Chapter 6

By David A. Kearns

They did not, in fact, leave the old Seminole Indian named Red Dancing Bear in the roadside John attached to the country-store type purveyor of plastic items, diet cola, ice, porn, monster truck magazines, beer and cigarettes. No, Jeffery was sufficiently chagrinned at his behavior by his wife Helen’s lambasting, he disallowed himself from doing something so cruel, but otherwise, so very logical.
They drove along through the summer wind, sort of like that “coo coo” Summer Wind of Frank Sinatra fame, with their failing air conditioner blasting out warm air tinged with the smell of radiator fluid. All harbored their own thoughts about the last two days. They were growing very fast, thought Red, almost too fast.
Jeffery was first to speak, breaking the silence the way a prisoner would talk to a confidant on the assize yard about a pending break.
“You think I haven’t thought of all of this before, Red? You think you’re so damned smart for bringing this to my attention?”
“Speak, Jeffery. Let it out. It burdens you like a crippling heart affliction and in fact, it will become one before too long.”
“I’m not sure what it’s all about but that compartmentalization, that stuff you were talking about; yeah, they got that stuff down. Everything is so compartmentalized. It’s like you’re not even a human being anymore.”
“Then what are you?”
“It’s like you’re a chimpanzee in some lab. There you sit at your table with all your blocks cut out of various shapes and sizes; and you have your box of cut out holes you’re supposed to fit them into. Of course there’s some metallic probe on your head, all wired up to the system…”
“You’re speaking metaphorically, of course.”
“Christ Chief, I’m not nuts. Geez, just shut up and listen for a minute.”
“Sorry Jeffery. Continue.”
“So there you sit, trying to be happy like the chimp that you are about your little shapes and your box of cut outs; happy that you can pass all the shapes through the holes by the end of the day, raise your chimpy arms and go “yaaaaaay!
“And some days you can do it. You can pass the test.”
“Which is?”
“To seem good at it, seem concerned about it all, and above all, happy that you’re doing it for them.”
“And on other days?”
“On other days, you can’t help but notice the lab proctors sticking you with needles as they note your reactions, as they scribble on their little pads.”
“Honey,” piped Helen from the back seat. “Are you saying Doctors are poking you with things at your work?”
“I think, Helen, Jeffery is speaking in metaphors.”
Jeffery shook his head and glowered slightly at the Chief. There was no way he was going to be able to make Helen understand them at this point in the conversation, so he shouldn’t really try. Jeff had given up years ago. Who was Red to come in here and even make the attempt?
“I am sorry, Jeff. Continue.”
“Started to notice some strange things a few years back. And it was like, the second I did, the more clearances I was required to get. It wasn’t even something I said or did, really. I look back on it and I just know, someone could read it by a look on my face. They just knew that I knew …what it was all about.”
“Yes.”
“One day this guy says he wants to have a meet with me at lunchtime, over near this utility shed outside my window. This low building, looks more like a place where the lawn guy would keep the weed whackers, is surrounded by gravel and a stainless barbed wire fence.”
“That’s good, the level of detail. It means they haven’t wiped all your slates clean.”
“Never really noticed this little building before, you know? It was just sort of outside our main complex, like an annex.”
“Go on.”
“So, I go out there and there’s this guy waiting for me outside. He’s been working in my sector for a few years. I’ve never said shit to him, nor him to me. But he’s always been around, in on all the key meetings. Never knew his name that I can remember.”
“Yes?”
“He says something about the fact that I am about to begin the process of getting the highest security clearance I can get. Which sounds great ‘cause it means more money.”
“And?”
“Well, inside what had looked like a shed there was this waiting room; like the ones you’d see outside a doctor’s office. We walk through that to a double bolted heavy duty galvanized door that he gets through with a card swipe, into a foyer of sorts, which we leave behind by thumb-print pad. From there we’re into an even smaller room he gets through by retina scan, which they also administer to me. Once in there, we’re inside his office and that’s where the real fun started; an on-the-spot polygraph.
