Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? (9 page)

“And the nuclear facilities?” the President asked.

Iran’s nuclear program had been scaled back, but it still possessed potentially deadly radioactive material, and its prior nuclear bomb-making program could be revived and produce a warhead in two or three years—if it could proceed unhindered. NATO forces were poised to destroy what they could of the program if the rebels took over.

“They’re safe for now,” Nettleton said. “The government is focusing its forces on protecting the facilities.”

“Chairman Yamata, you’re up,” the President said, turning to Franklin Yamata, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. “How are the markets taking it?”

With global financial markets teetering on the brink of collapse, the head of the US central bank had become a fixture at every NSC meeting, in case the crisis under consideration was enough to push markets over the edge.

“Oil shipments gradually stopped going through the Straits in the last forty-eight hours, as shippers’ insurance premiums became prohibitive,” said Yamata, a small, middle-aged man with a dignified bearing. “Even if the Iranian government gains the upper hand, the risk will still be too high until they drive rebels well away from the Straits.

“Markets clearly think that won’t happen for weeks. But the financial system is holding up at this time.”

“All right, thanks—” the President started to say.

“Mr. President,” Colonel Nettleton interrupted, out of sync with the conversation because of the lag in communications.

“Yes, Colonel, go ahead.”

“I know we’re spread thin, but it would help if we could send another aircraft carrier group to look after our interests,” Nettleton said.

Douthart and Peoples exchanged wary glances. “Unless you’ve got a spare carrier stashed somewhere, it’s not happening,” the President said. “We now have a war in Korea, China is pushing its offshore territorial claims harder than ever, we don’t know yet if India and Pakistan will get into it, and … let’s see, oh, of course—terrorists are making a comeback in Iraq and Syria.

“Those are just the crises at the top of the list,” he said as Peoples nodded in agreement. “And the ETs haven’t even arrived yet.”

Later, as the meeting was about to break up, the President asked Peoples for an update on fighting in Korea.

“It seems to be going according to plan so far,” the General said after conferring with an aide. “The North has made very little headway.”

Douthart didn’t respond, but continued to look expectantly at Peoples, who soon guessed what information the President wanted.

“We’ve lost nineteen, sir, with eighty-one total casualties.”

US and South Korean leaders faced the tricky challenge of defeating the North quickly, to minimize their own losses, while decisively destroying the DPRK’s ability to strike again, but leaving the North’s leadership strong enough to retain control of their country. Neither China nor South Korea wanted millions of destitute North Korean refugees pouring into their country.

Three days later, the DPRK halted its attack. And the long, frustrating process of trying to negotiate a peace plan started.

Although President Douthart made one difficult decision after another, nothing relieved the frightening, simmering discontent connected to his leadership. Criticism of his policies was inevitable, but in addition, old rumors surfaced that Douthart didn’t really want the massive responsibility of being President. What was more, talk emerged, even from unnamed government sources, that he was overwhelmed by the space crisis and sometimes paralyzed into inaction.

Douthart had never seemed to give himself completely to politics. At the University of Virginia, he dabbled in Young Republican activities, and recoiled at what he saw as Democrats’ penchant to solve every problem with a new government program. But he spurned the Ayn Rand books that inspired many of his conservative classmates with tales of heroic, supremely successful, and self-sufficient entrepreneurs. Instead, he directed his passion toward 19
^th
-century Russian literature, especially Dostoevsky’s novels, with their characters’ intense inner struggles.

Douthart abandoned his first presidential campaign when his wife became seriously ill. After she died a few months later, some of his close friends and advisors feared he might be too emotionally fragile to finish his Senate term.

Grief therapists made points that seemed reasonable to him, and he agreed with their message, at least on the surface. Douthart firmly believed in God, and found some comfort in reassurances by counselors at his Lutheran church that his wife’s soul lived in heaven. However, somewhere deep inside, the pain from his wife’s death endured, untouched by reason or faith. But he persevered, because that was what people expected, and what
he
expected.

During the next presidential campaign, he seriously and very publicly considered running again, but in the end, decided not to. However with no credible centrist candidate emerging halfway through the contentious Republican primaries, Douthart entered the race, apparently answering the call of Party leaders. After he won the nomination, pundits were divided: Was Douthart’s initial reluctance a political masterstroke, or did it show he just really didn’t want to be President that badly?

More and more, world leaders and public opinion leaned to the conclusion that Douthart was not capable of leading the monumental task of coping with the arrival of extraterrestrial life. If that opinion grew strong enough, any coordinated global response would fall apart.

M
AKING
P
ROGRESS

W
hen Claire arrived
at Denver One after her disturbing detour with Scott, she tried to put her heightened fears of chaos behind her.
The best thing I can do is help find out as much about the aliens as soon as we can
, she thought. At present, the main thing was to figure out what D9 was trying to say to Earth.

The first person to meet Claire at Denver One was Blake. “You’ve got an appointment at the White House for the National Security Council meeting at 1:00,” he told her.

Claire took a deep breath. She’d briefed the President and some other high officials separately and mostly on the phone, but the prospect of being called on in person at the highest-level government policy-making group was daunting.

“Here’s a memo for you. They want you to get inside the aliens’ heads and tell the Council why they’re doin’ what they’re doin’.”

“Oh lord,” said Claire.

“You’d better head up to the Squirrel Cage and keep up with the D9 messages,” Blake said. “Ahmet will connect you with the people you need to talk to for your NSC meeting.”

