Fade Out Read online

  It was from Broken Mill, from Annie’s Mercantile and General Store that Deputy Carl Volkert telephoned to the Rosebud County Sheriffs office in Forsyth details of what he thought was a plane crash. Normally, he would have used his car radio, but since early morning there had been some heavy fade-out on the normal police frequencies. It had been impossible to transmit or receive a coherent message. There was a lot of background noise on the phone line too. Volkert told his office that several of the people at Broken Mill claimed they had seen a bluish-white ball of fire cut through the overcast and curve down towards the southwest, going out of sight behind Crow Ridge. Volkert, who had been making a quick detour to visit his lady friend, had heard a long, distant rumble of thunder but had seen nothing from his car. Three kids were convinced they had seen a UFO. Volkert didn’t take them too seriously.

  The county sheriffs office told Volkert to take a look around Crow Ridge, then phoned the Air Force at Glasgow AFB, one hundred and thirty miles to the north. The base had been mothballed in the mid-seventies and was now host to a long line of cocooned B-52s but the tower was still operational. Air Traffic Control had no reports of any aircraft missing or in distress in Montana air space but agreed to arrange for a helicopter to check the area.

  The county sheriffs office knew, of course, about the temporary ban on civilian flying. What they didn’t know was that ten-tenths cloud and heavy rain had socked in all the Air Force bases in the northern half of the United States. Blinded by the loss of radar navigation aids and the progressive disruption of radio transmissions, no military aircraft had left the ground. Apart from the birds, there was only one thing that could have been in the air over Montana that Friday morning, but nobody at Glasgow AFB, Broken Mill, or in the county sheriffs office in Forsyth had any idea what the people in the White House were expecting.

  Volkert drove south on the highway and turned on to the ungraded dirt road that snaked up towards the top of Crow Ridge. The road had been cut by an oil company that had sniffed around the area at the tail end of World War Two and probably hadn’t been used since.

  Each spring, the rain and melting snow had softened the deep, scarring ruts in the fawn-coloured gumbo, but never enough. When the dry spells came, the ground hardened back into the weaving pattern cut by the last departing truck in those far-off days when Volkert had been glued anxiously to the family radio-set, wishing he was four years older so he could get himself some action and a few fräuleins before the shooting was all over.

  The earlier, thunderous precipitation had turned the top half inch into mud. Volkert took a couple of the earlier turns too fast and almost slid off into the pines. He dropped his speed to about forty. He’d already taken several rocks against the underside of his car. One jolt had sounded as if his transmission box was coming through the floor. There was no point in piling it up this far from home…

  As the edge of the rocky plateau came into sight, his car stalled. Volkert swore quickly to himself. He’d collected it that morning fresh out of Maintenance. He tried to restart the car. Nothing. The motor didn’t even turn over. He got out, opened the hood and checked all the electrical leads. There was nothing loose. The battery was full. He slammed the hood shut and peeked under the car to see if he’d fractured an oil or fuel line on a rock. No leaks, nothing broken. He got in behind the wheel again, checked the wires under the dash for a loose connection, then tried to restart the car. No response. Volkert hit the wheel with his palm and pulled out the radio mike. That at least was independently powered. With the fade-out he might have trouble getting through, but it was worth trying.

  ‘Car Four Seven to Rosebud One, over.’

  The mike hissed a storm of static at him. The noise flared up and faded away several times. Volkert repeated his call sign, then suddenly the mike went dead. His radio batteries had failed too. He reached up and switched on the interior roof light. To Volkert’s surprise it came on, then began to flare rhythmically. A few seconds later, the light went out. Volkert dropped the dead mike back on to the seat in disgust.

  ‘Goddamn crap heap…’ He got out of the car and took a long look around him, hands on his hips.

