civilization.
It lived on only in myth, most notably in the Vedas of ancient India. But there was almost enough information there, in the descriptions of Vimina aircraft, to reproduce the power plants of the distant past. Careful questioning of Adam and Bob had filled in the missing pieces of information.
Large though they were, the TRs, of which there were ten on the books and two off, were no more difficult to fly than a small general aviation aircraft.
As Mike continued toward the faint red light, his head was just a few inches from the lower surface of the craft. The light marked the entrance, a simple hatch that was slid open by hand.
He withdrew the ladder, which gave a bit under his weight as he climbed aboard. He took the long tunnel to the flight deck, pulling himself along on a stretcher as the crew had in the old B-36 bomber.
This flight deck, though, was very different from what a bomber pilot from the fifties might have seen. It wasn’t even meant to be flown by a pilot, but rather flown
Mike used a penlight to find the code panel, and input the thirty-three-digit code that activated the craft. A moment later, its amber control panel came to life. The basic aircraft instruments were there, of course, airspeed, bank and turn, altitude. There were others though, that were not so familiar. Most of these involved the craft’s extraordinary surveillance capabilities.
Mike keyed Wilton, Kentucky, into the autopilot. He pressed the three buttons that activated the plasma. Behind him, there was a distinct “pop,” the loudest sound the device would ever make. The altimeter began to wind up—but not far. It was a very unusual sort of altimeter, because it could measure anything from thousands of feet to inches. The plane’s operational altitude was, essentially, ground level. Unlike a cruise missile, it did not rely on comparing a picture of the terrain it was crossing to its memory. Instead, it had the intelligence and the instruments it needed to examine the terrain it was crossing, and adjust its altitude accordingly.
He watched the altimeter rise to 60 meters, then felt a slight shudder as the ship’s propulsion system, which used the Earth’s magnetic field, slowly began to impel it forward. It took ten minutes for him to reach top speed.
The craft sought out forests and mountains, only rarely slipping across a town, and never a city. From ten feet away, it made no sound at all.
The flight from Owings Mills to Wilton covered 433 kilometers and took just over two hours. As Mike flew, he prepared instrument after instrument, most of them gained from his own hard work managing the empaths, extracting bits and pieces of information from his grays.
Sound, in the craft, was as carefully managed as all other emissions. Even switches had been carefully damped so that pressing a button made nary a click. The fans that controlled the craft’s altitude were entirely silent, designed so that the air they emitted was always exactly the same temperature as the air they took in. Just as it had no sound signature, and at night essentially no visual signature, it also had no heat signature and no radar signature. Even the pilot’s body heat was dissipated by being used in production of electricity.
The TR could fail; if the mercury plasma malfunctioned, the craft would be incinerated inside of a second. During development it had happened many times. There was never anything left, only ash drifting in the sky. In 1980 in Texas, some civilians had been close-up witnesses to one of these failures. One of them got cancer and filed a suit against the U.S. government, but the judge was prevailed upon and the case went nowhere. The civilian died soon thereafter, thankfully.
He flew on. When he was within thirty miles of Wilton, he flipped another switch, and something happened that would have awed anyone who had not expected it.
This was a technology that they had developed by analyzing the stories of a close-encounter witness called Travis Walton, whom they had also discredited in every possible way, making a national joke out of him so that the public would never be convinced by his tale.
Why the grays had taken him on a ride was not clear. But they had, and on that ride, they had made their ship disappear around him, so that he appeared to be floating in the stars. Such a capability would be extremely useful for a reconnaissance craft, and Eamon had gradually obtained from Bob knowledge of how to design materials that would change their opacity by the simple application of heat. He pressed a button and was rewarded with the apparent complete disappearance of everything around him except the control panel itself. He floated now over the broad hills of eastern Kentucky, a man alone in the night sky.
The ship was on a course that would take it directly over Oak Road. He had only to watch the world slipping by fifty feet beneath his feet. He saw horses running in the moonlight, he passed over an elegant farmhouse and barns, so close that he felt as if he could have reached down and touched a weathervane. He smelled nothing of the night air and felt nothing of the cold, because the temperature within the ship was carefully controlled. There was a heat signature, of course, but it was no greater than that of the breath of a swooping owl.
The ship’s voice said in his earphone, “Two minutes.”
He turned on the camouflage. This drained electrical power, but also provided an additional level of protection from notice from above and below. It consisted of thousands of tiny light-emitting diodes served by cameras on the upper and lower surfaces of the ship. From below, an observer would see the night sky under which the ship was passing. From above, the image that was projected was of the ground.
“One minute.”
He saw light ahead, winking in among the trees. Soon a small neighborhood of tract houses appeared. He stopped the ship. Now he activated the infrared sensors, trained them on the first house in the tiny development. Two adults, one registering 98.6, the other 97.9. An infant, registering 99.1.
The ship was so low that it was buffeted by gas fumes coming out of the furnace chimney. He “opened” the house by activating the whole array of surveillance instruments.
An ultrasensitive receiver read the electroencephalograms of the occupants, and provided a readout of their state, whether awake or asleep, and a level-of-awareness index. One adult was fully awake. One adult was registering mostly Alpha. Dozing, according to the computer’s interpretation. The infant was profoundly asleep.
It seemed to him that he was not likely to be dealing with an infant, because this child would surely need to be at least fairly mature by 2012.
He went to the next house. In it, he saw two adults. Deeper in the structure was another person, perhaps a small adult, perhaps an older child. The two adults were physically motionless but their minds were alert. He deployed the microphone system. He heard a familiar voice, and for a moment was shocked. How could he know somebody in that house? Who would it be?
Then he realized that it was Grissom. They were watching
In the basement, there was another sound, a continuous noise identified as a small electric motor. Could it be a shaver? No, it was moving over too broad an area. He visualized the movement and immediately had his answer. The person in the basement was using a model train set. Therefore, it was not a small adult, but a child.
He moved to the other two houses, then, gathering the structural plans into the computer, identifying approximate ages and sexes of the occupants.
When he was finished, he had all the humans and all the animals. He then found the open space behind the houses that the grays had used on their revealing foray. He dropped down into it. He wanted to step on the actual ground, but he must not leave the ship unless necessary. It had been designed to allow the occupant to reconnoiter on the ground, and was intelligent enough to protect itself, even for extended periods, but still, no chances were to be taken unless they were essential.
He increased altitude to a thousand feet, then went online again. Using Expedia, he found motels in Wilton. He input the address of the local Days Inn and was carried there.
He then observed the local terrain for heights. It turned out that the top of a grain elevator was the highest point in the area. He flew until he found it, an enormous structure in the center of the small community.
He went close. There, on one of the silos, was where he would place his antenna. Nearby, he saw a field. He dropped down.
Putting the ship’s remote into his pocket, he slid back along the access tunnel and climbed out. The ship would find a hiding place on its own. It would not go to altitude, but rather would hide just above the surface somewhere, probably back in the hills that surrounded the town. When he looked up, even though he knew that it
