by Clyde Key
* * *
Evan Saxton invited Hank Halloran and Homer Phillips to the university to preview the first message that was prepared for the aliens.
At Evan’s direction, one of his assistants rolled out a large viewing screen and displayed the whole message for them. It began with a series of still pictures of people—men, women, and children—along with English names printed under each figure. Then the same figures were shown in moving television pictures engaging in simple activities, such as walking, running, and using simple tools. These clips were also accompanied by printed captions and audible words. The last frame was a display of our solar system. In this diagram, the planet Earth was shown radiating waves into space, in the hope that the aliens would recognize that the signals were being transmitted from the third planet from the sun in our solar system.
“What do you think is the likelihood they’ll be able to recognize the format here?” asked Phillips.
“There’s no way to know,” said Halloran, “but if this doesn’t work, we will simply have to try something else.”
“That’s quite true,” said Evan. “But the real problem here is that if they recognize it immediately, it will still be four and a half years before their response gets back. In the present, though, we’ll still keep the computers trying to make some sense of what they’ve already sent us.”
8
April 29, 2112
Ed Halloran began to awaken, although it was still pitch dark where he was. Then he awoke completely with a start when he remembered the circumstances that brought him into the darkness, his having been jerked roughly into the globe.
It was as if he existed only in a tiny world barely large enough to hold him, perfectly round and with neither sound nor light. It was not totally devoid of sensation, though, because there was the smell—stinking, reeking of decay, and overpowering. Ed decided that it must have been the terrible odor that had awakened him.
Then there was the frightful thought that he’d been buried alive! It would explain the silence and darkness. Gripped suddenly with this fear, he began to hammer on the inside of the globe with his fists. “Let me out of here, you slime!” he screamed.
But after some time, he gave up and sunk into despair. Ed slumped in a heap in the bottom of the globe and thought I’m dead. I’m already dead, so why am I still conscious? Maybe I’m not dead but I wish I were?
For what may have been a very long time, or perhaps not a long time at all, Ed lay in a heap in the darkness inside the globe and thought about his life—the life that he had before—and what brought him to this point.
He remembered the time when Grandpa Hank told him about the aliens. Ed was very young then, perhaps eight or nine years old when Grandpa Hank came to visit.
“They’re coming, Eddie,” said Hank. “Hardly anybody else believes it, but I know they are coming.”
“How are they going to get here?” asked young Ed.
“I don’t know that part of it yet, and at my age I may not ever know it, but I’m sure they’re on their way. I can’t calculate it precisely, but I think it will probably take another fifty to seventy years.”
“Did they say they’re coming, Grandpa? I didn’t think anybody knows how to understand them.”
“They didn’t say so in as many words, but they told us that, I’m sure, in their own way. Nobody else understood it, but I’ve got it figured out.”
Then he thought about his early days at ETCC. Some people grumbled that Grandpa Hank had pulled a few strings to get him on at ETCC, but he didn’t care because he just wanted to be in on the excitement of the biggest game in the world in the year 2051 A.D.
It was only a couple of years after he started at ETCC when Ed first met Arlene Sisk. He’d had an interesting, even if somewhat tumultuous, relationship with Arlene over the years. If opposites really attract, it would explain why they were so completely taken with each other at first. But they were so completely opposite that it practically guaranteed the running feud that developed over the years. But Ed had such an easy-going personality that Arlene had won most of the battles, even though he obviously had the most fun.
They had gone out for dinner and a show one evening and Ed was driving Arlene back to her apartment when she told him about her assignment. It was her task to write a first draft of recommendations for dealing with the aliens when they finally arrived, even though that event would be many years into the future. Helen Norden, who had written extensively about the aliens and their (probable) psychological makeup, picked Arlene for this task. Norden was considered the foremost expert in this area.
“Ms. Norden and I share similar views about the aliens and that’s why she picked me for the report,” said Arlene.
Ed chuckled. “The old dame is looney. I don’t think you should want anybody comparing your views with hers. They’ll think you’re as crazy as she is!”
That made Arlene mad, and when they arrived back at her apartment, she slammed the door on him without saying another word.
When the silent treatment continued for the next few days, Ed vowed to get back at her. And he figured out a way when he accidentally learned her password into ETCC’s computer system. One evening after she had gone home, Ed broke into her file and printed it out. Then he composed a set of alternate recommendations written as a spoof and carried it to silly extremes. He replaced her file with the bogus one not knowing the job was due to be turned in the next day, and never dreaming that Arlene would print the document without looking at it again.
What happened was certainly not what Ed had expected. Norden raved about the job Arlene Sisk had done on the report and recommended her for a promotion. Of course Arlene was furious later when she discovered the trickery, but to expose the hoax meant that she would have to disavow the paper that won her accolades. She never told anybody about Ed’s trick, but it had soured their relationship forever.