“An hour later, we walk down a flight of stairs in what I thought was going to be his office john, to a below ground level corridor. On the wall there are signs that read “USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORISED.” Every one hundred feet or so, stood a Marine with an assault rifle. Above us is a line of whirling red lights on the ceiling letting anyone in the hall know that someone now walking past them has not yet been cleared to be here. The Marines looked straight ahead, their weapons across their chests pointed down with fingers outside the trigger guards at the ready. I just know all safeties were off. If I’d a so much as twitched, I’d be dead now.”
“So me and this guy, call’s himself ‘Jim’ at this point, we get to this second set of stairs and we’re up and outside again in this blazing field of Florida rock, with about 100 yards of walkway between us and this blockhouse kind of building. The tunnel had taken us under a tree-line that I had never seen beyond; and now here we were beyond it walking toward this grayish white block house building; looked like a pump-house or something but the more we walked between all the guard towers the more it dawned on me this thing was huge and I had never seen it before. It sort of remained camouflaged in clouds and treetops.
“The guy tells me, ‘Don’t step off the path.’ And I don’t need to ask why.
“We get to the building, have a thumb-print and retina scan, again, go through a fence with coiled razor wire above us up a flight of stairs and again with the lights whirring above on the ceiling of this long, featureless hallway. Above every door is a sign with either a red or a green light.
“The guy says ‘room 23. Go in and sit down.’ So I comply having no idea what I have walked into. I get to room 23 and walk through. No retina scan, no anal probe,
“Jeffrey!”
“ …no anything. And I thought what the hell is this, some kind of sick joke?”
“What was it?”
“It’s a movie theatre, an IMAX movie theatre, at that. Place has maybe twenty seats. I’m the only one in the room.”
“You sit, as the man told you.”
“I do. And I mean the moment my ass touched the seat the lights dimmed and the show started.”
“What show?”
“The movie. It started out as sort of a promotional flick about the company; it’s work during World War II perfecting radial, supercharged and then jet engines for weaponry. But then the announcer says, ‘But CSI was soon thereafter given a sacred trust which will be revealed later in the program should you desire to learn more about your company.’”
“And here is where they told you about the alien beast?” Red Dancing Bear asked.
But Jeffery flinched at this. He would not be so easily diverted from his task.
“No. Here it skewed into American history; the relationships between America and some Old World secret societies, you know, from Europe.”
“Ah,” said Red Dancing Bear. “The Masons.”
“Right. The Masonic Order… how they were entrusted with certain truths passed down to them from the days of the Roman Empire and how that sacred knowledge was one of the reason England sought to destroy the orders and lodges and why key figures in the Revolutionary War, on the American side, were targeted for execution; all of whom were Masons.”
“Benjamin Franklin, Paul Revere, John Hancock ...”
“Right.”
“And those truths were?”
“One of these was there must always be a separation between church and state; which the Romans, the Byzantines and the Egyptians had learned the hard way.”
“This whorish business of governance, yes. There’s truth here. Indeed. Like prostitution and masturbation, a necessary evil of sorts.”
“Whatever, Chief. The point is, the movie said there were certain truths that ensured the existence of freedom were carried like a torch from old world Europe to the United States, and right or wrong, the United States was now a guardian of those truths.”
“I am hearing a ‘but’ here.”
“It’s more like an ‘And…’
“And?”
“And, now there are newer threats, to newer truths. Those ‘newer’ truths will be guarded by patriotic men, and that was one thing, the movie stressed men understood the nature of warfare and try as enemies might to reduce the man in our culture, he would be continued to be trusted to guard those newer truths.”
“And those truths, Jeff.”
“Technology has been acquired by us; sometime during the 1940s.”
“This Roswell thing ...”
“Was a joke. Was a carnival sideshow, a freak act for newspapers. Nothing more.”
“Jeff, I won’t hear talk like that. You know how I hate for you to disparage my beliefs.”
“Helen, that’s not what I mean. If Roswell actually happened it was something that someone wanted us to see, to divert us from whatever indeed really has been found.”
“And what is that?” the Chief asked, unable for once in his life to see through the veneer of thought clouding someone else’s mind.
Jeff shook his head. Sweat now bubbled around his lips and over his brows.
