First Contact (3 page)

Her speech hung in the air for a few seconds as they both paused to consider the enormity of the thought. When the moment passed, Ralph understood it was his obligation to say something next. He said the first thing that came into his mind.

“Do you think the Police are popular on other planets?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Jessica said. “Perhaps we’ll find out soon.”

Ralph regretted his question. The aliens were a matter of national security. She would have interpreted it as a joke, but it was the kind of joke that got White House staffers in trouble. He wondered also what she meant by her reply, but Jessica quickly changed the subject.

“Let me ask you something else,” she said. “This is truly the most important question in the history of the universe. Forget cold fusion and general relativity, this is the question someone should get the Nobel Prize for answering.”

“Go ahead.”

“Would Sting have been Sting if he hadn’t changed his name?”

Ralph smiled. “You mean if he had remained Gordon Sumner?”

“Right,” she said. “And I ask this question with the greatest of respect for Sting. I have all of his solo albums. I love
Dream of the Blue Turtles
,
Ten Summoner’s Tales
, and
Brand New Day
. I gotta be honest, I didn’t love…
Nothing Like the Sun
. I didn’t get “Englishman in New York.” But I didn’t hate it either, and that says a lot. The man has been making music for thirty years and I’ve hated none of it and loved almost all of it. I am a huge fan. But the plain truth is there aren’t a lot of famous Gordons. I defy you to come up with two famous Gordons.”

“There’s Gordon Jump from
WKRP in Cincinnati.”

“OK. That’s one, I suppose.”

“Lord Byron’s middle name was Gordon.”

“That’s a middle name. I bet he had a normal first name.”

“George.”

“You’re still at one.”

“There’s Gordon Moore.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“He invented Moore’s law—you know, computers double in speed every two years.”

Jessica rolled her eyes. “I said famous.”

Ralph racked his brain.

“Got it,” he said. “Gordon Lightfoot.”

“Gordon Lightfoot is famous?”

“I think you’re selling him short,” Ralph said. “He had something like eight gold records.”

“Why do you know that?”

“I love ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’?”

“What are you, sixty-eight years old?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Well, you have an old soul.” Jessica smiled ever so.

Ralph nodded thoughtfully. Then he said, “Lightfoot was a big talent. But I take your point. There are not a lot of famous Gordons.”

“Thank you,” Jessica said, touching her heart. “That’s very big of you.”

“My pleasure.”

“The power of a name is awesome,” Jessica said, resuming her train of thought. “Do you think Stewart Copeland ever sits in bed at night and wonders if things might have been different if he had come up with the name Sting first? It’s not like anyone had dibs on it. Einstein could have called himself Sting.”

“It’s not as if Stewart Copeland had a bad life. Dad in the CIA, private schools in the Middle East, toured the world in an all-time great band.”

“Of course not. He’s had a great life. But he’s not Sting. He doesn’t sell out Madison Square Garden. No one goes around humming ‘Miss Gradenko’.”

“Maybe it’s not a good song.”

“Or maybe it’s a great song but we’ve just been trained to think ‘Every Breath You Take’ is great.”

“Because the record companies didn’t think they could sell a guy named Stewart?”

Jessica flared her eyeballs. “Can you think of any famous Stewarts?”

“Stuart Little?”

“I suppose that makes my point,” Jessica said.

“I suppose,” Ralph said, and hummed the chorus to “Miss Gradenko.” “It’s a pretty catchy tune,” he said. “If only he had named himself Flea or Slash or some other one-word name.”

Jessica smiled. “It’ll be interesting to see what sort of music the aliens admire,” she said. “And what else they value too.”

H
ERE’S THE CHORUS TO
“Miss Gradenko”:

I have no idea what the song is about.

“W
HAT’S THAT
?”
HE ASKED
.
Ralph absorbed Jessica’s words. He was sure he had heard wrong or misunderstood.

“I said it’ll be interesting to see what art and music the aliens value,” Jessica said. “We’ve had thousands of years to develop our conception of beauty. Now these people will come and give us an entirely fresh assessment. It doesn’t mean theirs is right and ours is wrong. It’ll just be interesting to see what they think.”

Ralph stammered. “You know about the aliens?”

“Oh my goodness,” Jessica exclaimed. She reached out and touched Ralph on the arm. “That was so insensitive of me. Did you not know?”

“No, I knew. I just didn’t realize it was public knowledge.”

