The Transatlantic phone lines were cleared of all calls, orbiting satellite relayed encoded signals and NATO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland received an ultra top priority message. The lightning exchange of passwords and countersign took another ten seconds before the military mainframe verified the information and saluted its new commanding officer. Two milliseconds later, NATO's emergency global telecommunications network exploded with signals that were the purest gibberish to anyone but the designated computer system.
Within the cavernous basement of the Kremlin, the incoming signal was shunted to a review station specifically built to prevent such a computer takeover. Already the installation had proved its worth by stopping four such acts of piracy: two from China, one from Germany and one from The Junior Hackers Club of Duluth, Minnesota.
But this signal passed through without hindrance as the construction of the review station had been supervised by a Colonel Nicholi and a young computer genius named Malavade. Therefore it was a total surprise when Russia declared its allegiance to an unknown group of nobodies in the basement of the UN building.
In America, the computers of NORAD instantly complied with the proper and legal request to usurp the Pentagon and seconds later the Army, Navy and Air Force received duly authorized commands to go to Defense Condition One. The unprecedented move caused moans, shrieks, groans, two heart attacks and a promotion.
Across the globe, country after country became locked into the growing computer grid. China was the last to join, due solely to a faulty sub-junction in Beijing, but join it did.
Incredibly and ironically, the problem child turned out to be Greece, as the computer operator assigned to monitor any maximum security messages that involved the safety of his nation, and perhaps the world, was locked in the supply closet sleeping off his lunchtime rendezvous with the entire secretarial pool and a bottle of ouzo.
With the activation of the FCT, many politicians became seriously displeased and threw what could only politely be called tantrums. But despite their every effort, all of the vaunted power each of them had lied, cheated, stole and (depending upon the country) murdered to get, simply flowed through their fingers like a bride's tears. But after a shot of brandy and a hurried reading of the FCT's original charter, most politicos accepted the inevitable and did what they could to assist. Most, but not all.
Five minutes after pressing the button, a green light winked on his keyboard, and with the flick of a switch, Rajavur irrevocably transferred the military might of the world to General Nicholi.
His VOX headphones on, controls live, voices began whispering to the Russian general about the launch status of NATO missiles, combat troop readiness and the present location of Navy and Air Force strike teams. Nicholi sub-vocalized into his throat mike, allocating 5 more NATO submarines to the New York harbor and scrambling an additional flight of F18 Raptor fighter/bombers. He already had enough atomic weapons pointed at Manhattan Island to blow it out of the history books, but he told the dreaded American CBW units to stay on the alert, and ordered his homeland to begin the careful assembly of their prototype Hellfire Bomb. In the solitude of his truncated room, Nicholi bitterly cursed the day he learned to play poker.
“Let's hear the alien's message please, Mohad,” Prof. Rajavur said, laying aside his hotline to the White House. This was no time to chat with the President. He appreciated the offer of assistance, but Rajavur had infinitely greater resources at his command than any local politician.
With a nod, the Hindu linguist pressed the Playback switch on his built-in video tape recorder.
“...PEOPLE OF DIRT, ATTENTION. PEOPLE OF DIRT, ATTENTION."
“Dirt?” Bronson asked, putting a wealth of questions into the single word.
“Semantically correct,” Dr. Malavade explained didactically. “Though hardly flattering I agree."
“WE ARE SCOUTS FROM THE GALACTIC LEAGUE,” the strange echoing voice continued. “HERE TO DETERMINE IF YOUR PLANET, DIRT, IS SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TO JOIN THE COALITION OF YOUR NEIGHBORING STARS."
The rippling TV screen melted into a whirl of colors that became the picture of a blue skin humanoid wearing a dusky white uniform of classic military style. He (she? it?) had a formidable brow, pie plate eyes and two mouths; although only one was in use at present. Dr. Wu touched her throat mike commenting briefly on the oddity and the possibility of copper sulfate life forms. Sir John made a notation on the military cut to its clothing, and requested detailed information on anything blue in nature; topaz stones, birds of paradise and the music of Blind Lemon Jefferson.
