The Second Ship (The Rho Agenda #1)(5)
“As will become clear in moments, this secrecy was required so the government could investigate the national security and public safety ramifications of this discovery. However, recent breakthroughs promise such huge benefits to mankind that I, in consultation with key congressional leaders, have decided to make them public.”
The president paused momentarily, and Heather wondered if he had lost his place on the teleprompter. Then, taking a deep breath, he continued.
“In late March of 1948, just outside Aztec, New Mexico, the United States military discovered a crash site for a ship of unknown origin. That origin has since been conclusively determined to be from a star system other than our own. In short, it is a spaceship from another world, constructed using advanced technologies, many of which we still cannot fathom.
“For the past several years, a team of our top scientists has studied this ship under a program called the Rho Project. I will now turn this briefing over to the lead scientist on the Rho Project.”
The McFarland household erupted into pandemonium, with excited shouts eventually drowned out by bellows for quiet from Misters McFarland and Smythe.
On the television, the president’s image had been replaced by a speaker standing at a podium in a press conference room. The speaker was immediately recognizable to anyone from the Los Alamos area: Donald R. Stephenson, deputy director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in charge of special projects, many of which were unnamed. Apparently one of those projects was about to make a name for itself.
Looking at the man had always made Heather feel uncomfortable somehow, as if those sharp eyes were picking her out of the crowd, drilling through her, reaching into her very soul. He was a wiry, slender man with a sharp face, a high forehead, and an intense mouth that looked as if it had never been forced to twist into a smile. His brown hair still showed no sign of graying or thinning, even though he was in his mid-fifties.
Timeless. That was how Heather thought of Dr. Stephenson. No age fitted him. It was like the way the funny Pat character on the old Saturday Night Live reruns was gender-ambiguous. You certainly couldn’t tell by looking.
Dr. Donald Stephenson was widely regarded as the smartest man on the planet. He had gotten out of the army in his mid-twenties and quickly attained doctorates in astrophysics, mathematics, and chemistry from MIT. Three Nobel Prizes before he was forty had been enough to propel him into his current high position at the laboratory. Heather had heard from her father that if the man were not so completely dislikable, he would no doubt have been named director instead of deputy director, not that he showed any interest in moving away from the projects he kept under his strict control.
Both her father and Mr. Smythe despised the man, although that was a sentiment so widely held among the scientists and technicians around the laboratory that it raised no eyebrows. To her it seemed that Donald Stephenson reveled in making others hate him.
Now before a roomful of reporters, he spoke steadily as a sequence of slides flashed on the screen behind him, scenes filled with a cigar-shaped ship draped with instruments, workers moving along catwalks that clung to its surface, a ramp extending up into the interior. There were no shots of the interior of the spaceship.
Although Heather was too excited to follow the droning monologue, the gist of it was clear. Recent breakthroughs in deciphering some of the alien technology had yielded results so important and startling that they could not, in good conscience, be kept from the world, results that had ramifications on both energy production and on the health of the world's population.
In coming weeks, those results would be carefully released to a select group of the world's scientists for verification and to allow for external analysis of whether the breakthroughs were safe for rapid dissemination to the governments of the world.
The slide show ended. Dr. Stephenson’s steel gray eyes swept the room. “I will now take your questions.”
Bedlam. It took a full five minutes to get the reporters settled down so individual questions could be heard. After that they came hot and fast.
“Why keep this from the American people all this time?”
“Will independent scientists have access to the starship?”
“Shouldn’t this discovery be turned over to the United Nations?”
On and on went the questions, many of which were deferred to the political leadership to answer. It was immediately clear, however, that despite the US government's declared willingness to share technologies from the project, that openness did not include access to the starship itself.
As the news conference ended, a slow shudder crawled along Heather’s back, up her bare neck, and into her hairline. For a split second, it seemed that she would recall the details of last night’s dream. Then the feeling was gone, replaced by the lingering sense of dread with which she had awakened.
Chapter 3
Why anyone even bothered to open school on schedule defied rational explanation, considering the demonstrators and nutcases that had descended, like locusts, upon Los Alamos. The start of junior year should be exciting, but all Heather could muster, as her mom's van weaved its way slowly through the throngs of demonstrators, was dismay.
To be fair, the demonstrations were not aimed at the school, nor were the demonstrators even allowed close to the school grounds. Still, the disruption threatened longtime residents' comfortable way of life.