The Gemini Divergence (52 page)

Jack sat in the doorway of the plane, looking
at the sky and said, “I wonder what its like up there?”

Lemay looked up and wondered only for a
second, then said, “Well, I’ve got work to do.”

He then turned and started to walk away
without another word.

Volmer stood there and shrugged his shoulders
at Gus and Jack, when suddenly, Lemay bellowed, “Doctor!”

Mr. Volmer jumped in reaction to the summons,
and then followed briskly after the General.

*~*

Schwerig was scratching his head and looking
up at a large world map posted on the wall of his operations room
with all of the sudden activity annotated onto it.

“What the hell are they doing?” he asked
Graff.

“I have no idea, Herr General. It is somewhat
like Bay of Pigs, only there is no obvious enemy. There is activity
everywhere, but we can’t figure out what the hell they are
deploying for?”

Schwerig took a stick and pointed at Johnston
Atoll, “The Air Force sergeant is here, and many packages from
their atomic laboratories at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, along with
rockets from Redstone Arsenal have arrived there as well… I wonder
if they are conducting more tests? Why so many people?”

“You don’t think that the Soviets and the
Americans are feinting tests under the guise of sword rattling, in
order to mount atomic weapons on rockets without our interference
so that they may launch a nuclear assault upon us? Do you Herr
General?”

Schwerig paused and answered, “Oberst Graff,
I think that is the most insightful supposition that I have heard
you utter in some time.”

“What do you propose we do Sir?”

“Double the monitoring patrols. We will watch
for now.”

9 July 1962

Gus and Jack awoke before sunrise to get
ready for a very big day.

When they first arrived on the flight line,
they had to work with flashlights until the clouds on the horizon
towards their east started to glow with a silver lined rosy
tint.

Jack looked out of the open aircraft cargo
door to see the crack of sunrise behind the dark silhouette of the
coral dredges that had been brought here to deepen the approach
channel to the island as well as enlarge the island for an ever
extending runway.

As he scanned the sunset he could also see
the men readying the rocket for today’s test on one of the newly
constructed launch pads. They appeared as ants working on lighted
but dark gantry that was also silhouetted against the post card
sunrise.

As some seagulls caught his peripheral vision
he noticed that one of them was not moving like the others, the
more they moved, the more he realized that it may be man made, when
suddenly one of them caught a reflection of the rising sun.

Jack turned his head quickly to see that one
of the objects, which was actually far behind the birds, was a
small silver saucer.

“An Overseer!” bellowed Jack in a deliberate
attempt to alert Gus, “Gus? Where are you? There’s an Overseer out
here.”

Gus appeared at the door with Jack and they
watched as the craft hovered low along the island coast, just over
the tops of the palms, as it appeared to coast toward the launch
pad.-

It slowly circled the rocket, as the sun
reflected from the polished metal surfaces of the rocket and the
saucer, while steam vapor flowed away from the rocket as they
fueled it for today’s launch.

They could see the unsuspecting men on the
gantry suddenly notice the intruder and start pointing and
panicking.

“What do you think its going to do? They
rarely get this close,” asked Jack.

“Don’t know. There’s really nothing we can do
but watch it.”

Suddenly the saucer started to bolt towards
Gus and Jack with great acceleration.

They both jumped from the plane and ran for
cover, as the saucer that they thought was flying towards them in
particular, zipped quickly over their heads.

Only a moment after it passed overhead, they
figured out why it bolted off so fast, as two F-101 Voodoo’s roared
directly over their heads in pursuit of the object.

The ground thundered as the fighter pilots
hit their after burners in order to intercept the Overseer.

They watched as the fighter planes followed
the object out over the ocean towards Hawaii several hundred miles
away, when the saucer suddenly whipped up into the heavens at a
rate that the American aircraft could not match.

The part of the sky that the saucer ascended
into was still dark and starry, and the metal finish on the
Overseers craft reflected the sun until it was so high that it
seemed like it was directly overhead, until it was so small that it
just vanished.

Later that day Gus and Jack were both in the
air waiting for the event.

As they looked out there windows, they could
see the usual Soviet compliment of fishing trawlers with large
satellite dishes, as well as a couple more Overseers, keeping their
distance once again.

When the scheduled time came, Gus could hear
the countdown commence over his headphones.

They watched the rocket climb into the sky
and pass them up as they filmed the entire ascent with their
special made high speed cameras.

Gus was relieved that the chatter on the
headphones was a little more organized than in the past.

As the second countdown ended, Starfish Prime
exploded over the ocean southwest of Johnston atoll with a yield of
1.4 Megatons.

People on the ground could still feel the
heat of the explosion in space, and it burned the retinas of
several unsuspecting islanders that looked up at the light.

It caused power outages in Hawaii 750 miles
away, and left artificial auroras in the South Pacific skies for
days after the event.

The Soviets and the Raumsfahrtwaffe were
greatly impressed by the EMP effect of the bomb and rushed to start
their own programs to mirror the effect of America’s newly found
energy weapon.

The Soviets started ‘Operation Keg’ as the
Overseers started their own program. They were struggling to find a
way to duplicate the magnetic disturbance in the ionosphere.

Both began experiments burning things in the
ionosphere and measuring the effect.

The Americans continued with ‘Highwater’;
even though the others didn’t completely understand how it worked
in unison with the EMP device or that it was even a related program
at all.

