Alien Contact

by Marty Halpern

  “We discovered it for ourselves,” he said proudly. “We did not have to learn it from some other starfaring race, as many folk do.”

  “But how did you discover it?” she persisted.

  “How do I know? I’m a soldier; what do I care for such things? Who knows who invented gunpowder or found out about using bellows in a smithy to get the fire hot enough to melt iron? These things happen, that’s all.”

  She broke off the questions early that day.

  “It’s humiliating,” Hilda Chester said. “If these fool aliens had waited a few more years before they came, we likely would have blown ourselves to kingdom come without ever knowing there was more real estate around. Christ, from what the Roxolani say, races that scarcely know how to work iron fly starships and never think twice about it.”

  “Except when the starships don’t get home,” Charlie Ebbets answered. His tie was in his pocket and his collar open against Pasadena’s fierce summer heat, although the Caltech Athenaeum was efficiently air-conditioned. Along with so many other engineers and scientists, he depended on linguists like Hilda Chester for a link to the aliens.

  “I don’t quite understand it myself,” she said. “Apart from the hyperdrive and contragravity, the Roxolani are backward, almost primitive. And the other species out there must be the same, or someone would have overrun them long since.”

  Ebbets said, “Once you see it, the drive is amazingly simple. The research crews say anybody could have stumbled over the principle at almost any time in our history. The best guess is that most races did come across it, and once they did, why, all their creative energy would naturally go into refining and improving.”

  “But we missed it,” Hilda said slowly, “and so our technology developed in a different way.”

  “That’s right. That’s why the Roxolani don’t know anything about controlling electricity, to say nothing of atomics. And the thing is, as well as we can tell so far, the hyperdrive and contragravity don’t have the ancillary applications the electromagnetic spectrum does. All they do is move things from here to there in a hurry.”

  “That should be enough at the moment,” Hilda said. Ebbets nodded. There were almost nine billion people jammed onto the Earth, half of them hungry. Now, suddenly, there were places for them to go and a means to get them there.

  “I think,” Ebbets said musingly, “we’re going to be an awful surprise to the people out there.”

  It took Hilda a second to see what he was driving at. “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny. It’s been a hundred years since the last war of conquest.”

  “Sure—they’ve gotten too expensive and too dangerous. But what kind of fight could the Roxolani or anyone else at their level of technology put up against us? The Aztecs and Incas were plenty brave. How much good did it do them against the Spaniards?”

  “I hope we’ve gotten smarter in the last five hundred years.” Hilda said. All the same, she left her sandwich half-eaten. She found she was not hungry anymore.

  “Ransisc!” Togram exclaimed as the senior steerer limped into his cubicle. Ransisc was thinner than he had been a few moons before, aboard the misnamed Indomitable. His fur had grown out white around several scars Togram did not remember.

  His air of amused detachment had not changed, though. “Tougher than bullets, are you, or didn’t the humans think you were worth killing?”

  “The latter, I suspect. With their firepower, why should they worry about one soldier more or less?” Togram said bitterly. “I didn’t know you were still alive, either.”

  “Through no fault of my own, I assure you,” Ransisc said. “Olgren, next to me—” His voice broke off. It was not possible to be detached about everything.

  “What are you doing here?” the captain asked. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but you’re the first Roxolan face I’ve set eyes on since—” It was his turn to hesitate.

  “Since we landed.” Togram nodded in relief at the steerer’s circumlocution. Ransisc went on, “I’ve seen several others before you. I suspect we’re being allowed to get together so the humans can listen to us talking with each other.”

  “How could they do that?” Togram asked, then answered his own question: “Oh, the recorders, of course.” He perforce used the English word. “Well, we’ll fix that.”

  He dropped into Oyag, the most widely spoken language on a planet the Roxolani had conquered fifty years before. “What’s going to happen to us, Ransisc?”

  “Back on Roxolan, they’ll have realized something’s gone wrong by now,” the steerer answered in the same tongue.

