H g stratmann, p.1
H G Stratmann, page 1
THE INVASION
by H. G. Stratmann
First contact may not happen the way either party suspects.
The president of the United States shivered, wondering if the next hour would bring salvation or destruction to the human race. Her worried frown was mirrored in the faces of the National Security Council members filling the chairs at the long conference table. The only smile in the well-guarded White House room belonged to the famous astronomer sitting immediately to the right of where the president sat at the head of the table.
Arthur O. Lewis, director of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life Foundation, slid a bulky pair of glasses back up the bridge of his nose. His unruly shock of fine sandy hair and the bright boyish grin beaming from his clean-shaven face made him resemble a college freshman instead of the middle-aged owner of doctorates in astronomy and computer science. The trademark turtleneck sweater and khaki slacks he sported stood in stark sartorial contrast to the stiff business suits and military uniforms worn by the dignitaries around him.
Lewis spoke with the high-pitched enthusiasm of a nerdy teenager describing the details of his first date with a real girl. “Don’t worry, Madam President. Today could be the greatest day in human history!”
The president looked uncertainly at the dark screen of the device resembling a laptop computer that the astronomer had just set up in front of her. She said, “Or it might be our last day. I almost wish this machine of yours wouldn’t work.”
Lewis gleefully stroked his index finger over the tachyonic transceiver’s power button, barely restraining his impulse to depress it as he replied. “The electronic engineers who built it based on the plans the aliens sent us believe it will work. True, the theoretical physicists we consulted still don’t understand how it can send and receive signals faster than the speed of light. But we really don’t need to know exactly how the transceiver works to be able to use it. After all, most people who use computers don’t have any idea how a CPU functions.”
The puzzled expressions on the room’s other distinguished occupants suggested they didn’t know what a “CPU” was, much less what it did. The president said, “Dr. Lewis, do you think the aliens who sent that message you received already know of our existence?”
“I don’t think so. The signals our radio telescope network picked up were omnidirectional rather than beamed specifically at Earth. We also discovered that the aliens’ transmissions didn’t begin recently. Our review of old magnetic tapes from the first SETI programs over fifty years ago, like Project Ozma in 1960, showed that some packets of their message were being transmitted even back then.”
The president frowned. “What do you mean by ‘packets?’”
Lewis said, “The original SETI investigators tried to detect data being transmitted in a linear, analog fashion—the same way signals are received on a conventional AM or FM radio. They used single-channel receivers limited to monitoring just one frequency at a time and confined their search to a narrow range of frequencies, such as those around the twenty-one cm wavelength of radiation produced by interstellar hydrogen. Those initial surveys also listened for signals from only one star at a time and checked only a few nearby ones, like Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani.”
The astronomer grinned. “But the way the aliens sent their message was much too complex to be detected by simple methods like that. They disassembled and formatted their message into many discrete fragments or ‘packets’ of binary code difficult to distinguish from random noise until you put them back together.
“Then those packets were transmitted in a manner similar to the ‘frequency-hopping spread spectrum’ technology used in some wireless computer networks. To put it simply, the aliens sent each digitized signal over a broad range of frequencies instead of only one. About every hundred milliseconds the signal ‘hopped’ from one frequency to another within that range in a recurring pattern. Finally, packets containing separate parts of the complete message were transmitted in signals originating from several nearby stars instead of just one. The specific stars we discovered parts of the message coming from included—”
The president interrupted him. “That all sounds very complicated, Dr. Lewis. Why did the aliens make it so difficult to detect their signals?”
The scientist shrugged. “Perhaps they’re only interested in communicating with civilizations that have achieved at least our current level of technology. Those first SETI investigators simply didn’t have the equipment or techniques available to discover more than a tiny piece of an incredibly complex puzzle. Even with the large-scale distributed computing methods we now use, the raw computational power needed to monitor so many frequencies, integrate those multiple extraterrestrial signals, and reassemble all the data packets into their original form wasn’t available until recently.
“But once we had the aliens’ complete message, it didn’t take our linguists long to translate it with the help of the foundation’s new supercomputer. They discovered the message only contained instructions for building and using this device.”
Lewis tapped the edge of the tachyonic transceiver. “This machine will let you become the first human to instantly communicate and exchange messages with the aliens who broadcast those signals—to make ‘first contact’ with an intelligence far greater than ours. I hope you’ll decide to take advantage of this history-making opportunity.”
The president smiled sadly. “I knew winning this office held many heavy responsibilities, but I never expected this to be one of them.”
She looked questioningly at the other officials seated in the room. “I would appreciate more advice before I make my final decision whether to use Dr. Lewis’s device.”