  It was a good seven miles back down the dirt road to the highway, and it wasn’t all downhill, so he couldn’t freewheel back. Overhead, the low clouds looked ready to open up with another heavy squall of rain. Shee-yit… Still, now that he was up here, he might as well take a look around. He remembered that there was a couple living in a shack down over on the northern flank of the Ridge. Man by the name of Bodell. A World War Two Marine vet, and a hard-eyed sonofabitch. Looked mean enough to hunt bear with a razor strap. Volkert had seen him a couple of times down in Broken Mill, and had heard some more about him from Annie. Drove a beat-up old ex-US Army Dodge 4 by 4. Maybe he could talk him into giving him a tow.

  Volkert followed the dirt road up to the point where it ended among the trees. From there on up, the route was marked by a series of deep, crisscrossing ruts imprinted with the tread of heavy-duty Goodyears. Probably from Bodell’s old Dodge, thought Volkert. If so, it meant they’d be able to get the truck back up over the top to where he’d left the car. He aimed off left towards the rocky crest. From there he would be able to scan both flanks of the ridge.

  Volkert clambered up on to the highest part of the ridge and took a good look around. The visibility was down to two or three miles. On a clear day in Montana, you could see more than fifty. Down below him on the plateau, he could see a big crater at the edge of the tree line. Behind it was a semicircle of blasted trees. They looked as if they had been flattened by a giant fist.

  There was no sign of any wreckage of a plane.

  Maybe it just blew to pieces, thought Volkert. There had been some talk of an explosion. He was just about to climb down when he heard the helicopter. It was about level with him, just below the overcast and coming in at an angle from the north. The black blob resolved itself into an olive drab Air Force Bell Iroquois. Volkert waved his stetson at it.

  The helicopter altered course and lifted in a curve around the ridge to the left of him. Volkert could see the midships crewman leaning out of the hatch. Volkert waved again and pointed down towards the crater as the Iroquois flew a tight circle overhead. Volkert started down off the ridge. The helicopter banked sharply and came in low over the top of the ridge, almost running him down.

  Crazy bastards…

  The midships crewman gave him a thumbs-up sign. Volkert watched the helicopter float down across the plateau. With a bit of luck, he could maybe hitch a ride back to Rosebud. It would sure beat the hell out of Bodel’s Dodge.

  As the thought entered Volkert’s head, the helicopter suddenly stood on its tail, then fell out of the sky.

  Volkert broke into a run.

  Blades windmilling, the helicopter spiralled down and clipped the side of the crater. Just before it thudded down on to the rim, the midships crewman jumped clear and went rolling down the slope of the crater. By a bizarre twist of fate he chose the wrong side. A flailing rotor blade sliced his head off as he was scrambling to his feet, then the helicopter keeled over and steam-rollered his body into the loose earth.

  Volkert covered the half mile down to the crater as fast as he could. The pilot was wandering around the helicopter, his face drained of colour. He seemed pretty shaken up. Volkert checked him over, but the only thing broken was his wristwatch.

  The pilot waved dazedly towards the broken body of his crewman. ‘I can’t find his head.’

  ‘Keep looking,’ said Volkert. He patted him on the shoulder then turned to take a look at the copilot. He was lying with the top half of his body inside the upturned cockpit. Volkert squatted down beside him.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah, fine. Was just trying to raise somebody over this goddamn thing.’ The copilot waved towards the radio. ‘Was that you up on the ridge?’

  ‘Yeah. They sent me over to check out reports of a crash. Looks like you’re it. Volkert. Rosebud County Sher
iffs Office.’

  ‘Great. You got a radio?’

  ‘No. Mine’s out too. The whole car cut out on me a quarter of a mile back. Down towards the highway. There’s a man back over that way with a truck. Reckon he’s our best bet.’ Volkert cast an anxious eye over the helicopter. ‘You sure you want to stay in there? I seen one of these things come down once. Fractured a gas tank – went up like the Fourth of July.’

  ‘Yeah, that can happen,’ said the copilot. He threw down the useless mike. ‘Does this guy have a telephone?’

  ‘No. But if he’s home, we can maybe hitch a ride down to Broken Mill. We can phone from there. Okay?’

  ‘Sure. Let’s go.’ The copilot wriggled out of the upturned cockpit.

  The pilot, who still hadn’t found the midships crewman’s head, had to be dragged by the arms all the way to Bodell’s house.