“It’s been on the Internet all morning. They sent an e-mail last night with a video attachment to this high school kid in Chicago. He sent it to everyone he knew. Pretty much the whole world knows now.”

“An e-mail? A video? How do you know it’s authentic?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just seems sincere. I never had any doubt. I hope you don’t think I’m a wacko, but I always knew this day would come. The universe is such a big place. It was just a matter of
time. They sent this sweet, peaceful message. It is the way I always imagined it.”

For a moment, Ralph lost himself in her eyes. Impossibly, this beautiful woman had a searching, joyful soul. Everything about her seemed magical. He wanted to lean across the table and kiss her right then and there, but duty called him back.

“I need to go,” he said. “I have to get back to work.”

“Don’t forget your iPod,” she said, as she handed it to him. “And your boss’s sandwich.”

He took the iPod and the sandwich and turned for the door.

“Wait,” he said. “How will I find you?”

“You’ll figure it out,” she said.

He wondered, but she seemed confident. “Tell me one other thing,” he said. “You said there was a video. What do they look like? What did the alien look like?”

“Dark hair, braided, thick facial hair,” she said. “A bit like a rabbi.”

Ralph nodded, exited Blimpway, and walked briskly down Avenue L toward the White House, thinking as he traveled that the world was changing faster than he had ever imagined possible. How many of these people knew? Did the woman with the Lord & Taylor bag know? Did the man cleaning up after his beagle know too? Did they just go on with their lives as if nothing had happened? He had presumed the dozens of people who passed him on the street were all operating in blissful oblivion, shopping and walking their dogs, but maybe they each knew all along and still chose to go about their business. Who knew what to believe?

Ralph walked faster. As he crossed Sixteenth Street, he glanced down at his cargo and noticed that Jessica had written her phone number across the wrapper of the President’s sandwich, and the pace of change seemed to accelerate further still.

W
HEN
R
ALPH RETURNED TO
the West Wing, the White House senior staff had already assembled in the Roosevelt Room. They were waiting to begin a meeting with the President, who had been behind schedule all morning because at the start of his day he lingered for fifteen minutes too long with a group of Eagle Scouts. The President, himself a former Eagle Scout, had a special fondness for all Boy Scouts. This was touching, but as a result of his dallying with the scouts, the President was late for a meet-and-greet with the national spelling bee champion, in turn late for a photo opportunity with the Stanley Cup champions of the National Hockey League, in turn late for a meeting with the prime minister of Luxembourg, then late for a meeting with a high-profile lobbying group of rock stars
and actors who wanted the United States to buy the Amazon rain forest, late to meet the First Lady and a renowned upholsterer about changing the couches in their weekend home on the Chesapeake to which they were scheduled to leave later that afternoon, late for a reception with the ambassador of Tahiti, late to talk to a midwestern congressional delegation about relaxing the standards required to call a farm product “organic,” late for a haircut, late to have tea with the chairman of the Federal Reserve, late to call and wish the First Mother a happy birthday, and finally, now, late for a session with the senior staff about how to respond to the whole alien situation.

Ralph was out of breath when he entered the Roosevelt Room. “They know,” he panted. “Everybody knows. The aliens sent some kid a video. It’s all over the Internet.”

The press secretary, Martha Jones, gestured for Ralph to sit down. “We know,” she said. “We’re not sure everyone buys it, though. The person who forwarded it to me thought it was a hoax.”

The chief of staff, Joe Quimble, said, “Apparently not everybody thought it was a hoax. In one morning, it’s already the most downloaded video in the history of the Internet.”

“Well, it’s real,” said David Prince. “People have a way of sniffing out the truth in these things. Call it a collective intuition.” David was the deputy chief of staff, and the closest thing Ralph had to a friend in the West Wing.

“What’s in the video?” Ralph asked.

“It isn’t much,” Joe Quimble said. “It’s less than a minute long. Basically they say hello and that they come in peace.”

“The production quality isn’t very good,” added Martha Jones. “It’s just a crappy straight-to-camera shot. We should put them in touch with our media people.”

“Does the President know?”

“Yes,” Martha said. “He asked the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense to join us for this meeting. They’re waiting next door. He wants to coordinate a tactical and political response—just as soon as he gets off the phone with his mother.”

Softly, Martha added, “Len Carlson is coming too.”

Joe Quimble said, “I hate that guy.”

