Nebula

NEBULA

Copyright © 2010 Howard S. Marsh

I want to thank my wife Lynn for her patience and love during the many years of our marriage and for her invaluable assistance in editing this book and finding so many of my errors, both in content and grammar.

I also want to thank our daughter Ivy for her thorough review and comments during the writing and in the final proof. She found errors that were significant for continuity and for grammar, and this book would be far less without her help.

The strange craft tumbled through the desert air, spinning and lurching wildly to the right and left as the pilots tried to regain control. It flew erratically like this for several minutes, soaring just fifty or sixty meters above the desert floor below.

Suddenly it appeared to stabilize and hovered for several seconds, rising slowly to about one hundred meters. A silent, powerful force projected downward from it, stirring up an enormous dust storm in the dry soil. Then it lurched out of control again, spinning rapidly and throwing off bursts of lightning like an angry storm cloud, and it plunged into the ground. The dust settled back down, some of it covering the craft that now lay dead.

Local residents, police, and firefighters rushed to the scene. They were joined a short time later by military and federal government personnel who cordoned off the area and imposed tight security for many days. When they left, all traces of the strange aircraft and its crew were gone. It was as if nothing had ever happened there.

Harry Ambrose never expected that his life would change so drastically when he was first approached about working on the project. It all started while he was eating lunch in the cafeteria with one of his graduate students. His colleague and friend, Walter Ferguson, approached him and asked if he could speak with him in private.

“Sure,” Harry said. “We were just about done anyway. Ted, why don’t you go back to the lab and see if you can track down that phase instability problem. I think that it’s most likely in the feedback amplifier; probably a nonlinearity due to an out-of-spec chip. I’ll join you as soon as I finish with Professor Ferguson.”

The grad student left, and Harry got up and joined Walter off in a corner of the cafeteria. “OK, Walt, what’s the problem?”

“Not a problem Harry; more of an opportunity. I want to see if you’re interested in working on something that a group of us are doing. It’s totally new and very challenging, not like anything that you or I have done before, and we could use your help. I think that you’d find it worth your time. It’s also pretty important and highly classified, so I can’t go into what it involves until you sign on and get cleared.”

The unusual offer was pretty strange. It intrigued Harry, and he had known Walt long enough to trust his judgment that the assignment would be an interesting one, but he didn’t like the thought of jumping in totally blind.

“Can you give me at least a hint of what’s involved and how much of my time it would take?”

“Afraid not Harry. All I can tell you is that it’s the most interesting, challenging, and important thing that I’ve ever worked on. I know that you’d want to be involved, but I can’t tell you why. As far as time commitment goes, that depends on how much of a role you want to play. At a minimum, you’d probably spend enough of your time that you’d have to turn your current research and grad students over to someone else. But I guarantee that you wouldn’t regret it.”

The whole thing didn’t sound right. If things were classified, Harry could understand that Walt couldn’t tell him very much about it, but Walt wasn’t telling him anything, not even the topic of this mysterious project. Besides, Harry enjoyed his current research and felt a commitment to his students. He also didn’t like the idea of jumping into something that was totally unknown and could disrupt his work at the university for a few years.

Harry wasn’t one to make decisions on the fly, without any plan at all for how everything would fit together. He’d been like this since he was a young boy, first starting out on his road toward a career in research. Everything that he did was part of a long term plan that evolved in an orderly and logical way, not by random zigs and zags. He wasn’t prone to ventures into the unknown, and his world was focused almost entirely on his research. It was a well structured world, and it suited him perfectly. His only close friends were the small set of colleagues at the university and the graduate students who did their research under him. Other than them, he was more or less a loner. His parents had died when he was still in graduate school, and he had no brothers or sisters and never married or had any close relationships since leaving college. He liked this world and the structure and intellectual challenge that it provided. Why, he thought, would he want to risk this and take a leap into something that was completely undefined?

