“No! No,” Will said quickly, “only partly, only partly.”
Kelly wasn’t quick to answer, so Will continued. “It’s an airplane, like most airplanes you’re familiar with, except it has some very special technology that was borrowed from the incident at Roswell.”
“I thought,” Kelly decided to pursue another line, “that all the stuff from Roswell, turned out to be nothing but pieces of a balloon. They packed up all the debris and flew it off to Wright Field, or some other base.”
Will showed a small knowing smile, “Well, you got part of it right.” He paused long enough for another slug off of his coffee. “The part you got wrong is,” he moved closer to Kelly, “it never even got close to Wright Field. It never even got close to Ohio. Somewhere over the Midwest, on its way to Wright, that plane and all its contents, and I mean everything: the pilot; the co-pilot; all the service men; and every piece of your so called balloon debris, became the first men and equipment of the new United States Air Force. And that was a full two months before the Air Force officially existed. Truman signed the paperwork while they were still in the air, and General Ramey and the other officers who thought they had scored a major coup, had to watch as their plane and all its contents flew off over the horizon to a destination even they weren’t told.” He sat up straight in his chair, “Boy, were they a bunch a pissed off brass.” Then he gave a conceding nod, and continued, “I gotta give Ramey credit though; he played the part of a good soldier. He laid out a complete cover story; pictures of a weather balloon and everything … killed the speculation in the papers, and radio, all by the end of that week.”
Kelly just sat there, trying to take it all in. “It was a flying disc”, he said as a statement, not a question.
“That’s what I’m tellin’ you Kelly”, Will said, putting a hand on the Lieutenant’s shoulder, “it was a disc. It was a disc,” he almost whispered the second time.
Kelly continued to stare at Will, as if he were pleading with him to somehow change his story. Something … anything, had to make more sense than this. “Look,” he said, “I do remember a little bit about the story. And what I heard was that the debris was nothing but pieces. Lots and lots of little tiny pieces. There couldn’t have been enough left to use in any meaningful way.”
In his mind, Kelly realized he was, once again, looking down one of those long, dark hallways that so often tested him. His face was flushed and hot and he was sweating from his upper lip again. He could only sit. Sit, and try to decide whether he would walk down this long dark corridor, or turn and run as fast and as far away from here as his legs would carry him. He took a deep breath (he’d been taking a lot of those lately). Since he never was one for running, he thought: for now at least, he wanted to hear more of Will’s story. “So”, he asked, “how did they, or you, make use of all the debris? There must have been some larger pieces, huh? Engine, or motor, or drive unit, or whatever it is that powers one of those things?”
“Whoa, slow down. That’s more than one question,” Will said, again smiling. “First off, it wasn’t us, at least not us here in this trailer. It was us though, in the sense that there are more, or were more, of us here at Marana. And, the problem of what to do with, or how to use all those tiny pieces,” he paused for more coffee, “was made considerately easier, at least that’s what they thought at first, because there were two discs, not one. And you can bet General Ramey and his boys would’ve went ballistic if they had found that out. He’d a figured, if there were two discs, he should’ve been entitled to one of ‘em.”
“Two discs,” Kelly replied.
“That’s right,” Will continued. “Two discs. One came down in pieces and the other landed nearly intact.”
“You mean they had a whole one?” Kelly asked loudly. He looked down the trailer to see a few eyes staring in his direction. Cory was smiling as he and the others turned back to their work.
“Well, nearly a whole one. It was dinged a bit in the nose section. It had stuck itself in the side of a little draw about a hundred and twenty or so miles to the west and north of Roswell. Someplace called San Agustin.”
“So, you, or these other guys here at Marana, removed the engine from the whole disc and mounted it in a conventional aircraft?”
“Well, yeah, that was the first thing that was tried. Worked real well too, except when they tried to take it to speed. As it neared super sonic, it suffered severe out of plane acceleration. Nobody realized at first that the gravity drive, that’s what they were calling it by then, was designed to move itself in any direction you wanted, regardless of whether the plane had wings or not. At that speed, and this didn’t happen at lower speeds, when the pilot pulled back on the stick, some sort of inertial trigger in the drive, sensed, by the movement of the plane, that it was supposed to change direction. And that’s what it did. Tore the wings right off the F-eighty-six, and nearly killed Colonel Rantman right then and there.”
“The Colonel Rantman?” Kelly asked.
“Yes,” Will said, lowering his eyes, “the same, but he’s, unfortunately, no longer with us. He was flying the next eighty-six. They had modified the controls to read the stick differently. The acceleration continued through the plane’s long axis so that it no longer tried to jump straight up. Unfortunately, even though they had beefed up this eighty-six, the wings still came off again, around a thousand miles an hour. Rantman got out, but the drogue chute on the ejection seat was shredded. He was tumbling so fast when his main chute deployed, that it just wrapped itself around him and the seat. He never had a chance.”
Kelly, once again, didn’t have any idea where his next question was coming from. Never mind, that they wanted him to fly a plane they couldn’t keep the wings on; a plane powered by technology taken from a crashed disc … this was a plane that had already killed at least one man that he knew of. “You’re tellin’ me,” he asked, “that this drive thing, this gravity drive thing, has survived being dug out of a smokin’ hole in the ground? … and it still functions?
