forever, deeper and deeper into the mountainside.
The corridor, at the entrance where he now stood, was at least forty feet wide, and the ceiling, although only about ten feet above him, tapered upwards quickly to at least thirty feet. As he walked straight ahead, the corridor opened to his left. A huge room, supported by granite columns left in place every forty feet or so for support, stretched at least, he estimated, two, maybe three hundred feet, back into the mountain. The distance to the wall directly to his left, however, was only a hundred feet or so. And he could make out another sliding door built into it.
The lighting to the rear of the huge room was considerably more Spartan, and it appeared, by the drilling machines and front-end loaders lined up against the far wall, the process of digging this massive hole in the ground was still an ongoing process.
Kelly looked again to the sliding door he had spotted on the left side wall. His vision blurred slightly and then the customary rose tint (now so familiar when he was about to see his Brother) filled his thoughts.
“This is not necessary, Brothers. I know you are there. I am coming to get you. And, by the way,” he said, turning his thoughts inward, “where have you been Brother? I could have used a little help these last few minutes.”
The voice from within came back with its usual soft inflection. “Brother, do you wish me to speak every time I give a little push here, or a little shove there. We … I, thought you would be less distracted if I merely helped when you needed it.”
As with the outer door, there was another touch pad behind another lock box. Kelly had to run back to the outer door to retrieve the keys he had left in the guard shack. He wasn’t used to doing business without pockets. After opening the box he punched in the same code he had used outside. Of course it didn’t work. “Nothing could be that easy,” he muttered. Trying several more codes from days in military history, the huge electric motor finally roared to life with the numbers oh-seven-oh-four-seventeen-seventy-six.
He heard the huge locking rods and keeper-pins disengage as the huge door began to move. No faster than the exterior door, it took a full five minutes to open to its forty foot width. The chasm was dark inside except for the now three distinct rose colored glowing orbs hovering near the far wall. He opened the light switch cover next to the door and thumbed the button. As the switching solenoid slammed home he turned and almost had to cover his eyes.
“My God … she’s beautiful,” he said aloud.
Before him rested the San Agustin disk. With its nose section fully self repaired, it was not possible to tell which direction it might fly. It sat there; shining … gleaming … like no other object Kelly had ever seen in his life. It reflected the overhead lighting to such an extent, it was almost blinding.
This disc was clearly different from his. The wings, or the circular disc, had a wider span. It was easily forty feet, and Kelly wondered if it would make it out either door or between the support pillars. “Surely it would, for it made it in, didn’t it?”
He laid a hand on the leading edge and found it nearly razor sharp. It was perfectly smooth; no seams, dents, scratches or control surface outlines anywhere. From the edge, the wings increased in thickness until they met the central bulge at which time they were nearly three feet thick. The central bulge itself was considerably larger than his Sabre cockpit. It was a perfect sphere on top with a diameter of ten or twelve feet. The center of the sphere was nestled down into the disc at the center, with the bottom of the sphere protruding only a foot from the underside of the disc, where it was flattened. The one thing, or things, that were the same, were the landing struts that held the flattened portion of the central bulge no more than six inches off the granite floor.
Kelly looked back through the huge door at his own ride, hovering inside the main entrance, still wobbling slightly, sand still trickling from the jagged edges of its wound.
His first thought, at the pitiful sight of his former F-eighty-six was, ‘How do I get the drive unit out of the Sabre, and mounted in this gorgeous creature.’ He turned and laid both hands on the perfect San Agustin Disc. ‘I will need tools,’ he thought. ‘There must be tools here, somewhere. They must have …’
His body
convulsed and went rigid, and for a moment he blinked hard, trying to dispel the vision in front of him. His fingers appeared to flow into the disc, and as hard as he pulled, he could not remove them. His vision flushed once again with the familiar rose color of the home world and he gasped as his breath seemed to leave him. Warmness filled first his fingers, then his arms. It flowed throughout his body, finally reaching his feet. And suddenly, he knew what it was.
