Rude Astronauts

by Allen Steele

  A TV camera outside the ship televised the final steps of Wilson’s descent, and its images, along with Wilson’s voice, were transmitted to 50 million people watching throughout the world, in their homes and on storefront sets and on giant screens set up in Times Square and Piccadilly Circus. Those millions of viewers were witnesses when Wilson, obeying a higher call than nationalism or loyalty to the US Space Force, changed the script.

  Wilson stepped off the landing pad, planted his booted feet solidly in the lunar dust, and spoke the words he had concocted weeks before. “That’s one small step for man,” he said slowly. “One giant leap for mankind.”

  There was a long pause from Mission Control at the Cape, longer than was obligated by the 2.6-second delay. “Eagle One, this is CapCom,” the Cape’s spacecraft communicator responded after almost a minute. “We didn’t quite copy that, over.”

  Wilson spoke again, his voice steady. “I, John Harper Wilson, claim the Moon in the name of humanity, not as the property of any one nation, but as the common heritage of all the peoples of Earth.”

  He paused, then added, “We’ve come in peace for all mankind.”

  Senator Eugene “Rocky” Costello (D-MA) was in the Oval Office with President Kennedy when Wilson stepped onto the Moon. With them was Air Force Secretary General Malcolm Danforth. “When John Wilson said that, the President was sort of surprised,” Costello says today. “He turned to General Danforth and said, ‘I didn’t know the Pentagon had it in them to be so generous.’”

  The general didn’t say much. He simply said, ‘Yes sir, Mr. President’ and then he excused himself, saying that he had to make a phone call. I started to say something about how nice it was for the Space Force to give us NASA when Bobby, the President, looked back at the TV and said, ‘Hey, what happened to the picture?’”

  Wilson had gone on to describe the soil he was standing on and the condition of Eagle One, but by then—according to the Space Force’s explanation—there was a temporary communications failure. TV screens went blank, and Wilson’s voice was lost, and the communication link between Earth and Moon was lost for four and a half minutes. The networks were informed by the Space Force that there had been a satellite snafu, but what had really happened was that the Cape pulled the plug on Wilson.

  An anonymous Space Force source has recently leaked a classified partial transcript of the communications between CapCom, Eagle One, and Wilson during that brief black-out.

  CAPCOM: “Eagle One, this is CapCom. Do you want to repeat what you have said? Over.”

  WILSON: “CapCom, Eagle One. I said that the soil is fine and powdery and that I can pick it up with my toe, and it adheres to my …”

  CAPCOM: “Eagle One, you seem to have deviated from your mission profile. Please acknowledge, over.”

  WILSON: “CapCom, this is Eagle One. That’s affirmative, over.”

  CAPCOM: “Eagle One, CapCom. Is this a deliberate change? Over.”

  WILSON: “That’s affirmative, CapCom, over.”

  CAPCOM: “Eagle One, this is CapCom. Captain Holliday, do you copy? Over.”

  HOLLIDAY: “CapCom, this is Eagle One. Holliday. We copy, over.”

  CAPCOM: “Holliday, Mission Command affirms that you are now in command of Luna One until further notice. Major Wilson has been relieved of his command. Do you copy? Over.”

  HOLLIDAY: “CapCom, this is Eagle One, Holliday. We copy, over.”

  WILSON: “I copy, CapCom. Thank you, over.”

  CAPCOM: “Eagle One, this is CapCom. Commander Holliday, you will descend from the craft and continue the mission profile. We are now in communications blackout and will continue on your mark. Major Wilson, you will place yourself under military arrest, and Mission Command orders you to desist from any communications until you are back inside the ship. Do you copy? Over.”

  WILSON: “We copy, CapCom. Wilson out.”

  HOLLIDAY: “We copy, and we are preparing to leave the ship. Eagle One, over.”

