by Scott Baird
Nelson stood in thought for a moment after the transmission ended. He was bothered that Abigail was still absent, and upset with himself for breaking protocol already in touching the artifact on Titan. He was acting like a cowboy, and this was only the first leg of the mission.
Reluctantly, he hit the record command to send his reply.
“Thank you for the congratulations, and for everyone's hard work to get me here, sir. My testing is progressing well and I'll transmit the measurements and imagery right away, although there's little else to report at this point—the sphere seems indestructible and immutable. I have no insight into what it is, or how it's transmitting. But I, uh... I may have touched the object, while on Titan. With my bare hand.”
He swallowed, wondering if he should apologize. He decided not to. It was his choice, and he had to own it. Besides, he wasn’t really that sorry.
“Becker, it reacted to my touch with a light and an audible tone! Nothing happens when I handle it gloved, but I'd like to repeat that little experiment soon, if I can, and record it for you. I realize this was a breach of protocol, and I hope it won’t cause any undue turmoil. But you did send me on this mission because you respected my judgment, and I had no reason to believe the object was dangerous or capable of being tainted in any way. I will await your next transmission before proceeding with another such experiment.”
He opened his mouth to say more, but then just sent the message. He stood up and shook his head, lapsing back into a thoughtful trance. His thoughts kept straying to Abigail. He angrily pushed them away; she was sacrificing her own needs to allow him to focus on the mission, and it would be a disservice to her and all humanity if he allowed his inner worries to cloud his concentration.
He began to work again, shifting his attention to the methane sample he took from the lake, and was content for some time as he analyzed the chemical compounds in the methane.
It wasn't until later, while Ferdinand was running some molecular composition tests in the background, that Nelson's mind again drifted to the situation with his wife. This time he decided to take a moment and deal with his thoughts and feelings squarely so he could really put them to rest.
He had trained himself long ago to focus on command, and to always put the mission first. He wouldn’t have gotten through his tour in the Air Force otherwise, or proved himself as a capable and dependable test pilot in NASA’s experimental programs. But this was an extreme situation, and all the counseling the government psychologists had done with he and Abigail prior to the mission had barely prepared him for the prospect of such intense separation anxiety. He had left Mother Earth, after all, and his wife as well.
With nothing to do until Ferdinand finished his analysis of the methane samples, Nelson stepped over to the chess board and looked over the array of small pieces as he mulled things over in his mind.
What was Abigail up to? Was there a hint somewhere in her last couple of chess moves? She had left him hanging after he moved his castle.
That was probably an overreaction. He was reading too much into it. Until he heard from Becker or Abigail, he simply wouldn’t know anything for sure, and he had to content himself. But still there lingered an uneasy feeling inside.
He glanced over at the sphere, sitting silently in its transparent box. His memories of the reaction when he touched it filled him with suspicion—was it somehow unlocked by human touch? Was it just making its signal audible and visible to him, or was there more that he might discover if he touched it?
Ferdinand spoke. “I've compiled the results on the methane sample, sir.”
“Put it on the screen, Ferd,” Nelson replied, still distracted by the sphere. There was no way NASA would allow him to play around with the artifact again, or to experiment with it in his own way. They cared nothing for intuition and didn't trust anything their instruments couldn't predict. Breaking away, he glanced over the report on the wall screen. Skipping over the first section, he read over the description of complex organic compounds Ferdinand had found in the liquid from Titan's surface.
“This is... a lot more than just methane,” he said. “Ferdinand, there are amino acids in here!”
“Yes, sir. This sample appears to confirm the hypotheses of Miller-Urey and Horst.”
“Unless it's contaminated. This isn't my own biological matter in here, is it?”
“No, sir, not at all. The matter in the sample is distinctly alien.”
Nelson reeled and had to sit down. His heart beat wildly. “This is huge. Ferdinand, this is just a few steps away from life off-Earth!”
“I agree, sir. NASA will be very interested to hear about this development.”
“Everyone on earth will be interested!” Nelson looked up and found his eyes straying again to the sphere, sitting innocently in its transparent box. Was it a marker? A guidepost to a point of interest that someone or something wanted him to find?
“Sir, a new transmission from Mission Control. Sent by Director Becker, but the contents of this one appear to be from your wife.”
Nelson sighed in relief. “Finally. Put it on, please.”
Abigail appeared on the screen where the report had been. “Hey, Roger,” she began. Her soft eyes and high cheekbones were captivating, and he was forced to acknowledge how lonely he felt. Even her brief absence had really gotten to him. Nelson's feelings swirled back into him forcefully, taking the place of the work he had been conducting. How was he going to withstand so many years away from her?
