Area 51

CHAPTER 5

“About a year, give or take six months, without treatment. With treatment you can add perhaps another half a year.”

The old man didn’t blink at Dr. Cruise’s pronouncement. He nodded and rose to his feet, a black cane with a wide silver handle grasped in his withered left hand.

“Thank you, Doctor.”

“We can start the treatments tomorrow morning, Professor Von Seeckt,” Dr. Cruise hastily added, as if to cushion his earlier words.

“That is fine.”

“Would you like something—” Cruise paused as the old man held up his hand.

“I will be fine. This is not a surprise. I was informed this would most likely be the case when I was hospitalized earlier this year. I just wanted to confirm it, and I also believe I was owed the respect of your telling me yourself. My security will take me home.”

“I’ll see you at the meeting later this morning,” Cruise said, stiffening at the implied rebuke in Von Seeckt’s words.

“Good day, Doctor.” With that Werner Von Seeckt made his way out into the hallway of the hospital and was immediately flanked by two men wearing black wind breakers and khaki slacks, their eyes hidden behind wraparound sunglasses.

They hustled him into a waiting car and headed to the airstrip at Nellis Air Force Base, where a small black helicopter waited to whisk him back to the northwest. As the helicopter lifted off, Von Seeckt leaned back in the thinly padded seat and contemplated the terrain flitting by underneath. The American desert had been his home for over fifty years now, but his heart still longed for the tree-covered slopes of the Bavarian Alps, where he had grown up.

He had always hoped he would see his homeland before he died, but now, today, he knew he wouldn’t. They would never let him go, even after so many years had passed.

He unfolded the piece of paper on which he had written the message he had taken off his answering service while waiting in Cruise’s office. Power, sun. Forbidden. Home place, chariot, never again. Death to all living things. He remembered the Great Pyramid.

Von Seeckt leaned back in the seat. It was all coming around again, like a large circle. His life was back where it had been over fifty years ago. The question he had to ask himself was whether he had learned anything and whether he was willing to act differently this time.

Underneath the camouflage netting that Turcotte had helped rig during darkness, the mechanics made the three helicopters ready for flight, folding the rotors out and locking them in place. The pilots walked around, making their preflight checks.

On the perimeter of the primitive airstrip Turcotte was lying on his stomach in the middle of a four-hour guard shift, looking down the one asphalt road that led up to the airstrip. The road was in bad shape. Plants and weeds had sprouted up through cracks, and it seemed obvious this place had been abandoned for quite a while. That didn’t mean, of course, that someone in a four-wheel-drive vehicle couldn’t come wandering up and stumble over their mission support site. Thus Turcotte’s orders to apprehend anyone coming up the road.

The question that still had not been answered — albeit Turcotte had not asked it out loud — was what mission this site was set up to support. Prague had given orders through the night, but they had been immediate ones, directed to the security of this location, not shedding any light on what they would be doing once the sun went down this evening.

The conference room was to the left of the control center as one got off the elevator. It was soundproofed and swept daily for bugs. The Cube had never had a security compromise and General Gullick was going to insure that the record remained intact.

A large, rectangular mahogany table filled the middle of the room with twelve deep leather chairs lining the edges.

Gullick sat at the head of the table and waited silently as the other chairs were filled. He watched as Von Seeckt limped in and took the chair at the other end of the table.

Gullick had already been briefed by Dr. Cruise on the confirmation of Von Seeckt’s terminal condition. To Gullick it was good news. The old man had long ago outlived his usefulness.

Gullick shifted his attention to the youngest person in the room, who was sitting to his immediate right. She was a small, dark-haired woman with a thin face, dressed severely in a sharply cut gray suit. This was Dr. Lisa Duncan’s first meeting, and while inbriefing her on the project was one of the two priorities on the meeting schedule, it was not the primary one in Gullick’s mind. In fact, he resented having to take time out at such a critical juncture in the project to get a new person up to speed.