  That did nothing to cheer Togram. “There are so many ways to lose ships,” he said gloomily. “And even if the High Warmaster does send another fleet after us, it won’t have any more luck than we did. These gods-accursed humans have too many war-machines.” He paused and took a long, moody pull at a bottle of vodka. The flavored liquors the locals brewed made him sick, but vodka he liked. “How is it they have all these machines and we don’t, or any race we know of? They must be wizards, selling their souls to the demons for knowledge.”

  Ransisc’s nose twitched in disagreement. “I asked one of their savants the same question. He gave me back a poem by a human named Hail or Snow or something of that sort. It was about someone who stood at a fork in the road and ended up taking the less-used track. That’s what the humans did. Most races find the hyperdrive and go traveling. The humans never did, and so their search for knowledge went in a different direction.”

  “Didn’t it!” Togram shuddered at the recollection of that brief, terrible combat. “Guns that spit dozens of bullets without reloading, cannon mounted on armored platforms that move by themselves, rockets that follow their targets by themselves. And there are the things we didn’t see, the ones the humans only talk about—the bombs that can blow up a whole city, each one by itself.”

  “I don’t know if I believe that,” Ransisc said.

  “I do. They sound afraid when they speak of them.”

  “Well, maybe. But it’s not just the weapons they have. It’s the machines that let them see and talk to one another from far away; the machines that do their reckoning for them; their recorders and everything that has to do with them. From what they say of their medicine, I’m almost tempted to believe you and think they are wizards—they actually know what causes their diseases, and how to cure or even prevent them. And their farming: this planet is far more crowded than any I’ve seen or heard of, but it grows enough for all these humans.”

  Togram sadly waggled his ears. “It seems so unfair. All that they got, just by not stumbling onto the hyperdrive.”

  “They have it now,” Ransisc reminded him. “Thanks to us.”

  The Roxolani looked at each other, appalled. They spoke together: “What have we done?”

  was sitting at my desk, reading a report on the brown pelican situation, when the secretary of state burst in. “Mr. President,” he said, his eyes wide, “the aliens are here!” Just like that. “The aliens are here!” As if I had any idea of what to do about them.

  “I see,” I said. I learned early in my first term that “I see” was one of the safest and most useful comments I could possibly make in any situation. When I said, “I see,” it indicated that I had digested the news and was waiting intelligently and calmly for further data. That knocked the ball back into my advisors’ court. I looked at the secretary of state expectantly. I was all prepared with my next utterance, in the event that he had nothing further to add. My next utterance would be “Well?” That would indicate that I was on top of the problem, but that I couldn’t be expected to make an executive decision without sufficient information, and that he should have known better than to burst into the Oval Office unless he had that information. That’s why we had protocol; that’s why we had proper channels; that’s why I had advisors. The voters out there didn’t want me to make decisions without sufficient information. If the secretary didn’t have anything more to tell me, he
shouldn’t have burst in, in the first place. I looked at him awhile longer. “Well?” I asked at last.

  “That’s about all we have at the moment,” he said uncomfortably. I looked at him sternly for a few seconds, scoring a couple of points while he stood there all flustered. I turned back to the pelican report, dismissing him. I certainly wasn’t going to get all flustered. I could think of only one president in recent memory who was ever flustered in office, and we all know what happened to him. As the secretary of state closed the door to my office behind him, I smiled. The aliens were probably going to be a bitch of a problem eventually, but it wasn’t my problem yet. I had a little time.

  But I found that I couldn’t really keep my mind on the pelican question. Even the president of the United States has some imagination, and if the secretary of state was correct, I was going to have to confront these aliens pretty damn soon. I’d read stories about aliens when I was a kid, I’d seen all sorts of aliens in movies and television, but these were the first aliens who’d actually stopped by for a chat. Well, I wasn’t going to be the first American president to make a fool of himself in front of visitors from another world. I was going to be briefed. I telephoned the secretary of defense. “We must have some contingency plans drawn up for this,” I told him. “We have plans for every other possible situation.” This was true; the Defense Department has scenarios for such bizarre events as the rise of an imperialist fascist regime in Liechtenstein or the spontaneous depletion of all the world’s selenium.

