Kelly sat, still trying to make heads or tails of everything he was learning. Will turned to the radar scope and took a quick glance, then typed a line on his keyboard. His screen went dark. He threw a couple switches on the frame that held the radar console. The output scale changed to 2X. His computer screen came back to life. It still showed nothing but the little three-view. “Ah good,” he said quietly, “still no problems.”
“What kind of problems were you expecting?” asked Kelly.
“None, actually. It’s just that this keyboard monitors and controls the armament on the aircraft. If there were a problem, well, you can imagine, we’d need to take care of it quickly.”
“If this is an experimental project, why is the plane armed?”
“Again,” Will came back, “politics. Believe me, it wasn’t our idea, or the techs that put her together; but it did give me something to do. It came down from the top. Got no idea why. She’s got the six original fifty cal Brownings. M3s with ball rounds, twelve hundred rounds a minute, times six, at nearly three thousand feet per second at the muzzle. And even at that speed, she can fly fast enough to outrun her own ammo.”
Both men had their eyes on the radar screen as the little echo disappeared once again.
THE REST OF THE TRUTH
Will turned away from the radar scope and called down the length of the trailer, “You guys getting’ anywhere?”
Matson raised his head, shaking a slow no as he looked at the others.
“Nah, nothin’ yet,” Brickman answered. “have you got her on radar?”
“We’ve been watching her, but she just went dark again.”
“And nothing on primary?” asked Forest.
“No, nothing at all. Primary is useless. If she doesn’t turn on the transponder again, we’re blind.”
As Will turned back to his station, he noticed that Kelly had reached over and switched the scope back to normal. He gave a questioning look, and Kelly said, “I wanted to make sure she hadn’t moved outside the 2X field.”
“Shouldn’t have to do that. She should be heading in this direction.” He paused, and then, under his breath, “I don’t know why I should count on that. Nothings worked right on this project, yet.” He gave Kelly a shrug, “I guess we’ll leave it on normal for awhile.”
Kelly, still not finding an end to his questions, asked, “Why won’t she echo with primary radar?”
“Far as we can figure, UFO’s get pinged only when they want to get pinged. The skin from the disc is invisible to primary radar. The only time we can see her is when she’s got her transponder on, and she has apparently decided to turn it off whenever she feels like it.”
“You mean the transponder won’t reply to a request to squawk?” Kelly asked.
“It did, when we first put her up, but now, well, we’re not quite sure what’s going on with it.”
“So, why not replace it? You’ve had, what did you say, three years, to change it out?”
Will gave him a hard look. “That’s not exactly what I said.” He continued to stare. “You still don’t understand what I’ve told you, do you?” he paused. “Kelly, we haven’t been able to do any kind of work on this plane for the last three years, because she hasn’t been on the ground for the last three years.”
Kelly pushed his chair back from the table. They continued staring at one another. Kelly was trying to mouth a question, but he just couldn’t seem to get it started. Will thought he could recognize what Kelly was trying to convey. Something like, ‘What kind of fool do you take me for?’ or something close to that. It now became obvious to Will, that Kelly didn’t understand nearly as much about what was going on, as he thought.
Kelly stood, deciding to say nothing. He spun and headed for the other end of the trailer. Grabbing his cap from where Cory had thrown it earlier, he turned to Matson “Get yourself another pilot,” he said as he made the turn toward the hallway and the door.
Matson looked at Will as if to say, ‘What in hell did you say to him?’
Will was already on his was up the length of the trailer. As he hit the hallway Matson turned to Cory, “Go with him,” he barked, “We can’t afford to lose him.”
As Will cleared the steps he could see Kelly, already half way to the gate. He knew Kelly had nowhere to go, so he continued at a walk. As Kelly approached the fence, he realized he was going to look stupid yanking on the locked gate. Instead, he raised both hands and leaned against it. Will and Cory flanked him. They gave him a couple seconds to stand there and relax.
Will placed a hand on his shoulder, “Sorry Kelly, I guess I … ”, he paused, “ … I guess we all assumed that this would all be, somehow, easy for an outsider to understand. We’ve been at this a long time now, and it seems we’ve lost touch with the real world.”
“Yeah,” Brickman quipped, “we, pretty much, take all this for granted … flying saucers, n’all … you know?”
“You are the first pilot we’ve had to,” Will searched for a word, “initiate.”
Will dropped his hand from Kelly’s shoulder. Kelly slowly turned to face them. “You’re not going to open this gate for me, are you?”
“Can’t do that Kelly,” Cory said. “You know that.”
Kelly stood there, staring between them at the trailer off in the distance; the light still casting the sharp cone down on the little porch. His foot was in it now, and he knew it. In fact, both feet were in it, as deep as he’d ever been in it before. ‘What would an outfit like this do,’ he thought to himself, ‘with someone like me? Someone who knows too much.’
Will reached up for the back of Kelly’s arm. He gave it a gentle pull and offered, “C’mon Kelly, let’s go back to the trailer. We’ll talk some more. You can ask some more questions … try to make a little more sense of all this.”
Kelly raised his arm to throw off Will’s grip. He stepped between them and headed back toward the trailer on his own.