There was also the fact that Dr. Duncan was the first woman ever allowed in this room. But, since Duncan was filling the chair reserved for the presidential adviser, it paid at least to give the appearance of respect. The fingers of Gullick’s left hand lightly traced over his smooth skull, caressing the skin as if soothing the brain underneath. There was so much to do and so little time! Why had the previous adviser been reassigned? Duncan’s predecessor had been an old physics professor who had been so enraptured by what they were doing upstairs in the hangar that he had been no trouble.

A week ago Kennedy, the CIA representative, had been the first to notify Gullick of Duncan’s assignment and this visit. Gullick had ordered the CIA man to look into Duncan’s background. She was a threat; Gullick was convinced of that. The timing of her sudden assignment and this first visit couldn’t be coincidental. “Good afternoon, gentlemen — and lady,” Gullick added with a nod across the table. “Welcome to this meeting of Majic-12.” Built into the arm rest of his chair was a series of buttons and Gullick hit one of them, lighting up the wall behind him with a large-scale computer image. The same image was displayed on the horizontal console set into the tabletop just in front of Gullick for his eyes only:

“This is today’s schedule.” Gullick looked around the table. “First, since we have a new member, introductions are in order. I will begin from my left and go around the table clockwise.

“Mr. Kennedy, deputy director of operations, the Central Intelligence Agency. Our liaison to the intelligence community.” Kennedy was the youngest man in the room. He wore an expensive three-piece suit. If they weren’t a quarter mile underground he’d probably have been wearing sunglasses, Gullick thought. He didn’t like Kennedy because of his age and his aggressive attitude, but he most certainly needed him. Kennedy had thick blond hair and a dark tan that looked out of place with the other men at the conference table.

“Major General Brown, deputy chief of staff, Air Force. The Air Force has overall administration and logistics responsibility for the project and for external security.”

“Major General Mosley, deputy chief of staff, Army. The Army supplies personnel for security support.”

“Rear Admiral Coakley, assistant director, Naval intelligence. The Navy is responsible for counterintelligence.”

“Dr. Von Seeckt, chief scientific counsel, Majic-12. Dr. Von Seeckt is the only man in this room who has been with the project from the beginning.”

“Dr. Duncan, our latest member, presidential adviser to Majic-12 on science and technology.”

“Mr. Davis, special projects coordinator, National Reconnaissance Organization. The NRO is the agency through which our funding is directed.”

“Dr. Ferrel, professor of physics, New York Institute of Technology. Our chief scientific counsel and in charge of our reverse engineering work.”

“Dr. Slayden, project psychologist, Majic-12.”

“Dr. Underhill, aeronautics, Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Our expert at flight.”

“Dr. Cruise, MD.”

Gullick wasted no further time on the people. “I would like to welcome Dr. Duncan to our group for the first time.” He looked down the table at her. “I know you have been given the classified inbriefing papers on the history of the Majic-12 project, so I won’t bore you with that information, but I would like to run through some of the highlights of our operation as it currently stands. “First, everything and anything to do with the project is classified Top Secret, Q Clearance, Level 5. That is the highest classification level possible. Majic-12, which is the official designation for the people around this table, has been in existence for fifty-four years. Not once in all those years have we had a security breach.

“Our primary mission is twofold. First is to master flying the bouncer disks and reverse-engineer their propulsion system.” He flicked a button and an image of nine silvery disks appeared, lined up in a massive hangar. It was hard to tell details from the photo, but five of the disks appeared to be identical to one another, while the other four all differed slightly.

“We have been flying bouncers for thirty-three years and keep double flight crews current on their operation. But we have not had as much success discerning their method of propulsion.” He glanced down the table and arched an eyebrow. “I’m current on that research,” Duncan said.

Gullick nodded. “We are continuing flights of the bouncers to keep the flight crews current and also to continue tests on the propulsion system and their flight characteristics. We have several prototypes of the bouncer engine, but have not yet succeeded in engineering one that functions adequately,” he said, understating the massive problems they had encountered over the years and eager to get past the failures of the past and on to the future.

“Our second purpose — the mothership — is a different story altogether.” An elongated black cigar shape appeared on the screen, again nestled inside a hangar with rock walls. It was impossible to tell the scale of the ship from the photo, but even in the two-dimensional projection it gave the impression of being massive.

