First Contact (4 page)

“Mr. President, nothing is bigger than you.”

“This is crazy! We don’t even know if they’re Jewish!”

Heads had been darting back and forth in tennis-match fashion between Carlson and Quimble. Thus no one realized at first it was the normally unassuming David Prince who had shouted these last words. For a moment even Len Carlson was stunned.

“Excuse me, Mr. President,” David continued, calmer now, “but we have no reason to believe the aliens are Jewish. So the man in the video has black hair and a ponytail. That doesn’t mean he’s Jewish. It wouldn’t make any sense. Judaism is six thousand years old. These people are coming from thousands of light-years away. They probably left before Abraham was born.”

“You mean Moses,” said the President.

Ralph felt David deflate.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Whether they are Jewish or not is beside the point,” Len Carlson said. “People will believe these people are Jewish. Thus how you treat them will determine whether or not you are reelected.”

The President considered the matter. He sat silently in his chair, tapping his finger on his upper lip, absorbing everything he had heard. The staff waited anxiously, knowing the President’s next words would inalterably shape the future of human history.

Finally, he spoke.

“They did say they wanted to have brunch.”

“Sir?” asked Quimble.

“I’ve never heard of anyone having brunch who wasn’t Jewish.”

“Mr. President,” David said quietly, “lots of people have brunch who aren’t Jewish.”

“Well, I don’t know any. Where does the word come from anyway?”

“It means breakfast and lunch.”

“Well, I never heard that word when I was a kid. We had breakfast and then we had lunch, like the Good Lord intended. First I heard of brunch was when I got into national politics. I’ll say the same thing today I have always said: Don’t understand it, ain’t gonna eat it.”

“But, sir, whether or not you like brunch isn’t really the point.”

The President rose and put his fist to the table.

“It’s decided,” he said. “We’re going to proceed on the assumption our new friends are Jewish until proven otherwise.”

“A judicious decision, Mr. President,” Len Carlson said, reaching for a jelly-filled cruller.

“We still need to send a reply to the aliens,” Joe Quimble said.

The President looked to Len Carlson. He was chewing his donut.

“Say ‘shalom,’” Carlson said.

The President nodded approvingly. “Make sure that gets out to the media,” he said.

T
HE ASSOCIATION OF BRUNCH
with the Jews is yet another counter-historical, anti-Semitic defamation, like Jews’ responsibility for the death of Jesus, with the notable difference that pretty much everyone likes brunch, so no one gets too agitated about the error. The word is, in fact, British, a term of student slang, which originated in the mid 1890s. It is a portmanteau, of course, of “breakfast” and “lunch.”

I would like to invent my own portmanteau and have advocated strongly with friends who live in Seattle that the Space Needle be renamed the Sneedle. I worry, though, I may be forgotten by history, as was the Oxford student who, in a flash of brilliance, came up with “brunch,” which is really snappy, and the best sounding of the several meals one can eat between breakfast and lunch. These include second breakfast, elevenses, and the Indian meal tiffin. If you go to Seattle and hear somebody saying they’re taking the monorail to the Sneedle, please know that’s my doing.

As the professional bowler Jacques explained to an ignorant Marge Simpson, “It’s not quite breakfast, it’s not quite lunch, but it comes with a slice of cantaloupe at the end. You don’t get completely what you get at breakfast, but you get a good meal.” It is most decidedly, most emphatically, not a Jewish thing. Dim sum brunch is an enormously popular meal at Chinese restaurants worldwide. They serve stuffed buns and dumplings from passing carts and, almost inevitably, a slice of cantaloupe at the end.

D
AVID
P
RINCE AND
R
ALPH
lingered in the Roosevelt Room.

“Can you believe this?” David asked.

Ralph smiled and shook his head.

“I can only imagine what the history books will say,” David said.

Ralph nodded and smiled again.

“You’re glowing,” David said.

“What do you mean?”

“You met a girl.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s all over you. I can see it in your eyes and in your face. Don’t try to deny it.”

“It’s true,” Ralph said, with a silly grin. “I met this great girl at the sandwich shop today.”

“Does she like you?”

“I think so. She gave me her number on the President’s sandwich wrapper.”

“Are you going to ask her out?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said.

“Are you kidding me?” David asked. “You’re not seriously saying you’re not going to ask her out, are you?”

“I don’t know,” Ralph said. “With everything going on it just seems like such a—frivolous thing to be thinking about. And, besides, the President depends on me…”

“To get him his lunch.”

“All the same, he depends on me, and I feel a sense of duty.”

“Well,” David said, somewhat mischievously, “the President is going out of town this weekend, so it would be the perfect time.”

“I don’t know,” said Ralph.

“Let me tell you something, Ralph. When I was a history professor, I was always struck by one thing. Historical moments are over in a flash. Caesar ruled an empire—then, snap your fingers, and he’s a Shakespeare play. Genghis Khan ruled half the world and, snap, hardly anyone remembers who he is. We’re about to live through history and it’s incredibly exciting. But don’t make the mistake of thinking life stops because of any of this. It doesn’t. It just keeps coming at you, faster than you could ever imagine.”

