"Space: Above and Beyond" [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
"Pilot"
24 September 1995
Episode 1 Season 1 DVD video:
Vanessa Damphousse: I knew we couldn't have been alone but now that we're not, I don't know what's scarier - being alone or - Do you think you'd be scared if you saw one?
Paul Wang: I remember when I was a kid and saw my first A.I. They looked so human, but something inside me could just tell.
Vanessa Damphousse: I felt that way when I saw my first InVitro. I don't mean anything by that, Coop.
http://www.oocities.org/elzj78/bsgminiseries.html
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: Miniseries (2003) [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
(Galactica - the flight pods are retracting.)
Tigh: The board is green. The ship reports ready to jump, sir.
Adama: Then take us to Ragnar, Colonel.
Tigh: Lt. Gaeta.
Gaeta: Yes, sir.
Tigh: Execute the jump.
Gaeta: (on intercom) All decks prepare for immediate FTL jump. (He puts a blue crystal device in one of the consoles and turns it.) Clock is running. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two...
(Hangar)
Cally: I hate this part.
(CIC)
Gaeta: One. Jumping.
From 12/8/2003 ( RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 - premiere US TV miniseries "Battlestar Galactica" ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 2880 days
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 9/21/1973 ( premiere US film "The Spook Who Sat by the Door" ) is 2880 days
From 10/18/1954 ( Texas Instruments announces the Regency TR-1 - the first commercial transistor radio ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 20828 days
20828 = 10414 + 10414
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 5/8/1994 ( RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 - premiere US TV miniseries Stephen King's "The Stand"::miniseries premiere episode "The Plague" ) is 10414 days
From 8/14/1945 ( Steve Martin ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 24180 days
24180 = 12090 + 12090
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 12/9/1998 ( the Seattle Washington Public Meeting On Gas Works Park Environmental Cleanup Project ) is 12090 days
From 3/26/2004 ( international organized crime event - premiere United Kingdom film "Dawn of the Dead" ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 2771 days
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 6/4/1973 ( the United States patent granted for the automatic teller machine ) is 2771 days
From 11/11/1946 ( Corrine Brown ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 23726 days
23726 = 11863 + 11863
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 4/26/1998 ( RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 - premiere US TV series episode "The Simpsons"::"Trash of the Titans" ) is 11863 days
From 4/26/1998 ( RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 - premiere US TV series episode "The Simpsons"::"Trash of the Titans" ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 4932 days
4932 = 2466 + 2466
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 8/3/1972 ( premiere US film "The New Centurions" ) is 2466 days
From 4/14/1961 ( Robert Carlyle ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 18458 days
18458 = 9229 + 9229
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 2/8/1991 ( premiere US film "L.A. Story" ) is 9229 days
From 10/2/2009 ( RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 - premiere US TV series "Stargate Universe"::series premiere episode "Air" ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 755 days
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 11/27/1967 ( The Beatles "Magical Mystery Tour" ) is 755 days
From 1/14/1952 ( premiere US TV series episode "I Love Lucy"::"The Amateur Hour" ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 21836 days
21836 = 10918 + 10918
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 9/24/1995 ( RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 - premiere US TV series "Space: Above and Beyond" ) is 10918 days
From 1/14/1952 ( premiere US TV series "Today" ) To 10/27/2011 ( --- ) is 21836 days
21836 = 10918 + 10918
From 11/2/1965 ( date hijacked from me:my birth date in Antlers Oklahoma USA and my birthdate as the known official Deputy United States Marshal Kerry Wayne Burgess and active duty United States Marine Corps officer ) To 9/24/1995 ( RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 - premiere US TV series "Space: Above and Beyond" ) is 10918 days
http://www.divxmoviesenglishsubtitles.com/U/US_Marshals.html
US Marshals
Look, I made a mistake, okay?|I usually work alone.
We're lucky I got shot, kid.
Lucky?
If he'd shot one of my deputies,|you wouldn't see your mama again...
...I'd be in jail for shooting you.
http://www.cswap.com/1986/Top_Gun/cap/en/25fps/a/00_20
Top Gun
:20:21
You need any help?
You figured it out yet?
:20:28
- What's that?
- Who's the best pilot.
:20:33
- I can figure that one out on my own.
- I heard that about you.
