“What are you talking about?” Helen asked.

  “When I was back at home I tried to look him up. His family said he never returned. They thought he was still here,” George explained.

  “I’ve heard they polygraph family members after a visit,” Drath said, “and they test your honesty too.”

  “But murder?” Helen asked again. “That’s a bit too much to believe.”

  “John Baddington, from engineering said his friend Walter never made it home after he was fired either.”

  “I suppose you think he was murdered too?” Helen asked.

  “I’m just saying,” George commented quietly.

  “I think you are just paranoid.”

  “Then why am I in jail? What am I being detained for? I’m going to end up dead if I don’t get out of here,” George whispered.

  “Fired maybe, but dead? I think not,” Helen responded.

  Drath remained silent, not knowing what to say. He wasn’t sure what to think. He had seen the lengths that Glass security had went to in Birdsville. He understood the secrets that were at stake, but he didn’t know where the company might draw the line. They all sat quietly discussing the what-if’s and why’s of the whole situation.

  Eventually, Helen accepted the notion that the security at Glass was a bit overpowering. She conceded that it may be possible that such a transgression of the law could happen, but still did not accept it. After an hour of debate, George too accepted the possibility that perhaps he was overreacting, and he conceded that he didn’t know all the details about any of the missing people, or even the death of his daughter. But, in his heart, he still believed that Glass was involved.

  They said goodbye and promised to visit again. George seemed in a little better spirits but was still distraught. The guard came when called and opened the cell. He had them sign out and walked them to the elevator. He said goodnight and closed the barred door as the elevator doors slid closed. Helen grabbed Drath’s hand and whispered, “I’m worried about George.”

  The elevator went up one floor and stopped. The doors slid open. There were no bars across the doorway. An empty hallway stretched before them into the distance. They both looked down the long hallway. The elevator door seemed to stay open longer than normal like it was inviting them out into the hall. Drath scanned the ceiling for mounted cameras and security sensors. He saw none. He took a step out of the elevator, Helen followed, still hand in hand. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Just looking around,” he answered as he started down the hall. She hesitantly followed.

  “If Glass is as dirty as George thinks he is, I want to know.”

  Every ten or fifteen feet there was a closed door. Some of them had plates that described their use. Office Supplies, Storage, Wardrobe were a few of them. Drath stopped when he read Arsenal. He turned the knob on the door. Surprisingly it was unlocked. He slowly opened it and walked in. Helen let out a gasp after she looked around.

  The back wall was filled with rifles. The rack spanned the entire width of the room and was filled left to right with what looked like military grade weaponry. A chain ran from one side to the other through a ring mounted in each weapons shoulder stock. They were secure unless someone unlocked an end of the chain from an iron mount in the cement wall. Besides the rifles, there were two other large iron gun cases. There was no way of knowing what was in those.

  “It looks like Glass is well armed,” Drath said under his breath. Helen nodded silently. They look around a second longer then retreated back to the hallway and walked a bit further into the unsecured area.

  Voices and a door opening broke the silence of the floor. They ducked into the door they were near. It was a mop closet with a metal rack of cleaning supplies. The door had a long thin window that offered a clear view of two security men slowly walking down the hallway and inspecting most every room. They passed the closet and continued their round. When they got to the far end, they entered another stairwell and left the floor.

  Helen and Drath exited the closet. Their hearts were racing. They didn’t know what would happen if they were found snooping. Drath decided he’d explain they were lost, but it was probably best to leave while they could.

  As they walked back toward the elevator, Drath felt Helen pull him toward the other side of the hall. They walked to a door labeled as a file room and tried the knob. It was unlocked, and they entered. “They’re not much on security around here,” Drath said sarcastically. Helen giggled a nervous laugh and told him to hush. The room was filled with rows of large wooden file cabinets. One wall had a row of metal shelves with boxed files. The room smelled of old musty paperwork. They looked around, opened a file drawer or two and inspected the contents. They were quiet, but every noise they made sounded deafeningly loud. Their nerves were on edge and their adrenalin pumped. Drath could hear his heart beating as he quietly rummaged through the files in a cabinet labeled released employees. As he fingered through the files, he was disturbed by some of the terminology used. Some of the files read that the employees were fired, but other files used the word terminated. He wondered what the difference was. One surely sounded more permanent than the other and had much darker connotations.

  When he fingered past a file on Carl Berger, he stopped and pulled it from the drawer. He set it open on the extended drawer and reviewed the contents. Helen was looking through another cabinet as he started reading the pages it held. The first few pages were his bio. It was basic boring details he skimmed and passed over. After a few pages, the file started getting into the investigation on his actions while working at the Glass Corporation. It outlined the suspicion that he had been delivering information to personnel outside the company. There were copies of emails that he had sent and received from his computers at home, as well as a couple of photographs. As Drath reviewed the file, he became convinced that Berger was indeed selling secrets to a major unnamed company in the United States whenever he made visits home. As he continued through the pages, he found security reports to Glass about Burger’s actions and response emails from Glass himself. He made it clear to the security crew that Burger was not to be allowed access to any additional classified files or projects, and arrested as soon as he returned to the complex. Glass concluded the letter by saying that Burger was to be terminated. Drath wondered what exactly that meant. He folded the file, put it back in the drawer and slid it closed. When he looked up, Helen was gone.