L
EN
C
ARLSON WAS THE
President’s political consultant, and the mastermind behind his election. At the start of the campaign,
the President—then a little-known senator—was polling last in a crowded field of Republicans. Carlson adroitly positioned the President as a moderate in the conservative-heavy Republican field, largely by emphasizing his openness to abortion for victims of rape and incest. This attracted attention and set him apart from the other candidates. Then, after the President shockingly won the primary, Carlson had him tack back to the right for the general election. This maneuver consisted almost entirely in emphasizing his blanket opposition to abortion, including for victims of rape and incest. The press did not explore the arguable tension between these positions. The strategy worked, which was all that mattered.

Carlson would have been heralded by the press as a genius, if it knew that he existed, which it did not. Carlson was obsessively reclusive. This allowed him to take on clients of differing persuasions without his engagement creating difficulties for the candidates. Included among these were the President’s immediate predecessor, a lifelong Republican who at Carlson’s urging won nomination through the Democratic primaries, and the President’s predecessor’s predecessor, a liberal Democrat who ran on a bring-back-prayer-in-school platform.

The joke among the dozen or so people inside the Beltway who knew of Len Carlson’s existence was that with $100 million for television advertising, Carlson could get Nixon reelected president, despite the impeachment and being dead.

With $200 million, the joke went, he could get him elected as a Democrat.

T
HE SPECTER OF
C
ARLSON’S
presence cast a pall over the political team as it waited for the President to get off the phone with his mother, who was giving her son substantial grief about her birthday gift, a magnificent Jean-Paul Gaultier evening gown, unfortunately purchased in a size eight instead of a size ten, the size the First Mother had worn for her entire adult life. The First Mother tearfully concluded the President was sending her a message about her weight. In truth, an assistant had reminded the President of his mother’s birthday, searched for the gift, and arranged for its delivery. His participation consisted entirely of saying okay to these arrangements. Of course, the President could say none of this to his mother. He spent several minutes trying to calm her.

In the Roosevelt Room they did not know the details of what detained the President. They just waited.

“I wonder why they came to Earth now,” David Prince said softly, thinking aloud. “What’s significant about this particular moment in our history?” This was a natural question for Prince, who had been a college history professor, with a tenure track job, when he decided to volunteer some time for the President’s first senate campaign. His interest in the campaign was academic; he wanted to see how politics worked. Before David knew it, he was in charge of research on the campaign, then the legislative director in the Senate, and soon after that a key member of the White House staff. Ralph wasn’t entirely sure David shared the President’s politics.

“Maybe they were just in the neighborhood,” Martha Jones said with a smile.

“In
Star Trek
,” David said, “the Federation makes first contact when a planet develops faster-than-light-speed travel.”

“That’s quite a bit beyond us technologically,” Martha said. Neither Martha nor Joe Quimble seemed very interested in exploring this issue, but Ralph found David’s question intriguing.

“In the movie
Contact
,” Ralph said to David, “it was the transmission of television programming that triggered the alien response.”

“They’re a bit slow on the draw if that’s the case,” said David.

“They were in
Contact
too. In fact, part of the message they sent back was footage of Hitler opening the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. That was the first image ever transmitted by television. It took the
Contact
aliens more than fifty years to get a message back to Earth.”

“Remember in
Galaxy Quest
,” said David, “how the aliens had seen all the episodes of a
Star Trek
–like show but thought it was real, and decided Tim Allen, who played a character like Captain Kirk, should lead them through a crisis?”

“Galaxy Quest
wasn’t bad,” Ralph said.

“Well,” Joe Quimble said, “I hope they didn’t see a bunch of
Sanford and Son
reruns. They might think Earth is a giant junkyard.”

“Seriously, though,” David said. “Why would they come now? We’ve been transmitting messages into space for almost a hundred years and listening for responses all the while. What has happened recently that’s special?”

“Nuclear weapons?” Ralph suggested.

“The first atomic weapon was detonated more than sixty years ago,” David said.

“Space travel?”

“The Russians launched a human into space in nineteen sixty-one.”

“So what then?”

“It’s just as likely something sociological as technological,” David said. “It’s exciting to be alive for this, and more exciting still to have a front-row seat.”

Ralph said, “I hope it’s not like that
Twilight Zone
episode where the Kanamits come to Earth because they want to harvest humans. That story always creeped me out.”

“‘To Serve Man,’” David said. “I loved that episode.”

Martha Jones cut them off. “I hate to interrupt your little sci-fi convention, but the President is coming.”

