Two days latter a much cleaner looking John posed for television camera's as he received a check that was physically the size of the fish that got away. The check was only a token for the camera's. He wasn't about to really get the whole amount in one lump sum. If he had, the IRS would have gotten most of it anyway.
  The bank had actually set him up with a very good tax attorney team . He had spent most that day with them and expected to spend several more.
  The first action of the second bank manager was to phone the State lottery commission in question and let them know he had a prospective winner. He faxed a copy of the ticket to them for preliminary evaluation. Once the ticket was verified as probably legitimate, the bank had advanced him five thousand dollars in travelers checks and flash processed a gold credit card with a fifteen thousand dollar limit.
  After locking up the ticket for the night in a safety deposit box, the bank manager had personally escorted him to the nicest hotel in town. A few of the cops rode along side, just in case ......two actually escorted him onto the plane (courtesy of the bank).
  The bottom line worked out to a lump sum -after taxesof $287,353.42, with a like amount to be paid each year, for basically the rest of his life.
  The lawyers set up a trust account for his long lost child that suddenly "missed him dearly" and a $28,000 lump cash settlement for his ex-wife (who fired her lawyer because he had convinced her that John would "never amount to much" and that it wasn't worth haggling over the dollar-a-year alimony that John was opposed to when they got divorced.)
  Johns ex-wife was suddenly in love with him all over again. He told her and her fickle fledgling to fuck off, that he never wanted to see either of them again.
  He bought the requisite sports car and new clothes.
  At what had been his local watering hole he bought the house a round... most all night long. Several of the women who wouldn't have given him a second glance before, became seriously infatuated with him. He alternated nights at his old rental between the two cutest of them for about a week before they started hinting that he ought to move up in the world (and take them with him).
  This reminded John of the missile silo. Two days later he was looking at it - without the gold diggers-. A week later it was his.
  John was pretty well ready for a break from the world when he purchased the Silo.
  From the time he entered the work force, he had quickly worked his way up through the ranks in the electronics world. Starting off repairing amplifiers and receivers. As a technician he worked his way up through various jobs until he topped out as a prototype technician in a microwave lab. He was hired contingent against a large government contract for a NATO base, which the company wasn't granted. Fifteen minutes after this was known, he was on the street unemployed. There was no place else for him to go in his home town. Refusing to take a down in his career, and the emotional crisis of his divorce still fresh within him, he headed for the mythical Mecca of Silicon Valley.
  Silicon Valley; The land of the Pro's. A magical feeling in the very air of the place, millionaires springing up like weeds around garage companies. .
  John spent months parked in his uncle's driveway, sleeping in his old V.W. buss. Living off his last unemployment checks from his home state while he went from company to company leaving résumés.
  Nobody wanted to hire him, as he had no local experience. Finally he accepted a position as an entry level technician in a calibration lab of a defense contractor, as his funds were virtually exhausted.
  John had expected his climb in Silicon Valley to be a hard one. This was the land of the Pro's . Much to his surprise and delight, his previous broad experience made him one of the best technicians in the valley.
  Within six months he was promoted to Sr. Technician. Eighteen months later he was in an engineering aide slot. A year later he held the title of acting engineer. He wasn't just good at his job, he was the best. As an engineer he quickly took on and acquired new talents that the then burgeoning Defense electronics industry was hungry for. Within half a decade, he was a full systems engineer specializing in automated instrumentation. His seemingly lofty title: Metrology Engineer. (Metrology being the science of measurement.) A shift to another growing company netted him the title of Sr. Metrologist.
  Then in the late '80's Détente arrived. Defense spending plummeted and the market was flooded with unemployed engineers. Non-degreed engineers were among the first to go. Especially if they took their positions seriously enough that they talked about recalling product because an out-of-tolerance was discovered in a company standard. John was a very ethical man. Which made him a natural target.
  Starting his own, one man consulting firm, John subsisted on meager earnings from consulting contracts which were quickly diminishing. He skinned his nose real good pulling up from the resultant dive in his finances.
  John finally had to give up his company and accept a position as a field sales engineer. Which barely paid him enough to survive, not in Silicon Valley, with its inflated real estate, but back in his home town. He spent almost eleven months of the year on the road. His vast experience in automated instrumentation making sale after sale possible. But he didn't get the commissions. He designed the systems based upon the customers needs, then the real sales force would waltz in and present the companies with a completed solution to their needs. They got the commissions.
