Wherever Seeds May Fall (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  “This is a joke, right?” Jorge asks. “You’re making fun of me because I’m a simple man.”

  “No, Papa.”

  Padre Jesus says, “You’re a good man, Jorge. No one would make fun of you.”

  “This is strange,” Jorge says. To him, it’s a fairytale come to life.

  “It is very strange,” his daughter says.

  He looks up at the stars, asking, “Which one is Saturn?”

  “The one with the rings,” the padre says, “But you need a telescope to see them.”

  “Will binoculars do?” he asks. “I have some on the boat.”

  “Maybe,” the padre replies.

  “Wait here,” Jorge says, putting his meal aside. He jogs across the sand to the rickety old pier. His boots pound on the wooden boards. Jorge’s pier services six boats, giving him some modest rent. His trawler is an aging thirty-footer. Rust stains surround the portholes. Nets hang from poles mounted above the rear deck, ready to cast when he puts out to sea again.

  Jorge grabs a pair of binoculars from the cabin. It feels unnerving to turn his back on the stars rising over the Gulf. Somewhere behind him, someone is watching. He hurries to his home, handing the binoculars to Maria.

  “Can you find it?”

  “I can try,” she says, using an old Android phone to connect to the Internet and search for Saturn in the night sky.

  “Okay,” she says, pointing. “It should be right up there. The bright one in the middle.”

  Maria looks through the binoculars, focusing them.

  “Oh, yeah. There it is. You can see the rings.”

  “You can see it?” Jorge is excited. He takes the binoculars from her and peers into the darkness. “I can see Saturn. Where is the alien?”

  “Oh, you can’t see the alien,” Maria says as Jorge hands the binoculars to the padre. “Not yet. Only NASA can see it.”

  Jorge laughs. “I think they are fooling us. It’s fake. There’s nothing out there.”

  Padre Jesus lowers the binoculars. “My friend, there are many things we cannot see. That does not mean they’re not real. No one has ever seen God. You cannot see love or faith, but we know these things are true.”

  “You believe them?” Jorge asks. “The Americans?”

  “I believe something wonderful is happening,” the padre replies.

  Jorge says, “Then that is good enough for me.”

  Coffee

  “If you want… No, that’s fine… Umm, huh. Okay. Yeah, I get it… I understand. It’s not your fault. Tread lightly, babe.”

  Kath doesn’t mean to eavesdrop on Nolan’s phone call. She’s wandered down to the cafeteria in the basement of the Eisenhower Executive Office at 11 pm. She’s after a caffeine hit. Stupid, dumbass brain.

  “Decaf Latté,” she says to Jonathan, the night manager. That’ll teach her mind for silly cravings at a crazy hour. There’s no way Kath’s going to give in to her desire for caffeine. Instead, she’ll fool her mind and still get a decent night’s sleep.

  One of the surprising things about working for the President is there are no formal hours. Kath’s been woken at four in the morning to answer questions. On other days, she’s slept in till eleven. There’s an unspoken agreement that they’re all putting in the hours without a nine-to-five clock. Kath’s quite happy with that as her circadian rhythm marches to its own beat. When the science demands it, she stays late.

  Jonathan’s a geek. Most people yawn when she talks about galaxies and supernova, but not Jonathan. He might not have a degree in astrophysics, but he loves chatting about the stars. For Kath, it’s refreshing to talk about something other than An̆duru. It’s therapeutic bouncing ideas off someone that strives to make the perfect cup of coffee. Perhaps it’s that they both have a passion for excellence.

  “Oh, you’re going to love this,” he says, frothing milk for her drink. He taps a little chocolate powder on top and pulls out a contraption made from bent paperclips and rubber bands. “I’ve been practicing all day.”

  “Cool,” Kath says, watching with interest.

  “A long time ago,” he says, twisting the tips through the foamy milk, slowly drawing them to a point.

  “In a galaxy far, far away,” Kath says, finishing his quote. She loves the miniature spiral galaxy he’s created on top of her coffee. Kath smiles, waving her credit card over the pay station. “Your talents are wasted here, my friend. We need you at NASA.”

