Upon A Pale Horse (21 page)

She seemed reluctant to leave, but then turned and bounced down the two wooden steps and returned to the garage.

“Kaycee is a miracle, a true gift. She’s been out helping me for the last few months. I fell and hurt my knee pretty badly, and she dropped everything to come tend to me. Like her mother, God rest her soul, in that regard. She’d do anything for you, and never complain.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Seems like there’s a lot of that going on. Now where was I?”

“You were going to tell me why my brother was so insistent I speak with you.”

“Yes. Well, the best way is to start at the beginning, I suppose, as I did with your brother. The beginning in this case is forty years ago, around 1973. It was the end of an era, of the peace and love period of the sixties, with all the turbulence of the Vietnam War winding down and the disco era about to begin. I was a young professor, thirty-six, at Georgetown, happy with my life, married, with a beautiful little girl – Kaycee’s mother – eight years old at the time. Anyway, that year a wave of cattle mutilations began in Kansas, and later Nebraska, spreading to New Mexico. To make a long story short, I became interested in them due to what I viewed as an incredibly gullible press parroting all sorts of absurd stories, about alien spaceships or cults, and later, black helicopters. Skepticism came naturally to me, and I’d spent much of my career examining popular delusions and debunking them as a sideline – things like claims of psychic power, telekinesis, spoon bending, that sort of thing.”

Sam reached for the pitcher, and Jeffrey beat him to it. He poured them both glasses of tea and handed one to the professor. Sam took a long appreciative swig and then set it down on the table, his eyes staring at a distant point known only to him.

“The cattle mutilations, or more accurately, the livestock mutilations, were like waving a red cape in front of a bull for me. I was zealous about proving that reason triumphed over pseudo-science and superstition, and this was the biggest example of snake oil I’d ever seen. Over the course of three or four years, I became somewhat of a minor authority on the topic, and even went so far as to fly out to some of the locations and do experiments with cattle that had died of natural causes, capturing their decomposition over the course of several days to show that there were perfectly natural explanations for what had developed into a media frenzy.”

“So you were the James Randi of the cow world.”

“Sort of. But a funny thing happened as I spent more time researching the incidents. Most were pure hokum, incoherent reactions to deaths revealing no nefarious explanations. But there were some that didn’t fit my model. That were, in fact, unexplainable based on all available data. I called those the outliers, because while ninety percent could be debunked, ten percent couldn’t, and in fact appeared to be something other than what logic predicted. Then, when I began looking into patterns, I noticed that my outliers all had certain similarities – namely that those incidents were closely linked with the nocturnal helicopter reports, and that they all were in clusters grouped in relatively close proximity to suspected or actual military installations.”

“The army was mutilating livestock?” Jeffrey asked in disbelief.

“I know. That was my reaction. Why would the military be killing cows, seemingly at random? And only at night? Look, you have to understand where I was coming from. I set out to disprove the whack-job theories, and after two years of it I started sounding like the nut cases. But that’s what the facts were telling me. That a percentage, albeit a small one, of the slaughter was deliberate, and most likely being carried out by the government. Once I got comfortable with that idea, I parked it, and addressed the question of why – because simply speculating that it was happening was really no better than the tin foil hat crowd. I also began to suspect that some of the crazy ideas floating around might have been planted with the media to further obfuscate the true facts. Stuff like the alien experimentation. Of course, there were plenty of zealous loons willing to go along for that ride, but it just all seemed too…coordinated.”

Sam appeared to falter at the thought, sputtering to a halt as old men sometimes did, and he took another quick sip of his drink, savoring the tea as it coated his throat with its subtle honey and lemon infusion. Jeffrey didn’t prod him, waiting for the account to continue at its own pace.

“I eventually developed a comprehensive hypothesis that explained all aspects of the mutilations, discarding those accounts that were clearly natural deaths or predator kills, and focusing on the unexplainable ones. In seventy-six, I published my findings, expecting there to be a public outcry. Instead, it went unnoticed, and in four months I was out of a job for some trumped up reasons – a co-ed who claimed I’d sexually harassed her. Back then I was too naïve to understand what was happening, but in the passing years, it became obvious when I couldn’t get a job anywhere else, even though the girl’s inventions were eventually disproved: I’d stepped on the wrong toes, and dared to posit an explanation that was dangerous to the powers that be – an explanation that was probably the truth, if an incomplete one.”

Jeffrey leaned toward him. “Which was?”

“That the government was conducting experiments on livestock, presumably for its biological weapon program, in spite of assurances that it was doing no such thing. Remember that bio-weapons had been reclassified as weapons of mass destruction, with the U.S. leading the charge to ban them entirely. I believe that even as it talked out of one side of its mouth, it was carrying out a large-scale testing program. Because of the political climate and the anti-war movement, it couldn’t very well have thousands of head of cattle and whatnot penned for experiment.”

“Why not? Surely the government’s capable of keeping a secret that involved bovines?”

“The answer is ominous. It wanted the animals it was experimenting with to be out in the general population. I proposed two possible reasons – to mislead Congress or our adversaries so that it would appear that we had no active testing going on; or perhaps worse, because it wanted to test contagious agents and monitor how they spread in an uncontrolled setting. My guess is that one of those, or perhaps both, were on the money, because you’ve never seen a paper buried as quickly…and a life ruined. Even now, in the age of the internet, you won’t find any mention of my paper. At one point an acquaintance uploaded it to his website, and the site was hacked and everything on the servers wiped clean. Needless to say that freaked him out sufficiently to where he lost his interest in fostering controversy. So it’s as though the theory never existed. Revisionist history of the finest order.”

