My own speculation was simpler, and I found many lonely comments scattered across the Internet that agreed. In the novel Contact by Carl Sagan, aliens transmit back to us the first televised transmission they detect from Earth—which is Adolf Hitler’s opening speech at the Olympics in 1936. Similarly, I suspected the lunar ad was a primitive attempt at communication, basic mimicry of symbols the aliens sensed we approved of, but which the aliens themselves did not understand.
I was wrong.
II
CYLINDER
Exactly a year after the lunar advertisement appeared, I received a 4:00 a.m. phone call.
“Markus West?” a crisp, male voice asked.
“Yes.”
“Sorry to be calling this early. This is Francis Holliday. We—”
“Apology not accepted,” I said, yawning.
“Okay, I’m not sorry. I’m the national security advisor, and you are coming to the White House.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
I thought it was just another prank call.
“What is this?”
“This is an emergency and we need your help. We can’t talk about it until you arrive. Get dressed and look out your window. The Secret Service is there.”
Francis hung up. When you have a doorbell and only hear violent knocking on the front door, something is wrong. When I saw the men in suits with handguns on my front lawn, I forgot about brushing my teeth. I got dressed quickly and opened the front door to find two agents staring me down.
“Sir, come with us.”
I rubbed my eyes and walked toward their vehicle, which had another agent holding the door open for me.
“Do you have a cell phone, sir?”
“I left it inside,” I said, slowing down.
“Good. Let’s go,” he said, putting a strong hand on my back and pushing me along.
I hopped in a slick, black SUV, which was moving before the doors closed. In short time, we were speeding through the morning darkness into the heart of Washington, DC.
The Secret Service agents were quiet. Wedged between two burly and conspicuously awake agents, I had to ask, “What’s going on?”
“There’s a situation at the White House,” one said without moving his head.
“At the White House?”
“Above the White House.”
His tone suggested I shouldn’t ask. I didn’t.
For one second, at 1:28 a.m., the power went off at the air-traffic control center of Ronald Reagan National Airport, near DC. When the power returned, an alarm went off. The alarm indicated the presence of an unidentified aerial object deep inside the prohibited airspace over DC. There was no detection of the object beforehand. Radar telemetry indicated an altitude of five miles and a creeping descent with no horizontal movement. Attempts to establish communication were unsuccessful. After exactly six minutes and eight seconds, the power went off again, then on again, and the object disappeared from radar.
The air-traffic controller immediately called the two other DC area airports, Dulles International and Baltimore-Washington International, but they had detected nothing. Before September 11, 2001, an air-traffic controller might not have reported such an event and just assumed the Air Force would be tracking it. But, before that terrible day, there wasn’t a fifteen-mile-wide prohibited airspace over the capital of the United States. The official phone calls were made, and the machine of federal emergency awakened quiet and quickly in the midst of a sleeping populace.
NAIC, the National Air Intelligence Center, is the military entity whose main purpose is to detect foreign aircraft entering American airspace, but they never noticed the alien object. Neither did Andrews Air Force Base, Langley Air Force Base, Anacostia-Bolling, Fort Meade, The Naval Air Warfare Center, nor the Patuxent River Naval Air Station.
The unidentified object was a large cylinder. It floated upright and steady in the dark with no lights, and its downward trajectory was the White House.
I arrived at the White House around 4:30 a.m., still in the dark. As they rushed me into the West Wing, I saw Secret Service agents on the South Lawn, together with military personnel on emergency reassignment from the Marine Barracks in DC. Most of them had large binoculars pointed directly overhead. The president and first family had been evacuated before I arrived. The vice president’s family had been as well.
The White House was near vacant, but not completely vacant. Officially, it is called a ‘silent partial evacuation.’ Silent, because the White House didn’t want the press to know. Partial, because a complete evacuation is impossible to keep silent. The White House Secret Service was there, and the live-in staff remained as well. All other nonessential personnel were told to stay home.
The Oval Office was unrecognizable. The president’s desk had become a breakfast buffet with bagels, cream cheese, water, coffee, mugs, and paper towels instead of napkins. A dozen pairs of military-grade binoculars lay scattered about the room, and anything of historical value had been put into emergency storage. Wires meandered throughout the room empowering various laptops and small machines I didn’t recognize. An automatic rifle rested in the corner unattended. The main door to the Oval Office was propped open by a bottle of red wine, and no one was guarding the door.
In retrospect, it wasn’t strange the president would let Francis organize our meeting in the Oval Office. Like many presidents, she only used it for show and did her real work elsewhere. But the room was desperate and amiss. On the ride over, I convinced myself there was an impending environmental catastrophe. When I saw the Oval Office, I thought we were at war.
I took black coffee, sat down, and slowly realized the fake blonde next to me was the secretary of defense, the legendary Samantha Weingarten. Just glancing at her woke me up.