From the far end of the conference table the director of national intelligence said, “Dr. Lewis, we all appreciate the admirable discretion you and your staff exercised by keeping your discovery of the aliens’ message and its contents secret. I hate to think of the worldwide panic that might have occurred if any of you had spoken with the media about it before we clamped a security lid on everyone concerned.”
The astronomer grinned humbly. “I hope what the president and all of you choose to do here today will validate our refraining from going public with this. Though my staff and I were sorely tempted to give a press conference about our discovery, we finally agreed that the decision whether or not to contact the aliens had to be made by the people who held the greatest responsibility for dealing with the results of that choice.”
The director of national intelligence looked back at him suspiciously, wondering whether this otherwise brilliant scientist was incredibly naive or being subtly sarcastic. He replied, “Thank you for having such faith in us.”
Then the director’s voice turned low and dark. “But tell me, do you have any idea why aliens would send us the plans for that device?”
Lewis shrugged. “There’s no such thing as an expert on exopsychology. Anything I say is speculative. Perhaps the aliens have motives that our mere human minds couldn’t possibly understand. Or maybe, in some ways, the aliens do think like us. It’s possible that they too are curious to find out whether intelligence has evolved elsewhere in the galaxy and what form it’s taken.”
He pointed to the silvery metal transceiver resting in front of the president. “Perhaps they’re eager to share their own religious and philosophical insights into the meaning of existence with us. Beings capable of this level of technology may be as intellectually and morally advanced above us as we are from Homo habilis.”
Lewis’s eyes peered out into the misty distance through thick lenses. “Or perhaps, as those beings gazed up at a clear night sky into the vast silent Universe, they felt a great melancholy emptiness within them. The information they sent may have been like a message in a bottle, tossed out into the vast ocean of space with a prayer that somewhere, someone they could call ‘friend’ would find it and let them know that they were not alone. This device they taught us to build could be a ‘laptop of loneliness,’ the instrument by which they hope we’ll answer their plaintive plea for companionship.”
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff grunted. “That sounds fishy to me. I think it could be the worm on a fishing hook—the bait for a trap!”
He squinted acidly at Lewis. “If we follow your suggestion, we could be letting immensely powerful and hostile creatures know we exist and where Earth is. Their ‘answer’ might be a fleet of flying saucers and armies of death ray-wielding robots dropping out of the sky over our cities!”
The president stared at her general, worried about his taste in movies and recreational reading material—and unsure whether he was really serious. After deciding she’d rather not know if he was, she replied, “While that possibility seems a bit ... remote, I must consider every ramification of making what Dr. Lewis calls ‘first contact.’ Earlier in this meeting you all heard him describe the many potential advantages of beginning a dialogue with these aliens.
“Besides the religious and philosophical insights he just alluded to, they may provide us with practical solutions to many of the problems facing our world today. If they really could help us solve the energy and environmental crises we face, provide us with the medical knowledge to live longer and healthier lives, and teach us how to coexist in harmony with each other, then this device might indeed be our salvation.”
A disapproving voice along the side of the table interjected, “Or those same ‘benefits’ could wreck our economy!”
The secretary of the treasury continued, “Say these hy
“Or if the aliens told us how to cure cancer or heart disease so people lived longer, the money we’d save by spending less on healthcare might be far outweighed by the greater amounts we’d pay in Social Security and other benefits to recipients who would now be living many more years than we’ve planned for! I know this sounds harsh, but we don’t want to unintentionally cause more harm than good.”
The secretary of defense nodded his perspiring brow. “For all we know the aliens really might want Earth’s nations to get along better with each other—but for their own ends. The aliens could want us to reduce military spending so we’ll be less prepared to defend ourselves when they attack!”
The secretary of state looked at her colleague dubiously. “I won’t even guess what the aliens might do, but I am concerned about the threats some of our fellow humans are making. While the public may still be in the dark about Dr. Lewis’s discovery, rumors of what’s going on have leaked out to several of our allies and a few unfriendly powers. They’re all demanding we give them a full account of what we know and plan to do.”
The vice president nodded. “It’s risky to either stall them or share our information with them. Their greatest fear seems to be that we’ll acquire technological knowledge from the aliens that would give us such a tremendous economic and military advantage that our country could unilaterally dominate the world. If they thought we’d learned how to build advanced weapons of mass destruction like the flying saucers and rampaging robots the general described, even our so-called allies might feel justified in a preemptive military strike against us before we could deploy those weapons.”