***
Kelly moved to the back of the trailer and took his seat next to Will’s station. Will and Cory were busy having a quiet conversation with Matson. When they finished, Matson came down and sat in Will’s seat. “Sorry Kelly,” he started, “I know this is a little hard to get around.” Kelly looked at him in silence. “I can remember back in forty-eight, when they first introduced me to all this. ‘Wow!’ was all I could say, over and over again. I must have sounded more like an idiot than a scientist. It took awhile,” he went on, “but, I eventually put myself in the right frame of mind, and things finally started falling into place.” When he was sure Kelly had nothing to say, he offered, “What can I tell you Kelly? What more can I tell you? What do you need to know, or hear, that might make you feel more like becoming a part of all this?”
Kelly was having a tough time resolving the situation. This was a deeper, darker hole than he had imagined. He wasn’t sure if he was standing on the precipice, or if he had already fallen in. Maybe a few more questions would help him decide.
“This plane, it’s killed a man,” he stated to Matson, instead of questioning.
“Yes,” Matson paused, “it has.”
“More than one?”
“Yes.”
“More than two?”
“No! Just two.”
“Tell me about the second.”
“Will told you about Colonel Rantman?”
Kelly nodded.
“Well then, that leaves Colonel Randy Parker.”
“R.T. Parker?” Kelly interrupted.
“Yeah, the same. You’ve heard of him?”
“He was one of my instructors at flight school.” Kelly paused. “He’s dead?”
“Well, yes. We think. The truth is, we really don’t know, for sure.”
Kelly looked puzzled, “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
Matson looked around the room, trying to find a little sincerity to add to his answer. “Look, Kelly, this is going to
be a bit hard to understand. But then,” he cocked his head to the side, “what hasn’t, lately?” He paused, then, “Parker, Colonel Parker, took off in the third F-eighty-six in June of nineteen fifty. Eighteen-thirty hours on the sixteenth, to be exact. We were able to maintain communication with him for a little more than three weeks.”
“Three weeks? How in hell was he supposed to stay alive in the cockpit of a Sabre for three weeks?”
“Let me finish,” Matson came back quickly, “You’ll find the answer to that and more, just let me finish.” He picked up where he had been interrupted, “He should have been able to survive, we estimated, for approximately two years.” Matson saw Kelly move to ask another question. He raised a hand to halt Kelly, and continued. “If you think everything you’ve heard up to now has been a little crazy, well, just keep listening. There was a phenomenon discovered at the crash site of the San Agustin disc. As the Army boys were doing their recovery, one of the officers decided to have a look inside. He mentioned to one of the other officers what he was going to do. They stationed a soldier to guard outside of the hole in the front of the ship, where the officer entered. The guard and the other officer both swear that the officer, who entered the disc, disappeared inside and didn’t come back out for almost an hour. But the officer, after his trip inside, also swears that he was in there for no more than thirty seconds … a minute, tops.” Matson gave Kelly some time to soak up this bit of incredible information.
“You mean that the time …,” Kelly stopped, not being able to decide how to phrase the question.
“Yeah, that’s right. The time on the inside of the disc, is different than the time outside, that is, when the drive unit is running. Nobody realized it when they started the recovery, but the drive hadn’t stopped when the disc hit the slope face.”
“Time slows down in the disc,” Kelly made another statement, not a question.
“Well … let’s say it’s different … inside the disc. It can be shifted in either direction. In fact, that’s how the techs were able to do so much engineering on the drive unit and the disc itself. With a little experimentation, they were able to calculate the time differentials at different drive settings. They figured they saved at least twenty to thirty years worth of time by moving their work stations inside the disc. They would send a couple guys inside with a particular task in hand, and they would come back out a few hours later or sometime a few days later, swearing they had been inside for weeks or months.”
“So,” Kelly started, “you figured that by using the time differential, you could keep Parker in the air for two years, and only two weeks would pass for him?”
“That’s right, because, with the proper setting, we were able to swing time in either direction. You see? A short time for Parker would equal a long time for us. We packed the cockpit; no longer like a cockpit that you would be familiar with, it had lots more room now, especially behind the seat, with about two weeks worth of food. We got a catheter inserted in him along with a bag into which he could do his duty. We had one of the dietary guys, from some college or another, come up with a menu that would all but eliminate the solids.”
“So, what went wrong?”
“We don’t really know … for sure. After we lost communication, we started the recall protocol that you’ve been watching. We did that once a week, then once a month, and finally once every year. You are the second pilot on the yearly schedule. There were two before that, a month apart. We didn’t worry about a pilot before that because we were hoping against hope that Parker was still alive.”
“And now, what do you think?”
Matson took a deep breath, “Well,” like I said, “we don’t know for sure. The techs never did get the time-thing down to an exact science. Parker could have died early on, or he could have lasted a year, our time, maybe more. We just don’t know.”
“You communicated with him for three weeks?”
“Yeah, about that.”
“And what did he say? What was going on?”
