by Mark Alpert
“That’s better,” he murmured. “I’ve got a lot to tell you, so we might as well get started.” He splayed his hand on his chest, pressing his fingers against his jacket and tie. “My name’s Joe Graham. I used to be a surgeon at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan. You’re Dr. Sarah Pooley, correct? Principal investigator for the NASA Sky Survey project?”
His voice was casual and unhurried, as if he were introducing himself at a cocktail party. Sarah was so flummoxed by his relaxed tone she didn’t know how to respond. She glanced at Tom but he was no help at all. He just stared with wide eyes at Joe Graham the surgeon. The man stared back at him, not unkindly, still trying to put them at ease.
“And you’re Dr. Thomas Gilbert?” he ventured. “Assistant to the president for science and technology?”
Tom said nothing. His face was very pale. Despite everything, Sarah felt sorry for her ex-fiancé and angry at the man who’d frightened him, this well-dressed stranger who seemed to know so much about both of them. She stepped forward, placing one foot on the edge of the pitcher’s mound, and pointed at him.
“Okay, enough with the introductions. What the hell’s going on?”
She practically yelled the question at him, but Joe seemed unperturbed. He nodded and gave her a sympathetic look, the kind of look that a surgeon would give to a nervous patient. “Well, this will probably sound very strange to you, but I’m serving as an intermediary, a translator. I’m the human representative for an alien machine that calls itself the Emissary.”
Sarah immediately looked at the man’s right hand. There was no crystalline disk in his palm. “The Emissary? What the … how did that happen?”
“Believe me, it wasn’t my choice.” Frowning, he raised his hand and tapped the side of his head. “The alien probe infected me. It put devices into my brain so I could communicate with it. That’s how I know your names.” He pointed straight up. “Take a look at the screen. The Emissary built this structure to help you understand.”
Sarah tilted her head back. The underside of the dome brightened and the stars winked out. In their place the screen showed an image of Earth, the familiar blue marble. The planet grew larger as Sarah stared at it, and after a few seconds she could see the outlines of the continents—Africa, Asia, Europe—against the blue oceans. At the same time, the Earth rotated, and its night side came into view. The image was so realistic that Sarah felt as if she were inside a spacecraft speeding across the solar system. She looked away for a moment and glanced at Tom, who’d also tilted his head back to stare at the screen. He seemed less afraid now.
When Sarah turned back to the screen she noticed that the perspective had shifted. Now she saw a thin red line curving across the blackness of space near Earth. At the tip of this line, like a knot at the end of a string, was a black disk careening toward the planet. It was clearly a spacecraft designed for interstellar travel, with dozens of rocket nozzles at the back and a conical shield at the front to protect the craft from high-speed collisions with space dust. As Sarah admired it, the shield separated from the disk, revealing a small probe attached to an aeroshell and another rocket engine. Then the probe fired its engine and sped toward Earth’s night side.
Sarah tore her eyes from the screen and turned to Joe Graham. The man was staring at her, observing her reactions. He smiled again, but it was a bleak, knowing smile, as if he were sharing an awful secret.
“You guessed right,” he said. “The probe was programmed to land near the brightest city. So it could tap into the electric lines.”
She grimaced. She didn’t know this man. She didn’t like the way he was looking at her. “How do you know what I guessed?”
“All that information is on the Internet. All your reports about the probe, all of General Hanson’s reports, everything. And the Emissary tapped into the Internet lines too.” He pointed at the dome again. “Look at the screen. It’ll show you how everything happened.”
The screen zoomed in on the Earth, displaying the probe’s path over North America. Sarah had seen this trajectory before, four nights ago, on the radar screens at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The aeroshell slowed the probe’s descent until it was jettisoned over New Jersey along with the probe’s rocket engine. Then the screen showed an image of Upper Manhattan at night, with the red line terminating on a wooded slope in Inwood Hill Park. Sarah felt a grim satisfaction—the landing site was inside the impact zone she’d estimated. If only Hanson had listened to her, they might’ve found the thing.
The perspective on the screen shifted once again. Now it showed a schematic diagram, a cross-section of the hill where the probe landed. At the top was a red dot lying in a shallow crater on the hillside; below it were the layers of soil and bedrock below the surface. As Sarah tried to make sense of the diagram, a thin black line descended from the red dot, drilling underground until it reached the nearest power cable. Then more black lines branched off from the first, spreading like roots beneath the park and connecting to dozens of cables below the streets. The screen zoomed in on one of the black lines, magnifying the tip of the drill until Sarah could see its microscopic structure. It was swarming with nanodevices.
She heard a footstep crunching the dirt of the pitcher’s mound. Joe Graham had stepped closer to her. He pointed at the magnified image overhead.
“One of those tentacles attacked me. It struck me while I was sleeping in the park.” He paused, looking at Tom to make sure he was listening too. Then he turned back to Sarah. “I’m a drunk, you see. That’s why I was sleeping in the park. I lost my job at St. Luke’s two years ago.”
It looked like he was about to say more, but he cut himself off, pressing his lips together. Making this confession was clearly painful for him. Sarah stopped scowling and decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. There was no point in fighting him. She’d learn more without the hostility.
