Chapter Two

Astrophysics professor Carl Sayers stirred from an uneasy sleep; after a moment's confusion, he got his bearings. He had dozed off in his guest office at the JPL headquarters. Back at the old JPL at Pasadena, California, he mused - all the old days spent here, designing space probes, following their orbits through the Solar System, paying off at last. Someone knocked on the door; he shouted at the caller to come in.

"Did I wake you up?" asked biologist-anthropologist Ann Meadbouré as she entered the provisional office.

He recognized her slight, crisp French accent from the phone. Carl made a sleepy-sly face as he straightened in his armchair, yawning.

His own voice, when he answered, still carried traces of the old Brooklyn accent: "Hi, Ann... question is, why didn't you wake me when you arrived?"

The younger woman smiled; she was still carrying the bag with the airline tags on it, but she had arrived almost an hour before.

"The staff were going to wake you up, but I told them you deserved some rest. I'm rather tired myself, what with the flight from Sri Lanka."

Carl brightened up at mentioning of the island.

"How is Arthur doing now? I bet he wanted to follow you on this job."

Ann slumped down on the sofa next to Carl's desk. The office was one of several with a panoramic window overlooking the command central, which was now crowded with scientists. A horde of journalists was camping outside the building, and Ann had had to push and elbow her way past them. As they talked, Ann noticed some other newcomers out in the command central. They waved at Ann, and she waved back.

"Yes, he and the rest of the world. But he's getting to be too old and sick for travel now. Poor Arthur! The first contact is finally happening, and he can't board the space-shuttle to come and greet them."

Carl groaned, holding his gray, shaggy head between his hands.

"Don't say it! I'm the one who wrote that stupid book about a first contact! And imagine... they, the Sirians, may have actually seen parts of the film on TV! I feel like the greatest dork in the universe."

Ann reached forward to pat his hand, but didn't quite reach it.

"Don't be so hard on yourself, Carl. I'm... I'm sure they haven't seen it. Pity Hollywood instead, with their invasion movies."

He chuckled, his face wrinkling into a sardonic grin. Carl was pushing sixty-five and getting rather thin, but he still hadn't lost the childish twinkle in his eye; the hawkish nose was yet instantly recognizable. Carl Sayers' face had, through the years, become something of a public media icon - especially in the last few years after Hollywood made a movie of his book about contact with aliens. However, his lifelong commitment had never really changed. After the first excitement of the alien message, he had cleared his head with new resolve: he would not let the greatest moment of his life turn into a media circus. It was his long media experience plus his devotion that had made him the focus of the recent events; as newly appointed head of NASA's Extraterrestrial Contact Team, he was determined to keep the media at a strict distance from the aliens.

Carl had insisted on bringing Ann Meadbouré to the project, since she had shown a similar devotion and was a friend though he hadn't seen much of her - Arthur, an old writer and mutual acquaintance, could vouch for her skilled research in dolphin-human communication. Now their commitment would be put to the ultimate test - they would be allowed to communicate with real-life aliens.

He stood up and shook hands with Ann, who gave him a hug.

"I really appreciate that you'd join us," he began, hoping he didn't sound too friendly - Ann looked younger than her thirty-five years, and was quite beautiful in a very French, elegant sense of the word. Her short-cropped blond hair framed her symmetric features and clear gray eyes - the eyes had been covered by ugly glasses the last time he saw her, but now she seemed to be wearing contact-lenses; she wasn't blinking much.

"Don't be silly, Carl," she said with surprising self-control in her voice, "I'm one of the lucky few and I know it. When do we all meet up?"

"Please, Ann - I must save my energy for the big briefing tomorrow. I know how hard it is to relax now. You know what I did when NASA first called me about the alien transmission? I thought it was a damned joke and hung up on them!"

Ann grinned, almost laughed as she rummaged through her bags for cigarettes, listening to Carl without looking at him.

"It seemed like a joke then, because I thought such a huge transmitter in space would show up in the telescopes, years before it came this close! And intelligent life, more advanced than our own, coming from a double-star system that is only one billion years old? It defies belief! Planets just plain can't hold stable orbits in a double-star system for long enough that life can originate. Their planet would be thrown out into the cold or swallowed by one of the two stars!"

Ann couldn't remember the last time she had seen Carl so upset.

"They must be thousands of years ahead of us, you know," she suggested. "Maybe they can do things we can only dream of yet."

She lit a cigarette and drew the poisonous, acrid smoke into her lungs. Ann had quit weeks ago, saving a pack to test her willpower. The moment she had seen the Sirian TV broadcast, she took up smoking again - the irony of which now escaped her somehow. She had to work constantly to keep her outer persona cool and detached, to control the threatening confusion and chaos building up inside her head...