  He grins, wiping down the coffee machine.

  As she turns, Kath hears a distant, “I love you too.”

  Nolan puts his phone on the table. He sits there, staring at a poster promoting personal hygiene. There’s no way he’s actually interested in it.

  “May I join you?” Kath asks.

  “Sure.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Oh,” he says. “I’ve managed to get a couple of the Keyhole satellites re-tasked so we can—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she replies, sipping her coffee.

  “Ah,” he says. His eyes drop to his phone. “Yeah, my wife Jan is less than impressed at me being stuck here for the next couple of months. We kinda thought we were over that part of military life. When you’re young, you jump on command. You don’t ask how high. Then you have a family and kids, and all of a sudden, you want to know how long you’re going to be jumping for Uncle Sam.”

  “How many kids do you have?” Kath asks.

  Nolan opens the photos on his phone, saying, “Two. A boy and a girl. Eddie’s twenty. Samantha is fourteen going on twenty.”

  He flicks through pictures from a ski vacation, showing them to her. The smiles she sees are brighter than the overcast day around them.

  “Pictures are funny, aren’t they?” Kath says. “They’re a split second forever frozen in time—more vivid than any memory.”

  “They are,” Nolan says, putting his phone down. “And you?”

  Kath opens her phone. “Here’s my baby.”

  She shows him four pictures of her with her Bichon Frise. Floppy white ears frame a pair of beady black eyes and a button nose.

  “They’re toy dogs,” Kath says. “Perfect for apartment living and someone like me with allergies.”

  “Nice,” Nolan says, being polite. It’s clear he’s not much of a dog person. It’s the lack of comment about any dogs he’s had. Dog lovers enjoy talking about the breeds they’ve raised. His silence is telling. It’s okay. Some people like dogs. Others like cats. Still others are content by themselves. Kath’s mom says pets are surrogates for children. With a cheeky grin, Kath told her it’s the other way around.

  “It’s important, you know,” she says, closing her phone. “Having something other than work to focus on.”

  “It is. So who’s looking after…?”

  “Newt,” she says. “It’s short for Newton. I left him with a friend.”

  A friend? That’s vague, Kath. Family friend? Friend from work? Old friend? Friend with benefits? Boyfriend? Girlfriend? Kath can almost hear the gears grinding in Nolan’s mind. She had no desire to talk about her on-again/off-again partner. Why are you so uptight about your personal life? You’re the one that wanted to talk about something besides work. What does he care? He’s not judging you, and even if he was, who cares?

  She relents, opening her phone and flicking to a photo of an unshaven man with long hair pulled into a topknot. He’s crouching next to Newt in a lush green park, smiling as he pets him.

  “This is Eugene,” she says. “He’s an associate professor of English at USC.”

  “English?” Nolan says with a hint of surprise in his voice.

  “We all speak it,” Kath says, joking with him. “It’s more common than you’d think.”

  Nolan laughs.

  “Shakespeare and quantum mechanics is an odd combination, huh?”

  To which, he says, “All combinations are equally unlikely.”

  “Oh, now you sound like the physicist,” she replies.
/>   “So what hobbies do you guys have?” Nolan asks.

  “I tend to think of my work as a hobby. Eugene would disagree. On the weekends, we enjoy getting up into the hills and hiking. Nature helps clear the mind, you know?”

  Nolan nods.

  “And you,” she asks?

  “Oh, I’m a guitar tragic,” he says. “My kids think I suck. It’s a bit of a running joke in the family. It’s my taste in music they don’t like, I guess. Too old. Too nostalgic.”

  “Do you play in a band?” she asks.

  “I wish. I used to. Back in high school. A long time ago. These days, it’s just the occasional strum on an aging twelve-string.”

  Kath cannot imagine Nolan on stage with a guitar. It’s the uniform. It screams of military precision and being stiff and formal.

  Nolan asks, “Do you think they’ll understand humor?”

  “Oh, now that’s an interesting question,” she replies. “I don’t know. I think so. I sure hope so.”

  “What about things like love?”

  She sips at her coffee before answering.