“Nothin’ out of the ordinary: the catheter was uncomfortable; he was getting sore in the rear; his legs kept going to sleep. Other than that, oh,” Matson remembered, “and he complained about a pain in his back that kept getting worse. He was saying something about changing the seat when he got back. It had a bad spring, or something, pokin’ him in the back. Can’t remember anything else except the daily grind he put in, relaying all the flight data. He was a real trooper. Not many people would have, or could have, put up with that.”
“Hey, that’s not what you expect me …”
“No! No!” Matson stopped him short. “No, we’re not putting you in the plane, at least not right off. There’s lots of work to do first, not the least of which will be to remove Parkers body. Then we’ll make damn sure it’s safe to let you climb in. Hard tellin’ how long that’s gonna’ take, because, like I said, we aren’t really sure what’s wrong with it.”
“The way I see it,” said Kelly, “you’ve got more than one problem, and one of them is a big one. You’ve got a dead man on your hands, and a famous one at that. If I remember right, Parker was Rantman’s wing man. They’d been buddies their whole careers. He had nearly as great a record as Rantman. Surely, someone’s going to miss a guy like that? Hell, someone’s got to be missing him already.”
Matson thought for a moment. “Back when we lost Rantman, we were able to pass it off as a test flight incident. We were lucky, the plane crashed in an area that we were able to control. We removed the drive unit from the remains of the F-eighty-six, and no one was the wiser. After all the unpleasantness was over, we had a long talk with Parker, who had joined us the same time as Rantman. We all agreed that we couldn’t take the chance that someone on the outside might find out what we were doing. As luck would have it, this decision turned out to be even more important when the guys in the suits came and pirated the San Agustin disc. Parker decided that the best thing would be for him to disappear, and so he did. We rigged another Sabre to explode on the runway, right out front here. We filled a small urn with a little ash, teeth and bones and turned it over to the Air Force. Turns out, the only relative that Parker had was a spinster aunt up in Michigan. She never knew Parker, but was pleased to receive his burial flag and a small stipend that the Air Force delivered.”
“So,” said Kelly, “no one’s missing Colonel Parker?”
“Not a soul.”
“And the other pilots you had lined up? What about them?”
“They were never told what was going on. The first two showed up as placeholders. We told ‘em we had empty spots to fill on our pilot roster, and they were to ‘standby’. After it was clear we weren’t going to need them, we shipped them out. They went away clueless. The third guy, well, that was a slightly different story. We figured if we could get telemetry back from something other than the plane itself, then we might have a better chance of finding out what went on with Parker. So, we had the little transceiver implanted in him. That made it a little harder to cut him loose; but in the end, we told him that the tests (and we hadn’t yet told him what the tests were) had been canceled; and he was sent back with all the usual instructions. You know: under penalty of severe sanctions by the United States Air Force and the United States government, loss of pay, loss of pension, loss of life, etc., etc., you will keep your mouth shut or else.”
Kelly raised his head to look at the ceiling, afraid to ask the next question. “What about me?” Then he paused, thinking of all the implications of his next question. “Do I just disappear too?”
Matson appeared to be having difficulty finding the right way to phrase his answer. “Kelly,” he started, then waited until Kelly looked him in the eyes, “tell me about your parents.”
A puzzled look flooded Kelly’s face. “What?”
“Your parents Kelly, tell me about them.”
“My parents,” he paused, “are dead. They??
?ve been dead for six years,” he paused again, “died in a car wreck while I was at MIT. Why?” he asked.
Not answering, Matson continued, “And your brothers and sisters? Tell me about them?”
Kelly’s face, now flushed with an uncontrollable rush of blood, was becoming uncomfortably hot. The sweat was once again at his upper lip. Suddenly, he was beginning to see another one of his monsters at the end of another long, dark hallway, and a dark realization was setting in. ‘I don’t have brothers, or sisters,’ he thought to himself. ‘Neither my Mom, nor My Dad had brothers or sisters.’
“Christ,” he said, looking back up at the ceiling, then at Matson, “I’ve already disappeared … haven’t I?”
“Well,” Matson returned, “let’s just say, you were chosen … very carefully.”
Kelly thought back to the gun that Cory had held on him earlier in the evening. And now he wondered how many more there might be in this little trailer. He turned to look at the others. They were now all staring back at him.
Matson could see that Kelly was really on edge; enough on edge, he thought, that he might, at any second, bolt for the door, knowing full well what little good that would do him. “Look,” he said softly, “we’re not the bad guys here. Nobody’s going to take you out and lose you in the desert. We’re not like that.”
Kelly turned to look once again at the others, then back at Matson. “So, why make sure that I had no ties, no family?”
“Easier to hide you from the Air Force.”
“Surely the Air Force knows where I am?”
“That’s true, they do, sort of. But, you have to remember, the Air Force thinks all of the technology collected at Roswell and San Agustin is now safely hidden away somewhere in the Nevada desert. And remember too about our cover story for this place?”
“Yeah,” Kelly replied, annoyed, “the one about this bein’ a simple weather station where guys who’ve maybe been in a little trouble, get sent to kill a little time; punishment for getting out of line. Hell, the worst I’ve ever done was hit a home run off the base commander at Andrews in a pickup softball game.”