The older scientist paused, paced in no particular direction, stopped at the window. She thanked the god she didn't believe in, that Carl didn't notice how nervous she really was. Carl's lined face, as he looked out at the command central outside, was reflected in the glass so that Ann glimpsed the vast, exhausting awe he felt. He looked not happy, not sad, but overpowered... mentally flattened.

"No," he said, voice husky with exertion. "Tens of thousands, perhaps even a hundred thousand years ahead. They can understand us, the way we understand monkeys. Question is... how can we possibly understand them, or even be sure we do?"

Carl frowned. A half-conscious thought that had begun when he saw Ann up close, suddenly cleared. She had made herself prettier not for him, not for the other scientists - but for the aliens.

Ceremony, he had forgotten ceremony. Should they all dress up for the occasion?

"Isn't your wife here?" Ann asked - Carl's wife usually worked close to him, both being scientists and devoted to each other as well as their work.

Carl explained, somewhat awkwardly: "We, uh, decided that one of us should stay behind with the family, just in case there was a danger of exposure to alien microbes. But we keep in touch every day."

It was the truth, yet he feared people would misinterpret it. Then the phone rang, and all of a sudden Carl had a million other things to deal with.

DAY 2

The next morning, the newly-formed ECT gathered in the lab's Von Karman Auditorium for their first big meeting: a dozen people, mostly astronomers and specialists in the fields of biology and spaceflight.

Also present at the meeting were the NASA chief, the U.S. Air Force Joint Chief Of Staff, the Vice President, and the head of the National Security Council. All three visitors sat silent in the background, perhaps out of insecurity in the new situation; they listened intently to the chatting scientists around them. A cameraman from the White House was filming the entire meeting, so that the President and the UN Security Council could follow it from the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Other guests connected via the camera link were various scientists, NASA staff, and Ann's friend Arthur back in Sri Lanka.

Carl Sayers, standing at the small lectern, introduced the people present and made some formal notices about discretion - then he went on to his main speech.

"I assume that you've seen the Sirian message already; it's all over the world, and they'll surely keep repeating it until we respond. Well, as we speak the President and the United Nations Security Council are discussing the next step. I'm pretty sure most heads of state are eager to get their hands on alien technology, so they won't refuse the Sirians a visit altogether.

"Now, NASA's preliminary plan is as follows. First, we establish a certain frequency and stick to it, so that the aliens... uh, Sirians are clear about who they should listen to - remember, almost anyone can send something they might receive with their big disk!

"Then we send a radio message on several frequencies, making it clear that they are welcome - as long as we decide the conditions of their visit. They must not spread alien microorganisms or other uncontrollable life forms into our system, so personal contact will be difficult. I assume we can work something out, or that the Sirians can provide some kind of solution...

"The first close encounter would have to take place on neutral ground: close enough to make it soon, but not too close to Earth. I have suggested the surface of the Moon, and the President has declared his support of the idea."

He nodded toward the camera, and flashed a quick smile.

"Now, who will be the first to meet the Sirian envoy in person? Not me, I'm afraid..." The scientists laughed. "In all likelihood it's going to be an American astronaut, shuttled over from the space station, who's appointed Earth Ambassador. A great honor.

"The Sirians have mentioned a first, personal meeting in their message, but they weren't precise about the conditions. How should the initial communication proceed? We don't know. Can they speak our language, since they have taped our own TV and radio broadcasts since at least the 1950s? We don't know. Do they have complex rules of conduct, which we must learn before we can risk a close encounter? We don't know. Should we hold them off as long as possible, and stick to telecommunications? We don't know. And, of course, how many of them are there on that big mothership? We don't know."

A scientist on the second row couldn't contain his thoughts, and raised an arm.

"What if someone outside NASA gets to hold the meeting first, or... or tries to intervene?" he asked.

Carl Sayers gave the anxious caller a grave look.

"Remember that the President and the entire UN Security Council are watching. There is an exceedingly small risk that some rogue state - we shouldn't be pointing fingers here - is planning a pre-emptive missile strike on the Sirians. I should warn anyone with such ideas, that the Sirians may expect to be attacked. Don't forget, they've seen our TV. They know what we are capable of, so they shouldn't arrive defenseless..."

An uncomfortable moment came over the people in the room, a sense of collective shame. For all its supposed intelligence, mankind had until now dismissed the idea that it was being monitored by a superior civilization. Unless the world's televion broadcasts had been censored overnight, images of war, starvation, crime and pornography were yet available to the Sirian receiver-transmitter disk.

Ann Meadbouré, the anthropologist, broke the silence.