  After spending the better part of the six weeks confined to Eagle One and the immediate Tranquility base encampment—Neil Holliday led the expedition to Julius Caesar crater—Wilson returned to Earth with the rest of the Space Force team, and promptly vanished from the public eye. “I wasn’t exactly brought back in manacles, but there was some loose talk before we lifted off of whether I should be left behind to monitor the automatic instruments,” Wilson says half-jokingly.

  There was not much the Space Force could do to Wilson, though. A court-martial could not have been done in secret, and would have raised too many questions. So Wilson “retired” from the Space Force, under strict orders from the Pentagon that he never reveal what had happened on the Moon.

  It was impossible for the Space Force to retract Wilson’s statement. After all, millions of people had heard the major bequeath the Moon to humanity; Neil Holliday couldn’t simply say, “No, we take that back, the Moon belongs to the United States.” It would have caused international embarrassment for the United States in general and for the Space Force in particular. By the time Luna One returned to Earth, the Moon had become recognized as belonging to everyone and no one, and the United Nations was hammering out an agreement which would formalize these conditions.

  Within three months of the first lunar landing, the Space Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Kennedy. NASA became an official government agency on January 1, 1970, and control of the US space program passed into civilian hands. While former Space Force officers continue today to work for NASA, they take their orders from the Administration, not from the Pentagon. Shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, the US Space Force Canaveral Launch Center was renamed the NASA Robert Kennedy Space Center, and it became the springboard for future lunar expeditions and the continuing exploration of the solar system.

  John Harper Wilson never talked to Neil Holliday again after Luna One came home; three years later, Holliday’s T-38 jet trainer crashed at the Cape while he was practicing soft-landing maneuvers, killing Holliday and his co-pilot instantly. Despite the rift which opened between them during Luna One, Wilson bears no grudge against his former friend. “Neil thought he was doing what was right,” he says. “I can’t blame him for that.”

  Today, nearly two decades after Luna One, the United States has a self-sufficient, non-military base on the Moon. Instead of competing with each other, the US and the Soviet Union are embarked on a joint manned expedition to Mars, to be launched within the next two years. Civilians regularly travel into space, and the Hilton hotel chain has announced plans to build an orbital hotel in the 1990s. Yet Wilson denies that he was the catalyst in changing the direction of space exploration towards a more peaceful course. “Somebody else would have said something sooner or later,” is all he says about his role in events.

  So why has he decided to go public after all these years? The former astronaut shrugs and looks out the window as the early autumn sun begins to set behind the trees. “History gave me the chance to walk on the Moon,” he says after some reflection. “I just wanted to give history back four and a half minutes that it was missing.”

  PART THREE

  Contemporary Space

  Science Fact: LGM

  WE LIVE IN THE Milky Way galaxy: approximately 200 billion stars spread out among 100,000 light-years. Our solar system, located about 27,000 light-years from the galactic core near the edge of a spiral arm, is in the boondocks of the Milky Way. Out of nine planets and a sun, plus assorted comets, moons and asteroids, only our world is presently known to support life.

  Where is everyone else?

  On a cool, sunny autumn afternoon, Joe Caruso walks out the front door of the fieldstone cottage he inhabits with his wife and saunters down the hilltop roadway to begin his evening work. Later on, after an early dinner, he will go to the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory to continue his observations of the planet Mars through its sixty-inch optical telescope; now, however, Caruso walks the opposite way,
heading for the eighty-four-foot radiotelescope perched on the ridge at the end of the road. It’s time to look for aliens again.

  The middle-aged former college instructor from Ohio pauses outside the concrete instrument shack adjacent to the massive silver dish, peering fondly at a large yellow garden spider which has strung her net in a corner next to the door. Most people, upon finding the arachnid, would have been repulsed and destroyed the spider, but Joe has practically adopted the creature as a pet. The spider is leisurely devouring an insect wrapped in a silk cocoon, and after taking a few moments to admire her handiwork. Joe unlocks the metal door and walks inside.