Samantha was one of the six Navy SEALs in the 2011 raid on Islamabad, which killed Osama Bin Laden, and the story is, she planned the mission. Of course, her involvement was unknown until long after the event, and strictly classified, but about as classified as Israel’s nuclear weapons. Multiple books and newspaper articles were written about her. Soldiers joked about her the way they joked about Chuck Norris. She became a darling of the military establishment, which eased her path into the political community where she was coyly referred to as ‘Aunt Sam.’
Samantha was widely considered the most dangerous woman on the planet, and she was sitting next to me. When she recognized me, her eyes widened, but her mouth stayed still.
“Hello, everyone, I’m Francis Holliday, national security advisor,” he said, introducing himself unnecessarily—he clearly needed sleep.
Before working in government, Francis was a professor of computer science at Stanford University. After September 11, 2001, he left academia to work for the National Security Agency. There he allegedly created the Stuxnet computer worm, which crippled Iran’s nuclear centrifuges in 2010. Later, he left the NSA to work in the White House.
As national security advisor, Francis answered directly to the president and had an office in the West Wing. Strictly speaking, Francis had no authority at the NSA. But, practically speaking, he functioned as an unofficial second director of the NSA. He routinely used his old, high-level contacts and the influence of the president to get things done and find out information.
The national security advisor and the secretary of defense were the insiders of the Washington insiders. I wouldn’t normally be in the same room with them unless there was a shrimp cocktail in front of me. But there I was.
Naturally, I wondered why I was there. Given what I was about to hear, I should have wondered why anyone was in the White House at all.
“Francis, why was I told not to contact anyone? What’s going on?” Samantha asked as she took off her black-framed Cuban glasses, revealing the cute little scar under her right eye. She faintly smelled of cigarette smoke.
Francis sipped coffee to give himself a moment to think—an old academic trick for professors who had lost their train o
f thought. He put his coffee down and eyed all of us slowly before continuing.
“As we speak, an object of unknown origin is descending toward the White House,” he said, pausing to gauge our reaction.
“I’m sorry . . . What’s happening?” Samantha said.
“We need to figure out what’s happening. The president has deemed this a matter of national security, so all major decisions are to go through me, understood?”
A marine rushed into the room, handed Francis a wireless USB transmitter, grabbed his rifle from the corner, glanced at Samantha, and left from the door to the Rose Garden. Francis thanked him and plugged the transmitter into his laptop. After some fiddling, he placed the laptop on the table in front of us.
“Francis, what are you talking about?” Samantha said.
“Something unexpected is happening—unexpected in the extreme,” he said, guiding our eyes to the laptop monitor with his open hand. “You are watching live footage from a high-altitude helicopter hovering two miles above the White House.”
The monitor was on, but the unfocused footage revealed only the blurry black of night.
Using his smartphone, Francis communicated with the pilot of the helicopter. “Captain Hathaway, do you see it?”
“I see it.”
“Captain, you’re on speakerphone. Can you describe for my team what you are looking at?”
“Yes, sir. I am looking at a cylinder approximately 400 feet tall and 250 feet in diameter. The lower half of the cylinder is white, and the upper half is red. It is currently two miles above the South Lawn. The rate of descent is not constant.”
“Thank you, Captain. Please position your camera for us. We need to see it down here.”
“Affirmative.”
When it came up on the screen, it was easily identifiable. The other two members of our team looked at Francis, nodded, and walked out of the room. I didn’t know who they were and never saw them again. Judging from their casual dress and creepy, pale faces, they probably worked for the NSA. Only Samantha, Francis, and I remained. Francis couldn’t look at us or the monitor.
“This is a joke,” Samantha said.
“Is it?” Francis said without inflection.
Looking at the screen, I wondered if my eyesight was damaged from the eclipse a year earlier. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but my eyesight was not the problem.
On the screen was a gigantic can of Campbell’s soup.
“A giant can of soup,” Samantha said.
“What’s going on?”
“Chicken noodle.”
Samantha turned sharply to Francis. “I’m not in the mood to play the fool. Can you please . . . Does this have something to do with the advertisement on the moon?”
“We are all playing the fool here. The eclipse was exactly one year ago today,” Francis said, looking at me. “Captain Hathaway, please circle out to your left.”
“Affirmative.”
Circling to the left revealed the cylinder’s promise of low sodium.
Francis grabbed the house phone and contacted the understaffed White House kitchen. The White House was only partially evacuated, and everyone remaining had to eat. My understanding is that only the executive chef was in the kitchen, and someone from Secret Service was responsible for delivering meals throughout the White House.
“Hello . . . Chef? Jules? This is Francis Holliday. I’d like to order up a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup to the Oval Office . . . Just the can, though, uncooked . . . Yes. That’s right. Don’t cook it, just the can . . . and with low sodium if you have it . . . OK. Send it anyway. Thank you.”
In less than a minute, there was a single loud knock on the open door of the Oval Office. We looked and saw the can of soup on the floor in the doorway and the back of the Secret Service agent already walking away.
Francis rushed over, picked it up, and looked at us as if he had discovered the Rosetta Stone. I didn’t understand why, but Francis approached the cylinder as a puzzle to be solved.