“Ah, no, no, no, come on guys,” he pleaded out loud. “There ain’t room enough for all of you in there. One of you inside me has been creepy enough.”
His three lost Brothers had taken new residence, in him, and as he stood with his fingers now un-melding themselves from the disc, he turned his head to the side, and closing one eye, he shook his head slightly, as if trying to loosen something inside.
“Hey, settle down in there,” he said softly, “isn’t there a better way to do this … a better place for you all to stay?”
“You are in a hurry, are you not?” the soft voice of his Brother asked.
“Not at the moment,” he answered, standing in the huge underground room, talking to himself. “This should be a safe hiding place for awhile.”
“But the men outside … they will find a way in. Even with the locking apparatus you activated.”
“Yes, I suppose you are correct. They wouldn’t have left themselves without a fail-safe.”
“Then we must hurry, for the next step will take some time.”
“The next step?” Kelly questioned, “what next step?”
“Why, the reason we removed ourselves from the disc, of course. The living material will reclaim that which it has lost.”
“I do not understand Brother.”
“Kelly, do you remember when I first joined you?”
“Yes, you mean the day I touched the little piece of disc skin to the Sabre disc?”
“I told you then, that I had to leave the living material at that moment because we, you and I, could not exist in it at the same time.”
Kelly shook his head knowingly.
“Well, the same must happen now. The two discs will become one, and since you are one with the Sabre disc, so you will become one with the new disc.”
“You mean the two discs will merge?”
“It is the only way the living material can reclaim its own. Since it has no drive unit, we cannot fly it home to the Mother ship, and the Mother ship certainly cannot come into such a confined space.”
“You mean the Mother ship … is still here,” he looked to the ceiling of the bunker, “up there, waiting, after all these years?”
“Kelly, your years are but fleeting moments to us, a mere blink of an eye. We could, and would, wait millennia to recover our own.”
“But why didn’t your Mother ship come down and make the recovery back in nineteen forty-seven? Surely it could have?”
“Without doubt, but, that is not our way. We had never meant to be seen, but the electrical storm changed that. It was something we had never planned for. So, we chose to wait until an opportunity presented itself to make the recovery … discreetly.”
“But, Brother, something tells me that this recovery is already anything but discreet.”
“While that is true Kelly, the individuals that are aware of us, have kept us a secret from the inhabitants of your planet all these years, and we suspect that their failure here will induce them to continue their charade for decades to come, if not forever.”
“Their failure?”
“They have failed already Kelly. Even if we don’t escape, they will lose both discs and all proof of our existence. They will see to it. They would not want to explain to the people of your world, how they, the Military, protectors of the masses, lost such a great opportunity … how they let these flying saucers slip through their fingers. They will make excuses, devise elaborate explanations; they will bury all that has happened here today deep within the dark recesses of their bureaucracy. And then you, the discs, and our Brothers, will cease to exist.”
Kelly hung his head, knowing that his brother was correct. “If We fail,” he asked his Brother solemnly, “how will it end for us?”
“In a glorious and blinding flash of light, my Brother, for your world has, not too long ago, harnessed the power of your Sun.”
“You mean they would …?”
“It is already on its way Kelly. Look to the east and you will see the darkness covering the glow of our home world.”
As Kelly closed his eyes and directed his vision to the east … he could see it. The beautiful rose colored sky was there, but in the center of his field of vision, covering the beautiful canyons and cities, was a huge dark mass of boiling clouds; a great black monster, larger and more fierce than any of the black things that had stood before him in the past, and he could feel its fierce heat against his face. The heat continued to grow until he had to turn his gaze away.
THE TRANSFORMATION
“So, my Brother, what do we do, what do I do?”
“Simply call your Sabre disc to this room and bring the gravity drive up to speed.”
“What speed Brother, how will I know?”
