“Sir! The package retrieval was successful, and the film is in the lab now.”

“I knew that part, Lieutenant  It’s why we are here. Why I am here. Why are you here? What have you  got for me?”

“Yes, Sir. They prioritized random frames from each magazine, as you directed. I have the rushed prints for you here. They said the film was very brittle, for some reason, and had to be separated carefully.” He paused, as if making sure he conveyed a message exactly.. “There were enough extra frames to analyze the chemistry, so they are confident that all the exposed material can be salvaged. The color film will require equipment not currently on-site, but it is in route. The rest are being done right now, and will come by courier ASAP.”

He had asked for a quick selection- it was important for the officer in charge to be proactive. But there had been no particular reason; he just wanted to do something. Apparently there had been some interpretation of his simple request Color film, too? Two cameras? Good Lord. He sighed. SNAFU, again. “Let’s see them. Lay them out, on the desk.” Let’s just see what all this fuss is about, he thought. And, “prioritized”? Why couldn’t anyone in the military speak plain English unless there were lit cigars in the room? Should he order some in,  and offer the shave-tail a stogie? He smiled again. It was the last smile of the day. He picked up one of the photos.

“What…are these? What am I looking at? Those look like… !  What the Hell is this, Lieutenant? “  He waved one of the prints in the face of the suddenly terrified junior officer as if to accuse him of  perpetrating some sort of sick joke. The man’s confused expression said otherwise - he had no idea what was wrong. Obviously, the lieutenant had not peeked at the contents of the unsecured manila envelope- as he himself might have, given what it contained- so he softened his tone. “Here. Look at this and tell me what you see.” He handed over the photo, gesturing at the top of it.

“Sir, it looks like…sort of like  an Indian?” Bewilderment and fascination fought for control of the man’s facial muscles. “He’s smiling…”, the lieutenant added, almost too softly to hear.

“Yes, he is. Now please tell me, why would  there be a statue or whatever that is of an INDIAN CHIEF on the PLANET MARS?!” His voice had raised again, he couldn’t help himself. “And how large is it, anyhow? I don’t see any indication of scale, here. They didn’t land on the damn place, so how far away was this?” 

“I don’t know, Sir. Any of it. I don’t know.” He was sure he must be in trouble, somehow.

“It’s all right, son. I don’t think I was probably supposed to show you that anyway, so you may as well look over the rest of them. I doubt the Brains in the next room will have as much common sense as you do, and I suspect I’ll need all of that I can muster. I might have to recommend you for a promotion, just to cover your new clearance level.”

The two of them spent the next several minutes puzzling over the small pile of  photos, not speaking. At one point, the General was distracted by a motion, and glanced over at  the  lieutenant, who was  turning an image first one way and then another, as if he could not decide which way was right-side up.. Returning his attention to the one in his own hand,  he was startled to see an apparently different picture. No. wait- there was the thing he’d been trying to…what was going on? This was madness! The images seemed to defy simple perception. “Lieutenant, get out of here- and let’s wait until your promotion is filed to mention what you’ve just been doing. Not that you will ever be able to mention it to anyone anyway.” He punctuated that last point with a stern scowl.

“Yes, Sir.” Somewhat reluctantly, the lieutenant  placed a photo back on the desk and moved toward the door. He was reaching for the doorknob when the general, just to elicit a reaction,  said ,

 “Well, at least we don’t have to worry about an Invasion, right? Done deal, looks like.” The reaction was more than satisfying. He liked this man. But he had some thinking to do. “No one disturbs me for the next hour, understood? If more pictures show up, you bring them to me, but I don’t want to see anyone else.”

“Yes, Sir!” Not sure at all how he felt about anything at the moment, the suddenly-promoted, thoroughly confused aide quickly departed.