:20:38
You like to work alone.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070726/releaseinfo
IMDb
The Internet Movie Database
Release dates for
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)
Country Date
USA 21 September 1973 (New York City, New York)
http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/timeline/semicon/1950/docs/54regency.htm
Regency Radio debuts, first commercial mass-produced transistor product
TI was producing germanium transistors, but the market had been slow to respond.
The industry was comfortable with vacuum tubes and had taken a wait-and-see attitude. Transistor sales had been just a trickle with a few applications, but Executive Vice President Pat Haggerty's goal was to produce them by the hundreds of thousands. A daring plan would herald the world's acceptance of transistors and help launch TI into a new industry.
Haggerty decided that the electronics industry needed a transistor wake-up call and that a small radio would provide it.
TI's Semiconductor Products Division took on the challenge of developing a method for mass-producing germanium transistors. The existing fabrication consisted of skilled operators assembling tiny bars into individual transistors. It was a slow and tedious task and would never reach the production levels Haggerty envisioned.
TI's new fabrication method allowed for batches of transistors to be built at the same time in a furnace.
In the Spring of 1954, Haggerty decided TI would develop the transistor radio business, even though, at the time, transistors were poorly suited for the job and much too expensive.
After TI demonstrated a working transistor radio to the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA) of Indianapolis, the two companies decided immediately to design the production model jointly. IDEA would then assemble and market 100,000 of the Regency-brand radios. The revolutionary new transistor radio would be introduced in New York and Los Angeles by mid-October 1954 to take advantage of Christmas sales.
On October 18, 1954, the Regency TR-1 radio was officially announced to the world. More than 100,000 pocket radios were eventually sold.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1349235/releaseinfo
IMDb
The Internet Movie Database
Release dates for
"The Stand"
The Plague (1994)
Country Date
USA 8 May 1994
UK 10 August 1996
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1349235
IMDb
The Internet Movie Database
The Stand (TV mini-series 1994)
The Plague (#1.1)
Gary Sinise ... Stu Redman
When a deadly virus escapes from a government research facility, few prove to be immune to its effects. With symptoms similar to the flu, those who come into contact with it quickly die. One survivor is Stu Redmond, a gas station attendant from Texas, who suffers no ill effects whatsoever. Kept in a medical research facility in Vermont, doctors try to determine why he is still alive. Others that also survive include Frannie Goldsmith who lives with her dad; Nick Andros, a deaf-mute; a rock musician, Larry Underwood; and Lloyd Henreid, in jail for murder. Survivors begin to have dreams, either about an old Afican-American woman, Mother Abigail, or a much scarier evil man.
Release Date: 8 May 1994 (USA)
http://www.tv.com/shows/stephen-kings-the-stand/the-plague-1178981
tv.com
Stephen King's The Stand
Season 1, Episode 1
The Plague
Air Date
Sunday May 8, 1994
One sunny June day, a deadly virus accidentally escapes from a government-run lab, decimating the population of the world. Only a few people seems to be inmune. One of the survivors is Stu Redmond, a gas station attendant from Texas, who doesn't seem to suffer the effects of the illness. For this reason, he is kept in a center for disease control in Vermont, where doctors try to figure out why he is still alive. Others survivors include Frannie Goldsmith who lives with her dad, Nick Andros, a deaf-mute, Larry Underwood a rock musician and Lloyd Henreid who is in jail for murder. Each survivor starts having dreams about an old African American woman who warns them from danger and gives them advice, or about a scary evil man.
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
BOOK I
CAPTAIN TRIPS
JUNE 16 – JULY 4, 1990
I called the doctor on the telephone
Said doctor, doctor, please ,
I got this feeling, rocking and reeling ,
Tell me, what can it be?
Is it some new disease?
The Sylvers
Baby, can you dig your man?
He’s a righteous man ,
Baby, can you dig your man?
Larry Underwood
Chapter 1
Hapscomb’s Texaco sat on Number 93 just north of Arnette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston. Tonight the regulars were there, sitting by the cash register, drinking beer, talking idly, watching the bugs fly into the big lighted sign.
It was Bill Hapscomb’s station, so the others deferred to him even though he was a pure fool. They would have expected the same deferral if they had been gathered together in one of their business establishments. Except they had none. In Arnette, it was hard times. In 1980 the town had had two industries, a factory that made paper products (for picnics and barbecues, mostly) and a plant that made electronic calculators. Now the paper factory was shut down and the calculator plant was ailing—they could make them a lot cheaper in Taiwan, it turned out, just like those portable TVs and transistor radios.
Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week. Victor Palfrey was retired and smoked stinking home-rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford.
“Now what I say is this,” Hap told them, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward. “They just gotta say screw this inflation shit. Screw this national debt shit. We got the presses and we got the paper. We’re gonna run off fifty million thousand-dollar bills and hump them right the Christ into circulation.”
Palfrey, who had been a machinist until 1984, was the only one present with sufficient self-respect to point out Hap’s most obvious damfool statements. Now, rolling another of his shitty-smelling cigarettes, he said: “That wouldn’t get us nowhere. If they do that, it’ll be just like Richmond in the last two years of the States War. In those days, when you wanted a piece of gingerbread, you gave the baker a Confederate dollar, he’d put it on the gingerbread, and cut out a piece just that size. Money’s just paper, you know.”
“I know some people don’t agree with you,” Hap said sourly. He picked up a greasy red plastic paper-holder from his desk. “I owe these people. And they’re starting to get pretty itchy about it.”
Stuart Redman, who was perhaps the quietest man in Arnette, was sitting in one of the cracked plastic Woolco chairs, a can of Pabst in his hand, looking out the big service station window at Number 93. Stu knew about poor. He had grown up that way right here in town, the son of a dentist who had died when Stu was seven, leaving his wife and two other children besides Stu.
His mother had gotten work at the Red Ball Truck Stop just outside of Arnette—Stu could have seen it from where he sat right now if it hadn’t burned down in 1979. It had been enough to keep the four of them eating, but that was all. At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, and then at the stockyards in the neighboring town of Braintree, lying about his age to get twenty backbreaking hours of labor a week at the minimum wage.
Now, listening to Hap and Vic Palfrey argue on about money and the mysterious way it had of drying up, he thought about the way his hands had bled at first from pulling the endless handtrucks of hides and guts. He had tried to keep that from his mother, but she had seen, less than a week after he started. She wept over them a little, and she hadn’t been a woman who wept easily. But she hadn’t asked him to quit the job. She knew what the situation was. She was a realist.
Some of the silence in him came from the fact that he had never had friends, or the time for them. There was school, and there was work. His youngest brother, Dev, had died of pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never quite gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best… but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed.
In high school he had found football, and that was something his mother had encouraged even though it cut into his work hours. “You play,” she said. “If you got a ticket out of here, it’s football, Stuart. You play. Remember Eddie Warfield.” Eddie Warfield was a local hero. He had come from a family even poorer than Stu’s own, had covered himself with glory as quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone on to Texas A&M with an athletic scholarship, and had played for ten years with the Green Bay Packers, mostly as a second-string quarterback but on several memorable occasions as the starter. Eddie now owned a string of fast-food restaurants across the West and Southwest, and in Arnette he was an enduring figure of myth. In Arnette, when you said “success,” you meant Eddie Warfield.
Stu was no quarterback, and he was no Eddie Warfield. But it did seem to him as he began his junior year in high school that there was at least a fighting chance for him to get a small athletic scholarship… and then there were work-study programs, and the school’s guidance counselor had told him about the NDEA loan program.
Then his mother had gotten sick, had become unable to work. It was cancer. Two months before he graduated from high school, she had died, leaving Stu with his brother Bryce to support. Stu had turned down the athletic scholarship and had gone to work in the calculator factory. And finally it was Bryce, three years’ Stu’s junior, who had made it out. He was now in Minnesota, a systems analyst for IBM. He didn’t write often, and the last time he had seen Bryce was at the funeral, after Stu’s wife had died—died of exactly the same sort of cancer that had killed his mother. He thought that Bryce might have his own guilt to carry… and that Bryce might be a little ashamed of the fact that his brother had turned into just another good old boy in a dying Texas town, spending his days doing time in the calculator plant, and his nights either down at Hap’s or over at the Indian Head drinking Lone Star beer.
The marriage had been the best time, and it had only lasted eighteen months. The womb of his young wife had borne a single dark and malignant child. That had been four years ago. Since, he had thought of leaving Arnette, searching for something better, but small-town inertia held him—the low siren song of familiar places and familiar faces. He was well liked in Arnette, and Vic Palfrey had once paid him the ultimate compliment of calling him “Old Time Tough.”
As Vic and Hap chewed it out, there was still a little dusk left in the sky, but the land was in shadow. Cars didn’t go by on 93 much now, which was one reason that Hap had so many unpaid bills. But there was a car coming now, Stu saw.