  Drath walked the length of the room looking behind and aside the rows of file cabinets. Near the back of the room, he found her sitting at a desk with a file spread before her.

  “Look at this,” she whispered. There were several photos of Mother floating over the desert sand. They seemed similar to the slideshow images Drath had seen on the monitor during orientation. Helen pointed to a figure in the photo. On the ground, among the sparse grazing grass of the Glass Ranch, was a body. It was not human. “Alien,” Helen pointed out.

  “Glass said...” Helen slid another photo out of the stack and set it in his view. The image stopped Drath's words. It was a close up head shot of the alien. The eyes were huge and slanted, black and shiny. There was only a hint of a nose and a thin line for a mouth. It was the Gray alien of legend, lore, and abduction stories. Helen looked up from her seat. “I don’t know what to believe, Drath,” she said under her breath.

  “Let’s put it all away and get back to our rooms,” he said. The adrenalin was fading, and the fear of being caught snooping in the security office became overwhelming. Drath could feel the sweat beading on his forehead. “We shouldn’t be here,” he whispered.

  They had returned the files to where they were found and started out the file room when they heard a door close in the distance. They pulled the door closed to a crack and peered out into the hallway. One of the guards was walking in their direction. Drath quietly pulled the door closed. The leaned against the wall inside the file room with Helen at his side and tried not to breathe. If the guard entered that room, they would surely be found. He wished they could just melt into the wall unseen. The steps of the guard approached and walked past their door. They both silently sighed and thanked God for their good fortune. They heard the guard open the stairway door and take the steps. He walked with heavy footfalls, and they were sure he was gone.

  A second later they were in the hall again and heading toward their escape. They were almost to the open door of the elevator when the heavy feet of the guard sounded from the stairway. They took the nearest door and dove in quietly but quickly, closing the door behind them. Drath’s eyes locked on the door knob waiting to see if it turned with the guard making rounds or checking on any sounds they may have made. Drath’s hand still held Helen’s and he felt in her grip that she was in distress. He took his eyes off the knob and followed her glance across the room. The door on the other side of the small room was labeled Morgue.

  Something told him they had to check it out. The chill in the air of the room made the thought of being in a morgue even creepier. The room was covered with white tile, spotless and the smell of bleach filled the air. Two stainless steel tables sat in the center of the wide open floor. The back wall had two rows of square refrigerator doors. Both of them knew that each door would reveal a slide out slab that could hold bodies until autopsies were completed, embalming done and burials made. Neither of them wanted to look inside, but Drath couldn’t resist grabbing a handle and pulling the first door open. The slab was empty. A sigh of relief exhaled from him.

  Helen pulled the second door open. A cloud of deep freeze air puffed out. “Oh my,” she said as she realized there was a body on the slab.

  Drath grabbed the handle on the slab and pulled it out about two feet. The drawer was not just cool, it was freezing. The body was in a deep freeze for long term storage. It had a sheet draped over it. He lifted the frozen sheet, not ready for what was beneath it.

  The couple looked in horror and awe at the alien figure that lay before them. It looked like the alien in the photo that Helen had found, but the expression on the gray face was different, most likely because of the bullet hole that was centered on its forehead.

  They were silent as they made their way back to Helen’s apartment. The escape was uneventful. They made it to the elevator and out of the security building without being stopped. All the way out both he and Helen feared they would be detained, but there were no questions at the front desk regarding where they had been or what took them so long to get to the ground level exit. When they finally made it back to Helen’s room both of them let out a heavy sigh of relief.

  Helen plopped down on the sofa. Her crazy hair wildly bounced as she dropped. “Do you think...” Helen began but was cut off by a quick signal from Drath not to talk. He walked over to the stereo and slid a CD into the player on the entertainment center. He didn’t even care what band it was but was happy to hear it was a rock CD of an old band called Grand Funk. He wanted some loud rhythmic music to cover their conversation just in case the room was bugged. This would do he thought to himself and made his way to her and sat close beside her.

  He wrapped his arm around her and leaned close whispering. “Just in case they have a listening device in the room,” he said.

  The music was loud and pounding a fast beat. The screaming vocals would cover their whispers. Helen nodded understanding his concern. “What do you think this means?”

  Drath wasn’t sure how to answer. “Glass told me they didn’t find any aliens in the craft. It was a derelict ship buried for a while before they found it.”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought too,” Helen whispered back. “It looks like he lied to us about that.”

  Drath nodded, “We don’t know what else he’s lied about either.”

  “Do you think they killed that alien?” Helen asked. Her voice was almost crying.

  Drath hugged her reassuringly, “Maybe, but the photo showed the gray on the ground apparently dead without a bullet in the head. I can’t say if there were more than one or if someone was just worried it might wake up.”