Obviously, whatever this was, it was very real. Now the General understood why he was here, why the Brass wanted someone with experience, but new as well. This was potentially a very big problem. This was a bad-seed Baby Huey, and he was supposed to figure out how to baby-sit. That damn Nazi rocket would not be the last one to take such photos, and plans needed to be made lest the future just won at such terrible cost became an anarchistic nightmare. He really didn’t like the idea of the Truth becoming Man’s Greatest Enemy…but then, it seemed that Patton had been right after all- History was bunk. First Roswell, now this. Was he confronting Destiny or disaster? He quickly suppressed that train of thought, and searched for a positive angle to use as a personal anchor.  This wasn’t the escapist pleasure of Amazing Stories, this was too impossibly familiar. Bug-eyed alien monsters would have been much better.  This was the Abyss, the Void. Smiles or not, it felt Unknowable.

The General stared at the pictures on his desk, and pondered his options. His gaze wandered around the unfamiliar office, which he was probably going to get to know very well. At the moment, it was almost empty. He presumed it would be outfitted appropriately- no, he corrected himself, he would demand it be provided with the amenities befitting his rank immediately. Enough of this being hustled around! The previous occupant had left little other than a travel calendar on one wall. It showed Mount Rushmore. He shook his head. What to do, what did it all mean?  What should he say, to reassure everyone that Everything Is Under Control? He checked the desk to see if anything useful had been left behind, like a bottle of bourbon, but found nothing. He returned his attention to the photos.

He had seen plenty of aerial photographs, but these were totally different. Was it because they were from such high altitude, or was it because they were of a strange planet? Just on a whim, he propped up as many of them as he could (six) on edge, leaning them against the lamp, the ashtray, and a stack of files. Then he walked across the office and looked back at the row of images on the desk. In spite of what he’d seen already, he was startled. Half of them now looked like mug shots from .a Martian High School yearbook. At that distance, those resolved into what appeared to be  single faces, more or less centered. This was beyond insane, beyond description! No matter what perspective was apparent on the pictures when close-up, from a distance there was something else there. He was getting a headache just trying to describe it to himself in his own mind. He turned away and forced himself to count slowly to ten before turning around again. He was indescribably grateful to see the same little faces staring back at him- if there had been another change, he was not sure what he would have done. OK, so it was something about the place. But what kind of minds had designed it, and why? How could anyone have lived in such a place?  They looked like us, but obviously…what? He was drawing a blank. The statues- no, they weren’t statues or normal sculpture. There wasn’t even a name for what he saw. Damn. Yet the…subjects, the people, were mostly portrayed with smiles or casual,. all too ordinary emotions. No heroic poses or Terrible God expressions. Not Angelic, not Daemonic, often reminiscent of the characters from  Disney’s Snow White  cartoon, in fact. But the figures were alive with a dynamic realism any Earthly artist would envy.

He walked over to the calendar and turned it upside down. The Presidents did not change, nor did any new faces appear. What did it mean? He had to take control , demonstrate that the United States had the Situation well defined, reassure any doubters and contain any dissent, so he would. Even though he knew it was all bluster. This was more than a military situation. Hell, those Martians had to be long gone, everything was nothing more than a jumble of ruins. He had to assume for now that what these pictures showed was typical- and he saw no Flash Gordon stuff. Just primitive stonework, most of it impossibly big sculptures of very human-looking heads- that changed into other things at a whim, apparently.  It seemed unimaginable that such a culture could have left anything useful to our modern civilization. Shelley came to mind:

 …half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tells that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed

And on the pedestal these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

 Nothing beside remains, round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

 The lone and level sand stretched far away…

It was amazing how appropriate and yet inaccurate that poem was in this context. A picture showing some “lone and level sand” would be a great comfort right about now.   He could relate to the parts about mockery and despair, though. He saw new meaning in the Scoundrel’s Excuse-“What they don’t know can’t hurt them.” Well, the critter was out of the sack, whether anyone wanted it or not, so he had to figure some way to make It invisible. Could there possibly be some way out of this ? How do you fix everything ?

