Who is Krell?
A perennial question for aficionados of TMP, allow my take.
Towards the later stages of setting up the project with TEOTWAWKNI the project ran into two problems.
First of all what to do with recruits who had washed out of training, several times. Usually, these were pretty high-level members; ex-military or with other specialised skills who maybe shouldn't have been recruited due to psychological or physical issues.
Memory wiping wasn't that easy even for an organisation with psychics on call. And could you just stack them up in freeze tubes with no real use for them? Were you just putting trouble off for another world?
Secondly the traditional Project's approach to security was creating some concerns. Usually concealing large faccilties either hiding them or hardenining them. Could Prime Base it's self be protected if tens of thousands refugees would hear about it and turn up on it's door step? The more security you placed around a facility the more irresistible you made it. What were they hiding?
The answer was to make these sites as unattractive as possible. But could you really rely on a sign that read "beware of the radioactive dog" To keep humanity safe?
The answer to the 2 above problems was controversial. These untrainable members would be turned into "muftee squads" they would be placed in small groups of 10-20 near key facilities. With strict orders to maintain an absolute quarantine no one in or out until issued a specific coded instruction (they came to be known as Gort orders). These teams would lack any equipment to identify them as Morrow Teams. No fusion plants, no freeze tubes (they would stay awake as they would be needed at the point civilisation fell). In fact they were encouraged to make themselves as outlandishly threatening as possible. Some Muftee squads disguised themselves as biker gangs, another got their hands on a bunch of WW2 Nazi uniforms, one even dressed up as a sort of A team that shot straight.
They, of course, got plenty of guns, bullets and other cool tools. They were performing a useful job and at this stage in time no one really questioned who was responsible for their training and certainly not their loyalty.
As the world ended no one really noticed a dozen or so no go zones in a blasted landscape.
And no one noticed in the Morrow Project how a certain Kevin Robert Ellison a senior project planner had slipped out of head office. Nor paid attention to his last orders had been establishing these Mufftee squads, he had the only list of Gort codes. Fortunately, he never got the master list of all the project facilities but he had enough.
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