It was still a quarter of a mile distant, the day’s last light putting a dusty shine on what little chrome was left to it. Stu’s eyes were sharp, and he made it as a very old Chevrolet, maybe a ‘75. A Chevy, no lights on, doing no more than fifteen miles an hour, weaving all over the road. No one had seen it yet but him.
“Now let’s say you got a mortgage payment on this station,” Vic was saying, “and let’s say it’s fifty dollars a month.”
“It’s a hell of a lot more than that.”
“Well, for the sake of the argument, let’s say fifty. And let’s say the Federals went ahead and printed you a whole carload of money. Well then those bank people would turn round and want a hundred and fifty. You’d be just as poorly off.”
“That’s right,” Henry Carmichael added. Hap looked at him, irritated. He happened to know that Hank had gotten in the habit of taking Cokes out of the machine without paying the deposit, and furthermore, Hank knew he knew, and if Hank wanted to come in on any side it ought to be his.
“That ain’t necessarily how it would be,” Hap said weightily from the depths of his ninth-grade education. He went on to explain why.
Stu, who only understood that they were in a hell of a pinch, tuned Hap’s voice down to a meaningless drone and watched the Chevy pitch and yaw its way on up the road. The way it was going Stu didn’t think it was going to make it much farther. It crossed the white line and its lefthand tires spurned up dust from the left shoulder. Now it lurched back, held its own lane briefly, then nearly pitched off into the ditch. Then, as if the driver had picked out the big lighted Texaco station sign as a beacon, it arrowed toward the tarmac like a projectile whose velocity is very nearly spent. Stu could hear the worn-out thump of its engine now, the steady gurgle-and-wheeze of a dying carb and a loose set of valves. It missed the lower entrance and bumped up over the curb. The fluorescent bars over the pumps were reflecting off the Chevy’s dirt-streaked windshield so it was hard to see what was inside, but Stu saw the vague shape of the driver roll loosely with the bump. The car showed no sign of slowing from its relentless fifteen.
“So I say with more money in circulation you’d be—”
“Better turn off your pumps, Hap,” Stu said mildly.
“The pumps? What?”
Norm Bruett had turned to look out the window. “Christ on a pony,” he said.
Stu got out of his chair, leaned over Tommy Wannamaker and Hank Carmichael, and flicked off all eight switches at once, four with each hand. So he was the only one who didn’t see the Chevy as it hit the gas pumps on the upper island and sheared them off.
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F23.html
You Only Move Twice
Original airdate in U.S.: 3-Nov-96
At work, Homer's wearing his Tom Landry hat and coaching his team, but they're quite exhausted from the work he's asking from them. From experience, Homer knows that fatigue requires only one solution: hammocks. He goes straight to his "boss".
Hank: Uh, hi, Homer. What can I do for you?
Homer: Sir, I need to know where I can get some business hammocks.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970416/quotes
IMDb
The Internet Movie Database
Memorable quotes for
The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)
Helen Benson: I need to know what's happening.
Klaatu: This planet is dying. The human race is killing it.
Helen Benson: So you've come here to help us.
Klaatu: No, *I* didn't.
Helen Benson: You said you came to save us.
Klaatu: I said I came to save the Earth.
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/s/soylent-green-script-transcript-heston.html
Soylent Green
I need to know what he said to you.
- Are you sure he's dead? - Yes.
- Really dead? - He's dead.
- What did he talk to you about? - Come back tomorrow. I'm very tired now.
Father.
Father. Did you hear his confession?
There should be a requiem mass. But there's no room.
- Should I make room? - This is very important.
I can't help you.
Forgive me. It's destroying me.
- What is? - The truth.
The truth Simonson told you?
- All truth. - What is it?
What did he confess?
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
“You know who that was on the phone.”
“It was really him, then?”
“The President, yes. I’ve been relieved. The dirty alderman relieved me, Len. Of course I knew it was coming. But it still hurts. Hurts like hell. It hurts coming from that grinning, gladhanding sack of shit.”
Len Creighton nodded.
“Well,” Starkey said, passing a hand over his face. “It’s done. Can’t be undone. You’re in charge now. He wants you in Washington as soon as you can get there. He’ll have you on the carpet and he’ll chew your ass to a bloody rag, but you just stand there and yessir him and take it. We’ve salvaged what we can. It’s enough. I’m convinced it’s enough.”
