Extinction Machine

Chapter Thirty-seven

Over Maryland airspace

Sunday, October 20, 8:43 a.m.

“Hey, Bug,” I said into the phone. “We anywhere yet?”

He told me what Jerry Spencer had found out about the Blue Diamond connection. “Top’s heading over there with Echo Team.”

“Great, they get to have fun while I heroically sit on my ass in a helicopter.” I sighed. “Look, what can you tell me about this Junie Flynn character? Why’s she so obsessed with UFOs and that stuff? She see a flying saucer once?”

“Not that she’s ever claimed. In fact I bet she’d give a lot to see one. She’s very harsh with people who claim to have seen craft but who Junie thinks are faking it.”

“Why would someone fake a claim like that?” I asked.

“Why do people claim to have seen Bigfoot, Joe?”

“There’s that.” I scratched Ghost between the ears. “Is the Black Book her only message or is she a general interest conspiracy nut?”

“She’s not a nut, Joe. Junie’s one of the most lucid speakers I’ve ever heard. But … to answer your question, the Black Book and Majestic Three are pretty big with her, but she also talks a lot about the need for disclosure. She keeps throwing challenges out to the U.S. government to ’fess up and admit that there are aliens and that we’ve recovered crash vehicles.”

“Good luck with that.”

“She’s been leading up to something. She’s been talking about something she’s going to reveal to the world this week. I think it was on last night’s podcast. I have it taped.”

“Dude, don’t you think we should already be on that?”

“Sure, but you wouldn’t believe how many things the big man has me on right now, just related to the president. Besides, her podcast is like three hours long, so I have to find the time to go through it.”

“Find the time.”

“Yeah, yeah. Oh, and other areas she hits a lot—alien-human hybrids.”

“Really? What’s that all about?”

Bug laughed. “Jeez, you really are clueless.”

“I have that on my business cards. C’mon, Bug, hit me.”

“Okay, Junie says that the reason we haven’t figured out how to make maximum use out of the alien tech is that it requires a biological interface. Now I know you know about that because we sat through that lecture.”

“That was DARPA, not Plan 9 from Outer Space.”

“Junie says that DARPA is only one group working on a way to develop technology that will allow a human being to bond with an aircraft on a biomechanical level. Maybe on a psychic level, too. That way a craft will move with the speed of human thought and without the lag time between thought and physical action on, say, a joystick or any other instrument.”

“So how does that involve alien-human hybrids?”

“She said that bodies were recovered from some of the crashes, and that we’ve been trying to do gene therapy with alien DNA so that an alien craft would recognize the pilot and respond according to how the ship was designed. Junie said that the hybridization program began in the seventies and viable hybrids were born or grown or whatever in the mid-eighties. The hybrids were supposedly raised in labs and trained in special camps, but some of them were seeded into the human population so scientists could study how well they blend in.”

“I’m really sure I saw this movie.”

“Just telling you what she says on her podcasts.”

“Sure, but, since you believe in this stuff, Bug, what do you think about all this?”

“If I tell you are you going to make a snarky comment?”

“Snarky? Me? You wound me, Bug. Wound me, I say.”

“Joe—I’m being serious here. This is something that matters to me.”

And there it was. I really liked Bug. He was a true innocent and definitely one of the good guys. He was also way too easy a target for a barbarian like me, who tended to throw stones at everyone.

“My word, Bug,” I said. “Serious business.”

That seemed to mollify him. “Well, yeah … I think there are aliens and I think they’ve visited us. Consider the math, Joe. There are somewhere between one hundred and four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way. That’s a lot of wasted real estate if there’s nothing out there.”

“Lot of empty space in Antarctica, too. Not a lot of life.”

“Tell that to the penguins. Besides, there’s all sorts of bacteria and viruses frozen there, and some of it is viable when thawed.”

“You’re beginning to sound like Dr. Hu.”

“Bite me in an ugly place,” said Bug. He and I both hated William Hu, the DMS science director. “Look, Joe, there are some things to consider. In 1976, the Mars landers detected chemical signatures indicative of life. The following year, the radio telescope at Ohio State University detected a very weird thirty-seven-second-long signal pulse of radiation from somewhere near the constellation Sagittarius. The signal was within the band of radio frequencies where transmissions are internationally banned on Earth, and natural sources of radiation from space generally cover a wider range of frequencies. Now, understand, the nearest star in that direction is over two hundred million light-years away, so this was either a massive astronomical event that was not visible to any other telescope, or an intelligence with a very powerful transmitter created it.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And there’s those Martian fossils they discovered in meteorite ALH80041, which was from where? Oh, wait, was that Antarctica? Oh no!”

“Wasn’t that disproved?”

“Challenged,” corrected Bug, “not disproved. Also, back in 2001 some brainiacs did a serious upgrade on the Drake Equation, and—”

“The what?”

“Did you skip every science class?

“I was very hormonal and all the hot girls were in art class.”

Bug snorted. “Uh-huh. Well, back in the early sixties this astronomer Frank Drake came up with an equation to try and estimate the number of planets in our galaxy that could reasonably host intelligent life and also be potentially capable of communicating with us. His estimate was that there had to be at least ten thousand earthlike planets.”

“Okay … wow.”

