UFO: HOW IT ENDED
by Anthony Appleyard (Anthony.Appleyard@umist.ac.uk)

This story is written in the fictional world of the `UFO' space fiction series by Gerry Anderson that was shown on ITV (British television) in the 1970's and again on BBC2 (British television) in late 1996 and Jan 1997. Much of the text before the paragraph starting "So on that December 2nd" is a brief summary of the television episodes. The `HR' star serial numbers are in the Harvard Revised Photometry catalogue, see e.g. the Bright Star Catalogue published by Yale University, New Haven, Conn., USA. I made these general changes to the scenario: (a) Earth computer technology updated; (b) The single `Sky 1' replaced by a reasonable sized and distributed fleet of special fighter aircraft. Please email any complaints and remarks to the author.

THREAT TO SECRECY

I am Commander Ed Straker, head of SHADO, Supreme Headquarters Alien Defence Organization, a secret international organisation which operated, and still operates as far as it can, from a large isolated building in southern England which most people knew of only as Harlington-Straker Film Studios. Only we and a few of the world's top Ministry of Defence and CIA and similar men knew what was under the studios. Now that so much has happened, I see no reason at last not to tell how we tried to act in the best interest of mankind, now that yet another secrecy is blown and its workings spilt and useless, revealed to the public. It is not our fault that we had to operate in secret, away from risk of angering those driven by popular fascinations with the exotic that have led men into so much risk. All too well this has proved again that unnecessary curiosity for its own sake can kill far more than cats and waste much work and materials for little or no eventual benefit. While people outside speculated what UFO's were and tried to piece together what information escaped before government agencies hid it, we inside knew what they were and why they have been coming to Earth across the huge interstellar distances for centuries. That they exist was finally proved some years before SHADO started, after modern jet fighters got fast enough to occasionally manage to disable one and force it to land.

As to why all this had to be secret, I knew what might happen if the truth came out, mass space hysteria fed by decades of overdramaticised unrealistic popular space fiction hankering unthinkingly after contact with God-knows-what from the beyond. Have not I and many others seen and heard of the catastrophic effects on too many island cultures of Men when sea-sailors came and brought the outside in? At least Earth could remain an island and master of its own affairs. That secrecy brought its own price, as I know too well: the long job of setting up SHADO and building its headquarters hardly ever let me spend time with my wife and cost me my marriage, and my only son died because vital medicine being rushed to him was delayed when I had to divert transport to get SHADO armed ground mobiles to a UFO that had landed in western Ireland and all its unknown perils to people living near the place, while my already-estranged wife Mary wept and cursed me for putting my son's life second to getting a film ready on time.

Why did we go to all that expense, even running an armed base on the Moon and all traffic to and from it having to be disguised as other things in the face of public anger at the amount being spent on space when other matters went short, with the eventual result which that brought about and I feel all too likely that it would not have happened anyway?

People disappear sometimes, to escape debt or persecution or family trouble, by criminal action, by undercover official action, or whatever. Some disappear near UFO sightings, too often for it to be certainly coincidence: one was Leila Carlin, sister of Peter Carlin (one of my pilots), vanished during a UFO incident in a forest some time before. That persistent menace to public common sense, UFO cultists, had their own ideas. Many UFO's seen by the public are actually aeroplanes, Venus, Jupiter, Mars when near opposition, the bright yellow star Capella seen alone when glare drowns other stars and its twinkling is mistaken for artificial flashing, aeroplanes, ball lightning, or the like, or hallucinations, and many said that all UFO's were such things. But we knew otherwise after radar tracked some in space on paths which no unpowered natural space object would follow, and certainly after a secret Ministry of Defence team showed me the wreck of one and the body of its humanoid alien pilot in one of those red liquid-breathing spacesuits that few had ever seen but we now know all too well. When the body, and others afterwards, were dissected, we nearly always found transplanted organs in them, often several, some of human origin, or at least was so reported to us by a secret lab that examined the bodies for us; that on top of other incidents and a general feeling of danger finally drove me and others together to press for SHADO to be formed and given budget and authority to find means to track and stop the UFO's until their command realises that Earth now can defend itself at last. That lab told us later that DNA tests had found Leila Carlin's heart transplanted in an alien UFO-pilot's body.

Our movements and actions in the air and on the ground were inevitably seen by people, who started comparing notes and wondering if a secret anti-UFO force was involved; but routine Government denials and disinformation kept that risk to secrecy at bay.

So life continued, and satellites and our Moonbase routinely detected incoming UFO's when they were still millions of miles away as they came in from the endless remoteness. Our air and ground and undersea and space craft destroyed many and forced others to an ever more ingenious variety of tactics to try to get through, as is described at length elsewhere in the TV/video reconstructions of some of our actions that have been published recently after all this had led to its end result and the secrecy was of no more purpose. Our job was made much easier by their habit of going close by the Moon so its gravity by a `reverse slingshot' effect helped them to slow from full space speed. From time to time one got to Earth and landed and got away, such as one that came in anti-lunar (= opposite to the Moon) and down to the Canadian Rockies, and as one of our pursuit fighter aircraft got near it ducked in among mountains near the Kicking Horse Pass where the Canadian Pacific Railway goes through, and three days later it got away; but we destroyed most of them that when approached did not quickly abandon their missions and sheer away to remote space. Sometimes one or more would hang about a little out of Interceptor range.

So on that December 2nd Moonbase and our remote satellite SID (Space Intruder Detector) detected four incoming UFO's, and Col.Foster who was there sent the Interceptors up. The alien craft backed off and stopped just out of range of our missiles, but by the time it was clear what they were doing the Interceptors had been all too effectively drawn away, while six more in tight formation came in anti-lunar and descended from Iceland towards the Hebrides. We sent planes after them; three were near enough, and pursued them south, steadily gaining on them. Stornoway town on Lewis saw them, leaving me with another pursuit sighting to cover up for. They fled south down the strait between the Hebrides and Scotland without trying to dive, as my new SHADO fighter air-to-sea torpedoes can pursue fast and far underwater. Deep sea, no longer a sure refuge even when none of SHADO's submarines are near, passed below them and became open heathery land and scattered crofts on Skye as my fighters ever drew nearer, but the land was hilly and ahead were the jagged teeth of the Cuillin Hills, the remains of an ancient volcano. My planes fired a volley. The UFO's desperately used what jamming power they had, limited, but just enough as my craft and theirs dodged round the peaks. A missile found a target, but the fireball which consumed it was only some cooking propane in a deer-shooting shelter; deer and sheep fled and the high rock spines of Sgurr Alasdair and Sgurr Mhic Choinnich looked down unconcerned. Other missiles went in random directions and the fighters had to dodge.

The mishap checked my planes while the UFO's took what shelter they could in the Ord River valley past Tokavaig while they got a short-duration emergency overdrive into use and ran frantically across the Sound of Sleat to Loch Hourn, but my planes close-hauled them again up the inlet and into Glen Barrisdale. The people in Ambraigh croft in the bend of the deep valley had the sight of their lives as the alien craft swerved desperately to port below treetop height rather than show themselves on a skyline over the ridge ahead to any other planes or radar that might be about; the time when they could go where they wished and ignore men's defences was over. My planes fired a volley of missiles. The alien intruders just escaped, but the explosions sent them into a tumbling spin eastwards as the first flames rose from Doire Asamaidh forestry plantation on the steep valley side where the missiles hit. But that extra push sideways saved the UFO's, else the operation would have ended here in a routine SHADO success with "targets crashed" and a big ground explosion to be explained to the public as "an accidentally dropped practice bomb". As it is, as video taken automatically by the planes showed afterwards all too clearly, one of the UFO's missed by only two feet an ugly spike of rock which would have bashed its underbelly in and probably cracked its drive block and made it explode, and the rest escaped nearly as narrowly. They straightened and skimmed over the high sharp summit ridge of Sgurr a' Choire Bheithe into radar-blind safety among high mountains. Low fuel and an approaching storm front sent my planes back to base.

Fort William and then Ballachulish saw the UFO's briefly. They chose the deep narrow trench of Glen Etive as safer than the shelterless waste of Rannoch Moor. Foster sent other planes after them, from the east, to shoot them down from behind the concealing height of Ben Cruachan as they approached Taynuilt, but the UFO's turned off east. The SHADO planes turned towards them over the wild mountainous land, but availed only for four missiles fired at overlong range after a brief sighting to run away out of contact with their optical sighting systems blinded by atrocious weather and achieve no more relevant kill than three deer on Stob Coir' an Albannaich as the aliens ran southeast. Traffic on the Rest and Be Thankful pass on the A83 east of Inveraray knew them only as an unearthly whistling in the black storm overhead and an interference on their radios.

Having more Interceptors would have avoided this; but there is a limit to budgets for projects kept secret from many of the people who have to decide what official money to put where. I sent some Mobiles in. On the road they look like ordinary half-tracked military vehicles. As they approached the fastnesses of the Grampians at first light, their crews knew it was one of the worst areas for ground forces to hunt landed UFO's. They swore and became short-tempered and sleepy as they drove about in narrow hill-lanes delayed by farm tractors and sheep, and climbed over rocky slopes and sodden moor in rain to put sensors in dozens of lochs and lochans and bays and sea inlets that the alien craft might have submerged in to hide on their furtive unwelcome mission. I remembered various traceless boatman and diver disappearances: the standard alien spacesuit works well underwater, and one add-on for it is an underwater motor and propeller backpack. The huge spread and complicated underwater geography of Loch Lomond alone could have hidden a fleet of them, as the Mobiles struggled north from Dumbarton against watercannoning rain and gale on the long narrow lakeside road praised by the poet Burns in his own time but never again by us. We detected an explosion well enough - contractors rockblasting to widen and straighten the worst kinks in the road. Great, roadworks and contraflows on top of everything else. A garage at Inveruglas did not want to know about our Ministry of Defence fuel cards. After the top end of the lake the road became better, and we made better speed to Crianlarich, which seemed like a city among the endless distance of bare alien-looking moor whose main bird life seemed to be jet fighters. Submersible sensors found nothing in Loch Lubhair and Loch Dochart, nor in Lochan na Bi just west of Tyndrum, and what local people we overheard mentioned nothing useful; and dark comes soon in winter that far north.

We parked in Tyndrum on the bare ridge that it is named after in Gaelic as the rain finally started to ease off, and slept in our vehicles; two lochans on the moors northeast of Crianlarich would have to wait for our backpack helicopter motor-and-rotor sets in the morning, if the wind let up. News that some Glasgow University electronics department students were helping in a secret Defence project meant nothing at all to us as we searched and found nothing. The area's abundant jet fighter population carried only useless practice missiles, and availed only to clutter the radar screens. We tried further east, but after three more blank days as we met to sleep parked in the Slochd pass under the bare peak of Carn nam Bain-tighearna the weather forecast drove us back south away to base, for I had no intention of risking valuable Mobiles being trapped in deep Highland snow for days or weeks. Moonbase radioed to say that the other four UFO's were still near Earth a bit out of Interceptor range.

On the 6th, one of our spotter planes reported UFO's in the air over the Great Glen in Scotland, and I sent fighters there. The objects fled, but near Castle Urquhart suddenly vanished, leaving us with yet more fuel consumed in vain. The pilots logged it as `fairies' and returned to base. What we call `fairies' waste much time: the Great Glen is a minor but persistent earthquake fault zone, where rock creaks and shifts slowly under tectonic pressure, causing diffuse widescale underground piezoelectric currents, which in the air above induce shifting magnetic fields, which induce electric fields which occasionally get strong enough for air to break down so large glowing balls of plasma form and fly about and can be dangerous to aircraft that get too close to them. A report on the 8th near Fort William proved to be the same. On the night of the 17th a snowplough driver and a man in Alltnafeadh farm in Glencoe saw circular objects with shimmering equator bands flying north along Glencoe in the faint light of a crescent moon, keeping low to the hillsides, but the local police did not bother to pass the reports on.

That night another UFO came in from remote space, and the secret Utronics equipment in Moonbase detected it 15 million miles out. Two Interceptors blasted out of their protecting silos under the dusty regolith and ancient impact-altered rock near Moonbase, with ominous bulky UFO-buster space missiles fastened to their bows, The UFO tried to dodge, but a missile accelerated faster. The alien pilot fired his lasers at the missile, as uselessly as a cornered fox turning on the hounds, as always. The missile's onboard computer knew where and how to hit the UFO to get through its anti-meteorite force field and hole its casing and split its drive block. The alien motor blew in a fullscale `brew-up' which evaporated the UFO and all its parts and kit and crew and contents in a moment of intense white fireball, as often before - and we did not know that it would be the last time. During this the six previous UFO's rose from Loch Ellde Mòr in the Mamore Forest mountains around Ben Nevis southeast of Fort William and away to space safely, for the Moon was over the Pacific Ocean; the other four UFO's went away with them. If we had several orbiting Interceptor bases ... but there is a limit to practicality with real-world technology and politics and secret budgets and one planet's resources. Police reported no new persons-missing in the area.