“If so, this country ought to get down on its knees to you.”
“The throttle burned my hand, but I… I held it as long as I could, Len. I held it.” He spoke with quiet vehemence, but his eyes wandered back to the monitor, and for a moment his mouth quivered infirmly. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“Well… we go back a country mile or three, Billy, don’t we?”
“You can say that again, soldier. Now—listen. One thing is top priority. You’ve got to see Jack Cleveland, first chance you get. He knows who we’ve got behind both curtains, iron and bamboo. He knows how to get in touch with them, and he won’t stick at what has to be done. He’ll know it’ll have to be quick.”
“I don’t understand, Billy.”
“We have to assume the worst,” Starkey said, and a queer grin came over his face. It lifted his upper lip and made it wrinkle like the snout of a dog protecting a farmyard. He pointed a finger at the sheets of yellow flimsy on the table. “It’s out of control now. It’s popped up in Oregon, Nebraska, Louisiana, Florida. Tentative cases in Mexico and Chile. When we lost Atlanta, we lost the three men best equipped to deal with the problem. We’re getting exactly nowhere with Mr. Stuart ‘Prince’ Redman. Did you know they actually injected him with the Blue virus? He thought it was a sedative. He killed it, and no one has the slightest idea how. If we had six weeks, we might be able to turn the trick. But, we don’t. The flu story is the best one, but it is imperative—imperative —that the other side never sees this as an artificial situation created in America. It might give them ideas.
“Cleveland has between eight and twenty men and women in the U.S.S.R. and between five and ten in each of the European satellite countries. Not even I know how many he has in Red China.” Starkey’s mouth was trembling again. “When you see Cleveland this afternoon, all you need tell him is Rome falls. You won’t forget?”
“No,” Len said. His—lips felt curiously cold. “But do you really expect that they’ll do it? Those men and women?”
“Our people got those vials one week ago. They believe they contain radioactive particles to be charted by our Sky-Cruise satellites. That’s all they need to know, isn’t it, Len?”
“Yes, Billy.”
“And if things do go from bad to… to worse, no one will ever know. Project Blue was uninfiltrated to the very end, we’re sure of that. A new virus, a mutation… our opposite numbers may suspect, but there won’t be time enough. Share and share alike, Len.”
“Yes.”
Starkey was looking at the monitors again. “My daughter gave me a book of poems some years ago. By a man named Yeets. She said every military man should read Yeets. I think it was her idea of a joke. You ever heard of Yeets, Len?”
“I think so,” Creighton said, considering and rejecting the idea of telling Starkey the man’s name was pronounced Yates.
“I read every line,” Starkey said, as he peered into the eternal silence of the cafeteria. “Mostly because she thought I wouldn’t. It’s a mistake to become too predictable. I didn’t understand much of it—I believe the man must have been crazy—but I read it. Funny poetry. Didn’t always rhyme. But there was one poem in that book that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind. It seemed as if that man was describing everything I dedicated my life to, its hopelessness, its damned nobility. He said that things fall apart. He said the center doesn’t hold. I believe he meant that things get flaky, Len. That’s what I believe he meant. Yeets knew that sooner or later things get goddam flaky around the edges even if he didn’t know anything else.”
“Yes, sir,” Creighton said quietly.
“The end of it gave me goosebumps the first time I read it, and it still does. I’ve got that part by heart. ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’”
Creighton stood silent. He had nothing to say.
“The beast is on its way,” Starkey said, turning around. He was weeping and grinning. “It’s on its way, and it’s a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart. The job is to hold as much as we can for as long as we can.”
“Yes, sir,” Creighton said, and for the first time he felt the sting of tears in his own eyes. “Yes, Billy.”
Starkey put out his hand and Creighton took it in both of his own. Starkey’s hand was old and cold, like the shed skin of a snake in which some small prairie animal has died, leaving its own fragile skeleton within the husk of the reptile. Tears overspilled the lower arcs of Starkey’s eyes and ran down his meticulously shaved cheeks.
“I have business to attend to,” Starkey said.
“Yes, sir.”
Starkey slipped his West Point ring off his right hand and his wedding band off his left. “For Cindy,” he said. “For my daughter. See that she gets them, Len.”
“I will.”
Starkey went to the door.
“Billy?” Len Creighton called after him.
Starkey turned.
Creighton stood ramrod straight, the tears still running down his own cheeks. He saluted.
Starkey returned it and then stepped out the door.