T
HE
P
RESIDENT ENTERED, FOLLOWED
by the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, and finally Len Carlson. Everyone stood.

“Please sit down,” the President said. They sat and awaited his guidance.

“Ralph,” the President said, “do you have my lunch?”

Ralph took the ham and Swiss sub to the President. The President opened the wrapper and stared disapprovingly at the sandwich.

“There’s hardly any meat on this,” he said. “Did you bother to check this?”

“I did, sir. The sandwich seemed fine to me, Mr. President.”

“How can it be fine? There’s barely any meat.” The President removed the top slice of bread and thumbed through the sandwich.

“There are only four slices of meat here.”

“Sir, I believe there have always been exactly four slices of meat. That is the company policy.”

“I could have sworn there used to be more.”

“I don’t believe so, sir.”

“Well, is there any way to get more meat?”

“Yes, sir. You can pay two dollars and fifty cents more for an extra-thick sandwich.”

“Then let’s do that in the future. Can you take care of that, Ralph?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Ralph ran a quick calculation in his head. The President’s directive would cost him approximately seven hundred dollars over
the next year, and something on the order of three thousand more if the President won reelection.

“All right, folks,” the President said between bites, “what are we going to do about this alien nonsense?” He had a dab of mayonnaise on his chin. No one pointed it out.

The Secretary of Defense spoke first.

“Sir, our satellites have not detected any sign of weapons. Nevertheless, I have placed the military on alert. I recommend you issue a directive bringing us to our highest state of readiness.”

“So ordered.”

Joe Quimble raised his hand. “Mr. President, with all respect, that may not be necessary. The aliens have done nothing to suggest any hostile intention. Our actions may send the wrong signal. Mobilizing the military could be misinterpreted.”

“Point noted,” said the President. “But there’s no reason to take any chances. You know what Jack Frost said, ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.’”

Here followed the most awkward of silences, which only Martha Jones had the nerve to break. “Sir,” she said, “you have a spot of mayonnaise on your chin.”

The President wiped it off. “Mr. Secretary of State, what say you?”

The Secretary of State went way back with the President, even further than Lois Dundersinger did, all the way back to the President’s days as sanitation commissioner, when he, the Secretary, was starting what would later become the largest chicken-feed company in the United States.

“Sir,” the Secretary said, “our allies are looking to us for guidance. The nations of the world are waiting to see what we will do before they choose their course of action.”

The President nodded. He turned to his trusted political advisor.

“What do you think, Len?”

Len Carlson had been munching, some might say irreverently, on a cruller coated in powdered sugar, the substantial remainder of which he now devoured in a single bite and washed down with a swill of coffee. He stood up from his chair and made a halfhearted effort to clean his lapel. This effort consisted of a single outward brushing motion with his left hand, which did not disturb the detritus on his lapel but created on his right shoulder a curious blend of
confectionary sugar and dandruff. As he paced the room, speckles of this mélange floated to the ground like a soft winter flurry.

“Sir,” Carlson said, “this is the defining moment of your presidency.”

Few could disagree with this. Ralph saw several members of the staff nod their heads approvingly. This was not always the case when Len Carlson spoke.

“This is a critical opportunity to shore up our support among Jewish voters and reestablish the credibility of our commitment to Israel.”

Heads stopped nodding. David Prince silently mouthed the word “Israel” several times.

“Go on, Len,” said the President.

“Mr. President, your numbers have been dropping since the terrorist attack on Jerusalem last year. People feel our reaction was too slow and not sufficiently forceful. This is your opportunity to prove to America and the world that we stand by our allies.”

“So what do we do?”

“Lots of media, a flashy state dinner, big emphasis on the Jewish thing—dreidels, beanies, the works.”

The President said, “I like it.”

T
HE DISCUSSION SENT THE
cabinet into a trance, which Joe Quimble snapped out of first.

“If I may, Mr. President,” he said. “It seems to me we may be missing the real import of this event. This is a unique moment in human history. We have confirmation for the first time that we are not alone in the universe—”

Len Carlson interrupted. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a political opportunity here.”

“We should be thinking about the message we want humanity to send these visitors,” said Quimble.

“We should be thinking about the political message we want to send the American people,” Len Carlson replied.

“We should be thinking about history,” said Quimble.

“We should be thinking about your legacy,” said Carlson.

“We should think about the future.”

“We should think about now.”

“Mr. President, this is much bigger than you.”