“FROM THE CROWD THAT HEMS OUR SHIP,” The facial movements of the being in no way matched the words coming from the speakers. Dr. Malavade sub-vocalized into his throat mike about translation devices. “WE HAVE TELEPORTED ABOARD OUR SHIP SEVERAL REPRESENTATIVES OF YOUR RACE. THEY ARE UNHARMED, I REPEAT, THEY ARE UNHARMED, AND ARE WITH US SIMPLY TO HELP US ASCERTAIN YOUR ELIGIBILITY FOR MEMBERSHIP IN THE GALACTIC LEAGUE."
“They're alive!” Sir John cried, his nightmares of alien invaders who eat our flesh, enslave our children and make the stock market collapse dispersing like a Highland mist. “Alive!"
Rajavur reached for his direct line to Nicholi, but then relaxed, when he saw the reflected lights of the Russian's console blink from red to orange and the general heave a mighty sigh. The situation may still be precarious, but at least they were no longer sitting in the barrel of a nuclear gun.
“THE POPULATION OF YOUR PLANET SHALL BE ALLOWED TO WATCH THEM BEING TESTED, AND IF THE SUBJECTS PASS, THEN DIRT WILL BE WELCOMED INTO THE GALACTIC LEAGUE AS A NEW, BUT EQUAL, MEMBER."
Across the globe, humanity broke into wild cheering and began to dance about their TV and radio sets. Spaceships! Aliens! The stars! Whee! It was like a Saturday afternoon movie!
Meanwhile, Rajavur and company sat patiently in the air conditioned comfort of their underground bunker patiently waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“BUT,” the blue being continued.
Clunk, thought the FCT in unison.
“...SHOULD YOUR REPRESENTATIVES FAIL THE TESTS, THEN WE WILL BE FORCED TO REDUCE YOUR PLANET TO A RADIOACTIVE CINDER. NOTHING PERSONAL, MIND YOU, BUT I HAVE MY ORDERS. THIS IS IDOW FOR THE GALACTIC LEAGUE. OUT."
Once again, the picture on the monitor melted and swirled, changing back to an aerial view of the enormous white ship dramatically sitting on top of Central Park, the glass and steel buildings of the New York skyline forming a postcard background. Framing the picture was a twinkling amber bar that visibly shrank with each passing second.
“Chronometrics, Yuki?” Rajavur asked, taking an educated guess as to the nature of the border.
“Fifty two minutes and counting,” Dr. Wu answered, her lithe fingers working a wrist calculator. “If that color bar is indeed a timepiece and not merely a decoration."
His brown furrowed, Bronson removed the cigar from his mouth and inspected its soggy end. “What frequency was that broadcast on?” the soldier asked.
“All of them,” Dr. Malavade replied. “And as far as I can tell, it was received clearly by everyone on the planet."
With unhappy thoughts, the general returned his cigar to its normal position. Well, that certainly seemed to kill the hoax idea. No nation on Earth could do that. Merely to generate the crude electricity alone would require a hundred, a thousand, Niagara Falls power stations. Or controlled nuclear fusion. Neither of which Humanity had yet.
“It's a wonder we didn't pick it up on our teeth,” General Bronson stated aloud, thinking about an article he had once read in a newspaper describing a truly bizarre college prank.
“Many people did,” Sir John said, industriously scribbling away on his note pad. “Sixty two feet of ferroconcrete is probably the only thing that saved us from suffering a similar fate."
In reply, Wayne grunted. The walls of their bunker were a lot thicker then that, but Courtney had never seemed very interested in concrete, in spite of those fascinating lectures on Advance
d Defensive Architecture that the general had dragged him to so often. Odd fellow. Becoming rich must have driven him mad. Good poker player, though. That's what mattered.
“No,” Rajavur stated firmly into his UN hotline. “I'm sorry Mr. Secretary General ... yes, I understand that you have an interest in this matter. But ... I'm very busy now, sir. Look, I will talk to you later, Emile. Goodbye.” Firmly he cradled the gold UN receiver between his red, Russian, and blue, American, hotline phones. Damn. The last thing he needed was some frightened politico bothering him in the middle of a crisis. Agitated, Sigerson ran nervous fingers through his wiry crop of gray hair, which was a sign of his heritage and not age, as the diplomat was barely 50 years old.