The elevator hummed efficiently, marking off the floors. An alarm began to hoot—mournfully, as if it somehow knew it was warning of a situation which had already become a lost cause—when he used his special key to open it at the top, so he could enter the motor-pool area. Starkey imagined Len Creighton watching him on a succession of monitors as he first picked out a jeep and then drove it across the desert floor of the sprawling test site and through a gate marked HIGH SECURITY ZONE NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT SPECIAL CLEARANCE. The checkpoints looked like turnpike tollbooths. They were still manned, but the soldiers behind the yellowish glass were dead and rapidly mummifying in the dry desert heat. The booths were bulletproof, but they hadn’t been germproof. Their glazed and sunken eyes stared vacantly at Starkey as he motored past, the only moving thing along the tangle of dirt roads among the Quonset huts and low cinderblock buildings.
He stopped outside a squat blockhouse with a sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT A-1-A CLEARANCE on the door. He used one key to get in, and another to summon the elevator. A guard, dead as a doornail and stiff as a poker, stared at him from the glass-encased security station to the left of the elevator doors. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, Starkey stepped in quickly. He seemed to feel the gaze of the dead guard on him, a small weight of eyes like two dusty stones.
The elevator sank so rapidly his stomach turned over. A bell dinged softly when it came to a halt. The doors slid open, and the sweet odor of decay hit him like a soft slap. It wasn’t too strong because the air purifiers were still working, but not even the purifiers could dispose of that smell completely. When a man has died, he wants you to know about it, Starkey thought.
There were almost a dozen bodies sprawled in front of the elevator. Starkey minced among them, not wanting to tread on a decaying, waxy hand or trip over an outstretched leg. That might make him scream, and he most definitely didn’t want to do that. You didn’t want to scream in a tomb because the sound of it might drive you mad, and that’s exactly where he was: in a tomb. It looked like a well-financed scientific research project, but what it really was now was a tomb.
The elevator doors slid shut behind him; there was a hum as it began to go up automatically. It wouldn’t come down again unless somebody else keyed it, Starkey knew; as soon as the installation’s integrity had been breached, the computers had switched all the elevators to the general containment program. Why were these poor men and women lying here? Obviously they had been hoping the computers would fuck up the switch-over to the emergency procedures. Why not? It even had a certain logic. Everything else had fucked up.
Starkey walked down the corridor which led to the cafeteria, his heels clicking hollowly. Above, the fluorescents embedded in their long fixtures like inverted ice-cube trays threw a hard, shadowless light. There were more bodies. A man and a woman with their clothes off and holes in their heads. They screwed, Starkey thought, and then he shot her, and then he shot himself. Love among the viruses. The pistol, an army-issue .45, was still clutched in his hand. The tile floor was spotted with blood and gray stuff that looked like oatmeal. He felt a terrible and thankfully transient urge to bend down and touch the dead woman’s breasts, to see if they were hard or flaccid.
Farther down the hall a man sat with his back propped against a closed door, a sign tied around his neck with a shoelace. His chin had fallen forward, obscuring what was written there. Starkey put his fingers under the man’s chin and pushed his head back. As he did so, the man’s eyeballs fell back into his head with a meaty little thud. The words on the sign had been written in red Magic Marker. NOW YOU KNOW IT WORKS, the sign said. ANY QUESTIONS?
Starkey let go of the man’s chin. The head remained cocked at its stiff angle, the dark eye sockets staring raptly upward. Starkey stepped back. He was crying again. He suspected he was crying because he didn’t have any questions.
The cafeteria doors were propped open. Outside them was a large cork bulletin board. There was to have been a league bowl-off on June 20, Starkey saw. The Grim Gutterballers vs. The First Strikers for the Project championship. Also, Anna Floss wanted a ride to Denver or Boulder on July 9. She would share driving and expenses. Also, Richard Betts wanted to give away some friendly pups, half collie and half St. Bernard. Also, there were weekly nondenominational religious services in the caf.
Starkey read every announcement on the bulletin board, and then he went inside.
The smell in here was worse—rancid food as well as dead bodies. Starkey looked around with dull horror.
Some of them seemed to be looking at him.
“Men—” Starkey said, and then choked. He had no idea what he had been about to say.