“For all these years the mothership has defied our best scientific minds, but we finally believe we have gained enough knowledge of the control system to activate the propulsion system. That is currently our number-one priority in the project. It will—”

“It will be a disaster if we activate the mothership,” Von Seeckt cut in, looking at Duncan. “We have no clue how it operates. Oh, these fools will tell you we understand the control system, but that has nothing to do with the mechanics and the physics of the engine itself. It is like inviting a man into the cockpit of an advanced nuclear bomber and believing that the man can operate the bomber because he can drive his car and the yoke of the bomber is very much like the steering wheel of the car. It is madness.”

Gullick’s left eyebrow twitched but his voice was calm.

“Thank you, Dr. Von Seeckt, but we have been over all that ground already. We will never understand the mothership if we do not attempt to investigate it. That is the method we have used on the bouncers and—”

“And we still don’t understand the bouncers’ propulsion systems!” Von Seeckt threw in.

“But we’re flying the bouncers and using them,” Doctor Ferrell, the physicist, said. “And we are getting closer every day to figuring them out.”

“It is dangerous to play with tools we don’t understand!” Von Seeckt cried out.

“Is this test dangerous?” Duncan asked, calm in contrast to Von Seeckt’s wavering and excited voice.

Gullick looked across the table at her. Just before this meeting he had studied the classified file Kennedy had amassed on her. He knew more about her than she probably remembered about herself. Thirty-seven, twice divorced, a son in private high school back in Washington, a doctorate in medical biology from Stanford, a successful career in business, and now, due to her friendship with the First Lady, a political appointee to perhaps the most sensitive post in the administration. Of course, Gullick knew, the President didn’t fully comprehend the importance of Majic-12. And that was one of the Catch-22’s of the secrecy surrounding the project. Because they couldn’t really tell anyone what was going on, they were often neglected in the big scheme. But there were ways around that and the members of Majic-12 had long ago perfected those ways.

“Ma’am,” Gullick said, reverting to the military form of addressing a woman, “everything is dangerous, but test-flying is probably the most dangerous occupation in the world. I flew experimental aircraft early in my career. Over the course of a year at Edwards Air Force Base, eight of the twelve men in my squadron were killed working out the bugs in a new airframe. And here we are dealing with alien technology. We didn’t design these craft. But we do have an advantage,” Gullick added. “We are dealing with technology that works. The largest danger I faced as a test pilot was getting the technology up to speed so it would work. Here we know these craft fly. It is a matter of figuring out how they fly.”

Gullick turned his chair slightly and pointed at the mothership sitting in its cradle of steel beams. “We are currently slightly over one hundred and thirty hours from the first test flight. But before we attempt that, we simply are going to start it up and see what happens. That is the reason this meeting is scheduled for today: so you can see for yourself in a few hours that there is no danger. To use Dr. Von Seeckt’s analogy — but in the proper perspective — we are simply going to put our man in the pilot’s seat and have him turn the engines on and then off. The craft won’t go anywhere. And our man is not a child. We have the best minds in the country assembled here working on this project.”

Von Seeckt snorted. “We had the best minds back in eighty-nine when—”

“That’s enough, Doctor,” Gullick snapped. “The decision has been made. This is an information briefing, not a decision briefing. At thirteen hundred hours local time to-day the mothership’s engines will be turned on for ten seconds and then immediately turned off. The decision has been made,” he repeated. “Now, shall we move on with the briefing?” It was not a question designed to be answered with anything but assent.

For the next thirty minutes the meeting went as scheduled with no further interruptions. Gullick formally brought it to a close. “Dr. Duncan, if you would like, you might want to take a tour of the hangar and our other facilities and be present when we conduct the test on the mothership.”

“I would like that very much,” she replied, “but first I’d like a moment alone with you.”

“If you would excuse us, gentlemen,” Gullick said. “Designated personnel, please wait outside,” he added.

“There’s quite a bit that I don’t understand,” Lisa Duncan said as soon as the room was clear.

“There’s quite a bit we don’t understand,” General Gullick amended. “The technology we are working with here is overwhelming at times.”

“I’m not talking about the technology,” Duncan said. “I’m talking about the administration of this program.”

