The Gemini Divergence (79 page)

Hughes turned to the valet, “Yes, could you
get this man’s name and address so that I can thank him for his
kindness?”

“Yes sir. Right away.”

Howard started towards the door as the valet
pulled out a pencil and paper and approached the Samaritan’s car
window.

His first stop was a water fountain by the
bathrooms.

Some of the tourists recoiled at the stench
of the shabbily dressed stranger in tattered and soiled clothes
that had just wandered into the casino, thinking that he must just
be a bum from the street.

Then… “Howard! Where the hell have you been?”
bellowed the unmistakable voice of Jack, who was quickly
approaching. “I don’t know where you’ve been, but I knew that you’d
walk through that door when you returned… Phew, you stink man.
Where the hell have you been?”

Howard looked shocked and dumbfounded, to
have just gone through the ordeal that he had, and now to find that
somebody had been camped out in his lobby waiting for him, “Why
didn’t you come looking for me?”

“I ‘have’ been looking for you… Where do you
start looking for kugelblitzen with a half a million mile
range?”

Howard began to chuckle, but quickly winced
at the pain it caused to his dry throat.”

“Really, Where the hell have you been?” asked
Jack.

“I crashed into the desert in northern
Nevada… but I got him.”

“Got who?”

“The Overseer… You didn’t know at all?”
gasped Hughes, “I was in a dogfight with an Overseer over
Massachusetts and Maine… I last saw him going down over the
Atlantic east of Bangor.”

Jack, very surprised, looked like a deer in
the headlights as he exclaimed, “Whoops… Uh… I just got back after
investigating an Overseer that went down into Shag Harbor, Nova
Scotia… I didn’t put it together with your disappearance at
all.”

“You what?”

“Well look at the good side,” back peddled
Jack, “The Navy has dropped so many sonobouys into the Atlantic
chasing it down, that your company will be building replacements
for years… Ha ha.”

Howard didn’t look amused at all as he
moaned, “Then why did you come all of the way back here just to
wait for me?”

“Because you need to pay me for these damn
IOUs… that’s why. You need to tell your cashiers to expect to see
these things if you continue to hand them out.”

“Jesus F*$&#^!” Howard cursed under his
breath.

“Hey,” Jack defended himself, “You can’t
weasel out of it just because you had a bad day… week.”

Howard looked disgusted but relented, “Look,
you were talking about retiring from the Air Force anyway… right?
NASA wants me to re-fit the Blue Gemini capsules with some of my
newly developed kinetic impellers at Groom Lake… I need somebody
that already has all of the right clearances and the know how to
get it done… If you want it; I’ll give you the job.”

Jack looked shocked, but pleasantly
surprised, “Yeah, I’ll do that… When can I start?”

“Can I take a shower first?” joked
Hughes.

“Yeah,” re-assured Jack, “What would you have
me do first?”

“Well, if the Air Force doesn’t already have
plans for you to do it before you leave… I have a little mess up in
the desert that needs to be cleaned up before somebody finds
it.”

As they laughed and walked into the Casino,
Jack added, “Oh… Mr. Johnson is looking for you again.”

9 November 1967

Apollo 4 is the first mission since the
Apollo one fire. Even though the mission was unmanned, it was the
first use of the Saturn V rocket booster.

26 February 1968

AFOAT in conjunction with other Air Force
units, commenced ‘Project Clear Sky”, a network of over the horizon
forward scatter radar installations, designated 440-L, designed to
bounce high frequency beams off of the ionosphere in a
predetermined pattern and receive the same signals at listening
stations throughout the world.

Gus was working with Volmer at Kwajalein,
preparing for the initial test of the new system, by monitoring a
suspected upcoming Soviet RV test.

“It’s quiet without Jack around,” Volmer
noticed, “Do you miss him?”

Gus looked up from his work, “Yeah, I didn’t
realize how much he did until I had to do it all myself… but I’ll
still see him, like Everett, whenever we work at Groom Lake.”

“…When do you think that you may retire?”
reluctantly asked Volmer.

“I don’t know… this all took me by surprise.
I haven’t really thought about it seriously… I mean, I knew that I
had enough years to do it, but I still consider myself young. Do
you know what I mean?”

“I don’t think that I would ever retire… Idle
hands and mind are not something that is not very palatable to me.
I prefer staying busy till the Lord calls for me… I believe that he
put me here for a purpose and I shudder to think what I would say
to him when I first see him and he asks me, ‘So, what have you been
up to for the past several years?””

Gus laughed, but changed the subject, “How
does this new fangled radar work again?”

Volmer paused for a moment to absorb that the
subject had changed, “Oh… Well, conventional radar has always been
line of site, only looking away from a circulating antenna, but
Clear Sky, works like a super ball bouncing eternally between a
ceiling and a floor, when it is stopped from bouncing, something
has obviously interrupted it. In reality the signal is bouncing
from the ground to the ionosphere as it circles the globe in every
direction. We have placed listening equipment at all of our OLs
around the world that will monitor a constant and un-fluctuating
signal around the clock… Of course, when there is a variance,
something has obviously broken the beam and we can merely
triangulate on the disturbance from multiple locations.”

“So can it see everything, because
conventional radar has trouble at times with the Overseer’s
saucers?”

“Oh yes, this changes the whole relativity.
The foible with conventional radar is the cross section of the
aircraft facing it… They can’t hide the large circular cross
section from directly above or below… This development has allowed
us to finally detect so called stealth aircraft, and indirectly,
the Air Force has finally allowed our contractors to begin
development of stealth aircraft… I believe the project is called
Q-star.”