When she arrived, Claire found that the inner walls in some of the Language Unit offices had been knocked out overnight, to create a large working area. Ahmet and his colleagues stood or sat around a large table in the middle of the room. Some of them handled long sticks with a small, horizontal board on the far end, like rakes. They pushed and pulled pieces of
paper with words written on them around to various countries represented on the surface of the table. The scraps contained the English meaning of words translated from one of the aliens’ messages in a particular language. The hope was that if the fertile minds in the Language Unit saw the big picture, a new understanding might click.

“Hey, Claire, how’re you doing?” Ahmet asked with a big smile. “Guess what, we’re making progress!”

By progress, Ahmet meant the specialists thought they had figured out some of the words in the two D9 messages that had been sent. But they still couldn’t figure out what the aliens were saying. The work was a global effort, as D9 sent messages in three dozen different written languages. The first translations were little more than guesses, with many of the translations apparently a random jumble of symbols. There seemed to be a thick lens between the aliens and humans that distorted communications.

In the first message, one of the words spelled out “uracf” in English. Nothing in the rest of the English-language text seemed to give a clue to the meaning. But computer programs and the busy minds of code breakers examined each word in the thirty-six languages of the messages, to come up with every possible meaning. In this case, Portuguese and Chinese revealed words that could mean “surface.” The likelihood of that meaning for each of the three words, taken together, was enough to convince Ahmet and other experts that there was more than a 50-50 chance those three words meant “surface.” The Chinese found that their ideographic characters seemed especially useful for representing nouns. The word “round” popped up when it was spelled in full in Tagalog, the primary Filipino dialect, and partially spelled in three other languages. There were no good matches on the other forty-six words in the first message.

“So now we got ‘round’ and ‘surface’ in the first message, and ‘fifty-three,’ ‘down,’ and ‘knife’ in the second one,” Ahmet said.

“Knife?” asked Claire.

“Well, any of the words could be changed. It might just have something to do with the idea of ‘sharp,’ or the concept of a weapon.”

Claire had noticed a small woman in her late thirties, with a big smile on her face, standing beside Ahmet during his explanation.

“Hi, I’m Cindy,” the woman said, sticking her hand out to Claire.

“That’s Cindy,” Ahmet said with a laugh as he introduced the two women. “She’s the main person you need to see for your meeting.” The two women already knew of each other. Cindy Ricci was familiar with Claire’s name before D9, partly because they had both worked at the SETI Institute, and heard a lot about her after CSS discovered the spacecraft. Cindy, an anthropologist, was well known in the NASA community for her groundbreaking work at the Institute on possible paths for evolution of intelligent life outside the solar system. Which was why she’d been called in now.

Ahmet said, “She’s kind of about making friends with the space people and getting to know them personally. Show us pictures of their kids and stuff.”

“Doesn’t that sound like fun?” asked Cindy.

“It sure does,” said Claire, taking an immediate liking to Cindy. “And you’re definitely the person I need to talk to for a briefing I’ve got to give today. Where are we headed? How are we going to interpret these messages, and how long will it take?”

“Each country, the ones that are home to one of the thirty-six languages, is feeding their results to everyone else at the U.N. Extraterrestrial Command.” Cindy delivered each statement emphatically and enthusiastically, as if sharing choice news with a good friend. “We’ll get more words, they’ll get better at putting words together, and the more words we understand, the easier it will be. We can start to use sentence structure or meaning to infer new words.”

Her eyes widening, Claire said, “That sounds encouraging, Cindy. How long do you think it’ll be before we can begin to actually understand each other?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we have some breakthroughs and some setbacks. We’ve run some numbers on the computer, and our guess is we’ll really start communicating in about two weeks.”

“Wow,” said Claire, as she thought for a minute, catching a low drone of conversation around them and the occasional scrape of plastic rakes moving pieces of paper. “Now—the ‘why.’ Why are they communicating in ordinary written languages? Why are they having so much trouble doing it?”

Cindy didn’t lose a beat as she eagerly answered. “First, why they’re communicating in everyday languages…” Here, she turned toward Ahmet, expecting a reaction.

“Here we go, getting warm and fuzzy,” Ahmet said, shaking his head with a laugh. “Get out your family photos.”

“It’s not a popular theory with the math people, but I think maybe the aliens want to communicate with us, as many of us as possible, on a personal level. Thirty-six different written languages, red dots all over the world… Of course, that’s just speculation.”

Wearing an unaccustomed frown, Ahmet said, “That’s not out of the question, but it seems unlikely, and I’m afraid it will lead us to underestimate the danger from the aliens.”

“Believe me,” Cindy said, “the power the ETs have to do harm scares me, too. But as an anthropologist, I’ve seen what happens when some profound event or movement shakes people’s belief systems. And D9 is catching us at a bad time. We’ve just begun manned outer space travel, and have encountered no life outside Earth, not even bacteria or viruses. So it’s still easy to believe in Earth and life on Earth as the center of everything.

“In five hundred years, almost everyone will have been into outer space, maybe to work or as a tourist. We’ll have colonies on planets and moons, and will have discovered at least some simple life forms. A visit from ETs then wouldn’t be such a shock.

“But now it’s a huge shock that will make us question our beliefs or self image. There is no doubt some of us will lash out in that case. And people have a great capacity to do harm. ETs potentially have greater power and might use it to harm us. Might. I think the certainty that mankind will resort to violence makes people a greater threat than ETs.”

The three scientists stood in silence for a few moments before Cindy continued.