Majestic (29 page)

In the next instant he discovered how very far twenty feet can be.

There was somebody crouched on the foot of his bed.

At first he thought it was a shadow, but as his eyes adjusted to the light he could see that the form was solid and very much alive.

He called to the guard - and all that came out was a puff of air. His next thought was to turn on the reading light that was clipped to the head of the bed.

A small man sat there as solid and real as any living person. Will called out again but there was only more hissing.

Will cannot describe the man in detail but his impression is distinct that this was a human being. He had the disquieting impression that it was a child, a boy with a huge, bobbing head.

Will threw back the bedsheets and started for the door. A hand pressed against his chest, delivering what felt like an electric jolt. The man's arm was clad in silver cloth.

Will remembers vividly how startled he was by the effect the touch had on him. Blackness came around his eyes.

"It's all right, Willy, it's all right," the creature said. His voice was ugly and low and rattling as if his lungs had given out. "We're going to capture you, Willy."

It took him an hour to mutter the rest of this story. Will is terrifically reticent about sex, and even after all these years the embarrassment of talking about what next took place was painful to witness.

First he felt a terrific blast of pleasure in his groin. Then fingers were touching him intimately and their strange electricity was pouring waves of pleasure into him. In the shadows he could see the head come forward, closer and closer. He thought that he saw the face of a demented child. The lips smacked wetly.

Will toppled back into the pillows, swooning with terror and pleasure. An instant later his body gave a spasm and he experienced a terrific blast of sexual release. "It's all right," the thing repeated, "it's all right, Willy."

My heart went out to Will as he described enduring an intimate and protracted exploration that he was helpless to prevent. All the while it continued the voice kept repeating that it was all right.

As far us Will was concerned, it was very far from all right. At last the strange creature withdrew his hand.

The bed springs creaked as he jumped down to the floor.

He took a few steps toward the window and the next thing Will remembers the creature was gone and he was screaming. This sound the guard heard. He responded instantly. The door swung open.

Will managed to quiet himself down. He could not tell the man what had happened. Finally he croaked that he'd had a nightmare. He apologized to the guard.

He could not tell anybody that he had just been, in effect, raped. It was a secret he kept for forty-two years, until yesterday.

In his day homosexuality was the darkest of secrets, a deep personal shame for any man. Had he been able to gain access to his own sexuality, I suspect that he might have discovered that he was somewhat attracted to men.

As the guard left he called out, "Get me a pot of black coffee. And if I fall asleep wake me up." "Yes, sir."

He lay down to wait for the coffee. It was a long moment before he was aware that somebody was stroking his cheek. "Sleep, little one," said the voice of the strange man. Will's eyes flew open.

He was alone.

He buried his head in the pillow. "Stop," he shouted, "for the love of Mike stop!"

A sweet voice sang in response. "Sleep and rest, sleep and rest, mother will come to thee soon."

"God help me! Stop them! Stop them, God, stop them!" Then the world faded to black and he slept. The guard said in the morning that he tried to rouse him but couldn't.

He had slept their sleep, perfect sleep, the sleep of babies and old men. They had given him a gift, I think, the chance to see himself as he was. I cannot blame him for passing it up. It takes great courage to love one's true self.

The next morning Will ached with disgust. He loathed what had happened to him. And yet... there was also something else.

He didn't only feel attacked and raped and captured. He felt loved as he had not since he was a boy.

Cherished, even.

This did not reassure him, and for a rather odd reason.

As son of a master fisher of trout, he knew the secret of the stream, that the man who takes the best fish is the one who loves them truly, and feels a genuine compassion as he drags them exhausted from the water and drops them to suffocate in his creel.

He was just like that, Wilfred Stone, a fish being loved to exhaustion.

And he was just about out of fight.

Chapter Twenty-one

His forty-eight hours of grappling with the others had reduced him to a furtive, huddling creature aching with secrets he dared not tell. He was closer to a complete breakdown, I think, than he realizes even now.

It was in this state that he held his first meeting with the scientific team that became the nucleus of the group that formed under MJ-12.

Three of the four scientists were bursting with confidence and good fellowship. Two weeks ago he would have craved the company of such men and counted them as critical assets to the team he was assembling. Now he had no more faith in them than a tired commissar might in the latest rabble of slaves from Moscow's dungeons.

There was Walt Roediger with his churchwarden pipe and academic demeanor. And paunchy, fluffy Dick Toole, the electromagnetics whiz who had been working until two days ago on the linear accelerator project.

The two of them stood up and advanced on Will as silently as ghosts when he arrived in the cramped conference room of Tech 21, the building Sally had commandeered to house the project. It had once been a massive generator room. Now it was mostly damp cavernous space, smelling faintly of machine oil.

The communist pathologist Gene Edwards was what Will described in his old-fashioned manner as "a real Arrow Shirt man." Tall, youthful, strong, he reacted to Will's arrival only by putting down his Los Alamos Times with a considerable amount of paper rattling. His body language spoke resentment. This was understandable, in view of the fact that he had been coerced into coming here.

They did not feel that they could risk telling anyone anything until the individual was on site and under their control. One word to the newspapers that the government was looking for scientists to study alien artifacts and the desperate and fragile cover-up would fall apart.

So he'd been forced to cooperate by a threat to his clearance. Without it he could not work on the program to which he was assigned at the University of California, which sought to understand and mediate the effects of radiation poisoning.

Edwards was the most serious security risk and his area of expertise was the most vulnerable to disclosure.

The group's last member was costumed rather than dressed, in what Will assumed was his own carefully considered notion of intellectual disarray.

According to Sally he was more than just brilliant like the others, he was something of a genius. He was an astronomer by profession. He had been chosen for Majestic because of his combination of backgrounds. Not only did he have a degree in astrophysics and an outstanding record of discoveries and achievements, he'd also worked during the war as a propagandist. He had been damned good at that, too.