"There is no reason for panic," she told the assembly, and stood up. "Everything in the Sirian message and their behavior is non-violent. They act like scientists, they come only to study - not to interfere, or to build permanent settlements, or form alliances, or in any way judge us. There is no..." She hesitated: it was obvious to the point of silliness. "There is no moral dimension to a visit from scientists! Especially in the case of scientists from an entirely different world!"

Carl nodded to Ann, gesturing subtly at her to sit down.

"Ann Meadbouré is right," he asserted the audience. "No one is being judged here. The Sirians must come from a world that's quite unlike our own, which brings me to my next point..."

He used his remote, and the room darkened. On the wall behind him, a series of enlarged, fuzzy black-and-white photographs were projected: clips from the Sirian TV broadcast.

Gray humanoid shapes walked past the camera, the view slightly convex for unknown reasons. The aliens' size couldn't be determined, since there were no humans or man-made objects in view for reference. No easily definable machinery could be seen, except for smooth, silvery shapes and garments hung around the necks and chests of the Sirians. Long conic heads that were slightly swept backward, large eyes half-shut, all bodies having two arms each. Soft arms, almost tentacles with fingers. No clothes. Male and female genitals were easily discernible, astonishingly anthropomorphic except for lack of visible body hair. The faces were flatter than human faces, dominated by the eyes and their thick, smooth eyelids. Their age and size appeared to vary, though most of them seemed to move in their physical prime. Carl's audience lost their concentration and once more gazed at the eerie pictures. It was still too unreal to grasp. The Sirians were too human-like, too unlike the weirdest fantasies of aliens. Too... not ugly.

Carl cleared his throat.

"The Sirian broadcast, probably made in black-and-white to simplify matters of interpretation and transmission, came in two parts. First a purely abstract part, with simple words and sign-language. We'll skip that for now. Second, moving images of the Sirians themselves, taken during their long journey. As you can see, this travelogue also displays their route from Sirius to other stars, back to Sirius, passing our Sun, then spiraling outward to more distant systems.

"I was amazed to learn that this wasn't their first expedition to the Solar System. The first Sirian ship sailed us by without actually landing, more than six thousand years ago. That ship has now passed far, far out into the galaxy. The present visit is the fourth or fifth expedition from Sirius.

The NSC man rose from his chair. "Doesn't this indicate," the man asked gravely, "a mass migration from Sirius? Is their home system becoming uninhabitable?"

Carl put on his best TV documentary-host manner.

"Now, this isn't entirely explainable yet. I'm not even sure the Sirians originated on Sirius! Because if they did, and if they are as similar to us as they seem, their planet must have gone through enormous cataclysms! We know next to nothing of how the Sirius system formed, but normal double-star planets should have extremely unstable orbits and will be thrown out into the cold for very long periods. We might be dealing with a nomadic species, who colonized the Sirius system just recently... perhaps they even brought their own homeworld with them."

Now it was the Pentagon man's turn to ask anxious questions.

"You are suggesting the Sirius system was uninhabitable to begin with, and was colonized by the Sirians later! Have we got any guarantees that they ain't planning a similar colonization of our Solar System?"

Carl seemed almost insulted. The Egyptian psychologist of the ECT team stood up and faced the general, ready to explode; Carl answered quickly, before the Egyptian had the chance to respond.

"This isn't the time for invasion hysteria." His tone sharpened. "A shorter visit is what the Sirians've asked for, and I certainly think we can risk that. Besides, general - if they had colonization in mind, wouldn't you want to learn more about them? Otherwise we would surely be defenseless."

The general stiffened and said nothing. He cast an anxious glance at the camera, which carried his image to several important places in the world via the Internet.

"Now," Carl resumed, "what are we to make of the Sirians' proposed visit? I have a simple theory of why they want to visit our world in person. Shouldn't an automatic probe such as our Voyager or Pathfinder craft do the job just as well, at much lower cost and risk? No. These beings are looking for something more than atmospheric data or soil samples. They want -"

A cell-phone signal broke off his speech. The Vice President picked up his phone and talked a few words into it. Then he rose from his seat, looked around the briefing room. His face burst into a grin.

"The President called. The Security Council has just voted approval. The Sirians will be allowed to land on Earth! Get ready for the real thing!"

The assembled scientists broke out into spontaneous applause and cheering. The Vice President shook some hands, and then took the general and the NSC man aside.

"Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel just quit their membership in the United Nations," he said softly. "The Orient is getting ready for war. Space war. We fly to New York now and meet the President for a crisis council."

(NEXT CHAPTER)

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ALIEN BEACH(c)A.R.Yngve 1997, 1999, 2004. All rights reserved. May not be copied without permission.

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