Time passed with no more incoming sightings. Four of our aircraft equipped with special anti-UFO air-to-air missiles wasted time chasing `fairies' along the Pindos mountains in Greece, and a bigger flock of them a week later. If the geotectonic ground strains that cause them led up to a bad earthquake, we better not risk our transport planes being stranded on earthquake-broken runways or requisitioned for disaster relief. In our ground bases, and the big hall in Moonbase where one of the staff acting Santa Claus in a captured alien spacesuit (with faceplate open) brought in a UFO-shaped Christmas cake, our duty staff had Christmas undisturbed. Such seasonal work-related burlesquing went some way to relieve an undefinable feeling that something big and unwelcome was to happen.

It happened soon enough. On January 3rd Moonbase radar reported three UFO's incoming 17 million miles away in the direction of Aries. They were clearly coming to Earth, and this time they would pass near the Moon. In they came from none knew where beyond the endless emptiness. What need drove them to that long and hazardous mission from their far home? In they came, and what we knew of their purposes drove away any sympathy that we may have harboured for their far travelling, and Foster, currently in charge of Moonbase, sent the Interceptors against them as usual. The UFO's came in, heedless as in the old days before we set up, and thankfully not much good at quick evading when at full space speed. The Interceptor pilots, thankful of easy targets for once, aimed and fired. The UFO's lasered at the missiles - which one and all exploded uselessly far from their targets. The Interceptors frantically reloaded and fired again, with the same result. The UFO's carried on, so close that shocked base staff could see them, streaking a path against the stars from Perseus over the north pole and across Ursa Major into Bootes. When they reached Earth atmosphere I sent planes against them, and the same happened. When they came across an airliner they followed it closely to avoid shot, and finally veered off and disappeared into the geography in southern Borneo, where it was moonless night. Long before we could get anything to the site on the ground among the roadless hilly jungle and unbridged rivers, the UFO's landed and did whatever they had come for, and left, again passing in sight of Moonbase, knocking out seven more missiles sent against them. Their rounded alien forms vanished into infinity whence they came, with I knew not what packed in spare spacesuits or those gas-cylinder-shaped life-support containers of theirs on a one-way journey to their homeworld or local base which no man had returned from yet.

Over the next three months SHADO expended 47 Interceptor space missiles for no UFO kills while our scientists frantically improved and altered things, until we felt that we had the mastery again. On April 19th when two UFO's came we were ready for them. An Interceptor close-hauled one after a hard chase over the spectacular rings of jagged peaks around the Mare Orientale, and a missile got close enough to damage it; but it got away while the Interceptor was reloading, and the other UFO took it in tow and went away with it. At least forcing an enemy mission to abort was better than nothing. Two other missiles went into malfunction and were lost. The next time on April 24th they were ready for us again and brushed our missiles off - and attacked the Interceptors and damaged two of them. One managed to land but the other crashed in Sinus Medii with loss of its pilot, while in a remote part of north Burma among mountainous jungle the UFO's did whatever they had come for and got away. What was happening? A growing gloom gathered in Moonbase, and for some reason I found myself thinking of the December 2nd landing. What had happened needing 15 days on the ground? I had had no reply to my last-ditch suggestion for the world's airforces to be issued with anti-UFO missiles and orders to use them, which would have let thousands of security-uncleared ordinary fighter pilot types (and all too likely via some of them the general public) know that UFO's and aliens are real despite official denials. Over the next three weeks we managed to get a replacement Interceptor up to the Moon in parts and assembled at Moonbase and into its silo.

On May 7th Moonbase detected four incoming UFO's, and knew that there was no point doing anything but warn headquarters and try to predict a landing area, and to ready our missiles for any last point-blank defence. They passed the Moon and came in by night over Scandinavia to Germany, where we scrambled fighters after them. They disappeared from radar southeast of the Dogger Bank and were next detected wave-skimming up the Firth of Tay. Before anything could reach them they had covered fifteen miles of exposed Strathmore plain and dived into the deep narrow wooded gorge of the Pass of Killiecrankie where heavy railway supply trains to Inverness and Thurso for Scapa Flow navy base often had a hard climb into the Highlands. It was moonless night. The mountains around the upper Tay west towards Crianlarich made it dangerous for fighter pursuit and a diabolical area for radar to try to look for anything low-flying. I desperately rang the area's ordinary police to look for `crashed or straying unusual-shaped experimental aircraft' there. We heard nothing more until morning, while a report from the area fought its way from police to army and through the Ministry of Defence hierarchy and at last to the only man there who knew that SHADO existed and were the people to handle the situation - by which time we knew from the BBC TV news.

The place was north of Arden on the west shore of Loch Lomond in the low land in the mouth of Glen Fruin. I sent Mobiles there, and in the urgency rode in one with them although it took me far from my office and its communications with the world and Moonbase. The worst had happened. Four UFO's stood on the grass inland from the road, openly in sunlight, their rounded bulks discoloured as if hastily sprayed with anti-oxidation coating. Thousands of people were gathered round. The local police were as culture-shocked as the rest, seeing for the first time beings from another world, and were doing no more than control traffic and try to give the crews enough room to work. Army units had arrived, but were merely standing by, also culture-shocked, and faced with a crowd that clearly would massively resist any attempt to clear the area, and already-leaked publicity. At least thirty people in alien spacesuits stood round the craft or were unloading stuff, in front of a huge crowd, and not in secret darkness or remoteness as always before. Many of them had opened their helmet faceplates and were breathing atmosphere: something seemed wrong. Then one of them spoke, in an obviously local human voice.

"Hi Mom, we're back, like we said we'd be!" he called over the noise.

Others called out similarly, more excitedly, and people in the crowd called back. Whatever I had expected at a UFO landing, did not include seeing them unloading a bunch of thoroughly spaced-out Glasgow University geology students who had been on a field-trip that they certainly had never thought they would get. Not often before had humans in those spacesuits in those craft ridden a returning road still knowing who they were.

"We've been on Mars and Ganymede!" said one of them who had already opened his helmet faceplate, "They said they'd take us for the ride if we helped them with their exploration work. We went scuba diving just here and look what we found! Yeehaa! None of your space story film stuff, we've been on the real thing! just like those Apollo films from the Moon, except these suits are much lighter and handier. And real aliens with us!! That Ganymede's a cold hole, but they've got special oversuits for that sort of place.". Ganymede is a moon of Jupiter. Others called out also, with such a babble of talking all at once that our Mobiles' computers had their work cut out separating and recording the voices.

I watched with distaste, and looked for and turned angrily on the commander of the Army unit: "Instead of clearing and cordoning off the area and thinking of a plausible cover excuse, you just stand by and let this go on, as if they were scheduled planes at an airport with proper security around, instead of God-knows-who bringing God-knows-what from God-knows-where!?".

"It's OK, they're special planes just off the secret list." the commander said, "One of their pilots told me, and someone rang us to confirm it. Like the Stealth Fighter: that looked alien enough when someone saw it accidentally, but it turned out to be USA Earth stuff. I suppose it's something like that HOTOL project. That space travel talk of theirs is a publicity stunt, they said.".

That, these UFO's certainly were not, whatever anyone may have said over the phone. Luckily the film studio that we run as a cover has good make-up staff to disguise my face before I set out; the film producer Mr.Straker turning up leading a military team would endanger our secrecy. I disguised my voice. I desperately tried to plan disinformation to cover all this. Call them secret aircraft made by humans, like that Army man said? If so, people better not believe what the students were saying, as if they did ... I could not call them secret human spacecraft that could travel Solar System type distances only, as they said they had gone from Mars to Ganymede so fast that the craft must have gone faster than light or nearly so - unless I could bring suspended animation into the story, more and more fanciful and less and less convincing. And, more damagingly, some of them described a ride to Alpha Centauri in a day or two, much too realistic for me to tell them it was a simulation or deceit. Saying they were human-made long-range spacecraft would cause nearly as much unwanted public excitement and sensation as the truth. With public all round me there was little that I could officially do or reveal; I felt as out of place as those aliens, and cursed the secrecy rules which silenced me as effectively as any liquid-breathing spacesuit or diving suit would have. The truth was no longer only `out there' but sitting on the grass by Loch Lomond in sight of a hundred thousand people as the news spread.

Perhaps I could round up the students and reporters and interrogate and amnesia-treat them and tell them that my cover story was the truth - if there was not so huge a crowd for them to be lost in as soon as danger threatened, and the matter was getting all over the place on the Internet and CB and ham radio. The Internet, that friend and enemy of officialdom, giving, unplannedly and in some people's view inappropriately, every young irresponsible student type and backstreet computer fan the power of the CIA to gather and spread information but not responsibility who they spread it to. Or I could simply try to discredit the returnees - but unless these landings are stopped there may be another such group, and another, and more. Our usual amnesia drug that we used on outside people who had had contact with aliens or with us, only works for the memories of the last twelve hours; but with the landing deleted the returnees might be persuaded that the rest of their voyage was a hallucination; but how on earth to round up and truth drug interrogate and amnesia-drug half of north Strathclyde!? Despairing grandiose plans to restore secrecy evaporated in the cold shock of reason telling me that this one had got away. When ever would orders come from London and enough men to clear and cordon the area and perhaps send ground and air attack craft in? I had to remember that, although for us it was one more UFO incident, but a serious one, for most of the crowd it was that longed-for moment that they had never thought would come, the First Contact with men from beyond space, and breaking it up by force would risk the most serious consequences.

Previous SHADO drill in handling UFO landings was hopelessly inapplicable. "They were taken to the Moon and Ganymede to help in exploration?" I thought, and would have said if I could, "That's absurd, those aliens have been around for centuries and by now with their surveying and sensor kit they surely know everything about the Solar System that they need to know. More likely a show to look friendly, for what purpose? Certainly not kindness for its own sake.".

I had had as many SHADO fighter aircraft as I could moved to RAF Leuchars near Edinburgh, but when will more ground troops come? I went into a Mobile and radioed. Men had to be rounded up from remote battle training grounds or from leave. What could come quickly would have to come in radio silence. The sun grew hot. Hungry smells and burner noise from a fish and chip van did not help my men's attention to duty. A police car loudspeakered telling people to "please leave if you've seen everything you need to, to let other people in and avoid jams when everybody leaves". I swore to myself yet again, for there were plans that needed as many as possible of the people to stay there.

I looked again at the improbable-looking alien craft sitting openly among so many people, and their crew. The usual alien spacesuit helmet has a round top and a lower part which tapers somewhat downwards, grey opaque except a big faceplate, which is rectangular with rounded corners and also tapers somewhat downwards: it has a somewhat threatening appearance. As this sort of spacesuit is liquid filled and so constant volume, it is easier to prevent that bane of spacesuit design, pressure ballooning forcing the limbs out straight. Its life support gear is surprisingly small for its duration on a refill: even without long-trip adaptations an alien on the Moon once walked over two hundred miles with no more suit-recharging kit than he could carry. From us examining them, human spacesuits have been improved quite a lot, although we do not tell outsiders where we got the ideas.

Someone in an alien spacesuit came up to us and looked at us. His face was human. Seeing him in that spacesuit made in no factory on Earth breathing liquid in his helmet when there was good air all round gave some of us the shivers. He opened two valves on his suit. Inside his helmet a surface appeared and dropped down his face as the liquid flowed into a small tank. He blew a jet of the liquid from his lungs against his faceplate, then in half a minute of deep gurgly coughing and spluttering went to air breathing. He had surely done it more than once before, as there was none of the drowning-style panic and thrashing about that we had seen the various times we had to get rescued abductees (including once Foster) out of alien spacesuits. Someone said "how come newborn babies manage it so easily?". He opened his helmet faceplate.

I turned to a police control van again: "Damn the silly TV blowing this out live onsite like some common airshow before checking with authority, such a sensation that they even pushed live football aside for it, which I've never known before. Why didn't you send all this traffic round the A814 [the coast road via Helensburgh] and not let them see this lot and their silly passengers pretending they've been in space starting a sensation just for a lark!?".

