The Administrator (9 page)

The procedure had advantages. Although he remained just under four feet tall, only growing about an inch every five years, it also slowed down the natural aging process. In fifty years he had only aged about twenty. Chronologically, he was fifty-nine, but metabolically, he was still in his late twenties, and although he was a scientific genius, his emotional innocence bordered on emotionless indifference.

The light above the entrance flashed its warning that someone was coming to see him. He turned his chair away from the computer and prepared to greet his visitor. He didn’t usually care if anyone came or not. Since he had never experienced companionship, he had not learned the concept of lonely and actually preferred to be left alone to work in solitude. However, today was different. Today he had questions. Questions that he felt he already knew the answers to. Except ... Why?

His latest mentor, Dr. Kate, entered as the panel slid aside. She smiled and pushed her glasses back into place with a slender index finger. They never seemed to stay in place on her thin nose. “Hello, Adam. How are you tonight?”

“Fine, Dr. Kate. Please sit down. I have something to ask you.”

She ran her fingers through her short auburn hair that was just beginning to gray at her temples. The touch of silver accented her high cheekbones and gave her thin face a bird like effect. “Is something wrong, Adam?”

“Possibly,” he answered. “Please sit.”
 

She pulled the only chair in the small cubicle in front of the metal cot resting against a corner wall and settled gracefully into it. She looked tired, but only a small frown creasing her forehead betrayed her faint worry at his tone. “What’s wrong, Adam? The staff tells me that you haven’t been sleeping much lately. Would you like some medication to help you sleep?”

“No. No drugs. I haven’t been sleeping because I’ve been working on a project of my own.”

She glanced at the closed circuit monitor in the ceiling. “Your own? You didn’t tell me about any special project.”

“I didn’t tell anyone. It really began as curiosity, a diversion when I wasn’t assigned any work to do. It became a mystery to solve, something to pass the time. Now I need some answers.”

“I’ll help any way I can, Adam.”

“Why didn’t they ever give me feet?”

“Excuse me?”

“Feet. They replaced my eyes, my skin, and last year, they replaced the tendons in this arm with electronic ones.” He held his left arm out toward her and flexed it rapidly to demonstrate. “But they never gave me feet. Why?”

Her brown eyes widened in surprise at the question. She glanced at the monitor again and said, “I ... I guess I never thought about it. I really don’t know, Adam.”

“Is it because if I don’t have feet, I can never walk out of here? Never run away?”

She stood abruptly and took the few steps to close the distance between them in the small cubicle. She placed a hand on his shoulder.

Instinctively his shoulder muscles tensed, but he didn’t pull away.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that you don’t like to be touched.” She moved her hand and let it fall loosely at her side. “Adam, I’m sure that’s not why you were not fitted with prosthetic feet. I really don’t know why, but I will bring it up to Colonel Gordon tomorrow.”

He grimaced a gesture that would have been a smile if he had lips. “That’s okay. I really don’t mind it so much ... when it’s you ... the touching, I mean.” He swallowed hard and continued talking quickly to cover his embarrassment at admitting that he might enjoy her gentle touch on his shoulder. “Colonel Gordon will just say that I don’t need feet. Not to do what I do. You know that.”
 

She relaxed and returned to her seat.

“Well. We’ll see. I’ll talk to him. Now tell me about your project.”

He laughed harshly. “Trying to change the subject?”

“No. I just....”
 

“That is the subject, Dr. Kate. Why am I here? Why have I had five mentors in the last fifty years? Why do you call yourself my mentor when we both know that you are my psychiatrist? Why do I need you? Why does my door open for you and the guards but never for me when I’m alone? Why are they hiding me seventeen stories underground?”

Dr. Kate clasped her fingers together in her lap, lacing and unlacing them as though she couldn’t decide exactly what to do with them. “Adam, I....”

“And the biggest question,” he interrupted. “What do you know about Roswell, New Mexico?”
 

She coughed as if her mouth had suddenly become filled with cotton and covered her lips with one hand while grasping her throat with the other. Finally, she gasped, “Ros ... what has that got to do with you? Or any of this for that matter? That’s a left fielder if I heard one.”

“Left fielder?”

“It’s an expression that my father used to use when something caught him by surprise. ‘Right out of left field,’ he’d say. It’s a baseball expression.”

“Oh.” Adam looked at his desk for a moment and reached for the document he had just downloaded. “This is about the big celebration they had in Roswell. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the alleged UFO incident near there.”

She took the paper and read it quietly. When she finished, she dropped it in her lap and looked at Adam. “So? What has all this got to do with what we were talking about?”

He wheeled his chair close to her and turned his back to the monitor. He leaned close to her and whispered, “You really don’t know, do you?”

“Know what?” She whispered back.

Spinning his wheel chair around he said loudly, “I guess I just have too much time to think lately. Not enough work. Boredom does strange things to your imagination.” He swung back around to face her. “Do you think we could take a walk outside? It is night isn’t it? The sun isn’t out. I can’t take the heat of day, but it’s nice at night, especially if it’s cloudy.”

She laughed throatily. “Well you’re in luck. There is a slight cloud cover, but you can still see the moon and some of the stars. Let’s go.” She looked up at the blinking red eye of the monitor and said, “I’m taking him topside for a while.” She grabbed the handles of his chair, palmed the doorway panel and ushered him into the elevator before whoever was watching the monitor had time to put down his coffee cup, get his feet off the desk and acknowledge.

Adam chuckled quietly. He knew her reputation as a snap decision maker, and every one in the compound joked about her spontaneity in practicing her special brand of psychiatry. They’re probably joking about it right now, he thought.

