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lake bed in the desolate Nevada desert. It was only an accident of history that put the base under naval jurisdiction back when it was established in 1947, and Sage was the last in the line of ducks out of water.
    Kenney thoroughly and unreservedly hated Sage’s guts. He considered him to be a pompous and insecure son of a bitch whom he wouldn’t trust to shine his shoes in civilian life. To his confidants in the ranks of the watchers, the roster of majors who reported directly to him, Kenney seditiously referred to Sage as the banana slug after the creature so territorial and guarded that it bites off its own penis inside the female to prevent others from depositing sperm. He couldn’t recall how he knew about the mating habits of banana slugs, but it was the typical kind of factoid he was always picking up and tossing around to the amusement of the men he commanded.
    Sage’s new PA, a civilian who, rumor had it, had been a showgirl on the Strip, moved papers around her desk in a transparent attempt to appear busy. All service branches of the military had been operating under a mandate to be essentially paperless by 2025, but out-of-the-way bases like Area 51 weren’t visited by auditors and it wasn’t clear that Sage could operate all his productivity devices.
    Kenney sat stiffly, watching the PA. She was reasonably ripe and attractive and wasn’t totally out of his age range. He stared intently at her sweater with radium eyes and concluded he wanted to make a move on her. Unless the old banana slug had already bitten off his penis inside her.
    “Anyone in with him?” Kenney finally asked her.
    “He’s on a conference call, Colonel,” she said. It sounded like a lie, but there was nothing he could do about it. He settled into a game. He was self-assured about his own attributes: dark, cocky features, lean, strong, and fast. He stared hard at her and tried to use mind control to make her look up. When she did, he’d hit her with a devilish little smile. Fifteen fidgety minutes passed. He needed to get back to theTruman Building. For the first time in his five years as head of watchers Kenney actually had some serious work to do.
    Groom Lake Building 34, the Truman Building, had become a shadow of its former self. At its high-water mark, over 700 government employees made the daily commute by charter plane from Las Vegas to the remote desert base. Now there were 134, 16 of them watchers.
    After the existence of the Library became a matter of public knowledge gawkers and the press gathered at the security fences at McCarran Airport focusing binoculars and long lenses on commuters. Some Area 51 employees were followed from the parking lots back to their homes in Las Vegas and surrounding suburbs, prompting the security force at Area 51, known not so affectionately as the watchers, to go into overdrive, monitoring employees to make sure they could not and did not leak highly classified information on birth and death dates from the Library database.
    The watchers had been knocked on their heels by the Shackleton affair and its aftermath. Their chief, Malcolm Frazier, had been killed by Will Piper’s wife in an FBI shoot-out at the home of a dissident Area 51 retiree. Will Piper had gone to the press and blown the lid off of sixty-four years of maniacal secrecy. They had been disgraced, plain and simple. With an acting chief on board, an outsider dropped in by a Pentagon in crisis mode, they had been relegated to calling the Las Vegas police to deal with paparazzi chasing their analysts around Sin City.
    But perhaps no one at Area 51 had been as affected as Roger Kenney. When the shit hit the fan, Kenney had only been a watcher for five years, but he’d already caught the eye of Malcolm Frazier in a big way.Frazier had latched onto the gung ho kid and put him on a promotion fast track. He’d given him plum assignments and habitually singled him out to the rest of the watchers for his accomplishments. Whenever