"I tried. The roadblock south had to be at Balloch or nearer, so it didn't trap any of Dumbarton inside, and they just started to park there and surge across the fields like a tide. They're far too many for us. If I'd put a backup checkpoint at the coast road junction, checking who were residents behind the cordon coming home would have jammed the coast road as well, with all the people coming. And they're cutting across from Helensburgh and Garelochhead. I'm not risking thousands of them leaving cars blocking the coast road to walk across country to get past roadblocks. It'd take an army to stop this lot. Then an ambulance had to go up the valley to Luss, and I had to reopen the road. We've enough to do finding parking room off the road for them all. The Chief Constable said he's not stripping Glasgow so the gangs have a spree while we're all drawn off for a crowd gawping at whatever these four things are.". He still sounded very culture-shocked.

More people kept arriving. I watched in dismay and shock as a police sergeant, forgetting where he was in desperation to follow his training to keep traffic moving, ran up to the UFO's and pleaded with an alien, red liquid-breathing spacesuit and all, for loan of earth-moving gear to make gaps in roadside ditches and hedges along the roads so cars could park on more fields. Luckily the spring had been dry and the land was firm; the UFO crew, whose captain's auto-translater knew English, unloaded an odd-looking ground vehicle that could move earth, and drove it to the places, and did the job, aided sometimes by a few motorists who had a spade in the car and realized afterwards with some awe what they had worked alongside. The day dragged on and the sun was hot; the students took their spacesuits off. Some in the Army unit suspected that the students' talk of space adventures was not what they had been told by radio that it was, and said so. The UFO's and the police loudspeakered at intervals telling the crowd to stand back. The SHADO men watched helplessly.

I went up to the students, feigning a casual civilian-type curiosity. Among much excited talk about where they had been, they showed me some alien writing, some copied by them and some original. I had seen alien writing before. There were styles that may have been standard printed font, cursive, shorthand, and code, including one somewhat Chinese-like sample on a cut piece of bluish plastic sheet. They let me photograph it all.

One UFO released a small observation missile which rose about 4000 feet and flew about and returned. The UFO then to my dismay loudspeakered, warning in English that many more troops and what sounded from the description like armed forces scientific staff were on the way, and some short messages in an unknown language. The aliens, and the students, and some reporters who had films and tapes that they did not want to lose, ran to the UFO's, then into them. As every Army helicopter that could be gathered in haste appeared over Beinn Tharsuinn behind the place and Ben Vrackie to the east and split to land men in riotsquad kit in blocking positions in a arc round the site trapping the crowd against the lake, the UFO's took off south, low along the packed A82 and not over the exposed empty Kilpatrick Hills where they could be shot down without endangering anyone on the ground. In Bellahouston Park in west-central Glasgow, ignoring the extra sensation caused, they landed and unloaded the humans, who scattered into the crowded streets long before anything official could get there through the snarled-up city traffic. The UFO's shot straight up to space; I in tired shock saw no purpose in wasting any more shot and fuel on them, as we still had too little firepower on site to swamp the enemy's new anti-missile ability.

The planned massive Army cordon had little to do but pick up litter as it watched the crowd disperse, for a general who came realised that with the crowd in its excited state any attempt at a big camera-seizing operation would risk a massive riot beyond any use it would serve when so many people had got away with evidence already. Security force reaction had been grossly muddled, and too little and then too late. `They caught the shadow and let the substance escape', as the saying goes: or rather `they caught the SHADO', as Foster joked sourly afterwards: we were trapped in traffic there much longer than I like when other calls may have arisen. The police and armed forces returned to base. I dreamed of work all night as I slept in a Mobile on our way back to base.

The sensation slowly faded. At an emergency conference we decided what to say. The circular craft seen in the Glasgow area were USA experimental aircraft, as they themselves had told that Army squad indeed; the student types who they unloaded were local RAF cadets, and their talk of off-planet adventures was a rag-type stunt and a joke at the MOD's expense, and they had been disciplined for it. My film studio filmed or computer-generated supporting `news' footage. Reaction to the alarm had been delayed by having to round up three of my staff from a cafe in the village of West Harlington near my base; I had to remind them of the standing order to have all meal breaks at their workplace. The matter seemed to be settling down to how it was before.

Several politicians who had objected to spending money on SHADO or any other UFO-related organization suddenly changed their opinions on the matter. Two of them had been on holiday boat-fishing on Loch Lomond and, after a lifetime of refusing to treat as reliable for any job at all anyone who believed in UFO's, to their shock and dismay saw four of them flying over only fifty feet above them, clearly by day as solid craft and not just balls of light.

As to why the Earth end of the alien system suddenly revealed itself to men, there are various guesses. That they returned the students was probably to avoid scaring off other such groups; but why did they want such groups? Why didn't they return them secretly by night to a remote glen, perhaps with their memories of what had happened erased or overwritten? Perhaps they were merely trying to split human opinion by seeming friendly to create a pro-alien faction; perhaps a more serious plan. Suddenly starting to lose many men and craft by SHADO action after having their own way here for centuries or longer may have strained their long tradition of obedience to standing orders. Employing so many humans would expose them to human ways including human endemic insubordination, and may have woken in some aliens a spirit of cooperation and older and gentler feelings than the rules of secrecy that necessity forced on them; even before this, the UFO that took Foster got away too damaged to return to its base, and came back to the Moon to dump him out before it blew up. Or perhaps other reasons. We tried to patch up our plans and position.

New improvements to our anti-UFO in-air and space missiles promised to make them immune to UFO misleading and return fire once more. We hoped to prevent any more landings, whether for their usual missions or for any more disruptive Arden-style stunts. The next three UFO attacks were all seen off; there were no more `brew-ups', but all the UFO's were damaged and forced to limp away with their missions unachieved. Once Moonbase saw a remote explosion, as if a badly damaged UFO had got so far but had to be evacuated and detonated. A threat by the secret international committee that finances and controls SHADO, to close us down as unprofitable, receded at last. No more UFO's came for a while, and we caught up with work in our film studio public front at last. The geology students were back at their ordinary courses, and people seemed to have stopped believing their tales of space travel. But some Glasgow electronics postgraduates who had gone on what they said was a secret Government project, were still incommunicado and nobody knew where they were.

We still had Moonbase, which we needed for the GWD special equipment that we use to detect gravity disturbances caused by incoming UFO's slowing to sub-light speed, as it does not work well in Earth atmosphere and radio noise. If we have to change to having a tighter close-in defence of Earth, we will have to let all sorts of ordinary airforce fighters be equipped with UFO-buster missiles and let their pilots know that UFO's are real, with the expected consequences. "And if we can't see them till they're close up, we'll waste a lot more time chasing `fairies'.", as I had to point out to the Committee once.

After that they avoided the lurking peril of Moonbase as they had before, and came in to Earth anti-lunar or by decoy tactics or among meteor showers, but bolted to space when fighter planes got near. An occasional one landed. The Arden event was retreating into legend and official silence and disproof as fast as something that spectacular could be expected to. Five UFO reports in the USA Cascade Mountains proved to be `fairies', but the sixth was genuine; they ducked into a small lake and waited until it was safe to bolt to space anti-lunar; nobody was reported missing in the area, but, in a USA diving magazine and much too late, we found an underwater photograph of someone in a red `modern hardhat diving suit' with a motor-and-propeller backpack seen by chance in that lake - the photographer was one lucky scuba diver, coming back to tell of it. Police had to keep clearing cultists' camps off the farmland at Arden. The MOD wrote a sharp letter to the garage at Inveruglas. Loch Lomond had more tourists than before. Routine settled back in, as reported at length elsewhere, and seemed set in until the enemy gets tired of losing craft and pilots and stops coming.

THE DEFENCES FALL

On July 5 in Moonbase they were tidying up after the USA Independence Day celebrations. A siren sounded: "Incoming targets, five", and gave trajectory details. Interceptor pilots left books and board games and dropped into tubular sloping chutes which piped them through hardened silo walls into their craft's cockpits. Static defences were manned. Some new improved missiles had come: this would be a chance to try them out. "Yaah, liquid-breathers!" one of them shouted over his radio, "How many more times before you thieving foxes learn that this chicken-keeper's bought a shotgun at last!". They blasted out of their silos in a shower of disturbed regolith and up into space. Each had a missile ready to fire and three more in reserve: 12 missiles against 5 targets.

Behind them the sun shone on craters never seen by Earth-bound men as the moon dropped away. John Harrison in I.2 and his onboard computer noticed an extra star in the hindquarters of Leo the Lion, brightening fast on the last stage of their far journey across the void from their unknown home: he was the first to see a UFO in that action. More soon appeared. The Interceptors' computers radio-linked and assigned code numbers to the targets. He, and Mike Kaminski in I.3, fired together at target T1; the missiles as always were programmed to avoid each other and friendly craft. Part of his computer display was suddenly hidden by a new `window' showing a close-up of a UFO with something on its underbelly marked for his attention. Lacking time to appreciate art right then, he swore briefly as he pressed Alt-Tab on his computer keyboard to hide the distraction under the proper display. He waited impatiently as his missile-firer reloaded and prepared to fire at T3 so his missile and I.1's hit it together. It would be satisfying to see UFO's evaporate in fireballs again: seeing them limp away or be towed away and in some dread remote base far beyond our slow short rocket-powered reach and knowledge be repaired and re-used was not the same.

He aimed his craft and fired as Len Carrington in I.1 did; his computer at accelerated electronic thinking speed worked out what to do in this and that case in the battle ahead. The action was proceeding as planned, as it should, and routinely did before that ill-starred January 3rd. Fortunately rockets within their speed range accelerate better than UFO's. Alien technology was advanced, but showed little sign of having advanced further for a long time. As always had been, except occasionally a meteorite used as a crude bomb, and an attempt at kamikaze ramming, the only hostile return fire would be laser, which his craft, and now thankfully again his missiles, were proof against unless a UFO managed to aim at the same place too long.

I.3 fireballed as two UFOs' missiles hit it together piercing its fuel tanks.

Other missiles from the UFO's took out all of the first four SHADO missiles fired. I.1's second missile hit T5 in the underbelly, but much of its impact and blast was wasted destroying the extra bulge fitment that his computer had noticed and tried to tell him about. T5 made radio noises, perhaps calling for help, as he and I.1 bolted for home. They never got there; his craft shook and his computer screen showed an `error window' as an enemy missile took out his steering. His computer tried to steer with his docking-jets, and showed on a `window' enlarged pictures of one UFO after another; they all had the same new underbelly missile-pack bulge. The same happened to I.1. The UFO's closed in. He fired one more missile, but hit nothing. Before he could start any auto-destruct sequences, something broke his cockpit canopy open and cut his harness and pulled him out. "So I end, with my skin as a spacesuit." he thought, and closed his eyes and mouth and nose and tightened his chest and belly muscles as hard as possible, but something scooped him up and after the longest three seconds of his life he was in a pressure hold on board a UFO, with little hope of walking on his Earth again. The UFO's clustered round the two Interceptors and took them away into far remoteness.

Moonbase's shocked staff guessed what had happened from the pilots' radioings and the distant radar images. The enquiry and wondering what to do next began, after I had been helicopter-snatched out of a traffic jam at roadworks on the A40 in Ealing and airlifted the rest of the way to my office. In the hazards of running an armed space-patrol I had inevitably occasionally lost an Interceptor (the first soon after Moonbase came into operation during a massive over-late attempt by the aliens to destroy it), but not like this and so easily. All three gone. The words echoed in my brain. Until now I gave a lost Interceptor's number to its replacement, but not after this. Where were they getting all that new technology from? Why hadn't they used it earlier, without losing so many men and craft first? That was the agenda topic, but discussion soon became general.

"The further from base and backup, the harder it is to do things and to get an invasion past the beachhead stage." I said, "That's why the Viking settlements in America never came to much. And Cortez could never have conquered the Aztec empire without local allies. That's why I favour the `Minas Morgul theory', that means they've got a big outpost base quite near us, perhaps in our asteroid belt.". Minas Morgul is a place in Tolkien's fiction, a big enemy base outside the border mountains of Mordor, which was the great enemy's land.

"When those geology students at Arden told of their adventures in space, they said they'd been to such a base, but it was in the Alpha Centauri system.".

"We've only got Moonbase, and that can't do any big jobs, they've got to be shipped up from Earth. How long to get three more Interceptors made and sent there in bits in shuttlefuls and reassembled there - if they let us? It'd cost them a lot to take Moonbase out by attacking it head-on, but until we get more Interceptors there we can't stop them shooting every Moon-shuttle down and starving Moonbase out." someone said. "And what to tell the pilots' next of kin!?, all this secrecy.".