“Yeah, amazing huh?”
“And the one from the disc that went to pieces?”
“That’s a different story,” Will said as he reached into a small drawer on the other side of the radar scope. “This is a piece of debris from that disc.” He handed Kelly a small shard, about three by four inches, of what looked like tinfoil. It was irregular in shape; had a mirror like surface and almost no weight at all. Kelly turned it in his fingers.
“Try to bend it,” Will said, almost taking it back from Kelly. He seemed drawn to it as Kelly handled it. “Bend it quickly, but be careful of the sharp edges.”
Kelly held it in front of himself and tried to fold the little piece with a quick move of both hands. It resisted like it was made of solid steel.
“Now,” said Will, touching it again, as if he wanted it back, “try it again, very slowly.”
With his hands in the same position, Kelly tried again. This time, applying a slow steady pressure, the piece began to give way. It was like pushing against a shock absorber. If he pushed harder, it offered more resistance. By easing off the pressure a little bit, he was eventually able to fold it nearly in half. He released his pressure completely, and the metal, if that’s what it was, began to unfold by itself. As Will took it from him, it slowly regained its original shape. Will put it between the palms of his hands and rubbed it slowly. Will’s demeanor was changing as he handled the little scrap. Will, seeing Kelly staring, quickly returned the piece to its drawer. As he pushed it closed, his fingers lingered on the drawer handle. He turned to Kelly, “How ‘bout that … it’s got a memory,” he paused. “All the pieces did the same thing,” he said as he removed his hand from the drawer and continued. “The drive from this disc was destroyed, completely, just like the disc itself.”
“Why one and not the other?” Kelly asked.
“That was the question everyone wanted answered. When
the discs first arrived, everybody was quick to jump all over the whole one. They left the pallets, with all the pieces of debris, in the corner of the hangar. It was all covered with tarpaulin and tied with rope. Nobody wanted to play with the broken one. As time went on, they were able to disassemble the good one. A bunch of really savvy fellows these guys were. They got the drive out and figured out what the power source was. They had the whole thing figured out inside the first year it was here. But then, they ran into their first big problem. They couldn’t figure out how to take the outer skin apart. They had in mind using it to cover a conventional aircraft, like a Sabre jet. Up until that time, the disassembly was simple nut and bolt stuff. But, the skin, well, it was all one piece. No rivets, no welds, at least none that could be seen. No one could figure out how it was assembled in the first place. That’s when someone had the idea to look at the pieces still covered and tied to the pallets in the hangar. There they sat, untouched for more than a year. When the pallets were moved out to the front of the hangar and uncovered, well, that’s when the guys noticed something really strange. Most of the pieces on one of the pallets couldn’t be separated. They had, sort of, melted, and started flowing together. This struck every body as rather weird, because they had tried every cutting technique known to man to take the other ship apart. Nothing would melt this stuff. Yet here this pallet sat, with one big lump, and a few stray pieces on it.”
Will took another draw on his coffee. “They continued working on the drive unit. Got it married to a third F-eighty-six. This time they tried to modify the container that held the power plant. That nearly got one of ‘em killed. Seems this battery kind of thing, that’s used for power, is highly radioactive. When they first got it opened, one of the techs was handling it barehanded. Got burned pretty bad. They shipped him off to Bethesda, I think. At any rate, we never saw him again. After that, they put it back in its original container, which looked like it was made from the same material as the skin. Amazing stuff,” he said, shaking his head. “Then, one day, the pilot who had flown the discs here, a year and a half before, shows up. He was a bird colonel and he wanted to see what was going on with the disc, and, since he was cleared anyway, no one objected. The first thing he says when he sees the melted lump of disc skin sittin’ on the pallet was: “Must have been the lightning”. “What?” one of the techs asks him. “Yeah,” he says, “hell, July weather was really bad that year, at least in the southwest. We got hit four times flying this stuff over here.” Finally, the lights started going on in everybody’s heads. They checked the bottom of the pallet and the spot in the plane where it had been strapped down. Sure enough, there was the proof: burn marks no one had noticed before. They were paying so much attention to the whole disc that they nearly let the answer to their biggest problem slip away. They finally concluded, that back in July of forty-seven, the first disc was struck by lightning. But they didn’t think the lightning itself caused the explosion. It turns out that the skins integrity was controlled by vibrations at hyper frequencies. The lightning strike found its way into the gravity drive, which works by producing hyper vibrations, or gravity waves. They found out that these gravity waves work at the molecular level, somehow producing, sort of, a negative gravity field below or behind the disc. Nobody knew it at that time, but, it turned out that these hyper waves could be used for more than just propulsion. One day when they were runnin’ the drive up for a test in the hangar, they got a little surprise. It had just been installed in the third F-eighty-six, and it was setting next to the original disc. As they tried new settings on the controls of the drive unit, one of the techs noticed that there was movement coming from the front of the whole disc. They weren’t sure at first, but as they stood and watched with the drive running in the eighty-six, the damaged portion of the disc sitting next to it began to repair itself. The bent parts and pieces just seemed to flow and mold themselves together. Well, after they recovered from the shock, they were able to figure just what was going on. They determined what settings on the drive unit … did what … sort of. At least, they were able to put some of the debris pieces together, a little at a time, until they worked out a technique to cover an entire plane.”