“Mohad, have you had any success in contacting the aliens?” Rajavur asked. Dr. Malavade replied no. Communications were nil. The aliens must be deliberately ignoring him.
The diplomat swiveled his chair to the right. “What is your opinion, Jonathan?"
“On what, professor?” Sir John asked looking up from a computer printout on emotional factor responses that he was perusing.
“On the chance that this Idow and his people are a First Contact Team similar to ourselves?"
“Zero,” General Bronson interrupted hotly. “Because if they are, then they're doing a damn poor job!"
Behind his glass wall, Nicholi nodded in heartfelt agreement. It was true, the aliens must be either insane or fools. The status lights were crimson again, and his American CBW unit had just volunteered to do a suicide attack on the invaders.
Irritably, the Russian general stretched out his cramped legs. Damn consoles were designed for midgets, he decided. Probably built that way to literally keep him on his toes. Ha!
Mentally switching tracks, Nicholi wondered what the man in the street was doing. He knew there would be no trouble with his NATO troops. They were good soldiers, tried and true, the best. But what was the population of Earth doing right now? Laughing? Screaming? Running around in circles? Only Sir John knew the up to the minute details, and he relayed his findings through Sigerson. Good or bad, Rajavur alone got the whole picture. With a loud buzz, the NATO hotline broke into his chain of thought and Nicholi resumed his more pressing work, deciding for the moment to forsake his attempt to out guess Man, a thing that God himself had trouble doing. Not that he believed in such superstitious prattle, of course.
Concurrently, Prof. Rajavur bowed his head in thought. If Courtney's preliminary report was correct, then the Earth was in terrible shape. What with most of humanity laughing, screaming, and running around in circles. Things could go from bad to worse when the aliens commenced broadcasting again in 47 minutes. But until then he must retain control.
The diplomat suddenly noticed how quiet the bunker had become and clapped his hands together. “To work, people!” he cried, and the room bustled with activity.
THREE
While the FCT prepared to investigate, study and defend, the population of the world reacted as it always has in times of trouble: inconsistently.
TV reporters dashed out of their air conditioned buildings to buy a newspaper. Newspaper reporters hid in the bathroom and turned on the dreaded television. Survival groups, who had been patiently waiting for nuclear war, decided that this was good enough and went to their secret mountain shelters, taking their family, neighbors, pets and TV sets with them. Alcoholics swore off the sauce forever. Junkies ordered more of whatever it was they were taking. In California, Unitarians built, and then burned, a giant question mark. In New York, landlords with buildings overlooking Central Park put them up for sale, then changed their minds and instead, doubled the rent.
The real life landing of an alien spacecraft on Earth caused UFO clubs to disband, six science fiction movies to be cancelled, and twelve more initiated. Video tapes battled it out with aspirins for record sales. History making traffic jams clogged the arteries of the world's highways, as drivers: (A) parked their cars and ran for the hills, (B) drove for the hills, (C) fainted in their cars; bringing the unknown word gridlock to such places as Tasmania, Nova Scotia and Outer Mongolia.
In the United States of America, the FAA ordered the nation's airways cleared of all traffic immediately. Every non-military plane in flight was given fifteen minutes of grace in which to find someplace, anyplace, in which to land. Helicopters dropped like stones straight to the ground. Small planes landed on any flat, open land: farms, parking lots, or football fields. One unfortunate 747, with time running low, was forced to make an emergency landing on an interstate highway. Gunning his engines to warn motorists of the approach, the jetliner swooped low over the roadway, neatly hopping over underpasses and a rest stop. With smoking tires the giant plane touched down and throttled to a squealing, roaring halt only meters away from a hastily evacuated toll booth. As a ragged cheer arose from the onlookers and passengers, some damn fool in a Cadillac behind them started blowing his horn for the colossal aircraft to clear the way. Heroically, the 747 pilot refrained from firing up the #2 engine and melting the idiot into slag.