He turned a troubled look at the president. “No matter what you decide, it’s going to be a diplomatic nightmare convincing other governments we’re being open and honest with them. Maybe Dr. Lewis’s device won’t even work. Perhaps the aliens we contact won’t share their scientific secrets with us. The problem is—will any of those governments believe anything we say about what happens here today?”
The president bit her lower lip, deep in thought. She said, “If this device works, we could let those other nations know how to build their own. Then they wouldn’t have to be afraid we had a monopoly on knowledge they think could threaten them.”
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff shook his head vigorously. “Even if we don’t use any information the aliens give us for military purposes, our enemies probably won’t be so scrupulous. We don’t want to hand them a tool they could use to build superscientific weapons and destroy us!”
Lewis said, “Even if you decide not to share the plans for the transceiver, there are SETI programs in other countries that could potentially pick up and decipher the message we received. All they’d need is just a few details about the techniques we used and where to listen. Then they’d be able to make and use their own transceiver.”
The president turned to the individual sitting with uncharacteristic silence on Lewis’s right. “What do you think?”
The tall gray-haired man who served as both her national security advisor and husband looked bemused at the arguments swirling around him. He said, “I think we should go ahead and contact these aliens. Sure, we could get into trouble with them or other countries by doing that. But I’m confident we can talk ourselves out of any mess we make and come out on top.”
The other people in the room looked at him, unable to contest what he’d said. Finally the president continued, “Dr. Lewis has presented us with a difficult dilemma. Clearly there are serious risks whatever we decide to do about his device. All we can do is pick the course that seems to carry the least risk.”
She smiled ruefully at the tachyonic transceiver, then at the astronomer. “I remember listening to my old classical studies professor at college lecturing about the ‘Golden Apple of Discord’ that started the Trojan War. I hope the crisis your machine’s caused has a better outcome.”
Her eyes slowly scanned all the faces around the table. “I appreciate your input and ideas. However, to quote one of my illustrious predecessors, the buck does stop with me. Ultimately only I can decide what to do and take responsibility for that decision.”
With a firm voice she continued, “I don’t want to be the person who brought hostile aliens to Earth and destroyed the human race.”
The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and several other faces around the room tried to suppress gloating grins. But before Lewis could begin his protest the president added, “But I don’t think the chances of that happening are great enough to outweigh the damage I would definitely do by holding back human progress. Dr. Lewis, show me how to work your machine.”
* * * *
For the next thirty minutes Lewis worked feverishly with two information technology technicians summoned to the room. The pair of computer experts arrived rolling a large open metal cart with closed laptops stacked on several shelves. After being asked to temporarily vacate their seats, the president and other officials stood nearby and watched anxiously as the IT techs set one of the notebook computers at each place along the table and brought its screen to glowing life.
Meanwhile Lewis sat in the president’s chair, turned on the tachyonic transceiver, and ran his fingertips like a virtuoso over its keyboard. As he called out instructions to them the two technicians bounced from chair to chair, carefully configuring each laptop to his specifications.
Their work finally done, the technicians moved the now nearly empty metal cart to a far corner of the room and left. As everyone resumed their original seats, Lewis said, “We’ve set up a secure ad hoc wireless network linking the tachyonic transceiver with your individual laptops. Anything the president sees on the transceiver’s screen will be mirrored on yours. Once we’ve made contact with the aliens, each of you will also be able to interact with them through your laptops.”
The president stared dubiously at the familiar garish colors and icons on the transceiver’s display. “That looks like the same screen I see when I start up my own laptop.”
The astronomer nodded. “That’s because most of the hardware and software in the transceiver, including the operating system, are the same as in a conventional computer. Our programmers and linguists created a translation program to convert alien transmissions into English and instantly show their messages on the screen. When you enter your own message the transceiver does the reverse, translating what you type on the keyboard into the aliens’ language and transmitting it back.”
His index finger moved to the touchpad on his own laptop. “When I double-click this icon, the transceiver will load the program that should initiate a communication link with the aliens. May I do it, Madam President?”
There was a long pause. Finally she murmured, “Yes.”
Lewis made a quick pair of taps with his finger—and waited eagerly. The other people in the room stared at their screens with mixtures of fear, curiosity, and perhaps a slender thread of hope.
At first nothing happened. Then the tense silence was shattered by a high-pitched whistling emanating from the transceiver, followed quickly by a short series of weird beeps and a brief swishing noise. Those unearthly sounds stopped just as abruptly as they’d begun—and then something magnificent happened. Rainbow colors as subtle as the first whispered glow of dawn suddenly swirled on the screens of the transceiver and every laptop in the room. Those delicate hues coalesced and solidified into an abstract background that Picasso would have envied.
