Majestic (4 page)

"What is it, Dad?" Mary touched it gingerly. "I'm not real sure. A piece of the plane." They got in the truck and he drove carefully out of the draw. They bounced and rattled along the sandy borders of a wash, then turned and headed up toward the pasture he'd seen from horseback. Soon he could see the wreckage again, still lying scattered along a low rise, glittering in the sun.

He drove up to the edge of it, then stopped the engine. They all climbed out. It looked just like somebody had taken the tinfoil from a thousand cigarette packs, torn it up and scattered it over tens of acres. The rubble was spread in a long sort of fan, as if whatever had created it had come sliding into the ground out of the southeast. He picked up a piece of the foil. It was strange stuff. Tough. You couldn't even think about tearing it. And it was light, too. Like the webbed belt it had no weight at all.

"This isn't pieces of a plane," Billy said. He held some of the stuff in his cupped hands. When he let it go, it fell like a handful of dry leaves.

"Look," Mary said. She bunched up a piece of the foil until it was no bigger than a pill. Then she let it go.

Instantly it bounced back into its former shape.

"Damn," Bob said. He did it. The same thing happened. Again he tried tearing it. Nothing.

Billy put some of it on a stone and beat it with another stone. It didn't even scratch.

How anything as tough as this stuff could ever have gotten torn up like this just beat all, as far as Bob was concerned. Must have been a whale of an explosion. The stuff was stronger than metal and yet thinner than cellophane. And blown all to hell.

Then he saw a gleam of violet coming from under a largish sheet of the foil. He lifted the sheet, tossing the two-foot square over his shoulder. The way it fluttered in the air reminded him of the flickering wing of a butterfly.

What he saw on the ground confused him even further than he was already confused. There lay a T-shaped object a couple of inches long, made of what looked for all the world like balsa wood, with violet glyphs covering it. He looked at it for a long time. He did not touch it. Others were I-shaped.

There were also pieces of what appeared to be waxed paper, and on these had been painted rows of little figures that Bob surmised were numbers.

Mary picked up a piece that hadn't been written on and held it up to the sun. "Look, Daddy."

Bob saw the faint outlines of yellow flowers. He took the sheet in his own hand. It was as if there was a subtle design, or maybe even real flowers pressed between the layers. They were beautiful, like yellow primroses. Evening Primroses.

You couldn't do anything to the paper, either. It didn't burn or tear. It was as tough as the foil.

Bob surveyed the field of rubble. The sun shone down, but no birds sang. A creepy sensation overcame him, and he wished he hadn't brought his kids.

The only sound was their own rustling breath. His big, familiar pasture seemed strange and dangerous and full of mystery. He did not like this, did not like it at all.

Where were the birds? There had always been plenty of birds around here. What devilment had gone on last night?

"Were there bobcats crying out in the storm?" Billy asked. Bob did not answer. He could imagine the devil screaming like that. Then, with a toss of his head, he dismissed the thought.

"Somebody gotta clean this place up," he said. "Who's gonna do it?"

"It'd take ten loads in the Jeep."

"I'd say more like a hundred, son. We'd be at it for a month."

He surveyed the mess, and felt hopeless. There was so darned much of that tinfoil and other junk he could hardly believe his eyes.

Who the hell would do it? He couldn't haul all this crap out in his Jeep, not in a month of work. And what about the gasoline? A man had to think about the cost. At a dime a gallon, ten dollars' worth of gas at least.

He walked around, turning over pieces of the rubble with his toe, trying to see if he could find some insignia, something more than the little violet squiggles. But there was nothing, not a number, not a name.

"Hell." This wasn't what he wanted to see. He couldn't expect the AAF to deal with this mess unless it was theirs. But this didn't look like any sort of military stuff he'd ever heard of.

Maybe it was secret. Secret stuff. Them and their damned secrets, they'd really made a mess of one man's pasture.

He reached down and picked up one of the pieces with the violet writing on it. The thing was balsa wood, but it was so hard he couldn't dent it with his fingernail. It looked like balsa, he could see the grain. It was at least as light as balsa. But how could it be so damn hard?

