“So this is the famous Vault.”
Harley Drake rolled his chair through the doorway. He had been summoned out of the Home Team by Weldon, who introduced him to a tall, gangly, almost goofy-looking man of forty in a short-sleeved white shirt and several badges. “Brent Bynum,” Weldon said, “National Security Staff, our White House liaison.” Bynum said nothing, offering only a slight nod of the head.
Weldon led this short parade to the back side of Building 30, to a door that said ELECTRICAL.
And proved to lead to a spacious closet with a pair of ancient mainframes stacked floor to ceiling, and just enough room to reach another door . . . that led to a conference room beyond.
Weldon flipped on the lights. “We’re getting a lot of use out of it this month.”
Harley was surprised at how cool the room was, as if it had superstrength air-conditioning. “Is this little exercise going to be worth my time? Because you may have noticed that we have a crew wandering around loose on an alien spaceship.”
“It won’t take long, and yes.” As Harley wheeled up to a polished conference table, Bynum opened a safe—aside from table and chairs and a blank HD television screen, the only furnishing in the room. He took out a blank sheet of letter paper and slid it to Harley, with a pen. “Please sign this.” They were the first words the White House man had uttered.
“Nice to meet you, too.” Harley scribbled his name without hesitation.
Bynum continued: “Now, print these words above: ‘I understand the penalties associated with unauthorized disclosure of this information.’”
Harley carefully printed the sentence, but now he smirked. “How long do you think this information is going to remain secret?”
Bynum merely blinked as he collected the paper. “I’m sure some of it is on the Web even as we speak.” Then he stepped back and, as far as Harley was concerned, faded into the wallpaper.
Weldon pulled an aged manila folder from the safe. Harley couldn’t wait to flip it open—how often does anyone see any document that is so ridiculously secret? The folder was smudged, ancient—it even smelled of mildew—and contained a solid two inches of documents, many of them tabbed.
The cover page was priceless—an original typed sheet from someone called “Lt. A. G. Cumming” working for something called “Project Grudge,” part of the Technical Intelligence Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Dated January 4, 1948—six months after the first widespread flying saucer reports, from what Harley recalled—and originally classed as “Secret,” it bore half a dozen strikeouts and upgrade marks.
It was also labeled Copy 1 of 5 copies. Who got the other four? he wondered.
Beneath the cover was a two-page memo summarizing what was known about flying saucers and suggesting that a “protocol” be developed in case some sort of extraterrestrial beings—here called “Foreign/ Non-Human Entities”—happened to show up, alive.
On the sound assumption that whatever this Lieutenant Cummings had proposed in 1948 was likely to be revised, expanded, and eventually contradicted by the newest documents in the file, Harley flipped ahead several pages. “I was hoping for the secrets to the Roswell crash. Until today I was skeptical about the idea that we had alien bodies at Hangar 18. . . .”
“The whole Roswell–alien body thing was made up in the 1970s.”
“So you’ve read this.”
“No,” Weldon said. “I’m not cleared for it.” Which surprised Harley. “But I was interested in UFOs as a kid.”
Harley quickly worked through the pages, seeing little more than a series of cover pages recounting each new name of the organization that succeeded the Technical Intelligence Division, ultimately becoming the Air Intelligence Center—at which point the “protocol” was transferred to “joint control” between the Air Staff, the CIA, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the State Department. (At one point in the early 1980s, some low-level Air Staff officer—clearly not worried about potential damage to his career—had dubbed the protocol “Have Atom”.)
“Don’t fucking read it, Harley. Skim. The world is waiting for me.”
“I’ll try not to move my lips.”
The content kept expanding, but the principles did not: Non-Human Entities should be treated as potentially hostile, like the crew of a captured Soviet or Red Chinese aircraft or vessel in the absence of a formal declaration of war.
Any landing or crash site should be sealed off and treated as a radiation leak. A team of pre-identified experts—Harley was amused to note that linguists were high on the list—would be activated and brought to Wright-Patterson and designated “The 48 Committee.” Decisions should be made at the presidential level, with input from his national security adviser and the secretary of state. Financial support would come from the intelligence community black budget; support personnel would be Air Force. All information would be treated as highly secret.
But there was nothing mysterious about the document, nothing worth classifying . . . except for the fact that it proved that the U.S. government had taken the possibility of extraterrestrial life seriously as early as 1948.
Harley Drake had grown up with the idea, of course. Every other cartoon he had watched as a kid, most comic books, a good number of books and movies . . . all assumed that there was intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, often hostile life.
Even at ten he had not expected to find a giant alien spaceship parked over Washington, D.C., but he had been waiting for the day some backyard astronomer would announce that he’d picked up an extraterrestrial radio signal.
The closest he’d come was the day he first heard about Keanu. So the events of the past few hours didn’t require a major paradigm shift; it was like hearing the results of a blood test. “Okay, I’ve got the idea, Shane. Mr. Bynum. There’s a whole set of plans for dealing with E.T., assuming we run into one on Keanu.”
“You didn’t read the last page very closely, which was the one thing I was cleared for: It says that the 48 Committee will designate a point of contact and team leader, reporting directly to them.
“That team leader is you, Harley. You are now planet Earth’s general in charge of First Contact, and that’s how you’re going to be introduced if I ever have to talk about this in public.”
His first impulse was to tell Weldon to piss off . . . and to take Bynum with him. He wasn’t that happy trying to wrangle the great minds of the Home Team; he surely didn’t need to face reporters or deal with the White House.
But the second impulse was to remember the aviator’s creed: Never turn down a combat assignment.
“Okay,” he said.
“This changes very little, of course. Your primary job is making your experts available to mission control. . . .”
But Harley had ceased to pay attention to Weldon or Bynum or the political challenges of the Alien Protocol. He had just realized what was disturbing about Keanu’s newly increased rotation.
“Shane, we’re going to lose contact with Venture.”
Weldon was an agile thinker, but fatigue, pressure, and setting combined to make him blink and say, “What?”
Harley quickly recapped the information from the Home Team, noting that Venture and Brahma had landed close to the western limb of Keanu, as observed from Houston. “Keanu is rotating, and sometime in the next hour, two at most, Vesuvius Vent and those two spacecraft are going to be out of direct line of communication.”
“And this might last ten hours?” That was an eternity in mission operations.
“Yeah, best guess—” Weldon was already on his feet and heading for the door, leaving Harley alone in the Vault with the White House security man.
“I think that means we’re done,” Harley said, wheeling himself out.
The President of the Russian Federal Space Agency sends his congratulationsto cosmonauts Chertok and Yorkina for their heroism inrescuing American astronaut Hall, and for their continuing participationin missionBrahmaunder command of ISRO’s T. Radhakrishnan. The President notes that today’s use of Russian equipment to correct deficiencies in a critical American operation is the sixth such event since 1975, including the recent evacuation of a sick astronaut from the International Space Station in September 2017.