Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [97]
His hope was that the confusion caused by the appearance of the haguya might supersede reports of his own strange behavior—reports that would eventually be given to the Council of Truth.
The chatter on his headset confirmed his hope. The live sighting of the haguya, and the capturing of the entire incident on videotape, had stunned the entire CS organization. There was no precedent, no prior experience with alien life. The manual didn’t say what should be done when confronting the impossible.
He pictured the CS video editors scrambling, impelled by the necessity of presenting something, anything, to the Council of Truth for inspection. No one would dare tell this story to the Council without tape to back them up. It was just too fictional to be believed.
Bowles suddenly realized he couldn’t go back to his office. The place was filled with brain wave antennae and camera lenses, and he needed to do some dirty work.
He diverted his steps into a room that had a disk reader and terminal.
His fingers stumbled in their eagerness as he commenced a search in the disk library for the name Alfred Bowles.
There was no such person listed in the regular files, but he had Crichton’s knowledge of the system and he could get anywhere, even into the Council of Truth’s own files.
He broke into the Council’s data base, found that a disk did exist, and retrieved it from the vault.
When he put it on the disk-reader he got a message on-screen:
This disk contains mental material from the only surviving crewman of the U.S.S. Huxley, Captain Alfred C. Bowles. Only the material relevant to future conflicts with other hostile expeditions has been saved herein. All information on this disk has been filtered and certified as sanitary.
“Subject’s mind was blanked and replenished with filtered memories of James Crichton, CS officer killed in the line of duty on date 7/8/12.”
Within a few moments Bowles was watching events from his life as a Starship captain unfold on the little monitor. He found plenty of verification that his “science fiction hallucinations” were real memories, but he noticed that there were no images of alien life on the disk.
The CS saved only the material the computer recognized as factual.
He typed a command into the computer: Search for the last images of the Huxley.
And there they were. He saw himself crawling around inside the ship. It had crash landed. It was burning. CS men pulled him out, only him. His face was on fire. They rolled him in the dirt to put it out. He tried to go back in, because all his crew were inside, but the CS held him back, and then the ship exploded.
His eyes shifted focus and he looked at his own reflection on the monitor. He, Bowles, had never seen that face before. It was keloid-scarred, and the features were so strange—as if his face were pressed against a clear membrane.
Bowles suddenly looked away from the screen. Had he heard someone outside the door? Suddenly aware that he hadn’t listened to his headset for several minutes, he turned it back on. He heard the comm officer telling patrols to find the Director of Cephalic Security and report back, because the director was not answering his page.
There was no more time to look at the disk. He left it where it was and fled.
As he hurried toward the evidence repository he saw several CS personnel looking at him and speaking into their headsets, reporting that they saw him.
The clerk at the repository looked startled at the director’s demand for one of the Enterprise communicators, but relinquished it without question.
Bowles then rushed to the electronic warfare room, and ordered the Electronic Warfare Officer to turn off the jamming for the Enterprise communicators.
The EWO, a thick-necked young man with crew-cut hair, just stared at him and listened to the voices on his headset.
“Something wrong with your hearing?” Bowles asked.
The EWO’s face started to shine with sweat.
“Instructions have just been issued. Your orders are to be ignored by all personnel,