Harry Truman vs the Aliens (3 page)

* * *

March, 1951

Douglas MacArthur sat across the
little desk from Truman and looked pissed.

Too fucking
bad
, thought the President.

“Sorry, Doug,” Truman said. “But I’m
going to have to fire you.”

They sat a moment looking at each
other, the silence echoing in the little office.

Truman realized he’d been spending too
much time here, and vowed to return to Washington by the end of the
week. But this project had been so important that Truman had wanted
to keep an eye on things himself. The army had erected new
buildings in area 51, including a small office for the President.
It was tiny and Spartan, something for a clerk, not for the leader
of the free world. Doubtless, General MacArthur felt insulted to
meet the President in this way.

MacArthur sighed. “I suppose I’m not
surprised, Mr. President.”

“Buck up, Doug. I have another job for
you.”

“Mr. President?”

And so Truman told him the story. He
took his time, not skimping on details. He filled in the general on
all the intelligence they’d gathered since that bloody day just
over a year ago. MacArthur looked incredulous then terrified then
resolved.

Truman pushed away from his desk.
“Come with me, Doug. I want to show you something.”

The general followed Truman across the
compound, past drilling troops and gun emplacements. Area 51 was
now the most secure place on the planet. They entered the hanger on
the other side of the compound, and once within, MacArthur gasped
at what he saw.

Three enormous ships like huge, fat
submarines sat side by side in the hanger. Unlike submarines there
was a row of thick glass windows up front and portholes down the
sides. Each craft stood on thick landing skids. They were as big as
destroyers, some unfamiliar, bulky engine mounting on the back of
each.

“This is the beginning of
our fleet,” Truman said. “
Your
fleet, General MacArthur. We’ll have nine more by
the end of the month. I want you to take it to the alien bastards,
Doug. I want you to go get them before they get here. If we do this
right, the world never even needs to know there’s been a
war.”

“These are spaceships?”

“Damn straight. Our best people have
been working around the clock.”

MacArthur shook his head. “They must
way a million tons each. They’ll never fly.”

“Oh, they’ll fly,” Truman reassured
him. “You’ll ride the power of the atom. Exploding atomic bombs
will propel the things. It’s all good science, so don’t worry.
We’ll have to fuck about a hundred square miles of Nevada to launch
them, but they tell me the radiation will fade in two hundred and
fifty years or so.”

MacArthur tore his gaze away from the
spaceships, turned solemnly to Truman. “I think you’ve changed, Mr.
President.”

“Changed? Yeah, I guess so. Fact is
the world you knew is over,” Truman said. “Now are you going to
help me make this war or not?”

A slow smile spread itself across
MacArthur’s face. “It would be my pleasure, Mr.
President.”

Emerson Malcolm Witt
LaSalle
was born in
Le Fils de Vainqueur, Missouri on
March 11, 1899. At the age of seventeen he was admitted to Harvard
to study journalism and was expelled after a single semester.
Yearning to see the world and “fling himself into the dripping
fangs of adventure” he joined the French Foreign Legion where he
served honorably before losing a hand to an Arab in the Sudan.
Accounts vary , but most agree he put it someplace it didn’t
belong.

He
bounced around, writing for a number of newspapers as a foreign
correspondent before publishing his first novel
The Clockwork Woman
in 1928, a startling tale
of a lonely mad scientist who builds the perfect companion of
springs and gears. A critical failure, the novel nevertheless sold
out nine print runs, and launched LaSalle’s career as a fabulist.
But his new success was tainted later that same year when his
father (Earnst) and his mother (Helga) were killed in a blimp
accident over the Scottish Highlands.

LaSalle met the girl of his dreams.
Seven times. After his seventh and final
divorce in 1978, LaSalle vowed never to marry again, and was
arrested four times over the next decade for soliciting
prostitutes. He produced no known offspring.

Twenty-two of his novels were optioned for film,
including
Vixen
Shamus
which was
optioned by Ed Wood for one dollar but, alas, never filmed. Only
one of the options actually came to fruition. Bulgarian filmmaker
Ivan Ivan shot and edited the Bulgarian language version of
The Unmazing Mr.
Mechanical
in
three weeks. The film flopped. No prints are known to
exist.

LaSalle’s
career waned but enjoyed a minor resurgence in the 1970’s at which
time LaSalle made the science fiction convention circuit, garnering
a new generation of fans.

On November
17, 2007, LaSalle was found dead in the woods near his Calamity,
Idaho cabin where authorities determined he’d been mauled by a
bear.

Thanks to author Anthony Neil Smith
who formatted this document.