  Within a small room inside the shack, pampered by air conditioning and protected by an alarm system, is a large, complicated computer system. Inside a transparent case are lined dozens of computer chip breadboards, each one containing the memory capacity of a high-end home computer. The computer is capable of scanning and analyzing 8.4 million different radio channels in the 400 kilohertz radio spectrum. It was hand-built by students from Harvard University and various volunteers; its components were purchased with a $100,000 private grant from movie director Steven Spielberg. Indeed, with its blinking red status lights, CRT screens, and tape reels, the Multichannel Spectrum Analyzer looks like a leftover prop from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  Caruso is the watchman for this lonely outpost. After going to the telescope’s control panel to routinely shift the antenna’s lateral alignment by one-tenth of a degree—as he does every afternoon—Joe sits down behind the keyboard and types in commands which allow him to check what the radiotelescope has picked up. Interesting patterns are logged and saved in memory by the computer. They rarely happen. Today, there is nothing: the CRT screen shows a line of random spikes, the oscilloscope displays a fuzzy white bar, and from the audio speaker, a loud hiss. The music of the spheres is electromagnetic white noise, no more interesting than between-channel static on a car radio.

  However, if and when the day comes that Project META’s full-sky search of the Milky Way galaxy bears fruit, the computer screen may display a different pattern, like a regular series of sharply-defined, box-like lines. At 4:11 pm on August 28, 1986, just such a pattern was picked up by META, prompting it to be logged in the computer, along with a serial number, with the letters “WOW.” A subsequent search of the sky, though, could not repeat the discovery, so the origin of the signal remains mysterious.

  One day, there may be another such signal received here, one that can be tracked and confirmed by this and other radiotelescopes: a message from deep space, a collect call from another world—“Hello. We are here. Can you hear us?”

  The search for extraterrestrial intelligence—SETI for short—is perhaps the most existential of modern scientific pursuits. It makes assumptions for which there is no hard evidence: first, that intelligent life exists in the galaxy, and second, that it is trying to make contact with other civilizations. As Joe Caruso points out, it has only recently been proven that planets exist in other star systems, such as the giant planet discovered by the Harvard observatory to be orbiting HD 114762, 90 light-years from Earth.

  (1993 UPDATE: this finding was later to be proven false, or at least unconfirmed.)

  SETI is also one of the most recent, if not underfunded, scientific enterprises. Although experiments such as Project Ozma, Project Sentinel, and Suitcase SETI had been conducted off and on over the last three decades, at this time only Ohio State University’s SETI telescope and Project META are scanning space for LGMs—“Little Green Men,” in the slang of the field. NASA research at the Ames Research Center in California has been slowed by budget cutbacks to little more than part-time work, and no one seems to know what SETI research the Soviet Union is doing these days.

  Since Ohio State has been recently “off the air” due to technical difficulties, Project META (short for Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay) may now be the only full-time monitor for ETs. The project is funded exclusively through private donations, mainly from the Planetary Society, the public space group co-founded by author-scientist Carl Sagan. With an annual budget of only about $25,000, META is a shoestring operation. The radiotelescope is a hand-me-down ex-NASA rig bought from Harvard University by the Planetary Society, while the nearby optical telescope is run by the Smithsonian Institution.

  If SETI is existential science, then it’s only appropriate that Project META’s director, Paul Horowitz, is a professor of physics at Harvard University, the home of classic American existentialism. In his late 30s, occupying a hopelessly cluttered office near Harvard Yard, Horowitz is one of the generation of young research scientists who came bursting out of college campuses during the ’60s. He first became interested in SETI during his student days at Harvard, when his roommate took a course taught by Sagan when he was lecturing at the university.

  Horowitz’s graduate work in astrophysics was paralleled by SETI research at the giant Arecibo radiotelescope in Puerto Rico and at Ames. As a professor of physics at Harvard, he helped start Project META, along with Sagan, under the auspices of the Planetary Society. If a legitimate radio signal from an extraterrestrial civilization is detected within our lifetime, it may possibly be Paul Horowitz who accomplishes the feat.