*~*

“Do you realize what an EMP weapon could do
to a space station,” Schwerig lectured his Führer and staff during
a meeting of the Raumsfahrtwaffe High Command, “The effect on Earth
is bad enough, but at least, they, then, still have air to breath
and food to eat. Up here, it would be certain death… Loss of power
means loss of light… forever, loss of air, loss of food… We have
already changed the orbit of all of our stations to avoid the
possible line of fire from their giant satellite dish at Arecibo…
Now they have ‘this’ devil’s contrivance.”

“Is there any way to shield against it,
General Schwerig?” asked Von Sterbenbach.

“The only defense is to keep them away. Once
a weapon like that is delivered there is almost nothing we could
do.”

“And you say that the Americans and the
Soviets are both capable of delivering such a weapon to the moon,
is that true?” asked General Kreutztrager, sitting at Von
Sterbenbach’s right.

“What do you suggest that we do, General
Schwerig?” asked Von Sterbenbach.

Schwerig put his fists on the end of the
table opposite of Von Sterbenbach and recommended, “We need to
create a bomb that duplicates the effect and then demonstrate it on
a major city within the U.S. or the Soviet Union, but first, we
need to demonstrate that we can detect these weapons and destroy
them on the launch pad before they can be deployed.”

Everyone quietly turned to Von Sterbenbach to
gauge his response.

Von Sterbenbach put his hands together and
smiled as he chuckled, “General Schwerig, in all the years that I
have known you. You have never made a suggestion unless you already
had a plan.”

Schwerig smiled and quietly laughed.

*~*

“What are we going to do with all this stuff;
it’s like it was all hit by lightning,” complained Gus as he
analyzed damaged monitoring equipment after the Starfish Prime
test, “And the testing is still ongoing, we don’t have the
equipment to replace the stuff damaged by this event, how are we
going to do this, event after event? We had to scramble anther crew
from the mainland to cover the ‘Sunset’ test today on Christmas
Island… What are we going to do about the ‘Pamlico’ test
tomorrow?”

Just then Jack pushed a cart full of more
damaged equipment through the hanger door and belly ached, “I’ve
never seen so much fubar stuff from one event. This isn’t even all
of it; I have to go back for another load.”

Volmer, who had pulled up a chair to inspect
the items on the other carts in the hanger, suggested, “I remember
back in school when my professor was demonstrating Tesla
experiments; he used these things called Faraday cages to protect
his laboratory equipment from the excessive RF and EMP. Perhaps we
need something like that for our purposes.”

“What’s a Faraday cage?” asked Gus.

“I hope they’re smaller than those elephant
cages.” quipped Jack.

Volmer looked at both of them and answered,
“Well they would be just large enough to cover whatever piece of
equipment that you were protecting… They are basically just
grounded metal boxes that enclose the individual pieces of
equipment as completely as possible. I could use your handy work to
start building them Gus.”

“Well, I would need some sheet metal, but
resources on this island are very scarce. We would have to have
some flown in.”

Volmer answered, “I’ll talk to the General
before he leaves.”

~~~**^**~~~

The Divergence / The
Raumsfahrtwaffe Changes Tactics

25 July 1962

Gus and Jack were taking a break from working
on their planes to watch the launch of the rocket carrying Bluegill
Prime into space.

They were sitting on a manmade pile of coral
on an offshoot peninsula of the island, still in sight and earshot
of the flightline, as the island was not very large.

If they were on the mainland, they would be
asked to step farther away from the launch pad, but on this small
Pacific atoll, there was no were else to go.

Occasionally they could hear status reports
being broadcast over the installation PA, telling them that the
launch was very near.

Gus commented to Jack, “Do you think that
we’ll ever get to work on one of those, they keep putting our
equipment on everything else that flies.”

“Whoooa, that’ll be the day.”

“Final warning, the pad should be clear,”
echoed across the water, “We are in the final countdown,
7-6-5…”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. We’ve been going
wherever people are testing nukes. Now they’re testing them in
space. What happens when they start testing them in deep space, or
the moon?”

“Ignition sequence start,” came over the
intercom as the rocket started to rumble and steam billowed into
the air

“What if all this testing, is really to
develop a way to get at the Overseers on the moon?”

“That’s a frightening thought,” responded
Gus, “I wonder what they think of us testing in space?”

“Blast off!” came over the loudspeakers as
the rocket began to roar, instantly startling every seagull on the
island into flight.

Just then they were surprised by a flight of
several saucers that came from behind them and appeared just above
the trees over their heads.

The saucers then flew in single file, across
the water, towards the rocket that was now leaving the ground, in
what seemed like slow motion.

Gus immediately knew that something was
different this time because they were flying much more intently and
at a more rapid rate than other times when they were just snooping
around.

He yelled, “I don’t think they are here to
see what we are doing this time.”

“I don’t think so either. Lets duck into
these palms,” as jack was already kicking up sand dashing towards
the tree line.

When they reached the trees, they dove onto
the ground and crawled back around as quickly as possible to peer
around a large palm tree, to see what was happening.

Just then, the lead saucer reached the rocket
and started firing his Strahlenkanone at the rocket as it was
taking off.

The formation started to circle the rocket,
all firing their directed energy weapons at the slowly climbing
rocket.

It looked like lightning striking everything,
sparks started to fly from the rocket and the gantry, until the
rocket started to slowly move backwards and fall over.