The Gemini Divergence (32 page)

None of the scientists at A3X believed that
anybody could meet Lemay’s deadline of a month or two, to replicate
the device, but within two weeks, Volmer and Gus had built a
working model that could be dismantled and loaded into three deuce
and a half trucks.

The only person that was not surprised was
Lemay, who immediately asked them how fast they could load it all
onto a plane.

September 1952

Carswell AFB seemed like a ghost town.

Almost the entire compliment of personnel had
left their normal posts on the base for the Labor Day weekend,
leaving the entire fleets of the 7
^th
and 11
^th
bomber wings parked on the field. It was 2/3rds of the United
States’ entire nuclear capable bomber force.

The remaining 3
^rd
was stationed
with the 509
^th
at Roswell.

No one was walking around the planes or the
hangers; few were even in the barracks. Most had gone home to spend
the weekend with relatives.

Thus there were few present to see the
ominous thunder head that was rolling in.

The storm brought the night early into the
evening as the clouds and lightning enveloped the entire Dallas -
Fort Worth metro area. The thunder and wind were impressive as they
ravaged the idled base.

As the storm raged, many of the locals looked
out of their doors and windows with amazement to a dazzling light
show of what seemed to be the strangest thunder and lightning that
they had ever seen, and it all seemed to be concentrated over the
air field.

Two guards on base were sitting out the storm
inside of one of the hangers when they heard a tremendous noise,
like a barn roof being ripped off.

“What the hell was that?” asked the first
guard.

“I don’t know, but it sounds like one of the
hangers coming apart.”

“Let’s go see,” as the first guard stood up
and walked for the door.

“Be careful, some of that shit is probably
still blowing around out there, it sounds like it ain’t done
yet.”

“I will,” assured the first guard as he
slowly opened the door.

As the wind tore the door away from the
guards hand and blew it totally open. The rain started to pour into
the opening.

Once the shock of the door opening left him,
he looked in horror at what he saw through the rain.

A flying saucer was hovering over the bombers
directly across from him shooting what looked like lightning blasts
at the parked aircraft.

“Holy Shit!” he exclaimed, “It ain’t the damn
storm, it’s the fuckin’ Martians.”

“What!” cried the second guard as he jumped
to his feet and ran to look.

They both ran out into the rain to see that
there were many other saucers as well, shooting blasts at aircraft
sitting all over the base.

They gasped as they watched the giant
aircraft get cut into pieces and be blown around like a child
stomping on toys.

No one in the surrounding area could see much
through the thick storm except the weapons blasts, which seemed
somewhat like bizarre concentrated lightning bolts.

The mayhem was everywhere. The men were
caught speechless, not knowing what to do, when the second guard
excitedly poked the first guard in the back to draw his attention
to something behind them.

When he turned to see, he froze in terror as
he saw a saucer, not fifty feet over their heads slow to take a
look at the two standing in the rain.

As it circled around them another joined it
for a moment, then both of the saucers sped across the field and
rejoined in the destruction.

“What the hell do we do?” asked the first, as
they both looked each other in the face and obviously came to the
same conclusion simultaneously.

At that, they both pulled their rifles from
their shoulders and began firing at the objects, to little or no
effect. As they did, others around the base began to fire as well
with equally ineffective results.

But whether by their actions, or because the
saucers mission had been completed, the saucers began to depart one
by one into the clouds until they were all gone and there was
nothing left, but the rain and thunder.

All of the men stood speechless for a moment,
as the air raid sirens finally went off.

They both looked at each other and started to
laugh as the second said, “Boy, he’s on the ball, isn’t he.”
Referring to whoever had set the alarm off after the saucers had
already left.

They both stopped laughing though as the
first said, “come on, lets go see if any body needs help,” as they
both shouldered their rifles and began walking through the rain
towards the field of wreckage.

*~*

“What a damn mess!” exclaimed Lemay as he
walked through the debris, “What the hell am I going to tell the
President?”

It was the next day and the rain had stopped,
the sun had come out, but the airfield was littered with broken
bombers and acres of scattered debris.

“General Sir, I took the liberty of having
the gate guards turn the airmen returning from leave back away. I
told the guards to tell them that there was a dangerous fuel leak
that had to be cleaned up before anyone could return to base,”
reported one of Lemay’s junior officer aids who was currently
following him through the wreckage.

Lemay turned to look at him and agreed,
“Good, captain, that was fast thinking.”

After they looked for a moment more, the aid
queried, “General Sir, what are we going to tell the public
happened here last night? What do we tell Congress? Have you
thought of anything yet sir?”

Lemay turned and removed the cigar from his
mouth and said in a facetious and dramatic tone, “That damn tornado
last night, look what that blessed thing did.” He then put the
cigar back into his mouth, and continued, “I saw it… didn’t
you?”

The aid understood immediately and responded,
“Oh, yes sir, biggest damn tornado I ever saw, sounded like a
freight train.”

Lemay smiled with approval and winked as he
turned to look at the planes as he exhaled a puff of smoke and
began to walk away.”

As the captain then followed he asked,
“Should I tell General Ramey about the tornado sir, he already
knows it was the Germans and that he can’t tell anybody?”

Lemay responded, “No… I’ll let him know… as
soon as he stops crying.”

*~*

“Gentlemen, how in the world has this
happened?” asked President Truman, chairing a meeting with the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as Lemay, Volmer, Symington and
other high profile people with direct interest in the Nazi problem,
“I need to know how these things got through our radar screen
undetected… Can somebody please tell me how this has happened? We
never lost 2/3rds of anything in one day during WWII, The German
Luftwaffe was never able to do anything like this when they had all
of their planes and Goering was a fat and happy drunken hunter.
They flew several squadrons of these things over the capital last
month. What if they would have attacked then? No country on Earth
has ever had a single days defeat like this since the ancient
Germans did it to the Romans at Teutoburg Forest, and Augustus
spent his remaining days crying , ‘Varus, give me back my legions’.
Do I have to spend my golden years crying, ‘Lemay, give me back my
bombers? I ask again… How did this happen.”

