This is probably going to be the longest post I have or ever will write.
So, this topic has been ruminating (incorrect usage, I know) in my head for a while, and was actually one of the reasons I started a blog anyways. I could have written it before, but I wanted to do it when my mind was semi-clear. Barring that, I'll just go ahead and write it anyways.
So it started a little less than a month ago, after Christmas when I was returning from my father's house. I got on the plane and went all the way to the back, but my usual right hand window seat was taken by a 12 year old girl. I sat next to her, which was better than the fat guy in the row in front of me, and the elderly lady who came in behind me sat on the other side of me. She looked like your typical old tourist, horrible print sweater, blueish hair, pleasant smile, and lumpy packages. As she sat down, she told me and the other little girl, "Now, girls, please remind me when we get off the plane to not forget my things in the overhead place, some cookies I made for the neighbor picking me up are in there." We nodded, (I nodded, the other girl was reading some boring teen magazine) and I settled down without another thought on my fellow travelers to finish crocheting my sister's hat.
The lady kept up a steady stream of conversation, though, and told me all about how when she was a girl, there wasn't an education like you could get today, especially for women, and how today's colleges are just turning out trained idiots, because anyone can get in now without barely any work. After a bit of this, I decided she must be more of your typical complaining old tourist, who is always harking back and critiscing new things, even though you know they're right.
Then she told me an interesting little story that I'm not going to go nearly in depth as would be fitting about how because she wanted to learn the Russian language so much, she got her school to become the first to teach it in the USA. She told me about how there were newspeople interviewing her, and everyone in her town wanted to talk to her.
I thought, oh, that's cool, her moment she can look back on and tell everyone about, hope I can accomplish something like that one day, maybe actually change something for the better!
Well, she kept talking and I kept crocheting, and she happened to mention that she worked on the Star Wars Project, and went then on to say how sudden it was when they took her out to the middle of nowhere. I stopped her and was like, "Wait, what? The Star Wars Project?"
"Oh yes, you know, the Stars Wars Project. That's what they called it, but now when you say that people always think of those strange creatures and bizarre worlds and Skyluke or whatever his name is. I haven't ever watched it, you know, because its so weird..."
She kept rambling on, but I managed to figure out, with some very pointed and specific questions, that the Star Wars Project was actually an old development and testing site for laser and chemical weapons. Yes, that's right. How cool is that?
So as she kept talking, I gathered the bits and pieces and tried to formulate them in my head as best I could. Here's as near as I can say what she was talking of:
After her schooling, she got a job as a secretary. She was a very good writer, apparently, and somehow got noticed by important people. One day, without warning, some government officials came and took her out to a few buildings in the middle of the New Mexico deserts. She was going to be the secretary/project manager of the place. The first few weeks were hard, she said, when they literally dropped her off at the place she asked, "Can I have some water?" and they replied, "No, there isn't any water here yet, we'll get you some in a few weeks." When she asked, "Wait, aren't there any bathrooms around here?" they said,"No, but we'll get you a portapotty in a few weeks." Fortunately she had a house a few hours away and only worked there during the day. But for a while, when there was some 25 of them, technicians, engineers, chemists, scientists of every genre, things weren't exactly smooth and neatly laid out. She told me about how they would run out of drinking water, and she would have to ration out water for those who needed the clearest minds; how without water to use, she would wash dishes with water that dripped off the swamp cooler. Or how, since they were literally doing things that had never been done before, they would be told, "You need to do this and this," and they would ask, "But how do we do that?" and they would say, "We don't know, figure it out."