“Is there a problem?” Gullick asked, his voice chilling the room.

Duncan was blunt. “Why the secrecy? Why are we hiding all this?”

Gullick relaxed slightly. “Numerous reasons.”

“Please enumerate them,” Duncan said.

Gullick lit a cigar, ignoring the NO SMOKING signs that adorned the walls of the Cube conference room. Government bureaucracy found itself into even the most secret of locations. “This program began during World War II, and that was the reason it was initially classified. Then there was the Cold War and the requirement to keep this technology — what we did understand of it — out of the hands of the Russians. One study by our staff even found a high possibility that if the Russians ever discovered that we had this technology it would upset the balance of power and they might launch a preemptive nuclear strike. I would say that’s a damn good reason to keep this secret.”

Duncan pulled a cigarette out of her purse. She pointed at the ashtray for Gullick’s cigar. “Do you mind?” She didn’t wait for an answer as she lit up. “The Cold War has been over for over half a decade, General. Keep counting the reasons.”

A muscle twitched on the right side of Gullick’s jaw.

“The Cold War may be over, but there are still nuclear missiles pointed at this country by foreign countries. We are dealing with technology here that might totally change the course of civilization. That is sufficient—”

“Could it be,” Duncan cut in, “that all this is classified simply because it’s always been classified?”

“I understand what you’re saying.” Gullick attempted a disarming smile that didn’t work. He ran a finger over the file folder that held Kennedy’s report on Duncan and restrained an impulse to throw it at her. “It would be easy to see the secrecy surrounding Majic-12 as simply a leftover from the Cold War, but there are deeper implications here.”

“Such as?” Duncan didn’t wait for an answer. “Could part of those deeper implications be that this project had been founded illegally? That the importation of people such as Von Seeckt to work in it — in direct violation of law and a presidential order in force at the time — and other activities since then would open up personnel involved in this program to criminal prosecution?”

The glowing red numbers set into the desktop next to the computer screen read T-130H/16M. That was all that concerned Gullick. He’d talked to a few of the others about how to handle Duncan and now it was time to start with what they had come up with.

“Whatever happened fifty years ago is not our concern,” he said. “We are worried about the impact publicizing this program will have on the general population.

“Dr. Slayden, the program psychologist,” Gullick said, “is on our staff for this very reason. As a matter of fact, we will have a briefing from Dr. Slayden at eight A.M. on the twelfth. He’ll be able to explain things better then, but suffice it to say that the social and economic implications of revealing what we have here at Area 51 to the public are staggering. So staggering that every president since World War II has agreed that the utmost secrecy should surround this project.”

“Well, this president,” Duncan said, “may think differently. The times are changing. An immense amount of money has been poured into this project and the return has been minimal.”

“If we fly the mothership,” Gullick said, “it will all be worth it.” Duncan stubbed out her cigarette and stood. “I hope so. Good day, sir.” She turned on her high heels and walked out the door.

As soon as she was gone, the Majic-12 men in uniform and the representatives from the CIA and NRO came back in. All attempt at being cordial slipped from Gullick’s demeanor. “Duncan’s fishing. She knows there something more going on.” “We need to have Slayden give her the data on the implications of revealing the project,” Kennedy said.

“I told her about Slayden’s briefing and she’s got his written report already,” Gullick said. “No, she’s looking for something more.”

“Do you think she has something on Dulce?” Kennedy asked.

“No. If there was any suspicion about that, we’d know about it. We’re wired into every intelligence apparatus this country has. It has to be something else.” “Operation Paperclip?” Kennedy asked.

Gullick nodded. “She made a point of mentioning that Von Seeckt and others were recruited illegally. She knows too much. If they pull on that thread too hard, this whole thing might unravel.”

Kennedy pointed at the folder. “We can go hard with her if we need to.” “She’s the President’s representative,” General Brown warned.

“We just need time,” Gullick said. “I think Slayden’s psychobabble will keep her occupied. If not”—Gullick shrugged—“then we go hard.” He looked down at the computer screen and changed the subject. “What’s the status of Nightscape 96-7?” Gullick asked the director of Naval intelligence.

“Everything looks good,” Admiral Coakley answered.