“I hope everything is going well with your mission on Titan. I know you have a lot to do, so I'll try to keep this brief and to the point. I want you to know how proud I am of everything you’re doing. I’m as excited as everyone else to see what you find there.” She paused for several long seconds. “Sorry if I seem unsettled. Things have been a little crazy today. Someone… someone hacked into our home network, Roger. Probably looking for information on the mission. They’ve been controlling my webcam for... I don't even know how long, or what they got access to. I turned the whole network and all our devices over to the authorities, but they haven't figured out exactly what happened yet. So now the CIA is involved and Secretary Stewart is really pissed off at Becker for allowing any of this—”
She cut off and swallowed hard. “As if I'm not separated from you enough! Now Stewart's threatening to have me banned from Mission Control and off the project for good. I hate that guy! Just because he wears a big suit, he thinks he's in charge of the entire mission and can throw people around like we're pawns in a game.” She teared up, and Nelson stared mutely at the screen, unsure what to think about what he was watching. It was not something he had expected NASA to put through to him, and it certainly wasn’t helping his own inner struggle.
“I'm sorry. I wasn’t going to mention any of this. I know you need to focus, and you're about to make some amazing discoveries, but… it's been a year and a half now, and I know we have most of a decade standing between us, and then this happens. I'm scared, and it feels like I'm writing letters to a dead guy! Best-case scenario, I don't see you for another several years, and it's just—”
She wiped her eyes and looked off-camera. “I should delete this and start over.”
The transmission ended.
Nelson sat silently for a moment, considering the situation. Thankfully, Ferdinand didn't interrupt.
He had made the decision to leave his earthly affairs behind, and that decision was necessarily final and binding. If he allowed problems back home to enter into his thinking, he might fail in some aspect of the mission. So far he had experienced good luck and steady progress, but there was no telling what complications he would encounter at Triton or beyond, not to mention all the things that could go wrong en route.
He needed to be a full-time astronaut, a laser-focused precision tool in the arsenal of the most important human organization since time began. Thousands of years of history had come down to this: him, on board the Magellan, performing what promised to be the
most thrilling string of discoveries ever witnessed. He could not afford to be compromised in any way, for the sake of the entire human race and the reputations and work of all the people that had sacrificed to send him here.
But his wife was in trouble. That was no small thing.
He shook his head. He had to trust the people on the ground to deal with it. There was nothing he could do to help that situation, nothing at all, and he felt a surge of anger that Becker had sent the transmission at all. He must have understood the effect it would have on Nelson, and it made sense now that the transmission had been delayed until after his return from the Titan mission. Why hadn't he kept a lid on it entirely, or censored it to allow Nelson to keep his focus? Even Abigail had realized at the end how inappropriate it was to communicate this way during the mission, and had tried to recant her message. But Becker had sent it through anyway.
Nelson shook his head again to clear it. He walked over to the secure box and looked down at the sphere. He surrendered himself to its quiet draw this time, allowing his curiosity to push out thoughts and feelings about his wife and consume his mental energy with its mystery.
The artifact almost seemed to hum to him in some subconscious way, filling his mind with an alien tune. It was comforting, almost like a physical companion on board the Magellan, taking the place of Ferdinand and his wife and everyone else he wouldn't see for years to come.
Later, after a cheerless meal carefully designed to replenish whatever calories he had expended on Titan and to prepare his body for another long round of stasis, Nelson sat down to record a message for his wife. He was thinking clearly and calmly now, and had regained the poise and focus he needed.
“This message is solely for Abigail Nelson, my wife,” he said. He waited a moment, looking firmly into the camera, an obvious hint that if Becker or some NASA communications intern was receiving the transmission, now was the time to turn it off and forward it directly to Abigail.
“Hi, honey. I was glad to hear from you. I'm really not a dead guy yet, though. Whatever it feels like. I'm here, I'm awake and alive, and I'm thinking of you.”
He cleared his throat, clenching his jaw and using all his willpower to avoid getting emotional in his response. “Try not to worry, honey. NASA will take care of the security situation there, and Ferdinand's taking good care of me, so there's no need to fear for the future. I want you to know that we're really onto something here and I'm getting very excited for what I'll find at Triton. My belief is stronger than ever that these artifacts were put here for us to find, and are guiding us toward something. I have no idea what, but it will be important and worth all that it takes to get there.
“I have to go into stasis now, and this will be my last transmission to you for a couple of years. But if you're thinking of moving your knight to h4, I'm going to have to move my rook to f6. I'm ninety-nine percent sure you're going to do that, so we'll pick it up from there when I wake. Okay? I love you.” He nodded, a gentle “keep your chin up” motion. “This is Commander Nelson, over and out.”
He sent the transmission, prepared the stasis box, and calmly entered his second long sleep, as the Magellan sailed effortlessly through space toward a distant planet.
12 - Chatter
“Who speaks for Earth? That’s our roundtable question tonight, and you’re invited to weigh in, America. MIT science chair Don Raymond is with us here in the studio, and on the phone we have NASA project director Gerald Becker. Welcome, Mr. Raymond. Welcome, Mr. Becker.”
“Thank you, good to be here.”
“Thanks for having us on, Maya.”
“Let’s get right to it, gentlemen. Last year’s startling discoveries have us all wondering, ‘are we alone?’. With Commander Nelson’s latest dispatch from his position near Saturn—live map and ETA counters online—it seems more and more likely that we’ll soon be connecting with someone or something beyond our current experience.