She told me that she quickly realized what kind of environment she was working in. Walking around every day she would see people crying and hugging each other, saying their last goodbyes, because they would be going into a room to handle such dangerous equipment and chemicals they didn't know if they would be coming back out again. She told me about a chemical called F2, I think, that if one drop of it got on your skin, it would burn the entire flesh on your whole body down to the bone in seconds. Or another chemical, E2 I think, that burned invisibly, which meant that clouds of it might be in front of you burning in a raging fire and you wouldn't know until you stepped into it. With such dangerous surroundings, there's normally specific protocols you have to adhere to, but since they were working around things no had before, they actually had to write down manuals or whatever they would be as they went along for others who would follow. One day, she said, one of the security devices on a piece of the equipment needed repairs. She stationed a young man to walk the 6 foot square perimeter for the whole day. Sometime during that day, something went wrong with that piece of equipment, and she said, "...and if that young man hadn't done what he had done, and acted as fast as he did, and used his head, I wouldn't be here telling you this right now..." Those were the kind of things that happened daily.
Which leads to what her specific job was. From what she said, she pretty much organized and kept track of everything, not to mention anything else that needed to get done. One of her main jobs was to record everything that went on. Because the scientists were working so much that there wasn't time for them to keep track and write up what they did day to day, she would sit down and talk with each one of them whenever they had a spare moment so they could quickly tell her what they had done. Then she would write down from her notes what they had done, and send in the handwritten records to the government. Through all this, she learned a lot about what each job required. So eventually, when more people were being stationed there, she was the one who had to go through the huge amounts of resumes of those trying to get in. She said she threw out hundreds and hundreds of applicants who just weren't good enough. Sometimes too, she would be taken out somewhere else to where a group of applicants were waiting, then she would merely go down the line and ask them one question specific to their field, and depending on how they answered that question determined whether they would get the post. She said, "And even if the question wasn't that difficult, you just had to look in their eyes, and you can tell if a person is intelligent or not." She said eventually there was some 50, 75 maybe people, I think.
About this time the girl sitting on my other side on the plane sighed and switched from her boring magazine to Twilight.
Another time, the lady said it was a day when there was going to be a rather important test of something, and there were generals and important government people there waiting to see it. Someone ran up to her a few hours before it was scheduled to commence, though, and said,"We have a problem! We can't run the test, one of the parts broke and ordering a new one would take weeks! All the officials are waiting here, we can't send them away, what should we do?" So she got everybody together, and they all thought about it for a while. As she was walking around outside with a couple of the scientists, they walked towards the back, near the dumpster. "What exactly does the part look like?" she asked them, and they described it too her. She pulled some old tin foil from the dumpster, some duct tape, pieces of wire, and other bits of trash, put them together, and said, "Here's your part. Now get more pieces from here and make a better one." So they made in a few hours the part from garbage from a dumpster, fixed the equipment, and ran the test for the important men. Everything went fine.
She told me a lot of other amazing stories, but my brain juice is running out. If I remember other cool stuff I'll write them down later.
I do know she said she was working there for about 5 years, and when it was semi-shut down, (yes, its still out there running with a skeleton crew) she went to work in a nuclear testing site in Nevada.
Quite a few years later, she realized that there wasn't a whole lot of information about the Star Wars project, so she decided to write a book on it. It was under the genre of fiction, she said, because the things she was writing about were classified so she had to mix in some fiction. She tried to get it published, but all the publishers said, "Oh, nobody wants to read about that kind of thing, they only want to read about the science fiction Star Wars." So it was never published. Copyrighted, but hidden away in the library of congress archives. "Oh yes, the characters are all based off of me and the others who worked there. Much of what's in there is completely true, but you're not supposed to know that."
She said that a few times; I'd ask, "So, what exactly was it that you did with this and this?" and she say, "Oh, well, I can't tell you, that's classified..."
She said the book was called T-minus, and that I should look it up, see if I could read it somehow. I said I would, so she said that I should write down what she'd told me in a short book, or a blog, or something. I said, yeah, maybe I will...
So, when I got back, I looked up the book and found it. I also discovered her name, which I'd clean forgotten to ask: Roberta L. Temby, if I found the right book, which I'm pretty sure I did.
One of the last things she said, before we got off the plane, was that I looked like her daughter, which is why she had told me everything she did. She also said, "Oh, and if you ever do find my book, maybe you could read it someday some how...and if you do, I really shouldn't tell you this, but there's a whole section that's completely true, its..."
Oops, but I can't tell you that, its classified.