In Lebanon, the PLO demanded to know if the aliens were Jewish. Zurich asked if they valued gold. Hollywood begged for the rights to film their life story. New Zealand longed to hear their favorite lamb recipes. Poland asked how many of them it took to change a lightbulb. At first, the Pope declared the alien beings devils, then angels, devils again, Protestants, and then he was unavailable for comment.
The independent countries of South America found themselves in a quandary. The aliens had landed in the much hated United States of America. If the creatures proved hostile, then this might be their big chance to help destroy the filthy Yankee pigs. But if the aliens were friendly, America might receive advanced technology that could make them undisputed masters of the world, someone you don't want mad at you. How they should act was solved by the brilliant political strategy of aligning themselves with Switzerland. With much eagerness, the always neutral Swiss bankers accepted this commission as they had so many others, positive that, somehow, they could make a buck out of it.
Ireland got drunk.
England ordered out for tea.
Italy got drunk.
Japan sent out industrial spies.
France paid its UN dues.
In a small Arab nation, a fanatical Moslem leader stood on the balcony of a tall minaret and told his faithful followers assembled below that while they could handle the evil American devils, blue monsters from space was an entirely different matter. So in order to save his nation, he would have to destroy it with a hydrogen bomb. He raised the detonator switch for all to see. Oddly, the crowd in the courtyard below didn't react very favorably to this idea.
While they were breaking down the locked door to the minaret, their ex-beloved leader said a prayer and pressed the detonation switch. This only resulted in a loud click as his aides had long ago stolen the plutonium from the bomb and sold it for drugs. When the howling mob of outraged Arabs finally reached the top of the prayer tower, the Moslem zealot saved them from the messy task of tearing him into bloody gobbets by simply diving over the ornate metal railing of the balcony and falling to his death.
* * * *
Meanwhile, orbiting high above the troubled Earth was a large golden rectangle about the size and shape of an industrial packing crate. Skimming along the very edge of the planet's atmosphere, the strange box passed unnoticed by the incredible profusion of spy satellites that filled the sky, and the ground based military radar installations that stared directly at it with blind electronic eyes.
Those who had placed the enameled machine in orbit had been assured by their research staff that the box was, on the exterior, a perfect reproduction of a scientific device made by something called Westinghome Industries, and this was true. But the design had come from the wrong division of the international conglomerate. The golden rectangle was the exact duplicate of a Westinghome refrigerator; from the exposed cooling grid on the back, to the price tag on the door handle. (The technical staff
had wondered about the function of those items, but had included them anyway in the noble interest of Science and to promote job security, which was a basic urge in most sentient beings throughout the known galaxy.)
At the present moment, that refrigerator shaped device was receiving some very curious transmissions from the normally peaceful world below. Hungrily, the machine consumed the incoming signals as fast as it could, chewed up the data into byte sized pieces, digested them thoroughly, and then burped out a most unappetizing answer.
Crystal programming cubes, nestled in multi-compartment ionized tin power trays, became activated and the rectangle began to rotate about, until it was facing away from the Earth towards the distant stars. Then the door opened wide and out erupted a mighty tachyon particle beam, steady at 14 seconds of arc above the orbit of Pluto. The refrigerator's message was terse, concise and left nothing to the imagination. Much too soon, the golden light beam terminated and the enameled door closed with a soundless thump. Next, tiny jets flared from underneath the water drip pan, and the golden box moved off to relocate itself above the North American continent, in a geosynchronous orbit that would hold it relatively motionless above the source of those extremely disturbing transmissions:
The 81st Street ballfield of Central Park, New York.
FOUR
Leader Idow reclined in his formfitting chair and scowled at the viewscreen before him, his hairy face a sober study in blue.
The first contact with an alien species was always a ticklish job at best. So far, everything had gone well. He could only hope that succeeding events would justify this expedition.
The control room of the starship All That Glitters flowed around the humanoid being like a sine wave, with the ship's Leader placed at the apex of his pristine, high tech domain. This position gave him a comfortable feeling, as his primitive ancestors had often perched in the top of trees, dropped onto unsuspecting creatures traveling below and blithely sold them insurance.
Illegal Aliens Page 3