“The MSS is secure and all elements are in place.”

“What about the infiltration by that reporter and the other person last night?” Gullick asked.

“We’ve cleaned it all up and there’s an added benefit to that situation,” Coakley said. “That other fellow’s name was Franklin. A UFO freak. He’s been a pain in the ass for a long time working out of his house in Rachel. We no longer have to worry about him. He’s dead and we have an adequate cover story in place.”

“How did they get inside the outer perimeter?” Gullick demanded, not appeased at all.

“Franklin unscrewed the antennas from the sensors on either side of the road,” Coakley replied. “We got that off a cassette recorder we found on the reporter.”

“I want that system replaced. It’s outdated. Go with laser sensors on all the roads.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the reporter?”

“He’s been transferred to Dulce. He was a freelancer. We’re working on a back story for his disappearance.”

“It won’t happen again,” Gullick said, his tone of voice indicating it was not a question.

“Yes, sir.”

“What about Von Seeckt?” Kennedy asked. “If he makes any more trouble, Duncan might start asking more questions.”

Gullick rubbed the side of his temple. “He’s become a liability. We’ll just have to move up his medical timetable. We’ll take care of the good doctor and insure he won’t cause any more problems. He outlived his usefulness to this program a long time ago. I’ll talk to Dr. Cruise.”

“What’s that?” Turcotte asked.

The man in the gray flight suit looked up. “Laser firing system,” he said shortly, snapping shut the metal case on the sophisticated machinery that had drawn Turcotte ‘s attention.

Turcotte had never seen a laser that was packed suitcase size, but the technician did not seem amenable to discussing the technology. Another question to add to all the others.

“Get some sleep. You’ll need the rest,” Prague said, appearing suddenly at his shoulder. “We’ll be ready to move after dark and you won’t get any sleep for a while.” Prague smiled. “Sleep good, meat, “ he added in German.

Turcotte stared at him for a second, then walked over to where the other off-shift security men were dozing in the shade offered by several trees. He grabbed a Gore-Tex bivy sack and slid into it, zipping it up around his chin. He thought about everything he had seen so far for about five minutes, wondering what Prague had been told about him.

He finally decided he didn’t have a clue what was going on or what Prague knew, and switched his brain off.

As he fell asleep, his mind shifted to other scenes.

Prague’s final words in German echoed through his brain and Turcotte fell into an uneasy slumber with the echo of gunfire and German voices screaming in fear and pain.

Lisa Duncan had read the figures and studied the classified photos, but they had not prepared her for the sheer size of this operation. Flying into Area 51 on board one of their black helicopters, she had been impressed with the long runway and the aboveground base facilities, but that impression had been dwarfed by what was hidden out of sight.

Taking the elevator up from the Cube, she and her scientific escorts entered a large room carved out of the rock of Groom Mountain. This was the hangar, over three quarters of a mile long and a quarter mile wide. Three of the walls, the floor, and roof — one hundred feet above their heads — were rock. The last side was a series of camouflaged sliding doors that opened up onto the north end of the runway.

The true size of the hangar could only be seen on the rare occasions, like now, when all the dividers between the various bays were unfolded and a person could look straight through from one end to the other. Duncan wondered if they had done that to impress her. If they had, it was working.

She was still bothered by her confrontation with General Gullick. She’d been briefed for the job by the President’s national security adviser, but even he had seemed uncertain about what was going on with Majic-12. It actually wasn’t that surprising to Duncan. In her work with medical companies she’d often had to deal with government bureaucracy and found it to be a formidable maze of self-propagating, self-serving structures to negotiate. As Gullick had made very clear: Majic-12 had been around for fifty-four years. The unspoken parallel was that the President whom Duncan was working for had been around for only three. She knew that meant that the members of Majic-12 implicitly believed they had a greater legitimacy than the elected officials who were supposed to oversee the project.

The CIA, NSA, the Pentagon — all were bureaucracies that had weathered numerous administrations and changes in the political winds. Majic-12 was another one, albeit much more secretive. The issue, though, was why were Gullick and the others in such a rush to fly the mothership?

