Someone once said; "Time flies when you’re having fun”. My own take on that old axiom is: "Time flies when you’re up to your ass in alligators and trying to tread water at the same time. ” Dr. Harvey Gilpsen had been gone for six months with just the random phone call to ask how we were progressing on the device. I had not even been in the hanger bay to look at the ships. Bellamy had been silent as a tomb out on his island paradise in the Caymans and somehow during this period I started to feel I was no longer in the Third Boss position. Jack was pulling double duty, flying his desk and covering all of the material usually handled by Ellen. She was home doing whatever it was she occupied her time with during the long hot days of summer. I was sure the magazine bill she ran up would pay for half the national debt. No one could read that many fashion, women’s and general interest articles. But she was making a herculean attempt to prove me wrong. Sitting by the pool, she had deepened her tan by a major percentage and each night I went home, she was doing the best Donna Reed impersonation I’d ever seen.
What had been most surprising was the fact that she never asked about what we were doing at the lab, with the exception of random and relatively unimportant personal questions about this person or that. She was sweet, kind, considerate and... vacant. I had what most men would consider the perfect wife. Never demanding, always understanding, accommodating to a fault and always there waiting at the door with a kiss and a drink in her hand. Jack was still with me most of the time. But when we got to the house, he would head over to his section in the separate wing and joined us very seldom for dinners or drinks or much of anything. I should have been happy. But I wasn’t.
The device was progressing, but like all major scientific projects that require huge inputs of money, time and resources in regards to personnel, this one was moving along on schedule and in the dull tedium of making sure every resistor, capacitor and gauge of wire was correct, it was taking its toll on me. Our first scheduled run up of the device was well over a year away and yet there was a ton of paperwork that had to be done everyday to insure all the tees were crossed and the eyes dotted.
I found the cocktail at night before dinner was turning into two or three and the after dinner drink was becoming four or five. I was falling into bed by ten without caring if Ellen was next to me or not. She would stay up at night and watch Johnny Carson in the living room and then sometimes, actually most of the time, watch a late movie afterwards. Each morning I was up and gone before she was out of bed. A gentle kiss on her shoulder and I was out the door.
I had become a normal every day working stiff who just so happened to be working on one of the most important and interesting projects in the country, the world or for that matter in the history of the Human Race, and I really didn’t care.
Now and then the discussion would come up about having a child. She thought it be would nice to have one. I never said anything, but I thought she and I would probably be better off getting a dog. I had two children; one I had never seen and the other I would probably never see again. That pain was enough to keep me from ever
wanting another. Besides, I had gone to the base physician and had a series of test for a recurring pain in my groin. The results were something that I didn’t want to tell anyone, but someplace along the path I had been on, I had been exposed to enough radiation to impair my reproductive ability. I thought of the day at Dulce when Jack and I had met with Tugy after the firefight and realized that knowingly or unwittingly they’d exposed us to a large enough dosage of radiation to make sure that neither of us would ever have children again. Jack told me he had the same results on his tests, after I’d asked him to go in for a routine exam. The motility factor was almost nonexistent in both of us. Jack never spoke about it, being the good soldier he was, it was just another injury in a campaign, in a war no one else would ever be aware of.
I spent the afternoons in my office with the door closed, reading and re-reading my father’s journals. All of them. I was trying to find what was not written on the pages. Things that were spoken of between the lines. I was searching for his frustration and how he coped with being out of the circle of power, when he was conducting research out in the desert by himself. Things were still not adding up for me. His knowledge of the project was so deep and extensive he had to know others would be working on the same thing, yet he never talked to anyone about it.
I had a staff of over a hundred scientists and related staff working away on something that was about the size of a shoe box and they were talking about five year programs to me.
With each reading of his journals, I became more certain that dad was working with someone else. His insights would make quantum jumps and then a whole new part of the device would be added. The notes never reflected the actual building of anything, but rather were filled with notes on theory, that could be translated into a working device, but something was missing; there had to be another journal, somewhere. The one that was the lab manual on how he was constructing the device itself. I wondered if someone had taken it and was why he went missing or, even a more wild thought, that he had taken it with him.
That was the day everything stopped for me. I was still under the belief that he had left, physically or through some time manipulation he had engineered. Never once, in all these years, did I think he was just lying out in the desert decomposing in a shallow grave where someone had tossed his lifeless corpse. My hypothesis had not been built on facts at all. I’d always presumed he was still alive somewhere. But on that summer day in 1980, I realized for the first time that he might, actually, be... dead.
I felt as though a ton of hard material had just been dropped on me. Everything I’d done, all my life, was secretly about finding him. I didn’t realize it, for the most part, until that afternoon, but then slowly the thought took form and I realized in so many ways that I had sidetracked my own career and life, to follow a dream, or worse, an illusion, that might not be real.
Leaving the building without checking out with security, I walked in the hundred plus heat over towards the old test airstrip that sat a quarter of a mile from our laboratory. I put one foot in front of the other and walked the length of the seven-mile runway. I was only partially aware of the heat, the sun and the immense desert that surrounded this place.
I was sure where I was going, but now I had a new destination.