Free Star Trek The Original Series From History's Shadow by Dayton Ward Page A

opting instead to swerve the Jeep so as to avoid a large rut in the unpaved road, which had appeared after the vehicle he was following also dodged to miss it. He still managed to catch the furrow with the Jeep’s rear tire, sending him and Marshall bouncing in their seats and Wainwright’s head brushing against the Jeep’s canvas top.
    “I think I just broke my tailbone,” Marshall said, recovering her grip on the dashboard. “Are we sure this road isn’t part of the actual bombing range?”
    “Might be,” Wainwright said, both hands on the wheel in what he hoped was not a vain attempt to keep the vehicle from swerving into the ditch on either side of the road. The sun was dropping lower on the horizon, and he wanted to be back at the base’s main garrison area, rather than driving outhere in what promised to be near-total darkness with nothing but the Jeep’s dim headlights to guide the way.
    Located in southwestern Arizona near the borders of California and Mexico, most of the land designated to the Yuma Test Station was uninhabited; nearly two thousand square miles of harsh, desolate desert landscape. Wainwright knew that the army had first established a presence at Fort Yuma before the Civil War and that the testing range now accounting for the immense size of the current base made it one of the largest military installations in the country if not the world. It had been used during World War II for testing various weapons and mechanized infantry equipment, and similar work had continued after the war’s end and even now as the current conflict raged in Korea.
    “I hope we can get back without blowing a tire,” Marshall said after Wainwright failed to miss another bump in the road, “or one of my kidneys. Didn’t you hit that one on the way out?”
    Chuckling, Wainwright replied, “This is nothing. In France, I actually broke the axle off a Jeep when I ran it into a crater made by one of our bombers. I thought the colonel I was driving back to his command post was going to kill me right there on the road.”
    “That bad, huh?” Marshall asked, around what Wainwright thought might be a suppressed giggle.
    “Yep. I couldn’t wait to get back to my unit. At least then, the only ones to be scared of were the Germans.”
    A flickering light from somewhere behind him reflected off the Jeep’s metal dashboard and Wainwright glanced over his right shoulder to look for the source. “I think you left the Geiger counter on,” he said, returning his attention to the road.
    Shifting in her seat, Marshall attempted to reach for the unit, which they had brought with them from Wright-Patterson. The device, along with their jackets and other items, lay just beyond her fingers. When the Jeep hit another rut, she turned back around in her seat. “Sorry about that, sir. I thought I’d turned it off.”
    “The way we’re bouncing around here, the switch could’ve hit the side or something,” Wainwright said. “Wasn’t worth bringing along, anyway.”
    Upon their arrival at the testing station, Wainwright and Marshall, accompanied by Lieutenant Brian Pearce, the Blue Book liaison officer from Luke Air Force Base near Glendale, Arizona, had visited with each of the witnesses to the previous week’s sighting. Each witness’s report was consistent with the others, without sounding as though the accounts had been rehearsed or coordinated. Further, their statements along with his own gut feelings told Wainwright the witnesses were being straight with him, and he believed they had seen an unidentified craft in the skies above the testing range where they had been carrying out a series of weapons-fire exercises.
    A visit to the area where the sightings had taken place had proven to be a near-total waste of time through no fault of the witnesses, owing to the fact that there simply was nothing remarkable about the terrain making up ninety-eight percent of the Yuma Test Station. Still, he preferred to study the area