"Can't someone build an Apollo or shuttle big enough to carry an Interceptor up from Earth complete and fuelled and armed to fly and fight as soon as released? Even if it only serves to disturb the aliens and any damn misguided or brainwashed human helpers of theirs from their celebrating in the Great Hall of Moonbase.".

"Human helpers?" someone queried.

"Like that lot they unloaded at Arden, obviously." I said, "And that alien body we got hold of a bit before Regan died that turned out to be all human. Now as well as destroying all my Interceptors they've likely got two of my Interceptor pilots for their plastic surgery and overwriting their memories and retraining to reprocess them into alien UFO-crewmen to replace two of their men that they lost by SHADO action.".

"Just like I'd reprogram and re-use a suitable captured computer." Col.Freeman said grimly, "And likely given the identity of one of their men who he'd shot down before. All his personal life and memories of loved ones and achievements in training and battle gone as casually as deleting an unwanted computer file.".

"Once they attacked Moonbase and it had to use its emergency close-in defences." I said, "During this a UFO got through to Earth and picked up a man called Regan and his wife and 3 others on a country road at night near a spaceport. Its crew kept the rest of them, but when they found Regan was one of my Interceptor pilots they implanted orders in him and let him go, so next time he flew in an Interceptor he tried to kamikaze into Moonbase and only just in time came to his senses and pulled away; that was one narrow escape for us. Regan still crashed and it left us without Interceptor 1 until I could replace it. He'd been a good pilot.

When public are in earshot I'm hopelessly `gagged and handcuffed' by needs for secrecy, as you all know. Likely the alien top commander involved is also hampered by orders, in his case to take from Earth what he must and leave as few other signs of his presence as possible, so natives don't realize what's happening. That's likely why there are no provable cases that I can think of right now, of them in former centuries pretending to be gods wanting human sacrifices in exchange for such goods or services they could offer easily. OK, cultists say some old rock-drawings look like men in spacesuits; but they could as well be natives in fancy ceremonial clothes.".

"Are you sure they never did? There's flying craft in all sorts of old legends." someone said showing me a photograph, "OK, the rock paintings in the Tassili N'Ajjer in Algeria that some people go on about are too generalized to prove much, but what about this old rock painting from Fergana in Uzbekistan? That's a man in a spacesuit and helmet, or I've never seen one. Complete with helmet-to-suit fastening rings and two pipe-connections. Likely they usually only contacted in remote areas because in organized literary societies there was too much risk of some native king trying to grab their craft trapping them with an army too big for them to shoot their way out back to their craft.".

"What do you think they had to offer their contactees, in exchange?".

"Odds and ends that they could do easily at a quick visit, likely, such as: Some infertile women can be cured by giving her reproductive system a careful blow-through with sterile saline to clear muck out. Removing cataractous eye lenses. Using their guns to shoot man-eating or crop-raiding animals or clean out robber dens, and so start legends about heroes with magic weapons. Bits of simple technology. Round up the village or tribe and truth drug interrogate everybody to clear up disputes and find thieves and work-dodgers.".

"But how could people ever be so hard as to sell their own flesh and kin in exchange for that sort of thing!?".

"Those were hard times. Even in Britain well into the 19th century, petty thieves were routinely hanged as the only practical way to keep property safe. Chronic food shortage, made worse by endemic thieving and drought famines and neighbouring peoples crowding in wanting more room, and no way to keep money or property safe, and nobody had heard of police. All that sort of thing makes people hard. Superstitious uneducated people do all sorts of strange things to try to bribe favours from their gods, including offloading undesirables by `giving them to the gods'. Don't forget that in the African slave trade, West African chiefs and kings routinely sold their own people, or prisoners taken in local tribal wars, to European slave ships in exchange for cloth and suchlike, well into the 19th century: `we were their aliens, and big wooden ships were our UFO's'. Aliens driven by their own hard necessity knew this; often safer for them than raiding a large village or camp of natives who may fight back with arrows and spears. One thing aliens would not likely do here at the end of long communication lines, is a lot of heavy construction building temples and making big stone spheres and suchlike. Anyway, that time of routine contacts ended long ago.".

"Like in Mu and Atlantis?" said someone.

"Mu is damned trash cultist stuff and I don't want to hear of it again." I interrupted angrily, "Atlantis is Minoan Crete and the big Santorini alias Thera volcanic eruption and tidal wave about 1400BC plus someone misreading a symbol for `hundred' as `thousand' making it ten times as big each way and ten times as long ago. Lets get back to the present day.".

"Likely also it's only those secrecy orders that's stopped him from taking out Moonbase by kamikazeing a UFO into it at interstellar speed or bombing a big meteorite into it, because it'd make a flashbang that'd be seen easily on Earth like that big meteor hit in the Middle Ages that made Giordano Bruno crater. That may change, since he knew for some time that we knew that his people exist, particularly if he's so desperate to `improve your performance or you're for organs' that he shows his people to Men to try to split us by encouraging a pro-alien faction. Also, if they let no-one reach the moon the fascination for space that encourages such factions would turn people against the aliens, so SHADO could operate openly, and they likely by now know that, which restricts what they can do against Moonbase. If there were none of these damn silly popular space cultisms to become pro-alien factions, we could operate in public like any ordinary Armed Forces branch like the Marines etc and have far more budget and help and support to pay for far more craft and men than now, and the public and the ordinary police could tell us about ground and near-the-ground UFO incidents in time, and the aliens know it.

This going public to men may be in breach of his orders, and now he's realized that he may as well be hanged by his superiors for a sheep as for a lamb. A mess on both sides. Perhaps he's in trouble for not noticing Moonbase being built in time so they could take it out easily before it got into operation, as well as for losing so many men and craft after that; the attempts they've made to put Moonbase out of action have been too little and too late. They did once try to kamikaze a UFO into our headquarters, but one of our fighter planes destroyed it. They didn't try that again.".

"Yes, many tricks but all with the same kit, didn't understand or like having to use anything new. I could name some humans who are like that. Comes from having lived unopposed without change for too long. Well, they've got different kit now. Face it, the turkey shoot's over. We've had it too easy so far, sitting here shooting them as they come. Now they've got much better antimissile lasers, interference guns or something like that, and now their own missiles. It can't be factories sending us bad stuff which goes wrong in use, we test everything thoroughly before we send it up. Now they've got two Interceptor wrecks to examine, and likely their pilots captured alive. If so, one syringeful of alien truth drug each and they're open books.".

"Why they used only lasers before in space could be some old standing order or custom or religious rule against wasting metals as space projectiles. After so long running a space effort they're likely down to the leavings of the leavings of their metals resources plus what they asteroid-mine where they can and they need all their ingenuity to make spaceworthy craft at all, and they haven't got the means to make them routinely resistant to atmospheric oxygen. Something's knocked them out of their old stasis and given them new stuff, and I want to know what.".

"From what I.1 managed to send back, it seems those damn new missile kits of theirs can turn like a tank's turret and fire any way on the UFO's current horizontal, not only straight ahead like our Interceptors and fighters.".

"I take it you meant before that instead of sitting cosy in a shooting hide on the Moon we should set forth across the outer wilderness to that alien `Minas Morgul', if it exists, whatever they call it, and attack them far from our bases in their own den like when Tsar Ivan the Terrible of Russia didn't stay near Moscow waiting for Tartars to come but marched out far across the steppe and attacked them in their own capitals Kazan and Astrakhan to stop their continual raiding. How? The Tartars and the Russians had the same sort of transport, but in our spacecraft how the devil to get enough attack force to wherever that place is!? It's as if we're on foot through foodless waterless desert and they've got helicopters. To them Alpha Centauri's the next town; to us even our own asteroids are beyond reach to manned craft. I did have ideas that way once, when I had better hopes than now of finding and copying how UFOs' drives work.".

"About us saving people from alien abduction, if we went public many would say we'd save lives for far less cost in money and materials each by preventing road accidents, or fitting heart-attack-prone people with automatic heart restarters, or medical work in poor nations, or the like.".

"There are other opinions among aliens also: one tried to defect to us that time; one saved Foster's life on the Moon once, and was shot on sight for it by a misunderstanding.".

"I reckon there's chlorine-breathing aliens here already, the amount of scuba divers I've seen with yellow cylinders." Foster joked tiredly to try to relieve the tension, "I know the standard industrial gas cylinder identification colours even if a lot of scuba divers don't.".

A message came over my personal radio that two more UFO's were incoming: I heard it over a deaf-aid-type earpiece without other people hearing it. I told them about it and pushed my chair back in case I had to run to my headquarters's control room, but continued the meeting.

"How much longer do we call them `UFO's'? They are no longer unidentified.".

"If we must admit that UFO's are real, there's one thing governments'll have to stamp on hard. Too many silly cults say that if Man is a good little boy for long enough and cleans his teeth every day and eats all food offered without query, or clears away all pollution and preserves nature, etc, then the kind aliens will take him for a nice holiday in space, and solve all his problems, etc. Not bloody likely. I get sick of such schizo rubbish. Like the trouble the police have had at Arden since that landing. Like the UFOism that that place Roswell in America has such a trade in, after that UFO crashed there that time. Could we prosecute such people for aiding the enemy in a time of war? That's only a beginning of what'll likely be let loose if we admit in public that aliens and UFO's exist. Far too many people'll trust them blindly, and they'll take advantage of that.".

"I'm beginning to wonder how much longer we can keep SHADO secret. The aliens know nearly everything about us: like that time they made an imitation of our headquarters under the Atlantic to give our men false orders: they got everything right including what colour tie I wear. And other evidence. So far it's stopped with the aliens, who kept away from men except when abducting. Until now, and they told those geology students about us, and those students are telling everybody else. The world's governments have just about managed to gag the main public media from spilling all those beans, but they can't stop the `alternative press' and the Internet. Against all that, disinformation and secrecy orders to the press and TV are just about holding the lid on and persuading most people to bracket us with the `Men in Black' and such myths, and to believe that those students were hoaxing and the UFO's were USA aircraft. We were dangerously near becoming public knowledge, like those tales about Area 51 and all that, but it's starting to slacken off, thank God, else - it'd only take one of our men to `not like what's going on' and go public.

Even before that, more and more people saw our Mobiles, and air battles with UFO's, and the like, and people started to put two and two together. FBI men and the like have started nosing about after whatever they think we are. NASA men are complaining about what to them are unexplained restrictions on scientific space activity, that keeping our space work secret is causing them. I was never more thankful about security than when that moon mining firm Dalotek that was operating near Moonbase, shut down. But if there's another public-relations landing like Arden - well, we better not allow another. And people round here have been starting to guess there's something odd here, by how little they see the studio staff in the village, and the same when this place was being built, workmen sleeping on site, everything down to food and beer and newspapers for the workmen trucked in from afar, no return for losing one farm and parts of three more for land for this place, our own fuel pumps for visitors' cars even, no compensation for John Maldon at Home Farm converting that barn into bed-and-breakfast rooms only to get no trade for them. OK, OK, one of the first security precautions is for a place to have its own bar, better than having men work on building hidden rooms or putting secret stuff in and then they go to the White Horse and drink loosens their tongues in front of a lot of farm men and trippers.

Talking about landings and disappearances, does anyone know where those Glasgow University electronics postgraduates are? December last year, same time as those geology students went away, we now know who with, they said they'd be away working for a secret Government project, but nobody's heard anything of them since.".

"Some say: `If the Arden craft were human planes, then gas-mains can fly.'.".

"Erh??".

"In the last war the Germans sent rockets called V2's at London. One landed at Beckton, I think it was, and made a big bang. The UK government covered up and said the explosion was a gas main blowing up; but people had seen the rocket come over, and talked sarcastically about `flying gas-mains'.".

"If we admit what we've been doing against aliens, we'll have `all the hosts of Mordor' against us, as you said, all those cultists and space story fans. And if we say the aliens have been abducting, a lot of them'll call it `typical CIA-type disinformation and smear campaign', that sort of popular mythology, and silly TV comedy programmes treating it as yet another unjustified fear to poke fun at, and so on, until the comedian responsible may well end up telling his wisecracks to the inside of a UFO's hold on the one-way road.".

"Something different:" I interrupted, "At Arden some of those students showed me some alien writing they'd got hold of in their travels, some original, some they'd copied onto paper. They let me photograph it. The photographs are here.".