“And that’s how you were infected?” Her voice was less belligerent now. “When the tentacle struck you?”
Joe nodded. “It injected devices into my neck and they traveled to my brain. The devices made copies of themselves using the molecules in my blood, and soon there were enough of them to change my biochemistry. They enhanced my vision, reflexes, and agility. They also relieved my dependence on alcohol.” He tapped the side of his head again, very gingerly, as if he were afraid of its contents. “But that was just the prelude. The Emissary’s real goal was to build a direct communication line with me. The devices in my brain are connected by radio to the rest of the Emissary’s network, so she can hear all my thoughts and speak inside my head.”
“She?” Sarah leaned closer to him. “The Emissary is female?”
He shook his head. “No, no, she’s a machine, a computer program. But she uses a female voice when she talks to me.”
“I don’t understand. Why does this Emissary need a human translator? The program must understand English by now, so why doesn’t it just broadcast its communications to us by radio?”
Joe didn’t answer right away. Instead, he looked down at the pitcher’s mound and studied the dirt, clenching and unclenching his hands all the while. Sarah glanced at Tom—he shrugged, bewildered, out of his depth—but she’d already guessed what was going on. Joe was listening to the Emissary’s voice.
After several seconds he raised his head and took a deep breath. “The aliens who created the Emissary had some prior experience encountering another intelligent species. That’s because their planetary system is very different from ours.” He pointed at the dome once more. “Their star is about two hundred light-years away, which is close enough to see from Earth if you have a decent telescope. In our star catalogs it’s called HD 942180. It’s about the same size as our sun, but it has more planets than we have in our solar system.”
Sarah looked up and saw that the screen had gone back to displaying a night sky full of stars. The screen zoomed in on one of them, an ordinary yellow G-type star, and as it grew larger she saw the planetary orbits around it, a
ll drawn as glowing red circles. At least twenty planets circled the star, moving in orbits as perfectly concentric as tree rings. Sarah felt an intense excitement as the magnification increased and more details of the system came into view—the comet cloud, the asteroid belts, the moons orbiting the planets. She realized now why the stars on the screen were arranged in unfamiliar constellations. She was seeing them from the perspective of the Emissary’s world.
Sarah quickly noticed two intriguing features of this planetary system. First, most of the planets appeared to be rocky bodies that were about the same size as Earth. Second, several of these Earthlike worlds traveled in orbits that ran through the star’s “Goldilocks” zone—they were far enough away from the star to keep them from boiling, and yet not so far away that they’d freeze over. Sarah was astounded that so many planets were in the habitable zone. Feeling a little giddy, she turned to Joe.
“So which one is the Emissary’s planet?”
As soon as Sarah asked the question, the screen focused on one of the Earthlike worlds. It had brown continents and blue oceans. As the screen zoomed in on the planet, Sarah noticed black splotches along the coastlines. She guessed they were cities.
Joe pointed at it. “It has a tongue-twisting name in the aliens’ language, but in translation it just means ‘the First Planet.’ And the aliens who lived there called themselves ‘the First People.’ But life evolved on three other planets in the system, and on four of their moons too.”
“Because all of them are orbiting in the Goldilocks zone? So they’re neither too hot nor too cold to have liquid water on the surface?”
Joe shrugged. “I guess that’s right. The Emissary tells me the facts, but sometimes she leaves out the explanations.”
Sarah looked at Tom again and gave him a triumphant smile. She knew she was being cocky, but she felt an urge to rub it in. “You see? Wherever there’s water, there’s life.”
He frowned. Tom had recovered some of his composure by now, at least enough to be irritable. Tilting his head, he cast a wary look at Joe. “But what about intelligent life? You said the aliens made contact with another intelligent species?”
“It happened about a thousand years ago. After the First People developed the technology for space travel they sent dozens of spacecraft to explore the other planets in their system.” Joe pointed at another Earthlike world. Its orbit was a bit farther from the star. “On one of the planets the explorers discovered a network of burrows occupied by intelligent creatures that lived underground. The First People called them the Second People, naturally enough.” The screen zoomed in on the planet. Its oceans were indigo, its continents a pale orange. “This species was less advanced—they had only crude Stone Age tools—but there were billions of them living under the surface of Second Planet. Because their environment was so crowded, the Second People tribes were constantly warring with one another. And the encounter with a more advanced civilization just made things worse.”
“Let me guess.” Tom folded his arms across his chest. His arrogance was returning. “The tribes wanted the First People’s technology? So they could use it in their wars?”
“That was one of the problems. The tribes stole scrap metal and rocket fuel from the explorers and learned how to build new weapons. One tribe eventually grew stronger than the others and massacred half of the planet’s population. But there were also epidemics. Although the explorers tried to be careful, some of their parasitic microbes spread to the Second People and adapted to their biochemistry.”
Sarah winced. The story sounded depressingly familiar. “It’s like what happened after Columbus came to America.”
