Majestic (26 page)

I clung to my damp glass of Coca-Cola. It was a handle on the familiar world. Dark waters were engulfing me.

The cafe, the people, all began to slip away.

Had there been someone in the car with me? I thought - a woman. Yes . . . but I couldn't remember clearly.

My head was whirling, my ears ringing.

"Hey, traveler, you seen it? You were right out there on the road."

"I had - had - car trouble. I'm running late and flat-out tired. I don't think I could see fifty feet."

"Well, everybody in this town saw it. Yes, sir! It was as big as one of them blimps."

A blimp. My mind raced. Weren't they all in mothballs? I grasped at a straw. "Maybe that's what it was."

"Hell, this thing went up so fast you wouldn'ta believed it." The man who spoke wore a sloppy uniform. A local sheriffs deputy, I thought.

A woman spoke up. "I was lookin' at it outa my pickup, mister. I saw that car of yours. I saw you drivin' right under it."

The whole room became silent. Even the cook at the grill turned to look at me.

"Like I say, maybe it was there. I just didn't notice! I mean, who expects a thing like that!"

The woman from the pickup was regarding me with eyes like pins. "That Chevy of yours looked like it came down outa the thing."

Oh dear God, surely that couldn't be! If my car - no. It would mean that I was nothing more than a little trout being played on a line, played until I was tired.

"Maybe we oughtta have a look at that Chevy of yours, mister."

I had to get out of there.

I drank down my Coke and cranked up what was probably a pretty bad smile, "I didn't realize the time. I've really gotta be going!"

The cook glanced at one of his checks. "You got a hamburger comin'. I'm just gonna put it together."

"Oh, I'll pay."

The woman was like a snake. "He came outa that thing," she murmured to the deputy, who nodded. His hand was on his gun.

I put a dollar down on the counter. "Will this cover it? Keep the change!"

"You spend two bits and you leave a simoleon. That's real generous, mister. You take your burger basket with you." He laughed. "And you can keep the basket!"

I edged toward the door. In a moment I was outside. I started to open my car. The deputy had the movements of a jackal. He grabbed my wrist with a hard, thin hand. My fingers let go of the car door.

"Yes, Officer?"

"We all saw it. We saw your car come out of it. It came right out of the bottom and the thing flew away. I want to know what the hell you are, mister. What the hell was that thing? You like to scared us half to death!"

"I'm a federal officer," I said. I flashed my wallet at him, hoping that he'd be satisfied with a glimpse of a Washington, D.C., driver's license. "You saw secret military activity. You keep your mouth shut, and tell the rest of those folks to do the same."

He leaned back on his heels. "The hell."

"That was it!" I tried to get in the car.

"You're - "

"Let me go! You can't hold me like this!"

"Mister, I want to search this car."

"No! You have no cause."

"What's that smell, then? What stinks like that - you got something in there - what is it?" He peered into the backseat. "What's rolled up in that bag?"

I took the moment to jump into the car. Frantically I inserted the key and hit the starter. He grabbed into the window, clutched my shoulder. "You're under arrest!"

"I'm a federal officer!"

"Get out that thing."

I slammed it into reverse and jammed the gas pedal down so hard his strong grip was instantly broken.

I slurried into the highway and stepped on it.

For a long time I saw a flashing red light behind me, but he couldn't overtake me/Mobile radios hadn't penetrated to small New Mexico sheriffs' departments in those days, so he wasn't able to call for help.

But he was tenacious as hell and he drove well. No matter how fast I went he kept getting gradually closer.

And he knew every slight bend in the road.

I couldn't arrive at the Hill with an infuriated hick sheriff on my tail.

In desperation I cut my lights. We were entering the mountains south of Santa Fe and the road was beginning to twist and turn a good bit. I jammed the gas pedal to the floor and started taking bends on two wheels.

Finally I found what I was looking for - a dirt road leading off the main highway. I turned hard, sliding into it amid a cloud of dust.