They looked at them. What secrets of technology far beyond ours did they tell of? One of them was the `Chinese-like' piece, about 30 characters scraped with a sharp point into a cut piece of tough bluish plastic sheet.

"Where was that piece from?" said someone.

"One of the students said it was in an repair and storage base of theirs on an asteroid orbiting Proxima Centauri, that they went to. It's part of some old UFO hold lining that they must have ripped out and replaced some time ago. It was in a heap in a storage area.".

"Well, the other samples are nothing I've ever seen, but that blue piece is no sort of alienese, it's good Earth Chinese. The rune-like deformity comes from it being scratched in a hurry into a hard surface. I was in Hong Kong for 17 years, I learned Chinese there.".

The Chinese at various times invented gunpowder and rockets, flamethrowers, printing, and multi-arrow-firing machines long before Europeans did, and what I had read of cult belief in a long-ago advanced human technologization before the modern one, plus other more sensible guesses, started to surface in my mind, but were interrupted when someone asked "Well, what does it say!?".

"Hang on while I sort it out: old-style literary Chinese tends to read like an over-abbreviated telegram, and worse if he's trying to be brief. It looks like: `Chiang Erh-wang of Nankow in Hopeh was carried in this dragon chariot in strange red armour, drowned but living. He [had been] hunting in the mountains, slept, and woke in here. [It is] Wan Li's 3rd year [as emperor]. May the Emperor of Heaven be merciful.'. That was 1575, in the Ming dynasty. The Emperor of Heaven was the chief of the Chinese gods. Nankow is north of Beijing.".

It was nothing sensational, merely the same yet again but long ago. A Chinese man, rich enough to learn to read and write, caught away from habitation by night and abducted, put into a liquid-breathing spacesuit long before humans had or imagined any sort of spacesuit, desperately recording himself as he could unimaginably far from home before his unknown but to me guessable fate. One human life from a young crowded water-rich world to save, at least for a while, several aliens from a drying dying world - which side would a neutral judge support? But I am not neutral, and I defend my own human people.

Later, after all this had blown over and there was no point in the secrecy, I sent an agent to Nankow to enquire. After so many wars and disorders since there was still a Chiang family there, whose archives recorded the disappearance. He had been a travelling official; landowners that he called on sometimes took him hunting as a pay-off. Even so the only memorial tablet his people got for him was a piece of alien repair shop waste, and that four centuries late.

"I'm not sending any more Interceptors to the Moon until we've got much better weapons." I said, shocked, "From now on the Moon gets supplies if they let it, else we pull out back to Earth.".

"But - our whole position - all the money invested -" General Henderson, older than the rest, started.

My earpiece suddenly started making frantic noises. I said "sorry, excuse." curtly, calling for quiet, and phoned a number.

"What is i..." I started, irritated at the interruption, when the reply came.

"They got SID!" came an alarmed voice with a background of communication room noise and alarmed shouting, "Those two UFO's just went past it and instead of it our radar now shows only a debris cloud!".

I announced what had happened. "Damn. Missiles from a distance, I suppose. After all the trouble proofing it against UFOs' lasers and so on, and that far out to be right away from Earth ground noise it'll be a hell of a cost putting another up, plus having it made with all that special Utronics stuff in and keeping it secret. I'm sick of having to make up cover stories for all these bills. Those filthy new missiles of theirs." I said, "Bang go all the special surprises on board SID in case anything tampered with it or poked inside it. All three Interceptors, and now this. This time the boffins better give me properly UFO-weapon-proof and jamming-proof Interceptor missiles, before I send anything more up. I've wasted enough transport replacing missiles only for the aliens to crack the new ones within a month, since all this started. And on top of that we now need a reliable fast-working compact anti-missile system. What the hell's got into them, all this new stuff sent against us all of a sudden!? Or do we go back to letting them quietly come and take people as they want and otherwise leave us alone, buying peace by selling human lives?".

"How many lives?" Foster replied, "I've seen photos of UFO's with another sort of underbelly clip-on that looks like a scoop-pack. I've seen in the desert east of Asyut in Egypt where something in the night shovelled up two tentfuls of Bedouin, tents and all. Nine days ago one of our aircraft was over the Auvergne mountains in France chasing one that had one of those scoop-packs; as it shot up to space out of a deep valley near the Puy de Sancy it ejected what proved to be a bale of three trash-compacted hang-gliders: where are their pilots? I wouldn't like to be shot down and have to parachute with one of those around. They're getting bolder and bolder.".

The debate went on for a while, but got nowhere. Transport to Moonbase in the next weeks was often buzzed by UFO's but not interfered with. Scientists desperately tried to design a new Interceptor to stand up to the new threat. More airforce planes were armed with anti-UFO missiles as I tried to organize a tighter defence closer-in within what governments would pay us for. There was quiet for a while. Two radar echoes that may have been UFO's came and stood about 300,000 miles off Earth. Our spacecraft suppliers started making another Interceptor. The public tales about us had stopped and were retreating into myth. Relatives and department-mates of the Glasgow electronics postgraduates received telephone calls or email messages from them saying that they would be back soon; that was that matter tidied up and shown to be irrelevant. Then came the 11th of October.

The six alien craft came in from the direction of the middle of Virgo, reached the Moon, swooped low over the empty Interceptor silos near Moonbase, and away to Earth. They all had the new feared underbelly bulge. They came in prograde over the North Atlantic. As seen on a spy satellite image they all turned into fireballs - but it was only air heated by fast deceleration from space speed, as with a re-entering Moon-shuttle, and they came out of it unharmed over France near Bordeaux. Jet fighters came after them, but UFO's make no hot exhaust for heat-seeking missiles to follow. They rose out of reach to 40 miles, feinted towards south England making us scramble our fighters there draining their fueltanks, turned across East Anglia out to sea towards Norway, then suddenly turned northwest and descended, came ashore near Morpeth, and ran for Scotland. Three of my fighters came after them and tried to take their best chance over the empty lands of Ettrick east of Moffat away from ground witnesses and risks of ground casualties, but again their missiles behaved oddly, and the pilots saw that this time the UFO's could shoot back effectively. The fighters were VTOL and could hover but very fuel-expensively, and after an eddy of chasing and shooting over the bare dominating heights of Ettrick Pen and Capel Fell they kept back away and had to be content with following until they had to return to base. One of my planes was hit, but its pilot baled out and floated down to the north slope of Bodesbeck Law above the Moffat Water watching pursuit going away northwest over the Southern Uplands.

I sent from RAF Leuchars other planes with new improved anti-UFO missiles, but by the time they made contact the intruders had passed Motherwell. One of the UFO's radioed in English on an RAF frequency: "Do not fire. We have Earth-men on board." as they swooped too low over Govan and Clydebank in Glasgow for us to risk any of them exploding. They flew northwest and settled on flat land north of Arden by Loch Lomond, on a warm weekend with the lakeside road busy.

It was the same again, and the men available could not cordon off or clear the area in time. People gathered as the news spread. Several live-TV news reporters helicoptered in, astonishingly promptly, over the heads of police trying in vain to keep this one private. The craft seemed a somewhat different colour from most previous sightings. 42 people from the far distances in red spacesuits made in no factory on Earth came out onto Scottish grass as people who had seen the craft coming in low over the city bypassed attempted checkpoints and swarmed in over the fields and hills in huge numbers. I and Foster were in RAF Leuchars at the time, and we quickly helicoptered to the site as people still swarmed in like army-ants. I decided not to try a ground assault.

Of the 42, 28 went easily to air breathing with the usual unattractive noises and opened their faceplates. Two others were obviously less used to it, and had to be tied to frames, and strained at their bonds in the usual drowning-like panic like Foster had before, as they went to air mode. The two saw me and Foster, and when untied opened their faceplates and ran over to us. They were John Harrison and Len Carrington, and they addressed me as Commander in full public earshot. They said afterwards that they had not been forced to do or say anything; but their captors long ago found how to quickly effectively coerce or extract information without their victims knowing that they had been coerced.

The 28 were the electronics postgraduates and some other people from the university and the area: I knew, as I had brought a file of missing persons. Now I knew where they had telephoned from, and how they had been telephoned in late November and early December the previous year to offer them the secret research jobs, and how the army detachment at Arden on May 7th had been telephoned: a way impossible when most telephone calls went by cables on the ground, but all too easy now so many calls go via interferable radio or microwave links to and from satellites. That UFO's have been eavesdropping on communications is likely enough; but that they make calls pretending to be someone on the ground seemed silly - and then in these days of satellites all too possible and the idea made my blood run cold. A missing persons list that we had at last got hold of a fortnight before this said that, some time ago at the same day and area as the Kicking Horse Pass incident, three Canadian telephone engineers who also were satellite linkup experts had disappeared during site work on cables.

We listened in angry secrecy-gagged frustration and a tired feeling of inevitability to a councillor from Dumbarton who should have known better going into a by now predictable speech about cooperation between peoples, and bringing back local employment which had been poor since the area's heavy industry had declined, and so on. There was nowhere private to talk except in our craft or theirs. John and Len stayed near me, remembering too late not to acknowledge me in public. In a long struggle like crabs moulting, their human forms emerged from their encasing alien spacesuits. A crewman came up and took the spacesuits back. I could tell by his face through the liquid in his helmet that he was no offspring of Earth. Where did all this lead, inappropriately like some ordinary expedition returning? Yes, it had happened again. I felt helpless and unreal. The crews stayed near their craft and their weapons. I could not say anything against the aliens, because I dare not risk the human mass casualties that a crowd attack on them and their well-armed craft would cause, and many in the crowd would aid the aliens and attack us instead. Some of the 28 unsuited and went into a Glasgow University coach, still in a highly excited state at where they had been. It looked reasonably soundproof, and I and Foster went in with them.

"They said they were a secret government body when they booked us." one of the postgraduates said, "We took a bus to the right time and place that evening, and what I thought were divers came out of the loch. Not scuba divers, but in those things like spacesuits that some deep-water work divers wear. No flippers, they had motor and propeller backpacks instead. They said they were the people who'd booked us. Then six UFO's came out of the loch. We couldn't see them well, it was dark, and I didn't believe in UFO's before that. They said they were experimental vehicles. We got in. Those geology students came later: they were scuba diving and found us, and the crew were going to swim out and take them on board because of secrecy, but they came in by themselves to see what we were. After a day or two they put us in suits like theirs and the ships lifted and flew out of the water and up the valley. We went down Glencoe in the moonlight: I recognized it through a porthole. We wondered just what was happening. After a bit we went straight up into space. I never thought that'd happen to us. Yeehaa! We've been millions of times further than Aldrin and Armstrong and the rest! They paid us well, never mind how, to help them develop some stuff. The places we've been! I've seen the Sun as an ordinary 2nd magnitude star at the end of Cassiopeia. Those spacesuits of theirs are something else! One of us tried his in air-breathing mode, and in space it ballooned his arms and legs out straight unless he wrapped a lot of banding round them to hold the pressure in. The Russians had to do that with their cosmonaut spacesuits. But in liquid mode it behaved just right in space. Real right panic it is for anyone going back to air mode the first time, but we've got used to it.".

So they talked, in such a high at distances and alienness that they had seen that no amount of stern words would have got anywhere. Of all the worst things to happen. Contact with peoples previously unknown, a job only for the few most experienced and responsible men accustomed to running organizations and delegating responsibility and taking decisions after long consultations with all possible bodies and showing the proper managerial attitude, had gone to - that rash young lot, just at the worst age for being automatically for anything which is against the established order, plus a few older harder armaments trade men only interested in profit and never mind who from.

"Look, it's that Straker and Foster from that Shado that they told us about!, bunch of CIA-type secret licenced murderers shooting every alien craft and alien they saw just out of scaredness and xenophobia." one of them said.

Hearing yet again evidence of what my long-term enemies now knew, and how they were trying to turn public opinion against us, on top of now knowing how they had been pushed out of their long stasis, anger at the massive spoilage of my organization's spacecraft and orders and purpose finally broke wide open my training and disciplining to automatic secrecy when in public as their excited remarks confirmed what had been going on. I addressed them:-

"OK, so they didn't tell you the truth what they were when they rang you, tapping the satellite or whatever they did. Doesn't excuse you collaborating with them like you did when you found what they are. As you seem to know a lot about SHADO, I'll speak my mind. You disloyal sewage designing that fancy new missile system for those creatures from the far end of nowhere, you cost me all three Interceptors in one day, at least one of their pilots dead and the rest captured, and our main detector satellite soon after, no way to stop them starving Moonbase out whenever they want, much harder to stop UFO's from reaching Earth and taking whatever they want and getting away routinely. And you made anti-missile kit for them before that. If you think I'll sit by and let you be feted like the first astronauts while a fancy lawyer in court lock-picks through the prosecution's case for locking you up and throwing the key away for aiding the enemy that you sewage of traitors deserve, `you're for organs', as your fancy new friends'd likely say. Now I know what happened, you totally irresponsible wild young lot like I'd have rejected after the first few seconds of interview and never let anywhere near my organization until you'd had several years in security-non-sensitive jobs to settle down and get experience, never mind letting you loose in armed interstellar spacecraft.".

