Trespassers: a science-fiction novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

was to follow the more genuine leads.
    In his six years in the field, Bruner had investigated over five hundred sites, but all he had to show for his efforts was an artifact that he wore around his neck. He told people it was an arrowhead, but he knew it was something very different. It was made of two metals that had been twisted together. He had performed dozens of tests on the pendant, but he could not match it to any known material on Earth.
    Bruner had trouble admitting it — even to himself — but that pendant was very special to him. He found it at an investigation site, at the base of a thick tree. It captivated him. He spent a moment on his knee, gazing at it, while other researchers scoured the field. For some reason, he felt an overwhelming impulse to conceal this piece from the others. Sensing prying eyes, he slid the artifact into his pocket. Since its discovery, it was never out of his grasp. It took several days before he actually attached a cord to it and put it around his neck.
    Normally, each item that Bruner uncovered found its way into the twenty-by-thirty storage room across from his office. And from time to time, usually when he ’ s feeling down — or more commonly these days, when he ’ s feeling down and had a few too many — he would sift nostalgically through its shelves. That pendant, however, never joined the other artifacts. It was something that he just wasn ’ t going to part with.
    For all his precision and planning, Bruner couldn ’ t take credit for building the team up to its former robust size. Bruner ’ s agency owed its success to another man: Harold Stanton. Harold was long gone from the picture now, but he did for Bruner ’ s agency what he had done for many agencies. He wrangled the funding. Directing the flow of funds that poured out of Washington, DC, was a vocation all to itself. It involved the same old song and dance that had been practiced in every town in the world since shortly after the beginning of time. This should not be confused with the actual noble and forthright rules of the nation, as are found in the US Constitution, nor should it be confused with the honorable principles of the country, as are found in the Declaration of Independence. No, this was something altogether different. It was the professional manipulation of those rules and principles.
    One of the foremost masters of this was the aforementioned Harold Stanton. He was a purist. He wasn ’ t using his position as a stepping-stone. He shifted the flow of money in Washington because he loved it. The excitement and nonstop action of inside politics was necessary for his mind and body. He shaped beltway politics and made an indelible mark on the granite pillars of Washington. He was directly responsible for allocating the bulk of spending for the United States of America, and he never once appeared on television or in a newspaper — a testament to how he executed his job.
    Before Harold Stanton made his quiet exit from the grand arena, he incorporated Bruner ’ s pet project into his song-and-dance routine, diverting every penny Bruner dreamed of through an incomprehensible maze of paperwork that could only be kept straight in the mind of someone like Harold Stanton . . . and, truth be told, there was no one else like Harold Stanton.
    Bruner first met Stanton at a Washington bar, not the kind where a person goes to get drunk or throw a line in the water hoping to snag a shag for the evening. It was the kind of bar where one goes to get government funding for a project, because in the nation ’ s capital, you need a friend on the inside, and that ’ s exactly where Stanton was. Bruner, however, was not there to get any funding for anything. He wandered into the bar for the wrong reason: to get drunk and throw a line in the water, hoping to snag a shag for the evening. He was struggling with three life-altering events. These events should have been separated by a decade or two, just to allow the