“Murphy. Tex Murphy. I found out a little. I know you recently married a young woman named Emily Sue Patterson. I know that you used to work at Berkeley with Sandra Collins, and that you once worked as a research scientist with Fitzpatrick.”
“Is that it?”
“Pretty much.”
Malloy nodded and scratched his white-stubbled chin. “My life’s been in danger for some time now. You probably know I’m wanted by the N S A. Well, a few other little groups would like to get their paws on me as well, some in the government, some in other governments, some in private organisations. Hell, sometimes it feels like I’m running from everyone but the Girl Scouts.”
He coughed violently into a closed fist. He didn’t look very healthy. I didn’t ask if he was all right.
“I knew about the NSA. I had a little run in with them a couple of days ago. They mentioned your name, but I played dumb. It’s something I’m really good at. But I’m pretty sure they believed me.”
The old man glanced up at me sharply. “You didn’t let them follow you here, did you?”
I thought back to what I’d done over the past six or seven hours. I was fairly certain that I hadn’t been trailed. I shook my head. The old man didn’t seem one hundred percent convinced. “If they followed you here, our acquaintance is going to be a short one. Better give me another one of those cigarettes.”
I pulled out the pack. There was only one smoke left. I handed it over and lit it for Malloy. He leaned back in his chair and inhaled, French-style. “Do you want to hear a story?”
“Sure.” I tried to be casual, but I had a feeling that this guy had a lot to say. I wanted to know everything.
“You positive? What I’m gonna tell you could put you in the same danger I’m in.”
“Just knowing you has been dangerous enough. Besides, danger’s like Jell-O — there’s always room for a little more.”
Malloy grinned, coughed three or four times, then wiped his eyes on his shirt sleeve. “You ever heard of Project Blue Book?”
It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it. “Wasn’t it some kind of scandal in the testing department at the Naval Academy?”
The old man shook his head, smiling, then coughed again. “No. It was a government-appointed study started in 1952 to determine whether or not aliens had ever made contact with Earth.”
I remembered now. I’d always been somewhat interested in the idea of aliens but had never really gotten into the whole UFO scene.
“It was the first time the government publicly addressed the possible existence of UFOs. Of course, the findings were negative, and all reported sightings were determined to be fraudulent or misinterpreted. Most UFOlogists consider Project Blue Book to be the first step in a massive government cover-up.”
Malloy coughed again and turned to the desk behind him. He grabbed a can of Crown Cola and took a drink. The desk was littered with books and papers, some of which were covered with symbols like those I’d seen back at the boarding house.
“Anyway, the government made an official announcement that Project Blue Book had been closed.”
He paused poignantly.
“It wasn’t. The truth is, the military had found something at Roswell — I’m assuming you’ve heard about Roswell — and it wasn’t a @#%$ weather balloon. It was a spacecraft, and it sure wasn’t Soviet. The Roswell incident was the greatest disinformation campaign of all time. Sure, there were allegations and investigations, books written and witnesses interviewed, but not a shred of tangible evidence was ever released to the public.”
I’d heard this kind of talk before, mostly from UFO crackpots. I believed Malloy more than I would believe most people on this topic, but he hadn’t told me anything that wasn’t already in print.
“So what does this have to do with Project Blue Book?”
Malloy grinned. “Project Blue Book turned into Project Blueprint. I seriously doubt you’ve heard of it, seeing as how you’re still alive. The military made it their top priority and never allowed a leak.”
“What is Project Blueprint?”
“The wreckage in Roswell was taken to a nearby underground base. A handful of top researchers with the highest security clearance were essentially given lifetime assignments to the Roswell complex. The spacecraft was not large, but was chock full of goodies to analyse. Of course, their first thought was of finding weapons, or technology to help build a better bomb. Remember, we were still in the middle of the Cold War and looking for any advantage possible.”
“Seems to me the military hasn’t changed a whole lot.”
Malloy smiled grimly and nodded.
“You got that right. Anyway, Project Blueprint was the operation concerned with gleaning new information and/or technology from the wreckage. The research continued well into the 1980s. Small advances were made, but it took time for our analysing technology to catch up the alien data. Eventually we got there.”
“You said ‘We”’
Malloy leaned back and took another sip of cola.
“So I did. I joined Project Blueprint in 1984. As a promising graduate student in linguistics and symbology, I was recruited by the military and given the assignment at age 21. In retrospect, that particular year was an interesting time to join, seeing how Big Brother was firmly in place, and the Peacekeeper was the most powerful weapon on the planet. It now strikes me as being very Orwellian. Anyway, I went to work at the Roswell complex. My job was to carry on the work of deciphering hieroglyphics. Very little — or I should say, no — progress had been made over the previous thirty-two years. In the years since the Roswell incident, the military had found no other spacecraft, though plenty of sightings were reported.”
The old man was besieged by coughing spasms, which took him a minute to recover from.
“Excuse my hacking. It’s become a problem lately.”
I waited, impatient to hear the rest of the story. Eventually, Malloy caught his breath and went on. “I’d been working in Project Blueprint for about fourteen years when word came through the complex that there’d been a breakthrough. I never got all the details, but apparently someone had discovered that one of the alien instruments would generate minute quantities of antimatter. Of course, this was technology we were capable of — in theory — in 1998, but the operation was impractical, not to mention potentially devastating. The alien technology worked much more efficiently.
“Naturally, the military was ecstatic about the breakthrough and set about using the antimatter generator to build a new and improved bomb. If you will remember, the Desert Standoff was in effect by then, and we were looking for a technology edge on the Middle East Bloc. Well, the military had what they needed and started the war. Unfortunately, as you know, things went wrong.”
“That’s the understatement of the century.”
“Yeah, well, the military didn’t think it had time to do any testing. Instead, they started a political incident and let it boil until they could plead probable cause. Then they flew a squadron out and dropped a few bombs. I don’t know all the details, but apparently the bombs hit someplace they weren’t supposed to and started a chain reaction. It ended up being like Chernobyl back in the early ‘80s, only on a scale a hundred times bigger. As the war raged on, radiation clouds drifted across every continent, seeding the atmosphere to the point of saturation. The military had screwed up big, and even they realised it. They stopped producing the bombs and destroyed the generator, but it was too late. The war ended, but irreparable damage had been done.”
Malloy paused for a moment, pondering the sad, stupid, tragic story.
After a short time, the old man leaned forward and spoke, his voice low. “During all this, as I said, I’d been working on the hieroglyphics found in the Roswell spacecraft. We had quite a bit of raw material to work with, but of course, we had no key. The collective set of symbols was an interstellar Rosetta Stone, a cryptic code just waiting to be broken. I spent the first sixteen years obsessed with the hieroglyphics. At least a dozen times, I felt like I was on the verge of discovery when, suddenly, everything would fall apart.