"Sewage?" one of them replied, "Yes, we smell right for that, been shut in their spacesuits in long-trip mode for weeks on end, shows we're not soft business-class airline passengers riding cosy in a pressure cabin. At least we worked with them properly and didn't just shoot them on sight. And two of us invented a handy anti-oxidation coating for their ships so they can stand a long time in air. Cool off, man, who said the turkey-shoot stage was going to last for ever like some space-invaders game? Or that Earth could act isolationist for ever like Tokugawa Japan did before Commodore Peary sailed into Yedo in 1853? I saw one of us `press the button' on SID: Zap splat! One less electronic noseybody!".

"Very well," I said, also not liking what I was to know all too well later as long-trip asteroid miner undersuit smell, "you bright young irresponsible bunch ready to try anything new, show off in those alien spacesuits making out you are the new Gagarins off to bring news back from where nobody's been before. Never mind how many Earth people each of those spacesuits have likely contained before, on the one-way road, in the long record of people disappearing in UFO incidents until at last we could stop them. Soon likely they'd have stopped coming. Now look what you've done, running your private little `Area 51' collaborating with them getting a real fancy high of thrill being in a space thriller come to life. Next time think!, before rushing ahead improving weapons of some lot from God knows where beyond the light-years without checking with authority first. Because of what you did just for profit and as an interesting postgraduate project, the outer part of Earth's defences against that lot of marauders is down and the inner part crippled, and look like staying so for weeks at least. Do you know what that means!? I don't think they'll just fly by and do nothing as we try to re-arm Moonbase, like before when they were used to meeting no resistance. What am I expected to do? Become `Supreme Headquarters, Alien Diplomatic Organization', having to be polite to those creatures and guide them in and out like a harbour pilotage, and Earth is no longer master of its own affairs!?".

"Oh, they abduct, do they? Don't give me that sort of stuff. Typical secret agency type disinformation to reinforce old paranoias, by the sound of it. Anyway, they say a lot of UFO's are not the real thing but balls of discharge from funny electric effects in the air which also affect anyone's brain that's near and make memory gaps which their subconscious fills in afterwards with whatever they've been brought up with, and nowadays that's often space stuff such as abduct-and-return experiences.".

It had happened as I thought it would. Government and financial bodies of one sort and another tell so many lies and half-truths and cover-ups that when someone does tell an unwelcome or unexpected truth it is too often not believed.

The coach driver started his engine. It was time to go, or it would be my turn to go on an unwanted journey. I went out. As I reflected that the coach engine's dirty diesel-powered smell was at least something Earthly after all that had happened, one of the UFO's sealed itself and took off after the coach, clearly checking for any `unfair' attempt by human authorities to detain the coach's passengers on their way home. So confident that now one was running armed escort here. The councillor had promised all there safe-conduct and such politeness "on behalf of Earth's peoples and nations", although he had no right to: if he was an accredited United Nations space envoy with due official backing, then I am a Klingon. The rest of the 28, and the alien crew, went back on board. There was nothing that we could safely do, as I and Foster looked with helpless anger from close up at their craft's new ominous underslung missile-packs which have made them so bold in public, and at their designers, and at the small picture of an Interceptor which one of them sported as a kill trophy. The craft took off and away. The people went home.

TIME OF DISASTER

Time went by, and the attempt to get it universally believed that the craft were USA aircraft was harder than before as landings multiplied. Two of my operatives went public, but with a desperate effort we managed to get them discredited as cranks and their memoirs suppressed, and then the old standby, having them committed to a secure institution; which the two lots of returnees read of in the papers and `for a while were wise'. Our aircraft damaged a few UFO's and saw more off but never again destroyed one. Over the next four months we managed to get an Interceptor up to Moonbase in shuttlefuls of parts and assemble it there, a long job, as all of it had to be in small enough pieces to be carried inside, and the makers, not told what the parts were for because of secrecy, far too often ignored official pleas for priority but queued it in with ordinary work. When a solar ion storm radio blackout at last happened when no UFO's were in detector range I finally sent it on a test flight, but when dared I use it? The designers on Earth could give no date for its necessary anti-missile system, for they also could not be told what it was for to override their excuses and put it before other work and time-wasting proceduralisms.

I went to the makers yet again. They demonstrated at length a fast patrol boat equipped to submerge and scoop up scuba divers, that had been much ordered by inshore naval and fisheries patrols; but my space missiles were no further advanced. I had that gagged and handcuffed feeling again, for yet again secrecy, even more necessary in the face of public pro-alien feelings after the Arden events, stopped me from telling him why they were so urgent. When I went out to my car afterwards I heard a radio report that in the poisoned land of Bitterfeld north of Leipzig in eastern Germany, polluted so badly with chemicals during Communist times that men see no near future of it coming clean, four UFO's had taken off from a large chemical works. My staff had not noticed them until they were nearly out of atmosphere, as nothing had been seen to land in the area. We have wasted enough plane time on `fairies' and weather balloons and the like; `when the balloon goes up' is no figure of speech with us. A jet fighter (not ours) got near enough to photograph them; thankfully they did not have the new underbelly missile-packs. As they went near the Moon to get extra speed by the gravity `slingshot effect', they radioed, but, after what the Arden events revealed, Moonbase was even less interested in such pleas from `a fox caught nosing round the hen run saying it was just looking', but sent the new Interceptor after them; it fired, and jolted one, but did not make it explode. They went away into the deeps of space far beyond Man's reach, towards Mars. But I had an undefinable disquiet that something was different.

That was on 1st October; eight days later a single incoming UFO seemed no different from many others. It came in anti-lunar as was now usual, and neared Earth retrograde, as its pilot saw our planet change fast from a sky object into a world below him. It passed over the dreaded inland salt-deserts of Iran, the Dasht-e-Lût and the Dasht-e-Kavîr, places as unearthly as the emptynesses that it had come from. By now many of the Earth's more reliable airforces were under secret orders to pursue UFO's, and it knew that. It put up three lots of them wasting their fuel by feinting in various directions, but 7 miles above Tabûk in western Saudi Arabia it finally went into a landing run northwards. Mafraq airfield in Jordan was put on alert, but north of Ma'ân it turned northwest to the Negev, and lost distant pursuers' radar by ducking under the lip of the spectacular desert erosion crater called HaMakhtesh HaGadol, the Great Mortar. I sent after it two of my fighters who were over southern Lebanon chasing what had proved to be `fairies'. It flew north low up the middle of Israel, startling a lot of people, and on my men's radar disappeared again into the geography near the Israeli Air Force (IAF) base at Ramat David, where fighters got up and there was a flurry in the air. My men flew there, and saw the place, with disbelief. The UFO was sitting on the ground among the fighters quite quietly as if it belonged there. As they approached, it and three fighters taxied into a hard silo, whose doors then shut. A radio voice from the ground ordered my two planes to land. They had to obey, as they were too short of fuel to run for it.

"You've got a UFO here." Ken Ashleigh, one of my planes' pilots, said, "We saw it. We were assured the cooperation of the world's major airforces against them. Your army will have to keep it in here while specialist weapons are brought in to deal with it.".

"We've got nothing here unidentified or that doesn't belong here." the base commander answered, "If you want to look around, you can.".

They were shown round, and in silos but not in that one. As they went round, a man came in, wearing a full space-type pressure suit with IAF symbols on it. Its flexible parts were blue, and at the time it was in air-breathing mode, but its helmet and life-support kit including a liquid tank were of alien spacesuit type. Another jet-pilot type came, certainly human and in flying overalls, but his breathing was gurgly, and his face was discoloured by alien spacesuit type breathing liquid. When my pilots were allowed back to their planes to collect property they heard over their radios that the previous four UFO's had returned to Bitterfeld, following an airliner closely to avoid shot as UFO's often did in these times, and had gone into buildings. My pilots managed to get refuelled, and returned to base.

Over the next 2 months I heard of 5 other such incidents, and I knew what they meant. A complaint in the United Nations by a man representing various medium and small nations about "our peaceful space exploration and research craft being harassed and shot at by unidentified jet fighters and in one case by an armed rocket-type spacecraft based on the Moon" only confirmed my suspicions. Several uncoordinated groups of Men had made and used UFO-type FTL (faster than light) craft. Our attempts to keep it all secret took more and more of our time and effort and got ever more desperate.

The Israeli FTL group that Ashleigh found is innocent: they were told their FTL knowledge by the German Bitterfeld group as a `backup copy' in case of overt or covert interference from the major powers. The Bitterfeld FTL group are an industrial firm who got their FTL knowledge by means that they will not specify, except to say "At least we got on with the job and developed it, instead of discussing considerations for ever and ever amen, and just when we think they've finally finished they dig up several more considerations and they're off again and the work never gets started." and suchlike.

From Magnitogorsk in Russia also, UFO's took off which had never flown in, and some of them did not return. It came out later as I had suspected, that place was making them for aliens, who were supplying the drive units (sealed to prevent humans looking inside them); the place was paid by being allowed to keep for itself one in every three or four of the craft that they made. Approach by us to their government achieved nothing.

All this was despite the secret international agreement that we were part of, to keep the Outside out and Man from getting the means for a wide-ranging space exploring habit. Many are in two minds about Earth starting a big space effort. For one thing, metal lost on a planet is got back in the end much more often than metal lost in space: ever more metal is lost in derelict spaceships and space stations, some enormous, that have been lost track of, and in non-return missiles and probes, and the planet's people have to go further and further for construction metals and fuel, until choice is so limited that the standard alien spacecraft had to be made of metal that rots fast in our air. It is expensive in men and work, and the more that is surveyed and mapped, the more the astronomer and explorer types want to push further, and so on it goes. Why did aliens suddenly start selling UFO-drives to men, and then let men have their space drive technology, risking us building better space-interceptors to stop them raiding? The second part was almost certainly not `the aliens' but a few aliens or even just one betraying his own side to get a position of power in some large Earth company's or small nation's new space effort, or in exchange for supplies or weapons: a disobedience within a disobedience, a total mess on both sides. I also have the sense to guess that UFO-drives supplied by aliens might contain a precaution against anti-alien use of any craft that they are built into.

The dreaded thing happened. Never since the second Arden landing had we and the secret committees who control us managed to make our cover properly secure again; it strained out, and now it split and broke open like a volcano blasting out the incinerated remains of careers, secrecies, assurednesses, and political and organizational reputations and policies. The world learned the truth. All the `hosts of Mordor' came out against us: Aetherius Society, Scientologists, space fiction fan groups, every crank cult that developed, until reason returned at last. SHADO headquarters was under seige by demonstrators for weeks, people dressed as fictional aliens and their idea of the real aliens, the placards "Straker Murderer" and similar, and so on, until I had to have its grounds perimeter fortified like an army base, and there was no more point pretending it was only a film studio. It was far from a `total disintegration of modern Earth society', but for us and for many it was bad enough. Many groups with unrelated grievances such as long-term unemployment joined in. In Washington riot police fought a savage 11-day battle to defend CIA headquarters from rampaging crowds. Distant roadblocks and the waterless hot width of the Nevada desert kept most of the trouble away from Area 51, but could not stop many of its staff from going public. NASA (except a few of its top men who already knew of us officially) suddenly and angrily saw the reason for a strange pattern of secrecy orders and censorships and restrictions that they had been under for years, and flight schedules burdened by many bulky secret loads to and from the Moon on different excuses, and, saving their own skins at our expense, did not mince words about the delays it had caused to scientific work and space kit research and development. Some Moon-mining commercial firms complained similarly.

Far too many people are space-mad. UTC's (UFO-Type Craft) are all too easy for large companies or small nations to build, now the secret is out. We have had to protect landed aliens from mobbing cultists, and find them bed and workshop room at our headquarters in what used to be my public front's film studios, and let them park their spacecraft on our lawns. Public knowledge of our amnesia drug got us flamethrowered even more by the newspapers and TV and civil liberties groups for weeks, and now we are forbidden to use it.