“Commentators have compared this moment in history to Columbus making contact with the Americas. Others have pointed out that we’re the Native Americans in that scenario, not the European explorers—which could have drastic security implications for our future. I’d like to start out with Mr. Raymond giving us his take whether we’re looking at mankind’s next great leap forward, or staring our doom in the face. Or, perhaps, none of the above: maybe these signals aren’t what they seem at all.”
“Yes, thank you, Maya. Here’s the thing: we can’t possibly know at this point whether there’s anybody out there at all, but what we can do is adopt a communications posture that works for us regardless of the outcome of this mission.”
“And what would that be? Safety in silence?”
“Excuse me, Maya, but I need to respond to Mr. Raymond’s assertion that we don’t know whether someone’s out there. We do know, and we’ve known since the signals were first analyzed. There’s someone there, believe me. Astronomers agree that these signals are not a mistake, they’re not garbled Earth transmissions bouncing back to us, and they’re not natural. They’re artificial.”
“Mr. Becker, with all due respect, astronomers may agree, but the rest of us aren’t so sure. Nobody has been able to make sense of the signals, and until they do, how can we know there’s extraterrestrial intelligence behind them?”
“Because they’re musical! They follow a pattern, a human-recognizable pattern. Stuff like this doesn’t happen in nature, but it does happen when an intelligent hand is guiding the development of the signal.”
“And if they were designed that way, if some E.T. left a song for us to find, what does that tell us about them?”
“Not necessarily a song, Maya. The harmonic nature of the signals are what initially led us to believe they were artificial, but that doesn’t mean it’s their primary purpose.”
“Well, until we know their purpose, Mr. Becker, I say we proceed with caution. And that means not making the first move.”
“They’ve already made the first move, Mr. Raymond. They know we’re here. Someone left the equipment in place in our solar system to transmit these signals once we reached a certain stage of technological advancement, and—”
“That’s an assumption, which is being argued. But until we know, we need to be careful and we need to ensure that our needs as a species are provided for.”
“Those don’t sound like the words of a scientist, Mr. Raymond. They sound like the pressure I get from the State Department.”
“Gentlemen, I’d like to bring this back around to the main question. If we do find ourselves conversing with otherworldly voices in the near future, who should do the talking? Mr. Becker?”
“Well, my contacts in the government would like that honor to reside with the President of the United States, subject to review by a panel of military and bipartisan advisors. But I think that leaves an awful lot of people out in the cold, and I think we need to bring them into the discussion. I’ve been advocating an active-SETI plan where everyone votes on a message to send, and then NASA is simply tasked with executing the communication of that message.”
“Mr. Raymond?”
“Maya, that’s just incredibly naïve. We can’t even agree on which political party should be in power for more than a few years in a row. If Mr. Becker thinks the country is going to suddenly come together and agree on matters of this kind of significance with a simple vote, he’s being unrealistic.”
“Excuse me—not the country, Mr. Raymond. The whole world! When I said a POTUS committee would leave people out in the cold, I was talking about all the other countries too. Extraterrestrial contact affects the entire planet, not just the U.S. Don’t the people in Europe and Africa get a say? There are far more people in Asia than in our hemisphere. Who says they don’t matter and that we’re the ones who should call all the shots? Now you’re reminding me of Columbus’ era more than I like.”
“But Mr. Becker, it was the United States who made the discovery. And it’s us mounting the mission to examine the sou
rce, at our own cost.”
“Yes, but the danger is shared. We might lose our astronaut and a couple billion dollars’ worth of gadgetry. But if we bring down the wrath of some extraterrestrial technology on our heads, the people in Asia and South America will suffer for it just as much as we will.”
“Amen to that! Hence my argument that active SETI is dangerous and we ought to be careful.”
“I never said we shouldn’t be careful, and I also don’t want to overemphasize the danger. We should absolutely be careful. But we shouldn’t be fearful either.”
“So, Mr. Becker, how would this voting system work?”
“I’m probably not the man to work out all the details, but I’m imagining an online tool that’s easily accessible by even a remote cell-phone user on the fringes of civilization. People could nominate a simple written message and then upvote or downvote, and the message with the most votes at the end of a certain deadline gets transmitted. It’s a relatively simple process, and one that’s worked out quite well for our political systems over the last hundred years.
“Think of it. Future politics, after we’ve solved most of our pressing terrestrial concerns, could be interstellar in nature! The issues, instead of dealing with people and resources, will be about how to go about spreading humanity among the stars. That’s inspiring, isn’t it?”
“Mr. Becker, when has anything like this ever been done on a global scale? What’s you’re talking about is a political impossibility.”
“It’s called the internet, Mr. Raymond, and it’s been around for nearly a century. We’ve got the beginnings of this kind of system already, and it’s been iterated on since the rise of social media and crowdsourcing. What we’re largely still lacking is a way to organize and act on all those conversations, to collate them all and add them up intelligently so that they have aggregate meaning.