“Unfortunately he did. I wish now, in many ways, he had simply shot me dead on the spot. I was escorted up to Level Three, which I had always assumed to be a maintenance area. There, the general allowed me to peer through a window into a room that held a visiting Archon, or as they officially designated them, ‘Pan-Terrestrial Biological Entities.’
“I was terrified in its presence, even though it could not see me. At first, I told myself it was a cunningly crafted animatronic model, such as those built for amusement parks. But I saw it walk, move, breathe, blink and interact with another human being.
“I was only allowed to observe it for a minute. The general led me away. He seemed sympathetic to my stunned state, and was patient with my babbled questions. He explained that although the Archons had never allowed a physical examination of themselves, the military had in their possession several bodies taken from ‘saucer’ crashes that had occurred shortly after the war. Evidently these accidents precipitated modern contact with the entities. Autopsies had been performed on the corpses, and the consensus was that the Archons were descended from an unknown reptilian species that had cross-bred with sapient humans several millennia ago.
“Furthermore, the general told me that certain branches of the government had entered into a pact with the Archons, and in 1953, agreed on an exchange with them for high-tech knowledge, and to allow them the use of underground military bases. He refused to tell me what our side of the trade agreement was to be. He added that if I ever mentioned to anyone what I had just seen and heard, ‘buzzards would be picking my bones out of the desert.’
“Though it was difficult, I focused on my work, trying to forget everything about Archons and trade pacts. My focus bore fruit, and in 1989, we had the first successful long-distance matter transfer of a living subject. That success was reproduced many times, improving and modifying the gateways. Then within a year of our victory, things began to change in a sinister fashion.
“By the early 1990s, the Project Cerberus staff were suddenly under the impositions of a timetable. We had strict schedules to keep, results we had to achieve, non-negotiable deadlines. We were ordered to basically mass-produce the units, to design them in modular form so they could be shipped and assembled elsewhere. Such a task was arduous, to say the least. The problems with the self-contained nuclear power packs were almost insurmountable. It all seemed very odd, very insidious.
“At this point, you must understand that while the Totality Concept scientists as a whole were working on some remarkable projects, the projects were rarely coordinated. Now, all of them were linked, even those in other bases in other states. For example, the technicians of Operation Chronos used our mat-trans breakthroughs to spin off their own innovations and achieve their own successes.
“You may not be aware that Operation Chronos dealt in the mechanics of time travel, forcing temporal breaches in the chronon structure. Without getting too technical or metaphysical, because I really don’t understand all of it myself, the purpose of Chronos was to find a way to enter ‘probability gaps’ between one interval of time and another. Inasmuch as Cerberus utilized quantum events to reduce organic and inorganic material to digital information and transmit it through hyperdimensional space, Chronos built on that same principle to peep into other time lines and even ‘trawl’ living matter from the past and the future.
“Then something very strange happened. A series of sweeping policy changes came into play, which created something far beyond the scientific ambitions of the Totality Concept staff. I learned much later that the changes came about as an edict from the Archon Directive.
“Other government agencies became involved, as well as other countries. In a short time, it appeared as if the Totality Concept was a deep-cover international cooperative. In 1998 a massive, almost frantic redoubt-construction program began. Keep in mind that for many years, especially at the height of the Cold War, underground complexes had been constructed under the Continuity of Government program, as an insurance policy in case of a nuclear war. Many subterranean command posts had been built in the fifties and sixties, located in different regions of the country.