  “I’m going to say, yes. Emotions aren’t unique to humans. Chimps will laugh at magic tricks. Rats enjoy being tickled. Animals care for their offspring. That seems obvious enough, but they’ll often go further. Elephants have built thickets around people lost on the savannah. They have no reason to protect them from lions and hyenas, but they do.”

  “Huh?”

  “Intelligence seems to demand things like being playful and caring.”

  Nolan says, “But no dad jokes, right? They won’t like them.”

  “Nobody does.”

  Nolan grins. “Why do gulls fly over the sea?”

  “No,” Kath replies. “Please. Don’t.”

  Nolan doesn’t care. This is intelligent playfulness at its best.

  “Because if they flew over the bay, they’d be bagels.”

  Kath hangs her head.

  “Get it? Bay—”

  “I get it.”

  “—Gulls?”

  Nolan laughs at himself. Of course he does.

  “I do wonder what they’ll make of us,” she says, unable to suppress a smile after his lame-ass joke. “I mean, we have all these quirks and foibles that make us quintessentially human. Maybe they do too. Maybe the biggest discovery that will come out of this is that they’re not all that alien after all.”

  “Now there’s a thought,” Nolan says.

  “It’s the real reason we’re here, right?” she says. “I don’t mean here as in looking at An̆duru or here in Washington, but here as a civilization. We’re more than roads and suburbs, huh? We’re more than Bud Lights and a pickup truck.”

  “We are,” he says.

  “As much as I love science, it’s not what makes us human. It’s all the other things.”

  “Here’s to things other than work,” Nolan says, raising his disposable coffee cup as though it were a glass of wine.

  “Yep. They’re the reason we’re here,” Kath replies, touching the rim of her cup to his.

  “Cheers.”

  Rendezvous Jupiter: December

  Battlespace

  “Three weeks,” General Cooper says, berating a meeting of scientists and engineers at the Los Alamos. “It’s been almost three goddamn weeks since we learned about this thing, and you’re telling me we’ve got nothing? No strategy to counter a threat from outer space?”

  Nolan clenches his jaw. He’d rather let the scientists speak so he can better understand their issues. Interrupting isn’t helping. Three weeks may sound like a long time to Cooper, but the problem is too complex. Throwing more people at it won’t solve anything. Nine women can’t produce a baby in a month.

  Developing rockets takes years. Decades. Even though they’re starting with established designs, there are a myriad of constraints. Any upgraded missile has to fit inside the silos on the aging US submarines. They have to work with existing (often antiquated) control systems. And then there’s testing. What’s the point if the damn thing doesn’t work when it gets up there? Hitting an object in orbit isn’t easy. Blink, and you’ll miss a target that’s racing by at twenty-eight thousand kilometers an hour. Trying to hit anything in space is akin to firing a bullet at another bullet swirling around within a hurricane.

  Orbits are predictable, but only if the target isn’t under propulsion. Hitting something that’s moving around under its own steam takes the already insane complexity off the charts. Given all that, three weeks for a bunch of technical papers outlining a strategy isn’t bad. If only ET wasn’t about to arrive on their doorstep.

  “We have to be accurate,” the lead engineer says in his defense. “These aren’t hand grenades. We can’t simply deploy explosives in orbit.”

  Although there’s plenty he could say, Nolan doesn’t speak. Cooper’s done enough damage. Nolan’s got to try to salvage what he can.

  There are twenty-seven people crammed into the elongated basement meeting room. Nolan counted them as they entered. How the hell are they going to get twenty-seven people to agree on anything? He’s heard it said that zebras are a horse designed by a committee. It should be black. Make it white. No, black. No, it needs to be white.

  “We have nukes,” General Cooper says. “Why do we have to be accurate? The damn things will take out a city. You don’t have to hit a specific street or even a suburb. Just get close and—wham!”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” the engineer says. “Nuclear weapons operate by superheating the atmosphere. They force the air into a wall of overpressure. This then rolls out like a tsunami, destroying everything in its wake. That doesn’t happen in space. There’s nothing to heat. Nothing to compress.”