“It gets better. In 2001, scientists applied new data and theories about planets that could be in the ‘habitable zone’ around stars, where water is liquid and photosynthesis possible. They now believe that there are hundreds of thousands of worlds that could support life as we know it. And that’s just life as ‘we’ know it. What about life that exists outside of that range? After all, penguins can live in Antarctica. There’s a bacteria that thrives in the hot springs at Yellowstone—an environment where the waters are near the boiling point and acidic enough to dissolve nails. There’s another bacteria that lives at the bottom of an almost two-mile-deep South African gold mine in one hundred and forty degrees Fahrenheit. It fixes its own nitrogen, and eats sulfate. There are microbes thriving off the acid runoff from the gold, silver, and copper mines on Iron Mountain in California, and other microbes that live in the stratosphere miles above the Sahara. And there are some insanely complex ecosystems in utter darkness and under intense pressure way at the bottom of the ocean. I’m not talking fish, I’m talking about tube worms living in volcanic undersea vents, thriving in sulfur-rich waters. Down there you got the worms, all sorts of microbes, barnacles, mussels, and shrimp, in an environment that, prior to its discovery in the late seventies, scientists swore could not support life. Now, step back for a moment and let’s look at the red color of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. One of the leading theories is that the color comes from frozen bits of bacteria. Joe … you can’t be a rational person and tell me that there’s no chance at all that we’re alone in the galaxy.”

I said nothing, digesting the implications.

“Besides,” continued Bug, “over the past decade a slew of reputable scientists have begun making a case for the likely existence of extraterrestrial life. Guys like Stephen Hawking and Lachezar Filipov, director of the Space Research Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.”

“Wait, Hawking actually said he believes in aliens?”

“Oh, yeah … and he’s gone as far as strongly urging against any attempts to engage them. He was on one of those Discovery Channel documentaries, and he referred to aliens as ‘nomads looking to conquer and colonize.’ That’s some heavy shit from a guy who everybody considers to be one of the top brains on the planet. You want to call him a fruitcake, or ask him if he wears aluminum-foil hats?”

“Stop kicking me in the shins here, Bug. You’re making your point.”

“Let me toss this in your lap, then. There was a theory advanced a couple of years ago by Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies, who said that he believed that some microbes on our planet may be derived from alien civilizations. Right after that, Chandra Wickramasinghe, a professor at Cardiff University, claimed there was new research showing that human life started somewhere other than the planet Earth. You see, a lot of this new interest in the possibility of alien life is growing out of the new technologies that are enabling a more thorough search for other habitable zones in the galaxy. You watch, Joe, as this movement keeps gaining momentum from the top minds, then we’re going to see skepticism about UFOs shrivel up and die.”

“Maybe,” I said grudgingly, “but you’re talking about guys who are taking a careful approach. Are any of them saying that the aliens are actually here now? Are any of them talking about technologies looted from crashed vehicles? Or even saying that they believe that we’ve already been visited?”

“Some,” said Bug, “but you’re right—they’re careful. They have to be, because they’re with universities and stuff like that, and one whiff of anything questionable and they lose their grants or their chair. This is why Junie Flynn is building such a strong case for full governmental disclosure. She wants our government to do it and if we do then others will follow suit.”

“Not a chance,” I said with a laugh.

“You don’t think they should?”

“If it’s true? Maybe. But, I don’t think they ever will. C’mon, Bug, if flying saucers crashed and we actually did recover the wreckage we would never—ever—admit to it. We’d study that stuff in secret in hopes of building advanced craft, new weapons systems, and anything else that would put us out in front in the arms race.”

There was a significant silence.

“Bug…,” I said slowly, “tell me you didn’t just trick me into making your point for you?”

“How’s that shoe taste, Joe?”

I laughed again. “Okay, okay, you sneaky bastard, I can see the shape of it. I can build a good case for us creating secret R and D divisions to study this stuff, if it exists. That’s a logic exercise based on an understanding of how paranoid all governments are and how the military mind-set works.”

“Uh-huh,” he said.

“Doesn’t mean that there is actually something to disclose. Your Junie Flynn could be yelling in a windstorm.”

“Or maybe she’s onto something.”

“If she is, no matter how loud she yells it’s not going to make the government disclose. And maybe they shouldn’t. Imagine public reaction to the existence of aliens. You know what that would do to organized religion?”

“Prove that the universe is a bigger and more wonderful place than people give it credit for?”

His innocence was a wonderful thing. I think we need a lot more people who not only see the glass as half full, but half full and a waiter is coming with a pitcher. Most of the rest of society is so cynical and jaded that they think the glass is always half empty and filled with bacteria.

“Where does the Black Book fit into the disclosure equation?” I asked. “Why does Junie Flynn rant about that? What set Junie on this path? What made her an evangelist for this particular cause?”

“I really don’t know,” said Bug, sounding surprised. “She came onto the scene with a bang and she never talks about herself. She always keeps it about the message, about the need for disclosure, about how we need to believe the truth, and how the Black Book will set us free.”

“Set us free? How?”

“I don’t know that, either,” Bug admitted. “All I know is that she’s been building up to something lately. Whatever it is, it’s supposed to be big. She says that soon the governments of the world won’t be able to keep us in blinders and they won’t be able to hide the truth anymore. Or words to that effect. Maybe it was on her podcast last night. I’ll go through it.”

“Okay, let me know what you find out. And, Bug? About this UFO stuff?”

“Yeah?”

“I do want to believe,” I said. “I just don’t yet.”

“‘Yet’ is a pretty significant word, Joe.”

He disconnected.