“I have signed certain documents to get those clearances. They can put me in jail for twenty years. Not to mention…”
“What, Jeff?”
“My initials are alongside certain character strings in those contracts.”
“Character strings?”
“Forward slash, forward slash, a series of random numbers bracketed by another set of forward slashes.”
“And what does that mean?”
Jeff shrugged. Tears welled in his eyes. “Got me. But, I bet if I blew anything off in those contracts, these folks behind me wouldn’t be safe, not for one minute.”
“You mean they were some kind of code?”
“It was implied. There were exactly five such bracketed sets of numbers; one for …”
“Every member of your family. Yes, I should have foreseen this. This is new. They were, or, are, doing this now.”
“What do the numbers mean, honey?” asked Helen. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“The numbers are serial numbers; for every one of us. Assuming the technology is available, and it is, it would take little effort to task a satellite to find someone who had been tagged with a microchip complete with a serial number,” sighed Jeff.
“And of course, they have never explicitly spelled any of this out to you,” said Red Dancing Bear.
“Didn’t need to. They see that they can rely on your own intellect to put all the pieces together later, at the prescribed speed; otherwise…”
“You would not have been selected in the first place. They search for those of us who are cool, rational, tinged with just enough natural paranoia that would alarm others of the heard if it came on too suddenly, but otherwise sane enough that we would be a credible source, making us dangerous to the farmer. So the farmer provides those calves and bucks with…”
“Right, the incentives for shutting up; for years at a stretch.”
By now, Jeffery was sweating bullets. The words weren’t coming easily.
“And Jeff, this is all to protect this thing you call The United States Constitution; or at least part of the reason. And in doing so, the farmer has so thoroughly hog-tide you, you no longer possess the right of free speech to discuss your misgivings with those closest to you. It has gotten so bad over the years, medically, psychologically, nay, BIOLOGICALLY, you no longer possess the ability of Free Speech. They have robbed you of your right to think and speak freely, down to your cellular level; you are passing it on to your young as a form of instinct; a Pavlovian reaction to keep your mouth shut and your brain tuned out as a means of self preservation. The great irony is that this is all happening in the one country that ostensibly values this concept, free thought, free will, freedom, above all others. Oh, these beasts have humor, they do. It strikes me they were behind that great joke played out over one-thousand years ago.”
“What joke?”
“Guys with huge knives slashing away in the name of Christ! Crusaders, of course! Tell me Jeff, can you see the fences now?”
“Yes Chief. I can see them. Are you saying the Crusaders themselves were driven by this farmer as you call him?”
“Without a doubt this is so. How else could you coax Christians to commit murder, all the while extolling Christianity as they slash through bone and flesh. As I said, at least they are not without a sense of humor, or cruel irony at the very least.”
“Hmmmmm…..”
“Hmmmmm, what Jeff?”
“The farmer, as you call him. We’re conditioned to call him ‘the customer’ or ‘the client.’”
“Yes, that fits. Subtlety, easy does it.”
“I started to notice this when some of the higher ups said things like ‘yes the contract ostensibly is for the USG’s department of DOD but the customer remains invisible on this one.’ Sometimes the contracts would use the character strings again, indicating a block of knowledge within the contract, that had to be completed as well.”
“Go on.”
“Once I was called in for a hands-on proximity inspection of the payload as it was hauled out of the hangar. I’m not sure why I was there, I mean, I’m not a structures guy. Anyway, the thing they put inside the payload bus just wasn’t made by human hands. It was mechanical, sure, and I guess we had a part in its manufacture but it was infinitely intricate and it looked animate; like it had a personality, more like it had an anti-soul, really. It was all in matte black and it retracted and folded into that small space the way a squid or a cuttlefish retracts when it shoots off. There was a bottomless, soulless power coming from it; like it hummed with hatred and contempt for us. But you had to marvel at how well it all folded down into the payload bus.
“You just knew the other guys were thinking the same thing too, when it was fitted into position, like what in God’s name is that, who paid for it, and where did it come from?”