Man now has FTL, got in no honourable way. It could have been otherwise. Those alien spacesuits that those eager young students proudly paraded in at Arden, and the alien craft that they flew in, could have been of human design and make. Now that man has FTL anyway, the secret labs that supplied us the GWD gear, labs so secret that even I was not allowed in or to know what was happening in them, admitted they discovered the principle of FTL at least ten years before. They could have released it to a single space authority to get it working so we could easily know what authorized spacecraft were where and use patrol FTL craft to easily stop all alien craft much further from Earth. As it is, they hid it, and published convincing articles saying why it was impossible, leaving my labs to have to poke about in unsafe parts of the few available UFO wrecks to try to find what I now know that man already knew, until many doubtful groups got FTL technology from aliens in secret deals probably grossly against our moral rules and both sides' laws, and encouraging an interstellar scramble for position. The 18th and 19th century scramble for colonies, each major nation having to take what it could before someone else grabbed it and added it to its power base, was expensive enough in lives and sea-ships and national effort; but Earth's surface is finite, and that stage ran to its natural end. But space is far bigger, and a scramble for colonies could run indefinitely; we are likely to get entangled in interstellar politics, and people to get lost in space and need finding in an impossibly huge volume.

Some of the Glasgow students had brought back photographs from Mars and Ganymede. They also inevitably claimed discoverer's rights to name things, and in the cover-up were refused, but after secrecy collapsed they reasserted their claim and had to be listened to. This caused trouble at the Astrophysical Space Commission's names committee.

"For a start, some of the people's names they've used are totally against our rules of who to commemorate:" said a member, "the rule is scientists and other famous people, and traditional mythologies; OK, Shakespeare is acceptable, such as for Uranus's moons, but I don't like this bunch of James Bond character names that lot are trying to put on the maps of Mars; and all these names in alienese, such as for this dry stream bed - kliv-vig-"

"Khlîvighdakaghep. Circumflex means long vowel." said one of the students who had been allowed to attend, and explained what the name referred to.

"Oh indeed!?" I replied angrily, "Even if you translate it into Latin to get nearer to convention, as `Fossa Khlîvighd', I see little reason for me as the leader of SHADO to put up with a place that near Earth being named in memory of some alien who came here to raid once too often and was killed by SHADO action. Try `Fossa Kaminski' (he died piloting Interceptor 3 resisting them), or after one of the many people who disappeared in UFO incidents before SHADO started. Lets try translating them: `Gakhkabaz' would become `Mons Furcatus', that's `Forked Mountain'; Keghdinakaghep (it says Keghdin's an alien who they flew with), Gakhkakaghep, Tiqazabkhvâran (it says that's Yellow Rock Slope), etc, and transplanted Scottish placenames - what a mess - I say ignore the lot and give the places more fitting names. Perhaps their claim is technically valid, but after what they caused aiding the enemy inventing that fancy missile system -".

"Please, quiet, if we want to recycle that dispute in here it better be as a separate motion." the chairman interrupted somewhat desperately.

"And we were the first Earth Men to Mars, after all." said the student.

In the end for the sake of peace and quiet I was overruled and the names had to be accepted. The other matters on the agenda and the `any other business' were settled and the meeting finished unremarkably. I went home and for some reason dreamed of being interrogated in the Lubyanka in Moscow, the sort of thing that I have thankfully not gone through in real life. I was glad to wake.

We had launched one FTL craft before the Arden landings changed everything. Ever since the UFO crash at Roswell in New Mexico in 1947, Area 51 in Nevada has collected what UFO wreckage it could, and tried to study it. Of one wreck, the drive block survived in a damaged and doubtful condition, and attempts to look inside it safely proved vain. Finally they declared it unsafe and had to get rid of it. By then SHADO had started, and the Astrophysical Space Commission told us about it, so we had a small unmanned probe built around it, rather than merely take it into space and blow it up. The probe was launched, and tailgated a UFO's FTL travelling field to an alien world, recorded what it could, returned, and signalled to us. Thankfully its drive had held out that long. It showed a stark world of rocky barren mountain ranges and dry air and thin clouds, little or no open water, and what may have been patches of vegetation and habitation in damp hollows and flat areas; it seemed to have a large moon. The probe's ranging equipment had failed, so it could have been looking at a moon, or an asteroid or stone close up, and there is the risk that the aliens had detected it and fed it false information; but later the pictures proved to be genuine. I was optimistic then about soon making a SHADO FTL fleet and taking the war to the enemy's planet, so helping not only Earth but also any other planets they may have been raiding; but that proved elusive, and the first Earth-made FTL craft was not SHADO's.

I once managed to get an agent into the Bitterfeld UTC-making works. One of the pilot-instructors there was clearly an alien, named Kahless or Qeilis. The agent was no Star Trek fan, or he would have spotted the obvious, as Col. Freeman sharply pointed out to him when he contacted base next to report. The agent kept his ears open, and, although the above codename taken from human space fiction was usual, he twice heard English-speaking trainee UTC-pilots call their alien superior `Slick Harry', but thought it was just a nickname, although `Harry' was not particularly slick in manner; only later did we hear the name Zlîkhakhâriv, and there may be more than one alien with that name; probably he chose the alias to use among English-speakers merely to avoid the nickname. The workmen said he had twice rescued valuable cargo and several alien crewmen from UFO's which were about to explode after being damaged by Earth missiles.

It is a measure of our helplessness in that time of chaos and pro-UFO frenzy that we could not have the place suddenly taken out by a special-forces unit and everybody arrested and everything seized or destroyed, but got via the agent only observations and a duck leg bone that the alien had bitten the meat off at a dinner. But the agent, who had noticed something suspiciously different about the way the alien pronounced Earth languages, got the bone quickly to a lab, which in a bit of saliva on it found a few live cells shed from the alien's salivary glands or mouth lining, and multiplied them in tissue culture - and their DNA was human. Comparison with our database of DNA scans of disappeared people and their relatives told us what it could, unless his salivary glands were a transplant.

Next day the works management truth drug interrogated everybody including each other, as it did at intervals, and my agent baled out just in time; two secret-service men, and a thief, and a man pushed by a mortgage to the edge of selling information where he could, were not so lucky. The Committee who set SHADO up had harboured a plan to cause a series of destructive UTC-drive explosions on the ground in such places, to scare the world's nations into formally banning all FTL research and production; but the UFO technology package included alien security equipment and techniques, and the workmen were willing to endure such interrogation techniques at intervals as a price of freedom and ability to reach the stars rather than have their long-yearned-for FTL ability and achievements snatched away by what many call `the ugly underhand side of international power politics, secret-agency-ism, fear of the unknown, people in charge not liking change or afraid of losing authority, destabilization, assassination and sabotage, as bad as the worst sort of paranoid delusion but real.'. The mood of the times had infected even my agents, and some of them told me directly "If you order us to risk causing heavy innocent civilian casualties, we're going public, even if it means the electric chair.".

One secret agency (not SHADO) tried it, once. Their men trained and set out. It would be a quick cleanup and arrest all personnel. A coal-fired industrial boiler furnace near the place would consume a dozen at a time the alien-type spacesuits that I dislike seeing as much as I ever did, and much else; pile all possible in and round the UTC's and set them to fireball, or fly them away; use any security destructor the place has, or pile stuff in the open and put it and the whole premises to the flamethrower. Disguised as businessmen, they flew to Lima in Peru, fought for breath in less than half an atmosphere of air where the railway struggles over the high Andes near Morococha three miles above sea level, and reached the place at Huancayo on a high cold plateau among mountains. There they met men who had gone before, took hidden weapons which had been taken in in falsely labelled containers, rushed the UTC works - and found its men armed against them. Local special police who had received secret orders to aid the agency men, decided where loyalty lay and attacked them instead; their commandant afterwards came out with that old fairy story, alleged non-receipt of a message. Instead of a quick in and cleanup and out there was a long shoot-out while more help for the works men came from the area.

Five works men died and seven were wounded forcing agency men back briefly from the works's UTC's, but it gave just enough time for their pilots to get in them. The UTC's, named in the native Quechua Indian language, some with those underbelly missile packs that had blasted away the policies that SHADO had been set up for, took off and aided in the defence. One of the attackers got a radio warning out, and an unmarked incoming Hercules transport plane carrying a larger holding force of agency men and US Marines turned away.

Notices and overheard orders were in Quechua, some duplicated in alienese, not English or Spanish which the agency men could have understood. The agency men, unacclimatized and weakened by hypoxia in air so thin from altitude that SHADO regulations would have demanded oxygen or pressure suits, and in a ugly mood at being resisted, looked for an easier target and rushed the works's family quarters to take hostages, and found even them armed. An AK47 shot accounted for its 10-year-old user's right collarbone (with its recoil) and the agency men's commander's life. The attackers surrendered, and from them much was found out and became public; the world's secret agencies patched up what they could, and tried to claim that the captured men were nothing to do with them; negotiations to get them freed dragged on and sucked in other complaints. That the danger had forced the defenders to arm children so young added an unwelcome emotional point. There was yet another angry demonstration at the gate of my headquarters.

At the same time that secret agency sent a sabotage frogmen team to a Nigerian FTL work site at Port Harcourt. An ordinary-looking rusty old freighter with a Liberian flag of convenience released seven subskimmers. These are a sort of RIB that can deflate on the run and transform into an underwater diver-rider, and back; 3 men rode on each. As they got near their target, something detected them, and the harbour's new submersible dredger ran along their single-file with its front scoop open and pumped them into its dredgings tank `along with all the rest of the rubbish that gets in the water round here'. That anti-diver tactic was to be heard more of later; this time the craft brought its catch to port to custody intact and they could tell of it. Some officials connected with the agency tried to prove that the frogmen were a marine biology expedition; kit and weapons and papers found on them, and the inevitable truth drug, said otherwise, but could not prove hard enough for a law court that the FTL site was their target. The port set up an underwater patrol squad using the subskimmers, and sometimes let marine biologists use them. The affair achieved mostly to stir up the public yet more and make people wary. FTL work sites near navigable water strengthened security or moved inland.

The side-fallout from the Huancayo and Port Harcourt affairs was one more thing on top of what I was not needing already. All they achieved was to blow yet more secrecy wide open and warn the FTL users of risks and make them wary and make any such future take-outs much more difficult. A film that my film producer public front was making to help pay the bills had been at a standstill for three months. By NASA's permission but not mine my studios were full of aliens and their kit sheltering from cultists and pressure of public curiosity and using the rooms as workshops and accommodation. As I went out tiredly into the morning I no longer cared much that I was showing a SHADO badge in public - `Supreme Headquarters, Alien Diplomatic Organization' yet again, I thought sourly. Some say that the morning is the `m-yawn-ing', a bleary no-good time of day that should be banned, and I was tempted to agree. I and the grounds gardener looked briefly and dully at four large sheeted-down UFO's parked on my back lawns, and the dents and spacesuit footprints and vehicle ruts where others had been. I thought of what had happened since the Arden landings, and of what had blown out and become public, and of the area's road signs now duplicated in alienese. A visiting NASA man said to me "I know it's `per ardua ad astra', as the RAF's motto says, but we don't need secret anti-FTL hostility making it even more arduous.": a persistent popular error, for the RAF motto correctly means `through high places to the stars'. West Harlington parish priest's visits and pious prayers for peace between all parties involved achieved little useful. The village was growing untidily into an unofficial spaceport servicing area.

These matters had made urgent new small but important spacecraft parts that we had ordered from a factory called `Z & K' west of Toronto in Canada. They made good parts, but I could not wait any more for them to finish the consignment or for the chances and delays of transport, or risk hostility from space-minded people recognizing me caught in traffic or in an airport. There was only one way: one of my jet fighters, carrying cargo pods which one of my pilots had made from empty drop fuel tanks. I am not much use as a combat pilot, but I could fly it, over the heads of the hazards and nuisances and delays of the ground. I helicoptered to the nearest airfield where one was, took off as soon as I could warn the various air traffic controllers on the route, refuelled in Newfoundland after the shortest possible Atlantic crossing, flew up the St.Lawrence River to Toronto, found the factory, and landed on its airstrip.

