THE ARK

Day 939

Early the next morning Colonel Fitch was back at the Pentagon, this time he was seated in General Draper’s private office. The office was quite spacious, and there was a large rug in front of the General’s desk. The emblem of the US Army was imprinted in the rug in bright eye-catching colors. Judging by its appearance, Fitch got the impression that the unspoken rule was to walk around the rug, and not over it.

There were numerous photos displayed on the walls of different units that the General had served in during his career.

The Colonel was still annoyed at being blindsided by an unexpected conference with the President. Still, it had seemed as if his briefing to his Commander in Chief had gone better than he would have expected.

He had told the President the same thing that he had told the General. He needed time to put some things together before he could promise anything. There was no way they were going to be able to get a plan in place to sleep more than a few thousand people with their time frame. Even that could only be done if there was a large enough facility ready for them to start working on immediately.

While the President was not overly pleased with the news, he was not surprised either.

Following the conference call, Draper dismissed him for the day and instructed him to come up with what he could. He was to report back at 0800.

Fitch left the Pentagon and took a long walk through Arlington National Cemetery. The cemetery was one of his favorite places to visit when in Washington. He had known a good number of men who were now buried there. It was a quiet place where he could think and would not be disturbed. The weather had cleared and the temperature was in the low eighties, and he found the walk was quite relaxing. He decided that this had been a good idea. This walk was exactly what he needed to clear his head.

The whole comet story still did not seem real. It was more like a scenario for some kind of a training exercise. While he knew it was real, for now at least he’d approach it as he would any problem real or fictitious.

After two hours of walking and thinking, he found himself back at his hotel. He could not remember making the decision to walk back, and he had only a few small images of the trip back in his mind.

That night Matt Fitch went to dinner at a steakhouse across from the hotel. While there, he enjoyed a medium well porterhouse and baked potato with a salad, following that he went for another walk and came up with a few ideas. After a while, he went back to his room and thought some more. He made some notes and worked over possibilities in his head. Most of these he immediately dismissed.

Finally, he picked up the phone and called James Cowan. After six rings the phone was picked up by Kathy Cowan, from the sound of her voice he could tell she had been asleep. Fitch looked at his watch and was shocked to see that it was almost three in the morning, which meant that for the Cowans it must be about midnight. Fitch was shocked; he would never have imagined that it was this late.

“Kathy, this is Matt Fitch. Sorry to wake you, but is James there?” Cowan said.

There were some muffled words and after about twenty seconds, James Cowan came on the phone.

“James, sorry to wake you,” Fitch said apologetically

“Is something wrong? Are you still in Washington?” Cowan asked. He still sounded half-asleep.

“Nothing wrong, and yes I’m still here, there are some interesting things going on here, some big names here are real interested in the Sleep Project. I’ll be stuck here at least for another day. I have an early morning meeting with a Four Star with many questions. I need to know, would it be possible to design a capsule that would hold more than one person?” the Colonel wanted to know.

There was a brief pause while James pondered the question. “I don’t see any reason why not; we’ve always done separate capsules to better monitor individual responses and systems, but there is no reason we can’t place more than one in a capsule.”

“How many people could you probably fit in a single capsule?” the Colonel asked.

“I never thought about it, but I guess it would be possible to design a capsule that could hold a many as a dozen, maybe more.”

“Thanks, that gives me a place to start,” Fitch said.

“I’ll think about the idea and see if I can come up with anything else. What’s this all about anyway?” Cowan asked.

“I’ll give you as much info as I can when I return, but they may be giving us a larger facility and want us to try something on a much larger scale,” Fitch answered.

“Sounds exciting, let me know as soon as you’re back in town,” Cowan said.

Fitch hung up the phone and lay down; he continued to think about the problem for another hour before falling to sleep.

Now here he was in General Draper’s office, with less than four hours sleep, and still no solid answers.

