LITMIR.BIZ

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you mean?” He couldn’t look away from the silvery beauty sitting next to him.

      “Doctor …” Groton said, and then he hesitated. There was so much Brody still didn’t know, and it was entirely possible that some of it he would never know, never accept, if only because his brain was too old and inflexible to wrap itself around some of this stuff. “Dr. Brody,” he tried again. “You’ve been through indoctrination. You know the truth, or a large part of it. You’ve seen some things that, for most people, would be very hard to believe.”

      “Yes.”

      “You’ve seen the Grays—”

      “Yes, yes! Horrible things! What’s your point?”

      “Elanna here is …” He paused, trying to find the right way to explain it. He settled on, “A kind of alien. Alien to us, at any rate.”

      “But she’s human!”

      “Indeed. I’m as human as you are, Doctor,” the woman said. She smiled, and Brody felt the rush of hormones once more.

      “Elanna,” Groton continued, “is human, but she’s from the future. She’s from roughly eleven thousand years in the future, in fact.”

      “My God!” And the shock jolted him backward and knocked him out of his chair.

      “A SPACESHIP!” Taylor said with an edge of sheer reverence in his voice. “A fucking alien spaceship!”

      “Actually,” Benedict said, “it’s one of ours.”

      Hunter gave Benedict a sharp look. “So we do have advanced spacecraft?”

      “For a good many years, Commander, yes. That is a TR-3B, and it’s one reason we no longer have a space shuttle.”

      The craft was large—at least twenty-five yards wide, and it was shaped like an equilateral triangle with slightly rounded tips. Three landing legs held it a couple of yards above the concrete flooring of the immense room, and there were several technicians working on, around, and under the ship’s body. Cables as thick as a man’s leg snaked across the floor and vanished into ports on the thing’s belly, while light spilled from an open hatch at the top of a long ramp. Three red lights glowed with sullen brilliance on the underside, one within each of the triangle’s corners. A larger light was nestled into a recession at the underside’s center, but it was not on at the moment. The hull had a matte finish, like black rubber. Hunter wondered why it wasn’t polished silver, like the disk he’d seen.

      Benedict led them past the looming spacecraft, though Hunter was itching to go on board. “A good many years,” Benedict had said. How many years? How long had these things been flying?

      “Some of you gentlemen might remember a flurry of UFO cases back in 1989, 1990, in Belgium, and out over the North Sea? Big black triangles like this one. That was us.”

      At least twenty-five, then. Jesus.

      There were other craft stored in that subterranean hangar.

      On the southern edge of Wright-Patt, Hunter knew, was the National Museum of the US Air Force. Born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, Hunter had practically lived in the place when he was growing up. This hangar was like that … huge and open and filled with artifacts straight out of the history of flight. The biggest difference seemed to be that this museum was not open to the public … and the fact that it seemed to be devoted to alien spacecraft recovered from around the world.

      The craft came in all shapes and sizes, though most were saucer shaped, with silvery hulls. Many were in fragments and might have been anything. Small tags on display stands identified each. The one labeled “Roswell, New Mexico, July 1947” had had its hemispherical undercarriage shredded into fragments, many of which were spread out on several nearby tables.

      “I didn’t think you’d have these things on display,” Hunter said.

      “They’re not, really. We keep them here so that our technicians and xenotech people have ready access to them. We’ve been collecting these things for decades, and we’re still learning from them. You’ve heard of Roswell, of course …” He stopped, then gestured at a battered, burned, and rusty-brown-looking craft in one corner. It was an acorn shape, perhaps twelve feet wide and fifteen high.

      “That’s from the Roswell crash, sir?” Minkowski asked.

      “No. Roswell is over there. This one is a particularly interesting craft called Die Glocke—‘The Bell.’ It was being constructed in Nazi Germany at the end of the war, when it mysteriously vanished, along with an SS officer named Hans Kammler, who was heading the research team. We recovered it outside of a small town in Pennsylvania twenty years later.”

      “Kecksburg!” Nielson exclaimed. “I read about that.”

      Benedict nodded.

      “What’s this writing around the base?” Brunelli asked. The swollen base of the craft showed a continuous line of angular markings—triangles and circles and straight lines and a wealth of other geometric figures crowded together one after another.

      “Alien writing, of course. We’re still trying to decipher it.”

      “So the Germans didn’t build it?” Taylor asked.

      “They reconstructed it,” Benedict said. “We think it was from a crash they retrieved in Bavaria back in the late thirties. We also think they had some help in the reconstruction. Alien help.”

      Hunter was doing some math in his head, and it didn’t add up. “You’re saying,” he said, “that the Nazis had time travel?”

      “Yup. At least they managed to send this pod twenty years into the future, where it crashed a second time. We had an idea that it was coming, though, and we had a special response team ready to go in and pick it up.”

      “Yeah, but time travel?” Minkowski said. “That’s wild-assed Hollywood stuff.”

      “Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. You see, gentlemen, it turns out that if you have the technology to travel between the stars, you also have the ability to travel in time. Einstein pointed that out. Space and time are part of the same thing—what Einstein called ‘space-time.’ Bend and twist one, and you bend and twist the other. So, apparently, the Galaxy is brimming over with life and civilizations that have spread out to fill space … and time.”

      “That’s … incredible,” Hunter said. He took a closer look at The Bell. A hatch in the side was open—it looked like it had been pried open with brute force. Inside there were two wire-frame seats with canvas straps, one considerably larger than the other. “Two passengers?”

      Benedict nodded. “Hans Kammler … and another.”

      “What happened to them?”

      “I’m not at liberty to say, Commander.”

      Hunter nodded understanding, but privately suspected that Benedict didn’t know himself. The information would be more highly classified than USAP clearance, and might even be beyond Benedict’s reach.

      “Sir …” Hunter began, then stopped. He wasn’t sure how to formulate the question.

      “Go ahead. If I can tell you, I will.”

      “Yes, sir. Why all the secrecy? Why not just tell people that we have time travelers from space … and have known about them for years? I mean, people have been seeing them since God knows when. The public knows. Why try to keep it hidden?”

      “Good question, Commander, but one with a very complicated answer. Back in January of 1953, the Intelligence Advisory Committee commissioned the Robertson Panel, which looked into the problem of UFOs. Were they really alien? More, were they a threat? There’d been a nasty scare the previous July, when hundreds of unidentified targets

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