.

light having a nervous breakdown in front of twenty cameras?’

      Ray looked confused, an expression which seemed to suite his fat red face. ‘Why … they gotta test fly them. Can’t just send them into combat without putting them through their paces first.’

      ‘Quite,’ muttered Dave, rapidly losing patience. ‘But if it is a secret military craft why do they have to test it in quite such a public manner? It doesn’t make any sense to test a secret stealth plane in front of a bunch of snap-happy tourists.’

      ‘But they ain’t,’ growled Ray, a new edge in his voice. ‘This here’s the Free World’s most secure covert base. Ain’t nothing comes in or out of there that the Powers That Be don’t want to. We’re privileged to get a sneak preview. Next time you see those babies they’ll be on the Six O’Clock News beating the hell outa Saddam.’

      Dave pondered this long and hard. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Ain’t nothing comes in or out of there that they don’t want to.’ With that he turned on the soft desert sand and traipsed back to his waiting hire-car. He felt the display he’d just witnessed lacked just one thing – a large glowing sign projected onto the low clouds reading ‘Your Tax Dollars At Work’. Perhaps it could be subtitled ‘Return to your homes, and your 92 channels of home-shopping cable TV, safe in the knowledge that we have it all under control.’

      It had been Dave’s long and burning ambition to see Area 51 in person, but now that he had, he couldn’t help but wonder what was going on at Areas 52 and 53.

      When he returned to his motel, despite the late hour, Dave was sufficiently stirred by his thoughts to do a spot of research. In fact, as long as it involved sitting at a desk with a nice weak cup of tea, it never took very much to spur him into a flurry of investigation. As long as he had a nice cosy library full of books, or better still a microfilm reader packed with ancient newspaper cuttings, Dave was in his element. Actually getting out into the field to collect hard evidence was a far less appealing prospect. On this road trip, however, all he had with him was his laptop, and that meant, in order find what he was looking for, Dave was going to have to use the internet. The very thought sent a shiver down his spine.

      Dave had been slow to jump on the internet bandwagon; as a result it had almost run over him. It was only a glorified version of teletext after all – with just a bit more on it. Now there was a medium which had never been fully exploited. Dave’s rational, scientific soul was deeply troubled by the way that pinnacle of 1970s technology had been superseded by its younger, flashier cousin. About the only thing you could get on the Net which you couldn’t conceivably receive via Ceefax was hard-core pornography – and that was hardly much of a recommendation. It still made Dave fume to think about it – the ultimate triumph of form over content. Dave was not a man to be drawn in by what he saw as incessant hype, quite the reverse in fact. If he saw what he thought was a fad he’d do his best to ignore it. He liked to think he was above the fickle meanderings of the common herd. Lots of Dave’s acquaintances liked to think he was a bit of a sad weirdo.

      But in the last year even Dave had had to screw up his pride and establish an on-line presence. His beloved magazine would not have been taken seriously unless he had done. Against his better judgement www.scufodin.org had been born. Fortunately the setting up of the site had not had to break the bank. Dave’s friend Chris was more than happy to build it for nothing more than all the tea he could drink and his own weight in chocolate hob-nobs. Nice one, Chris, milk with two sugars, isn’t it.

      It an attempt to ‘do it properly’ Dave had conducted a rigorous scientific analysis of what the world-wide-wacko had to offer. His conclusions left him deeply troubled. What had Dave most bothered about it, especially the bits he was prone to visit, was, not to put too fine a point on it, the unmitigated amount of pure, unadulterated crap there was sloshing about. Was there something about the very medium which brought out the crank in everybody? Reading some of the conspiracy sites it was hard to escape that worrying conclusion.

      I ask you – that the English Royal Family was behind a global plot to usurp political power through its communist-riddled puppet, the United Nations … what sort of brain-dead paranoid gun-nut dreamt up crap like that? Or that somewhere in the South Pacific there was an island populated by genetically engineered versions of apparently ‘dead’ celebrities, which some shady organization was using to manipulate the masses in a campaign to spread hysteria and irrationalism. Just where did they get it from? Some people (some Americans, Dave thought smugly) just weren’t right in the head. Why did they allow net access in mental asylums, after all?

      Things only got worse when Dave began to interact with the cyberspace community. There seemed to be something about messages posted on newsgroups or bulletin boards which led normally sane, polite people to take them completely the wrong way, no matter how many ;) or :) you inserted. It was almost as if they thought you were laughing at them. There was also the bizarre and completely inexplicable tendency for all trans-Atlantic communications to deteriorate onto two-way rants on one highly contentious subject – that one great napalm-fuelled flame-war to end them all.

      Dave’s earnest postings to a software discussion forum regarding the perceived inadequacies in Nanosoft’s latest word processor (Why was it slower on his new 1200 MHz Cray clone than Write Perfect V.1 had been on his 286?) would be met with a barrage of nationalistic vitriol. If American software was so poor, why didn’t he use the British alternative? As patiently as he was able, Dave would point out it was far from easy getting hold of an operational BBC model B these days, let alone the software to use it. His reasoned response would not matter, however, as all too soon the discussion would mutate into the same one it always did whenever Brits and Yanks started getting a bit shirty. Somehow the subject would metamorphose into gun-control, or rather the lack of it.

      ‘How can you guys in England be truly free when your government doesn’t allow you to carry guns?’

      Dave would take many hours poring over his answer, conducting lengthy background reading to help make his point.

      ‘If you truly believe you live under a clandestinely oppressive regime do you really think a Kalashnikov and a landmine-strewn patio is the best solution? Aren’t you playing them at their own game? Surely the tactics employed by individual citizens must reflect our own strengths and abilities. Through the spread of knowledge and information we can conduct a peaceable campaign to bring any such travesty to the attention of all right-thinking citizens, thereby halting any dastardly schemes in their tracks.’

      This was what he’d mean to write. What he’d actually post would be:

      ‘You’re a smelly poo. And you smell of poo.

       So there. Poo-off you smelly poo. Vietnam, hahaha.’

      Of course the exchange could only go downhill from there. With the remorseless, blood-boiling belligerence of the World-Wide-Whine the reply would be posted.

      ‘Geeze. If it wasn’t for the US and its citizens’ skill with guns you guys would be ruled by a gang of mad, emotionally repressed militaristic right-wing Germans right now. Drop dead and rot, commie-loving scum!’

      There was not really any answer to this, apart from to ask if the irate colonial had ever heard of Buckingham Palace – but this would just add more fuel to a fire that hardly needed it.

      Dave would honestly try his best to bring a modicum of rationality to the debate, but it would be too much for him in the end, such was brain-numbing effect of ‘newsgroup rage’. Dave had even begun to wonder if there was some subtle undertone to the very medium which reduced reasoned, lucid discussion to the level of the school yard. But no, that was paranoid nonsense, wasn’t it – almost the sort of thing you’d read on the internet, in fact. When you took into account that the whole thing had initially been set up by the US military to help them survive a nuclear war, it got you to thinking …

      As so often in the past, on this evening Dave’s research didn’t so much hit a brick wall as get subsumed into the bland mass of meaningless drivel he found at every turn. As the internet proved all too conclusively, quantity in no way made up for quality when it was information you were after. All the web seemed