  Three hours later, after the pilots had got back to the air base north of Glasgow, they felt a burning, prickling sensation on their hands and faces. The exposed areas of skin turned bright red, began to swell painfully, then started to erupt. The medical section diagnosed it as a massive dose of ultraviolet radiation and ordered immediate hospitalization.

  Back at Forsyth, Volkert had also found himself similarly afflicted but to a lesser degree. The Sheriff sent him to the doctor. The doctor gave him a shot of pain-killer, put on a soothing lotion, told him he had sunburn, and sent him home.

  There was just one problem – the sun hadn’t been out all day.

  THE WHITE HOUSE/WASHINGTON DC

  It’s an ill wind, as they say, that blows nobody no good. While the storm of static brought the networks to their knees, the newspapers boomed back into business nationwide. Special lunchtime editions enlarged upon the solar-flare/magnetic-storm theory, and confidently underlined its temporary nature. Some confidence was needed. The uniformly bad weather had combined with the fade-out to cause a grim total of seventy-four airline crashes including several midair collisions. Nine aircraft had gone down in the Chicago area, seven around New York, five midairs over Boston, Washington, and Philadelphia. Most of the rest had been in Europe and Japan. Death toll, 4,128 and rising. Damage to property in millions of dollars. A shattering, global catastrophe, all within the first sixty minutes of the fade-out.

  Soothing radio music and sugarcoated newscasts faded in and out through a rustling noise like a mouse inside a bag of potato chips, while on TV, the best that channel switchers could get was a woozy picture laced with an incoherent pattern of white lines.

  During the morning, General Clayson urged the President to brief the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his Cabinet on the presence of the spacecraft, its extraterrestrial origin, and the current belief that it was the cause of the present fade-out. At that point in time, Washington didn’t know about the crater on Crow Ridge, and Volkert, who had found it, didn’t know about the spacecraft.

  On the advice of Connors and Wedderkind, the President decided not to follow up Clayson’s suggestion. Wedderkind had argued that the presence of the spacecraft did not, in itself, constitute any immediate threat to the security of the United States. Fraser didn’t agree, but his main concern centred on the more tangible dangers that might come from possible moves by Russia or China under cover of the fade-out. He felt that it was on this aspect of the situation that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, if necessary, the Cabinet, should concentrate their attention.

  The President decided to bring in the other Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Wills and Admiral Garrison, but not the members of his Cabinet. In spite of their differences, they all agreed that any unnecessary widening of the involvement at this highly speculative stage of the operation would increase the risk of a serious news leak. The country was already in an uneasy mood, jittery about layoffs, rising prices, the ripple effect of the new downturn in oil prices, and the rising tide of Far Eastern imports that had already caused several chinks of the American industrial landscape to sink without trace. Coming hard on the heels of the morning’s air disasters, it didn’t need much imagination to see that uncontrolled, uninformed, sensational publicity about the spacecraft’s arrival could rip the country apart.

  Called in by the President, Connors had laid it on with a trowel – the damage such news might cause to the stock market, banks and other financial institutions, how it would be a field day for every doom-laden end-of-the-world fanatic, rapist, arsonist, and mugger.

  As the President sat listening he thought, Perhaps it is only us, who are in power, who fear this thing…

  Clayson dropped his request and backed into line.

  Connors knew that Clayson’s concern for open government was not solely out of respect for the Constitution. It stemmed from his belief that the weakened post-Watergate powers of the Executive made it impossible to cover up this kind of collusion indefinitely. All he really wanted to do was keep the Air Force out of trouble until Congress had agreed to buy him another two hundred B-1s.

  Connors dictated two telegraphic-style memos to JoAnne, told her to shut the door, then tuned back in to Wedderkind. ‘You know, if we could get to this thing before the Russians and find out how it works, it could give us a real edge…’

  ‘Bob – just for two milliseconds try and forget politics. What worries me is the potential power source this thing represents. To create this amount of static all around the world, well it’s… I mean, the amount of energy you’d need is unbelievable.’