Draper walked into the room and sat a pot of hot coffee on the desk. Fitch chuckled inwardly as he saw the General intentionally circle around the ornate rug in front of the desk. He looked over at Fitch. “You still mad about the unexpected chat with the president, Matt?”

“What makes you think I was mad Sir?” Fitch answered.

“I could see it in your face; if I wasn’t wearing these stars you would’ve probably killed me. Right?” asked the General

“Right,” was all Fitch said.

“Have you come up with any ideas?” the General asked

“It is possible to build larger sleep capsules that will hold about a dozen people. That should make it possible to greatly increase the number of sleepers. But every day we delay in getting started decreases the number of units that we’ll get functional,” Fitch explained.

“Good, the problem is we don’t have a facility ready for you to move into yet. The amount of radiation coming off the tail of the comet indicates we’re going to need to be at least twenty feet below ground.

“The Air Force is currently working on a new NORAD installation near the Arizona / Utah state line, to supplement the Cheyenne Mountain facility outside of Colorado Springs. I talked to the President about getting control of that. It’s massive and will be completely self-sufficient. Unfortunately, it isn’t currently scheduled to be operational for two years,” Draper said

“Well sir, I’ll look into my end of it, but without a facility, we have nothing to offer. At this time, I see the sleeper project offering a way of providing a rebuilding team to the people that survive either by standard underground shelters or out of luck. There is no way we’ll be able to do a hundred thousand sleepers. I can’t even guess how many we can do, but every day without a functional facility decreases the numbers. I’ll need to see the facility before I’ll be able to give you an idea of what we might be able to offer,” Fitch explained

“That certainly isn’t what I was hoping to hear, but I’m not surprised. I’ll move things as fast as I can on this end. In the meantime start planning everything that will be needed when you have a facility and get everything moving as much as possible,” Draper instructed.

“Sir, you said yesterday that there were other avenues being pursued. Can I ask what they are?” Fitch asked.

The General paused before responding. “I suppose there is no reason not to tell you. As you can imagine, we’re keeping this as quiet as possible, the complete anarchy and panic that would come out if this were known would be devastating. There are less than ten people who know about it at this time. There are some from the Air Force looking at altering its course with nukes. No one thinks they’ll be successful, but everything has to be tried.

There are some looking into underground shelters. However, I think I’d rather take my chances in the open than to wait in a hole for ten years or more. Undersea shelters are being considered as well, the technology isn’t there yet, but some are hopeful. I got stuck with the suspended animation idea. No offense. Personally, I think simple underground shelters will be the primary direction of choice, they have the ability to save the most people,” Draper said.

“Thank you, sir, as I said, I’ll get things moving as much as possible. Let me know when there is a place available for us to work,” Fitch said

“I’ll move things here as fast as possible, in the meantime contact me immediately with any new ideas or if there is anything that’s holding you up,” Draper said

With that, Fitch was dismissed. He returned to his hotel and packed and by 1300 hours, he was airborne and heading west.

Four hours later Fitch was pulling into the driveway of the duplex that he had lived in ever since his divorce seven years earlier.

His wife had held out as long as she could, but in the end, she had to admit that she could no longer handle the military life. Matt had been transferred every few years and that was something that had sounded exciting when they first got married, but after ten years she just could no longer continue doing it. They remained friends, and both had noticed the irony of the fact that ever since the breakup, Matt had been stationed at the Arizona facility.

This was not the first time that Matt Fitch had been given a seemingly impossible job to perform. Over time, he had learned that the best way for him to deal with these types of situations was to do nothing at all, at least for a little while. Stopping and thinking first tended to produce better results than diving blindly into a situation. So that evening all he did that could even be considered work related was to place a call to James Cowan.

He informed Cowan that he would not be in the next day, and asked him to look into an idea that he had. He hung up and went to the basement and dug out his golf clubs. The next day was definitely not the best golfing he had ever done, but not the worst either, more importantly, he now felt ready to get to work.