15: Chapter 15: Irrefutable Evidence Points to the Dam

No one denied it.

No one displayed the slightest intention of denying it in the silence.

Because the five people sitting in this room—Edward, Raymond, Hawthorne, Sloan, and Margaret—were all brilliant minds.

For intelligent people, this matter belonged to the type where once the first piece of the puzzle was put together, all subsequent pieces would come crashing down like dominoes, unstoppable.

Each falling domino revealed a deeper layer of truth, and each layer of truth was more chilling than the last.

A logical chain automatically surfaced in Edward's mind.

He was involved in politics, and he understood the logic of power better than anyone:

"You capture an Aliens, you study it, you reverse-engineer its technology. These research activities require water, electricity, underground bases, and a confidential environment completely isolated from the outside world."

The Hoover Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the American West, provided exactly that.

Its abundant hydroelectric resources, for fifty years after 1947, had consistently flowed in large part to a place that did not exist in any public record.

"If you capture Aliens to study them, their kind will come looking sooner or later."

"If their kind comes looking and discovers you are doing this, how do you think they will treat you?"

"They are a civilization superior to humanity."

"Their technology can make a person vanish from the world, erasing every trace of their existence."

"And after you have done this to their kin, can you expect them to forgive you?"

And Gore, that poor old engineer described by all the newspapers as a "drunken lunatic," had shouted all of this out back in 1945.

Two years after he shouted it, he died.

Edward Warren's fingers finally moved, lifting from the armrests.

He stood up slowly, walked to the fireplace, and looked down at the remaining ashes.

The fire had long since gone out, leaving only a small pile of grayish-white charcoal ash that gently stirred in the breeze leaking through the vent.

Then he turned around and scanned the four staff members before him.

Hawthorne's face, that of an old lawyer, showed little change in expression, but the hands resting on his knees were clenching the edges of the law book, his fingernails digging into the grooves of the spine.

Sloan had his arms crossed, his back pressed tight against the sofa cushion. His eyes, usually half-closed, were now wide open, with bloodshot whites.

Margaret leaned in the corner of the sofa, clutching a pen, the cap of which she had twisted off and on dozens of times.

Raymond sat on a folding canvas chair, hands supporting his tablet, his eye bags dark and gray, his lips cracked.

"Since newspapers reported on this in the past," Edward's voice broke the silence.

His tone remained steady, but the four people present knew that this steadiness itself was masking a greater degree of turmoil.

He was the only person in this room who could not lose his composure.

He looked at Margaret, "Then, is that newspaper that reported on this matter still around?"

Margaret gave a bitter smile.

There was not a trace of humor in that smile; it was entirely bitter.

"After reporting on this matter," she said, "the owner of that newspaper declared bankruptcy due to insolvency."

"Less than a month after the bankruptcy, he jumped from the roof of his four-story office building in the old district of Las Vegas."

"The police concluded it was suicide, caused by depression from the bankruptcy."

She paused slightly, her fingers tapping lightly on the casing of her laptop, "And the reporter who conducted the exclusive interview and wrote the report became unemployed immediately after the newspaper went under."

"In the third week after losing his job, his name appeared in the Las Vegas police department's missing persons registry."

"From that point on, no one ever found him again."

Silence again.

It was no longer just silence; it was a deathly stillness that stretched every nerve to its limit.

The wind over Gold Lake whistled as it passed through the gaps in the wooden cabin's door.

The waves of pine trees roared one after another, like something gasping low in the distance.

Edward stood for a long time.

He did not return to his armchair but remained standing in front of the fireplace, looking down at the grayish-white fragments of ash.

Not a single tense line on his face moved, but the imperceptible rise and fall of his chest betrayed him; his breathing was half a beat faster and a few degrees deeper than usual.

Then he raised his head, moved his gaze away from the fireplace, and slowly swept it across Hawthorne, Sloan, and Margaret, finally landing on Raymond.

"What is the conclusion you four have reached?"

Hawthorne did not speak.

Sloan averted his gaze, casting it toward the gray lake surface in the distance outside the window.

Margaret continued to obsessively twist the pen cap off and on, on and off.

No one wanted to be the one to say the conclusion first.

It was Raymond who finally spoke.

But he did not state the conclusion directly.

He looked at Edward and said in a tone that was almost like casual conversation:

"Boss, don't you think that a project like the Hoover Dam couldn't have been built under normal circumstances in the Lighthouse Country?"

Edward did not speak, waiting for him to continue.

"The workers in the Lighthouse Country," Raymond continued, "have always been the hardest to manage in the world."

"They strike at the drop of a hat, organize unions to demand wage hikes at the drop of a hat, and turn construction sites into battlefields for lawsuits between unions and management at the drop of a hat."

"For a mega-project like the Hoover Dam—21.6 million cubic meters of concrete, a 320-meter span, requiring work day and night in the deep desert for five years—under normal circumstances, the workers of the Lighthouse Country would absolutely never finish it."

"They would start striking by the third month, form a specialized construction union by the sixth month, and drag the entire project into the mire of labor arbitration by the tenth month."

He paused, his gaze as sharp as a blade.

"But the Hoover Dam was different."

"Construction started in 1931 and finished in 1936. A five-year schedule, and there wasn't a single strike throughout the entire process."

"Do you know why?"

"The 1929 stock market crash," Edward said.

"Correct," Raymond nodded, "The 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression began."

"By the time construction on the Hoover Dam started in 1931, the unemployment rate in the Lighthouse Country had already exceeded 25 percent."

"Every state had tens of millions of people who couldn't find work."

"Under those circumstances, as long as there was work to do and food to eat, no one would strike."

"When the Hoover Dam was recruiting workers, people from all over the country flooded into the Nevada desert like a tide."

"Not because they were patriotic, not because of the Federal Government's call, but purely because they were about to starve to death back home."

Raymond pulled a document from his stack of materials and showed it to everyone.

"I checked all the policy records for the recruitment of workers for the Hoover Dam in 1931," he said,

"The one that concerned me the most was this: all workers had to undergo a strict background check."

"Not the kind of ordinary check like 'where did you work before,' but a thorough investigation of three generations—who their parents were, who their grandparents were, the years they lived in the Lighthouse Country, and whether there were any gaps where they were not in the country."

"The standards of this investigation were so strict that, even today, they would surpass the entry-level background checks for Federal Bureau of Investigation agents."

He said, enunciating every word:

"Building a dam and being able to check three generations of every worker—that is something I have only encountered once in the Lighthouse Country."

He scanned everyone, then delivered the final sentence, word by word.

"And later, after the dam was completed in March 1936, for over a decade, all the dam's operational data was normal."

"But it just so happens that after 1947, for the next fifty years, there was a continuous shortfall in hydroelectric resources."

"The starting time of this shortfall coincides perfectly with the year the Roswell Incident occurred."

"This is already irrefutable evidence."