“Okay,” he said, pensively. “I’ll give her a call.”

Ralph wondered about what David said. His thoughts returned to the men and women he had seen earlier that afternoon walking the streets of Washington. Ralph’s instincts were always to do what was expected of him, to fulfill his responsibility. But perhaps if those people’s lives could go on as normal, even in the face of the most dramatic shift in their reality, so too could his own. Perhaps David was right.

“Okay,” Ralph said pensively. “I’ll give her a call.”

David smiled a wide grin, which infected Ralph, and soon he could barely contain his excitement at the prospect of seeing Jessica again.

I
N THE RIGHT-HAND LANE
of the Trans-Galactic freeway, puttering along at 40,000 miles per second, less than one quarter the speed of light and just above the highway minimum, Maude Anat-Denarian was having a bad day.

It started when she decided to drive all the way to the Trader Planet in Orion to shop for groceries. Maude had a love-hate relationship with Trader Planet. The idea of being able to buy everything in the universe in one place was grand in theory, but odd in practice. It seemed unnatural, at least in Maude’s view, to go to a single place to fill a shopping list that read:

• Seltzer
  
• Succotash
  
• Trans-Warp Coil
  
• Frozen Fish Fillets
  
• Epsom Salts
  
• Pencil Sharpener
  
• Portable Cold-Fusion Generator Filter
  
• Baby Formula
  
• Cremation Urn
  

But you could get it all at Trader Planet. You would even find the urn and the formula in the same aisle, #684, arranged and titled by a store manager with a macabre sense of humor: “Birth/ Death.”

Maude Anat-Denarian did not care for irony.

M
AUDE FINISHED HER SHOPPING
in a reasonable amount of time. She found the right filter for the fusion generator and fought through the beverage section, securing the seltzer without incident. She found the formula and the urn for her friend Edith, who had had a baby and lost her great aunt in the same week. They even had the brand of succotash she liked.

The trouble began at the checkout. The man ahead of her on line got into an argument with the cashier over the price of a one-pound can of dangonsheel, a meat substitute that tastes like ham. They had to call over the manager and get a price check. Since Trader Planet is almost five miles long, it took nearly twenty minutes for the manager to travel from one end of the store to the other. The customers in line behind the man did passive-aggressive things like exhaling and muttering under their breath.

T
HIS WAS ALL HAPPENING
at precisely the same time the homeless man was fighting the powers that be at Blimpway about the quantity of meat in his sandwich. This is not as much of a coincidence as it might first appear. Lots of people in the universe like ham and ham substitutes, which can be expensive. There are often disputes over price.

A
T
T
RADER
P
LANET, UNLIKE
Blimpway, the customer is always right. When the manager arrived, he happily resolved the price dispute in favor of the customer. The customer thus saved approximately a half dollar on the can of dangonsheel. The manager even threw in
a free gallon jug of a new concentrated prune juice, which hadn’t been selling well.

This was all fine for the customer, but of no help to Maude. During the nearly twenty minutes it took for the manager to arrive, most of the customers lost patience and went to other cashiers. Maude stayed. Immediately next in line, Maude felt trapped. She figured if she abandoned her position the manager would arrive the very next moment. So she stayed in line, and thus ended up waiting out the full twenty minutes.

For some reason, the cashier could not ring up another customer while they waited. This required a sophisticated technological advance beyond the store computer’s capabilities.

I
T SHOULD BE NOTED
that in point of fact, Trader Planet did not sell items in either one-pound cans or gallon jugs. The people of that region of the universe used the Natriccian system, which, by coincidence, is identical to the Metric system. For convenience, I have converted all mass and volume to the English system of weights and measures.

T
HINGS GOT WORSE STILL
in the parking lot. They have every modern convenience at Trader Planet, including shopping hoverwagons equipped with antigravity lifts that can be used to hoist the heavier items. These are free of charge, save a modest deposit of a ditron, a coin equivalent to the quarter, which is inserted into a female lock attached to the handle of each hovercart. The coin is retrieved by inserting a male key, one of which is attached to the rear of each wagon. The idea is that when the shopper brings back her hovercart, she pushes her cart into line, using the key from her cart to release a coin from the next cart in the queue.

This kept the carts stacked neatly and saved the Trader Planet the expense of hiring cart boys. In the past, this function had been performed by the Zosmodians, a reptilian species from a six-dimensional universe with photosynthetic skin, a talent for spackling, and the ability to travel across time and space. The Zosmodians worked cheap, and generally off the books because few of them had visas, but they were nevertheless regarded as undesirable laborers. This was because, though they possessed the ability to travel through time, they always showed up five minutes late. This
defect in their chrono-ambulatory capacity was why they had never parlayed their natural abilities into fortune. When they showed up, for example, to bet on the Andromeda Derby, with knowledge of which space eel won, they arrived tardy as usual, and after the close of pari-mutuel wagering.

For their part, the Zosmodians had a good attitude about the whole thing. They figured it was part of God’s master plan, and spent lots of time in the distant past, when people appreciated quality spackling and weren’t in so much of a hurry.