That issue and other disturbing rumors about Majic-12 operations that had sifted their way back to Washington was the reason Duncan was here. She already had some dirt on the program, as she’d indicated to Gullick; but that was past dirt, as he’d indicated in return. Most of the men involved in Paperclip were long dead. She had to find out what was presently happening. To do that she had to pay attention, so when her guide spoke up, she put away her worries.

“This is the hangar we built in 1951,” Professor Underhill, the aeronautics expert, explained. “We’ve added to it over the years.” He pointed at the nine silvery craft parked in their cradles. “You have all the information on how and where we found the bouncers. Currently, six are operational.”

“What about the other three?” she asked.

“Those are the ones we’re working on. Taking apart the engines to see if we can reverse-engineer them. Trying to understand the control and flight system along with other technology.”

She nodded and followed as they walked along the back of the hangar. There were workers on each of the craft, doing things whose purpose was unclear. She had indeed studied the history of these craft, which seemed simply to have been abandoned in various places some time in the past. From the conditions of the locations they were found in, the best guess had been about ten thousand years ago.

The craft themselves seemed not to have aged at all.

There had been very few answers about the origin or purpose or original owners of the craft in the briefing papers. Something that didn’t seem to concern the people out here very much. That bothered Duncan, because she liked thinking in analogies and she wondered how she would feel if she had left her car parked somewhere and came back later to find that it had been appropriated and someone was taking the engine apart. Even though the bouncers had been abandoned long ago, centuries might be just a day or two in the relative time scale of the original owners.

“Why does everyone out here call them ‘bouncers’?” she asked. “In the briefing papers they were called ‘magnetic-drive atmospheric craft’ or ‘MDAC’ or simply ‘disks’.

Underhill laughed. “We use the ‘MDAC’ for scientific people who need a fancy title. We all call them ‘disks’ or ‘bouncers.’ The reason for the latter, well, wait till you see one in flight. They can change directions on a dime. Most people who watch them think we call them ‘bouncers’ because they do seem to suddenly bounce off an invisible wall when they change direction — that’s how quick they can do it. But if you talk to the original test pilots who flew them, they called them ‘bouncers’ because of the way they got thrown around on the inside during those abrupt maneuvers. It took us quite a while to come up with the technology and flight parameters so that the pilots wouldn’t be injured when they had the aircraft at speed.”

Underhill pointed at a metal door along the back wall.

“This way, please.”

The door slid open as they approached, and inside was an eight-passenger train on an electric monorail. Duncan stepped into the car along with Underhill, Von Seeckt, Slayden, Ferrel, and Cruise. The car immediately started up and they were whisked into a brightly lit tunnel.

Underhill continued to play tour guide. “It’s a little over four miles to Hangar Two, where we found the mothership. In fact, that’s the reason this base is here. Most people think we picked this site because of the isolation, but that was simply an added benefit.

“This part of Nevada was originally being looked over to be the site of the first atomic tests early in World War II, when the surveyors found that the readings on some of their instruments were being affected by a large metallic object. They pinpointed the location, dug, and found what we now call the mothership in Hangar Two. Whoever left the ship here had the technology to blast out a place big enough to leave it and then cover it over.”

Duncan let out an involuntary gasp as the train exited the tunnel and entered a large cavern, a mile and a half long. The ceiling was over a half mile above her head and made of perfectly smooth stone. It was dotted with bright stadium lights. What caught her attention, though, was the cylindrical black object that took up most of the space. The mothership was just over a mile long and a quarter mile in beam at the center. What made the scale so strange was that the skin of the ship was totally smooth, made up of a black, shiny metal that had defied analysis for decades.

“It took us forty-five years before we were able to break down the composition of the skin,” Ferrel, the physicist said, as they exited the tram. “We still can’t replicate it, but we finally knew enough about it to at least be able to cut through it.”

Duncan could now see scaffolding near the front — if it was the front and not the rear — of the mothership. The ship itself rested on a complex platform of struts made of the same black material as the skin. The rock sides of the cavern were also smooth, and the floor totally flat.