  “Just a second, Mr. President,” said the secretary. I could hear him muttering to someone else. I held the phone and stared out the window. There were crowds of people running around hysterically out there. Probably because of the aliens. “Mr. President?” came the voice of the secretary of defense. “I have one of the aliens here, and he suggests that we use the same plan that President Eisenhower used.”

  I closed my eyes and sighed. I hated it when they said stuff like that. I wanted information, and they told me these things knowing that I would have to ask four or five more questions just to understand the answer to the first one. “You have an alien with you?” I said, in a pleasant enough voice.

  “Yes, sir. They prefer not to be called ‘aliens.’ He tells me he’s a nup. That’s their word for ‘man,’ in the sense of ‘human being.’ The plural is ‘nuhp.’”

  “Thank you, Luis. Tell me, why do you have an al—Why do you have a nup and I don’t?”

  Luis muttered the question to his nup. “He says it’s because they wanted to go through proper channels. They learned all about that from President Eisenhower.”

  “Very good, Luis.” This was going to take all day, I could see that; and I had a photo session with Mick Jagger’s granddaughter. “My second question, Luis, is what the hell does he mean by ‘the same plan that President Eisenhower used’?”

  Another muffled consultation. “He says that this isn’t the first time that the nuhp have landed on Earth. A scout ship with two nuhp aboard landed at Edwards Air Force Base in 1954. The two nuhp met with President Eisenhower. It was apparently a very cordial occasion, and President Eisenhower impressed the nuhp as a warm and sincere old gentleman. They’ve been planning to return to Earth ever since but they’ve been very busy, what with one thing and another. President Eisenhower requested that the nuhp not reveal themselves to the people of Earth in general, until our government decided how to control the inevitable hysteria. My guess is that the government never got around to that, and when the nuhp departed, the matter was studied and then shelved. As the years passed, few people were even aware that the first meeting ever occurred. The nuhp have returned now in great numbers, expecting that we’d have prepared the populace by now. It’s not their fault that we haven’t. They just sort of took it for granted that they’d be welcome.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. That was my usual utterance when I didn’t know what the hell else to say. “Assure them that they are, indeed, welcome. I don’t suppose the study they did during the Eisenhower administration was ever completed. I don’t suppose there really is a plan to break the news to the public.”

  “Unfortunately, Mr. President, that seems to be the case.”

  “Uh huh.” That’s Republicans for you, I thought. “Ask your nup something for me, Luis. Ask him if he knows what they told Eisenhower. They must be full of outer space wisdom. Maybe they have some ideas about how we should deal with this.”

  There was yet another pause. “Mr. President, he says all they discussed with Mr. Eisenhower was his golf game. They helped to correct his putting stroke. But they are definitely full of wisdom. They know all sorts of things. My nup—that is, his name is Hurv—anyway, he says that they’d be happy to give you some advice.”

  “Tell him that I’m grateful, Luis. Can they have someone meet with me in, say, half an hour?”

  “There are three nuhp on their way to the Oval Office at this moment. One of them is the leader of their expedition, and one of the others is the commander of their mother ship.”

  “Mother ship?” I asked.

  “You haven’t seen it? It’s tethered on the Mall. They’re real sorry about what they did to the Washington Monument. They say they can take care of it tomorrow.”

  I just shuddered and hung up the phone. I called my secretary. “There are going to be three—”

  “They’re here now, Mr. President.”

  I sighed. “Send them in.” And that’s how I met the nuhp. Just as President Eisenhower had.

  They were handsome people. Likable, too. They smiled and shook hands and suggested that photographs be taken of the historic moment, so we called in the media; and then I had to sort of wing the most important diplomatic meeting of my entire political career. I welcomed the nuhp to Earth. “Welcome to Earth,” I said, “and welcome to the United States.”

