Mine: The Arrival by Brett Battles Read Free Book Online Page A

doors, Durant stopped. One of the rules he’d created for security team members was that they were never to pass beyond it. Their domain was everywhere from just outside the blast door to the surface. The other side of the door was the exclusive world of Durant and his team.
    “Here will be fine,” he said.
    The men set the crate down.
    “Thank you, Lieutenant,” Durant said. “That will be all. Please secure the elevator entrance.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Instead of taking the freight elevator up, the men headed the other way down the corridor to the passenger elevator. Durant waited until he heard the elevator doors close before he stepped through the blast doors.
    The ten members of his science team who had arrived were waiting inside. They had spent the past couple of days familiarizing themselves with the base. Seven more were scheduled for arrival within the next week. More would come after Durant filled the remaining positions.
    “It’s here,” he said.
    The group hurried into the corridor. Like him, they couldn’t wait to get their hands on the craft.
    Though he had briefed them on Titan’s weight, the scientists were still surprised they were able to lift the crate so easily. After they crossed the threshold of the first blast door, Durant pressed a series of buttons on the control panel that swung the door shut.
    The group carried the crate out of the curved corridor, into the cavernous space and across the threshold of the second blast door. From there it was a straight shot to what they called the Titan Room, a space originally intended as a workshop for the repair and maintenance of the machinery needed to run the facility. Durant had ordered the equipment there moved to several smaller storage rooms.
    “Right there,” Durant said when the crate was in the exact center of the room.
    The team lowered the box and stepped back, staring at it.
    Dr. Abel Chambers was the first to speak. “Can we open it now?”
    The eagerness in his eyes matched that in everyone else’s.
    Durant walked over to a table, picked up the crowbar lying there, and returned to the others. “Who wants to do the honors?”
    “It should be you,” Chambers said.
    The others nodded in agreement.
    It took five minutes to get all the pieces of the crate separated and out of the way.
    Silence—not even the sound of a breath—as all eyes focused on Titan.
    Even though Durant had seen it before, it was only the one time, so he too was mesmerized. If anything, it seemed shinier now than it had before, as if it had gained a new chrome finish. He wondered how he could have ever considered, even for a moment, that it was anything but otherworldly.
    The technology of 1939 paled in comparison to that needed to construct Titan.
    No, man had not made this.
    “It’s…amazing,” someone finally whispered.
    The word was woefully inadequate for what stood before them. All words were.
    Durant let them savor the moment for several more seconds before he said, “Okay. Time to get to work.”

MATERIAL MAN
    S EVEN
     
    Project Titan Facility, Colorado
    October 18, 1942
     
     
    U LTIMATE BLAME FOR the accident was Durant’s. He knew it, and though no one said anything, his team knew it, too.
    He’d been driving his people relentlessly, encouraging them to work twelve and sometimes sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for months. There was good reason for this. December 7 would mark the one-year anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the entry of the US into the war. Every day American soldiers and sailors were dying, not to mention all the civilians the war was eating up. If the scientists could learn anything from the Titan craft that could help bring an end to the hostilities, then it was worth every extra minute they spent examining it.
    The problem was that for the three and a half years they’d been working on the damn thing, they had come up with nothing but theories. They hadn’t even been able to find a way inside the craft.