The letters were inlaid into the gray surface. What did they say? He couldn't make out a bit of it. Was it Jap?

Maybe that was it: the Air Force was testing some kind of Jap secret weapon they'd captured from old Tojo.

"Banzai," he muttered. Then he tossed the little piece of wood aside.

He strode forward, moving steadily up a long rise. Now he could see signs of fire. Some of the pieces of foil were melted, others showed signs of scorching.

He listened to the silence. It made him want even more urgently to get his kids out of here. What kind of thing was it that terrified dumb sheep and horses and made birds fly away? Whatever bothered the animals about this stuff probably ought to bother him, too.

Then he realized that there weren't even any insects buzzing around here.

The place was totally silent, and he knew that even the little things, the insignificant things, had been frightened away.

He whirled around, sure that somebody was coming up behind him. But there was only the kids standing in the sun, their skin golden, their faces solemn.

"Come on, y'all. Lets get some of this stuff picked up and put in the back."

Each of them dumped an armload of the wreckage into the Jeep. Then they got in. Bob pulled the choke, then hit the starter. She ground and gasped and finally chugged to life. He put her in gear and she went lurching off, tires spinning and whining in the wet, sandy dirt.

"Move," he growled, whipping the wheel around and gunning the motor to get out of an especially bad area.

Then he was on dry stone and doing twenty. She rattled like a can of marbles, but she got them home three times as fast as horses, and for that he was grateful.

Ellie had heard them come rattling down the hill, and was waiting at the kitchen door. He stopped the truck and turned it off, then got out.

His wife looked small and fragile, just pretending all that strength of hers.

He gathered her in his arms.

"Is it bad?" she asked.

"There's somethin' funny."

"Are all the men dead?"

"There weren't any men, Mom," Billy said.

"There was wax paper, like, with yellow flowers pressed in it."

"It's all about like this." Bob showed her the back of the Jeep.

She was a practical woman, and because it didn't make sense she didn't comment. She gave them all beans and potatoes for lunch. Bob ate in silence. Afterward he said, "Don't you kids go back up there without me."

"Should you tell the sheriff?"

"As soon as I get to town I'll do it."

She was silent after that, going about her work. How slim she was, this woman who had been swayed by his love. He listened to her movements, the shuffle of her slippered feet, the occasional sigh.

That afternoon he got a frozen-up windmill gear and had to spend a couple of hours working on it. Before he knew it the sun was heading toward the horizon and it was time to knock off. He thought no more about the field of rubble and the sheriff. Maybe it was some kind of test glider. That would explain the seeming lack of victims. After he finished work he sat at the table drinking coffee and smoking.

In the back of his mind he'd been thinking that the Army Air Force might show up on its own, but as evening fell he had to conclude that they were not coming today.

Late that night he was awakened by light outside brighter than the moon. He pulled on his boots and went out. A blue searchlight was darting down from a huge, dark object that hung soundlessly in the sky, blackening out the stars.

The searchlight went on and off in the dark, darting down now and again. It moved toward the pasture where the wreckage lay.

Perhaps the fourth being was rescued on that night. I think not, though, because it was heard again. Bob expected the Air Force to show up the next morning, but they didn't. He waited a few days. Still nothing.

Finally, on July 7, he got in his Jeep and went rattling off toward Maricopa. He told the sheriff's deputy to tell the Air Force to get out to his place and claim its own.

When the sheriff called the Army Air Field in Roswell, they had no idea what he was talking about, but they went out anyway, to see what had so upset one of the region's stolid ranching men.

Chapter Three

The Chronicle of Wilfred Stone

It would soon be the responsibility of my friend Joe Rose to get Ungar under control. He would do it with the same ferocious subtlety that appeared when we were fishing for trout, and that he had used on former Gestapo agents when he interrogated them.

Now I dislike fishing, but in those days I was young and full of murder, and loved the game of it and the kill. I inherited the sport of fly-fishing from my father, and many of the other gentlemen in CIG had done the same.