He thanked Walt
for the strange offer, but said that he’d rather go on with his research and his other duties at the university. They went their separate ways that day, but Harry couldn’t get what Walt said out of his mind. The old saying is that curiosity killed the cat, and the same seems to apply to people. The constant curiosity nagging at him finally won out, and after all, the saying also says that satisfaction brought the cat back. So he finally decided to see if something could be arranged for him to take a small step without being fully committed. After all, what could it hurt to inquire a bit?

He approached Walt with that question, and Walt said that it probably could be arranged. So that’s how Harry got roped in, presumably with only one small step at a time.

Once he agreed to take the first step, things became even more bizarre. He was asked - summoned was more like it - to go to a room in a building at the edge of campus, where Walt and another man were waiting inside.

Harry knocked on the door. It was a particularly strong looking door with a cipher lock and what looked like a retina or iris reader, and as it opened, he could see that the door was very thick and looked heavy as the unidentified man pushed it open. That massive appearance of the door was reinforced by the heavy clunk and loud click of the lock as it slammed shut.

The room was almost bare. It had a small table in the middle with four chairs around it and a desk and bookcase along the wall. There were no windows, and the only light in the room was from a plain fixture that hung down from the ceiling.

“This is like something out of a low budget movie, Walt. Is it a joke or something?”

“Not a joke Harry. We just need to start the clearance process. That’s all. We use this room for classified discussions but nothing else. That’s why it’s so bare and so well protected.”

“Please sit down,” the unnamed man said and pointed to one of the chairs. He never introduced himself; he only pointed and directed Harry to sit. “Please read these security agreements and sign them.”

Harry sat and looked at the documents before him on the table. He’d done this sort of thing before, when he needed to be cleared into government programs. There were the usual words about keeping secrets and penalties if he broke the rules, and of course the lifetime prohibitions about discussing things, but it didn’t have the usual government document markings. He wasn’t sure what this was all about, but the words looked OK, so he signed and passed the papers back to the strange man who seemed to be in charge.

“Good,” Walt
said. “Now we can make the formal introductions. My friend here is Bradford Lincoln. He’s one of the senior security officers in our program and will handle your clearance to Level-1 access. The three of us will take a ride to a secure facility where we can show you a bit about the project. I guarantee that you’ll want to get to the higher levels once you get this first taste. I know that I did.”

As they walked out of the room, Harry couldn’t help but notice a slight bulge in Bradford Lincoln’s jacket when he turned to lock the door. The man clearly was armed.

“What the hell is Walt getting me into?” Harry thought as the three of them left the room and Brad set the alarms and locked the door. The whole thing was looking more and more like some sort of grade-B movie. It was actually a bit funny in a very bizarre way, and if Harry had known Walt to be a practical joker, he probably would have said something mildly insulting and left. But now he was even more curious to see how everything would play out, so he decided to go along to see what it was really about.

They walked a few short blocks to one of the staff parking lots. Harry expected that they would be driving in some exotic armored car, maybe some Hollywood version of the kind of car that a secret agent would have. He certainly expected them to keep up the appearance of some sort of black operation. But it was only a small Toyota sitting by itself at the extreme edge of the lot. Brad Lincoln opened it by inserting a key in the lock, not with the common remote entry device.

“More secure this way,” Brad said as he noted Harry’s questioning stare at the key. “The remote entry signals can be intercepted, and even though the code rolls to a new one each time, the lock needs to respond to a number of past and future codes so that you don’t get locked out if there’s a false alarm or if you accidentally press the remote entry when you’re away. We can’t take chances that someone might be monitoring the signals. We also want to avoid any risks that someone was able to insert a bug and eavesdrop on us. The best security is to just avoid using any electronic devices when we deal with the project.”

“Is that all really necessary?” Harry said, looking at Brad. “It seems a bit paranoid.”

“Believe me,” Brad replied. “It’s definitely necessary. You’ll appreciate it when we fill you in.”

Harry looked at Walt
with a quizzical expression. Brad did seem to be overdoing it. But Walt just nodded. Apparently he agreed with the extreme measures.

Now things became even weirder. Harry got into the back seat
and the door was closed. Walt then gave him a blindfold and asked him to put it on.

“Come on. Isn’t this going a bit far? A blindfold?”

