“They are fools,” the old man muttered in German, his gnarled hands wrapped around a cane with a silver handle.
Turcotte ignored him, looking out the window at the base of Groom Mountain. Even this close — less than two hundred meters away — it was almost impossible to tell that there was a hangar built into the side of the mountain.
Turcotte wondered how much money had been poured into this facility. Several billion dollars at least. Of course, with the U.S. government having a covert black budget somewhere between thirty-four and fifty billion dollars a year, he knew that was just a drop in the bucket.
“They will all die, just like they did last time,” the old man said in perfect German, shaking his head.
Turcotte looked over his shoulder. One of the bodyguards was asleep. The other was engrossed in a paperback.
“Who will die?” Turcotte asked in the same language.
The old man started and then looked at Turcotte. “Are you one of Gullick’s men?”
Turcotte lifted his right hand, exposing the blood-soaked fabric. “I was.” “And now who are you?”
At first Turcotte thought he had translated poorly, but then he realized he had it right, and he understood. It was a question he had struggled with all through the dark hours of the morning. “I don’t know, but I am done here.”
The old man switched to English. “That is good. This is not a place to be. Not with what they plan, but I am not sure any distance will be enough.”
“Who are you?”
The old man inclined his head. “Werner Von Seeckt. And you?”
“Mike Turcotte.”
“I have worked here since 1943.”
“This is my second day,” Turcotte said.
Von Seeckt found that amusing. “It did not take you long to get in trouble,” he said. “You are going to the hospital with me?”
Turcotte nodded. “What were you talking about earlier? About everyone dying?”
The engine noise increased as the plane taxied toward the end of the runway. “Those fools,” Von Seeckt said, gesturing out the window. “They are playing with forces they don’t understand.”
“The flying saucers?” Turcotte asked.
“Yes, the saucers. We call them bouncers,” Von Seeckt said. “But even more, there is another ship. You have not seen the large one, have you?”
“No. I’ve only seen the ones here in this hangar.”
“There is a bigger one. Much bigger. They are trying to figure out how to fly it. They believe if they can get it to work they can take it into orbit and then back. Then there will no longer be any need for the space shuttles, but more importantly they believe that it is an interstellar transport, that we can bridge centuries of normal development by simply flying the mothership. They think we can have the stars right away without having to make the technological breakthroughs to do it.” Von Seeckt sighed. “Or, perhaps more importantly, without the societal development.”
Turcotte had seen enough the past couple of days to accept what Von Seeckt was saying at face value. “What’s so bad about just flying the thing? Why are you saying it’s a threat to the planet?”
“We don’t know how it works!” Von Seeckt said, stamping the head of his cane down on the carpet. “The engine is incomprehensible. They are not even sure which of the many machines inside is the engine.
“Or there may be two engines! Two modes of propulsions. One for use inside of a solar system or inside a planet’s atmosphere and the other once the ship is outside significant effect of gravity from planets and stars. We simply don’t know, and what if we turn the wrong one on?
“Does the interstellar drive create its own wormhole and the ship is pulled through? Maybe. So, maybe we make a wormhole on earth — not good! Or does it ride the gravitational waves? But in riding, does it disturb them? Imagine what that could do. And what will it do if we lose control?
“And who is to say the engine will still work properly? It is a flaw of inductive logic to say that just because the bouncers still work that the mothership will work. In fact, what if it is broken and turning it on makes it self-destruct?”
Von Seeckt leaned over and spoke in a lower voice. “In 1989 we were working on one of the engines from the bouncers. We had removed it from the craft and placed it in a cradle. The men working on it were testing tolerances and operating parameters.
“They found out about tolerances! They turned it on and it ripped out of the cradle holding it. They had not replicated the control system adequately and lost the ability to turn it off. It tore through the retaining wall, killing five men. When it finally came to a stop it was buried sixty-five feet into solid rock. It took over two weeks to drill into the rock and remove it. It wasn’t damaged at all.
“I have seen it before. They never learn. I understood the first time. There was a war. Extreme measures were called for then. But there is no war now. And all the secrecy! Why? What are we hiding all this for? General Gullick says it is because the public will not understand, and his cronies produce all sorts of psychological studies to back that up, but I do not believe it. They hide it because they have hidden it for so long that they can no longer reveal what they have been doing without saying that the government has lied for so many years. And they hide it because knowledge is power and the bouncers and the mothership represent the ultimate power.”
The plane was gathering speed and moving down the runway. “It all used to make sense,” Von Seeckt said. “But this year something changed. They are all acting very strangely.”
Turcotte had cued into something Von Seeckt had said. “What do you mean the ‘first time’?”
“I have worked for the government of the United States a very long time,” Von Seeckt said. “I had a certain”—Von Seeckt paused—“knowledge and expertise that they needed so they, ah, recruited me in mid-1942. I came out here to the West. To Los Alamos, in New Mexico.”
“The bomb,” Turcotte said.
Von Seeckt nodded. “Yes. The bomb. But in 1943 I moved to Dulce, New Mexico. That is where the real work went on. Los Alamos, they worked off of the information we gave them.
“It was all very, very secret. They pieced it all out. Fermi had already done the first piece even before they had the knowledge I brought with me. His chain-reaction experiment gave them the raw material. I gave them the technology.”
“You did?” Turcotte asked. The plane was gaining altitude. “How did you know—”
Von Seeckt raised his cane. “Another time for that story, maybe. We worked nonstop until 1945. We thought we had it right, just like they think they understand the mothership. The difference was that there was a war then. And even so, there were many who argued we should not test the bomb, but everyone in power was tired. Then Roosevelt died. They hadn’t even briefed Vice President Truman. Their great secrecy almost cost them there. The secretary of state had to go and tell him about the bomb the day after the President died.
“After understanding the significance of what he was told, Truman gave the go-ahead to test. But I don’t think they fully informed him of the potential for disaster, just as they keep the President in the dark now. We took a chance then.”
Von Seeckt muttered something in German that Turcotte didn’t catch, then he continued in English. “They have a presidential adviser on the Majic committee, but there is much they do not tell her. I know they have not told her about the Nightscape missions. They believe this operation here, and much else that is secret in the government, is beyond the scope of the politicians who can be gone in four years.”