All they wanted to do was enjoy the party… but a group of friends find themselves in the midst of one of the United States’s most controversial testing experiments.

Bruce Dean lost his job on the evening of the annual Halloween party. He could just hear his father: “You’re good for nothing, son. Good for nothing. You should have gone to college.” He took the long way home from the old stamp mill and stopped at the town package store; since he suddenly didn’t have to work in the morning, a few drinks at the party wouldn’t hurt. As he paid for the bottle of whiskey, his father’s voice continued: “How are you going to provide for your family, when the time comes? You need an education.”

“Why so glum, son?” Pat, the owner of Cerrito Package, asked as he bagged the whiskey and slid it across the counter. “Say, you’re off pretty early…”

“On my lunch,” Bruce mumbled. “Just picking this up for the Weatherby party.” He turned to leave the store.

“Lots of airplanes and ‘copters flying overhead today,” Pat remarked as the buzz of a plane flying low overhead drowned out the sound from the television set in the corner. “Heard they’re doing some kind of testing out there.”

Bruce shrugged. “I should get going.” He tipped his cap and left the store, the door bells jingling behind him.

The sky above him hovered bright and blue, completely absent of clouds—a perfect fall day. When his supervisor called him into the office, Bruce knew why. The mill owner had hired too many people during the economic boom after the war, and rumors about layoffs had been circling for months. Most of Cerrito Del Fe’s people worked at the mill or in the mines. Bruce’s father forbade him to work in the mines years ago. “Your best bet,” the elder Dean said before Bruce finished high school, “is to work in the mill part-time during the summer and go to school full-time. Get out of this town.”

Bruce slammed the driver’s side door behind him and his 1940 Studebaker Champion coughed to life. Even with all of the money he’d saved so far, he would never be able to fix the Studebaker or buy a vehicle that wasn’t almost fifteen years old.

As he got closer to home, he heard another plane flying low overhead, but barely gave it more than a second’s thought; Pat had been right about the number of aircraft, but it hardly affected Bruce’s life. He pulled into the driveway of his parents’ small home and turned the sputtering Studebaker off.

The neighborhood sat as quiet as a cemetery after a funeral. His father wouldn’t be home from the men’s emporium for at least another hour; the old man couldn’t work more than five hours at a time since the mining accident. Bruce’s mother, Nancy, worked full-time as a secretary, but came home during her lunch hour. He took a deep breath, got out of the Studebaker, and went inside.

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