“Just put it on Harry. The location that we’re going to is secret. You have to be cleared to Level-1 before you can know any more about it.”

Harry grumbled something that was unintelligible, but obviously obscene, but he complied and put the blindfold on. They then drove off on a trip that lasted about two hours and, as far as Harry could judge, much of it on small country roads. It was uncomfortable riding blindfolded for that length of time, and he was glad to finally feel the car come to a stop before he lost his breakfast all over the back seat.

Finally, Walt said, “OK, Harry. We’re here. You can take the blindfold off.”

“It’s about time. You almost ended up with my breakfast all over your car. I hope that you aren’t going to make me wear the thing on the way back. I swear that if I get sick, I’ll make sure to spray the both of you.”

“No. You’ll be cleared to Level-1 here, so a blindfold won’t be necessary. But you need to keep everything that you see and hear to yourself. From now on, everything is covered by the agreement that you signed.”

Harry nodded, and he staggered out of the car and finally got his legs to work after the long and disorienting ride. The three of them headed toward a small building that looked like a farm house. From the look of the fields and foliage, plus knowledge of the time it took to get here, he guessed that they were somewhere in the wilds of western Virginia, or maybe West Virginia or the panhandle of western Maryland. It was pretty hilly and definitely far from the populated areas around Washington, DC.

What looked at first like a small farmhouse turned out to be a much more elaborate structure with several levels below ground. They took an elevator three levels down, where the horizontal spread of the facility was many times larger than the apparent size of the building above. There was a combination of offices, small conference rooms, a well equipped medical clinic, and several rooms that looked like living quarters.

Harry was subjected to routine medical examinations and a series of interviews that seemed to be both psychological profiles and security evaluations. He questioned some of the staff about the reasons for this and tried to get some information about the project, but none of them replied, other than to tell him that he’d learn soon enough and that even they were in the dark about most of it. Presumably, these people were only briefed into the entry requirements for the project, probably the Level-1 that Walt had mentioned, and not any information beyond that. The process took about three hours.

After the initial battery of tests and questions, the in-brief took place in one of the small conference rooms. Walter Ferguson was among those present, probably to calm Harry’s nerves, but the others, except for Brad Lincoln, were complete strangers. Brad Lincoln was clearly in charge, and the others weren’t introduced at all and simply sat there and observed Harry as Lincoln spoke.

“The first thing that you need to know,” Brad began, “is that this level of access will give you only the basic knowledge of what we are doing; only knowledge that the project exists and minimal detail of what it actually involves. But what you learn at Level-1 will still commit you to absolute secrecy for the rest of your life. Clearance to any higher levels will commit you to a more extensive involvement, most likely full time for quite a few years. We’ll explain that once we give you the general information at Level-1. You can continue at this point without that commitment, but if you want to back out, you’ll need to do it before we go any higher.”

“Wait a minute. I thought that this would be a temporary assignment, only a short time,” Harry said, looking toward Walt. “What’s this about extensive, full time, and quite a few years?”

“OK, I misled you a bit,” Walt
said. “But it was necessary to get you to go this far, so you can learn enough to make a decision. You’ll still have a chance to back out, but if you proceed beyond Level-1 it’s quite a bit more of a commitment than just a few years, like Brad said. Once you know everything about the project, you’ll have to work on it and no others, possibly for the rest of your life, and there’ll be some other restrictions too. We’ll explain before you get past this level. But at this point, the only commitment that you have is to absolute secrecy. I didn’t lie to you about that.”

“OK,” Harry replied, not particularly happy but determined to get at least what he was owed for already suffering the two hour blindfolded ride and the three hours of exams and interviews. The whole day was shot anyway. “Let’s keep going then, but tell me when we get to the point of no return. I certainly have no intention of getting submerged in this for the rest of my life. We’ve come this far, so I guess I’m entitled to learn a bit more. Maybe I’ll even change my mind if it’s as interesting as you say, but don’t bet on it.”

“Right,” Walt replied. “Let’s go to the Level-1 laboratory down the corridor. That should give you enough of a taste for you to decide.”