Draft92

CHAPTER 92

When things  got boring between the national parks  in  the  American southwest, Gabriel and Rebekah "Becky" Redstar filled in the time  by having  sex in a mesh hammock slung between hooks on the bulkheads  of their  flying saucer. Gabriel guessed that Robyn, who could literally see the future (hence there was no hiding anything from her) was abso- lutely fine with it, since she gave her blessing to go.

Well, if not her actual blessing, then at least she didn't pitch a fit when Gabriel floated the idea.

The P51 Mustang fighter plane was a bomber escort that revolutionized the strategic  bombing campaign over western Europe during  the  war. Bomber pilots called them, affectionately, their "little friends". Jet aircraft began to come on line after the war, but the P51 remained in service  as  the most numerous fighter in the US Army Air  Forces. In July, 1947 that outfit was still a few months away from  being  split off into it's own branch of the military called the US Air Force.

Unfortunately for Gabriel and Becky, they were touring a part of  the country that had large empty areas of land given completely  over  to military operations and no way to know when they crossed over the line into their airspace. On Independence Day fireworks commenced. Gabriel and Becky became acquainted with a pair of P51s flying out of  Alamo- gordo AAF base in New Mexico. They didn't have a chance. In the  war Mustangs shot  almost 5,000 enemy aircraft out of the  sky,  and  de- stroyed another  4,000  aircraft on the ground. Each plane  sported six .50 caliber machine guns.

Several rounds penetrated the crew canopy. One hit Gabriel and passed right through hez leg. It was all che could do to get the saucer down to the ground without killing himself or Becky. It was more of a crash than a landing, and it took place on a hilly ranch about thirty miles west of Roswell. This was to become the most famous UFO incident  in history.

Becky was shaken by the crash but not seriously injured. Sha tied off Gabriel's injured leg with hez belt to try to stop the bleeding, trad- ing a certainly lethal loss of blood for a possibly lethal blood clot.

Gabriel said, "I think the saucer is still air-worthy."

Sha shook har head and said in reply, "Those airplanes will return and finish the job if we start flying again."

And indeed, as soon as sha finished speaking the Mustangs flew by very low overhead to confirm they were down.

But there was one thing Becky was willing to do, and it was an  enor- mous thing. Both of them eyed the Purple Cable they had  frequently used to enhance their sex in the way Robyn had first discovered  with Kim. Sha snapped one end into har head and the other end to Gabriel's head. Then sha began to receive hem.

Gabriel's memories and personality flood in. Becky's self was pushed down and flooded out, but there was the beginning of a creeping return as the  edges of Becky soaked back into the new memories  of  Gabriel which stood firmly in the center of har mind.

The threshold trigger levels between what used to be brain cells  be- fore the Change were being flushed of Becky's values and set to Gabri- el's values. But this was not fully accomplished.

The neuron-analogues were even physically rerouted to reflect  Gabri- el's long-term memories but this too was not one hundred percent com- plete.

Feedback went up the Purple Cable to Gabriel. A new person emerged in Becky's body with half of Gabriel's brain wiring and half of Rebekah's original  wiring. A new composite person who was both Rebekah and Ga- briel stared out at Gabriel and hez crippled and bleeding body.

Through the Purple Cable, directly, Gabriel said, "Somebody  will  be coming. You better leave before we're both captured."

Rebekah-Gabriel replied, "You could suffer True Death."

True Death was something Robyn used to talk about in the days leading up to  her murder at the hands of Paul Bergin. She explained that  a terminal mind-capture must encapsulate the moment of death. If even so much as a single instant was allowed to transpire after the recording, then the individual bifurcated. One would go on, but the other would experience being extinguished.

Yeshua tried to talk her out of that idea by pointing out that no one in history had ever "experienced" being extinguished, and  he  should know better than anyone, having been extinguished by the Romans  once before. No doubt Robyn, in turn, would try to talk them out  of  the idea now. It was like there was a cabal of lucky winners who denied the existence of True Death.

Gabriel said, "I trust you will move heaven and earth to make sure it doesn't happen."

Che removed the Purple Cable from hez head, establishing the bifurca- tion. Then che gave hez copy of Ithuriel's Silver Gift  to  Rebekah. There was  no  point to keeping it stashed in the  little  pocket  of space-time that always accompanied hem. If che was captured it would- n't do  any good to cut hez way out of hez cell. Gabriel's leg  was shattered. And if che died there'd be a perfectly good Silver  Gift floating between realities somewhere that nobody could ever retrieve.

Gabriel said, "Use this to eliminate all the important parts  of  the saucer and all the controls."