Secretary of the Air Force Symington raised
his voice to respond, “Mr. President, during many of the less
violent incidents that we have witnessed with these craft, we have
already discovered that they have the ability to elude radar,
especially at higher speeds.”

Truman responded with, “And why have we not
come up with a way to detect them?”

Lemay responded this time, “Mr. President, we
have been working on that problem, we have a group of paperclip
scientists at a secret detachment in Alaska that have been working
on that problem for a few years now. As a matter of fact my top
scientific advisor, Mr. Volmer here, has just returned from
there.”

Truman looked at Volmer, who seemed like an
extremely timid and modest man to him and inquired, “Is that true
Mr. Volmer, were you just working on that problem?”

Volmer turned his head suddenly towards the
President in shock that the leader of the free world had just
called upon him. His eyes opened even wider than normal through his
coke bottle glasses.

He fidgeted nervously as he responded, “You
will have to excuse me, Mr. President. I did not believe that I
would be called on today, but yes, I was just there, only I was
working on another discovered application for the same array…
Although, the others there, have been working on the detection
aspects of the array since the Consolidated/Northrop
controversy.”

Symington and Lemay both winced at Volmer
giving a response that raised more questions than it answered.

Truman shook his head in disbelief, “What
‘new application’ and why on Gods green Earth has there been a
secret project commissioned about a contracting controversy?”

Symington interjected, “Mr. President …
Harry, I have known you for years from back in Missouri. I thought
that this may be something that could and should be solved on a
lower level, so I took the liberty of taking care of it myself. I
know that the news papers smelled a rat, and they were suspicious
of bribes and kickbacks, but what really happened was a surprise
discovery during the testing of the B-35 and B-36 prototypes. While
running the two models through the tests to figure out which model
the Air Force would purchase, the B-35 was actually winning the
competition, but then we started to notice something shocking.”

“What was that Stuart?” asked Truman,
“because I have put people in jail for selling leaky engines to our
military, I better not hear that there is anything fishy going on
here.”

Symington swallowed hard, “We discovered that
the Northrop B-35, or ‘flying wing’, was elusive to radar… Well, we
panicked. It would be great for us, but what if another country
copied the technology? We would not be able to detect their
attacks.”

Lemay interjected, “and the Russians would
almost certainly have copied them. They copy every thing else. Hell
they made perfect replicas of our B-29s that had emergency landed
in Vladivostok, before they gave them back to us. Hell, my
mechanics bitched for months that nothing on those planes worked
quite right after the Russians took those planes apart and put them
back together again.”

Symington continued, “So we also ordered the
controversial destruction of the remaining prototype wings, and
ordered everyone involved into secrecy, and believe me, Jack
Northrop protested wildly, but I promised to make it up to him
somehow.”

Lemay again interjected, “We then had to haul
the B-35s out of their hangers and demolish them on the tarmac, in
front of hundreds of weeping Northrop workers, who were completely
in the dark as to why this was happening.”

Symington explained, “General Lemay, who had
been doing other paper clip projects, discovered Dr. Wundt, who had
been working on directional receiving arrays in Germany before we
captured him with the other paper clip scientists, like Mr.
Volmer.”

Then Lemay said, “Mr. Volmer told me that Dr.
Wundt’s work on these ‘wullenwebers’, or as our men have nicknamed
them, ‘elephant cages’, would be ideal for detecting things that
were impervious to radar.”

“So I approved funding,” explained Symington,
“They have been struggling to make it detect as well as we hoped,
but they accidently made a discovery during their research.”

“It can be used as a weapon,” revealed
Lemay.

Truman gasped, “That’s incredible. How did
they stumble upon that?”

Lemay gestured for Volmer to answer the
President and he nervously complied, “Well Mr. President, they
first noticed when they used microwave beams and focused them
directionally that birds would fall from the sky. Curious about
this anomaly, they increased focus and magnitude and within weeks
they were blasting holes in storm clouds.”

Lemay interjected, “It seemed useless at
first, because it could only shoot straight up, but then those
German things appeared in the sky, so I assigned Mr. Volmer to work
with Von Braun to figure out how to locate these things in the sky
so that we can aim at them, and then had his miracle working crew
build a portable one, so that we could set it any where in the
world that it needed to be in order to zap one of those things in
the ass.”

Truman was mesmerized, “This is incredible, I
think that we are totally defenseless and then I hear these things…
Will it work?”

Lemay responded, “We don’t know yet. We were
going to let you know before we tried, because we don’t know what
will happen if these things fall out of the sky, but I can attest
that everything else that Mr. Volmer has done for me has worked
well.”

Truman stared across the table thinking for a
moment, and then said, “I can’t believe that 50,000 people could
accomplish this, we have over a hundred cities that are larger than
that.”

The Army Chief of Staff replied, “But Mr.
President, the Germans have historically always held us at points
of contention with smaller numbers.”

“Not this much smaller,” snapped Truman. “In
contrast, I also can not believe that they have been able to hide a
group of people that large from us for seven years. How did they do
that? How come we don’t know every single thing about them and
their intentions?”

The Navy Chief replied, “Mr. President, if it
makes you feel any better, the Russians still have not found them
and they have been looking for them longer than we have.”

Lemay added, “And to put this into
perspective Mr. President, China has over a billion residents. I
doubt any person at this table knows what they normally eat for
breakfast, or who their biggest celebrity is, or what their
favorite past time is; yet they are right there with their name on
the map.”