Star Trek The Original Series From History's Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page A

their own free will. Both Carlson and Garland had struck him as naïve in their hopes and beliefs that the aliens had come in peace rather than with conquest in mind.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” Carlson said, as though he indeed possessed the ability to read Wainwright’s thoughts. “You’re still wondering what might really have happened with me and Faith back at Roswell. The truth is I really don’t know what to think about the Ferengi, whether they were yanking our chains or if they were a scouting party for some kind of invasion fleet. My gut tells me those three weren’t a threat to anybody, but this project is bigger than that. Much bigger.”
    Wainwright leaned forward, reaching to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray sitting on the desk between them. “So, what is it I’m supposed to be doing?”
    “Initially, you’ll be working with me,” Carlson replied. “Our primary job at this point is to investigate reports of any unidentified craft. Since Roswell, there’s been a surge in reports of people seeing flying saucers all over the place. We’ll conduct interviews, gather any evidence that might present itself, and go from there.”
    “Evidence?” Wainwright asked, frowning. Though originally a skeptic so far as the existence of beings from other worlds was concerned, Roswell had made him a believer. That did not mean he would accept without strict scrutiny anything presented to him as proof of extraterrestrials.
    Carlson nodded. “A few of the reports we’ve received have included photographs of strange flying objects, or figures the witness purports to be aliens. Most of the pictures I’ve seen are terrible—out of focus, bad exposure, double exposure, whatever—but a few of them will definitely get your attention, Jim. There may be other evidence, too, of a sort similar to what our Ferengi friends had.”
    That indeed got Wainwright’s undivided attention. “What? You mean ships, or other technology?”
    Shrugging, Carlson stood up from his chair. “I don’t know for sure, yet. The top brass is being very tight-lipped until we get our team together and organized. You probably already know that everything we do here, every last thing we see, hear, read, or talk about, is classified top secret, Jim. Not a breath about anything to anyone.”
    “What about my wife?” Wainwright asked. “I wasn’t able to tell her a damned thing before I left Roswell yesterday. What’s my cover story?”
    “All of that will be given to you,” the professor replied. “Everything will be handled. Arrangements are already being made for your family here. You’ll move them just like any other change of assignment. So far as anyone not affiliated with the project is concerned, you’ll just be another officer with duties requiring frequent travel. The Air Force is chock-full of men and women just like that. You’ll blend in fine.”
    The decree that he would, in essence, be forced to lie to his wife, Deborah, as part of the normal consequences of his job at first troubled Wainwright, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that it would not be the first time duty had made such demands on him. During the war, the months leading up to Operation Overlord had been fraught with secrecy, with the success of the entire campaign hinging on the allies’ ability to keep even the slightest hint of its planning and preparation from making its way to the Germans. Likewise, the American development of atomic weapons also had been conceived and carried out in near-total isolation, with no one suspecting the mammoth, even horrifying results of that endeavor until one fateful August morning in 1945 in the sky above the now-devastated Japanese city of Hiroshima. Keeping secrets, Wainwright knew, even from his own wife, was just part of the job.
    The idea of refusing this assignment—if indeed that even was an option—was laughable. For Wainwright, this was the job of a career, or a lifetime, even if everything