“I got a splitting headache two days ago. Jesus, I should have known.”
“We need to assume that you’re both under mind control and we have to get your asses out of here fast.” He opened his cell phone. “I’m calling for a Secret Service escort for both of you guys to Walter Reed. If you go under your own steam, you just might change your minds, as you know.”
“Thank you.”
Nobody else, thankfully, was implanted, and Mike finally was able to take his customary place at the conference table, second from the head on the left. Charles Gunn was head of table. Normally, he would not be at a meeting of the security-operations committee, but Mike had specifically requested his attendance.
Henry Vorona shuffled some papers as the Three Blind Mice took their places, three sour and mutually indistinguishable liaison officers from the main corporate groups that accepted delivery of the technologies and processes that evolved out of the liaison with Adam. They were Todd Able, Alex Starnes, and Timothy Greenfield, all in their forties, all looking like undertakers. It was their corporate dollars that funded the survival program. Creating the database of people who would be sheltered was costly, and monitoring their movements even more so. But those things were nothing compared to the cost of the underground shelters themselves, a hundred at half a billion dollars each, hidden around the world.
“Let’s get going,” Charles said. “I’ve brought a little patents-and-processes business to deal with first. Where are we with the plasmonics device?”
Mike was confused by that question. The invisibility fabric was deep in the pipeline. “Uh, do we need more from Adam? Because I wasn’t aware—”
Tim Greenfield said, “We have a report, Mike. It’s on its way to you.”
“Then there’s a problem, Timmy?”
Tim Greenfield’s pate flushed. “It doesn’t work.”
“Well, that is a problem.” The concept was a material that would reduce light scatterback to zero, thus rendering an object effectively impossible to see. They knew that the grays used invisibility cloaking in their abductions, in addition to their peculiar physical ability to lock movement with the slightest flickering of the eye, so their victim could not see them.
Adam and Bob had been queried on the cloaking, in the tiny bits and pieces necessary to extract information from them, for fifteen years. They had a ten-billion-dollar check riding on the success of the process.
“There’s a compositional issue. Chemical. We need a real formula. What they’ve given us is not real.”
So the grays had lied again. All of those years of work, those hundreds and hundreds of tiny, seemingly innocuous questions had led down another blind alley.
Not that they didn’t have successes. “How are we doing with the electrostatic anti-friction shield?” Mike asked Todd Able, who was team leader on that project. He knew the answer better than Todd did, but he wanted to remind everybody that his work with Bob and Adam had resulted in its share of successes.
“It’s deploying and we’re looking at a ninety-seven percent decrease in friction across angular surfaces. If we could mine gravitite, we could fabricate non-aerodynamic spherical vehicles and we’d be looking at the same zero- friction profile we see in the grays’ craft. All we’d be missing is their engine.”
“The coherent mercury plasma can’t be made more efficient,” Henry Vorona said. “We’re getting everything we can out of it.”
Mike knew that well. Using a combination of research into ancient Vedic texts about the technology of Earth’s previous civilization and questions to Adam, they had evolved a device that rotated a mercury plasma inside a powerful magnetic field, that reduced the weight of the craft that carried it by 40 percent. Simply knowing that the Vedic references to aircraft and weapons referred to actual devices had enabled scientists to proceed much more quickly.
“So what about gravitite? Progress?” Charles asked in his peculiarly cheerful voice, so improbable in a man who looked like the director of his own funeral.
“We know what it is and where it is, but extracting it is another matter,” Mike said. He looked toward Henry Vorona, who was a substantial shareholder in a dozen companies that were feeding off the grays’ technology. One of those companies, Photonic Research, had been mining for years in the same seams of iron in the southern Catskills that the grays used, pulling iron out of shafts directly adjacent to theirs, but failing to extract more than a few molecules of gravitite.
Henry said, “We’re not going to be saving the human race with gravitite. We can pull up the iron and cut it up atom by atom, but we find one atom of gravitite for every three hundred billion atoms of iron. The grays must have a more efficient process, otherwise they would have used up every bit of iron on the planet to get a handful of gravity-negative product.”
Charles now rested his eyes on Mike. “Colonel, if you’d like to go on to this security matter now.”
Mike told himself that he wasn’t frightened, but he was, he felt like a schoolboy about to get a thrashing. “We have a potential crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.”
“Adam’s not sick?”
Bob had been invaded by common household molds. This was why they kept Adam in an ultra-dry, ultra- clean environment. They were all terrified of losing their only captive gray. “Not that, thank the Lord, but something might be unfolding that could be bad for us.”
Henry Vorona sighed. He was not a patient man and Mike could see an explosion building. He hurried on. “Basically, we’ve obtained information about a very unusual operation on the part of the grays. Spectacularly threatening, I am sorry to say. What happened initially was that the triad that works Pennsylvania and up into Canada, came out of their boundaries and did an abduction in a college town in Kentucky.”
“Okay,” Todd said, “I’ll bite.”
“The grays have devised a way to communicate with mankind. To teach us how to save ourselves. They’ve been working on it for probably a couple of thousand years. And now, gentlemen, they are going to spring it on us. Of course, we save ourselves not for us, but for them. Mankind survives, but as a genetic milk carton for them. Slaves.”
That brought total silence. These men had counted on the coming catastrophe to free their carefully selected fragment of humankind from the grays. None of them liked the idea of the disaster that they knew was coming. But they feared this slavery more. If six billion were alive in 2012, they would all be enslaved. If only a million were left alive by then, they would be left alone. So, at least, went the theory.
“So, get on with it,” Henry Vorona snapped.
“Okay,” Mike continued, “we’ve known for some time, based on the abduction pattern we’ve observed over five decades, that the grays are especially interested in children.”
“Because they’re small, easy to control, and emotionally rich,” Henry said. “Easy to feed on,” he added in a tone electric with contempt. Every man here shared one truth: he despised the grays.
“That does not explain the ‘why,’ which has always been our problem. The grays can outthink us. They’re always ten moves ahead.”
Henry slammed his briefcase, which had been open on the table. “That’s it then. Let’s all go home. Follow Forrestal out the damn window.”
“I’m too old to jump out a window,” Charles said. “Mike, you finish this. What’s your problem and what do you need from us?”
“Well, wait,” Tim said, “what about the scalar weapons program? We’re going to have eighty of those birds up by 2012. We’ll be able to induce the destruction of most of the species ourselves.” He sighed. “God help us, I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“You think they’ll sit back and let us kill their cattle?”
“They haven’t touched the scalar prototype.”
“Because its only one small weapon,” Charles said. “It doesn’t have the potential to affect their plans.”
Mike continued. “The grays are doing something very inventive. What they’ve apparently done is to breed a child so intelligent that he can process and use the contents of their knowledge.”
Vorona shook his head.
“You have a problem, Henry?”
“They’ve been preparing this from the beginning, then?”
“I found out about it early this morning.”
“Mike, we’ve known about them for fifty damn years, and you found out