“But the Second People suffered even worse than the Native Americans did. They were almost wiped out. Only a few hundred of them survived, and their culture was lost.” Joe pointed again at Second Planet, and at the same time the image of the world began to darken. The oceans and continents turned brown, then black. “The microbes brought by the explorers also devastated the planet’s animals and plants. The ecosystems collapsed, the atmosphere changed. In less than two hundred years Second Planet became uninhabitable. It was a catastrophe.”
Sarah stared at the blackened planet. Her stomach churned as she looked at it, and she didn’t know what to say. Tom, on the other hand, seemed less upset. He simply grunted “Huh” and turned back to Joe. “So I suppose your point is that the First People learned something from this episode?”
Joe nodded. “By seven hundred years ago they’d finished exploring all the planets in their own system and started to launch spacecraft to other stars, small probes that could travel for centuries across interstellar space. They knew the probes had to be nonbiological, because they didn’t want to contaminate any other planets, so they created the Emissary program to guide the spacecraft. But they worried about what would happen if one of the probes encountered another intelligent species. The spacecraft were going to travel so far across the galaxy that communications with First Planet would become impractical. If the probe sent a radio message from a planet that was two hundred light-years away, it would have to wait four hundred years to get a reply.”
Sarah thought of her conversation in Phil Clark’s office about the difficulties of interstellar travel. For a second she wished Phil were here—he would’ve loved this—but then she shook her head and told herself to focus on Joe. “So the First People gave preprogrammed instructions to the Emissary?” she asked. “Telling the software how to handle encounters with intelligent species?”
“Yes, that was the challenge. How could a piece of software have a meaningful dialogue with the life-forms? How could the program convince them not to misuse the probe’s technology? After a lot of debate the First People came up with a solution: the Emissary would choose one of the local life-forms to be its translator. This would ease communication and prevent misunderstandings.” Joe raised both hands to his head and rubbed his temples. “It’s a logical plan, right? A win-win for almost everyone. The only loser is the poor schmuck who has to do the translating.”
He massaged his forehead for a few more seconds, then dropped his arms to his sides. He looked tired and bitter and thoroughly disgusted, and of course he had every right to be. Yet Sarah saw the value of what he was doing. She would’ve been a lot more skeptical of this story if she’d heard it coming from an alien machine’s loudspeakers. Hearing it from a person definitely made a difference.
She wasn’t sure, though, if it made much of a difference for Tom. He narrowed his eyes at Joe. “What about the teenage hoodlums who brought me here? Are they also translating for the Emissary?”
Joe shook his head. “They’ve been assigned other tasks. The Emissary has given them special tools to perform these tasks, but she assured me that the changes are temporary and the surgical implantations are reversible.”
Sarah didn’t like the sound of that. “Special tools?” She gritted her teeth. “Are you talking about the weapons implanted in their hands?”
Joe seemed uncertain, taken aback. He looked down again, staring at the pitcher’s mound as he conferred with the Emissary, listening to the alien voice in his head. The silent conversation lasted longer this time, almost a full minute. When Joe finally looked up there were tears in his eyes.
“I’m sorry.” He turned away from them. “I can’t do this anymore.”
Joe stepped off the pitcher’s mound. He lurched across the infield, heading for the black wall that loomed over the third-base line. When he was a couple of yards from the wall he knelt on the turf and buried his face in his hands.
Tom craned his neck and gawked. He seemed annoyed. “Now what? What’s wrong with him?”
Sarah didn’t respond. Instead, she went to Joe. She didn’t go straight to him; she walked to the middle of the third-base line, a few yards to his left, in the hope that he would glimpse her out of the corner of his eye. She stood by the wall, waiting for Joe to lift his head, and after several seconds he looked up and noticed her. He didn’t
turn away, so she stepped closer. She moved slowly, giving him enough time to stand up and brush the grass off his pants. He’d stopped crying by the time she reached him, but his face was haggard and his cheeks were wet. He looked very old now, old and sick.
“It’s my fault,” he muttered. “All my fault.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“I screwed it up. Just like I screwed up everything else in my life.” Joe clenched and unclenched his hands. “There was so much alcohol in my system that the Emissary couldn’t connect to me right away. And then I was stupid enough to get myself thrown into jail.”
“Wait a second, what—”
“By the time I got out, Hanson’s soldiers were all over Inwood, searching every block. They were going to destroy something that was important to the Emissary. So she ordered the boys to attack.”
Sarah remembered what Luis had told her. “This happened on Sherman Avenue? They fired on the soldiers?”
“The Emissary showed me everything, the whole battle. They’re horrifying weapons. The beams are invisible, so you can’t see where they’re coming from. But if they hit something, they vaporize it. They blow it to bits. They—”
Joe stopped himself, too appalled to go on. Turning away from Sarah, he stepped toward the black wall and stood facing it, his nose just a few inches from the gleaming metal. But there was more to the story, and Sarah needed to hear it. She stepped beside him and gripped his shoulder.
“Hey,” she whispered, “don’t blame yourself. You didn’t ask for this.”
He closed his eyes and leaned forward. His forehead pressed against the metallic wall. “This is exactly what the Emissary didn’t want to happen. She wanted to talk to the government first, before they could attack the probe, before they even knew it was here.”