They walked alongside the struts, dwarfed by the sheer mass of the ship above them. Underhill pointed at the center as they passed it. “We call it the mothership not just because of its size, but also because there’s space in the center hold to contain all the bouncers and about a dozen more. There are cradles in there that are the exact dimensions to hold every bouncer. We believe this is the way the bouncers got here to Earth, as they are not capable of leaving the atmosphere on their own power.”

“But we still can’t even open the external cargo bay doors.” Von Seeckt spoke for the first time. “And you want to start the engine,” he added accusingly, glaring at Underhill.

“Now, Werner, we’ve been through all that before,” Underhill said.

“It took us forty-five years to simply get in,” Von Seeckt said. “I was here for all forty-five of those years. Now in the space of a few months, you want to try and fly this!”

“What are you so worried about?” Duncan asked. She’d read the file on Von Seeckt and personally, given the man’s background, she did not much care for him. His constant complaining did little to ameliorate that impression.

“If I knew what I was worried about, I’d be even more worried,” Von Seeckt answered. “We don’t understand at all how this ship works.” He stopped to catch his breath and the other members of the party paused also, over three quarters of the way to the nose.

Von Seeckt continued. “I believe part of the propulsion system of this craft works using gravity. In this case it would be the gravity of our planet. Who knows what it would do if it got turned on? Do you want to be responsible for affecting our gravity?”

“I feel so much better,” Von Seeckt snapped back.

A voice on a sound system echoed through the cavern:

“TEN MINUTES UNTIL INITIATION. ALL PERSONNEL ARE TO BE INSIDE PROTECTION. TEN MINUTES.”

“Gentlemen, enough,” Underhill ordered. They were at the base of the scaffolding. “We can see the inside later, but for now, let’s go over here.” He led the way toward a small doorway in a concrete wall. A metal hatch closed behind them and they were inside a blast bunker. “We have two men on board in the control room. They are simply going to turn on the engine, leave it on for ten seconds, and turn it off. They are not going to engage the drive. It’s sort of like starting a car engine but leaving the transmission in neutral.”

“We hope,” Von Seeckt muttered.

“FIVE MINUTES.”

“You are witnessing history,” Underhill said to Duncan. “We have every possible monitoring device set up here,” Ferrel added. “This should give us what we need to understand the engine.”

Duncan glanced over at Von Seeckt, who was sitting in one of the folding chairs along the back wall of the bunker. He seemed uninterested in what was going on.

“ONE MINUTE.”

The countdown now started by the second, reminding Duncan of the space shots she had watched as a youngster.

“TEN.”

“NINE.”

“EIGHT.”

“SEVEN.”

“SIX.”

“FIVE.”

“FOUR.”

“THREE.”

“TWO.”

“ONE.”

“INITIATION.”

Duncan felt a wave of nausea sweep through her. She staggered, then leaned over, feeling the contents of her breakfast in Las Vegas come up. She fell to her knees and vomited on the concrete floor. Then, just as quickly, it was over.

“ALL CLEAR. ALL CLEAR. PERSONNEL MAY LEAVE PROTECTION.”

Duncan stood, feeling the taste of acid in the back of her mouth. The men all looked pale and shaken also, but none of them had thrown up.

“What happened?” Duncan asked.

“Nothing happened,” Ferrel replied.

“Goddammit,” Duncan snapped. “I felt it. Something happened.”

“The engine was turned on and then off,” Ferrel said.

“As far as what the effect we felt was, we’ll have to analyze our data.” He pointed at a television screen. “You can see from the replay that nothing happened.” And indeed, on the screen, the mothership sat completely still as the digital readout in the lower right hand corner went through the countdown.

Duncan wiped a hand across her mouth and looked back at Von Seeckt, who was still in his seat. She felt embarrassed to have thrown up, but Ferrel’s response to her brief illness seemed a bit nonchalant. For the first time she wondered if the old man might not be as crazy as he sounded.

In the conference room Gullick and the inner circle of Majic-12 had watched the test on video, although there had been nothing to really see. The mothership had simply sat there, but the data links indicated that the power had indeed been turned on and the ship seemed to function properly.

Gullick smiled, momentarily erasing all the stress lines on his face and scalp. “Gentlemen, the countdown continues as planned.”