Using Gabriel's Silver Gift and her own in tandem, Rebekah  sabotaged the saucer in such a way that it was unrecognizable as a viable  air- craft. When she was done it was just a pile of sheet metal and glass and upholstered seats baking in the desert.

There was still a little bit of water left over. Gabriel decided the water was  a much more important thing to duplicate than  the  Silver Gift. Che did his standard trick to produce enough to fill two can- teens for Rebekah, then put the rest in the little hidden  fold-space pocket for hemself.

Rebekah also took along a bag of trail mix to eat, and kissed Gabriel goodbye.

It har took two days to walk the thirty miles west and a little south to the town of Roswell. When sha was halfway to town she found a small burrow pit in a ravine that was blessedly free of rattlesnakes. There she sheltered for the night and contacted Dory to tell her about  the accident. Dory wired money to her from Hunky-Dory's slush fund. Then from the town  of Roswell, which like Headwater was the only  outpost of civilization for many miles around, Rebekah returned to Franklin by bus. The trip took another three days with all the required bus trans- fers.

Cowboys found the wreckage in the desert while Rebekah was  still  on foot. They rendered what first aid they could and took Gabriel to  a small  hospital in Roswell. The doctor managed to save Gabriel's  leg but he was laid up in traction and, as he originally guessed, he could make no move to escape.

At the same time the 509th Bomb Group retrieved the saucer  from  the rancher's land and craned it onto a truck, but they saw it was just a pile of junk and there was nothing they could learn from it. There was no motor and no controls. It looked like a playground flying  saucer made to entertain some children. Yet the pilots swore they shot it out of the sky. The .50 cal round that had done Gabriel's leg was  still inside the thing to support their claim.

For hez part Gabriel refused to explain to the doctor and  the  local sheriff how  the saucer or che came to be out there  on  that  desert ranch. And there was the issue of the bone cup that emerged from the back of hez head, which of course was soon to attract the attention of Clyde Tolson and make this another DECON case.

In the saloons, cowhands mentioned the "silver disk" they  found  and soon after that some reporters from Albequerque came calling. The Army press liaison told them it was just debris from the crash of something they called project Mogul, and that Gabriel Shybear was just a  local Indian who found it first, and shot himself in the leg when he thought he saw something move inside.

Then an Army general bitched about the leak of Mogul. Tasked to con- ceal the existence of Mogul, the first thing that came to mind was the big national flying saucer craze that was in all the papers. This was exactly the scenario that occurred to Robyn when the Silver Gift tech- nology was first being fitted to an airframe. So the Air Force made an official announcement that it had recovered the wreckage of a  flying saucer.

The press went even more insane, and the Air Force bureaucracy gradu- ally realized it had made a huge mistake.

On July 8 they went on the radio in Roswell to retract the flying sau- cer claim,  and said naw, it was really just a weather  balloon  they picked up. Americans were less cynical in those days and let this go, so the military concluded they had successfully covered up the cover- up.

But that was not the last time people caught the B'nei Elohim  flying around America in their flying saucers. The weather balloon dodge was soon overused to the point of becoming a cliche. It lost its original keen edge. So two years later when the existence of Project Mogul was declassified the Air Force said their second weather balloon statement was inoperative,  and that it had really been Mogul  all  along. The first Mogul statement was back to being the operative statement.

Mogul had  been an experiment to send balloons with  microphones  and tape recorders high into the sky to listen for Soviet nuclear detona- tions, then pick up the recordings later after the balloons had  cir- cled the globe. The press and the public let the issue drop again and the military concluded they successfully covered up the coverup of the coverup.

That was the last anyone heard of it until three things happened that took away America's virginity and put an end to the halcyon days when her leaders were looked up to and trusted implicitly. The first  was the assassination of the President in 1963, which sparked a poisonous conspiracy mindset that only seemed to be validated by later  events, especially the  Tet Offensive in South Vietnam in 1968,  when  people realized with shock that the government had lied and victory was  no- where in sight in the Vietnam War, plus the cover-ups and  incredible abuses of power of the Watergate affair.

Only after this vast shift in perception did people begin to read back ominous things into the comedy of errors that took place at the begin- ning of the "UFO era" in 1947.

Alien bases  were imagined to exist in the four corners area  of  the southwestern United States.

An entire alphabet soup of imaginary government agencies were  cooked up who were supposed to control all the top secret information on the alien presence, and even the information that these agencies  existed was, conveniently, also supposed to be classified top  secret.

There were claims that projects existed to recover all downed  flying saucers and claims that projects existed to overhaul and test-fly re- covered flying  saucers  at "Area 51" sixty miles  northwest  of  Las Vegas.

And the complete lack of valid evidence for any of these  claims  was considered proof that a conspiracy to hide the truth existed, all man- aged by the same organization that bungled the original crash.