“You will know. The living material will show you. Then my Brother, simply stand aside and be as amazed as we were, millennia ago, when we watched it for the first time.”
***
As the Sabre disc slid toward him through the second door, Kelly began to feel a bit of melancholy. ‘Strange,’ he thought, ‘I will miss my Sabre.’ He had grown used to it; attached to it. He was finally becoming somewhat proficient in it, and now, in a few, or ten, or twenty minutes (he wasn’t sure how long it would take) it would be gone. It would be replaced by something new, something different.
The disc was fully inside the second room now and Kelly walked beside it, keeping one hand on the starboard wing tip, gently guiding it with thoughts and a physical shove now and then. When the nose of the Sabre was within three feet of the San Agustin disc Kelly slowed its forward motion, stopping with no more than a few inches between them.
“Closer Kelly,” his Brother said, “they must touch one another.”
“Of course, I should have known,” he lamented.
Kelly walked to a point directly behind the Sabre and pushed gently on the now unused exhaust nozzle at the rear. As his disc moved forward, he felt the nose of the old F-eighty-six slide up onto the front edge of the circular wing and come to rest there.
He pulled his hands away from the tail section as he felt, and watched, a ripple begin to run through both discs. It started where the two discs had come together and moved quickly from there to the rear of each. The ripple was in concentric circles, much like someone had tossed a pebble in a glassy pond. He felt the motion move through his own body and as he looked down he watched the same ripples travel down his chest and arms, through his legs to the granite floor below, then reflect upwards to make the same journey again and again. As the rippling in the discs and his body came to a slow halt, Kelly smiled; what else could he do?
And now, he heard a new voice. Heard is not the correct term to use here, for he did not hear it. Not in the same sense that he could hear his Brothers. This voice was more like a feeling. He cocked his head, as if listening more carefully for a repeat of the vague sentence that had passed through him. It came again, and he recognized it this time. It was a feeling of readiness; of preparedness.
“Ah, wonderful Kelly,” he heard his Brother say, “it speaks to you, and you hear it, don’t you?”
“The living material,” Kelly offered as a statement of wonder, not as a question.
“Yes Brother, you become more and more a part of it as every day passes. Soon you will hear it as easily as you hear us.”
Kelly smiled yet again. He was truly becoming at ease with this … this alien thing … this creature … this being or beings that now lived within him. He was resigning himself to this new life, no matter how unusual
or creepy or scary (“or even short,” he thought aloud) it might be.
He now knew what to do next. As the sound of the Sabre’s gravity drive rose from a gentle hum through various stages of increased pitch to an almost unbearable scream, Kelly moved to a point between the two discs just outside their wingspans. From there he watched as the rippling started again. Small pieces of granite and other flotsam, lying loose on the floor, began to dance the same way he had seen other items affected by the gravity field. The lights above began to flicker, then pulse, keeping time with a low frequency hum that increased and diminished, again and again, becoming louder and stronger with each cycle. Pieces of granite began to fall from the ceiling, bouncing off the shiny surfaces of both discs, seeming to do no damage except to create more of their own ripples. As one such piece fell near Kelly, he looked to the rear of the cavernous room. He saw the rubber-tired loaders that had been used to haul the diggings out of the bunker. They were moving and vibrating as if they weighed almost nothing, but they would at least offer some protection from the falling debris that was all around him now. As he took his first step to run to the loaders ….
“Lieutenant Kellerman!”
The voice came from a speaker somewhere in the room; barely audible above the whine and pulse of the transformation now taking place. “Lieutenant Kellerman,” the voice came again, “this is General Macon … can you hear me in there?”
“Macon … here already?” Kelly said to himself, “and how does he know that I am in here?”
“Lieutenant Kellerman … please … talk to me.”
“Brother?” Kelly said their name as if asking for council.
“Kelly,” his Brother answered, “the blackness continues its approach from the east … there is little time.”