  “I think it’s become a completely legitimate branch of science these days,” Horowitz says. “I think what has happened is that things have changed over the years. Things that people thought twenty-five years ago are no longer what people think in terms of the evolution of planetary systems and the beginnings of life.”

  Astrophysicists now have a better grasp of how planets are formed and how life begins in primordial conditions, Horowitz notes; this in turn has increased their understanding of the potential for intelligent life in the universe. Another major change in SETI research has been the microelectronics revolution, making a search like Project META possible. “Progress there has been so rapid and astounding that it is now possible to analyze millions of channels simultaneously and really look for needles in haystacks, which really would have been far-fetched a generation ago,” Horowitz explains.

  Indeed, public acceptance of SETI is remarkably high. “I think that, in terms of grassroots support, this is a project that can’t fail,” Horowitz says. “People love it. It doesn’t require special training in science to understand SETI.

  “First of all, people understand that there could be other intelligent things out there,” he continues. “It’s in science fiction, in the culture, it’s been there for a long time. Everybody looks at the night sky and wonders what the heck’s going on. So what is it that’s so hard to explain? Just the details, like the frequency of the carrier wave or why we look at certain kinds of stars. The technical details are new to them.”

  On the other hand, there are a number of popular misconceptions among the public about extraterrestrial intelligence. Horowitz has a small collection of supermarket tabloid headlines taped to his office wall, such as “Space Aliens Make Woman, 86, Pregnant.” Both he and Caruso note ruefully that Project META has attracted its share of the lunatic fringe, such as visits or phone calls from people who claim to be in telepathic contact with aliens. “If you really did a random sample of people in this country or anywhere and asked how many thought we had already made contact with extraterrestrials, I bet you’d get a pretty high percentage,” Horowitz says. “I bet twenty percent of the people in this country think that.”

  Project META has its technical drawbacks as well. Its location is in a place with a rapidly increasing population, and as the population rises, so does the potential for radio interference from even household sources. Interference is particularly high when the telescope is pointed towards the southern horizon, for instance. Sometimes the telescope intercepts regular, repeating signals which turn out to be from manmade sources.

  “It’s either equipment malfunction or interference in one form or another, and we’ve had a little bit of everything,” Horowitz says. “And every now and then you get something tha
t looks just right, but it doesn’t repeat. Y’know, I can’t say anything about that, except that it looks right and it doesn’t repeat. You hope that any one of them is going to be the one that does repeat, but so far …”

  It’s intriguing to speculate what would happen if a genuine, real McCoy LGM were intercepted by Project META. Joe Caruso would probably be the first person to know, finding the signal during his daily inspection of the computer. If an interesting signal were detected, he would notify Horowitz, who in turn would probably have the telescope kept at that declination for another day to see if the signal repeated. If the LGM did repeat for several days, Caruso and Horowitz would unpin the telescope and track it across the sky, following Earth’s rotation. If the signal were still there, Horowitz would notify another observatory elsewhere in the world and have its astronomers attempt to confirm the discovery, “because maybe it’s just those MIT boys out there in the woods with their little transmitters,” he laughs.

  Although the event would be kept quiet until it was confirmed, Horowitz admits that the discovery would probably be leaked to the news media before a formal announcement could be made. “Although we wouldn’t be very good at keeping a lid on it, even less good would be a national observatory with a staff of 100, and these guys are telling their wives and their kids and their dogs and everybody knows about it, and it just leaks out. A kid makes a comment to a friend at school whose father is a journalist and that’s how the world will know of the First Contact.”

  The major problem after initial detection will be in translating the message. It would probably not be in Morse code, English, or Mr. Spock’s Vulcan tongue, so decoding and deciphering the signal will take a very long time. Even then, Horowitz warns, pieces of the message may never be understood. All language is culturally based, and thus understanding the language of a completely alien culture will be difficult, if not impossible.