Travis woke up with a tremendous headache. The light was dim. He was laying on his back in what felt like a conventional bed.
Was he back home at the Project? He tried to get his eyes to focus. Dim light coming from his right. Shades pulled down over a window. He was in a bedroom but it wasn’t one at the base or for that matter, at his ranch.
He tried to sit up, but it didn’t work the first time. The headache suddenly increased behind his eyes. He lay back down a moment and then tried again. This time he managed to sit up. He could hear a dog barking outside.
Yes, it was a bed. Pillows, quilt, looked hand-made. Pictures on the wall of people he didn’t recognize. A cheap painting of some foothills. Wallpaper. Beat up wooden floor with throw rugs. He hadn’t seen one of those pull down shades since he was a kid (he liked to pull them down all the way, let go and watch them shoot up to the top). It gave the light coming through it a golden cast, as if the world were a sepia tone photograph.
Lloyd Bridges and Angie Dickinson in the 1970 made for TV movie “The Love War”.
Allan didn’t need the glasses to read and he didn’t even need them to survive, not anymore. He had written an app so that it accessed the camera on his phone, letting it perform the task of detecting his adversary automatically.
He took a seat in the back of the coffee shop where he had a clear view of everyone coming and going. He had ordered the establishment’s trademark latte more to blend in than because he liked it.
To the world around him, he looked like a middle-aged man, blond, athletic, bronzed from the sun. He could have just finished a game of tennis or golf.
In front of him was a mystery novel by a well-known author whose name was, as they say, a household word. And yet Allan couldn’t have told you any other books the writer had penned. Like the latte, it was camouflage. Even his name was misdirection and subterfuge.
Actor Lloyd Bridges in the 1970 television movie “The Love War”.
Allan didn’t need the glasses to read but he did need them to survive.
He took a seat in the back of the coffee shop where he had a clear view of everyone coming and going. He had ordered the establishment’s trademark latte more to blend in than because he liked it.
To the world around him, he looked like a middle-aged man, blond, athletic, bronzed from the sun. He could have just finished a game of tennis or golf.
In front of him was a mystery novel by a well-known author whose name was, as they say, a household word. And yet Allan couldn’t have told you any other books the writer had penned. Like the latte, it was camouflage. Even his name was misdirection and subterfuge.
From the first episode of “The Invaders” (1967) with Roy Thinnes as David Vincent and Diane Baker as Kathy Adams.
No one believed him. He wasn’t surprised, but he was frustrated. He wasn’t some nut or UFO conspiracy kook. He was a rational human being who had been thrown into an irrational if not insane world.
Architect David Vincent. 29 years old, considered reasonably good-looking, divorced for two years, no kids, a successful career but at the cost of friendships, marriage, and family.
It wasn’t his fault that he’d seen an alien spaceship land near a deserted diner off of an old State road used by almost no one anymore. It wasn’t his fault that the only two witnesses, a newlywed couple who had been camping nearby, hadn’t seen or heard anything, not even the approach and then rapid departure of David’s car. It wasn’t his fault that the local Sheriff thought he was another crazy Californian trying to play a prank on what he thought was some dumb country Arizona officer.
There had to be evidence at the site. David had to tell someone. He drove to the nearest town, burst into the Sheriff’s office, and demanded an investigation.
The strange irony was not lost on David Vincent when his car’s GPS device failed to lead him to the all-night diner off the old state highway and instead revealed a horrifying discovery.
“Damn it.” The young architect, driving through a remote area of Arizona after meeting a developer at the proposed site of a new data center, wanted to grab a cup of coffee before continuing his drive back to Los Angeles. It was after midnight and he was exhausted. Instead of a hot coffee and maybe a pastry, he found a restaurant closed for over a year. No town, not even a gas station within miles.
“I can’t make it. Got to get some rest.”
He pulled his Audi R8 off to the side of the building and after stepping out to relieve himself on a dying shrub, returned to the car’s interior and prepared for an uncomfortable nap in the front seat.
At first he thought he was dreaming. There was a shrill sound getting louder, fluctuating in tone. David opened his eyes and looked out the windshield. Off to his left, around the corner of the building. Bright, multicolored lights. He got out and hiding in the shadow of the old diner, peered around the side.
It was big, about the size of a two-story house. A short cylinder flaring out at the bottom. Three…no, four landing struts. It was setting down. There were windows in the top part of the cylinder. He could see figures moving inside. Then a light shone down one of the landing struts. Stairs. Figures were coming out. People. No, they couldn’t be.
“It began with a closed, deserted diner, and a man too long without sleep to continue his journey. It began with the landing of a craft from another galaxy…Now, David Vincent knows that the invaders are here. That they have taken human form. Somehow he must convince a disbelieving world that the nightmare has already begun.”
