STRANGE HAPPENINGS AT PROJECT PHAROS

by ardavenport

"It's not fair. It's just not fair!"

"Yes, John. You've said that already." Sarah Jane Smith barely listened to the tirade while she prowled through the third drawer from the top of John Westlinn's filing cabinet.

"John, are you sure those notes are in here?"

"You're not even listening to me!"

"Of course, I am," She replied placatingly, even though she hadn't. "But it's no use grousing about a story the government won't let you print. You even said it was too weird to use anyway."

John started to raise his voice. "That's not the issue here! I've got a story, and whether or not I want to print it, they won't let me. It's the principle of the thing!" And John Westlinn was indeed a man of principle.A product of the1960's radicalism, he had pursued the truly meaningful and adventurous life of an investigative reporter. His ideals had gotten side-tracked somewhere in the middle 70's in a second floor office cubicle at the NATIONAL REGISTER. Now he was balding, middle-aged-waisted, and at the moment, loudly complaining about official censorship.

"Look, John," Sarah faced her opponent squarely with hand on hip. "I know how you feel. I had two months work tossed out the window when the government wouldn't let anyone print anything about the spy scandals. You're not the only person to have trouble with the National Secrets Act. But there isn't anything we can do about it. Now, can you stop complaining about something you can't do anything about long enough to help me find your Oxford notes?"

Westlinn glared at Sarah for a few more seconds before rolling his chair over to the cabinet. He thought she was being terribly complacent about what seemed to him to be a very serious problem. They were practically living in a police state!

"You could find them if you'd look up 'Oxford Music'", he tossed rudely over his shoulder.

"Not in there there isn't. There's a big nothing in between 'Oxford Cricket' and Ozone."

Sarah waited a few seconds for him to discover the obvious. Then a few more while he started probing through the rest of the 0's for the missing file.

"Well?"

"Well, they're in here someplace. I know I've still got them."

"Humph." Sarah took a seat on the edge of John's desk. She hadn't really intended to come and argue.

She had gotten a request from a magazine editor to interview a deaf student at the Oxford School of Music. Knowing only the sketchiest of details, and the fact that John had done an article on him when he'd been accepted at Oxford, She had naturally sought out her old acquaintance for more details before she went for the interview the next day.

A little impatient, Sarah looked about for some distraction while John started rifling through the second drawer from the top.

"Are these your notes from the Pharos Project?" she asked, picking up a pile of scribbly notes and photos.

"That's them. Take a look if you like. It's a pretty strange lot," he answered, now totally absorbed in his hunt, or perhaps feeling a little sorry that he'd gotten mad at her for something that really wasn't her fault.

After looking over the whole mess and trying to find what might be a beginning, Sarah started to read the "Strange Happenings at Project Pharos."

Apparently, six people had broken on-to the grounds of the Pharos Project, some kind of radio set-up designed to contact life in outer space. The group consisted of three men, two women, and a boy, and not only managed to get on the grounds without disturbing any alarms or guards, but also tampered with the project's computer and radio-sending dish.
The project authorities were quite eager to catch them since a technician was found dead (details unknown) at the scene of some of the computer tampering.

The two girls and the boy were actually caught for a time, but when asked why they were there, the boy had explained that they were aliens come to answer the Pharos Project's call. The boy had been in his middle teens, dark-haired, and wearing a yellow shirt. The girls both looked to be in their twenties, and both had brown hair. One was wearing a purple uniform-dress, the other a black shirt and a fairy tutu.

All three of them got away in the confusion caused by two (or three) of the men who'd climbed on to the project radio tower.

There had apparently been some kind of a fight between them. One of them, a medium-sized man dressed in black, with black hair and beard, had forced a second out of the radio tower control room, and even off the catwalk next to it. The second, a middle-aged man with brown curly hair, red coat, red pants, boots and an enormously long scarf, at least twenty feet long, looped around his neck . . . . . . . a . . . long . . . scarf?

The red-coated man was left hanging from the cable that connected the radio dish to the control room. The cable unfortunately broke, and the man fell at least ten stories to the ground.

"Must have broken every bone in his body . . . " the notes quoted one of the guards present.

The guards had been absolutely certain that the man who fell was the same one who'd escaped from them a few minutes earlier. But when they got to the man on the ground, they found not the middle-aged man with the curly brown hair, but a young one (about 30) with straight blond hair and dressed exactly as the other one.

At this point, Westlinn had run into an impasse. All six escaped in the end, but the guards were very reluctant to say how. But John Westlinn's persistence (that had also allowed him to bully his way onto the project site and then weasel the story out of a few guards and technicians after they'd gotten off work) won out. Sort of. One of the guards gave him a very strange ending to the whole incident.

When the man fell, an ambulance was immediately called, and he was loaded inside. But when the boy distracted the guards, the girls made off with the ambulance, drove across the site, and all three got into a blue Police Box which had not been there the day before.

The boy was recaptured, but then he was 'rescued' when a Greek column appeared in mid-air and stunned everybody with some kind of lightening bolts. They'd all woken up just in time to see the column and the Police Box disappear amid loud grinding noises. Neither the man in black, nor the one with the brown curly hair were ever accounted for or seen again.

There were also numerous notes from Westlinn about how ludicrous the whole situation was, and a few badly taken photographs of the Pharos Project, but that was all.

"Ah, ha! Here it is." Sarah looked up. John proudly waved a folder marked 'Deaf Music'.

"Well, I'd expect a bit more response after finding this for you," he commented when he got no reaction.

"Oh, ah yes...thank you." She reached for the folder.

"You look a bit done in. What's wrong?"

"Oh, um . . . . a friend of mine just died."

"I'm sorry to hear that . . . . " John let the words trail off as he tried to put the proper amount of concern in his voice.

"It's all right." Sarah gave him a small, sad smile and put the unpleasant details back on the desk top. "He'll get over it."

- END -

Note: This story first appeared under the name 'Anne Davenport' in the print fanzine 'From the Notebook of Sarah Jane' #4 in 1984.

Disclaimer: All Who characters and their universe belong to the BBC; I m just playing in that sandbox.