“Even though the room was brightly lit it seemed so dark and malevolent, like those monsters from H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds, only in reverse in that we were putting it into the spacecraft and sending into space. And not one of us really knew what the thing was, nor why we were sending it up. I can safely say whoever did, isn’t from around here. Not at all.”
“Which brings your newly freed mind to the question, who are they and what do they want?”
“Right. Like why us? Just who the hell are you and why can’t you show yourselves?”
“Yes, Jeff. And they are so good at concealing themselves you begin to wonder why?”
“I know that there are a few other people at the Cape who have reached the level of clearance that I have reached, and there seems to be a common theme in their lives.”
“Ah, now you’re getting into the shaky area; what you fear the most.”
“Right. Murder suicide. At least two of the guys I know have been cleared as far as I have, have flipped out. One guy just three weeks ago. Drives to Norfolk with his wife and kids, kills them all then turns the gun on himself.”
“And you believe that’s exactly what happened? That’s what he did, huh?”
“I don’t know what to believe. I think that once you have your entire world flipped upside down and you realize, that your worst nightmare from a 1950s comic doesn’t even come close to the reality…”
“And why doesn’t it come close, Jeff?”
“Well shit, because in all those dramas, the battle lines are so fucking clear. I mean, here come the ships let’s get ready, arm some nukes or something. When Godzilla attacks the Japanese fishing villages or fights with Mothra in the streets of Tokyo, the citizens can at least band together and have that sense that, there’s the enemy gang. Let’s get it!”
“And in the current case?”
“The enemy has already won. When you finally figure it all out, the last freedom you have, the last act of self determination you possess is the right to take your family out before they can get on with their experiment or whatever it is they have planned for us, and that’s what these guys are doing, Chief. That’s what they’re doing. They’re not saying they DON’T love their families anymore, and are the most evil selfish sons of bitches in the universe. These are good people, family men, with hopes and dreams. Sometimes they’re right in the midst of sending their kids off to school. No, these men are saying ‘you can’t have me motherfucker! Not for one second longer, nor can you have my offspring.’”
“Yes, as with the noble Celtiberians of Gaul who…”
“Impaled themselves with their own swords after killing their families, rather than submit to Roman rule.”
“Is this the way, Jeff?” the chief asked. And the way Red Dancing Bear said it caused alarm; without harsh judgment, with understanding. But that was to be expected. The man named Red Dancing Bear had anticipated that reaction, and Jeff, predictably stalled; actually considering it. He wasn’t prepared to answer yet, not honestly anyway.
“I’ve seen what they do to your memory, your family after that and it is not pretty. They go through your computers at work and at home, and all the sudden somehow they churn up all this shit of their own invention; kiddie porn, snuff films on video, gambling debts, allegiances to radical groups, you never had. They burn your name so bad all your buddies want to do is forget you ever lived. They use the media, the local goddamned shit-assed newspaper that never checks a fucking fact beyond what’s written in a police report. They run with it, again, and again and again so much so, it’s a miracle if the surviving family members don’t off themselves as well. Like I say, there are other considerations, aside from which it is cowardly.”
“Jeff, the ancient Celts didn’t think it was cowardly, nor did the Roman artists who immortalized their final act. Many of those who died in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg knew they were committing suicide but Robert E. Lee told them they were doing a great service for their country in deciding something once and for all, then and there. Did the brave Japanese warriors who committed suicide on Iwo Jima against best-equipped best-trained fighting force in the world, did they have cowardice in their veins? Does that sound cowardly?”
“What are you saying, Chief?”
“Nothing. Just musing as an old man is prone to do.”
“Yeah, well, that kind of statement isn’t in me. Not yet anyway.”
“I was merely making the point that you should not be so quick to judge someone. You know, when the Tlaxcalans saw that Texcoco and Mexica were allied with the invader, Cortez; many of the mothers set themselves aflame as their husbands went off to war. Some jumped into the giant lake, others carried their newborns to the smoldering top of Mount Popo and flung themselves into the volcano.”
“Really? How do you know this?”
“I’m not sure. I just do. Sometimes I show off, and I shouldn’t do that. I know it angers you and now that you and I are allied, I should refrain from doing this. I am human, Jeff. I am sorry.”
“Now worries, Chief.”