  “Mother does have two seats,” Helen reminded him. “This is terrible.”

  Drath kissed her on the forehead. “We don’t know the situation, they could have been aggressive. It could have been self-defense.” As he said it, he doubted his words but he said them anyway.

  It seemed to calm Helen, “Maybe.” She said under her breath. “What do you think they’ll do with George?” she asked.

  “I have no idea,” he whispered back. “He’ll probably get fired.”

  “He thinks they’ll kill him.”

  “That’s a bit extreme. I think George’s just paranoid.” He said it convincingly but wasn’t sure he believed that himself. He really didn’t know what he believed.

  Helen snuggled in closer to him. “I hope so,” she whispered.

  “In any event, we need to keep working like we don’t have any doubts. We can’t talk about what we think we saw.”

  Helen looked up into Drath’s eyes. “I know,” she sighed. “I need you to stay here with me tonight,” She added.

  Drath gave her a warm understanding kiss and held her tight. “I’m right here,” he said.

  The next day he and Helen went through the motions of work, but no real project advancement took place. Their minds bounced back and forth from the photos they saw in the file room to the worries they had for George. Drath spent some time in Mother looking further into the file system that was continuing to be mostly a mystery. The duplicate ship was not far away. The final attachments of the power cords had been completed, and the ship was floating a foot or so above the floor. The thick power lines were longer than necessary, and the extra length was wound into loops and set aside the craft. Drath thought the extra length may come in handy when they get ready to test moving it around using the local gravity drive.

  As he sat in Mother’s bio-sensitive pilot’s seat, he had a clear view out the hatch to the other craft and the warp tunnel in the distance. Helen was at her work station next to the tunnel absent-mindedly puttering with the test equipment. She was not getting a lot done either. It was strange not having George around. He was always in an upbeat mood and two steps ahead of them. Sometimes it could be annoying, but even his meticulous scientific process would be welcomed back, Drath thought. Helen apparently felt the same. Every so often she would look over at George’s desk. Apparently, they both missed him.

  Later, when he got to his office and checked his computer, he saw that he had a couple of emails. The first one was from the radio telescope that Glass had leased to continue looking for the second round of Sputnik beacons. This time they knew what area of the sky to look in and what frequency to look for.

  “Helen, I’ve got an email from the telescope,” Drath said. She was across the room at her desk but quickly came to him. She almost ran.

  “Really? What have they got?” she asked excitedly.

  Drath clicked open the email and started reviewing the report. Just as they had guessed the two beacons were located at the same location as the first, which was still broadcasting too. He copied the data and plugged it into his program to calculate the distance and time since the signal was broadcast. The results were the same, Pont zero, zero three light years.

  “The second and third probes went to the same place,” Drath announced.

  “So that frequency does lead to that location,” Helen said.

  “Yes, George was right,” Drath said. “We have confirmed that the two variables of frequency and amplitude control the destination.”

  “That was the setting that the aliens used when they came to Earth,” Helen said. “It’s so far away but so close. They used the gravity drive and just cruised the last bit to get here.”

  It seems likely,” Drath agreed.

  “George was right. I wish we could tell him,” Helen said.

  “Yeah,” Drath agreed, “I’m not sure that would be wise, though.”

  Helen nodded in agreement. Still, he should know he was right.”

  “He does. He was pretty sure of himself,” Drath quipped.

  The somewhat cheerful news was suddenly blackened by the second email. When Drath opened it, he found it was a letter from Glass explaining that George Hanlon was no longer a member of the Warp Team. Glass security had evidence that he had discussed the project’s details with family members and had put the project and the company at risk. As of that day, George was terminated from work at Glass Corporation and legal proceedings were under way. Tomorrow he would be taken into custody by the Australian authorities and would be charged with sub-clause number twenty-three of the nation’s corporate espionage laws.

  “That’s crazy,” Helen sighed shaking her head. “It was his daughter he talked to.”

  “Sounds like they have him hooked on some fine-print ruling,” Drath said. “Big business has ways of getting what it wants.”

  “I don’t like it,” Helen said firmly. “I’m not sure if I want to work here anymore.” It was a thought that had been going through Drath’s mind too. He nodded in agreement.

  That evening Drath went to the security building again to see George. He knew he wouldn’t be able to talk about the beacon’s signals being received, or the fact that George was right all along. Still, he felt he needed to say goodbye. He asked Helen if she wanted to go with him, but she declined. She didn’t know if she could handle going to the jail again. No matter what it was called, it was a jail to her. Helen asked him to explain to George how she felt and say goodbye. She would try to keep in touch, she promised.

  After he signed in and was taken to George’s cell, the guard gave him the same instructions not to talk about anything work related. He explained that the conversations within the cell would be recorded and reviewed.

  After the guard closed the door and left, Drath took a seat on the bunk next to George. The cellblock was silent. There was no background noised to mask the conversation. It would be impossible to tell George the news without being overheard. “How are you doing buddy?” Drath finally asked.

 

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