  “Thank you,” said the nup I would come to know as Pleen. “We’re glad to be here.”

  “How long do you plan to be with us?” I hated myself when I said that, in front of the Associated Press and the UPI and all the network news people. I sounded like a desk clerk at a Holiday Inn.

  “We don’t know, exactly,” said Pleen. “We don’t have to be back to work until a week from Monday.”

  “Uh huh,” I said. Then I just posed for pictures and kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t going to say or do another goddamn thing until my advisors showed up and started advising.

  Well, of course, the people panicked. Pleen told me to expect that, but I had figured it out for myself. We’ve seen too many movies about visitors from space. Sometimes they come with a message of peace and universal brotherhood and just the inside information mankind has been needing for thousands of years. More often, though, the aliens come to enslave and murder us because the visual effects are better, and so when the nuhp arrived everyone was all prepared to hate them. People didn’t trust their good looks. People were suspicious of their nice manners and their quietly tasteful clothing. When the nuhp offered to solve all our problems for us, we all said, sure, solve our problems—but at what cost?

  That first week, Pleen and I spent a lot of time together, just getting to know one another and trying to understand what the other one wanted. I invited him and Commander Toag and the other nuhp bigwigs to a reception at the White House. We had a church choir from Alabama singing gospel music and a high school band from Michigan playing a medley of favorite collegiate fight songs and talented clones of the original stars nostalgically re-creating the Steve and Eydie Experience and an improvisational comedy troupe from Los Angeles or someplace and the New York Philharmonic under the baton of a twelve-year-old girl genius. They played Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in an attempt to impress the nuhp with how marvelous Earth culture was.

  Pleen enjoyed it all very much. “Men are as varied in their expressions of joy as we nuhp,” he said, applauding vigorously. “We are all very fond of human music. We think Beethoven composed some of the most beautiful melodies we’ve ever heard, any
where in our galactic travels.”

  I smiled. “I’m sure we are all pleased to hear that,” I said.

  “Although the Ninth Symphony is certainly not the best of his work.”

  I faltered in my clapping. “Excuse me?” I said.

  Pleen gave me a gracious smile. “It is well known among us that Beethoven’s finest composition is his Piano Concerto Number Five in E Flat Major.”

  I let out my breath. “Of course, that’s a matter of opinion. Perhaps the standards of the nuhp—”

  “Oh, no,” Pleen hastened to assure me, “taste does not enter into it at all. The Concerto Number Five is Beethoven’s best, according to very rigorous and definite critical principles. And even that lovely piece is by no means the best music ever produced by mankind.”

  I felt just a trifle annoyed. What could this nup, who came from some weirdo planet God alone knows how far away, from some society with not the slightest connection to our heritage and culture, what could this nup know of what Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony aroused in our human souls? “Tell me, then, Pleen,” I said in my ominously soft voice, “what is the best human musical composition?”

  “The score from the motion picture Ben Hur, by Miklos Rozsa,” he said simply. What could I do but nod my head in silence. It wasn’t worth starting an interplanetary incident over.

  So from fear our reaction to the nuhp changed to distrust. We kept waiting for them to reveal their real selves; we waited for the pleasant masks to slip off and show us the true nightmarish faces we all suspected lurked beneath. The nuhp did not go home a week from Monday, after all. They liked Earth, and they liked us. They decided to stay a little longer. We told them about ourselves and our centuries of trouble; and they mentioned, in an off-hand nuhp way, that they could take care of a few little things, make some small adjustments, and life would be a whole lot better for everybody on Earth. They didn’t want anything in return. They wanted to give us these things in gratitude for our hospitality, for letting them park their mother ship on the Mall and for all the free refills of coffee they were getting all around the world. We hesitated, but our vanity and our greed won out. “Go ahead,” we said, “make our deserts bloom. Go ahead, end war and poverty and disease. Show us twenty exciting new things to do with leftovers. Call us when you’re done.”