On the way in I saw a large pool beside the office at the back. I asked for Mr.Peter Spaldick and Mr.John Carrick, for so their two top men had called themselves in letters and emails. Their workmen seemed unused to those names, but called them by what were clearly attempts to pronounce very un-English names. As I went out at the back and crossed a garden to the office, I saw a standard-shaped UTC standing on a lawn. On top of it birds were eating pond snails and leeches and worms among a dense growth of stagnant-smelling pondweed, as if it had been a long time in its storage pool and had just been brought out for use. This surprised me, as Earth-made UTC's can withstand our air. After previous experiences, I was disinclined to nose round one when its pilot was likely nearby, but I did - and found it was of no earthly make, for its maker's plate was in alienese and said `made at Zlîkhabaz'. By then I knew from books written by contactees enough to decipher that as `Wildfire Mountain', perhaps a volcano whose underground heat source they had tapped to run an industrial area on some planet after they had long ago used up all its fossil fuels and actinides. Long ago the dominant language among them would have suppressed all others, and centrally organized education would stop any tendency for speech in different areas of their planet to diverge and shift to dialects and then new separate languages.

I went into their office with a growing apprehension which was soon realized. The two were aliens. They were wearing spacesuit undersuits. They announced themselves in the usual strangely-accented English as Zbaldek and Khvâraqh. Zbaldek looked for a moment as if he had seen a snake, and muttered in his own language something like "khak khet Streika Shadwapalqeg". I recognized my name and the next syllable all too well, and knew to watch for trouble. They were not necessarily trying to hide their nature as part of some grand infiltration and takeover conspiracy; many Chinese have a local-type alias forename in countries whose natives find Chinese-type names hard to pronounce or remember. I had to be wary, as their workmen would not take easily any threat to the badly-needed new engineering jobs that the two had brought into a long-term depressed area. Khvâraqh gave a quick annoyed order into a microphone, and a man went out to hose their ship's outside down.
(`khak' = "he", `khet' = "that, the aforementioned", `palq' = "(one's) superior", `-eg' = "-est, topmost")

They stayed polite and let me collect the parts made so far. I towed the parts out on a works hand-trolley myself and put them in my cargo pods and the empty rear seat. They gave me brochures and offered to show me round the works, but I was in a hurry. From what I overheard and saw, it was clear that the area and Toronto Airport air traffic control knew what they were and treated it as part of daily life. I had heard rumours of something of that sort in the area, but had ignored it among a frenzy of false alarms caused by cultisms and sillyness. I flew home and unloaded and waited to see what would come of it and whether I would ever get the rest of my consignment, now that they knew who and what they had been making parts for.

STRAKER THE ALIEN

New authorities sorted themselves out of the chaos. During it all, the British government's term of office finished and they had a general election. This was a far from suitable time for such a thing, but it went ahead. The outcome seemed less harmful than my misgivings feared. An unusually large number of crank and facetious candidates got an unusually high vote, but the usual parties were returned, and the electioneering helped somewhat to get people's minds back to normality. A Minister who had helped to set up SHADO lost his seat in Derby North - causing me more trouble than merely losing a supporter. Soon after that someone in NASA thought it clever to persuade a new inexperienced committee to take me off SHADO for a while and to order me to lead a remote space-exploring fleet which assorted space groups had put together. I protested in vain, for they persisted in calling me "the best suited because of my experience in space matters".

The craft landed by night on grass by my headquarters five days later to pick up me and the rest of their stores and crew. When I went out to them in the morning their shape gave me a shiver despite their NASA and ESA symbols, for they were nothing that I had ever flown but the standard UFO design that I knew all too well as an enemy to be shot on sight. They bore serial numbers ESE4 #0, ESE4 #1, etc, and Pittsburgh maker's plates. ESE4 means `Earth Space Expedition 4'. They also bore cartoon character names; I took one look at that ridiculous and totally out-of-place result of the limited imaginations of space base workmen and spoke my mind and had to choose more suitable names in a hurry and get them painted on, on top of all the other work. I was not going to allow a repeat of when an early Apollo expedition's crew during flight codenamed its two modules `Cornet' and `Peanut'; on all later Apollo missions NASA chose more suitable module names before launch. The habit of secrecy lingers in me, and I decided that this was a suitable time to try out a new enciphering code that we had developed, to write certain records in: a list of 200 or so letters and common syllables were each given a 2-digit hexadecimal number to represent it. I overheard someone say "We called at Selsey on the way, gave Mr.There's No Such Thing As UFO's Or Aliens rather a shock.".

I went to craft #0, which was the command craft. My second-in-command, not chosen by me, was the nearest that could be got among Men to an interstellar astronavigator, an astronomer called Peter Stamford who had had a brief space training course with NASA. He used alienese words for some of the ship's parts until I told him to talk English. I got in the unearthly-looking craft and looked around its limited crew space for somewhere private to put my briefcase and suitcase where they would not be kicked or knocked down or looked in.

"You'll have to trim that lot down to what fits in a crew issue backpack, like it said in the information you were sent." he said, and showed me a pack and a crew overall with my name and rank and a number `ESE4 0.0' and shoulder flashes.

"I take it that overall thing goes on instead of my clothes, not over them. I know that much at least." I said, "I didn't expect conditions onboard to be quite so cramped, suddenly ordered off SHADO and told to go careering about in the wild trusting my life to an alien UFO-engine. What on earth got into NASA's head making it act like that? I'm not used to careering all over the galaxy in a UFO. Exploration mission, huh! I'm used to a proper desk in a proper office in an on-planet base with good fast communications to everywhere. I told them that, but they wouldn't listen.".

"That overall's a spacesuit undersuit, your spacesuit goes over it." he said, "And once you said that you'd soon find how UFO's worked and then SHADO would make its own and set forth and go in hard and clean out the aliens on their own homeworld, and then you would have to come with the fleet to command it, and in a uniform and not that business suit. What we're on is a scientific expedition.".

"That's still not what I was planning, unless they put reconnoitring first. What I was wanting was a proper big enough combat-ready assault fleet manned by disciplined Armed Forces men, straight there and do the job and straight back, and not this miscellaneous lot with far too many untrained civilians among them and their plans for space sightseeing." I replied.

There was too much breeze to sort papers in the open, so I had to manage on my hands and knees in a corner in the craft. Out went all my carefully chosen and ironed changes of clothes and toiletries. Out went a spare pair of shoes wrapped to preserve the shine on them. I had had too much to do tidying up SHADO affairs and clearing my desk and handing over to deputies to pay much attention to the information sent to me about my new posting. Stamford was numbered ESE4 0.1, and so on the rest of #0's men. I was too busy to say what I thought of being `called nothing', but had to accept the result of someone's computer-derived habit of numbering things and people from 0 not 1, reinforced by a naval habit of calling a ship's second-on-command `[the captain's] number one'.

"That computer printer of yours can't go with us." he said, "Its ink cartridge'll boil dry in space, and the ship's acceleration G'll crush it flat. The ship's computer's got its own printer that can resist G and run in vacuum.".

A ground man outside #0 had finished painting out `Miss Piggy' and replacing it with `Explorer', and had taken his stepladder away. All stores had been loaded, and the new crewmen had been assigned to their ships and duties. The men were clearly ready for off. I went into #0 again and radioed round asking if everyone was ready and had carried out all final checks. They had, so I ordered the ground staff to back away and the pilots to seal the craft and take off into orbit, trying to seem in charge rather than a figurehead. My crew went to the spacesuit lockers.

"Suiting up now? I thought I at least'd be travelling in pressure and able to wear ordinary clothes and work in comfort." I queried.

"We'll be in spacesuits most of the time. Easier and a lot less trouble." said John Lambert, #0.2, the pilot, a typical NASA type, "UTC's can be pressurized, but airlocks take room and airlocking loses some air each time, and the better and faster the airlock's air recovery pump is the more room and weight and power it takes up.".

I had worn astronaut spacesuits a few times in emergency drills, so I knew what it would be like. I sighed tiredly and ordered everybody in all the ships to suit up. But when they took the spacesuits out, I backed off in distaste, for they were alien-type. One had my name and rank and number on.

"I'm not putting that on." I stated, looking at it much as I would have looked at the muzzles of a firing squad's rifles.

"You'll have to." said Lambert, "That's the only sort of suit we've got with us, and it'll hamper us far too badly to accept if we have to keep #0 in pressure just for you.".

I had to put it on, and saw in a mirror the fated-looking sight which I had long dreaded, my own body encased in an alien spacesuit and my face looking out through its faceplate. At least it had NASA and ESA symbols on. I knew enough about it to start its life-support system, in air-breathing mode. Around me my crew suited up and sealed their helmets - and in a chorus of drowning-type noises flooded their lungs and went into liquid-breathing mode easily as if many of them had done it several times before.

"What!?" I queried, "I wasn't told ...".

"In this sort of ship you can have comfort or maximum speed, but not both. I thought after all this time you'd know more about UFO's than merely how to destroy them." said #0.1 before he went to liquid-breathing, and quoted from a handbook: "In the long high-G speed changes of UTC's going into or out of interstellar speeds, liquid-breathing spacesuits help a lot to prevent internal G-force injuries to the respiratory tract and sinuses. If you insist on breathing air all the time, getting to and from interstellar speed'll have to take several times as long. That's one reason why they breathe liquid.".

I felt fated and trapped. I wondered what all of that committee's motives were in sending me off like that. With an effort of will I managed to imitate; it reminded me of what I had heard of experiments carried out on unwilling human convicts and the like in the past. I was to be shut in it for 12 weeks, unable to talk (except by a synthesizer) when my vocal cords were submerged. After years of defending one planet from a secure home base, it was hard to be ordered to wander randomly in the wild leading a pack of UFO's looking like one of those I had fought against, with my Sun shrunk to one of the remote stars. Like the world's first scuba divers we had to learn on the job; only those who flew after us and could be taught what we and others found out the hard way, could have a full long-trip interstellar spaceman training before setting off.

"To talk, operate this switch." Lambert had told me. I had heard of deep divers' voice undistorters to correct high-pitched helium voice and breathing mask `gasmaskyness', but with my breathing tract full of liquid it would have nothing to work on. But I operated the switch and tried to talk. A piece of kit on my spacesuit said what I was trying to say, but in such a strong alien accent that I stopped in shock. That was my first use of the now well-known ultrasound and computer device which detects the current shape of the liquid-filled mouth and throat and produces the appropriate vocal sounds. They produced the intended sounds most of the time. "Now we don't even sound like humans." I thought desperately; but that fault has been put right since. Some of us did not have these devices but had to talk by typing on a synthesizer keyboard.

We took off after dark, frustrating the reporters. The stars appeared as we rose out of a deep overcast. As we got into orbit #2 radioed: "Our biochemist, he's Prof.Jackson, #2.3, he's one of that six that we picked up at Arden on the way down, he's busily photo-ing out of the portholes. He was photo-ing about inside the craft and on the ground before. I thought I better rep...".

"Stop him and put him on the line." I said sharply, and then to Jackson: "Commander Straker here: I thought I told you all quite clearly that any film or other recording materials people bring is expedition supplies and I'll authorize how and when it's used, never mind who paid for it or claims to own it. We've got astronomers to photo the star patterns properly. Wasted film can't be re-used like video can, and out in space where's the shop to buy more!?". That was done; but as we were about to set off for a test run to Mars I got another complaint the same, interrupting my reflections how things had changed, Mars suddenly being next door instead of beyond our furthest manned reach.

"I'm an armed forces man. I believe in jumping hard on insubordination." I said, "I've got to get to #2 to back my orders up.".

Instead of flying #0 to #2 and docking with it, or taking out some sort of small vehicle, Lambert handed me a backpack propulsor. It was my first go with one except on a simulator. I put it on and opened the hatch and set off for #2, and radioed for a man from #1 and a man from #4, both reliable spaceman types, to meet me there. Seeing us coming like a volley of missiles Jackson `sorried' over his suit radio in a mistype-ridden panic, but we kept coming, in two minds about having a motor fastened to me directly by a parachute-type harness rather than riding in a comfortable vehicle. After some overshooting I reached #2's hatch and hung onto a handle hear it.

We got in #2. I went into air-breathing mode, as I insisted on using my own voice for that sort of serious disciplinary matter. It was my first time at it, and the others had to tie me to struts through the panic stage. I ordered the others there to do the same. Jackson's camera looked suspiciously professional. I had seen enough lab equipment of various sorts to `smell a rat' when I looked in his apparatus locker. I took a syringe-pistol from my suit's outside pack and advanced. Jackson backed off, tried to turn the others against me, but realized that he may as well admit without a truth drug interrogation as with one that he was not what he had said he was but a freelance reporter using any trick to get to site and as prepared for us to find ourselves far from base among alien life without a biochemist as one of his kind was two years before for a climbing expedition to find themselves in a remote part of Nepal with no geologist but an unwanted reporter instead. Lucky I found so s