point, we believe.”
Given the threat they were under and the absolute inability of the Air Force to offer any defense against the grays, those words made Rob feel a little sick. “What sort of a flash point?”
“We need to take you to another level, Colonel,” Simpson said. “I’ve revised your job description and your need-to-know.”
“You can do this?”
He laughed a little. “Colonel, you’re talking to your boss—for the first time in your whole damned career. Isn’t it the damnedest thing?”
Rob shook his head. “Maybe we’re a little too bound up in need-to-know.”
“I’m a Defense Intelligence Agency specialist and chairman of the Special Studies Sciences Committee.” Special Studies was the umbrella euphemism for all the scientific groups that worked on the problem of the grays.
The Sciences Committee, Rob knew, oversaw the whole operation, including his own Air Force mission. The poetry man was indeed his boss.
“How has my mission changed, sir?”
“We’ll get there. First things first. I brought you here for the specific purpose of showing you this device, because you need to understand exactly what it did, why it’s been destroyed, and by whom. Because you are about to be tested, Colonel, more rigorously than you have ever been tested before. I cannot stress this enough. In a few moments, I am going to ask you a question. Your answer will be crucial.”
“If I answer wrong?”
Simpson gazed at him. The man’s eyes were rat-careful. “This machine gave us communications access to Mr. Crew’s species,” he said. “Which we very much needed, because they were generating questions for Bob and Adam that were, frankly, a lot more subtle and a lot more effective than anything Michael Wilkes has ever come up with himself.”
Rob realized that he’d just been told that his old friend Crew was an alien. He looked at him, pale in the dim light that filled the room. He appeared human enough. But then again, Rob had read enough UFO folklore to know the stories of a tall, blond race from a planet somewhere in the direction of the Pleiades. “You’re what the UFOnauts call a Nordic.”
“Ours is a very stable agricultural world with as much land mass as Earth, but barely a million people.”
“But you look so much like us. What are the odds of that?”
“We’ve done DNA studies,” Dr. Simpson said. “We and Crew’s line split from one another about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago.”
“But we—we’re the same species? On two different planets?”
“So it would seem,” Simpson said. “The most bizarre part is that the DNA trail is quite clear. We are not their colony, Crew’s people are our colony.”
“But in the past, uh, weren’t we pretty damn primitive? How could we possibly have colonized another planet? We couldn’t do that now, couldn’t begin to.”
“The past is a greater mystery than we allow ourselves to believe,” Crew said.
Rob’s mind raced. “All of those ruins that nobody can understand, things like the pyramids and the fortress at Sacsayhuaman in the Andes and that impossibly huge stone platform at Baalbek in Lebanon—all of those ancient engineering impossibilities . . . does this explain them?”
“The remains of our lost civilization, or so we believe.”
“The legends of the fall . . . Atlantis, that sort of thing, the war in space narrated in the Vedas—”
“Distorted memories of a world that was lost in a ferocious war that plunged Earth back into savagery and caused you to lose contact with us altogether. The Book of Ezekiel in the bible is a confused account of a failed mission on our part to rescue you, when we built the Great Pyramid at Giza. We had to come physically, and that is extremely slow. The journey took thousands of years on a multigenerational starship.”
“The Great Pyramid is dated. We know who built it.”
“You know that Khefu put his mark on it. We returned in force about thirty-five hundred
Given the threat they were under and the absolute inability of the Air Force to offer any defense against the grays, those words made Rob feel a little sick. “What sort of a flash point?”
“We need to take you to another level, Colonel,” Simpson said. “I’ve revised your job description and your need-to-know.”
“You can do this?”
He laughed a little. “Colonel, you’re talking to your boss—for the first time in your whole damned career. Isn’t it the damnedest thing?”
Rob shook his head. “Maybe we’re a little too bound up in need-to-know.”
“I’m a Defense Intelligence Agency specialist and chairman of the Special Studies Sciences Committee.” Special Studies was the umbrella euphemism for all the scientific groups that worked on the problem of the grays.
The Sciences Committee, Rob knew, oversaw the whole operation, including his own Air Force mission. The poetry man was indeed his boss.
“How has my mission changed, sir?”
“We’ll get there. First things first. I brought you here for the specific purpose of showing you this device, because you need to understand exactly what it did, why it’s been destroyed, and by whom. Because you are about to be tested, Colonel, more rigorously than you have ever been tested before. I cannot stress this enough. In a few moments, I am going to ask you a question. Your answer will be crucial.”
“If I answer wrong?”
Simpson gazed at him. The man’s eyes were rat-careful. “This machine gave us communications access to Mr. Crew’s species,” he said. “Which we very much needed, because they were generating questions for Bob and Adam that were, frankly, a lot more subtle and a lot more effective than anything Michael Wilkes has ever come up with himself.”
Rob realized that he’d just been told that his old friend Crew was an alien. He looked at him, pale in the dim light that filled the room. He appeared human enough. But then again, Rob had read enough UFO folklore to know the stories of a tall, blond race from a planet somewhere in the direction of the Pleiades. “You’re what the UFOnauts call a Nordic.”
“Ours is a very stable agricultural world with as much land mass as Earth, but barely a million people.”
“But you look so much like us. What are the odds of that?”
“We’ve done DNA studies,” Dr. Simpson said. “We and Crew’s line split from one another about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago.”
“But we—we’re the same species? On two different planets?”
“So it would seem,” Simpson said. “The most bizarre part is that the DNA trail is quite clear. We are not their colony, Crew’s people are our colony.”
“But in the past, uh, weren’t we pretty damn primitive? How could we possibly have colonized another planet? We couldn’t do that now, couldn’t begin to.”
“The past is a greater mystery than we allow ourselves to believe,” Crew said.
Rob’s mind raced. “All of those ruins that nobody can understand, things like the pyramids and the fortress at Sacsayhuaman in the Andes and that impossibly huge stone platform at Baalbek in Lebanon—all of those ancient engineering impossibilities . . . does this explain them?”
“The remains of our lost civilization, or so we believe.”
“The legends of the fall . . . Atlantis, that sort of thing, the war in space narrated in the Vedas—”
“Distorted memories of a world that was lost in a ferocious war that plunged Earth back into savagery and caused you to lose contact with us altogether. The Book of Ezekiel in the bible is a confused account of a failed mission on our part to rescue you, when we built the Great Pyramid at Giza. We had to come physically, and that is extremely slow. The journey took thousands of years on a multigenerational starship.”
“The Great Pyramid is dated. We know who built it.”
“You know that Khefu put his mark on it. We returned in force about thirty-five hundred
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