“Last I heard was that everybody thought a lightning strike, back in forty-seven, had overloaded the drive unit in the first disc. The disc then went to pieces because the drive unit now thought that it had been switched to this so called repair mode. The skin lost all of its cohesion and simply disassembled itself at an estimated five or six hundred miles an hour. Apparently, they don’t have lightning where these folks came from. The drive unit was then ejected in the direction of the other disc. It exploded as they came in contact, or near contact. That’s what caused the damage to the second disc’s front end; not the crash as it came down at San Agustin.”
Will paused for more coffee, “Oh! and there’s one other thing they think they figured out while doing work on this new hyper frequency welding … that’s what they call it now. You know about all the UFO sightings since forty seven, right?”
Kelly, remembering the vague stories he had heard, nodded yes, in order to keep Will talking.
“You know how it seems people are seeing them in all kinds of shapes and sizes?” Kelly nodded again. “Well, it appears they can change the shape of the disc, using this same technique, while it’s in the air. With very careful frequency control in this repair mode, the techs were able to get the San Agustin saucer to completely finish its own repairs. And then, with a little more trial and error, they made little changes to its shape. Best guess was, it helps the disc travel at high speeds in a planets atmosphere.”
Kelly was now almost completely overwhelmed. He thought for a moment, then asked, “If they had a whole disc, why did they continue trying to modify a conventional aircraft?”
“Ahhh!” Will breathed heavily. “There’s still so much to tell you about the technology, and you’re changin’ the subject to politics. Look, word came down from the top, that since the project was to be kept above top-secret, it would be best to fly the technology in an aircraft that was familiar to the public. Now granted, the F-eighty-six was still relatively new, but it had the look of a normal airplane, and if we ever lost one, and the press got hold of it, well,” he paused, “John Q. wouldn’t be any the wiser.”
“Speaking of the press,” Kelly asked, “how on Earth are you hiding all this out here? We’re not that far from Tucson; not that far from civilization.”
“You just got here Kelly. You’ve never seen this place in the daylight, have you?” He continued, “This place is dead. Just a bunch of old mothballed planes, desert plants and cactus, maybe a coyote or two. We don’t do anything out here to draw attention. No new paint on the buildings. When we have to, we drive in and out of here only at night. We fly in supplies on a couple private planes. We’re very careful not to make a big show of security. That would only draw attention. Our best security is no security at all. And our cover, if we ever need one: we’re a civilian weather station on lease to the Air Force. We do experiments and keep records on the effect of southwestern weather on all the abandoned aircraft.”
“And the outpost in Tucson, where I got my orders, how do they fit into this? Do they know what goes on out here?”
“No. They know nothing. All they do is act as a way-stop for an officer that gets shipped out here once a year. They think you were sent to keep tabs and collect info on all of our supposed weather studies. They probably figured you were a bad boy gettin’ some kind of punishment for a little indiscretion somewhere in your recent career. After all, what kind of on the ball officer would get himself shipped out here? No,” Will repeated, “they’re just your typical recruiting station, with no clue at all what’s happening here. In fact,” Will continued, “very few people in the country know what’s going on out here. Maybe not even the President anymore. About three years ago, right after we put our
plane up for the last time, President Truman mixed things up on us. Somebody convinced him that the thing to do was start a new black operations outfit. They supposedly found an isolated spot somewhere out in the Nevada desert. They sent a bunch of trucks and MP’s and a whole lot of guys in suits and dark glasses. They tarped and tied up the San Agustin disc, packaged all the records, all the equipment, everything they could get their hands on. They drove out the gate, and that was the last we ever saw of ‘em. The strange thing was, even they didn’t know that there were two discs. You see, we’d been flyin’ the third eighty-six for nearly six months when they came. The guys who had done all the work, all the studies, every piece of important research to figure out how this technology worked, well, they were all gone. There was no reason for them to stick around. The Air Force left a couple corporals to guard the place. After the suits had taken everything, the techs were notified. They just assumed that both discs were taken. No way for them to know any different since they weren’t here. And we … well we were tucked away here, in our little trailer, about a half mile away from the main buildings. The Air Force had done such a good job of compartmentalizing, that they didn’t even realize they had left half of their secrets behind.” Will reached for his coffee again. “So, here we sit in Marana, a small, nearly forgotten, weather outpost with a few trustworthy ties to an underground cadre of friends who continue to put their necks, and their careers, on the line to keep us in business. I doubt even Eisenhower was told about us, or if he was, he must think that everything’s been moved to Nevada.”
“Amazing,” Kelly shook his head in disbelief, “that something like this could happen in the modern day Air Force.”
“Well, when you stop and think about it Kellerman, the modern military environment, with all its infighting and compartmentalizing, is exactly the kind of place this sort of thing could happen.”