There had been no point to wondering if things could have been different between them under different circumstances. Likely, he decided, their disparate personalities would have soon found some other opportunity to clash. And for Arlene, it worked out very well anyway. Since the paper had Helen Norden’s blessing, it very quickly became The Official Commission Report with only minor editing. For most of the American public, it was as big a joke as it was to Ed. In the commission, however, no one (except Ed) dared to speak of it other than in reverential terms because that would have meant instant dismissal for anybody except the grandson of Hank Halloran.
For many years, most people regarded ETCC as simply an expensive bureaucracy—useless and costly, but firmly entrenched and thus impossible to rid from ever increasing federal budgets. It was hard for anybody to seriously consider interacting with strange beings that were still a light year away or even half or a fourth of that. But ETCC spawned AABC and that agency had the mandate of educating Americans for interacting with suitable sensitivity for the expected considerable differences of the visitors. When they considered how humans with only very slight differences treat each other, it became obvious to Norden and Sisk that they had to control the circumstances very closely when aliens first began to contact humans directly.
Ed saw some humor in it now. This whole sensitivity thing was laughable because aliens were obviously not human to any degree. Respect for fungi would have made more sense than the pretense that we could treat these strange things as if they were in any way equivalent to humanity. Ed decided that he must be delirious to be able to laugh at anything in this circumstance.
Then he fell from the globe. Sprawled on the hot desert sand, he couldn’t see for a few minutes because the sudden glare of sunlight blinded him. Gradually, though, he became able to see that he was in a ravine, surrounded by the globes. At first, the globes rested on the ground but then they began to sprout the tails of fire that propelled them upward. Globes then began to travel down the ravine to a point perhaps a thousand meters away where they streamed up and across the desert. The globes went int
o a formation that became a huge glowing dome that surely could have been seen for many kilometers.
Ed was alone in the gulch. He stood and tried to brush away the dirt from his clothes but it was caked on. The streaks of mucus must have come from inside the globe that had captured him, and then dried quickly after he was dumped unceremoniously on the dirt. He picked at the filthy patches and rubbed furiously but none of it would come off. Ed was sickened at the sight of his extended arms, and began to vomit on the ground. At length, the vomiting stopped but he didn’t feel any better.
Ed wondered how long he had been in the globe. The sun was not high in the sky now, and it was already getting to be late afternoon when he’d gone into the globe so did that mean only a little time had passed. Or had it been many hours?
He began to walk away then. When Ed saw the fleet of rockets was on the other side of the formation of globes, he knew that Needles must be in that direction. And since the sun hung in the sky above the rockets, he also knew that the time was middle of the morning so he must have spent the night captive.
Ed wanted to hurry back to Needles, to find some way of communicating back to AABC. However, he decided to give both the globes and the rockets wide clearance, so he stayed in the ravine for a few hundred meters before coming out into the open.
It was then he began to notice the bones. Piles of small bones littered the ground at intervals. Ed recognized them as the skeletons of small desert animals. There were bones of snakes, rodents, lizards, and some others he didn’t even recognize.
This seemed strange at first. Anyone who had seen the flames from the huge retrorockets would have known that all the small desert animals would have been incinerated. There would have been no bones left. But in this low gulch this far from the nearest rocket, there was probably no flame so the desert life may not have been burned. However, the toxic fumes from the rocket exhaust would have killed all life here just as it did in the great cloud of poison that rolled northeastward from here. But death by poisoning would not explain why there was no flesh left on these bones. Aliens must have eaten these animals. What else would aliens eat? Despite the intense desert heat, Ed shivered as he walked.
9
April 29, 2112
Arlene Sisk had been summoned to Camp David. For all she knew, President Litton’s headquarters were far away in a top-secret location for security reasons, so she didn’t know why she had been called here, but she came anyway on the first available magtrain.
She didn’t have to identify herself at the gate. As the time neared for the arrival of The Visitors, Arlene had become very much in the public’s eye. Frequent news clips and service announcements over the video channels made her face known to every household in America, and perhaps on the planet. This guard called her by name and invited her to ride with him on his small transport to the main building, then escorted her to an elevator. “This is as far as I go,” he said. “You’ll have more instructions on the elevator.”
She stepped inside and looked at the control panel. There were buttons for two floors and the basement. Then the door closed and she heard a voice, “Look around here, please.” When she turned she saw the video camera, and the voice said, “Step forward, please, so I can get a good look at you.”
I hate the neutral voices they put in machines, she thought. Because this voice was neither masculine nor feminine and held no trace of emotion or accent, Sisk identified it instantly as belonging to a lower order machine and that irritated her even more. She stiffened, annoyed at being ordered around by a machine, but then remembered where she was and moved into good view of the camera.
“Very good, Ms. Sisk. You are identified. Please press the B button twice rapidly.”
“Wh... what?”
“Very good, Ms. Sisk. You are identified. Please press the B button twice rapidly.”
“No, no. I didn’t mean it that way. I was... Oh, never mind!” She pressed the button twice as instructed.
“Very good, Ms. Sisk. Now press the 1 button three times rapidly, then enter your personal identification code.”