Then I backed right out into the highway and tore off around the next bend.

It was a trick I'd learned during the war. He saw the dust I'd left and took off down the side road.

I almost wept as I pulled up an hour later to the main gate at Los Alamos. I had never in my life been so glad to see armed men and lights and to hear my credentials questioned.

I was reassured to see that the guards were wearing snappy new Atomic Energy Commission uniforms, blue like cops rather than khaki soldiers' things.

I had challenged the night and won, or so it seemed to me. Actually, I was more like an ant who finds the poison the housewife has laid. Delighted with its sweetness he carries a piece of it deep into his nest.

Because it is so good he hides it away at the back of the food tunnels.

That way only the best and brightest ants may feast on the treasure.

Part Three

CONGRESS OF LIES

They know not, neither will they understand;

they walk on in darkness: all the foundations

of the earth are out of course.

- psalm 82

Chapter Nineteen

The same night that Will arrived at Los Alamos, Roscoe Hillenkoetter seems to have become personally involved with the others. Nobody, least of all Hilly, realized that anything like this had happened until 1960, when the old man, retired now, suddenly threw caution aside and called for a congressional investigation into unidentified flying objects.

It was a direct attack on Will and his agency - an agency that Hillenkoetter had literally created during a midnight session with Truman.

By 1960 Hilly was long retired. After making his statement he very publicly joined a group called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Will says that he was forced to infiltrate it, take it over and ultimately destroy it.

In order to get Hillenkoetter to back down Will finally briefed him. He saw at once their predicament and left NICAP, commenting quite correctly that the government had revealed all it could and it was up to the "aliens"

to tell the rest of the story.

During that time MAJIC interviewed the former CIA director. When he was placed under hypnosis the first thing he remembered was the remarkable night that he conceived of the new agency.

Hilly's encounter was not simply a matter of a flying disk landing in his backyard. Like all the most profound encounters with the others, it was also an encounter with a powerful aspect of self.

Roscoe Hillenkoetter was not sleeping well on that night. His dreams were troubled by familiar storms. He was having a ship nightmare of a kind that had dogged him since he'd gone through Pearl. This time he was on the bridge of a tired old cruiser somewhere in the South China Sea. She burned coal and every seam sweated. The wind was screaming and there were Jap subs about. He didn't like the flying whitecaps or the evil green sky. He listened to the distant laboring of the engines and gave an order to come about into the wind.

Then he noticed that the steersman was a twelve-year-old. He was shocked beyond words. How the hell had a kid like that gotten into the Navy!

He shouted for his first officer. A high, piping voice replied. This one was ten! Then he saw babies crawling on the deck, hundreds of them, and women in the rigging, little girls on watch without lifejackets!

They were singing sea shanties while the typhoon came down on them. Nurses, babies, children. An elderly couple covered with coal dust helped each other up from the engine room, looking for a breath of air.

His ship was crewed by the innocent and the old. And then he saw three white torpedo tracks dissolving in the crest of a wave. "Hard a-starboard," he screamed, "flank speed!" As the ship heeled a box of pickup sticks fell to the floor of the bridge and went scattering reds and greens and yellows down the ladder.

Then the ship took the first torpedo. A geyser of water burst up, and in the rocking, plunging aftermath all the hatches flew open and screaming crowds of children poured up from below like a desperate horde of ants.

She took the second fish and he felt the shuddering snap of the keel and knew she was going down.

He was half out of bed and running for the pumps when he finally came awake.

"Lord God almighty!"

He dropped back onto the bed. What a hell of a nightmare. Damn the war that it left a man with dreams.

He turned over and plumped his pillow, then closed his eyes and tried to fall back to sleep. He was shaking.

He deliberated about waking his wife. But he was too old to admit even to her that he'd been frightened by a dream.

He was methodically calming himself down when he began to get the feeling that there was somebody in the room.

