Page 40 - Extraterrestrials, Foreign and Domestic

Anthropic Fallacies
(Fantastic Transactions 2, 1997)

The military base one hundred-twenty miles south of Gozaimas,
Ohio was designated on most civilian maps as a federally-
protected reservation of the Redbird Indians. An unmarked dirt
road led from the main highway to a shack manned twenty-four
hours a day by crack Special Forces soldiers in National Park
Service uniforms. Casual tourists would be turned back there,
several miles before that road terminated at the gate of a
maximum-security compound. A five-meter high double chain-
link fence patrolled by German shepherds constituted its
perimeter. The last Redbird had died in the nineteen-twenties.
One private vehicle was allowed to pass the checkpoint on a
cold and windy morning in March. A subcompact rental car
engaged in Gozaimas the previous day, it pitched and rolled in the
ruts made by much heavier conveyances. At length it arrived at the
gate, where its occupants, two rumpled and red-faced men, were
again scrutinized. They were instructed to park their car at some
distance outside the compound and wait for an escort.
After a brief delay, a jeep arrived to transport them to a small
camouflaged building near the center of the base. The visitors
were ushered through a metal-detector into a hallway terminating
in a small conference room. There they found the man
recognizable by voice as their contact, George Buck, and two
other men, seated at a large round table.
“Thank you for being on time,” said Buck. His bearing and
manner were clearly those of a career military officer, but his
khakis bore no identifying insignia of rank or service. “My
colleagues are Professor Helmut Heinzeit and Donald O’Day;
between them they cover the fields of cosmological physics and
exobiology. Gentlemen, this is Mister Raymond Zorbach and his
ah, adviser, Reverend Douglas Upchurch.”

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