The Invaders was an American television show that ran on ABC in 1967-68 and starred Roy Thinnes as David Vincent, a man who had witnessed the landing of an alien spacecraft and learned that their intention was to invade and take over the Earth.
The last bit of narrative above in italics is taken from the opening title sequence and was dramatic as heck to me when I was thirteen years old.
I was reminded of the show when I read a piece of fan fiction earlier this morning, so I decided to recreate that opening for 2017. Below is a YouTube video of the show’s opening sequence. To find out what happens to my version of David Vincent next, read The Hidden.
Burial sled of Anubis from King Tut’s tomb, on display at the Egyptian Museum – Cairo, Egypt.
The Egyptian Museum – Cairo – December 22, 2016
“Here’s what we’re preparing for our 2018 exhibit, Gordon.”
Archeologist Gordon Ashe was being given a private tour of the new wing of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo by his friend Dr. Tarek Sayed Tawfik, the general director.
“This is truly astounding, Tarek. I have to admit to being more than a little envious. All five thousand of the artifacts that had been discovered in King Tutankhamun’s tomb will be displayed together for the first time.”
“You shouldn’t be envious, Gordon. After all, you’re here almost two years ahead of schedule, and you didn’t even have to pay the price of admission.”
“I guess being a personal friend of the director helps.”
Both men laughed. Gordon and Tarek had become friends at Oxford as undergraduates some decades ago. Both had a passion for antiquities but their lives traveled along highly divergent trajectories. Tarek had eventually gone into administration and Gordon gave up life as a field archeologist to work for the U.S. Government, though of course Tarek wasn’t sure exactly what services the esteemed Dr. Ashe performed for them.
Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon – found at keyway.ca
Somewhere in that vast throng of revelers was Rachel Aiyana Zheutlin, a woman out of time. Gordon Ashe, Ross Murdock, and Travis Fox stood looking down at Jerusalem. King Solomon had dedicated the Temple of Hashem, God of the Hebrews, and the entire region was now celebrating the festival of Sukkot. From what Ashe recalled, during the dedication, blood ran exceedingly freely as 22,000 oxen and 120,000 sheep were presented as peace offerings.
Now was the great festival. In order to keep their cover, the time travelers erected their own temporary shelter. True, they were conspicuous. By rights, they should be in the city, but then again, as foreign travelers, presumably non-Jews, they did not have to fulfill the commandment to observe the festival.
Yet even if somehow they could get into the city already packed with hundreds of thousands, then finding Aiyana would be a miracle. Gordon chuckled to himself as he regarded the newly built Temple, clearly visible from their vantage point, and imagined it to be a house of miracles as well as prayer for all nations.
“So what now, Gordon?”
“We can’t hope to find her by going in, Ross. We’ll have to wait. I told Kelgarries as much over the radio link.”
Martin Fields watched the woman he had fallen in love with put on her skin-tight temporal transfer suit. Both of them were reluctant time travelers, recruited by extra-dimensional beings for the purpose of correcting time anomalies in their little corner of time-space.
She’d gone through hell and was just now beginning to come to terms with her new life. First of all she had died at the age of fourteen, but that was over 700 years ago. She was resurrected by “them” as one of their time travelers, but a rogue “them” named Vanir had captured and tortured her in an other-worldly realm for centuries.
Twenty year old Fred Valentich was reaching the end of his rope or at least his dreams. With only 150 hours of flying time, he had been twice rejected by the Royal Australian Air Force and failed all five of his commercial pilot’s licensing subjects, not once but twice. He’d also been cited for deliberately flying blind into a cloud and received a warning for straying into restricted air space.
He wanted to be a professional pilot more than anything, but everyone who knew anything about flying said he was no good at it.
At 1819 hours on October 21, 1978, he took off in a rented single-engine Cessna 182L from Victoria’s Moorabbin airport near Melbourne, Australia with the intension of heading across Bass Strait to King Island near Tasmania. He’d told flight officials that the purpose of his trip was to pick up some friends from the island, but he’d also told his friends that he was going to pick up some crayfish.
Neither was true. He just needed to get away and clear his head. His life was mundane, boring really. He was enthralled with UFOs and thought it would be great to encounter one in the air as other pilots claimed to have done. If nothing else, he could log a few more hours flight time.
The only known images of The Man in the Hole were captured in the film Corumbiara – Photo credit: Vincent Carelli
“Now we wait.”
Historian and linguist Aiyana Zheutlin sat down on the ground in front of the rough-hewn hut in the Amazon rain forest.
“Wait for what?” Her companion, engineer Lynn Huỳnh quickly sat down beside her, putting her tablet in her lap.
“Him. I told you. We brought the food and water as a gift. This is his land. We are intruders but we hope he’ll accept us as guests. So we wait for him to respond.”
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