“Captain, circle around the cylinder as slowly as you can. I need a full 360-degree view.”
“Affirmative.”
As the helicopter revolved around, Francis compared the big can of soup in the sky with the little can of soup in his hand. Samantha and I joined him. There was no propulsion device of any sort detectable. No way to view inside. No lights.
The ingredients, the logo, the inspection seal from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the seal from the International Exposition of 1900, the fleur-de-lis, the recycling symbol, and the address of the Campbell’s Soup Company were all identical. Even the dimensions of the cylinder were proportional.
Despite the similarities, there was an important difference. But at that moment, I didn’t recognize the difference as important, so I stayed silent.
Naturally, I assumed the cylinder was a promotional stunt from Campbell’s. But there were two glaring facts that didn’t make sense. The first fact being my presence in the Oval Office—I still didn’t know why I was there. I only had the vague suspicion that my experience with the lunar advertisement brought me there. The second fact was the level of detail on the cylinder—I couldn’t imagine why someone at Campbell’s would make a near-exact giant replica of a regular can. No one on the ground could’ve read even half of the detailed information on the cylinder. It was hard enough reading it off the computer screen.
“You’re saying you have no clue where this thing is from?” Samantha said.
“No one does,” Francis said.
“Not even NAIC?”
“Not even NAIC.”
“. . . How is that even possible?”
Samantha waited for a response, but didn’t get one—Francis had no idea how it was possible. He hated saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and wanted his silence to say it for him. It didn’t work.
“Answer me,” Samantha said.
With strange reluctance, Francis divulged the cylinder’s lone discovery by Ronald Reagan National Airport. Samantha and I were stunned to silence—how could only one airport pick it up on radar? My first thought was that every airport and military installation with radar covering DC was simultaneously hacked—a possibility so unreasonable it was embarrassing just to think it, let alone say it.
“Have you tried dragging it off course, somehow?”
“It was the first thing we tried. We dangled grappling hooks from the helicopter, hoping to hook the cylinder and drag it away, but it wouldn’t catch hold.”
“What else have you tried?”
“We’ve only been here a few hours.”
“Look,” Samantha started, “I’m tired, and I’m tired of this. If this is some sort of joke, you better say so right now.”
“If this is a joke, I’m not in on it. There are no major winds outside, so it should keep its trajectory, which is currently aimed near the South Lawn. If there is something dangerous in there, like a bomb, I’d rather it be high above us right now.”
“You idiot. Nuclear bombs are not detonated at ground level; they are detonated a few thousand feet above the target for maximum damage,” Samantha said.
Francis looked at me for confirmation. I nodded and he paled slightly. The atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima detonated 1,900 feet above it. Nagasaki, 1,650 feet.
Samantha grabbed Francis’s smartphone. “Captain, can you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am. It is an honor to be taking orders from you, Miss Weingarten.”
“Get serious, Captain. Do you see any person on or in the cylinder?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Captain, take your flare gun and fire a warning shot across the bow.”
“Across the bow . . . of a can? Ma’am?”
“You heard me, Captain.”
Captain Hathaway increased his altitude above the cylinder. After a pause, a burning red flare shot out across the top of it. The shot landed near the edge, bounced, and fell over the other side. Nothing changed. I had to say something.
“Do you really think this is dangerous?”
“I don’t know if it is dangerous, which is why it is dangerous.”
“Come on, obviously, this is some public relations stunt gone to hell. Francis, have you tried contacting someone at Campbell’s?”
“I talked to the head of advertising, and she claimed total ignorance. Of course, if this is a PR stunt gone wrong, it would be natural for them to lie. I’ve got some people looking into it, but nothing’s turned up. Personally, I don’t think Campbell’s is responsible.”
“This feels like Coca-Cola all over again,” I said.
“I’m not sure this is just another advertisement,” Samantha said. “Francis, is Iran capable of something like this?”
“Like what? Intercontinental Ballistic Noodle Soup?”
With a quick hand, Samantha shoved Francis by the shoulder and he fell backward onto the carpet, landing on his ass.
“We don’t know what the hell is in that thing, and it is hovering over the White House. Did it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, whoever is responsible made it laughable so that we wouldn’t take it seriously?”
It didn’t work for Francis, but humor, by nature, is disarming, and that is exactly what Samantha was worried about. She didn’t want to be the secretary of defense who let a can of soup annihilate the White House.
Francis got back on his feet and played it calm.
“I apologize for the flip remark,” he said. “But what are you proposing? Fire a missile at it?”
“We could easily knock it off course by a hundred yards, using an unarmed missile, and the White House would be fine . . . but you must have considered doing that . . . What are you not telling me?”
His body slumped in response. I was a spectator watching a game I did not understand, but I knew Francis had lost.
“It’s classified,” he said, turning away from her.
“You can’t pull rank with me.”
“You can walk out the door if you like. But I assure you, the president is familiar with this information and she agrees with the decision as well.”
The Book of Ralph Page 2