  “So what does happen?” Cooper asks.

  “A flash. A burst of radiation,” he clicks his fingers, adding, “And it’s over.”

  “What about a thermonuclear device?” Nolan asks. “A hydrogen bomb?”

  “Slightly better,” the engineer says. “You’ll get a ball of superheated plasma, basically a miniature sun, but it’ll be gone within seconds. It’ll only cover a small area. We’re talking hundreds of meters, maybe a kilometer. Nukes in space are nothing like what you see on Earth.”

  Nolan did not want to be dragged into this meeting, but he’s glad he’s here. He needed to witness this conversation firsthand. He hates it, but he knows it’s important.

  Everything about the meeting feels wrong. Perhaps it’s the setting. Basement level 2 is at least twenty-five feet below ground. The room is ugly. There are no windows. Warm stale air falls from the ceiling. Fine dust clings to the vent cover. The filters haven’t been cleaned in decades.

  Fluorescent lights cast an unnatural glow. Occasionally, one of the tubes flickers. The wallpaper is from the eighties, at least. Hell, it’s older than he is. As for the desk, Nolan’s not sure how anyone got it through the door. For all he knows, the damn room was built around it. The wood is old and worn but has been recently varnished—for the fifth or sixth time.

  “So, what the hell do we do?” General Cooper asks.

  The engineer looks uncertain. It’s not that he’s intimidated by the four generals in the room. Nolan understands what he’s feeling. This guy gets one shot at convincing the brass. He wants to get it right. It’s difficult to balance arguments while keeping the conversation focused.

  “War in space is different to fighting on Earth. The distances are immense. Orbital mechanics have a significant impact on strategy. Even if we develop a weapon that could cripple an alien spacecraft, we have to be careful. The shrapnel from an exploding spacecraft could create a long-term orbital hazard.”

  Being a SCIF, or skiff as they’re colloquially called, the room is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. No unauthorized electronic devices are allowed beyond the door. A scanner ensures nothing untoward enters the room. The handful of laptops and phones inside the room are plugged into a raised wooden centerpiece built into the desk.


  General Cooper isn’t listening. He says, “So we fire conventional missiles at them. Use high explosives. Hit ’em with something like a modified Hellfire or a space-enabled AMRAAM.”

  “Even that has its difficulties.”

  “Explain.”

  “In a firefight, stray bullets hit buildings and hillsides. Imagine if they didn’t hit anything at all. What if they continued racing back and forth across the battlespace? What if they kept going until some poor soul stuck their head up? That’s what happens in space.”

  General Cooper looks across the table at Nolan.

  The engineer says, “It gets worse. If enough shrapnel is flying around up there, it acts like a minefield. We could be denied access to space for years, possibly decades.

  “This is known as Kessler’s syndrome. Unlike a minefield, there’s no way to defuse the problem. We could end up with a cloud of debris moving at twenty-eight thousand kilometers an hour in all directions. Launch anything from Earth and it has to run that gauntlet to get into space.”

  Cooper nods, saying, “So we could end up hitting ourselves years later.”

  “Yes,” the engineer says. “This is a real problem. There are already over a hundred million bits of space junk orbiting Earth. Most of it is smaller than your fingernail but still as lethal as a bullet. If we just start blowing things up, we could take the count to over a billion. Fight an extended war in space and debris could reach into the trillions.

  “It’s one thing to fire a missile with a known velocity and a predictable orbital path. It’s another to deal with a swirling cloud of shrapnel. We need to be aware, we could hurt ourselves. In a worst-case scenario, we could leave ourselves locked-in on Earth, unable to reach orbit.”

  “But what goes up must come down, right?” General Cooper asks. “I mean, these fragments won’t stay up there forever.”

  “Orbits are like a banked NASCAR track,” the engineer says. “They’re not nice neat, circular patterns. They’re ellipses, squashed circles. A large explosion in orbit would result in debris on a wide variety of paths. Some shrapnel would go down, but we have to think in three dimensions. Most of it will be on the same plane. Some of it will go considerably higher. It’s—It’s—It’s like putting an egg in a blender.”