Privately they would work Gerald Benning the astrophysicist to the bone. His public role would be a propaganda function. As an astronomer of significant academic standing he would explain every sighting that came to Air Force attention, taking the position that they were all bunk.

To make the group's chief astrophysicist also its chief propagandist was a stroke of cunning. It minimized

"need to know" while it also meant that the propaganda would be fine-tuned to hide the real situation.

I have read some of Benning's books, Flying Disks and The Saucer Enigma, and they are indeed masterpieces of the propagandist's art, making utterly insupportable and absurd claims that the disks can be explained by things like nonexistent atmospheric "lensing" effects.

Benning truly was a genius and he must have been a man of courage as well, a moral man. While keeping the public calm with his debunking books he secretly fought to understand the others. And he knew that he would be publicly discredited when and if his secret labors bore fruit.

Was CIG lucky, or was their real insight at work when these scientists were picked? I have a feeling that Roscoe Hillenkoetter was a far more extraordinary man than history yet realizes.

Will made an opening speech which was designed to disarm his small audience as much as possible. "Good morning, gentlemen," he said, "I'm your resident bureaucrat here to interfere with your work in annoying ways."

"Thank you," Edwards replied in a surprisingly pleasant voice. Will had expected a file like his to whine.

"I realize that none of you know exactly why you're here."

"But we're damn interested," Benning said. "I just gave up a week's telescope time at Palomar, so this had better be good."

"Gentlemen, this is probably the single most important thing that has ever happened."

"Tom Dewey's decided to get off his duff and whip Harry Truman," said Walt Roediger around his pipe.

Edwards looked disgusted. "This is supposed to be important. That excludes both Dewey and Truman."

"Gentlemen," Will said, "we've captured a flying disk and three of its occupants and we would like you to participate in a program of greater potential impact than the Manhattan Project - "

"Hold it," shouted the hitherto silent Toole, "did you say a flying disk?"

"I did."

He burst out: "Poppycock!"

He would not be the first to submerge fear beneath a shout of derision. Will quickly learned to use that tendency of the intellectually arrogant as a tool in maintaining secrecy. A man proud of his own intellectual attainments does not want to believe in superior aliens, not when their mere existence threatens the validity of his knowledge and therefore his self-integrity. I believe that this is the reason that scientists such as Carl Sagan continue to delude themselves about the reality of the disks.

Will decided that the best way of responding to Toole's outburst was to ignore it for the moment. "You must understand that we have a need for absolute secrecy. There is substantial evidence that our alien visitors are extremely hostile."

Edwards shook his head sadly. "Of course. The only motive strong enough to bring intelligent life across the universe turns out to be conquest."

Out of exhaustion and nervousness Will downed an entire cup of coffee, almost gagging with the heat of it.

There were sweet rolls and he began gobbling one.

Roediger stared at him. "Mr. Bureaucrat, this is about the most unnerving pause for refreshment I have ever endured. Will you get on with it, if you can stand to stop feeding."

"These sweet rolls would be good if they had more than the single raisin among them."

"Hostile aliens! Talk!"

"Yes."

Toole's eyes twinkled. "I'd want proof. Absolute proof in the form of a corpus delicti to autopsy."

"Dr. Edwards will be starting his autopsy in fifteen minutes."

"I'm beginning to suspect that you aren't kidding."

Sally pointed to the large double doors at the far end of the room. "The disk is through there. The bodies are in cold storage next door in T-22."

"I'm going to autopsy these things?" Edwards had gone pale. Roediger gave Will a frank look.

"There's physical material? This disk is what - I remember the papers saying something about debris being recovered."

"A rawinsonde. It was a rawinsonde that was recovered. I think that was the official verdict." Dr. Toole folded his arms.

"Gentlemen, we ought to begin. First, this project is going to be tightly compartmentalized. That means that every research team reports only to its own supervisor."

"No cross-fertilization?"

Will wondered if Toole rather than Edwards was going to prove the more difficult.

"Initially there will be. But when we begin to gain some perspective we will divide according to subject area.

At that point cross-fertilization will stop and need-to-know will replace it."

"Stupid, but predictable," Toole said.

"I would like to begin with a walk-around of the disk. Then we will observe Dr. Edwards's first approach to our most intact body." I went to the doors and pulled them open.

There was absolute silence. Then Toole spoke. "It looks a bit like something from a movie. Is it a prop?"

"No, Doctor, it is not." Roediger walked up to the disk.

"I'd like to go inside. Is it safe?"

"It may be partially operational. Personnel entering it have experienced extreme time disorientation. We don't know why."

"Time," Dr. Toole said. "In what sense?"

"A man subjectively perceived himself as being inside for a few minutes. He was actually gone for nine hours."

Benning was examining the damaged area. He reached his arm in and waved it up and down. "I wonder if we have a time machine here."

"Could such a thing exist - I mean, as a frankly physical object?" Roediger touched the edge of the disk as he spoke.

"Has it been tested for radioactive output? Are there disease factors possibly involved?"

"The AAF men who found it put a Geiger counter on it," Sally said. "There is no radiation."

"What about X-rays? Neutrons?"

"Doctor Benning, the main reason we're here is to develop a program. To make a beginning."

"Mr. Stone."

"Yes, Dr. Toole?"

"This temporal effect interests me. Is there a written report? Were any measurements taken, data gathered?"

"The man went on a brief reconnaissance into the vehicle, carrying only a flashlight. Nobody can account for the fact that nine hours passed, least of all the man himself."

Edwards regarded me. "Were you the individual who entered the craft?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"Just answer the question."

"Yes is the short answer."

"Then I have another question."