Back in July of 1947 I was - God, let me see - I was thirty-four years old. I'd just had my birthday. I was born on Friday, June 13, 1913. I walk under ladders and seek out black cats.

Thirty-four. I was healthy from my years in the Office of Special Services. Now I am bent and flabby and cancerous from my years in MAJIC. The wages of sin.

But what delicious secrets I know. I am so terribly afraid . . . and that, too, is delicious.

Don't let me pretend to be a hero. I am no hero. Spies are not glamorous. We gather and protect secrets, which are power. We control your lives and you don't know it.

When the history of this era is written, it must certainly be called the Age of Secrets. I will state the matter simply: Everything important is classified.

Everything.

Public knowledge has degenerated to a form of entertainment. I should know. The control of the public mind has been my lifelong profession and horrible fascination.

Official secrets are the snare of modern life. If you don't know them, you're helpless. If you do, you're trapped.

July 6, 1947: The previous week I had been roped into a peculiar sort of a project. The Board of National Estimates had asked the Central Intelligence Group what it would mean if the rash of "flying disks" being reported nationwide resulted in contact with spacemen. We did not yet know of what had happened in Roswell, but there had been so many other sightings reported in the last few months that our interest was piqued - at least officially.

Because I'd made no secret of the fact that I was unhappy on the French desk, I was given this bit of silliness to amuse myself.

I was in the process of completing the intelligence summary that would answer the BNE request. What, if anything, did we know about these spacemen, if they even existed? Why were they here? Were they hostile?

Communistic? I worked diligently away in my dingy office at 2430 E Street, the headquarters of the CIG.

My official employer was still the OSS. The military was battling the President over the establishment of the CIA, and the National Security Act was at that time under debate in Congress.

The best friend of the Central Intelligence idea in those days was General Hoyt Vandenberg, soon to become commanding general of the United States Air Force. But he wanted the CIA on his own terms, as a military toy, not as an independent civilian agency.

An old Socialist and gentleman named Norman Thomas once said, "Where the secrets start, the republic stops." We were ignorant and proud men and we did not believe that. Had he known what he was helping to create, Vandenberg would never have done it. He was a great man, and I love him still.

The Central Intelligence Group was populated from three or four different directions. OSS people. FBI people.

Military intelligence people. A prescription for chaos, but it worked fairly well. We were united in our desire to turn back communism. Well, perhaps a few of us were a little more cynical - but for the most part, we were united.

Flying disks were the merest diversion, and my intelligence estimate was expected to be the work of an afternoon. The disks had started appearing in numbers only in June, and nobody viewed the matter very seriously.

During the war a little work on the question had been done by the Army Air Force. So we already had a dossier of unsolved mysteries and unusual phenomena, collected on an ad hoc basis when Army Air Force Intelligence was assessing the "foo-fighter" phenomenon toward the end of the war. We had concluded in 1946 that the "foo-fighters" were some sort of unknown phenomenon "possibly under intelligent control."

They represented a form of chaos, the intrusion of a powerful and provocative unknown into human affairs. I will not lie about it: The AAF was telling us that there was something going on, but they had no idea what to make of it.

I had worked through the July Fourth holiday, which I viewed as a minor sort of a tragedy.

I would have enjoyed spending my Fourth banging around the Snake Pit at the Mayflower Hotel looking for unescorted chorines, or crawling the Statler-Carlton circuit in search of a party.

Since the war I'd been uncomfortable with anything but the most casual relationships. I had nightmares about a French operative named Sophie, and about the North African I also lost, Jamshid, who was little more than a child. Often I would wake up in tears, but be unable to remember which of them had broken my sleep.

I disliked myself pretty thoroughly, because I thought I had been a less than brilliant spymaster, and I had wasted their lives.

I assumed that Admiral Hillenkoetter, who had just replaced Vandenberg as CIG director, realized these things about me. He knew that I felt useless on the French desk even though French politics was what I knew best.