But tonight was one of the most serious nights of his life, and he suspected that, although she couldn’t know why, Dr. Kate felt it too. That was why she had spirited him out of his cubicle and away from the spy-eye, the name she had given the monitor, in such a hurry.

Maybe I really can trust her, he thought, but his guts shivered with cold, icy dread while the elevator climbed swiftly toward the surface.

Neither spoke as he activated the power on his chair and edged out of the elevator. She took long strides to keep up with him through the corridor and out the double doors that led to the enclosed patio.

He steered over to a stone bench and parked beside it. He sat gazing at the moon and the few stars that peeked through hazy cloud cover.

She came and sat on the bench without speaking.

“The stars look like they’re draped with a sheer, silk scarf,” he mused.

She raised her eyes to the sky. “Yes. They do.”

“I wish that I could tolerate the sun.”

She said nothing.

“It must be wonderful to see everything bathed in golden light. To feel warmth on your skin without pain.”

“It is,” she answered, still watching the sky. “Adam? What’s going on with you?”

He turned round black eyes on her and said quietly, “Why am I here?”

 
Her eyes met his, and she exhaled deeply as if she had been holding her breath. “As your mentor....”

“Psychiatrist.”

She smiled. “Okay. As your psychiatrist, I should let you tell me without offering any information because it could affect your perception. That’s what I’ve been trained to do. But after the time I’ve spent with you, I realize that you are more sane than anyone here—probably including me.” She clasped her hands in her lap and sighed. “Do you want what they told me ... or what I really think?”

“I want the truth.”

“I don’t know the truth, Adam. At least not all of it, but I’ll tell you what I know. I know that they call us mentors to avoid revealing what we really are. Spies! I and my predecessors were all hired to report your thoughts to the higher-ups. To help keep you calm and working, to keep you from thinking of anything but your job.” She turned to look at the wide, steel door that they had just come through. “They’ll be here soon to check on us. The cameras see us but the microphones can’t pick us up from here. “This will have to be fast.”

“I know,” he said. “Tell me what you know. Do you know who I was before ... before the accident?”

“You still don’t remember anything from before? Your mother? Father? Anything?”

“No.”

“I can’t help you with that, Adam, because I really don’t know. I was told that this was a matter of national security, and my top security clearance from my work with the NASA astronauts was the only reason that I got the job. I had to sign an oath that I would never speak of anything that happened inside this compound. If I do, they will deny it even exists and prosecute me for treason.

He nodded his head as if he had expected that answer. “Did anyone mention why I am....” He raked his eyes over his legs and his spindly arms. He held his three-fingered hand up in front of her. “Why I’m the way I am?”

“They told me that you had been in a terrible airplane crash that killed your family. The report said that you had exhibited extraordinary intelligence before then, and your parents were taking you to a special school for gifted children funded by the government. Apparently, it was just after the Second World War ended, and the country needed the brightest minds it could find to help get us get back on our feet.”

“Do you believe that?”

She didn’t seem surprised by his question. “Yes. Most of it. The part about your intelligence is obviously true. Look at the work you do. Lasers, holographics, micro-electronics and all that other technical stuff that I will never comprehend.”

He looked back up at the sky. His oversized head swayed gently from side to side on his spindly neck as if keeping time to a private tune in his mind. Still gazing skyward, he asked, “Dr. Kate, why didn’t they just let me die?”

“Oh, no, Adam. They couldn’t have done that. It wouldn’t have been right.”

He held her eyes with his again and asked, “Wouldn’t have been right for whom? For me?”

“Well, I—”

“How did they save me? Have you thought about that? It was over fifty years ago. Where did the technology come from?” He grabbed the flesh of his forearm and pinched. The skin puckered like a gray, cotton ball between his fingers. “This covering is not available even today for burn victims. And this....” He turned his chair so his back was to the camera and hoped his body blocked its view, then he trained his laser eyes onto a small Yucca plant beside her bench. For a second, nothing happened, then slowly, the tip of the sturdy, center spike began to smolder. Thin wisps of smoke curled upward to disappear into the night sky, and the spot it emanated from on the plant turned black.

Kate gasped, “How did you do that? I didn’t know you could....”

“No one knows I can do that. I modified the laser components of the optical sensor in the left eye.”

“But how? Why didn’t you report your modification?
 

He ignored her questions. “I got these eyes thirty years ago. Thirty years, Doctor Kate. Did you know that we had that kind of technology that long ago? Experimental, yes. But to make eyes with? Eyes that work better than real ones?”

“I ... I don’t know.”

“Roswell, Doctor Kate.”

“Roswell? What’s that got to do with this?”

“I’ve been researching. When Colonel Gordon discovered what I was finding, he blocked my access. I can’t crack the block, but I have other accesses that they can’t cut off. Top secret research files that I must have to do the work they want me to do.”

“But don’t they monitor that too?”

“Yes, but I have a little blocking trick of my own. When I’m in files they don’t want me to see, I program a sort of screen. When they trace it, it circles in on itself so it seems that I am accessing whatever material they think I need.”

“I don’t understand. How does that work?”

“Kinda’ like a mirror. They monitor what I did an hour ago and think that’s what I’m doing now. But none of this is really important. What matters is what I discovered.”

She took another deep breath. “And that was?”

“The alien landing in 1947 and the cover-up that the public claims the government perpetuated may be true. At least partly true.”

She relaxed her tense shoulders and laughed. “Oh, Adam. You’re not falling for that crap, are you? How could anyone in government service keep their mouths shut about such an event for fifty years? They can’t even keep a scandal quiet for more than a few years at best. Mostly, not even that long. And I’ve had top security clearance for fifteen years. Surely I would have heard something if it was true?”