 The military representatives would not be a  problem. Uncomfortable or not, they would be pragmatists.  Most of the rest in the adjoining room were science types, some of them familiar to him and some from other project groups. But he knew there were some bureaucrats from the Pentagon and God-all knows who else in there, too. If he could get the scientists started talking first, it might keep the politicians off-balance for a  little while, so he could get a read on the room and figure out what to say before those who knew even less than he did about this chimed in, trying to give him orders. Politicians had no respect for the chain of command, he thought with a snort, they just naturally assumed it was an array that stretched beneath their own positions. OK, he himself was being political to think that. Well, there were Big W wars, and Little W wars…he’d just have to see which this was going to be. God, those pictures! Who were those…people?  Suddenly he realized he was casually juggling thoughts of Martians and Politicians in equal measure. Either he was in a state of shock, which might be,  or the complete destruction of everything he’d ever thought he knew about History  did not upset him that much. Maybe he liked it. Hmm. Really, it was not unlike a divorce, where a few photos from a Private Eye could end what had seemed eternal. Poof. That, he knew about. Could he extend that insight? What percent of the public could handle this if it was not held back? Most? Some? Any?

The poets would love to hear about this almost as much as the archeologists. Too bad they wouldn’t. But somehow he knew that the churches would be a bit less receptive. None of them were very good at adapting to a change of circumstance. In a certain sense, were not all wars Crusades?  This was not likely to provoke a war, but tranquility was not a probable outcome either.  The Christian Bible didn’t mention any Martians, especially any that looked just like us, and he suspected the various other Holy Books were similarly lacking in that area. Now, one could say that some of the older cultures might be interpreted to have  references to aliens, like the Hindu writings Oppenheimer was so intrigued by, or even the ancient Egyptians. Their “gods” came from Somewhere Else. Hmm. He was actually making some headway. Himmler might have been bizarre, but he based his notions on legitimate scholarship. He made a note to add some suitable scholars to his own new team Uh, oh- Angels. Were those Angels who came to Lot in the Old Testament, or Martians? Just as he thought he was getting on top of this, it all came crashing down around his ears again. Damn! That’s it, he thought cynically, top off some heresy with some more blasphemy, like a good soldier. Yep, the best course of action would be to tell Nothing to Nobody, like the man said in that Western he saw last week. Unfortunately, that was going to be a little hard to manage. It was absolutely certain that even the most limited necessary disclosure through channels was going to produce demands for more “information”. We would have to send our own cameras out into space. Goddard would like that, von Braun had been demanding it already, before this…Ah. He made a personal vow to place his hands firmly around the man’s neck and ask politely if there might be some other little items which had been inadvertently left out  during debriefing.

The outlandish proposal he’d seen for a reconnaissance  base on the Moon now seemed more likely than not to get funded. Anything of the sort would be tried, all of strictly Top Secret. This was going to cost a lot of money- good thing it was all military projects, where that didn’t  matter too much.  It was  a shame the civilian sector would probably never get to play Rocket Ranger now, but no easy way to reconcile the need for secrecy with such public operations came to mind. He’d have to set up  a committee to study that- maybe something could be worked out. This was totally crazy- a huge undertaking, to protect History from History. Absolutely essential, but with no payoff. This was so far beyond FUBAR it deserved a brand-new acronym. God, his mind was racing a million miles an hour- he had to focus on the tasks at hand right here and now. How should he start the briefing?

He decided to get everyone focused on the hardware questions first, maybe that would soften the blow when they realized what the implications of the images were. That was it, just like trench warfare- get the troops moving before they started to think too much. Momentum. He could do this.

Time for the first of many Meetings to start. He only hoped that the serious nature of this…problem would be enough to wipe the smug smile off  Werner’s face. As he gathered up the photos, a chilling thought intruded: someone had already known about this, known about far more than just the existence of that Nazi probe, and had convened this conference, before the film had even been recovered. Who?