He walked slowly over to where Frank D. Bruce lay with his face in his soup. He looked down at Frank D. Bruce for several moments. Then he pulled Frank D. Bruce’s head up by the hair. The soup bowl came with him, still stuck on his face by soup which had long since congealed, and Starkey struck at it in horror, finally knocking it off. The bowl clunked to the floor, upside down. Most of the soup still clung to Frank D. Bruce’s face like moldy jelly. Starkey produced his handkerchief and wiped off as much of it as he could. Frank D. Bruce’s eyes appeared to be gummed shut by soup, but Starkey forbore to wipe the lids. He was afraid Frank D. Bruce’s eyes would fall back into his skull, like the eyes of the man with the sign. He was even more afraid that the lids, freed of the glue which held them, might roll up like windowshades. He was mostly afraid of what the expression in Frank D. Bruce’s eyes might be.
“Private Bruce,” Starkey said softly, “at ease.”
He put the handkerchief carefully over the face of Frank D. Bruce. It stuck there. Starkey turned and walked out of the cafeteria in long, even strides, as if on a parade ground.
Halfway back to the elevator he came to the man with the sign around his neck. Starkey sat down beside him, loosened the strap over the butt of his pistol, and put the barrel of the gun into his mouth.
When, the shot came, it was muffled and undramatic. None of the corpses took the slightest notice. The air purifiers took care of the puff of smoke. In the bowels of Project Blue, there was silence. In the cafeteria, Starkey’s handkerchief came unstuck from Private Frank D. Bruce’s face and wafted to the floor. Frank D. Bruce did not seem to mind, but Len Creighton found himself looking into the monitor which showed Bruce more and more often, and wondering why in hell Billy couldn’t have gotten the soup out of the man’s eyebrows while he was at it. He was going to have to face the President of the United States soon, very soon, but the soup congealing in Frank D. Bruce’s eyebrows worried him more. Much more.
http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi1293352985
IMDb
The Internet Movie Database
"The Outer Limits" - IMDb.com
"Decompression"
30 June 2000
Episode 13 Season 6
Pilot: Ladies and gentlemen, we are making our final approach into Columbia Metro airport. Please take your seats and fasten your seatbelts. We should be on the ground in approximately six minutes.
The Stranger: When the plane crash-lands short of the runway you will be killed. Your legacy will be destroyed.
Senator Wyndom Brody: Michael, I - I think we need to rethink some of this.
The Stranger: If you are going to save yourself you must act now!
Senator Wyndom Brody: Individuals are important. One person can make a difference. But individuals do not take precedence over the common good. See, the people - the people need to know that we are all in this together.
The Stranger: What the public needs is you, Mr. President. Your country needs you. The future depends on you.
Senator Wyndom Brody: Unfortunately, people don't want to make a sacrifice anymore!
The Stranger: I can't understand you, Senator.
Senator Wyndom Brody: There's, uh, there's a price to be paid. A price to be paid for anything that we do.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/16566891.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Nov+20%2C+1996&author=BILL+HIGGINS&pub=Los+Angeles+Times+(pre-1997+Fulltext)&edition=&startpage=8&desc=%27First+Contact%27+With+a+Soon-to-Be+Hit
Los Angeles Times Archives
'First Contact' With a Soon-to-Be Hit
Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext) - Los Angeles, Calif.
Author: BILL HIGGINS
Date: Nov 20, 1996
Start Page: 8
Section: Life & Style; PART-E; View Desk
Text Word Count: 382
Abstract (Document Summary)
The Scene: Monday's benefit premiere of Paramount's "Star Trek: First Contact" at Mann's Chinese theater. A party followed at the nearby Hollywood Colonnade. Filmgoers with lives beyond the "Trek" biosphere should find the film readily accessible. One woman associated with the TV series said: "Borgs are bad; humans are good. That's all you need to know."
http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/battlestar
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
http://www.twiztv.com/scripts/battlestar/season3/galactica-307.htm
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
3X07 - A MEASURE OF SALVATION (2)
Original Airdate (SciFi): 10-NOV-2006
Colonial one.
Apollo: We jump to an area we know the Cylons use as a supply line. NCD2539. We stay there, exposed; we look as if we're spoiling for a fight. They'll send their Fleet. And where there's a Fleet, there's a resurrection ship. And once the resurrection ship is within our reach, we execute our infected prisoners. We bug out. The executed prisoners download into the resurrection ship, and with them, the virus.
Roslin: You're sure the virus will download to a new body?
Apollo: The Cylons are sure of it. They left their wounded out here to die alone with no hope of being rescued. Tells me all I need to know.