  It wasn't what you really were, but rather what you appeared to be that mattered the most. Despite twenty years of experience, John had no degree, so he couldn't possibly be qualified for the positions he actually held. John's dissolution with the world continued to grow. What he wanted most, was a comfortable hole to crawl into and pull the cover over it. The lottery provided him with the means to fulfill this wish. The silo was the perfect vehicle for his desire.
  Working on it supplied him with the solitude he desired. He threw himself into the work for the sake of it, building his retreat from the world.
  The firm John purchased the Silo from, had also been taken by the size of it. They had picked it up at auction for a mere $17,000. They had visions of building a retreat hotel in it, until the cost of conversion and the realization that few people wanted to "get away from it all" into a hole in the dessert sobered them to the fact that they were out $17,000.
  One of the more sobering facts, was that the concrete used on the silo walls was among the hardest man made rock substance on earth. The cost of drilling the walls to hang umpteen floors was way out of their budget. They didn't bother to mention this to John, but he noticed anyway before the deal was closed.
  The $562,000 the owners were asking diminished fast. The land was in the middle of the desert, surrounded by BLM land. The only access was across 32 miles of bad dirt road. He made the purchase outright for $47,000 cash .
  Three concrete cutting firms made estimates he quickly rejected. He purchased several diamond drill bits and the equipment to run them himself. Next he called around the country till he found the cheapest load of steel I -beams that he could find. More calls located a used winch motor used for Jig Pole radio tower installations.
  The first project was mounting the winch motor to the concrete pad on the surface.
  The Silo was one hundred seventy feet deep by forty-five feet in diameter. It was located roughly dead center of a fifty acre plot, which was fully enclosed with a razor wire topped fence with impressive looking signs about the use of deadly force on intruders. John left the signs up. The gate got a digital controlled garage door mechanism.
  There was another shaft descending parallel to the Silo, but off to the side for the main elevator. This descended to the a group of rooms that were probably the launch facility. Between the elevator and silo, a set of cement stairs zigzagged downwards.
  A small cement boxed stairway ran down from the surface to a heavy single door hatchway which opened into a large hallway staging area. This hallway led some thirty five feet away from the silo and then doubled back. to a smaller staging area. A communications room with a small bathroom, an environmental control room and an elevator shaft led off this area. Then a small hatchway led to a narrow hallway which circumnavigated the top of the silo. There was a main transformer room off the environmental control room. Here the three phase power lines terminated in a bank of three large transformers. These fed a series of main panels that fed out to sub panels throughout the silo. There was also a switch over panel to interface with a diesel standby generator.
  John found maintenance stops on the main elevator which opened into small box rooms at half a dozen points on the way down. Each room had hatchways opening into inspection tunnels like the one on the top level and a small terminal and utility room which each contained a sub-main power panel. A large heavy, tapered hatch opened into the silo from each of these stops. From these one could access the four small service elevators which hugged the walls. Each little more than cages on a track. John fancied these up a bit to make them safer and more convenient. There were also hatchways at mid-points between the maintenance stops, accessible from the stairs.
  The Silo came complete with an ISDN phone trunk line 132 pairs of high quality phone lines and an underground power feed which was source metered, as it was the only customer on the line. He negotiated activation of power and a portion of the trunk line for phone service and Internet access. The power company was particularly thrilled as the line was just wasting away. A small satellite dish supplied him with entertainment when he got bored.
  A standby diesel generator purchased from a used construction equipment firm rounded out his basic necessities.
  One of the first problems John encountered, was that the original construction plans were "CLASSIFIED, SECRET, NOT AVAILABLE". After repair and activation of the elevators John spent most of a whole month just surveying exactly what was, and wasn't there.
  The firm he had purchased from had done considerable damage to wiring and environmental equipment by ripping it out for salvage. He replaced what he needed to, to get power and heat into a small apartment which had probably been the launch control facility (based upon the amount of wiring and the size of the door.).
  He bought every appliance known to man for his apartment in the meantime. His computer would have spun circles around many of the main frame models of just a generation earlier. He used it to design his hideaway and track the burn rate on his money. After a few months he realized the burn rate was way too fast. A final purchase of a Hot tub, washer, dryer, freezer, refrigerator and range finished up his major expenses for a while, with the exception of an old flatbed truck he had refurbished to safe running condition.