She complied and then gasped as the elevator suddenly dropped. It was quickly obvious to her that the elevator was traveling down past many floors at a fast rate, even though she’d thought this building had only two floors above ground and a basement. When she had just about caught her breath, the elevator slowed, and then came to an abrupt stop that almost made her fall. She grabbed the handrail and steadied herself momentarily. Then the door opened and the voice said, “Step off, please.”
Arlene went out of the elevator and was met by another uniformed guard. “Welcome to Camp David, Ms. Sisk,” she said. “The president is expecting you, so please come this way.”
Arlene followed the guard down a long hall, and then watched as the guard placed her hand on an identifier panel. “It will be necessary for you to show identification also,” she said.
Arlene put her hand on the panel. “But they knew me upstairs,” she said.
“So do I,” said the guard. “But these instruments are picky, and you have to do everything just right or they won’t allow you to go in.”
Arlene nodded. She could have done without any of that, and in her agency, she had always refused to install these bothersome things. But then, what would anybody have ever wanted to steal from AABC anyway? AABC had always freely dispensed its information to the whole world.
The door opened slowly and the guard said, “Come on in, please.”
President Litton sat behind a huge desk that either had been moved from the Oval Office or was a copy of the famous furniture. The president was a tiny woman who looked even smaller behind that desk. She also looked much older than Arlene had expected, probably because of her unretouched gray hair and her plain dress. Arlene thought even a president doesn’t have to dress up when she lives hundreds of meters below ground. But then one would expect that stress from all the unexpected results of The Visitors’ arrival probably would have aged anybody.
“It was so good of you to come,” said Litton.
“Oh, not at all. I’m very honored to be here. And since I am, I want to tell you how thrilled I am that you’re president. The nation is in good hands, I must say.”
“I hope so. Anyway, I didn’t particularly wish to be president, but it was thrust upon me. At my age, I would rather be third vice president. I always thought I could accomplish just as much with a lot less strain. But that’s beside the point. You weren’t invited here to discuss my political ambitions.”
“No. Certainly not.”
“I’m hearing reports—from all over but not from AABC—that the situation is not improving. They’ve been here just about 30 hours and so far I hear only that you’re losing personnel and have had no useful contact yet.”
“That essentially is true. However, it hasn’t been long enough to...”
“It’s been long enough that you’ve had three agents captured by the aliens.”
“Yes, that basically is true. However, the problem here is primarily caused by one agent that I’ve had trouble with over the years. I should have dismissed Halloran years ago but there has been an internal political situation that prevented it.”
“Halloran? That sounds familiar. Was he related to the Halloran who helped found ETCC?”
“Yes. That’s the basic problem, you see. Ed Halloran is Hank Halloran’s grandson, and that presents a situation where we’ve been unable to terminate Ed even though he’s the most insubordinate employee we have.”
“That may well be, but let me get straight to the point. Your agency has spent trillions of dollars each of the last several years to study the aliens and learn how we should interact with them when they came. It appears to have been wasted because now that the aliens are here, they’ve killed a couple of hundred million people with their rocket exhaust, and you not only can’t seem to communicate with them but you are obviously reluctant to.”
“Ms. President, we refer to them as our Visitors
. Aliens is such a very negative term that we at AABC have been trying to educate people to call them Visitors instead.”
“We don’t have to worry about bruising their egos in here, assuming they have egos. This office is absolutely impervious to spying from humans or aliens or whatever.”
“Yes. Certainly. Still it seems like a good habit to practice consistent...”
“Get off it! You’ve had twenty years for that! Now I want to know what you plan to do to improve the present situation! And I want you to know that you must show results soon or you will be relieved. I think your assistant, Everett Lane, has a reputation for being able to handle things.”
“I’m sorry, Ms. President, but Lane Everett is one of the missing agents.”
Litton seemed taken aback by that information, and considered it for a moment. “Surely you have a plan for regaining control. Would you be so kind as to tell me about it?”
“Certainly. At present, we’re still formulating the plan to some extent, but what we’re doing is moving some interaction agents into place. We’re going to move in with teams as soon as it appears safe.”
“And what if it doesn’t ever appear safe?”
“Then we’ll have to come up with another plan,” said Sisk. “If we do, your administration will be involved in the decision processes, I can assure you.”
“Of course, we will!” said Litton. “You work for us, remember? Not the other way around. My God, but military forces would look good to me right now! What ever made us think bureaucrats and toothless police forces could ever keep the world safe?”
Arlene Sisk knew the president expected no response to that question, and offered none.
“I expect reports on an hourly basis,” said Litton. “I am somewhat frail, and I have to rest more than I’d like, but there will be at least one cabinet member on duty at all times, and that cabinet member will have authority to make instant decisions.”
“Yes, Ms. President,” said Arlene. “I’ll keep the administration constantly informed but I must know how to contact you.”
“Report to the Treasury Department. It’s the only department still operating in the open, only because our economy would collapse under any other condition. Make your reports directly to the office of the Secretary of the Treasury. And by the way,” said the president, looking Sisk in the eye, “you are the only person outside the administration who knows about our security precautions here. You will under no circumstance divulge that information to anybody!”
Arlene nodded weakly.
“That is all,” said Litton. “You may go.”