“Why didn’t they allow development of that
before the 440-L?”

“They didn’t even want to risk a foreign
agent stumbling across a stealth program until we had a means of
defending against it. Very few knew that was the real reason that
Northrop had its flying wing operation shut down.”

“So if this new scatter radar thing is ground
based why are we preparing the plane?”

Volmer smiled boyishly as he replied, “Didn’t
you see that new cargo door and the large object under the tarp in
the front of the fuselage?”

Gus returned a smile and replied, “Yes I did,
but I figured that it had something to do with this new radar
system… What is it then?”

“It’s a Starcast camera… The Soviets found
out that we were retrieving their test missiles from the ocean
floor, so they started to scuttle them before impact with the
water… Then they became further agitated when we developed a bucket
to drop from the back of our WC-130 to collect debris in the water,
so they started hovering their helicopters over the debris field
until it sank to prevent us from scooping, so we developed
this.”

“What does it do?”

“It takes high speed and highly color
sensitive film of the Soviet RVs re-entering the atmosphere and
finally capturing their detonation.”

“So how do we tell what they’re made of from
that?”

“By the color spectrum… That’s how.”

“How is that done?”

“Well you already know how we use mass spec
machines to scan the mass spectrum… We burn something and run the
smoke through a variety of magnetic fields and measure the
differing amounts of atomic weights contained in a substance.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well when things burn, they not only give
away their mass… They give off a signature light frequency.”

“You mean, everything burns its own
color?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“But this won’t work on metals, will it?”

“It is especially sensitive to metal.”

“Really?”

“Why yes… When you watch different colored
fire works, have you ever stopped to wonder how they make them
different colors?”

“I guess I never thought about it.”

“Well, they get different colors by adding
different metal powders to the gun powder. When burning… metal
gives off the same light color as its oxidation. i.e. iron = red,
barium = green, copper = blue, sodium = yellow… So we can tell
almost as much about the alloys that they are using, just by
watching it burn, as we can by actually collecting a piece and
running it through a mass spectrometer.”

“You mean, everything on the periodic table
also has its own light frequency?”

“That’s exactly what it means… They are also
working on a version of this to mount on the MOLs in orbit to
observe the Overseers.”

“Is there anything that we can’t tell
anymore?”

“You’ve been doing this for twenty years now…
When have you seen a year go by without another huge break
through?”

“…Never.”

“Exactly.”

~~~**^**~~~

From
Gemini to Apollo / Magnificent Desperation

27 March 1968

Yuri Gagarin died unexpectedly in a
mysterious plane crash.

Soviet Generals immediately blamed the U.S.
but were prevented from taking any action by an aging Gennedy
Kasparov, who intervened and explained the reality of the situation
to the, until now, oblivious Soviet Generals.

1 May 1968

Schwerig arrived in orbit around Mars with
his expeditionary station and began to prospect the Arean orb for
the most promising locations to build.

Knowing that the Americans and the Soviets
would probably never stop sending probes into space, Schwerig
wrestled with the problem of keeping the Raumsfahrtwaffe presence
on Mars a total secret.

He came up with the idea to hide behind the
possibility of extreme controversy by excavating a mountain into a
sphinx like human face.

If or when any earth bound probes were to
find it, it would surely explode into controversy and secret
conspiracy theories, thus causing the earth bound world leaders to
intervene into their space programs; forcing them to back away from
further public exploration of the Martian surface in fear that they
would have to explain the Raumsfahrtwaffe to their respective
publics.

Von Sterbenbach thought that the Cydonia face
was a fantastic idea, but was still convinced that Schwerig had to
be eliminated once he had completed the exodus to Mars for him.

To keep tabs of what was going on back home,
Schwerig recruited his old head mechanic, Faust, to be his eyes and
ears back in the space around the Earth and the Moon.

Faust pledged his loyalty to Schwerig and
began recruiting people loyal to Schwerig for the coming
insurrection.

11 October 1968

Apollo 7 was the first manned U.S. space
mission launched after the Apollo 1 fire.

25 October 1968

The Soviets launched Soyuz 2 and 3.

The original mission that had been planned,
was to rendezvous in space and communicate by radio, but it was
reported after the mission that Soyuz 2 had been unmanned.

This started a huge controversy within the
Soviet Union as to whether Soyuz 2 had actually been manned but had
somehow been lost.

All pre flight crew photographs were
confiscated and whoever the cosmonauts that piloted Soyuz 2 were,
they had been erased from history.

Strangely, Soyuz 2 is one of the only Soviet
missions that doesn’t seem to have patch or mission symbol recorded
anywhere. Even the robotic Voskhod missions had mission patches. If
there ever was a Soyuz 2 mission patch, it has been erased from
history.

The Soviet public contends to this day that
Soyuz 2 had been manned but was somehow lost in space.

*~*

Von Braun feared what may happen to American
Astronauts that ventured behind the moon, so when planning Apollo
8, he enlisted the help of Howard Hughes to install some of the
reverse engineered kinetic impellers into a team of Blue Gemini
capsules that were planned to escort Apollo 8 around the Lunar dark
side.

America had still not been able to duplicate
the vril, but Hughes had made enough advances on the kinetic
impellers to be able to design a system that would work in the
micro gravity of space with the use of hydrogen and oxygen already
onboard the MOLs as fuel.

Von Braun had deliberately scheduled the
first circumlunar passage for Christmas Eve, in anticipation that
the astronauts may reappear on the bright side using the euphemism
‘Santa Claus’, to describe an unwanted encounter with the
Raumsfahrtwaffe.