  ‘But surely we already know something about the type of propulsion unit the craft might have. What are the alternatives – nuclear fission, plasma, ion, photon drive? We’re already working on them ourselves.’

  ‘On three of them. We’ve test-fired nuclear rocket reactors but we still haven’t got ’em off the ground. The ion motor was tried out in 1964 – to adjust the spin of a satellite. Total thrust .006 pounds. Big deal. Even the giant ones we’re planning now will only generate a few pounds’ thrust. The photon drive is still on paper. Bob – have you any idea of the difficulties involved? Take the plasma propulsion unit. You fuse deuterium atoms together and you get a fantastic release of energy – plasma – which will push you along. But to generate that energy, those deuterium atoms have to be fused together at over two hundred and fifty million degrees centigrade. And the only way you can do that is to contain the molten mass inside a magnetic field – inside a total vacuum. The problems–’ Arnold waved them away. ‘I can’t tell you. Just the size of the Large Torus plant out at Princeton, New Jersey… and we are still having problems keeping a continuous reaction going for more than one or two seconds. But while we are still trying to get it together, it looks as if these boychiks have got one working. And not only working – they’ve built a spacecraft around it and schlepped two hundred tons or more right across our galaxy. Maybe even further.’

  ‘Is that really so fantastic?’ asked Connors.

  ‘Nearest star?’

  ‘Alpha Centauri?’

  ‘4.3 light years away. Procyon is 10.4, 61 Cygni, 10.7, Ophiuchi, 12. Light years. Have you any idea how far that is?’

  ‘Yeah, okay – so they travel at the speed of light. Or ninety-nine per cent of it.’

  ‘What about their life support systems?’

  ‘It’s unmanned. Nobody’s going to send a manned probe first.’

  ‘Who says it’s the first?’

  Connors didn’t answer.

  ‘Even if we discount every flying saucer story, how far would we have to go back to get beyond recorded history? Ten thousand years? On the cosmic time scale that’s infinitesimal. It’s not even one tick of the clock!’

  ‘Arnold, all our lives we’ve been conditioned to expect that any contact from outer space is going to be with a civilization far in advance of our own. The chances are it will be. But it doesn’t have to be so. That could be an unmanned probe up there. Like one of our Surveyor Craft. Now suppose instead of sending out probes to Mars and Venus, we sent one straight up – just aimed in the gener
al direction of the Milky Way.’

  ‘We did,’ said Wedderkind. ‘Pioneer 10. Launched in March 1972 to fly past Jupiter, then on out of our system.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I forgot.’

  ‘Never mind, go on.’

  ‘Okay, but let’s stick with the Surveyor, because it can land. It doesn’t get hit by a meteor, it goes on functioning perfectly – ’

  ‘Powered by what?’

  ‘Solar batteries.’

  ‘But you just left our solar system.’

  ‘Okay, it just coasts along till it reaches another star like our sun.’

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘The solar batteries charge up again, the instruments are reactivated. The star has a planetary system. The Surveyor gets pulled into orbit round a planet. It follows a preprogrammed flight pattern, softlands, then starts transmitting data. You know what Surveyor looked like. To an advanced civilization ten thousand years from now, it might seem as sophisticated as an iron bedstead is to us.’

  ‘Bob, even reduced to its simplest form, the problems of controlling an unmanned interstellar flight are still pretty colossal. Even from the nearest star. Say you’re four light years out from Alpha Centauri and heading for our sun. At this point you’ve still got another nine hundred and ninety-six thousand eight hundred million miles before you hit Pluto. We’re another thirty-one hundred million miles further on. Your instruments confirm the presence of a planetary system. It will take eight years to transmit this news and receive a command signal back from Alpha Centauri.’

  ‘If they’re still in business.’

  ‘All right, let’s take your preprogrammed package on a random flight path – that just happens to be angled clear of the gravitational pull of Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn – not to mention the Sun, and aimed right at Earth where we just happen to be. I suppose it is just conceivable.’

  ‘Maybe it’s programmed to home in on a specific gravitational mass which is emitting x amount of radio waves – in an intelligible pattern. Think of the number of radio signals that have been heading out into space over the last thirty years.’