  John mostly spent his days drilling walls. It was slow and dirty work. Each hole had to be lubricated with water as it was drilled. Gray dust filled most the silo. Gray streaks lined the walls. John worked hard all day guiding the bit and breathing the dust, which was abundant, despite the lubricating water. He finally realized that particle masks had been invented years before. A cement chip zinging past an eyebrow brought safety goggles and finally a face shield into usage.
  The hardest part, was the lack of help. He could have easily hired labor to help him, but he didn't feel like it. He spent hour after hour planing how he would move each steel girder and plate. How he would align heavy connections and manipulate beams while he fastened them together.
  He purchased the necessary gear and converted his winch to a radio controlled unit. He could drop a beam a quarter inch at a time if need be, while sitting on it. Finally he got the I-beams in place for the first floor. This actually gave him two as there was a concrete floor already in place at the bottom. He welded corrugated iron sheets on top of the Ibeams and then topped that off with heavy particle board.
  When he started drilling holes on the second floor, he realized his error. Water from the drilling process started down the walls toward his new floor. He pulled the particle board back up and moved the whole operation up to the top floor drilling location. This way he could move down as each floor was completed. This lasted all of a day before he realized he would lose positioning ability on his crane when he sealed off the top. He spent a whole week replanning the whole thing. In the end he went back down to the bottom to drill. As each layer of Ibeam frames was set, they were left uncovered.
  Towards the end of the year the Silo resembled a big inside set of monkey bars . However any one of the frames would have easily supported a D-9 Caterpillar tractor.
  Next step was to run plumbing and wiring to each stage. He pulled the corrugated iron back off the first level to plumb and wire it as well.
  Next came heating systems. The most logical for this set up was a hot water system. Almost by accident John discovered several ducts running up and down the entire length of the silo, but deep in the walls. They had probably been used to cool the concrete when it was being poured.
  On a hunch he searched the walls with a metal detector. He found the water pipes he'd suspected running through the walls. They had probably cooled the inner surface of the concrete while it set. He grinned ear to ear thinking of their usage for solar heat. He had a major hunk of land on the surface that was basically worthless for anything except making solar heat.
  Using the metal detector he carefully marked the position of every pipe within the walls. In the process he found several unidentified metal traces. One group of these seemed to line up almost exactly with the positions of each level he had chosen for a floor anchor. A small perfect 1/2" hole marked each one. Careful drilling around one of these revealed them as some sort of pressure gauge, probably used to evaluate thrust on a missile if it was launched. Each one however was on it's own large conduit. He searched out the other ends and found them terminated in the mass of wiring which led into the launch room (his apartment.)
  Each conduit contained a multi-cable capable of a dozen full bandwidth video channels. He discovered how lucky he had been with the anchors; almost any of them could easily have pierced either a water or wiring conduit. Many of them passed within bare inches, but luckily, all missed.
  He tried plotting the exact location of the air ducts using a laser site, but he wasn't certain that they ran exactly vertical. He solved the dilemma by lowering a coil of wire down each duct. He pulsed a signal into the coil and detected it from the other side of the wall. This allowed him to mark the path close enough to miss any pipes or conduits. He drilled multiple one inch diameter holes into each of the ducts on each level. This alone took an additional two weeks time. However when he was finished he used multiple blower fans at ground level to removed much of the dust which had been building up. He ran all of them at full speed while he descended to each level with an air hose and thoroughly cleaned each one. Next he washed the whole silo down from top to bottom.
  The water and cement mud gathered in the cement bottom of the silo. When it didn't drain anywhere he pumped it into 55 gallon barrels and hoisted it by crane to the top. Then it struck him. Drain anywhere?
  The bottom of the silo was a good 170 feet deep! Where would it drain to? In fact, how did his toilet in the apartment drain? A two day survey tracing pipes located a grinding pump on the lowest level which pumped waste matter up to ground level into a septic tank. A booster pump was located halfway up in one of the maintenance closets. Another day with a metal detector traced pipes from a leach field running into two corners of the property.
  There were two fresh water wells located in the opposite corners of the property. One was seemingly just a capped pipe. He opened it and dropped weighted line down till it hit water. Water level was a good 15 feet above the floor of the silo. This meant one thing; the cement in the silo was totally waterproof. This had to be so, or the lower part of the silo would have been flooded from seepage from the outside. No seepage from the outside meant no seepage from the inside.