He opened his eyes but didn't move. A prowler? Surely not. But then who? He wasn't a man given to flights of fancy. There was damn well somebody here. He could hear them breathing right over by the closet door. In and out, in and out. Breathing as regularly as a damn machine.

He kept a .38 Special in his bedside table. If he was quick he could probably get his hand on it before they moved, but I he'd be bound to take at least a couple of shots before he could bring his own weapon to bear.

Hell.

Moving his head very slowly he tried to look across the room.

A woman was standing there, big as life. As on a stage she was lit from above.

He sat up. She was young, and so beautiful he all but cried out from the pain of seeing her. There was recognition, shocked, confusing. He loved this woman as if he had always known her - as indeed he had. She was mother, daughter, lover, the betrayed woman within us all. She was the one in whose lap we lie when we are babies and when we die.

When a boy on the battlefield calls for his mother, it is she who comes. She is why we make love so often.

No matter how deeply we penetrate the bodies of our lovers we never reach her. Our eternal striving for her has brought the whole human race out of our loins. With the softest of smiles on her lips she rose into the air and went right through the ceiling, disappearing in a swirl of flimsy blue skirts.

The synopsis of his hypnosis states dryly that he cried when he described her departure. And now in Will's garden, with the traffic hissing beyond the wall and a child singing next door, now I am also betrayed by the old man's traitorous tears.

His unease, on that distant night, finally got the better of the admiral. He woke his wife. "I'm having trouble sleeping," was all he cared to tell her.

"Would you like me to make some hot toddy?"

"That would be a sainted act."

She stretched and kissed his cheek and slipped from the bed.

The admiral got out of bed and went to the divan under the window. From here he could see the moon's low sickle riding the oak tree that stood in the side yard.

She brought the toddy and he sat sipping it. His mind went back to the dream, and he reflected that an old man running an organization like CIG really was playing with the futures of hundreds of young people.

He knocked back the drink and returned to bed with his wife. He entered what was for him an unusual state between waking and sleep. The transcript of his hypnosis revealed a very strange encounter.

A beam of blue light came down from the ceiling and began to move slowly back and forth in the room. Hilly was paralyzed. Finally it found the bed. It moved up the sheets, then up Hillenkoetter's cheeks, until it rested just between his eyes.

The center of his forehead glowed white.

And the beautiful lady walked into his dream. She was young, no more than twenty, and wearing a light-blue summer dress. He thought that she was the prettiest girl he'd ever laid eyes on. She had a piece of chalk in her hand.

She turned to the blackboard (he seemed to be in a schoolroom) and wrote a single word in block letters.

"MAJESTIC."

Then she lectured. Even under hypnosis he was so taken by her beauty that he could not remember her words. That was the cunning part of it, of course. They were probably standing right around his bed with their big bobbing heads, pulling that girl out of his unconscious and making her their tool, their way into his deep mind. Their weapon.

She laughed and tossed a curl from her eyes. And there his hypnotized narrative ended, as he recalled waking up. His ordinary file contained the rest of the story.

He remembered being filled with a sense of malignant, creeping evil. Something awful was about to happen, some slouching horror to come through the dark window.

Damned if he was going back to sleep now. Anyway, he'd had an idea. Really a hell of an idea. He put on his robe and slippers and went down to his study.

There he wrote out the organizational plan that remains to this day the basis of majic. He created an agency that would oversee every detail of our relationship with the aliens, and designed it in such a way that it has kept itself almost perfectly secret.

When he was finished he looked over the sheets of legal paper. He was excited.

As he worked he had become more and more aware of just how urgent this really was. He saw that he also had a chance to make a lightning strike against Vandenberg and close this thing up now and forever as a CIG/CIA project.

His sense of urgency was so great that he began to think that he ought to bypass everybody, Van, even Forrestal, and go to the President right this second.

He'd also figured out something else. Once the initial leaks were fixed, this business of the aliens was going to stay secret forever.