“I…Professor, with all due respect, there are protections against that sort of abuse of power. Legal remedies. And the idea that the media would just go dark on something newsworthy…I mean, that was around Watergate, it was a new era of transparency.”

“Bullshit, young man. And please. The name’s Sam. I haven’t held the title of Professor for almost four decades.”

Jeffrey waited for Sam to make his point.

“You think the media isn’t controlled one hundred percent by special interests that dictate to its owners what story gets told and what doesn’t? Don’t be childish. Even today, it’s the way of the world. Most people are uninformed, which the media relies on, and when there are those who point out that it’s all lies, it just pretends that nobody believes the accuser and that they never said anything. How do you think the public stays in the dark? The media doesn’t report the truth.”

Sam cleared his throat to continue.

“A great example would be the war on drugs. Did you know that most of the politicians who are the staunchest opponents of marijuana legalization own financial interests in companies that directly benefit from it remaining illegal? Drug testing companies, private prison operators, you name it, they own it. And yet you never hear about that from our media. Or how about when Bush and his gang were assuring the world that there were nuclear weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? A bald-faced lie, but the media went along in lockstep. Son, I could go on all day. But hopefully you take my point. The media is nothing more than a propaganda machine for those in power – the rich, the connected, the friends of the handful of men who own the companies that operate the largest networks and papers. And it’s always been like that. Trust me, in the early seventies it was the same.” Sam paused, catching his breath, his outrage evident.

“I wasn’t born yet in the seventies, but I don’t disagree about the situation now.”

“So you get it? Governments don’t like admitting to their populations that they’re a bunch of crooks, so the politicians close ranks and their media parrots the party line, and the truth gets buried. That’s the world we live in. I doubt you’ve read one true thing in your entire life if it was in the paper. And TV is even worse.”

“Back to the cows. Do you have anything to support your theory?” Jeffrey asked, wanting to steer the subject away from tangents.

“I had, and it went missing when I lost my job. Just disappeared. Of course the university claimed that it was all an administrative SNAFU and that it would be found in time, but that, like so many other promises, was never fulfilled. Years of careful research confiscated, literally overnight, and a career in ruins – all because I took on the wrong people. After I exhausted my savings I found work where I could, and became a pretty fair carpenter, which is honest labor and a real craft, unlike moving integers around in cyber-space or teaching propaganda to students in order to advance in the pecking order. I now live in harmony with nature, nobody bothers me, and the outside world can go to hell as far as I’m concerned. My job isn’t to save it.”

“Back to your hypothesis…Not that I’m uninterested in how crooked the media is, but my brother thought you had a key piece of information I needed to know–”

“Then you now know it,” Sam interrupted. “The military was experimenting on livestock in the early seventies to advance its biological weapons program, in secret, while denying everything and planting red herrings in the press to keep it quiet. I believe they were injecting animals with something ugly, and I mean really ugly, and then going back and pulling organ and blood samples for analysis. If you look at a significant number of the suspect animals I isolated, they had a remarkable incidence of bovine leukemia and unexplainable levels of chemicals that aren’t naturally occurring. I speculated that the government was testing viral agents that could be used to infect humans, using cows as hosts. Within weeks of proposing that, I was being accused, baselessly, I might add, of sexual misconduct, and shortly thereafter had been effectively blacklisted from academia.”

Sam ran out of steam and shook his head. “That was my claim to fame, and I proved it, and it cost me everything. And nothing about it was ever covered by any news agency. So don’t expect anything out of the media. The media is a prostitute, diseased and crooked under its glossy exterior, and it went along with the lies, as it has with most of the big ones during your lifetime. And it worked. To this day, God help us all, it worked.”

TWENTY-FOUR

The End of the Story

The afternoon wore on, Sam rambling over the minutiae of his battle against the accusations that had poisoned his promising career, Jeffrey allowing him to talk and recount whatever seemed important to him, much as he was sure his brother had.

Eventually Sam stopped talking, lost in the labyrinth of his memories, fighting unwinnable battles against long-dead adversaries over issues nobody remembered or cared about. Kaycee rounded the garage and came back to the porch, her stride confident and unassuming; a graceful dancer’s glide, Jeffrey thought. He watched as she mounted the stairs, brushing a lock of unruly hair from her eyes, and then fixed Jeffrey with a disapproving stare.

“He tires easily. The medications do that. It’s time for him to rest now. I hope you got what you came for, because the meeting’s over,” she said, one hand on her hip, the other clutching a pair of work gloves.

Sam returned from whatever internal neverland he’d retreated to and waved her off with a feeble hand.

“Don’t be rude, Kaycee. Our guest was patiently entertaining my stories and asking some questions. This is the brother of the young man I spoke to when you were out buying supplies…what was that, a month and a half ago? I told you I’d had a visitor.”

“That was right after the accident, so almost two months,” she said.

“We were just talking about the past. Ghosts in the machine. The end of an era,” Sam said cryptically, finishing his last glass of tea, the pitcher now drained as the day had drifted past them.

Jeffrey edged forward in his seat. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Anything my brother seemed particularly interested in?” he tried, hoping for more from Sam before he got preempted for good.

Kaycee gave him a dark glare, annoyed that Jeffrey hadn’t taken her hint. “Why don’t you just ask him and leave my grandfather in peace?” she demanded, her tone still neutral but her eyes flashing with annoyance that he hadn’t stood and left yet.