  He drilled more holes to anchor a platform and equipment, cleaned up the whole thing spotless. Several layers of swimming pool paint were applied and allowed to dry Then he pumped fresh water in and he had a swimming pool. One damn cold swimming pool! This he solved this by separating the wall cooling pipe system below the first level. A separate pipe led from this section led up to the solar collectors. He installed automatic controls which regulated his pool at a much more comfortable temperature. Perhaps it wouldn't stay that warm come winter, which was fast approaching, but he seldom used more than around 18% of the potential from the array of solar heat panels he had installed.
  He pumped most of the heat around the system and had to defocus the panels most of the time. With all the natural insulation around the silo, it just didn't take that much heat to make it comfortable. This was a good thing, as John didn't think about the expansion of the concrete as it warmed. Had he warmed it too quickly, it would have cracked, allowing the water table outside to seep in, inundating the lower portion of the silo. It was blind luck that it didn't.
  He had a few ideas about how to improve things topside, but he was running out of money. He realized the closeness to winter just in time to finish up the top floor and move most the equipment down to it. He ran snorkels out for his winch and generators to keep the fumes out and noise down.
  A final trip into town on a mad buying spree for provisions and equipment made a good number of the local merchants very happy. They knew nothing about his retreat out in the desert. John had no intention of telling anyone. On a whim, he bought a case of .357 and a case of 38 special ammo. He could fire the 38's out of his python, according to the man at the gun shop, and they were cheaper.
  He was intending to find out how well he could live in total seclusion. During the summer he gave it no thought, he could always go to town if he wanted to. But winter would be a different thing entirely; the road which led to the silo wasn't exactly on the snow plow routes. The snow could get up to three feet deep in this area, and drift over six. Just in case John bought a used snowmobile.
  He made one trip to deliver a full load and stow it, then went back for a load of carpentry power tools and lumber so he could work uninterrupted through the winter.
  Finally he used the flatbed truck to roll the launch roof back into place. (It spent most the time open, or hastily tarped against any approaching storm.)
  Last step was having a truck deliver enough fuel to run his generator for the winter. It was the first time anybody had gotten near the silo since he had the steel delivered.
  For some reason it made him uncomfortable to have anybody know about the existence of his retreat. He stretched a large tarp over the launch roof to disguise the true nature of the place. All the driver would see would be a tarp covering a platform like lump and the sturdy out buildings John had built to house his car & snowmobile and keep a large supply of lumber dry. The tank was buried to one side of the road coming in, intended for the original standby generator that had been scrapped out.
  When the driver showed, John was waiting in his car, like he had just driven out to meet him. He ushered the driver to the fill point.
  "Kind of a strange place for a fuel tank." said the driver looking around.
  "Gonna be a Solar Research facility" John said.
  "What's the fuel for?" asked the driver.
  "Gotta run a generator to drive the solar panels." John replied.
  "Huh" the driver grunted, "That's progress for ya."
  "Well... Gonna mount a steam generator on the cells after they figure out how much heat they will generate... I just go where they tell me." John said. He walked away to effectively cut off communication.
  The driver shrugged and went on with his filling. John busied himself tarping over the snowmobile & trailer.
  The driver waved to John when he had topped off the tank. John walked over and signed for the fuel.
  "Seems like a lot of fuel to power solar cells." commented the driver.
  "Long term project... you know the government." said John.
  "Yeah, don't forget to add stabilizers to that fuel if it's gonna sit very long." the driver said, climbing back into his truck.
  John watched the fuel truck pass into the distance. It seemed odd, but the driver was probably the last human being that John would see until sometime in spring, yet he had felt relieved when he was gone.
  John locked the gate and made a further check of the topside assembly's and equipment. He hitched his car to the snowmobile trailer and pulled it into one of the sheds. He held off winterizing the car for now. He did pour some diesel fuel in the truck and ran it till it died, then he took out the battery, drained the radiator and tarped over the cab. Finally he was satisfied that all would survive the winter. He took one last look at the setting sun and then descended through the heavy hatch -under the edge of the tarpdown into his refuge. He latched it from the inside. He was alone and alive with a curious feeling of freedom.